Eyes & Ears – January 2015 edition

Dear readers,

Happy new year 2015 and welcome again to the first Eyes and Ears session of 2015, as well as the first post of the new year! Today we are going to travel back in time both through books and music, but we will also listen to the Café del Mar’s latest remix (the 35th Anniversary).

Tracks

We are about to travel back in time, backwards to the nineties, when the electronic music scene was both highly creative and for the most part confined to what is usually referred to as the underground. I present you with two mixes, a set of the Global Communications label, and another one by Warp 69. I do not believe one could call these “underground”, but they have never been part of the “mainstream” either.

 

Coming back closer to our days, a rather discrete yet renowned collective who worked with great names, such as LTJ Bukem and MC Conrad, released this very  nice track, “all over again” in 2007. Here’s a little more icing on the cake, as what follows is Tom Middleton’s remix of the track:

I have already written about Melorman and NorthCape in early December 2014. Here’s a nice and recently released track by Melorman:

Here’s a collective from Iceland I just discovered (should I have known, about it earlier?), Murya. This is how I discovered these two guys, with this recent release: “And she spread her wings”:

Last but not least, here’s the latest mix by Café del Mar I had alluded to at the beginning of this post:

Books

Books often make us travel back in time. Today they indeed will do just that, and for one of them, even quite literally :

• The Art of Memory, by Frances Yates is a comprehensive study of much forgotten mnemonic techniques used during the Antiquity until the XVIIIth century. Should this be important? As a self organization and logical work method, yes. But it is likely that this art led to framing the most important spiritual and philosophical currents of the West by being applied to cases that were not connected to work, public speech and discourse.
• The Pauline Epistles, a rather classic yet somewhat disputed part of the New Testament, offers insights as to what the early Christian communities had to deal with. Even more interestingly, the epistles often provide beautiful and deeply spiritual messages.

Enjoy the new year!