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HUMAN GREED - Fortress Longing

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Omnempathy OMIC2 Release Year: 2011 Note: fourth album by the project of MICHAEL BEGG - mesmerizing poetic & acoustic ambience noir, feat. many guest-musicians as JULIA KENT or LAURA SHEERAN; creating a very filmic & melancholic atmosphere, this is nightshade-music at its best, like being lost in a dream, combining beautiful drones & poetry... still very much to discover ! Price (incl. 19% VAT): €14.50 More Info "Human Greed's fourth album " Fortress Longing: The Internal Campaign for the Safe and Complete Return of the Sleeping Egyptian to the Desert" is night-music at its most acute - unsettling, uncanny, beguiling, bewitching, and often profoundly moving. Founder Michael Begg releases the work on the back of an exhaustive wave of activity. The last 18 months have seen him pack out cathedrals with the sonic swells and squalls of Fragile Pitches, his collaborative project with Nurse With Wound's Colin Potter, contribute to releases by Blind Cave Salamander, 48 Cameras and Laura Sheeran, and also play a core role in the emergence of the debut album by Fovea Hex, Clodagh Simonds's cult ensemble, with whom he has performed and recorded since 2007. Rather than thin the mix, however, the insights and juxtaposition of the various disciplines exerted by all this extra curricular activity have helped forge Fortress Longing as the definitive work of melancholic extremism. (A term coined by the Polish press during the band's 2008 tour of that country) Begg is joined, once more, by erstwhile visual artist Deryk Thomas, and a handful of other performers and friends: Antony and the Johnsons cellist Julia Kent once more lends grace to the proceedings, whilst Fovea Hex colleague Laura Sheeran provides vocal arrangements and harmonies. Nicole Boitos - who painted the blue lamb featured on the cover of the recording also provides a reading voice to Begg's texts, as does the Norwegian singer Tommy Aashildrod. Further vocal chants and singing bowls are provided by Charlemagne Palestine collaborator and 48 Cameras leader Jean Marie Mathoul. The record makes stunningly effective use of the broadest palette of acoustic and electronic tools yet proposed by Human Greed. Pianos (treated, bowed, prepared), cellos, violins, dulcimer, autoharp, guitars, singing bowls, glass armonica, gamelan, all fold, dovetail, and swap identities with synthesised, processed and eroded digital files and field recordings gathered from the trips Begg undertook in researching the record to Ile de Re, Athens, Heraklion, Frankfurt, London and Poznan. A number of formally spoken texts even allow Begg to seemingly make peace with the written word after almost a decade of self imposed silence. The work moves as a single mass, shedding skins and identities as acoustic instruments increasingly take on the role more commonly occupied by ambient electronic beds, whilst the electronics, synths and signals, and manipulated samples and field recordings are teased into releasing their hidden melodic potential. Again and again in Fortress Longing, the discipline of musical form that Human Greed has so thoroughly deconstructed and undermined in their decade long journey, rises out of the boiling, roiling landscape of restless foreboding. The effect - particularly on the elegiac cello arrangement by Julia Kent on The Green Line - is simply heart breaking. Human Greed has delivered a singular and hypnotic work of disagreeable beauty, and Begg the composer, author and producer, is in complete control of his craft." [label info]