With Christmas approaching I wrapped up a very nice World Music compilation. It contains favorites that I discovered in the last three years with songs from all over the planet! There would have been at least six more hours but I will skip those for the next compilation ;) If you like any of these songs I recommend you to dig into the full albums as well! For the credits please check the full post. The youtube playlist contains most of the songs if you want to access all just hit the download button.
Melnitsa (the Russian word for windmill - Мельница) - is a Russian folk rock band from Moscow. Founded in 1999 by lead singer and primary songwriter Natalia O'Shea the band is famous for its powerful singer songwriter songs featuring a very rich instrumentation and intensive hook lines.
Natalia being an
academic and a specialist in medieval European languages and cultures
by day creates complex fantasy-laden Russian lyrics and also masters harp.
Within Russia the bands seems to hold a pretty big fan base but there seems to be a fair amount of fans abroad as well. This compilation is a modified version of the official "The best" album released in 2008 as selected by me. With the last two albums the band took a different route stylistically by heading more into a rock direction and thus "The best" does not feature any songs from this period. On her solo project Natalia still performs folk rock under the moniker "Хелависа" (Helavisa) and the 2009 release "Леопард в городе" (Leopard in the city) is an equally outstanding record as well.
Usually, I don't get a lot of inspiration from the radio: this is one of the few exemptions: N.O.H.A. from the Czech Republic. They utilize a pretty wide range of styles with drum n bass being the most prominent one. N.O.H.A. received a lot of airplay for the 2007 song "Tu Café" with its extremely sense making lyrics ;)
The project was founded by Philip Noha with different singers and MCs and they started with a self titled album back in 1997. The band itself is extremely diverse with members from Prague, New York and Sao Paulo.
N.O.H.A.'s releases cover a pretty wide range of styles from trip hop to drum n bass and this is a self compiled selections of their best songs distilled out of their regular releases. On this compilation my favourites are the extremely funky "No Slack" and the pop track "Nasty".
N.O.H.A. appears to be also an excellent live band and you can convince yourself with the live tracks at the end of the
youtube list. Unfortunately it appears that they are only performing in
the Czech Republic this year.
The cover of this compilation is "stolen" from a Reed Danziger painting which I found through the amazing inspiring blog Basic Sounds.
This is the self named demo of the French band Krepuskule released back in 2006. Krepuskule (“crépuscule” being the French for “dusk”) crafts music which is best described as gothic or dark metal with a dense atmospheric touch. This is emphasized by female vocals and the use of a violin.
This great demo consists of three tracks and in my opinion they are all equally brilliant. Checking their myspace site I can only guess that the band did not release more since 2006 due to line-up issues.
The band is still touring occasionally (in France) so let's hope that they can add something to this hidden gem in the future.
Yes, Turkish pop music! Göksel Demirpençe born in 1971 is a pop music artist from Turkey. I've got aware of Göksel through a Putumayo compilation "Turkish Groove" which was interesting enougth to let me dig deeper. She sings and performs the guitar and her songs feature typical pop instruments but also typical Turkish elements such as violins etc.
What makes her songs special is the timbre and the presence of her voice. This "Best Of" compilation was released by Sony after she changed the record label back in 2008 and it was released possibly without her consent. After listening to some songs from her releases I wasn't particularly fond of the ballads and I felt that other songs were missing so I modified the song selection and kicked out some songs and replaced them with songs that should have been on this compilation.
My favourites of this compilation are Depresyondayım ("I am depressed") a song over a lost love, the uplifting Karar Verdim ("I decided") and the pushing hip hop duet Taş Bebek ("Stone Baby") a collaboration with Dursun Zaman from the Turkish New Metal band maNga. Nowadays, with her last two releases her style of music changed towards more classical Turkish folk music which is not my cup of tea but it'll be very interesting to see how her career continues in the future. Enjoy this excellent compilation!
As 2011 is history now it is time to look back. In total, less music entered my personal library compared to last year. An evaluation within foobar2000 showed me that I added this year 160 albums, only which is considerably less than last year (583 in 2010). Musically, this year is equally interesting but I think I have been far more selective with new additions.
Interestingly, there is only one album which made it on the list which is from an artist that I followed for a longer time (Leaves' Eyes - Meredead). All the other ones were artists to which I did not listen to previously. I also got more critical towards discographies: Quite often one album of an artist is outstanding while others are simply mediocre. With the increased influx of new artists and releases on the Interwebs the necessity to bound to an artist (as a brand) for a longer time does not exist any more. So here is the list:
