phenomeNEWS - This Month's Music Review

This Month's Music Review
by Greg Ozimek
music@wwnet.net

Little Plastic Pilots
Little Plastic Pilots
Kanpai Records

Impressive. Serene.

With Little Plastic Pilots, the self-titled debut of artist and L.A. native Sam Nelson, electronic music’s evolution steps us into the future – a future that is grounded in the present, our favorite...”the Now.”

And how.

Nelson has combined some layers of organic sound and an easy groove. The organic is mostly variations on the spoken word. The easy groove is supplied from a love of early analog electronica that moves into atmospheric, ethereal sounds just too cool. This “whole” is an organic form that hangs together like chocolate and peanut butter.

Little Plastic Pilots is the brainchild of Nelson while touring with his rock outfit H is Orange.

OK. What’s with “Little Plastic Pilots”? really.

Sam told us, “Little Plastic Pilots is an interpretation for me; It is a reflection of my life, encapsulating my dreams, hopes and memories while giving me a soundtrack to experience from. It is a perfect representation, in musical form, of who I am.”

Interesting guy, I’d say.

Delving deeper, we find Sam Nelson has fond memories of his younger years, watching his brother building model airplanes. He said he was fascinated with the time spent on meticulous details and often felt a connection to the pilots inside these small replicas.

Ah ha! The reason.

He feels his songs are much like these hidden personal treasures. His sense of time in-the-moment via the musical expressions from his animated Little Plastic Pilots takes us on a driving excursion from our most precious body centers into the life of our choice.

He has a collection of these pilots.

Little Plastic Pilots, like it’s creator, have been influenced by and inspired by artists as diverse as Autechre, Four Tet, Fugazi and pioneers Brian Eno and of course, Tangerine Dream.

As for me, I’m eager to move Little Plastic Pilots via iTunes and listen to it on a 40 minute tour down Hines Drive from Dearborn to Northville the next evening possible: Me and 6,500 pounds of Detroit strapped to my body tooling down the two lane parkway, exploring the darkness and every bend in the road with Little Plastic Pilots’ electronica, piles of snow along the way, recent memories of brilliant autumn trees and the lush greens of summer.

Gotta love the drive!

Kanpai Records is an imprint of Domo Records (this info may be useful when you go searching the music stores so you can surf with this mile-marker marvel of electronica).

Kampai Records is dedicated to publishing music that fuses electronic and traditional pop/rock elements. Nothing too genre specific, they say, but rather in the space in between.

What a great place to be, in between.

Nascent Bach Preludes
Bert Lams
Inner Knot

These are JS Bach preludes, transcribed and transposed by Bert Lams for the steel string guitar. Lams is a highly acclaimed guitarist and tunes are selected here to warm your December holidays and winter evenings.

This CD develops the closeness of a live performance. It is like having Bert Lams in your living room this season playing his transcriptions, but you don’t have to feed him.

Overall, Lams brings an engulfing, warming effect to his steel strings and pick; recall here that Bach wrote these for the bow and stings of the cello and violin not the plucking and strumming of a guitar.

With this first solo recording, Lams presents an overview of the different moods and colors of Bach’s violin and cello preludes in a bold new format for steel string guitar.

Featured are selections including Chaconne, Bourree, Sarabande, Courante and Prelude(s) from Cellosuite 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Recently, Lams enthused, “The recordings on this release are only a snapshot in time. This is how I play it now. Tomorrow it will be different. The notes remain the same but the music changes like life does. Over the years my approach to the solo repertoire develops and matures. The music is never nascent.”

He was introduced to the New Standard Tuning based on fifths (C-G-D-A-E-G) using a steel string guitar with plectrum (pick) by Robert Fripp in 1986, two years after Lams graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.

“The tuning is, in principle, the same as the cello, violin and the viola tuning. It opened a new door for me. The cello and violin repertoire suddenly became much more accessible and I returned to the Bach repertoire with renewed enthusiasm.”

The past 18 years have seen Lams traveling the world as a performing musician and he sites Bach’s preludes as constant companion.

“At age seven I heard the prelude in C major of the well-tempered clavier by JS Bach on harpsichord played by Gustav Leonhardt. I was drawn to the world of music at that moment and have been exploring this wondrous art form ever since.”

Bravo!