Customer Reviews

Eyvind Kang: Theater of Mineral NADEs

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Eyvind Kang is one of my favourite musicians of the past few years. He is one of a rare breed who is actually doing something different in the music world. I think that this is a great album, but my only reservation is that it falls slightly short of some of the other stuff he has produced.

The pieces are mostly miniatures, exploring such diverse territory as Medieval, reggae, and Kang's infamous NADEs (pieces only he could write or describe). It is mostly stunning, but towards the end it goes downhill just a little bit.

I would certainly recommend this album to anyone looking for interesting new music, but also direct you towards Kang's other work: 7 NADEs, The Story Of Iceland, Dying Ground, Bill Frisell "Quartet", etc...

This album is a wonderful thing. It's very well made. Since I received it in the mail, I've listened to it repeatedly and it continues to grow and develop (or at least my perception does). There are many complexities in the music that one just doesn't pick up on with the first listen. My favorite song is definitely mary of magdalen. purchase this album. you will not regret it.

I grew up with a variety of music styles, from classical, folk, blues, rock, religious, spirituals- all over the landscape, you might say. I expanded on my own to include avant-garde, nature sounds, experimental, country-rock, folk-rock, jazz, various ethnic music styles... and the list goes on.

This is the first album I've purchased with Eyvind Kang on it, but I'm hooked! Every time I listen to it, I hear more and more layers of influence. I even made an extra copy to play in my car!

Kang and his friends mix styles together, move from style to style, invent new sounds & styles... Listen to the samples made available on the site here to see if you are as intrigued as I was when I first heard it. I just can't find the words to give an adequate impression of the breadth of this music for the unexposed.

If you're an adventurous listener like me, let me just invite you to sample the work of this genius by getting this album. If on the other hand, you just can't bend or expand beyond your bland vanilla musical tastes, you'll know after you just give a listen.

Kang's "theater of mineral NADEs", like other recent releases on John Zorn's Tzadik label (by Evan Lurie and Naftule's Dream), is a striking representative of some of the most vital and fascinating music being made today. Though I find Zorn's own music too shallow to sustain interest (and it seems designed to be this way), I give him credit for putting out such high quality cds on his various labels. "Theater of mineral NADEs" takes Zorn's manic electicism to some bizarre (and deeper) extremes. The pieces here (24 of them) are not the sound-byte snippets of Zorn's cut-up music, but are more like little song samples gathered by a time-traveling ethnomuiscologist (most average 2-4 minutes). The album follows a stylistic curve that begins with 20th-Century "atonal" orchestral music, veers through Medieval instumental and vocal music, stops briefly at some kind of weird aboriginal music from a nonexistent tribe, dips into South American big band territory, and then shifts into reggae! And it works! Highly recommended for the sonically adventurous--you will be instantly rewarded. I've haven't heard the first NADEs cd but am now determined to find it.

This is what good music is. If anyone says "there's no good music being made nowadays," refer them to this CD.