NIGHTLANDS
FORGET THE MANTRA
Label: |
SECRETLY CANADIAN |
Cat No: |
SC229LP |
Barcode: |
0656605022918 |
Packaging: |
LP (100g) |
On order. Delivery expected between 2 weeks and 3 months.
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$46
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ADD
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Nightlands is the recording project of Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist Dave Hartley. The
music he creates in his bedroom is itself a bed of delicate, chiming strings and bubbling synths
beneath a blanket of choral vocal arrangements. It's dreamy in the literal sense - the seeds for the
albumwere sown when Hartley began archivingmusical ideas that occurred in his sleep with a simple
bedside tape recorder. As a result his debut album Forget the Mantra is, in essence, a field recording of
Hartley's dreams - a travel journal through pop music and a collection of psych-hymns from the
first human lunar colony. The songs sound both huge and intimate, breathy and cavernous like
massive echoes of a faraway concert. It's the big, shadow music from just across the lake.
The album deals with themes of anxiety, fear and the limits of concentration. Therein, it mines
Hartley's personal history as often as it does influences The Beach Boys, The TravelingWilburys and
Hawkwind. Side A pulses with layers of tom tom drums on wide-open standout slow jam ''300
Clouds'' and nimbly-picked acousticmelodies on ''Suzerain (A Letter to the Judge),'' like Crosby, Stills
& Nash gone comsic-kraut. The songs roll and gallop then stop to breathe, always exhaling with what
sounds like a thousand voices. Through its experimental back half - reminiscent of Bowie's Low or
Kate Bush's ''The Ninth Wave'' from Hounds of Love - full of vocal samples from Hartley's real life,
the more pop-leaning front end is given greater context, like a close study of a plant's blossom before
traveling down through its root architecture.
Hartley, who for years has been a prolific sideman inmany Philadelphia ensembles (most notably The
War on Drugs), laid these songs to tape on a Tascam 388 insularly over several months, inviting
friends along for feedback and ultimately, some additional tracking.
''There are degrees of warmth...and Philadelphia musician Dave Hartley's Nightlands project sounds
like it was recorded in a hearth...Hartley's music seeps out and fills spaces, combining the kind of
expansive resonance found in Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs with Beach Boys-like vocal
arrangements...'' - Pitchfork
Tracks:
Forget the Mantra
300 Clouds
Suzerain (A Letter to the Judge)
G od W hat Have I
'Til I Die
G lass Vacuum
A Walk in Cheong, 1969
W FMS, 1993
Longways Homebound, 2010
Slowtrain
Fly, N eanderthal
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