motel de moka

Chants d’Auvergne with Victoria de los Angeles is one of my all time favourite albums. I heard it for the first time around 1999 when EMI were doing their Great Recordings Of The Century reissue series. I was working in Cape Town, doing stock admin and every new item that came in for the first time had to be recorded for the listening database. It took really long for the company that did the recording to come collect the items, so they would end up sitting on my desk for weeks sometimes. One day I hooked up some headphones I found lying around to my PC and started to listen to stuff that had come in. My boss, who was not a man to easily allow hapiness amongst his minions, used to constantly be on my back about it. I stuck to my guns and my headphones and did not live to regret it. In those pre to early days of file sharing I found myself in a fairly priveliged position of listening to many, many new releases. The guy who used to do our classical buying was the coolest. He was a borderline psychotic who was known for breaking up liasons between consenting males while he was cruising the street for action of his own. I thought he was a peach and we became good buddies. He constantly gave me awesome recommendations for stuff to listen to, such as Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Canticus Articus (previously posted) and Chants d’Auvergne. The songs are arrangements of folk pieces from the Auvergne region in the higher southern part of France by Joseph Canteloube. Since Moka is living in Montpellier (in the south of France) I thought it would be a good time to post some tunes from the album. Grey Lagoons has again been called into action for a mix job, inspired, themseves, by the story Brian Eno once told about his inspiration for Music For Airports. Apparently a German friend of his had made him a tape using only the slow movements of Haydn’s late string quartets. Eno described the music on the tape as being in a place and not moving anywhere away from there. The Lagoons were asked to try and achieve a similar sense with this rather luscious music. The lyrics are written in Occitan, which is a language native to parts of the south of France and Catalonia, besides other smaller pockets. Hope you enjoy the mix!

Also featured on today’s blog entry is the first track ever by the Grey Lagoons. It seems that Acid Jazz may have left the mainstream but has lingered within the lagoons, sticking to the rivers and the lakes that it’s used too. The guy talking on the track may sound utterly stoned out of his mind but in fact was quite sober during this recording, but he will still avoid playing it to members of his family due to the fact that they’ll never believe him, and may accuse him of being back on the sauce. The song is still in demo format and will be reworked and reposted in the near future.

Canteloube - Chant’s d’Auvergne

Grey Lagoons - Home Pills Demo

P. S. Today I have chosen three tracks for the mighty Moka for www.anothernightonearth.blogspot.com/  . The track The Mexican by Babe Ruth is a Balearic Not Balearic track that was huge this summer in Sweden by some accounts. I thought that one was pretty darn applicable. The Smokin’ O. P.’s track is a cover of Love The One You’re With which has always been my favourite song to cheer me up when I’m homesick or missing someone. The first time I played the song to Mr. Keyz today, he asked me if I wasn’t actually a hippy. The answer to that is yes, first and foremost, all else follows. Lastly there’s Slabo Day by Peter Green, a rare Balearic Not Balearic classic that you don’t see around much these days. ‘Cept around my house. Not bragging or anything. Okay, a bit.