Foreign music sung in languages i don't understand, and on instruments i don't know the name of. Other more obvious musical influences might include Lech Jankowski, Can, Captain Beefheart, Bartok, Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Erik Satie, Howlin' Wolf, Moondog, Sun City Girls, Harry Smith Anthology, Big Science, Iva Bittova, Ghedalia Tazartes, This Heat, Ocora, Folkways, Brigitte Fontaine, Nonesuch Explorer Series, Meredith Monk, The Residents, The Velvet Underground, The Hounds Of Love, Eno, Olivier Messiaen, those Secret Museum Of Mankind CDs, Volcano The Bear, Coltrane, Funkadelic, Pascal Comelade, The Monks, Sun Ra, Faust, Stravinsky, Mingus, Colette Magny, Liberation Music Orchestra, Sun Records, Hildegard von Bingen, Duke Ellington, Pierre Bastien and Robert Wyatt. Amongst others.
Sounds Like
"Pause For The Jet" review in The Wire
When I think of English Music (with capitals) I don't think Vaughan
Williams, I think The Shadow Ring. So this, the new solo album by
Daniel Padden, also of Volcano The Bear, is very English. There's a
tradition, or group of traditions, stemming from such disparate
progenitors as Syd Barrett and AMM, through Robert Wyatt, This Heat
and Nurse With Wound, to a host of unlikely children such as the Dry
Leaf artists and sundry contemporary hauntologists. And Daniel Padden.
The definitive adjective is waywardness. You get the feeling he could
make a cracking good straight pop album, but simply won't. It's a
position I totally respect. He wants to let sounds be what they are,
with a minimum of polite marshalling into vague shapes. Sometimes
sounding like a song - such as the significantly titled closer
"English Again" (see!) - sometimes sounding like a message in a
bottle ("Marseille Tape").
Like many exemplars of this tradition I'm attempting to illuminate,
Padden has a tendency to sing like a cracked choirboy. I think that's
an English characteristic as well: 'Cake or death' as Eddie Izzard
insightfully put it - or more likely both. Key themes here include
the sea, natural history and grammar, while instrumentation can
encompass anything from a squad of harmoniums to what sounds like a
staircase. Recordings seem to have been made inside a giant banjo. At
all times you know there's more going on than you can get to grips
with. I love records like this. I could listen to it all year.
(Bruce Russell, The Wire)
"Pause For The Jet...proves that you can dance squares in the form of circles and vice versa. If that isn't true art, then I don't know either." (Cracked Reviews)
"The Isaac Storm"
Demented music box melodies drift amidst soaring strings, clinking clanking percussion, deep moaning cellos, bursts of staticky field recordings and manipulated field recordings, while over the top float haunting mysterious melodies. Sounds a bit like a more druggy demented Tom Waits.
Elsewhere, thick washes of fuzzed out ambient whir wrap themselves around damaged pitch shifted guitar warble, junk yard percussion marches through thick clouds of ominous drones, detuned acoustic guitars shimmer beneath heavily reverbed scrapes and squeaks and wheezing harmonica melodies. A totally mesmerizing, dizzying and damaged trawl through some surreal junk yard filled with broken musical instruments and ghost musicians, jamming in the middle of the night to an audience of beat up stuffed animals and rusted out appliances. So cool! (Aquaruis Records)
"Strikingly beautiful at times, Padden's music truly comes from another place. Wholly unique and lush with feeling, "The One Ensemble of Daniel Padden" is a rare and unclassifiable masterpiece." (Other Music)
"His soft deregulation of sounds obeys an internal logic, a secret unity which makes it all the more penetrating. Swift and Carroll are dead, but their Jack 'o' Lanterns are still dancing." (Les Inrockuptibles - The One Ensemble Of Daniel Padden CD)
"The Owl of Fives" rivals the finest experimental folk releases of 04 or any other year." (Foxy Digitalis)
Daniel Padden is also a member of Volcano The Bear. Volcano The Bear's Myspace page is here.
Dumfries Tape is a piece i made for Matt Hulse's 'Audible Picture Show'. It came about after i picked up a job-lot of old theatre-organ tapes in a charity shop in Dumfries.
Teenage Kicks is a version of the Undertones song, commissioned for a DVD to accompany Matt Hulse's Filmcraft Weekend held at the Dovecot space in Edinburgh in January 2009.
Current projects include: final work on the Dummy Jim album; The One Ensemble Orchestra's 'Other Thunders' album is now out on the No-Fi label; 'The Bellow Switch' by myself and Sarah Kenchington is out now on Shadazz Records.
Recent projects include the music for Visible Fictions' production of 'Curse Of The Demeter', (based on a chapter from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'), Kate Burton's film 'The Ice Plant', and Sarah Tripp's film 'Me & Her', music for a TV documentary on photojournalist David Gillanders, and the music for Nick Higgins' documentary 'A Massacre Foretold'. In addition Padden created the music for a children's theatre production of Jason And The Argonauts, produced by Visible Fictions.
Daniel Padden has composed music for Matt Hulse's film 'Half Life', Faulty Optic's theatre piece 'Horsehead', Visible Fictions' theatre piece 'Big Baby', Zam Salim's film 'Original Bob', and many more.
Daniel Padden & Sarah Kenchington 'The Bellow Switch' out now! On Shadazz Records. The album features the remarkable sounds of Sarah Kenchington's mechanical instruments. Go to http://www.myspace.com/paddenkenchington for more...
Review of 'The Bellow Switch' in The Wire magazine, Aug 2009: Daniel Padden's work - in both Volcano The Bear and The One Ensemble - has always operated in an imaginary realm, creating folk music from places that never really existed. So it makes sense that this CD finds him working with Sarah Kenchington, an artist and musician who specialises in making and playing unique mechanical instruments that look and sound like lost artefacts from a magical realist history of music.
The Hurdalion Gurdalion is a pedal-powered machine that agitates banjo and double-bass strings. The Horns utilise pedals, tractor inner tubes and balloons to blow a euphonium and tenor horn. The Forkwriter is a percussion instrument made by a typewriter and forks, amplified by a drum. The Bell Tower is a 3-tiered pyramid of wine glasses that, when small balls are fed into the top, has the potential to create an infinite number of tinkling, spontaneous melodies. The Flutterbox is a large, kalimba-like musical box with a spinning drum that creates rhythmic loops - simple, repetitive figures that form the backbone to the music collected here. There are obvious echoes of Harry Partch's singular creations and Moondog's custom-built percussion, but Kenchington's inventions have a very English eccentricity, more reminiscent of Heath Robinson's implausibly rickety contraptions.
Padden's role in all of this was primarily to record Kenchington playing the instruments and then edit the results into patchwork compositions - often with a twinkling sense of mischief. On 'Unbagging The Wish Spoon', absurdly wheezing horns rudely interrupt a regimented clockwork tick-tock; on 'The Mine Shaft', sawed string drones and overtones interlock with cyclical metallic clunks like an automaton jam band. It's prevented from sounding too coldly mechanised by the addition of a few subtle touches - Kenchington providing a tickle of banjo here, a parp of trumpet there - and its surprising how much of Padden's personality comes through with the addition of his mysterious, deceptively winsome vocals to tracks like 'Tapered Things'. Another tantalising postcard from Padden's distinctive parallel universe."
I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace
Pause For The Jet is available. Its a solo album released on the Dekorder label. You can buy VINYL copies here (UK only - get in touch if overseas).
For UK:
To buy the VINYL of Pause For The Jet (UK ONLY) use this link:
The artwork and design for 'Pause For The Jet' was created by Nicola Atkinson Does Fly. Nicola's website is www.nadfly.com.
CHRISTMAS Fiodor Dream Dog's album "i lose things" is virtually but truly OUT NOW ! You can find it HERE ! or HERE: fnac.com, virgin, i-tunes store, amazon, napster.... Alleluïa. NOËL L'album de Fiodor Dream Dog "i lose things" est disponible virtuellement mais pour de vrai MAINTENANT ! Dénichez-le ICI ! ou bien ICI: fnac.com, virgin, i-tunes store, amazon, napster.... Alleluïa.
Hello, thanks for adding. there was a radioprogramm about your album Pause For The Jet at Transcarpathian radiostation. you can listen it at my myspace, it's in ukrainian =)
these days I'm enjoying Pause for the Jet and the gig yesterday was mesmerizing. Really enjoying the way u 2 occupied the stage, the moves that took us into your world... A very pleasant soundtrip
