30-09-2022, 17:30
NEW ALBUM: ALPHAVILLE ~ Eternally Yours
![[Image: NjUtNzEzOC5qcGVn.jpeg]](https://i.discogs.com/YnZ91S6EqI7-7PXQdq4vGmB92bheVoUg-FfZ_i98icg/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:534/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTI0NjAz/ODM5LTE2NjM5MjA1/NjUtNzEzOC5qcGVn.jpeg)
Winding down with a 100% guilty pleasure after a whirlwind of a week and willing to bet there won’t be many, if any takers for this one! I simply had to listen due to a longstanding and mysterious fascination with Alphaville. Marian Gold is a force – he has some kind of drive, and a whole lot of aplomb - no doubt at all that he very much enjoys life! He basically IS Alphaville now (he was probably always the glue holding them together) – this album is pretty much himself (ok – one or two others) and the orchestra - Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg.
Alphaville used to be a three-piece synth pop band and none of them could really play an instrument – they started out with what Gold calls ‘toys’, essentially – the cheapest synths they could lay their hands on and that could translate the music they had inside their heads, in the most basic fashion. I don’t know how it happened, but in my opinion they wrote some great pop songs – made it big in Europe but not in the USA. Not a whole helluva lot has changed since the band started out (in terms of style of music) except the equipment is superior! This is the eighth album in 38 years. Marian Gold has made a couple of solo albums too. This is absolutely, unequivocally and unabashedly dollied up synth pop in all its resplendent glory. They never pretended to be anything other than what they are/were – maybe that’s why I like them.
Copying this from an interview in Chaos Control Digizine – gives a bit of insight into the album. I like the bit about the orchestra basically being a gigantic biological synthesizer! … https://chaoscontrol.com/marian-gold-alp...lly-yours/
"It was a really fantastic experience for everyone. It’s a very unusual situation for a musician to do a project like that because normally you go into a studio with a band, you’ll record the music, you’ll have these dialogues between the different members and the creative process will basically involve two, three or four persons. This time, it was just like we were next to a wishing well, and everybody else did the job. We had the arrangers; we had the orchestra; we had the conductor and we, as musicians, were only involved in a very theoretical way. Because the idea was that we would not perform personally on this album because we would let the orchestra do the whole job. It was not the idea like what bands like Metallica, for instance, did: to just play their music and in the background there’s a big orchestra and they follow the music. We wanted to have the orchestra as the main medium for the whole production, and then give the listener the impression that the music was almost recorded in the 19th century and played by an orchestra.
That is a completely different process because it means a lot of changes for the original songs. An orchestra is a polyphonic instrument with each instrument being monophonic. So you have to split up when playing chords. You have to split up each line to specific instruments. And it’s an absolutely fascinating process. And it reminded me actually a little bit of the early days when we started making music and we had these modular synthesizers, where we arranged all different kinds of effects and lines inside the synthesizer to perform a sound or a sequence or whatever. So the orchestra, in a way, is a gigantic biological synthesizer."
The sound of the album is cinematic – (big, bold and all enveloping under headphones – I might not always cope with it, but it’s working today!) – hardly surprising since it’s a film orchestra doing the honours. There are two new tracks but most of them go way back. Some songs I infinitely prefer to others, some are a little sugary and heaven only knows why he included a cover of "Diamonds are Forever"! It’s a bit of an indulgence all round actually – like a black forest gateau. Gold’s voice holds up, which is fairly impressive but he's also the first to admit that he took a bit of vocal strain. Oh well - he wanted to do a symphonic album and it's done, so bravo to him/them.
Choosing two tracks - "Sounds Like a Melody" ...
... and "Summer in Berlin"
Winding down with a 100% guilty pleasure after a whirlwind of a week and willing to bet there won’t be many, if any takers for this one! I simply had to listen due to a longstanding and mysterious fascination with Alphaville. Marian Gold is a force – he has some kind of drive, and a whole lot of aplomb - no doubt at all that he very much enjoys life! He basically IS Alphaville now (he was probably always the glue holding them together) – this album is pretty much himself (ok – one or two others) and the orchestra - Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg.
Alphaville used to be a three-piece synth pop band and none of them could really play an instrument – they started out with what Gold calls ‘toys’, essentially – the cheapest synths they could lay their hands on and that could translate the music they had inside their heads, in the most basic fashion. I don’t know how it happened, but in my opinion they wrote some great pop songs – made it big in Europe but not in the USA. Not a whole helluva lot has changed since the band started out (in terms of style of music) except the equipment is superior! This is the eighth album in 38 years. Marian Gold has made a couple of solo albums too. This is absolutely, unequivocally and unabashedly dollied up synth pop in all its resplendent glory. They never pretended to be anything other than what they are/were – maybe that’s why I like them.
Copying this from an interview in Chaos Control Digizine – gives a bit of insight into the album. I like the bit about the orchestra basically being a gigantic biological synthesizer! … https://chaoscontrol.com/marian-gold-alp...lly-yours/
"It was a really fantastic experience for everyone. It’s a very unusual situation for a musician to do a project like that because normally you go into a studio with a band, you’ll record the music, you’ll have these dialogues between the different members and the creative process will basically involve two, three or four persons. This time, it was just like we were next to a wishing well, and everybody else did the job. We had the arrangers; we had the orchestra; we had the conductor and we, as musicians, were only involved in a very theoretical way. Because the idea was that we would not perform personally on this album because we would let the orchestra do the whole job. It was not the idea like what bands like Metallica, for instance, did: to just play their music and in the background there’s a big orchestra and they follow the music. We wanted to have the orchestra as the main medium for the whole production, and then give the listener the impression that the music was almost recorded in the 19th century and played by an orchestra.
That is a completely different process because it means a lot of changes for the original songs. An orchestra is a polyphonic instrument with each instrument being monophonic. So you have to split up when playing chords. You have to split up each line to specific instruments. And it’s an absolutely fascinating process. And it reminded me actually a little bit of the early days when we started making music and we had these modular synthesizers, where we arranged all different kinds of effects and lines inside the synthesizer to perform a sound or a sequence or whatever. So the orchestra, in a way, is a gigantic biological synthesizer."
The sound of the album is cinematic – (big, bold and all enveloping under headphones – I might not always cope with it, but it’s working today!) – hardly surprising since it’s a film orchestra doing the honours. There are two new tracks but most of them go way back. Some songs I infinitely prefer to others, some are a little sugary and heaven only knows why he included a cover of "Diamonds are Forever"! It’s a bit of an indulgence all round actually – like a black forest gateau. Gold’s voice holds up, which is fairly impressive but he's also the first to admit that he took a bit of vocal strain. Oh well - he wanted to do a symphonic album and it's done, so bravo to him/them.
Choosing two tracks - "Sounds Like a Melody" ...
... and "Summer in Berlin"
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." ~ Bill Watterson
