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Stuart A. Staples - Arrhythmia (2018)

Posted By: Designol
Stuart A. Staples - Arrhythmia (2018)

Stuart A. Staples - Arrhythmia (2018)
EAC | FLAC | Tracks (Cue&Log) ~ 254 Mb | Mp3 (CBR320) ~ 152 Mb | Scans included
Label: Lucky Dog/City Slang | # Lucky Dog 21/City Slang 50156
Post-Rock, Alternative/Indie, Electronic, Chamber Pop | Time: 00:54:07

Stuart A. Staples releases Arrhythmia on 15 June via City Slang, his first solo album in thirteen years. Arrhythmia is immersive and experimental, both recognisably the work of the Tindersticks’ frontman and simultaneously a stand-alone, unique piece of work. It's a provocative album where electronic experimentations and rare multi-instrumentations interweave, wrapping themselves around unconventional but utterly spellbinding song structures.

Written in what Stuart A. Staples describes as “a lost year”, Arrhythmia began on Christmas day 2016 when he was drawn to the studio to record the beginnings of A new real, the album’s hypnotic opener of glitchy electronic loops with a sly nod to disco. A year later the entire album was complete, a process which involved Staples struggling between his own free sense of timing and more mechanical rhythms and what he describes as “a growing need for each song to take a turn, to lead them into strange places, keeping the feeling or effect of the song, but only as a memory.”

The second track Memories of love is indicative of Arrhythmia’s time-less experimentation and musical exploration. A stark and delicate melancholy opens up to rich and increasingly vivid chiming bells. There’s a feeling that the song has two diversely distinct parts unexpectedly, yet perfectly, married. Closing side 1, Step into the grey offers a dark romanticism reminiscent of early Tindersticks with a crescendo of freestyle percussion and strings.

Side 2 of the album consists of a 30 minute instrumental track Music for ‘A year in small paintings’. The piece began its evolution back in 2012 when filmmaker, and long-time Staples collaborator, Claire Denis first saw the serial of works by the painter (and Staples’ partner) Suzanne Osborne and wanted to turn these 365 oil paintings of the sky into a film. As friends and musicians passed through Staples’ studio he asked them to watch and react to the paintings. As Staples explains “From these recordings, I chipped away at its form, guiding and editing. Each time there was an exhibition of the work there was a newly evolved version of the music to accompany it.” Eventually the creative process came full circle when Claire Denis’ film Un beau soliel interieur (transl. Let the Sunshine In), featured the paintings, and their music became inextricably linked to the film’s soundtrack. Improvisations of the themes from Music for ‘A year in small paintings’ were also contributed by The Julian Siegel Quartet.

If there is currently a musical perfectionist, Stuart A. Staples, the Tindersticks main guy doubling as a solo artist, is certainly one of them. Back in the late 90s when The Hague’s Crossing Border Festival was at its height, Staples surely manifested his strive for perfection. Throughout the band’s show, he kept on hailing the sound man with what was to be highlighted and what not, only at one moment to get so pissed off, to drop his mic on the stage and leave the podium not to return. He did have a guilty conscience towards the audience, so he and the band returned a year or so later to give an astounding performance.

That search for perfection might be one of the reasons it took him 13 years to come up with Arrhythmia, his second solo album, and as with his previous one and everything else he has done with Tindersticks, he is always mightily close to his goals, probably only to realise nothing is quite perfect. A good enough reason to try it all over again.

To that effect, there’s enough music on Arrhythmia that does get quite close to perfect. “A New Deal” that starts off the album is ‘staple’ Staples, with or without Tindersticks, this time around with some quite audible electronic beats/drumming which coupled with Staples’ vocals could be dubbed as ‘quiet disco’. “Memories of Love” is that truly exceptional music piece here. Starting off just with the electric piano, Staples’ solo voice and a lot of silence in between and then switching into an instrumental piece with only a glockenspiel and electric piano, all so hushed that it is not something for the middle, but something that would sound like a shriek in the dead of the night. This has previously only been achieved by another duo of perfectionists, Scott Walker and Mark Hollis on his sole solo album away from Talk Talk.

“Step Into The Grey” is exactly that - starting off as something you might call a ‘regular’ staples music piece, it turns into a set of almost dissonant string music, yet another step in the direction Scott Walker started off with his “Climate of Hunter”.

The confirmation comes in what seems to be intended as the album’s centrepiece, the 30 minutes long “Music For ‘A Year In Small Paintings’ where 365 daily paintings by his partner Suzanne Osborne were turned into a documentary film. Staples prepared the piece out of the musical snippets from the sequences that were presented at various exhibitions of the piece. Here he goes into the territory of ambient/post-rock specialists like Labradford and Stars of The Lid with a matching quality effort that stands alone even if you didn’t have a chance to see the paintings (I didn’t).

So an accomplished and intriguing effort from Staples which at times reaches his struggle for perfection. Hopefully, it will not take him another 13 years to come up with the next one.

Review by Ljubinko Zivkovic, Soundblab.com


Stuart A. Staples - Arrhythmia (2018)



Tracklist:

01. A New Real (5:13)
02. Memories of Love (10:34)
03. Step into the Grey (7:27)
04. Music for 'A Year in Small Paintings' (30:52)


Exact Audio Copy V1.3 from 2. September 2016

EAC extraction logfile from 25. June 2018, 13:02

Stuart A. Staples / Arrhythmia

Used drive : ASUS BW-12D1S-U Adapter: 1 ID: 1

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 667
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Gap handling : Appended to previous track

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -V -8 -T "Genre=%genre%" -T "Artist=%artist%" -T "Title=%title%" -T "Album=%albumtitle%" -T "Date=%year%" -T "Tracknumber=%tracknr%" -T "Comment=%comment%" %source%


TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
1 | 0:00.00 | 5:13.26 | 0 | 23500
2 | 5:13.26 | 10:34.04 | 23501 | 71054
3 | 15:47.30 | 7:27.30 | 71055 | 104609
4 | 23:14.60 | 30:52.07 | 104610 | 243516


Track 1

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Track 2

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Peak level 85.7 %
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Track quality 100.0 %
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Track 3

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Track 4

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None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database

No errors occurred

End of status report

–– CUETools DB Plugin V2.1.6

[CTDB TOCID: hUJcq4f0Upvl5m1pqu55LnMaunc-] found
Submit result: hUJcq4f0Upvl5m1pqu55LnMaunc- has been confirmed
Track | CTDB Status
1 | (2/2) Accurately ripped
2 | (2/2) Accurately ripped
3 | (2/2) Accurately ripped
4 | (2/2) Accurately ripped


==== Log checksum A37062F916E83B658D97A6AD73A9839E197F8B3D8B0D912806EE7166CBEC9AD7 ====

foobar2000 1.2 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2018-07-01 02:48:12

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Analyzed: Stuart A. Staples / Arrhythmia
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

DR Peak RMS Duration Track
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DR8 0.00 dB -9.75 dB 5:13 01-A New Real
DR14 -1.34 dB -20.59 dB 10:34 02-Memories of Love
DR10 0.00 dB -13.76 dB 7:27 03-Step into the Grey
DR12 -4.06 dB -22.70 dB 30:52 04-Music for 'A Year in Small Paintings'
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Number of tracks: 4
Official DR value: DR11

Samplerate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 550 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================================================

Stuart A. Staples - Arrhythmia (2018)

Stuart A. Staples - Arrhythmia (2018)

All thanks to original releaser - DoobieBro

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