Letters, Letters... wonderfully weird!

Once upon a time, not so long ago, letters in the mail were the main form of communication.
Letters, Letters have, on their eponymous début, messed with this perception and all the misunderstandings that words can convey...

The band comes from Montréal (how near inevitable does that seem) but they also have help from Chicago. Amazon.co.uk does not appear to know about this release yet while Amazon.com does, but only on CD. Don't however, even for one moment, think that we in the UK are on the losing end of this particular game. The album is released by 'Type Recordings', as many strange but good things are, and they have released it as a 12" LP on vinyl. This is available only in the UK and limited to just 500 copies; all of them pressed in strawberry-red clear vinyl!
The music on the album is I think, and this is after just three listens to one of the aforementioned vinyl copies, a new take on what I can best describe as dirty low-fi electronica; it has much instrumental variety and merit but also the very interesting addition of both male and female vocals, sometimes both together in the same song. That does not mean something bad, very far from it in fact, but for a 'Type Recordings' release to have any vocals at all is really rather remarkable.
Now you can understand why I'm unwilling, as I mentioned earlier this week, to be tempted into making my 'Best Albums of 2007' selection so early in the year. I'm not saying this album will be in that list but I'm certainly not prepared to exclude new possibilities just because it is the start of November.

I should have, in fact, added another 'Type Recordings' release to my post yesterday that considered music for autumn and winter nights. That is Le Fumeur de Ciel by the Parisian artist Julien Neto, who has released under various other monikers and on assorted labels, which was released in 2005 but is now available on 12" LP for the first time. It is a wonderful concoction of electronica, melded with dusty acoustic samples, and the album is entirely instrumental. France is a real, yet often unrecognised, force when it comes to this and related kinds of ambient music. I have reviewed Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique already and I am rather tempted to buy a copy of the Colleen album The Golden Morning Breaks. (These are both released on the Manchester-based The Leaf Label.)

I closed my eyes and everything changed...

Why? Because "Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change." would fit this album perfectly.

It is a fourteen-track selection of entirely instrumental music which, with the exception of the final one that also features sparse classical guitar, was entirely made by recording mechanical music boxes live and absolutely nothing else. These recordings were then sampled, over-dubbed and looped (but not otherwise electronically altered) to produce the final effect.

The final result, Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique, was actually commissioned by 'Radio France Culture' in 2005 and is the work of Cécile Schott, better known as the recording artist Colleen.

On the face of it would seem to be a rather outré kind of album and in some ways it is... but that would be to get its premise very wrong overall; it is actually very listenable and even soothing but without ever veering towards trite "musak" territory. It was finally given a full CD release in late 2006 by Manchester-based 'The Leaf Label' that has also released her slightly more conventional, yet still very far from ordinary, albums --- Les Ondes Silencieuses (2007), The Golden Morning Breaks (2005) and Everyone Alive Wants Answers (2003).