Cortijada Los Gazquez - Vida en 1000m. Parque Natural Sierra Maria Los Velez. Andalucia.

Fleet Foxes, definitely my summer album for this year. I love them. And I’m not going to describe them as eclectic either. We all have influences and to achieve some of those sounds that make you the artist you are doesn’t mean that you are borrowing from others. If you can describe the taste of wine by evoking the flavours of autumn fruit or coal then like a wine Fleet Foxes have a hint of ’surf sound’, close harmonies and steel strings. And like Midlake, they have a slight gothic English ‘pastoral’ sound which is curious and I like very much. Their sound is a bit ‘Motown’, fab and restorative though on occasion they do create in me an involuntary desire to stick a finger in my right ear in the 70’s ‘northern’ folk way in order to achieve better harmony.

OK, I’ve got it. The music from the previous blog is by Ennio Morricone from ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, although the arrangement is a bit different.

I spend a lot of time driving through the mountains here listening to Morricone (amongst others) and it’s not just that the ’spaghetti’ westerns were filmed here, there is a genuine connection for this music to this landscape even though the films were meant to be set in Arizona or some such.

But I also spend a lot of time driving through the mountains here listening to Aaron Copland and there seems to be a genuine connection for his music to the landscape too. Now I’m not going to try and compare the two artists, that would just be silly. Morricone writes exclusively for the cinema and would, I am sure, be flattered to be compared to one of the 20th century’s greatest composers. So I am not going to make that comparison.

However both men have defined the American musical phyche. Copland (Kaplan) a Lithuanian Jew from Brooklyn (and also wrote the original film score for film of the book above) and Morricone a Roman from Italy. But how?

Now this is just my theory and please feel free to shoot it down. I feel Copland represents the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ all puritanical zeal taking the ‘folklore’ and music of the white man at toil on the land and wrapping it all up with some form of spiritual modernism. Whereas Morricone uses the ‘Pope’s’ authority to define black and white conceptions of good and bad (and ugly) and a Latin exuberance to stretch drama into a world of superlatives.

So who reigns supreme? On one side we have ‘Rodeo’, ‘Billy the Kid’ and ‘Appalachian Spring’ amongst others, and on the other, well we all know them don’t we, and we love this man’s music if for no other reason than that he employed his school mate Alejandro to whistle on many of his compositions because he was such a good whistler. Basically they fall on either side of a ‘TexMex’ border defined by their relative cultures.

But why is the music evocative for Andalucia? Well it’s not because we are trying to be Arizona. But like Arizona we have the heat and dust, the superlatives in climate and the sense of wilderness.

Velez Blanco has the luxury of wireless broadband although freak weather conditions can disrupt it for a day or two now and then. Los Gazquez is too remote for such ‘urbanista’ luxury so we have a two way satellite system allowing us good access to the internet although the distance to the satellite and back does cause some latency. However if you upload several pages consecutively using tabs it is no hardship.

It allows me to down load music like… ‘Hot Chip’.

Our blog is supposed to be about our lives in Spain, and so, I guess, this technically  is no exception. It’s our January album. The new one by Bonnie Prince Billy. (a.k.a Will Oldham), ‘Joya’ and we love it.

So to be hypocritical I shall attempt to compress someone’s creativity into a few words. It’s existential ‘roots’ music with a twist of ‘Nashville’ but with it’s feet firmly set in western rock. That should narrow it down.

His voice is shallow and reedy, but he has an easy disposition to sophistication, making it necessary to persevere with new work but it is so worth it. Buy it.

Mexican ex-metal heads who busked in Dublin got signed and beat Johnny Cash and The Arctic Monkeys to number one in the Irish charts.
Some classic tracks in there fused with Latin sounds and guitar rhythms of Flamenco. Absolutely superb musicianship and should be listened to by everybody.