Benbecula Records
Scotland, est. 1999
Electronica, ambient, electro, folk, post-rock ... blah
VIP Code: BRIANELLIS
12 MONTH SUBSCRIPTION
Sign up to receive all CD releases and Minerals Series CDs for a whole year!!
Look here!!
COMING SOON
Receive all these titles for less than half price!
Ochre
"Death of an Aura"
Jack Marchment
"Corydon and Manjrekar"
MINERALS SERIES
Read all about it
  |
Chris Dooks "The Aesthetic Animals Album" Benbecula Records, 2008 (BEN540) CD Album Minerals Series - Limited Release date: 7 April 2008 BUY THIS RELEASE Track Listing 01 The Swan 02 The Penguin 03 The Mouse 04 The Dog 05 The Human Male 06 The Salmon 07 The Salamander 08 The Finch 09 The Fox 10 The Manatee (Short Story) Dooks is a visual artist and electronica musician as Bovine Life and is an ex-director of TV arts documentaries, including a South Bank Show on sound terrorist Scanner. Vocal compositions have been released on Highpoint Lowlife, and electronica via French label Bip-Hop. Concept Chris Dooks “sings the news” after meeting Turkish troubadour Latif Bolat and was inspired by the ceilidh storytelling tradition in Dooks’ adopted Scottish home. He likes the idea that songs could be local news plus melody. Proper culture. Fed up with singing melancholy love songs during a failing relationship, Dooks got all conceptual and decided to write an entire album based on finding local and global news stories - but avoiding - at all costs, the songs being “worthy” despite having a song about global warming within the E.P. But this is his first suite of songs - and he’s got a great cover by Mina Braun who did the artwork for James Yorkston’s The Year of The Leopard album. Here is a few of the news stories, loosely connected by the animal kingdom that inspired the critter-based song-suite. The Penguin Iceberg B-15A, was the world’s largest free-floating object—it was 122 km (76 miles) long, 27 km (17 miles) wide, and covered an area of 3,100 km2 (1,200 square miles, or approximately the size of Luxembourg). It inspired the track “The Penguin”. The Swan A swan flew in and smashed through the windscreen and out the back window of Gertrude Effing’s van in Germany in 2005. The swan survived. This story was found in The Sun newspaper as one of the “sun-spots” - brilliant one sentence news stories in the smutty rag. The Salamander Parthenogenesis (from the Greek parthenos, “virgin”, + genesis, “creation”) is an asexual form of reproduction found in females where growth and development of an embryo or seed occurs without fertilization by males. Some Salamanders can do this. But they’ve never had their own hymn till now! A theme of THE WICKER MAN which Dooks remixed in 2006 for Deveron Arts. The Manatee Sea Cows or Manatees have advanced sexual organs, which can be stimulated by sea kelp in the wild. Biologists have recorded that a manatee’s orgasm can typically last up to two days. But in some manatees, a gene mutation means that occasionally they risk become “locked” in orgasm, spending much of their life burdened by bliss. (Dooks made this up and reads it as a story on the E.P.) Reviews " ... ultimately a wonderful and dreamy record which, very much like his previous projects, sits somewhere outside of reality." The Milk Factory |
|
Resources www.dooks.org Bovine Life on MySpace Bip-hop |
OUT NOW
Chris Dooks
"The Aesthetic Animals Album"
Acumen
"Acumen"
talkingmakesnosense
"The Winter Drones"
Cheer
"Static Traps"
RECEIVE UPDATES
Read the Newsletter Archive to catch up!
