Land of Clouds is one of those songs that underlines the power of the digital music revolution. There was a time when synthesisers and samples, music created from non-analogue sources, sounds drawn from the ether rather than for physical dexterity of the player was viewed with suspicion, especially by guitar wielding, narrow-minded, nostalgia freaks. But that was their loss because the studio itself has become an instrument in its own right, one limited only by the imagination of the creator rather than the sonic limitations of the instrument at hand.
Thus we have artists such as Yaman Palak making songs which are wonderfully emotive, seem to be built as much on mood and atmosphere as much as they are on beat and lyric, songs which seem to encompass a strange blend of primal force and futuristic sound. The past and the present existing in one space. Land of Clouds is a mercurial blend of technology and soul, of ambient soundscaping and skittering, slow dance grooves, a glimpse of the future via sounds which resonate with familiarity. Music isn’t always about revolution, that rarely works, but evolution, that is much more effective.
It maybe a cliche that the best things are worth waiting for, but in the case of RobAshley the 25 or so years he paid his dues gigging around the North-East of America before striking out to write his own album Premiere. Farewell. The Drugs Didn’t Last for Every is the opening salvo and lead single from that album, a considered, spacious and understated number of the sort that Leonard Cohen would have been proud to have written in the 70’s, though Ashley’s voice is one that is more universally accessible than the Canadian’s dulcet and melancholic tones.
I’ve been saying it for a while now, there is something in the air, a change, a need to comment, something borne out by the fact that I seem to be receiving more and more music which has a message about the darkness gathering in the world at the moment and the need to push back against it. Music has always been a potent force to inform and energise people, to call to arms like minded folk and to put your thoughts and observations on record for all to see. Some bands make music which counterpunches with rhetoric and rabble rousing, some makes music which examines and debates and some, like Skip, fights back in the sweetest, gentlest way possible an approach which seems to make it all the more powerful in a sort of David and Goliath fort of way.
I remember Joshua Ketchmark’s last single, 
Take a female singer/songwriter/producer from Delhi in India, give her a musical education from London and drop her into the boiling pot of influences of a city like, oh I don’t know… New York, and it would be pretty interesting to hear what she came up with, well Rivita is that woman and her new five track EP is currently being played into my ears.
I once heard a folk tale that every place on the map has its own voice and tale to tell. Not just natural features such as rivers and trees, rocks and mountains but even man made structures and the more ancient they are the more they have to tell. It is for this reason bards and storytellers would travel from place to place listening to the song of the land, learning its message and then use it to inform and entertain. India’s top guitarist Kapil Srivastava seems to be on just such a mission. The founder of India’s largest chain of Guitar Schools, 
Any track that is topped and tailed with the strains of Withnail and I wins my respect irrespective of what they do to fill the space between those soundbites. For these are clearly people of taste and didn’t a wise man once say that there are two sorts of people in this world, those who know it to be the greatest, not to mention most quotable, film of all time and those who have yet to see it. No, well they should have.
In such an interconnected age as today, I’m surprised more bands don’t realise that just making music is limiting your appeal and that the best approach is a multi-pronged media attack. Okay, many deliver their music with a video to create a pincer movement of audio and images but far too few put out their own comic book series, one where they are the characters and the music can be considered the sound track. That’s clever, very clever.
