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Music : Soothing Sounds for Baby-Vol 1 (1 - 6 months)
Rating: 
- Terrific for newborns & great for Eno and Aphex Twin fans!
There's good news and there's good news. After 10 minutes of track 1, Lullaby, my one-month-old was fast asleep. As it played on, she continued to rest peacefully at a time when she would normally have been one alert little munchkin.
And now for the other good news: This is a fantastic recording, and an important one for music lovers and musicologists. Having been recording in 1962/3, this sounds extraordinarily sophisticated (in a mellow, analogue "soothing" way). It sounds as if it could have been made today, and put out on Warp Records. The melodic blips and rhythyms are echoed in Radiohead's recent releases and, as the liner notes point out, this work pre-dates Brian Eno's Discreet Music by a decade.
Raymond Scott himself was a nutty genius who made it his life's work to experiment with sounds and instruments. While I appreciate a lot of his stuff - notably the outlandish cartoon music he made for Warner Brothers cartoons of the 30s, as chronicled on Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights - I wouldn't necessarily listen to it over and over again. But the music found on Soothing Sounds.. is not only innovative; more importantly, it is extremely listenable and, well, 'soothing'.
Just one note of caution. Not all parents enjoy Eno or Aphex Twin. And so some parents might not actually get a kick out of this whole album. But the album is worth the first track alone - and I defy you to try it with your baby and not be impressed by the results. This is experimental stuff for both you and your little one.
Rating: - Haunting Echoes of a Distant Past
This first volume of soothing sounds for baby is a wonderful journey into a distant world, maybe our own pre-memory past."Sleepy times" is a haunting melody conjuring images of sleepy and content babies. "Music box" sounds like a group of tiny pipe players and "Nursery Rhyme" takes this one step further and envokes the idea of scores of small wooden toys coming to life for a festive dance.
Like any re-release, the music is open to completely different interpretation from the modernistic sixties. It is much more likely to appeal to adults with curiosity for the cover art, the dated sounds, or just for academic interest.What possibly seemed cheap and plasticky music on its release has now mellowed into a charming collection of melodies that show up contempory childrens music for being too overstated.
The historic perspective is made all the more interesting by the fact that Raymond Scott was an intensely private man in search of his dream of directly realising the composer's sounds without interference from other musicians' interpretations. So in a way, when we listen to this CD we are observing the sounds inside Mr Scott's head. Those comments about his rooms of electronic equipment being his "play rooms" were not far wrong!
Well worth a listen and a trip back in time.
- Terrific for newborns & great for Eno and Aphex Twin fans!There's good news and there's good news. After 10 minutes of track 1, Lullaby, my one-month-old was fast asleep. As it played on, she continued to rest peacefully at a time when she would normally have been one alert little munchkin.
And now for the other good news: This is a fantastic recording, and an important one for music lovers and musicologists. Having been recording in 1962/3, this sounds extraordinarily sophisticated (in a mellow, analogue "soothing" way). It sounds as if it could have been made today, and put out on Warp Records. The melodic blips and rhythyms are echoed in Radiohead's recent releases and, as the liner notes point out, this work pre-dates Brian Eno's Discreet Music by a decade.
Raymond Scott himself was a nutty genius who made it his life's work to experiment with sounds and instruments. While I appreciate a lot of his stuff - notably the outlandish cartoon music he made for Warner Brothers cartoons of the 30s, as chronicled on Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights - I wouldn't necessarily listen to it over and over again. But the music found on Soothing Sounds.. is not only innovative; more importantly, it is extremely listenable and, well, 'soothing'.
Just one note of caution. Not all parents enjoy Eno or Aphex Twin. And so some parents might not actually get a kick out of this whole album. But the album is worth the first track alone - and I defy you to try it with your baby and not be impressed by the results. This is experimental stuff for both you and your little one.
Rating:
- Haunting Echoes of a Distant PastThis first volume of soothing sounds for baby is a wonderful journey into a distant world, maybe our own pre-memory past."Sleepy times" is a haunting melody conjuring images of sleepy and content babies. "Music box" sounds like a group of tiny pipe players and "Nursery Rhyme" takes this one step further and envokes the idea of scores of small wooden toys coming to life for a festive dance.
Like any re-release, the music is open to completely different interpretation from the modernistic sixties. It is much more likely to appeal to adults with curiosity for the cover art, the dated sounds, or just for academic interest.What possibly seemed cheap and plasticky music on its release has now mellowed into a charming collection of melodies that show up contempory childrens music for being too overstated.
The historic perspective is made all the more interesting by the fact that Raymond Scott was an intensely private man in search of his dream of directly realising the composer's sounds without interference from other musicians' interpretations. So in a way, when we listen to this CD we are observing the sounds inside Mr Scott's head. Those comments about his rooms of electronic equipment being his "play rooms" were not far wrong!
Well worth a listen and a trip back in time.
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