SOUNDTRACK: KELSEY LU-“Rebel” (2019).
I saw that Kelsey Lu was playing NonCOMM this year. I had never heard of her, but her record was getting some high praise. Then as I was going through some older Harper’s things, I saw this story by Pamela Lu. I quickly thought it might be the same person. Then I double checked and of course they are different, they just have the same last name.
Kelsey Lu is a classically trained cellist and has become one of many classical performers who have migrated into the pop world. She is certainly underplaying her chops on the record, going more for melody than virtuosity.
This piece opens with a pizzicato cello (looped I assume). It is overlaid with a mournful melody before Kelsey sings in her quiet but affecting voice.
The song is just over three and a half minutes and it slowly builds with more and more organic sounds–strings and voices. By the half way point, there’s echo and by the three minute mark, this quiet, almost chamber pop song has built into a full-sounding piece which just as quickly drops nearly all the music as two cellos fade the song to the end.
It’s an astonishingly pretty and subtle song to start an album that has production credits from Skrillex (on a different song).
[READ: April 24, 2019] “Ambient Parking Lot”
I started reading this excerpt and thought it might have had something to do withe The Flaming Lips’ Parking Lot Experiments:
During 1996 and 1997, The Flaming Lips ran a series of events known as “The Parking Lot Experiments”. The concept was inspired by an incident in Coyne’s youth, where he noticed that car radios in the parking lot at a concert were playing the same songs at the same time, Wayne Coyne created 40 cassette tapes to be played in synchronization. The band invited people to bring their cars to parking lots, where they would be given one of the tapes and then instructed when to start them. The music was “a strange, fluid 20 minute sound composition.” [from Wikipedia]
I’ll assume there is some kernel of something, maybe, that inspired this, frankly, disappointing piece.
It begins by talking about the recording of “Ambient Parking #25.”
With just a little filtering, the empty landscape managed to express its industrially generated solipsism and came to overshadow even the engine gunning and trunk popping of SUVs.
The seven inch vinyl was released two weeks later on an indie label.
It was a huge success compared to attempts 1-24 and inspired them to make a full album. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 