| This Week's Highlights |
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analysis w/e 14.5.11 |
DVDs out 9.5.11 |
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@ DVDfever Youtube |
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May 11 2011 
DVDfever co uk
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Re-working of 2001 album. Tasteful. Detroit’s 34 year-old music maverick Sufjan Stevens likes his thematic approach, which has brought us the dazzling Michigan and Illinoise (part of his Fifty States Project), along with the festive Yuletide box-set Songs For Christmas. Though considered to be on the cutting-edge of alt-folk, Stevens doesn’t like to be boxed-in, so in true troubadour style, he has a broad musical palette. On the suggestion of friend Bryce Dessner in 2006, he’s gone and revisited a 2001 electronica album Enjoy Your Rabbit (song cycles based around animals on the Chinese Zodiac calendar), reworked it with New York-Berlin based contemporary string quartet Osso (who played on Illinoise), called it Run Rabbit Run, a totally instrumental Baroque-infused collection. Like the original, this contains oblique glitches, repetitive trills and experimental textures, occasionally punctuated by meditative expanses of sound. A mouthful you might think ….and you’d be right. But it works beautifully as Rob Moose and Olivier Manchon (both violins), Marla Hansen (viola) and Maria Bella Jeffers (cello) dig deep to recreate the original electronica magic. Being a collective effort, musicians were allowed their contributions to ‘interpret’ the mechanical sounds in favour of the human touch.
The clever bit here is the rotation of arrangers (six in all) which keeps the pieces sharp and focused on the various undulations and minimalist compositions. Another fascinating thing is, how do you match up a composition to the actual ‘animal’? Artistic license jumps to mind. Anyway, Stevens’ creative juices might have gone sideways for now, but this reworking will have undoubtedly brought some fresh ideas, like, why not do a stringed album in the first place? Enjoy Your Rabbit was tailor-made for strings. On the CD liner notes there’s no mention of Steven’s actual instrumental involvement despite being a multi-instrumentalist, so we can only assume this is (in essence) an Osso album, using (rejuvenating?) the splendid original concept, with Stevens overseeing the project. The verdict – Delightful.
Weblink: sufjanstevens.com
The full list of tracks included are :
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B 37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier. PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
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Review & concert pics copyright © Elly Roberts, 2004-2010.
