Tiny Dancing - Arts For Conecers

A shiny new present arrived in the post recently, all the way from the Amazon. It's called Lifetracks and it's by Mr Tom Middleton, one of my top 20 ambient music heroes (I have a lot of ambient music heroes). Tom Middleton was one half of Global Communication who were doing their thing way back in the nineties, the other half being Mark Pritchard.

As well as creating one of the slowest albums ever with 76:14 (here we give you the last track on the album, 12:18. It's a choral piece that has always put me in mind of the lapping of waves on a beach and is simply beautiful, especially the reprise at 7 minutes 30. It's also excellent for falling asleep to - in a good way), they were also partly responsible for one of my favourite albums in Remotion, a compilation of seven remixes for other artists (and a couple by themselves including one under their Reload guise) that manages the tricky business of hanging together as an album in it's own right.

Not only that but they also recorded an electro funk odyssey under the moniker Jedi Knights, nearly got sued to high heaven by George Lucas and then wrote the bona fide CLASSIC deep house tune The Way / The Deep (I'm going to leave you to seek this one out - it's too good to give away). Since then they have gone their own ways, recording under various names and DJing themselves silly all over the world - nice work if you can get it. For full information I can do no better than direct you towards the excellent and informative Reloadonline here.

So it was that I gave Lifetracks a spin - and I must confess did so with some trepidation, hoping that Tom would have not lost his magic. I was rewarded for my faith with an album of shimmering beauty. Recorded over a period of nine years, and linked inscrutably somehow to the Big Chill festival where Tom has played several times, each track is "inspired by history, people, places and experiences". There are two good reasons for buying this album:

1) it's bloody lovely; and

2) it has a really nice picture of a coastal scene in the fold out booklet. Nice touch.

For your listening pleasures: