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Tuxedomoon \ Soundtracks + Urban Leisure [LTMCD 2331]

A collection of vintage Tuxedomoon material recorded for films and staged performances.

Film soundtracks featured are Plan Delta (1986) and The Field of Honour (1983), alongside the experimental Urban Leisure Suite from 1980, and the full BRT radio orchestrations of three tracks from The Ghost Sonata (1982).

Cover design by Andrew Prinz.


Tracklist:

1. The Bridge
2. Celebration Futur de la Divine
3. Nimrod
4. Lop Lop's People
5. Urban Leisure Pts 1-4
6. Fanfare
7. No-One Expects the Spanish Inquisition
8. Driving to Verdun
9. Music #2
10. Licorice Stick Ostinato
11. Basso Pomade
12. Celebration Futur de la Divine (live)


Available on digital (MP3 or FLAC). To order click on Add To Cart button below cover image. Digital copies are delivered to customers via email link.


Soundtracks/Urban Leisure liner notes

1. PLAN DELTA

Soundtrack to a 1986 sci-fi film by Dutch director Bob Visser, set in a post-apocalyptic future and filmed with a large dam complex as a background. Each of the four band members (Brown, Principle, Georgiev and van Lieshout) contributed a single composition, with Georgiev's Celebration Futur de la Divine truly shining on the powerful live version which closes this CD.

2. URBAN LEISURE SUITE

Urban Leisure dates from 1980, when the band were still based in San Francisco. The following interview (from July 1980) is taken from a longer piece which appeared in Praxis magazine, which included an extract from the Suite on a flexidisc. The full 11.32 version was released on the very limited Joeboy in Rotterdam album in 1981.

Praxis: How was the Urban Leisure project conceived?

Steven: Several months ago, while Peter was in New York, I had made some tapes of my own. I later played them for Winston and Bruce Geduldig. We felt there was something about this music that was very different - it felt very urban, yet relaxed. Then we hit on the concept of Urban Leisure, which we saw as a whole new music or genre, a kind of idealised style of living.

Blaine: Steven drew a picture of it, and we did a show around it, with the concept being us wearing white suits, sitting in lounge chairs, sipping long cool drinks in front of a projected slide of the Trans-America Pyramid.

Steven: I kept working on the rhythm tracks, Blaine made the melodic form and structure, Winston worked on narratives and Bruce started on the visuals.

Blaine: There was this real nice one that went with Devil Drum, a real percussive thing I did with two drum tracks out of sync with each other, with no beat, but obviously were throbbing drums. During this, Winston was miming driving a car, and wearing this terrible horrific mask. Behind him was a film of the Trans-America Pyramid projected on a realistic cardboard model of that same structure. The film had been filmed at such an angle that the film and the model were the exact same size, but one was moving while the other was stationary - one was moving forward through space, as if you were driving in a car.

Praxis: Exactly how many people were involved in this?

Blaine: Well, Steven and I and Bob Hoffner of Indoor Life - an excellent San Francisco band - constituted the orchestra, and Winston and Bruce did the visuals. Now as far as the music on the flexi disc, it's Steven and I.

3. THE FIELD OF HONOUR (HET VELD VAN EER)
Another Bob Visser film, this time from 1983. Fields of Honour dealt with a tourist couple encountering ghosts on the battlefields of the Great War of 1914-18, and marked the last Tuxedomoon recordings with Blaine Reininger before his departure. These tracks were previously released on the first volume in Crammed Discs' Made to Measure series.

4. THE GHOST SONATA

Tuxedomoon's celebrated 'opera without words' was performed at the Polverigi Theatre Festival in July 1982, and included some of the group's most ambitious music. Although a proper soundtrack album was not released until 1990, these three orchestrations were recorded for BRT Radio by the Flemish Chamber Orchestra of Brussels in January 1983, conducted by Arie van Liesbeth and produced for radio by Wim Mertens.

Soundtracks + Urban Leisure [LTMCD 2331]
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Reviews:

"Maintains its tension very well. With its spiralling electronica, austere strings, wailing guitars and mournful saxes, you imagine it's going to collapse under the weight of its own portentiousness, but it's forever shape-shifting and stimulating" (Uncut, 9/2002)

"Magnificently packaged Cold Wave mists and biting electronic particles. Remarkable" (Les Inrockuptibles, 9/2002)

"Tracks range from a sophisticated, urban and modern Martin Denny-like soundtrack feel to a surprisingly 'post-rock-like' downtempo mood music. Timeless, necessary and enlightening" (Other Music, 10/2002)

"Impressionistic in ways both broodingly martial and woozily arch, layered onomatopoeic orchestrals and absurdist horns vie with minimalist piano and primitive electronics" (Glasgow Herald, 6/2002)

"The Ghost Sonata is intense, dramatic, chilling - as ambient as a knife in your back" (Select, 3/1991)

"Ghost Sonata is a tiny masterpiece of sorts, and captures Tuxedomoon's rarified, quixotic melancholy at its peak" (Q, 5/1991)