Donnacha Costello - Colour Series S&D

So, unfortunately, I may be of little help here, however, the stuff I have is all quite similar-sounding and is uniformly good.

but I'm impressed that this guy can get such warm, delicate tones from his synths

Yes. These tracks are virtually carbon copies of something you'd expect from the Modernist (very minimal, but with playful melodies).

Maybe I should revisit and swallow my words, but I find this music that is really mood music - ie if you aren't in it, it doesn't work.

i like the names of the colours tho eg pistachio, mustard

as for this being listening music...well, on my part, listening to 1 min clips makes me think a bit "hmmmm" but then when im dancing like a nob in a club and my friend says "oh this is donnacha costello!"....this context maybe more constructive......

"green" - flexes and shimmies with great conviction. maurizio is now a genre unto himself.

"grape" - warehouse-y and euphoric.

"pistachio" - tough acid house shit on one side, jan hammer pop ambient on the other. driving through a tunnel ---> into miami skyline.

"orange" - when is the new kaito album coming out??

destroy

"olive" - there is actually a pretty awesome kms/octave one/UR ripoff on the b-side of "olive" but it suffers from the lack of a monologue about black holes and cosmic consciousness. or star trek samples. or paris grey. but it's so n-th generation it hurts. actually "n-th generation" would make a pretty good title for a UR track. see also my comments on "cocoa"

"rubine red" - one side is dubbier and has nice piano chords but this track is just totally inert. kind of like "grape" but not as good. see also my comments about "cocoa".

"blue" - barely there.

"cocoa" - first of all bleep+bass revival is a really bad idea. early warp records were really great but there's even fewer places to go with it than revival chicago house (see: the badly misnamed or maybe ironic get physical label).

if you d/l and burn them all to CD it actually makes for very hypnotic listening and you'll barely notice the weaker tracks.

a mixed compilation of the colour series would probably rock my universe as badly as mike dred's universal indicator mix did.

now hopefully he is smart enough to get thomas brinkmann to do it.

http://s19.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=12MUKLE07N6H337TAV1MMV9PBE

I had to laugh when I read this: that's so on point, this record really sounds as if it's about to disappear. But thinking about the Colour Series again, I realised how this series-thing changed the way I was listening to the tracks. Completist frenzy fought hard with a nah-I'm-not-letting-him-fool-me-attitude. That made the records I liked sound much better, while the ones I didn't like sounded worse than they actually were. Same thing with the AFX-series.

His recent 12 inches "Ok, That's Great, Start Over," and "No Matter What I Do" 12" are killers, with buoyantly banging Detroit tracks on the b-side.

i just bought this today for $4. uh, i am very happy with that purchase.

pistachio is almost exactly the way you described it, vahid, thx. (though i wouldn't have put that jan hammer bit in...)

If he has, I can't find it anywhere, just the 6x6=36 material...

-- Telephonething

dammit. sorry thread, seems I got a bit confused.

On CD soon!

nice column, Ronan, read it a couple days ago.

Is Ronan still posting around here? I suck at keeping track of who's who; hell, I can only figure out who's Vahid now that usernames aren't changeable...

ronan has written a bit on the minimal bobbins thread as of recent, but seems like he's been busy with other things. he's definitely still around, tho.

i still like Grape the best out of all of them, but that's because it has a really great Detroit warehouse vibe that gets my blood going.

also, wtf is with resident advisor being down right now?

i think the track selection on the new CD is somewhat sub-optimal

I can only figure out who's Vahid now that usernames aren't changeable...

bummer because i came up with a good one last night: ACID HOUSES OF THE HOLY

Completist frenzy fought hard with a nah-I'm-not-letting-him-fool-me-attitude. That made the records I liked sound much better, while the ones I didn't like sounded worse than they actually were

so true. anyway the revive made me go and hunt out opal and mustard ...

OMG OPAL!!!

so yeah most of these still wipe the floor with the bulk of contemporary revivalist bleepy techno-house.

closed out a recent set with the b-side to mustard. amazinnnngg track

i am pretty sure that i posted a mix somewhere on ILM a long time ago which also ended with that track. maybe it was the second to last track. i love how the main synth lead echoes the opening lead but the sounds he uses are so radically different that it almost sounds like he's shifting time signatures.

it's like this pristine shift from a very clean, slow, rounded bell to a dirty, rapid, square synth bass. maybe he should've called it the shape series because that's how i visualize it! my favorite today is "cocoa".

...which is not really bleepy techno-house, but whatever. i have been playing the comp a lot lately and every time i listen to it i am struck by how good it sounds. and not in terms of erm, sound design, but how the stereo field is just so balanced without being too clinical. all the notes pop.

I played this for the fam on a road trip, and had them guess the colors. They were about 75% correct, if granted a bit of leeway in the spectral nomenclature.

neat. daddy what's rubine?

I've been listening to mustard b over and over lately, thanks to Macallan, by the way.