All My CDs, pt 11: Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light

Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light - Bell Orchestre

Once in a while, I pick up an album at near-random from a rack, one that I’ve never heard or heard of, and just buy it. I find that I’ve had better than even odds of actually enjoying the music. That was the case with this one.

I should say that I have absolutely no knowledge of this album’s origins beyond my having found it in the dollar rack of my local record store. I don’t know the names or biographies of any of the group members, or what genre they identify themselves as (if any), or even their nationality. No voices appear on the album, so I can’t even get clues based on the gender or language of the vocals. All I know is that these people do beautifully discordant things with orchestral instruments.

The music is all instrumental and mostly uses accoustic, orchestral instruments, including a significant but not overwhelming amount of brass. In fact, I suspect the name of the group refers to the “bell” or flared end of a brass instrument, although a few of the other type of bell are also heard in The Bells Play the Band and Recording a Tape (Typewriter Duet). A few less conventional sounds are used as instruments, such as the typewriter in the aforementioned Duet, and the muffled traffic noises in Recording a Tunnel (The Invisible Bells).

The music itself also appears to be an uneven mix of the ordinary and the unexpected, but slanted toward a more comfortable, “safe” sound. It has just enough experimental flare to be fresh and not boring, without being so out-there as to challenge my learned sense of aesthetics. Few of the songs have much in the way of a melody, but are more atmospheric, and make very good background music. Salvator Amato briefly contains a melody that stuck in my mind and that I would describe as catchy, but few of the others do. And that’s okay, because they’re still beautiful.

I found the overall mood to be optimistic but pensive, and at a few times dramatic, as in Throw It on a Fire, which is my favorite track. It’s the fastest-paced of all the songs, and features stringed instruments used as percussion; this is an easy way for a song to gain my affection. All in all, this is a good album and I’ll make a mental note to put it on when I want pretty but relatively undistracting background music.

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