Friday, May 01, 2015

23: The Shaman - Richard Searles


I don't quite know how to describe this one. It's a sort of haunting new-agey type instrumental with a minor-key acoustic guitar structure overlaid with some strings and a few other simple things, really nothing fancy at all. Richard Searles himself is known for producing a kind of medieval music that can probably be best described as 'Elizabethan' or 'Tudor', and indeed the majority of the album that this is from ("Ancient Isles") takes that form. But this different, much more timeless, and it really gets its hooks into you.

I know it from Landscape. The podcasts they produced a few years ago were varied (and contained too much Bach) but I listened to them in the background while working and presumably absorbed them by some sort of musical osmosis. Then one day I found I had the acoustic guitar sequence in my head and thought "what is THAT?". The I thought some more and tried to play the music in my head and went "oh yes, that's the one with the owl noises in it, must be from Landscape". Off I popped to the podcasts and there, second track on podcast six, was this weird guitar-and-strings-and-owl-hoots thing that I then proceeded to listen to over and over, and never got sick of it. I still haven't. Unquestionably one of my favourite instrumental pieces ever.

My only wish is that the boat journey in the video above below actually WENT somewhere, like a secret cave or something where we could really meet the owl.

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