Here is the track list for Landscape With Snow, a forty-five-minute mixtape completed as part of the first series of the 42/40 Explorer Series boxed set on January 26, 2023.
Aeoliah, Out of the Silence (6:22) — from the album The Liquid Light of Healing (2008)
Takahiro Kido, Landscape With Snow (7:56) — from the album Sending My Love (2008)
Matthew Halsall, On the Other Side of the World (8:57) — from the album
Jucara Marcal & Kiko Dinucci, Mar De Lagrima (4:31) — from the album Pade (2008)
Savina Yannatou & Primavera En Salonico, Addio Amore (4:28) — from the album Songs of An Other (2008)
The Caretaker, Von Restorff Effect (5:34) — from the album Persistent Repetition of Phrases (2008)
The Boats, A Party at Break-Neck Speed (3:14) — from the album Our Small Ideas (2008)
World Standard, Miracle Hill (4:02) — from the album Canon (2008)
This mix is a short tour of a quiet world of tender beauty, askew bereavement, and cheerful motility set in the time period 2008.
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With Aeoliah we ride a chord slowly up from the tonality of the universe, at least according to Aeoliah. Like a beam of sunlight turned lateral and emanating from the center of a stone, it lifts to the same degree that it sinks. It is a New Age track.
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Takahiro Kido’s soft arpeggios precipitate inevitable strings that arrive and depart with grace and politeness, just like a friend who tactfully does not interrupt the sorrow of a friend who is aching with sorrow, but gives scarcely discerned comfort anyhow. The genre is Easy Listening if you’re being honest, Instrumental Acoustic if you’re marketing.
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Like a sudden creek taking its cues from a rainstorm, Matthew Halsall’s track picks up and thickens the arpeggios. But like a toy boat made of sticks and leaves, a melodic figure goes floating off away from that sudden creek and soon enough it’s not weather anymore. The genre is Modal Jazz.
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Kiko Dinucci and Jucara Marcal develop the sound of the after-dusk lament. There is nobody else in the grove, or the bar, or on this corner outside a house. This is the melody at the beginning of that lonesomeness. The genre is, as close as I can guess, Candomble.
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Now that night has really fallen, the lament grows deeper. No longer content to sit alone, the lonesome one, edging into a feeling of being truly bereft, wanders until they find someone feeling their lonesomeness more fully. They make themselves fully comfortable within what is larger and deeper than they are. The genre is Italian Olive Harvester’s Lament.
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The Caretaker posits that whatever you’re feeling now will, once it’s been distorted by time and compressed by all kinds of decay, will be more beautiful to all than it feels to you now. The genre is Drowned Ballroom.
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The Boats promise, on the other hand, that if you strip away all evidence of decay, what was beneath it will move with a lightness, a quickness, that sustains the interest of friends and strangers for the duration of an evening, at least. The genre is, according to the band’s record label, Sleepy Insect Music.
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World Standard makes a case that every feeling is full of beauty and the emotional depth of every moment is unfathomable. The genre is Music Box.
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