Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles...With Gaspar Claus

And its taken a week, but I have gotten through all the bands on Bad Panda Records that I deemed good enough to unearth! And again Ive got two here for you, and finishing with a couple of instrumental/post-rock acts seems pretty fair I reckon!

First up is Gaspar Claus. A French music classicist, Claus has studied music for most of his life, in particular the usage of the common cello. He has extrapolated such knowledge to expand upon and stretch the boundaries of cello playing, and indeed what the instrument is capable of achieving. He has worked with various artists from wide ranging global creative fields - from flamenco and actors to pop musicians such as Scout Niblett and Sufjan Stevens (two artists who eschew the conventions of the pop song for their own ends as it is). He is involved in projects all over the world, with Tokyo and Berlin unsurprisingly two of his main destinations on this life journey. Vincent Moon, who most recently filmed Mogwai's Burning film, has followed him around on this quest. Below is a track from his solo recordings, as well as one of the songs recorded by Moon. Amazing stuff, and his musical mission statement and constant drive to go further means I want to indulge in everything he has to offer.

Gaspar Claus - An Inexhaustible Feeling


Cello in the desert

Gaspar Claus MySpace Music Videos

A very different beast be Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles, a New Jersey post rock outfit, although their elegaic moniker (from the title of a lesser known and yet great film by Yimou Zhang). Its a sprawling outfit all right - 11 regular members that includes five guitars, bass, drums, violin, cello, piano, bells and a harp - you wont see these guys play Old Blue Last! Post Rock bloggers The Siren Sound are avid fans of these guys, as they evoke a spooky mindscape that is fully immersive. And dont want to paint them into a corner so I wont mention names, but a couple tracks did mirror a certain Canadian band that have reformed this year... A Boldogság Minden Reményét Elragadták (from Hungarian, “All The Hope Of Happiness Has Been Stolen”) is a behemoth of an album that they released not long after forming in 2008, and it is all done on 8 track - AND ITS AMAZING. Hunt this fucker down, STAT! But they are so hard to hunt down - they have no Facebook/Myspace page, interviews are almost non existent... So hunt down the album, hunt them down on Last.fm, and listen to the track below, which is hugely exciting as its a newie! There should be a new album just around the corner...

Riding Alone For Thousands Of Miles - Brick City Love Song

So there it is - Bad Panda has turned out to be very good after all! Enjoy the rest of your weekend, we'll speak again tomorrow...