Back from Lisbon

I just got back from Lisbon, where I spent four days with my language teacher Ana Paula who submitted me to a “linguistic immersion” – Portuguese only ..! She can be a pretty cruel person.
(But it seems that this is the way to go if one wants to learn a foreign language. And I have been cruel to her too, in the not so distant past ..truth be told.)

Lisbon is fabulous on a hot and bright summer day, the seafood is amazing and very cheap, the beer is always really, really cold and the churches are impressive, the coast is only 20 minutes away and the Atlantic Ocean is wild and very stormy – and swimming is not really recommended.

The service industry is a disaster.
The most famous coffee house offered orange juice with live larvae swimming in it, and no one saw the need to be embarrassed or offer apologies. They did, however, offer to make us another one. We declined.

After exploring Lisbon, we went to Sintra which was an Arab stronghold in the 8th century. The “Castelo” is built on the top of a mountain and integrates Stonehenge-like boulders into its structure, and Allah alone knows how these monster stones were cut to precision, moved into the most unlikely positions and how they refused to fall down in 1200 years.
Whoever shaped and asssembled these stone blocks sure knew his anti-gravity stuff….

The national portuguese music style, Fado, is deep and romantic and probably the most melancholic music I have ever experienced.
It comes from the background of Portugal being one of the major sea-faring nations as early as the 15th century – and a common and shared experience of generations of women longing for their men and husbands out at sea.
This includes all those men that were lost to the sea and never came back.

To get an impression, listen in here

- stay tuned -
the skipper

Pandeiro time..!

I have recently decided to learn how to play additional percussion instruments so I can record them over the drum loops I am using. Recording a Shaker and the Claves already worked very well on my latest songs.
Now I am getting really serious – I had my first Pandeiro lesson from Brazilian pecussion master Marcus Santos from Bahia.. via DVD! He is an excellent teacher, the first two lessons on the DVD taught me how to get a total of six different sounds out of the instrument.

– stay tuned -
ERIK

On Reincarnation … part II

When I published the lyrics to “A Distant Land“, I did get a couple of weird looks from people who thought I had read to much New Age literature.
That’s ok … I’d rather be New Age than Old Age if you know what I mean
But here is an interesting side note:
An 11 year old boy who remembers the very details of his former life and proves it by naming people and stories he cannot possibly know otherwise.
Watch the video here

No one wants to be in some weirdo minority group, of course …
but hey ! there is already more than one billion people on this planet – in India , Brazil, and elsewhere – for whom reincarnation is a reality.

-stay tuned -
ERIK

Upcoming album .. release date and more

The release date for the album “A Distant Land” will be December 7, 2009.

It will be pretty much a collaborative effort, featuring 6 different female singers, one co-producer , one male guest singer-guitarist, one guest violinst and we will see who else comes along the way until December .

To give an idea, you can check out three of the collaborations here … featuring respectively vocalists Deepika, Sabine Pellarin and Vanessa Elle. Enjoy!

- stay tuned -

ERIK

The new song …produced half way around the globe!

WE DID IT !!
Abhi Ken and myself finalised yesterday our first ever collaboration – the new song “A Distant Land” .
Abhi was working out of his studio in Mumbai, India while I was doing the same over here in Geneva, Switzerland.
Working with Abhi was like a charm: agreeing on musical ideas, on what-to-do and what-to-avoid was completely intuitive. It feels like we had been working together for years.. when in reality we only started a month ago and we have never met in the physical world.
Moreover, Abhi was able to win Indian traditional / crossover singer, Deepika, for the production – and she really did a marvellous job.
The result is more beautiful than I could have imagined .. I have only praise for Abhi and for Deepika, who made this song into something absolutely special and unique.

You can listen to “A Distant Land” here
or ( if you are having trouble with the Myspace player… ) click HERE
 - Stay tuned –  
Erik

Collaboration with Abhi Ken and Deepika

I am working with Abhi Ken, a composer-producer from India, on the new song ” A Distant Land”.
After I made a rough arrangement of the Verse, Bridge and Chorus, I recorded my vocal part over it and sent the files to Abhi. He translated the most important parts into Hindi, then called his colleague, Deepika, who is trained in the Carnatic (Southern Indian) singing tradition. Abhi wrote for her a string of flowing melodic patterns that magically blend with my Western style of composing “harmonic changes above all and underneath everything” ! Abhi recorded Deepika in his studio and sent me the vocal files .. so, now I started re-arranging the whole thing into a Duet, sung in two *very* different languages!
When that is done, I will send the arrangement back to him so he can advise on the proper use of Indian percussion: of these I currently know next to nothing…

Then we will mix the song and master it and put it on the new album.
Abhi and I have never met, except in cyber space.. and we both feel we were born at the right time!

As for the lyrics, you can go to my previous post ” What it’s all about” to read them .. please see further down on the page
.. as an addendum, I recently put in the following :

” The world was young and innocent
When Space gods came to our land
To the gardens where we walked
And everything was changed

They taught us how to read and write
To calculate and build up high
They taught us everything we knew
It was a Golden Age

Betrayal put an early end
To our friendship with the Gods
They turned away and left our land
Never to return”

Those who have read the works of Zecharia Sitchin will know that this is not just a metaphore… for all others – relax, guys, it’s just a metaphore!

Back from BRAZIL pt I

I will skip all  the cliches that you can read at your local travel office, such as  “Amazing country / Beautiful beaches / Incredibly Friendly People  / Awesome Great Food “  and so on and on.  Not because they aren’t true, but because they are all true.

I would rather share some impressions to do with music and the general way of life as I perceived it in Brazil.

In Sao Paulo, we were invited to a party by some journalist friends of my dear tourist guide, Ana Paula. After some cold beers  – Brahma beer is easily in the top three worldwide so far as I can tell – we ventured onto the dance floor, a place that I normally avoid. This is because the last music style I really had fun dancing to was the funky stuff from “Earth Wind and Fire” in the last century.. unnecessary to say that I hate Rap music and I even more detest Techno. To my amazement, dancing to Samba music (the samba rock variation, not the carnival samba one) turned out to be very great fun!

The next day, we went to see some buildings by master architect Oscar Niemeyer, notably the “Oca” in the Ibirapuera Park. The Oca currently hosts an exhibition celebrating “50 Years of Bossa Nova” with an amazing multimedia show, featuring Tom Jobim and his colleagues on black and white film footage from the 60s, displayed on state-of-the-art holographic  screens that I haven’t seen before – you can walk around those large plastic sheets and the film is showing on the back side as well, without being mirrored the wrong way round!

I am always touched when I see children becoming aware and proud of something meaningful and beautiful.. I was especially touched when hundreds  of schoolchildren came in with their teachers to appreciate Brazil’s Bossa Nova revolution. A real brazilian moment .. sitting inside Niemeyer’s futuristic building with my brazilian guide, and the school children flocking around everywhere and Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Morais composing their hit songs on the hologram screen before us.

I also learned an important figure that day: “The Girl from Ipanema” is,  (after “Yesterday” by The Beatles) the second-most-played song in the world..!

- to be continued -

Erik,  (jet-lagged)

World Music continued

Check out this amazing example of World Music ..

Ofra Haza in 1988 !

- stay tuned -

World Music !! the next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing in music is already here and rapidly growing up.

I clearly remember the day when I first heard “Desert Rose” by Sting on the radio: the year was 1999, I was living in New York City and this song was the most incredible piece of music to hit my eardrums in many years.

I knew of course that John Mc Laughlin had been jamming with Ravi Shankar in Inda, I knew that rappers from Algeria were now doing their thing in Paris and so on .. but those seemed like fringe experiments compared to Sting’s take which was so new, refreshing and powerful.

I am very tempted to declare Desert Rose the “Official First Mainstream World Music Song”..

Here is a beautiful live version of Desert Rose

Anyone who is not totally asleep knows that the Internet is the biggest revolution in our lifetimes. Proof is that you are reading this now and probaby listening to music and watching video via your internet connection.

What better expression for the interconnected world that we are creating right now ? World Music is it !!

..and for World Music by the power of two….  click here:

Desert Rose featuring the stunning Aishwarya Rai

-stay tuned -

Erik

The Mozart of Madras

I would like to introduce the man whom they call “The Mozart of Madras” … his name is AR Rahman.

He is an incredibly talented musician, composer, arranger, producer, performer .. you name it , AR does it. And he does it very, very well. So far I have “only” listened to a double-CD collection entitled “Introducing AR Rahman” but when I listen to something intriguingly new, it means that the particular CD is in permanent rotation in my car’s cd player, for weeks on end.

AR manages to blend the Indian concept of melody-over-rhythm with our Western concept of Melody-over-Harmonies, and the result is almost always sensationally beautiful.

It is quite remarkable that although I do not speak a word of Hindi ( do you? ) AR’s music flows so naturally that it needs no explanations at all. Same was true for Mozart, the master of masters.

A great example of AR’s craft is “Thirakkaatha Kaattukulle”.

Peace and Love,

Erik