一共有3部专辑
2009 – The Safety of the North
ambient, electronic, experimental, idm, spoken.word, neo.folk
Last Days – The Safety Of The North
Label: n5MD
Catalog#: MD 166
Format: CD, Album, Digipak
Country: US
Released: 09 Mar 2009
Genre: Electronic, Non-Music
Style: Ambient, Spoken Word, Experimental, Neofolk
Credits: Producer, Written-By – Graham Richardson
Recorded By – Ken Negrete
Rating: 4.25/5 (4 votes)
Discogs: http://www.discogs.com/Last-Days-The-Safety-Of-The-North/release/1661209
Tracklisting:
01. The City Failed (4:57)
Voice – Clemmie Law
02. May Your Days Be Gold (3:10)
Vocals – Fabiola Sanchez
03. New House (2:11)
04. Fracture (6:10)
05. Thoughts Of Alice (3:05)
Voices – Jodie Davis, Neamh Rose Breen
06. Run Home (4:53)
07. Life Support (6:52)
08. Your Silence Is The Loudest Sound (3:20)
09. This Is Not An Ending (5:05)
Voices – Clemmie Law, Neamh Rose Breen
10. The Fields Remember My Father (4:20)
11. Missing Photos (2:04)
12. Nothing Stays The Same, Nothing Ever Ends (5:57)
13. You Are Stars (3:46)
14. Blue And White Flowers (3:57)
15. Onwards (6:20)
http://www.n5md.com wrote:
Graham Richardson’s Last Days project returns with its latest full-length The Safety of the North. Richardson has fully embraced his cinematic tendencies, expanding his creative palette to include spoken excerpts, a vocal collaboration with Fabiola Sanchez of Familiar Trees, and a "script-based" compositional approach. Drawing on a theme first explored in Sea’s "Arrival at Jan Mayen" (in which its sailor is first excited by the prospect of a distant island home, then disappointed by its barren terrain), The Safety of the North tells the story of Alice, her parents and their relocation to a remote northern land. Disappointed with the trappings of the city, they wish for a simpler, more rewarding way of life. Their arrival promises clean air, miles of snow covered fields surrounded by forests and mountains but above all, safety and a protected existence. As dark as it is light, the Safety Of The North explores relationships, loss, recovery and how hope is the only certainty in life.. With a strict script in mind, Richardson divided the album into 15 "scenes," scoring each with a new focus on the emotional states of his characters and the settings they inhabit. Using the same tools he employs on his previous albums (i.e. field recordings, song titles, and album art), along with snippets of dialogue, monologue and more diverse instrumentation, Richardson guides the listener through Alice’s initial departure, hopeful beginnings and eventual tragedy in what may be Last Days most melodic work to date.
http://www.boomkat.com wrote:
Running through Last days’ The Safety Of The North there’s an elaborate, very clearly defined narrative. The album tells the story of protagonist Alice and her parents as they settle for a new life in a remote northern land. This curious, tragic yarn is told through excerpts of dialogue, monologue and textured instrumentation. According to Last Days’ Graham Richardson the album is divided into fifteen ’scenes’ rather than tracks, and the producer goes out of his way to make every bar of his music evocative of a specific segment of his story. Inevitably, without language this all takes on a more impressionistic tone, which proves to be no bad thing: the opening ‘The City Failed’ busies itself with stormy field recordings, marking a transition between the steely guitar-spun quiet and a more raw and chaotic sonic environment. Next comes the more illustrative ‘May Your Days Be Gold’, a vocally fronted piece that makes the tale a little clearer, but soon enough field recordings and intensely atmospheric post-rock passages arrive, guiding us through the subtly magnificent ‘Fracture’ and the Tape-like tuneful electroacoustics of ‘New House’. As the album develops it only seems to get more involving, turning out stunning electronic/classical hybrids like ‘Missing Photos’ (which would be equally at home on Make Mine Music as it would a Kompakt Pop Ambient selection) and the glacially paced elegy ‘Blue And White Flowers’ which is part Max Richter, part Sigur Ros. It’s so easy to be massively put off by any sort of story-based concept album, particularly when the recordings in question are chiefly instrumental affairs and don’t explicitly outline anything in particular, but The Safety Of The North quickly sheds its conceptual baggage, winning you over with its clearly defined emotional poise and all-round compositional elegance. This third Last Days album is quite an achievement and surely one of the very finest things the n5MD label has released in some time. Highly recommended.
2007 – These Places Are Now Ruins
ambient, electronic, experimental, folk, instrumental
Artist : Last Days
Title : These Places Are Now Ruins
Format : Compact Disc
Catalog# : MD151
n5MD wrote:
Last Days’ follow up to 2006’s “Sea.â€� “These Places Are Now Ruinsâ€� is by the artist’s admission a personal journey about revisiting the past and accepting the present is something we can all truly identify with. The album tells, strictly through feelings, of expectations, disappointments, distance, and the futility of attempting to reclaim lost memories. “These Places Are Now Ruinsâ€� is not so much a concept as “Seaâ€� but instead a loosely chronological album documenting thoughts and emotions experienced when returning home after having moved away. The result is often dark and abstract when recalling fears or memories we can’t forget but also touching on moments when one explores hopes for the future and the impact loved ones and special times have had on our lives. Last Days’ sound remains at times cinematic yet slightly lo-fi and now features more live instrumentation giving “These Places Are Now Ruinsâ€� a wider diversity and more fullness of sound. Few things stay the same and those things we wish would change never do. “These Places Are Now Ruinsâ€� examines these themes and over its duration accepts that it’s sometimes best for us all to leave the past where it is…
The Silent Ballet wrote:
Score: 7/10
On These Places Are Now Ruins, Graham Richardson’s (aka Last Days) follow up to last year’s delicate Sea, noticeable changes are abound. For starters, Richardson has opted to step away from the conceptual art and embrace the empirical. The album’s name accurately describes the reinterpretation of the artist’s memories, be them distant and faded or immediate and potent, and this provides a larger arch to the album which claims to tie the works together despite an apparent lack of tangible commonality between the tracks themselves. This approach has several resonating effects on These Places Are now Ruins, the most obvious being that moods are not held onto very long, as each subsequent memory may have an entirely different emotion attached to it. However, it’s interesting to note that this album is, predominantly, much darker than its predecessor, which obviously goes a long way towards unearthing Richardson’s personal life. But that’s a story for another time…
The buzzword for this album is abstraction; Richardson’s intent becomes clear without much effort: These Places Are Now Ruins seeks to step out of the shadows of the cinematic, ambient influences that Last Days came from and instead adopt a technique that is more grounded in lo fi, organic sounds that bring in more live instrumentation than most will give him credit for. And this is a success; the abstraction couples well with the album’s theme and Richardson makes it all pretty painless for the listener. Nothing dives too deeply into background music and nothing lingers in the self-indulgent area of pretention as well. A balance between substance and expression is maintained for the better part of an hour, and it’s within this region where Last Days is truly impressive.
An issue does arise with accessibility, which is a common point of conflict for releases that have trouble deciding if they are experimental or cinematic. Richardson is not committed to making a stance one way or another, and therefore forces the listener to do it themselves. As such, some tracks are bound to appear either decadent or impoverished, depending on what mindset the listener has chosen. Ideally, a middle ground should be reached by the listener where he can easily conform to the varying soundscape provided by Richardson, but there is a strong sense that his personal journey and the one which the listener traverses are not the same, which means an inherent disconnect is established from the very beginning. In any case, he’s putting a lot of faith in his audience to not be complete dolts, and call me pessimistic if you will, but I just can’t see many people really ‘getting’ the point he’s trying to drive home here.
Undoubtedly, this is a minimal complaint; the album is nonetheless enjoyable, for the tracks do end up functioning well enough by their own, and any eventual motif resurrected from the audience just heightens the experience. I raise the issue because it’s precisely what holds Richardson back enough to prevent this from being a really outstanding album. Certainly Richardson has done well to distance himself from landmark artists such as Stars of the Lid, Loscil, and Deaf Center, but this move towards abstraction does mean that he’s now upstaged by much more proficient artists such as Richard Chartier, Taylor Deupree, Alvo Noto, and others. But, for a sophomore release, it’s expected to see the artist still coming into his own sound and experimenting with possible new directions, inevitably creating a slightly disjointed work of art in the process. Regardless, Last Days is a quickly rising star who’s likely delivered n5md’s top album of the year and given himself plenty of room for future growth. This is an exciting time for Mr. Richardson.
-Lee Whitefield
2006 – Sea
ambient, experimental, post.rock
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Artist info:
Last Days (AKA Graham Richardson’s) music explores personal themes of stasis and flux, escape and acceptance, security and upheaval. Drawing his moniker and ethos from the bittersweet emotions that often accompany periods of transition and loss, Last Days contrasts the intimacy of lonely field recordings and elementary instruments (a child’s accordion, a single repeated piano note) with cinematic shoegaze swells and complex, interlocking melodies created by the latest in digital technology. The resulting mixes are often melancholy, but ultimately hopeful, acting as musical elegies to the places we can no longer go.
Growing up in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Richardson pursued music sporadically, playing drums for local bands before shifting his focus and detouring south to study graphic design. Completing his degree in 1997, he applied his trade in the mental health field but, after four rewarding, yet creatively stifling, years, decided to pack up his recently acquired PC, mic and guitar, and head north to Scotland. While the mood certainly preceded the move, Edinburgh’s darker, colder climate and close proximity to nature proved influential in developing Last Days signature blend of brooding synths and pastoral neo-folk. Inspired by the likes of Eluvium, Sigur Ros, and Jasper TX, Richardson continued writing and revising in relative obscurity until February 2006 when he was discovered in Port-Royal’s Myspace friends list by Mike Cadoo (AKA Bitcrush) of the Oakland-based n5MD Records. With nine tracks already in the can, the timing could not have been better, resulting in the release of Last Days full-length debut Sea just seven months later.
Noting his penchant for writing soundtracks to lonely, isolated places, Richardson devised a unifying narrative for Sea, which chronicles the hapless travels of a disillusioned man who, leaving his family behind, sets sail to find a new home. Through a combination of eerie, abstract set pieces, signpost song titles, and bleak cover art by Liam Frankland (another Myspace find), Sea captures the anxiety, confusion and yearning of a man lost at sea with only his ill-defined desires to guide him. Released to near-unanimous praise, Sea cemented Last Days reputation as a member to watch within the UK’s burgeoning electro-acoustic ambient scene.
Just months after the release of Sea, Richardson began writing material for its follow-up, a meditation on the inconstancy of "home." Released on n5MD in early 2007, These Places Are Now Ruins finds Richardson in far more personal territory, tracing a semi-autobiographical trip through the resonant locales and experiences of his adolescence. Book-ended (save the closing epilogue "Traveling Hearts") by "Stations" part 1 and 2, TPANR’s main body mourns the diminishing comforts afforded by fading memories and the lonely detachment that comes with discovering your "home" is no longer tethered to a tangible place. Opting for a warmer, more “realistic” approach, Richardson cuts back on the aimless synth washes of Sea, anchoring the majority of these musical snapshots (like the memories they’re exorcising) in the familiar realm of live instrumentation, intimate field recordings, and emotional post-rock builds.
For his third full length, The Safety of the North (2009, n5MD), Richardson has fully embraced his cinematic tendencies, expanding his creative palette to include spoken excerpts, a vocal collaboration with Fabiola Sanchez of Familiar Trees, and a "script-based" compositional approach. Drawing on a theme first explored in Sea’s "Arrival at Jan Mayen" (in which its sailor is first excited by the prospect of a distant island home, then disappointed by its barren terrain), TSOTN tells the story of Alice, a young girl who leaves the city with her family to settle in the rural north. With a strict script in mind, Richardson divided the album into 15 "scenes," scoring each with a new focus on the emotional states of his characters and the settings they inhabit. Using the same tools he employs on Sea (i.e. field recordings, song titles, and album art), along with snippets of dialogue, monologue and new instrumentation, Richardson guides the listener through Alice’s initial departure, hopeful beginnings and eventual tragedy.
With an approach both abstract and melodic, lo-fi and hi-tech, yearning and content, Last Days has consistently yielded music that, despite its largely digital origins, is all-together human.
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真的很不错，喜欢电子类的真的不容错过，当然也有小小的postrock
