The Shamen were a Scottish psychedelic band, formed in 1985 in Aberdeen, who became a chart-topping British electronic dance music act by the early 1990s. The founding members were Colin Angus, Derek McKenzie and Keith McKenzie. Peter Stephenson joined shortly after to take over on keyboards from Angus. Several other people were later in the band. Angus then teamed up with Will Sinnott, and together they found credibility as pioneers of rock/dance crossover. When rapper Mr. C joined, the band moved on to international commercial success with “Ebeneezer Goode” and their 1992 Boss Drum album.
I think The Shamen were awesome, not just awesomely cheesy but awesomely good too. They had a clear vision of what their music was supposed to be about, which in turn led to a definite blueprint for how they should sound. For radio, they allowed the record company to smooth the weirder edges by handing over their singles to remixers like The Beatmasters so they could be prepared for mass consumption. Meanwhile, the albums themselves a great deal of deeper material that allowed the band to indulge in the more experimental side of their music.
Axis Mutatis is front loaded with Beatmasters versions of the two lead singles and another track MK2A (probably the best pop song ever written about the astronomical telescopes on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii). Almost every song with vocals has a production credit that implies that it has been remixed for radio.
Arbor Bona Arbor Mala is an almost entirely instrumental ambient techno album that is continuously mixed. I am used to long form ambient music, albeit stuff that varied quite quickly in the thematic sense (like albums by Mike Oldfield) or crammed with (often humorous) vocal samples that helped to tell the story. It shifts between its moods slowly and surely, from a beautiful ambient opening to a rather dark middle to a pulsating ending. A younger me would definitely fall asleep at night during the dreamier parts of “Sefirotic Axis” or “Entraterrestial”, only to be woken up by the woozy gales of found sound in “Beneath the Underworld” or failing that, later on during the pounding beats of the similarly titled “West of the Underworld”.
What is also compelling about Arbor Bona Arbor Mala is not just the style of music but also the nature of the sounds themselves. The Shamen had some good kit, there are some really wonderfully physical sounds here that have been built with analogue synths rather than existing as digital shadows within the computer. It is this physicality of the sound that makes Arbor Bona Arbor Mala so enjoyable to listen to: when the music drifts you really feel the sounds drifting; when the music becomes propulsive you get knocked off your feet (or woken up); when synth lines drift from left to right, you to turn to look at where they are going. Ambient music isn’t any good if it is inert, it needs to provide something for the listener to interact with.
The album is pretty much closed out by a very upbeat trio of tunes: “A Moment In Dub”, “Pizarro In Paradise” and “West of the Underworld”. I think that “Pizarro In Paradise” is probably as poppy as Arbor Bona Arbor Mala gets and is almost certainly from the same lineage as “Conquistador” on Axis Mutatis. It is an interesting game to think of Arbor Bona Arbor Mala as a remixed version of its parent album, though if that really is the case then it really is a radical collection of remixes. There are very few recognisable hooks from tracks of Axis - and then only if you know a few of the band’s own remixes of the tracks, as taken from the singles. One example is the Escacid remix of Destination Eschaton that underpins the penultimate track “Be Ready for the Storm”.
“Out in the Styx” returns the listener to the outside world on shanty boat along a river of silt. At least that’s how it has always sounded to me, it returns to the ambient sounds of earlier in the album but much faster and in a harsher way, like the end of a bad dream.
Track listing
Axis Mutatis
- “Destination Eschaton”
- “Transamazonia”
- “Conquistador”
- “MK2A”
- “Neptune”
- “Prince Of Popocatapetl”
- “Heal (The Seperation)”
- “Persephone’s Quest”
- “Moment”
Arbor Bona Arbor Mala
- “Axis Mutatis (A Tellos B Xibalba C Nemeton D Eternal Return)”
- “Eschaton Omega (Deep Melodic Techno)”
- “Asymptotic Eschaton”
- “Sefirotic Axis (A Tellos B Creation C Formation D Eternal Return)”
- “Entraterrestrial”
- “Demeter”
- “Beneath The Undeworld”
- “Xochipili’s Return”
- “Rio Negro”
- “Above The Otherworld”
- “A Moment In Dub”
- “Pizarro In Paradise”
- “West Of The Underworld”
- “Anticipation Eschaton (Be Ready For The Storm)”
- “Out In The Styx”
Links
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created January 12, 2024
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