Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Class Act

Marden Hill (aka Christopher Bemand) released some great tracks during the mid nineties and managed to have a few underground hits during this period including 'Come On', 'Harlem River Drive', 'Melt On' and the previously posted 'Sugarplums'. There seems to be three albums available of theirs, but on closer inspection, these territory based releases, contain overlapping material. The Japanese release 'Sixty Minute Man' is the only one which contains 'Bardot', a brilliant Nick Drake'ish, broody, cinematic Folk classic. It has always been my favourite track of theirs, conjuring up the exquisite dramatic perfection and beauty of it's subject in a nostalgic but also timeless manner. The track builds with noir tension, rich orchestration swirls ever higher, until it ends in a pithy bittersweet moment of solo violin, then you hear a car driving off, probably an Aston Martin - certainly something very sexy. I thought I should also mention that Christopher has worked in a number of outfits, most notably for me Los Ladrones, who's exquisite releases can be found on Earth Project, I reckon under this alias he created some of his best work yet.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/marden-hill-bardot-mp3.html

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

great track chris.

am a big marden hill fan, ever since hanging at this really self -righteous jazz mate's place. He was going through different records giving a running commentry on each track .When he came to the marden hill cover of 'harlem river drive' he simply said 'if you don't like this record then you don't like music'-which was probably a bit strong, but I kinda know what he means.

ps have you got the marden hill version of 'blacker' that came with the eccentric afros vs the balastic brothers part 2-I'll get it to you if you haven't.

chris keys said...

Hey Jaksoul, hope you are well. I never got that second 'b brothers vs ecc afros' album and dont think i ever heard the marden hill rmx of 'Blacker' - would love to check it out.frop it on us when u get a chance. otherwise thanks for the theo clip man, really nice, I'll probably spend the next three years trying to get a copy of that :)

Anonymous said...

here you go man.
http://www.firemusic.org/tempaudio/blacker(marden%20hill%20'sweet%20green%20jam')%20mix.mp3

tried to leave you a message yesterday might have been caught as spam?

hope you had a good break

cheers
jack

chris keys said...

Hey Jack
thanks so much for this, gonna give it a spin in a minute - really cool of u to hook me up. The break was good thanks :)