Cobalt Blue

RockPaperScissors It's been 14 years since Michael Brook did a proper solo album, Cobalt Blue, but that doesn't mean the guitarist has been absent from music. He's produced and performed on pop recordings by Julia Fordham and Jorane and made numerous albums for the Real World label, including sig...	Hybrid	Night Song Canadian experimental guitarist Brook and the late, "shining star of Qawwal" come together for a second time to bring the music of Pakistan into a creative new realm. If you are a traditionalist who wants nothing but Pakistani music, stay away. This album is soaked in ambient ele...	Albino Alligator Import only 1997 soundtrack music for a Kevin Spacey directed neo-noir thriller, Brook's work here turns into an interesting blend of his own style and smoky late night jazz interspersed with a variety of other instrumental touches. 4AD. 2006.	An Inconvenient Truth Most documentaries suffer from generic soundtracks or the most rudimentary of scores, often cut by the director's friend. But then most of them don't have Michael Brook as composer. The guitarist is best known for his world fusion work with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and other Real Wo...
Dream	Live at the Aquarium: London Zoo 21 May 1992	The Equatorial Stars	Affliction: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Hard to imagine, but Michael Brook's score for Affliction is just as dark and probing as the Russell Banks novel this movie was based on. Using electric guitars and synthesizers, Brook (Heat, Albino Alligator) creates a haunting and dissonant soundscape that continues to unset...	A Strangely Isolated Place Ulrich Schnauss's A Strangely Isolated Place was released in Europe during May of 2003, but fans had to wait over a year for it to arrive on these shores. The Berliner's follow-up to Far Away Trains Passing By is another gentle and fascinating record, similarly drunk with melody....

Layers within layers upon Layers--Distinctive guitar
Background: Found this in the City Library and took it home out of curiosity. Am reviewing it because I see three reviews only, here, and how do you find music like this without encouragement? ==>Creative World Music-flavored tracks with life and beauty. Michael Brook is an adventurous guitar player who likes all the colors a guitar can produce. He flavors each song on this album with its individual recipe of guitar ingredients. Each song has layered depths of musical space, and hold surprises and delights with honest,driving rhythm sections. Shona Bridge: African thumb piano meets finger picking and sustained echo guitar with layers of melodic excitement. Top number, and should be heard on ambient internet radio. Breakdown: Electric guitar tour de force with syncopated beats kept up by not only drums but many layers of guitars. Red Shift: Dreamy, spacey, Brian-Eno type textured sound tapestry, but with interesting "tune" that sings throughout. Layers of fiddle, accordian, piano, and eerie sliding scale harmonies with electric guitar with interesting bongo-tabla rhythm section. Skip Wave: Gonzo tribal singer mixed in with world music mix of drums and edgy guitar work in the backplane. Not my favorite, but ok. Slipstream: Another wild track where background rhythm is in the foreground and the guitar work writhes and echoes like a black mamba snake through the trees. Andean: Synthpad and severa types of synth-harp (probably electronically treated guitar plucking) fluctuates between primary, secondary, and tertiary chords in a minor key, pulsing and strenghthening. Not much melody, but very listenable. Ultramarine: With a beat of 140 or so, this has a frantic feel with the slapping, metallic guitar picking background texture....then a pure-toned guitar-sung melody appears soaring through the moody, spacy synth pads filling a large background space. Noteworthy. You won't hear something like this anywhere else, I don't think. Urbana: Starts with a simple melodic line and many layers of rhythm and backing pad-like guitar support. Gets a little funky after a couple minutes, and the lead guitar, on full sustain, wails along on melodic overload. Tapers back to where we came in, and leaves us. Lakbossa: Like all the tunes on this CD, the rhythm section (we're not talking snare drum and base here) plays prominently, with layers of background guitar textures sampling the chord space (basically oscillating between E minor and C) and one foreground "clean" guitar talking directly to you. Great stuff. Ten: Excellent "Space music" track in a minor key with subdued rhythm section, full sonic spectrum from profound base to stingingly high soaring guitar, with other colors such as bells playing a slightly discordant minor (diminished 7th?) in the mix from time to time. Hawaii: There is nothing offhand about any of these songs. They are fully realized, with many ideas flitting through them, but with a similarity of tone and feel. The last track, again in a haunting minor key with spacey guitar textures, has the percussion section sitting up front and center, but at a slower pace. The guitars get to harmonize, and play, touch and feel, and resound upon each other. A true masterpiece in the space guitar world beat genre, if there is such a thing.

The Wizard of ERR
This is a damn good album. It should be noted; I don't hand out 5 stars to every album I like (or review)- seems kind of pointless. 4 stars is high enough praise in itself. -Anyway- For reference purposes: If you have Eno's "Music for Films III"; listen to the the track "Err" - this album is essentially the planet Err came from. There are even some interludes that contain little distilled pieces of Err. The sound is one you don't hear much; A large number of tracks are built around rhythms which are driven by 2 very different forces: very low, fast-attack/slow-decay, bass and very high, crisp guitar, which is restrained just enough to complement the bass dead-on. Several are relatively fast (almost "catchy" I guess) tempo, but have a whole different character in the absence of a drum kit. If none of this makes any sense, listen to the samples. Hell, listen to them anyway; that's what got me going. I started out looking for a copy of "Sleeping With the Fishes", and it landed me here. So, there you go. PS This is the kind of stuff which will make those insanely expensive speakers show their worth.

Great, intelligent, relaxing music for the soul.
This is some of the most inventive music around today, made by some of the most inovative musician/producers. It's hard to say if it's ambient, new age, inprov, or whatever. Just say it's gorgeous music--perhaps late-night music. All of the Cobalt Blue CDs are amazing, but their live one is the best I've heard. I tend to avoid live recordings for all the audience noise, but theirs is well-produced. Organic percussion, heavenly guitar, and production to die for. Get one of their CDs if you can--it's great, intelligent, relaxing music for the soul.

My favourite CD
Cobalt Blue is a rich and varied piece of work - very special. At work I write documentation for computer processes and at home I paint water-colours. In both environments I like to listen to music, especially non intrusive music. I am not sure how you would classify this music - It is different from most of the Ambient stuff I have heard and is not your run of the mill electronic. I also like Vangelis and J.M. Jarre but this is different.