Scaledown 104

Playing the Christmas Carol versions again..

Here’s the Card/CD i am selling.

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“A Minimal Christmas”- by Georgina Brett greetings card with cd attached. ….£7.99 each

This cd contains versions of 6 well-known Christmas Carols. The idea was to represent them in a meditative style. The tracks are all vocal live-looping, the sounds are one person with some technology and a head full of chords and ideas..

Carols are ubiquitous, we know them so well, but what are they saying? What do they say to us? What they make us feel and what the words are, are often completely separate, so here each carol is treated in a way that captures the essence of the carol evoking our emotional response, sometimes due to the lack of words in the vocal sounds. (Most of the Carols retain some or all of the words of the original). It gives us a chance to see the power of the emotive nature of the carols and perhaps reconnects us to the Christmas of days gone by.

1. The Angel Gabriel – (Baring-Gould/Wilcocks) absolute classic, so stylish and
the harmonies are exquisite, so i left them as they are.

2. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – (Traditional English Carol).

Completely reworked the extra melody lines, with the carol gently digressing towards the end.

3. The Coventry Carol – (Traditional English Carol).This carol is so harmonically rich there are endless melodies to be interwoven, so this is a rework of the structure of the song, improvisation being possible in the live version.

4. In Dulce Jubilo (German Traditional Carol) If you ever heard Pygmies sing their interwoven matrices of songs then you might find this flavour here… The melody is not at all apparent until a way through the track.

5. Gaudete – ( Swedish Traditional Carol)Again this adaptation has great scope for improvisation, with a surprising ostinato in the first section and alternating chords in the second. A unique song.

6. In The Bleak Mid-Winter – (Holst/Rosetti)I had fun working out what to do with this. I found inspiration from the music of two Ugandan wooden xylophone players. They play interlocking tunes to make a melody twice the speed. I added a twist in that i swap parts half way through each line. So much fun to sing!

£1 from each sale goes to www.thepassage.co.uk a homeless charity in London.