david karsten daniels Archives - Various Small Flames https://varioussmallflames.co.uk/tag/david-karsten-daniels/ New and independent music Tue, 16 May 2017 18:42:09 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://i0.wp.com/varioussmallflames.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/cropped-finalwhite-e1490809629909-1.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 david karsten daniels Archives - Various Small Flames https://varioussmallflames.co.uk/tag/david-karsten-daniels/ 32 32 88787050 February 2016 Roundup – A Mixtape https://varioussmallflames.co.uk/2016/03/02/february-roundup-mixtape-2/ Wed, 02 Mar 2016 14:00:31 +0000 http://www.wakethedeaf.co.uk/?p=8422 That’s right, February 2016 is a thing of the past. We think it’ll live on in our ears though, because there was some exceptional music floating around that we’ll be going back to all year. Here’s a playlist featuring every act we wrote about, hosted on the brand new (at least to us) Playmoss platform. As ever, click on the artist’s name in the tracklisting to be beamed off to the specific post. Tracklisting: 1. A Hospital + Crucifix Made […]

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]]> That’s right, February 2016 is a thing of the past. We think it’ll live on in our ears though, because there was some exceptional music floating around that we’ll be going back to all year. Here’s a playlist featuring every act we wrote about, hosted on the brand new (at least to us) Playmoss platform. As ever, click on the artist’s name in the tracklisting to be beamed off to the specific post.

Tracklisting:

1. A Hospital + Crucifix Made of Plastic – Florist
2. Richmond – talons’
3. Say – Indoor Voices
4. Aeroplane – House Plants
5. When I Was an Island – David Karsten Daniels
6. The Gentleman’s Apocalypse – JR Green
7. Hitman – Mrs. Hopewell
8. sun drops – ratbath
9. A Cruise – Brian S. Cassidy
10. Orpheus – Matt Kivel
11. Your Love – Jeremy Squires (INTERVIEW)
12. Blood Moon – C.M. Slenko
13. Bake – Broken Beak
14. Brushes Like a Fox – Saint Corsair
15. daniel – francie cool
16. Baby Blue – Mount Moriah
17. For You – Free Cake For Every Creature
18. Have This Dance – Govier
19. Goodness (trailer) – The Hotelier
20. The River Because – Sawtooth
21. why are you so cool? – Dying Adolescence
22. cockroach – tall friend
23. Waiting – Faint Peter
24. Heart Destroyer – Lazy Legs
25. Take it Forever – Beat Radio (INTERVIEW)
26. Every One of Them, Dogs – Quarterly
27. like a feather or a pawprint – Field Medic
28. Lay For June – Old Earth
29. 2 old 2 broke – Gorgeous Bully
30. Funny Man Routine – Table People
31. House & Home – Arlo Aldo
32. Cave Song – Sea Ghost
33. Everywhere (Fleetwood Mac cover) – Boosegumps (from Sugar Rush)

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]]> 8422 David Karsten Daniels – The Teacher https://varioussmallflames.co.uk/2016/02/04/david-karsten-daniels-the-teacher/ Thu, 04 Feb 2016 20:02:55 +0000 http://www.wakethedeaf.co.uk/?p=7605 We’ve featured Dallas, Texas-based songwriter David Karsten Daniels before here at WTD, when we were very complimentary about his cyclical and meditative album The Four Immeaurable Minds. Daniels has carved a niche that’s all his own, a mish-mash of genres and philosophical tendencies which his bio describes as “inhabit[ing] a private imaginary place where American folk, rock, jazz, ambient and field recordings bleed into each other seamlessly underneath musings on family, death, religion and love undeterred by distance and time.” Daniels […]

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]]> We’ve featured Dallas, Texas-based songwriter David Karsten Daniels before here at WTD, when we were very complimentary about his cyclical and meditative album The Four Immeaurable Minds. Daniels has carved a niche that’s all his own, a mish-mash of genres and philosophical tendencies which his bio describes as “inhabit[ing] a private imaginary place where American folk, rock, jazz, ambient and field recordings bleed into each other seamlessly underneath musings on family, death, religion and love undeterred by distance and time.” Daniels is now back with his eighth full-length album, The Teacher, which he released recently. The album has been gestating a long time, a collage of of fifteen years worth of audio, comprised of iPhone demos of songs as well as personal field recordings. It’s intended to illustrate the story of a new father struggling with what Daniels refers to as “the new-found interdependency of family life and the unavoidable – but much needed – death of self.”

Opening track ‘The Secret Thoughts of Housewives’ begins with crackles and pops and snippets of ambient recordings, before plaintive acoustic guitar frames a sad-sounding song that is explained pretty well by its title, and comes with a lovely video directed by S. Cagney Gentry.

“Oh I want to be gone when you get home tonight, alright
No I won’t be home when you get home tonight, alright
I want to be flying away into the night
When the baby is asleep, I will slip out in(to) the early morning light”

‘When You Were Out on the Lake’ is a lo-fi folk song which sees Daniels shred away on the acoustic guitar and produce something that feels empowering and almost spiritual by its close, when a personal choir of other voices and horns join Daniels’ own. ‘Baby Teeth’ is a short and poignant piano piece, before ‘The Leaves in Our Mouths’ pairs strummed guitars with vocals that describe the pure, soul-warming joy of little everyday things, of the things that you do for a loved one (a child?); the tending of a garden, the filling of a bathtub,the collecting of small and individual treasures. ‘When I Sleep I Dream of my Father’ proves a change of tone, a bluesy shuffle of a folk song about a plucky musician of a father and his search for riches:

“Poppa got a dream gonna leave this Alabama
Said to mama ‘gotta get’ she said ‘No!’
Jumped in his camino, said ‘I’m off to California
Come and find me when you ready’ she said ‘No!'”

‘Postpartum Blues’ is a short (and actually devastatingly sad) song about the hidden darker side of starting a family, while recordings of family life permeate ‘When I Was an Island’, with its dream-like imagery and vocals that sound like I imagine Justin Vernon’s later records would sound if he would only abandon the autotune. ‘Om Family / The Death of Self’ sounds like a family meditation session, an incensed-scented mantra interrupted by the sounds of a child, which approaches the death of self that Daniels mentioned head-on.

‘I Take What I See With My Eyes’ has a slow and considered rattling drum beat and snaky electric guitar, adding layer upon layer as it builds towards its conclusion, hitting the closest thing to a crescendo on the record, a gloriously messy marriage of all the elements used so far. The penultimate track is an interlude of pure field recording, again self-explanatory titled ‘Anna’s Whistler Windchimes’, before finale ‘We Go Into the Ocean’ begins with a touching recording of a father and son being silly but also creating a pretty convincing ocean soundscape. Daniels then sings a song about the ocean to the accompaniment of his son’s seaside sounds, before they swap duties and Daniels’ son sings a (much more irreverent) song of his own.

It’s a beautiful end to a beautiful album, deep and ambitious but also somehow natural and organic, as if these songs were born from the picture they paint and not the other way around. You can buy The Teacher now via the David Karsten Daniels Bandcamp page.

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]]> 7605 Lit Links: Tina Refsnes https://varioussmallflames.co.uk/2015/11/12/lit-links-tina-refsnes/ Thu, 12 Nov 2015 19:57:38 +0000 http://www.wakethedeaf.co.uk/?p=6867 Last week we premièred No One Knows That You’re Lost, the début album from Oslo-based folk musician Tina Refsnes. A superb example of contemporary folk music, the album draws upon a number of influences (Joni Mitchell, Feist, Laura Marling, Sharon van Etten, etc.) to produce something fresh and new with its own personality and style. As we summed up at the end of our review: “No One Knows That You’re Lost is an album inspired by the Norwegian coast and a human […]

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]]> Last week we premièred No One Knows That You’re Lost, the début album from Oslo-based folk musician Tina Refsnes. A superb example of contemporary folk music, the album draws upon a number of influences (Joni Mitchell, Feist, Laura Marling, Sharon van Etten, etc.) to produce something fresh and new with its own personality and style. As we summed up at the end of our review:

“No One Knows That You’re Lost is an album inspired by the Norwegian coast and a human interior, by tight itching doubts and wide open spaces. Here, fragility, strength and beauty become one and the same, parts of a landscape in constant flux yet remaining fundamentally unchanged”

Tina very kindly agreed to write a guest post for our ‘Lit Links‘ series (part of the Quiet, Constant Friends project), where artists and writers create a playlist of songs based around a book of their choice. Arm yourself with headphones and have a read below.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
by Tina Refsnesartoffielding

I’ve never felt comfortable with answering questions that ask for «the best» or «your all time favourite» as I just feel there’s too much good and different material in the world to hold them up against each other like that. So, I’ll say that one of my favourite books that I enjoyed immensely reading is one called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It’s set in an American College and with baseball as the back-drop, and it’s one of those slow books with great meaning but without the drama. It deals with the big hopes that young people usually have to life, with self doubt in performance, and with the social difficulties or shyness that young people sometimes struggle with. But, in a very down to earth way since, at least the main character, is so un-academic. I also imagined this suburban North-American setting for it: Long, wide streets with tall leaf trees on both sides of it. Really big and old campus buildings, and maybe since the characters were so alone in their minds I kept picturing everything as with never that many people around.

Tracklisting:

  1. Jenny Come Home- Andy Shauf
    2. Gather, Form and Fly – Megafaun
    3. Own Side – Caitlin Rose
    4. Casimir Pulaski Day – Sufjan Stevens
    5. Easy – Laura Marling
    6. Blue Train – Emmy Lou Harris, Linds Ronstadt and Dolly Parton
    7. Out of the Woodwork – Courtney Barnett
    8. Big Black Road – Thousands
    9. That Knot Unties? – David Karsten Daniels
    10. Mr. Rodriguez – Rayland Baxter
    11. We Are Fine – Sharon Van Etten
    12. Horizons – The Staves
    13. Archie, Marry Me – Alvvays
    14. Friends – 22-20s
    15. Poison Oak – Bright Eyes

You can buy No One Knows That You’re Lost now via Vestkyst Records and iTunes. You can read about our Quiet, Constant Friends project here, and buy the compilation here. Finally, check out the other entries in the Lit Links series here (and get in touch if you think you have a great playlist for a book!).

 

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]]> 6867 David Karsten Daniels – The Four Immeasurable Minds https://varioussmallflames.co.uk/2014/10/13/david-karsten-daniels-the-four-immeasurable/ Mon, 13 Oct 2014 16:25:00 +0000 http://www.wakethedeaf.co.uk/?p=119 The Four Immeasurable Minds is the seventh full-length from Dallas-based songwriter/composer David Karsten Daniels. The title refers to a collection of Buddhist virtues and each track is named after one of these so-called “sublime attitudes – Love, Equanimity, Joy and Compassion. The album has a decidedly meditative quality, utilising droning guitars, looped church organs, wooden flutes and vague, wordless vocals to offer respite form what Daniels refers to as “an increasingly busy and anxious modern world.” Each song on the album […]

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]]> The Four Immeasurable Minds is the seventh full-length from Dallas-based songwriter/composer David Karsten Daniels. The title refers to a collection of Buddhist virtues and each track is named after one of these so-called “sublime attitudes – Love, Equanimity, Joy and Compassion. The album has a decidedly meditative quality, utilising droning guitars, looped church organs, wooden flutes and vague, wordless vocals to offer respite form what Daniels refers to as “an increasingly busy and anxious modern world.”

Each song on the album bleeds into its neighbours and, interestingly, the end of the last song runs into the start of the first one, meaning the whole thing forms a continuous loop. The cyclical nature of the album adds to its ruminant nature. Daniels says that the listener could begin to experience time as a cyclical phenomenon, or even percept a deceleration, or even comlplete halting of time. This reflects Daniels’s interest in indigenous ideas of circular time and gives the album a mystical quality, elevating it beyond a simple slice of relaxing ambience. Each track has its own idiosyncrasies, but my current favourite track is the first one. ‘Love’ sounds like the serene and dream-like descent to the bottom of some deep ocean, complete with the cryptic calls of colossal ceteacea hidden somewhere in the blue.

<a href=“http://davidkarstendaniels.bandcamp.com/album/the-four-immeasurable-minds” data-mce-href=“http://davidkarstendaniels.bandcamp.com/album/the-four-immeasurable-minds”>The Four Immeasurable Minds by David Karsten Daniels</a>

Daniels has released The Four Immeasurable Minds on his own Smll Thngs label. Order it via his Bandcamp page. If physical releases are more your thing, you can also get the album on cassette from the super cool French label Carpi Records. Order it here.

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