Electronica Sensible: liner notes

This collection started as an exercise on nostalgia meet fashionable electronic music. I’ve been asked in the past few years to score in a specific, “modern” style, inspired by late takes on electronic music like Cliff Martinez, electro-acoustic soundtracks like Johann Johansen and Clint Mansell and more abstract stuff like Alva Noto, Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

People who pushed me to revisit this recent and fashionable styles were really reticent to go in a more traditional, old-fashioned electronic school that proved to be very successful and efficient in film scoring on the 70’s and 80’s. Most notably the works of people like Vangelis and Giorgio Moroder. Now, that was outdated and dowdy. But as we know, what’s dated today will be fashionable again tomorrow and eventually I played the (illegal, I know) “Esper Edition” of the Blade Runner OST (that I cherish) to somebody who was crazy with the vintage sounds of Drive soundtrack and realized that, at least those old styles were “in” again.

But, besides the analog sounds, it was the compositions that charmed me when I was a kid and that I was missing the most in recent “electro-years”. Those “themes” and melodies spiced by electronica, those arrangements that could sound almost baroque and out-dated now.

I’ve found myself going back to those LPs I own, full of melodies and yet deeply electronic, from my first purchases (Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita) to the recent Sakamoto haunting piano with electro-glitches collaborations, through Vangelis and Giorgio and some others.

Here for you, an hour of electronic themes; synthetizers and acoustic instruments, programming and real performances, melodies, chord changes and soundscapes; all as an homage to those electro masters.

                                                      D.D. Paris, 20^th December 2014