Lilacs and Champagne

This new project by Emil Amos and Alex Hall - roughly one half of Grails who are definitely my favourite band of recent years - is ruling both my turntable and my iPod at the moment. I've always loved sample-based music, and in fact one of my first musical obsessions as a young teenager was Pop Will Eat Itself, a band with a philosophy of recycling music (hence the name) that consisted of live instruments and vocals coupled with layer upon layer of samples, some impossibly obscure and others as blatant as the vocals from Mel & Kim's Respectable which they used in Hit the Hi-Tech Groove (their song from 1987 that describes the aforementioned philosophy)....but I digress. Lilacs and Champagne bear no resemblance to PWEI and have more of a spooky instrumental hip-hop vibe, which is better described and reviewed here. Below is one of the neat videos Emil made to promote the new L&C record:


LILACS! from The Fact Facer on Vimeo.

I think what I love about sampled music is the juxtaposition of soundbites both new and familiar, arranged in unexpected and harmonious ways to create mood and texture and narrative unobtainable by conventional instrumentation or vocalisation. Perhaps it's partly to do with referencing or capturing someone else's sentiment and re-framing it to say something different, or to emphasise something that would be difficult or awkward to express more candidly...either way, it's fun and I hope L&C have more like this to come. If you're into it, order the CD or LP from Mexican Summer here, check out the L&C Facebook page here, and check out more of Emil's effed-up videos on Vimeo here.