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MP3 Dean Manning - Diplomatic
12 MP3 Songs in this album (38:23) !
Related styles: ROCK: Lo-Fi, POP: Ambient Pop
Details:
So how do you make a record?
With fantasies of being a spy and the mystical tug of the moon. He adds a bicycle and rear view mirror. Paints images of travelling in Greece, Spain and Morocco. And a few moments from a puppet show in the Czech Republic. Then he gets a guitar "that doesn''t sound like a guitar" and a computer he''s not sure how to use …
Pretty soon it all starts heading somewhere, so Dean decides to make some music at home in Sydney with the help of a few friends, a record to remember what it was all about in the first place.
Now living back in Australia after travelling through Europe and North Africa, he nonetheless struggles to pin down the gentle art of whatever it is he''s trying to do with his first solo CD, Diplomatic.
Conjure up the last few years of his life into music and words, sure. Make something pretty and positive that people might like to hear, oh that''s really important. But there''s something else too that runs deeper.
Musically, I tell him, I hear flickers of Daniel Lanois and Nick Drake in the aural textures and fragile vocalizing: a pop music that seems to be trying to escape into somewhere else or return from this ''other'' place. He shrugs his shoulders. Talks about his admiration for that little voice inside Neil Young that keeps him so true and simple; how, then again, Leonard Cohen once observed ''why say tree when you can say sycamore?''
We agree we shouldn''t go on too much about the past, but that we need to say something. To let people know he was the principal songwriter and guitarist for Leonardo''s Bride (https://www.tradebit.com), whose ''Even When I''m Sleeping'' was voted the APRA Song of the Year for 1998. To say Leonardo''s Bride broke up happily in the year of 2001.
Their dissolve freed Dean to wander the world with his then girlfriend. By the time he was back in Sydney he was painting swarthy men with fezzes, the humps of one too many camels, and exotic images that suggested he''d been lost in a reel of Casablanca. He even had his Moroccan-style self-portrait hung in the Salon de Refuses for the Archibald Prize 2003. Now he''s attending classes in puppet making. He shows me his first two creations: ''Moon Boy'' and ''Sun Girl''. They look pretty good together.
When you''re at Dean''s house you notice his freshly-opened piano and lyrics written in pencil on paper, his paintings on the wall, and an obsession, in both his art and found objects, for stars, starfish, seashells, the starburst lights of the circus and the stage. He hadn''t thought about this before but he says, "Stars are past tense though they are present light." Then he adds, "They''re all remnants aren''t they."
It''s in the spirit of this past tense and present light that Dean Manning is about to release his debut recording, Diplomatic.
Diplomatic will be released through Cloudy But Fine this August. The recording first appeared in Spain this past June with the help of an independent record label in Barcelona called Popchild (https://www.tradebit.com). It''s a small universe and Dean Manning likes the feeling involved.
In fact, if you listen close to Diplomatic you might hear a car door slam, a few dogs barking, the footsteps of passers-by, his whole street outside the window of his sometime recording studio (it serves too as spare bedroom too) (do you need a place to stay when you''re in town?). He''s happy about this sense of the world just outside his door.
Mark Mordue, 2003.
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