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MP3 Marcus Satellite - From On High
12 MP3 Songs
ELECTRONIC: Dance, ELECTRONIC: Breakbeat/Breaks
Details:
"From On High" is the debut album of Marcus Satellite, featuring the beautiful lyrics and vocals of K Blu.
The following is re-printed with permission from a review by X.J. Scott, at:
https://www.tradebit.com
From On High — Marcus Satellite
Fans of Electronica and Techno will find this album essential listening.
Composition
Electronica is one field that just seems naturally right for xenharmonics. You are using all electronic instruments and they can be retuned any way you like with no constraints. But a lot of it, which I call Bad Techno is in 12 equal, and 4/4 meter, and 180 beats per minute. But there is some microtonality I hear from time to time, fortunately more often as time goes by. But I wonder if they know what they are doing or if they are just randomly messing around, or maybe their instruments are just all out of tune.
Marcus Satellite is one who understands. He knows how to do xenharmonics. He totally understands everything. Perhaps too well. He could probably bore you to tears talking about math. Usually math guys stay on the math side and don''t enter the music side. But that''s not Marcus. He''s a composer first and foremost. He knows how to write a great song with catchy riffs. This is so important. If you can''t write a song, knowing the math won''t do you any good since you can never connect theory to reality. You can only speculate and hope that your speculations have some bearing on reality, which they probably don''t through no fault of your own. You need both sides to make that connection. The curse of the math head who wishes to be creative, but simply is not that sort of person.
But there are rare folks that can master the creative side and the technical side. We call these people genuises. Marcus picked up what he had to to accomplish what he needed to and uses it to supplement and feed into his songwriting skills. And he kept on top of it, not knowing when to stop until he was so far out there that he had transcended anything that had been done. And kept going because it was so darn much fun off on the pioneer with your banjo and your cornbread. He''s good at the math. Really good. The music makes sense, the tunings make sense, and half the time, I have no idea what he is doing, only that it sounds cool.
I have some of his songs memorized. The lyrics are catchy, poignant, whimsical, dark, a whole range. He''s not going on about scoring some chick in an alley or yammering about the size of someone''s butt. These are much more hard core than that. Hard core, philosophically. But humorous as well. Marcus knows how to be funny.
Performance
Great, professional singers complement well written lyrics and can turn your work into a real class act. You know they do. This is the stuff you hear on the radio. Except its not the same. The tunings are not the same.
Audio Quality
The mastering and mixing and balances are all what you expect from someone living in LA who works in the industry and knows exactly what he is doing.
Technique
I don''t know what he is doing as far as technique. Hundreds of years from now, someone will write a book about it. But until then, know that this is his first big full microtonal album and you should get it.
But then you should check out his website and subscribe to his podcast. He has gone way beyond this album and now he is off on a vista somewhere where no one and no one is exploring. I mentioned above how some brave folks are doing extended just intonation. Marcus is beyond that. He traverses multidimensional spaces in which pitches exist, floating, waiting to be tickled by the paths he follows. Marcus is now, as we speak, doing insane things that put the experimental music programs at the most avant garde institutions to shame. I sort of understand some of what he is doing but only some. He''ll show you the diagrams and point out different things. Some people that do this are faking. You can tell them because they have no music to share. But Marcus has music. He is the real deal. The diagrams do describe what he is doing. I hope you have extensive experience with ancient languages and are comfortable speaking space alien dialects. This stuff I can follow with my ear, but it is insane. It is futuristic, but it is too futuristic. Someday this will be heard as normal. But how would jazz sound to someone from the Renaissance. It would be just to different for them to understand. But they might be able to recognize that there is pattern and structure, they just can''t grab what it is.
It''s going to take the collapse of civilization and rise of a new one before this stuff seems normal. I thought I was out there on the fringe of what was possible and then Marcus showed that there is a new frontier beyond that one, or maybe even farther, than we could just see in the distance, but not make out completely. But he is there. And he has some apple seeds that he is planting. And when us stragglers get there, there will be some nice apple trees. Thanks for planting those trees Marcus.
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