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French duo Fin de Siecle paint a simple, soft ambient soundtrack full of feelings of longing. Music that comes on like a light breeze yet is potent enough to stay with you.
OPN is proud to announce the release of FIN DE SIECLE's brandnew CD, "Patagonie" !
It features 15 new tracks making this CD a perfect soundtrack for your nostalgia.
Strange Fortune listener reviews are a free space to share your impressions of the music.
Michael J. Salo says on 19 Oct 2006
This release by Fin de Siecle was almost a gem of the month for the past few months, & we've decided to give it the mention it deserves at last.
On a surface musical level, it's tough to point out why this is a good release. The palette of sounds is really quite simple and limited. There are two members in this group and there are only a couple elements in play at a given time, perhaps a piano line and a synth, or a drum machine and some samples.
I would say Fin de Siecle has to be explained in terms of the feeling that it offers. Everytime I have played this CD, these basic sounds have taken me to a certain mental space. It's melancholic yet peaceful and it's somewhere between contentment and longing. It's more about looking backwards than forwards.
Earlier this evening I had some other electronic ambient release on the stereo. It may have been a more technically impressive effort but it wasn't taking me anywhere. I felt a need to put on Fin de Siecle once again.
Here at the end of summer I'm finding this album's effect to be increased. As I play this music I can look back on the summer that just passed, at all that happened and all that I didn't get to. It's effective in much the same way as Fennesz's _Endless Summer_, which struck a chord for me and so many others a few years back.
Musically, Fin de Siecle has little in common with Fennesz. There's no trendy "glitch" sounds or feedback noise here at all. There is a keyboard and a handful of real instruments brought in to spice up the mix. It's vaguely "cinematic" in style. It's split up into many short tracks which makes it easy to listen to. The influence that comes to mind first would be fellow soundtrack composers In the Nursery, or something like Popol Vuh, although this music is more stripped down than either of those.
While you can surely chill out to this album, one thing I learned you cannot do is sleep to it. There's an underlying dark element that's too strong, and the many short tracks are too varied amongst each other to stay completely in the background. This isn't vapid new age music, this is something real.
Sad yet perhaps contributing even further to the poignancy of the music is the news that this duo has apparently finished after five years of recording, there will be only one more new album on the way. Fin de Siecle indeed. The moment may be slipping away but you can catch this release now and look back on it fondly forever.
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