October 2005 Archives

Klaus Schulze is a bit of a favourite of mine. It's hard to explain why as I'm sure to many people 70 minute tracks based around just a couple of ideas may seem a little... dull. But not to me. I have most - but not all - of his albums plus the limited edition box sets that came out over the last few years. So the news last year that a new label was going to be re-releasing all of his albums seemed great. They came in nice digibox sleeves with the original artwork and liner notes and bonus tracks to fill out the CD's. Which is where the problem comes. There's a great temptation to re-buy all the CD's to get hold of the bonus tracks, which of course is silly given that I have a 50 CD box set of "previously unreleased material" already. So I'm limiting myself to items I haven't already got - or that have significant extra material - to keep the madness at bay. This album is the first one out that I didn't have. It's a sound track album and so, like most sound tracks - but unlike nearly all other Schulze albums, has around 20 short tracks. The pieces for the most part seem to reflect the period (1994) recalling Beyond Recall and the Royal Festival Hall concert. but the division into such short segments robs the album of the flow that the "proper" albums have. The bonus track is an interesting piece, a 20 minute track from a very limited edition giveaway sampler album done for (I think) the Alesis corporation to show off their new keyboards.

Well it goes without saying really that it's a great movie and everyone should go to see it immediately! I'd go every day if I had the time to make sure it got a sequel.

The day after we saw it I got the Serenity: The Official Visual Companion for a late birthday present. This is well worth picking up as it has a quite lengthy interview with Joss about the movie, the shooting script - so a few deleted scenes - and a selection of concept drawings, storyboards, photos etc.

I rewatched the pilot of Firefly (also called Serenity of course) afterwards, there's only a couple of discrepancies I picked up on - although Joe reckons the layout of the ship is slightly different. Small spoilers follow...