Worth Finding

I've only posted to good old NGW twice since the beginning of 2009 as a result of my life being consumed entirely by my dissertation; and one of those posts wasn't even about music, it was just a massive rant about how much I hated the first ten minutes of the new series of Skins. I managed to see the last ten minutes as well. They weren't much better.

But in the last few weeks I've stumbled across something so magnificently wonderful that I just had to write about it, so I've put my final draft and my textbooks down for a moment.

Now, this is perhaps the most pretentious piece of prose that will ever be entered on Next Goal Wins, but bear with me, as the music of Ólafur Arnalds is worth it.

Arnalds is an Icelandic neo-classical composer, who has (predictably for an avant-garde Icelandic musician) supported Sigur Ros on tour in the past, and is building up a critically acclaimed reputation for himself as creating beautiful, classically orchestrated soundscapes that fall somewhere between his post-rocking compatriots and the great neo-classical and post-minimalist composers of the last half century.

But recently he's excelled himself, electing to spend the week commencing the 13th of April 2009, writing, recording and releasing one new musical work a day, to be collated under the title Found Songs and available for free download over at http://foundsongs.erasedtapes.com/

I urge you to visit this URL, and to download the songs for yourself.

I would review them myself, but when these tracks are a) so utterly FREE that it will cost you nothing but a few minutes of your day to download and hear them with your own ears, and b) so wonderfully incredible that my limited range of superlatives will not be able to do them justice, there just doesn't seem to be any point.