Various Artists – Greater Lengths – An All Saints Compilation – (All Saints)
DMC World Magazine
All Saints Records started in 1991 under the leadership of Dominic Norman-Taylor – but only recently has much of their output become available again, in high quality audio for the first time. If you’re not familiar with their repertoire – which includes some ambient greats from Brian Eno as well as his brother Roger, Harold Budd, Laraaji and Jon Hassell – then ‘Greater Lengths’ is an excellent place to start. This isn’t just because of the first disc, which chooses its source material well, but because of the second, where newer electronic artists are let loose on the source material. patten’s blissful version of Harold Budd’s ‘Mandan’ leads the way, but there are some really meaningful contributions from Machinefabriek (reworking Djivan Gasparyan’s ‘Moon Shines At Night’) and Peaking Lights, who add their distinctive dubby fingerprints to Roedelius’s ‘Puente’ Incidentally it’s Roedelius who is one of the stars on the first collective CD, with his plaintive piano piece ‘South Of’. You’ll doubtless recognised the calm of Brian Eno and John Cale’s ‘The River’, while Eno’s collaboration with Jah Wobble is represented by ‘Spinner’. Elsewhere the tour takes in John Paul Jones’s weightless ‘4-Minute Warning’, Jon Hassell, whose ‘Streetfaxx’ flits between edgy loops, and the very, very strange ‘New Laughter Mode (The Way In)’ by Audio Active and Laraaji, which bends the mind in a weird yet wonderful way. All Saints are often regarded as ‘New Age’, which is always a misleading genre title. ‘Soothing yet thought provoking’ is a better fit.
