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| Ales, Brian |
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The openness and versatility Ales displays in terms of musicality since his first album is propabably best explained through his professional background which provided him with a vast pool of experience to draw from.
For a long time Brian Ales has been making his living as a sound engineer and producer who has in the course of his career put his hands shapigly onto the console for well-reputed colleagues such as Joe Lovano, Oliver Lake, Bob Moses and Lyle Mays. Not seldomly a band would drive several hundred miles to Ales' studio (back then) in the canadian Banff Center of Music to get that finishing touch for their album. Besides that line of work, Ales profiled very well as guitarist, composer and arranger, writing and pro-ducing many a music for cinema and TV productions of U.S. or canadian making; several of Ales' contribu-tions in that area have won prestigeous awards.
Add to the picture the albums he has done himself so far [Naiveté (1993, vBr 2054-2), Creature Of Habit (1996, INT 3162-2) und November (1999, INT 3209-2)] and the image of the multifarious musical genius he certainly is begins to show.
Connoisseurs do cherish Ales' work for a reason. Creature Of Habit was praised by german journalist Carsten Sandkämper in INTRO 2/97 with the words: "At long last something to discover on a CD! [This one] provokes me relentlessly and deserves being called fantastic", while November made a name as "soundtrack for cloudy november days" and "beautiful Ambient-Jazz-CD" (PRINZ, Bernd Schwope 3/99) to which "one readily listens from the first to the last minute" as Gunter Janssen in Vintage Guitar News 3/99 put it.
The natural appeal of Ales' music is even more intriguing considering the fact that composing and process-ing are one in his creative approach. All working on the music is done directly in the studio; he'll play a phrase, simultaneously recording it, and do whatever editing, tweaking or altering comes to his mind right away. A multi-layer method of creating new songs which has long earned him the label of being a 'puzzler'; but nonetheless, be his methods geekish as some may have it, his sound was always far from letting on. Never coming across in a sterile manner, never lab-like. |
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