Posts Tagged ‘Cecilia Fage’

COLBALT CHAPEL – ” Orange Synthetic “

Posted: April 10, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Let us be quite clear from the start: This is a minor masterpiece. The 2017 debut Cobalt Chapel album was already moody and strange, but the strangeness quotient is upped several notches here, such as with the nightmare circus atmosphere of ‘Cry A Spiral’ that leads into the apocalyptic dance of ‘It’s The End, The End’.

Conceptually, the album focuses on Yorkshire. The titular track is about the 1970 Krumlin music festival, which was a complete disaster due to bad, stormy weather. It was staged on a hillside in Yorkshire, and that is also the location of the cover photo; the orange synthetic blankets in the shot replicate those seen on old photos from the festival.

Cobalt Chapel are a duo consisting of Jarrod Gosling and Cecilia Fage. Their music combines psychedelia with folk and touches of kraut. It is inherently rhythmic and primarily keyboard driven – Jarrod is a collector of vintage synths and uses all of them here. But despite the amazingly layered analogue sound, the songs themselves sound like the future rather than the past, not least thanks to Cecilia’s stately vocals. Her voice is paradoxically both passionate and somehow slightly aloof.

Compared to earlier albums, ‘Orange Synthetic’ is also closer in style to the sound of Jarrod Gosling’s “prog” band Regal Worm, whose new album is expected later this year!

COBALT CHAPEL – ” Orange Synthetic “

Posted: February 25, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Orange Synthetic by Cobalt Chapel

After almost four years, Cobalt Chapel, are an English duo formed by multi-instrumentalist Jarrod Gosling and Cecilia Fage on vocals, flute and clarinet, The duo are back with “Orange Synthetic”. The first, self-titled album showed an exuberant band mixing strong folk writing with rich, progressive arrangements and a spacious, psychedelic sound.

Nominally, the album to be released on 29th January 2021 would be the second album, but it should be noted that between the debut and this second work we find an episode at the same time curious and fascinating. It’s “Variants”, an album in which the duo decides to revise/remix nine tracks from their debut, dilating them and increasing the psychedelia level.

But let’s come to “Orange Synthetic” which, as the band state, is an album strongly influenced by the area where the band live, Yorkshire, and which “is inspired by the humanity, anecdotes and folklore of the region, the creatures and legends of the dramatic landscape surrounding them”. The name in particular is linked to a singular incident that took place there about fifty years earlier. It was a jazz festival that, following the devastation brought by a storm, saw many of the spectators risk their lives, while the organiser was forced to wander the moors for days before being found. A singular story that, in moving from hopeful joy to moments of terror, seems to express effectively, according to Fage and Gosling, the feeling of the end of the world that is beginning to spread in our time. Paradoxically, however, it is the duo’s sunniest album. 

That album sleeve looks like every day out I’ve had in the beautiful countryside that surrounds us in Yorkshire. Cobalt Chapel have made an entire album called ‘Orange Synthetic’ about the place – about its history, folklore, nature and landscape. What a place! And the perfect subject matter for their style of music, one which includes all kinds of organ variants plus mandolin and recorders all topped off with Cecelia Fage‘s cut-glass vocal. 

words from  “La linea Mason&Dixon”