I love music that is emotive and inspiring yet mellow - the sort that to ears unfamiliar with its type might sound enervating, that could be dismissed as easy listening, and yet is lifted up by its oddness. All the pieces here have in common a restrained subtlety, and yet they make the heart soar within structured bounds - it's as if the limits the musicians impose upon themselves result in a more exciting creativity than if they gave themselves free reign - the discipline tempers and restrains the passions which could result in cacophony. Imagine that a painter has an unlimited palatte - what comes about from this has more chance of being an incoherent mess than if he was limited to just a few tones.
Vigil is the project of spanish master pedro vigil, who has mastered an elemental 70-s style soft loungecore funk, and Los Gatos High School is particularly illustrative of his oeuvre - in its almost absurdly restrictive subtlety it seems to come from a parallel universe where rock - and all excessive - music is simply against the laws of thermodynamics, and therefore impossible; Arzachel was an afternoon-long project of young late-60s musicians who were stuck in a studio and told to make a 'psych' album - their members included Steve Hillage and Dave Stewart, and Queen Street Gang shows them wigging out in a way made all the more exciting by the stylistic limits imposed upon them; William d. Drake is the former keyboardist of the Cardiacs, and this track - the last from his sole album - has a breaking but still desperately hopeful innocence in its yearning which is made all the more effective by the combination of a 'minor' mood and warm diatonic major chords, and those slightly odd, 'Beatles-y' cadences. the sense of impending abandonment and sorrow is added to by the tune's shortness.