MP3 Laurel MacDonald - Luscinia´s Lullaby

"She turns a kaleidoscope that revolves around the listener in sultry polyrhythms and ghostly vocal gymnastics." A pulsing, buzzing, soaring vocal fantasia.

10 MP3 Songs
ELECTRONIC: Ambient, CLASSICAL: Contemporary



Details:
Luscinia's Lullaby is the third full-length CD by internationally acclaimed Canadian singer and composer Laurel MacDonald.

MacDonald has built her recording career on a production style characterized by the use of multiple layers of her voice, with eclectic instrumentation and soundscapes concocted by producer and sound designer Philip Strong.

MacDonald's vocals dovetail and spiral in bewitchingly complex layers. By turns she sings with simmering intensity and wistful fragility: here, a spine-tingling invocation; there, a sleepless lullaby. From boyish soprano to throaty alto; from yodels to whispers to wails.

Luscinia's eludes description as if the act of elusion were itself a game. A torch song rife with playful innuendo is accompanied by slithering slide guitar and liquid violins. A trippy, groove-driven polyphonic chant generates a new wave of mediaeval funkadelia. A gaggle of Venusian doo-wop girls warble and croon their way through a jubilant rhapsody. An aching lament is borne forth on a tube drum with undertones verging on the subsonic, conjured to resonate through your body and into your bones.

With Luscinia's Lullaby, Laurel MacDonald and Philip Strong juxtapose surprising musical elements with ingenuity and beguiling sleight of hand. They hurl their sonic mirror ball into the stratosphere, to create a pulsing, buzzing, soaring vocal fantasia.

News & Reviews

Luscinia's Lullaby was #8 in the top 25 for January 2005 on the radio program Echoes, heard on over 150 Public Radio International affiliate stations across the US.

"MacDonald is one of Canadian music's little-known treasures... Her latest CD is another strikingly original work, featuring the chanting Murmur of Pearl, the jazzy title track and the dreamy Song for this Child, with its pulsing rhythms and rich, cascading vocals."
- Nicholas Jennings, Inside Entertainment

"The empyreal vocalizing of this Toronto-by-way-of-Halifax singer may be wordless but it is rarely short of things to say. This wondrous highlight of only her third album in ten years exists at the stylistic nexus of Laurie Anderson and Jane Siberry. Which is to say, it is less to be listened to than immersed in."
- John Sakamoto, The Anti-Hit List, eye Weekly

Biography

Over the course of a fifteen year career Canadian singer and composer Laurel MacDonald has released five CDs: Kiss Closed My Eyes (1995), Stars & Elements (EP, 2000), and Luscinia's Lullaby (2005), all for Improbable Music; and Chroma (1999) and Wingspan (EP, 1999), both for BMG Classics/RCA. MacDonald's longtime creative partner Philip Strong produced Kiss Closed My Eyes, Chroma, Stars & Elements and Luscinia's Lullaby, and on her remix EP Wingspan she collaborated with John Oswald, Bill Laswell, and Transglobal Underground.

MacDonald's work has appeared in many film and television productions, and has accompanied contemporary dance performances on three continents. In 2003 MacDonald and Strong received a Gemini Award (The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television) for their score for the dance film The Year of the Lion, produced by the Bravo! Television Network and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.