SONG OF THE DAY

“Adiemus” by Karl Jenk­ins (Adiemus: Songs Of Sanc­tu­ary, Jenk­ins Ratledge Records, 1995). Writ­ten by Karl Jenkins.

MY TAKE

For a week, I have been des­per­ately try­ing to think of a great child­hood music mem­ory to blog about today in honor of my sis­ter Lili’s birth­day, but kept think­ing of Dis­ney songs and musi­cals and “Light­ning Strikes” by Lou Christie.…yeah.…basically miss­ing the men­tal mark of wor­thy songs for today. Then it struck me: the vivid mem­ory of watch­ing t.v. in the early 1990’s in the back room of the house on Melton, and those ridicu­lous Pure Moods infomer­cials. My first, and pretty much only, taste of New Age music. We had that com­mer­cial mem­o­rized (and the Cat Stevens great­est hits infomer­cial!! “Moon­shadow, Moon­shadow!”). It’s really such a bizarre com­mer­cial for lit­tle kids to be into, and I won­der to this day why they paid for adver­tis­ing on chan­nels that were clearly play­ing day­time children’s pro­gram­ming. It’s not like we were watch­ing VH1…well, we watched that a LITTLE when mom wasn’t look­ing! But I swear this com­mer­cial was play­ing on Nick­elodeon. I swear.

Okay, so below I have posted a youtube.com video of the orig­i­nal Pure Moods informer­cial. I have so much love for that com­mer­cial, espe­cially how it switches from Mike Oldfield’s “Tubu­lar Bells Part 1″ (soft, cheesy, sorta jazz album my dad made us lis­ten to once) to the totally 1990’s dance remix of the X-Files theme. It’s a ridicu­lous tran­si­tion. Plus they adver­tise the CD as “direct from Europe”.…hello, 11 year old me wants in! I want Muzzy and I want Pure Moods!

This par­tic­u­lar track is so Avatar sound­track, right? I feel like it’s the score for every epic moment in every movie. Good work, Karl Jenkins.

A few resources if, after you read the wikipedia sum­mary below, you want a lit­tle more!

1. The Unof­fi­cial Adiemus series website
2. Karl Jenk­ins’ web­site (link is to the sec­tion on Adiemus)

PURE MOODS (1997 Re-release) PLAYLIST

1. “Return to Inno­cence” – Enigma — 4:10
2. “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” – Enya — 3:46
3. “Sweet Lul­laby” – Deep For­est — 3:51
4. “Oxy­gene Part IV” – Jean Michel Jarre — 3:19
5. “The X-Files Theme (DADO Para­nor­mal Activ­ity Mix)” – DJ Dado — 3:30 <——–RIDICULOUS TRACK.
6. “Tubu­lar Bells, Pt. 1″ – Mike Old­field — 4:59
7. “Sade­ness, Pt. 1″ – Enigma — 4:16
8. “Adiemus” – Adiemus — 3:59
9. “Crockett’s Theme” – Jan Ham­mer — 3:34
10. “Theme from The Mis­sion” – Ennio Mor­ri­cone — 2:52
11. “Main Title Theme from The Last Emperor” – David Byrne — 4:03
12. “Yeha-Noha (Wishes of Hap­pi­ness & Pros­per­ity)” – Sacred Spirit — 4:26
13. “The Theme from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” – Angelo Badala­menti — 5:01
14. “Makambo” – Geof­frey Oryema — 5:01
15. “My Wife with Cham­pagne Shoul­ders” – Mark Isham — 5:32
16. “The Promise” – Michael Nyman — 3:13
17. “Lily Was Here” – David A. Stewart, Candy Dulfer — 4:18

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- Released in 1995, Adiemus: Songs of Sanc­tu­ary is the first album by Welsh com­poser Karl Jenk­ins as part of the Adiemus project.

- This album quickly gar­nered crit­i­cal acclaim as the title track “Adiemus” had been pre­vi­ously well received dur­ing its use in a Delta Air Lines tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial and release on the album Pure Moods.

- Adiemus is the title of a series of albums by Welsh com­poser Karl Jenk­ins. It is also the title of the open­ing track on the first album in the series, Songs of Sanc­tu­ary.

- Each Adiemus album is a col­lec­tion of song-length pieces fea­tur­ing har­monised vocal melody against an orches­tral back­ground. There are no lyrics as such: instead the vocal­ists sing syl­la­bles and ‘words’ invented by Jenk­ins. How­ever, rather than cre­at­ing musi­cal inter­est from pat­terns ofphonemes (as in scat singing, or in numer­ous clas­si­cal and crossover com­po­si­tions), the lan­guage of Adiemus is care­fully stylised so as not to dis­tract the listener’s atten­tion from the pitch and tim­bre of the voice—for exam­ple, syl­la­bles end­ing in con­so­nants are rare, in this respect it is sim­i­lar to Japan­ese and sev­eral other languages.

- The core con­cept of Adiemus is that the voice should be allowed to func­tion as noth­ing more than an instru­ment, an approach that has become some­thing of a trend in recent choral writ­ing (com­pare, for exam­ple Vangelis’s score for the film 1492: Con­quest of Par­adise (1992), or “Dogora”, sym­phonic suite by french com­poser Étienne Perruchon).

- The ses­sion singer Miriam Stock­ley per­formed the vocal parts on the first four albums. Addi­tional vocals were pro­vided by Mary Carewe on all but Dances of Time, which saw the intro­duc­tion of the Finnish Adiemus Singers (who would later reap­pear on Vocalise). Extra vocals and the cho­rus effects were cre­ated by over­dub­bing mul­ti­tracked record­ings of the singers (in some cases up to forty times) and vary­ing the speed of the tape. Stock­ley was described by Jenk­ins as cen­tral to the Adiemus project due to her range and into­na­tion, how­ever for rea­sons that remain unclear she was not re-engaged for Vocalise.

- The Songs of Sanc­tu­ary orches­tra con­sisted of a string sec­tion aug­mented by var­i­ous eth­nic per­cus­sion instru­ments, with occa­sional fur­ther addi­tions such as bells, a recorder and a quena.

- Though there has been con­sid­er­able evo­lu­tion over the course of the project, the musi­cal lan­guage of Adiemus draws heav­ily on clas­si­cal and world music.

–The under­ly­ing mood of Adiemus is gen­er­ally either ener­getic and uplift­ing or calm and tran­quil, com­ple­mented by pieces with what Jenk­ins describes as an ecclesiastical mood.

- Many lis­ten­ers iden­tify the sound of Adiemus with New Age or Celtic music; indeed The Eter­nal Knot is an explic­itly Celtic-themed album that formed the sound-track for the doc­u­men­tary The Celts. In clas­si­cal music cir­cles Adiemus has strug­gled to dis­tance itself from the chill out quasi-genre, but the ear­lier albums are con­sid­ered impor­tant crossover works nonetheless.

- The album Adiemus: Songs of Sanc­tu­ary was a huge com­mer­cial suc­cess, top­ping clas­si­cal album charts. It is con­sid­ered by crit­ics to be the quin­tes­sen­tial album, on which Jenk­ins’ vision suc­ceeds to the great­est extent with the fewest resources.

- Though none of its suc­ces­sors has achieved the same crit­i­cal acclaim, Adiemus acquired a cult fol­low­ing and main­tained a place in main­stream con­scious­ness through its use in TV com­mer­cials, in par­tic­u­lar the track Adiemus.

- The albums:

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Here’s the vin­tage 90’s com­mer­cial for Pure Moods, that for some rea­son was often played dur­ing the day on chan­nels like Nick­elodeon, which is how my sis­ter and I knew of it at ages inap­pro­pri­ate for new age fanati­cism. Don’t ask me, man:

And here’s the song “Adiemus”: