The Isle . Wechsel Garland & World Standard
staubgold 51
2004. cd . dl . lp
“After a single listen to this record, you will feel like you've escaped your urban life and ended up on an isolated tropical island. (…) "The Isle" is a delightful, organic escape into a world that most of us will never experience. For two unique composers from two very different parts of the world, the connection they have is astounding. ‘The Isle’ is a true testament to the understanding they share, and as a listener, I am grateful for this brilliant collaborative effort.” (Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis)
Friends of the Penguin Café Orchestra, FS Blumm and other tea-room minimalism - this one's for you. In a loose, but harmonic sequence, the 15 tracks of "The Isle" create a mood music, which is calm and still like a summer house by the edge of the sea. Its music chirps like the steppe in Tuscany during May. This album needs no formula to function.
“The creators of ‘The Isle’ do not go after the epic and the expansive but aim for the childish and the minimal: a fairy tale. (…)The result is not a heavy-lidded Odyssey but rather a Treasure Island as enacted by talented carefree kids, wearing oversized Hessian boots and paper cocked hats, with prop parrots perched on their narrow shoulders and plastic spyglasses pressed firmly to their wide-open eyes. (…) The latitude and longitude of ‘The Isle’ may be different from the ambient banjoisms of World Standard's ‘Country Gazette’ or cinematic dubisms of Wechsel Garland's ‘Liberation von History’, but it confidently stands on its own in the murky sea of this year's music. The last harbor for the Lost Children.” (Dmitry Elentuck, Brainwashed)
Wechsel Garland
Jörg Follert's melodic, electronic-leaning work as Wechsel Garland combines the organic and the synthetic for productions that employ elements like organ, accordion, acoustic guitar, melodica, and Fender Rhodes.
Jörg Follert has released critically acclaimed albums under the pseudonyms Wechsel Garland and Wunder on labels Staubgold, Morr and Karaoke Kalk.
Follert lives in Cologne and has become an influential artist in the field between acoustic instrumentals, electronic collages and song-orientated pieces with vocals. Apart from album releases he wrote scores for different movies and contributed music to theatre plays. He has collaborated with musicians like World Standard, Felix Kubin, Sora, Niobe and did various remixes for projects like Calexico or Tied & Tickled Trio.
World Standard
World Standard is a long-running Japanese project run by Sohichiro Suzuki, who has created a body of work that stretches out over 20 years. Suzuki released many of his albums through Haruomi Hosono's (Yellow Magic Orchestra) Daisyworld label. Thematically, his work is located on the fringes of European, American and Far Eastern "exotic music".