Newby, Kenneth

Artist: Kenneth Newby
P: 1994
Kenneth Newby's 1993 solo release. Responsible for the primal soundings of Lights In a Fat City and the world beat experience of Trance Mission, composer and multi-instrumentalist Newby envisions and sculpts atmospheric frameworks. Percussion, acoustic instruments, didgeridu, vocal chants and natural sound environments are fused with the suling gambuh, a meter-long bamboo flute that is tremendously flexible in terms of range of technique to create an effective and provacative tool communicating a variety of emotions.

Artist: Steve Roach & S.Kent & K.Newby
P: 1996    
Halcyon Days is an amazing amalgam of electronics, drones, and non-European instrumentation assembled seamlessly by Steve Roach and Trance Mission members Stephen Kent and Kenneth Newby. Roach's soundscapes provide a perfect texture for the overlay of music of indigenous peoples, as was demonstrated in his collaboration with Stearns and Sunsinger last year on Kiva. In Halcyon Days, Newby brings his knowledge of the instruments and musical traditions of Indonesia, Kent demonstrates his mastery of the digeridoo, and Roach provides the landscape in which the drama takes place. The music is pregnant with the mystery of existence, and conveys a sense of the earth as both mother and destroyer. Rather than the sense of solitude which pervades much of the solo work of Roach, Kent and Newby create a sense of community - of a small group of people living close to the land with both reverence and fear. "Halcyon Days", "First Day", and "Riding the Atlas" are especially primal and social, with heavy percussion and digeridoo.
"Slow Walk at Stone Wash" and "Calyx Revelation" crackle with the heat of the desert and impart the feeling of open spaces. Although the album is dedicated to the halcyon days of winter (when the album was actually recorded), days of peace, creativity, and prosperity, the music frames those days with allusions to the sinister and hostile world.