Artist: Bela Karoli
Title: Furnished Rooms
Label: Helmet Room Recordings
Format: CD
Catalog: HR0018
Price: 13.00 USD
ABOUT BELA KAROLI
This unorthodox trio combines an upright bass, mechanical electronic percussion, two women singing, violin and accordion to produce music undefined by genre.
Bela Karoli swelled from a solo project to a trio when Julie Davis (bass, soft instruments, vocals) began playing with Brigid McAuliffe (accordion, vocals) and Carrie Beeder (violin and cello) in the summer of 2006. Bela Karoli’s music has been described as nakedly beautiful, gorgeously affected, stunning and emotionally resonant, but most listeners agree that it’s hard to classify the band’s compelling mix of modern electronica with old-world acoustic music.
ABOUT FURNISHED ROOMS
“Furnished Rooms” is an album that began in the car. Its songs range from sparsely acoustic to lush, electronic landscapes, while the collection reckons with the realization that we are animals living with machines. Bela Karoli’s own instrumentation reflects this tension as the band balances between acoustic and electronic.
The album takes its name from the second poem in T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes.” Published in 1917, “Preludes” is a series of bleak portraits of modern life through which Eliot hints at the hopelessness born of living in the modern machine. Alongside Eliot’s poetry, “Furnished Rooms” assembles other typically American lyrics, including George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” Oscar Hammerstein’s “Ol’ Man River,” and Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Some things that fly there be.” From the driver’s seat of a moving car, Julie Davis wrote the album’s other lyrics.
PRESS QUOTES
“The record is a marvel of sequencing and production - to say nothing of the songs' quality - and already a contender for the best Colorado release of 2007.”
- John Wenzel, Denver Post
“Bela Karoli’s music is a thing of beauty.”
- Westword
“Drawing inspiration from Thom Yorke, Emily Dickinson, and the songs of cicadas on summer evenings, Denver’s Bela Karoli has a sound full of joyous eccentricity….The band’s musicianship and cohesion allows it to move easily though genres, textures, and moods.”
- Cassie Schoon for The A.V. Club, The Onion
Track List:
- Snow [3:13]
- String Of Lights [3:50]
- Invertebrate [2:58]
- Psychosomatic [4:16]
- Some Things That Fly There Be [3:15]
- Summertime [3:32]
- Machine [3:57]
- Carnage [3:50]
- Prelude 2 [3:28]
- Old Man River [4:57]
- Metal Body [3:08]
- Margin [2:56]