Coax – [2008] The Ice Garden

Icy cinematic orchestral soundtrack. Calm instrumentals with electronic ambient influence. A Kahvi classic (pun intended).

kahvi262_coax-the_ice_garden

I will start my (hopefully long and prospering) series of music reviews with a very unusual piece of music, considering that it is released at Kahvi, a Netlabel for electronic music.

It is unusual because this album consists purely of orchestral and piano music. Both technical and musical quality are astonishing. In total, it sounds like the O.S.T. to a film playing in Siberia. Don’t evaluate this album based on the performance on laptop-speakers. This music needs headphones or real speakers to not get destroyed by distortions. On my laptop it sounds awful… Continue reading “Coax – [2008] The Ice Garden”

foobar2000

foobar2000 is probably the most flexible audio player for Windows currently available. Its most obvious difference from other widespread applications like Windows Media Player, iTunes or WinAMP is its unskinned user interface using standard controls. This lack of skinning makes it possible for the user to interactively design his/her own layout consisting of so-called UI elements. Among them are (tabbed) playlist views, an album art viewer, text display and several browsers for the internal media library. Continue reading “foobar2000”