Beautiful Darkness: Celebrating the Winter Solstice

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(5 stars) - excellent CD
merrymousies has already provided some detail on this CD. It includes both songs and spoken word pieces set to music. A variety of instruments are used. I think it is beautiful.

One thing I like about it is that it avoids the cliched "light wins over darkness" point of view that so many artists seem to get stuck in when they celebrate the solstice. There is one song called One Small Candle which is from that point of view, but the song ends with a spoken-word piece about "beautiful darkness." As Paul Simon asked: "If the answer is infinite light, why do we sleep in the dark?" (from 'how can you live in the northeast?')

The harmonizing works really well on songs like the Wexford Carol, which was rewritten to provide solstice, rather than Christian, lyrics.

I started looking for solstice music after hearing the vastly inferior (in my opinion) recent release by Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces. I found Amos's take on things to be fairly boring and lacking in much originality. Additionally her voice does not sound good. I went looking for something better and found this CD. While Amos appears to have made her CD for commercial reasons, this really seems to be a labor of love on the part of the musicians. Although I also enjoy the solstice music of George Winston/Windham Hill, I thought this CD was better b/c it was a lot less cliched.

I also thought the poem "Time is a Little Girl" was amazing. Time is compared to a little girl who takes your hand and plays with you, taking you all over different geographical areas, until she gets bored and lets go of your hand. I thought that conveyed the capriciousness of life pretty well, as well as the reality that we are not in control of the passage of time.

Ten stars.

(3 stars) - Pagan Christmas
Nice CD. Liked most of the music. They are very talented people, just not to my taste.

(5 stars) - Wonderful!
This is one of my favorite CDs this season. The songs are simply lovely. Sond of the songs have words that are spoken rather than sung as poems or stories being told. Beautiful flutes, bells ringing, guitars and the like. Its very gentle music that you just want to sit and absorb. The lyrics are beautiful - poetic blessings, celebrating our change of seasons, the winter, the wildlife. A few have a celtic sound to them but most do not. The voices, music are just so harmonious, melodic, wonderful. This cd was just what I needed to celebrate the darkness. An amazing work. I wish I could find more like this one!

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