Browse by Artist: NIOBE

Artist:	NIOBE
Title:	Tse Tse
Label:	SONIG (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	SONIG 027CD

"After listening to Tse Tse a few times, you might find yourself wondering whether Niobe's Yvonne Cornelius hasn't departed to the other side. Much of the album momentarily assumes form only to dissolve once more in an instant, coalescing into a whole at the end. Piano, acoustic guitar, soulful horns and strings resound like film music. Against a wistful, melancholic, an abstract background that meanders in a continually arresting flux, the German-Venezuelan artist sings, whispers, coos, laughs and murmurs with a singularly cautious eloquence. The nostalgic glamour of the Ratpack is artfully deconstructed here. The sub-division of material into individual songs or tracks is scarcely perceptible on Tse Tse, a soft-sift through the listener's fingers. The album represents a further development of everything laid down in Niobe's Tomlab debut -- enchanting jazz vocal renditions, siren-like with apposite timbre; strange electronic effects and 8-bit sampling; narrative structures reminiscent of a radio play. A treasure trove of textured sound, rich in melody and harmonic phrasing. Cornelius was born in Frankfurt and has been living in Cologne since 1994. For over a decade she has developed a unique approach to electronic production, as well as a style of singing ranging from diva-esque acrobatics to comic excess. Concerts in Mexico City, at Berlin's Volksbuehne, and the Batofar in Paris have already exposed her to an international audience."

Artist:	NIOBE
Title:	Voodooluba
Label:	SONIG (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	SONIG 040CD

"The restlessness, distraught magic, and collage-like sleepwalking beauty of Niobe's previous album, Tse Tse, also reign supreme on Voodooluba. Yvonne Cornelius introduces her listeners to carnivalesque rhythms performed on timpani and trumpets, then changes direction almost unnoticeably and picks up a new theme just to dissect it a few moments later. Strangely burlesque melodies and grooves interlock and are replaced by fragments of texts only partially intelligible. Far from cliche and stereotype, unfazed and in complete control, Cornelius continues to develop her signature sound: her trained voice. With it, she samples catchy melodies as well as complex vocal arrangements with a great feeling for tone, modulation and harmonies. On Voodooluba, she takes a big and decisive step forward and reaches beyond the compositional style displayed on her last album: she puts elaborated song arrangements and all-knowing pop-elegies above all, resulting in wonderfully and unexpectedly equable tracks, songs and ballads from late modernism. Then again we encounter unambiguous massive rhythmic moments in which the inquiring voices fall silent and Niobe suddenly becomes magnificent pop music. Andi Toma of Mouse On Mars is one of the producers responsible for this."

Artist:	NIOBE
Title:	White Hats
Label:	TOMLAB (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	TOM 072CD

"With White Hats Niobe has recorded her most accessible album since Tse Tse and Voodooluba. White Hats projects memories from a vacation of skiing in the Swiss Alps sometime in the '50s, it bears the easiness, the miracles and mysteries of nature in the mountains and carries as much romanticism as today's modern world can allow. Niobe has shaped White Hats with a great variety of sound colorings and associations that illustrate her amazing ease of travelling through the last 8 decades of songwriting and chanson highlights. Niobe's songs are starting to breathe through the uniqueness of her voice that transmits all her emotional variety we already had discovered by surprise in her early cut-up work on her debut album Radioersatz (even through the thickest walls of sound). On White Hats, Niobe's passionate voice wanders between many worlds, marching through picturesque landscapes, and releasing its amazing powers over crystalline guitars. She uses the feelings from the sight of the red and blue skies of a day in the mountains as determining colors in her music. There is a red disturbing side and a blue soothing side to Niobe's voice and both intertwined they can guide the lost folks out of the sudden darkness in the mountains into the secure refuge. Very different from her previous albums, the new songs are always very optimistic. The experience she gained from the vocal contributions to the house tracks for Mouse on Mars' last record Radical Connector can be clearly discerned on this record."

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page