daau

Updated May 4th

Reviews of the new album are starting to come in, and I’ll link to them as they become available online. They are mostly very favorable, and rightly so !

• kwadratuur.be (3.5/5 stars)
• darkentries.be (8/10 stars)
• rifraf has a review on page 22. Again the free music mag gives a very favorable review to the extent of associating DAAU with contemporary composers and even going so far as to label them a crossing between Eleni Karaindrou en Nino Rota (!).
• cuttingedge.be, 4/5 stars
• psychemusic.org, 4 stars
• The New Music Review, 4 stars

Feel free to send me more if you come across them…

A short interview with Han about The Shepherd’s Dream, on occasion of the Kleppersfestival in Antwerp:

Het is een plaat waarin we de stilte en de traagheid opzoeken. Waarin we met kleine details in onze sound het verhaal proberen te vertellen. Meer dan in volume of snelheid. We proberen het echt subtiel aan te pakken. (…)

We zijn gewoon zonder vooropgezet plan gedurende enkele maanden muziek beginnen maken in improvatiesessies. Die muziek had volgens ons iets pastoraal. Het heeft bijna een naïef utopisch karakter waarin we een idyllisch landschap proberen te creëren. De pastorale muziek zoals Beethoven’s Pastorale is ook een beetje inspiratie geweest.

Which translates roughly to the following: The band were aiming at a quieter, slower sound and looking for a way to relate a story through variation of small details rather than volume or tempo. The music has the character of an almost utopian, idyllic landscape.

Quite an apt characterization of the album’s mood, which I like more every time I listen to it (& so does everybody else I’ve played it to).

As of today, the new DAAU album is available for pre-order from the Radical Duke.

And it’s a beauty!

Only five long tracks this time. You can listen to a track at the Radical Duke site.

01 – A Matter Of Time
02 – Out Of The Woods
03 – Girl, Swimming
04 – Into The Wild
05 – Visions Of Arcadia (the final protest)

update: the link to buy the album was taken offline again, but I’m told it will be back very soon.

Last-minute notice for people closer to the Belgian capital than I am: DAAU will play a try-out gig in Brussels this Sunday at Bar des Clandestins.

In other news, the new album title has been confirmed to be “The Shepherd’s Dream“, and to mark the occasion the band’s site is hiding behind construction planks, no doubt soon to be back with more information.

Tour dates come trickling in by the day. France concerts will be in March, Austria and Switzerland are for May.

It’s finally ready. Welcome to the all-new and still unofficial DAAU page. Finally revamped and ready! This will be the place for the latest news and gossip from the DAAU world as it extends into 2010 and beyond, with a new album and hopefully many shows to come.

And just in case things should get boring, there is still a nice long backlog of archival material waiting to be published. From time to time I will try to pull a rabbit out of the hat and present you with something unexpected from, say, 1998 or something.

If you look closer you’ll see that I’ve made the switch to a blog-based format. The days of hand-crafted HTML are finally over once and for all, which might just mean I’m getting lazy. Otherwise, it’s probably not a big deal for you but it is for me.

Looking for the page you used to see here? The old news page is still available here. (If you hate web sites that just forget all their old content whenever the design changes… so do I.)

According to the Flemish music centre, the new DAAU album will bear the title The Shepherd’s Dream. Also lists the release for March 2010.

The animal metaphors continue.

Hooray!