Redloz Featuring Gerard Rudolf - Orphaned Lullabyes

Nice interesting CD to start the day from Gerard Rudolf and Redloz. This collaborative effort mashes-up some mellow & inventive spoken word poetry from the South African Rudolf underpinned with a cool minimal downtempo soundtrack that recalls Harmonia & Lemon Jelly one minute, brooding trip-hop next, some mellow dubby skank & even a sadly ponderous guitar, gradually moving onto looping ambient cycles and such sound art further down the line. It's quite a chequered listen - i'm really taken with the variety of moods explored that form the wonderful backdrop to this reflective wordsmithery. I always enjoy poetry set to music, finding it often soothing & evocative and find 'Orphaned Lullabyes' is a really well rounded and professionally presented set of musical ideas & eccentric ruminations.

Best thing this year in music and poetry together.

Surprised by the music of Redloz and the dark and warm voice of Gerard.

The more you listen, the sounds and lyrics just keep growing. Pretend that you're in a car and the drive will take you to new places, you just don't know where. They showed me and i liked it.

I really enjoyed “Orphaned Lullabyes” which combines the poetry of Gerard Rudolf with the music of Redloz. Rudolf’s voice, like a South African Richard Burton, is juxtaposed with the much more modern sounds created by Redloz, creating a very atmospheric album that is deeply evocative of the South Africa it seeks to explore.

Rudolf’s poems largely concern his past. There is a yearning for the landscape, the smells and the warmth of South Africa throughout, but this is tempered by an understanding of the vastness and the danger of this land.  A theme that recurs throughout is the contrast between the trappings of anodyne modern life on the one hand, and the far more ancient world surrounding the neat suburbs and city on the other. There is some resolution to this tension found in the last track, “Southern Discomfort”. Here, a nightclub scene becomes as keenly felt, as bodily, as the South African desert.

Redloz has produced a soundtrack to these poems that veers between a very warm and mellow sound to something much heavier and creeping. “Christ Re-Entering Cape Town” is the opening piece. Dealing with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela, this track captures the enormity of the day. Its slow build leads to a hair-standing-on-end pay off, and it is probably my favourite track on the album. With “Overnight Commercial Flight” Redloz ably demonstrates a clever and light touch, using minimal sound to re-create a late-night flight. Both “Blown Away” and “Southern Discomfort” are more richly textured pieces. The violent edge to the poem “Blown Away” is paired with a melancholic guitar piece, while “Southern Discomfort” creates a swelling, hypnotic soundscape of a night in Cape Town.

This is an album that tries to do something a bit different and I am really enjoying listening to it.