Stolen Shore Lines is the first full-length release by 30km Inland, an Anglo-Spanish project steered by guitarist and arranger Xavier Martí with help from drifting musicians. The album is mixed by David Sheppard (Snow Palms, Ellis Island Sound, State River Widening, biographer of Brian Eno).
Those who have drunk at the fountains of Morricone-like soundtracks, Movietone, High Llamas, Jim O’Rourke, 60s Brazilia, John Martyn, or the Penguin Cafe Orchestra will find refreshment here. Unashamedly poetic, subtly plaintive, and colourfully filmic (like the dramatic chiaroscuro of Alain Tanner’s Dans La Ville Blanche), its impressionistic tracks are drawn from an almost entirely acoustic palette. Five instrumental pieces alternate with five songs with vocal delivery shared between Spanish chanteuse Ines Naranjo (Winter Cabin) and the album’s lyricist Peter Wix (Jean Paul Special), who works with both Martí and Sheppard on their occasional joint project Continental Film Night.
Martí is known in Spain for his earlier electronic pop project MUDO (Zebra Records 2002), which also involved Juan Antonio Ramos, a key ally in arranging and recording Stolen Shore Lines.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SEA..
In tone, this sad but uplifting album celebrates the splendour and decadence of life close to coastlines, and our need to physically and spiritually feel the sea even when we are far from its shores. This is what the album’s author, Xavier Martí (daytime profession: tree expert and conservationist), has in his heart. For years he has made music at home in a small top-floor flat that looks straight down a motorway winding through the last inland hills before you reach Spain’s eastern coast. The seaboard magic he has aimed to capture here tracks both the sublime and mysterious transient beauty of coastal ambience, and the threat over recent decades that speculators have posed to such natural treasures worldwide, however specifically the album has drawn its light from Mediterranean exteriors.
The decision to release initially only on vinyl reflects Martí’s belief that Stolen Shore Lines is one of those records you have to listen to with attention. However much it seems like a soundtrack to a very engaging yet non-existent film, it is by no means background material.
The album was recorded and produced with care and on a minimal budget over six years in a variety of locations ranging from living rooms to a Los Angeles studio, and including a theatre and the attic of a school. Participating musicians asked for nothing in return for their work, just another reason why the record is also a homage to friendship.
credits
released April 4, 2014
Music composed by Xavier Martí
Lyrics: Peter Wix
Mixed by David Shepard at Soap Studios-London
Mastered at Las Vírgenes- Los Ángeles
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