Stealing Orchestra have been amazingly generous contributors to the free music world for a decade. The orchestra has provided a
prolific free netlabel (and at
Free Music Archive) featuring their work and the works of fellow Portuguese bands.
DELIVERANCE is Stealing Orchestra's new album. It is a master work, a massive opus that begins with the big bang and delivers us to the present day. It is amazing. The first time I heard it I was stunned, so I am here to recommend it to you. Preview the album at
Amazon or
iTunes.
The goal of Oddio Overplay is to unite listeners with artists who share free music. Every once in a while, promoting a commercial album is a good reminder that artists would like to eat or to have the means to dedicate themselves to support themselves with their work.
DELIVERANCE is not an album to buy only in thanks to Stealing Orchestra for all the free music they have given us. It is also an important album you will want to hear, a vast philosophical composition able to pull you out of yourself and the present moment and into something cosmic and larger than all of us.
From the
press release:
After seven years, Stealing Orchestra gain new life and announce their return with their third feature-length album, DELIVERANCE. The new album contains nine brand new tracks and celebrates the 10th anniversary of the band's netlabel You Are Not Stealing Records.
Stealing Orchestra are joined on the new album by Rodrigo Leão (Madredeus) and Ana Deus (Três Tristes Tigres). DELIVERANCE can be found in digital format on iTunes or Amazon and in CD in Portuguese stores, Louie Louie, or through the band....
The last release of this Portuguese band from Porto was the EP BU in 2004. Since then, the musicians have dedicated themselves to various side projects, including X-Wife, Genocide, Motornoise, GG Allin's Dick, Tres Tristes Tigres, Mécanosphère, Dr. Phibes & The Ten Plagues of Egypt, FRICS, and Two White Monsters Around the Table. Members have even collaborated with musicians like John Zorn, Damo Suzuki (Can), Steve Mackay (Stooges), Massimo Pupillo (Zu), and Pamelia Kurstin, among others.
This "liberation" is the culmination point of several years of distilling ideas, compositions, recordings, and sound research. Unlike previous albums, where manipulation and sound collage assumed a key role, DELIVERANCE celebrates a new attitude of the band, promoting a creative process involving several elements where it is impossible to distinguish between what are samples and what are the real instruments.
The result is thus a more organic and fluid composition, which must be heard as a whole: the drama in "Evitando o Cinismo (Avoiding Cynicism)," the loss in "Enquanto há Memória (While There is Living Memory)," the harsh beauty of the Tras-ss-Montes province [Americans suck at geography, so explaining it is a province here for the dummies] in "Um Reino Maravilhoso (A Wonderful Kingdom)," the popular violence in "The Glorious Moment of Popular Catharsis & Revenge," and the hope in "Earth Provides Enough to Satisfy Every Man's Need." In the last song, "Getting Him Out Of Creation," we listen to an excerpt of an interview with the philosopher Colin McGinn, on THE ATHEISM TAPES (BBC, 2004). Then back to the beginning of everything: explosions, the thunder, the violent birth of the Earth, and the first sounds of water and life, ending in Man, the Machine, and Chaos. Stealing Orchestra suggest us to forget God and see the creation of a world that was born by itself and not by Him.
DELIVERANCE is a deeply emotional album, full of faith and idiosyncrasy (but always without him around, of course), waiting to be discovered and rediscovered again and again.
DELIVERANCE is, at its core, an album made with love, without asking permission, and without any fear of pointing out new directions where we can hear everything we have heard before in totally different ways. DELIVERANCE will never be "World Music," but it is not afraid to admit that it is music from around the world always true to its roots.
With 13 years of existence, Stealing Orchestra edited their first demo in 1998, POSTCARD PEOPLE, which earned them the attention of critics and six awards at that year's edition of the defunct Prémios Maquete (Demo Awards). Two years later, the group launched their debut album STEREOGAMY (NorteSul / EMI-VC) which expressed the group's fascination with cinema, collages, sound manipulation, computer game soundtracks, and obsolete machinery capable of producing the most unlikely sounds.
In 2001, the album É PORTUGUÊS? NÃO GOSTO! began a new phase in the band's career. Released by the newly formed netlabel YANSR (the first Portuguese netlabel and one of world's first), this EP challenged traditional means of publishing and played with the prejudices about "what is ours" (from our country Portugal). The title speaks for itself, IS IT PORTUGUESE? I DON'T LIKE IT.
The last full-length release before hibernation, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING BAND (Zounds / Sabotage), took their universe further and continued to celebrate music as a weapon. At this time the group had reached the status of a cult band in Portugal. A year later, they released THE HAUNTED AND ALMOST LOST SONGS 97-98 - a collection of previously unreleased lost songs recorded during 1997 and 1998 - and BU! - an exorcism in the format of an EP of their paranoias, fears, anxieties, and excitements.
Special Guests:
Ana Deus (“Enquanto Há Memória” and “Sem Tempo Para Tudo”)
Rodrigo Leão (“Finding The Right Self-Schema”)
João Filipe (“When Conspirancy Theories Become Mainstream”)
Stealing Orchestra are:
João Mascarenhas, Fernando Sousa, Gustavo Costa, Pedro Costa, Henrique Fernandes
Stealing Orchestra