The Pastels - Slow Summits (2013).zip LINK
Sharmaine Kachmar
'Slow Summits' is the culmination of all the music they've been engaged in since their 1997 set, Illumination. Not quite as shadowy a presence as sometimes suggested, their music has continued to grow by way of other activities; a well regarded film soundtrack (The Last Great Wilderness, Geographic, 2003), some theatre pieces (for 12 Stars) and a collaboration with Japan's Tenniscoats (Two Sunsets, Geographic, 2009). Slow Summits gathers on all these works but moves off in newer and older ways too with its flowing montage of autumn instrumentals, pop songs, slow motion build ups and suddenly optimistic melody lines. Recorded in Glasgow by John McEntire and Bal Cooke, and mixed in Chicago by McEntire, Slow Summits features the core Pastels lineup of Stephen McRobbie, Katrina Mitchell, Tom Crossley, Gerard Love, Alison Mitchell and John Hogarty. Guests include original member Annabel Wright (Aggi) and Norman Blake. Two-thirds of To Rococo Rot (Stefan Schneider and Ronald Lippok) contribute and Tenniscoats too. Kicking Leaves features a memorable string arrangement from Craig Armstrong, the Glasgow-based composer. It features a two drum sets approach to music, a love of elongated jams and the turnaround.
SP: In the first instance you just want to get music out there to prove you exist and then after a while you feel that you have a lot of quantity out there and you only want to add good things to it, so for many artists there is a curve and they become slower [with age] but hopefully you become better at what you do. None of us could ever take for granted that we are musicians so we are very respectful of what we can do. It is such a struggle for us and a lot of work goes into it.
A slow, dense river of bodies flowed north from Blackfriars Bridge; another snaked its way south through Bloomsbury. They met at Piccadilly Circus. For four hours a tidal swell of placards, banners and flags flooded past the Ritz Hotel, DeBeers diamond showrooms and the Royal Academy towards the rally in Hyde Park. A million people, at least, and the organizers claim near 2 million. Clearly it was Britain's biggest political rally ever -- on this, everyone agrees.
I began a cycling tour of the long march at the Euston Road, a broad east-west arterial route bounding the northern limits of the city's West End (the theatres, shops, bars and club district). Pedaling sedately down Hampstead Road on my approach to the slow-moving serpent writhing east and west, I was assailed by a rising cloud of fragile bubbles -- the kind of bubbles kids love to blow. I dismounted as two tall, slim girls in woolly hats passed by bearing aloft a Pythonesque placard with a picture of Tony Blair -- frowning, but his eyes ablaze and wearing a teacup as a hat; across his chest he's clutching a heavy-duty military rifle. The caption reads: "Make tea, not war."
A police helicopter circles overhead and the piercing shriek of pee-whistles blown in dotted rhythms hint at urgency, alarm, almost panic as the slow-moving beast with cold feet heads toward Bloomsbury and the heart of London University. A party of mid-lifers in pastel car coats waits to cross the road. Their long banner reads: "Blair -- don't spend millions bombing civilians." Other banners assert: "Oil fuels war," or ask rhetorically: "How many lives per gallon?" I spot a flotilla of Palestinian flags waving above the slow-moving tide. This will be a recurring theme.
In response to this week's Franco-German veto of plans to send Patriot missiles and AWACs to defend Turkey from Iraqi missiles, sections of the British press launched searing attacks on European hypocrisy. "MONSTROU.S. INGRATITUDE" thundered the Daily Mail's front page on Tuesday; over a moody sepia print of U.S. soldiers on Omaha Beach in 1944, a strap-line detailed the cost of defending Europe in U.S. lives over half a century. Rupert Murdoch's Sun, never slow to take a pop at Johnny Frog, called the Chirac-Schröder plan "cynical and shameless opportunism." The London Evening Standard ran a trenchant feature: "The Selfish Men Wrecking NATO."
According to Natasha Bezuidenhout, Microsoft Executive at First Distribution, there is uptake in partners looking to add the Azure offering to their stack and build out Azure practices. "From an end-user/customer perspective, we are definitely seeing more interest, although adoption is relatively slow as opportunities must first be filtered through reseller partners," says Bezuidenhout. She also notes that limitations to what Microsoft has enabled locally at this stage is impacting transition from other Azure geos, where particular workloads are not yet enabled in South Africa.
Despite typically slow South African uptake of new technologies, Bezuidenhout notes established Azure partners are finding more deployment and migration opportunities and anticipates continued ramp-up. To aid this transition, First Distribution has launched a set of Inside Azure technical sessions and Webinars to support partners with technical enablement. "We are also invested in the Microsoft SureStep programme, to help partners reach the relevant competencies to share in rebates as well as support them in scaling their Azure practices," says Bezuidenhout.
Throughout the first day, navigating intermittent patches of ice and switching from towing our kayaks to paddling routinely halts our progress; the going is slow, but honest. The light of day starts to flicker, and we decide to look for our first camp. As we round the last river bend of the evening, our eyes fixate on a wall of jagged granite peaks looming in the distance, guarding the entrance to the mountains that we plan to transect.
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