Chimes And Bells Views
American chimes usually have one to one and a half diatonic octaves. Many chimes play an automated piece of music. Prior to 1900, chime bells typically lacked dynamic variation and the inner tuning (the mathematical balance of a bell's complex sound) required to permit the use of harmony. Since 1900, chime bells produced in Belgium, the Netherlands, England, and America have inner tuning and can produce fully harmonized music.[1]
In these hyper-connected times we’re living in, it’s rare for a band to emerge from seemingly nowhere, with no biographical baggage, no superficial hype and no expectation – and yet utterly astound you with their music. This much I know about Chimes & Bells: they’re a Danish quartet, and their debut EP Into Pieces of Wood marks them out as the best new band I’ve heard this year.
It may be that Scandinavians are more adept at sidestepping the public parade of the music business, or it may just be that Chimes & Bells are still undiscovered. At the time of writing they had a mere ten listeners on Last.FM, there were only a few, non-descript photos on their MySpace, and on Google the band itself is buried beneath an impenetrable layer of tacky e-commerce sites for wind chimes and door bells.
So that leaves the music and the music alone. Not to discourage anyone from the start, but it’s unremittingly slow, brooding and bleak; the four tracks that constitute this EP all last more than five minutes, and are all dirge-like in quality. But there’s an allure to Chimes & Bells; a ghostly glint that illuminates the darkness of their sound world, best captured in a line they borrow from Leonard Cohen on opener d‘Stand Stillt’: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
Chimes And Bells Images
