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TAKE ME HOME – BIG CHILL RECORDINGS

May 2nd, 2006 by rui

TAKE ME HOME - BIG CHILL RECORDINGS Reviews and feedback for ‘Take Me Home’ have been coming in from journos and regular bigchill.net contributors – read a selection below…
If you’ve heard the album and want to share your opinions on it, email rui@bigchill.net with your review.

Matt Chittock – Wave Magazine

In the mid 90s many a fledgling space cadet’s fuzzy morning-after-the-night-before was spent with the TV sound turned down, sunshine flooding through the blinds and Pete Lawrence’s brilliant Eyelid Movies compilation on the stereo. The sonic equivalent of a fistful of St John’s wort, the lush, playful collection of downtempo tunes brought back the positivity required to put on the kettle and accept a new day had begun.

Many moons later, and Pete is once again back in compilation mode with this fresh effort. As befits one of The Big Chill’s co-founders, the tempo never goes much beyond meandering, but if you’re in the mood to have a gentle wander, it’s a bewitching journey up the garden path. There’s a good ratio of gems like The Beaufort Scale’s rolling anthem ‘Sevestapol’ and Dollboy’s slightly sinister slowburner ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’. To prove that Pete’s got a sense of humour it even ends with a pleasingly parpy slice of mutant Dixieland jazz. A gorgeous soundtrack with a real sense of fun designed to give the warm and fuzzies to even the most hardened late-night coffee table connoissuer.

Emma Haslett – Time Out – April 26th
‘The Big Chill deliver a little beaut to make us all look forward to long, warm summer evening sipping rum cocktails next to large bodies of water. Starting with Pan Electric’s ambient ‘Rising Slowly’. Pete Lawrence takes us on an ‘uplifting journey’ thorugh the sounds of Eastnor Castle via Tom Greenwood’s ‘Slent Running’ and another gorgeous mix of Sebastien Tellier’s ‘La Ritournelle’ to create a mix so chilled it could make a polar bear shiver.’

Comments from bigchill.net regulars…

Enchanted Gordon
It’s a real pleasure to have another Big Chill compilation come along, the wait has been too long!

The standards have been so high over the year that it should be considered a real honour for the artists involved to make the cut. So I’m delighted to see a handful of my recent favourites being awarded their laurels. I think these recordings of ‘Sevastapol’, ‘La Ritournelle’ and ‘Honey Czars’ are already Big Chill classics and it’s a pleasure to see them here. I’m also personally delighted to see recognition of Animat, Digitonal and Dollboy, three of my favourite acts.

It wouldn’t be a Big Chill compilation without a few new sounds however, and I’m chuffed to have found a few jewels here. I’ll be checking out more from Tom Greenwood, for sure. The George Chatzis tune is lovely, and Pan Electric drew me into the album magnetically.

Still, an album that never offends anyone rarely excites anyone either and there is plenty here to be excited about. For my money, Take Me Home is lovelier and more coherent than iChill, and stands healthy comparison to Disc1 of Glisten, probably my favourite BC collection of them all.

Well worth taking home.

King Rob
Coming out around the time when most people will probably buying their Eastnor tickets, ‘Take Me Home’ is a handy reminder of what’s so great about the musical aspects of the Big Chill Festival.

Like the festival, you won’t be drawn in by big names, although most people will recognise Sebastien Tellier’s La Ritournelle. As you would expect, there’s new unsigned talent, as wel as artists with a longer association with the festival. Canada’s Upstairs recordings ar represented by tracks from Telefeuzz (with vocals by Big Chill recordings’ own Laura B) and The Verbrilli Sound (which has been remixed by Alucidnation – also part of the BC recordings stable), and Jon Hopkins appears with one of the tracks from his Contact Note album.

Elsewhere Digitonal’s ‘A Lighter Touch’ would sit happily alongside tracks from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Adem adds his vocals to a track by Lunz and George Chatzis gives a nod to the festival’s Greek past with the almost Balearic, Beloved-sounding ‘After Paros Island’.

After Blu Mar Ten’s pulsating ‘Black Water’ the album rounds off with Dollboy’s slighltly discordant and echoey cover of 30′s standard ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, then closes with Swinging Troubles’ ‘Raining Pleasure’, which sounds like it came from the era that Dollboy’s track was written in, with it’s jazz clarinet and horn section. Exectly what you weren’t expecting when you started the cd, but like the festival, you end up with a broader musical horizon for it.

I’d try and end the review with a pun based around ‘Take Me Home’ and taking the CD home from shops but I’m too relaxed now. Wake me up in time for Eastnor…

Marky a.k.a Mach V (SoxaN)
The latest sublime selection from maison de grand chill is outand once again Pete Lawrence has managed to compiled another high quality, eclectic and welcome collection of downtempo musical marvels.

The cd kicks off with ‘Rising Slowly’, a beautiful beach-boys-meets-Apollo-records piece by Fragile State’s guitarist Matt Coldrick under the name Pan Electric and carrys on through the warm electronic sounds of Forum find The Beaufort Scale, with ‘Sevastopol’ on to Just Music’s maestro producer Jon Hopkins which bridges the aural gap from electronica into the acoustic ambience of ‘Lunz’ by Lunz, accompanied by ‘nu’ folk god Adem with a passionate waltz that’s reminiscent of Elbow.

Tom Greenwoods ‘Silent Running’ reminds us that electric guitars don’t have to be sharp blunt instruments and with a keeping on a plucked string theme, we end up with Andreas Vollenwelders harp sound ‘Moonday’.

Sheffield’s Animat, with ‘Signwave’ is up next, and then Digitonal pick up the mantle with aplomb and from vinyl samples, clicks and scratches lay down an aural shag pile for your feet to make fists in. Next up is last years DJ anthem, Sebastian Tellier’s ‘Ritournelle’, this time restructed by Mr Dan, in a way that rivals the original and keeps it fresh to the ears. New Greek Islands find George Chatkis takes us in to deep Mediterranean ambient and BC Laura B teams up with BC Telefuzz to create the blissful 4AD inspired ‘Tasp’.

Old Ambient Drum and Bass heads and North London trouble makers Blu Mar Ten return to a Big Chill compilation with a complex layered jig called ‘Black Water’, that takes me back to their beautiful ‘Everglades’ EP. On to the spooky sounds of Dollboy who twists up the Art Garfunkel love lament ‘I only have eyes for you’ into something far more sinister and scary and we’re left with a reminder that good music is always good music, irrespective of genre, fashion and style, in the form of Raining Pleasures beautiful big band sound on ‘Swinging Pleasures’.

I like.

Pete Lawrence on ‘Take Me Home’ track by track

Duke Power Hopes New President Will Raise Profits, Standing with Customers.

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News January 20, 2003 By Stan Choe, The Charlotte Observer, N.C. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Jan. 20–At 20, Ruth Shaw had a husband, a baby son, a full-time course load at East Carolina University and a job at the local paper.

It still took her only three years to graduate. site greenville daily news

Shaw has always loved a challenge, and now she’s got a new one.

In a month, she will begin leading Duke Power — the Carolinas largest utility, with 2.1 million customers.

The 54-year-old incoming president will preside over a business that’s taking an increasingly important role within parent Duke Energy Corp.

Sales at Duke Energy’s wholesale power and trading subsidiary continue to plummet after the fall of Enron Corp. The parent is depending more on Duke Power to provide profits.

Even Duke Power itself, which traditionally has enjoyed high customer-service ratings, is at a crossroads. Analysts say Duke needs to shore up its reputation.

It recently settled allegations of improper accounting with Carolinas regulators and is fielding complaints after 1.4 million customers lost power after last month’s ice storm.

Friends and relatives say Shaw is ready for the challenge.

Even with all her professional, civic and family responsibilities, she never feels overwhelmed.

“I’m always doing something, but it’s not frenetic activity,” she said. “I think I’m mellow, not hyper.” She was born in Danville, Va., near the N.C. line. Her mother was a middle-school teacher, her father a tobacco-farm manager who later ran a fertilizer plant.

She adored reading and would often go for long walks with her grandfather, watching the people at the train station, said her mother, Frances Gwynn.

“All of her life, she has been a very independent kind of a person,” said Gwynn, who lives in view of her daughter’s Davidson home.

The family moved to Greenville when Shaw was 10, where her father suffered a stroke four years later. He would spend the next 14 years in a Veterans Affairs hospital.

Money became tight in the household, and Shaw began working as a reporter for the Greenville Daily Reflector.

She wrote a column called “At Rose With Ruth” about the goings on at her high school, Junius H. Rose, earning 10 cents per column-inch.

Shaw wanted to go to UNC Chapel Hill. But the money wasn’t there, and she stayed home and attended East Carolina University, still working at the paper.

She started writing feature stories, interviewing the wives of famous men, such as baseball players Catfish Hunter and Gaylord Perry, or covering the opening of the tobacco market.

Studying English in college, she stayed at ECU to earn a master’s degree in English.

After getting her doctorate in educational administration from the University of Texas at Austin, Shaw helped create a new community college for the Dallas system. After leading another Dallas school out of a $1.5 million deficit she inherited, Shaw came to Charlotte in 1986 as president of Central Piedmont Community College.

One of her mentors in Dallas, Bill Priest, was helping lead CPCC’s presidential search, and she couldn’t pass it up, she said.

At the time, she told The Observer, “Am I on a career plan that I’ve charted out? Not at all.” Six years later, Shaw made the leap from education to the power industry.

Recruited doggedly by then-chief executive Bill Grigg, Shaw joined Duke in 1992 as its vice president of communications.

“It was one of those things that seemed so unusual that you have to do it,” she said.

Shaw had deliberated for months about the move. She decided the risk was low: If working at Duke didn’t pan out, she could return to academia with valuable leadership experience in the corporate world.

The move shocked many Duke Power employees. Few, if any, outsiders joined the company at such a high level. site greenville daily news

“People were asking, `Who is she?’ ” said Tom Williams, a Duke spokesman who joined the company a few months before Shaw.

The woman voted “Most Likely To Succeed” by her high-school classmates quickly cracked the inner circle of Duke’s power brokers.

With the company’s CEO as one of her biggest fans, she led a team that redesigned how Duke Power did its planning and strategy. She later became a member of the powerful Duke Energy Policy Committee.

At the time, the energy industry was experiencing fundamental changes, as new federal laws loosened regulation of the market. Duke officials wanted a non-engineer in leadership — such as Shaw — to expand the company’s thinking.

Then, last week, Duke named her the new Duke Power president.

“I have felt at home with this company since I walked in the door,” Shaw said.

Although Shaw has devoted so much of herself to work, she still finds time for her sons.

When her younger son, John Shaw, now 20, graduated from high school, she planned a family vacation to a place he had wanted to go since he was a toddler — the African savanna.

Her older son still remembers the advice she gave him in high school, when he was interviewing for the prestigious post of regimental commander at his military school.

Don’t script it, she told Henry Fleming, now 34. Don’t do a speech; focus on the things you think are important for the institution.

Fleming listened, talked to his interviewers about how to better integrate the female students in the school, and won the position.

The Shaws still find time to gather for family vacations at a friend’s cabin in the Rocky Mountains.

Each trip, Shaw tries to rouse others to join her for hikes, which sometimes begin at 5 a.m.

She often, though, can’t convince her younger son.

“Each year,” he said, “she picks a more difficult hike than the year before.” DUK,

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