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Another Fine Day - Chasing Tornadoes Ep (another Fine Label)
Tom Green is well known to the Big Chill audience for his customary Sunday lunchtime sets with his band Another Fine Day (AFD) at Big Chill Festivals. Another Fine Day are the nearest the festival has to a resident band and have travelled afar and with great success. But Tom's work has also popped up alongside the Orb, inside the MRI scanner for children at Bristol's Royal Infirmary and with African legend Abdul T Jay's live band, to name but a few side projects.AFD's seminal 90s ambient LP 'Life Before Land' had been released to great cult and critical acclaim and has gone down alongside Mr Morris's 'Global Chillage' and Global Communication's '76-14' as an absolute genre classic from that time. It was originally a limited vinyl run put out by Beyond records from Birmingham. Watch out for those copies, they're as rare as snake's wings. In any case, you can judge the quality for yourself as it gets a welcome re-release next year. The follow-up CD released in 2000 for Six Degrees, 'Salvage', featured as radical a re-work of 'Scarborough Fair' as you'll ever get and was described as sounding like 'A Parisian restaurant in outer space'. Erk Alors..
So to 'Chasing Tornadoes'. Picture a valley in Wales with a stream running through it and the ubiquitous AFD thumb piano tinkling along in time to the water. It was at the Big Chill's first outdoor event in the Black Mountains that this tune first surfaced. And it was the aural equivalent of one of those cinematic moments when the camera zooms in whilst being dollied out. If you know what I mean. Another Fine Day's set at the Gala was a real eye-opener, as it has been at every appearance since. I heard 'Chasing Tornadoes' again a year later having borrowed the live take on cassette (yes, I said cassette!) from the Gala in 94 and it subsequently became a permanent feature on my car stereo. It doesn't appear on 'Life Before Land'. Call it a lost classic if you will.
The great thing about AFD is how they bring the outdoors into the mix and the theme for this tune is a perfect example of that. A jaunty piano line moves across a dubby bass landscape into which floats a vocal snatch from some American lunatic who spends his time chasing tornadoes around the desert. It has a loping, nodding shuffle which is particularly infectious and should be a permanent fixture in 2005 chill-out sets. It is a beautiful tune in every respect, from the creaking gate to the fade. Please seek it out.
The EP features two other new tracks 'Here Are 4 Notes' and 'Lo-Sugar PM Phase' plus an 'Ableton'd' re-mix of the title tune.
The CD is issued on Tom Green's Another Fine Label and we can expect to hear some great releases from that source over the coming months.
AJ
Another Fine Day's 'Chasing Tornadoes' EP is out now, alongside a 10 year anniversary re-release of 'Life Before Land'.
For more info go to www.anotherfinelabel.co.uk
www.myspace.com/anotherfinedday
Written: 7th Dec, 04
Read: 2904 times
