Aleksi Perälä - discussion and playlists

  On 10/1/2024 at 11:47 AM, zazen said:

Yes Gaia 3 is great. For a similar ambient chime journey check out the last 5 tracks from Unity III III III, e.g
 

 

Thanks for this, it's been my soundtrack for a couple of afternoons

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Have a few days off this week so will try and put the mix together so there will be alternative means of getting it. 

Put up a mix of my favs from Children of Light on the soundcloud.

In case the embed doesn't work: https://soundcloud.com/flybot/chengods-children-of-light

Track list:

Apologies for the shitty mixing skills - but I had fun doing it.

Next up Northern Lights - even though Zazen has already done one.

A mini playlist: Phantabla

Phantabla is a set of 3 albums (from Oct '21, Nov '21 and July '22) that sortof carries on from the Phantasia series but ... has more tablas. I didn't spend a lot of time on this but for completeness sake here's a quick Phantabla playlist: (4 tracks, 27 mins)
 

pls enable downloads djs' zazen & chengo

 Next playlist: Cycles

Cycles is a set of 12 albums released from December 2021 to May 2022, the album names and artwork are references to the Twelve Ornaments, a set of ancient Chinese symbols and designs associated with auspicious qualities and virtues.

In an interview Aleksi said:

  Quote

I got the idea for CYCLES in a hotel room in Lyon, France quite some time ago, but it took me a couple of years to get to it and make it into reality. It is about the cycles of life — interests, projects, observations, ideas, situations and so on. I tend to return to same points of interests from time to time, and each cycle you’re coming back to it a bit wiser and your way of dealing with the subject will be different, because you have been there before. CYCLES is also my take on world music, towards the end of the series.

The earlier series Midnight Sun, Phantasia and Northern Lights all had tracks that really stood out as 'holy shit!' tracks. Cycles is much more laid back, nothing really jumped out and made me think 'holy shit!' but there's a lot of beautiful, crafted tracks here and I found it really good music to have in the background while I was working. Here's a playlist of things I liked from Cycles:

This is 21 tracks over about 2 hours.

I use Spotify because its an easy way to share playlists but if you want an actual .m3u8 playlist of 'Cycles Highlights' here it is:

cycles_highlights.m3u8Fetching info...

^ this uses the album/track titles as per Bandcamp, so if you have the bandcamp releases and drop this into the folder where the albums are, it should find the tracks.

If you want the whole of Cycles its 100 tracks over just about 10 hours, Spotify playlist here.

In the release thread there was a lot of love for Cycles 5 and Cycles 7. Cycles 12 is specifically described by Aleksi as an ambient album.

In July this year a double-vinyl selection of tracks from Cycles was released on Clone, here's a Spotify playlist of the tracks they chose here. They chose quite different ones to me but they did include my favourite one which is FI3AC2269030, the third track from Cycles 10:

In other news, a new album from Aleksi dropped today, the first for six months, an ambient/drone album called Waves

Bits of news:

Waking Life is a midsummer festival in Portugal, with 24 hour music from three stages arranged around a lake, Aleksi Perala did a 4 hours set there last summer and it was put up on Soundcloud recently. Its a good mix of tracks from Children of Light, Cycles and other recent series, I think there's some Gaia in there ...

New album CYCLES-0 was released on Bandcamp, seems to be a sortof prefix to the Cycles series. To my ears the sound is a kindof mix between Cycles and the recent ambient album Waves. The cover art also seems to reference both Cycles and Waves

Aleksi is doing a gig at Zenner in Berlin on 13th March 2025

180 min with Aleksi Perälä (live)