Album Review: Late Night Tales - Ólafur Arnalds

Picking up the batton on the latest release in the seemingly never-ending Late Night Tales series is Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds. More often known for his modern-classical inspired music, here Arnalds combines diverse soundcapes spanning techno, folk, pop, R&B and more classical sounds.

Upon hearing this album it is clear that Arnalds has poured considerable effort and heart into this album, his first real attempt at something like this mix. In his words, when he was first asked to do the mix his reaction was "This will be fun and easy, only a couple of days work. No problem!"... He claims he was still working on it six months later, weaving together music from his life, his friends and his collaborators, his influences.

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The album opens with the dreamlike Jómsvíkingarímur Ýta Eigi Feldi Rór by Hjálmar Lárusson and Jónbjörn Gíslason before melting into Julianna Barwick's Forever... Both are like fragrent vapour hanging in your soul, softly billowing and gently pulling you in.

Odesza's How Did I Get Here appears in an exclusive instrumental form that transforms it into a slow and considered piece of leftfield beauty. Odesza give way to Anois' A Noise - a stilted moment of melodic folk that recalls The XX's male-female vocal harmonies and stripped production.

Jamie XX himself is here, providing remix duties for Four Tet on Lion, creating the kind of slow moving ambient beauty only he can. Jai Paul's Jasmine shows up like the guy everyone knows at a party, but it's still always so good and therefore hard to resent. Spooky Black's Pull is a liquid post-rock ballad, melodies slowly tumbling in freefall to create a monument to the dramas of human emotion.

The album's only real misstep is in Arnalds' own contribution in the form of three exclusives... His techno side project Kiasmos has the slowly building Orgoned and includes Kinesthesia under his own name - these are both fine if somewhat unspectacular. It is on the staple Late Night Tales cover-version where Arnalds properly stumbles - his take on Destiny's Child transforms the original into the sort of earnest folk cover that I thought we had all grown out of. It lacks all the sass of the original and if I were the subject of the song I'd only be further convinced to never say the singer's name again.

Olafur Arnald's Late Night Tales maintains the series' record for high quality and thoughtfully created mixes, only it loses its way in the final third... Yet everything up until that point is so strong that it balances it out to make the album a valuable listen.

Late Night Tales by Ólafur Arnalds is out now - check out the preview below:

LNT: http://po.st/olafurLNT iTunes: http://geni.us/LNTolafurarnalds Bandcamp: http://po.st/olafurBC Standing at the intersection where techno meets classical music, Ólafur Arnalds directs the new Late Night Tales. “When I was asked to do the next installation of the Late Night Tales series I thought "This will be fun and easy, only a couple of days work. No problem!". Six months later, I was still pulling my hair out in some kind of quest to make the perfect mix. As someone who has never really done mixes before, I learned a lot of things along the way and the whole experience was very inspiring. I decided to approach the mix in a similar way as I would one of my scores. This is the soundtrack of my life. I included songs from many of my friends and collaborators and tried to deliver a mix that represents who I am as an artist and where my influences are coming from - both personally and musically.” - Ólafur Arnalds, March 2016 Follow Late Night Tales: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/latenighttales1 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LateNightTales Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/latenighttales Instagram: http://instagram.com/latenighttales

Stream: Looped - Kiasmos

"Emotive, classically informed techno" from Ólafur Arnalds and Bloodgroup's Janus Rasmussen, as premiered by Dummy Magazine. 'This song, like most of our songs, was made late on a Friday night while enjoying a glass or two of a nice Scotch.

Iceland's Ólafur Arnalds turns his hand to techno here having previously focused on new classical sounds. Kiasmos is a collaboration with Bloodgroup's Janus Rasmussen and this track is taken from the forthcoming album.

Says Arnalds: "This song, like most of our songs, was made late on a Friday night while enjoying a glass or two of a nice Scotch. It’s one of our personal favourites of the upcoming album and is usually the point in our live set where things change from ‘slight head-bobbing chill’ to ‘all right, let’s party!'. We want to release this song ahead of the album to get ourselves as well as you all excited for a much more Kiasmos-active 2014!"

There's a real Jon Hopkins vibe to this, in the way it blends piano and techno… So it is perhaps unsurprising that you can them both at Sonar Reykjavík later this month.