There’s the creatively-spelled “Sadeness Pt. There’s the trippily titled “My Wife With Champagne Shoulders,” a strummy and meandering easy-listening track written by musician and Scientologist Mark Isham, who would later score Crash (the Oscar-winner, not the Cronenberg flick). Instead of a calming, empowering, classical-lite CD filled with harps and string sections, the remaining numbers are a pastiche of bizarrely named songs like “Oxygène Part IV,” a track with various layers of sputtering techno composed by Jean Michel Jarre, Guinness World Record holder for the Biggest Concert Ever (seriously). It’s a soundtrack for a land where time drifts slowly, after all! The first chunk of the commercial tries to fool you into this, listing “Sail Away” not just once but twice in the first 30 seconds of track listing, and the visual imagery of foaming waves and darkly flickering candles suggests music for a particularly macabre day spa.īut one might also be totally wrong. One might assume that, with those two songs at the helm, the rest of Pure Moods would be in the same vein of mystically orchestral and reverb-drenched females chanting nonwords. ![]() Enya Brennan is the well-known Irish singer and songwriter behind zillions of mystical, folk-inspired ballads that have appeared chiefly in movies whose middle words are “ of the.” Adiemus (the band) is a conglomeration of musicians led by composer Karl Jenkins that produced multiple “vocalise-style albums” that mash together classical, gospel, African, and “world” music traditions to produce tracks that you recognize either from Delta Airlines commercials or from, well, Pure Moods. The anchors of the of the whole collection are two of the most recognizable songs in the popular-New-Age canon: “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)” by Enya, whose video the Pure Moods people seemed to have ripped off entirely for their album art, and the single “Adiemus” by the eponymous … Adiemus. But it’s the original, the purest of Pure Moods that many of us remember from seeing this ad as children during the Nickelodeon afternoon programming block (?) and can now sing all the snippets of the songs in order, even the ones that don’t have actual lyrics. The Pure Moods brand, according to Wikipedia, spans over 10 total CD compilations, including Celtic Moods, Christmas Moods, and the vaguely Paganistic Pure Moods: Celestial Celebration. Pure Moods seems to have been an attempt to corner a lucrative “new age” market, targeting the kind of people who do dream of a world where unicorns prance, ‘80s-style headdresses are all the rage at weddings, and will believe “direct from Europe” and “multi-platinum” constitute a legitimate musical pedigree. So called “direct response television commercials” for CD collections like this were a staple of cable advertising for the last 20 years: sold more on overall aesthetic than on specific songs, they were usually the first step in a mail-order (remember 800-numbers?!) and had price points that invariably ended in 99 cents (except for the obviously inferior 98, or, heaven forbid, 97 cent offerings). Maximum meditative vibes all throughout this comp, except for one delightfully bouncy Euro-house tune from DJ Dado that sounds like the lovechild of The X-Files theme and Robert Miles’ dream trance classic, “Children.” Except, according to this 1994 Canadian issue of Pure Moods, Dado’s “X-Files Theme” actually predates “Children” □□□.ĭJ Dado - “X-Files Theme (DADO Paranormal Activity mix)”ĭave Stewart feat.“Imagine a world where time drifts slowly, a world where music carries you away…” Some of your favorite TV and movie themes ( Twin Peaks, Miami Vice, Chariots of Fire) are mixed with the greatness that is Enigma, along with gods like Brian Eno, Jean Michel Jarre, and Mike Oldfield, too. This thing runs the gamut of all things chill, immersive, introspective, and worldly. Modern Classical / New Age / Worldbeat / Ethnic Fusion / Downtempo / Ambient / Film Score / Synthpop / Smooth Jazz / Trip Hopīuncha very different versions of this “As Seen On TV’ comp from Virgin Records that have come out over the years-the Swedish version is different from the UK version, which is different from the South African version, which is different from the US version, etc., etc.-so I took a bunch of those releases and compiled them all into one listening session, and the result was about two full discs worth of unique songs.
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