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MARTYN BENNETT
Grit
Real World CDRW114
In a raft of inspired albums fusing Celtic music with modern dance culture, Grit is Martyn Bennett's tour de force. No-one else welds the Scottish tradition to cutting edge electronica so well and here you couldn't slide an atom between the elements, so well are they interwoven.
Triumph in the face of struggle is the album's theme, celebrating the people and songs Bennett grew up with. A childhood spent in the company of legendary singers - Sheila Stewart, Flora MacNeil, travellers Lizzie Higgins and Jeannie Robertson - left a deep impression on the musical youngster who later embraced classical training and a teenage love affair with rave culture. Grit fuses these life-forming influences into a mercurial soundscape stunning in its breadth and passion.
Elderly voices full of timeless character come from Bennett's own vinyl collection and tapes bequeathed him by the late Hamish Henderson, to whom the album is dedicated. These samples of song, conversation, psalm and story integrated with layers of programming, string arrangements, narrative, monastic chant, instrumentation and found sound inhabit a magical location somewhere between the oldest, most mysterious earthly territory and the unknown horizons of the future.
Potentially controversial and challenging in its groove-clad modernity, the album has gained the delighted approval of the singers' families, who see it as continuing the tradition. It's apparent in the spellbinding, sparsely-accompanied story by tinker Davie Stewart, the Dundee-accented tones of Annie Watkins mixed with sampled Edith Piaf and the beat-wrapped traditional jewels of ballad and elegy that Bennett's passion for the real folk culture of his homelands is colossal.
Knowing that Grit represents Bennett's survival strategy during a particularly harrowing period in his own struggle with cancer makes sense of the intensity, the deeply personal yet hugely accessible emotion in this album. Do it the service of listening with headphones. It's an astounding experience, simultaneously painful and uplifting. This is a man with a huge voice.
Mel McClellan - November 2003
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anyone with any interest in scottish culture should have this album.through his musical legacy, Martyn will live forever.
Ronnie MacDonald, ullapool, scotland
martyn was (and is!) my all-time favorite musician, and is an inspiration to me in my own work and music. the pure passion and intensity that radiates from these songs is indescribable... the world has lost one of it's greatest young artists. Grit is without a doubt his best album, i can only imagine what he would have accomplished if he had lived a little longer.
emcee lynx, california
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Folk & Acoustic
