Morcheeba New Album Details (Charango)

Charango is the new album from Morcheeba. It sounds like the kind of album that should always have been a part of your collection; like mood music for the 21st century.

From 1996 to 2000, Morcheeba released three albums: Who Can You Trust, Big Calm and Fragments Of Freedom, which collectively sold over 3 million copies (and still sellling). Those four years saw the band go through the insanity of huge success and come out of it with a renewed determination to put everything - experiences, efforts and encounters - into their own musical stew.

In the 60s a group of Brazilian musicians formed Tropicalia, a movement that was based on the idea of musical cannibalism. Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and the rock band Os Mutantes combined Brazil's own folk and samba styles with whatever they liked from the west: rock'n'roll, psychedelia, R&B.
The goal was to "eat and digest" the finest cuts of European music, and do with the rest of it what bears have been doing in the woods for a very long time indeed.

Now Morcheeba have taken that idea and applied it to their own rich and strange work. "We've used the place that we've come from - that English beats tradition - and reached out to as many things as possible to make this defining sound," says Ross Godfrey, the band's guitarist/multi-instrumentalist. " Skye, Pacewon, Slick Rick and Kurt Wagner can all sit on this record together comfortably"

Charango is the result. The beating heart of Morcheeba ripples through every song - there is the same elegance, romance and melancholy that made the first three albums so special - but the breadth of vision has grown. It is music that has the confidence to forge its own identity while taking on board everything that its creators love from anywhere in the world. The benign influence of library music, orchestral film scores, hip-hop old and new, country, 70s rock, blues, exotica, and the Brazilian psychedelia of Os Mutantes have all gone into the making of a thoroughly modern sound.

"It wouldn't have been possible to make an album like this ten years ago," says Paul Godfrey, Morcheeba's Beathead and lyricist. "This isn't a case of us going out and looking for the exotic, but a natural result of what's been happening to us, and what we've been listening to."

It's also the result of the mixed blessings of Morcheeba's changing circumstances. "It's a cliche, but it's very difficult to come to terms with success" says Paul. "You can become self-conscious about the fact that people know who you are. So the goal is to concentrate on the songwriting and the production - all the focus is on bringing those classic traditions to our trademark heavy beats and making music that we love."

After the four years of madness that saw Skye, Paul and Ross pulled in every direction and left with no time to touch base, they have spent the last two years doing what they were meant to do in the first place. "If I look back on a typical week I'll have spent most of the time in the studio" says Ross, "I'll have been jamming, or writing something, and then when I get home I'll start playing, or I'll listen to music. My days have been entirely taken up with music, and we've been soaking in new sounds all the time, and each one acts as a lesson, a new way of doing things."

There is nothing fraudulent about this record. Everything is played live, and great missions were undertaken in the search of finding the right instruments to create the right sounds. "We've worked really, really hard, and done exactly what we have believed in," says Paul. "We haven't had the usual distractions of having to worry about money, or about whether the business is being taken care of. Having completed this record, I feel completely genuine as an artist, and that's the first time I've felt like that in our career."

Another important ingredient was the choice of collaborators. On Orchestral arrangement duties was Nick Ingman, a veteran of the Music de Wolfe sound l Tags

• morcheeba