Mark Bruland Offers Carefully-Crafted Instrumental Music On New CD

Lillian

New member
I am often amazed by the music industry -- sometimes that there are so many albums that come out that do not have many redeeming qualities, but also by remarkably-enjoyable recordings that just seem to drop out of the sky. Latter case in point: the third album by Mark Bruland, BEEing Human. The cutesy title refers to the fact that he also raises bees. But the key thing here is that he makes extremely good music. It is instrumental music that probably is technically classified as new age, but it has more melodic content that some other music in that genre. Where did Mark Bruland come from? Right now he is a farmer in Wisconsin. Before that he was in the food industry in Southern California playing Los Angeles-area rock’n’roll clubs on weekends. As far as I can tell he never recorded any rock albums or played with anyone famous, he just learned his lessons well so that when he put together his own studio on the farm he knew what to do. He probably makes music during the winter months when there is less to do, especially outside. In the summer he is probably slopping hogs, stealing honeycomb from the bees, weeding and hoeing, picking apples or whatever he does. But when he goes into that studio on the Appley Ever After Farm, he sits at the piano or synthesizer, or picks up a guitar, and gets down to business. According to the liner notes and his biography, he gets his inspiration from people around him, and most of the tunes reference someone in the song titles, although obliquely at times. His music, however, is straight-forward (he plows a straight furrow, if I may). He only uses a drum kit on a couple of tunes, but if he used drums and bass more often, you could almost classify this as instrumental pop music. The songs are short, punchy, carefully-crafted and imminently-listenable. His music is a bit hard to describe because almost every tune is different. He uses a lot of horns (probably synthesized, although well done -- he played trumpet in his younger days). I hear trumpet, French horn and some high (soprano?) sax as well as flute. Most of the pieces feature piano, but one or two are mostly acoustic guitars. If this rambling dissertation has enticed you at all, your best bet is to go online, use a search engine, find his music and listen to some samples to get a feel of his breadth and width. I believe it will be worth the search for you because this is high-quality music that bears repeated listenings.
 
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