(minimal synth, electronic, folk, pop, ambient) Lewis - 4 альбома, MP3, 320 kbps

1 Thought The World Of You
2 Cool Night In Paris
3 My Whole Life
4 Even Rainbows Turn Blue
5 Like To See You Again
6 Things Just Happen That Way
7 Summer's Moon
8 Let's Fall In Love Tonight
9 Love Showered Me
10 Romance For Two

1. We Danced All Night
2. Bon Voyage
3. Don't Stop It Now
4. It's A New Day
5. So Be In Love With Me
6. Bringing You A Rose
7. Where Did My Love Go Away
8. As The Boats Go By

1. Heartbreak
2. Ain't No Mystery
3. It's A Frail Thing
4. I Was Not Shy
5. You Just Break My Heart
6. I'm Losing You
7. It Will Never Go Away
8. I Come From Texas
9. The Strangest Thing
10. Every Tear Drop
11. Wrapped Around My Heart
12. My Good Shepherd

01 Falling Down
02 I Was Not Shy
03 Just Sittin' By the River Bank
04 My Love Has Gone Away
05 World, You Hurt Me Deeply
06 Have You Ever Known Sorrow
07 Sweet Heart

2014 has been a busy year for a ghost from the 1980s. First came Light in the Attic's resissue in May of the 1983 LP L'Amour, by the mysterious, apparently-untraceable figure called Lewis (supposed real name: Randall Wulff). Then in July, a second artifact was discovered in a warehouse: a 1985 album called Romantic Times, credited to Lewis Baloue. When Light in the Attic reissued that, they also claimed to have found the man himself, or at least someone who looks like a decades-older version of the suave gent who graced those '80s album covers.
Even before that encounter, rumors circulated about more Lewis recordings, made under the name Randy Duke in the late '90s at a studio near Vancouver called Fiasco Bros. An engineer named Len Osanic confirmed these were indeed by Lewis/Wulff, and recently released some of them digitally as a 12-track album called Love Ain’t No Mystery, later licensing them to Summersteps Records for a cassette with three additional songs. Since the voice on these tapes is unmistakably that of the man who made L’Amour and Romantic Times, and Osanic says the release is approved (he’s been friends with Wulff since the early '00s), it seems fair to call this the third Lewis album.
In many ways, though, Love Ain’t No Mystery occupies a different universe than its predecessors. Where '80s Lewis was smooth as silk—an enigmatic soft-rock savant—'90s Lewis is raw and direct. His subject matter is still love, but he’s shifted from seduction and romance to heartbreak and loss, and he wants to tell you about it without filters. Hence the music is much sparser: just voice and guitar, without the synths and beats that added texture to L’Amour and Romantic Times. Lewis’ singing retains a shy, retreating quality, but it’s much higher in the mix, and where his voice once could disappear, it now rarely takes breaks. He massages phrases obsessively and repeats lines like mantras, as if he can find answers by asking the same question over and over. (Osanic claims Lewis often spent hours making subtly different variations of songs, sitting silent for 10 minutes before starting each one.)
This tireless repetition, combined with the fact that Summersteps’ cassette lasts almost 90 minutes, makes Love Ain’t No Mystery an endurance test. Most songs cross the 6-minute mark and feel longer; at their most hypnotic, they’re as fascinating as infinity, but in other places they just feel endless. The closest parallel to Lewis’ approach here is the lonely, damaged blues of Jandek, or perhaps the stretched melodrama of later-period Scott Walker. But Lewis doesn’t venture as far out as either; he never sounds like he’s going off the deep end or even staring over its edge. Oddly, this makes Love Ain’t No Mystery prone to tedium, since there’s not a lot of unpredictability in terms of song structure. Once you hear the first few musical phrases of a given track, you pretty much know what you’re in for the rest of the way.
The many moods Lewis conjures with his vocals, however, are harder to peg. He continually pushes and pulls his voice until it quivers and cracks, abandoning conventional notions of pitch or melody if they get in the way of expressing emotion. But he also knows how to hold back, how to hint and suggest rather than yell, even when he’s not whispering. So the halting, vaporous “I Was Not Shy” takes an opposite angle from the hoarse, distorted blues of “I Come From Texas”, but both arrive at convincingly geniuine feelings.
The variety in Lewis’ singing is especially impressive given how close and unprotected it sounds. According to Osanic, Lewis set up mics “so he could 'work' them by moving closer and sideways as if he was whispering in someones ear,” and even wore a special shirt that made the least possible noise when he shifted around. (Stories like that make you understand why some suggest the whole Lewis story is a hoax.) But the relentless in-your-ear aura doesn’t limit Lewis’ ability to convey feelings; in fact, it seems to enhance it.
All that compelling emotion is what connects Love Ain’t No Mystery to L’Amour and Romantic Times, and shows their peculiar, mesmerizing accomplishments were no flukes. Those two previous records are stronger works: subtler, more complete, weaving vocals and music into a richer whole. But even when his tactics are more simplistic, Randy Wulff knows how to turn feelings into music, and that makes the discovery of Love Ain’t No Mystery a valuable one.

In 1983, a man named Lewis recorded an album named L’Amour, which was released on the unknown label R.A.W. And that’s about all we know.
The record itself is a delicate, whispered album, reflecting the way the artist himself – spectral, movie star-like – almost disappears into the grey of the cover. It should come as no surprise that it failed to shout loudly enough to be noticed, another private press album that sank without trace.
The ingredients are simple: smooth synthesizers, feather-light piano, ethereal, occasionally inaudible vocals and the gentle plucking of acoustic guitars. But the effects are arresting: a spine-tingling, sombre album that echoes Springsteen’s Nebraska or Angelo Badalamenti’s atmospheric soundtracks. Later, Arthur Russell would grasp for something similar on the epochal World Of Echo LP.
L’Amour is a true discovery of the blog age, uncovered in an Edmonton flea-market by collector Jon Murphy, passed on to private press fanatic Aaron Levin, shared on the internet and speculated over by lovers of curious LPs. There’s almost no information about Lewis or the album on the internet. There’s precious little on the sleeve: a dedication to Sports Illustrated supermodel Christie Brinkley, a photo credit for Ed Colver, the noted L.A. punk rock photographer, and credits for engineer Bob Kinsey and synth player Philip Lees. All that was known of Lewis is conjecture: a rumor that he was a con artist who fled after not paying for L’Amour’s photo-shoot and a dubious theory that he was not actually of this earth.
When Light In The Attic looked to release the album, they set out to investigate the mystery. They found some answers, but more intrigue too. Colver was able to fill in some blanks. Firstly, Lewis is a pseudonym. The man the photographer met was named Randall Wulff. He stayed in the Beverley Hills Hilton, drove a white convertible Mercedes and dated a girl who looked like a model. He paid for his photo session with Colver with a $250 check, which bounced.
Eventually, the trail led to Alberta, Canada, where that first LP had been found. Liner notes writer Jack Fleischer along with master detective Markus Armstrong found Randall’s nephew, who remembered Randall as a stockbroker. His vague recollections include a visit to Randall’s apartment, with all-white furniture and that beautiful girlfriend in situ. Crucially, he offered another name – another of Randall’s pseudonyms – which led to a Vancouver studio and the revelation that Lewis had recorded three or four albums of “soft religious music” there. Alas, even the new nom de plume led only to dead ends.
Lewis remains a ghost, a total mystery, but the music will be heard. The album is being pressed for the first time in more than 30 years, and widely distributed for the first time ever. Lewis’s royalties will be placed in escrow until he makes himself known. Perhaps you know Lewis. Perhaps Lewis is you. The only certainty is this: Lewis is about to find a whole bunch of new fans.

Earlier this year, we released the mysterious, bewitching L’Amour, a 1983 private press record thought to be the only release by one of music’s true lost talents: Lewis.
So lost, in fact, was Lewis, he eluded every effort to track him down. Scant details were known: just a series of possibly apocryphal stories about a sports car-driving Canadian with a model on his arm and a habit of skipping town when there were bills to be paid.
Deciding that Lewis’ spider web-delicate songs demanded to be heard, we put the album out anyway, offering to present the due royalties to anyone who could prove they were Lewis.
One sure thing was this: Lewis was a man of many names: Randall A. Wulff among them. Now we have either found another alias – or perhaps even his real name – on the sleeve of a completely unknown album.
Sourced soon after the re-release of L’Amour, Romantic Times is the 1985 follow-up to L’Amour – and it’s released as Lewis Baloue. The name may be slightly different, but this is absolutely our man: a familiar blond posing on the sleeve, a familiar, tortured voice pouring his heart out over languid synths and synthetic waltz beats.
Remastered from a sealed, vinyl copy of the ultra-rare album, the album was discovered in the vaults of DJ and collector Kevin “Sipreano” Howes in Vancouver, BC. It’s so rare that what is, at present, the only other known copy – found in the same Calgary store where Aaron Levin discovered a batch of sealed copies of L’Amour – is presently soaring into quadruple digits on eBay.
Even engineer Dan Lowe, credited for working on the album at Calgary’s Thunder Road Studios, remembered little about the session other than that Lewis seemed to be “under the influence”. Yet the music is utterly captivating.
The album further fleshes out the Lewis myth – we see him pictured in that white suit with his famous white Mercedes and a private jet too; we hear him focussing more intently on matters of the heart, and appearing to unravel in the process. “I felt like I was witnessing a full-blown exorcism of a phantom clad in the finest linen,” writes filmmaker and historian Jack D. Fleischer in his brand new liner notes. “This record went further [than L’Amour ]. It was a personal plea, of sorts. Something had gone wrong. Nerves were clearly exposed.”
It paints Lewis, then, as being more like a David Lynch character than even his debut did, exposing the darkness beneath the sheen. The album is presently being readied for release to the throng of new fans Lewis has found, willingly or not. The man himself remains a total enigma.