Sunday 29 January 2012

Shuffling With The Music Machine & Writers Who Have Not Influenced Me

The machine will choose. I'm incapable.
Click the shuffle on...

Stop Looking At Me! - Dennis Michael Tenney
Tape Loop With Rhythm & Bass - Kid Baltan
Border Cop (Opening Titles) - Stanley Myers
We Travel The Spaceways - Sun Ra

I've written about shuffling music before, but cannot remember where. If I had a memory that good, I might be a machine.
Paul Morley writes a lot about Lou Reed's Metal machine music in Words And Music. Morley is not a writer who has influenced me. Other's writers who have not influenced me:
Lester Bangs
Julie Birchill
Richard Meltzer
David Meltzer
Philip Larkin
Nick Kent
Kevin Pearce
Alistair Fitchett
Simon Reynolds
Greg Tate
David Toop

Factors - John Baker
Chippewa - John Zorn
The Witchdoctor - Ennio Morricone & Bruno Nicolai


I return from a charity shop hunt empty-handed, saying to myself 'That's the way it goes sometimes'. Two weeks ago I found series 1 & 2 of The Wire, £3.99 each, having mentioned it to a friend at Work the day before, which either cast a lucky spell on me, or simply made me conscious of it and subconsciously on the look-out. Tomorrow I intend to discuss Pierre Henry on vinyl with a view to finding some in a charity the next day. Except, it doesn't work like that, unfortunately, and besides, he'd having nothing to say about Pierre Henry. But he could say something about Henry Winkler as The Fonze, since his heart is sprayed with American graffiti in the form of a love for The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, Springsteen, Ray Charles etc. But I don't want a copy of Happy Days on DVD, should such a thing exist.

The machine continues to choose...
Laptevinmera - Pan Sonic
Closing Crawl - Jerry Fielding
Children of the Corn - Jonathan Elias
Incredible Melting Man - Arlon Ober

Except it doesn't choose, does it? Surely there is no pondering involved; no consideration of mood, or desire to hear anything. But if the machine could ponder and decide, I suppose it could do so in a nanosecond. It plays...
Modulus - John Zorn
of the hundreds of tracks it could pick, why Zorn again? Can it really be in the mood for John Zorn?
It plays...
Klangexperimente - John Cage/David Tudor
By now I am convinced it is choosing what it knows I will enjoy, rather than one of the tracks that I've yet to delete. I'm waiting for it to pick one of those, just to have the satisfaction of erasing it and creating more space on my hard drive.

S.O.S.Z2 - Peter Hamilton...
Only the machine would put them together...electronic avant-gardism and swinging psichedelico.
The machine has yet to chose a track that I can provide a YouTube clip of - it's being elitist and awkward, and I cannot stop until it does as I wish.

Atlantic - Tom Dissevelt
Photo Injector - Dopplereffekt
Memory 45 - The Caretaker

At last...

Thursday 26 January 2012

Mayan Temples - Sun Ra 'live' in Detroit


Here's a fresh upload from your favourite rambling amateur media archaeologist 
It's from the 28-CD Transparency box set, 'The Complete Detroit Jazz Center Residency'.



Wednesday 25 January 2012

Sexton Blake Union Jack Omnibus (Greyfriars Press 1972)


I found this hardback last week, a snip at £3.50. Five issues of Union Jack are reproduced in their entirety, along with one Detective Weekly. Union Jack, a story paper, ran from 1894 until 1933. Detective Weekly ran from 1933 until 1940.



 

 


Tuesday 24 January 2012

James Kirby, The Caretaker - Downloading (The Past)


Most net-savvy people out there will have downloaded entire careers in an hour or two. Do we listen to all we download? Is it about having everything? Does too much availability of an artist’s work leave us confused about where to start listening? Is easy access to an artist’s work slowly blunting our desire or ability to connect with it?
                                                                                                   - James Kirby (The Caretaker)

We follow James Kirby into the ballroom of the Overlook Hotel, Stockport, where he is the caretaker during the winter recess (winters are very harsh up North). He orders a drink whilst an orchestra materialises in ghost form, shimmering, transparent, playing an old Swing tune. He drinks up, leaves the room, goes into another and sits at his mixing desk until a woman enters with a tray of sandwiches and a hot drink. He rejects her offer, grows increasingly psychotic, telling her 'When you hear this sound' (he presses a few buttons) 'That means I'm fucking working!' She flees, trembling. Later she returns when he is elsewhere and plays back what he's been creating. All she hears are the words 'All work and no play make Jack a dull boy' over and over...

Do we listen to all we download? Or are our memories capable of retaining so many files? The Caretaker remembers things for us, delivering snippets of old music which we may not even have heard before...and it returns, as memories often do, in distorted, fragmentary forms. 

It's fitting that someone who once embraced file-sharing, but has now turned his back on it, should deliver past music as a broken entity, corrupted by time, made impure by technology. Through the digital domain, either on disc or, yes, file, his music spreads further than was ever possible before. Perhaps he would rather it remained elusive and demanded more effort and attention on behalf of the buyer, although he once gave it away. 

We photograph everything according to whim and store the images. How many snapshots in time and place remain dormant on hard drives, never to be looked at again? Kirby has a point. Be it music or images, saturation frequently prevents proper connectivity. 

This is a time of panic amongst avid downloaders as one storage facility after another bows to the law. Right now many will be grabbing what they can - everything must go! - before the next store closes. Yes, people hoard for the sake of it, but in the light of the clampdown, many will now be examining what they have. Suddenly files become more precious. Uploaders are going to find new ways to share, and the will to do so, coupled with people's desire to hear obscure music, means other methods are necessary.


The Caretaker's 'Repetition Of Phrases' shares a disc with Gino Marinuzzi's soundtrack to 'Planet Of The Vampires' in my collection. I can't recall why I put them together, but it is not an unsuccessful marriage. I can imagine Kirby working wonders with Marinuzzi's orchestral sketches. Copyright lawyers, meanwhile, wage war with 'vampires' who they fear may suck the very lifeblood (royalties & other sources of cash) out of the entertainment industry.


Kirby's latest work, 'Patience (After Sebald)', is a continuation of his mission to remake musical history. In this case, Schubert's 'Winterreise' (1827). The song here certainly does not remain the same, the voice being altered beyond recognition, rendered as barely human sound. Classical music has long been appropriated, often resulting in cheap attempts to marry beauty and the beats. Kirby's immersion in memory and sound, however, ensures that the grace and poignancy of the original are retained.


Essential Caretaker music: Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia  



Sunday 22 January 2012

Friday 20 January 2012

Thursday 19 January 2012

Michel Magne, Kindle Burning, The Artist & Inappropriate Laughter



Right. Think. Come on, dammit!
Trouble is, I'm distracted by Michel Magne playing 'Planetes Et Foret', from his 1978 album 'Elements No.1: La Terre'. The track is a strange fusion of grand(iose) piano awash with, and at the same time being strafed by, synths. It's a strange album altogether, being a blend of Indo-New Age late-Prog bordering on the bland but remaining onside through subtle arrangements and unpredictable electro hits. I shoulda been a professional music critic, eh? Maybe not.



But I wanted to write about something else, and music snared me, as it does if it's good. Now that the album's finished, perhaps I can. Perhaps I cant...

Tim Footman wrote recently that he'd acquired a Kindle. I ribbed him about it. You may have been given one for Xmas. Should anyone present one as a gift to me, I'd accept politely, feign gratitude, and see if it burns. Not that I'd ever get one as a present because LJ knows me better; she knows how often I struggle home with a bag full of that old stuff, paper, printed pages bound up in the art, good or bad, of a designer.
Design is one of the reasons books beat Kindle - the most obvious one. After all, how can a Kindle compete with this. It can't, and doesn't try. Instead, it relies on the medium being the message, a message which says 'This is modern, ergo, so are you'. To be Modern, as in consuming every popular gadget made, is to display a willingness to partake in Modern Life, which in turn demonstrates that you are not an old Luddite living in the rear-view mirror world.
Kindle-reading suggests to me the kind of person who not only loves gadgets, but didn't give much thought to the aesthetics of book design. After all, most popular literature does not come bound in great art. Most of it is crudely designed, or to put it another way, designed in a simple fashion because the main  purpose is to tell the reader the title and author. To those for whom 'airport novels' aren't just for holidays, the Kindle makes a kind of sense. All it does is carry the words.
Tim's a smart cookie, though, and I'm sure he'll be reading Baudrillard on his.

Watching 'The Artist' last night, we found ourselves in front of four inappropriate laughers (or idiots, as I prefer to call them) who obviously had IEED (Involuntary Emotional Expression Disorder). As you may have noticed, it's not uncommon in cinemas. Luckily, the film was so good as to remain unspoiled. If they do not technically have IEED, they definitely have an inability to understand what they're watching, which again, is common amongst cinema-goers, and one of the reasons I stopped attending years ago. Mobile phones, talking, and generally idiotic behaviour have long plagued film-lovers, which begs the question: what are those arseholes doing there in the first place? To which I can answer: they are the prime audience for films made with idiots in mind, naturally. Which is not to say that all action/entertainment-based films are idiotic, but that they allow for numbskull viewers by battering them with noise, employing rapid edits and, of course, lacking intellectual or aesthetic depth.
The laughers were primed early by the comic dog and light-hearted nature of the film, but their poor minds were unable to cope with the contrasting moods and emotional subtlety that followed. The best example being when Valentin finds Miller in his dressing room caressing herself with the sleeve of his jacket. A scene that was momentarily comic quickly shifts, along with the actors' expressions, to something more poignant, almost tragic, and is matched by Ludovic Bource's superb soundtrack. But even as the orchestra mirrored the emotional content of the scene, the laughers kept laughing. Duh.

TTFN

Monday 16 January 2012

Electronics Without Tears - F.C.Judd (Public Information)






First Daphne, now Fred, another name to add to the roster of revived sonic revolutionaries from ye olde England of Amateur Tape Recording magazine and fanatical dedication to tinkering with sound, as well as actually inventing such things as the Oramics machine and in Fred's case, the Chromasonics system. Its this dedication to boffinry that cracked the Enigma code, you know. Fred was a radar engineer during the war; the sonic bleeps might have inspired his interest in sound.

In the studio: ring modulators, tape recorders, mixers, filter circuits, a keyboard, which Fred assures us 'will play tunes', but he's not some old square who's going to practise anything like a tune on it - oh no! Fred uses it for 'making sounds' - yes, that's how advanced he was - sounds like those on 'Mysterioso', which as you can guess from the title, perfectly fits the bill as far as the modern love of Haunting Music goes. Along with that we have 'Spooks', 'Ghosts' and 'Maniac Laughter', all of which, thanks to Fred's treatments, are brief but wonderful improvements on mere BBC sound effects tracks.

Fred & Daphne
'Let's see what we can do with a loop and electric guitar' says Fred before the track, 'Broken Guitar'. He brilliantly deconstructs that most treasured instrument of teenage Pop - he's hipper than that, daddy-oh - so hip that he's making the future of electronic music. Witness 'Voltage Control 2', which wouldn't sound out of place on an Ekoplekz album.

The collection's littered with examples of the sound of things to come from the likes of The Focus Group, Jon Brooks and the rest of that crazy gang for whom early English eccentricities in electronic music are such a source of inspiration. 'Voix Angelique' is a particularly fine example. Brilliant work by Public Information.

Sunday 15 January 2012

A Yin Yang Diet, Gultskra Artikler, Stalker & Soho Lit

Me, me, me, me ME!

I just looked at a blog post that was all about the blogger – no surprise there – but he didn’t half go on about his musical career. It must be of interest to someone, but I didn’t stay long.

So, I went to the supermarket today. Thrilling, eh? Nothing interesting happened, unless you can call being able to buy two packs of Go Ahead! Crispy Slices (49 calories per slice) for the price of one interesting – which it isn’t to you, obviously. To achieve yin yang I also bought a chocolate éclair, although I don’t think eating both is what dieticians mean when they talk about a ‘balanced diet’.

Musically, I’ve been consuming Gultskra Artikler’s ‘Galaktika’, a very fine album in the modern IM mode, where they’re very much in the same Zone as fellow Russian Edward Artemiev. Note to self: watch ‘Stalker’ again soon. I recently read the book, ‘Roadside Picnic’ by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, which inspired ‘Stalker’.  Tarkovsky changed a lot, changed virtually everything except the essential mystery of The Zone, and in doing so, made a far great work of art. In the book there’s much wheeling and dealing with artefacts gathered by stalkers who, with names like Bob The Gorilla and Pete The Scab, sound like pulp mobsters. It could have been filmed in another way entirely, as a sci-fi action movie by William Friedkin, with Gene Hackman as the troubled stalker. It would have been truer to the book, but not as visually sumptuous or enigmatic as Tarkovsky’s masterpiece.

Terry Taylor’s ‘Baron’s Court All Change’ was another recent read. In Zone 1 of London’s transport ticketing system (tenuous links, I’ve got ‘em!), Soho was/is also a place for wheeling and dealing, along with lashing of smut, and in the 50s, when this was written, breeding ground of a young bohemian bunch. Yes, it’s all that Jazz and smoking stuff that made Art Blakey records sound even better. Taylor was the model for Colin MacInnes’s anonymous hero of ‘Absolute Beginners’. That is a far superior novel to ‘Baron’s Court’, and will always be the best on the subject, but as a cultural document of the time and place Taylor’s novel is worth a look.

I’m currently lost in the labyrinth of the Navidson household. There’s your clue. I’m sure some of you will now know what I’m reading.

TTFN

Saturday 14 January 2012

Raiding The 20th Century with DJ Food & Paul Morley


Bless UbuWeb. I was only alerted to the existence of this mix because they included it in their Top 15 this month. It evolved after DJ Food first aired a mix on XFM (well, I wouldn't be listening to that station) in 2004. Kev then read Morely's book and got him to read some choice parts for a new, extended mix. UbuWeb's recent tweets suggest that the Stop Online Piracy Act proposed by 'Hollywood's favourite Republican', Lamar Smith, should be taken very seriously. Well, I'm ignorant regarding the technicalities of the issue, but as y'all know we need the Net to be free from shackles that prevent us from being able to hear what would often otherwise be lost musical treasures. The mix is a brilliant history lesson dedicated to (whilst demonstrating) the art of sampling, cut-ups and other forms of sonic adventure. 


 

Raiding The 20th Century






Friday 13 January 2012

DEMDIKE STARE CRASH SCARE! & Fred Judd

It's that time of year when we're all waiting for The First Great Album. Lest you think me completely stupid, that is The First Album Which You As An Individual With Your Own Taste Really Enjoy - something like that. Perhaps I'd never make a good tabloid headline writer. 'DEMDIKE STARE CRASH SCARE!' There's one The Sun will no doubt use on their showbiz page when the van Sean & Miles are touring Sweden in swerves to miss a moose and ends up in the ditch. 'TRYP-DITCH!' would be even better.

Whilst eagerly awaiting the dynamic(?) duo's next release on CD, the first hit of 2012 will be 'Electronics Without Tears', the Fred Judd comp on Public Information, which I've yet to hear, but for us lovers of ye olde electronics it's unmissable.

Thursday 12 January 2012

A Well-Known Friend Slightly Altered

                                                       
                                             Scan for viruses. A hearse passes me on North Rd with
                                                  no cars following other than those waiting to get past -
                                                      a corpse with no family or friends.
                                     The Love-Death Thing. "Oh, the bloke with different coloured eyes"
                                                                                    (woman taking my money for
                                                                     'Bowie In His Own Words'). 'Come On My Skeleton'..
                                                         ...........'The most fearful of monsters
                                               is the well-known friend slightly altered' (Kobo Abe, Inter Ice Age 4)
                                   shglksjhglskdjfgh. The Zone. Three 5p pieces (found in the back
                                                of my draw at work). 'No likey, no lighty'. TRAIN YOBS SET
                                                                                                   DOG ON TV ROXANNE.
                                                                  'We should not worry about how many people
                                                             can already understand or hear what is happening'. (Stockhausen)
                                                   The bricks of my house will outlive me. 'Lots and lots of cheese flavor
                                                                                                          Many, many uses
                                                                                                        Tangy and delicious
                                                                                                       Right size
                                                                                                         Convenient packages
                                                                                                     Popular price
                                                                                                 Everybody loves cheez-it!'
                                                                  Consume/Create/Consume/Create/Consume/
                                                                      Create/Regurgitate. Diplassiasmus.
                                                         Morricone: 29 albums, 300 songs. The Anatomy of 
                                                                                             Melancholy. Ego is
                                                                    not a four-letter word. All The Things You
                                          Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother.
                                                                                             

Wednesday 11 January 2012

Something Kind Of Urgh

It was pure chance that lead me to listen to Girls Aloud. What else could have caused the self-inflicted misery? This morning I just happened to get in the same lift as the girl holding up her MP3 player, inadvertently showing me that she was listening to a song called 'Something Kinda Oooh'.

It's rare to get a peek into someone else's sound world. I was curious, and yes, we know what curiosity did; in this case, it probably killed a few brain cells. Being culturally astute I reasoned that a title like that wasn't going to turn out to be a piece of avant-garde electronic music, or Free Jazz. So I Googled it. Worse still, dear reader, I played the track, by Girls Aloud. Yes, it serves me right, I know. But I didn't play it all, only about a minute, which is more than any sane person would endure, I admit. Despite the clue in the title and despite knowing that most people listen to absolute garbage I was still disappointed, which must mean that somewhere deep inside I'm an optimist.

Below is a new upload. I've put it onto my MP3 player and intend to watch out for that girl in the future. I'm going to make sure I get in the same lift as her and show her what I'm listening to. I hope she'll be as curious as I was, and Google 'Timesteps' in the hope that it's a Pop sensation.

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