Tuesday 26 February 2013

Stephen Lawrence Illustrations For Famous Fantastic Mysteries Magazine

Amazing work by Stephen Lawrence, especially the last two stunners.

Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine info here

August 1947

February 1946

June 1949

April 1943

February 1950

October 1952

September 1945

December 1947

Monday 25 February 2013

50 Ans D'Acousmatique - Francois Bayle (Ina/GRM)




This dropped through the letterbox a few weeks ago. I love to say it was a surprise promotional gift from GRM because they just know I'm their main man in the UK when it comes to hyping electro-acousmatic vibrations - but what do you think? I bought it - how extravagant!

'In the acousmatic approach, the listener is expected to reconstruct an explanation for a series of sound events. ' - Francois Bayle

But I can't explain...I think it's love...a 15-CD box set...a box, a cardboard one containing 15 slim cardboard sleeves on which the details are printed...same design as the Parmegiani set, also from GRM, which I'll say again is an essential collection. OK, so it's cheaper (£15) to buy the MP3 version of this but a material object has many advantages, least of all the booklet, which I've yet to read properly, and titled sequences, plus all the dates, some of the which are 1980, 2001, and the starter, 1963...

...back then Bayle was intimidated by the company of Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, Xenakis and others...who could blame him? He waited about five years before feeling confident in his abilities, and since he was running GRM knew he had to deliver. Not being 'a symphonist at heart', Bayle was free from either rigid 12-tone dogma or the shackles of older classical schools. As a child of the stereo generation he was the right age to enter new territory, the unmapped sonic regions beyond early electronic and musique concrete beginnings.

There is so much music here that I couldn't do it justice in a few hundred, or probably thousand,words. It changes according to the technology used, of course, from tape to analog synths, MIDI and real-time computers. Bayle said 'Acousmatics is the art to fill with nuances, to work with spatiality', and there is much 'spatiality' going on. Sounds move, but not like stereo panning Rock gimmickry. Instead, to advocate a philosophy of creation and listening. You have to listen hard. Your head becomes an auditorium in which sounds shift, disappear, leap out, shimmer and so on - the sound of sounds, alien and vaguely familiar.

I've lived with this collection for almost two months and it feels as if I've barely scratched the surface. That might be normal for a big set of 'normal' songs, never mind music as deep as this. It's deep and above all wide. Bayle's realm is the space in-between, which he seeks to expand, rather than simply fill, by seemingly stretching it. In short, this is mind-expanding music, ma-a-an, if I dare say so. Bereft, though, of clichéd psychedelic effects. Instead, technology becomes...transcendent?

Radio interference, distorted piano chords, plucked strings, whispered voices, chimes, silence, fluttering noise, hum, drones, bird calls...but what is that...and that? Primordial off-world field recordings...a broadcast from planet Bayle calling prisoners of the earth - come out? Layered sounds, remote sounds...gentle, menacing, disturbing, dense and airy sounds...

It's pointless recommending this kind of thing - you either get it or you don't, and if you do, spend the cash. You won't regret it.




Thursday 21 February 2013

Electronic Panorama Box Set

Paris.
Tokyo.
Utrecht.
Warszawa.

Luc Ferrari - Bernard Parmegiani - François Bayle - Guy Reibel & Arne Nordheim amongst the artists featured.

One of the best compilations of electronic music ever made. It's now been made available again via the Wolf Fifth collection as acquired by UbuWeb. Grab it here



Wednesday 20 February 2013

Poison Ivy - Peter Cheyney (Fontana Books 1964)

'Read. Learn. Destroy'. Not a bad motto.
New addition to the Lemmy Caution collection. Peter Cheyney site here.
I posted another here featuring the Jean-Luc Godard connection.

The pulp fiction and music connection can be made here, where I posted a Mickey Spillane book of mine along with a mix called 'Kiss Me Deadly', which has been re-upped.




Tuesday 19 February 2013

1960s Concrete Poetry


Words to be looked at.
Concrete poetry.
Poetry?
Art?

untitled, Reinhold Dohl  1965


'Homage To Dada', Henri Chopin, 1965

'Sonic Water', Dom Sylvester Houedard, 1965

'Poem For Rosemarie', Charles Cameron,  1965

'Whisper Piece', Bob Cobbing, 1969


Monday 18 February 2013

Uneasy Listening On TV


BBC TV brainiac music attack: The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Music and Howard Goodall's Story Of Music - ooh what an illicit thrill...when we could be watching Come Dine With Me, Skyfall on DVD, or even Sky Sports....

...but no, here's Howard, tinkling his keyboard in a tutorial fashion, showing us chords, diminished flats, cells and other things I've since forgotten...

...telling us all about the Story Of Music, no less - I eagerly anticipate his description of the musique concrete revolution and Stockhausen's electronic kick, assuming he'll include them. What will he say about Hip-Hop? Will he demonstrate the use of the Apache break on twin decks, or simply play a sample on that keyboard of his (does it have a 'breakbeat' setting?) - can't wait.

Meanwhile; Difficult Music. Atonality, no less. The sound the fury of Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg and Edgard Varèse upsetting the establishment by playing new things on old instruments - that is the shocking aspect. It's kind of Classical, but not as we know it. Had synthesizers been available in 1910 they may have written for them, and nobody would have cared because avant-garde electronic music isn't taken seriously. Not on TV, anyway - therefore, not anywhere - because to be on TV validates everything, from cooking to cats that can skateboard....

...skateboarding ducks became a symbolic joke on British TV back when everything was orange (or to be more precise, nicotine-coloured) and workers went on strike. Yes, that long ago. How could those who sniggered at animal antics being broadcast predict that three decades later the whole world would be addicted to animal antics via a thing called YouTube on computers (!) that weren't the size of a bungalow, but could be held in the palm of your hand?!

How could I have predicted, when starting my career as a DJ, that two decades later a Varese LP would always be in my record box (ask your dad) for one residency. The place was called Bartok, and therein lies a clue to the theme it promoted (but only if you know anything about the history of Classical music). Yes, Varèse would get a regular airing, although when they hired me perhaps they expected more Mozart. But it was a thrill to play Ionisation - call me crazy...



Why bother watching these programmes when there's so much Easy Viewing to tempt us? Wall-to-wall cooking, dining and cosy comedy beckons. I spoke to someone about this recently who suggested that many with demanding jobs (intellectually, presumably) wanted Easy TV. Oh the irony, since aren't those the very people this kind of programming is aimed at? And what is everyone else's excuse? They need a break from existence, to hit the mental snooze button. What else is High Definition TV for if not Lowbrow Culture? We have very Smart TVs for so many Stupid programmes.

'Why is the world full of so much shit?' LJ asked me not so long ago, meaning excrement of the cultural kind - and, staring out the window of the bus, I came up with the theory that the sheer volume of tripe on the telly acts as fertilizer for the forest of foolish nonsense today - music, film, whatever. The more there is the more they make and the outlets bloom like so many poisonous fungi, which people consume, and their brains die. - you see? Whereas when there were fewer channels the simpletons were more likely to come across something good and possibly think 'That's quite good, actually, despite the subtitles etc', and the world (UK, at least), would be a better place, filled with more creative energy dedicated to Art, Music, Film because people had been inspired by something they saw on TV. But was it better back then, in, say the 70s? Wasn't there as much crap as there is now? Percentage-wise...who has the figures,and who decides what it Crap? I don't know. The theory may be nonsense, but it passed the time. And anyway, Barry Norman's film programme (ask your granddad) was sure to feature many undisputed classics in the 70s. Today, there isn't even a good film programme on terrestrial TV - and if there was, it would be filled with formulaic garbage, mostly.

Radical music gets no time on TV. Not even on The Culture Show, which regards New Folk (?) and token black singers as the be-all and end-all of contemporary music. Yet it ventures across all terrain in the Arts. Is music not considered a valid art form in the UK today? Is Ekoplekz twiddling his knobs in vain? Demdike Stare? Café Kaput? Mordant Music? Perhaps I missed programmes featuring them...

...so I rejoice in the current 'glut' of programmes about music on TV. Yes. They may be historical by nature, but what The Sound and the Fury does cover makes a change from the usual BBC policy of providing TV for Mojo-readers...



Thursday 14 February 2013

Harry Bertoia's Sound Sculptures


'Sonambients are friendly aliens.' - Val Bertoia

Harry Bertoia not only patented the Diamond Chair for Knoll International in 1952 (pic below), but in the early 70s designed sound sculptures with his son, Val. They called the sound Sonambient. Where Jean Tinguely's sculptures sound like machines at work and play, Bertoia's elegant designs are reflected in the sounds resonating from them. 'Alien', deep, yet easy to listen to, these recordings are astounding, Zen-like meditations on sound reverberation and more worthwhile than a million 'ambient' albums.

Interview with Val Bertoia here.

Eleven of the LPs can be grabbed here at UbuWeb




Wednesday 13 February 2013

Exai - Autechre (Warp)




Not another Autechre album...

...no-one in modern electronic music is supposed to make more than a handful (never mind 11)...and in doing so, prove themselves to be left standing at a post they may well have erected years ago, only to watch younger technicians leave them standing...

...well, Rob Brown and Sean Booth have the audacity to persist - because they've got nothing better to do?

What's it like, though? Like Autechre, and more so - like Autechre grown up and giving the young pretenders a good kicking. Every devious detonation of bass and percussion blasts the competition out of the water. What competition? Nobody has or can (sensibly) try to sound like Autechre. Such is the studious configuration of rhythms they concoct - they've got more time signatures than Dave Brubeck.

It's bass music for brainiacs - sophisticated manoeuvres in the dark such as 'Draun Quarter', which plays skittish percussion against a leisurely keyboard line, whilst 'Fleure' features trademark scrambled electro transmissions that brilliantly breakdown in an atomic blast of boosted bass dynamics before burning out. Tension between hi and low-end dynamics drive the album; whiplash beats and deformed drones, brutal mutations evolve, as on 'irlite (get 0)'. To paraphrase Derrick May, 'cloudline' is like George Clinton and Stockhausen are stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company - a breathing space amid the intense arrangements which hardly constitutes peace, but to these ears is underpinned by the spirit of The One as rewritten for mechanized funkateers.

Here is Rubik cubism in sound which appreciative listeners can spend hours trying to lock together in their heads, only to fry their brains - but oh what a delicious mystery.

One Album of the Year, already - perhaps the Album of the Year - in February? Surely not. Yes.

Tuesday 12 February 2013

All This Nonsense Is Known As Collage - Laurence Vail


From Life magazine, 1943, the writer seems undecided as to the validity of collage, calling Vail 'a real master' of a medium he appears to dismiss. Collage is 'quietly threatening to become a fad'? Ha-ha - tell Picasso! What a fool. '43 was was too soon after the event to recognise Dada as a key artistic movement rather than 'another harmless little hoax', perhaps, although I doubt that the idiot would acknowledge that if he were alive today. 

Laurence Vail had a famous wife in Peggy Guggenheim, as well as knowing Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in Paris, where he was known as 'the king of bohemians', no less.

More on Laurence Vail here on the Guggenheim collection site.







Monday 11 February 2013

TM404 – TM404 (Kontra-Musik)


Roland equipment:
One MC-202 MicroComposer
Four TB-303 bassline synthesisers
Four drum machines (two 606s, a 707 and an 808)


'Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.'  - G.K. Chesterton

Andreas Tilliander in Roland-only mode creates fantastic mood pieces on this album. Not ambient, but fluid, subtle, sometimes even funky (in the techno sense, like Kraftwerk stuck in a lift with Bernie Worrell, but not quite that good), always trance-inducing, but not in some hippy-dippy Trance way; mesmerising is a better word, perhaps, as we bath in the warm tones that wriggle and weave throughout - hints of  Basic Channel, the understated bump and grind of Roland gear getting frisky - balmy bass lines expounding the low-end theory amid luxurious reverberations - penthouse Acid for mature listeners who would rather recline than rave...and that's a recommendation.

Sunday 10 February 2013

In Search of a Concrete Music - Pierre Schaeffer (University of California Press)


'In other words, I wasted my life.' (interview, 1987)

The inventor of hip-hop scratch sample turntablism? No.

'I lower the pickup arm as one rhythmic group starts. I raise it just as it ends, I link it with another, and so on. How powerful our imagination is!' (p12)

'Not only were we interested in Musique Concrete but also in playing organ tone clusters and flute feedback sounds that added variety to the repeated note sequences that we recorded and mixed on tape.' (Ralph Hutter, Kraftwerk, 1981)

'The world of music is probably contained within DoRéMi, yes; but I'm saying that the world of sound is much larger than that.' (interview, 1987)





'But the readership for which it is intended is not very great at the moment,' (p188)

In search of In Search of a Concrete Music I ask the young man at the information counter in Foyles bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London. One left. He tells me it's going through a second printing. Due to popular demand? A book by Pierre Schaeffer?! Did they only print a thousand? Or are more people now interested in him? More than the publishers thought, obviously...

'In doing so, he (the concrete musician) claimed to discover and not to express in his work.' (p131)


First: 'Étude aux chemins des fer' (1948)


'You can sense that engines can't like being performers.' (p11)

The birth of Hauntological sound? 


A cheap and easy reference. The desire to attach a precedence, seek a serious lineage, join pieces of the collage as if they belong together through similarity rather than contrasting representations of something. We long to unify. Schaeffer, against Music, sought only sound, but was haunted, still, by music.

Schaeffer, the caretaker of dreams in the haunted ballroom of sound?

'There is no instrument on which to play concrete music. That is the main difficulty.' (p18)

The difficulty today is that such instruments exist. The ease with which sounds can be conjured is the problem. Today's dilemma: making the right choice. The problem with sound today: sanitation. So-called Hauntological music seeks the soiled sound of the past? In nicotine-stained TV, in pre-video mythology, in decaying machinery of old industry. 

The effort then required to create distortions of the sound an object makes may now be achieved at the click of a mouse. It is that very effort, the rewind, alter pitch, manipulation, splicing of tape etc is what we love now, what we crave in this world of immediacy.




'Blessed are those who struggle' (Mark Stewart). 

'..'real' music seems like the repose of the blessed after the contortions of damnation.' (p90)

Inside the outsider - his contradictions, doubts, insecurities - voyeurs both academic and non may be surprised to learn that a human was responsible for capturing the voices of objects, albeit in mutated form, and creating compositions from them. The intellectual, the sound scientist has doubts? Human, all too human. 

'I do not know, and doubtless will not know for some time yet, if these attics are inhabitable, whether they are a temporary prison cell or will be apartments of the future.' (p115)

Over 50 years later, listeners enthralled by the sounds of Pierre Schaeffer do inhabit his 'apartments'. 

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Art Out Of Print: An archive as artistic concept - Guy Schraenen (2001)

Out Of Print is the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition of the same name. It displayed small press productions, art and ephemera from the 60s to the 90s and toured several countries from 2001 to 2002. Print run for this catalogue was 2000.

The Archive for Small Press & Communication was founded in 1974 by Guy Schraenen and Anne Marsily in Antwerp, Belgium. 


















Tuesday 5 February 2013

Zombies Under Stress

Via Mutant Sounds (no, not that one) on Facebook I found Zombies Under Stress, a one-man operation which at times has been a collective, with recordings dating back to 1984, starting with Normal Obsession...


...on cassette only, as were all the 80s releases, as far as I can tell. 

As you know, 80s 'Industrial Music' on cassette is not only extremely fashionable (or was three days ago) but some, such as Ekoplekz, have returned to the format with a passion. Nick's work still contains echoes (literally) of the golden age of lo-fi electronics (of which there's now a Second Wave) as personified by Zombies Under Stress. It's roughly cut, hardcore and contains no singing (that I've found yet), although there are, in the tradition, heavily distorted vocal elements.  

Unlike Nick Edwards, ZUS has remained off the radar as far as mainstream alternative exposure goes - to my knowledge anyhow. This is criminal, in a way, yet it enhances the pleasure of discovering artists who live so deep in the caverns of sound, like weird creatures found by adventurous zoologists that you see on TV - 'I don't know what this is! I've never seen one before!' 

Since the last post on his site was a year ago, perhaps he's gone insane with so much effort and little recognition, preferring to focus on tending the garden and baking, which may be better for his health. The good news is that all the ZUS album are available as free downloads here. Those are courtesy of ZUS, by the way.




Monday 4 February 2013

Collage: Bathing Man Nightmare

The rough and ready aesthetic at work here - note the horizontal lines, which any professional artist would never allow, but free from such restraints, I offer this, a horror story twinning nightmarish 70s décor with the Skull of Doom haunting the bathing man. It's quite obviously a comment on the paradoxical existence of domesticated man indulging in modern luxury whilst plagued by inner demons urging him to wreak havoc in the world by renouncing normality in favour of a homicidal spree having smashed his Yes albums to pieces, burnt his lovely house and bought a shotgun...


Sunday 3 February 2013

Illustration: The Devil Finds Work & Jazzoetry From Kenneth Rexroth


From Fantastic Adventures magazine, 1950. Illustration by Robert Gibson Jones.

This poet was obviously about to compose another flowery romantic ode to his lover. But the Devil's laughter and powers of persuasion prompted him to abandon that in favour of a free-form spontaneous epic about madness, bebop and the joys of benzedrine...




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