Thursday 29 May 2014

New Facts About Marijuana (Ambassador College Press, 1970)


A booklet I found today. Never touch the stuff myself, although I once got 'high' on it. The thing is, I was already five floors up on a balcony to start with. I hated the feeling of being even higher. I've never felt the need for it to 'enhance' a musical experience, but was once told by an idiot that 'You have to be on drugs to appreciate that' in relation to Dub. Reefer songs go way back, as you know. Here's one from 1941...










Wednesday 28 May 2014

Repeat Pattern Abstraction/Mutation


I've been creating patterns made from details of images. These are some of the results. I found myself transfixed by the resulting multiplication and mutation, to the point where I had difficulty stopping. The lure of the endless pattern was hard to resist. Whilst collating some of them the music of Philip Glass came to mind, quite naturally, you might say. Whilst, despite the common misconception, there is variation in much of Glass's music, there is none in mine. ideally, I would like them to be as tall as tower blocks. Or, Christo-fashion, to wrap tower blocks in them.









Tuesday 27 May 2014

Arabie '79 - Arabie '79 (Booma Collective)


'When I first began this project twenty eight months ago, I had no idea the end result would look the way it does today. I had obviously a goal in mind, goal which, I am proud to say, I have completely forgotten as the enterprise gained in importance...Most of the time, I didn't even know what was going on.' - Arabie '79

To not know what's going on or where your creative journey will take you is a noble condition. It allows for anything to happen. Most artists don't know where they're going when they start, I suppose, unless they've studiously mapped out a project or they're painting an object/subject. 

Much is made of the potential for improvisation, although the very nature of electronic music seems to suggest planning of some kind (which button to push?). I don't know, I've never tried but, like you, I've heard too many tracks that sound as if they've been pre-programmed to eradicate any signs of imaginative human input. Genre clichés, in other words. There's something to be said for mechanised repetition, of course, if the point is to make purely mechanical, minimalist sound. I don't know what the point is, but if the creator can justifiably be called an 'artist' and has read a few clever books it will be a conceptual statement rather than the latest EDM smash hit. I reckon.

I didn't know where I was going with this except to say I knew I would, at some point, praise it to the hilt. But I'm not doing that just yet. Right now I'm listening again to Side 2. I've listened to it all several times and each hearing reveals something new. You sense the 'journey' aspect, get carried along and experience a warping of time and space. Yes, many electronic music artists might claim/wish to have the same effect, but Arabie '79 really does.

I'm not one for long tracks usually, unless, like these, they evolve, mutate, mix tones and textures etc. Most become a bore. Most end long after they should have done. I guess that's the temptation with so much choice at your fingertips...to go on and on through a potentially endless sonic territory. Unlike trad musicians, the electronic artist is limited by her imagination. From even the most basic kit a million mutations are possible. But it's the shaping, editing, defining and restricting of that territory that makes a piece special, or not.

Rewind: crackle...sustained repetition of a phrase that shifts...fades, sounds panning from speaker to speaker...a beat, bass line...the feeling of early ambient-dub-techno, perhaps...are those crashing waves? Wind effect...it takes a darker turn, reminiscent of Horror sound effects records, just as it began...rewind to Side 1...sounds like the Master Musicians of Jajouka lost in space...midway a break comes in that reminds me of Lemon D in a Jazzy mode...towards the end, Fender-like keyboards...going Lonnie Liston Smith meets Miles Davis in an electronic interference way...applause at the end...rightly so. 

Did I forget to praise it? This is a great piece of work...a trip that's worth your time. Top marks to Booma Collective and Arabie '79.

Sunday 25 May 2014

Sun Ra at 100 / Fondation Maeght

Sun Ra was born 100 years ago last Thursday (May 22nd) but I wasn't home to celebrate by posting then so here's a visual tribute I made...


...I was in France on the Côte d'Azur where, coincidentally, Sun Ra also spent some time playing a gig at Fondation Maeght, a museum of Modern Art near Saint-Paul de Vence. Ra was there in 1970...


...whilst my appearance was not so monumental as to be recorded sonically (anyway, that would mainly consist of 'Wow!', 'Amazing!', 'Oh, God!' etc) there is photographic evidence...


Wandering the galleries I wondered which space was the place where the concert happened but didn't see a likely room. The museum blew my mind and the thought of seeing Sun Ra there sent me into a trance whilst standing next to a Giacometti sculpture...


I'll post more pics of that amazing place soon. Meanwhile, I belatedly raise a glass to Sun Ra, the man who walked through the door of the cosmos 100 years ago and reported what he saw for the eternal pleasure of us mere mortals...


Friday 16 May 2014

Record Round-Up: Thomas Ankersmit / Ben Vida / Leyland Kirby / M.E.S.H




 '...we are finding ways to bring this music to new audiences rather than staying comfortable in our niche. Avant Garde music should be bold like that.' - Bill Kouligas, PAN label

Go ahead, Bill, you carry on. But is avant garde just another word for bullshit as John Lennon suggested? Bullshit is in the ear/eye of the beholder, of course. Yes, avant garde music is bullshit to most people - no tunes! No beat! But since when have Mr & Mrs People's opinion counted? Except for in general elections. And look where that gets us.

Thomas Ankersmit's Figueroa Terrace (Touch) is enough to scare the horses, but luckily for them he doesn't perform it in the street. A 36-minute piece recorded at the CalArts electronic music studios, it shifts from dense clusters of sound to extended high frequency passages, keeping your ears in suspense as the seemingly simple sound actually moves around. It's all done on a Serge analogue modular synthesizer, or to be specific, the 'Black Serge' system, a name which endears me to the machine even more. You could call it a 'black' album if disturbed by Ankersmit's determination to elicit extreme sonic subtleties from technology. But there is a satisfying wholeness to the piece, topped and tailed as the minimalism is by maxim noise from the Serge.





More modular business on Slipping Control by Ben Vida (Shelter Press), where words are snipped into rhythmic segments interspersed with purely musical pieces by Vida. Sound 'poetry', if I can call it that, may not sound appealing, unless you're an avid collector of it, in which case, I salute you. But it works very well alongside Vida's playful, imaginative synth manipulation. It's as if he's commanding the machine to echo the vocal rhythms and sometimes it stubbornly refuses. His pieces mirror the vocals, being frequently skittish, but he makes the kind of joyous, bubbly sounds that remind me of Pop Moog albums, except they're better because you don't get a Beatles hit rendered electronic or any such crap. They could also be pieces to accompany radical dance theatre of the 50s, a la Alwin Nikolais. At their best, they're that good. 




We drink to forget the coming storm by Leyland Kirby (Bandcamp) is a 40-track exercise in restraint. Contradictory, yes? Perhaps even ironic in it's gargantuan nature, as if trying to elbow it's way into the packed musical arena through sheer size, only to sit there like a strange, almost silent child in class. It settles over us like a huge white cloud, despite being melancholy, it is light, painfully so, offering tranquillity, or bliss beyond the pain. We drink to forget, yes, and try to reach another place. Kirby's album takes us there. This is not 'furniture music' as described by Erik Satie, although it's reminiscent of his desired ideal to create background music. Yet this sonic furniture inhabits an always empty room. It's as if the party is over and everyone's left. That or nobody turned up. In its way, it's as challenging as Ankersmit's album. The simple use of synth and choral vocals, always accompanied by the plainest of piano, dares you to keep listening.


Lastly, returning to PAN, the latest is an EP by M.E.S.H called Scythians. The title track starts like a Monolake tune; no bad thing, but then percussion breaks, cracking open the ground beneath your feet, causing you to drop into a chasm in time and space stretched by scratching and scored with strings, all cut to a staggered rhythm. For a few seconds, Photek sprang to mind. But M.E.S.H is his own man, by way a many influences (aren't all music-makers?). Hints of classic Detroit, but always with a difference, the way Captivated, an otherwise indistinctive ambient piece, breaks down towards the end gives lends it more weight. The closer, Glassel Finisher, has a great texture to it. Without venturing in avant garde territory or towing the common club track line, these tracks find a place between that's gratifying and shouldn't scare the horses...too much.

Thursday 15 May 2014

Powell - Club Music (Diagonal)



“I find it almost impossible to articulate what kind of music I make, and I hate it when people ask me in person because I can’t explain it and end up using vomit-inducing terms like ‘experimental techno shit’ to shut them up. I honestly can’t describe it with any kind of elegance at all. To me, it’s just music I like.

”

Luckily, I read this quote, otherwise I might have used that vomit-inducing term, though I doubt it, because, well, is this 'experimental techno'? Lazily, you might say 'yes'. I'm not above being lazy. It's Techno-affiliated and it's experimental. Powell wouldn't deny the Techno influence; it's inescapable what with the pounding beats. But, you know, a lot of young men who grew up absorbing club music since the 90s are trying to move things on, or at least impose themselves (and all their home listening) on the music they make now. Sometimes they can't make what they've heard into something other than a new old sound. But sometimes...

Powell's music packs a wallop. No big deal. It's the type of wallop he creates that marks him out from the pack. As you can hear below, So We Went Electric comes on like a New York big beat (Suicidal!) body-shocking and block-rocking beat monster from the ruins of both electro-punk and Industrial noise. No U-Turn acknowledges the D&B label (of whom Powell is a fan) without sounding anything like it, except in the heaviness. A clipped metal guitar (?) riff, the upfront drum sound he loves and a total understanding of how to lock a rhythm down whilst letting other elements whiz overhead make this work. Maniac, featuring Russell Haswell, reworks the groove with added guitar licks and a 'One-two-three-four!' thrown in, as if a Punk band recording next door briefly leaked through the studio walls. When the vocal sample came in it started to remind me of Keith LeBlanc's Malcolm X: No Sell Out and that's no bad thing.

Wednesday 14 May 2014

Messing Around: Sd Laika - That’s Harakiri / Collage / Poetry


Messing around with the idea of an album review......




Artists Can Be Copied

Unfinished poem

Earth control
Birth canal
Baby boom
C.....

I haven't written poetry for years. I had a spell in the 80s whilst attending a writing workshop (!). I read at various events. For one memorable gig a saxophonist and drummer accompanied me, making a Free racket. The best thing about it was that they probably drowned me out. It's all on tape and if you don't follow this blog slavishly I'll turn them into MP3 files, find your email address and send them to you. 

Tuesday 13 May 2014

Collage: Let's Abolish Stupid Limits!




An Eastmancoulour Dream: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg



Even the properly male, iron-clad heart of this thoroughly macho writer, impervious as it is to emotional vulnerability and soppy love stories, cannot resist the seductive powers of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Perhaps real men watch Jacques Demy films after all.

Cannes Film Festival starts on Wednesday and 50 years ago this film won the top prize, the Palme d'Or. Those were the days...true glamour and top quality films! I say that with some reservation, not wanting to sound like a fuddy-duddy member of the nostalgista, trapped in time to the extent that nothing after 1970 was any good. You know the kind, wallowing in images of designated golden ages in music, literature and film. The chosen ages depend on that of the nostalgist involved. The 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s...perhaps even the 70s. 

The younger a person is the harder it must become to dwell on the decades that have accumulated - a whole century's-worth! It's easier to just pick the time when you were a teenager, although it's not uncommon for strange young folk to become obsessed with decades from before their birth, most commonly the 50s and 60s. They may possess iPhones and use Twitter, but yearn for and idolise times when common people didn't even have telephones. Well, as Carson McCullers said, 'We are homesick most for the places we have never known.' It's that very fact that magnifies the feeling. The grass is always greener on the other side of time. 

The colours in Demy's masterpiece are more radiant than any today. We view a world that is unreal, super real, even by Hollywood standards, yet convince ourselves that it existed, that the 60s were one long Technicolor (or to be precise in this case, Eastman colour) dream. No-one coloured the dream like Demy in the 60s, not even Godard at his Pop Artful best. See another Demy classic, The Young Girls of Rochefort, for further evidence. Danielle Licari sang Catherine Deneuve's part, perfectly pitching it as believable simplicity, yet with great elegance. Michel Legrand wrote the score. The main theme is I Will Wait For You. Like Geneviève Emery in the film, we will wait forever to see anything that comes close to matching this amazing film.








Monday 12 May 2014

Room For Squares: Josef Albers & Revolutionary Russian Art


Dear web log,
                     What have I been doing?  Well, I went to the St Petersburg Gallery on Saturday, by chance, since we were really on our way to the Josef Albers exhibition up the road, the famous London road being Cork Street, which is full of galleries and should therefore be bombed as soon as I am king because Art is dead and useless, isn't it? Smartly bombed, that is, leaving the Albers and Russian Revolution In Art exhibitions intact because both are brilliant. 

Here are Alber's Bass Clefs. I think that's what they are, only LJ's got the notebook.


Albers created a series called Homage To The Square, as you probably know. I couldn't help thinking of Hank Mobley's album, No Room For Squares, whilst walking around...


I don't think Josef had the same squares in mind whilst painting the series, but he may as well have done because, let's face it, squares are going to dig his squares.

Onward, comrades, to the glorious revolutionary people's republic of constructivist Art!


This exhibition was a knock out, featuring many artists that I'd not heard of, none of whom I remember and they're all in LJ's notebook. Sorry, that's not very helpful, but then, this is a web log entry, not an online magazine, so what do you expect? Like Number Two in The Prisoner, you want information, perhaps. And as Number Six replied, you won't get it, not about the artists, anyway. Go to the gallery site. Go to the exhibition if you live in, or intend to visit, London. It's on until September. 

The Soviet revolutionary communist social experiment is over, but I sense many view communism with a kind of fondness faced with the debacle that is capitalism today. The manifesto and other related books pop up on my friends' Facebook pages now and again. No doubt they're looking for wisdom that will clarify why capitalism 'isn't working'. perhaps they're right to do so. I haven't read political theory since I was an anarchist for three months in 1986. 

That's Lenin atop the sculpture, by the way. I'm currently reading Andrei Codrescu's The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, coincidentally. So far so great and I highly recommend it. This quote from Tzara sums up why I continue with this blog, I suppose: 
                              'If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can.'



TTFN



Sunday 11 May 2014

Brood Ma - Populous


As one long piece divided into titled sections, James B. Stringer's Populous plays like a future apocalypse of shattered metropolitan cityscapes where shards of sound shower down whilst rampant monolithic mechanical beasts trample us all under foot. It's an evil, brilliant, craftily cut album, packed with powerful slabs of sound that scrape your brain and churn your bowels with bass. IBEAM is a stand-out track with what sounds like an electric bass line driving the assortment of bruising components. FORTRAN fused with RUBBLE BODY is a noteworthy passage, but as one entity it completely carries you away on a heavy, thrilling trip to a hellish tomorrow. 

Available here as a free download.

Friday 9 May 2014

Catherine Deneuve 1969


A hint of space-age jewellery configuration suggestion atomic diamond head wear will be de rigueur in The Future.


Thursday 8 May 2014

John Cage Early Electronic & Tape Music - Langham Research Centre (Sub Rosa) / Sound Houses - Walls/Oram (Ecstatic)


Two legends from The Tape Head Hall of Fame. What do you mean you've never heard of it? It's a wonderful place, complete with waxwork models of John Cage, Daphne Oram, Pierre Schaeffer etc, t-shirts, badges, loads of old reels and a man in the ticket booth who claimed to have been the cleaner at the Columbia-Princeton studio. He had some tales to tell about what Milton Babbitt got up to under a mixing desk with one of the secretaries but I'm sworn to secrecy.


Legends, yes, but far from untouchable, or rather, unremixable, as these two albums prove. On John Cage Early Electronic & Tape Music Langham Research Centre set about the task with laudable rigour, going as far as to source and restore moving iron phonograph pickups. You know what they are, surely. They could have called the album Zen And The Art of Improved Playback Fidelity, perhaps. Perhaps not. It's all splendid, especially the Old/New World symphonic splicing on Imaginary Landscape No.5 and an extended Fontana Mix With Aria. Although a staple of many avant-turntablists since Cage and Schaeffer, the sound of operatics and Classical music being scorched by a stylus and screwed up on tape is still a joy when done as well as this. Cartridge Music brilliantly portrays the nightmares had by a stylus being dragged across the run-out grooves of a Miley Cyrus record when its previous owner was a Charles Mingus fan.





Remember Us3? (How could you forget?). They were allowed to plunder the Blue Note label's vaults in order to sample anything that would make them sound good. Yes, it was that easy. For this album, Walls were given access to Daphne Oram's library. Imagine that? I'd never reappear, let alone record anything. Less puritanical in approach than Langham Research Centre, but no less enjoyable, Sound Houses reboots the sound of Daphne's oast house for the, er, modern listener. But as you know, Oram was modern all along, predicting as she did every electronic/tape genre from Ambient to Hauntology (RIP) and some would say Techno, but that's stretching it. What I mean is she already created templates for the Sound of Now, so Walls had no problem making it even more Now. They do a great job. Some Shriller And Some Deeper proves that from the essence of Daphne (that should be a perfume) it's possible to mix up something modern, dark and meaty. A Very Large Metal Box comes with a beat, just for The Kids, but it's still good. Beats do creep in elsewhere, but thankfully without selling the project out totally. Well, if that's what it takes to gain some folk entrance to the house of Daphne Oram, fine.



Wednesday 7 May 2014

Bernard Parmegiani - L'Ecran transparent/The Transparent Screen (1973)




'This is why the electronic human lives faster and faster....Every morning he has information, information, information...And this crazy environment full of images and sounds builds a screen around him. And only those who know how to remain deaf or blind will be able to escape the screen...'

As you can tell by the quote above Bernard Parmegiani's film predicts our current screen-dominated environment. He wasn't the first to suggest the future domination of electronic audio-visual content over our willingly subservient modern brains, of course. But he was Bernard Parmegiani and it's his vision, his music, which makes it brilliant.





Tuesday 6 May 2014

The Journey, Daniel Menche, Age Concern

I don't get it
What is it?
I don't get it
What is it?
I don't get it

The Journey



************************************


Music




************************************


Age


She said 'I don't believe it!' when I told her I'd seen The Clash. 'You look so fresh-faced.'
It must have been the light outside in the alley that passed as the 'Outside Area' of the bar where we were using cigarettes to add years to our faces and subtract them from our lives. I haven't looked fresh-faced since I was sixteen. She was drunk. Women do wear beer goggles after all.

Six days later I told a young man I'd seen the Funkadelic/Parliament show in 1978 so he asked me if I'd seen Hendrix, thus adding another ten years to my age. It could have been worse. He might have asked if I'd seen Buddy Holly. Things have a way of balancing out...


Saturday 3 May 2014

I Am Awesome, Get Back, In Every Dream Home & Vegetables



I'M JUST AWESOME I AM!!!

Selfie, May 3 2014

It was cold and the sun shone and I felt like an actor...and I thought of myself before and I wanted to get back there...

Before what? Before my brain had been flooded with a trillion songs, fragments of which suddenly play, triggered by nothing. That would be pre song consciousness, very early, perhaps when I was...five? 'How much is that doggy in the window?' You see?

Before my brain got fried by all the images on the internet. I want to wipe the slate clean! I love the internet. How did we survive before it? What did we do? Stay in bed longer...watch more TV...what? Were we living before the internet? I used to read newspapers in one job when there was nothing to do. In another the work was too physical, too continuous to have time to fill. There were always more bricks coming along the conveyor belt and I had to stack them properly. I'd throw half onto a pile, despite having spent days training in my own room with a private conveyor belt. Hey, Pink Floyd, don't talk to me about just another bloody brick in the wall...


Bashing my head against a brick wall... is that what I've been doing all these years? It's not been a waste of time, surely. What else would I have done? Got a career? You know, one of those jobs that take up a lot of time and tire you out but earn good money so you can have a 'nice' house, car etc. Here's a nice house...


That's my idea of 'nice', anyway. More than nice...amazing. What kind of job would I have to do to live there? Brain surgeon? Architect? Pop star? I'd make the most saccharine, brainless, catchy Pop in the world to live in a place like that, I would. You might hate me but I wouldn't care. I'd stand in that top room of an evening, sipping expensive wine, thinking...what? Perhaps I'd think about all the money I had, all the fans, the flash vintage cars...and wonder why I still wasn't happy...why I cheated on my wife...how much longer I could carry on touring...and why those fans at the gate don't fuck off and leave me alone...


I haven't mention a courgette for a long time. I really need to because when I did people landed here looking for something to do with courgettes but finding John Cage smiling at them, along with a courgette, which isn't smiling as far as I know, but how can you tell? It's one of my greatest achievements, foisting a 20th century cultural icon (cult) onto people who only want a recipe including courgettes (I presume that's what they were after). It's quite possible to be a fan of both the courgette and John Cage, isn't it? Not that courgettes engender adoration, really. They're quite bland. Like most music. The music world's full of courgettes...not enough chilli peppers, tomatoes or spinach. Here are some people playing vegetables...


Friday 2 May 2014

The Scent of Sun Ra


What every sophisticated space cadet will be wearing for a night on the town...you know you want it...
available here...



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