,,,,,,,,,,have you heard the news from Neptune? the Arkestra asking me this morning at Work as I climbed three floors to mine because two of the lifts are broken so the queue was massive me starting to pant but not wanting to display signs of exhaustion in front of those also climbing behind me - I should have been listening to some energising Techno-thump like people in gyms do but sod that & anyway,
what's that got to do with Buried Treasure's release of Alan Sutcliffe material? NOTHING!
other than......
Sutcliffe's synthitones could well be broadcasts from Neptunians - like - first off, LIKENESS (ACM conf. California) is very B-movie sci-fi cold war soundtrack & well, so is most of it & you may think 'Oh not another retro-sounding electronic album' but it was recorded in 1972-3, not quite so retro as all the planets Americans were forbidden from visiting but did anyway in the name of killing communists, I mean aliens.
this compilation is brief but brilliant
aside from raw pure synth experiments there's the 14minute SLIDESHOW of Cage/Schaeffer kaleidoscopic concrete components which really is (and I mean this) one of the best examples of the tradition you will hear.
top marks to Buried Treasure!
After Skullscapes, coincidentally (or subconsciously not) comes this, a Pyramid of Skulls by Carlos Casa. It may be inspired by the the people of Pamir in Tajikistan but the second track, Triune God , feels very much like a trip through the Interzone with Bryon Gysin and William Burroughs as your guides. This blurs boundaries between time and place in a similar way to Burroughs' use of cut-ups as portals to both the past, present and future. Here, 'ancient' music becomes lost in/transformed by modern interference. Elsewhere, the traditional is pretty much left to stand on it's own merits with minimal alteration, or at least, alteration that is so subtle as to be barely discernible. More here.
Sounding as if he's out of his skull on something, a selection of Yuri Morozov's 70s output is represented on this Buried Treasure compilation, Strange Angels. Trapped behind the Iron Curtain as he was, like many others in the same situation confinement must have fostered freedom of imagination to compensate and it's here in abundance in the form of electronics, tape manipulation, samples and song. It's a phantasmagorical trip. He recorded over 46 albums in various styles, cassettes passed around in sonic samizdat fashion to prove that communism could not crush the creative spirit. Inexplicable (pt4) sounds like a take from Miles Davis' Jack Johnson sessions but Morozov was not one for genre limitations and the following Violet Vibrations unleashes dancing electrons which are both joyous and insane. He sounds positively possessed on some vocal cuts whilst elsewhere, such as on Sadly All, almost settles into 'normal' Jazz Fusion style. This kaleidoscope of crazed invention is hugely entertaining.
Monday - burn Iannis Xenakis' Persepolis to disc and play...to try out the new blanks, which work, thankfully - I didn't know because I dont know much about technical stuff so I gambled on a cheap stack of 100. His noise competes with that made by the builders next door - they're big Polish men who I can't tell to fuck off, or even be quieter because they're just doing their job, the sound of which Xenakis is doing his best to counteract although, weirdly, not by drowning out (haven't got it on loud) but by imitating the buzz of their saws, consequently nullifying them, like a form of white noise - well it is noise made by a white person...
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The Big Edit of Shadows (working title), a cut-up 'novel' comprising of texts collected over several years, gets under way...here we see the author reading the first few pages and no, there hasn't been a power cut, he is outside at night...
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Swap Xenakis for the Malcolm Pointon comp, Electromuse, on Public Information - obvious similarities between the first track and Xenakis, although Pointon probably never stretched a creation to an hour in length. But it is a fine kind of noise and we have top UK vintage electronics archaeologist Ian Helliwell to thank along with Public Information. Pointon began his tape music voyage of discovery in 1969 having been inspired in part by Stockhausen. He had worked for the BBC, doing what, I don't know, but I wonder if it's coincidental that the same organisation should have spawned it's own school of tape music pioneers earlier in the 60s. Whatever, this is a great collection, not basement tape excavation for the sake of obscurity. Then Wakes The Ice is as good a piece of tape trickery as I've heard, complete with chopped vocals that William Burroughs would have been proud of, play it all back...backwards too. As a bonus, in keeping with what is almost a tradition in these kinds of collections, we hear Malcolm introducing Symbiosis and describing the kit in a typically English 'BBC voice'. First class release.
Just as I had complained about the lack of good new music along come '...953 fragments, 722 situations, 952 interruptions & countless Sources, intensions & beings' courtesy of Berlin's Column One in the form of their new album, Boiling Pool. But it's not music! It takes something 'non-musical' to supply the remedy to all the average music around - naturally. If you know Column One you'll know they're capable of creating all manner of soundscapes from lengthy 'ambient' minimalist works to music with beats and a lot else in-between.
This is a kind of masterpiece. I've had it on repeat all afternoon whilst working on various pieces of art. That way, fragments become familiar and such is the nature of the album that, unlike music, it never gets boring. Even I can only listen to a Charlie Parker album so many times in a row - none, in fact, because I never do that. Who would have an album on repeat?
Boiling Pool begs to be repeated. Each snippet is brief, aside from occasional things such as a woman la-di-da-ing or a field recording and accordion, the contrast with sound-effects-type snatches makes it work all the better. I'm reminded of John Zorn's card game experiments, but actual samples increase the effect dramatically. Perhaps this is ideal non-music for these times of short attention span restless clicking. If that bothers those who wish for lengthier engagement with supposedly deep, expansive 'ambient' music, they'd best stay well away from Boiling Pool. For these ears, though, it's perfect listening for right now and an antidote to contemporary long form indulgence containing very little.
Out now // 12" vinyl // limited edition of 245 numbered copies. Get it here.
what kind of name is that? it doesn't promise much
.........................................................it could promise nothing.......................................or everything.........I should ask sometime, not that I know Alan Gubby, the man behind both this EP and the label, Buried Treasure.....................still.........................I'm curious............up to a point.......
the point here being that until now you'd probably never heard of Revbjelde either so I'm here in my capacity as writer about great music (have you noticed? I never post a bad review....mostly because life's too short & the list of mediocre or bad recordings I hear too long............&............I would dread meeting the creators of something I publicly dismissed at those cocaine-fuelled electronic music biz nights I'm always attending.............................................)
hold on, that doesn't happen...............
for a second I was a famous critic, like Lester Bangs & it was the 1970s & I was always attending music biz nights populated by famous musicians who would confront me angrily having read my review in Creem.........
Buccaboo starts brilliantly (bowed cello, effects, shimmering vocal) with Carry My Woes & doesn't get any worse - you can't tell what's being said but it doesn't matter because the atmosphere/mood is enough...
...then there's the title track which continues the mysterious tone with strummed guitar then slide guitar as if Elmore James was guesting & as if the player wanted, for the hell of it, to throw in a Baby Please Don't Go-type riff...........interesting.............but more interesting & what takes it up a level is the acoustic bass line, trumpet & brush work...bloody great!
Never Green is a brilliant moody interlude made all the more so by a hammered dulcimer (I think that's what it is)..................................................the blues kind of reappear on If This Is in the form of a harmonica played in a not-especially bluesy style, but then this EP is not especially any genre & several at once.....but wait, there's more.......here's Dolly Dolly! always a bonus. every album should feature David Yates & would if I were king - so here he is speaking of promises broken on stones & 'lies and untruths uttered in these walls' in his own inimitable style................................when I say things take a more Folky turn on the final track, Port Of Arundel, don't be put off; it's Folk through an echo chamber, historical Radiophonica, if you like & I don't like most of what passes for modern Folk..........but I like this EP very much.........................
David Yates gets busy dicing 'n' splicing an old cassette tape and as you'd expect if you know his work as Dolly Dolly it's anything but an attempt to reconfigure Jazz as a cool cut-up. Instead, his trademark behind-the-curtains urban strangeness permeates the whole thing...avant-gardening, pastoral perversion, loops to send you loopy, sweating veg, cookery tips...all collaged as a crafty, loving homage to English pop culture. Pure lunacy and I love it.
What? He Did? When? Yesterday? He chopped up a photo of a record! What does it look like? I see...
Vinyl, Track 1
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Listening to Lee Perry's Apeman Skank one minute, then Josef Anton Riedl's Komposition No.3 and thinking 'That's a fine combination, the kind I'd like to play at my fantasy music night populated by select punters who could only gain entry by answering three simple questions: What kind of pie did Mingus make a track about? Who directed The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg? And who wrote Endgame?' So I played great music to myself, that's nothing new. I've emptied dance floors...and filled them...such is the life of a DJ...
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Meanwhile, in Nice last year, I dropped acid and stared at a Rauschenberg for three hours...here's what it looked like...
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What am I doing? Do I know where I'm going? Who does? I continue regardless through life, this 'excursion on a wobbly rail', time snipping seconds from however much I have...
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain. - Frank Herbert
"I've only just" are reassuring words, aren't they?...reminders that you're not the only one in the world who isn't absolutely on top of all that's fresh, interesting and, dare I say, hip (I can't because it's been hijacked by observers of, if not actual wearers of, Beards In Britain (surely a band name soon)) - whereas hip-ster used to mean...oh, never mind, ask Harry...
I doubt that Felix Kubin cares much about being hip; a purveyor of perverse Pop and twisted Techno, he's too wayward for that. I've only just discovered how great he is thanks to Gagarin Records' release of Chromdioxidgedächtnis. You know how one thing leads to another and another and another and before you know it in the click/connect world you've traversed several tangential zones or, in this case, albums. The good thing about "I've only just" is the joy of discovery in the rear-view mirror of time/recordings.
"Hello? Is it me you're looking for?" Kubin calls to me through the various portals...brilliantly flipping Lionel Ritchie's saccharine schmaltz Pop classic (!) into existential (?) narcissistic self-analysis...
...he's looking at the man in the mirror...perhaps all this searching we do is about looking for ourselves, in the end...things that define us...
Chromdioxidgedächtnis revels in/exploits/honours the tape cassette better than most things I've heard since the ol' gang of Cage, Schaeffer et al first exploited it's possibilities. The chromium dioxide memory ain't what it used to be for some of us....but we still might have a few examples stashed away....memories of the medium baring ancient messages, mixes or, in my case, a few recordings of my 'live' poetry readings. Yes, it's fashionable again (what isn't?) - the cassette, that is, not poetry readings. On sharing blogs and Bandcamp pages you'll find it's flickering, fragile flame still burning. I wonder how many new buyers of cassettes have suffered the same problem us originals did when the tape tried to eat itself...and we had to try to rewind (insert pencil) in order to salvage the sound.
Kubin salvages/samples all manner of sounds, from voicemail messages to Soul (When A Man Loves A Woman trapped in dioxide time) - collaged sounds from the archive which William Burroughs would have approved of, I'm sure ("Is this machine recording?"). The fact that this idea's nothing new doesn't detract from the sound choices Kubin makes as old rhythm machines surface, somnambulist ambient melancholia drifts and the music of tape mechanics constantly reminds us of the apparatus involved. Loops, static...all that noise that memories make, Kubin re/creates a compelling sound world, a reflection of fractured modernist life. It was once the exciting, newness of it all that inspired composers. If we now listen through the funnel of nostalgia the experience is still a fascinating one when the sounds are arranged so skilfully.
Remember when computers were sexy, new, futuristic things of wonderment and mystery? Perhaps you're not that old.
The Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition ran at the ICA, Nash House, London, from August 2nd to October 20th in 1968.
Here's a cartoon from the programme...
An album was compiled to go with the exhibition. It's not all computer-generated music (there's classical modernism) but it contains some great tracks.
There's a wonderful page dedicated to the show here. It features more photos and videos as well as a download for the album and PDF of the programme. One thing I can tell you that isn't mentioned there is that it cost £59,000 to put on and lost £24,157. That's not necessarily a fascinating fact.
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.
Great book. Contains a discography, reviews of selected recordings and sections on the main composers as well as the photos below.
Xenakis (right) and Le Corbusier when they created the now legendary Philips pavilion at the Brussels World Fair.
Otto Luening
Ussachevsky and Shostakovitch, the latter thinking 'What a bloody racket' whilst pretending to understand the new music.
Milton Babbitt
Ussachevsky twiddling knobs whilst thinking 'Is Dmitri hip, or was he just pretending?'
Nick Edwards (holding royalty cheque from Unfidelity), Bill Kouligas, Russell Haswell, Luke Younger, Laurel Halo, Yves De Mey, Paul Snowdon, Sean Canty, Miles Whittaker, Mika Vainio and others.
John Cage and Stockhausen in a plane! Wh-e-e-e-e-e! 'Do you know where you're going, John?' 'No, I'm leaving it to chance!'
Jean Claude Rissett demonstrating his synthesised trumpet music which 20 listeners (out of how many, it doesn't say) could not distinguish from a real trumpet. Miles Davis did not feel threatened.
Fascinating diagram of how computer music is generated, eh?
Truly outstanding film from the golden age of tape, a time when experimenting with music was not out of bounds. I've no idea how they teach music in schools today or if they even bother. In theory, to exploit this generation's obsession with technology, now should be a great time for exploring computer-based sound. I suspect, however, that it would be based on trying to make a hip-hop rhythm rather than looking to Stockhausen for inspiration. That would be a great shame. I'm not advocating a rigorous study of composition but the potential for play inherent in technology is obvious, as this film proves. Watch it and marvel...
