LYRELYRELYRE is the 11th solo album from Laura Cannell, the UK based Composer, Performer and Improviser. Cannell calls upon an ancient Lyre that was buried in the epic landscape of the Suffolk Coastline to sound once more. She wakes it from its 14 centurylong slumber and coaxes it’s shrouded sounds onto her new offering.
Cannell delves deep into the history of the lyre, finding a way to bring this ancient instrument back into the landscape it once lived in and into her fold of feral chamber music. The Lyre lives again alongside haunting bass recorders and double reeded battle cries of the crumhorn.
Had my eye on this, the beginning of a new series, for a while. It evidently has a touch of Simenon to it. I kept putting off picking it up, and then it showed up on sale.
I am also impressed by the cover design: so many British crime novels look exactly the same these days.
THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE is very obscure, and unsurprisingly so. Made in 1966 – and remember THE AVENGERS tv show was in full swing well before then — it doesn’t know if it wants to be modernist spoof or surreal drama, or modernist drama (there is some weirdly adult biting dialogue and surprising emergences of sex) or surreal spoof (on a fraction of THE AVENGERS’ budget). It is, in theory, the story of a British covert security department and the wars waged between it and a vengeful female criminal mastermind in a world of high science and low magic. In practise? There are moments where it plays like “what if the LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN team remade CALLAN?” This is a few years before McGoohan’s THE PRISONER, and you wonder what the reaction to CORRIDOR PEOPLE would have been if they’d dropped the broad comedy. (Which I presume was there to smooth off the weirdness and edginess.)
…profound thought has gone into this – in ‘Birdwatcher’, Kronk reports to his superiors, a dark roomful of varied establishment types (bishop, general, cricketer, etc) who stand on pedestals and rant clichés at each other. It could as easily have come from an avant garde theatre piece as a Monty Python sketch, and it’s possible that this loose committee of the country’s clueless owners are the eponymous corridor people (the title is never referred to in dialogue).
Note also that the scene he refers to becomes quite chilling. Before it turns into a Greek chorus reciting “Breathes There The Man” by Sir Walter Scott. It’s peculiar. For all its ridiculousness, an oddly haunting piece of work.
A participant in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, Leonard lived and worked at Palmer Research Station for five weeks in 2009. At this remote outpost on the Antarctic Peninsula, the composer made pristine field recordings of ice, water, wind, and wildlife. During this time she also gathered (with the proper permits) rocks, shells, and penguin bones which she later fashioned into the penguin bone idiophones and sculptural percussion instruments featured on this album. These sound sources are woven together into eight carefully-crafted compositions that evoke the dynamic environments and ecosystems of the Antarctic Peninsula.
I bought this three years ago and apparently never made a note. Endlessly interesting – microtones, washes of sonics, crepitating percussion, alien ocean sounds, I find something new in it every time I listen.
Actually picked this up Friday night. I required a palate cleanser, and Craven is a reliable entertainer. I didn’t think the previous novel in this series, FEARLESS, was his best, but it was amusing enough that I grabbed this in a sale.
Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There’s scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn’t anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre’s Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman’s masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie’s death.
ERIC SATIE THREE PIECE SUITE, Ian Penman (UK) (US+)
Why do some ideas spread like wildfire, while others resist being seen — despite their importance? A new book by Nadia Asparouhova explores the emerging phenomenon of antimemetics.
Abraxas Publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of their facsimile edition of Aleister Crowley’s TANNHAUSER, in a gorgeous A4 form. Abraxas are doing all kinds of weird and occult stuff, and their website is really worth a look if you’re into that stuff. Lovely looking objects.
