I haven’t listened to Jarre in years, and tripped over this on Arte. Balm for the electronic European soul.
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tv
ORGAN MUSICS:
- GLEANN CIUIN, Claire M Singer
- NIGHT MUSIC: Primal Image / Beauty
- SHE CAME THROUGH THE WINDOW TO STAND BY THE DOOR, Natalia Beylis and Eimear Reidy
- THE LIMITED CIRCLE IS PURE, øjeRum
- WE LONG TO BE HAUNTED, Laura Cannell
- UNLOCKING RITUALS, Laura Cannell
- INNOCENT PASSAGE IN THE TERRITORIAL SEA, Olivia Block
- ROTHKO HORIZONS, Cut A Lonely Figure
- Library: Claire M Singer
- REALM OF PERFUME AND LIGHTS, Anna Peaker
- ALL LIFE LONG, Kali Malone
That opening piece is immense. I listened to it with earbuds last night and it just sounded huge.
Italy’s Daniela Pes takes the Europavox festival by storm with her unique blend of Sardinian folklore, electro and musical experimentation. A modern-day siren.Comments closed
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.
THE CORRIDOR PEOPLE (UK) (US+) – REGION 2 ONLY
Been revisiting HANNIBAL, that wonderful proof that real television can be made in the US broadcast ecosystem, and enjoying one of the finest moments in a generally fine series:
I have just watched the most peculiar tv show from 1974. It’s like NAME THAT TUNE, but for classical music. Also a sequence where the panellists have to guess the piece of classical music from one of its bad reviews, and one where a classical pianist had to guess the pianists in three different recorded pieces. I guess I was too young to remember this show with any clarity – the name itself rang a bell, but nothing else. It was on in the days of three tv channels, so this was basically mainstream tv culture. Probably a BBC2 show?
It makes 1974 feel like a very cold, lonely and poor place, somehow. And yet. Imagine that even making it to television today. Such a weird half hour.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m0023hc2/face-the-music
Comments closedFound this lurking in pending posts while trying to get the iPad’s keyboard case to connect [it is dead]. I think it is set to their rendition of “Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her” but I guess I’ll find out in the morning
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Eight episodes on Netflix. A Greek myth remix – the lazy comparison is going to be with SUCCESSION, as an ageing and paranoid Zeus (Jeff Goldblum working within established Jeff Goldblumisms only to poke holes in that bubble here and there) starts to lose his grip. Marvellous cast. It has that Game Of Thrones-ish pleasure of seeing British actors you thought had disappeared. Joe McGann! Cathy Tyson as the leader of the girl-biker Furies!
It starts with great speed, attack and style. If you watch it and wonder why it seems to slow and meander, the bad news is that the final episode sets up a second season. Which for me was a shame, because the early section led me to believe this was going to be a fast and furious single-season statement. But, when you’ve got a cast this good, you want to keep playing with them, I guess.
That said, it’s funny, sometimes viscerally fucking horrifying, and it does a great job of not letting you know what’s going to happen next whether you know the myths or not. Really well written and planned.
The production design is excellent. There is the sense of working within a certain budget for the good of the story – the things unseen, the sets re-used, the application of limits for storytelling cohesion. This is a Netflix show, but honestly it seems well within the BBC’s means. Hell, even Jeff Goldblum has done BBC plays for television before.
I don’t especially keep up? But it’s the best original series I’ve seen on Netflix in ages.
One Comment“Space 1999’s first season was part financed by Rai Television. 3 episodes were edited together into a movie and screened in Italy. Barry Gray’s theme was dropped and replaced by this theme by Ennio Morricone of “A Fistful of Dollars” etc. fame.”
One hundred years after his birth, a fascinating portrait of the composer, engineer and architect Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), a leader of the avant-garde and a pioneer of sound and light shows, who turned contemporary music upside down by bringing art and mathematics together.
This was excellent. A well-structured introduction to an artist I still don’t know enough about, and beautifully made.
That last point is the thing: cross-pollination and applying ideas from one form to another.
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