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Tag: music
The Ecstatic Music Band is a trance-psych collective from the US West Coast. For the last thirteen years, the group has been performing and recording long-durational, high-volume, maximalist dronewerks on amplified acoustic and electric stringed instruments, employing tuning systems derived from the overtone series.
It’s just a massive sound that gives me joy. A physical copy was necessary. Have a listen. Loud.
Comments closedErrant Space Podcast 118: 3 DronesComments closed
Zoharum sent me a promo copy of CD1 of this 3CD album, and it’s rather wonderful trancey drone. Tactile, electroacoustic, mantra vocals from 1992. Shocked to discover I’ve never logged anything else by them here before.
Ref. also a thought about ethnological forgeries / Can / Boat Woman Song et al
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She’s at it again. Another year-long series of EPs. Putting us all to shame and hooking me in for yet another year of buying every one in a series.
Comments closedA Compendium of Beasts – Volume 1 is a modern day Medieval Bestiary in sound. Composed, performed and produced by internationally acclaimed musician and composer Laura Cannell.
It’s the first in a series of EPs created to search for strength and solidarity in the world of real and imagined beasts.
Cannell’s ‘Beasts’ series opens the door on a new chapter in which she is searching for meaning amidst chaos. She embraces her feral medieval and improvisatory roots through her instruments as she plays a game of catch and release to explore the minds of these mythical and real animals. Volume 1 features 4 tracks which include the mythical Norfolk puma and the bittern who booms across the marshes.
First insomnia night of 2025!
New Ruby Colley single:
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Just when I was in the mood for something new, another Zoharum package arrived. You can see all their stuff at their Bandcamp. I have a stack of Zoharum material to finish listening to, so that’s my weekend sorted.
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“Exhaustive” doesn’t even begin to describe the granular detail of this exploration of psychedelic music throughout the 1960s (and the overspill of its visual aspects into the broader culture in that time and the years that followed – I was watching psychedelic children’s cartoons on tv in the Seventies, CRYSTAL TIPPS AND ALISTAIR comes to mind). Chapman is chiefly a music journalist, and shows his crate-digger side, doing a paragraph on what seems to be every psychedelia-associated record of the period that was ever released.
Even Sun Ra got in on the act with a pseudonymous 1966 album called The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale, which featured the core of his exotically garbed Arkestra, along with members of Al Kooper’s Blues Project. Together they knocked out some splendidly convincing surf pastiche, over classical melodies by Chopin and Tchaikovsky.
Chapman goes really deep, down into the session musicians who created a river of off-brand psych-exploitation albums. REALLY deep:
the Fe-Fi-Four Plus Two, indisputably the greatest band name in this entire book.
Ed Cobb, the production svengali behind the Chocolate Watch Band, also wrote ‘Tainted Love’ for Gloria Jones and ‘Every Little Bit Hurts’ for Brend Holloway. If you listen to ‘Heartbeat’, the Cobb-penned follow-up to ‘Tainted Love’, it’s basically a garage stomper with gospel-soul vocals.
…another Michigan-based outfit, the Ruins – with the wonderfully titled ‘Take My Love (and Shove It Up Your Heart)’
It’s actually a lot of fun, in the way a good trivia book is. His broader points, about infantilism in the culture for example, get a little lost under the weight of all these research nuggets. The thing is, Chapman just can’t stop himself from sharing everything he’s learned:
That same year Lacey appeared with Ivor Cutler in the fondly remembered An Evening of British Rubbish. Times critic Bernard Levin laughed so hard he was physically sick. Peeping nervously through the curtain to see how the show was progressing, Lacey saw Levin writhing in his seat and assumed he was having a heart attack.
Al Kooper, the man who laid down the distinctive root-chord organ sound on Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and participated in numerous supersessions with the cream of his generation, also played in the Banana Splits’ house band…
In one of those barely believable instances of historical happenstance C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy all died within a few hours of each other on 22 November 1963.
It’s an immense, even overstuffed, piece of scholarship, towering in its commitment to the fine grain of the period under study. It’s a great time.
PSYCHEDELIA, Rob Chapman (UK) (US+)
Comments closedLorenzo Abattoir is a sound artist from Torino in Italy who has spent the past couple of years engaged in an intense study of what he refers to as “three key concepts for the artist: breathing, amplification, and movement” (as per the album’s inner sleeve). This is the fourth “act” of that study, which began with Flag Day Recordings’ Disincarnazione in 2023. From the very beginning, it is a seriously intense listen. The word “immersive” gets bandied about a lot in music writing these days, but Mess (Akt IV) is a positively engulfing experience. Which is to say that putting it on feels rather a lot like being eaten.
The music on this tape represents part of a concert given by Hugh Davies and David Toop at Riverside Studios, London, on 15th July 1978. The music was improvised without prior discussion. Hugh Davies plays mainly amplified found and home-made instruments; David Toop plays (on this occasion) mostly acoustic found and home-made instruments as well as more conventional flutes, fiddles, etc. The fact that this duo has not worked together often combined with the differences in approach and types of sound-producing technology highlights a quality of so-called free improvisation. The structure of the music derives from an immediate listening interaction rather than from externals such as composition, choice of instruments, cosmic schemes, preferred mode of dress and so forth.
SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIESComments closed
At the very beginning of Survival Research Laboratories in 1978, the group’s founder Mark Pauline predicted that people would eventually start building their own technology in order to seize control of the very violence that characterizes the age we live in. Survival Research Laboratories was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception, SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 50 mechanized presentations in the United States, Europe and Japan, each performance consisting of a unique set of ritualized interactions between robots and other machines. Humans are present only as operators and audience members.
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