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.
Comments closedTag: music
“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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In a series of papers led by the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS), a team of researchers examines what Earth’s level of technological development (aka “technosphere”) will look like in the future. In the most recent installment, available on the arXiv preprint server, they offer a reinterpretation of the Kardashev Scale, which suggests that civilizations expand to harness greater levels of energy (planet, host star, and galaxy).
Instead, they suggest that the Kardashev Scale establishes upper limits on the amount of stellar energy a civilization can harness (a “luminosity limit”) and that civilizations might circumvent this by harnessing stellar mass directly.
The Old Ways: Ben Edge’s Folklore Rising Playlist:
As I arrived at Tower Hill tube station, and walked out into the busy road, I could see in the distance a group of people processing in a line, draped in white cloaks. Completely unbeknown to me, it happened to be the day of the Spring Equinox, the time of year when night and day are of equal length, and the long darks days of winter are behind us and the long bright days of summer are now on the horizon.
Transparent, glass-like planes sweep across Daniel Mullen’s canvases, dancing across the color spectrum and layering or rotating with mathematical precision.
Linton Kwesi Johnson From Mento to Lovers Rock episode 01
Can’t believe this is out there. I listened to this series on the radio in the early 1980s.
November 09, 2024 at 10:25PM
Comments closedReleased on 1 November 1974, Autobahn was the album that marked the moment when Kraftwerk fully embraced electronic pop music and honed the futuristic, mechanized aesthetic that would become famous. The record was an international success in spite of some decidedly mixed early reviews; and its influence has been felt across a wide variety of genres in the half century since. Herself a visitor of the band’s iconic Kling Klang studios in Düsseldorf, Elizabeth Alker considers Kraftwerk’s classical roots, placing the album in the context of Twentieth-Century German Classical Music (the musicians themselves have cited the expressionism of Schönberg and Stockhausen’s experiments with sound as key influences.) And, as can be heard in the iconic title track, which unfolds over twenty minutes, the band were borrowing from traditions of structuring music that harken back to older, classical forms, too (in the bringing back and development of themes). Elizabeth also plays contemporary tracks that share a musical kinship with Autobahn, and owe it too, perhaps, a debt of gratitude.
Available on BBC Sounds for 23 days and counting, at this time.
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I accidentally fell in on the end of Jools Holland the other night, and caught this guy’s act. He specialises in early blues – Holland kept referring to it as “early music,” like it was fourteenth century plainsong. But it was really very good, good enough to send me straight to Amazon, where I found this new album released through the excellent Smithsonian Folkways label.
Paxton is a student of the acoustic blues of the early 1900s, but the music has a lot more life and crackle to it than that might suggest. It’s not the frozen music of a devotee. It’s assimilated and it breathes.
THINGS DONE CHANGED, Jerron Paxton (UK) (US+)
CONNECTED:
- Tibetan and Bhutanese Instrumental And Folk Music Volume 2
- Stealing Nectar: Cross-Pollination In The Arts And The Hard Cut
- Invisible Alien God, Half The Bones Broken: TROUBLE IS WHAT I DO, Walter Mosley
- NEVERENDING BLUES, Keijo
- Gazelle Twin, Clara Engel
I don’t always log these, and I should. Every now and then, the nice people at Zoharum Records send me a care package of new music.
You can stream their new releases at their Bandcamp page. Really looking forward to sitting down with these.
Other care packages from Zoharum.
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Finally recovered this from the bottom of a stack in the office. This is today’s work music.
Choral music with a filigree of saxophones. The sax isn’t my favourite instrument, but it works here for me as edge colour. I can’t even remember how I came to own this record – maybe because the Hilliard did a recording of STIMMUNG?
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