The boy is patrolling the grounds, I’m just going into the mines to hit today’s page count and then turn around and go into rewrites on another thing. Production Month!
LISTENING: Tabernis:
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A 2024 remaster. I owned and treasured this on vinyl in the 80s. It was apparently a loose and freeform collaboration between Budd and the Cocteaus, but you’d never know it. Falling in love with Fraser’s voice and those guitars all over again, in a crystal remastering. So happy to have this to hand once again.
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The music feels ancient as she breaks down and reconstructs selected music by the 12th Century Polymath Hildegard von Bingen alongside her own compositions. The 12 track album is performed on bass recorders, a 12 string knee harp, delay pedal and sparse layering, conjuring a bridge to connect the centuries. The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined was improvised and recorded in single takes.
Cannell has been on a creative tear lately. I’m a big fan. As a casual glance at this notebook makes obvious. This one is a bit more cosmic and supernatural than others in her catalogue, which is only befitting the inspirational matter. I’ve been streaming it for a few days, and am glad to have the physical object.
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This arrived the other day, even though it’s still listed as pre-order on Bandcamp.
In the summer of 2022 renowned cellist Lori Goldston (cellist for Nirvana, Cat Power, David Byrne) finally made it over to the UK, travelling to rural Norfolk for a long-delayed session with equally renowned chamber folk musician Laura Cannell.
The resulting album, The Deer Are Small And The Rabbits Are Big was completed in just a few days. It has the ease and energy of some of the best artistic collaborations, capturing the deep resonances and sympathies in their music, which cuts across traditional and improvised playing into luminous realms for instrumental folkloric music.
On recent albums Lori has played and recorded outdoors, and Laura’s back catalogue is defined by its non-traditional recording spaces, which has included churches, lighthouses and shipping containers. For this album, they recorded in the atmospheric vaulted 14th century undercroft of St Olave’s Priory in Great Yarmouth, and in the empty aisles at St Andrews church in Raveningham, Lori on cello, Laura on fiddle and singing in invocations that draw on the literal, spiritual and historical resonances of these spaces.
There’s always something autumnal, to me, about the work of these two artists. With summer easing towards a close, it’s perfect timing.
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Falling behind on my logging. This was excellent and I couldn’t do without a copy. I love the Sound Mapping Project, which picks a place and does a deep dive on its fringe musics. I have quite a lot of them at this point.
CONNECTED:
- Anthology Of Post Industrial And Experimental Music From Italy
- Songs from an obscure matriarchal tribe: And A Gift
- ANTHOLOGY OF PERSIAN EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
- Drone Islands, Anthology Of Contemporary Music From Middle East
- Unexplained Sounds
Yeah, I bought it.
1907. Afonso, a doctor, arrives at Principe Island to cure servants from a cocoa plantation “infected” with Banzo, nostalgia of the slaves, who are dying from starvation and suicide. The group is confined to the forest, where Afonso decides to heal them by trying to understand what is affecting their soul.
I’m looping this today. Despite the description of the film it soundtracks, it’s incredibly peaceful.
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Laura Cannell continues to make me feel like a lazy old man. The rate at which she’s producing and releasing new material is extraordinary, and it’s all wonderful.
The WOLFLORE EP holds a 4 songs which take inspiration from the Wolf. I was thinking about where Wolves live, how they behave, and why and how they vocalise.Comments closed
I wanted to use a different voice, so I played a violin that I have adapted with Octave Strings. The strings are thick and rasping, they howl and shimmer on their own, but the instrument is a normal violin. The strength of the voice comes from a small powerful body, like the wolf.
Sharp looked into the roots of the terminology of this strange shadow culture which had survived decades of neglect, he discovered that the first use of the word ‘folklore’ did not occur until 22 August 1846, in a letter to the Athenaeum magazine by one W. J. Thoms.
Finally finished this wonderful book on the flight back from Galway. I’m a sucker for BBC music documentaries, and this scratched exactly the same itch.
It’s the story of British folk music over the last hundred years or so, essentially. Which sounds dry as dust. Except that Young convincingly positions British folk as our visionary music, the true sound of mad Albion. From William Morris and song collector Cecil Sharp, through Vaughn Williams and Peter Warlock, Seeger and McColl, scattering through the explosion of the Sixties and out to the complex obituaries of the Seventies (taking in The Wicker Man and hauntological touchstone The Changes), it’s an absolutely fascinating journey.
Don’t seek the ‘original’ copy, insisted Sharp; focus on the transformations themselves – for they are the substance of the song. He conceded that most songs probably had a sole author in the indistinct past, but unlike in high culture, the ‘original’ is not the authentic prototype; instead, it should be thought of as the equivalent of a composer’s first draft – ‘the source from which it is sprung’.
There are some confusing gaps towards the end – I’m still unsure how you spend so many pages on Talk Talk (the drummer used to live down the road from me when I was a kid) and manage not to address, say, XTC or Billy Bragg. But that’s an entirely personal caveat (if I played Devil’s Advocate I could probably see an argument against including Billy, but I think Mr Young may have missed a trick in not using him to unify and tie up so many of his themes) and doesn’t deserve to be held against an immensely impressive, clever and thoughtful piece of work, superbly researched and very well written. If you have any interest at all in British music, native musics or mad people, then you want a copy of this.
ELECTRIC EDEN, Rob Young (UK) (US+)
originally written March 2011
CONNECTED:
- The Spirit World Of Our Age: THE MAGIC BOX, A Book Of Strange British TV Culture by Rob Young
- Telemetric Folklore
- Shipwreck Radio
- just a few pictures
- Folklands: Witch Country part 2
“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.”
🌐 TODAY IS 1jul24
- French parties rush to build anti-far right front
- The Trump immunity decision is about to drop. Here’s how it might go.
- Chinese space rocket crashes in flames after accidental launch
📡 FRESHENER
A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });An international team, led by Penn State researchers, using the NIRSpec instrument aboard JWST as part of the RUBIES survey identified three mysterious objects in the early universe, about 600–800 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% of its current age.
I had no idea this record even existed.
Things were not looking up in 1974. From oil-crisis-induced austerity to Watergate in the US, the West was undergoing a pan-cultural nervous breakdown. Bad vibes abounded at every turn; the hippie dream deferred, as clear in the headlines as in Hollywood. But no cultural document captures that era’s transitional unease better than June 1, 1974, an art rock meeting-of-the-minds that placed luminaries Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico and Brian Eno before a bewildered live audience at London’s Rainbow Theatre. Released fifty years ago this month, its potency – and oddness – remains intact.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
… her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young.
STRANGE HOTEL, Eimear McBride
morning computer, zibaldone first thing in my day
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