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THE DEER ARE SMALL AND THE RABBITS ARE BIG, Laura Cannell and Lori Goldston

Published August 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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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Anthology of Experimental Music from Canada

Published August 15, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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:

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BANZO, Rutger Zuydervelt

Published July 11, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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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WOLFLORE, Laura Cannell

Published July 9, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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.
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.
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ELECTRIC EDEN: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, Rob Young

Published July 9, 2024 by Warren Ellis

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:

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Ennio Morricone’s SPACE 1999

Published July 5, 2024 by Warren Ellis

“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.”

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morning computer 1jul24

Published July 1, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 1jul24

📡 FRESHENER

Toni Hamel.

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.

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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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here and there, 29jun24

Published June 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 29jun24

📡 HERE AND THERE

Timur Si-Qin.

Iwagumi is a Japanese term that refers to the methodical arrangement of rocks in aquascaping. Usually taking on the form of bold, weighty stones resting among each other in opposition to open, airy surroundings, the distinctive art form appreciates and showcases the humble beauty of rocks. For the tenth edition of the i Light Singapore art festival in Marina Bay, art and technology studio ENESS pays homage to the creative tradition with a major installation titled Iwagumi Air Space.

Kate Carr’s new album is a ‘sonic transect’ across London. She slices the city from her Loughborough Junction home out west to Staines and east to Slade Green, travelling on public transport and recording as she goes. Her work is based around field recordings, which morph into electronic tracks, distortion emerging across the stereo spectrum from bus and train noise, and blending back into the sounds of the places she visits.

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Voices, Lightning

Published June 24, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 24jun24

📡 VOICES, LIGHTNING

Some 1,000 years ago, a small band of Polynesians sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific to settle one of the world’s most isolated places—a small, previously uninhabited island they named Rapa Nui. There, they erected hundreds of “moai,” or gigantic stone statues that now famously stand as emblems of a vanished civilization.

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Eventually, their numbers ballooned to unsustainable levels; they chopped down all the trees, killed off the seabirds, exhausted the soils and in the end, ruined their environment.

Their population and civilization collapsed, with just a few thousand people remaining when Europeans found the island in 1722 and called it Easter Island. At least that is the longtime story, told in academic studies and popular books like Jared Diamond’s 2005 “Collapse.”

A new study challenges this narrative of ecocide, saying that Rapa Nui’s population never spiraled to unsustainable levels. Instead, the settlers found ways to cope with the island’s severe limits, and maintained a small, stable population for centuries.

Very unusually among the virtuoso composer-pianists of the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan spent much of his life as an apparent recluse.

He shunned the concert platform in favour of keeping his own company, reading, studying and creating some of the most spectacularly demanding piano music ever written.

Choosing a life like this meant that rumours flourished about him during his lifetime, as they have ever since. For instance, the story that he died when reaching for a volume at the top of one of his bookshelves, which then toppled forwards and crushed him, is now known to be a fabrication.

To see the quick corruption of the revolutionary minds and the ease with which the general population accepted conformism as the way to go through the life, it was an interesting experience which shaped my feelings about reality, when I’m thinking about history, and the sociological and psychological mechanisms of people and societies.

“One of them was called Cone of Variable Volume. It was very simple, just an exploratory film in which I tested the idea of a circle that would change its volume, by expansion and contraction. It was at four different speeds, from frenetic to so slow you could barely see it moving. To my surprise, I realised that it was doing something I had never noticed before. It was quite obviously breathing.”

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just a few pictures

Published June 21, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 21jun24

📡 END OF THE WEEK, OFF TO MARK MY RSS READER AS ALL READ

Radical Traditional: Folk Music for Summer, by Patrick Clarke:

In this new quarterly column, I’m going to be getting to the heart of this resurgence in traditional and folk music, focussing particularly on those practitioners who possess a progressive energy, whether in sound or philosophy. I call it a resurgence, rather than a ‘revival’, for a reason. Just because more mainstream attention is increasingly being drawn to those performing traditional music, does not mean that they have ever been absent.

Mikael Siirilä.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969. Daily Rothko is a daily stop for me.

Nice piece by John Coulthart on a treasure trove of Hannes Bok art.

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