RAMÓN PUYOL

... not so much info available on the creator of this image - & even less of it in English. Single most useful source is his entry in the exhibition catalogue for "Shouts From the Wall: an exhibit of Spanish Civil War posters", published by the University of Princeton. Here's what little I can gather:

Ramón Puyol (1907-1981). Born in the town of Algiceras (Andulucia province). By the late 1920s, was making a living doing illustrations for a number of Spanish publishing houses. Dedicated member of the Spanish Communist Party (probably from at least 1930, when Spanish Communism was very much in the shadow of the local Socialist party & various Anarchist groups). Travelled abroad several times, and in a 1933 visit to Moscow he worked on one of Mayakovsky's theatrical productions. During the Spanish Civil War, designed graphics for Red Aid International (Sp: Socorro Rojo Internacional) - a humanitarian charity directed by the Comintern.

... and hence, the image above. Published in Feb of 1937 within a folio of 10 lithographs, each of which mixes the burlesque & the monstrous in its portrait of 10 different bourgeois personality-types: the hoarder, the defeatist, the spy (etc). Dedication of the folio is to his brother Miguel, "murdered by the fascist hordes". The Ultraleftist caricatures the Trotskyist; its target is the POUM militia. For all those clenched fists, the shadow is gathering into the raised open hand of the fascist salute... This is still some months in advance of the open fighting between the Communists & the POUM, detailed in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia: messy politics! Propaganda graphics typically tend to the crude (to say nothing of the then-Soviet penchant for socialist realism), but this is a tremendous, cartoon-like image: the zealous super-marxist, with his homely capitalist swine lurking within...
... another from the same folio: The Rumour.

Iberian history is rich with horrible ironies. Puyol was captured by the falange after the capitulation of Madrid. Sentenced to death, which was commuted to 30 years in prison, he was then offered a reduced sentence in exchange for restoring Tiepolo's fescoes in the San Lorenzo de Escorial monastery. Presumably, many of Spain's most able & gifted artists were either already dead, or had fled the country in advance of Franco's hordes.

Below, the cheerfully dilapidated house Puyol was born in:

L'oeil ecoute: on sound-image correspondences

The Parmegiani box arrived at the end of last week: 12 CDs, bi-lingual booklet. And despite its mammoth scope, even that is far from a complete survey of this king-of-beards' acousmatic experiments. Over at the Avant-Garde Project, you can find his early Danse on Ilhan Mimaroglu's comp of GRM sonorities, as well as Generique and a revised version of Ponomatopees from the Electronic Panorama box. If we assume that Danse (1964) is representative of those early works that are absent from these douze discs, we haven't missed out on so much. But despite a couple of revisions-for-LP-record (the afore-mentioned Ponomatopees, and Pop'eclectic), his soundtrack work has been largely omitted.

One Parmegiani soundtrack included in its entirety is his 1970 L'Oeil Ecoute (The Eye Listens); a stunning work, tho' sadly the only existing copy of the video has been damaged - so we can only guess at the images that accompanied this tour-de-force of brut extremity.

Anyways. I've been thinking on this great & very thoughtful piece by Colin Black for RealTime. And he's right: within the (local) concert and festival circuit, there's a definite tendency to privilege the audio-visual over the purely sonic... Or the purely cinematic, for that matter - something which plenty of experimental filmmakers would take a definite issue with. Stan Brakhage is (was) perhaps the most famous, but there are plenty of others and a couple of them live locally.

(Ultimately, Black does exactly that thing he's bemoaning: he fails to discuss, even in passing, the actual sonic qualities of works. This doesn't diminish his argument, but it does reflect on a general failure of Australian "music criticism" to engage with its subject in a meaningful way. Yes; for sure we can debate about funding and programming policy. But: surely we're mature enough to begin a robust discussion of this country's creative music? The works, and the artists, deserve that as much as the audience.)

Thinking on Black's article reminds me that both of Bebe Barron & Tristram Cary have recently passed for other-planes-of-there. 2 pioneering figures of electronic music: no question. Both of them produced what are arguably their most memorable electroacoustic works as soundtrack commissions.

... and its worth remarking upon: excepting for the Columbia-Princeton academy (and even there), much of the initial post-WW2 experiment in electronic music was paired to the expedient of soundtracking. The GRM & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop... even "pure" research facilities at Darmstadt, Utrecht, Tokyo, Moscow, Milan & Warsaw (etc) were producing works for radio broadcast. Tod Dockstader began as a film editor, did cartoon SFX, and eventually wrote Tom & Jerry cartoons. 1 of the 2 musique concrete pieces that Boulez produced at the GRM became a soundtrack. Its a facile statement, but the technology suggested its own outcomes: Sci-Fi film & animation scores, radio plays & horspiel.

Brakhage nailed it when he spoke of his filmwork employing a musical structure; in the absence of a literary narrative, its the most obvious way to 'decode' his cinema. Maya Deren used the analogy of poetry - but in the classic sense, & again not far removed from what we understand as music.

This analogy also functioned in the other direction. The "logic of successive images" provided composers with the means to arrive at new structural models for electronic music, which often owed little debt to existing creative forms.

Neitzsche (via John Hartmann) identifies the analogic function as one of the singular powers of the human animal: "first, the nerve stimulus is transformed into image (thus leaving dreams as originary writing?). Second, the images become sounds, or words. Language, which is so pervasive in our human existence, is thus the second level of metaphor. Finally, there is the transformation from the sonic realm back to the conscious, as the sound/word becomes the concept."

So. Hardly suprising that this correspondence between sound & image should be so prevalent: it makes quite a lot of obvious sense.

Ultimately, I'm still essentially in agreement with Colin Black. But beyond the qualification outlined above, there's an obvious historical rejoinder:

(graphic score by Parmegiani; possibly for Capture Ephemere?)

extra infos:

Ant Pateras & Rob Fox's MIBEM deserves singular mention as an event with an absolute attention to sonics, above & beyond a/v concerns...

... Absolutely pitiful obituary for Tristram Cary in The Age, merely reiterating the errors of the AAP feed. No, he didn't compose the Doctor Who theme - Ron Grainer came up with a melody, & Delia Derbyshire made the electronic realisation of it. Grainer thought her realisation was so far removed from his original idea to be wholly Derbyshire's own - but BBC Radiophonic protocols attributed the credit to him (Derbyshire was merely employed as a technician!). And: the suggestion that contemporary studio pop - hip hop, techno, etc - "wouldn't exist" without Cary is risible in its exageration. The first electronic pop music was actually created in Australia back in 1951, and within a few years there were other, & more ambitious, works in both Holland & the USA.

(Contrariwise: the CreateDigitalMusic site has superior obits for both Barron & Cary)

Final, -like: Andrew Ford reprises a 1hr interview with Cary from 2005, available as a stream or MP3 DL from the The Music Show website... Cary's influence on Australian music culture is difficult to determine; he brought the likes of John Cage & Henk Baadings out here, then left them stranded in Adelaide?

Freakbeat-sploitation: The 4 Instants, "Discotheque"

... at risk of this becoming a DL blog: here's one I uploaded for a pal in Austria. Crypto-garage/freakbeat styles from 1966, by a team of what are probably UK session players. Somehow, it got licensed for Antipodean listening 3 years later by, unnh, Basic Books Australasia.

3 originals, credited to Cattini/Winters/O'Neal/Keen, including the second side's blazing hot opening track. In a fairly naked case of plagiarism, Barely Breaking Even once re-released Bogattini on a BigBeat 12, but without any mention of its title or the musicians who'd recorded it (BBE did, however, embellish it with some seal SFX & an Art Blakey drumbreak - tho' I personally doubt this gives them anykind of compelling authorial claims...). Among other choice tunes, the truly epic & thumping double-time cover of Tizol/Ellington's exotica regular, Caravan. That, the several other raucous rave-ups of "jazz standards", & the tremendous technical chops of the players - a 4tet of guitar, bass, organ & drums - might suggest this particular wrecking crew had a background in jazz?

I'm confounded that this one has been overlooked for so long in its native territories, while much lesser discs get their celebratory re-release. Angela Sawyer is dead-on when she remarks on the (B-music) "tendency to lean toward the UK end of collecting: lots of beats, slick brass, clean bass." Within its strictly metered discipline, there's a storm of scattered beats dropping all over the place - but the guitar is filthy with fuzz and in fierce competion for the lead with a rippling funk organ.

As recently as 2006, it was still possible to read in The Wire that the first White Noise LP was an artistic failure (wha?!?). And yet Delia Derbyshire's merely chromatic library tracks seemingly provoke an evangelical fervour (double-wha?!?). Perhaps this all speaks to some kind of structuralist distinction between "raw & cooked" obtaining in UK pop music - an avidity for precisely the kind of MOR over-production that punk stylings reacted against.

... A second "Discotheque" LP followed, 6 years later & produced by the same corporate pseudonym (Art & Sound, Ltd). Failing to capitalise on its predecessor, and somewhat optimistically, that record announced itself as "Discotheque Volume One". That one has a different crew of players and much reduced appeal, but there is one killer track in the rumbling funk of Car Wash (an original, predating the US film by 4 years). Apparently, there are more; Johnny Topper has told me that he's seen a Volume 3.

Anyways. Back to 1966:

A1. Discotheque
A2. Watermelon Man
A3. Mashed Potatoes
A4. Caravan
A5. Portobello Road
B1. Bogattini
B2. Outrage
B3. Monkey Time
B4. All about my girl
B5. Night Train

320Kbps!

here

Haackula (liner notes)

With his wildest aspirations realised in the major label release of Electric Lucifer (CBS, 1969; reissued on Omni 110), the future blazed bright with promise for Bruce Haack. But his elation was shortly eclipsed by a brutal reality: the incomprehension and indifference of the listening public and the US recording industry. The Electric Lucifer was to be Haack's solitary release on a major label. Within 2 decades he was dead, mourned only by a small group of devoted friends.

Throughout the intervening years he never ceased from inventing new instruments and recording music. Madison Avenue had offered him work, but after 1972 he never accepted another advertising commission. When his friend and collaborator, Ted Pandel, took up a teaching position in the rural Pennsylvania town of West Chester, Haack relocated from New York to join him. His creative partnership with Esther Nelson fell apart, but she continued to release his music - a record a year until 1976. With Pandel's support, his bohemian lifestyle took a turn for the wholesome, and when Pandel bought a house in 1976, Haack established his home studio in an upstairs bedroom. Haack struggled against the most profound unhappiness: frustration and disappointment had followed him South. Dispirited by the institutional apathy of the music industry, it was the love and kindness of his friends, and the solace of his music and inventing, that sustained him.

There are multiple revelations contained on this disc, which essentially documents the "lost years" of Haack's career - a 5 year hiatus in his discography between the 1976 release of Ebenezer Electric, and his final 2 LPs, Bite and Zoot Zoot Zoot, Here Comes Santa in his New Space Suit (both 1981). The 3 recordings on this disc speak to the breadth of the always prolific Haack's activities across that period...

(etc)

... a "true story". Because this is the first-time-ever commercial release of all this music, Omni bossman Dave Thrussell mocked up some covers, & emailed the Jpegs at his crew of friends & fellow-travellers. The vote was split, so as a decider, Dave held a seance, summoned "Bruce Haack", and the ouija board picked out this one.

(Just for the record: I was & am in agreement w/ the ethereal Haack on this)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation