i flips me lid

Australian premiere (*maybe) of Tristram Cary's < Trios >

2010-03-24T19:40:00.010+11:00

... *leastways, as near as we can figure out.

Tristram Cary's Trios, for "unskilled turntable players" (I & Pat O'Brien) & "skilled synthesizer player" (that would be Ant Pateras), as part of the next concert in Ant Pateras' season, during his year as resident composer at ANAM.

Ant will be performing on the same EMS VC3 synthesizer, & DK1 keyboard, that Keith Humble ordered from Tristram Cary back in 1971. Which is a congenial serendipity, I guess.

Friday 26th March
Australian National Academy of Music
Old South Melbourne Town Hall
Bank Street, South Melbourne
7pm-9pm

concert program:

Anthony Pateras Chromatophore
Keith Humble Bagatelles
Tristram Cary Trios
Anthony Pateras Thirst
Neil Kelly Flush (World premiere)
Mary Finsterer Ether
PIVIXKI Ayala Valva
PIVIXKI The Stratosphere and the Bird

Michael Kieran Harvey - piano
Max Kohane - drums
Jim Knox & Patrick O'Brien - turntables
Anthony Pateras - synthesizer/conductor
Musicians of the Academy

Entry by donation!

... iteration of the same infos at the ANAM website, here

Ant will also be diffusing electroacoustic works by Natasha Anderson, and Robin Fox (both World premieres), as well as historical e/a works by Jack Ellitt and Percy Grainger.

Thanks heaps to Samon Takahashi (creative audio champion) and Monica Syrette (brains-trust of the Percy Grainger Museum)

ABC-FM is recording the concert; broadcast details will follow.

(gratuitous image theft...)

March 26th is Ant Pateras' birthday, & this concert maintains his recent tradition of celebrating the date with live performance. He's a super-fine fellow, and a tireless partisan for the cultures of both organized and disorganized sound: it is a rare honour to be performing with him. Cheers, ears!

Serendipity extra: Trunk Records have just released a compile LP of Tristram Cary's music. Among which pieces are soundtracks to several films that I screened for the Lumpen Intelligentsia Film Society, way back when. It is a solid collection, & recommended accordingly.

fumare permesso

2010-02-28T18:11:00.004+11:00

John Waters' PSA for the Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles...

Ecoplex cinema program for the 2010 Golden Plains Festival is here

Khrjanovsky & Schnittke: Butterfly (1972)

2010-02-22T19:39:00.004+11:00

Among a wealth of incredible animation from the former USSR, this is one of my favourites. I've come to think of this one as a gentle & cautionary rejoinder to Stan Brakhage's Mothlight. The tone is delicate & heartbreaking; the images are beautifully realised, and in their flat perspective and vibrant colours might have a kinship with Paradjanov - and, indeed, anything under the heavy influence of european folk art.

Andrei Khrjanovsky is still working; hopefully we see his new feature at the MIFF this year. Audio chores on this one are by his regular collaborator, Alfred Schnittke (electronic tonalities, realised on the ANS synth).

googlestalk: bin night at Pierre Henry's...

2010-02-22T18:24:00.003+11:00

Marinetti OST CD launch, Weds 9th December

2009-11-09T16:27:00.005+11:00

Katie Lee - Songs of Couch & Consultation (even more liner notes)

2009-10-06T16:25:00.007+11:00

Arizona native, Katie Lee was born to a Tucson building contractor and his wife, a professional singer, in the boom years of inter-war properity. Indulged from an early age, her father schooled her in bushcraft while mother coached her in breath control & vocal technique. Ravine and desert exploration figured prominently in a happy childhood. She learned songs from the local cowboys, and sang with her youthful peers around campfires lit beneath the stark desert sky.

Hardship years of the great depression abruptly sundered family fortunes; and this pre-adolescent pioneerwoman was entrusted her share of breadwinning chores. By the age of 12, she was regularly striking out for frontier wilderlands of the Sonoran Desert, behind the wheel of the family's Model A Ford. The wild pigs & jackrabbits she brought down with her .22 calibre rifle helped in the feeding of hungry kinfolks. In Winter, East Coast carpetbaggers hit town on a seasonal holiday jaunt; Lee's family rented out their home on the city fringe and took more modest lodgings in the centre of town - saving the difference for Summer months.

If this erstwhile Arizona Cactus Flower was something of a tomboy, she maintained a dilligence at piano lessons (but abandoned ballet - pirouettes made her dizzy). Graduating from Arizona State University with a BA (drama major, English lit minor), Lee married early & impetuously, to a shavetail from the nearby Davis-Monathan Air Force Base. 3 months later her husband was posted South to Guatemala. Lee adventured after him in pursuit, arriving in Mexico with one of her girlfriends. With the help of some local friends, she obtained a visa for the border crossing. Shortly after reunion with her husband, she was pregnant. She made the return trip to home. Her husband followed not so long afterwards, but the marriage faltered and a new son was not enough to save it. The pair divorced.

With junior entrusted to the temporary care of her own mother, Lee made West for Hollywood. By day, she worked as a secretary for one-time silent matinee idol, Mary Pickford, on the United Artists lot. At night she worked at the Pasadena Playhouse; sometimes as a set decorator but more often acting. She also practised over her guitar pickings. Before long she discovered that her ex-husband, newly remarried, had effected something of a custody coup - seizing their son, and adopting him under Florida law. Lee would not see her child for the next 4 decades and the grieving weighed heavily upon her. For several years she attended Jungian therapy by way of reconciling herself to this trauma.

Despite screen testing & securing bit parts in Hollywood features, Lee enjoyed more success on the nation's airwaves. Fellow Arizonan, Andy White, was scripting for NBC-syndicated The Great Gildersleeve, and helped her to an audition. A romantic foil for the eponymous lead, "Katie Lee, the Green Mountain girl" became a regular and popular guest on the show. By 1953 she'd figured in some of the most successful radio serials of the day: in addition to The Great Gildersleeve, there were spots on Halls of Ivy, The Railroad Hour, and One Man's Family. For a time, she was music director for the weekly Bell Telephone Hour. These were transitional years for US broadcasting, and Lee made the leap to live television along with some of the programs she'd voiced for; appearing in Armchair Detective, the first live drama telecast from Los Angeles.

In a paradoxical sense it was her popularity on radio that pushed her towards a career in folk music. A rendition of her Girl In The Wood signature on The Great Gildersleeve won her sackloads of fan mail far in advance of what the show's lead had ever received, and he agitated for her removal. Her discovery of Glen Canyon, rafting down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, recovered her awe for nature, and awakened her rage at its despoliation. Disgusted at last with the pretence of this epicentre of industrial entertainment, it was Josh White and Burl Ives who provided some robust mentoring and advice. With Ives' help, she launched herself on a national tour of nightclubs and coffee shops. She researched traditional musics at every opportunity, haunting libraries and scrutinising broadsides and songbooks for folkloric materials to adapt and perform.

In 1956 Lee was performing at Murray Franklin's nightclub in Miami when Bud Freeman called long-distance from Hollywood. Would she like to record an LP of folk music? At curtain close she headed east in her Thunderbird.

(etc etc etc...)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

The Shower Scene From Psycho - Exploding Hits! (liner notes)

2009-10-06T16:21:00.002+11:00

1986, and I am a hormonal hillbilly. For pocket money, my school holidays are spent driving a combine harvester in ever-diminishing circles within expansive heat-hazed paddocks. And I have just discovered that record stores also retail music which will never be broadcast on the local AM radio, or feature in glossy teen mags. Mostly, what I buy is cassettes (my first turntable is still a year away). And in my burgeoning avidity for Australian independent music of the day, I buy all the split-sided series of Cooking With George compiles. Much of it is unremarkable, but two tracks by The Shower Scene From Psycho enjoy household high-rotation. It's compelling power-pop! In my adolescent naivety, I imagine the tracks are original compositions. And I puzzle over the identity of the androgyne vocalist: man, woman, or cartoon mutant?

More than 20 years later, the recordings archived here still describe a stunning collision of eccentric creativity and aesthetic extremes. The avant-pop atonality is embellished with raucous guitar riffage, and punctuated by charmingly wry DIY concrete FX. It begins with a studious intention to deconstruct and subvert the pop tradition, but the hooks have been retained and accentuated. The covers are extravagantly wrought; the originals convey a haunted existentialism.

(etc)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

Dockstader's last tape...

2009-09-21T16:23:00.008+10:00

... not too clear what's happened. But Tod Dockstader's recording studio, archive of master tapes, has all been dispersed on ebay. And this, from a local (Westport, Connecticut) auction house:

Primitive Calculators: live recording from The Tote 04.01.2009

2009-09-21T12:30:00.018+10:00

Early in the year a friend was kind enough to gift me a ticket for ATP; a genuine treat - the first time I'd made one of these outdoor scenarios in a non-work capacity. Plenty to engage the senses (not least the setting, which, beyond the concentrated brutalist architecture, was genuinely restorative).

In respect of the actual music, several things struck me. The element of spontaneity, unpredictability, seemed largely absent - most musicians adopted the role of stadium rock entertainers. Even worse, the audience suffered an inertial restraint, breaking their static poses only for polite applause or the sipping of beer. As a study in social morbidity, it was fascinating: as a cultural experience, it had all the thrill of being lost in a foreign city, but eating lunch at McDonalds (Remember also, by way of context, that this was within a schedule of echofromthepast celebration of Aus postpunk...). And for sure, loud music with a regular rhythm and timbral density can be fun and exciting, per se - but the proposition of reassuring familiarity is anathema to this particular auditor.

There was a wry bemusement to be found in all this. "Weren't the Laughing Clowns incredible?" (erm, no, I thought inaudibly; rather, 1 of the 3 or 4 least accomplished things I'd ever seen & heard in my life: superannuated burnouts with no chops fumbling over their instruments and missing the changes. A great band in their day, for sure - only that day was twentysome years back).

It began to remind me of the reflexive brand loyalties that surburban zombies must pledge to an uber-rock corporation like the Rolling Stones. I asked one of the festival organisers to nominate a highlight. "The Dirty Three, definitely. I saw them in Europe last year, and it was fantastic. I didn't think they could repeat it, but they did!" I took my quizzical leave, thinking back to their Brisbane tours of '94-and-5, when the band was the most exciting thing I saw in either year (the first time, in company of one-time drummer for Sydney jazzpunk ensemble The Great White Noise, John Gillies (then in residence with the Institute of Modern Art) and only 3 others... the second, a pre-Christmas show at the Zoo that featured unannounced guest spots from Nick Cave and Robert Forster). Back then, the band's formidable musicianship was the vehicle for a manic intensity, by turns hateful and heartbreaking. Now they played like synchronised sleepwalkers.

Beyond the sheer delight of having momentarily escaped the urban grid, there were other and ample pleasures. The Louis Wain exhibit was modestly staged, but a charming enough diversion (and presumably some kind of epiphany for many of the punters). And music! The Reels' anachronistic pop fragility... Passenger of Shit's ultracore insania... And the Primitive Calculators, with their defiant introduction: "We were shit 29 years ago, and we're still shit!"

Later in the day, I asked Edgar from Missing Link to confirm my very different opinion. "They were shit 29 years ago - this is the amazing thing - now, they're actually good!"

I've heard some incredible live music in the last year: a half-dozen Balkan Gypsy bands; Angelo Badalamenti's opera, with the Pasolini libretto; a killer Nono piece; live diffusions from Pierre Henry; a career-retrospective performance from Dubravko Detoni and Acezantez; Tristan Murail conducting his spectral compositions; even Singing Sadie. And 3 concerts from the reformed Calculators, each time stunning me anew with their cynical indifference, casual nihilism, and an immersive vortex of compelling noise.

Alan Bamford has long been a tireless partisan for the band, and he was kind enough to gift me with this - live recording of the first Primitive Calculators concert in 29 years.

55 minutes, 320Kbps CBR MP3, 131MB: FWIW! DL here

and yesterday's top news: Lightning Bolt ("renowned for being the most insane shit ever", ha!) touring Aus, with the Calculators in support, courtesy of Heathen Skulls...

(couple more links)

photos from this same gig, and eyewitness account

M&N review, & interview

and for DL...

Frontman's egghead dayjob - here's proof (podcast for DL)

new Pynchon, dud

2009-09-20T14:50:00.009+10:00

"Yeah, but nowadays it's all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with fuckin cop shows, just being regular guys, only trying to do their job, folks, no more threat to anybody's freedom than some dad in a sitcom. Right. Get the viewer population so cop-happy they're beggin to be run in. Good-bye Johnny Staccato, welcome and while you're at it please kick my door down, Steve McGarrett."

John Nada said it better: BANG!

Least deferential, & most intelligent, review that I've seen is this piece, from the London Review of Books. Otherwise... worst cover-design ever. Absent, the labyrinthine metatextual intrigues. As a pulp pot-boiler, its not a patch even on something like Don Winslow's The Winter of Frankie Machine (tho' Pynchon's scope is less individual psyche than social landscape). Winslow's also has a far more colourful diction; Pychon's hippie patois - and the anti-authoritarian/free lovin' sentiment it ostensibly conveys - is inelegant & reflexive (and who knows: maybe Pynchon reads Winslow? The last time I saw the word < copacetic > in use was this aforementioned novel). Mostly, what it reminds me of is Bukowski's last fiction; something so poorly crafted I still suspect it was ghost-written simply to provide a legacy for his heirs.

Marinetti (ACMI screening, & OST CD liners)

2009-09-17T20:28:00.012+10:00

Albie Thoms' Marinetti was the culmination of the synthetic environments that the UBU group had pioneered in Australia; festive public 'happenings' that combined the energy and volume of creative rock and jazz with the mesmeric effect of multi-dimensional lightshows. Another kind of culmination: Marinetti records most of the principal collaborators in the UBU film group, like Aggy Read and the Perrys. Uniquely valuable as a document of Australia's late 1960s counter-culture, the soundtrack provides the best indication of the unrestrained liberty that bands like Tully and the John Sangster Underground band - some of whose members perform on this recording - were famously achieving in their improvisations of the period.

This is the sound of the acid-stained Down Underground. Led by the irrepressibly eccentric multi-instrumentalist, John Sangster, the sextet of players included veterans of Sydney psych ensembles Tully and the Nutwood Rug Band, as well as accomplished sidemen from the Don Burrows and Bernie McGann groups. By the time they improvised the soundtrack recording to a screening of the film, guitarist Michael Barnes was performing alongside Sangster for the Harry M Miller production of Hair. Tully mainstay, Rick Lockwood, can be heard on flute, sax, and a raucously untutored violin. New Zealand expatriate, Dave McRae, would further explore the sound of organ enhanced by outboard effects in his later work with UK jazz-prog group, Nucleus, and Daevid Allen's post-Soft Machine Matching Mole; for several years he was musical director for British comedy series, The Goodies. Drummer, Alan Turnbull, was a member of the classic Burrows quartet. George Thompson, on bass, would record again with Sangster in support of Sister Janet Mead's landmark album of inspirational christian pop.

The inital tone of the soundtrack is idyllic in its gentle lyricism, and the naive candour of overheard conversation. Across the next 80 minutes Harry Medax builds the mix - up to 6 additional tracks woven over and around the musicians - towards a crescendo of cacophonous simultaneity... Birdsong and the barking of dogs collide with fragmented needle-drops of The Doors and The Beatles. There are whispered reassurances, anguished shouts, and the wholesale reprise of Thoms and Gerry Dupal's musique concrete composition, De Moon Service, originally realised as accompaniment to sculptor (and computroid, from ABC TV's SciFi series, Interpretaris) Gordon Mutch's film, Hallucinagenia. A moment of Ravel's Bolero, start of reel 3, wryly harkens to one of Thoms' earliest shorts.

Beyond the threshold of conscious perception, Thoms launches his audience into a maelstrom of sound and vision. The group delirium unspooling in the dark is consistent with his notion of a 'cinema of cruelty': the resort to a course of homeopathic madness prescribed by Antonin Artaud. The film certainly has people; 'characters' even, and aplenty - but no actual characters as such. Rather than something as facile as telling a story, the film is a distilled concentrate of lysergic impression, a sacrament of celluloid metaphysics.

(et cetera etc!)

40th anniversary screening, Saturday afternoon at the ACMI. Director, Albie Thoms in attendance. Not for the puny-lobed!

And: premiere release for the soundtrack, on CD from Roundtable - new joint venture of James from Votary, and Jeff from Round and Round Records. Available at the screening this weekend.

Details of launch party to follow...

Shortly: even more unimagined Sangster gems, pried from the archives...

map of the world (revised)

2009-09-11T20:20:00.002+10:00

Sven Libaek - Solar Flares (liner notes)

2009-09-03T18:59:00.025+10:00

Antipodean tones for mental healing. AD 1974, and launched from beneath the Southern Cross, these easeful midnight notes of writhe-time funk describe a singular document of Australian space jazz. Skipper Libaek navigates starlight spaceflight by that fourfold twinkle; his crew - the brightest luminaries of local session players - stretch out & settle into orbit.

Norwegian-born Libaek was already a young veteran of film and television scoring in his adopted homeland, lending an outsider's ear to striking interpretations of the alien landscape. At the prompting of his publisher, Southern Music, he recorded My Thing, an LPs worth of stock music for their Peer Southern imprint. The licensing sucess of that record led to this outer-space-themed successor.

This album's synthetic enhancement heralded a uniquely Australian innovation: the Qasar II duophonic analogue/digital synthesizer. Sydney inventor, Tony Furse, had designed the modular keyboard unit with R&D funding from the Australia Council, and resource support from Don Banks at the Canberra School of Music. Perhaps heard at its best on the eponymous track 7, the Qasar II delivers not only wobulating funk, but devastating treatments of George Golla's electric guitar lines. Libaek utilised the Qasar synths extensively across soundtrack recordings for the Boney and Inner Space television series; Furse would later partner with fellow Sydney entrepreneurs and inventors on the development of the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument...

(etc etc etc!) ...
So I had to scare up some infos on this synth. Sven remembered only that it was a kind of Fairlight prototype, but the session dates put this quite a few years in advance of the CMI.

I rang Rob Fox (who is a genius, if you hadn't already realised this).

"Australian-designed and manufactured analogue synth. Recorded in Sydney, '74. Probably a one-off model. There's a Fairlight connection. What is it?"

And the Fox: "Hmmm, well if it was recorded in Canberra it could be the Qasar... That one was an analogue Fairlight ancestor, but I don't know of any recordings. Apparently it had a unique sound; something to do with the circuitry [at this stage, I'm thinking: bingo!]... Don Banks also had a Moog IIIA there... And in Sydney, and around that time, all I can think is that it would be an ETI 4600 - which is also the first synthesizer I built myself. They used to sell in kit form. There were a lot of custom-mod varieties, so it could be one of those..."

So I hit the infobahn. ETI 4600 is a fascinating instrument, right era, and a Fairlight link in designer Kim Ryrie. But the epiphany was the title of synth workout, track 7: Quasers. OK! A clue... So, looking around for background on the Qasar, I discover an earlier (non-Canberra-based) model. One of these, near as I can figure, somehow came to be a frequent visitor at Spencer Lee's studio. Libaek's 3 vinyls are perhaps the only commercially-released (and this one, not so commercial at that) recordings made with it.

Here's what it looked like:

"Second variety":

Damned useful website, with infos of Don Banks' EMS & the Qasar, can be found here

Anyways. Its available now, on lobe-enhancing vinyl, from Votary Disk. Limited to 500.

Somehow I wrote the liners (which I like to think are not so shabby) in an all-night writing jag between 2 days shaking at the end of a jackhammer, at the end of a week working on a construction site... I emailed them in, caught a quick shower, wolfed a bowl's worth of cereal & made straight to work for the 7am start.

Delirious with lack of sleep... I remember the foreman giving me some instructions later in the morning: I tried not to blink-my-eyes-open too gratuitously, and hoped my swaying side-to-side was not disconcertingly noticable.

Lunch time. I put a new pair of earplugs in. "Please don't wake me till we're back on". Folding my head into my arms on the table. The power of nap!

So. Quitting time, later that afternoon... Sean Healy pulls up in a borrowed ute: we hit the road & head for the Golden Plains Festival site... So I can install the outdoor cinema. Keerist...!

Aus TV hosts 2: local shocker prompts breathless apoplexy

2009-08-09T18:26:00.026+10:00

speaking of the living dead...

Here is Bill Collins losing his mittens over one of the greatest films ever made in aus:

... apologies for sketchy quality of the video; this is off-air from the solitary tv broadcast of 'Wake In Fright', 10 network in 1989.

More info on the film: entries at imdb & wikipedia

Bill Collins has always creeped me out a little. I think he reminds me of Mr Joyboy, from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (a top read, & recommended)

Aus TV Hosts 1: Hideously yours, Deadly

2009-08-09T18:26:00.023+10:00

Very little by way of information available about this one...

Deadly Earnest was a late-night television host on the 0-10 network to Australian capital cities at 1960s' decadal cusp. For reasons presumably involving the state of the network back then, there was a different Deadly for each city (tho' Perth & Adelaide both shared Hedley Cullen in 1975)

Most prominent among them, & seemingly progenitor of the idea, was the Sydney Deadly; a young drama student, UK expat, name of Ian Bannerman.

By way of ancillary merchandising, this LP - now horribly obscured by history. I spent an age scaring one up; eventually, I landed 2 in the same week. High sherrifs of both the record labels I work for have heard it, but I think we're all in agreement: this is more interesting as an historical artefact, per se, than as actual music. If neither of those companies will be licensing it for re-issue, I figured at least to restore it to public attentions (however small they might be).

Producer, Ron Wills, was a life-long champion of Australian music and had recorded Slim Dusty's 'A Pub With No Beer' in 1957. Co-lyricist & occasional backing vocalist, John Brindle, was a radio announcer for 2CH. No available information on the session players, tho' they might include members of Max Merritt's backing group, The Meteors (whose 3rd LP Wills was also producing around this same time)

You can download the album rip, here

Melbourne's Deadly was Ralph Baker; that link will direct you to infos on a personal appearance from 1993.

oh... you're a "reader"

2009-07-05T11:37:00.009+10:00

docs on the DL:

English translation of Michel Chion's Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (via EARS)

Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema

Sheldon Renan's An Introduction to the American Underground Film

... Sheldon Renan is an interesting character: founder of the Pacific Film Archive, he's also the director of some powerful experimental cinema. Most of those titles do not appear on imdb, but his The Killing Of America is a scarifying montage of USAmerikkkan verite violence - a big hit for Palace Video (or maybe Roadshow?), back in the halcyon days of VHS home rental.

Esma encore

2009-05-09T18:53:00.015+10:00

... well I did only a very little of digging for vinyls, this most recent European trip (there was however a substantial component of film research). Here is the fruit of a leisurely wander thru the market stalls at trg. Brittanski, my first day in Zagreb. The vendor sniffed dismissively at the crates I was riffling, "Zose are do-mestic". "Oh. Good!", I thought.

This is early Esma Redzepova - her voice is in a much higher register, & she has a wildly expressive ululating vibrato. Difficult to date with any confidence, as nothing like a year appears on either of the cover or the record labels, and scant information by way of a discography is available online. But, so near as I can figure, this is her first LP.

A couple of these tunes have become standards of the contemporary Balkan/Gypsy repertoire, and I've heard several performed this year by both Fanfare Ciocarlia and the Kocani Orkestar. Caje Sukarije is something like her signature tune, and was infamously bootlegged on the Borat soundtrack. I'm guessing there may be some interest in this; something like 100 folks DL-ed the Esma tape I posted an age back; several tracks from that tape reappear here, but in greater fidelity.

Anyways. Enjoy!

the king of beards & concrete mixers: pierre henry

2009-05-04T15:10:00.027+10:00

"... Everyone should try to attend a performance by Henry at least once. It's the kind of experience you emerge from believing you will never quite hear sounds in the same way again. Attendance should be mandatory for every every indie rock musician, just so they realise the utter futility of their existence."

(from this page at The Guardian. I thought of it tonight, when I was confronted by some Facebook spam: 'Ian Wadley would like you to become a fan of ian w'... sorry, but I'd honestly rather not. Instead, I hope that Ian enjoys a long hard listen to everything that Pierre Henry has ever recorded.)

I heard something like 40 concerts in Europe, & by a country-simple reckoning the 2 diffusions I caught from Pierre Henry were way-and-ahead the highlights (this includes a 4hr set by Kocani Orkestar in an old factory, 2000 wasted Croats & I dancing on a floor of broken glass - sufficiently so that a white line (salt!) around the legs of my jeans marked the extent of that night's saturated sweat...)

The Henry gigs were the centrepiece of the last 2 nights of a week honouring the memory of the French choreographer, Maurice Bejart, for whom Henry had been composing since the 1950s. The image above is Bejart & Michele Seigneuret dancing for Henry & Schaeffer's Symphonie pour un homme seul, in 1955 (colour stills below are from Louis Cluny's stunning film of the following year).

Each of the 6 Henry diffusions is a different 1hr set: a near-complete survey of his works that Bejart had adapted for dance. The earliest 50s pieces are convulsively dynamic - servomechanical sounds & brut-harsh edits, with audio principally generated on prepared piano. Pieces from later that decade suggest what was to follow in the 1960s: oscillator sweeps & sine waves enter the mix, as the pieces become more textural & less frenetic, making greater use of audio filters, albeit still punctuated by artful 'noises'. Beyond this span of years are a handful of more populist anomalies - Messe pour le temps present, the Rock electronique finale of La Reine verte, and the cartoon SFX-enhanced Tokyo 2002. (this last, by way of an unscheduled encore on the closing night, as a rejoinder to the capacity audience's rapturous applause).

Pierre Henry is on his way to his 82nd birthday; his age is starting to show. He gets about in a wheelchair, mostly, then discreetly shuffles his way to the mixing desk, front of stage, after the audience have taken their seats. Despite his years, he seems (in conversation with what I think was his daughter, Isabelle) completely lucid. As much as it must have pained him, he struggled to takes his bows after the show; clearly, he loves the attention of his audience. At the conclusion of the 5th evening, I figured these concerts to be a public swansong - but after witnessing him sympathetically bouncing in his seat to Psyche Rock the following night, I felt little doubt that Henry will be stalking concerthalls for as long as he's physically able. By the end of that piece, and the closing Tokyo 2002, all 24 faders had found their way to maximum volume.

(Henry working with the Bejart company in 1977: Machine Danse)

Opening performance each night was Futago for 2 dancers, choreographed by Bejart-veteran Emmanuele Huyn to Henry's Psyche Rock: absolutely ridiculous, I was desperately choking back laughter (& arrived sufficiently late on the final night to be able to miss it altogether). Far more convincing is the evening closer in Bejart's choreography for Variations pour une porte et un soupir, performed by the National Opera Ballet of the Rhine.

Bejart's choreography is informed by contemporaneous (1965) aleatory principles: each of the 7 dancers draws a numbered piece of paper from a glass box at the start of the evening's performance. That draw determines which dancers (or 'Rien', none, or 'Tous', all) will perform to each movement of the work.

The dancers perform physical improvisations from their repertoire; sometimes incorporating the chairs, or the supine bodies of non-performing colleagues, as props. Across the 2 nights, its possible to see both the range of individual gestures that the dancers are able to bring to Henry's composition, as well as the collaborative moves they test on each other (Respirations one night sees all 7 dancers united in an unwieldy spider-like huddle - a beast with 7 backs).

Interviews with Pierre Henry, here and here

Annotated biography listing his opus

more on this season (in French) can be found here, here and here. Contrary to advertised program, the diffusion of the 27 Avril soiree was Variance II, Coexistence, Signes, and Rock electronique (from La Riene verte), rather than Le Voyage. Liberation also ran a pre-show piece

Another useful post

a report on the status of dogs in continental europe

2009-05-04T14:54:00.007+10:00

... back home to Aus. [edit]

Here are some photos of European dogs...

Not so much leisure for the immediate future: editorial meeting last night, final meeting of the animation selection panel for the melbourne international film festival tonight, back on the building site Thursday (shaking at the end of a jackhammer), & plus of which is 4 liners due this month. And a whole bunch more...

Beard on a bender at the reels of steel

2009-04-10T13:05:00.006+10:00

Monday, I discover that Pierre Henry will be performing live diffusions in Paris at the end of the month...

Tuesday, I called my travel agent

Wednesday, I'd paid for my flight

Tomorrow, I will be in Europe! First & last stops are London. Most of the in-between is the Zagreb Music Biennale, but 1 (of several) anticipated highlights is the chance to hear Henry mixing Messe pour le temps present to a new choreography by Emmanuelle Huynh.

Full schedule of the Pierre Henry concerts can be found, here

Some pleasing youtube clips, here and here

5/4 benefit for Brunswick lawn bowls

2009-04-01T17:12:00.002+11:00

... in support of a new water tank.

Brunswick Bowling Club infos, here

currently DLing...

2009-03-16T21:53:00.010+11:00

Gil Melle – complete Blue Note 50s sessions

The Legend of Hell House (radiophonic muse, Delia Derbyshire, on audio chores)

Michael Robinson DVD (ace contemporary xprmntl)

Rotten TV, episode 2

Psych series #44 – The Firebirds (I used to have this on vinyl! Bought for $1 from the Fortitude Valley Salvos in Brisbane... Ian Wadley told me it was “rare” psych, but I sold it on at a record fair. Then more recently Dave Thrussell asks me about psychsploitation recordings on Sony/CBS subsidiaries...)

Kenny Everett – The Complete Naughty Bits

Barbara Moore – Bright & Shining

Ester Krumbachova – Vrazda Ing. Certa (her only film as Director!)

The very strange story of Joe Meek (BBC Arena doco’ from 1991)

Tragedia Endogonidia 01 DVD

Tristram Cary - Quartermass & the Pit OST

AMM - AMMusic

&, erm, Asstraffic – Natasha & Ana

... Pathetic, I know

But that's the kind of guy I am (ie, pathetic)

Golden Plains 2009: Ecoplex debrief

2009-03-14T12:51:00.005+11:00

some words from the JJJ morning show

photos at Ben Butcher's keyhole camera blog

Rod Cooper & the Vessel crew prepare for launch

(best documentation of the actual performance is by way of avi files - will upload to youtube as time permits)

testing my new data projector at twilight: Zbig Rybczinski's I Can't Stop

digging on Quintron & Miss Pussycat

all photos this page courtesy of Sean Healy

Outlands Ecoplex cinema: Golden Plains Festival 2009

2009-02-24T19:04:00.021+11:00

I Need That Record!
The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store...

Straight from the US for its Aus premiere at GP, Brendan Toller’s guerilla doco’ laments the lost & beloved indie record retailer; more than 3000 disappeared in that country within the space of 5 years. Peopled with a cast of righteous brothers & sisters - Noam Chomsky, Thurston Moore (SY), Ian Mackaye (Fugazi/Minor Threat), Mike Watt (Minutemen/reformed Stooges), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group), Legs McNeill (punk) etc etc – knocking their lobes together on whyfor this storefront species became so endangered...

http://www.ineedthatrecord.com
The Vessel Project
Expanded Cinema performance insania by Rod Cooper & crew

“Broken music marooned with ghost-ship transmissions...”

Most ambitious project yet from this experimental musician & instrument builder (Cooper) & his crew of all-around ratbags & ace characters. The skipper’s new caper is a landlocked metal ‘boat’ with home-made instruments built into the decking panels: springs, strings, percussion & electronics... pirate shortwave broadcast from the rigging, and films projected into the sails. Ahoy, idiophones!

Rod Cooper – skipper/maniac, Dale Chapman - electronics, John Jacobs - radio navigation, Riky Metisse Merlow – automated sound sculpture, Anthony Magen – organised noise, Michael Prior – disturbances, Hugh McSpeddon & Richard Oremek – signals/projection, Gab Carazo – general hand
http://www.pool.org.au/users/the_vessel_project

The Drum Buddy Show

By way of celebration the great man & his gal’s appearance for GP09... “Rock, noise & electronic experiments finally took a trip to dance class”: a pre-Katrina infomercial for Quintron instrument of choice & patented invention, The Drum Buddy! This 5 oscillator, light-activated, mechanically-rotating drum machine is the direct link between the human hand and sheer electronic voltage! Taped live (in front of a studio audience) at the Spellcaster Lodge in New Orleans’ 9th Ward, this classic late night infomercial transports you from the classroom of a local high school to the stage of a late-night rave. Starring: Quintron, Miss Pussycat and her puppets, MC Trachiotomy, the Drum Buddy Dancers, and legendary R&B recording artist Ernie K-Doe. Hosted by Bob Global and Rebecca Simms for Midwest International Industries; directed by Rick Delaup.

http://www.quintronandmisspussycat.com/
PLUS: (YES!) A WHOLE BUNCH ELSE!!!

Golden Plains Festival 2009 website

Pete Seeger - Rainbow Race/Now/Young vs. Old (liner notes)

2009-02-17T00:47:00.007+11:00

The paradox of the United States of America is the historical problem of “democracy” as an idea and an ideal. Liberty & justice – but not for all. Settled partially by religious dissenters fleeing persecution in their homelands, the new freedoms they sought were seldom extended to the native inhabitants, or people of colour, or the poor, or even women. Thus had precursor “model Republics” (Athens, Rome) also been designed to exclude the toiling majority from the privileges of citizenship. Welcome to the new world...

But just as those settlers fled across the Atlantic lake, so they also carried with them the seeds of fresh dissentings: the germination of new and revived ideas about civic virtue, and a universal franchise in the government of their lives. Enlightenment scrutiny of the social contract was underway; the rebellion that began in those 13 colonies made the return trip to France and beyond.

And perhaps this is the reason for a nation birthed from revolution, but whose rulers have so often been in terror of even modest reform. Sometimes those fears have extended to the arts. In the modern era we recognise attempts at centralised control of culture as the mark of a totalitarian state, but Pete Seeger is not the only US artist to have suffered government injunctions.

Seeger proceeds from New England privilege, and a scrupulously Calvinist dedication to mission. He shares the progressive politics and ardour for music of his parents and stepmother. Father, Charles, had been forced from a position as Foundation Professor of music at the Berkeley campus of UCLA, due to his public opposition to US involvement in World War I; later he taught at Juilliard. Stepmother, Ruth Crawford, was both a prominently atonal modernist, and an early champion of US folk music traditions.

If Pete Seeger enjoyed the benefits of this patrician background early in his life, what is remarkable is where his subsequent experience has led him. Mentored by Huddie Ledbetter & Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who schooled him in the instrumental techniques of guitar and banjo... Friend & fellow traveller to Woody Guthrie, with whom he shared proto-beat highway wanderings and a busking minstrelsy... Colleague to John Lomax at the Library of Congress, working at the preservation and revival of a neglected musical heritage. By his twenties Seeger had achieved the synthesis of dual vocations as a social activist and musical performer: an effective partisan for the culture and concerns of ‘just plain folks’.

Seeger came of age in a halcyon era for US politics: the New Deal administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was an extended, but singular, moment, which sought to reconcile progressive ideals to the preservation of a (kinder, gentler) capitalist economy. In many respects, subsequent US governments delivered a Great Leap Backwards. 17 years on the blacklist sundered one promise of Seeger’s early career – the limelight prominence of chart success – and reconfirmed him in the bardly chronicling of causes which were seldom popular.

These 2 CDs gather Pete Seeger’s final recordings for Columbia label. Initially signed by John Hammond in the early 1960s, his presence on the Columbia roster leant the company a considerable prestige (it was reportedly the reason that Bob Dylan joined him as a labelmate), but Seeger’s aversion to mercantilism and strongly-voiced political opinions made his records a difficult prospect to market. A national television blacklist was only lifted in 1967, after an outraged campaign in the US national press. Columbia sales reps struggled to fit Seeger’s work to existing markets, and senior executives were rarely sympathetic to his paladin altruism.

(etc)

available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

Elsewise! Seeger gets his apology

And: more good news

Jack Ellitt bio - BFI GPO set, Vol 2

2009-02-14T10:34:00.002+11:00

Jack Ellitt was the anglicised and vernacular name of Avrom Yitzhak Elitski, born to Lithuanian Orthodox Jews in Manchester, 1902. Moving to Australia 3 years later, Ellitt’s parents early determined on a legal career for their son. In response, he ran away at 15, supporting himself as a farm labourer and jackeroo. Upon return to Sydney, he won a scholarship place to the New South Wales State Conservatorium, studying piano and violin. Rather than compete with his peers for keyboard or string duties in the school’s new orchestra, Ellitt took up the bassoon for their first concert: the Australian premiere of Gustav Holst’s The Planets (a work Ellitt would later abbreviate for the score of Lye’s The Birth of the Robot).

Ellitt and Lye first met in the constrained bohemian circles of 1920s Sydney. Lye was stoking and shiphanding his way to the cultural epicentre of the old “Mother Country”; Ellitt, recently graduated, was gigging in orchestra pits for vaudeville. Libraries gave them a restless sense of what was happening beyond the diminished horizons of then-Australian culture. Both were avid for the cultural renovations of European modernism, and the provocative theories of Marx and Freud. Both were keen amateur anthropologists, stalking the tribal artefacts of the Australian Museum. The pair tested their roughhouse cerebrations at pubs in The Rocks, and between swims at Bondi.

Lye made his abrupt departure for the UK, and at his correspondence-urging Ellitt shortly followed; by 1928 the pair were domiciled in a wharf-bound barge loaned by the writer, A. P. Herbert. Lye and Ellitt maintained a regime of physical fitness by regular swimming in the Thames (suggesting they might previously have been members of Sydney’s “polar bear” club, of perennial all-weather surfers). Herbert also found them work as stagehands at the Lyric Theatre, with Ellitt performing in pubs and teahouses on the side. When Lye began work at animating Tusalava, he entrusted Ellitt with the composition of a live soundtrack...

(etc)

available February 2009 from the British Film Institute

is this a bullshit i see before me...?

2009-01-21T22:02:00.014+11:00

(Bruno Richard, ex ESDS27, Sexy Polizei)

... after ubiquitious rave-ups in elevated quarters of the UK press, I finally sit to scope some of cop series The Wire. Initially I am digging on this caper, but it shortly (5 hours in) transpires the whole scenario is total garbage-sandwich of uniquely USAmerikkkan "epic" scale: for 90 hours I am expected to assimilate this "support yr local sherrif" hypnoganda.

Sorry kids: the police are not on my xmas list & this thin tissue of horseshit only serves to explain why the blonde monsters are so happy to elect themselves global gendarme #1. Wherefor the ambiguous & complex characterisations I seem to recall reading about? The players here seemed grateful for the beginnings of a second dimension (eg, intimations of the hero's struggle w/ alcoholism or ex-wife grief).

It simply isn't a patch on a generation of Aus cop shows that retailed a genuine & troubled ambivalence about the whole notion of 'law & order': Blue Murder, Police Crop, & near at the pinnacle Scales of Justice. Or even: the A Dog's Ransom storyline of Armchair Thriller for ITV (scarifying chiller of longback, but well-remembered from childhood viewing). I allude to: narratives disturbed by the idea of extra-judicial but legally sanctioned murder, police role as middle-management enforcers of the international drug trade, corruption as a structural norm rather than an isolated anomalous instance, & ultimately the mere fact that these clowns are the agents of social control and repressive by definition.

(Credit where it is due: my local police force do an unobtrusive job of maintaining relative peace in the neighbourhood & this is mostly due to a long-standing & highly scrupulous station chief. But, their actual job of "solving crimes", they comport w/ much less success.)

On available evidence the blonde monsters are a foolish people and simply unable to accomodate the straight-forward notion of "ambiguity". Perhaps alike to the Israelis they are an immature nation & cling to the frontier myths of their founding: blankly-stated good & bad caricatures of the human animal, ie Obama "good emperor", Bush II "evil emperor" (or vice versa - & what does the reflexive polarity of the argument suggest? elucidation on this in a later posting...)

Elsewise: new tom cruise vehicle is portrayal of a 'good nazi' which is an altogether chilling precedent even for the blonde monsters. There is little that was heroic about the July Plot - it was a simple matter of military expedience - a circle of generals sought to remove hitler, negotiate a peace settlement (or even an alliance...) with the western allies, & redouble their efforts killing off eastern 'untermensch'...

In this respect, its refreshing to note that Adam Curtis has acknowledged that the brutal Stalinist purges did indeed support the complete renovation of the Soviet red army - & in which respect they also, further down the track, may have provided the Russians with the military means to turn back the nazi blitzkrieg. Ambiguities don't come very much more brutal than that.

Caperucita y Pulgarcito contra los monstruos

2008-12-16T19:46:00.004+11:00

amongst multiple epiphanies delivered by the MuMesons last w/e: this Mexican kiddie shocker, as re-dubbed for yanqui consumer tastes by K Gordon Murray...

elsewise: Germaine Greer has been weighing in on fairytales closer to home, & more recent...

Outlands Ecoplex cinema: MMF08

2008-12-11T01:09:00.026+11:00

Yes: special. The Mu-Meson Archives has been the legended epicentre of Sydney underground culture for several decades (plus). Home to Jay Katz & Miss Death is a warehouse/cinema/venue abulge with fringe film insania. Finally! At last! We have brought them back to Melbourne; please make them welcome for their Ecoplex premiere! Then peel your peepers for this wig-flipping program of freak-film insania... You will see:

choice cuts from their Freaks, Geeks & Almost X-Rated Peeks: a no-attention-span collision of excerpts from insane films, senseless adds, demented educational films, weird public service announcements and much mucho more...

an unpredictable (& unforgettable!) journey through that most horribly-obscured of all celluloid ghettos: the informational film. Drawing from their extensive private collection, this survey of "social guidance cinema" explores the extreme outer-limits of: christian dating ethics - workplace hazards - perils of driving - ordnance disposal - those perverts roaming your neighbourhood - personal hygiene - and much much more!

an episode of the Phoenix5 TV series (1969 Melbourne production conceived as “the Australian Star Trek”) with the dodgiest robots ever broadcast at a unconvinced audience... A computer made of light switches? Youbetcha!

some films are best enjoyed in their trailer format, and the Archives has collected a range from the most bizarre international titles... Experience the wild world of world-wide cinema with highlights from the Turkish Exorcist, the Italian Jaws, the Brazilian Star Wars, the Indian Dracula etc etc etc

clips from their collection of rare music documentaries, and a head-spinning trip into the murky world of Para-Politics, Conspiracies and UFOlogy...

Welcome aboard, Space-brothers and –sisters!

Transworld Travelogue
- Live Cinema Performance by Jean Poole

(you may remember Jean from such previous Ecoplex live-AV scenarios as ‘Around the world in 80 minutes’, GP08)

Load up on supplies, lie back on the grass, and let that screen become your spaceship windshield for an intergalactic journey to distant stars ( and back - we don't want you to miss the next act ). Underappreciated Flying Objects along the way, may include, bootlegged Super Heros (badly green-screened by filmmakers in Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Turkey ( of course! )), Will Oldham high on a trampoline, a Mike Munro paper mache mask ( as used in Jon Safran's banned Australian TV pilots ), a 21st century German cannibal, Lucky People Centre, musical prostitutes, animated turntables, fighting gorillas, and a Soviet Union cosmonaut who returns to earth to discover the U.S.S.R. has been dismantled. In-flight zentertainment for the 90 minute journey will include video karaoke, animated interludes and a condensed history of musical cinema. BYO anti-gravity boots.
&: plus a whole bunch else (yes!)

Sound art is political: the Truman Doctrine at Gertrude St

2008-12-08T00:06:00.015+11:00

... Ant Pateras is a genius in many respects, but we don't agree on all things. eg, he cleaves to a notion that sound, "least plastic of the arts" (by his estimation) has a limited relationship to what some of us might recognise as the "real world". & which is fine; everyone is entitled to hold their differing opinion.

I'm fairly sure that at least some, and possibly most, of the other artists in the 21:00:00 exhibition (Gertrude Street Galleries thru Oct/Nov, in association with the Melbourne International Arts Festival), would agree with him on this. OK.

The context of exhibition & performance, however, is always political; it involves compromise and negotiation with inescapable material realities: where is the money coming from/who is making the decisions/which agendas are being supported or suppressed???

(and hence, what I figure to be the elementary inconsistency of Ant's line: composing and recording are likewise subject to these imperatives)

21:00:00 is/was great, and surveys a solid selection of artists/musicians. But the roster of nations they represent looks like Harry S Truman's vision of the globe - a strange way to be be approaching the world in the 21st century...

The principal member-states of the NATO alliance are represented. Finland, Austria and Switzerland have all been oriented Western/capitalist in their recent history. Japan, and the member nations of the ANZUS alliance, are what strategic planners refer to as "out-of-area" Western nations.

And that is it for the world! Africa & South and Central America have been disappeared from this planet, as has Eastern Europe and Russia. (I mean: what kind of contemporary international focus omits the culture of all the BRIC nations?)

So this is/was an exhibition proceeding from the assumptions of the previous century (and the most conservative assumptions, at that): progressive culture is the exclusive province of white capitalists and the Japanese. Historically, this kind of thinking has been a license for the oppression & exploitation of subject peoples (and its the essential reasoning behind the stolen generation, here in Australia).

I can anticipate some of the defences for the omission. I suspect it simply reflects international marketing dynamics (very little of culture, of any description, makes it thru the WestBloc embargo). The widely toured & travelled Lucas Abela reckons experimental music will be found any place there's a prosperous middle-class... And to the extent that sound art involves formal experiment with advanced technology, access may well be limited in poorer nations.

All of which is, hmmm, 'illuminating' in terms of the assumptions it reveals about experimental music & sound art...

Australian culture has a funny relationship to tradition: we adopt them from the distant geographic centres of western culture. The vast bulk of Australian government funding for music proceeds directly to the state & national opera companies and symphony orchestras. Their repertoire is, literally, 'repertory': canonical works of long-dead Germano-Austrian and Italian composers, mostly. So there's a danger of also framing local experimental music as a displaced and introduced phenomenon - which is among the things that Jon Rose warned of in this year's Peggy Glanville-Hicks memorial lecture.

And in the historical context of Australia - an immigrant nation, with a heritage of colonial dominion - and given claims towards anticipating the trends of the new century - 21:00:00 starts looking like a no-brainer (even if it doesn't necessarily sound like one). The curators' adoption of a quote from John Cage fairly summarises things: a tradition of individual genius/heroes in the romantic mould, what my [RIP] friend, Nick Zurbrugg used to refer to as the post-modern avant-garde. But are those assumptions of white & western bourgeois privilege sufficient to address a changing world?

And is this the future for creative music in Australia? Maybe.

But, I gotta say - it looks an awful lot like the past.

Tape Projects TAPR 06/07

2008-11-28T10:33:00.003+11:00

ABC-RN: Prisons mix

2008-11-14T22:56:00.007+11:00

“Penal Music for a Prison Planet”

... some of this music comes out of the prisoner rights movement, and the riots in Attica (USA) and Bathurst (Australia). A great radio doco' on the Attica rebellion can be found here.

The Night Air, ABC Radio National

Sunday 23rd November, 9.05pm
rpt Sunday 1st December, 12.05am

Ivo Malec
Bizarra
(Malec)
Triola
INA Collection GRM LP AM 830.11

Nathaniel Mayer [RIP] with The Fortune Braves
I Want Love And Affection (Not The House Of Correction)
Movers 1
Vampisoul CD Vampi 077

(MGM Studio Orchestra)
Dungeon Elevator
(Geisel/Hollander)
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Studio reference acetate 78 (no #)

The Firesign Theatre
Le Trente-Huit Cunegonde
(Gary Usher, The Firesign Theatre)
Waiting For The Electrician Or Someone Like Him
Columbia LP CS-2718

10CC
Rubber Bullets
(Godley/Creme/Gouldman)
10CC
Decca 45 Y 10248

Leonard Rosenman
Target Practice
(Rosenman)
Beneath The Planet Of The Apes OST
Film Score Monthly CD FSM Vol. 3 No. 3

Lee Hazlewood
6 Feet of Chain
(Hazelwood)
Trouble Is A Lonesome Town
Smells Like Records CD SLR 037

Gil Trythall
Folsom Prison Blues
(Cash, arr. Trythall)
Country Moog
Omni Recording Corporation CD Omni-108

Group 180
Coming Together
(Rzewski)
Group 180
Hungaroton LP slpx 12545
Gavin Friday & The Crash Ensemble
Coming Together
(Rzewski)
live recording; Dublin, 10th Nov 2005 (unreleased)

Acezantez
Gimnastiki Zu Grupu/Group Gymnastics
(Detoni)
Dubravko Detoni
Jugoton LP LSY-66005

The Pop Group
Amnesty International Report On British Army Torture Of Irish Prisoners
(The Pop Group)
Rough Trade 45 RT023

Archie Shepp
Attica Blues
(Shepp/Harris)
Attica Blues
Impulse LP AS-9222

Joan Baez
The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti-Part 2
(Baez/Morricone)
Sacco & Vanzetti OST
RCA LP LSP-4612

Vic Simms
Get Back In The Shadows
(Simms)
RCA 45 CPKS-1411

The Selector
The Selector
(Davies/Bradbury)
Chrysalis 45 K 7610

Jerry Goldsmith
The Gaz Chamber/The Rape Of The Earth/How?/Hypnosis/Chimes
(Goldsmith)
Demon Seed OST
Film Score Monthly CD FSM Vol. 6 No. 8

Cassetteboy featuring DJ Rubbish
Fly Me To New York
(Cassetteboy/Rubbish)
The Parker Tapes
Spymania CD Spy 017

Alain Savouret
Dulcinea
(Savouret)
Computer Music Currents 1
Wergo CD Wer 2021-50

AC/DC
Jailbreak
(Young/Young/Scott)
Albert Productions 45 AP-11135

Ennio Morricone
Disordini
(Morricone)
L’Istruttoria E’ Chiusa: Dimentichi OST
Dagored LP Red 150-1

Acezantez
Document 75
(Detoni)
Acezantez
Paradigm CD PD 11

Peter Thomas
Escape From The Camp
(Thomas)
Sound Music Album 5
Golden Ring Records LP S 5051-23

Bernard Parmegiani
Generiques
(Parmegiani)
Electronic Panorama – Groupe De Recherches Musicales De L’O.R.T.F.
Phillips 4LP Box 6740 001/LP 6526 003

Joe Byrd & The Field Hippies
Leisure World
(Byrd)
The American Metaphysical Circus
Columbia LP MS 7317

Toru Takemitsu
Punishment Island 3
(Takemitsu)
Complete Takemitsu Edition 3 Music For Movies 1 Disc 8
Shogakukan CD STZ-31

Pier Paolo Pasolini
Tempo Di Colera (II)
(Panagulis/Morricone)
Vi Scrivo Da Un Carcere In Grecia
RCA LP PL 31238

Nick Cave, Mick Harvey & Blixa Bargeld
Outro: The Free World
(Bargeld/Harvey/Cave)
Ghosts... Of The Civil Dead OST
Mute LP IONIC 3

Rodolfo Caesar
Les deux saisons
(Caesar)
A Arte Des Sons
Rodolfo Caesar LP RC-8859

The Residents
Jailhouse Rock
(Leiber/Stoller, arr. The Residents)
Commercial Album
Torso Records CD 413

Cheeseburger featuring Doc
Comin’ Home (Superjail theme)
(Cheeseburger)
unreleased
Kemado Records

Gordon Jenkins
The Nightmare
(Jenkins)
Seven Dreams
Decca LP DL 79011

Steven Jesse Bernstein
The No, No Man, part 2
(Bernstein/Fisk)
Prison
Sub Pop CD SP 101B

Malvina Reynolds
Little Boxes
(Reynolds)
Sings The Truth
Omni Recording Corporation CD Omni-114

Future-Retro 151108

2008-11-08T16:30:00.004+11:00

Last shindig for the year by the Sound Art kids from RMIT. They throw a good party!

The Dawson St Warehouse is just next to the trainline, between the Brunswick Baths & the police munitions depot...

Patrani po Ester

2008-11-08T01:01:00.004+11:00

Ester Krumbachova. There are some infos at imdb and cfn, but still no complete credit list; partly due to protocols of the centralised Czech film industry, and also due to the fact that she was 'banned' from working in film after 1970. Fantastic interview in Antonin Leihm's "The Politics Of Culture" (Grove Press, 1971). I think the photo above dates from sometime circa. 1969; ie, round about when she was working on Valerie & Her Week Of Wonders & We Eat The Fruit Of The Tree Of Paradise. She was the 'secret collaborator' and catalytic genius of the Czech new wave.

un regard moderne

2008-10-28T14:59:00.013+11:00

...mandatory in Paris is a visit to un regard moderne; a legended retailer of small-press and otherwise marginal comix publications. Near neighbour is the former 'Beat Hotel': one-time home to Burroughs, Gysin, Balch et al.

To be honest: I found the selection - which is sufficiently extensive as to render human egress past the leaning 'skoob' towers of accumulated graphic detritus mortally perilous - a little disappointing. Ebay has been very kind to me in recent years & I've hoovered up some horribly obscured items (principally, in the Elles Sont De Sortie line) for what was relatively dirt-cheap (& correspondingly; proof also of just how difficult specialist retail is become in an increasingly global & digitised marketplace).

Such were the boom years of the Australian economy: in retrospect I can recognise what a supremely serendipitious thing it was to be earning real money while the Australian dollar actually traded at a decent rate of exchange... Upon returning, I stifled a weary yawn to make the final Goran Bregovic gig of the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Bumped into a former colleague there, "we were worried you'd run out of money - the exchange rate went directly south for the Aussie, while you were away"... But I suspect, rather, that my timing could not have been better: I spent my savings while they still obtained a reasonable value.

Is financially much more tightened circumstances now, & perhaps not only for myself. But a joy it was to traipse about Europe in the knowledge that I didn't have to go back to work at the library. And now, the misremembered luxury of leisure moments in which to enjoy alla musique concrete vinyls and 'figuration libre' monographs. I've been hoarding gourmet artefacts of marginal creativity for the last 2 years, but with the defered expectation of ever being able to actually enjoy the damn things!

Anyways. Paris! Un Regard Moderne. Mark H found himself a graphic anthology of works by Roland Topor. I picked up the new Henriette Valium omnibus, and a collection of punky strips by Marc Caro; both of them published by L'Association (who did Persepolis, and the works of our friend Caroline's housemate, Florent)... some confoundingly beautiful books, but I was visited with much better luck at Bimbo Tower - digging up a long OOP #4 of L'Horreur est Humaine, and for a bare 4 Euros, heh heh...

Ostalgia in Krakow

2008-10-24T00:48:00.010+11:00

Alright! Now that's what I call a feature ceiling!

The Propaganda Bar in Krakow. Nice atmosphere! A mix of fiesty locals & softly-spoken expats. Iron Curtain-era iconography is their interior design schtick.

House special is the 'mad dog': vodka, a little raspberry syrup, and a dash of tabasco...

Art Brut in Europe & Australia

2008-10-23T02:18:00.036+11:00

(Psychiatric clinic/golf links? Youbetcha!)

Art Brut is seemingly enjoying increased attention in recent decades & there is ample evidence of this all over Europe. The Olomouc Museum of Modern Art just staged a revelatory survey of Czech Art Brut (this same gallery exhibited an exhaustive collection of Czech film poster art, Flashback, a couple years ago - the catalogue is stunning: seek it out if this is yr caper). Like previous exhibitions of its kind, this most recent one drew upon works from the private collection of Jan Svankmajer; among them, the botanical fabulations of the medium/mystic, Josef Kotzian.

(Josef Kotzian, Studie, 1922)

Meanwhile...Switzerland is seemingly populated by a crew of evil preppies from an unmade John Hughes film, but it is also home to the Musee de l'Art Brut - thus making it the essential centre of the known universe in respect of 'Outsider' creativity. My friend John Blades describes this place as "the greatest Museum in the world" and I totally concur: distinguished by the best collection of works I've ever seen in an art gallery, as well as sensitive presentation (tho' often in dim light, to retard fading of fragile & non-archival materials) and a scrupulous documentation. A viewing here is a profound & humbling experience. The works, synthesised from extremities of the human condition, consistently approach a quality of the absolute: uncompromising & intransigent.

(Henry Darger room at the Musee de l'Art Brut, Lausanne)

My first trip to Europe, I chanced upon some remaindered back-copies of the Italian journal, KOS; prized collectables now (Editor/Publisher, Franco Maria Ricci, since enjoys a much greater success with his journal, FMR), back then every bookshop in Firenze was throwing them out at 1000L apiece. My girlfriend & I did the rounds & tried to grab a complete set. Issue 36, Aprile-Maggio 1988, was a monograph on Adolf Wolfli, "Il creatore schizo".

The appeal of Art Brut for contemporary audiences is made nakedly apparent in Wolfli's art: more than 25,000 drawings, and 45 volumes of fantastic, fictionalised autobiography, proceeded from an adult life confined almost exclusively within institutions. But his work relates less a quality of obsession, than one of transcendance: a quasi-monastic dedication to his instinctive vocation.

Outside of hours attending the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, I spent most of 2 days at the Museum, before making a pilgrimage (of sorts) to the site of Wolfli's internment, the Waldau Asylum, on the edge of the Northern suburbs of Bern.

(the view along WolfliStrasse, Waldau Asylum. In the distance is the former residence of Doctor Walter Morgenthaler)

The Swiss are a genuinely strange bunch (and forgive me for being so unkind a couple paragraphs earlier). For all their bourgeois reserve and discretion, they can be wonderfully humane as well; the Red Cross is only 1 instance of this and the Musee de l'Art Brut is definitely another. Here in Waldau, Adolf Wolfli - a recidivist sex offender and dysfunctional psychotic - has a street and a lecture theatre named after him.

(view towards the Kunstwerkstadt - occupational therapy art workshop. Not visible, but located behind it, is the Psychiatrie Museum)

The grounds at Waldau are beautiful, but inescapably melancholy. I'm not suprised when I discover that the writer, Robert Walser, was another inmate here: the paths and parkland recall settings for so much of his own work.

Anyway. The purpose of my visit: over in the Psychiatrie Museum the pride of their collection are Wolfli's wardrobes, which are covered every inch in his drawings and musical notation...

(Robert Walser's portrait, on the (viewer's) left; Morgenthaler, on the right)

The presentation here is very different to the Musee de l'Art Brut; this Museum serves principally in support of the pedagogical function of the University Psychiatric Department, so the context is strictly diagnostic. Visitors are infrequent (and yes, it did occur to me that I might be, err, 'mistaken', for a roaming nutter, & sectioned in consequence. Happily, I was able to make my return to Lausanne unimpeded).

(sadly, a lot of detail is lost in these images, and the pencilmarks are beginning to fade in any case. Essentially, they combine Wolfli's singular musical notation, and freize-illustrations of his cosmology: the life of St. Adolf II)

Back to Aus! I originally flew out via Sydney so I could scope Without Borders down at Cambelltown; now I figure to head back up there for John Blades' Brut Loops, next Thursday 30th October at Artspace. Details:

Brut Loops
A special night of Art Brut and Loops featuring: - an introduction to Art Brut by Professor Colin Rhodes (Dean of Sydney College of the Arts and internationally recognised authority on Art Brut and outsider art).
-a visual journey through incredible outsider environments in France with Philip Hammial .
- poetry readings by Phil Hammial.
- two short documentary films about Henry Darger and the anarchitect, Richard Greaves.
- talk about machines in the Journals of Anthony Mannix by Gareth Jenkins.
- exhibition of Australian outsider art.
- audiovisual performances by Ian Andrews and The Loop Orchestra.
- a short experimental film by Rik Rue.

The Loop Orchestra will be launching their new split CD released in China with two Chinese artists and a Swedish artist.

MC: Brent Clough from Radio National

Without Borders suffers from an elementary deficiency: the quality of the work, especially in respect of the Australian content. This will not be the case next Thursday evening (I am confident).

... and plus of which: John Blades clues me up, Professor Rhodes' personal collection of American & European Outsider Art is showing at the Orange Regional Gallery. So maybe I pass thru there on my way back to home?

...typical Warsaw shops

2008-10-12T04:39:00.004+11:00

(best - & cheapest - retail outlet for "Plakaty Filmowe" in Poland is a guy selling off what is reputedly the biggest private collection in the country. No, I won't tell you how to find it; but it is literally underground.)

Kostnice Ossuary, Kutna Hora

2008-10-12T04:25:00.003+11:00

Death lives here.

Prague: day 3 - meeting Vera Chytilova

2008-10-12T04:05:00.008+11:00

... dashed back to town (from the national film archives) to met with Vera Chytilova: she, introducing a special screening of Daisies at the FAMU. Her first viewing of the film in more than a decade, & afterwards she spoke for maybe an hour an a half about the film, ethical imperatives for artists, etc. Not huge in physical stature, by any stretch, but advancing years have not diminished her unrepentant feistiness. A peak moment!

Chester Brown does Chatterley

2008-09-06T00:27:00.007+10:00

... the library has just finished accessioning a whole new batch of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions. The editorial selection - which finds room for repress of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, & Jack London's The Iron Heel - is unapologetic in its militant humanism.

What is most striking about the best of these titles is the absolutely stunning packaging: these are genuinely beautiful books. Frank Miller does artwork for the Gravity's Rainbow of Pynchon, and a Dame Darcy portrait of Dot Parker is all over that anthology. Clearly the execs at Penguin have clues, nerve, and a budget.

This one kills me! The first time I read thru that cover graphic, my eyes teared up. Chester Brown's graphic summary is the passionate & feisty epicentre of the book. In his own way, Gamekeeper Mellors is just as impotent and powerless as any of the other characters; just a bit more outspoken, is all. But the cover's tension - between the furtive tenderness of the becalmed lovers, and the righteous outrage of abased humanity - is what makes this thing so powerful. (click on the image for a better look, in a new tab)

Biff Rose S/T (liner notes)

2008-08-23T15:44:00.005+10:00

Johnny Carson: “He’s a composer, a performer, a philosopher, an electric carrot... arrgh, a charming guy - would you welcome: Biff Rose...”

Beloved by David Bowie and the Manson family, reloved by a crew of contemporary troubadour types (Devandra Bernhardt et al), Biff Rose hails from an eclipsed tradition of vaudeville artistry. It was talking pictures on large and small screens alike that put an end to all that quick-witted stagecraft, but just as they took so they also gave back and so for a while every US television station had its own humourous but topical singer/songwriter declaiming away and (sometimes) working over the ivories by way of accompaniment.

Well, Biff Rose is (or was) a bit like that; he was on television, some. Writing for stand-up guy George Carlin at first... Also: performing on variety shows hosted by Mort Sahl... tho’ Rose himself prefers the notional company of peers like Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley... (Huh?) OK... This stuff may be of some kind of significance when thinking on the work of our current Rose: the cuss words and provocative antagonism. These folks are and were the “loyal opposition”: exponents of the inflammatory arts of liberal-baiting and iconoclastic put-ons.

Anyways! His early works (especially those 2 late ‘60s LPs) betray his counter-culture sympathies and an Oedipal tension... Moreover: a boisterous good humour, and the laid-bare heart of a gentle, tender person. He is a terrifically accomplished pianist – stride-style audio slapstick, tho’ balanced with a virtuoso attention to phrasing. There’s a genuine delicacy of touch and timing, to match the intimacy of the earnest, heartfelt lyrics. The wry sardonicisms invite comparison to Tom Lehrer - who is a laughing mad cat likeways - but Rose graduated from Lehrer’s sophomore wit long years back; even his funny songs are invested with a romantic poignancy.

(etc)

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

Hugo Montenegro - Mr Groovy (liner notes)

2008-08-23T15:24:00.011+10:00

Sunshine delirium with an electronic edge

"I'm an experimenter in music. I am interested in enhancing the musical experience by utilizing dramatic effects" – Hugo Montenegro

Gratuitous guru of the groovy glee-club, Hugo Montenegro cooked the Western world’s nearest equivalent to the kind of ‘marsala’ composition so famously wrought on the Indian subcontinent by the likes of Rahul Dev Burman. No instrument is safe, and the human voice is the most ubiquitous instrument of all. Like Burman, Montenegro was adept in writing for a choir of wordless vocals; jazz-scat stylings via the innovations of their soundtrack compeer, Juan Garcia Esquivel... “Babada!”

Born to a modest New York family, World War 2 and a tour with the US navy provided youngster Montenegro with a G.I. bill place at the Manhattan School of Music. Here he applied his lessons in composition to the dance band he led outside of class. After graduation, a second tour-of-duty saw him arranging for the band at the Newport naval base; ultimate return to civilian life found him working as staff manager for Columbia Record’s king of saccharine strings, Andre Kostelantz, and Montenegro’s earliest LPs are subject to this regrettable “pazz and jop” influence.

By the dawn of the HiFi era, Montenegro was on staff at Time Records label, leading large ensembles through stomping covers of erstwhile standards like Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King (from the particularly choice Bongos And Brass LP). Work at Columbia Records had also brought him into the orbit of Harry Belafonte, and through the early and mid-60s Montenegro was arranging and conducting for Belafonte’s elaborate live performances. As Producer of Belafonte’s The Midnight Special LP in 1961, he hired a fledgling Bob Dylan as session harmonica player – but the gruelling rehearsal schedule proved too much for the aspirant star, and Dylan reportedly quit after recording only a single track...

By 1966, Montenegro had relocated from New York to Hollywood and was writing and recording soundtrack music both for Columbia Pictures, and Columbia’s television company, Screen Gems. Contracted to score Hurry Sundown for Otto Preminger, he brought Belafonte back into the studio to record the film’s theme. Other assignments on Western B-films followed; by 1969 he was scoring star vehicles Charro! (Elvis Presley) and The Undefeated (John Wayne). Around this same time, Montenegro’s staccato double-time adaptation of 50s West Coast jazz to an amplified rhythm section - fuzztone guitar and surf drums swinging a bossa beat - made him as responsible as anyone for 60’s spy-jazz style. 2 LPs worth of music from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV series suggested him to the producers of the Matt Helm franchise, but between scoring The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969) Montenegro enjoyed perhaps his most unlikely commercial success.

(etc)

...one of the (many) great things to admire about that cover: the "Goodies" typeface.

Available now from the Omni Recording Corporation

Listen w/ Henson

2008-07-08T15:54:00.010+10:00

Fortuitous ebay score: a Jim Henson novelty 45 from 1960 - "Tick-Tock Sick" & "The Countryside"; 2 sides of crypto-beatnik wordjazz riffage w/ amply swinging utility percussion in back... DL the audio here.

Jim Henson retrospective happens at the ACMI in September: encompassing most aspects of his work, from early anarchic commercials (see below), experimental routines with electronic music pioneers Raymond Scott & Walter Sear, thru to more familiar muppets movies & tv shows. Program details after that link...

RAMÓN PUYOL

2008-05-15T18:22:00.014+10:00

... 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... & I figure the metamorphosis of his left foot into a tree stump to be the allegorical indication that this character is safely rooted to a position far-in-back of the front lines.

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 (2nd thought: maybe not so cheerfully) house Puyol was born in:

L'oeil ecoute: on sound-image correspondences

2008-05-04T19:06:00.017+10:00

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"

2008-04-22T14:57:00.013+10:00

[this has been re-issued on vinyl by Wah Wah; the DL is deleted, buy it instead from them.]

... 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

not any more

Haackula (liner notes)

2008-04-22T14:31:00.007+10:00

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

Szeki Kurva: multikultiultraturbopunkfolkfreakcore

2008-03-28T00:26:00.005+11:00

"Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome on board Air Bosnia Herzegovina. May we take the opportunity to ask you to extinguish all burning objects, including fellow passengers. Now put your head between your legs and KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE..."

... this one has been a decade in the scaring-up, but ebay delivered where more conventional music retailers had previously failed. Now I have 2 of 3 CDs released by Szeki Kurva.

Difficult to characterise this stuff in any meaningful shorthand fashion. There are the casually scattered brutal beats of breakcore. There's a wonderfully inspired choice of samples from Hungarian trad tunes. And its informed by a politics of social collapse that was the Balkans in the 1990s - rustic village life sundered by anachronistic tribal hatreds.

I'm not clear that there was so much other music this thrilling in the 1990s (and this stuff was hardly "available" at the time...) I heard about it from ex-housemate & congenial maniac, Glenn Normal (where he'd heard of it, I'm less clear).

Anyways: is killer! The discs are inconsistent, but the best tracks are at the pinnacle of the style & Szeki Kurva have that niche all to theyselves. Some of it might bear comparison to Curse ov Dialect's first long player on Mush; tho' for its ethos & execution, rather than the actual "sound".

Some infos:

Download their debut CD on Iris-Light, "Music for Joyriders" - unavailable for long years

Mailorder the other 2 discs (label, Iris-Light, also do a comp of Joe Banks' Disinformation project, and a DVD of solar VLF recordings...)

Interviews, here & here

... Szeki Kurva are no more, but some members raise a ruckus still as The Revolting Cocks

eggheads vs egocasting

2008-03-27T22:56:00.008+11:00

... followed this link from James Howard Kunstler's website (an interesting character - stunning for his prescience as well as his casual command & synthesis of a number of different technical disciplines eg: urban planning, architecture, resource economics, more! His blogging tends to curmudgeonly lambast, but all his books are distinguished by their abundance of dry wit; "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century" & "Geography of Nowhere: the rise & decline of America's man-made landscape" are both recommended).

Anyways. Downloaded the podcast at that Berkeley link. Essential proposition of the debate: the sheer abundance of information on the internet, much of it trivial, is distracting we the citizens from more meaningful & authoritative sources of information. And wasn't this always transparently the promise of the internet: a globe of atomised individuals staring into their screens when they might be engaged at more genuine social activity? Uber-geeks like Ken Wark and Mark Amerika have a lot to answer for... (no, I won't provide a link to either of those buffoons. They belong in a remake of Robert Downey Snr's Pound)

There's something to the argument - much of web content is worthless garbage (even if that criteria is essentially a matter of personal taste). BUT should we necessarily be mourning the decline of commercial mass media institutions, in the forms in which they existed in C20? Its a fascinating debate.

Andrew Keen (author, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy") is prone to many of the worst flaws he identifies in the bloggers/youtubers/etc that are the subject of his critique. His argument proceeds from a logical fallacy...

BUT: the cat has some clues. When I'm teaching at Uni, I can't help but be struck by the seeming inability of many younger students to discriminate between different sources of information: to determine fact from spin, sort the material fact from opinion/advertorial/propaganda.

So: the podcast makes a stimulating listen, and exemplifies the web's potential for Open University -style info-sharing. It also serves to remind me just how poorly we're served in Australia by the folks that should be our "public intellectuals" - too many of our debates on social & cultural policy are the arena of narrow sectional interests (you can tune into ABC radio anyday to cop these thinktank commentators flapping at the gums about some nonsense or other).

(Where it all resolves): the idea, maybe attributable to Paulo Friere, that the function of education is to provide future citizens not with facts per se, but to equip them with the kind of in-built "bullshit detector" that will enable them to evaluate information, and apply it in meaningful everyday ways.

... Earlier today, I bumped into my pal James Hullick; we talked about the postgrad seminar we both attend. And we were agreed: an idea is not an outcome in itself, its a tool from which to fashion an outcome. Ideas can & should be critiqued - but, ultimately, the point becomes: what sort of use can you make of them? That podcast is replete with lucid & articulate thinking: useful tools, aplenty.

the spiral gouge

2008-03-19T22:09:00.006+11:00

DJ gigs upcoming:

2 nights for the Melbourne International Biennale of Exploratory Music:

Monday 31st March
Tuesday 1st April (ha!)

Corner Hotel, Richmond

(killer & sensational line-up for all shows, dedicated attention to sonic qualities etc - mandatory attendance!)

Once more, into the bush...

2008-02-23T12:38:00.020+11:00

GOLDEN PLAINS FESTIVAL 2008 - OUTLANDS ECOPLEX CINEMA

Rituals of the Captured Moment
Feature-length monsterpiece of outsider-vision by Nylstoch. Probably the most destroyed film ever made in Aus. Not for the puny-lobed...

Helmethead

Rod Cooper & Anthony Magen

“Semi-visible mental furniture of the ‘helmet-head’; a literal dream-screen...”

Expanded cinema performance insania from this experimental musician & instrument builder (Cooper) & all-around ratbag/landscape architect (Magen).

Around The World in 80 Minutes

Live Cinema Performance by Jean Poole

Continent hopping cinema under the stars, slowly spanning the globe with weird and rare clips, animations, tv snippets, instructional videos, internet oddities, edits, remakes and remixes all cobbled together live with a microphone, audio effects unit, laptop, dvd player and video mixer. Expect karaoke sing-a-longs, E.T. in the Middle East, custom animated overlays, South American psychedelia, live overdubbed sound effects, commentary & soundtracks, perverse Japanese TV gameshows, live video remixing and effects, Star Trek as reimagined by various cultures, skateboarding monkeys, banned Australian TV, wrestling octopi and all kinds of crowd participazioni~!

PLUS: the usual garbage sandwich of idiot cinema (that only a mother could love)

Crazy mixed-up whirled mix, ABC RN

2008-02-22T21:34:00.025+11:00

Sunday night on ABC Radio National, as part of The Night Air 8.35pm AEST
(rpt broadcast: midnight, Saturday 1st March - or 12am Sunday 2nd March, if you prefer)

AFTER IMPERIAL MONO-CULTURE, beyond the limit of maps: vintage pop & soundtracks from Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Czech & Slovakia, Croatia, Egypt, Iran, India, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Chile & points inbetween thereof...

Denizalti Ruzgarlan Okay Temiz
45: Yonca Plak YCAS-076

... super-fine Turkish moog funk from this percussionist, composer & instrument builder extraordinaire. Recorded in 1974; later re-issued on (Turkish expat) Ilhan Mimaroglu's Finnadar label.

Is there life on the earth? (Makavejev/Hadzijakis) Anne Lonnberg
Sweet Movie OST CD (Lyra 1152)

... recurring freak/libertarian musical motif, from this monsterpiece of '70s Euro art/porn cinema.

Podatij Mi Troche Slonca Bemibem
Bemowe frazy LP (Muza SXL 1013)

... the Polish jazz/funk/prog scene has been the subject of avid collector attentions for a while now. This one is amazing for the way the female wordless vocals meander in a heterophony around the horn lines. I first discovered this track thru the "East of Cosmic" mixes of DJ Slobodan, from Belgrade's youth/opposition radio station B92.

??? Unknown song (Bazant/Hala/Malasek) Jirina Bohdalova & chorus
Dama Na Kolejich OST (unreleased)

... an unreleased track from the score of this 1966 Iron Curtain feminist pop-musical. Contrary to Western propaganda & historical myopia, the Iron Curtain produced some of the world's most colourful & creative popular cinema. The lyric explores that abiding conflict of the socialist "new woman": how to be feminine, & attract a mate, after a hard day on the factory floor.

Phonomorphia III (Detoni) Acezantez
Jugoslav Avant-Garde Music LP (Philips 6521 028)

... still largely unknown in the West, the Croatian composer Dubravko Detoni was a champion of post-WW2 modernism in his native Yugoslavia; after stints in the experimental studios at Warsaw, Paris & Darmstadt, Detoni was closely involved with the Zagreb Biennale of contemporary music, and performing music with the live electroacoustic ensemble, Acezantez. He continues to perform & record to this day.

??? music (edit) Kurt Grieder?
Samac OST (unreleased)

... the work of Zagreb Film re-defined creative animation in the 1950s & '60s; Samac (Eng: Alone) is generally considered to be the film that launched the new Zagreb style internationally (after its screening at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival). Music credit goes to Kurt Grieder, but I suspect this early electronic pop has been "borrowed" from another source - Grieder's score for a 1962 animation by the same Director, Mala Kronika (Eng: Everyday Chronicle), is constructed from an elaborate remix of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack!

Title Music (edit) Zdenek Liska
Ovoce stromu rajskych jime OST (unreleased)

... more unreleased soundtrack music, again from Czech, this time by the long-standing collaborator of the animator, Jan Svankmajer. The chorus translates in English as "tell me the truth". Both this, and the previous film (Sedmikrasky, Eng: Daisies, see below) by Director Chytilova, represent a singular pinnacle of international cinema - recommended!

Abgad Hawaz (???) Laila Morad
Laila Morad, Volume 2 LP (Soutelphan GSTP 54)

... stomping Egyptian jazz. Lovin' that tap-dance breakdown! I always had this one figured as being from a soundtrack (see below: Ghazl il banat of 1949) - what is immediately apparent is just how restrained the image is, in comparison to the wild, up-tempo music.

Chee ro bavar konam (???) Googoosh
The Best of Googoosh Vol. 5: Kavir (Caltex Records CD 2047)

... Googoosh is the most prominent pop vocalist from Iran, with a career spanning from the 1960s into the present. She works across both traditional Persian & contemporary Western styles. I've also seen the title of this track transliterated to English as Chiro bavir konam.

Title Music Rahul Dev Burman
Teesri Manzil OST LP (EMI 3AEX-5109)

... RD 'Pancham' Burman is probably the defining composer of the archetypal "Bollywood" musical style - a 'masala' of different genres, instrumental voices, rhythms, melodies & time signatures - achieving a colourful accomodation of traditional Indian & contemporary Western pop music styles...

Baithen Hain Kya Uske Pas (S D Burman/Majrooh; arr. R D Burman) Asha Bhosle
Jewel Thief OST LP (EMI 3AEX-5146)

... his father, Sachin Dev Burman, remains for many listeners (native Hinds, especially) the most important composer of Subcontinental cinema's "Golden Age". Sometimes, tho', he enlisted his son to help him chart more modern styles.

I want your love (Hendricks; arr. Qi) Grace Chang
The Age of Shanghainese Pops 1930-1970 CD (EMI/Pathe 724353094324)

... fiery vocal athletics from the gorgeous 'Ge Lan' Chang, as accomplished an actress as she was a musician. Ge Lan was the first Canto-pop singer to achieve popular success in Western territories, recording an LP for Capitol in the late 1950s. This style of East Asian jazz has a long and ambiguous legacy, hailing back to the nationalist period between the world wars.

Unwilling Heart (???) Ros Sereysothea
Ros Sereysothea's Collection 02 CD (Khmer Rocks no no.)

... smouldering torch-jazz from Sereysothea, perhaps the most prominent female singer of '60s & '70s Khmer pop & jazz styles (& with quite a few soundtrack credits as well). I have a definite love for the tonal languages of SE Asia - killer!

Cabaret Tragico theme (Esquivel) Columba Dominguez
Cabaret Tragico OST LP (RCA Victor MKL 1088)

... early work from Juan Garcia Esquivel, for this Mexican nightclub noir. All the trademark Esquivel motifs are already in evidence - the wild dynamic flux (quieter vocal parts going into bombastic horn charts), wordless chorus, Alvino Rey's electric guitar twang. Somewhere, I have an RD Burman soundtrack where the choir is all over that 'zu-zu' wordless thing - an indication of just how widely the Esquivel style was admired & imitated.

El derecho de vivir en paz Victor Jara
El Derecho De Vivir En Paz CD (WEA CD 8573 87606-2)

... the great Chilean folk-singer Jara, with what is perhaps his signature: "they deserve to live in peace" - and a sentiment that informed this selection of music.

some correspondences: Grandieux>>Lynch>>Bunuel>>the Spanish Civil War

2008-02-21T16:28:00.018+11:00

(reverse order)

Y/day, one of the local op shops yielded up a book on the Spanish Civil War. Interesting fact at p. 53:

"... after the collapse of the Bourbons in the Napoleonic Wars, the Church, gaining popularity from its championship of the opposition to Napoleon, became the centre of resistance to liberal ideas. Its most violent protagonists grouped themselves into the Society of the Exterminating Angel."
(Hugh Thomas, "The Spanish Civil War" 1961 Penguin p/b)

Which would merely serve to confirm something already well known (I guess): Bunuel's films are taking place in all kinds of amazing metatextual arenas. The quote above provides a wry joke on the 'protagonists' of another Spanish drama, his El Angel exterminador (1962) - suggesting a sinister motive for that seemingly innocent bourgeois dinner party. Bunuel's fantasy of revenge on Falangist conspirators? Maybe...

Anyways, Bunuel was alike to David Lynch (and very few others) in that he often took responsibility for sound chores with his films. Lynch is more given to ominous timbral mass; Bunuel's soundtracks are punctuated by a sly form of sonic surrealism. I treated with some of this for the 'cognitive dissonance' series for The Night Air (ABC RN), & Aranda makes mention of it in his Bunuel bio-crit... But listen to some of the off-camera but diegetic sound effects in (especially) The Milky Way or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie & you'll hear what I mean.

Whether consciously or not, Lynch's most recent (& remarkable) feature, Inland Empire, owes a considerable debt to a film by Philippe Grandieux of a couple years previous: La Vie nouvelle. This is true not just of both the audio-image technique, but also of its seedy reckoning with a sexuality that might encompass prostitution and violence, and a disjointed narrative structure that never completely explicates just WTF?!? is actually going on. Both films might be surveying a certain kind of mental landscape; the margins of LA, in the case of Lynch's film, and a darkly visioned underbelly of former Iron Curtain countries (the presence of the UNProFor peacekeepers suggests Sarajevo) in the Grandrieux... what the situationists used to call 'psychogeography'.

Lotsa links:

Exterminating Angel review on Slant

some Bunuel action from senses of cinema

Calanda's Bunuel Centre

Religion in the films of Bunuel

Inland Empire homepage

Adrian Martin on La Vie nouvelle, at KinoEye

An interview with Grandrieux, from Martin's Rouge

Another piece on La Vie nouvelle and more, here

Toronto Psychogeographical Society

Psychogeography and the derive, by Sadie Plant

(liner notes) Malvina Reynolds... Sings the Truth

2008-02-21T16:03:00.005+11:00

Conscientious refusenik within the belly of the U.S. monster, Malvina Reynolds sometimes puts me in mind of Lillian Gish’s character in Night of the Hunter. Adoptive Mother to a fragile human flotsam set adrift by the “Great" Depression, her home the concluding and compassionate refuge to a raggedy Hansel and Gretel’s down-river transit through the heart of Amerikan darkness; modest in resource, but steadfast in her principles – she’s warm, if a little awkward, and possessed both of a great affection for her fellow humans and a respect for the bounties of nature. And for all of this, she does not retreat from an absolutely feistiness in defence of what she takes to be sacred.

Reynolds, the Unitarian atheist, seeks for & recovers the dignity and divinity of all living things. Born in the first year of a century of total war, she testifies to the best and worst of human behaviour. A keen intellect lends her work a playful quality and its occasional sharp, acerbic humour. An instinctive socialist, she proceeds from that honourable antimonian tradition of left-wing Jewish émigrés - now largely eclipsed and forgotten - to which the progressive strands of North American civic life owe so much.

(etc)

now available from the Omni Recording Corporation

merchandising psychopharmacology

2008-02-10T23:52:00.001+11:00

DIY cinema notes (local)

2008-01-25T23:43:00.000+11:00

Nice coverage in today's Age for my friend (one-time Brisbane art/punk compeer), Dean McInerny. A link to the article is here

... Had the pleasure of dinner w/ Dean twice in the last week; an avuncular cat & possessed of a rare and lucid intelligence. Timecapsules is his regular intervention into local screen culture & his venue, a muy simpatico bar/gallery within a Collingwood warehouse conversion, is probably the most agreeable local forum for film screenings.

Irving Gribbish celebrated 10 years of continuous screenings with his Splodge! Film Society at the Empress of India Hotel, late last year - a milestone that passed seemingly unremarked in the local media. (Irving probably needs to do something about maintaining his on-line presence, but it is also remarkable that he should be so casual about it...)

Anyways, Dean related to me part of his interview/conversation (missing from the published text), & he made the point that a contemporary audience is accustomed to the phenomenon of a DJ choosing a mix of tunes; why not a film curator doing the same thing in a public space, but with the moving image? And while Dean is quick to acknowledge the evident differences in the social functions of music & cinema, he has a point - Irving has exhaustive historical smarts on US comedy & animation (among other things); Dean has an acute sensitivity to radical politics & camp aesthetics. The audience at their screenings is assured of revelations, even when viewing seemingly familiar films. Those epiphanies proceed from the respective curatorship.

... Of course I tend to think the whole thing is essentially unsustainable at a personal level - the audiences are typically modest and diminishing all the time. How much time & energy (not to mention: your own money) can a curator commit to a project like this? Thankfully, they persist.

(An historico-legal aside: film societies in Australia began in the 1960s on university campuses. While film societies presume a measure of, unnh, "discretion" in the application of copyright law to their activities, the law as-such only provides formal exemptions to strictly "educational" screenings...

So what happened? Well, after the original drafting of Australian copyright law in 1968, social agitators of a cultured persuasion recognised that film societies were a productive means of building and supporting creative communities. This trend is exemplified by the Workers Entertainment Association, operating out of Sydney...

If they changed their name to the WEA Film Study Group to facilitate some limited state funding, they never compromised their unique (imminently oppositional) political stance. Extreme art, as workingpeople's culture. For cheap! And with trade union affiliation!)

* & not defunct, as previously stated - check the link...

I think everyone that persists at this particular endeavour shares some variety of that politic. The point is: cinema is a social phenomenon.

The alternative? Atomised individuals staring into their mobile phones...

... which finds a certain correspondence with this great bit of investigative journalism into the politics & commercial interests behind facebook, from the Guardian

More in this thread, "shortly". Meantime, some links:

Unlike to ACMI - which arguably deserves to be the subject of an ACCC lawsuit in the Federal Court because its commercial operations (repertory cinema, festival venue) are both state-subsidised and in direct competition with commercial cinema operations (the government isn't supposed to compete with existing private industries!) - the new Australian Cinematheque is showing some remarkable programs; imported prints, curated for a local audience...

Head of film programming at ACMI is Richard Sowada; interesting character with some fascinating perspectives on cinema exhibition in Australia. He really needs to think on ACMI's breach of Federal law, but...

Jack Stevenson is one of the most prominent champions of this area internationally. Here's a link to my review of his book (which is great: mostly (the book, that is)).

Senses of Cinema's Film Culture Forum, from a couple years back.

Henri Chopin 1922 - 2008

2008-01-13T13:38:00.001+11:00

"... in response to the question of whether or not Chopin should be categorized as a composer or a poet, the best critical solution seems to be to suggest that as a result of this research the frontier between poetry and music no longer exists."

Henri Chopin, interviewed by Nick Zurbrugg, Paris 12th January 1992

Henri Chopin at Ubuweb

poesie sonore, documents

films

"Why I am the author of Sound Poetry & Free Poetry"

(... I'll add more to this post - excerpts from the exhibition catalogue for Chopin's retrospective at the Qld College of Art Gallery - in a couple days (got 3 pieces of writing due tomorrow!))

and now the screening starts

2008-01-07T22:16:00.000+11:00

(difficult to tell from the photo: but that screen is a little more than 8 metres wide, by around 6-&-a-half metres high... and some 36 metres distant from the caravan annexe/biobox...)

Heartbeat of Africa

2007-12-11T14:55:00.000+11:00

... back to home (after a further couple weeks in Brisbane). Made a garage sale on Sunday morning; found this - which is not quite what the title might suggest - among a haul of ethnomusicological vinyls.

So far as I can tell, the original (Series 1) releases in Sapra's 'Heartbeat of Africa' series were all recorded by David Fanshawe; otherwise famed for his African Sanctus LP. Chances are, these are the audible fruits of the field recordings that he, unnh, 'harvested' for that disc, and its companion, Arabian Fantasy.

Most of the recordings that I've found on this label document the musical traditions of East Africa, but at least one (CMIL 92, Pearl Divers of Bahrain) is from further afield. Bits & pieces from these 7s were compiled to a pair of Nonesuch Explorer LPs, both of which are currently available on CD. Almost all the rest has been out of print for decades - a great shame, as it represents an exhaustive survey of a stunning wealth of ritual and festive musics, sounds of bird & beast, and local ambience. All of them are beautifully recorded

Anyways: "The Wagogo are a little known people who live in central Tanzania, around Dodoma. Those who have met them rate them as one of the most musical tribes in Africa. Their variety of home made instruments and vigorous dances come perhaps nearest to the accepted Western concept of music; yet Gogo music remains unquestionably African..."

Sensational music, like everything I've heard in this series. Dating from the early 1970s. Sometime soon I'll post up a link for DL of some of this material.

(An aside: I think all of the 'Heartbeat of Africa' 7s that I've found in Melbourne came originally from the same West Brunswick garage sale, back in 2000 - the grandchildren of a deceased evangelist clearing his cluttered house. The entire top floor of that place was a god-bothering home cinema. I guess there's a chance that character was connected to some kind of missionary activity?)

... For recordings of African music within more popular idioms, albeit from the other side of the Continent, check the amazing Voodoo Funk blog: recommended!

Esma does Epping

2007-11-10T14:14:00.001+11:00

and here we jump the time tunnel heading back aways: is now, sunday 14th of october ...

so I'm a week back from Brisbane; where I momentarily recovered my human citizenship in company my kinfolks - gathered for my Mum's 60th b-day - and making the acquaintance also of new small humans: twin nephews Sam & Jo, who'd winged over from Eire a couple days previous with their own Mother, and my long-absent Sister, Libby (photos to follow)

20 after 7 in the pm, the phone is buzzing & its Anthony Magen asking if I'm feeling "spontaneous"...

Lord help me: but no, dude - I have a bunch stuff to do, perched afront my overheated PC all day (& it only then occurs to me that I have neither eaten since breakfast nor even showered which may demonstrate just how tenuous my human citizenship can be)

"Esma Redzepova is playing tonight in Epping - a final show before she flies out of Australia..."

Ah but fortune has visited a rare & consoling boon upon me: solitary regret of the previous w/e's flight northwards was passing up the chance to make what had been advertised as Esma's only Melbourne shindig...

... so 10 minutes later we're driving north into remote & unfamiliar suburbs, past the advisable limits of human habitation. I'm wearing my 2nd most floridly colourful shirt & Anthony is similarly attired & we're working thru the bag of apples I brought along for nourishment. Any expectations are already confounded halfway from the city: this is by way of an adventure! Our destination, an industrial estate. And here we find a Macedonian function centre which achieves that rare marriage of 'wedding cake' architectural confection & prime iron-curtain era brutalism: the venue for this evening's show...

The audience is polite & restrained, but visibly & abundantly happy. While I suspect we're most likely the only folks there of a non-Balkan extraction, I recognize before long that for the local Macedonians this is an occasion of genuine community celebration.

(photos of her show up in Sydney at the Bankstown Football Club should provide a fairly near indication of what kind of scenario we were in...)

So myself & Anthony are a little by way of outsiders here, but the mood is so exhuberantly jovial that while our presence is at first quizzically noted nobody seems at all bothered by it: just a pair of white-boy nerds w/ tasteless shirts. (& at this point I was glad that I'd only worn my 2nd most colourful shirt)

Anyways, the band played for 4 hours with barely a half-hour break, and were still blasting away when we swung out to the car at midnight. Anthony clued me that the musicians are actually gathered from among Esma's adopted children(!)

Esma herself is diminutive and homely but completely charming and in all these respects reminded me very much of Asha Bhosle... also for the fact of her peerless stature within this particular musical culture. Despite her tiny size, and an indifferent PA, she works her way through a repertoire of new & old tunes (I couple of which I even recognise). The music almost provides the audience a licence to emote: before long they loosen up; money gratuitiously changes hands as notes are pressed into the instruments of the wandering players and the crowd happily dance a meandering cocek with Esma at its centre. Her singing is powerfully expressive, but she gave little indication of how demanding the performance must have been (several times she vanished off stage, only to return a few minutes later in a new and even more theatrical costume).

The whole thing put me in mind of some evangelical faith-healings I'd been to as a teenager, or the rare concerts by touring bands in the small country Qld town I grew up in: a magical evening.

briefly by way of explanation my absence

2007-11-01T20:34:00.000+11:00

... ok well i been plenty busy lately. some folks have ample of discretionary time to be attending to their blog/facebook/myspace & etc - but i am not those people

this week its shooting a tv add for the greens. last week it was finishing some tracks for the next tape projects, unnh, "project". week before that, recording a show for abc radio national. & top of the "to do" list right now is sorting stuff for the next meredith music festival & writing liner notes for the next 2 releases on omni.

anyways: i did catch most of the Merce Cunningham & co events at the recent Melb festival: 2 concerts by a quartet of Christian Wolff, David Behrman, Takehisa Kosugi & John King, and 2 performances of dance pieces by the Merce C Dance Co...

... this clip is also by way of alluding to the new blog of quockenzocker, surveying documentary & other footages of avant musical activities.

more, "shortly"...

kevin rudd & the ICJ, pt 2

2007-10-04T21:57:00.000+10:00

... Here's something I stumbled on, in the course of my research. The International Court of Justice has found Isreal's apartheid wall to be illegal.

The UN general assembly has voted overwhelmingly for Isreal to comply with the ICJ's decision: Australia was one of 6 nations voting against that resolution.

So, I've emailed Mr Rudd to enquire on where he stands on this issue...

dickhead of the week: kevin rudd

2007-10-04T18:12:00.000+10:00

PM-to-be, Kevin Rudd, once visited a strip club with Col Allan, Aus-expat editor of the New York Post...

The Post rather famously declared George II the "winner" of an "election" that he'd lost (but that he later "won"). It's owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Editor Allan supports the Neo-con agenda, & US military intervention in the Middle East (including Iran).

Rudd has now declared that, under his government, Australia would seek to bring the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, before the International Criminal Court.

Rudd's indictement: incitement to genocide, based on Ahmadinejad's declaration to wipe Isreal off the map.

Rudd obviously has much less facility with Farsi than he does with Chinese: Ahmadinejad's oft repeated statement is a mistranslation...

Admadinejad actually quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, who died seventeen years previously, as saying, "the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time"

(from: http://www.juancole.com/2006_05_01_juanricole_archive.html)

[Ahmadinejad] made an analogy to Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government, which Khomeini had said "must go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Again, Ariel Sharon erased the occupation regime over Gaza from the page of time.

I should again underline that I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for, not to mention the odious Khomeini, who had personal friends of mine killed so thoroughly that we have never recovered their bodies. Nor do I agree that the Israelis have no legitimate claim on any part of Jerusalem. And, I am not exactly a pacifist but have a strong preference for peaceful social activism over violence, so needless to say I condemn the sort of terror attacks against innocent civilians (including Arab Israelis) that we saw last week. I have not seen any credible evidence, however, that such attacks are the doing of Ahmadinejad, and in my view they are mainly the result of the expropriation and displacement of the long-suffering Palestinian people.

...UN security council resolution 242 (1967) calls on Isreal to withdraw from the occupied territories, ie, get its military out of Jerusalem.

So, relative understanding of international law:

Admadinejad 1,

Rudd 0.

... how does the New York Post report Admadinejad's statement?

That's right!

Admadinejad supports the right of return for Palestinean refugees; a bit controversial in some quarters, but the international community has voted on this one & UN security council resolution 89 (1950) supports the legality of just such an outcome....

revised score:

Admadinejad 2,

Rudd 0.

Admadinejad also supports a unified state in Isreal/Palestine, with a popularly elected democratic government.

Whoops! Palestineans would be in the majority - just as they were before 1948.

(Hmmm... Personally, I think a 2 state solution might be a better solution - much safer for everybody.)

Democracy: its a great idea in principle...

Now as for Australian "democracy": did I do a Rip Van Winkle here? I'm struggling to recall when it was that I voted on the invasion of Iraq?

Because, under the Geneva convention, that invasion was an illegal war of agression.

ie: a war crime

in fact, (quote from the Nuremberg trial transcripts) it "is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Hmmm... Johnny Howard, how would you like a taxpayer-subsidised trip to Brussels?

We've got a cold, dark prison cell waiting for you.

Q of the G: performing in St Albans this w/e...

2007-10-02T01:39:00.001+10:00

Thx to Balkan beast DJ Delay for clueing me to this caper...

Big news! Esma Redzepova will be performing this Saturday evening at the Croatian Centre in St Albans.

Redzepova - sometime actress, & Nobel peace prize nominee - occupies an Olympian pinnacle of Roma femme-vox. Some readers will be familiar w/ her singing from the Borat soundtrack, but here is the earliest recording of her's I have to hand - a 1979 cassette of A Bre Ramce.

Dig!

Not her first local appearance, but she doesn't make it Aus so very frequently...

... the Balkan beasts explore this sonic terrain in their regular club nights: this Thursday at Horse Bazaar, and Friday at Bar Open.

anarchists expose zombie nun racket

2007-09-27T23:25:00.001+10:00

(Daily Mail, 3 August 1936, p. 10.

Reproduced in: Caroline Brothers' War And Photography: A Cultural Reader)

"All religions are domains of the devil" - Ilhan Mimaroglu

We remember: Khmer musics

2007-08-31T12:57:00.001+10:00

... It was un-proud Australian journalist, John Pilger, who initially alerted international citizens to the horrors of the Cambodian killing fields. Pilger defines his professional mission as a "guardian of the public memory", invoking these words of Milan Kundera: "The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

The Maoist political program of Pol Pot had a very different intention; it sought to erase the past - to declare a revolutionary 'tabula rasa': Year Zero. To that end, books and ancient texts were burned, buildings were levelled, and vast human populations were murdered.

3 decades later, and history has liquidated Pol Pot - if not his memory, or that of the atrocities he visited on his fellow citizens. Now the task of recovering the history of Khmer culture has enlisted humans from about the globe; 1 of my favourite is DJ bUMp, of Defective Records. He's been kind enough to send me a copy of the Cambodian Psych-Out complication... My colleague, Sokha Suy, is going to do a little translation for him.

Mr bUMp relates that several luminaries of the Khmer pop scene were involved in the Royal Orchestra, so for yr delectations I'm posting this LP: UNESCO Collection Musical Sources/Art Music from South-East Asia IX-3 Royal Music of Cambodia...

"This record is dedicated to those magnificent artists, the royal dancers and musicians of Cambodia" - Jacques Brunot, January 1970. Download it here.

The music bears analogy to Javanese and Balinese Gamelan, but is closer in style to the traditions of Malaysia and Thailand. Wonderfully melifluous, and supported by a female choir who sing in a language which is essentially devoid of the harsh guttural consonants of Anglo-Saxon dialects. Recorded on the eve of the coup which would depose Norodom Sihanouk, the palace orchestra employs antique instruments tuned to a traditional scale, and the choir has been augmented to reflect its size at the beginning of the 20th century. A little over 5 years later, and all those instruments and most of the musicians, singers and dancers were 'liquidated' by Pol Pot & his crew.

There is something of an irony that these recordings were made by UNESCO: Cambodia is the only nation to have suffered an embargo on UN aid & assistance. Instead, food & medicine were directed to the Khmer Rouge militia of Citizen #1, in accordance with the strategic interests of the Western democracies.

Cambodian musicians were recording extraordinary pop and psychedelic music in the late '60s and early '70s - music which reflected their indigenous traditions, but made ample accomodations to the alien influence of Western culture. Those unique stylings are enjoying a revival through several documentaries and a succession of CD compilations...

(promo for the new documentary on Cambodia's secret history of rock music, Don't Think I've Forgotten)

(trailer for the recently completed biopic of Ros Sereysothea, The Golden Voice)

Some links:

the KhmerRocks website - an exhaustive catalogue of this music, for sale on CD or MP3.

Mr B. Normal's Cambodian Swing Machine compilation (download)

Nik Cohn's article on Khmer Rock for the Guardian (note, tho', that the Khmer Rouge were supported by the Peoples Republic of China, and engaged in a bitter conflict against the communist Vietnamese - an expression of millenial animosities between these distinct cultures).

some information on the contemporary Khmer music scene...

John Pilger: The War on Democracy

2007-08-29T00:35:00.000+10:00

John Pilger's newest documentary (and the first produced expressly for theatrical distribution) is The War on Democracy. Not so far from its Australian release; Pilger will be introducing a couple screenings as part of a promotional visit - Melbourne's turn is at the Nova, evening of 20th September...

Pilger can be partisan, & is sometimes prone to agit-prop. Not necessarily a bad or dishonourable thing: Pilger's docos of the late '70s (& beyond) not only alerted the world to the catastrophe of Cambodia, but led to millions of dollars in charitable donations from the international public... This, over a period in which the governments of USA, UK, and other western nations (Australia!) were maintaining military and material support to the genocidal Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot.

The thesis of his new film echoes that of an Argentinean documentary of a couple years back; Memoria del Saqueo by Pino Solanas... (from my review of the time) "Solanas’ documentary raises some troubling questions about the economic function of representative democracy in the third world – is it just a convenient means of delivering legitimacy to the familiar pattern of imperial rapine? That ‘blonde monster’ to the North throws its long shadow over Argentine history, and the shift from rule by military junta to elected government has failed to deliver material improvement to the lives of most Argentineans; rather, state enterprises were sold to alien interests, and the foreign capital seemingly embezzled to launder huge fortunes in narco-profits..."

Within the South American context, Pilger's doco is dealing more with the specific experience of Venezuela. It is a colourful recent history, and Pilger has declared his admiration for the new varieties of "direct democracy" which are emerging there... and in contrast to the neo-nazi death squads which have been a prominent feature of more-than-a-few US-backed regimes in that part of the world.

This is an argument which has been elaborated by Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt in their collaborative works, Empire & Multitude (personally, I prefer the later, which reads a lot better in English than its precursor & companion). Among their contentions: that "democracy" has become an arbitrary term - in the vocabulary of empire, it merely describes a state which is favourable to imperial interests... and by definition, governments which prize the welfare of their own citizens above that of foreign multinationals & investors become "despotic", "evil", etc etc etc.

There is an obvious danger to this particular abuse of language: how then do we distinguish a genuine tyrant?

More Pilger infos can be found here and here

Filmanthropy 1: Sweet Movie (OST)

2007-08-18T01:54:00.000+10:00

Disappeared from the imdb listing for the film, but Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie was among a number of films maudite produced by the production company, Filmanthrope.

Filmanthrope were responsible for some of the finest European art/freak cinema of the late '60s thru mid-'70s; Themroc, & works by Alain Tanner and Marco Ferreri.

Sweet Movie is, for me, the pinnacle of Makavejev's filmmaking - clever, creative & fun in equal measure. It also documents a uniquely aspirational moment of the continental counter-culture, with a narrative thread involving Otto Muehl's aktionist crew, and a Pierre Clementi who was already the veteran of work for Bunuel & Pasolini.

Composer Hadjidakis was a partisan for rebetika, and is uniquely responsible for elevating it to greater esteem in Greek culture. He also popularised the bouzouki, and was an early champion of fellow composers, Mikos Theodorakis & Iannis Xenakis. Thus, while he was a cultural nationalist, he also did much to promote Greek modernism - as in the song cycles he adapted from the poetry of native surrealist, Nikos Gatsos.

By the time of this soundtrack commission he had substantial experience of film scoring, having won the US Academy Award for Never On Sunday (1960). I've come across quite a few of his recordings on old vinyls, but for my ears this is easily the finest of his works - the perfectly bittersweet complement to Makavajev's colourful monsterpiece of whimsy & tragoedia: a libertarian sono/cine-manifesto.

Music & lyrics : Manos Hadjidakis,
except 4 & 8 : lyrics by Makavejev & Ann Lonnberg

1.Ta paidia kato ston kampo (2:42)
2.Oi paragkes kai oi anthropoi (1:30)
3.Serenata gia thn sexoualikh apousia (3:16)
4.Is there life on the earth? (2:35)
5.H sexoualikh polyrrythmia (2:07)
6.Oi paragkes kai h kefalh toy karl marx (2:56)
7.Nyxterino (3:24)
8.Is there life on the earth? (1:04)
9.Ta paidia kato ston kampo (3:37)
10.strip tease gia tria paidia (4:47)
11.nyxterino gia dyo fones (2:22)
12.o xoros ths sokolatas (2:39)
13.ta paidia kato ston kampo (2:31)
14.h sexoualikh polyrrythmia kai ta tria paidia (3:01)

Additional music : Les Chants Révolutionnaires du Monde – Les Flûtes Roumaines

download the Sweet Movie OST here

... the imdb soundtrack listing details a couple other tracks, not on the commercial OST release:

"Réel de L'Arrivée", Dominique Tremblay and Denis Boucher
"Macho", Music by Pierre Dutour/Lyrics by Santiago El Ghi
"Bandiera Rossa", Record: Chants Revolutionaires du Monde

Some links:

An interview with Dusan Makavejev

The new Criterion DVD release - with David Sterrit's essay

Details of the original Greek soundtrack release

Julien Mazaudier's essay on the soundtrack (in French)

... both this, and Makavayev's previous film W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, are informed to some extent by the theories of Wilhelm Reich - principally, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and "The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality" - some info on him, here, and a hilarious photo, here

Thanks to Joel, from Brisbane's OtherFilm Festival, for originally gifting this soundtrack to me... Cheers, ears!

Invasion of the...?

2007-08-18T01:27:00.000+10:00

"It wasn't the Martians who invaded Earth...

It was the imbeciles!"

- Alejandro Jodorowsky (1992)

Well. Having conquered Hollywood, the pod people have gotten their mitts on a superior artefact of US B-movie heritage: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The original leaves me a bit cold, but the 1978 remake is fondly remembered from a impressionably-aged viewing at my local drive-in (in company of my mum, who was a Donald Sutherland fan). Super-fine cast, supporting Sutherland & Brooke Adams in the leads, included Leonard Nimoy, and cameos by Kevin McCarthy and Don Siegel (star and director, respectively, of the 1956 original).

Abel Ferrara's modest tv-movie adaptation has its several merits as well; it reframed the original story around the central character of a teenage girl dislocated, with her US Marine Dad, to a new home on an Alabama army base. Suprisingly enough, it essays the condition of adolescent displacement anxiety & identity crisis with a genuine sympathy. The understated ending is chilling - some singular qualities within Ferrara's testosterone-addled oeuvre.

Anyway: viddy the trailer for the newest remake...

It starts with an explosion and ends with a car chase. Inbetween times, Nicole Kidman tries "not to emote" (not terribly difficult. an inspired bit of casting - this particular plank should be able to pass quite well for a passionless alien, I should think).

There seems to be a horribly mawkish sentimental plot-strand about Nicole Kidman's small human. The confused political allegories are a thin tissue of horseshit veiled over a good ole yankee obsession with Volk, and dangers presented by pesky outsiders - "they're here, they're amongst us... keep watching the skies!"

Anyways, the film sounds ridiculous and has already bombed at the box office.

(I pinched that cover graphic to the original novel from this site, which provides an interesting treatment of Capgras Syndrome)

Book Illustrations 2: Trnka

2007-08-16T23:17:00.001+10:00

... death & the emperor, from "The Nightingale"

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales / by H. C. Anderson; illustrated by Jiri Trnka London : Spring Books, 1961

(This one figures in a book I copped as a long-ago b-day present from my Grandfather)

... Titania! A character sketch, for Trnka's stop-motion adaptation of:

A Midsummer Night's Dream / William Shakespeare ; with pictures from the film by Jiri Trnka Praha : Artia, 1960

A sad story: I bought a 16mm print of this one - technicolour, and in wide-screen scope - at a deceased estate auction for $21. I delegated some friends to collect it (the auction was interstate, you understand) & they grabbed the wrong reels - a Russian ballet film of the same title.

Stills can be found at the Kratky Film website...

... and some clips can be found on this site, and at youtube.

Book Illustrations 1: Revolt of the Angels

2007-08-16T22:59:00.000+10:00

The revolt of the angels / by Anatole France ; translated by Mrs. Wilfrid Jackson; with illustrations & decorations by Frank C. Papé.

London : J. Lane, 1924

... more on Frank C. Papé can be found here

Lepidoptera of RMIT Library

2007-08-16T22:33:00.000+10:00

lumpen intelligentsia film society - programming archive

2007-08-11T15:50:00.001+10:00

Found at Archive.org: the defunct website of the lumpen intelligentsia film society... Program notes for most, tho' not all, of some initial 45 screenings.

Lumpen intelligentsia was coordinated by a trio of myself, Rob Bonica & Tony Arividis. Tony now devotes himself mostly to his landscape architecture business, & Rob is teaching English in Japan. 2001 program screened at Glowbar on the edge of the Melbourne CBD. The following year, we moved to the Rob Roy Hotel in Fitzroy before relocating to a warehouse loft (the "Bughouse Omniplex") in the CBD. Everything was in hiatus through 2003, though we organised an Australian tour for Dame Darcy, brought a program of Jean Painleve's films to the ACMI, and staged a book launch for Outre's Beatsville - among other things.

The 5 months of screening in 2004 - at the Victoria Hotel, in Brunswick - exhausted the last of my own dwindling commitment. By that point, I was working in partnership with a number of music festivals: Liquid Architecture, What Is Music?, the Meredith Music Festival, as well as the OtherFilm Festival in Brisbane.

The screenings sometimes won some generous plaudits in the media, & there's a considerable amount of material here in the form of press clippings & etc.

Sometime (soon), I'll post the audio & video of the Dame Darcy tour... Meantime, this is a live recording of her super-fine cover of In The Pines (200VBR mp3, 5.2Mb via SendSpace)

Christian musique concrete/psych comp

2007-08-05T18:07:00.001+10:00

Where I live there's about a dozen op shops within a healthsome walking distance. My favourite of them has yielded up Tod Dockstader's first LP, and French Phillips pressings of Gainsbourg - among other choice booty. Once I missed out on an I Cantori Moderni di Alessandroni vinyl there, after I'd strolled in on a whim but without any cash on me - by the time I got back (not long!), it'd gone.

I initially figured this one to be barely deserving of a moment's glance - the cover is so unforgivably daggy. But something about it was strangely compelling - I went back to it, pulled it out the rack and gave a squizz to the back...

THIS is what I pulled up on:

Thank you, umm, God!

... Probably the most unlikely vinyl I've pulled at my local, this one documents a concert series presented at a NYC Presbyterian church in 1968. Custom pressing, & silk-screen cover. File it under "evangelical/freak".

The late '60s saw a genuine renaissance in Christian liturgical music - think of Pierre Henry & Michel Colombier's "Messe pour le temps present" (Eng: Mass for Today). This music here is brut/naif rock & vocal choir, with riotous electronic noise blasting the ears of the unsanctified on the very first track (about 2 minutes in).

Download it here

LIBERATORS...?

2007-08-04T00:22:00.001+10:00

Hmmm...

"...In Venezuela I got the point with even greater force. With a local friend I had managed to walk about La Charneca, one of those ugly Caracas slums surrounding gigantic ultra-modern steel-and-glass skyscrapers interconnected by huge spiderwebs of multistoried concrete highways. We were able to start a conversation with a small mild-mannered man of forty odd years who told us that three families - sixteen children - lived in his one-room shack made of discarded or stolen planks. It was a hot and humid day, and almost automatically we began to stare with him at a fifty-foot-wide Coca Cola advertisement that stood out at the foot of the slum hill.

"None of us in this house has ever drunk a Coca-Cola," he said softly. "One day we will kill those who make them."

- (from) John Gerassi, "The Great Fear in Latin America" Collier-Macmillan: London, 1965, p. 39

My favourite book on South American politics is 42 years old. Gerassi was a former editor of Newsweek, and had served as Time magazine's South American bureau chief for more than a decade. This should, by definition, make him a conservative commentator, and an advocate of business rights. He also has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Here's words on the man from J-P Sartre:

"I trust no one more than Gerassi to make me understand America."

So, the cat has some clues. "The Great Fear" is the most lucid account of South America's labyrinthine political intrigues that I've come across; amply supported by an incisive economic analysis, but distinguished mostly by its rare humanity. The book documents the disconnect between the great fear of Washington power elites - communist subversion, south of the border - and that of the South Americans themselves - US intervention, however benignly intentioned. The history that informs this book is not a pretty one.

(Where am I going with this?) Well, I was curious to discover just how US claims to promote democracy beyond its borders might correspond with historical fact. I started doing a little research. Here's a list of democratically elected governments in South and Central America that were overthrown with some form of US espionage, financial or military support to the putsch, in the period since the end of WW2:

1954 Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Guatemala

1961 Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, Ecuador

1963 Juan Bosch, Dominican Republic

1964 Jao Goulart, Brazil

1964 Cheddi Jagan, Guyana (previous 1953 coup, principally due to UK intervention)

1972 Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, Ecuador (Ha! Some folks just never learn...)

1973 Salvador Allende, Chile

1985-1990 Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua (Contra military intervention; armed & funded by the USA)

1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti

2002 Hugo Chavez, Venezuala (unsuccessful coup - Chavez restored to power)

2004 Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti (another "repeat offender"...)

... A couple of qualifications to this list: I've limited it to heads-of-state that were generally recognised to have to been legitimised by free and fair elections (a bit tricky: electionworld.com is currently transferring all its archives to Wikipedia). I also needed some fairly compelling proof that the US government, either through the State Department or the CIA, was directly involved in the machinations that lead to the downfall of the government.

South American politics can be pretty messy - a country like Bolivia has the Guiness record for the most coups (192). Obviously I discounted to list the region's military regimes - almost all of which enjoyed some measure of material & moral support from the US. However, when reviewing the historical record, it is stunning how many reformist military juntas are themselves overthrown by a secondary coup - and typically with US support.

South American has an honourable tradition of politically engaged writers (Juan Bosch, from the Dominican Republic, was a plaudited poet & novelist). Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits" and Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Feast of the Goat" are both recommended, among the wealth of work by their contemporaries.

Gerassi was writing at the time of the Kennedy presidency. More about JFK's foreign policy in a future posting; but you can find a recording & transcript of JFK's decision to remove Goulart here and here. There are some small 'for reasons of national security' edits from that record, but the context (discussion of the 1948 Italian general election) suggest he & his advisors are referring to Operation Gladio.

Hmmm...

some links:

Library of Congress country studies

North American Congress on Latin America - news

Central American political history database

Victor Jara on youtube:

(... and I am super-proud to anticipate that the next Omni release will include some of Victor Jara's music. Viva!)

Class Struggles in the Pit: musique concrete & marxism

2007-08-03T23:26:00.001+10:00

(juvenile shit, but funny shit: via TMCM)

"Music was set to enter a new golden age; a time when there would be no more harmony, when the tonal system, decadent and feeble, would slink off to a dark hiding place where it could keep company with Capitalism, Religion, Slavery, Censorship and other discredited plagues of humanity. Many freak flags were brandished in the faces of the rigid of the Earth. Music would be free from all the foolish prejudices of the premature fossils demanding tunes to hum, rhythms to tap toes to. Music would be made from anything. Anything would be music.

As it turned out, those plagues have refused to go anywhere and are insisting on their immortality and splendour. Most forms of music have been acting pretty much the same. Just as many who seemed to be our most promising Communists have turned into George Bush catamites, many composers who emitted wonderful rants on the death of tonality, the end of music and other attractive sounding options, have now turned into “Minimalists”, not to mention what the “audience” has been up to.

So, what’s the point? When the liberals of 1848 cozied up to the Kaiser, did Marx & Engels decide that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em? They did not. Instead they began theorizing in anticipation of a resurgence. I’m not going to get into the question of a moral duty to listen to post WW2 maniacs. It is enough that listening to them makes life sweet. Fortunately, lots of them are hanging in there and some of their music is loud as hell, and if it doesn’t exactly “rock”, it lurches, collides, howls, explodes, circles ominously, and performs a number of other useful and entertaining functions..."

- Conrad Conrad, “Class Struggles in the Pit”, Forced Exposure#17 (1991)

... a defining moment for the "Scientific American of the Underground", as it achieves a simultaneous accomodation with both left-wing politics and squeaky-door tape music. For myself, an epiphany. No idea who Conrad Conrad is or was, but he had a tremendous idiomatic style.

Submariner Cinema 2: Jean Painleve & Pierre Henry

2007-08-01T04:03:00.000+10:00

The link, below, is to the soundtrack of Painleve's Amours de la pieuvre (Eng: Lovelife of the Octopus) - as scored by Pierre Henry, and released on bootleg 45 from maybe a decade ago. Sound quality is tending to indifferent (it derives from a VHS release, and the occasional pitch-shifts are the result of it being played on a sketchy video deck). Jpegs are from my own design; the original B&W photocopy sleeve was a little rudimentary , & I had a lot more discretionary time back then... (not that this isn't also quite rudimentary: glue & scissors paste-up!)

Anyways: the year is 1965. Henry has left the GRM a couple years earlier, a not entirely amicable departure from the Schaefferian fold. This was produced at his own Studio Apsome. The brief except of "Song of the Volga Boatman" was added later by Painleve - something Pierre Henry was apparently less than happy about. (Not sure why; perhaps Painleve'd made a new edit, the film was running a little longer, and he needed to pad the score. Or maybe he figured to enhance the film's popular appeal by dropping some actual "music" into the mix. I don't know.)

This is probably the most outlandish soundtrack produced for a science film to that point - and aptly so, the octopus is a fairly remarkable critter & the ample proof is in the film image.

Love Life of the Octopus - OST bootleg 45