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Archives: September 2016

2016 16 Sep

Views, update from MM

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I think Views will be my record of 2016. The NME’s review was written by someone who gets what the record is about, and said „hip hop’s king of whinge still reigns supreme“. Whinge is quite a funny word though – and I’d argue that whinge is the last thing Views presents us with. Yes, it addresses rains and shadows, millionaire ennui and the tribulations of living the dream – but what we have here is candour, not whinge. It’s something of a genius ability, to delineate the non-positive aspects of inner space without the work being a bellyache – but here it is. The lyrics don’t really make sense out of context (this being Toronto 2016, not being Shakespeare’s sonnets) so I won’t quote any here. The other thing about lyrics, of course, is that it’s their spacing and pitch changes that often imbues the meaning – you have to kind of like be there, y’know? Listen to how the final deployment, for instance of the sub-chorus on „Feel A Way“ is rendered via a sonic degradation effect as if it’s emitting from a discarded cellphone – while fat shards of synth cut in at angles like bits off a falling building. The effect is like so-called ‚forced perspective‘ in a cinema backdrop, except the perspective here is temporal. One moment we’re *in medias res* and then – boom – we’re looking at a faded Polaroid. Complete fucking genius.

„Drake’s sly sense of humour is one of the things that stops his constant moaning becoming unbearable“ said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian’s review. I’d have to agree with this – at one point Drake (or the character’s voice he is mediating) complains that a girlfriend wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t wait around for him, even though he’d only been off the scene for „the last few months“. Hence the title Views, I guess. You could take things at face value, or you could take the record to be what I take it to be – a work that is about perspectives, not all of them autobiographically based. Also, the record is full of word play – so literality is probably a broken cup here.

The thing I like best about Views, though, is the production. In some ways it is, if not minimal exactly, then juducious. Take the track Too Good – there are only maybe 5 or 6 elements going on here (including what sounds like electric guitar played backwards) but it’s the voice recording that’s the main thing. You could pull it apart though and the acapella would be a listen on its own, as would equally the backing track. But even at its most upbeat, Views has darkness at the edge.

*

In other news, DJ Mireia Moreorless emailed yesterday. She told me to listen (really listen) to Diamonds On My Windshield. So I said, „Okay I will, yes“. (Hadn’t listened to it in years.) Next day she’s like „what did you think?“. I’m like „I don’t know. It’s like a Raymond Carver short story. You think you’ve got it, then the central point of it moves off someplace else“.

2016 16 Sep

Sechzehn Neun Sechzehn

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Musik ist vieles für viele Menschen, und vermutlich kann man ganze Regalwände mit Abhandlungen, die die Effekte von Musik auf den menschlichen Körper und Geist ausloten, füllen. Meine persönliche Hausapotheke wechselt; aktuell herrschen eher die besänftigenden, beruhigenden Töne vor. (Trifft „tröstende Töne“ es noch besser?)

Das neue Nick Cave Album Skeleton Tree wird, glaube ich, aktuell für länger in meinem CD Player eine Heimat finden; ich habe es in den letzten Tagen fast ausschließlich gehört: sehr gut! (Mit Caves Texten zum neuen Album werde ich mich noch etwas beschäftigen.)

Und gleichzeitig ist mir danach, eine akustische Mauer hochzuziehen – im Rahmen der Zimmerlautstärke, versteht sich. Dann greife ich zu dem gerade erschienenen neuen Livealbum Earth von Neil Young und bin beim Anhören dann ganz in seiner wall of Sound, die diesmal, angereichert mit Tierstimmen zwischen den Stücken, dafür sorgt, dass mich Telefonklingeln, der Anrufbeantworter, und ähnliche Störungen der Außenwelt, nicht erreichen.

Ich erinnere eine Episode mit dem Zeichentrickheld meiner Kindheit, dem Paulchen Panther, in der er von einer kleinen, grauen Wolke verfolgt wurde, die immer nur auf ihn und sonst niemanden hernieder regnete. There’ll be days like this … – und man fällt auf sich selbst zurück.

2016 14 Sep

Vierzehn Neun Sechzehn

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Jetzt, wo die Dornröschenranken um das Schloss durchschnitten sind, und uns die angekündigten Gewitterwolken in dieser Woche einen von mir lang ersehnten Temperatursturz bescheren werden, wird deutlich: der Herbst ist da.

Noch ist nicht die Zeit, wie Herr Geiser (in „Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän“ von Max Frisch) schreibend gegen den Verlust der eigenen Welt mit Schreiben und Erinnern anzukämpfen. (Von dieser Geschichte gibt es übrigens eine sehr gute Verfilmung unter der Regie von Manfred Eicher mit Erland Josephson in der Hauptrolle.) Was im Herbst bleibt, sind die Erinnerungen an (vermeintlich?) bessere, schöne Tage, an summer wine etwa, und eine leichte Melancholie stellt sich ein.

Da kommt mir die Doppel-CD „Classics And Collectables“ von Scott Walker gerade recht. Zugegeben: mit seiner Gesangstimme im Spätwerk, also allem, was nach „Climate Of Hunter“ kam, konnte ich mich nie so recht anfreunden; aber hier sind alle Perlen aus seinen früheren Soloalben versammelt, zum Schwelgen und Versunkensein. And all I’ve said was just instead / of coming back to you.

2016 13 Sep

ECM

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2016 13 Sep

Now, No. 11 is on board!

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With a name that suspiciously sounds like a fake. Has the most quoted Brian of this blog finally decided to publish his cultural and political views on the best kept secret of blogs? Mhmm. No Facebook friends, no twittering, just a small crowd of readers worldwide, some trolls around, too, but that happens in the best places. In a year where one of the most dangerous idiots might start writing world history, it’s good to have one American guy among the Manafonistas. You cannot change the world, but you can be a witness – and tell stories.

 

 

„There aren’t many, if any, precedents, but Eric Clapton’s 1991 song Tears in Heaven was written in response to the death of his four-year-old son, Conor, also from a fall. But where Clapton found some comfort in ideas of heavenly reunions and eventual peace, Cave finds no such salvation or solution. In fact, one of Skeleton Tree’s most powerful statements is its rejection of God and notions of easy healing, happy endings or even meaning.“ (Dave Simpson, The Guardian) 

 

„In den letzten Tagen tauchte ein Album auf, als ferne Parallele, in Besprechungen der neuen Alben von Wilco und Okkervil River: „On The Beach“, von Neil Young. Ganz sicher keines seiner bestverkauftesten Alben, aber eines, dessen Wirkungsgeschichte umso weiter reichen wird. Ein Werk des Abgesangs, verstörend allemal, in seiner Ruhe und Schwärze. Teil einer Trilogie Mitte der Siebziger Jahre, in der Neil Young die Flowerpower-Träume ohne Blumen zu Grabe trug, und gleich zwei Weggefährten mit beerdigte. Jetzt darf man eine weitere Parallele benennen, zu Nick Caves „Skeleton Tree“, Youngs „Tonight’s The Night“. Nicht in Hinblick auf die Alptraumakustik von Neils Grosser Nachtmusik, sondern mit einem Gespür für all die hörbaren und unhörbaren, letztlich untröstlichen Schreie, in der Stimme, und um die Stimme herum.“ (m.e.)

 

 
 
 

I don’t actually know if this one qualifies as a lost classic, but it never crops up in lists of classics, so it’s going in the Lost Classics shelf.

The Buggles‘ The Age of Plastic is a remarkable LP for lots of reasons. While it’s a contemporary (roughly) of Kraftwerk’s Computer World, there could hardly be more difference between them, despite superficial similarities of theme. Computer World is brain food – a manifestation of an almost limitless intelligence. I am glad to be one of the many people who have made a pilgrimage to Mintropstrasse, Duesseldorf just to stand at the doorway of where Kling Klang used to be. Computer World is biting satire, its rhythmicism a necessary corrective, its darkness illuminating. I wouldn’t count myself as a Kraftwerk fan though beyond Computerwelt and the song Neonlicht. Why? Why not. Anyway, where the fuck was I? Oh yes, The Age of Plastic.

Computer World is sequenced, metronomic, swingless, nailed down with spikes. The Age of Plastic is uncomputerised. Computer World is – in a sense – neoclassical. A term that’d usually be pejorative but in KW’s case it’s not pejorative at all. The Age of Plastic is pop all the way through, with some proper prog bubbles fizzing at the surface. What both records have though – in bulk – is tunes: melos and structure.

1. The Plastic Age. The lyrics here don’t really withstand critical analysis. This is not a Ray Bradbury short story. Essentially it’s a brief evocative description of someone overcome by technology. Touch of the Jacques Tati rather than the Fritz Lang.

2. Video Killed The Radio Star. A 4 minute 14 second long operetta. Teh end of teh pop. LOL. „Put the blame on VCR“ – a slightly ludicrous piece of metacommentary, yes – but that’s what pop music is for. If we wanted something on the inextricability of sound/vision we’d have to pick up a Roland Barthes book and light up a Gauloises cigarette.

3. Kid Dynamo – this reminds me of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. For this reason: the music tells a better story than the libretto. A musical masterpiece with funny human larynx soundwaves on top. Odd but truly great.

4. I Love You (Miss Robot). This is the greatest song on the record. Somewhere in this gleaming cyborg fantasy is the trace of John Donne’s „The Sun Rising“. But the unruly sun is down, and the sky is nuclear, and the sour prentices are sardonic and made of metal.

5. Clean Clean. Very, very clever stuff. Starts off with funeral church organ not unlike John Cage’s „Souvenir“ (which it predates, time travel stylee) and the rest is a war narrative presumably from the POV of the dead, with media echoes in his head. „Lost a million in our very first attack. Clean clean. Don’t you worry ‚cause you know we’ll get them back“. A powerful, trenchant and understated comment on the deluded arithmetic of conflict.

6. Elstree. More media metacommentary. A snowstorm within a snowstorm. Love the juxtaposition here, against the previous song. „They made a field into a war zone/ I beat the enemy on my own/ All the bullets just went over my head/ There’s no reality and no one dead/ in Elstree…“

7. Astroboy (And the Proles on Parade). Is this prescience or is it just history? The lyrics tell of overprivilege and ennui. But there is heart here, as well as brioche.

8. Johny on the Monorail. Like track 3, the backing track transcends the lyrical content. Strip the track of its vox and watch a YouTube (or VCR) clip of the Chicago Loop with it instead.

2016 10 Sep

The sound of the Faeroers is dying away

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The Ship


 
 
 

Heimlicher Blick in eine birdhunter Stube

 
 
 

 
 
 

Ich bin sehr froh, dass ich mir die CD: LIGHT WHEN DARK von Karsten Vogel mitgebracht habe. Damit fällt das Aftermath leichter. Linger on sound of cavebirds …

 

2016 10 Sep

Behind words

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I have been a bit reluctant to post the Kristiansand lecture here. But Erik Honore asked me for it – kindly :) – he himself couldn’t make it cause he had to prepare his David Sylvian essay (the English translation) finishing his labour in the last seconds of my „showdown“.

Though it is true that I’m working with hypnosis and hypnotherapy (the Milton Erickson school) I’m not doing any conventional trance induction during speeches. What I do take from that field is the repertoire of handling language (change of tempo, emphasis, silences, all the things you don’t get reading sober words).

So, for example, I do use a hinterland dialect when reading the two short stories of Darren Hayman, I do use a bit of „Laurie Anderson voice mode“ when telling the woman’s dream at the end („the showdown“). And everything had to be carefully mixed with the music, so that the „sound man“ in the background will make a difference. Sometimes part of my talking has music playing underneath.

And there was a silent movie running (with good reasons) all along the lecture: „From The Sea To The Land Beyond“, 100 years of coastal history in Brittania. The room was quite dark, and fifteen minutes before the first words were spoken, an atmosphere had been established, with an album that of course was part of the story, Bo Hansson’s „Lord of the Rings“ (1970). Who says, time wouldn’t fade away?

To make a long thing short, this kind of lecture could be a model for music festivals and other cultural events with a vision, because it simply offers extension of knowledge, prepares the ground for other happenings, and supports any kind of thinking out of the box. Because readers (here) might know some of it, I put the lecture (it really was a lecture in the literal sense!) back on the day it has been performed. Just click h e r e – and you can read it, at least the sober words.

 

 
 
 

Zunächst wusste ich nicht recht, was ich aus dieser Platte machen sollte. Seit ein paar Tagen läuft sie nun aber bei mir, und mit jedem Hören gefällt sie mir besser. Dabei bieten Lanois und Deluca nichts, was man seit Apollo, Belladonna oder dem „Steel“-Part der Omni-Trilogie noch nie gehört hätte.

In zwölf kurzen Stücken spielen Delucas Lap Steel und Lanois‘ Pedal Steel („my little church in a suitcase“, wie er das Ding in seiner Autobiographie nennt) eigentlich keine Melodien, sondern fließen in immer neuen Kombinationen zu ständig wechselnden Harmonien zusammen. Das Ganze läuft durch ein offensichtlich gut bestücktes Effekte-Rack, das seinen vollen Leistungsumfang zeigen darf. Das Ergebnis ist eine manchmal powervolle, manchmal seltsam inoffensive, latent psychedelische, gelegentlich meditative instrumentale Klanglandschaft, die trotz einer gewissen Gleichförmigkeit nicht langweilig wird und niemals ins New-age-ige abgleitet. Voraussetzung ist allerdings, dass eine Lautstärke deutlich über normalem Zimmerlevel gewährleistet ist und eine Wiedergabeanlage vorhanden ist, die mit den gelegentlichen heftigen Kellerbässen nicht überfordert ist. Erst dann nämlich kommt der spezifische Sound, den Lanois zu zaubern versteht, zu voller Geltung.

Goodbye to Language sollte es in meine Top 10 des Jahres 2016 schaffen.


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