Manafonistas

Apart from Neonlicht, Taschenrechner and Autobahn, I don’t really listen to much Kraftwerk. But this sandstone-coloured building is where (so the internet tells me) some of the magic happened.

It’s about 5 minutes walk from the Hauptbahnhof, worth a look if you’re in town and a fan of more than two Kraftwerk songs.
 

A cassette release – limited edition of 50 - Don’t Say Nothing by Dwellings is probably a highly valued collectors’ item already, despite having only been released two weeks ago. Thankfully, the artist’s label Tesla Tapes have made this release available as a download so it can be heard by more people than those lucky enough to still own a working cassette player as well as the tape itself.

Relentless, powerfully near-future dystopic, and if you play it loud enough, slightly disturbing. Think Suburban Knight’s The Worlds except if it was from Salford, and not designed for the dancefloor. Highly recommended!
 
 
 

 

Some records are just too good to be true. One that springs to mind is Charanjit Singh’s Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat - originally recorded in the early 80s, it is acieed avant la lettre. The fact that it existed in a limbo of total obscurity for neaarly 30 years before being reissued, well that just adds to the mystery.

And so it is with Felix Kubin‘s Teenage Tapes, an album of music recorded when the artist was between the ages of 11 and 15. Not unlike Singh’s Ragas, this stuff went unheard for a very long time. According to Kubin’s website:

Although Alfred Hilsberg of the notorious ZickZack label (Palais Schaumburg, Die Toedliche Doris, Einstuerzende Neubauten) had planned to release Felix Kubin’s early music in 1985, it took another 20 years until the French label SKIPP and the German label A-Musik put out a selection of tracks for the first time. The press was raving about the music which gave rise to an increase in his popularity.

I’m not surprised the press were enthusiastic – this is great, great stuff. The young Kubin has a natural way with sonic texture – an indefinable thing, perhaps, but when you hear (for instance) the early work of Juan Atkins it’s just there, like it is on this record.

Literally from the first bar of the first track Japan Japan, this record draws you right in. Something about that shonky/ warped sequence of notes at the beginning (think Temporary Secretary or Drexciya, both of which this precedes!) and all you can think is: wow. (Actually it may not precede Temporary Secretary, but I hope it does.)

Perhaps it’s because these recordings weren’t intended as an album, or perhaps it’s because Kubin’s age meant he was unencumbered with any sense of influence or artistic responsibility – whatever it was, this record sounds like a creative mind set completely free. The record is littered with great moments – the gloriously bonkers percussion at the start of The Germans, the authoritative vocal delivery on Qualität Des Staates, the sound (oddly) of a fizzy drink being poured and loudly gulped down on the same track. The title (and comedy Nintendo acid trip stroll vibe) of Sonntagsspazirgang. On and on this record goes, throwing off sparks of genius as if that’s just what people do.

A truly amazing release. Highly recommended.
 
 
 

In a recent interview with UK newspaper The Guardian, novelist Colm Tóibín, when asked whether ‘story or style’ is more important to his work, had this to say:

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I’d run away.

Which isn’t to say, of course, that novels aren’t stories. What Tóibín is on about here – presumably – is that to approach novel writing simply as the telling of a tale would be to ignore or at the very least undervalue the subconscious wellspring from where the piled up images and evocations emerge onto the page. To tell as story is to control: to be allowed to fashion a narrative from the virtually limitless interplay of the imagination and the depths of the mind – that is novel writing. Or filmmaking. Think, for a second, about Harmony Korine’s “mistakeist” aesthetic – somewhere beyond juxtaposition but just this side of utter nonsense, a vibe emerges, if not an actual story. The viewer can make of things what they will. Or walk out of the cinema. It’s not about captivating the senses, it’s about freedom, maaaan. Or something like that, anyway.

Yes, so where was I? Ah yes. Stories. Stories is the title of Masyoshi Fujita‘s first solo album, which was released at the end of January. Japanese by nationality but resident in Berlin, Fujita is something of an enigmatic character. When asked by Digital in Berlin what he’d do if there was no music in the world, he simply stated “astrophysics, or live in mountain” [sic]

Stories is widely described as solo vibraphone, but this isn’t entirely the case – listen all the way thru and you’ll hear cello and violin, and percussive noises at various points. We start off with the mathematical and accessible track “Deers” which is the kind of music that if you heard it in a shop or on the soundtrack of a film, you’d be dying to know what it was. It’s an arresting piece of music, not least because it takes a jazz-associated instrument and subtracts the swing element. It’s like acoustic Detroit Techno from Berlin via Japan. It’s genius.

Closing track Memories of the Wind is noteable for the fact that you can hear what sounds like the hiss of an acoustic master tape fill the spaces between the notes – itself an enactment of the track’s title. The deliberately odd time signature here makes me think for some reason of Debussy’s composition Jimbos’ Lullaby. But this is its own record, its own thing. -Although there will undoubtedly be instances of “this reminds me of…” aplenty in reviews already written and yet to be written about this wonderful work.

I haven’t listened to this much vibraphone in one go since On Fillmore’s 2009 album Extended Vacation, or, going way bacl to when I was a kid, those childhood days when aged around 8, I used to borrow my dad’s Modern Jazz Quartet LP (he only had the one MJQ LP) and marvel at the warm yet ice-cold sound of this instrument.

Masayoshi Fujita: Stories. It’s a ‘recommended’ from me, and no mistake.
 
 
 

 

God knows what Virgin’s A&R department must have thought when David Sylvian presented them with Gone to Earth. It isn’t a conventional album, and let’s face it: large record companies were in business principally to make money out of entertainment products that sold well. Not to indulge artistic vision, no matter how artistic or visionary it may have been.

But that is maybe where Virgin differed from the other big record companies. They showed a commitment to the artist that most other record companies didn’t. Can you imagine Cabaret Voltaire’s Micro-Phonies having been released by CBS or Polydor? Unlikely. I’ve never read any biographical material on David so I have no idea how he viewed Virgin/ Richard Branson, but to me a big part of Gone to Earth’s success as a work is that it was brought into being within the apparently supportive context of the label. Even the quality of the physical (vinyl) product was exemplary.

The four sides of this album can (and should) be taken as a whole. Indeed, it’s one of very, very few albums that I can listen to all the way through in one sitting. In fact, for me, a listen to Gone to earth is like a trip to the cinema or time spent lost in a novel. Gone to Earth is immersive, vast: a parallel universe. But today I’m only going to talk about the second disc, sides C and D, the instrumentals. After the at times biblically heavy first half of the album, this second half moves beyond lyrics and takes us beyond the physical. Words still tumble around, but somehow, on the second half of Gone to Earth, we have become pure spirit.

The Healing Place kicks off proceedings, with Bill Nelson’s guitar on this sounding literally ancient. Like two thousand year old sorrows accreting into a single cathartic entity. The Colosseum at night, its roars temporarily silent. Its ghosts moving and shifting up, up into a black starless sky.

This half of the record is genreless. Ambient? No. Jazz? No. It doesn’t need a genre, or has created its own. Perhaps not a leitmotif exactly, there’s a recurrence of chimes throughout. Even in the desolated expanse of A Bird of Prey Vanishes Into a Bright Blue Cloudless Sky, there are chimes. Not going to launch into a musicological/ semiotic theory about this other than to say those chimes have a Shamanic resonance.

In the album’s final track Upon This Earth, the chimes reappear – with the voice of Robert Graves reciting the poem “A Foreboding”:

But the vision was not false, this much I knew;
And I turned angrily from the open window
Aghast at you.

Why never a warning, either by speech or look,
That the love you cruelly gave me could not last?
Already it was too late: the bait swallowed,
The hook fast.

To listen to Gone to Earth is to take a journey: geographical, temporal. To the centre of ordinary existence, in cities buried under millennia and sand, where ordinary hearts broke, their stories forever untold.
 
 
 

 

In his diary of 1995 – A Year With Swollen Appendices – Brian Eno says something about how he gets bored of music. And that he wants instead to create a kind of aural context within which music exists rather than make music itself. I’m paraphrasing Eno here, but it’s fairly obvious what he means – that if day in and day out you work in music, then your appetite for music will move far beyond conventional forms of it.

The reason this half-remembered meditation of Eno’s has stayed with me all this time is because, eventually, you can squeeze the fun out of most records if you play them enough. Except Harold Budd’s records, that is. My LastFM account shows an unholy amount of plays for tracks off Plateaux of Mirror, The Pearl, Nighthawks, and also the Robin Guthrie collaborations. My theory regarding the infinite durability of Budd’s music is, in part, this: the notes are so far apart that your brain can’t join them up. Or at least not like it could with The Troggs’ Wild Thing, another favourite, but not something that demands to be listened to that much.

So, in some respects much of Budd’s music kind of fits what Eno said in 1995. There is so little identifiable song-shape to tracks like Music for Swimmers and Late October that they play a different game with the neural network. To the untrained ear it might sound like elevator music, but to the initiated listening to this stuff is like being placed in a landscape. The response is close to synaesthesic. This is music with colours, contours, scents, textures, temperatures.

Tellingly (I think, at least) Budd said the following in an April 2012 interview:

I don’t listen to music. I look at a lot of art.

HB also then goes on to say that “Steve Reich, and especially Philip Glass, they do come from an art-school mentality. But it’s still an art that’s based on conceptualism, and I’ve never cottoned on to that whole attitude.” Certainly, you’re never going to get an overbearing conceptual vibe from HB’s records, and his piano work could hardly be any different from Reich’s. What we have with Budd is someone who is pretty much unclassifiable. He’s also on record as saying that he doesn’t much like the term ‘ambient music’.

The latest release by the artist is Bandits of Stature, a series of 14 string quartets. This recording will in some ways be familiar to fans of Budd’s work. This assuredly is not the fluidly beautiful sound you hear in Music for Swimmers or the streams and leaves of Late October. But it is still classic Budd, minimal in form and abundant in mood. The milieu of the work is drier here, the Mojave perhaps, where Budd is said to have grown up.

It has to be said that given the nature of the string quartet format, there’s little variety on offer here. But that is surely the point. Each composition forces you inwards into the world of this music, to listen to each composition’s own melody and to concentrate on its dynamic before the next one begins.

The most immediately accessible piece here (for me anyway) is Veil of Orpheus (Cy Twombly’s). How great to name a track not just for a painting but the painting with the painter’s name in parentheses afterwards. Accessible not for the reference to Twombly’s work of abstract(ish) topography, but for the piano. Because without the piano on this track that’s placed two-thirds of the way through the set, I’d have felt a bit cheated. It also has the really interesting effect of holding the entire work together, of explaining its own absence throughout the surrounding pieces.
 
 

 

1. Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland – Black Is Beautiful (Hyperdub)
2. Jodey Kendrick – Steel Erector (Rephlex)
3. Terrence Dixon – From The Far Future Pt 2 (Tresor)
4. Squarepusher – Ufabulum (Warp)
5. Harold Budd –  Bandits of Stature (Darla)
6. Tujiko Noriko and Nobukazu Takemura – East Facing Balcony (Happenings)
7. Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin – Instrumental Tourist (Software Records)
8. Luke Hess – Keep On (FXHE)
9. Thomas Köner – Novaya Zemlya (Touch)
10. Symmetry – Themes for an Imaginary Film (Italians Do It Better)
11. Stacy Barthe – In The Inbetween (Stellar/ HomeSchool)
12. X-TG – DESERTSHORE/ THE FINAL REPORT (Industrial Records)
13. Damon Albarn – Dr Dee (Parlophone)

 
Other very good records were released in 2012 by: Brian Eno, Actress, Laurel Halo, Greeen Linez, John Cale, Robert Hood, Lone, and a lot of other people too. It’s been a good year. Thanks for reading this far.

 
 

 
 
It’s not every day you get to see a living legend, so this was an unmissable concert for me. It pretty much didn’t matter whether it was going to be any good or not – there’s just some artists you gotta see live.

No viola in sight.

Well attended but not sold out. This is a good thing. You could tell that just about everyone there was into the music rather than any hype.

Rock vibe: so no Ship of Fools, Child’s Christmas in Wales or The Sleeper. Ach well …

Highlights (imho) were Scotland Yard and Face to the Sky, two of the more interesting tracks off the new album.

Cale’s band were phenomenally good – engaged with the material rather than simply performing it.

Missed the encore as I had to be someplace else. So as I stepped out into the clear crisp dark autumn Edinburgh night to navigate the city’s profusion of pedestrian diversions, who knows? Maybe JC of the messianic initials played Sunday Morning or Fools or Christmas or The Sleeper.

So, anyway, the kid from Carmarthenshire played a blinder in Edinburgh – no surprises there really.

In a previous post on this blog, I made mention that it was high time for a remaster of The Blue Nile’s miraculous second album, Hats.

Well it looks like one was already on the way. It’s due for UK release in just over a month, and Blue Nile producer Calum Malcolm is the one sprinkling the digital magic, which is a good sign. Reissue contains an additional CD with, among other things, the unreleased track “St Catherine’s Day”. There’s a version (title misspelt) of this track on YouTube, which is worth a listen if you don’t already know the song.

A Walk Across The Rooftops is also being released on the same day. Full details here.

What extra tracks would you have included in these reissues? Have your say in the comments box below…

(Me? I’d have chosen the Clearmountain version of Headlights On The Parade, of course.)
 
 

 
Stock image: Buchanan Street, Glasgow.

Now, if I had to pick a favourite Blue Nile record, well … it would be easy. It would be Hats. Not the actual LP, mind: it wasn’t a great master or pressing. Grooves too close together, and the plastic was wack/deficient – unless, maybe, your turntable arm was as light as a feather and your diamond stylus was split-new.

But the music? Oh, yes. from start to finish, this is a record that I never tire of hearing. The vibe is autumnal. The smell is burning leaves. Synaesthesia? Yes, probably. Music is olfactory and visual when it’s like this. No autumnal browns here though – UK streetlamp Lucozade orange falling on the blacktop, check. Neons? Yes, them too. And like the helicopter scene in the 1995 film Heat, an almost blinding coruscation of megalopolitan lights. Seen from above.

And my fave track off this record is Headlights on the Parade. And the reason for this blog post is that the last few lines of the song are a mystery. I’d always heard this:

The city wins while you and I come fine away
Oh, headlights on the parade, yeah, yeah

Find you, find you
Yeah

The lyrics sites say:

The city wins while you and I
Can’t find a way
Oh, headlights on the parade, yeah, yeah

Fly little angel
Fly little angel
Yeah

Fly, angel sounds good to me, and there’s an angel on the cover, too. Doh! Anyone have a definitive set of words for this song?
 
 
 

 
 
Notes:

1. Always thought the Bob Clearmountain remix was the superior version

2. When the fuck will a digital remaster appear – with all the b-sides etc? When??