Manafonistas

Will 2013 be a strange year? Some highly expected records (at least in some circles) have titles that might send shivers down your spine: “The Terror”, “Pale Green Ghosts”, “The Beast in its Tracks“ – and “Wandermüde”.

John Grant’s background story for PALE GREEN GHOSTS: “Moving to Reykjavik, at the age of 43, was incredibly risky and scary, I didn’t know anyone here, but I’ve built up a life here, and recorded an album I’m really proud of, that distils what I’m about down to its most essential components, better than ever before. And this was during the middle of health issues. It means I’m trying to take the bull by the horns, and to live.“ 

Josh Ritter’s background story for THE BEAST IN ITS TRACKS: „I wrote and recorded this record in the 18 months after my marriage had fallen apart. All heartbreak is awful – my broken heart wasn’t unique. But writing these songs was helping me get through the night and I didn’t have the strength to care or question. It felt like a different record from the start. Far from the grand, sweeping feel of the songs on So Runs the World Away, these new ones felt like rocks in the shoe, hard little nuggets of whatever they were, be it spite, remorse, or happiness. I told all this to Sam Kassirer, my producer and friend. If we recorded these songs, which felt so personal, their starkness needed a corresponding simplicity of production. I hadn’t composed this stuff, I’d scrawled it down, just trying to keep ahead of the heartbreak, and they needed to be recorded like that.“

WANDERMÜDE: „david sylvian’s experimental breakthrough blemish sees a new interpretation in the album wandermüde, by the remarkable electroacoustic musician stephan mathieu. working from the instrumental source material, mathieu brings us a new experience of the most stirring textures and darkest thoughts from this pivotal album.“

There’s no music from The Flaming Lips‘ new album THE TERROR available yet. Though several songs are supposed to be „creepy“. So, in the meantime, (to lighten the mood a bit after this short trip through upcoming albums that are full of chasing one’s demons, ghosts, shadows – and hopefully some irresistible tunes), you can find a video of Wayne Coyne and Stephen Colbert crowd-surfing in matching giant hamster balls. Enjoy.

James McNair: On Saturday Night from HATS you sing,“Meet me outside the Cherry Light“ – was that a pub or a club in Glasgow?

Paul Buchanan: No, it’s just an image, really. If I’m being honest, there was a BHS I knew on Sauchiehall Street, and outside there with the window all lit up was a popular place to meet your date. You’d see other guys waiting on their girls. Cherry Light just seemed more poetic than British Home Stores.

„One day, as I recall,  Life Magazine arrived with The Beatles guitarist George Harrison featured on the cover, along with a man holding a weird looking instrument with a funny name. The instrument was called a sitar and the gentleman holding it and playing it was Ravi Shankar. The accompanying verbiage explained that Mr. Harrison was taking sitar lessons from Mr. Shankar. As I was studying this and trying to take it all in, my mother said, „See, that’ll be the next big thing now. Everybody will be playing those things instead of guitars“

„No way,“ thought I. I had already worn out and memorized an entire Fender guitar and amplifier catalog by thumbing through it and dreaming of owning those instruments. I was showing promise as a guitarist. My instructor had said so. Rock and roll and long hair and love and peace and screaming fans and adrenaline were what I craved. Not a goofy looking, uncomfortable gourdy thing played by a guy in his pajamas that sounded to my young ears like a swarm of mosquitos hopped up on a sugar buzz. Besides, I would never be able to transport a sitar on my Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle.“

1. Bish Bosch – Scott Walker
2. 1966 – Karen Dalton
3. Sun – Cat Power
4. A House Safe For Tigers – Lee Hazlewood
5. This is PiL – Public Image Ltd
6. Love this Great Divide – David Byrne & St Vincent
7. The LHI Years – Nudes, Singles and Backsides – Lee Hazlewood
8. That’s Why God Made the Radio – The Beach Boys
9. Foreign Body – Mirroring
10. Live and Rare VOL 2 – Subway Sect
11. Ca Se Traverse et C’est Beau – Juliette Greco
12. Kurtag / Ligeti: Music For Violin – Kim Kashkashkian

There are numerous breath-taking moments on ‘Bish Bosch’ – in fact, rather like in a Kurosawa movie, where every frame is full of energy and dynamism – even where nothing appears ostensibly to be ‘happening’, in each track on the album almost every moment is replete with suggested meaning or, almost as strongly, the absence of it. For me, there are two particularly stunning moments. The first of these can be found on SDSS14+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter) after 16:33’. In his latter day work, Walker’s voice has consciously been used in such a way as to remove ‘emotion’ or ‘character’ from it – to become as neutral a medium as possible for the lyrics. On ‘Tilt’ and ‘the Drift’ in particular this approach has been adhered to quite rigorously. On BB, in contrast, something very interesting has happened: whilst some tracks reveal the same ‘neutrality’ – at least at various moments, there is now running through the album a fascinating loosening of the shackles, which sees Walker’s voice at times a mature mirror of his work on the four 70s solo works; whilst at others it screams, double (or multi?-tracked) with rage and, at the moment referred to above – the significance of which I can’t really fathom, the timbre of the voice is such that you could almost be hearing the teenage Scotty Engel  singing the words ‘don’t forget to blink, least your eyeballs dry up’. When I heard this, I wondered whether it was an out-take from an early recording session, where the 14-year old nascent songwriter had made his first public attempt to make public his singular writing style – only to find that the precocious ‘and dangle on your cheeks like Caesar’s shrivelled Coglione’ wasn’t something that the people at Orbit were ready for! The other incredible moment comes in the same ‘song’ – seconds after the Voice (I refer to it as though it were a character in its own right) has assumed the familiar persona of the Crooner, which so many would like Scott Walker to revert to being, for a few bars, which I italicise purposely, because it then transmutes – quite literally into ‘Ba-s’ – first one ‘Ba’, then a string of them, before finally becoming a cacophony of multi-layered ‘Ba-s’. It is a stunning chain of events. I believe that ‘Barbarian’ was a term given by the ancient Greeks to anyone who did not speak their language and for whom such repellent speech sounded uncultured and actually unworthy of being named a language – just ‘BA’ – ‘BA-BA-BA’. It is as though, on this one track, Walker – far from becoming a parody of himself, as one reviewer has suggested, has on the contrary playfully sucked into a black hole / brown dwarf (they’re pretty much the same thing for me) all of the various permutations of which his voice is capable, together with all of the words he has used – conventional or abstruse from his Walker Brother days, through the first period of solo work to more recent work and allowed all of it to transmute into its essence: vibrations – ‘BA-BA-BA’. Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet Psychologist, once wrote that “a thought can be compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words” and in highlighting in this track the purity of consciousness over the relative grossness of words Walker has probably got a little closer to spiritual truth to which all great works of art aspire.

1) Further excursions in the world of Scott, The Walker

4) And the unexpected things of course that can happen every moment and stop you on the tracks:)

P.S.: By the way, after having read Ian’s long notes about the new string quartets of Harold Budd (string quartets, ladies and gentlemen, no keyboard sounds with unknown destinations!), Manafonista Jochen looked out for the music and was listening from start to end with an invisible smile on his face.

Has there ever been a book that tells us about the history of broken harmoniums? Once upon a time, Simon Jeffes, the late mastermind of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, found one on the streets of Osaka, and he composed his „Music for a Found Harmonium“. Later, Sigbjorn Apeland released a beautiful harmonium solo album, called „Glossolalia“ (on Hubro). With a lot of broken sounds, really, and noises that make you think, sometimes, of vintage synthesizers. Then there is the unique music of Germany’s „Kammerflimmer Kollektief“ who also make a subtle use of this ancient instrument (I don’t know how broken their harmonium is, sometimes you can hear a deep, deep breath coming from its lungs.) And now, on the small Canadian label called Komino Records, one of the most haunting records ever made with the living and dying sounds of an old harmonium, is available, 500 vinyl albums and digital download. Chris Dooks & Machinefabriek: The Eskdalemuir Harmonium. I was simply stunned when I listened to it, for the first time, in the wee hours. Then, with kind permission of the label owner Alex, I started a big mail-out and sent the music to Jan Bang, Erik Honore, Eivind Aarset, Guy Sigsworth, Lilly Baldwin, Ian McCartney, Henning Bolte, Thomas Weber, Jenny Hval and Brian Eno. I emailed Brian that, if he wouldn’t fall in love with this album, it might be time to retire for me :) So, maybe, there is someone out there in the hinterland of Canada, in the western parts of Scotland, or deep down in Texas who will, one day, write the book and tell all the stories about broken harmoniums.

 
Betamax and Dictaphones (from The Eskdalemuir Harmonium)
by Chris Dooks and Machinefabriek

In the end we will be 12, all saints.

The sixth one has just arrrived: the fabulous Bob T Bright.

Good night, and good luck!

Ah, by the way, If you’re interested in wonderful sounds on the verge of falling apart, look at the video for the new album of Chris Dooks & Machinefabriek, posted under „The last masterpiece of 2012“. Or read Gregor’s list of secret hits, and listen to Jason Lytle’s song. It’s a soft killer. And it’s called „Matterhorn“.

Best wishes from „The Department of Disappearance“

Eine kurze Ergänzung zu Plattenschrank Nr.28 zunächst. Da ging es um die Platte Stéphan Oliva Ghost of Bernhard Hermann, also um Musik zu Alfred Hitchcocks Filmen. Dachte ich nun bisher, dass Hitchcock wahrhaft ein richtiger Fan der Musik von Bernhard Hermann gewesen sein müsste, wurde ich vergangenen Montag durch die Lektüre der NEW YORK TIMES wie folgt belehrt: „Alfred Hitchcocks wife, Alma Reville, played an indispensable role in the making of his movies.“ Und an anderer Stelle heißt es: „Hitchcock did not want Bernhard Hermann´s music used in that film`s famous shower scene, Mr.Gervasi said, but `Alma insisted. And it was only because of his absolute trust in her that it´s included.´ He added, `She played a critical role not just in that scene but in the history of cinema´.“
 
Anderes Thema jetzt: Die Autoren dieser Seite haben ja nun ihre Hitlisten für dieses Jahr abgegeben, aber es gibt natürlich auch noch heimliche Listen, von denen ich heute einmal eine aus dem Dunkel des Geheimnisvollen ans Licht der Öffentlichkeit bringen möchte. Es ist doch so, viele von uns werden durch ihr Leben mit Musik begleitet, sie unterhält nicht nur, sie tröstet, rüttelt auf, lässt noch zorniger werden, besänftigt, stimmt friedlich usw. Im Auto werden dann bei Alleinfahrten diese Stücke so richtig aufgedreht und genossen. Und auf diesem Gebiet tummeln sich zuweilen ganz andere Platten als in unseren offiziellen Hitlisten und Jahresrückblicken genannt werden (siehe jetzt wieder Michaels Klanghorizonte zum Jahresende).
 
Und dann: Es gibt sehr häufig Platten, da begeistert mich ein Stück und sonst keines. Wir alle kennen das Phänomen, dass wir uns wegen eines Stückes eine Platte kaufen und dann maßlos enttäuscht sind, weil die anderen Stücke nicht in der erwarteten Liga spielen. In den nun folgenden TOP TWENTY 2012 liste ich Titel auf, die mich entweder durch verschiedene Lebenssituationen begleitet haben oder die Einzelstücke darstellen, von Platten, die ansonsten eher als gut, aber eben nicht als sehr gut zu einzuschätzen sind:
 
20. Bill Fay: The never ending happening (CD Life is people)
19. Megafaun: Get right (CD: Megafaun)
18. Landslide: Antony and the Johnsons CD: Tribute to Fleetwood Mac
17. Kathleen Edwards: Chameleon/Comedian (CD Voyageur)
16. Neil Young: Wayfarin` Stranger (CD Americana)
15. Bob Dylan: Narrow Way (CD Tempest)
14. David Sylvian: Where´s your gravity (CD: A Victim of Stars 1982-2012)
13. Neil Young: Walk like a Giant (CD Psychedlic Pll)
12. Paul Buchanan: Mid Air (CD Mid Air)
11. Jason Lytle: Matterhorn (CD Department of Disappearance)
10. Vijay Iyer Trio: The Village of the Virgins (CD Accelerando)
9. Malia: Keeper of flame (CD:Black Orchid)
8. Patty Smith: Tarkovsky (CD: Banga)
7. Spiritualität: Mary (CD Sweet Heart Sweet Light)
6. Regina Spektor: Don’t Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas)
5. Frank Ocean: Pink Matter (CD: Channel Orange)
4. Billy Gibbons & Ch: Oh Well (CD: Tribute to Fleetwood Mac)
3. Andrea Corr: Pale Blue Eyes (CD Lifelines)
2. Eivind Aarset: Close (for comfort) (CD: Dream Logic)
1. Frank Ocean: Bad Religion (CD: Channel Orange)
 
 
 

 

When certain people get serious (dead serious) and point to peaks of cultural history, they rather quickly mention Beethoven’s last string quartets. Or Mona Lisa. Well, you won’t have arguments. And the biggest idiots in this cultural field think that your life might be a lot poorer if you don’t understand and detect and feel the depth of those late quartets. Their looks behind the curtain. And they have their parameters: the complexity of the sound, the harmonic brilliance, the avantgarde aspect etc. To be honest, I’m much more (at this moment) keen to listen to Budd’s new string quartets (even if he would fail) I die for music with titles like „The Dream of the Girl at the Lonely Desert Cafe“ (on Budd’s new cd).  Give me The Plateaux Of Mirror, give me Waterloo Sunset, give me Paul Buchanan’s Mid Air, John Coltrane’s Live In Japan, The Drift – and a broken harmonium. More than enough. Deal?