Manafonistas

Gestern abend festgestellt: Das – nicht nur hier hochgelobte – „Trio“ Album von Carla Bley und ihren Mitstreitern liegt immernoch zu Hause und wartet darauf, gebuehrende Beachtung zu finden. Muss ich demnaechst nun aber wirklich einmal nachhoeren nachholen. 

Willkommene Ergaenzung und Erinnerungsanker wird mir am Pfingstsonntag eine Sendung auf BR_ALPHA sein: hundertzehn Minuten von einem Konzert, das Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard und Steve Swallow 2002 im Rahmen der „Jazz Lines Muenchen“ gegeben haben.

Überfallartig, ein Schnappschuss mit Dämmerküste,
ECM-Kargheit, etwas naturbunt, die Fotografin
wollte ich mit Seele vögeln, stattdessen schrieb ich
Gedichte, als Sprungbrett fungierten die Bilder,
und jeden Morgen musste ich mit ihrem Körper im Kopf
masturbieren, um den Tag nicht mit einer Platzwunde
zu beginnen, in einer Geschichte, die nie anfing, auch
nicht im verdammt heissen Sommerland 1976.

 
Persoonlijk en diepgaand interview met Eno & Hyde (writteninmusic.com)
 

 
Dieser Tag wird aus der Erinnerung verschwinden:
die Deckenbeleuchtung hat die vertraute Wärme,
sammle ruhig alle Zeichen der Unauffälligkeit,
den alles Sonnenlicht verschluckenden Americano,
den frisch geschälten Stangenspargel vom Markt,
ein karminroter Bus transportiert dich kurz
Richtung Upper St. Martin’s Street, „Days“
(aus alten Boxen) mischt Lächeln und Asche.
 

 
 

 
 
 
 
Nichts geht über Zwischenstationen, in denen das Wort
Liebe gehasst wird. Ich sitze in einem Cafe, in dem alle
verloren gehen, dabei tanzt der Bär im Bermudadreieck.
Nur nicht heute morgen, an so einem halbseidenen Feiertag.
Gute Gedichte lösen sich in den Bildern auf, die sie doppelt
belichten, sie brauchen weder die zweite Meinung noch
Diskursfreudigkeit. Sie blitzen kurz auf, und verschwinden
wie gute Schallplatten auf zu vielen Umzügen.
 

„Der leere Sarg“ (heute um Viertelvorzehn im Ersten)

Memory: The summer of 1990 was very hot – in London. No rain, no fog, no bad vibes under a clear blue sky. We lived in the Pearl Hotel on West Cromwell Road, Klaudia (she was the photographer) liked the special atmosphere in that old hotel with its sweet raga sounds flooding the entrance area. I thought Harold Budd’s masterpiece THE PEARL would be the icing on the cake. Breakfast was terrible, fucking was great. Within seven days we interviewed writer Peter Ackroyd, the late master of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Simon Jeffes, and trumpet player Jon Hassell – in Brian Eno’s artist residence in South Kensington. The topic was CITY – WORKS OF FICTION. (m.e.)

“He thought of his old tapes, the ones he’d had for years, the ones he’d used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn’t owning up to them.”  ― Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

 
Life and music is different on the road … spot in the city of Bergen: FOOD
 
 
 


 
 
 
spot in the city of Bergen: RECORDING
 
 
 


 
 
 
spot in the city of Bergen: FISH & MUSIC,
Sardinenfabrik
 
 
 


 
 
 


 
 
©FoBo_HenningBolte

Let’s end the day with a bang! The second album from Brian Eno and Karl Hyde will be out on June 27th. And I’m quite sure I’ve listened to the growing of one or two of the tracks during the legendary „concert for one“ :)! The big question is: will I get an advance copy for my next „Klanghorizonte“ show at the Deutschlandfunk on June 21st, starting one hour after midnight and running for three hours in a row …!?  And, yes, the title of the album is  „High Life“. 

„When Someday World was finished I felt like we were still on a roll and I wasn’t ready to stop working and get into ‚promotional mode‘ for that record,“ Brian Eno explains. „So I suggested we immediately start on another album, a different one, where we extended some of the ideas we’d started, and attempted some of the ideas we hadn’t.“

„I wanted to work with a stripped down set of equipment,“ Karl Hyde says of the record. „For this album I was very keen for Brian to live process my guitar playing so that we would be effecting one another’s performance, bouncing off each other, inspiring new combinations of polyrhythms.“

Excerpts from an email Brian sent me on May 1st:

Our new record is almost finished…we’re in the last two days. It’s been a great experience and I can’t wait to see what people think of this music.

Thank you SO MUCH for the YMG’s. I don’t know how I didn’t know about them before now. Problem with being a working musician is that you don’t get much chance to listen to music! if you’re an artist or a writer you can have the radio on all the time…which is why artists and writers know more about music than anybody else.

YMG is the abbreviation of  „Young Marble Giants“ , an ascetic masterpiece (imo) Brian had totally missed when it had been released at the beginning of the 80’s (at that time he was  living in New York, the Talking Heads, David Byrne, Jon Hassell, and some Future Ambient classics (On Land, Apollo) were part of that life that also lead to early video experiments, first encounters with Daniel Lanois (will Warp / All Saints reissue Roger Eno’s Voices and Michael Brook’s buried treasure Hybrid?) Productions  also included the New York No-Wave-scene and  zither maestro Laraaji. The forthcoming album High Life with some Steve Reich and Fela Kuti-connections seems to revitalize some of the wild vibes of that era, too. (m.e.)

„Since the beginning of the ’90s I have ‚collected‘ most of my words whilst mapping journeys through inner cityscapes. These places contain rhythms I love, sounds, smells, architecture, light & in particular – overheard conversations, all these things contribute to the words I find, collect & and am inspired to write. I continually return to cities because of their dynamic rhythms & the ease with which I can slip un-noticed through the streets with my notebook and pen. People talk loud in cities, their words freefall through the air, I catch & sing them – their rhythms & syncopation’s are more interesting than the poetry I used to write in the 80’s & by singing ‚conversational English‘

I am taken to different places than my old school traditional writing used to lead me. Having written most of my work for music, books & the daily text I write on underworldlive.com (every day since 1999) I was looking for a new territory to wander in & the edges of cities have for many years been a fascination to me. They are places filled with outsider art, idiosyncratic architecture & outsider cultures who wish neither to live in the city nor in the fields, here there are tribes which choose to live on the rim of the city – permanently just outside the castle walls.

They are a neglected, forgotten tribe & the landscape the inhabit is considered ‚run down‘ – these are sometimes overlooked places which for me are filled with positivity and a dynamism unlike the inner cities. They are places where new rhythms are to be found, so I focused my wanderings in these areas on the Eastern Edge of London where it’s not so easy to go unnoticed if you carry a notebook and pen and where you are likely to be approached by people asking what you’re doing – unlike cities you quickly engage in conversation with other people, like improvising with other musicians in the studio.“