3. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World - The Caretaker [2011]

Meditations on memory and decay. Retrospection, amnesia, repetition, regression. Alzheimer’s unmasked. The last stand of the prefrontal cortex. Atrophy. 

Stripping away phonographic fidelity by gradations, James Leyland Kirby mirrors the peeling back of memory, re-construing time-locked thought in a haunted present. 

Kirby's genius is to make decay tangible. He is a craftsman who makes audible the ticking of memory's clock as it winds down to a vanishing point.

Oddi wrth y brawd

13. Akhnaten - Philip Glass [1983]

Synopsis.

Akhenaten. 18th dynasty Pharaoh. Rules seventeen years, causing religious kerfuffle by introducing monotheistic worship of Aten, the sun god. The priesthood gets mardy and it doesn't take.

Akhnaten is the last installment of Glass's portrait trilogy, bringing warmth and depth to the cold precision of Einstein on the Beach and a grittier texture than Satyagraha. 

Open are the double doors of the horizon,
Unlocked are its bolts.
The constellations stagger,
Clouds darken the sky,
The stars rain down,
The bones of the hell hounds tremble,
The porters are silent when they see this king dawning as a soul.
Open are the double doors of the horizon,
Unlocked are its bolts

- Libretto, Act 1 Prelude, Refrain, Verse 1, Verse 2

Oddi wrth y brawd

14. Kesämaan Lapset [Children of the Summerland] - Es [2009]

This recording may well enrich your life.


Sami Sänpäkkilä's Kesämaan Lapset (2009), recorded under his Es moniker, follows four years on from Sateenkaarisuudelma's kaleidoscopic drone n chant.  Kesämaan Lapset dials down the sprawl and explores more accessible electronic sound worlds, in part tribute to 70s Finnish acid-folk waif Pekka Streng. Sami's own Fonal label harkens to days when album label stamp signified common sound and communal mystique. Fonal particular stock in trade: experimental psych-folk, witchy SSW and blissed out electronica.


Opening Ennen Oli Huonommin fanfares a flamboyance of iridescent analog chirrups, skittering and dazzling across four major-key minutes. Clearly, we're located somewhere in the pristine Nordic electrono-Fonal lab, next valley over from the lo-fi forest folk dwellers. Next up, cheery homespun ditty Kesa Ja Hymyilevat introduces spacy vocals and free-ranging electronics. Vaguely Magical Power Mako. Then things start to get really interesting. Sateet Sun Sielusta plays with some piano phrases only to build into a celebratory cascade of drone, combining disciplined minimalism with mind-manifesting kosmische synthesiser worship. 

Still reeling from the meteor shower of trickling lines and deep-space drones, stagger aboard title track Kesämaan Lapset for a twenty minute ride through personal space, childhood summers and euphorically expansive vistas of the latent. First comes a repeated piano phrase  - possibly a Dvořák steal - as pastoral grounding. This morphs into into idyllic trills, washes and field recordings, or perhaps simulated, summoning woods, streams and sea-shore adventure. Final enveloping section builds skywards to a celestial crescendo worthy of Popol Vuh in its pomp. Heady.

Closing, comparatively brief Haamut Sun Sydamesta is a necessary psychedelic come down which serves to remind us that, however abstracted the journey, this is a SSW album at heart. Which brings us back to Pekka.


Oddi wrth y brawd


[Pekka up bonus: Comments]

16. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet & The Sinking of the Titanic - Gavin Bryars

Two lengthy art pieces packing emotional punch. Cast-iron testament that the experimental and constructivist may cleave to the power to move. 

Gavin Bryars is not light on methodological muscle, working across jazz, free improv, minimalism, avant-garde and neoclassicism. A founding member of the Portsmouth Sinfonia - an orchestra whose membership consisted of performers who “embrace the full range of musical competence” (there’s a euphemism in there somewhere). Sinfonia members included erstwhile pal Brian Eno whose Obscure Records label put out several Bryars works in the mid-70s including the Titanic piece herein.


Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) loops around a field-recording of homeless man vocalising-improvising a hymn. Over the loop, are built rich harmonies, played by live ensemble; slowly increasing in density, and impact before gradual fade. The piece was first recorded for use in a documentary chronicle of street life in and around London’s Elephant and Castle:

When I played it at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano, and I improvised a simple accompaniment. I noticed, too, that the first section of the song - 13 bars in length - formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way. I took the tape loop to Leicester, where I was working in the Fine Art Department, and copied the loop onto a continuous reel of tape, thinking about perhaps adding an orchestrated accompaniment to this. The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.


I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man's singing. This convinced me of the emotional power of the music and of the possibilities offered by adding a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the tramp's nobility and simple faith. Although he died before he could hear what I had done with his singing, the piece remains as an eloquent, but understated testimony to his spirit and optimism.

 - Bryars 

The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), indeterministically allows performers to render various sound sources related to the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Cue heart-tugging, uplifting and perfectly poised melodic motif of Nearer My God To Thee / Amazing Grace against ambient backdrop of chilly ocean noise.

 Oddi wrth y brawd

[Sundry bonus sunderings and landings in Comments]

18. Cœur De Verre / Herz aus Glas [Heart of Glass] – Popol Vuh [1977]

He made visible what would have remained mysterious and forever hidden in the images. What is more, he had a talent for composing music that created whole new spaces, in concrete terms: landscapes that gain an unknown dimension which would not be accessible otherwise.

  - Herzog on Florian

 ...the essence of Popol Vuh is a mass for the heart. It is music for love. That is all.

  - Florian on PV

Clang kosmische to drive away the wolves.


Oddi wrth y brawd


[Deluxe harmonious bonus in Comments]

25. The Visible Sign of the Invisible Order - Master Musicians of Bukkake [2004]

Abandon the quotidian all ye who enter the wang: a gallimaufry of chant, caterwaul, instruments plucked, objects struck and assorted bukkacophony. There is method in ribald moniker madness, for herein prowls a winning amalgam of magickal Riff Mountain Jajouka riffing and esoteric Far Eastern ritual malarkey. Screeching, outlandish percussion, keening females acting up in a series of mostly short impenetrable psychodramas. Tenjo Sajiki / J. A. Caesar troupe on collective bad trip.

Two longer black psych standouts: Access of Evil - massed drums n call n response summoning the spirit of who knows what – and Circular and Made of Earth – bringing eastern drone closure, Karakoram blues guitar and Mongolian throat-signing against a soothing backwash of waves.

Oddi wrth y brawd

[Bonus bukkakerie in Comments]

26. Force the Hand of Chance - Psychic TV [1982]

Suffusing dread, ritual, drama and tenderness to coalesce themed meditations on nature of being and Will.


Not, then, hit parade material, steeped as it be in Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis reorganised around the Law of Thelema: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law / Love is the law, love under will. Often misinterpreted as carte blanche for all kinds of psycho-sexual carry-on and to indulge emotional impulses, however transgressive. A subtler reading is about seeking out and following one's own True Will rather than the ego's desires - thereby, if you will, forcing the hand of chance.

Music ideologically freighted at the expense of the thrills? Not so. Assisted by the more than able Fergusson and Christopherson, Genesis P-Orridge conjures a  collection of powerful soundscapes and some oddly captivating "pop". Agit-prop ontological soundtrack....and arguably PTV's most fully realised work.

GP-O confounds expectations from the get go. A pastoral, string-driven melody to baby daughter, Just Drifting (for Caresse) flows pleasantly like the country streams and rural breezes it eulogizes. Tender and sincere yet of a thematic piece: the child's pre-verbal state of being, drifting, following it's own will and under a "simple love".

It can't last of course. Things quickly get as dark as the devil's nutting bag. Terminus X-tul, a deeply unsettling account of a young man journeying toward initiation (?), derailed by a - fantasy or actual - suicide  jump from a railway bridge into a passing train. Morricone twang and strang ups the drama and cheekily references the time-stetching opening scene of Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. The first lines of spoken lyric: 

Quiet and hooded, his eyes stared out, small hands make patterns on the window.

Body shifting on wood, dog outside the door, flickering memories as trains manoeuvre in the old men's eyes.

Forever part of a sleeping world, waiting for him to come.

Lost dreams of childhood forgotten like hope.

These lives are stones made for cemeteries.

This time the victim is desired, like misery.

He stepped down from the train, dust on road and clothes.

Across the way a boy was grinning, hard-on obvious in torn grey trousers inherited from an earlier victim of the white horse.

The shade of Old Bill Lee hovers in Western Lands. A crisis is upon the lad - cue demonic howl of heavily distorted guitar. Time slows, a mystery is arrived at, a secret coda fulfilled.

   
Leavening the gloom, in swoons Marc Almond like the winsome nephew of Macbeth's Porter, offering Stolen Kisses and Doug Yule VU bubble-gum pop. Though, as "dark suns of sunlight flower", we seem to be talking about the oblivion of smack by way of light relief.


And so the album unfolds. Central themes unfurling like a sickly rose; moments of light made pungent by pervasive dark. Marc crops up again on Guiltless, exhorting us - with, it must be said, more than a soupçon of lascivity -   to "see it and go for it". Do what thou wilt.


Sex magick and Genet (Querelle / Queer Hell) combine in New Order-ish dance number Ov Power. In the parlance of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Ov = comingled male-female sexual fluids. Shouty chanting validates the bestial in us all.


Message from Thee Temple dogmatically lays out the Law of Thelema, delivered by a vaguely creepy if authoritatively warm voice (think Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers). A re-statement of Crowley's road map for discovering one’s True Will:

The temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline.
To focus the Will on one's true desires in the belief, gathered from experience, that this maximises and makes happen all those things one wants in every area of life.


Explore daily your deepest desires, fantasies -
Gradually focusing on what you would really like to happen in a perfect world,
Picking away all restrictions and practical considerations.

An unsettling doubling effect is discernable by the closely listening ear; uneasy.

Counterpoint to Terminus X-tul is jackal-snarling Thee Full Pack (for Bachir Attar). Equally cinematic in feel, this time evoking the disorientation and lurking fear that stalks Max Von Sydow through the souk at the beginning of The Exorcist. O.T.O., ceremony and fraternal bonding through ritual is captured in the name check for Bachir Attar, leader of The Master Musicians of Jajouka. The song invokes a great threatening force, surrounding us, and from which there is no escape.


Oddi wrth y brawd


[Bonus Themes in Comments]

Agape-Agape - Popol Vuh [1983]

 Agape, ἀγάπη, translated from classical Greek as love.  As Plato's crew would have it, love of spouse or family, or affection for a particular activity, in contrast to Philia - affection denoting friendship - and Eros, sexual affection. Appropriated in  Christian tradition as love of God/Christ for us common folk.


Late period Florian Fricke creates music meditative and devotional to love divine, unconditional, self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful. Trance-inducing chant - apparently, Byzantine scales - and piano melody of devastating beauty.


Agape Agape, the Christ is near. Nice one Florian.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Sexmagick Ritual - Sleep Chamber [1987]

As soundtracks to seduction go, none more leftfield (nor less likely to succeed in this parish...).

Oddi wrth y brawd

The Bern Project - Rhys Chatham [2010]

Thrilling minimalist noise-rock clamour. Textural avant-rock guitar joy married to slow-burning brass instrument drone in a metallic experimental fusion-funk stew. Oh yes.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Metal Box - Public Image Ltd. [1979]

Kraut dub post-punk opus. Pinnacle of Lydon's PiL "project". Levene and Wobble cover themselves in glory: all angular, spiky guitar and deep roots bass throb. A revolving stool of various metronomic drummers adding to general Can meets King Tubby down the death disco vibe.

...still sounds like nothing else; absurdly, it was often mocked at the time by people for whom The UK Subs were enough.

Oddi wrth y brawd 

Opera from the Works of Tadanori Yokoo - Toshi Ichiyanagi [1969] RE-DUG

Prescient and unprecedented tribute to indeterminacy, electronic hiss, ruptured nostalgia, guitar / siren wail, ghostly future times past, patriotism, distant bells, radio transmission, tape manipulation, hubristic pre-war swagger, and in the end, friendship. For all the artiness of the undertaking - avant garde to the core - "Opera" is intensely autobiographical and engaging.

Ichiyanagi compares music to Japanese garden design: meticulous, painfully ordered yet always interacting with indeterminate elements - moisture, light, wind. Despite the self-declared tilt at natural multiplicity over concentrated construct, the do-it-yourself flow of patchwork elements benefits from intimate aleatoric framing. The details look after themselves.

To Tadanori Yokoo, Japanese pop design magus. Like Ichiyanagi, Yokoo's multi-layered approach is highly personal and gives the lie to easy comparisons, notably "the Japanese Warhol" moniker. Modus operandi converge. Yokoo saturating and manipulating popular by-gone images in bang up to date lysergic colour; Ichiyanagi knitting traditional enka  with musique concrète and psych feakout à la mode. Both artists tackle tricksy themes around nationalism and nationhood: Yokoo's risqué red sun ray flag (kyoku jitsu-ki) as recurring motif; Ichiyanagi's sampling of rousing miltary marching song. More cultural reclamation than the revivalist impulse that drove contemporary  - and Yokoo friend and influence - Mishima Yukio.

The “Opera” is a multi-media affair; the importance attached to the visual side of the production well ahead of its time. Attention to sonic and visual detail - however indeterminate -as meticulous as traditional Japanese art and crafts. The work is ahead of its time in other ways.

Side A

1 Aria ichi [Aria one]
Traditional ballad setting leit motif of melancholy nostalgia.

2 Erekutorikku chanto [Electric chant]
More hiss and whine than chant. "Chant" well-chosen, nevertheless, as sickly electronic  Buddhist drone morphs into air-raid siren. Cue martial brass band and military singing. Oppressive and rousing; attracting as it repels. 20 years later, the likes of Current 93 and Death In June would court controversy with similar use of Nazi martial tunes. No gimmicks here.

3 Otoko no junjo [Man’s pure heart]
Distant noises, footsteps, two men feeling their way into a song on skeletal piano. Complaining about the piano, they notice the environing silence:


"Everybody’s gone – nobody is watching. Should we continue when there is no one?"
Big question. Finally, free from background noise, the song is delivered in full.

Switch: crowd noise. Rumpus. Sports match? Riot? Protest? Woman sobbing  - fear or erotic excitement?

Low-flying aircraft passes overhead.

(1966, a group of Narita locals tool up with student activists and left-wing politicos forming Sanrizuka-Shibayama Union to Oppose the Airport)

Side B

4 Uchida Yuya to Za Furawaazu (Uchida Yuya and the Flowers)
27-minute long psych free form freak out. 20 mins. one side, remainder on next. Ichiyanagi let loose the reins on budding young psychonauts with the sole stipulation that the piece be titled after Yokoo's signature 1965 poster I Was Dead.

The central slogan on Yokoo's poster: “Having reached a climax at the age of 29, I was dead". Inkling that Ichiyanagi is having a joke at young gun expense.

Side C

5 Uchida Yuya to Za Furawaazu (Uchida Yuya and the Flowers)
Caution, mind melting in progress. 7 more minutes.

6 Nyuyooku no uta [New York song]
Poem recited in Edo-jidai Japanese, then contemporary dialogue and short monogatari. 

At this point, check again Ichiyanagi's integration of Yokoo thematic riffs. For instance, the "Opera" shares imagistic and sonic links to Yokoo's 1965 animation Kach Kachi Yama:

7 Kayo myuzikare [Kayo musicale]
Medley: radio jingles, random commentary, film excerpt (adult scolds initially recalcitrant but ultimately pliable young woman for accepting something from a stranger), and Meiji Chocolate ad given the full Group Sound treatment  chokoreeto – chokoreeto.  Switch: European church bells, harpsichord looped, echoed, deconstructed. Switch: sound of massive bombing raid. End.

Amounting to what? Let's venture: a comment on corrosive Western / capitalist influence? Whether low art  or high - reedy GS organ peddling chocolate or god pandering Bach keyboard -  the outcome obliterates.

Side D

8 Love Blinded Ballad Uta 1969 
Archival announcements, patriotic songs, marching fanfares, speeches, classical violin, military songs intermixed curvilinear fashion.  Whirlwind tour through 30s & 40s public sphere. Pervading unease and eeriness recalls Derrida's hauntology. Ichiyanagi way ahead of "nostalgia for the future" curve.

And blinded by love for what exactly? Patriotism....

9 Spite Song Uta 1969  Frogs croak, waterfowl cackle, crows caw; earlier patriotic choruses hover ghostly in the background. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake subjected to discordant squeaking as AM radio tunes in and out of romantic cliché to the point of unlistenability. Final transition to bombing alert siren comes as relief!

10 Takakura Ken, Tadanori Yokoo o utau [Ken Takakura sings to Tadanori Yokoo]
Or is it more an "All Clear" signal? That would make sense as next and last up is enka serenade by yakuza movie hard man Takakura Ken.

Ichiyanagi's choice of Takakura Ken is apposite and affectionate. Tadanori Yokoo provided commercial posters for several of Takakura’s gangster flicks and was obviously enamoured.

And so, a warm, personal ending to a disquieting, shattering journey. Enjoy the trip.

Oddi wrth y brawd

The Seed-At-Zero - Robin Williamson [2001]

Mr Williamson in full bardic splendour. Forging Dylan Thomas, Henry Vaughan, Llywarch Hen and Taliesin in the long time sun.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Patience (After Sebald) - The Caretaker [2012]

Leyland Kirby's custodial nom de plume references Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining, inspiration also for his early musical stock in trade: sampled, manipulated 78s a-crackle with sweet-desolate-stranded 1920s/1930s dance tunes. Archival meditations on appropriation, memory, and the accretion and disappearance of cultural objects, Kirby's tracks dangle, turn slowly like rods on a disintegrating mobile.

Soundtrack to a film about writer W.G. Sebald, in place of spectral jazz-age ballroom, Patience draws from Franz Schubert, crafting melody saturated and motif uncanny. Kirby's thaumaturgy mixes emotional states - memory, decay, loss, childhood and life ahead filled with possibility - like no other.

Oddi wrth y brawd

Merrinology / メリノロジー EP - Lion Merry / ライオンメリー [1983]

Now, where were we? Incommensurably wonky popfolktronic cross-dressing fiddlage from Japan...that would be about right.


Oddi wrth y brawd

Strange Music - Moebius & Beerbohm [1982]

Electro-industrial dubby malarkey with cheeky post-punk pop twist. Tasty.

Oddi wrth y brawd

883

Lucifer Rising OST - Bobby Beausoleil [1980]

Serpentine back story:

Early 60s, Bobby grooving with psychedelic chamber group The Orkustra;  creepy filmmaker Kenneth Anger is impressed, asks the young musician to play title role in upcoming potboiler Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil agrees, provided he scores the music; The Orkustra piss off, hello The Magick Powerhouse of Oz. Beausoleil and Anger fall out, latter de-camps around UK, while Beausoleil hooks up with charismatic fellow named Charles Manson; murder of double-crossing drug dealer and Beausoleil lifetime sojourn in maximum security ensue.

Meanwhile.....Anger commissions Jimmy Page to score partially shot Lucifer Rising. Page produces but a trickle; project goes nowhere. Back in California, Beausoleil forms prison band, sends demos to Anger who is impressed enough (again)  to give Page his marching orders and re-commission Beausoleil to score Lucifer Rising. With the nod from obliging prison warden, Beausoleil builds scratch recording studio within prison walls and slowly over next few years records sound track with help from fellow inmate musicians dubbed The Freedom Orchestra.

Musick:

Disc the first

Sound track proper. As through a kosmische melange, darkly. Shadowy orchestral realm of electronic psych-rock exploration. Stygian Popol Vuh. Stew of DIY synth and homemade effect units recorded guerilla style. Inspiring. This needs to be heard.

Disc the second

Vintage Orkustra and Magick Powerhouse efforts plus early Freedom Orchestra demo. Intriguing.

Oddi wrth y brawd

morning star
son of dawn

Fluxus Anthology - Various [2001]

Fluxus is...

• attitude; not movement or style.
• intermedia: what happens when different media intersect; how found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts mix to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts.
• simple: small scale, short texts, brief performances.
• fun.

In other words, carte blanche for pissing about. Quite literally in La Ono's case. Y brawd invites you the listener to sort vacuous piffle from the really rather good. Let it flow.

01 Walter Marchetti: Per la sete dell'orecchio (1976)
02 Juan Hidalgo: Tamaran (1974)
03 La Monte Young: Dream house (1973)
04 Ben Vautier: Some ideas for Fluxus (1989)
05 Wolf Vostell: Elektronischer dé-coll/age. Happening Raum (1968)
06 Milan Knizak: Broken music composition (1979) 3:26
07 Robert Filliou: Imitating the sound of the birds (1979)
08 Alison Knowles: Natural assemblage. Le vrai courbeau (1984)
09 Emmett Williams: Duet (1968)
10 John Cage: Radio Music (1956)
11 Joseph Beuys: Sonne statt Reagan (1982)
12 Yoko Ono: Toilette Piece (1971)
13 Dick Higgins: B.B. finally dreams about life, B.B.'s you play it (1962)
14 Philip Corner: Car passing at night, country road in Maine (1988)
15 Eric Andersen: The untacti[c]s of music (1968)
16 Robert Watts: Interview (1963)
17 Nam June Paik: My jubilee ist unverhemmet (1977)
18 Ken Friedman: Orchestra requiem variations (1967)


Oddi wrth y brawd
flux us

Melancholia - William Basinski [2003]

14 short, er... melancholy tape-loops from early 80s. Akin to Satie's less jovial moments played by Boards of Canada on faulty equipment...on an overcast day. Soothingly repetitious and proof that Mr. Basinski is more than a disintegrating one trick load of pony. Efficacious as a fistful of xanax.

Oddi wrth y brawd
better than dolphins

Begegnungen II - Eno, Moebius, Roedelius, Plank [1985]

Something of a selection box: driving horizonwards Neu homage (Conditionierer); proto psy trance (Speed Display); gagaku influenced ambient (Mr Livingstone); fruity Eno vocal atmospherics a la Another Green World (Broken Head). Both prescient and strangely outmoded. 

Oddi wrth y brawd

langer atem