Heart Chamber Orchestra

Physical music?

Heart Chamber Orchestra - Pixelache from pure on Vimeo.

Conference of the Birds

Thanks to Nomadics I've discovered a great podcast by Stephen Cope called Conference of the Birds. His website is here, and you can also find his programmes here. From that second link, the Internet Archive one, you can imbed the player; this is what I was listening to this morning:



UPDATE: The first song on this one is absolutely amazing!:



The singer's name is Houria Aïchi. Here's some info on her and a video.

Isis in '75

The double CD Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue makes a big claim to be one of my favourite Dylan albums. I've been listening to it for the last few days. The previous CD in this series, the infamous 1965 electric "Judas!" chant one is pretty amazing, yes, but this is amazing too, in its own subtler way. It's a sound of a rag-tag band on full power, fully enjoying the whole experience.

I read Larry "Ratso" Sloman's account of the tour a few years ago. "Guitar sounds filled the air, Scarlett's haunting gypsy violin presiding over the clatter in hot, musky gyms and clean, stainless-steel auditoriums. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a caravan of gypsies, hoboes, trapeze artists, lonesome guitar slingers, and spiritual green berets" he writes. "They took to the road in the fall of '75, a weird karass, Dylan, Baez, Mitchell, Elliott, Neuwirth, McGuinn, Ronson, Blakley, Ginsberg, it went on and on".

The sense of the tour being something more than travelling between gigs I think helped the music. The tour was something of a statement but also something echoing back to travelling players, a twisting of the American on-the-road story, a sort of carnival. This video comes from the 4 hour film they made during the journey called Renaldo and Clara, a sort of quasi-mythical dramatisation of the Dylan myth and all the other myths he ransacked, appropriated and twisted to create it. I bought it on a DVD someone had burned from an old taped-off-TV video; it's never been released officially, perhaps because it's so rambling and incoherent. But that's part of its charm, as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to watch it all in order (or all of it at all!) to get the feel. You can dip in whenever and wherever you want.

I think the band sounds great, so tightly ramshackle - neither boringly similiar each night but not a hotchpotch either.

4:33's Artificial Demarcation

It's interesting to see how a piece that invites the audience - and the musicians too, I suppose - to feel the spatiality of sound, its physical aspects, encourages an artificiality in the audience's demeanour - all that coughing! A commenter below the video wonders this too: is there always that much coughing at classical music concerts? There're a few "heh-hems" in between movements, for sure, but these seem to be coded messages of some kind. Not the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?-type, mind, more a covert acknowledgement of the boundaries of the piece, even though objectively (problematic?) there is no change in the physical aural conditions of the hall from the last second of one movement to the first second of the little break. It's as if they need to mark it somehow, and because the piece is silent, there's no obvious demarcation between the piece and the not-piece, so they have to artificially create one.

These New Musics

The Observer Music Monthly tells me that quite a few bands I really liked a couple of years ago when their debuts came out have their second efforts released this week. There's Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer, as well as an older love Four Tet. There's also a very intriguingly-good review of a new album by a band called These New Puritans, who I've never heard before.

First Vampire Weekend. I really liked the first album; I'd been listening to a lot of West African music and I liked how VW incorporated these sounds into a pop record. I liked the literary-student-about-town lyrics about Oxford commas and Mansard roof architecture. After a while though, once the songs had been played a bit too much, it all began to sound a little stale. I haven't listened to them for quite a while. This new album seems quite a step forward, it's more sonically inventive and more interested in creating new textures, it moves away from more straight (chart-y) pop songs without losing the exuberance they had before. It's more confident, too. Here's some songs:








I saw Yeasayer with Al just after getting back from San Francisco in February 2008. I was rather grumpy about being back in Glasgow, and didn't really want to go out to the gig. But I was glad I did; it turned out to be one of the best gigs of the year. At that point I didn't know much about them, and their use of African rhythms (like VW) interested me. The album, when I got it, underwhelmed a little at first, but after listening to it again and again I came to love it. There's a very particular atmosphere to it which I love to get into and explore. So it's funny that I'm again a little underwhelmed by this new single:



I had my Four Tet moment when I first moved up to Glasgow in 2006. I remember listening to the album Rounds over and over as I wandered around a new city. But like Bonobo and artists on the Tru Thoughts and Ninja Tune labels that I was listening to at the same time, I began to get a bit bored by it; it all got a bit too "loungey" and affluent-sounding. It didn't have any edginess to it, it was the sound of comfortable London media types going to the Big Chill. I haven't really thought about Four Tet since, though I did like his collaborations with jazzer Steve Reid. But I really like the house-y stuff on his new record:



I had assumed, in the brief moments where I'd seen the name, that These New Puritans were some fairly bland emo-rocky-something-y band that I didn't need to bother about. But the review I read today describes their new album Hidden as "one of the most confounding, pretentious and self-consciously intellectual records I've heard in years". Now I like a bit of confound-ance/ity, I actively seek out pretentiousness, and I love intellectualism in music, so this seemed right up my street. The album is apparently influenced by "Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, Steve Reich, and 'the plastic textures of modern US pop'". You can definitely hear the first two in this song, as well as a bit of Radiohead I think. It's fascinating. I can't imagine listening to it very often, but I think it's incredible. The video is superb too:

Self Service

Wandering around Glasgow the other day, Studio's West Coast album came on the "Random Album of the Day" mode on my MP3 player. I bought it, aptly enough, on the west coast of the US, and have listened to certain songs on it a lot, but not this one, so it's a mini-discovery. I'd rather it was just instrumental though.

Bunker Hill

Heard this the other night, pretty great.

Working Hard

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Noir Désir - Le Vent Nous Portera 12" [Rubber Room Re-edit]

One of the best songs on Al's super-super-super compilation he made for me, entitled "Distractions from Studies Vol. 1":

Must Be Dylan

I couldn't have put it better than Justin Taylor on HTMLGiant - Dear Bob Dylan, Just When I Think I Can’t Love You More Than I Do Already, You Go And Do Something Like This:

Bustin the Airwaves

I was on Sean's show The Co-Operative this morning, very early. It was fun, we played some good music. Here's a link.

Dancing

Following on from the last post, here's a video of LA PARANZA DEL GECO at the Winter Olympics in Turin 2006.

Italian Things

Tom's been showing us various YouTube videos of Italian folk music over the last few days.

The guy in the orange shirt in this one is Nino, Tom's old flatmate from when he lived in Turin:



The old lady in this one is great! (They've taken embedding off)

And this band plays various types of traditional music. They're pretty great, I think.

London

Allen Ginsberg performing a musical version of William Blake's London.

My Girls

Atrium Musicae De Madrid - Musique Arabo Andalouse

Found on iMomus.

Shiggajon @ 13th Note

Ben put on another gig last night. Saw a band called Shiggajon, from Denmark, who were incredible! They "combine lucid string drones with ritualistic atmospheres and a wild free jazz stance" according to Volcanic Tongue (record shop in Glasgow), and that's pretty much right.

They added Ben and Hannah and Greg (Helhesten) to their number and began with a raucous cacophony of the aforementioned free jazz, crazy-loud and wild, wailing, banging of gongs, a tenor sax, everything. Everyone was pummelling the nearest instrument, dancing about, hair flowing all over the place, with the sax player, staring straight ahead, perfectly still in the middle of it all. The fact that these guys, with their hollow cheeks, wild stares and mops of blonde hair look like a religious cult just adds to the atmosphere.

It slowly simmered down to a drone, brilliantly sustained, a real solid, full sound, encompassing the whole room in its atmosphere, as if it were reaching out and pulling you in physically, grabbing you and ushering you towards it. Every now and again it was supplemented with tinkling bells and little fills of clarinet, that wafted up like smoke from the centre of a ritual in the middle of the night in an Arctic forest. It went on for ages, like they were calling something up or trying to time travel or disappear or something! with a few yelps from Ben.

It slowly, slowly petered dDwn to nothing. Literally nothing, all the instruments stopped. We all clapped, thinking it was the end. Then slowly it started back up, through the tinkly bells and an Arab-horn type thing that sounded like a call to prayer, to an amazing, timpani-drum-style-led crescendo, which was Arab-sounding and mysterious, propulsive and crazed, then a thundering beat when everyone went crazy again.

Es @ CCA

Our friends Ben and Hannah put on another gig at the CCA on Wednesday. I left before Ignatz played, which is a shame going by this video, but I did see this guy, Es:



I think it's absolutely wonderful! Didn't realise he was the guy that runs Fonal records...

Ben Butler and Mousepad

Joe put this up on his blog! It's pretty great Joe!

Ben Butler And Mousepad - Perform With Star6! from Star6 on Vimeo.

They're using this new iPhone app. I still really want one.

Star6 Introduction from Star6 on Vimeo.

Notes and notes

I have various blog article ideas gestating at the moment, but as is the way with these things, they keep getting put back.

One of them was/is about Trilogy, Nic Green's theatre/performance art piece for The Arches at St Stephen's as part of the Edinburgh Fringe. Whilst technically brilliant and invigorating, the ideas and more political points came across as muddled and a little out of date. Excluding men from a feminism that responds to "what it's like to be a woman in 2009" seems rather paradoxical to me. I hope I'll be able to write about this in more depth when I get the time, because it chimes with a lot of the stuff I'm starting to read for the MLitt, and what our friend Derek is reading with regards to his PhD on Virginia Woolf, Gilles Deleuze and posthumanism.

The other one, ever-so-slightly related, was a collection of thoughts about this excellent Simon Jenkins comment piece in the Guardian on Friday. Eminently sensible, lucid and right on the money, I'm in whole-hearted agreement with everything he says.

I have been listening on my walks into work to the same three artists over and over again:

Panda Bear.
I love how it all sounds like a party your cool downstairs neighbours are having that wakes you up in the middle of the night and when you wake up in the morning you're not sure if you dreamed it or not.



Asa Chang and Junray
I love this for its choppy/serene dynamics, how it layers up amazing sounds and creates whole new worlds out of them. Whenever I listen to Hana I remember this great video:



Steve Reich
I love how his music lulls you into a rythmn, and then you start to think he's changing the note order but then think it's just you putting different emphases on different notes but then you realise that he has changed it! Just ever-so-slightly. I love how it's perfect walking music.