A Sound Awareness

The Omni Recording Company

2012-01-29T09:02:00.000-08:00

Here's a little label that's definitely worthy of your investigation. The Omni Recording Company is one of my favourite purveyors of oddball and 'out there' sounds à la Trunk, Roundtable and Finders Keepers. Finely curated by maverick collector and musician David Thrussell, the label has unearthed a vast catalogue of weird and wonderful musical gems which range from off-kilter avant library music, electronic space jazz, hillbilly freak funk to global soundtrack psychedelia.

The Patrice Sciortino "Chronoradial" disc is a particular favourite. Originally released in 1970, on the cult French Musique Pour L’Image production label, this release showcases his underexposed and criminally neglected compositional mastery. Incredibly complex arrangements of densely layered avant percussive salvos, soundtrack jazz, psycho dramatic orchestration and ethereal choirs interweave and fragment in undeniably fascinating rhythms of off-kilter beauty. "Chronoradial" is no easy listen and despite being over forty years old much the music still feels uncannily contemporaneous. The playful minimal percussive dial tone rhythm of "Kullos 2" wouldn't seem out of place on a new Pansonic lp. The choral pieces in particular are evocative and compositionally unconventional with sparse Javanese percussion tones intermingling with ethereal wordless vocals to hauntingly hallucinogenic effect. This is a stunning release and very much deserves a wider audience.

The wonderfully entitled "Orion 2000" by Orchestra Peter Thomas is oft described as the 'Holy Grail' of 'Kraut Jazz In Space Music'. Originally released on the Golden Ring library imprint in the mid seventies, this release combines brooding big band noir jazz, Blaxploitation style syncopated funk and electronic studio trickery to create an oddball blend of intoxicating space age astro moog jazz. Think, the hip ray gun swank of Hugo Montenegro, the psyche rock electronic percolations of Pierre Henry and you're half way there. There's enough analogue space gloop on here to power even the most modest rocket ship. Das ist ein groovy beat baby.

Last up, an old favourite. Those familiar with the legendary Incredibly Strange Music books published by RE/Search almost twenty years ago will be delighted to finally see “Songs of Couch and Consultation” by Katie Lee reissued. Recorded in 1957, the record is a twisted beatnik psychoanalytical journey through the repressed mind of folk chanteuse Katie Lee. Odd and hilarious in equal measures and perhaps one of the finest examples of musical psychotherapy ever committed to vinyl.

..... definitely a label to watch.

Richard Forster

2012-01-27T08:37:00.000-08:00

Canto Arquipélago

2012-01-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

Smoke Ghosts & Dark Mimics

2011-12-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

Nearly the end of another year. Many thanks for following the blog. Here's a little audio collage of my favourite musical discoveries this year. I hope you enjoy. I'm not sure what kind of bandwidth I have but try to grab the mix it while it's available. Tracklist in comments. Happy Solstmas.

Plymouth's Leading Nightspots

2011-11-23T13:26:00.000-08:00

Sorry! I couldn't resist posting this one. Any idea where the music is from?

Michael Garrick

2011-11-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

Sad news. The world loses another visionary talent. If you're unaware of his remarkable contribution to British jazz, Mr Trunk had kindly posted the poignantly sublime 1963 track "Sketches Of Israel" as way of remembrance.

Digital Playgrounds & Analog Rituals

2011-11-09T09:17:00.000-08:00

Franco Grignani

2011-11-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

El Jazz Mexicano De Tino Contreras

2011-11-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

A little disc landed on my doorstep this morning and what a joy it is. A proverbial gem. I must confess I’d never heard of Tino Contreras but my ears have been truely opened after spending the last couple of hours with his vast and varied musical legacy. Relatively unknown outside his country of birth, he is probably Mexico's best kept musical secret. With a career spanning over sixty years, "El Jazz Mexicano De Tino Contreras" covers a wide variety of stylistic ground and consistently defies musical expectation. Fiery percussive salvos and modal jazz grooves are unexpectedly fused with mariachi rhythmic inflections, ancient pre-hispanic instrumentation, sinuous eastern scales and a myriad of oddly intriguing cultural twists.

In particular, “En El Viejo Estambul” is a wonderfully evocative psychedelic jazz composition, which combines strange middle eastern twilight zone scales, motorik jazz drumming and shimmering vibraphonic glissandos. The effect is beautifully exotic, propulsive and hypnotic. Things get a little odder with tracks selected from the 1966 long player “Misa En Jazz”. Like many jazz musicians and composers from the period, Tino Contreras attempted to combine secular and non secular composition. The results on display here are eerily engaging. “Santo” interweaves a stripped down jazz organ refrain in 5/4 time (think Dave Brubeck Quartet) with liturgical male and female vocal chant - it shouldn’t work but it does. Weirder still, “Credo” utilises a ghostly ballroom organ which evokes an image of Sun Ra languorously jamming on a disused seaside pier round midnight with a devout choir lamenting to otherworldly effect in the background. Twisted jazz never sounded so good. “Gloria” is even odder, opening with noir call girl tease, the track slowly evolves into celestial chorus and progressive modern jazz flourishes creating a sublime meeting point between the sacred and profane. I don’t go to church often but if I heard this playing from the pulpit, I definitely would.

Throughout his career,Tino Contreras, was a visionary innovator, he travelled to Egypt, Turkey, Haiti, Brazil and Argentina collecting a wealth of musical knowledge along the way. In his later years, he developed compositions using the microtonal system of musical composition, ‘Sonido 13’, the ‘Thirteenth Sound', which divided conventional scales into a vastly wider palette of sonic tones.The track “Orbita” is a fine example of this style of composition. Taken from the rare and virtually untraceable private press record “Quinto Sol, Musica Infinita” this track required specially modified instruments to be built in order to create the wonderfully strange percussive effects which feature in this lopsided waltz time number. Shards of prepared piano collide with a deep jazz groove while sonorous baritone sax overtones dissolve into kinetic percussive joy, an intoxicating blend indeed.

This release documents the career of a unique and singular talent and should be investigated at the earliest opportunity. A remarkable out there release.

‘El Jazz Mexicano De Tino Contreras” is released by Jazzman Records on the 7th November.

Edition Fieber

2011-10-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

Shrigley Forced To Speak With Others – "The Tree" by Edition Fieber
Shrigley Forced To Speak With Others – "Bong Your Dong Against The Gong" by Edition Fieber

Here's a little project I helped create. I'd almost forgotten about it but a small box of 7" singles arrived on my doorstep this morning and when I opened it I got a little excited. Probably more so than I should of. I did the audio warble and some other bloke scrawled the artwork and wrote the lyrics. I rather like them. Dinky little things. Maybe, it's because the covers look so rubbish, maybe it's the pink vinyl, I really don't know. There's more information about the project here. Oh and the price tag, absolutely mental.

Yaraandoo

2011-10-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a recording entirely worthy of your attention. Originally released in 1974 as a minuscule private pressing of less than a 100 vinyl copies, Yaraandoo, is surely one of the lesser known and oddest conceptual records in existence. It's a difficult recording to define, an oddly unique meeting point between Kosmiche outsider jam, restrained free jazz improv, romantic impressionism, pastoral jazz and taut progressive moves. Inspired by the Aboriginal dreamtime myth of Yaraandoo, the record is a masterpiece of deeply, sparse and evocative musicality which deftly captures the stark, sun drenched Dreamtime isolation of the Australian outback. Recorded over a few months by multi instrumentalist Rob Thomsett and friends on a two track home studio in Canberra, Yaraandoo evokes a wide range of stylistic and compositional tones, moods and colours. At times, the sound is reminiscent of the deep jazz groove of Ian Carr's progressive outfit Nucleus but this reference point soon collapses into unexpected forms such as childlike folk strum complete with shimmering bells, glockenspiel and auto harp, melancholic minor key orchestration, wibbly avant electronic oscillations and slow motion hypnotic jazz. Originally, packaged using hand glued stationary card and illustrated with startlingly contemporaneous spray painted graphics, the record has a strange outsider aura which would make even the most ardent record collector salivate. Few private records live up to the hyperbole, but Yaraandoo is undoubtedly a unique and strange listening experience which thankfully has been lifted from private press obscurity by the ever wonderful Australian based label Roundtable. Seek out this record, take off your clothes, lift your arms up to feel the setting sun and let this undefinable musical solar flare wash over you.

Photography Into Sculpture

2011-10-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles based gallery, Cherry & Martin, restage Peter Bunnellʼs landmark 1970 exhibition, Photography Into Sculpture. Perhaps worth a visit if you're in the vicinity?

Way Of The Morris

2011-10-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

More good news! My favourite purveyor of esoteric soundtrack recordings, Jonny Trunk, has started a new label called OST with the sole aim of releasing some of the more interesting proponents of contemporary film music out there. The first release on this new label is Adrian Corker's original soundtrack for Tim Plester's award winning documentary about the much ridiculed tradition of Morris dancing entitled “Way Of The Morris”. The film is a charming meditation on the curious role of folk traditions with contemporaneous culture and despite this rather oblique subject matter, the soundtrack is a wondrous mix of restrained electronics and ancient instrumentation and very much worthy of your attention. Utilizing field recordings from rural England, the music documents a strange and wonderful meeting place, where the sound of bells and whistles, voice and tradition, sticks and rushes blur and decay into a radiophonic otherworldliness. It is a weird mix indeed as shimmering glacial electronics elide into eccentric Moondog rhythmic patterns, joyous Bacchanalian reverie eerily echoes then dissolves into playful folk melody to suddenly side step into deeply meditative and cavernous melancholic disquiet creating an intoxicating amalgam of rural sounds. Compositionally, the soundtrack is both rich and emotive in tenor and style and wonderfully captures many of the contradictions of the preserving village green tradition within an industrial society. An utterly charming, idiosyncratic and very worthwhile release.

The "Way Of The Morris" soundtrack is released on OST on November 21st.

Playthings

2011-10-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

It's taken me a while to discover the wonderful blog entitled 50 Watts. Here's a few gems from the collection. The images are taken from a book from 1928 entitled "Children's Toys of Bygone Days: A History of Playthings of All Peoples from Prehistoric Times to the XIXth Century" by Karl Gober. Wonderful stuff.

Bulandra I Diabeł

2011-10-13T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Kramford Look

2011-10-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a little oddball record that I like. Odd, because I've spent a large part of my adult life looking for records like it. It's the kind of record that makes the endless hours spent rummaging through consumer dietrus at rain soaked carboots, church fairs and the occasional local dump worthwhile. If your bag is sinister Giallo schlock, dusty wibbly electronic library themes or kinky cinematic arrangement you'll want to dig a little deeper to find this gem. The descriptive cues on the back of the record such as "Apprehensive theme with childlike overtones, glockenspiel" give little indication of the sonic wonders contained within its grooves and if I pulled this out from a box of scratched Mantovani records at the local booter I'd be well chuffed. You can find yours here.

Sound Sculptures

2011-10-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

Photothèque Imaginaire De Shuji Terayama

2011-08-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

Jazz In Relief

2011-08-28T02:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a thing of beauty. I've been playing it all Sunday morning. For years, I was obsessed with finding a copy in good nick and when I did I played it non stop for a month or so, filed it away and forgot about it. I'm glad I've rediscovered it. It's a jazz record of sorts, not of the free blowing variety but a wonderfully melodic trio recording. The playing is beautifully restrained throughout. Sunday morning music my dad would have called it. I've always liked the cover. It looks oddly futuristic and nostalgic at the same time. On the back of the record it says the photograph is called 'Three Lions' which has always confused me because I can't for the life of me see a single lion on it. The link above is for the French issue which I found online but I much prefer the cover of UK issue from 1967 which can be viewed below. I hope you enjoy too.

Electronic Music Review

2011-08-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

Rising Stars

2011-08-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

...... delighted to see that this is finally getting a release in a nifty new bag although I do have a certain soft spot for the rather splendidly 'stiff upper lip' 1964 sleeve.

Serene Velocity

2011-08-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

Fantom Salon

2011-08-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

I'll be spinning a few 45s in Glasgow, Scotland this evening. Feel free to stop by and say hello if you're in the vicinity.

Tracy Nakayama

2011-08-01T09:17:00.000-07:00

إيقاع مغربي شعبي مسخوط

2011-07-25T14:10:00.000-07:00

How Acla Disappeared From Earth

2011-07-22T09:47:00.000-07:00

The rather wonderful curator of this book emailed me this afternoon with a link to the following short film by Anna Thew. It was also good to hear that Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window by Cyclobe will finally be released on compact disc this coming Monday. Review here. Enjoy.

Untitled from Phantomcode on Vimeo.

Own Label - Sainsbury's Design Studio

2011-07-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a little publication I'm all excited about. It's not quite as odd as the last Fuel/Trunk records collaboration but I'm sure it'll be interesting. It's a book about supermarket graphics. Who would of thought Lord Sainsbury was a fan of the International Style. Who would of thought Whole Wheat Bisk could look so typographically alluring. The book contains 208 pages of sexy packaging. Here's a few samples. If graphic design is your kink, you're going to be a happy person. I know I will be. Many thanks to Jonny at Trunk Records for the rather wonderful scans. Own Label - Sainsbury's Design Studio 1962 -1977 is published in September by Fuel.

Normal Transmission Will Resume Shortly

2011-06-25T01:28:00.000-07:00

A Sound Awareness will be taking a short break for the next few weeks in order to scour Turkey for obscure Anatolian vinyl but rest assured there's more interesting bits and pieces coming up soon.

R H Quaytman

2011-06-19T02:27:00.000-07:00

Radioolio Mix

2011-06-18T01:57:00.000-07:00

A Sound Awareness is delighted to present an exclusive mix of avant oddness expertly curated by Radioolio. Tracklist in comments.

A Sound Awareness Mix by A Sound Awareness

Once Around The Sun

2011-06-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

Here’s another wonderful cultural artefact I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. ‘Once Around The Sun’ is a strange and visionary soundtrack to a forgotten Australian post Woodstock counter culture film. Filmed by sculptor and experimental filmmaker Gordon Mutch, a well known figure in the late sixties Sydney underground,the film set out to document the Australian freakout fraternities first foray into mass open-air festival. As far as I know, the film never made it off the cutting room floor which is a shame as the resultant soundtrack by John Sangster is masterpiece of beautifully restrained pastoral instrumentation and deep, dark, passages of hallucinatory orchestration. This is no cheap soundtrack of low budget psych exploitation but a fully formed cosmic suite of ambitious proportions. Cosmic tones of avant free form improvisation,jazz noir and interstellar big band swing collide. Imagine Stockhausen conducting the Arkestra and your halfway there. At times, the music is strangely propulsive, as strolling basslines percolate up through the deliriously shimmering dissonance and reverb saturated discordance. There are also oddly expansive, staring at the sun moments of peaked outsiderness as home made percussion, tabla, electronics and sitar echo and reverberate in the noon day breeze. Another fine archaeological resurrection by the stellar Australian label Roundtable.

Doo & A Dihash

2011-06-17T10:53:00.000-07:00

Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines

2011-06-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meaning to write something on this wonderful book for a while. Falling somewhere between dusty nostalgia and future world innovation, this book documents the explosion of self published architectural magazines of the early 1960s through to the late 1970’s.

Despite the modesty of their production, many of these ‘little’ magazines punch well above their weight in terms of documenting the socio – political revolution of this period. Before social networking, independent architectural periodicals functioned as radical manifestoes for a new way of living and these small press periodicals were produced to disseminate a startling wide range of experimental theory and practice. Rescued from the dusty shelves of architectural libraries, these missives from another time capture and expose the paradigmatic rifts within the period they were produced, as the optimistic hippie idealism embedded within the Age of Aquarius becomes tempered by the cultural fallout of the late 1960s. The book is beautifully researched throughout and gathers together around seventy small publications as well as extensive interviews and facsimile reprints. Being an architectural non practitioner, what particularly caught my eye was the rather unusual, homespun quality of the design and layout of these publications. Many have a hand crafted, low budget, almost proto punk feel and reading through them feels like sifting through a folk archive of lost and arcane architectural protest. As the book evolves, modernist values tune in and drop out and any blueprint of a unified architectural model lies burning in the streets. Perhaps more importantly, this book serves as a timely reminder that despite our unprecedented access to information we have perhaps lost some of the intense political engagement with the world which was present when these periodicals were produced. Food for thought.

Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines by Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley is out now, published by Actar.

The MMs Bar Recording

2011-06-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

Having just completed the production of a spoken word recording of my very own, my curiosity was much piqued by this rather strange and everyday oddity coming your way via Trunk Records. It also presented me with the slightest of excuses to post this rather attractive and inspired logo by Gerald Burney of Design Research Unit.

1968–1972 Walker Performing Arts Flyers

2011-06-12T00:26:00.000-07:00

The Graphic Work Of Destroy All Monsters

2011-06-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

Formed at a house party in 1973 and playing their first gig at a comic book convention (where they were asked to leave after ten minutes), Destroy All Monsters [DAM] were a multi disciplinary art collective from the Ann Arbor area of Detroit. Comprising of artists, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Niagara and film maker Cary Loren they were responsible for the proliferation of a vast array of acid soaked visionary art across a wide range of media including paintings, prints, sculpture, film, performance art and of course music. Influenced equally by the avant garde and Sci-Fi B-movies their work oscillates somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous.

This book gathers together all six issues of Destroy All Monsters Magazine, a self published art ‘zine which was originally published between 1973 – 1979.

To the contemporary eye, many of the images in this book form a strange and disorientating synthesis of proto punk aggression, hippie mysticism and Warholian canniness. Despite much of the work being over thirty years old, much of it still feels contemporaneous and would not seem out of place in the shelves of your local purveyor of retina candy. Visually, the book combines a visceral punk cut & paste aesthetic with stoner chutzpah to create a rather oddly formed mixture of Looneyville high art. Imagine an ecstatic wunderkabinett of discarded visual ephemera recombined into an oozing mass of Day-Glo psychedelic visual gloopage and your halfway there. Densely layered collages compound consumer culture kitsch with aggressive counter culture subversion resulting is an explosion of hallucinatory misprint and sensorial overload. This book is a joyful graphic noise and very much worth your attention.

A facsimile reprint of the Destroy All Monsters Magazine 1976-1979 is out now published by Primary Information.

Phantom 1975

2011-05-29T01:36:00.000-07:00

Bojan Sarcevic - 1954

2011-05-19T15:47:00.001-07:00

Dance Of The Peacock Spider

2011-05-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

via Strange Attractor.

Anworth Kirk 2

2011-05-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

Something wicked this way comes. Another unsolicited, dark and spectral missive drops through the Sound Awareness letterbox in the form of a new Anworth Kirk release. Packaged in a rat chewed, hand pasted sleeve, this release is a much more caliginous and sage affair than its sister record. Like all good records, musically, it is difficult to pin down, part spirit rapping improv, part dim and eerie soundtrack, intense folk musique elides into Victorian grand parlour room Giallo schlock then dissipates in sound weaving patterns of lecture hall mesmerism. This is music of the ether, dark, nebulous and with many voices. Digital layering creates a seamless and complex atemporality, the folkloric becomes entwined with the technological present creating an utterly compelling and spellbinding new form of avant garde shadow electronica. This is a record to seek out and communicate with.

An Interview With Peter Strickland

2011-05-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

A Sound Awareness is delighted to present an interview with internationally renowned filmmaker Peter Strickland. The blog has been very quiet of late due to unforeseen family circumstances and hopefully this interview will make up for last few months of silence.

Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga is a stunningly dark and poetic tale of violent retribution and human pathos. Despite being filmed in Romania on a shoestring budget, it stands as one of the great masterpieces of recent cinema and I heartily recommend you endeavour to seek it out. Now for the interview.

The internet is a weird thing, I came across your film, Katalin Varga, after you’d written a few supportive comments about my blog on your site. I think I must have watched it five or six times now. It’s a stunning film on so many levels. Can you tell me a little about what inspired the film and how you ended up with a Hungarian cast and crew? How long have you lived in Hungary?

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what started the film off. Revenge is one of those themes that constantly renews itself. Sadly, it will never be irrelevant and it’s marred by so many contradictions in every sphere of life, whether it’s the street, religion or politics. I wanted to delve into the whole revenge thing a little more and go into some of the more troublesome aspects of it that tend to get airbrushed out of many films. To leave an audience with doubt about a belief instead of answers seems to be far healthier. I remember a recent interview with Michael Haneke in which he said that only politicians give answers.

I was thinking about this today and I recalled reading Justine (Or the Misfortunes Of Virtue) by The Marquis De Sade as a teenager, which is a very bleak view of the notion of virtue. There is this endless quest for salvation but in reality Justine's life is subject to the most horrific and brutal abuse with little or no respite in between, if memory serves me right, in the end she asks god for help and is struck down by an unforgiving and vengeful bolt of lightening. Katlin Varga has a similar bleakness, you're willing her on but soon any notion of virtue, right or wrong soon become blurred.

That's what I admire about Bunuel too. There is nothing deodorised about his worldview in a film like 'Viridiana'. Even the scene with the dog is desperately brutal and it shatters our idealism about charity to some degree. We see Viridiana take pity on this dog that is chained up and she offers to buy it from the owners. Once the dog is sold, the owners go round the back and get another dog out for another good-willed person to take pity on. That's one of the most effectively cynical scenes I've seen in a film.

Some people were offended by the ending in 'Katalin Varga', but somehow it feels that you're cheating people to offer happy endings when dealing with that kind of subject. The film to me wasn't really about rape, but about the nature of wrongdoing in general. It was one little footnote on something that is so complex. As a filmmaker, you do ask yourself if you're promoting what you're condemning by showing perpetrators escaping justice. But the wider problem is that in society we see that notions of justice (be they civil or divine) are simply random and quite often not applicable. I've heard about plenty of people getting away with robbing others blind, but they're smart enough and connected enough to not be accountable and also sleep very well at night. Dishonesty pays as much as honesty does, and it's much harder to navigate your own morals around that when the traditional deterrents you grew up with turn out to be a fallacy. A much more alarming question to ask ourselves is how to make the argument for being decent and honest when we so often see dishonesty reaping in huge rewards?

Looking back on it, I can see that I definitely enjoyed tampering around with the genre element of it. Rape/revenge films have their own sub-strata in the film canon and I wanted to see how it would be to take such a disreputable genre and place it in a very different context and slow it right down. It was going to be an even slower film with donkeys until I found out that Szekely Hungarians in Transylvania prefer the horse wagon.

In terms of the atmosphere, the two starting points were Sergei Paradjanov's 'Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors' and Charles Laughton's 'Night of the Hunter'. The former had a huge impact on me. I was 18 when I first saw it and being a suburban Reading boy, that film felt as if it had been beamed over from another dimension. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but at the same time it felt familiar, probably because of the Greek Orthodox side of my family. It was something that I just grew up with and never really thought about. It didn’t feel particularly special until I saw 'The Colour of Pomegranates' and 'Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors'. Suddenly all this Orthodox iconography hit me as being very cinematic. That was something I could respond to. It's got nothing to do with belief or lack of it, it's just there in your system if you've grown up with it. It's very potent in Paradjanov's work probably because the Communists suppressed it, so it's almost this heightened form of Christianity on display. That was something I wanted to weave the film around, as some of the ideas revolve around redemption, divine justice and so on. But those ideas could also hark back to gospel or the blues. It might sound pretentious, but in hindsight I think about 'Katalin Varga' as the film equivalent of an old gospel or blues number. It has that downtrodden lament to it, but at the same time that faith in the idea that one should just forge ahead even though it'll most likely end in tears. It also has the same production values – very rough around the edges. That was not my intention, but that was the reality with the money we had.

I had no specific country in mind when I wrote the script. I needed mountains and somewhere relatively convenient. Romania was otherworldly enough, but not too much of a pain to travel to. I was open to finding any actors and didn’t have any ethnic agendas. Whoever was suitable and whoever was keen was all I cared about. So Hilda Peter became Katalin when I met her in 2005, which meant I had to change the religion to Catholic since she’s an ethnic Hungarian.

I’ve been in Hungary on and off since 2007. Some things are better than the UK, other things are worse.

I watched Sátántangó by the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr at the weekend and was struck by it’s slowly evolving, almost meditative pace. There is a real sense of time in that film. Katalin Varga has a strange sense of time which switches between these disquieting moments of detachment and otherness and a more conventional dramatic structure. There’s a strong sense of narrative in the film which is discordant with these strangely heightened moments of separation. What’s you view on this interpretation?

Satantango is my favourite Tarr film. He really belly-flopped with ‘The Man from London’, but ‘Satantango’ has that rigorousness to it if you’re into more formalist stuff, and it also rings true. You can apply the doings of that small collective in Satantango to politics or even the film business in several countries east of Austria. It’s a very bleak ‘every man for himself’ world. There were definitely moments in Katalin Varga where we wanted it to drift into its own world a little. That was sometimes planned, other times it was impromptu. The script I wrote was fairly conventional and I often wondered how the film would find its own rhythm. When making short films, that was usually never a concern since they were so short. With 'Katalin Varga', it hit us in the editing room that with such a stripped-down narrative, we really needed to use up all that second unit footage we shot just to give the film some air to breathe. The whole process is very intuitive, but the deeper into the edit you are, the less sensitive you are to the material and the harder it is to judge the pacing and rhythm. The original script was quite wordy, but people kept going on about how Szekely Hungarians don’t talk that much. That’s something I’m still yet to notice. I remember one Szekely man taking thirty minutes to tell me that Szekely people don’t like talking.

There’s a dark ruralism running through the film, an almost hidden undercurrent of the supernatural, there are moments in the film when you almost forget it’s filmed in present day and it’s almost shocking when you see some of the characters in rural attire speaking on mobile phones? Was this intentional?

It was only intentional in that we had no choice. My big dream was just to rip off Paradjanov's 'Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors'. I showed it to Mark Gyori, the cameraman. That was pretty much the sole visual reference point, but I only had 30,000 euro to make the film. I was getting a little ahead of myself and realised that we can't go round villages ripping satellite dishes and aerials out. The more time I spent in Transylvania, the more I realised that we have something really special here - a country trying to balance itself between a determinedly unchanged past and the influence of lifestyle and technology from the West. You only get that clash in Romania, Albania and Moldova now. It was never a plan to do it this way. It certainly wasn't scripted. It was more of a case of us not fighting the reality around us and allowing it to add another dimension to the film. Strangely in the West, almost every single review I read picked up on the mobile phone. It was so funny for Hilda (Katalin) and the other cast from the film, as that extreme contrast is something quite natural for them. The mountains surround these small towns in Romania, so despite the fact that almost all the actors from the film live in these urban blockhouses, they still know how to ride a horse, they don't get freaked out by ticks and they can tolerate all kinds of things that actors' agents wouldn't allow over their dead bodies in the UK.

Katalin Varga has some particularly striking sound design. You’re obviously very interested in the transformative properties of sound as part of the film making process, I particularly thinking of the ‘rope sequence’ in Katalin Varga created by Steven Stapleton. How important is the use of sound in your films? Which soundtrack composers do you rate? How important is music to your creative process?

When I started out in the early '90s, wayward music was much more easily obtainable than film. I read about Stan Brakhage, Jordan Belson, Tony Conrad and so on, but those films were very hard to find, so you just had to imagine them until you got lucky enough to find them. Whereas the equivalent in music was relatively easy to get hold of, so by default, all that stuff I heard just ate its way into me much earlier than the equivalent in film.

There was a period between 1996-2003, in which I burnt out financially from making a short film on 16mm, so I got together with some friends from Reading (Colin Fletcher and Tim Kirby) and formed The Sonic Catering Band, which allowed us to try out ideas and methods that several years later ended up in 'Katalin Varga'. There are very few tracks we made that I can actually listen to and be proud of, but despite some of our more embarrassing efforts, I learnt a lot from Colin and Tim about how to document and work with everyday sounds. I was hopeless with technology and still am, but I learnt just about enough to now be that irritant sitting in the most comfortable chair in the room and making constant suggestions without actually doing anything. Pure back seat driving.

The equipment Colin first had was very basic - a 4-track tape machine, a graphic equalizer, a reel-to-reel, a wah-wah pedal and a copicat delay. It was a lot of fun, but we totally missed the point of what we were doing. We wanted to bring out the otherness of these intense frying and boiling sounds, but instead we were just hiding the source material behind effects and only showcasing the technology we were using. That was a big turning point for us. Around 2001, Tim played me Robert Ashley and Alvin Lucier and that changed everything in terms of my attitude. Suddenly I was no longer afraid to let sounds exist in their own realm. Prior to that, I wrongly thought that everything needed 'authorship' or some kind of stamp, but the really smart musicians knew when to hold back.

So with 'Katalin Varga', we used a little EQ and minimal reverb on occasion, but the actual sound design in the film mainly consists of mixing in a way that foregrounds some of the elements you normally wouldn't find so high up in the mix. Crickets are pretty high up in the mix and there’s this goat bell sequence that builds and builds. A lot of it was merely joining the dots in my record collection. There were references to Faust, Iannis Xenakis, Chris Watson and Luc Ferrari. No idea why I wanted those references. It just seemed fun and perhaps it could add some intensity.

The whole irony with the sound design is that there really wasn't much sound design at all. It was an assemblage job that involved decisions about where to put all this pre-sound designed material that people handed in, often prior to the shoot. With no disrespect to Gabor and Gyorgy (the sound designer and mixer) who were very sensitive and efficient with the material, I do feel that not enough credit went to people like Steven Stapleton, Geoff Cox, Roj (Stevens), Sculpture (Dan Hayhurst), Xylitol (Jim Backhouse), Alan Burbidge, RR Habarc, Pal Toth and others. I went out to Transylvania with Clive Graham in 2004 mainly to record goat bells. I suppose it’s called second unit sound. Clive also has his Paradigm Discs label, so I thought I could be sneaky and use a track from an Adam Bohman album that came out on that label. In my mind these people were the sound designers, but because they mostly made atmospheres, the majority of critics who brought attention to the sound kind of got the wrong end of the stick and just assumed that the work of all those guests was the sound design in post-production, which is understandable. I wanted the audience to either not notice or get confused over where the sound is coming from. The scene you mentioned with that Stapleton/Nurse track is the most emphatic example. You first think that this avian clucking sound is coming from these circling eagles and then it just builds and builds until you realise it's on the soundtrack and not in the background, then you start to wonder whether it's sound design or music. I love that confusion. It really works in a film like 'Elephant', which borrowed heavily from 'Satantango'.

Soundtrack composers – Lalo Schifrin, John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani, Lubos Fiser, Zdenek Liska, Georges Delerue, Serge Gainsbourg, Michael Nyman up until 1988.

It took me a long time to work out that nearly all my favourite films either have a very distinctive musical score or very specific use of sound. "Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors" is a good example, I think it has a sublime mix of instrumentation, voice and sound which elevates and transforms what is witnessed on the screen. I think it's a 'cultural crime' that the score by Miroslav Skorik is not commercially available and if you want to listen to it you have to dub it from a dvd. Do you have any favourite soundtracks you consider successful, poignant or original which you feel are neglected?

That soundtrack is really something, especially with the wedding sequence. It's great that these old ladies sing out of tune and they just sound really raucous and unrefined. That's quite rare in film. Usually folk songs are so well produced, they just sound buffed. All that untramelled energy that went into these songs has been neutralised. I have this great recording of gypsy songs from this Romanian village we shot in and the singing is wild. Totally out of tune and wild, which is how it should be.

Other soundtracks that either haven't been released or just don't get enough attention:

'The Fearless Vampire Killer's by Krzysztof Komeda, 'Le Mepris' by Georges Delerue, 'Danger Diabolik' by Ennio Morricone, 'Allures' - no idea who did that soundtrack for Jordan Belson's film, 'The Cremator' by Zdenek Liska, 'Last Year in Marienbad' by Francis Seyrig, 'Carnival of Souls' by Gene Moore, 'Stone Wedding' by Dorin Liviu Zaharia, 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' - general sound, and two Greek favourites'Girls in the Sun' by Stavros Xarhakos and 'The Girl and the Horse' by Gerasimos Lavranos (with songs by Elpitha). 'The World of Survival' nature shows often had some pretty amazing soundtracks, but they must have come from libraries, as they were never credited.

Music is almost vital when writing. I could never have music I like in the background. Rather it has to be something relevant to the atmosphere of what I’m writing even if I have no intention of using it in the film. Music is the best thing for transporting you out of your everyday thoughts. Usually I find I can write quite effectively once I’ve got into that world the script exists in, but the hard thing is leaving the normal world behind. That can take hours. I find that the older I get, the more clutter my brain collects – useless stuff revolving around daily irritations, some amazing thing I found on a blog, local gossip, and all that. A strong piece of music or sound can shove that all to one side on a good day.

I know you’re soon to embark on a new film project, are you listening to and watching anything particular things in preparation? Can you discuss the new project?

I've been writing a treatment for one of these film market catalogues. I could just copy and paste it here, but these things tend to be such a bore.

The new film started as a tribute to the Italian avant-garde music scene of the '60s and '70s and especially the technology used, but then more personal stuff crept in. What really drove the script forward was how musicians from the Italian avant-garde made some of their most beautiful and advanced music for horror films.

Music has been far more of an influence on this script than film. There's so much good stuff out there that not only sounds amazing, but is also full of ideas in terms of structure, juxtapositions and so on, and it's just there for the taking, as no other film makers seem to be picking up on it. I'm mainly talking about Luciano Berio and his Fonologia studio. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop has deservedly been documented by several labels, musicians and websites, but Fonologia's ghosts didn't quite filter through. The studio wasn't as functional as the BBC's, as it was mainly devoted to the work of Berio, Cathy Berberian, Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, who scored the demented giallo film, 'Death Laid an Egg'. The studio did some work for TV and radio plays, but not on the same scale as the BBC, but it still had such an aura and strangeness. Marino Zuccheri, the Fonologia in-house engineer was an enigma and it was only since his passing that we've discovered that his own work was just as strange and wonderful as the composers he worked for. If you hear 'Parete' by Zuccheri, you can definitely hear where Nono got his sound from. Several other composers from that '60s/'70s golden period - Ennio Morricone (of course) and his Gruppo di Improvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani, Franco Battiato and the strangest one, Enore Zaffiri. Saying this, we don't intend to use any music by these people. There is no intention to even emulate or do a pastiche, but anyway, the music side of the project has been put on hold.

This is a fascinating area of enquiry. Have you heard Morricone's Feedback lp? To me that's a perfect collision of rock and the formalism of the avant garde. [I've had a copy of Death Laid An Egg on my shelves of what seems like ages, I must make a mental note to watch it!]

Neither heard nor heard of the Feedback LP, but I should start looking for it going on what you just said. I thought I had a pretty extensive Morricone collection, but almost every month someone comes along and recommends another album that is bound to amaze me. The last Morricone album that blew me away was 'The Devil is a Woman'.

What was really fascinating about the Italian scene was how avant-garde and rock found its surrogate home in giallo cinema. Some of those soundtracks are so mind-blowing and propulsive. The Goblin soundtrack to 'Suspiria' still holds up. Even when Goblin are shockingly bad, they still have something. I'd rather listen to a bad Goblin soundtrack than any of these cynically-compiled soundtracks that are just dressed-up versions of those old ‘Now that’s what I call music’ albums.

In terms of film, there wasn’t any specific influence. The closest thing would be Peter Tscherkassky’s short film, ‘Outer Space’ in terms of its ideas, not in terms of how it looks. Some giallo stuff crept its way in too, but it’s misleading of me to say that, as we're not making a horror film. What we're doing is a little similar to mechanically-recovered meat, we’re ignoring the prime rump from giallo cinema and just picking up on all those peripheral, discarded elements such as design, atmosphere and music, which was either very rich in melody and/or very effects-driven. Needless to say I have no idea how it will all end up.

I would personally like to thank Peter for his generosity of time and spirit in making this interview possible. Credit should also be given to Marek Szold for many of the wonderful and evocative location shots.

Super 8 'Katalin Varga'

2011-02-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last couple of hours watching this location footage from one of my favourite films of recent years. Utterly mesmeric images by the ever wonderful Peter Strickland.

A Blind Date With An Afro Cubist From Gurnley

2011-02-05T04:46:00.000-08:00

A few musical oddities from the ever wonderful Trunk Records HQ. Probably the best £3.75 I've spent in ages. The Gurney Slade Theme is particularly evocative of those enchanting and surreal British comedies of the early 1960s. Top stuff.

L'Ecran Transparent

2011-01-29T10:01:00.000-08:00

Bernard Parmegiani - L'Ecran transparent/The Transparent Screen from Seth Watter on Vimeo.

Qui êtes vous, Polly Maggoo?

2011-01-24T13:16:00.000-08:00

This little gem of a soundtrack has eluded me for years and it was a joy to finally hear it.

Strange Attractor - Celebrating Unpopular Culture

2011-01-23T12:01:00.000-08:00

Just a little post to say that my favourite source of neglected and esoteric culture has recently updated their website. There seems to be a myriad of projects unfolding, including a much needed Strange Attractor Journal Four. Details here. Image by Richard Brown.

Fabulous Notes & Beats Of The Indian Carnatic Jazz / Hey Klong Yao!

2011-01-23T08:37:00.000-08:00

Without a doubt, EM Records of Japan is fast becoming my favoured purveyor of oddball, eccentric and out there records. Each release by this label, playfully twists expectation and lovingly documents a wealth of distinctive, genre defying musical wonders, the latest releases being no exception.

First up, is the wonderfully entitled “Fabulous Notes & Beats Of The Indian Carnatic-Jazz” by T. K. Ramamoorthy which is a masterpiece of cultural collision and improvisational verve. Recorded in Madras in 1969, it's a strange and perplexing hybrid mix of Western jazz instrumentation and traditional Southern Indian Carnatic music. The results are musically joyous. It’s the kind of record I hoped existed, with each track combining and interweaving two distinct musical traditions into a new and intoxicating sound of wonder. Each arrangement is astonishing in it’s breath and diversity. “Ranjani” has a late night strip joint swing Basil Kirchin would be proud of but the melodic use of tabla tharang drums elevates the track to another level with disarming effect. “Natta” starts with a simple call to prayer on a trumpet then builds to an ever increasing fervent and raucous percussive workout of fierce proportions. The quality of the musicianship is unparalleled. Listen here for a sneak preview of some particularly breathtaking single note Senku conch playing. Jazz never sounded this good. T. K. Ramamoorthy cut his musical teeth in the demanding and often labour intensive Indian film studios of Southern India. He provided a diverse and spectacular array of soundtracks to over seven hundred films but this record is one of the few he made as a leader. This recording is both startlingly original in form and content and stands as a testament to a both a visionary musician and skilled arranger. Wonderful stuff.

The second disc by The Son Of P.M. entitled “Hey Klong Yao” is also worthy of your attention. This is ‘Thai Modernized Music' of a different style to the music discussed here recently. The groove is very much rooted in frenetic and rhythmic rock ‘n’ roll with discernible elements of pop, surf and exotica. It’s hard to pin down tracks like “The Horse Step Dance [Guaracha]” which has moments of Velvets like organ drone coupled with hypnotic latin bass and Ventures twang. “Sad Chatree [Talung]” is both intangible and otherworldly, coupling a relentless trance-inducing rhythm with an archaic Thai melody, which hovers and shimmers like an insect caught in hazy and perfumed smoke. There is much to be intoxicated here as this is music which defies rigid categorisation and easy interpretation. At times, the results are downright weird, “King Of Drums” sounds like the ghost of Lux Interior throwing primitive goo goo muck in a Thai temple. Odd and exotic indeed. Both recordings are released by EM Records this month.

Musique Pour L'Image

2011-01-22T13:16:00.000-08:00

Twitch & Radioolio

2011-01-20T14:02:00.000-08:00

Those wishing to forget their troubles will find much to enjoy with these two rather finely crafted examples of audio collage. ~~Twitch Mix~~. Radioolio Mix. Image by Reiner Ruthenbeck. Tracklists in comments.

Bye Trish

2011-01-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

I've just returned from a weekend trip across Europe which took me to Barcelona, a well loved city which evokes a great many memories from over the years. One which I remember particularly fondly, was a B-Music event where I DJ'ed alongside Dom Thomas, a younger Gaslamp Killer and Trish and Jam from our mutually favourite band Broadcast. The event was a great success and remains one of my favourite memories of spending quality time with some really exciting musical minds. A right old knees up! Sadly, in contrast, this weekends trip to the same city was interrupted early on Friday with the unfathomable news that Trish had lost her life to pneumonia a few hours earlier. My reactionary call home was met with floods of tears from my distressed wife and from this point the only place I really wanted to be was at home with Jane and the kids... and my Broadcast records.

In simple terms, I could not believe my ears when I heard the first Trish Keenan record. Today, I find it equally unbelievable that I probably won't hear the next one. There's never a correct time for birth or death, which is why the news this Friday came as such a shock for so many people and the potential personal loss of something as abstract as art and music is also, for some people, somehow hard to emotionally quantify. I've taken Broadcast for granted for most of my adult life and now I'm confused and genuinely devastated.

The release of the first Broadcast record marked an unannounced significance in my life as a quasi professional spectator. Broadcast marked my coming of age like the meeting of a special new friend. Which is exactly what it was for many people.

The faceless voice I met on record came to represent a ghostly sister or brother that I never had, sharing lonely and intimate talks about realistic car parks, believable libraries and totally plausible classrooms. At times, the voice came in the form of a lost primary school supply teacher or your seldom seen youngest auntie who then disappeared. This might explain why when I was first introduced to Trish Keenan in person by Rob Mitchell at Bowlie weekender I was utterly terrified, then, within a matter of friendly uttered syllables, was sweetly normalised. She was, of course, human, and probably more human than most of my music making friends.

I'll never forget the moment I heard Friday's inconceivable news. Amongst many other brilliant memories of the woman who I still consider to be the most important voice in modern British pop music, it's the private mementos that are the most profound. When I first heard 'Echoes Answer' I felt like somebody was telling me a deep secret. When I first heard 'Distant Call' I felt like I was finally being forgiven after some lengthy family dispute. I honestly never knew that this was possible via pop music.

Trish was far from the jamming front man, as popularised by the macho music UNdustry, who would simply throw rhyming buzzwords at a dry wall of guitars until something stuck... for Trish, not one syllable went unpondered and her wordplay was expertly interwoven using Letterist influences and hard earned poetic license.

It's becoming hard to talk about Trish in the past tense because to me she has always represented the possibilities of the future and a heightened creative process that people within pop music rarely achieve. The common limitations of human perception, patience and perseverance means it could take a life time for some people reach the Keenan degree. I won't call her superhuman, but unlike Trish, I’m not poetic enough to find a better description.

While donning the unconvincing A&R man disguise over the years I would regularly piss-off my own artists, on a label primarily influenced by Wurlitzer Jukebox, constantly and casually referring to the Broadcast benchmark like John Peels Fall tick box system.

Even with long gaps between records Broadcast's albums would never outstay their welcome, evoking unwaning poignancy until the next rewarding chapter, more like good films than pop records. Broadcast were entitled to be perfectionists because in this rare case perfection was achievable. And I adored and admired the fact that it didn't come easy.

From where I stood and waited, the rewarding painstaking process of Broadcast songs were like the work of an eastern European animator with the most assiduous of working methods, that would, for lesser pop stars prove unsustainable and out-of-synch with the whinging industry. But Broadcast were a rare example of genuine hard working fine artists who made sacrifices to communicate craft with everyday people. I've never seen eye to eye with perfectionists...but Trish has never made an imperfect record...not one blot on a 15 year old copybook.

While transcending pop whims Trish's growing passions had recently found her moving into creative writing, fiction and sound poetry. Any single piece of Broadcast's 15 year legacy is omni-relevant and as a constantly evolving and challenging voice. It's devastating to think that she had barely even begun her creative journey. She was one of the only people to persuade me to release a financially doomed spoken word record, she emailed me her own personal review of the record when it came out which made it totally worthwhile.

Without delving too deeply I feel it's important to make a small reference to Trish's own very physical song writing process which unconsciously resembled an Ester Krumbachová backdrop or something from an alternative Canadian school room. Without knowing it she was also a conceptual visual expert working and arranging her words in Sister Corita Kent's doppelganger print workshop.

A few times over the years, Trish sent me demos of new album tracks asking for a critical opinion. Naturally they ticked all the right boxes but also put all sorts of new boxes on the matrix. Personally I was flattered that she valued my taste in records although I felt totally unworthy to judge the mighty Broadcast (I felt the same way when I remixed The Booklovers in 1999 - mission impossible) I suppose I'm trying to illustrate her humble nature towards their own music. The fact that they were probably the ONLY band I've ever known to sound even better than their vintage influences is maybe something I should have told her, but she was never digging for compliments.

While trying not to gush-a-lot the music of Broadcast means the world to me. After absorbing the expanding songbook of Trish Keenan the disposable language of pop music soon reached such a high benchmark that I accidentally stopped listening to English language music out of frustration. It's a big world out there so why accept anything less than the best. Trish Keenan, for example, wouldn't.

This is why Broadcast in many ways act as a clearly annotated instruction manual to my own otherwise nonsensical record collection. Losing Trish Keenan is potentially like losing the bag of Swedish screws. But her legacy represents the glue in my misinformed musical penchants. Her varied sonic mood board of Czech cinema, random Indian and Malaysian charity shop finds, Italian library music and French sound poetry - when added to her inimitable kitchen sink optimism - proved how an open mind goes hand-in-hand with super-creative communication. Again Trish, unknowingly, wrote the rule book. For selfish reasons alone I'm absolutely heartbroken to have lost her.

The fact that she also looked like a stunning Godard extra in plimsoles and parker coat became a small immaculate detail in her beguiling and utterly enigmatic personality. I don't know if I’m quite ready to hear her voice just yet.

Jam Cargill, is of course, and always will be, the other zen master, and my eternal respect for him is, at this moment, accompanied by all my love and strength. I hope a sense of eternal family pride will go some way to confounding your heartbreak. Whether you know it or not Broadcast are indestructible and occupy a genuinely special and private place in the hearts of a generation. A place where you are warmly welcomed. To Tim and Julian, as well as the other past members of Broadcast who I never met, my heart goes out to you - as well as the zillions of global Broadcast torch carriers who feel a huge loss of which we'll sadly never learn the true depth. It's a huge privilege for us all to have shared such a precious legacy. The wall of words will never tumble. Bye Trish.

Very Sad News

2011-01-14T09:10:00.000-08:00

Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors

2011-01-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Tomb - Death Of A Hippie

2011-01-12T13:01:00.001-08:00

Aldo Tambellini

2011-01-11T23:01:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas

2011-01-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

Micro-Insect Cinema

2011-01-09T09:44:00.000-08:00

The lovely music posted here made me think of this. An experimental visual menagerie of insects, arachnids and minute arthropod life, seen through image and sound.

Objection 1974

2011-01-09T01:01:00.000-08:00

David Noonan

2011-01-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

An Interview With David Noonan

2011-01-05T10:16:00.000-08:00

A Sound Awareness is delighted to present an interview with internationally renowned visual artist David Noonan.

David Noonan is first and foremost a maker of images. His work brings together an eclectic array of found imagery derived from film stills, books, magazines, and archival photographs into powerfully strange and haunting mise-en-scènes. His strange and beguiling images encompass a wide range of cultural associations and reference and it was an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss his work with him personally.

Where do we start? Can we discuss some basics, maybe the sculptural quality of the materials you like to use? I’m thinking of your use of plywood, jute and linen. These are materials which I associate with the functional public design and architecture of say twenty or thirty years ago. These materials evoke strong childhood memories for me. Both my parents were teachers and my childhood seemed surrounded by hessian carpets and display boards. Personally, the materials which you use evoke dormant childhood memories and associations of local authority buildings, libraries and churches.

My mother was a teacher as well and my father owned and ran a men's clothing store for a long time. This was from the late 60’s through to the late 80’s. Imagine a kind of b-grade House Of Dunhill in a small Australian City. I think both of their vocations affected my aesthetic to some extent, I guess the sisal carpets of friends beach houses and as you say the local authority buildings such as libraries and churches have found their way into my work. My parents divorced when I was very young and they had very divergent personal aesthetics. Mum took us to an alternative hippy church that was later shut down due to the priest being quite radical. This starkly contrasted with my father and his more bachelor pad lifestyle. I remember his shop, "Le Manz Young Squire", it was entirely wood panelled with duelling pistols, spring boks and deer heads mounted on the walls. It was kind of weirdly out there for Ballarat, a small city in Victoria, Australia which was mostly famous for its gold miner rebellion of 1854. I think both of my parents work and domestic environments influenced my aesthetic, and the town of Ballarat itself, it was a gold boom town, with quite grand architecture. It was famous for its terrible weather, so it had a kind of brooding quality not usually associated with Australia.

I really liked Ivor William's graphic design for your “Scenes” catalogue. Was it a conscious decision to create a book design which referenced late 60's, early 70's ‘how to do’ books, educational textbooks and experimental living manuals? It would definitely make me do a double take if I found a worn copy in a charity shop or village jumble sale.

I started the book with Marcus Wener Hed and then Ivor became involved and he finished the design, we worked very closely together on it. The design was based on a number of books that I have in my collection, many of which are educational textbooks, so yes, it was a conscious design to reference that kind of stuff. This reminds me, I made a book in Primary School "Cive The Ghost", it had the same colour of linen on the cover. It was pretty much the same size and square format.

So you were making ‘hauntological’ work, even as a kid?

I have never really thought about it, I only just remembered that I made it, it was definitely the most inspiring thing that we did at primary school.

I like the the physical craft skills in your work. The cutting, sewing and layering seem to remove your images from the age of digital production. Can you describe the technical and physical processes involved in the making your silkscreen collages? How laborious and intuitive is the assembly process?

It’s hard to explain the process as it changes from work to work, with the fabric collage pieces I overlay one image over another and then films are made for screen printing. The pieces can be made of up to four screens, depending on the size of the piece. There is a limitation to the screen size as the larger you go the less control you have. It takes five people to make the print, i.e. pull the squeegee over the screen. As each print is made by hand, the results can vary greatly from print to print. I usually print on two different types of linen or jute, so that when I take the material back to the studio I can compose the picture almost as you would make a painting i.e. using a warm and a cool palette to create advancing or receding effects on the picture plane. The studio part is as important as the printing or probably more so. Both aspects have to come together for a piece to work. The sculptures are what I call “cut outs” and are just that. The shape is made by hand in birch ply and then a print is made and glued onto the shape. I work with an assistant and we have to move the pieces around quite a bit, putting them on the wall to look at and work on and then we lay them down on trestles to glue the printed pieces together. The pictures are often heavily layered, the surfaces can be a little like reliefs. Unfortunately, this quality is often lost when the pieces are photographed or reproduced. The whole process is quite intuitive, from the initial creation of an image to constructing the piece in the studio. I never really know how a piece is going to be put together until I work with it in the studio. I usually only work on one piece at a time.

I’m particularly interested in the way in which you use found images? As a musician, who collects sounds to later reuse and appropriate, I’m constantly on the look out for ‘unusual’ and ‘emotive’ source material to collage, layer and transform. The notional act of ‘digging’ cultural detritus in order to unearth ‘hidden treasure’ seems relevant to your work. Do you see parallels with this method of working? Are there particular visual ‘sections’ or ‘bins’ you like to dig in?

Very much. I am constantly looking for material and I never quite know what I am looking for until I find it. Often, I just file it away and it might not be used until years later or not at all. My collecting began in charity stores in Australia and then later in NY in the Strand Book shop before it was renovated. More recently, it’s been basement sales on Charing Cross Road but my best finds were in antiquarian book shops in Berlin. I look under theatre, religion, carpets, DIY etc.

Many of the images you use seem to reference the experimental 'workshop' environments of the late sixties and early seventies, a time when educational establishments embraced and looked to the avant-garde for inspiration and direction. Have you listened to the David Cain recording I posted? He was an early electronic sound composer who created music to be used in school drama workshops. There's an odd photograph of kids dancing to these intense, sinister and otherworldly sounds printed on the back of the sleeve.

That photo is amazing. I have yet to listen to David Cain's recording. I have collected a lot of books from the Swiss German publishing house Zytglogge. They published maybe fifty books from the late 70's through to the late 80's that were all about experimental teaching methods, ranging from theatre and creative dance [Kreativer Tanz] to books about making instruments and even environmental issues such as the book "Warum UIst Der Himmel Blau?" These books are more like teacher guides or work books, they convey an amazing liberal approach to teaching that really appeals to me, alarming images and design, it seemed so progressive but now I think a lot of these methods are no longer around.

In a way, these kinds of images, suggest a world of failed Utopian dreams, to paraphrase David Shrigley, of ambitious projects collapsing. Is this a fair point?

Yes absolutely, that’s how I feel about it. I made some work about this kind of subject for a show at the David Kordansky Gallery in 2006. They were collages that had an ambiguous feeling which alternated between a kind of Steiner style educational scenario and a slightly cultish situation. I spent quite a bit of time in an Ashram in Melbourne and its head quarters in India in my mid to late teens. I experienced a kind of indoctrination, but it didn’t seem sinister at the time and nor should it really be thought of that way, but in my twenties I dropped it all. I became a lot more critical about the increasing monetary aspect and celebrity involvement. I also found a lot of the people in the Ashram to be quite damaged, there were so many politics in what was supposedly an evolved environment. I hoped these pieces reflected the ambiguity of these kinds of life styles.

In an old interview you did for Mousse Magazine you were asked about your musical and literary influences. ”Against Nature” by Huysmans is also one of my favourite books. Did you know it was Richard Hells’ favourite book? What are your current literary and listening trends? There are some brilliantly odd psychedelic folk records out there. Quite a few of your images would complement the Peter Howell and John Fernando "Alice Through The Looking Glass" lp perfectly. Do you listen to particular music in the studio?

No, I didn’t know it was Richard Hells favourite book, it was also Serge Gainsbourgs. I went through a phase of English psychedelia when I discovered records by The Incredible String Band such as “The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter” and “5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion” and my interest in this kind of music went from there. I like music associated with the Cambridge folk scene like Spyrogia and fresh maggots etc, but I have broad tastes. I think music influences me much less now than it did in the past. I listen to a lot of stuff in the studio, when I am here alone I tend to listen to pod casts like “Late Night Live”, but music today was Neil Young's new record (which is great!), Pearls Before Swine, Judi Stills, Karen Dalton, Garry Higgins, The Gun Club, I’m listening to White Magic for the first time as I type. Yesterday it was, Television, early Bowie, Roy Harper and Robert Wyatt. What am I reading? I just finished Elizabeth Jolly's "The Well" and now I’m reading Helen Garner’s "Monkey Grip" about a group of bohemians in Melbourne in the late 70s dealing with smack addiction and relationships. It was made into a film that I like a lot by Ken Cameron in 1982.

Films and theatre seem to obvious reference points in your work. Lately, I've been blown way by the dreamlike surrealism of Wojciech Has' ”Hourglass Sanatorium” and “Fruit Of Paradise” by Vera Chytilova. A few of your older works reminded me of poetic spiritualism of Sergei Parajanov's “Colour of Pomegranates”. Am I talking nonsense?

No not nonsense. I am only familiar with “Colour of Pomegranates”, I’ve only seen small parts of it but I plan to watch it properly soon. It reminded me of aspects of Alejandro Jodorowsk’s “Holy Mountain”. People make a lot of connections between my work and film and also to particular types of literature such as W.G Sebald.....but I feel my influences come largely from still images.....but I can’t argue that when these are made into pictures they sometimes possess a filmic quality. This week, I came across a stunning image from the Polish director Zulawski’s film “The Silver Globe. It was in the Stephen Throwers book “Eyeball. I’m looking forward to seeing it. A film that has really stayed with me of late is Fassbinder’s “World On A Wire” which was made for German television in 1973. Among many of the amazing aspects to the film is the cinematography by Michael Ballhaus.

Lastly, I recently, watched the Australian biker movie Stone and it got me thinking about Australia and how culturally significant being Australian is to your work. I think there is still a common European misconception that Australia was historically a cultural backwater but with the advent of the internet we’re beginning to find glimpses of art, music and films of the sixties and seventies which can be considered unique to the Australian underground. Do you think growing up in Australia has shaped your work?

Stone is a classic. The Australian film industry in the 1970’s was astonishing. There’s a recent good and quite funny documentary on Ozsploitation films called “Not Quite Hollywood. There are other classic films from that era that I’m fond of like, “Picnic At Hanging Rock”, “Walkabout”, “Wake In Fright” "The Cars That Ate Paris", “The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith.” There are so many really. The psychology of the Australian landscape is a central theme in all of these films, its perceived and actual hostility. Music was also important to me, the post punk scene that was happening in Melbourne in the late 70’s and 80’s. I was too young to really experience it fully, I kind of caught the tail end with the help of a fake ID. I’m not sure how Australia has shaped my work specifically but it has, the atmosphere of the town where I grew up and the surrounding landscape was really present in my work when I was studying painting in the late 80s and I think it has seeped back into the work over the years.

I would personally like to thank David for his generosity of time and spirit in making this interview possible.

David Noonan: Artists Studio

2011-01-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

Fresh Hell

2011-01-04T01:59:00.000-08:00

Na Srebrnym Globie

2010-12-21T14:38:00.000-08:00

Supergraphics

2010-12-21T14:15:00.000-08:00

I’m glad to see someone has finally managed to publish a survey of large scale architectural graphics, which in my humble opinion is a much neglected and marginalized form of visual culture. “Supergraphics – Transforming Space: Graphic Design for Walls, Buildings & Spaces” is a wonderfully engaging examination of the ‘cult’ of seductively large letterforms, arresting geometric abstraction and chromatically overloaded environmental design. Tracing a lineage from the radical painted architectural environments of the 1960’s to the present day ‘soft design’ of advanced digital light projections, the book examines a wide range of large scale architectural graphics which have been applied in order to radically transform and alter our experience of the urban environment. The concept of Supergraphics was originally political in nature, a way in which radical visionary architects could redefine the urban space by applying painted graphics to the interior and exterior surfaces of buildings thus ‘removing solidity, gravity, even history' from the built environment. The book covers a wide variety of ground, from deceptively simple exercises in visual ornamentation, complex spatial altering distortions to functional civic signage on a grand scale. Each ‘eye popping’ design has been documented with clarity and as one would expect by anything published by Unit Editions, the book has a clean, crisp understated layout and finish. A welcome addition to any design bookshelf. Unit Editions is fast becoming my favourite source of graphic wonder.

“Supergraphics – Transforming Space: Graphic Design for Walls, Buildings & Spaces” is published this month by Unit Editions.

ThreeSix

2010-12-21T11:28:00.000-08:00

More graphic and typographical wonder from Unit Editions. 'ThreeSix' is the third in a series of beautifully illustrated research papers devoted to graphic design and visual culture. This issue examines the development of a typeface called ‘ThreeSix’ by Hamish Muir and Paul McNeil. It’s a fascinating project which has yielded an elegant system of six simple and eminently readable geometric typefaces suitable for current digital screen technologies. Despite their adherence to a grid, the results are startlingly organic and beautiful. Based on subtly differing concentric forms, the letter forms are distinctive and easy to read at large point sizes as well as in smaller bodies of extended text. It’s easy to a draw parallel with this project and Wim Crouwell’s experimental 1967 New Alphabet typeface which is maybe why he was invited to write the forward. ‘ThreeSix’ has a versatility, humane weight and grace sadly lacking in most grid based fonts, designers out there please take note.

ThreeSix [U:D/R 03] is published by Unit Editions this month.

Printed Matter / Drukwerk

2010-12-19T05:42:00.000-08:00

I was overjoyed to see that Hyphen Press have recently published a third edition of Karel Martens’s graphic design masterpiece “Printed Matter / Drukwerk”. Karel Martens is without a doubt, one of the most significantly influential graphic designers working today and this book is a testament to his joyful pursuit in visual experimentation and his willingness to push the boundaries of the printed page. Copiously illustrated, the book documents a wide range of commissioned and non commissioned work by the Dutch designer and educator, ranging from his early designs for small left wing publications to his later non commercial and experimental colour saturated print work. This book is a visual treat, with page after page of inventive formal Swiss asceticism colliding with rough misprint and craft sensibility. What’s particularly striking about much of Martens's work is his unusual capacity to harness the economy of Modernism with a humanist spirit by carefully balancing a playful inventiveness with intellectual rigour and precision. This rare ability to satisfy the needs of the client while still retain a unique and personal voice invests an almost Cagian levity into his work, with error and chance being intellectually harnessed in the service of a truly democratic form of graphic communication. There is a clarity and vision at work here most designers would be envious of as form and function has rarely been so keenly nor adroitly combined. A welcome addition to any design library.

“Printed Matter / Drukwerk” is published this month by Hyphen Press.

Adam Fuss

2010-12-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

Primitive London

2010-12-18T08:37:00.000-08:00

Trunk Records continues to unearth and delve into the shadowy world of lost cinematic soundtracks with the release of a rather curious and oddly elegant score to a 1965 exploitation flick entitled “Primitive London”. The film itself, is a wonderfully unique and peculiar piece of British exploitative post war cinema. Filmed on a shoestring budget, with the sole intention of getting the punters in, this bizarrely engaging film by maverick director Arnold L. Miller is a strange and heady mix of skin flick, mondo exploitation and social documentary. The film sensationally combines sordid titillation, everyday banality and the downright bizarre, think boobs, bums, bikers, suburban swingers, beatniks, cheeky East End villains, glamorous showgirls, chicken processing plants and the latest developments in hair replacement surgery and you get the idea. Despite its best attempts to appear scandalously sensationalistic, the film captures a strangely peculiar pre-permissive Britain which is neither salacious nor shocking. The film proclaimed to scratch the thin veneer of respectability to discover a hidden world of crime and suppressed sexual desire waiting to vent but in reality what is presented is an oddball montage of schlock and tease, a second-rate, tawdry tour of the commonplace. Despite this, it’s a wonderfully engaging yet oddly surreal film but ultimately at the end of the show you're left with the feeling that the strippers depicted are not the only people who have ripped something off. This makes the accompanying soundtrack by composer Basil Kirchin even more remarkable in that the score is neither sensational nor sordid but a masterpiece of curiously elegant arrangement and compositional refinement. It’s beautifully haunting score which both compliments and transcends its cinematic setting. The music is gracefully rhythmical and shifts across a wide variety of moods and tempos while still retaining a singular and unique voice. The soundtrack is an unusual mix of baroque minimalism, cool post bop jazz, spectral orchestration and electronic experimentation which defies simplistic categorisation, an oddball one indeed. Like the score, Basil Kirchin is a bit of an oddity. He apparently spent five months in a Ramakrishna Temple in India a decade before it became fashionable. In the early sixties he created experimental “soundtracks for unmade films” using collaged ambient sounds and if this all sounds a bit Eno before Eno, he could also confidently compose in a bizarre range of musical styles and idioms. How he happened to become involved in scoring music for the nefarious and seedy underbelly of British cinema remains a mystery, perhaps a true meeting of the sublime and the ridiculous. This soundtrack is yet another meticulous reclamation of a hidden musical past by label owner Jonny Trunk and if the world is a just place, his residence will have a Blue Plaque promptly installed to commemorate his significant contribution to a very peculiar kind of cultural and musical archaeology. A fascinating and strangely beautiful release.

“Primitive London” is released on Trunk Records this month.

The Responsive Eye

2010-12-12T09:06:00.000-08:00

Nigel Henderson

2010-12-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

Normal Transmission Will Resume Shortly

2010-12-03T12:45:00.000-08:00

Filmstudie

2010-12-01T23:54:00.000-08:00

Armin Hoffman

2010-12-01T06:13:00.000-08:00

Spectres Of Photography

2010-11-30T10:33:00.000-08:00

Thai Modernized Music

2010-11-29T11:20:00.000-08:00

Before the twentieth century, the music of Thailand had largely remained unchanged for nearly eight hundred years. Traditional Thai classical ensembles would perform highly stylised compositions on drums, small chin hand cymbals, suspended gongs and xylophones. This music was anonymous, rarely notated and handed down through word of mouth. With the advent of radio and then recorded music, an explosion of distinct regional styles emerged and flourished.

‘Thai Modernized Music' came of age between the years 1955 - 1975, when ‘government issue’ soldiers, on leave from Vietnam, began looking for kicks in Thailand thus exposing a young generation of Thai musicians to a diverse array of Western styles. As this trend progressed, a fertile music scene emerged, with two distinctive styles becoming ever more prominent; Luk Thung and Molam. Luk Thung was a rural, grittier offshoot of an earlier urban style known as Luk Krung. Luk Thung, which literally translates as ‘Song Of The Child On The Fields’ is the rural music of Thailand and as such it's thematically concerned with the trials and tribulations of daily life. This music has absorbed and assimilated a vast range of Western influences which is startlingly evident when you listen to the material on the upcoming Finders Keepers release, “Thai Dai - The Heavier Side Of The Luk Thung Underground.” This is the raw, heavy, unkempt side of Luk Thung, combining traditional Thai musicianship with raw, aggressive proto punk discharges, hypnotic motorik grooves and garage funk. Traditional instruments such as the khaen [bamboo mouth organ] and phin [Thai flute] interweave with fuzz tinged guitar, stuttering organ licks and heavy drumbeats with unexpectedly joyous results. Sroeng Santi’s strange rendition of “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath is a monster of cultural collision and exemplifies this odd hybrid world, one part visceral rock, one part Thai folk melody, three parts downright weirdness. Bizarrely, despite the implied heaviness, the lyrical content of this song is actually a deliberation on the waxing and waning of the moon and the ups and downs of the Thai economy. These strange musical hybrids continue and peak with “Kanong Krung” by Teungjai Bunpraruska, which sounds alarmingly like the sinister child choral chants of Ennio Morricone backed by the raw scuzz of the Thee Headcoatees. This is exciting, exotic music, another top drawer release by Finders Keepers.

“The Sound Of Siam - Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam In Thailand 1964-1975” on Soundway covers slightly different musical terrain but is equally astonishing in its breadth and diversity. Opening with the fragile, haunting, psych eeriness of Ream Daranoi’s “Fai Yen” this compilation is a veritable treat for the ears. Nearly every track has a deep resonant groove, from the weirdly lopsided middle eastern jazz swing of Panon Nopporn’s “Sao Ban Pok Pab” to The Pletch Phin Thong Band, who manage to dig into a groove and never really stop. This Molam style instrumental is particularly wonderful, sounding like a primitive Appalachian jug band jamming with deep funk Thai zithers. This music inhabits a fascinating, eclectic and inventive sound world, with vaguely discernible elements of Ethiopian jazz, African drum patterns and raw funk. On the best tracks you can hear the Thai musicians absorbing their influences, experimenting and then pushing the limits of tradition. There's even a song about alcoholic monkeys, reefer smoking elephants and cows that drink Ovaltine for breakfast! Some of you may be tempted to dismiss this music as mere curious oddity, a collision between an indigenous style and a borrowed one. Don’t be fooled, there is some serious musical damage to be found on these discs. This is some of the most strange and uniquely compelling music out there and we should thank musical archaeologists Chris Menist, Miles Cleret and Andy Votel for bringing it to our attention.

“The Sound Of Siam - Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz & Molam In Thailand 1964-1975” is released on Soundway Records on December 8th. “Thai Dai - The Heavier Side Of The Luk Thung Underground” is an upcoming release on Finders Keepers.

Luk Thung & Molam

2010-11-28T07:42:00.000-08:00

The Moon & The Sledgehammer

2010-11-27T02:50:00.000-08:00

“The Moon & The Sledgehammer” is an extraordinary and deeply insightful film. Despite being made over forty years ago, this oddly moving and strangely familiar documentary seems more relevant and prescient today than when it was first shown. It is a film about a family of curious people; a father, Mr. Page, his two sons, Jim & Peter; and his two daughters, Kathy and Nancy and their curious way of life. The film documents the family, living in relative isolation, without running water, electricity or gas, in a deteriorating house hidden within the Sussex woods, twenty miles south of London. On first impression, the family appear to be strange folk indeed, oddball misfits trapped and marginalised in their own unique inner world. As the film progresses, a magical, oddly disjointed narrative reveals this presumption to be both tenuous and threadbare. “The Moon & The Sledgehammer” is a curiously profound film which respectfully celebrates people who are different. As a film, it's a remarkable and engaging feat of social sculpture which acutely observes, captures and preserves the resonant minutia of a disappearing way of life with all its incumbent tensions and quirky humour. It is a strange story, full of complex relationships which evokes a psychologically charged, non didactic world of lost values and traditions. It's a film everyone needs to see. Director, Philip Trevelyan was introduced to the Page family by a friend who had met them at a local auction in Newhaven and he was immediately struck by their unusual and fiercely individualistic way of life. The father had worked as a aircraft engineer and had operated local threshing machines, he had also, rather unorthodoxly, performed as a travelling circus entertainer and was affectionately known by locals as ‘Oily’ Page. The brothers are portrayed as skilled steam engineers and metal workers, forging their own tools and machine parts by hand. The sisters cook, tend animals, produce exquisite embroidery and expertly cultivate plants. The mother is never seen. What is slowly revealed is a strange and compelling mixture of humour, idiosyncratic behaviour, seemingly archaic rural values, consummate craft skills and bizarre family dynamics. Each member of the family has their own unique voice and story. Their performances, if indeed they are performances, are candid, free, at times contradictory but above all captivatingly unselfconscious. Throughout the film, the cinematography and sound recording beautifully captures and frames a faded landscape where the visual smells of oil, rust and fern intermingle and overlap with the complex psychological landscape the family. I've watched this film numerous times and each time a new facet is revealed. We have much to learn from Page family, with their quiet philosophical distance from the accelerated pace of modern life. These are people who possess the rare commodity of time to reflect clear unmitigated thoughts, the time to be intuitively curious about the world in which they live, the time to develop their own unique, personal and sometimes eccentric wisdom. This is a startlingly poetic film. A rare gem.

Cy Twombly

2010-11-25T14:15:00.000-08:00

The Impoverished Architectural Models Of Jockum Nordström

2010-11-21T10:48:00.000-08:00

Folk Photography

2010-11-21T07:26:00.000-08:00

The arrival of odd things through the post seems to be a common contextual link for this blog and “Folk Photography” by Luc Sante is no exception. This book serves as a fascinating survey of a marginalised and neglected form of early twentieth photography. The phenomena of real-photo postcards dates back to around 1903, when Kodak introduced the No 3A Folding Pocket Kodak, which allowed the public to take photographs and have them printed as individual postcards. Printed in local makeshift darkrooms, often in towns where the local newspaper was unable to reproduce half tone images, these photographs communicated the localised stories, pains, joys and tragedies of rural America. This book beautifully reproduces a selection of these images, which have been gathered together by the author, Luc Sante, who describes himself as a ‘marginal consumer’ sifting through the dusty detritus of flea markets and junk shops in search of visual treasure. Many of these images are blunt, raw and unmediated by pictorial convention, created by self taught practitioners and local entrepreneurs eager to turn a dollar. Many are author less. The postcards depict a vast range of subject matter, cataloguing the everyday to the downright bizarre. A few of the images are singularly personal, many depict local newsworthy events, all have a static, otherworldly quality, exposing a vanished world suspended in unsmiling, ritualistic solemnity. This book is a wonderful resource, constantly illuminating, informative and a must for anyone interested in non academic art.

I am deeply indebted to the publishers, Verse Chorus Press, for supporting the blog by generously sending a review copy.

Colori Della Luce

2010-11-18T14:12:00.000-08:00

Emil Ruder

2010-11-18T12:13:00.000-08:00

High Society

2010-11-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

History is oddly predictable, like a vast catalogue, oscillating between the extraordinary peaks of human existence and the seamier, squalid, pestiferous decline into the gutter. Like the man said, some days are good, some days are bad, life's highs and life's lows. From our humble morning coffee, to the exotic betel nut quids produced in south east Asia, drugs are inexplicably woven into the warp and weft of all evolving societies. "High Society, Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture" is an absorbing and detailed account of the cultural pursuit of 'getting high', the quest to alter our minds in significant but controllable ways. This fascinating survey examines and traces the development of substances utilized to change our perception and consciousness, forming a comprehensive study of the historical and cultural impact of drugs within society. The book examines the medical, recreational, spiritual, religious and economic use of drugs and chronicles the progressive discovery and development of each mind expanding 'pharmaceutical'. Tracing a lineage from the Ebers Papyrus [the oldest known Egyptian medical text, which described the 'analgesic' properties of the roots, seeds and head of the poppy] to the development of a global drug trade, this beautifully illustrated book elucidates the history of intoxicants with layer upon layer of meticulously researched material. What is particularly striking about the book is its ordinariness, its lack of moralizing and the authors ability to tread a scholarly path through the hallucinatory discourse of oppositional arguments for and against drug use. Highly informative, always engaging, Mike Jay has produced a wonderfully detailed book which offers exquisite observations on a difficult and controversial subject.

I am deeply indebted to the publishers, Thames & Hudson, for supporting the blog by generously sending a review copy.

Liquid Loops

2010-11-16T13:17:00.000-08:00

Floris Neusüss

2010-11-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window

2010-11-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

As mentioned previously, strange and curious items of mail have been landing on my doorstep and this limited edition release by Cyclobe is no exception. At the end of last month, I reviewed a most curious and extraordinary book of found photographs entitled "Haunted Air" by Ossian Brown. Unbeknown to me at the time of writing, Ossian also composes music in partnership with English musician and author, Stephen Thrower under the guise of Cyclobe. I was completely spellbound by Ossian's photographic oddities and found myself slightly apprehensive opening this particular package, fearing disappointment.

Fortunately, "Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window" is an unexpected musical delight. The opening track, "How Acla Disappeared from Earth", shimmers in otherworldly unease and mournful loss, acting as a prescient foreshadowing of the musical journey to come. "The Woods Are Alive With The Smell Of His Coming" was originally performed in November 2009 as part of a one day symposium on "Magic, Modernism in British Art" at Tate, St Ives. This striking composition builds with insidious momentum, slowly evolving through a hobbled, mesmeric rhythm, lurching towards a venomous intensity to end in soporific repose. Layers of sound evolve; celestial shards of disembodied chorus beckon, eerie murmurs ripple and cantillate, spiteful creaks and baneful gnarls twist and scamper, while fragments of folk instrumentation weave in and drift out of consciousness. For an all too fleeting moment, this music performs an invocation, bringing the unknown and the unnameable into our collective midst in all its harrowing, compelling and resonant glory. In contrast, the second side of this release appears more restrained, the music starts with a short frenetic folk refrain which dissipates leaving a cold cavernous electronic wasteland. A chilling listlessness takes hold. A slight piano refrain enters, hovering halfway between Giallo underscore and Morton Feldman like minimalism. An androgynous voice starts to intone around a score fluctuating between intense luminosity and uncertain disquiet. This is indeed magical music, with light and dark expertly weaved and balanced. I was apprehensive when I started listening. I still am. This is a wonderful, fearful and magnificent release which I highly recommend.

"Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window" is out now on Phantomcode. Front cover art by Fred Tomaselli.

Fred Tomaselli

2010-11-13T12:14:00.000-08:00

"Painting has traditionally been seen as a window onto another reality ….. I am interested in the relationship between this myth and the broader culture that contains it."

Precert

2010-11-11T10:40:00.000-08:00

Soundtrack avant oddities abound on this new spectral collage by Anworth Kirk and Demdike Stare.

Samhain Slant Azimuth 1 by A Sound Awareness on Mixcloud

Dissolving In The Warmth Of The Sun

2010-11-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

Malá Morská Víla

2010-11-10T13:40:00.000-08:00

Watching "Malá Morská Víla", the Czechoslovakian film adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" is like being drowned in an intoxicating blend of sub aquatic loneliness and surreal bittersweet enchantment. The film has a dark eerie, dreamlike quality which is enhanced by the wonderful mixture of set design by Ester Krumbachová [who was responsible for much of the visual inventiveness of films such as "Daises" and "Valerie & Her Week Of Wonders"] and a beguiling orchestral/electronic score by composer Zdeněk Liška. Much of the film is set underwater and there is an overwhelming undercurrent of sadness throughout, especially during the underwater scenes which are often filmed with a limited colour palette and a haunting use of slow motion cinematography. Director, Karel Kachyňa achieved international recognition for his poetic films of the mid to late sixties but this film is an unsung masterpiece, a veritable treat for both the ears and the eyes. The film score for "Malá Morská Víla" will be released by Finders Keepers some time in Winter 2010.

Daughters Of Air

2010-11-09T13:05:00.000-08:00

The Englishman Who Posted Himself And Other Curious Objects

2010-11-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

I like the odd bit of post, indeed, the odder the better. Over the last week or so, quite a few strange and curious items have arrived through my letterbox pertaining to the blog. One of the most interesting of these items, is a book published by Princeton Architectural Press about an eccentric Victorian Englishman who was responsible for sending over thirty two thousand postal curios through the mail in an attempt to challenge and perplex the postal authorities. “The Englishman Who Posted Himself And Other Curious Objects” is a delightful and playful book which documents the life of W. Reginald Bray, a mischievous prankster, who after reading the regulations published by Post Office in 1898 set about testing the limits, patience and problem solving skills of countless postal workers. The book lovingly details Bray’s endless passion for sending unusual and bizarre items through the post ranging from a bowler hat, a turnip, an old bicycle pump to a wide variety of oddly addressed postcards. The book is consistently engaging in both form and content and I was extremely impressed by the exquisite typography, layout and graphic presentation by designer Deb Wood. Throughout the book, Bray comes across like a playful, latter-day conceptual artist, constantly striving to out manoeuvre postal legislation through a consistent application of weird invention and eccentric wit. This is a superb book and highly recommended. My hat is doffed to researcher, John Tingey for writing and curating such a wonderful oddity.

I am deeply indebted to the publishers, Princeton Architectural Press for supporting the blog by generously sending a review copy.

Rudolph De Harak

2010-11-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

Bright White Underground

2010-11-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

Varese-Edgard, Iannis Xenakis And Le Corbusier

2010-11-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Martin Bassett and Enzo Ragazzini

2010-11-05T00:19:00.000-07:00

Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman

2010-11-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

Georges Hugnet

2010-11-02T11:49:00.000-07:00