Monday, October 25, 2010

Duffy, from a while ago, on one of her favourite songs:

When I discovered sex: Cover Me, Bettye Swann (1968)

"Bettye Swann is one of my biggest inspirations, but this song has particular importance for me because it marks the time I got interested in physical contact. I was 19, and here was a woman singing "Cover me, spread your precious love all over me". It's very tender, but it's also, hilariously, quite crude, so I'd make my friends listen to it and we'd all giggle."


Is Duffy perhaps reading too much into this song?



doesn't strike me as salacious... Cover Me" is more gimme shelter surely than
Mariah Carey-ish "and it's just like honey / When your love comes over me / Oh baby I've got a dependency / Always strung out for another taste of your honey"

(still what do i know, i only recently realised what ZZ Top's "Pearl Necklace" is about)

also: "the time I got interested in physical contact. I was 19" -- really? Nineteen?



That Duffy / Amy Winehouse / Adele moment was like a re-revival, like that 1986-87 Levi 501s Advert moment of soul reissues and soul rehashes all over again

Stubbs and I could have republished "All Souled Out", just changed the names and it'd have been as applicable as ever

"mercy" for fuck's sake!



Still i see Mark Ronson's moved on to ransacking the Eighties now



Wouldn't it be great if Duffo had got to #1 and won X number of Brit Awards

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Electronic Dance Music

Alwin Nikolais - Noumenon (1953) from Thomas Patteson on Vimeo.



Found an LP of this modernist choreographer Alwin Nikolais's electronic music at the annual yard sale of the apartment block over the road from us in New York several years ago. Going for $1! This is its amazing sleeve.




You can see one of his pieces recreated for the opening credit sequence of The Company, that disappointing very late period (last one before he croaked? Robert Altman movie on ballet.



A recent retrospective on Nikolais's work.

There is a thread running through avant-classical electronic/concrete music that involves the partnership of composers with radical ballet choreographers -- Pierre Henry et le chorégraphe Maurice Béjart, Warner Jepson and the San Francisco ballet company, some others I'm blanking on...

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

it's comic, but also rather touching, how the Black Eyed Peas are just about the only people left in pop who believe in the Phuture

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Modernist Churches: an irregular series - #1

Saint Basil Roman Catholic Church, 3611 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. Built 1967-69; dedicated 1969.