HARDLY BAKED: January 2019

Thursday, January 31, 2019

musique de bouche (proggy froggy)

mouth music (ear rational behaviour)

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

musique de bouche (la reine de quirk)

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

"The lost masterpiece Les Éphémères by the self labeled ‘sound painter’ Knud Viktor (1924-2013) now sees its first ever release by Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology – 40 years after it was conceived. Viktor’s pioneering work – his Images Sonores – are composed of field recordings of insects, animals and the his surroundings.

A finished master tape and even a complete cover layout for Les Éphémères was found in Viktor’s archives after he passed away in 2013. The phenomenal piece was originally commissioned by the French radio station France Musique in 1977. The twenty short ‘sound images’ of Les Éphémères were originally broadcast as vignettes in-between other radio programs.

From the middle of the 1970’s Viktor began composing almost exclusively for four channels. He invented his own intuitive quadraphonic mixer – the Tetramix – to realise his spatial visions for his Image VI – The Lubéron Symphony, and from then on worked with quadraphonic sound, thus making the release of his works difficult. Les Éphémères is close in time and also holds close ties to The Lubéron Symphony, which Viktor considered his magnum opus. Perhaps most strikingly is the shift in the way he uses the recordings of insects, birds and animals in both The Lubéron Symphony and Les Éphémères: Often untreated and clearly recognizable, the field recordings leave the inherent melody and rhythm of the animal sounds to sing for themselves, layering recordings to create simple and elegant sound images. In two of the twenty pieces Viktor’s own voice blends with the animals, as he recites two poems. One about the singing vineyard populated by musical crickets, the other painting an autumn picture with wine bubbling in the barrels as we hear the wine flies humming.

Viktor’s work emanates with a tremendous love and fascination with his companion species and the landscape and geology that surrounded him. His works are devoted to depicting the life on the mountain where he lived for fifty years. Hearing how the ecology of the landscape changed as commercial farming and pesticides took effect, a larger perspective in his work became clear to him:

"As it turns out, my work has actually set many things in motion; it touches upon something universal that I feel I have a duty to convey to others. A duty that I feel as a citizen of the earth. Not as a human citizen, but as a citizen of the earth. It may sound pretentious, but this is a question of generations to come." – Knud Viktor

The world has seen dramatic ecological change since Viktor recorded his sounds. Not only have the individual insects and animals that he recorded vanished from Lubéron, so too have entire species. Like fossils, their imprints now exist only in his works, in the recordings stored on tape. In the midst of our planet’s sixth mass-extinction event, the growing silence that Viktor heard in his immediate surrounding is now global: scientists estimate that half of the planet’s animal life has already disappeared. Viktor’s sound works allow us to borrow his ears. They convey his love for the animal worlds that surrounded him and perhaps we too can see our companion species differently through his works.

credits

releases January 17, 2019 "

YouTube poster says: "This recording (real name of the recording unknown if any) has been made by Knud Viktor and given to accompany the pregnancy of my mother. The sounds were used to discover my reaction to them in her belly.

Knud Viktor, Un artiste sonore (Patrick Montant) from nightowlechoes on Vimeo.

mond muziek (vloeibare taal)

Monday, January 28, 2019

When Pop Goes Meta #1

B-side of "When love breaks down"

attacking an obscure to 97% of his listeners country singer - never quite figured out the point.

another one whose point I never quite saw - Paddy here is attacking Springsteen for his supposedly constricted range of songwriting topics (erm, hello - Nebraska? Born in the USA?) - "some things hurt much more than cars and girls".... well, you have written your fair share of songs about girls Paddy man, haven't you? ... Also - what does actually hurt more than "girls" (meaning, love, heartbreak, unrequited etc?) or is a better subject for pop? There's death, but yeah the travails of the heart seem like pretty high up there on the list.

About Abba and the appeal of Agnetha

There's several other songs on Jordan that are about music, pop, specific artists (Elvis, if I recall right), including one where Paddy says - on the subject of music for dancing - "I'd rather be the Fred Astaire of words". Which is quite witty admittedly.

Wasn't there a whole unreleased, or written but un-rerecorded concept album about Michael Jackson?

over a bushell

Sunday, January 27, 2019

really poor videos #1

specifically meaning here, that they let down the great song - fail to do it justice

nominations please!

this doesn't even properly exploit the prettiness of Pete Perrett!

bad angles, shit lighting, minimal commitment from the band themselves in terms of stage moves or "giving it some"

could hardly be more desultory or uninspired - basic soundstage set up

the stale air of the Marquee/Rainbow type mid-level concert hall wafts off it