record stores in the movies (#1 of ???)

Starting at 15.55 seconds in....

Of course what we record fiend / rock-history nuts dig is not the battle between rival factions of telepaths....  the impact of the car smashing through the store front window.... the bloodshed and explosions....  no, it's the posters in the background for new releases by Herman Brood and Nick Lowe and Atlanta Rhythm Section and Robert Gordon and Village People  and XTC and Ian Dury Do It Yourself. The copies of Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti in the rack. And that little RSO promotional inflatable cow hanging from the ceiling, that starts getting licked by flames. All the period markers of North American record industry / record retail at the arse end of the Seventies.


Disc-O-Mat was a real chain of discount music stores in New York

altered states of Kensciousness

Climactic hallucination sequence from Ken Russell's entertainingly ludicrous Altered States - about a scientist using an isolation chamber and doses of an ancient native American psychedelic potion to regress to the primordial core of being / non-being

Original score is by John Corigliano and it's solid shrieky-scrapey avant-classical dissonant biz. But I was really wanting to know who done the more electronic-abstract passages that soundtrack the most hallucinatory parts. Then saw in the credits the  nod to Pierre Henry for use of "Voile d'Orphee"
Some earlier hallucinations





Final transformation scene, with fun dated FX




Trailer




I saw it at the time of release  - it seemed silly even then - but it's a recommended way to while away couple of hours - expensively made, well-acted cobblers at its most enjoyable!

Lot of William Hurt sweating, though.

The full score, minus P. Henry



P. Henry



The triptastic bit again

animacja eksperymentalna (z fajną muzyką elektroniczną jako bonus)

Przypadek from Krzysztof Kiwerski on Vimeo.

visuals: Krzysztof Kiwerski

Music: Marek Wilczyński

mouth music (creeling in the years)

Jack Tamul @ electro-music 2014 from Steve Mokris on Vimeo.

Tamul also did the score for this horror flic

alsó zene (mandible music )

translates as "cricket music"

bonus wind music





bonus mouth music




bonus mouth music + gurning + biddlybombapblam

næb musik (og mandible musik) (og vandmusik) (og jordmusik)

release rationale:

'Le Petit Duc' [The Little Scops Owl] is a sound work by Danish artist Knud Viktor, made between 1978 and 1983. Viktor was classically trained as a painter at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950’s. In 1961 he moved to France to live and work, but was overwhelmed by the sounds of the wildlife in Provence, and instead of painting began listening to and recording his surroundings. With these recordings, he composed what he called sound images – images sonores – and throughout the rest of his career, sound was his main medium. 

'Le Petit Duc' is primarily composed of recordings Viktor made of an owls nest in the spring and summer of 1978. Narrated by Viktor himself and put together from recordings throughout a whole nesting season, 'Le Petit Duc' tells the story of an owl family. The piece speaks to children and adults alike. Knud Viktor originally made the piece to fit on a 7” record, but it has not been released before.



release rationale:

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

released January 17, 2019 

release rationale:

This reissue documents Knud Viktor’s only two releases on record – Images and Ambiances – both released in 1972 on the french label L’Oiseau Musicien. These records have long been out of print and are hereby made available again, gathering the two separate albums on this double-release.

The utmost care has gone into creating a reproduction that is as faithful as possible to the original works. These have been transferred from the original analog master tapes and have not been remastered to any other extent than to prepare them for the vinyl reproduction. Thus, Knud Viktor’s pieces appear with the same degree of tape hiss, hum and other “artefacts” related to his aesthetics, compositional process and tools.

All the works on this release was composed by Knud Viktor in and around his home in Luberon, in the south of France.

more on Ambiances - Images

Overlooked and unheard Danish sound art Knud Viktor (1924-2013) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen as a painter. In the 1960’s he moved to the Luberon valley in southern France to paint the Provençal light and nature. However, Viktor left the painting and gradually moved towards filming and recording the sounds of nature. He used the field recordings as raw material for a series of abstract electronic compositions, which also served as soundtracks for his filmworks. A selection of these compositions were released in 1972 on the two records Images and Ambiances on the French label L’Oiseau Musicien. The records came in very limited editions, and therefore Knud Viktor’s works have remained largely unknown. With the re-issue of these records The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology wishes to revitalize Knud Viktor and his contribution to the history of sound art.

The small sounds of nature Knud Viktor is recognized as an important figure in the field of sound art in France and he is regarded as a pioneer within field recording and acoustic ecology. During the 1970’s he turned his house in Provence into one large mixing desk with a myriad of homebuilt microphones and cables spiralling into the surrounding landscape. From here he would carefully record the sounds of snoring rabbits in their holes, the rhythmic songs of cicadas in the night – even termites gnawing through an old cupboard in the bedroom As the Danish poet Morten Søndergaard writes in the essay A Sonic Seismograph, which accompanies the release: “Light became sound. The most fascinating aspect of Knud Viktor’s world is perhaps that there is a universal coalescence of all things: of artistic expressions and natural science, of painting, sculpture and installation. A paintbrush becomes a microphone. Music becomes sound.”

By re-issuing Ambiances and Images, The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology hopes to contribute to a revitalization of Knud Viktor’s important work, and that more listeners will engage and lend the deserved attention to these works.

The Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology is an independent association with the overall purpose of uncovering and releasing historical Danish electronic music and sound art.

Allô la terre [Hello, the Earth] is a sound work that you listen to in a telephone booth powered by solar energy and installed in a public space. When you lift the telephone handset, you can listen to the rhythms of busy lives, which Knud Viktor calls Petits sons [Little sounds]: a dreaming rabbit; two snails chewing lettuce; the love song of vinegar flies; a fleeing fox; a nestful of tits; a suckling mouse… and all these sounds evoke a visual symphony.

Originally from Denmark, Knud Viktor has lived in the Luberon area of Provence, where he derived all his inspiration for 50 years until his death in August 2013. A forerunner of sound art, Knud Viktor was revealed by radio in the 1970s. Making sounds of the landscape a space of experimentation, he used microphones to record the most unexpected sounds: erosion, the chatter of ants, the melodies of the woodworm, etc. He records the “Song of the Earth” in order to “preserve that which we will perhaps never hear again”. Therefore it is more as a painter than as an entomologist or geologist that he explores the world or rather the miniature worlds. With exceptional patience and perseverance, he records the imperceptible and preserves the ephemeral, to the point where he himself become a part of this environment, an organic element, full of wonderment inspired by this natural opera.

Knud Viktor’s work echoes the Digne area: in response to the monumental Geological Reserve, it replies with a microcosm that is just as spectacular. For this reason, the collection of items from the artist’s workshop have been preserved in the Musée Gassendi.

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. Je ne dispose d'aucun droit sur l'image qui sert d'illustration (cover of "Images" long play)

szájzene / ez holnap volt

mouth music (fifth world delirium)

via another Carl - Carl Neville at Neither Here Nor There

musique de bouche / c'était demain

näbbmusik

Ur Karl-Birger Blomdahl – Altisonans (1966) from Sensorium on Vimeo.

mondmusiek

intrigue piqued by his wonderful track on this Creel curiosity (the track not available online sadly) i went searching for more by Jurgen Brauninger

Cook

and the best for last

Das war morgen

detta var i morgon (and it sound RALPH)

Made on the electronic music machine Andromatic by Ralph Lundsten and Leo Nilsson (1969)

muzzle music (and it sound RUFF)

szájzene (phonopoetica)

newly vinyl-reissued on Soundohm


release rationale


"Katalin Ladik "Phonopoetics" LP


The avant-garde has always been a realm of blurry lines - of practices which traverse medium, discipline, and the boundaries of everyday life, refusing to be nailed down and easily defined. A near perfect capsule of this remarkable spirit - once stretching to every corner of the globe, is captured by the latest addition to Alga Marghen’s ever expanding catalog of crucial documents from the history of sound art and sound poetry - Katalin Ladik’s Phonopoetics, the first ever survey, issued in limited edition of 300 copies, of this seminal Hungarian artist’s sonic efforts.

A thing of beauty, drawing from the period between 1968 and 1993, its two stunning sides shatter the lines between performance, the spoken word, fine art, and experimental music, offering the terms to rethink how each is understood.

Born in 1942, Katalin Ladik has lived a wild and multifaceted creative life - beginning primarily as a poet of the written word, expanding into experimental theatre during the mid 1970s, and ultimately becoming an artist whose practice also incorporates sound and visual poetry, performance art, experimental music, audio plays, happenings, mail art, collage, and photography, built around visual and vocal expression, as well as movement and gesture. Phonopoetics, Alga Marghen’s remarkably diverse survey of Ladik’s audio work, is a refracting lens into this dense and dynamic world - a totem which belongs to a sprawling puzzle of highly nuanced personal, social, political, and existential themes, springing from the feminist and gender neutral concerns of Eastern Europe during the 1960s and 70s.

The totality of Ladik’s practice, particularly as it unfolds across the two sides of Phonopoetics, can be understood as a radical rethinking of the potential, manifestation, and application of poetry, as well as the fundamentals of vocalization. Delving toward the very origins of consciously created sound - spoken or otherwise, her efforts unseat the divisions placed between literary, musical, theatrical and visual disciplines, joining them throug the fundamental need and right to express. With the excepting of two works, Shaman Song / Sámánének (1968), and Ufo-Nopoetica (1976-1993), the featured body of work was created between 1974 and 1979, a prolific period which also witnessed her working within the Novi Sad Theatre and Radio Novi Sad. A rising sea tones, utterances, and expressions, eluding to an unseen body in space, these discrete efforts range from the unquestionably musical - her voice a single element within a landscape of diverse texture and tone, flirtations with folk melody, to solo explorations of the root meanings of vocal sound - primal and poetic, with shamanic overtones and therapeutic mechanisms of liberation, capturing the image of an almost entirely unheard history within the field of feminist expression developed by pioneering figures like Monique Darge and Joan La Barbara.

In the words of Henri Chopin, the great visionary of sound poetry, when speaking about her in 1979, Ladik is "a great, magical voice.. ”. A true revelation, breaking through the shadows of time, Alga Marghen’s issue of Phonopoetics places this little heard, and profoundly important artist into the centre of our consciousness where she will no doubt remain. Brilliant, beautiful, challenging, and historically seminal. Highly recommended on every count. A vital entry in the field of sound art, historic Eastern European experimental practice and sound poetry.

This tiny edition of 300 won’t sit around for long. Grab it fast."


Sound Cage - a portrait of Katalin Ladik from igorbuharov on Vimeo.

go Alan go go go

very exciting drumming on this tune

a top rock unit Devo, taut and crisp, under all the Spenglerian stuff

9-9

My favorite R.E.M. song by far - , and I never noticed this at the time, but in its slashing rhythm guitar frenzy, there's an audible link to the flint-chipped Andy Gill / Gang of Four sound (Stipe did once say that when Entertainment came out it took the Athens, Georgia scene by storm, you heard it at parties constantly - and it either influenced the likes of Pylon or struck a chord with what B-52s were already doing (musically-rhythmically, underneath the camp 'n' kitsch)



Murmur was a huge album for me, as it was for so many, at the time of its release. But while I kept on loyally buying their albums all through the Eighties, and enjoying them, in hindsight I think there's a sharp nosedive into stodginess and college-rock dullness of sound as we move deeper into the decade. Certainly nothing ever scaled the mystic heights and sublimely tensile dynamism of Murmur again.

Do you know what, I've owned a copy of Chronic Town EP for decades now and have never even pierced the shrinkwrap? How daft is that?  I bought it much later - I think in the US in the late Eighties, probably from a branch of Tower Records - to a visiting Brit those stores seemed paradisical in the sheer range and depth of stuff they carried - - but because things were so hectic with new stuff hurtling out at the young reviewer, I just never got around to listening to it.




Playing Murmur and "9-9" again, it made me realise (did I not notice this at the time? seemingly not) how much early Throwing Muses is an extension of R.E.M.'s American-but-not-quite-"Americana" folk-punk sound. (Much more so than Hersh & Co's professed prime influence, Violent Femmes).



Listening to "9-9", I also heard a connection with this thrilling rhythm-guitar driven stiletto-slashing slice of New Wave.

the other chopin (musique de la bouche)

Why I Am The Author of Sound Poetry and Free Poetry 
Henri Chopin, 1967 

It is impossible, one cannot continue with the allpowerful Word, the Word that reigns over all. One cannot continue to admit it to every house, and listen to it everywhere describe us and describe events, tell us how to vote, and whom we should obey.

I, personally, would perfer the chaos and disorder which each of us would strive to master, in terms of his own ingenuousness, to the order imposed by the Word which everybody uses indiscriminately, always for the benefit of a capitol, of a church, of a socialism, etc....

No one has ever tried to establish chaos as a system, or to let it come. Perhaps there would be more dead among the weak constitutions, but certainly there could be fewer than there are in that order which defends the Word, from the socialisms to the capitalisms. Undoubtedly there would be more alive beings and fewer dead beings, such as employees, bureaucrats, business and government executives, who are all dead and who forget the essential thing: to be alive.

The Word has created profit, it has justified work, it has made obligatory the confusion of occupation (to be doing something), it has permitted life to lie. The Word has become incarnate in the Vatican, on the rostrums of Peking, at the Elysee, and even if, often, it creates the inaccurate SIGNIFICATION, which signifies differently for each of us unless one accepts and obeys, if, often, it imposes multiple points of view which never adhere to the life of a single person and which one accepts by default, in what way can it be useful to us? I answer: in no way.

Because it is not useful that anyone should understand me, it is not useful that anyone should be able to order me to do this or that thing. It is not useful to have a cult that all can understand and that is there for all, it is not necessary that I should know myself to be imposed upon in my life by an all-powerful Word which was created for past epochs that will never return: that adequate to tribes, to small nations, to small ethnic groups which were disseminated around the globe into places whose origins escape us.

The Word today serves no one except to say to the grocer: give me a pound of lentils.

The Word is useful no more; it even becomes an enemy when a single man uses it as a divine word to speak of a problematic god or of a problematic dictator. The Word becomes the cancer of humanity when it vulgarizes itself to the point of impoverishment trying to make words for all, promises for all, which will not be kept, descriptions of life which will be either scholarly or literary which will take centuries to elaborate upon with no time left for life.

The Word is responsbile for the phallic death because it dominates the senses and the phallus which are submissive to it; it is responsible for the birth of the exasperated who serve verbose principles.

It is responsible for the general incomprehension of beings who succumb to murders, racisms, concentrations, the laws, etc.

In short, the Word is responsible because instead of making it a way of life we've made it an end. Prisoner of the Word is the child, and so he will be all his adult life.

But, without falling into anecdote, one can mention the names of some who insisted upon breaking the bonds imposed by the Word. If timid essays by Aristophanes showed that sound was indispensable- the sound imitative of an element or an animal then -that does not mean that it was sought after for its own sake. In that case, the sound uttered by the mouth was cut off, since it only came from an imagined and subordinated usage, when in fact it is the major element.

It will not be investigated for its importance in the sixteenth century either since it must be molded by musical polyphony. It will not be liberated by the Expressionists since they needed the support of syllables and letters as did the Futurists, Dadaists and Lettristes.

The buccal sound, the human sound, in fact, will come to meet us only around 1953, with Wolmann, Brau, Dufrene, and somewhat later with my audiopoems.

But why want these a-significant human sounds, without alphabet, without reference to an explicative clarity? Simply, I have implied it, the Word is incomprehensible and abusive, because it is in all the hands, rather in all the mouths, which are being given orders by a few mostly unauthorized voices.

The mimetic sound of man, the human sound, does not explain, it transmits emotions, it suggests exchanges, affective communications; it does not state precisely, it is precise. And I would say well that the act of love of a couple is precise, is voluntary, if it does not explain! What then is the function of the Word, which has the pretension to affirm that such and such a thing is clear? I defy that Word.

I accused it and I still accuse it as an impediment to living, it makes us lose the meager decades of our existence explaining ourselves to a so-called spiritual, political, social, or religious court. Through it we must render accounts to the entire world; we are dependent upon the mediocrities Sartre, Mauriac, De Gaulle. They own us in every area; we are slaves of rhetoric, prisoners of explanation that explains nothing. Nothing is yet explainable.

That is why a suggestive art which leaves the body, that resonator and that receptacle, animated, breathed and acted, that + and-, that is why a suggestive art was made; it had to come, and nourish, and in no way affirm. You will like this art, or you will not like it, that is of no importance! In spite of yourself it will embrace you, it will circulate in you. That is its role. It must open our effectors to our own biological, physical and mental potentialities beyond all intellect; art must be valued like a vegetable, it feeds us differently, that is all. And when it gets into you, it makes you want to embrace it. That way the Word is reduced to its proper role subordinate to life; it serves only to propose intelligible usages, elementary exchanges, but never will it canal the admirable powers of life, because this meager canaling, as I have implied, finally provokes usury in us through the absence of real life.

Let us not lose 4/5ths of intense life without Word to the benefit of the small l/5th of verbiage. Let us be frank and just. Let us know that the day is of oxygen, that the night eliminates our poisons, that the entire body breathes and that it is a wholeness, without the vanity of a Word that can reduce us.

I prefer the sun, I'm fond of the night, I'm fond of my noises and of my sounds, I admire the immense complex factory of a body, I'm fond of my glances that touch, of my ears that see, of my eyes that receive.... But I do not have to have the benediction of the written idea. I do not have to have my life derived from the intelligible. I do not want to bc subject to the true word which is forever misleading or Iying, I can stand no longer to be destroyed by the Lord, that lie that abolishes itself on paper.

housess in motions

David Stubbs writes: "In 1980, A Certain Ratio were supposed to cover Talking Heads' "Houses In Motion" with Grace Jones on lead vocals. She never completed them, and the Hannett -produced session languished in the vaults. This new recording, featuring Jez Kerr's guide vocal, is based on those original recordings, with a new video. "

As I recall from interviewing Martin Moscrop for Rip It Up, the idea - cooked up between Island and Factory - was to do a whole album with ACR as Grace Jones's backing band.  That never came to anything though.

But I do remember the news item in NME that specifically announced the "Houses In Motion" collaboration, and the comment by the one of the band, "we're gonna take a Talking Heads song, do it properly". 

(The snidery evident here perhaps coming from the fact  that there was a belief among ACR that the T.Heads turn towards funk came after ACR supported the Heads on an early tour of the UK. Hence the jostling tone of that quip - revenge for being ripped off. Don't believe that myself - T. Heads were surely already mad for discofunk before the first album.)

This "House of Motions" by ACR feat Grace that never transpired is one of those phantasmic music-paper-sired folk memory things

One I recently came across - didn't know this from the time, wouldn't have cared then, but now it tantalized when I saw it in the Uncut special edition on her life and work - is the fact that Joni Mitchell wanted The Police to be her backing band on one of her early Eighties albums. But presumably they - while flattered, one suspects, and probably fans of her - politely demurred, no doubt rather busy what with the superstardom and the world tours. She particularly liked the drumming and approach to rhythm in the Police. 

(The whole of the rest of Sting's career essentially was coming from the same mis-place as Mingus now i think about it.)

What other tantalizing should-have-beens were there? Proposed collaborations, albums of cover versions, side projects and solo albums ...  unrealized dreams

Ooh, well one is that  Bowie planned a Pinups #2, devoted to the American Sixties this time...  not that tantalizing to me i must admit, as I dislike Pinups #1

Another one is  Eno's desire and intent to produce Scott Walker, this is in that period between "The Electrician" and Climate of Hunter

Oooh - here's another, not tantalizing but promising some kind of compelling grotesquerie. The story that Shane Macgowan tried to persuade the Pogues to do a 20 minute acid house song called "You Must Get Connected" or something like that. He was well into the E guzzling Shoom vibes of the late Eighties. 

Must be loads more

the Sixties!

not literally Sixties but in the spirit



common denom all of above = Jane Birkin


Sixties but Birkin-free