mouth music / uninvention of the guitar

 

(via John Olson) 

Dave Segal on the case

https://www.thestranger.com/music/2017/12/20/25640340/lost-classic-album-alert-sue-ann-harkeys-the-ancient-past-and-the-ancient-future-are-both-seconds-away

Some of this stuff reminds me of disintegrated Jefferson Airplane

ShitBrit 2 of ???

Managed by a music journo James Brown (then features editor at NME but soon to start Loaded) and fronted by another NME journo. Not promising, eh? 

I remember a Fabulous feature in which they were playing a gig in the provinces and Brown explained to the reporter that he never booked a hotel for the band in such circumstances - "if they don't have the nous to cop off with someone after the show, they don't deserve to be in Fabulous".

1991 - so a little bit too ahead of the coming Shitegeist

ShitBrit 1 of ???

 Every country in the world has its musical shit but there is something unique about Britshit.

Really truly shaky musical propositions can get surprisingly far - onto music paper covers, TV youth shows, record deals, and even into the charts. 

There is something about the British tolerance for deficiency that is unique - Joe Carducci talks about a kind of listening where you sense the group's intention and supply it aurally even when it's not achieved or barely even gestured at. He was talking specifically about how after punk and its ethos of deskilling, you had a lot of rhythmically substandard outfits who got very successful - how British rock in the '60s and '70s had been all about great drummers and rhythms sections but after punk you could prosper as a band with barely adequate drumming, feeble rhythms etc. That only got worse with indie and Britpop.

There's a kind of solidarity-based listening where you like the attitude or line of patter that the group puts out - support their values or reckon they are good people - and as a result are prepared to turn a blind ear to the manifest failings in sonic execution. You imaginatively project the kind of musical substance that they ought to have and would supply if capable of it, or prepared to go to the bother of learning how to deliver it.

72 hours of Love

 

Now I want to hear the 72-hour version! 

On the same record, there's also "Water Music"

I'm interested in these composer dudes who just do one or two or maybe three tape / electronic pieces - and then revert to the orchestral / choral palette. 

Takemitsu also did this electro-acoustic piece  - harp + tape 

Other dabblers include Ligeti, Boulez, and Henri Sauguet, who did just the one concrete piece, among my absolute favorite pieces of electronic music ever

Ligeti's efforts:"Glissandi" and "Artikulation" 

Wonder why Kubrick didn't use either of these in 2001?

Boulez bits: 

And this job has some tape in amidst the tiddlybonk 

What disinclined these chaps from going any further? 

Ligeti expressed frustration: ""I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde; the other is the past. I want to escape."

Yet according to this liner note chappie, Ligeti had mastered how to express emotion through tape rather than the usual gimmickry and discontinuous sound-events

Rotten on Juke Box Jury

 

the first is I think from Radio Times (saved in an old scrapbook) and the second is from Sounds, July 14 1979

now you be the judge !

c'était aussi demain

 

c'était demain