a load of Cobblers

The Thief and the Cobbler - legendarily unfinished animated full length movie

more work by Richard Williams (RIP)





















and one not by him but from his Animation Studio

haresignal alphabet

Bernie, bro!

!!!!!Parmegiani soundtracks to French science fiction flic of the early 70s +  same director's earlier well-weird animated film of 1965!!!! Available on the WRWTFWW label.





Les Soleils de l’Île de Pâques (1972), by French director Pierre Kast, is a sci-fi feature which secured itself a well-deserved place in the pantheon of mysterious cult films thanks to hallucinatory (and superb) cinematography, exploration of supernatural phenomenons and occult symbolism, and one hell of a trippy atmosphere. La Brûlure de Mille Soleils (1965) also comes from Pierre Kast, but this time with the help of none other than writer, photographer, multimedia artist, homme à tout faire Chris Marker (notably known for films La Jetée, A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil) who edited this bizarre short to brain melting results that live up to the promises of its synopsis: A depressed millionaire poet, accompanied by his cat Marcel and a sign language robot, travels in time to shake a persistent feeling of ennui and falls hopelessly in love with a woman from another planet. Nuff said! "

The vinyl version comes "with original silver Procédé Héliophore sleeve in the fashion of the Prospective 21e Siècle series"!!!! 

[via Bruce Levenstein]

some more hot Bernie O/S/T action

zupa pamięci (polska ostalgia)

Polish counterpart to Look Around You - well, not exactly (the model perhaps more on the lines of  Poland's Communist-era equivalent to Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead, rather than Tomorrow's World)

"KrainaGrzybowTV (also known as Mushroomland (or Land of Mushrooms) TV, KGTV, or just Kraina Grzybów) is a Polish YouTube channel, which features a series of 1980’s themed videos revolving around a mysterious place called Mushroomland. The videos (so far) include: Smile Guide (Poradnik Uśmiechu) episodes 1, 2, 4, and 5, several Smile Guide OST videos, and one episode of Mushroom Melodies (Grzybowe Melodie). Six definite characters have been thus far established: Agatha (in Polish, Agatka), Maggie the Squirrel (Wiewiórka Małgosia), Caroline (Karolina), the Jeansman (Dżinsowy Człowiek), Hatszepsut,and Agatha’s unnamed mother.

"Smile Guide takes the appearance of an ’80’s or early ’90’s-era Eastern Bloc children’s educational program which, as the specific video progresses, descends into chaotic madness. Much of its style consists of footage made to look like it was shot on VHS, grammatically incomplete sentences, absurd humor, nostalgic-sounding music (mostly played on synthesizer and designed to evoke Polish television soundtracks from the 1980’s ), and, of course, disturbing imagery.
"The show is hosted by Agatha, a young girl always seen wearing a blue sweater with red flowers on it. She also wears paper eyes over her actual eyes (as do Caroline and the Jeansman). The premise of each episode is that Agatha is going to teach the viewer how to do something grammatically nonsensical (“how to effectively apple,” “how to make from paper”), but this pretense generally gets dropped about half-way through as the video descends into chaos. She is usually joined by Maggie, a talking cartoon squirrel, who acts as something of a co-host. The two generally seem to be friendly, although Episode 2 sees both of them snapping angrily at each other at one point, perhaps to imply everything is not as it seems...."

There was another KGTV series - Grzybowe Melodie (Mushroom Melodies) - but with only one episode

More information

More videos

animasonix (Piotr + Bernard)

(via Bollops at Found Objects)

the first three at least are definitely soundtracked by Parmegiani

reviewing a Bernard P box set, I noted direct parallels between the processes of animation and musique concrete

"In the booklet accompanying L'Oeuvre Musicale, Parmegiani talks revealingly about an artistic past-time that preceded his adventures in sonic fiction: photomontage. He'd cut out a large number of image-fragments from magazines--human limbs, machine parts, etc--and then glue them into surreal assemblages. His music-making would follow a similar process, starting with the building-up of a sound-bank, an inventoried miscellany of noises, before embarking on composition. Compared to the photocollages, though, Parmegiani's music has at least one extra element: life. It's analogous maybe to animators who use stop-motion film techniques to bring a queer vitality to their materials, whether three-dimensional puppets or photographic and illustrative material (as with Terry Gilliam's Monty Python collages). "I do consider sounds as living things," Parmegian has said. But with concrete as with animation, the movement in the musique is life-like but umheimlich."


Bernie soundtracking one of his own experimental films



Now a lot of this concrete for cartoons and experimental shorts was rounded up, unofficially, by a label that called itself New England Electric Music Company for a six part series of mini-CD-Rs.

This label would seem to be the immediate precursor to Creel Pone:

"... named after the original New England Electric Music Company from the early XX century, which funded Thaddeus Cahill's ambitious plan to transmit music, produced on his Telharmonium, to hotels, restaurants, theatres and private homes via the telephone network. This visionary project (preceding the concept of online music streaming for generations) failed due to high costs and potential interference with telephone calls on the same line. The description on the website mixes reality with fiction, describing Thaddeus as our contemporary and Whitman' "good friend": 

"The New England Electric Music Company was set up by our good friend Thaddeus Cahill to make rare, obscure, and unreleased historic electronic music available to individuals on a local basis. All NEEMC releases are lovingly researched and sourced by Thaddeus throughout the world, mastered in the Math Lab by Hrvatski, designed by Pieter Christophssen and manufactured in small runs in the Reckankomplexreplication bureau by the Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge staff. They are sold to local music stores on a not-for-profit basis".

memo to self: gotta get that Jeff Keen cd on Trunk