can u dig(ger) it

"Winstanley is a film made in 1975 in the UK by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, based on the 1961 David Caute novel Comrade Jacob.

This deals with some of the life story of the 17th Century social reformer and writer Gerrard Winstanley, who, along with a small band of followers known as the Diggers tried to establish a self-sufficient farming community on common land at St. George's Hill near Cobham, Surrey. This was one of the world's first socialistic living experiments which was copied elsewhere in England during the time of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, but was quickly suppressed and in the end left only a legacy of ideas to inspire later generations of socialist theorists.

Great efforts were made to produce a film of high historical accuracy. Armour used was actual armour from the 1640s, borrowed from the Tower of London. Real-life activist Sid Rawle played a Ranter (English Revolution period anarchist-type group)."

waaaaaaaaugh

Cathy Lane, "Nesting Stones"

musique concrete from the mother's point of view:

Anybody who has ever had an intense relationship with another person will know that for every positive emotion experienced there is a corresponding negative feeling. Nesting Stones is based on my feelings about my relationship with my baby daughter. 

In this composition I am using and developing anecdotal structures and gestural metaphors harnessing the sense of spatial positioning and movement and the tension between the recognisable and stated and the barely recognisable and unrecognisable to explore and express the contradictions and dualities of that relationship.
 
The sound material for the piece is all drawn from recordings of myself and my daughter.
Nesting Stones was written in 1996. In 1998 featured on Unknown Public Issue 8: Sensuality Essence And Nonsense


More Cathy Lane music

more on Professor of Sound Arts Cathy Lane at CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice at University of the Arts, London)

horses horses horses

Never noticed before, the spoken bit is by Jenny Agutter.

Almost certainly because of this film.

Quite possibly because of  a certain scene.

"Horse" was a word that Paddy Mac was partial to. See also "Horse Chimes" on Protest Songs.

Been on a bit of a Prefab Sprout jag this week. Steve McQueen is the immaculate execution, as we all know. Swoon has some good bits, albeit "underproduced" as they say. From Langley is nearly all cloying cack.   

Surprise for me was relistening to Jordan: The Comeback for the first time in a long time - a record I'd always gauged as the proverbial "return to form" Masterpiece (reunion with T. Dolby, producer of McQueen, songwriting reaches a mature peak of melodic and lyrical magisterialitude). And which I wrote up as such at the time. But hearing now, ooh but there's rather a lot of sickly sonic confections and edging-into-insufferable lyrical conceits.  The "Ice Queen" suite sounded least marred by the passage.  That and the opening sally of "Atlantis" and "Wild Horses" (a #1 Billboard R&B Chart hit, in a different universe, a la H. League's "Human" in this the universe in which we dwell).


Can't remember if I ever heard Protest Songs. Must have done, at least once. Made no impression, clearly. I have most of the later records, in one form or other, but never got round to them. A bad fan, I am.  But in that respect closer to a regular punter probably - faced with the choice of a first-time Andromeda Heights or the 112th listen to Steve McQueen, I'll go with the latter.

life is a circle

On The Strangeness of UK Pop-Rock Culture, or, Memories of the Bad Music Era (83-84-85-86-87)

and one from the 90s, which actually I rather like

retroformalist compositions

Latest in Benge's Forms series of explorations of the aesthetic capacities of a specific "outmoded"  electronic sound-generation machine:

"This time the whole record was made on the Ensoniq EPS. Its a digital workstation made in 1987. This particular synth was GIVEN to me by a Foxxy fan and friend called Steve Lamb - THANKS STEVE!!!! I love this synth - actually when I first started out making music properly in my bedroom my first sampler was an Ensoniq Mirage, and the samples and sounds on this album are all based on the legendary Mirage sound library. The EPS goes a bit beyond the Mirage in terms of layering and creating complex sounds. Its a really fun synth to play on! Once I got in the mood for 80s home-recording I decided to buy an old computer off eBay and make a video for the release - so I present my Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ rubbish video, which I programmed in BASIC "


 
Also most enjoyable was his earlier Forms essay with the Buchla 100

And the video




Benge's blog It's Full of Stars is a bonanza of synth porn

do the locomotion

according to Toys and Techniques the mindblowing, partly electronic music in this short film is performed by Steeleye Span!



The film maker Geoffrey Jones talks about Locomotion (his "documentary about the Stockton & Darlington line, the world's first passenger railway") here, mentioning the music

Often wondered why there aren't more alternative-history movies....

Here's one I always wanted to see - It Happened Here, from 1964.

Never even knew there was a movie of Fatherland, one of the more recent fictional stabs at that if-Hitler-had-won hardy perennial.

 

 

There was a late 70s TV series - An Englishman's Castle -  based on this scenario, but the idea was that things wouldn't actually be that different. So Germany presided over a sort of European Community, a united Europe. The UK was beset by terrorism, just like it was in the 1970s, but the terrorists were the remnants of the British Resistance and the general public is getting weary with them.

Always hated Big Audio Dynamite.

Or so I tell myself.

But then there's at least four songs I always turn up when they come on the car radio (which is frequently in the case of the first two, rarely and very rarely with the last couple).

Prefer B.A.D. II to B.A.D. mk 1, but the latter did have....

this was always embarrassing though

still as post-Clash discographies go it has the distinct edge over Strummer's