Saul Bass’s Birthday Video

A very quick one today, as I’ve simply borrowed the video from Google’s search page.

I’m a huge fan of Saul Bass’s graphic style (having written about him on these pages before) and although the thought of Google appropriating his effortless style by association sits a tad uncomfortably with me, I’m a realist and know that’s how it all works…

And besides, the video is a pretty clever summation of some of his best work. I’m even quite liking Dave Brubeck’s jazz tune this morning (but don’t tell my And)

And don’t bother sending Saul your best wishes either… he died in 1996.

Delia Derbyshire & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Last Saturday (May 5th) would have been the 76th birthday of the pioneering electronic musician Delia Derbyshire, a name that may be unfamiliar if you are not my side of 40, British or a bit of a geek.

There is however at least one of her tunes that you will recognise, as Delia was responsible for generating the futuristic bleeps, whooshes and synthetic sounds that combined to make the original Dr. Who Theme, which despite being made 50 years ago in 1963, is well worth a quick listen now, to remind yourself how good it still sounds…

Although credited to Ron Grainer, who wrote the basic melody, it was Delia who after three weeks of hard work recording noises and splicing together bits of magnetic tape, created the sounds and atmosphere that continue to make the tune as memorable today as it was then…

Delia (who sadly died in 2001 of alcoholism related problems, just as renewed interest in her work was beginning to pick up) was a key member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a name synonymous with the sonic and musical experimentation of the 1960′s and 70′s.

Formed in 1958 the Workshop’s original brief was to provide incidental sounds for radio and TV shows although this was quickly expanded and the team (which included Daphne Oram, Brian Hodgson and Paddy Kingsland) was soon creating theme tunes and other impressively futuristic sounds not only for The Doctor but also for The Goon Show, Quatermass & the Pit, Blakes 7 and The Hitchhikers Guide to name just a few.

Each of the members was also a composer in their own right and Delia wrote and recorded many original compositions, one of her most well known (and strangest) of which is Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO-OO from 1967. If you think it sounds odd today, imagine what it sounded like back when everyone looked this….

Delia was also involved in two offshoot groups in the mid 1960′s: the brilliantly named Unit Delta Plus (with Peter Zinovieff, inventor of the first British portable synthesizer the EMS VCS 3) and Kaleidophon (with David Vorhaus), neither of which had great musical success at the time, but both of which have since been the subject of much reassessment by musicians who see in their experimental electronic recordings, the beginnings of today’s digital soundscapes…

There a number of videos on YouTube about Delia & the Radiophonic Workshop, and the ones below I think are the most interesting. It’s fascinating to watch how sounds were created by speeding up and slowing down tapes, playing them backwards and then chopping everything up and making loops…. It must have taken hours and hours to do what any self respecting sampler can do in seconds today…

(I’ve no idea what the ghostly chap in the background is all about…)

There’s also an excellent 1 hour audio mix here put together by Soundhog, which through a mix of spoken word and music, gives a pretty good oversight of what they got up to over in their Maida Vale studio…

As a final aside and if you’re interested in this kind of music like me, I’ve also come across this BBC TV programme from 1979. Called The New Sound of Music and presented by Michael Rodd, it’s a wonder of optimism, science and massively complex technology. I especially enjoyed seeing David Vorhaus in the last section (Part 4) who at about 7.40 mins seemingly invents Goa Trance at least 15 years before anyone knew what to call it…

Truly Impressive…

One final excellent BBC TV programme of related interest can also be found here… (noted more for my records than anything else)

Margaret Thatcher: A Different Sort of Legacy…

Celebrating the death of another human being will never be the right thing to do. Regardless of your own personal politics, most people are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives and husbands and presumably were loved by at least some of these people at some time in their life…

I will start by stating for the record that I am no fan of Mrs. Thatcher. I’ve always seen her as a destroyer of things, much more than she was ever a creator, and someone who placed too much importance on the individual over the community.

Anyway, coming into work this morning I read an excellent piece by John Harris in the Guardian. Entitled Singing Songs of Rage, Harris eloquently examines one aspect of Thatcher that has always fascinated me. You can (and should) read the full piece here, but to summarise, it’s the conundrum that a woman who famously didn’t have a cultural or artistic bone in her body, and in many cases actively moved to weaken and diminish our cultural heritage and creativity, was responsible nevertheless for a huge “cultural earthquake” in the fields of arts and music, one that still reverberates to this day.

The atmosphere that Thatcherism generated, feelings of mistrust, betrayal and fear, galvanised a generation of musicians and artists alike to focus their anger on something tangible, a proper enemy. In so doing they created a culture that was alive with energy, intelligence and power. Sharp tunes, clever words, and above all a conviction in the things they were singing about.

Today we’re living through the toughest times I’ve experience in my adult life, and where is the protest music? Where is this generation’s Billy Bragg, Paul Weller or Pauline Black? Where can we experience feelings of alienation and struggle and hear tales of strength through adversity…

Not on BBC 2 for a start, where a recent Radio 2 Top 100 albums poll (find it here) asked listeners to vote for their favourites. I’m still finding it hard to come to terms with the Top 5 to be honest, which included 2 of the most contemptible bands of all time Coldplay and Keane along with that insightful commentator on contemporary life and love, Dido. Anodyne, derivative, lowest common denominator schlop for people with obviously no interest in music.

Similarly (if not more so) with comedy. I mean John Bishop, Michael MacIntyre and Alan Carr? Give me strength, sub standard comedy for apathetic punters. It’s no wonder there’s such a huge resurgence of interest in Eighties bands and culture at the moment, when today’s offerings are so weak and pathetic in comparison…

And whilst I’m not saying that Thatcher is directly responsible for all the great bands of the late 70′s and the 80′s, and all the alternative comedians, I do think that in her divisive policies and her apparent revelling in the role of figurehead, she was someone onto who feelings of hatred and anger could be focused. Unlike the wishy-washy and grey, middle of the road politicians that seem to be in charge at the moment (and I include my lot in that as well sadly. I quite like Ed Balls, but he’s no leader in waiting…)

So after all that, maybe I should also be more appreciative of her, as most of this mornings obituaries seem to be. It would appear that her formidable strength, singular vision and iron grip on politics during her reign, not only destroyed our industries and communities, but also gave birth to some of the best and most enduring aspects of contemporary music and culture…

Spot the Diggers Fans…

At the beginning of October last year, me & A went on one of our several annual trips to see John Digweed play repetitive dance  music very loud for long periods of time…

Undoubtedly (in our book anyway) the finest DJ in the world, Diggers has an enviable ability to choose and sequence wonderfully uplifting deep electro house music that in the 20 years or so that I’ve been going to see him play and the 13 years we’ve been going together, I can’t ever remember coming away disappointed… although often these days, we can’t really remember coming away at all…

I digress. And got the Live in London CD for Christmas, and unusually for me I didn’t really take any time to look at the art work, a symptom I suspect of Spotify and downloading, as the music and the artwork become more and more divorced, something that I find rather sad and that I’ve commented on before…

Anyway, we had the CD on quite a lot over the weekend, and finally getting around to picking up the  booklet, I was most surprised to see a largish figure in the centerfold photo, that can only be me… And is a bit more difficult to make out, but is just about visible if you know where to look…

Our first Digweed excursion of the year is coming up shortly (the annual Bedrock Easter bash) with support from two other favorites of ours Jimpster and Tom Middleton, and we fully expect yet another great night out…

Startrails, Observatories & Carbon Based Lifeforms

I found these three wonderful things recently…

Firstly this magical video of stairtrails, by Christoph Malin.

As I understand it all the original still shots are from cameras aboard the International Space station (ISS) which have then been “stacked” via a computer programme. The process of stacking is very similar to creating a timelapse image, however as each new image is added, the previous one is retained, hence the continuous trails, lines and general wonderousness that is revealed as the image builds up…

I’m no scientist, but aren’t they the Northern Lights/ Aurora Borealis at about 1 minute in, and isn’t that lighting at about 2.05? I like the heightened sense of movement that these images generate. The ISS is traveling at just short of 28,000km/h – orbiting the planet  about 16 times a day, and the quality of these images is made even more impressive when you consider the very high ISO levels that the cameras have to achieve in order to take account of this phenomenal speed.

Also on the Vimeo site, I also came across this stunning video by Babak Tafreshi

We had the very good fortune to spend an evening in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile watching the stars at the Mamalluca Public Observatory a couple of years ago. The memory of seeing whole constellations of stars and neighbouring galaxies climb up into the night sky, as our planet moved through its bit of space, will stay with me for ever. A truly amazing experience that this video captures pretty much as I remember, although as always through the restricted medium of a monitor/ TV screen, the mind numbing sense of scale will always elude the casual watcher…

And finally the music on the Atacama Starry Nights film. A track called Arecibo by the Swedish producers Carbon Based Lifeforms. No idea how I’ve missed this wonderful, epic space noise, as it’s right up my strasse…. Huge washes of static and infinitely deep chords and pulses that gradually build and mutate into.. well nothing really, just more of the same. Which is seriously what I like…

Their most recent album Twenty Three can be linked below via Spotify, but for now sit back, turn off your phone, click away your email, put your headphones on and pilot your own psyche through the Cosmos for 10 minutes… Nice…

Amon Tobin – ISAM

As a follow up to my Post on Amon Tobin @ Bloc , I’ve just found the whole ISAM show on YouTube….

Wonderment and joy… I don’t know how long Ninja Tune will allow it to stay up, but it’s really excellent to see it all again and in such amazing quality.

As I suggested before, you really don’t get anything of the sense of the scale and the all encompassing grandeur of the show, which is based on 3D digital mapping projected onto a set made of cubes which you occasionally get a glimpses of as the lights and colours change and mutate. The larger, darker cube in the center is where Mr. Tobin stands, creating his music and doing what he does….

A timely reminder of something I’ll never forget….

Anna Meredith – Nautilus video

A quick update on Anna Meredith, as I recently came across the video for her amazing tune Nautilus…

Made by Tony Comely, it’s full of everything that appeals to me; big colours, bold shapes & clever ideas, with echoes (to my eyes) of Saul Bass and Airside…

And as for that tune, I’m still listening to it (and the whole EP to be honest) and it still sounds like nothing else I’ve heard. When did the trombone ever sound so convincing as an intrinsic element of a dub step track?

A Murmuration of Starlings…

Watch this truly amazing short film of starlings and marvel at the wonders of nature…

 

Captured by Neels Castillon as he was waiting to film a helicopter flying into the sunset, some of the movements of these birds is so achingly beautiful that at times it seems almost choreographed, especially on the long, static shot from about 2.00 minutes up to the end.. You could almost believe it was CGI, it seems so perfect…

The only down side is having to listen to the god awful voice of last years big thing (this years bargain bin) Alt-J. Try watching it with the sound down and click the link below instead.

Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s The Plateaux of Mirror may well be over 30 years old now, but it still sounds as timeless and graceful as these starlings look…

Google Beatbox…

A quick & silly one today…

Copy the following into Google Translate…

pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk kkkkkkkkkk bschk zk

Then click the speaker symbol bottom right…

How cool is that? (makes you wonder what other sounds GT can generate…)

Swans way – The Fugitive Kind (1984)

I had a very enjoyable afternoon today listening to an album I’ve neither heard nor thought about since sometime last century…

I think it must have been someone on the radio talking about swans or fugitives (or something, I’m not quite sure now), but whatever, there was the idea and hey presto there it was on Spotify…

Like most people who have any knowledge of Swans way, I guess it was their appearance on The Tube in the early 1980′s that spiked my interest in the band.

Not in any sense my usual fare, Swans way were a smartly dressed three piece comprising Robert Shaw on vocals and sax, Maggie Du Monde on drums and Rick P. Jones on double Bass. Together they created a rich, semi orchestral sound with a brass section and a strong sense of soul and rhythm. As I say not in nay sense my usual thing at all, but there was something about these songs and those vocals that lifted them above the everyday…

Beautifully crafted and evocative, this was one of those records I played so much at University, that I literally wore the grooves out, making my copy now almost unlistenable in parts. And how do I know that I listened to it so much? Because despite not having heard it for all these years, I still knew all the words, all the tunes, all the musical breaks and all the little flourishes. It’s been sitting there in my head all these years waiting to be rediscovered…

Their big tune was Soul Train, a lush and atmospheric track which you can watch below to get a feel for their sound (and if you click the picture above you can listen to the whole album via the wonder of Spotify)

No idea why they only made one album, when they were this good together (musical differences I suspect) although I do know that the drummer and bass player went on to (slightly) greater success with a band called Scarlet Fantastic.

Maybe in these days of reunion and reconciliation, the possibility of some future gigs might not be out of the question… Personally I can think of nothing better than singing along to When The Wild Calls or The Anchor somewhere appropriate like The Union Chapel in Islington…