Alice

My latest round of obsessive listening comes courtesy of David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label and their new compilation of Alice Coltrane devotional music recorded in the 80’s and 90’s. Despite one track sharing its title with her 1971 masterpiece Journey In Satchidananda, this collection of Ecstatic Music, taken from three self-released albums Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1990) and Glorious Chants (1995) has little to do with Alice’s signature astral jazz music; on the face of it, the blend of Tangerine Dream-esque synths, Eastern instrumentation and Krishna chants and mantras would be more in line with New Age, that most loathed of musical genres. But it’s good to have your prejudices trashed once in a while, and in some considerable style too - the music Alice composed primarily for an audience of religious devotees and scholars at the Vedantic Center, located in the hills of Santa Monica, is absolutely spellbinding, radiating the warmth and joy of American Gospel, and the sublime spacey futurism of analogue electronica. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson are well known Alice fans (the closing track on sunnO)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions album is named after her) and I wonder were the long funereal Wurlitzer drones on the aforementioned Journey To Satchidananda (the slight variation on the names is noted) an inspiration for the opening track on the live Dømkirke album ? As well as extraordinary music, the album also serves as a rare outing for Alice’s gorgeous bluesy, yearning voice which alone marks these recordings as essential. World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is available on all formats, (the CD and 2LP come with extensive liner notes) and can be sampled over at the dedicated bandcamp page

Bloomsday

Continuing the theme of last year’s Bloomsday post...  I’m always on the lookout for interesting and unusual cover designs for Ulysses, and I very much like Kirsty White’s cover for Penguin’s 2011 Annotated Student edition. Pictorial views of Dublin in the early 20th century are de rigueur for art directors tasked with presenting Joyce’s masterwork but it’s nice to see an artist given the opportunity to present original work. I haven't seen a cover this striking since Richard Hamilton’s 1985 etching The Transmogrifications of Bloom, used on various editions of the Oxford World Classics series, and I particularly like that the artist has included little references to the book within the drawing - thoughtfully color-coded for the reader to puzzle over. And the framing device of the drawing, a faux supplement of the Freeman's Journal newspaper (where Leopold Bloom sells advertising space), is rather ingenious too, in fact I initially assumed the design was adapted from an actual illustration from that paper. (Click here for a large scan of the cover)

400 Beats That

I shouldn’t let June slip by without saying something about The Wire magazine which celebrates its 400th issue this month. Putting out a magazine of any kind is a Herculean task, but for a publication, which has for most of its tenure dealt with experimental and marginal music to reach 400 issues is something significant. I picked up my first copy of The Wire back in 1996 when the October issue devoted an article to Throbbing Gristle, and I’ve been buying it ever since. If that unwieldy stack in the pic below looks impressive, my collection is still short about 100 issues from the magazine’s early years when it was primarily a Jazz journal, bearing the immortal strapline: Jazz, Improvised Music and.....

I picked up a few issues here and there from the early years, (and worth noting that this era featured some exquisite photography) but it was the arrival of the millennium that saw The Wire really hit its stride (at least for this reader), as every new issue would see my album collection expand in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. It was through the good offices of The Wire that I discovered the music of Sun Ra, AMM, Herbie Hancock, Evan Parker, Fela Kuti, John Fahey, Tod Dockstader, Phill Niblock to name but a few. The magazine's championing of The Grateful Dead, King Crimson, John Martyn, even James Brown, artists that I previously had only a casual interest in, inspired me to delve deeper into their output. I heard Coil for the first time through The Wire, when in 2000, an early draft of A Cold Cell appeared on the 6th installment of the magazine's cover mounted CD series The Wire Tapper. To borrow a phrase from Cornelius Cardew, this was the time of The Great Learning.

If The Wire seems less vital in these recent times, it is perhaps a consequence of this reader not having the time to keep up with the endless flow of new music that emerges every month, but I must admit I've become increasingly frustrated by the magazine’s unfortunate inclination for fussy scholarly writing. The most recent offender, Philip Clarke's overview of Lou Reed's RCA & Arista Album Collection, in issue 397 in which the author couched the review in esoteric musicological language ("plagal cadences" and so on) was virtually unreadable. And yet I still eagerly buy it every month, usually rushing to grab one of the four or five copies my newsagents stocks. Incidentally, I had my name mentioned in The Wire back in 2012, albeit in the letters page when a tongue-in-cheek complaint about the previous issue's cover was fired off to the amused editor, who published it much to my dismay...

The Wire reviews Throbbing Gristle's TG24 boxset, issue Issue #227, January 2003

Coil, Issue #194, April 2000

The Herbie Hancock Sextet, Issue #174, August 1998

Yoko Ono, Issue #146, April 1996

What is Blade Runner ?

"A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities.....absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant or a tireless field hand - the custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant designed especially for your needs. So come on America, let's put our team up there...."

Quoted from the Blade Runner FAQ... I was rooting around some film magazines over the weekend when I discovered to my delight, a dog-eared copy of the Blade Runner FAQ bulking out an old Empire magazine. Compiled back in the early 90’s, the 70-odd page FAQ was a treasure trove of Blade Runner lore, crammed with fascinating facts, trivia and answers to those niggly questions the film poses (Was the Unicorn sequence taken from Legend ? What is the significance of the chess game?) Back in 1993, the BR FAQ felt like it was beamed from the future – my older brother, working at Motorola at the time printed me a copy from that mysterious newfangled thing known as the Internet, and for years the FAQ served as my Blade Runner Bible, endlessly read cover to cover up to its retirement with the arrival of Paul Sammon’s definitive chronicle of the film, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (which seems to be out of print these days). I’m looking thru an online version of the original FAQ now and enjoying the minutiae that easily slips the mind, like the association of each of the characters with an animal: Leon (Turtle), Roy (Wolf, Dove), Zhora (Snake), Rachel (Spider), Tyrell (Owl), Sebastian (Mouse), Pris (Raccoon), Deckard (Sushi (raw fish), unicorn). Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates? Answers here...