Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza

Listening to the music of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and the Italian collective's 1970 album The Feed-Back, a brisk but brilliant 27min suite of improvised avant-rock featuring Ennio Morricone on trumpet. I often see The Group filed alongside improv units like AMM and fellow Italians, Musica Elettronica Viva but the The Feed-Back sounds more at home with Kosmische music - the abrasive textures of early Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, as well as the propulsive motorik of Neu! come to mind. Well worth seeking out. Incidentally, composing credits on the album are assigned to the Group and I wonder if Tim Gane gave the band a nod with Stereolab's 1993 EP The Groop Played "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music"...

Zona

Finished reading Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, Geoff Dyer’s 2013 book about Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. Dyer’s book is not a scholarly study of the film but a scene-by-scene commentary on a film that has fascinated and obsessed the author for the past 30 years. It’s a short, breezy read (the book can easily be digested in one sitting), and while Tarkovsky students might feel frustrated that the book reveals little new about the film, Dyer has left me with at least one notion that I will take to my next screening of the film. With tongue firmly in his cheek Dyer imagines the mysterious black dog, possibly abandoned or separated from its owner in the Zone, has in fact ventured into the Room and has had its heart’s desire – of being adopted by a loving family – granted. Hence his reappearance in the final act of the film, back in the industrial wasteland of the Stalker’s home, happily lapping milk and finding a gentle companion in the Stalker’s daughter. It’s a lovely idea and it’s a measure of the brilliance of Dyer’s short book that it has increased my love of the film even more. Highly recommended reading.

Laraaji

Listening to the music of Laraaji this morning, courtesy of the recently released triple cassette collection All In One Peace which gathers together various recordings from the late 70's/early 80's. Laraaji was my big discovery of 2013. I had previously known him for his contribution to Eno's Ambient series, the excellent Ambient 3: Day of Radiance album, but in 2013 All Saints re-issued the luminous 1987 drone work Essence/Universe and two fine compilations of recordings. One thing I like about Laraaji's music is how it's challenged my notions of New Age music, a whole swathe of music I would have instantly dismissed before I delved into Laraaji's back catalogue - his music played on electronically treated zither and hammered dulcimer is a little too hectic to be classed as ambient wallpaper but it's a world away from dreary pan-pipe albums seen propping up counters at health shops. Another revelatory album worth checking out is the excellent and beautifully packaged I Am The Center - Private Issue New Age Music In America, 1950-1990...

Entering The West Wing

Sky Atlantic have started showing The West Wing from scratch this week, fitting nicely into the 5pm slot. Having missed previous opportunities to follow the White House drama, I'm quite excited to finally catch it, and am eager to jump into another political drama after the superb David Simon series Show Me A Hero. I don't know if Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet will turn out to be a good president but he surely can't be any worse than presidential candidate Greg Stillson...

Magma

I’ve been spending the morning immersing myself in the music of Magma… It’s taken me a while to reach this point, in less enlightened times, I would often dismiss Magma with the usual prog rock prejudice (always at one’s peril I’ve come to believe) but my interest has been piqued by their association with Jodorowsky’s ill-fated Dune film. I’ve amassed quite an extensive chunk of Magma back catalogue on mp3 (call it a try n’ buy) and am journeying thru the first salvo of albums from the early 70’s. This is not easy music to absorb in a few initial fly-bys - the jazz-rock fusion is formidable, the arrangements knotty and complex with ever shifting time changes and tempos, and the vocals, sung in Magma’s own devised language often sound like they’ve strayed from a bombastic symphonic opera. But perseverance yields rewards and I'm particularly enjoying Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh, perhaps the first of Magma’s signature albums. The evolutionary leap from Kobaïa and 1001° Centigrades is apparent, the jazz-rock workouts abandoned in favor of what might be described as inter-galactic gospel music backed by pounding martial rhythms. The extraordinary vocals which range from operatic to freak-out wailing and shrieking sound to my ear like people swearing in Polish. Truly incredible stuff. Listening to this album, I can better appreciate Alejandro Jodorowsky’s idea of using Magma’s music in Dune to represent the brutal forces of the House Harkonnen...

Speaking of Dune... Unmade movies are the opium dreams of film junkies, and with so much pre-production done on Jodorowsky's Dune there's always that threat that one of the major studios will shoehorn it into a hollow effects extravaganza, diluting Jodorowsky and Moebius' more outrageous inventions (the anal staircase entrance into the Emperor's throne room comes to mind!). My dream of Dune is to see it realized as a huge animated film and looking around at some of the Dune art on the web, the potential for such a film seems limitless. I'm particularly fond of concept artist/illustrator Mark Molnar's Dune artwork at his Project Dune page

Revisiting The Element of Crime

Michael Elphick wades thru a drowned world in The Element of Crime… I watched Lars Von Trier's 1984 debut yesterday evening, my third viewing of the film over the years and it remains as frustrating and dazzling as ever. The Red Dragon-style plot never quite works for me and I find myself too easily slipping in and out of the narrative, but the film’s extraordinary visuals always win me over, with Northern Europe re-imagined as a water-logged terminal rubbish dump, everything cast in a sickly rust sepia. Nick James wrote about the film in last month’s Sight & Sound examining the film’s Tarkovskian elements, most notably the influence of Stalker, both films sharing exhausted leading men and tracking shots of submerged flotsam, but watching The Element of Crime again, Eraserhead and Hard to Be A God came to mind - two other films set in a completely immersive environment. And oddly enough I found myself thinking of Derek Jarman’s The Last of England as well…

The Pied Piper

I've been listening to Donovan these past few weeks, and while I normally don't like my music so saccharine there are always exceptions. And so this afternoon, with an hour and a half to spare I sat down with The Pied Piper, Jacques Demy's 1972 film starring Donovan as the mysterious minstrel with the power of enchantment. Not exactly Horror fare for Halloween weekend but the film has much to enjoy - the stellar cast of British players, Demy's fluid direction, some terrific sets and costumes and a few interesting parallels with The Seventh Seal and more significantly, The Devils, which must have influenced the look of the film if nothing else. I thought it was interesting that the most sinister element of the tale - of the children being spirited away by a vengeful stranger was given a subtle benevolent twist by suggesting the piper was taking the children out of harm's way of the Black Death and John Hurt's character's plan to conscript Hamelin's children as soldiers to fight a war brewing in Italy. Interesting too was the final shot of the piper and the children effectively evaporating into the ether as dawn breaks over a pastoral meadow - a piper at the gates of dawn as it were...

Phantom Piano

I had a mind for the month of October to post a song a day themed around Halloween, but having a holiday booked in the second half of the month nixed the idea. Earlier today I was going to post The Specials Ghost Town, with its distinctive and eerie banshee wailing chorus, but I got sidetracked by the memorable cover art adorning the 12" sleeve. Failing to find an artwork credit on my own copy inspired me to roll up the sleeves and do some googling which revealed that the image of the skeletons had previously turned up on an album cover - fronting a 1966 sound effects library LP Sounds to Make You Shiver (which features appropriately enough something called Phantom Piano). After some more digging I found the original photograph which apparently was taken at a Belgian medical exhibition - the photograph so far untitled and the date unrecorded. Anyone have any additional info ?

Trek Lit

It won’t mean much to non-Trekers, but I've recently been dipping my toes into the plasma stream of Star Trek literature, a veritable galaxy of novels and stories encompassing the Original Series right thru to Enterprise and the films and spinning off into its own self-contained universe of Star Trek continuity and mythology. For someone like me, whose watched all the series and films (and am currently getting into Enterprise), it’s an exciting discovery, and I've completed my first installment of Trek-lit with David Mack’s 2007-2008 Destiny series, a fantastic trilogy of novels, largely set during The Next Generation era (but skillfully dipping between different timelines) which sees the Federation brought to its knees by a massive Borg invasion. I have no reservations in saying the Destiny books have been some of my best science fiction reading in years and after finishing that trilogy I’ve gone straight into another - The Eugenics Wars which over the course of three novels introduces Kirk’s nemesis Khan Noonien Singh, his rise to power on Earth and his banishment on Ceti Alpha V (which chronologically speaking comes between the Original Series episode Space Seed and the Wrath of Khan film. Phasers set to stun !

Oz Archive

I’m planning to retro-fit my ipad later with the entire run of Oz magazines which I stumbled across this morning – all available to download as good quality pdf files courtesy of the University of Wollongong. Essential reading for students of 1960s counterculture. The archive also contains the original Australian run of Oz before editor Richard Neville relaunched the magazine in London in 1967. Read online or download here

Back in September I posted the cover of International Times #87 (September 1970) which featured a reworked still of Mick Jagger from Performance. Looking thru the Oz archive earlier today, the cover of #15 struck a cord, and another connection between Cammel and Roeg's film and an underground publication. Oz 15 from 1968 features a cartoon by Australian artist Martin Sharp, of Mick Jagger, which appears in slightly different form in Performance as a concert poster for the Turner Purple Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, prominently displayed in the scene where Chas is washing the paint from his hair...