Can Outtakes

My morning listening is laid out for me... I'm near completion of the first disc of an unoffcial 4CD Can Outtakes collection which surfaced around 2005 or thereabouts. I usually don't care for bootlegs but was listening to Mute's Can Live - 1971-1977 over the w/end and the time seemed right to delve in. There's been nothing terribly revelatory so far but interesting nonetheless - a version of Outside My Door lacks the energy and crunch of the Monster Movie cut, and there's a more rockabilly take of Man Named Joe. Wandering folk singer Tim Hardin is credited with an unlikely cameo appearance on one track (unceremoniously titled Rehearsal), although to my ears it sounds like him supplying the bluesy vocals on a second track as well (the Future Days flavored Soundcheck). At this point, Can were operating a revolving door policy when it came to vocalists so I can't say for certain. Anyone know for sure ? The best stuff are the band cutting loose on some trancey jams with Jaki Liebezeit in particular in hypnotic form. Onward to the Damo Suzuki era stuff !

Fallen Angels

A chance mention of the 2002 film Hero last week sent me back to Wong Kar Wai’s 1995 film Fallen Angels yesterday (the connection being cameraman Christopher Doyle) and was very glad of the revisit - it’s a great amphetamine-fueled rush of a film, audacious and exhilarating, and featuring a cast that is impossibly cool, stylish and beautiful (and endlessly smoking) as they go about their nights of being wild on the wet neon-lit streets of Hong Kong. I especially loved Michelle Reis’ forlorn fixer, her scenes where she enjoys some “reveries” set my pulse racing, and she’s gorgeous enough to endure Wong Kar Wai’s penchant for ultra-wide lenses. My only regret is that I didn't precede the film with a screening of Chunking Express which Fallen Angels riffs on. Film also has the best Most Delightfully Unexpected Use of a Song I've heard since Harmony Korine’s appropriation of Brittney Spears for Spring Breakers, with The Flying Pickets’ a cappella re-write of Yazoo’s Only You…

John Coltrane

Just listened to a very good hour-long audio interview with John Coltrane recorded in November 1966. It's funny, for all the years I've been listening to Coltrane this may be the first time I've heard the man in conversation, and everything I've read about him - his shyness, his humility, his generosity of spirit is validated over the course of the interview. Coltrane is a little frosty at first, responding to Frank Kofsky's probing questions with clipped answers, but soon enough finds his stride and clearly enjoys discussing music. I won't give anything away for anyone who wants to listen, but I did enjoy Coltrane neatly side-stepping Kofsky's attempt to tease out some controversy about a well-known jazz musician. And there's a poignant moment near the conclusion of the interview where Coltrane looks forward to making a practice room at his home, little knowing he had less than a year of his extraordinary life to live. The interview comes with one minor caveat - it sounds like it was recorded outdoors so there are a few instances of ambient noise to contend with but fortunately these are fleeting moments, and are entirely ignorable. Listen here

Michelle, ma belle...

One last thought, related to my screening of Godard's Weekend - does anyone know what happened to Michèle Breton after she appeared in Performance ? I had read something a few years ago to the effect that upon completion of the film she rapidly descended into the Paris heroin underworld. A google search reveals conflicting testimony that she's alive and well and living in Germany, while another account suggests she had taken her own life. The only solid evidence of her in later years comes in the introduction of the Umlands' Donald Cammell biography which reveals that Performance writer Mick Brown managed to track her down for his 1999 book (which I don't have a copy of!). Considering she appears in two of my favourite films and then seemingly vanishes, I'd love to know what happened to her...

Le Funky Drummer

I wanna give the drummer some of this funky soul... I caught Weekend earlier, my first and favourite Godard film above all else. Watching the final act of the film when Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc fall foul of the hippie revolutionaries I couldn't help but be reminded of that moment in the The Bronx Warriors when a gang summit is called under the Brooklyn Bridge, the tenuous link being that both films feature drummers belting it out in the most unusual of places. I wonder did Enzo Castellari include his drummer as a nod to Godard's film ?

Regarding Susan Sontag

Just watched the 2014 HBO documentary Regarding Susan Sontag, a fine introduction to the life and work of the great American writer, thinker, essayist, philosopher and occasional film maker. With contributions from family, friends, former lovers and contemporary writers, as well as a fine selection of archive interviews of Sontag in conversation (or posing for Andy Warhol), what emerges from the film is a woman of immense complexity and contradiction, a cultural commentator with a laser-guided intellect who wrote in grandiose stokes about B-movies and the aesthetics of camp; a determined non-conformist who was guarded about her homosexuality, a romantic who left behind a string of intense but messy love affairs. Sontag's appetite for life was voracious, the documentary explores her time in Paris, hanging out with ex-pat Beat writers and cameoing in an early French new wave film. She had a huge ego could be fearless - once challenging Norman Mailer at a roundtable discussion on Women’s Liberation in 1971 (immortalized in DA Pennebaker's film Town Bloody Hall), she staged a production of Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo as bullets and bombs rained down on the beleaguered city and successfully faced down cancer on two occasions, never once considering she might die. My own experience of Susan Sontag up to now rests solely on her 1977 book On Photography but thanks to this excellent documentary, I now have much more to explore...

Prospective 21e Siècle

“The miraculous image of sound” as John Balance might have said… I’m leafing thru discogs’ page dedicated to the Philips experimental electronic series Prospective 21e Siècle which launched in 1967 to showcase the emerging electronic, experimental music scene. The series was a perfect symbiosis of design and music – the work of composers like Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Henry, as well as wellsprings of avant-garde music around the world, came packaged in the distinctive Prospective style, all abstract metallic-looking patterns and textures. Given the niche audience and the elaborate sleeve designs, Prospective issues were pressed in limited amounts, which makes the series incredibly collectible nowadays. More info here

Drums Of Death

I’m feeling a little lazy this morning and to snap me out of this inertia and get into work-mode, I’m listening to Drums of Death: Field Recordings in Ghana, a John Zorn curated compilation of traditional religious ceremonial drumming recorded in Ghana in 1996. I had a plan to listen to this album at some stage this week - last Sunday I caught about an hour of Plague of the Zombies on TV and the slightly cringe-inducing scenes of African bushmen thumping on their drums put the album in mind. The music itself is absolutely first rate with the drummers beating out incredibly complex, hypnotic, interlocking rhythms, and the recordings are pleasingly earthy with chants, calls, invocations and exhalations occasionally straying into the sound field...

Comus

My good FB friend Kat Ellinger shared a link to a very interesting BBC radio documentary yesterday on British Occultism and its brief 15mins of fame in the early 70’s. Recommended listening. And from there it seemed appropriate enough to dig out First Utterance, the dark, paganistic 1971 debut album by the British folk-rock collective Comus. First Utterance is a remarkable work, melding pastoral lyrical folk and edgy progressive rock, as if an unhinged Incredible String Band had handfasted with a Nursery Cryme-era Genesis; while the more quieter passages on the album sound strangely contemporary - one would be forgiven for mistaking them with the music of godspeed you black emperor. Much of the album's reputation of being some sort of acid-folk satanic liturgy rests on Roger Wootton's lyrics which deal with murder, execution, insanity and on two songs, defilement - the track Song To Comus describes the stalking and rape of a young girl in the woods "Comus rape, Comus break, sweet young virgin's virtue take. Naked flesh, flowing hair, her terror screams they cut the air". Evidently, something really was in the air - around the time First Utterance was released, Wes Craven was filming the rape and murder in the woods of Mari Collingwood in Last House on the Left... The final word goes to the artwork (spectacularly spread across the gatefold cover of the LP), depicting a horribly contorted primitive man. The artist was Roger Wootton and interestingly his artwork also graces the 1970 album Tone Float, the sole outing by the proto-Kraftwerk group Organisation, the artwork simply credited to "Comus"

Hunky Dory

Listening to Hunky Dory and thinking about the various people Bowie name checks on the album - Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Frank Sinatra (obliquely mentioned on the back sleeve), as well as the cast of Quicksand - Aleister Crowley, Heinrich Himmler, Winston Churchill, and Greta Garbo. Interestingly, there's a school of thought that Garbo is not the famous Swedish actress but the infamous WWII double-agent Joan Pujol Garcia, known to the British by the codename Garbo. The lyrics to Quicksand are quite impenetrable so who can say ? But considering the company - Himmler, Churchill, and Crowley who is believed to have worked as an Allied spy, the Garbo spook theory is entirely plausible. Still Greta Garbo gets a nod of sorts by way of Brian Ward's album cover photo...