Three
things occupied my adventures in music last week.
The
first was watching two documentaries broadcast on Sky Arts in the
last year - one about Robert Moog's development of his genre-defining
synthesizer, and another about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Both
highlighted a visionary spirit that feels like it's been lost with
the successive democratisations of electronic sound over the past
thirty years, first with the development of digital synths and then
with software synthesis. Moog synths required the user to literally
engineer a sound using an array of knobs, filters and the like,
whereas the Radiophonic Workshop's methods pre-dated synths
completely, pitch-shifting basic oscillators by painstakingly
recording to tape, cutting said tapes into loops and layering the
results into dizzyingly creative soundworks. The most famous
Radiophonic Workshop composition was the original theme to Doctor
Who, but few who listen back to that today would appreciate just how
complex it was to create.
 |
| Moog DVD (2004) |
One
of the most interesting things I took away from Moog was Bob decrying
the moves toward bedroom electronica that means anyone with a basic
laptop and free software can create passable music. His synths, he
explained, were designed to be played live. If the number of settings
on a Mini-Moog look hard to control in a live setting, watching
footage of Keith Emerson conjuring complex clusters of frantic
melodies out of a vast modular system - literally the synthesizer
equivalent of a telephone exchange with cables connected, spaghetti
like between hundreds of inputs and outputs - justified Bob's claim.
I may not yet have embraced prog, but Emerson's frightening mastery
of this unwieldy beast did at least make me appreciate that we have
indeed lost something in laptop electronica's global takeover. As I
write, I've just filed a review of Berlin-based electronic artist
James Welch's debut album under the moniker Seams, one of my two
assignments for Clash this month. The accompanying press release has
us believe that Welch has created the album with a nod to his live
sets, but I'm not sure Bob Moog would have necessary appreciated the
dry sound Welch has delivered on Quarters.
The
second concern last week was jazz. With the house to myself for most
of the week while my wife and kids were away, I found myself
consuming jazz voraciously, starting with flutist Herbie Mann's 1962
performance at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, New York and
concluding with Stan Getz's set at the nearby Café Au Go-Go some two
years later. Sadly, like most of NYC's most historic music venues
from yesteryear, neither venue is there today, even if the Village remains more or less untouched by real estate development. In between Mann's deep
introspective take on George and Ira Gershwin's 'It Ain't Necessarily
So' and Getz's bossa nova set with Astrud Gilberto ('Girl From
Ipanema', their most famous collaboration, was not part of the set),
I watched Bruce Weber's documentary on West Coast trumpeter Chet
Baker, Let's Get Lost. The film was made in 1988, just before Baker
fell out of a window in Amsterdam, trumpet still in hand, silencing a
fifty-odd year career in music. The contrast between Baker the slick
young gun and the weathered junkie shown in his twilight moments was
frightening, but appearances can clearly be deceptive - on the
footage of Baker singing and playing trumpet on what would prove to
be his final trip around the globe, he still very much had his chops
intact, still capable of delivering standards with a casual vibrancy
that characterised his career.
 |
| Herbie Mann At The Village Gate (1962) |
The
final musical concern last week was a lengthy piece I wrote on the
overlooked post-punk unit Rema-Rema, notable for including future
Adam & The Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni in their ranks and also
for setting a quality standard for Ivo Watts-Russell, who released
the bands's solitary 12" Wheel In The Roses on his 4AD label,
one of the most important British independent labels. My archive
piece benefited from the insight and recollections of the band's
vocalist Gary Asquith, who I've been interviewing about his various
musical projects since last year. Asquith gave me a heap of images,
flyers and posters from 1978 / 79 when Rema-Rema were active, making
this one of the articles I've enjoyed writing the most over the past
ten years. The piece can be found here.
 |
| Rema-Rema Wheel In The Roses flyer |
No comments:
Post a Comment