Audio Journal: 18/08/2013

There are many reasons to look forward to Fridays, but in the past six months I've found another reason: Jonny Trunk's 50p Friday emails.

Jonny runs the archival Trunk label, which remasters and reissues albums that their original labels don't feel there's a demand for any longer. Often issued as beautiful vinyl repressings, Trunk has become the place to go for unusual obscurities, forgotten soundtracks and much more. Back in February, Trunk reissued a single by The BBC Radiophonic Workshop as a download for a mere 20p and since then Jonny has been hand-picking an album from the label's back catalogue and offering it up as a download for a mere 50p. Over the past six months he's offered Louis and Bebe Barron's early electronic soundtrack to Forbidden Planet, albums from Peter Cooke, the Herbie Mann record I wrote about recently, cool bossa nova from Charlie Rouse, wonky jazz from Raymond Scott and primitive computer music - it's mindbendingly diverse stuff.

Sadly Jonny's taken a holiday this week and so there was nothing on offer on Friday, but if you want a means of comprehensively expanding your knowledge of music in these austere times, Trunk is the place to head. Navigate to the 50p Friday menu link on Trunk's website to fill your ears with great tunes you'd never think to listen to for less than the price of packet of crisps.

The past week I was tipped off about an album of covers of predominantly Eighties pop tracks by an Australian unit called Parralox. Recovery tackles classics from Erasure, Madonna, Pet Shop Boys, The Cure, Front 242, Depeche Mode and many others. My full review can be found over on Documentary Evidence here, but suffice to say it's probably the best electronic pop album I've heard for a long time.

Dave Fleet, who works under the alias Laica and who I wrote about ages ago (click here for that post) has a number of new projects in the can. Not content with lining up the Environs project for Alrealon, he's contributed to my upcoming MuteResponse project, is realising tracks inspired by my short story The Engineer and today let me know about another project, this time an EP for the Phatic Musk label. A short teaser for his latest dystopian soundtrack hit YouTube today – check it out below or hit here if you're reading on email.

Finally, I was recently sent a new track from Iggy & The German Kids which is presently doing great things on German radio. The mastermind behind this great, towering pop electronic moment is Ignacio, who I also wrote about way back in the early days of this blog. The Lynchian suburban nightmare video for 'So Hard' can be reached below, or for those reading this on email, click here to watch over at YouTube.

Audio Journal: 07/08/2013

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