I would describe my approach to music this past week as ‘restless’. I haven’t been able to listen to one band or style of music for very long, which has created a rather odd, disjointed play list for the week. I started the week listening to some ‘arty’ music, namely The Knee Plays by David Byrne, musical compositions – principally for horns – written for a play by Robert Wilson in 1984. It wasn’t at all what I expected, but then again I’m coming to be continually surprised by Byrne’s eclectic output. Broadly instrumental like last year’s Big Love: Hymnal album, the brass instruments are occasionally complemented by Byrne reading in a flat, robotic monotone. From The Knee Plays I moved on to some Philip Glass violin pieces, driven by an ambition to listen to more of his works after immersing myself in his Low Symphony last week.
I stumbled upon my Inspiral Carpets album collection this past week. The Carpets, now seemingly permanently defunct, produced four albums of spiky organ-embellished indie pop that transcended the rest of the overrated ‘Madchester’ scene that sprang up in the late 1980s. Whereas at the time their quirky, pseudo-Animals type sound earned them a reputation as oddball leftfielders, with time their songs are found to have an earnestness and depth which few would have bothered to have noticed at the time. The track ‘Two Worlds Collide’ from Revenge Of The Goldfish, with its world-weary chorus of ‘What have I done with my life?’ remains my favourite Inspirals track.
I also listened to a Luke Slater DJ mix on the train home one night while frantically sending emails from my BlackBerry that had two effects – firstly, and positively, the music made me type faster and secondly, I was left feeling light-headed like I’d drunk way too much coffee.
As I write this I’m listening to One Of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing) by A.C. Marias, aka Angela Conway with production assistance from Wire’s Bruce Gilbert among others. Conway now makes films, which is a shame, as this single album from 1991 has an ethereal vocal quality while arch-sound smith Gilbert (who is, along with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Robert Fripp entirely responsible for redefining how I listen to guitar music) adds obscure textural backdrops. I always think of the song ‘There’s A Scent Of Rain In The Air’ whenever I smell that freshness that prefaces a downpour. More on this album at my Documentary Evidence site.
Elsewhere, I watched the BBC Imagine documentary on Rufus Wainwright’s first opera which had Wainwright play a new piano song, ‘Zebulon’. Effectively a conversation after many years with an imaginary childhood friend and confidante, the track has a plangent Rufus expressing his sadness at his mother’s illness, and points to a more sorrowful sound on his next album. Rarely, I also found myself listening to Gideon Coe on 6Music, who played a Peel session by Glaxo Babies, a band I’ve never heard of. Their session version of ‘Who Killed Bruce Lee?’ is a Gang Of Four-esque number which was adorned by seemingly random, skronking, James Chance-style saxophone, an element missing from the vaguely inferior studio version. Speaking of sprawling music, I listened to Locust Abortion Technician by Butthole Surfers, one of the more challenging bands on the SSR label to emerge from the States in the 1980s.
Finally, They Might Be Giants, that quirky pop duo who scored an unlikely hit in the shape of ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ in 1990. Since then I’ve always had the band on my list of acts I’d like to listen to more of, though so far this has only extended to the aforementioned song, ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ and the delicate postcard pop of ‘New York City’, a love song which also lists all the major well-heeled landmarks of Manhattan. So, I was pleasantly surprised a few weekends back, watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on Playhouse Disney with my two daughters, to find that TMBG had done both the title music and the song ‘Hot Dog!’ (see video below, or for those reading this on email, click here). So, er, ostensibly for the girls, I downloaded ‘Hot Dog!’ this week and have no qualms in saying that it is a delightfully infectious little song that worms its way, like all the best kids’ songs, into your brain and refuses to budge. Not that I would, for example, listen to it on the train into work. Never. Honest.
Only those emerging from solitary confinement would have failed to notice that The Beatles have had their back catalogue repackaged, remastered and re-released, forty years on from their swansong Abbey Road. In our house we’ve watched three anodyne documentaries on the BBC and have very rapidly got sick and tired of walking into pretty much any shop only to have huge cardboard displays containing the remastered digi-pack albums foisted upon us.
Not only that, but we have the albums – in their last remastered guise – in the house already, relics from the days when my wife and her three closest friends were mad keen on the band as teenagers. We’ve found ourselves asking what the point of a remaster actually is when the material is that old. Surely the nature of recording methods back then means there comes a point where the only way you could improve the sound would be to record the instruments again using modern technology?
Nonetheless, in deference, we decided to have a Beatles-only Sunday and spent the day listening to their back catalogue of 200-odd songs on random play. In doing so, we came to the inevitable and well-trodden conclusion that the John Lennon-penned numbers were always the best. Our kids think the comedy Ringo numbers and the goofy Paul McCartney compositions are the best. We can only hope that they grow out of this and see sense in time.
I mentioned a number of blogs ago that I’d been working my way through a number of boxes of old CDs which have permanent and unfortunate residence in my loft. Returning the box I’ve been working through – which contained mostly dance music and industrial albums – I brought down the next one and alighted upon a copy of minimalist composer Philip Glass’s Low Symphony.
Glass, who just received his first Prom performance and who has of late moved into more accessible territory with soundtracks such as that for the Streep / Kidman vehicle The Hours turned his hand to producing an orchestral arrangement of David Bowie’s seminal Low. This was the first album in Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ trilogy and the first where he worked with iconic ex-Roxy Music keyboardist and soundsmith Brian (Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle) Eno. Working in Berlin’s Hansa Studios, a former Nazi ballroom, the furtive Bowie / Eno collaboration produced a bleak body of songs which would go on to inspire the likes of Joy Division (Joy Division’s original name was Warsaw, named after the track ‘Warszawa’ on Low).
Glass tackles three tracks from the Low sessions, the effect being a typical absorbing set of compositions which find little reference point in the original songs. I don’t listen to classical music generally and have no real understanding or vocabulary when it comes to describing such music, but suffice to say that this is both accessible and challengingly minimal.
Not so for The Arditti Quartet’s tackling of John Cage’s compositions for strings. Cage, a founder of the New York avant garde and a member of the Fluxus movement, is notorious for his work 4’33”, a piece of 'silence' lasting for the title’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The deal is that there is no such thing as absolute silence – in performances, whilst the ‘player’ would sit motionless, invariably there would be sound from the audience, a cough or what have you; the absence of complete silence would prove Cage’s notion that although theoretical to achieve, this is an impossibility in reality. Cleverer still, adding up the seconds in the performance length – 273 – and inverting that number, you get to the theoretical lowest temperature achievable, the notional Absolute Zero, a similarly unachievable yet theoretically feasible result.
In any case, Cage was an artistic and leftfield pioneer. His scores for strings dumped the traditional methods of writing notes and octaves, preferring instead to provide actions, frameworks and the musical equivalent of the vaguest stage directions. The result is nothing short of faltering atonal dissonance and only in my broadest-minded moments can I listen to this all the way through. Far better, at least from an accessible entry point to Cage’s work are Boris Berman’s performances of the Pieces For Prepared Piano, wherein Cage offered more specific and prescriptive treatments for the interior of a piano, the end result being a sequence of clanks and scrapings that industrial pioneers like Einstürzende Neubauten wouldn’t find unappealing.
