I've started a new blog - what the hell was I thinking?! It isn't a replacement for this blog, it's a 52-week side project that I thought might be fun, and also of practical use in improving my writing habits. But anyway, there it is - please go and have a look if you like Doctor Who, or if you like electronic music, or if you like me (flutters eyelashes), or... well, see if you like it.
Updates here will continue, although they might be a little more rough 'n' ready than usual. Case in point: the book write-ups for the last two months...
November
The Clockwork Angel, Cassandra Clare
Supernatural romance by the author of the Lord of the Rings "Very Secret Diaries". Well, actually a Victorian era prequel to supernatural romance etc etc. Not exactly steampunk, although doubtless many would disagree. Bought for $3 because, well, why not at that price? Much better than I was expecting, and even has some of the flavour of a period romantic novel. Fantasy elements are satisfactory and there's no "vampire porn" - at least, not yet, although I can't speak for later volumes in the series.
Whispers Underground, Ben Aaronovitch
Third in series of fantasy police procedurals, following Rivers of London and Moon Over Soho. Completely excellent, as expected. Looks like we're about due for an arc-heavy fourth volume now.
Aristoi, Walter Jon Williams
Read mainly because the author was going to be in town for a booze-up, and I wanted to be able to look him in the eye. Space opera with profound moral elements - the future nobility (Aristoi) are each responsible for the development of worlds under their care as well as the overall welfare of the galaxy; protagonist Aristos discovers that a fellow Aristos is secretly raising worlds in barbaric, primitive conditions. Does either side have the right? Fascinating read, not least for the parallel columns that allow for internal and external character dialogues to unfold at the same time.
Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the d'Urbervilles, Kim Newman
Borrowed from a friend. Brilliant, brilliant parody of Conan Doyle and other contemporary writers. Colonel Sebastian Moran becomes the narrator for a series of lewder and nastier versions of famous stories including Riders of the Purple Sage, The War of the Worlds, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (obviously) and of course, The Final Problem.
December
Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, EW Hornung
Read as a follow-up to Moriarty because I had it lying around and felt that this was a good time for it. Turns out I hate Raffles. He's a smug, unprincipled shit and a bit of a prat, and no amount of lovestruck fawning by the narrator can redeem him.
Strange Itineraries, Tim Powers
Short stories by an excellent novelist. Nuff said?
The Deep of the Dark, Stephen Hunt
More steampunky adventure mash-up. This week: submarines! I enjoyed it, as usual - better than the previous volume - but can't help wondering when Hunt is going to try something else.
Jack Glass, Adam Roberts
Library book. Incredibly, after my last couple of experiences with him, a really great book by Adam Roberts. Just when I was about to give up hope! This one doesn't even lose a wheel in the final act, but sees it through right to the end. Title character is a peerless murderer in a totalitarian future Solar System; the reasons for his murders turn out to affect all humanity. This book's surely a keeper - now I just have to get hold of a copy that I can keep.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Sunday, January 06, 2013
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Like a Robot Farting
It's Speak Out With Your Geek Out week, a Net-wide movement intended to bolster representation of and positivity towards all forms of geekiness. A kind of "Reclaim the Information Superhighway", if you will.
I've signed up to this, and it turns out that as part of that - what, you mean I'm expected to make some sort of hard commitment here?! - I have to blog about some aspect of my geek interests.
As luck would have it, there's been a new episode of Doctor Who on New Zealand TV this very night - but no, that'd be too obvious, and besides I'm going to blog about it eventually anyway. So instead, dear reader, I'd like to talk to you about Whovian music. This is the story of me and music, a story that begins and continues even today with the incidental music of Doctor Who. Strange noises, startling confessions and an extremely geeky quantity of facts await your perusal below.
Before we start, I should just thank all the unscrupulous Youtube users who've made it possible for me to link to some audio examples below. Although the albums the tracks appeared on have been commercially unavailable for many a long year now, and the publishers of said albums aren't known for their litigiousness, readers shouldn't be too surprised if the clips at the other end of any of these links are taken down without warning.
My love of electronic music can be traced back to two albums, encountered pretty much simultaneously back in my school days - Revolutions by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Doctor Who - The Music. The discovery of Jarre I owe to that rarest of things, a school friend, but DW - The Music was something I found by accident in the library and borrowed on the basis of my familiarity with the books and TV show. (In fact, it's probable that the TV show itself sowed the first seeds of electronica in my mind.) The impact of these albums on me can't be overstated. They came at a time when I knew nothing about music, when the only cassette tape I owned was The Very Best of Elton John, an album I'd bought solely because my peers owned music and seemed to expect me to, and Elton John was an artist I knew I'd heard on the radio. I was fifteen years old.
The history of incidental music on Doctor Who can be divided into five broad periods.
During the 1960s, the programme makers relied heavily on library music, with the occasional commission - Tristram Cary's score for The Daleks (1964), with its jarring metallic shrieks, is the standout among the commissioned scores. The choice of library music varied depending on the requirements of the story - historicals got straightforward stuff played on conventional instruments, action-heavy monster stories tended to get Martin Slavin and Norman Ramin's Space Adventure, and stories set off-world got experimental music. Really experimental music. These were the days when the first Moog synthesizers were just coming onto the market, and avant garde musicians were more accustomed to playing with musique concrete, tape loops and found sound. Library selections used on DW ranged from the electro-percussive work of Eric Siday to the glass tube stylings of Les Structures Sonores. Most of this material still exists today.
Barring a very few commissions from other artists, the 1970s belonged to Dudley Simpson, a prolific TV composer who typically worked with session groups of four or five musicians. At first Simpson worked closely with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop - who provided DW's theme tune and sound effects, and of whom we shall shortly hear a lot more - making heavy use of their resources to electronically treat his compositions. However, the arrangement didn't last and Simpson was soon producing much more conventional TV scores for the show - ordinary, some might say. Even so he's still probably the most popular incidental score composer among Who fans. He's the Murray Gold of his day, if you like. (I should disclose at this point that neither Simpson nor Gold, as wonderful as they both are, is "my" DW composer.) Sadly, very little of Simpson's DW music was kept after transmission.
From the tail end of 1980 to 1985, all the incidental music for DW was produced in-house by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This was a revolutionary (not to mention cost-cutting) move by '80s Who producer John Nathan-Turner and a bold departure for the Workshop. Their work on the theme tunes for DW and a number of other BBC programmes proved they could produce music as well as sound effects, and in fact a couple of earlier stories - 1968's The Wheel in Space and 1972's The Sea Devils - had been scored entirely by the Workshop, but this was the first time they had been asked to score an entire TV series (just beating out the 1981 TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Scoring DW essentially became a full-time job for the Workshop for five years. Thanks to the meticulous archiving of the Workshop's contents after its closure in 1998, all of these scores exist.
By 1986 commercial synthesizers were widespread and relatively inexpensive, and so were freelance electronic composers. Consequently, when DW returned from an 18-month enforced holiday with a reduced budget, John Nathan-Turner found it more cost effective to start commissioning incidental scores from outside the BBC again. The freelance composers employed from 1986 until the original series' cancellation in 1989 tended to keep hold of their work, and only one score from this period - the score for Mindwarp (1986), composed by Richard Hartley, who was also responsible for arranging the music for the latest stage tour of The Rocky Horror Show - is lost.
And then we have the modern era of DW, with John Debney's fully orchestral score for the TV Movie (1996) setting the tone for Murray Gold's work on the series (2005 onwards). But this isn't their story.
This is the story of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, you see. DW - The Music was their album. It was originally released in 1983, the year of DW's 20th anniversary, to both showcase the Workshop's efforts and celebrate the show itself. A second album followed in 1985, although I didn't find out about that one until a lot later. The first album mostly consisted of highlights from 1980 to early 1983, plus a couple of earlier pieces. It was a mixture of sound cues and effects taken pretty much straight from the soundtracks (albeit tidied up and presented in shiny stereo), and suites of music arranged from the original scores of certain stories. The suites made the greatest impact on me; a five-minute composition has a much better chance of working as a coherent, sustained bit of music than a one-minute cue. The Workshop seem to have felt the same way, and DW - The Music II was all suites.
Side one of DW - The Music ended with Peter Howell's suite from The Leisure Hive (1980). It's a little bit Holst's Mars, a little bit Ravel's Bolero, a spot of synth noodling in the middle - it's a fine piece of electronica. This was and is my favourite track of the whole album, which given the personal significance of the album to me makes it an extremely influential piece of music as far as I'm concerned. Peter Howell contributed the greatest number of radiophonic scores to DW - eight and three quarters (and a bit), and it's a long story - as well as arranging the theme tune for the first half of the '80s, and for my money he's the most versatile and most listenable of the radiophonic composers.
At either end of the album were suites of music by Malcolm Clarke - The Sea Devils (1972) and Earthshock (1982). The Sea Devils score was the result of Clarke's experimentation with the Workshop's brand spanking new EMS Synthi 100 analogue synthesizer, and it's been variously described as the sound of Clarke fighting with the machine, a nervous breakdown in musical form, and a number of things less printable. Here's another one to add to the pile: it's a wall of noise, and it's collapsing on your head. Believe it or not, I actually used to drift off to sleep to this one. If the Leisure Hive suite marks the start of my relationship with melodic electronica, the Sea Devils score must mark the start of my fondness for the sort of music that my best man once described (admiringly, mind you - he likes that kind of thing too) as "the sound of a robot farting". The Earthshock music is far more regimented, which is fitting for a Cyberman story. Clarke did well to stuff this piece with metallic hammering sounds.
Also present was Delia Derbyshire's original arrangement of the famous theme tune, and I can't not mention Delia in a blog post about the Workshop. If producer Verity Lambert was the Iron Lady of DW, Dame Delia/Darth Derbyshire was the Queen of Air and Darkness, her realisation of Ron Grainer's composition the beating heart of the show captured in a sampled bass guitar string and a dozen oscillators. A entire generation of British electronic artists points to her as an influence. She, fellow Workshopper Brian Hodgson and another musician by the name of David Vorhaus went on to produce the landmark electronic album An Electric Storm, which comes across more as an all-out psychic assault than a slice of synthesizer psychedelia, and is one of the most unsettling things your humble blogger has ever listened to.
More DW music has been released over the years, officially and unofficially. Paddy Kingsland, strangely absent from both DW - The Music albums and the composer behind the Hitchhiker's TV series score, apparently touted tapes of his scores from Tom Baker's last story and Peter Davison's first story at DW conventions. Keff McCulloch, the arranger of the 1987-89 version of the theme tune and scorer of fully half of Sylvester McCoy's stories, released a selection of his work alongside a full collection of DW theme arrangements in association with the Workshop to mark the show's 25th anniversary. Mark Ayres, who ultimately compiled the Workshop's archive after its demise, released all three of his freelance DW soundtracks in full on CD.
And now we have the DVDs. Many of these include the option of listening to the incidental music in isolation, and the wonders of modern technology make it possible for yours truly to record that music onto the computer desktop and... arrange it into five-minute suites. This is one of the large projects I've set myself, because all that free time was just cluttering up my evenings and weekends - to compose suites in the manner of DW - The Music for as many of the DW scores or parts thereof as I can lay hold of. Strictly for personal use, you understand.
I've signed up to this, and it turns out that as part of that - what, you mean I'm expected to make some sort of hard commitment here?! - I have to blog about some aspect of my geek interests.
As luck would have it, there's been a new episode of Doctor Who on New Zealand TV this very night - but no, that'd be too obvious, and besides I'm going to blog about it eventually anyway. So instead, dear reader, I'd like to talk to you about Whovian music. This is the story of me and music, a story that begins and continues even today with the incidental music of Doctor Who. Strange noises, startling confessions and an extremely geeky quantity of facts await your perusal below.
Before we start, I should just thank all the unscrupulous Youtube users who've made it possible for me to link to some audio examples below. Although the albums the tracks appeared on have been commercially unavailable for many a long year now, and the publishers of said albums aren't known for their litigiousness, readers shouldn't be too surprised if the clips at the other end of any of these links are taken down without warning.
My love of electronic music can be traced back to two albums, encountered pretty much simultaneously back in my school days - Revolutions by Jean-Michel Jarre, and Doctor Who - The Music. The discovery of Jarre I owe to that rarest of things, a school friend, but DW - The Music was something I found by accident in the library and borrowed on the basis of my familiarity with the books and TV show. (In fact, it's probable that the TV show itself sowed the first seeds of electronica in my mind.) The impact of these albums on me can't be overstated. They came at a time when I knew nothing about music, when the only cassette tape I owned was The Very Best of Elton John, an album I'd bought solely because my peers owned music and seemed to expect me to, and Elton John was an artist I knew I'd heard on the radio. I was fifteen years old.
The history of incidental music on Doctor Who can be divided into five broad periods.
During the 1960s, the programme makers relied heavily on library music, with the occasional commission - Tristram Cary's score for The Daleks (1964), with its jarring metallic shrieks, is the standout among the commissioned scores. The choice of library music varied depending on the requirements of the story - historicals got straightforward stuff played on conventional instruments, action-heavy monster stories tended to get Martin Slavin and Norman Ramin's Space Adventure, and stories set off-world got experimental music. Really experimental music. These were the days when the first Moog synthesizers were just coming onto the market, and avant garde musicians were more accustomed to playing with musique concrete, tape loops and found sound. Library selections used on DW ranged from the electro-percussive work of Eric Siday to the glass tube stylings of Les Structures Sonores. Most of this material still exists today.
Barring a very few commissions from other artists, the 1970s belonged to Dudley Simpson, a prolific TV composer who typically worked with session groups of four or five musicians. At first Simpson worked closely with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop - who provided DW's theme tune and sound effects, and of whom we shall shortly hear a lot more - making heavy use of their resources to electronically treat his compositions. However, the arrangement didn't last and Simpson was soon producing much more conventional TV scores for the show - ordinary, some might say. Even so he's still probably the most popular incidental score composer among Who fans. He's the Murray Gold of his day, if you like. (I should disclose at this point that neither Simpson nor Gold, as wonderful as they both are, is "my" DW composer.) Sadly, very little of Simpson's DW music was kept after transmission.
From the tail end of 1980 to 1985, all the incidental music for DW was produced in-house by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This was a revolutionary (not to mention cost-cutting) move by '80s Who producer John Nathan-Turner and a bold departure for the Workshop. Their work on the theme tunes for DW and a number of other BBC programmes proved they could produce music as well as sound effects, and in fact a couple of earlier stories - 1968's The Wheel in Space and 1972's The Sea Devils - had been scored entirely by the Workshop, but this was the first time they had been asked to score an entire TV series (just beating out the 1981 TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Scoring DW essentially became a full-time job for the Workshop for five years. Thanks to the meticulous archiving of the Workshop's contents after its closure in 1998, all of these scores exist.
By 1986 commercial synthesizers were widespread and relatively inexpensive, and so were freelance electronic composers. Consequently, when DW returned from an 18-month enforced holiday with a reduced budget, John Nathan-Turner found it more cost effective to start commissioning incidental scores from outside the BBC again. The freelance composers employed from 1986 until the original series' cancellation in 1989 tended to keep hold of their work, and only one score from this period - the score for Mindwarp (1986), composed by Richard Hartley, who was also responsible for arranging the music for the latest stage tour of The Rocky Horror Show - is lost.
And then we have the modern era of DW, with John Debney's fully orchestral score for the TV Movie (1996) setting the tone for Murray Gold's work on the series (2005 onwards). But this isn't their story.
This is the story of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, you see. DW - The Music was their album. It was originally released in 1983, the year of DW's 20th anniversary, to both showcase the Workshop's efforts and celebrate the show itself. A second album followed in 1985, although I didn't find out about that one until a lot later. The first album mostly consisted of highlights from 1980 to early 1983, plus a couple of earlier pieces. It was a mixture of sound cues and effects taken pretty much straight from the soundtracks (albeit tidied up and presented in shiny stereo), and suites of music arranged from the original scores of certain stories. The suites made the greatest impact on me; a five-minute composition has a much better chance of working as a coherent, sustained bit of music than a one-minute cue. The Workshop seem to have felt the same way, and DW - The Music II was all suites.
Side one of DW - The Music ended with Peter Howell's suite from The Leisure Hive (1980). It's a little bit Holst's Mars, a little bit Ravel's Bolero, a spot of synth noodling in the middle - it's a fine piece of electronica. This was and is my favourite track of the whole album, which given the personal significance of the album to me makes it an extremely influential piece of music as far as I'm concerned. Peter Howell contributed the greatest number of radiophonic scores to DW - eight and three quarters (and a bit), and it's a long story - as well as arranging the theme tune for the first half of the '80s, and for my money he's the most versatile and most listenable of the radiophonic composers.
At either end of the album were suites of music by Malcolm Clarke - The Sea Devils (1972) and Earthshock (1982). The Sea Devils score was the result of Clarke's experimentation with the Workshop's brand spanking new EMS Synthi 100 analogue synthesizer, and it's been variously described as the sound of Clarke fighting with the machine, a nervous breakdown in musical form, and a number of things less printable. Here's another one to add to the pile: it's a wall of noise, and it's collapsing on your head. Believe it or not, I actually used to drift off to sleep to this one. If the Leisure Hive suite marks the start of my relationship with melodic electronica, the Sea Devils score must mark the start of my fondness for the sort of music that my best man once described (admiringly, mind you - he likes that kind of thing too) as "the sound of a robot farting". The Earthshock music is far more regimented, which is fitting for a Cyberman story. Clarke did well to stuff this piece with metallic hammering sounds.
Also present was Delia Derbyshire's original arrangement of the famous theme tune, and I can't not mention Delia in a blog post about the Workshop. If producer Verity Lambert was the Iron Lady of DW, Dame Delia/Darth Derbyshire was the Queen of Air and Darkness, her realisation of Ron Grainer's composition the beating heart of the show captured in a sampled bass guitar string and a dozen oscillators. A entire generation of British electronic artists points to her as an influence. She, fellow Workshopper Brian Hodgson and another musician by the name of David Vorhaus went on to produce the landmark electronic album An Electric Storm, which comes across more as an all-out psychic assault than a slice of synthesizer psychedelia, and is one of the most unsettling things your humble blogger has ever listened to.
More DW music has been released over the years, officially and unofficially. Paddy Kingsland, strangely absent from both DW - The Music albums and the composer behind the Hitchhiker's TV series score, apparently touted tapes of his scores from Tom Baker's last story and Peter Davison's first story at DW conventions. Keff McCulloch, the arranger of the 1987-89 version of the theme tune and scorer of fully half of Sylvester McCoy's stories, released a selection of his work alongside a full collection of DW theme arrangements in association with the Workshop to mark the show's 25th anniversary. Mark Ayres, who ultimately compiled the Workshop's archive after its demise, released all three of his freelance DW soundtracks in full on CD.
And now we have the DVDs. Many of these include the option of listening to the incidental music in isolation, and the wonders of modern technology make it possible for yours truly to record that music onto the computer desktop and... arrange it into five-minute suites. This is one of the large projects I've set myself, because all that free time was just cluttering up my evenings and weekends - to compose suites in the manner of DW - The Music for as many of the DW scores or parts thereof as I can lay hold of. Strictly for personal use, you understand.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Television watchings:
Dancing On Ice
Obviously. It's looking ever more likely that the final will be a showdown between Chris Fountain and Suzanne Shaw, for truly theirs are the mightiest ice-dancing chops, but you couldn't pick either out as the obvious winner. To this we've added a further uncharacteristic dose of reality TV in the form of Masterchef, which ended this week, and you certainly could pick the winner out on that one, although all three finalists look like they've got a fine gastronomic future ahead of them. More The Lovely Jo's area of interest, although it has been strangely engaging watching three people prepare food each evening on the telly.
Torchwood
Has continued to be surprisingly good, with the gimmicky cross-over of Martha Jones utterly sidelined by the strange tale of Owen. Now I know I said last year that he was the character I'd most like to see dead, but... Slightly pretentious to pit the team against the actual figure of Death, but that's Matt The Satan Pit Jones for you. I'm actually tempted to say that this was better than his Who story, but I believe there's something in the Book of Revelation about that statement and trumpets. And seals, apparently. Some sort of apocalyptic circus? Anyway. It certainly was a fine episode. One small note on the directing: face shots filmed using a camera propped on the actor's chest are now indelibly linked in my mind with the tramp/adventurer sketches in That Mitchell and Webb Look, so I was unable to resist humming "The Devil's Galop" during the bar scene. Possibly not the director's intention.
Primeval
Alas, I caught The One With A Nasty Case Of The Crabs, then missed a friend's episode and the season finale. Half marks, but probably not the right note on which to stop watching the series.
Readings:
The Court of the Air, Stephen Hunt.
Christmas book #2. In defiance of my normal reading habits, this novel held me up for some three weeks in the same month that I went through a biographical work in less than a week. (Admittedly it was a Bill Bryson - more on that in a moment.) I like to think I was just savouring it.
Some might say (well, some have said, as a matter of fact) that this book is overfull, that it throws idea after idea after idea without pausing to pick one and focus on that. Hooray, say I. There's not much Mister Brain likes more than books that are overstuffed with imaginative ideas, and as long as I keep Mister Brain happy I'm hoping he won't shoot the puppy.
Dense is probably the word. It's quite a dense book.
It took me a couple of chapters to really start liking this book - I'd initially fixated on the idea that this was meant to be set in a parallel Dickensian London, but this proved wrong. (The Lovely Jo isn't having this problem and tells me I don't read enough fantasy novels, to which I can only reply "fie!".) In fact what Hunt's done is to remix familiar bits of history and culture in a way that is kind of exactly what every SF/fantasy writer does, but also kind of fresh and surprising.
I don't want to give away all the thinly disguised influences and satisfyingly bad puns, but the book ends up pitting its teenage superheroes against an enemy that's a combination of the Aztec empire, Revolutionary France and the Cybermen. How can you not love that?
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson.
Christmas book #3. Truly, as the critics say, it is laugh-out-loud funny.
Listenings:
They Might Be Giants, The Else.
And so begins my exploration of post-Flood TMBG. My, but they've changed. Apparently this album was produced by the Beastie Boys, Beck and Blur, and it's not too hard to spot their influence. Good, but a lot straighter and rockier than the early material that I'm used to. Fortunately I'd ordered the overseas version with the bonus disc of podcast material, and this is much more the TMBG that I know. Give it a few months for me to get properly used to it. Early front-runners: "The Cap'm", "Shadow Government", "The Mesopotamians", and perhaps as many of the bonus disc tracks.
Comic-book mayhem - slight return:
A few weeks ago the Bristol & Bath Venue magazine gave away a 200-page comic-book history of Bristol, The Bristol Story. Scoop! Touted as free with the magazine, but I preferred to think that I was buying it for the cover price of the magazine, with a free issue of Venue thrown in. A lovely little souvenir of Brizzle to take with us when we emigrate.
I'd go so far as to suggest it's a worthy rival to Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland, with the enormous added bonus that it was a freebie, yet the huge disadvantage that there are only enough in circulation to cover the population of Bristol (or likely, some fraction of that number) and even then only those who noticed and bought that week's Venue. I only noticed on the last day before the next issue came out, otherwise I'd've bought a few copies for friends.
Off the back of this, discovered that the creators, Messrs Eugene Byrne (co-author of the Back in the USSA SF stories) and Simon Gurr, had produced a free 100-page comic-book biography of Brunel a couple of years earlier. I immediately went looking. Didn't take long. So now we have a couple of lovely pocket-sized, instructive, entertaining, definitively Bristolian comic books to take with us, hand down to hypothetical future kids, etc etc.
Gangsters - el verdict finale:
Definitely not as good as I was led to believe. It suddenly became a lot more self-aware in the last three episodes of the second season, then more self-aware again in the last episode and a half, and so on exponentially up to the show's one, solitary instance of a character walking off set on screen and the much hyped end scene of the writer throwing the script in the air. Not really enough to recommend it as a cornerstone of post-modern TV, although there is a certain appeal to the writer's ninja WC Fields impression. But still.
A good three-star drama, certainly ahead of its time, just not a blower-off of socks. Next TV series in the DVD rental dock: The Lost Room.
Dancing On Ice
Obviously. It's looking ever more likely that the final will be a showdown between Chris Fountain and Suzanne Shaw, for truly theirs are the mightiest ice-dancing chops, but you couldn't pick either out as the obvious winner. To this we've added a further uncharacteristic dose of reality TV in the form of Masterchef, which ended this week, and you certainly could pick the winner out on that one, although all three finalists look like they've got a fine gastronomic future ahead of them. More The Lovely Jo's area of interest, although it has been strangely engaging watching three people prepare food each evening on the telly.
Torchwood
Has continued to be surprisingly good, with the gimmicky cross-over of Martha Jones utterly sidelined by the strange tale of Owen. Now I know I said last year that he was the character I'd most like to see dead, but... Slightly pretentious to pit the team against the actual figure of Death, but that's Matt The Satan Pit Jones for you. I'm actually tempted to say that this was better than his Who story, but I believe there's something in the Book of Revelation about that statement and trumpets. And seals, apparently. Some sort of apocalyptic circus? Anyway. It certainly was a fine episode. One small note on the directing: face shots filmed using a camera propped on the actor's chest are now indelibly linked in my mind with the tramp/adventurer sketches in That Mitchell and Webb Look, so I was unable to resist humming "The Devil's Galop" during the bar scene. Possibly not the director's intention.
Primeval
Alas, I caught The One With A Nasty Case Of The Crabs, then missed a friend's episode and the season finale. Half marks, but probably not the right note on which to stop watching the series.
Readings:
The Court of the Air, Stephen Hunt.
Christmas book #2. In defiance of my normal reading habits, this novel held me up for some three weeks in the same month that I went through a biographical work in less than a week. (Admittedly it was a Bill Bryson - more on that in a moment.) I like to think I was just savouring it.
Some might say (well, some have said, as a matter of fact) that this book is overfull, that it throws idea after idea after idea without pausing to pick one and focus on that. Hooray, say I. There's not much Mister Brain likes more than books that are overstuffed with imaginative ideas, and as long as I keep Mister Brain happy I'm hoping he won't shoot the puppy.
Dense is probably the word. It's quite a dense book.
It took me a couple of chapters to really start liking this book - I'd initially fixated on the idea that this was meant to be set in a parallel Dickensian London, but this proved wrong. (The Lovely Jo isn't having this problem and tells me I don't read enough fantasy novels, to which I can only reply "fie!".) In fact what Hunt's done is to remix familiar bits of history and culture in a way that is kind of exactly what every SF/fantasy writer does, but also kind of fresh and surprising.
I don't want to give away all the thinly disguised influences and satisfyingly bad puns, but the book ends up pitting its teenage superheroes against an enemy that's a combination of the Aztec empire, Revolutionary France and the Cybermen. How can you not love that?
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson.
Christmas book #3. Truly, as the critics say, it is laugh-out-loud funny.
Listenings:
They Might Be Giants, The Else.
And so begins my exploration of post-Flood TMBG. My, but they've changed. Apparently this album was produced by the Beastie Boys, Beck and Blur, and it's not too hard to spot their influence. Good, but a lot straighter and rockier than the early material that I'm used to. Fortunately I'd ordered the overseas version with the bonus disc of podcast material, and this is much more the TMBG that I know. Give it a few months for me to get properly used to it. Early front-runners: "The Cap'm", "Shadow Government", "The Mesopotamians", and perhaps as many of the bonus disc tracks.
Comic-book mayhem - slight return:
A few weeks ago the Bristol & Bath Venue magazine gave away a 200-page comic-book history of Bristol, The Bristol Story. Scoop! Touted as free with the magazine, but I preferred to think that I was buying it for the cover price of the magazine, with a free issue of Venue thrown in. A lovely little souvenir of Brizzle to take with us when we emigrate.
I'd go so far as to suggest it's a worthy rival to Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland, with the enormous added bonus that it was a freebie, yet the huge disadvantage that there are only enough in circulation to cover the population of Bristol (or likely, some fraction of that number) and even then only those who noticed and bought that week's Venue. I only noticed on the last day before the next issue came out, otherwise I'd've bought a few copies for friends.
Off the back of this, discovered that the creators, Messrs Eugene Byrne (co-author of the Back in the USSA SF stories) and Simon Gurr, had produced a free 100-page comic-book biography of Brunel a couple of years earlier. I immediately went looking. Didn't take long. So now we have a couple of lovely pocket-sized, instructive, entertaining, definitively Bristolian comic books to take with us, hand down to hypothetical future kids, etc etc.
Gangsters - el verdict finale:
Definitely not as good as I was led to believe. It suddenly became a lot more self-aware in the last three episodes of the second season, then more self-aware again in the last episode and a half, and so on exponentially up to the show's one, solitary instance of a character walking off set on screen and the much hyped end scene of the writer throwing the script in the air. Not really enough to recommend it as a cornerstone of post-modern TV, although there is a certain appeal to the writer's ninja WC Fields impression. But still.
A good three-star drama, certainly ahead of its time, just not a blower-off of socks. Next TV series in the DVD rental dock: The Lost Room.
Monday, February 04, 2008
January, part two
Tellyvizzyon:
Torchwood
Really quite good so far. Surprisingly good! Good enough even to be worth rating on the Doctor Who scale out of 10! "WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF TORCHWOOD??!?!" Ahem. The key change is that this year, the show has a sense of humour. Makes all the difference. The first series wouldn't have been half as bad if it hadn't been so bloody po-faced. And most surprising of all, the liveliest and, to my mind, the most enjoyable episode so far comes from no other pen than that of Chris Chibnall himself. He's taken the bum notes of the first series, turned them inside out and made a pleasing bit of off-the-wall pop music out of them. Bravo, we applaud. Consider last week's episode, very much on a level with the 1920s aviators episode of the previous series. There, it was a stand-out. Here, it's good (if a little obvious) but overshadowed by the preceding two episodes. May the goodness continue.
Primeval
I've actually caught two whole episodes of it this year! Only managed one and a half last year. Admittedly, that didn't stop me figuring out what was going on, even though the whole one was the last in that series - this may be considered a good thing for the purposes of netting the casual viewer. This year's viewings so far: The One With The Big King Kong Worms, and this week's One With The Big Future Mudskippers. Again, missing the first episode was no barrier to working out what had happened since the end of the previous series (although I'd've been stuffed if I hadn't seen that final episode last year). Slightly disappointed the apparent cataclysm had no other effect than to slightly rewrite the backstory of one secondary character. Still, eh? Worms episode a decidedly average pulpy action romp ("It's a bit ITV..."). Sharks episode, however, really rather good. Perhaps I shall watch more.
Dancing On Ice
Yes, yes, stop that. I command my readers (if plural they be) to go over here and watch Chris Fountain doing the Timewarp and Gareth Gates dancing to "Razzle Dazzle", for these are fine examples of the dancing we call ice. And if any readers have already seen it, I command them to go and watch it again. I know I have. I think perhaps we see the final beginning to take shape.
Books read:
Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, ed David Butler
Because sometimes, you just can't get enough academic dissection of the TV series you love. A collection of essays from different authors, ranging from dry to vivid and from insightful to, frankly, not insightful. There's enough intelligent and readable material in here that I'm glad I paid the price for it, which was surprisingly close to mainstream retail considering it comes from a university press. Still, there'll be no more DW reference books for a while now.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke.
Christmas book #1. A modest collection of short stories from the world (and, largely, in the style) of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. If there's one thing this book has brought home to me, it's that I like anthologies that don't just focus on one style in one world by one author. I honestly hadn't realised this before. It's a good book, don't get me wrong, and I do enjoy the written style (imitated or genuine) of Jane Austen, and I do also enjoy fairy stories of this somewhat sinister type, but after three or four in a row they start to wear a bit thin. Which is a shame, because three or four stories in is where this book really starts to serve up the quality material. "Mrs Mabb" is a little bit fairies-by-numbers, a little bit of a checklist of things you might find in tales of simple person versus fairy, but it's still extremely good. "Mr Simonelli" is another good 'un. This is a book for dipping into, and of all the stories here present I believe these will be the most dippable.
Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams, Nick Webb.
I'm counting this one in January because that's the month in which I finished it, even though I started it last autumn. I don't know why I find biographies such hard going. I suspect it's because they tend to run through the subject's life quite methodically and in some detail, where a novel would just skip between dramatic scenes. Or possibly it's that you get none of the lyrical scene-setting that novelists often indulge in. Still, there it is, I've clearly been conditioned to find fiction more interesting than real life. Ah, if only it weren't true.
Stereophonic sound:
Yello, The Eye.
Recent dance-tinged album from the surreal European pop-funk meisters. It's been fifty-fifty between this and They Might Be Giants. Most of the album is still growing on me, but I just can't get enough of "Planet Dada", the opening number. It just sets me right up for the day.
DVD rental:
Still on Gangsters. Now halfway through the second series, and the shift in tone is all too obvious. The suave and knowing titles have been replaced by something that looks like the title sequence from a Bond film rendered in crayons, and the theme tune is now sung, apparently by Van Der Graaf Generator raised by an octave. In fact (music nerd moment!) it sounds exactly like (but isn't) the guy who sings "The Tell-Tale Heart" on Alan Parsons' Poe-themed album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Lock me away now. The pioneering post-modernism I'd been led to expect is making itself known, so far in two scenes of the scriptwriter dictating to a typist in a street in Pakistan and a few scenes with whirling captions, including one brief pastiche of North by Northwest, but it's not much more than what was present in the first series. I'm expecting big things of the finale now.
All right, having the scriptwriter dictating the scene on-screen is quite good, but I was expecting a lot more. Damn you, Tat Wood. Final verdict to follow in due course.
Torchwood
Really quite good so far. Surprisingly good! Good enough even to be worth rating on the Doctor Who scale out of 10! "WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF TORCHWOOD??!?!" Ahem. The key change is that this year, the show has a sense of humour. Makes all the difference. The first series wouldn't have been half as bad if it hadn't been so bloody po-faced. And most surprising of all, the liveliest and, to my mind, the most enjoyable episode so far comes from no other pen than that of Chris Chibnall himself. He's taken the bum notes of the first series, turned them inside out and made a pleasing bit of off-the-wall pop music out of them. Bravo, we applaud. Consider last week's episode, very much on a level with the 1920s aviators episode of the previous series. There, it was a stand-out. Here, it's good (if a little obvious) but overshadowed by the preceding two episodes. May the goodness continue.
Primeval
I've actually caught two whole episodes of it this year! Only managed one and a half last year. Admittedly, that didn't stop me figuring out what was going on, even though the whole one was the last in that series - this may be considered a good thing for the purposes of netting the casual viewer. This year's viewings so far: The One With The Big King Kong Worms, and this week's One With The Big Future Mudskippers. Again, missing the first episode was no barrier to working out what had happened since the end of the previous series (although I'd've been stuffed if I hadn't seen that final episode last year). Slightly disappointed the apparent cataclysm had no other effect than to slightly rewrite the backstory of one secondary character. Still, eh? Worms episode a decidedly average pulpy action romp ("It's a bit ITV..."). Sharks episode, however, really rather good. Perhaps I shall watch more.
Dancing On Ice
Yes, yes, stop that. I command my readers (if plural they be) to go over here and watch Chris Fountain doing the Timewarp and Gareth Gates dancing to "Razzle Dazzle", for these are fine examples of the dancing we call ice. And if any readers have already seen it, I command them to go and watch it again. I know I have. I think perhaps we see the final beginning to take shape.
Books read:
Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who, ed David Butler
Because sometimes, you just can't get enough academic dissection of the TV series you love. A collection of essays from different authors, ranging from dry to vivid and from insightful to, frankly, not insightful. There's enough intelligent and readable material in here that I'm glad I paid the price for it, which was surprisingly close to mainstream retail considering it comes from a university press. Still, there'll be no more DW reference books for a while now.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke.
Christmas book #1. A modest collection of short stories from the world (and, largely, in the style) of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. If there's one thing this book has brought home to me, it's that I like anthologies that don't just focus on one style in one world by one author. I honestly hadn't realised this before. It's a good book, don't get me wrong, and I do enjoy the written style (imitated or genuine) of Jane Austen, and I do also enjoy fairy stories of this somewhat sinister type, but after three or four in a row they start to wear a bit thin. Which is a shame, because three or four stories in is where this book really starts to serve up the quality material. "Mrs Mabb" is a little bit fairies-by-numbers, a little bit of a checklist of things you might find in tales of simple person versus fairy, but it's still extremely good. "Mr Simonelli" is another good 'un. This is a book for dipping into, and of all the stories here present I believe these will be the most dippable.
Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams, Nick Webb.
I'm counting this one in January because that's the month in which I finished it, even though I started it last autumn. I don't know why I find biographies such hard going. I suspect it's because they tend to run through the subject's life quite methodically and in some detail, where a novel would just skip between dramatic scenes. Or possibly it's that you get none of the lyrical scene-setting that novelists often indulge in. Still, there it is, I've clearly been conditioned to find fiction more interesting than real life. Ah, if only it weren't true.
Stereophonic sound:
Yello, The Eye.
Recent dance-tinged album from the surreal European pop-funk meisters. It's been fifty-fifty between this and They Might Be Giants. Most of the album is still growing on me, but I just can't get enough of "Planet Dada", the opening number. It just sets me right up for the day.
DVD rental:
Still on Gangsters. Now halfway through the second series, and the shift in tone is all too obvious. The suave and knowing titles have been replaced by something that looks like the title sequence from a Bond film rendered in crayons, and the theme tune is now sung, apparently by Van Der Graaf Generator raised by an octave. In fact (music nerd moment!) it sounds exactly like (but isn't) the guy who sings "The Tell-Tale Heart" on Alan Parsons' Poe-themed album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Lock me away now. The pioneering post-modernism I'd been led to expect is making itself known, so far in two scenes of the scriptwriter dictating to a typist in a street in Pakistan and a few scenes with whirling captions, including one brief pastiche of North by Northwest, but it's not much more than what was present in the first series. I'm expecting big things of the finale now.
All right, having the scriptwriter dictating the scene on-screen is quite good, but I was expecting a lot more. Damn you, Tat Wood. Final verdict to follow in due course.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
January, part one
This is the week the TV viewing starts up again - new Torchwood on Wednesday, and tonight, Dancing on Ice. That new title sequence is too much, and the opening piece... has no one on the production team seen This Is Spinal Tap? Some might have doubted it was possible for this show to get any camper, but they've pulled out all the stops and made it happen. But anyway, more ice dancing fun ahoy over the next couple of months, and this time I actually recognise more than three of the non-pro participants (nearly half of them, in fact!).
Books read so far this month:
Babylon, Viktor Pelevin.
An advertising executive takes a variety of drugs and experiences a number of contradictory revelations about the nature of reality/commerce/television. More mind-expanding than anything its hero swallows. You have to get about seven chapters in before it really grabs you, but then the big ideas start landing. That's around the point when Che Guevara dictates a lecture on advertising and metaphysics through the hero's ouija printer. It might be worth mentioning at this point that the author is a Buddhist (Zen, presumably). Probably my first choice of belief system if I ever lapse out of atheism.
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges.
Seminal mind-bending short stories. Still reading through this - to be honest, I'm just marking time until the next Who reference book arrives. Borges is, like Pelevin, good for a big idea, although in some cases pop culture has caught up with him to unfortunate effect. For instance, it's hard to read "The Garden of Forking Paths" without being reminded of Choose Your Own Adventure books - yes, pre-1960 the idea of a novel that presented all the outcomes of the protagonist's choices simultaneously was fantastic, but by the mid-1980s the shops were stuffed full of 'em. Still, where pulp leads, mainstream culture will eventually "innovate", and in the mainstream this sort of thing is still considered edgy and experimental. Just consider the film Sliding Doors, and it wasn't so long ago that someone - was it Kim Newman? - wrote a novel in which you made the hero's decisions for him and followed the consequence in numbered paragraphs elsewhere in the book. How they all gasped. But I digress - nice to be reminded that Borges started it all.
Meanwhile there are Christmas books waiting in the wings, probably to come after that Who reference book. Can't get enough of 'em.
On the stereo: They Might Be Giants' first two albums. Rediscovering songs I'd heard on other people's tapes, and discovering new favourites. Their accordion licks inspire me to practise on the melodica. The rest of this year may see me exploring TMBG's more recent output.
DVDs: Currently renting Gangsters, a 1970s BBC series starring Ahmed Khalil (he gets top billing on the screen, oh yes he does) and Maurice Colbourne, written by Philip Martin. So far I've seen the pilot and first two episodes. Reason for renting: the repeated mentions in About Time, vol 6, off the back of the writer's two Doctor Who stories. Apparently this gritty urban drama of crime and race relations becomes increasingly self-aware until you get the writer appearing as himself on-screen and the characters leaving the set at the end. I'll have me some of that, I thought to myself. So far it's relatively straight-up, although the cliffhanger format shows early signs of cheekiness.
Books read so far this month:
Babylon, Viktor Pelevin.
An advertising executive takes a variety of drugs and experiences a number of contradictory revelations about the nature of reality/commerce/television. More mind-expanding than anything its hero swallows. You have to get about seven chapters in before it really grabs you, but then the big ideas start landing. That's around the point when Che Guevara dictates a lecture on advertising and metaphysics through the hero's ouija printer. It might be worth mentioning at this point that the author is a Buddhist (Zen, presumably). Probably my first choice of belief system if I ever lapse out of atheism.
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges.
Seminal mind-bending short stories. Still reading through this - to be honest, I'm just marking time until the next Who reference book arrives. Borges is, like Pelevin, good for a big idea, although in some cases pop culture has caught up with him to unfortunate effect. For instance, it's hard to read "The Garden of Forking Paths" without being reminded of Choose Your Own Adventure books - yes, pre-1960 the idea of a novel that presented all the outcomes of the protagonist's choices simultaneously was fantastic, but by the mid-1980s the shops were stuffed full of 'em. Still, where pulp leads, mainstream culture will eventually "innovate", and in the mainstream this sort of thing is still considered edgy and experimental. Just consider the film Sliding Doors, and it wasn't so long ago that someone - was it Kim Newman? - wrote a novel in which you made the hero's decisions for him and followed the consequence in numbered paragraphs elsewhere in the book. How they all gasped. But I digress - nice to be reminded that Borges started it all.
Meanwhile there are Christmas books waiting in the wings, probably to come after that Who reference book. Can't get enough of 'em.
On the stereo: They Might Be Giants' first two albums. Rediscovering songs I'd heard on other people's tapes, and discovering new favourites. Their accordion licks inspire me to practise on the melodica. The rest of this year may see me exploring TMBG's more recent output.
DVDs: Currently renting Gangsters, a 1970s BBC series starring Ahmed Khalil (he gets top billing on the screen, oh yes he does) and Maurice Colbourne, written by Philip Martin. So far I've seen the pilot and first two episodes. Reason for renting: the repeated mentions in About Time, vol 6, off the back of the writer's two Doctor Who stories. Apparently this gritty urban drama of crime and race relations becomes increasingly self-aware until you get the writer appearing as himself on-screen and the characters leaving the set at the end. I'll have me some of that, I thought to myself. So far it's relatively straight-up, although the cliffhanger format shows early signs of cheekiness.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
So it's come to this - I only have the time to blog when I'm off work... But here I am, enjoying a week off with Barry Norman's pickled onions in my hand. Not a euphemism. He lays them himself, you know - puts on a film, settles down in his nest, and fires them out. Buk-gawk! The worse the film, the spicier the picklin'. What's Barry Norman got to do with pickled onions, you ask? I don't know either, but there he is on the label, holding a clapperboard in case you'd forgotten who he is. I think he must have been watching the Police Academy films when he dropped this batch, they're kind of... musky.
So, about three months ago I promised some comment on a couple of albums I was listening to. Here, therefore, is a bumper post about music.
I've gone back lately to listen to Cantus Buranus, Corvus Corax's rock version of the "Carmina Burana" (and to finally watch the accompanying DVD, which turns out to be fifteen minutes of behind-the-scenes footage and then the album again on audio - mildly disappointing, but at least it didn't add anything to the cost of the CD). There's one song that ends with a loudly chanted "Ocius!", but owing to the strange German pronunciation of the Latin it sounds like they're singing "Oopsie-doos!" Perhaps there's something wrong with my ears. (Apart from the ear infection, that is.) Having noticed this, I now keep imagining these burly German goths and their massed choir earnestly chanting that old schoolboy favourite, "Charlibus sittibus on the deskinorum / Deskibus collapsibus, Charlie on the floorum."
Although, in a post-Youtube world where people can freely share whatever pranks and mishaps can be caught on a camcorder and the Internet has effectively become everybody's personal You've Been Framed, perhaps that second line should be updated to "Deskibus collapsibus, post it on the forum"?
Just wanted to share that.
Mikelangelo and Undine Francesca, The Floating Islands.
Readers with long memories or the ability to scroll down may recall that we bought this item from the talented hands of the artistes themselves at the Edinburgh Fringe. It's a combined media thing - a philosophical children's book illustrated by Undine's father and written by Undine, and inside the back cover there's a CD of music that she and Mikelangelo created to accompany the text. It's very soothing stuff, ideal for quiet evenings. You can hear multi-instrumentalist Mikelangelo indulging his playful tendencies but holding back his cabaret persona lest he scare the book's intended audience. Even so there's quite an exotic undercurrent to some of the pieces. The book's pretty good fun too.
The Floating Islands can be bought from the Word Sound And Picture Company.
Blue Lily Commission, Eastern Evening.
Not actually available as a CD, but as a download, so this went straight onto the MP3 player. Some may know that BLC is one of the many projects of me ol' mucka Steve Palmer, a man of many talents.
Steve is a member of Mooch, an ambient/electronic group whose work I quite like, but around the time I first met him he was experimenting with mixing electronic music and the sounds of his enormous collection of African and Asian instruments as a side project, and this soon became Blue Lily Commission. He played some of this music at the Exeter SF Society's 2001 convention, and it struck a chord (so to speak) with me. The first album was pretty ambient, but over time BLC's sound has become more complex and pushed the Eastern instruments more to the forefront. It's a direction I like, and the third album, Seshen and the White Jasmine Commission, ranks high among my favourites.
The new album has some of the electronic sound of the first album, but more of the dynamism of the third. The opening track, "The Spear", is full drum'n'bass, surprisingly close to jungle - certainly the fastest and loudest thing I've yet heard from Steve. There are a couple of familiar Seshen moments reworked in other tracks, most obviously "Symbolic". The overall sound is kind of... enclosed. Something about Seshen made it sound like wide open spaces; something about Eastern Evening makes it sound much smaller. More intimate, perhaps. Possibly that's the idea of the title - music around an evening campfire, or crowded into a tent. It's grown on me already since first hearing, and I imagine it'll be on the MP3 player for a while yet.
Eastern Evening can be bought from Pond Life Studios.
Paul Hartnoll, The Ideal Condition.
Or, "What half of Orbital did next", which is at any rate the basis on which I bought it.
I was expecting an album that would sound half like Orbital and half like something else, and this it is, but I don't think the hybrid's any better for it. There are five instrumental pieces here and four songs, and it probably shouldn't be any surprise that I favour the more Orbital-sounding tracks. The problem with the other tracks is that they just sound so cheesy, particularly the songs.
Consider "Please", with vocals from Robert Smith, previously the singer in The Cure. Having him sing the words "I was feeling baaad" in that depressed croaky voice he does just reduces the man to a caricature of himself. The song didn't really gel for me after that. Or consider "Simple Sounds", an odd composition with the recorder that sounds like a disco inside a cuckoo clock, or "The Unsteady Waltz", which would probably suit a Merchant Ivory film quite well but sounds a bit out of place on a modern electronic album.
The only piece that really grabs me is the opener, "Haven't We Met Before?", which promises a juicy collaboration of choir, light orchestra and techno that the rest of the album doesn't deliver on. That it's only four short minutes long wouldn't matter so much if there were more like it. Were it but for this and a couple of other tracks, I'd be thoroughly regretting this purchase.
The Ideal Condition can be bought in solid, physical shops on the high street.
And so back to the TV, to watch The Mighty Boosh on endless loop.
So, about three months ago I promised some comment on a couple of albums I was listening to. Here, therefore, is a bumper post about music.
I've gone back lately to listen to Cantus Buranus, Corvus Corax's rock version of the "Carmina Burana" (and to finally watch the accompanying DVD, which turns out to be fifteen minutes of behind-the-scenes footage and then the album again on audio - mildly disappointing, but at least it didn't add anything to the cost of the CD). There's one song that ends with a loudly chanted "Ocius!", but owing to the strange German pronunciation of the Latin it sounds like they're singing "Oopsie-doos!" Perhaps there's something wrong with my ears. (Apart from the ear infection, that is.) Having noticed this, I now keep imagining these burly German goths and their massed choir earnestly chanting that old schoolboy favourite, "Charlibus sittibus on the deskinorum / Deskibus collapsibus, Charlie on the floorum."
Although, in a post-Youtube world where people can freely share whatever pranks and mishaps can be caught on a camcorder and the Internet has effectively become everybody's personal You've Been Framed, perhaps that second line should be updated to "Deskibus collapsibus, post it on the forum"?
Just wanted to share that.
Mikelangelo and Undine Francesca, The Floating Islands.
Readers with long memories or the ability to scroll down may recall that we bought this item from the talented hands of the artistes themselves at the Edinburgh Fringe. It's a combined media thing - a philosophical children's book illustrated by Undine's father and written by Undine, and inside the back cover there's a CD of music that she and Mikelangelo created to accompany the text. It's very soothing stuff, ideal for quiet evenings. You can hear multi-instrumentalist Mikelangelo indulging his playful tendencies but holding back his cabaret persona lest he scare the book's intended audience. Even so there's quite an exotic undercurrent to some of the pieces. The book's pretty good fun too.
The Floating Islands can be bought from the Word Sound And Picture Company.
Blue Lily Commission, Eastern Evening.
Not actually available as a CD, but as a download, so this went straight onto the MP3 player. Some may know that BLC is one of the many projects of me ol' mucka Steve Palmer, a man of many talents.
Steve is a member of Mooch, an ambient/electronic group whose work I quite like, but around the time I first met him he was experimenting with mixing electronic music and the sounds of his enormous collection of African and Asian instruments as a side project, and this soon became Blue Lily Commission. He played some of this music at the Exeter SF Society's 2001 convention, and it struck a chord (so to speak) with me. The first album was pretty ambient, but over time BLC's sound has become more complex and pushed the Eastern instruments more to the forefront. It's a direction I like, and the third album, Seshen and the White Jasmine Commission, ranks high among my favourites.
The new album has some of the electronic sound of the first album, but more of the dynamism of the third. The opening track, "The Spear", is full drum'n'bass, surprisingly close to jungle - certainly the fastest and loudest thing I've yet heard from Steve. There are a couple of familiar Seshen moments reworked in other tracks, most obviously "Symbolic". The overall sound is kind of... enclosed. Something about Seshen made it sound like wide open spaces; something about Eastern Evening makes it sound much smaller. More intimate, perhaps. Possibly that's the idea of the title - music around an evening campfire, or crowded into a tent. It's grown on me already since first hearing, and I imagine it'll be on the MP3 player for a while yet.
Eastern Evening can be bought from Pond Life Studios.
Paul Hartnoll, The Ideal Condition.
Or, "What half of Orbital did next", which is at any rate the basis on which I bought it.
I was expecting an album that would sound half like Orbital and half like something else, and this it is, but I don't think the hybrid's any better for it. There are five instrumental pieces here and four songs, and it probably shouldn't be any surprise that I favour the more Orbital-sounding tracks. The problem with the other tracks is that they just sound so cheesy, particularly the songs.
Consider "Please", with vocals from Robert Smith, previously the singer in The Cure. Having him sing the words "I was feeling baaad" in that depressed croaky voice he does just reduces the man to a caricature of himself. The song didn't really gel for me after that. Or consider "Simple Sounds", an odd composition with the recorder that sounds like a disco inside a cuckoo clock, or "The Unsteady Waltz", which would probably suit a Merchant Ivory film quite well but sounds a bit out of place on a modern electronic album.
The only piece that really grabs me is the opener, "Haven't We Met Before?", which promises a juicy collaboration of choir, light orchestra and techno that the rest of the album doesn't deliver on. That it's only four short minutes long wouldn't matter so much if there were more like it. Were it but for this and a couple of other tracks, I'd be thoroughly regretting this purchase.
The Ideal Condition can be bought in solid, physical shops on the high street.
And so back to the TV, to watch The Mighty Boosh on endless loop.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
I bet you they won't play this song on the radio
Once again the Eurovision Song Contest has come and gone, and left bewilderment in its wake. With The Lovely Jo off with university friends camping in Wales, of all things, I had no alternative but to watch it. That's my excuse, anyway. Much more cheese but far fewer fatalities than its gangsta rap equivalent, the Eurovizzle Song Shenizzle. (Incidentally, that's pronounced "chenille" - this is the reason why so many interior designers are killed in drive-by shootings. It's all a terrible misunderstanding.)
I took field notes of the specimens on display, so that the final result wouldn't come as a complete surprise. Naturally it still did. First, let it pass that the presenters were bad. The presenters are always bad. The pink fairy third presenter was very, very, very, extremely, horrifically bad, but let that pass too. Soon your mind will scab over the mental wounds, as mine is already beginning to do. Highly amusing film inserts - full marks to Finland for these. My, there are quite a few goths in Finland, aren't there?
Final thing to say at the outset: after last year's leftfield win by a horror-themed hard rock band - Eurovision's all-time high point, in my opinion - it was to be expected that there'd be a few attempts to tap into that winning vibe this year. (Even the interval act seemed determined to cash in, presenting the customary acrobats and so on but with a very hard-rocking trio of long-haired, head-banging cellists and a phalanx of "alternative culture" fire jugglers. Made the Cirque du Soleil look like the Cirque d'Alan Bennett, I can tell you.) Although the imitators wouldn't go so far as to have Satan on guitar and the Mummy on keyboards, settling instead for a generic gothy-ish-esque female lead and a slightly heavier bass line. Anyway, here were my thoughts on the contest as it unfolded:
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Unless I've lost my touch at second-guessing Eastern European languages based on Russian (the overlap must be close to 90%, surely), the song's title translates as "River Without a Name". The choreography sees four water-nymphs swaying a bit while the singer duets with a lutenist from the French Foreign Legion. A bit limp, but inoffensive.
Spain. Oh, it's Los Bambinos Backstreet. Hack shit. Is there a key change? Of course there is. Can the band sing in the higher key? Of course they can't.
Belarus. Sung in English. It's some kind of musical arrangement of a David Copperfield show. Somewhat bizarre. The singer's voice is... regrettable.
Ireland. Oh begorrah, we're just lovable simple cheery rustic Oirish folk, so we are, to be sure. Rather nasal voice on the singer. Poor effort.
Finland. Sung in English. Looks like Elvira, albeit more tastefully dressed. This'll be an attempt to ride the coattails of last year's winner, then. Although it is actually a pretty good alternative pop/rock number.
FYR Macedonia. Points for singing predominantly in their own language. Sadly all I could make out was a chorus of "Niner niner niner, niner niner niner". Passable.
Slovenia. See Finland. Elvira again, but with an interesting new operatic angle. I have to admit I like it. Damn, so far the only ones I like are the half-hearted female goth acts. Not sure what/how/if this reflects on me at all.
Hungary. Sung in English. Hey, a blues song! Points for this novelty. More points for not using any explosives on stage. Singer's a bit too shouty though. And what the hell is the Bus Stop sign all about?
Lithuania. Sung in English. Again, no resorting to explosives, so points here. I like it, and I like it well. Tiny female singer/guitarist in her shiny silvery jacket. Bongos and many guitars - kind of a Latin lounge flavour. Strange to see the backing band only in silhouette, until you consider that they're actually even tinier than the singer and have to be positioned way backstage, right in front of a lightbulb, just so that the audience can see them.
Greece. Sung in English. Did I hear the word "Lord-a-mercy" in the chorus? A bad Ricky Martin clone. The dancers seem to be doing some strange mix of limbo dancing and sumo stomping. Burns my ears and my eyes.
Georgia. Possibly sung in English, although it's a bit hard to tell at times. Appears to be a Georgian version of Charlotte Church with an orange permatan, backed by techno Cossacks. The song's... Bjorkish. Very Bjorkish. Not entirely horrendous.
Sweden. Sung in English. What the hell's this? Glam rock? With psychedelic back projection? Get with the picture, daddio! The lead looks like Marc Bolan, and the song sounds like everything Marc Bolan ever sang.
France. Sung in Franglais. Jolly bon, vieux chap. Is that Richard O'Brien on backing vocals? Stone me, is that Anthony Worral-Thompson on drums?! Not good in any technical sense, and yet I strangely like it...
Latvia. Sung in... Italian? Oh look, they've hired Il Divo to represent them, or so it would appear. Top hats and dress shirts all round. Verdict: hum-ho.
Russia. Sung in English. What's this, Puritan sorority rock chicks? My immediate thought: The Worst Witch meets Britney Spears. And indeed, the song sounds uncannily like "Oops I Did It Again".
Germany. Mmm, jaaaaazz club. Nnnnnice. Swing with a trumpet and a sax and everything. Yes, this is what Eurovision has been waiting for! Sounds fantastic. My surefire tip for the laurels.
Serbia. Blimey, Harry Potter's let himself go a bit. Bland in the extreme.
Ukraine. Sung in some sort of pan-European Babel. What. The feck. Was that? Good ol' Terry Wogan got straight in there with the references to Christopher Biggins, but let me just add that if you dressed Elton John as a silver Christmas tree and made him perform something by the Pet Shop Boys, it might not look unlike this. Truly, the biggest mindfeck of the evening. Dada points: over there. Musical points: nul. Unless Europe goes for the novelty vote again.
UK. Is it Steps, the Vengaboys or the opening routine from The High Life? The one who looks particularly like Alan Cumming seems to be delivering his cheap doubles entendres with unnecessary venom. He's scaring me. He really looks angry.
Romania. Sung in everyone else's language but their own. Bloody hell, there's Richard O'Brien again. A hideous patchwork mess of a song. A shambling Frankenstein's pop monster.
Bulgaria. Comes on like Dead Can Dance. Develops into something more like "Open Up" by Leftfield. And then it's percussion a-go-go. Not too shabby at all - I'd expect to see it place in the top ten, but possibly not the top five.
Turkey. Sung in English. Is that Garry Bushell? Is he singing "I'm telling you now"? It's... curiously acceptable.
Armenia. Sung in English. Enrique Iglesias sings on the set of Waiting For Godot. Woops, you've smeared chocolate on your shirt there, mate. Hard to take seriously.
Moldova. Sung in English. A violin! Wahey! Another act making a half-hearted effort to tap the gothy/rocky/Lordi vibe, although it starts to look a bit bad when the singer's black-and-white dreadlocks turn out to be a wig. Stone me, though, she can actually sing. And well.
Interesting to note that only seven of the acts from non-Anglophone countries sang predominantly in their own language. I'm a bit surprised the French act got their Franglais past the censors, to be honest - the Academie Francaise used to be a bit draconian about this sort of thing. But anyway.
My predicted top five: Germany, Lithuania, Slovenia, Finland, Moldova. The actual top five: Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria. How did Germany not even appear in the top five, with such clear talent? How did they end up 19th?! How did the vote go to Serbia's bland Harry Potter? It does seem as though the accession of more Baltic states to the EU, coupled with the familiar old Eurovision block voting, is having some effect here, but even so. Germany, 19th? Indeed, not one of my predictions appeared in the top five, and of the actual five I only cared for 4th and 5th place. Dammit, I remind myself that the Brotherhood Of Man's "Save Your Kisses For Me" won this contest once, and I know that the moral victory is mine...
Edit: Astonishing follow-up news. Malta reveal that their mysterious douze points for the UK (well, I did wonder) was a protest vote. Doesn't that just make it worse, knowing that our entry's biggest supporter didn't mean it? (Still leaves us ahead of Ireland, who gave us more points than they received from the rest of Europe, but it does mean that in principle the camp Frenchmen beat our camp airline stewards.) Meanwhile, according to Paul Gambaccini, everyone else protests by not voting for the UK. I'm just not convinced about this - the UK's entries for the last few years have been bad enough to fail on their own merits, without blaming it all on politics.
I took field notes of the specimens on display, so that the final result wouldn't come as a complete surprise. Naturally it still did. First, let it pass that the presenters were bad. The presenters are always bad. The pink fairy third presenter was very, very, very, extremely, horrifically bad, but let that pass too. Soon your mind will scab over the mental wounds, as mine is already beginning to do. Highly amusing film inserts - full marks to Finland for these. My, there are quite a few goths in Finland, aren't there?
Final thing to say at the outset: after last year's leftfield win by a horror-themed hard rock band - Eurovision's all-time high point, in my opinion - it was to be expected that there'd be a few attempts to tap into that winning vibe this year. (Even the interval act seemed determined to cash in, presenting the customary acrobats and so on but with a very hard-rocking trio of long-haired, head-banging cellists and a phalanx of "alternative culture" fire jugglers. Made the Cirque du Soleil look like the Cirque d'Alan Bennett, I can tell you.) Although the imitators wouldn't go so far as to have Satan on guitar and the Mummy on keyboards, settling instead for a generic gothy-ish-esque female lead and a slightly heavier bass line. Anyway, here were my thoughts on the contest as it unfolded:
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Unless I've lost my touch at second-guessing Eastern European languages based on Russian (the overlap must be close to 90%, surely), the song's title translates as "River Without a Name". The choreography sees four water-nymphs swaying a bit while the singer duets with a lutenist from the French Foreign Legion. A bit limp, but inoffensive.
Spain. Oh, it's Los Bambinos Backstreet. Hack shit. Is there a key change? Of course there is. Can the band sing in the higher key? Of course they can't.
Belarus. Sung in English. It's some kind of musical arrangement of a David Copperfield show. Somewhat bizarre. The singer's voice is... regrettable.
Ireland. Oh begorrah, we're just lovable simple cheery rustic Oirish folk, so we are, to be sure. Rather nasal voice on the singer. Poor effort.
Finland. Sung in English. Looks like Elvira, albeit more tastefully dressed. This'll be an attempt to ride the coattails of last year's winner, then. Although it is actually a pretty good alternative pop/rock number.
FYR Macedonia. Points for singing predominantly in their own language. Sadly all I could make out was a chorus of "Niner niner niner, niner niner niner". Passable.
Slovenia. See Finland. Elvira again, but with an interesting new operatic angle. I have to admit I like it. Damn, so far the only ones I like are the half-hearted female goth acts. Not sure what/how/if this reflects on me at all.
Hungary. Sung in English. Hey, a blues song! Points for this novelty. More points for not using any explosives on stage. Singer's a bit too shouty though. And what the hell is the Bus Stop sign all about?
Lithuania. Sung in English. Again, no resorting to explosives, so points here. I like it, and I like it well. Tiny female singer/guitarist in her shiny silvery jacket. Bongos and many guitars - kind of a Latin lounge flavour. Strange to see the backing band only in silhouette, until you consider that they're actually even tinier than the singer and have to be positioned way backstage, right in front of a lightbulb, just so that the audience can see them.
Greece. Sung in English. Did I hear the word "Lord-a-mercy" in the chorus? A bad Ricky Martin clone. The dancers seem to be doing some strange mix of limbo dancing and sumo stomping. Burns my ears and my eyes.
Georgia. Possibly sung in English, although it's a bit hard to tell at times. Appears to be a Georgian version of Charlotte Church with an orange permatan, backed by techno Cossacks. The song's... Bjorkish. Very Bjorkish. Not entirely horrendous.
Sweden. Sung in English. What the hell's this? Glam rock? With psychedelic back projection? Get with the picture, daddio! The lead looks like Marc Bolan, and the song sounds like everything Marc Bolan ever sang.
France. Sung in Franglais. Jolly bon, vieux chap. Is that Richard O'Brien on backing vocals? Stone me, is that Anthony Worral-Thompson on drums?! Not good in any technical sense, and yet I strangely like it...
Latvia. Sung in... Italian? Oh look, they've hired Il Divo to represent them, or so it would appear. Top hats and dress shirts all round. Verdict: hum-ho.
Russia. Sung in English. What's this, Puritan sorority rock chicks? My immediate thought: The Worst Witch meets Britney Spears. And indeed, the song sounds uncannily like "Oops I Did It Again".
Germany. Mmm, jaaaaazz club. Nnnnnice. Swing with a trumpet and a sax and everything. Yes, this is what Eurovision has been waiting for! Sounds fantastic. My surefire tip for the laurels.
Serbia. Blimey, Harry Potter's let himself go a bit. Bland in the extreme.
Ukraine. Sung in some sort of pan-European Babel. What. The feck. Was that? Good ol' Terry Wogan got straight in there with the references to Christopher Biggins, but let me just add that if you dressed Elton John as a silver Christmas tree and made him perform something by the Pet Shop Boys, it might not look unlike this. Truly, the biggest mindfeck of the evening. Dada points: over there. Musical points: nul. Unless Europe goes for the novelty vote again.
UK. Is it Steps, the Vengaboys or the opening routine from The High Life? The one who looks particularly like Alan Cumming seems to be delivering his cheap doubles entendres with unnecessary venom. He's scaring me. He really looks angry.
Romania. Sung in everyone else's language but their own. Bloody hell, there's Richard O'Brien again. A hideous patchwork mess of a song. A shambling Frankenstein's pop monster.
Bulgaria. Comes on like Dead Can Dance. Develops into something more like "Open Up" by Leftfield. And then it's percussion a-go-go. Not too shabby at all - I'd expect to see it place in the top ten, but possibly not the top five.
Turkey. Sung in English. Is that Garry Bushell? Is he singing "I'm telling you now"? It's... curiously acceptable.
Armenia. Sung in English. Enrique Iglesias sings on the set of Waiting For Godot. Woops, you've smeared chocolate on your shirt there, mate. Hard to take seriously.
Moldova. Sung in English. A violin! Wahey! Another act making a half-hearted effort to tap the gothy/rocky/Lordi vibe, although it starts to look a bit bad when the singer's black-and-white dreadlocks turn out to be a wig. Stone me, though, she can actually sing. And well.
Interesting to note that only seven of the acts from non-Anglophone countries sang predominantly in their own language. I'm a bit surprised the French act got their Franglais past the censors, to be honest - the Academie Francaise used to be a bit draconian about this sort of thing. But anyway.
My predicted top five: Germany, Lithuania, Slovenia, Finland, Moldova. The actual top five: Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria. How did Germany not even appear in the top five, with such clear talent? How did they end up 19th?! How did the vote go to Serbia's bland Harry Potter? It does seem as though the accession of more Baltic states to the EU, coupled with the familiar old Eurovision block voting, is having some effect here, but even so. Germany, 19th? Indeed, not one of my predictions appeared in the top five, and of the actual five I only cared for 4th and 5th place. Dammit, I remind myself that the Brotherhood Of Man's "Save Your Kisses For Me" won this contest once, and I know that the moral victory is mine...
Edit: Astonishing follow-up news. Malta reveal that their mysterious douze points for the UK (well, I did wonder) was a protest vote. Doesn't that just make it worse, knowing that our entry's biggest supporter didn't mean it? (Still leaves us ahead of Ireland, who gave us more points than they received from the rest of Europe, but it does mean that in principle the camp Frenchmen beat our camp airline stewards.) Meanwhile, according to Paul Gambaccini, everyone else protests by not voting for the UK. I'm just not convinced about this - the UK's entries for the last few years have been bad enough to fail on their own merits, without blaming it all on politics.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
What happened to this song we once knew so well?
Kicking and screaming, I drag myself into the 21st century. I've finally bought an MP3 player - let the early adopters spend their month's pay-packet on these things, I'm happy to wait for the technology to become commonplace and get myself a bargain.
Up till now my mobile musical needs have been adequately met by an old Walkman. Yes, magnetic tape. (If it slurs when I'm doing anything more energetic than a stroll, well, that's still better than the skipping I got when I tried using a portable CD player.) It has meant carrying something like a saddlebag around to hold the machine, tapes and spare batteries, but I'm a big man and I quite like the physicality of big gadgets. That said, I can see the appeal of replacing it with something keyring-sized.
The main incentive for this is another purge of the CDs. It's good to prune the collection down now and then, and to let Oxfam benefit from my musical fickleness, but all the real chaff went months ago and I'm now looking askance at those albums that don't really merit a place on the shelves, but are hanging on by virtue of one or two good tracks. The solution: give the odd tracks a new home on the MP3 player, and the CDs can be safely disposed of.
Here are some of the albums now shaking their heads in forlorn disbelief at their P45s.
Jethro Tull - J-Tull Dot Com
Some Tull fans say that the party ended in the 1980s with A; others say that nothing after the 1978 live album Bursting Out is worth hearing. Personally I feel that things got a bit patchy between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, but recovered again with Roots to Branches. However, the Tull sound by then was remarkably similar to what Ian Anderson was doing with his solo albums, and frankly if you've got his Secret Language of Birds then you've already got all the good bits of J-Tull Dot Com. All except one track: "El Niño". A saucy little number with a driving electric guitar motif.
(The real heresy for Tull fans, mind you, would be that I'm also getting rid of Aqualung, widely supposed to be the zenith of Tull. And it wasn't even one of the main album tracks I saved, but a bonus track. The thing is, because it's so often claimed to be the best album, the interesting songs have been wheeled out on every compilation and live album since. It won't be missed.)
Yes - Close to the Edge
Apparently a lot of people like this album. However, of its three lengthy songs I've only ever really liked one, and it's not the title track. It's the ten-minute romantic ballad "And You and I". The three Yes fans in the world who don't now think I'm mad will do when I tell them that I really, really like Tales From Topographic Oceans and Time and a Word. Fortunately the chances of them reading this blog are zero.
Kosheen - Kokopelli
I have the same problem with Kosheen that I had with Portishead and Talvin Singh - fantastic sound, but what's the good of having the second album when it's just the same as the first? Only one song on this album distinguished itself, pushing its little synth/vocal hooks into my brain, and that was "Recovery". It lives on in electronic form.
King Crimson - Thrak
Like Tull, King Crimson kept themselves fresh over the decades by changing their line-up and sound, although with Crimso the changes were much more pronounced. No one can agree on precisely how many King Crimsons there've been, but broadly they split down into: 1969/flower-people, early 1970s/freaky jazz, mid-1970s/prog rock, 1980s/experimental pop, 1990s and after/hard rock. That's the very vague, unhelpful and somewhat inaccurate version. Thrak is the first of the 1990s albums.
Two tracks have been saved here: "Dinosaur", a hard piece, and "Walking on Air", a gentle piece, both of which are fine and have some rather nice lyrics. The rest of the album is filled with instrumentals that just didn't grab me and songs that hint at the predilection for gibberish/stream-of-consciousness lyrics Adrian Belew would indulge in later albums. Not my favourite era of Crimso. I am, however, keeping hold of the Happy With What You Have to be Happy With EP, which has four strong tracks (including the title track, a nice heavy rock parody) and some unobjectionable instrumental links, and which works better as a whole than the albums either side of it.
The freaky jazz albums, incidentally, went out almost as soon as they came in.
Call of the Wild
A bit of a novelty item, this. Back in Exeter a few years ago, we went to see Ken Campbell's stage show The History of Comedy, Part One: Ventriloquism. The show was introduced by a weird but infectious drum 'n' bass tune featuring a woman's voice and the barking and howling of some dogs. I was curious, and shelled out for this CD, which is a kind of soundtrack to that show, and which incidentally benefited the dogs as well. It's for charidee, mate.
The rest of the CD turned out to be half composed of the constituent bits of the interesting tune, and half snippets of Ken talking with some low-key synth laid over it. Still, it was worth hanging onto for that one weird tune. But no more! Let someone else discover its wonders.
Up till now my mobile musical needs have been adequately met by an old Walkman. Yes, magnetic tape. (If it slurs when I'm doing anything more energetic than a stroll, well, that's still better than the skipping I got when I tried using a portable CD player.) It has meant carrying something like a saddlebag around to hold the machine, tapes and spare batteries, but I'm a big man and I quite like the physicality of big gadgets. That said, I can see the appeal of replacing it with something keyring-sized.
The main incentive for this is another purge of the CDs. It's good to prune the collection down now and then, and to let Oxfam benefit from my musical fickleness, but all the real chaff went months ago and I'm now looking askance at those albums that don't really merit a place on the shelves, but are hanging on by virtue of one or two good tracks. The solution: give the odd tracks a new home on the MP3 player, and the CDs can be safely disposed of.
Here are some of the albums now shaking their heads in forlorn disbelief at their P45s.
Jethro Tull - J-Tull Dot Com
Some Tull fans say that the party ended in the 1980s with A; others say that nothing after the 1978 live album Bursting Out is worth hearing. Personally I feel that things got a bit patchy between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, but recovered again with Roots to Branches. However, the Tull sound by then was remarkably similar to what Ian Anderson was doing with his solo albums, and frankly if you've got his Secret Language of Birds then you've already got all the good bits of J-Tull Dot Com. All except one track: "El Niño". A saucy little number with a driving electric guitar motif.
(The real heresy for Tull fans, mind you, would be that I'm also getting rid of Aqualung, widely supposed to be the zenith of Tull. And it wasn't even one of the main album tracks I saved, but a bonus track. The thing is, because it's so often claimed to be the best album, the interesting songs have been wheeled out on every compilation and live album since. It won't be missed.)
Yes - Close to the Edge
Apparently a lot of people like this album. However, of its three lengthy songs I've only ever really liked one, and it's not the title track. It's the ten-minute romantic ballad "And You and I". The three Yes fans in the world who don't now think I'm mad will do when I tell them that I really, really like Tales From Topographic Oceans and Time and a Word. Fortunately the chances of them reading this blog are zero.
Kosheen - Kokopelli
I have the same problem with Kosheen that I had with Portishead and Talvin Singh - fantastic sound, but what's the good of having the second album when it's just the same as the first? Only one song on this album distinguished itself, pushing its little synth/vocal hooks into my brain, and that was "Recovery". It lives on in electronic form.
King Crimson - Thrak
Like Tull, King Crimson kept themselves fresh over the decades by changing their line-up and sound, although with Crimso the changes were much more pronounced. No one can agree on precisely how many King Crimsons there've been, but broadly they split down into: 1969/flower-people, early 1970s/freaky jazz, mid-1970s/prog rock, 1980s/experimental pop, 1990s and after/hard rock. That's the very vague, unhelpful and somewhat inaccurate version. Thrak is the first of the 1990s albums.
Two tracks have been saved here: "Dinosaur", a hard piece, and "Walking on Air", a gentle piece, both of which are fine and have some rather nice lyrics. The rest of the album is filled with instrumentals that just didn't grab me and songs that hint at the predilection for gibberish/stream-of-consciousness lyrics Adrian Belew would indulge in later albums. Not my favourite era of Crimso. I am, however, keeping hold of the Happy With What You Have to be Happy With EP, which has four strong tracks (including the title track, a nice heavy rock parody) and some unobjectionable instrumental links, and which works better as a whole than the albums either side of it.
The freaky jazz albums, incidentally, went out almost as soon as they came in.
Call of the Wild
A bit of a novelty item, this. Back in Exeter a few years ago, we went to see Ken Campbell's stage show The History of Comedy, Part One: Ventriloquism. The show was introduced by a weird but infectious drum 'n' bass tune featuring a woman's voice and the barking and howling of some dogs. I was curious, and shelled out for this CD, which is a kind of soundtrack to that show, and which incidentally benefited the dogs as well. It's for charidee, mate.
The rest of the CD turned out to be half composed of the constituent bits of the interesting tune, and half snippets of Ken talking with some low-key synth laid over it. Still, it was worth hanging onto for that one weird tune. But no more! Let someone else discover its wonders.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Part 2 - "I - can-not - hear - you! Let - me - hear - you - say - ex-ter-mi-nate!!"
Sunday was something altogether different - a concert of Murray Gold's music from the new Who, performed in the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and BBC National Chorus of Wales, and all for Children in Need. This was more than we were expecting in so many ways.
Sundry things were happening in the WMC during the afternoon. For one thing, as the letter we received earlier in the week told us, you could "have your face painted with an image from Doctor Who". What, any image? Could I have an establishing shot of a council estate daubed onto my cheeks? This turned out, we learned from the faces of passing children, to be a choice between the TARDIS or a Dalek airbrushed onto your cheek through a stencil. Still, we weren't there for the face-painting.
What we were led to expect was a sedate evening of Who music performed against a backdrop of Who images, followed by a Q&A with David Tennant, Russell T Davies and Mr Gold himself. What we got was David Tennant hosting a gala night of Who music performed against a backdrop of Who images in the midst of props and fragments of sets, while clockwork service droids, Daleks, Cybermen and sundry others larked about at the front of the stage and menaced the choir, to our great amusement. And the expected Q&A, cut off by a Dalek demanding audience participation and ordering the orchestra about. And some preview footage of the Christmas episode! (Which looked stunning, and amazingly hasn't appeared on YouTube yet...)
Random thoughts follow.
The final two pieces, though... These were the strangely popular "Song For Ten" from last year's Christmas special, and a song called "Love Don't Roam" from this year's. Sadly the programme does not record the name of the performer. He sang well, but the songs are very much in the line of Andy Williams ("Music To Watch Who By," perhaps) and the lyrics, once you get to hear them without an episode of Who going on around them, are utter pap. ("Bad Bond lyrics," suggested our pal Sarah. I just think someone's hit "fill in" on the Automatic Lounge Song Generator.) We were doubly pleased to get an encore of the Who theme at the end.
All in all, I'd be hard pushed to describe this event as anything less than fantastic. I dread to think what the auction props went for, though. (The Genesis Ark was going for five grand when we looked in at 2pm...)
Sundry things were happening in the WMC during the afternoon. For one thing, as the letter we received earlier in the week told us, you could "have your face painted with an image from Doctor Who". What, any image? Could I have an establishing shot of a council estate daubed onto my cheeks? This turned out, we learned from the faces of passing children, to be a choice between the TARDIS or a Dalek airbrushed onto your cheek through a stencil. Still, we weren't there for the face-painting.
What we were led to expect was a sedate evening of Who music performed against a backdrop of Who images, followed by a Q&A with David Tennant, Russell T Davies and Mr Gold himself. What we got was David Tennant hosting a gala night of Who music performed against a backdrop of Who images in the midst of props and fragments of sets, while clockwork service droids, Daleks, Cybermen and sundry others larked about at the front of the stage and menaced the choir, to our great amusement. And the expected Q&A, cut off by a Dalek demanding audience participation and ordering the orchestra about. And some preview footage of the Christmas episode! (Which looked stunning, and amazingly hasn't appeared on YouTube yet...)
Random thoughts follow.
- The seats in the WMC were lovely and comfy, and our view from about four rows from the back was splendid, so hats off to the architects. Just one thing: stick up some bloody signs to the toilets. I gave up looking for the gents' and used the disabled, deciding that I was indeed disabled by a) not possessing ovaries (the ladies' was right outside the auditorium door and easily found) and b) not having the telepathic ability to sense where the gents' were.
- Arrays of mini-floodlights lit up in the direction of the audience at the end of each piece of music, to the point that I began to wonder if this was some kind of Pavlovian conditioning to get us to clap whenever we saw floodlights. It may simply have been for the benefit of the BBC cameras.
- It's not until you hear it in isolation that you realise just how much the music from the Slitheen episodes sounds like "Mission: Impossible". Presumably Murray Gold thought this was the right music for blowing up Big Ben and 10 Downing Street.
- Kids are willingly wearing suits because of DW! The world has turned upside-down!
- I honestly don't recall there being an electric guitar in half those pieces during the actual episodes. I mean, it added something, but I'm pretty sure hard riffing wasn't a feature of the TV series incidental music.
- Lovely to hear Melanie Pappenheim singing that haunting music from the end of Series 2 in person.
The final two pieces, though... These were the strangely popular "Song For Ten" from last year's Christmas special, and a song called "Love Don't Roam" from this year's. Sadly the programme does not record the name of the performer. He sang well, but the songs are very much in the line of Andy Williams ("Music To Watch Who By," perhaps) and the lyrics, once you get to hear them without an episode of Who going on around them, are utter pap. ("Bad Bond lyrics," suggested our pal Sarah. I just think someone's hit "fill in" on the Automatic Lounge Song Generator.) We were doubly pleased to get an encore of the Who theme at the end.
All in all, I'd be hard pushed to describe this event as anything less than fantastic. I dread to think what the auction props went for, though. (The Genesis Ark was going for five grand when we looked in at 2pm...)
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