I saw that American family sitting glumly in the tea room of the farm shop the other day. Although the dad may actually be a Brit - he’s got one of those grating in-between accents. Passing their table on the way to my favorite nook, I heard him muttering disagreeably about the deficiencies of the bagel that lay forlornly half eaten on his plate. Honestly, anyone with a pinch of sense wouldn’t order a bagel in that kind of place. A scone, a granary bap, a nice white roll, a flapjack…
They do seem a downcast bunch. But I suppose having to move, lock, stock and barrel, in such a hurry... I really ought to make more concerted efforts to integrate them into the community, such as it is. But they don’t look the sort to be making jams or cheese straws for the church fete.
On to other matters....
Well, the big news in the parish is a new album by Position Normal - Modern & Unique 2.
It is indescribably good. Which I mean literally - I can't describe it.
All the quaint creaky crinkled quirkily chuneful qualities of classic Poz Normal (Stop Your Nonsense, Goodly Time etc) meshed with the unmistakably digital-now. A sort of hyper-brite murk, cobwebbed with glinty glitches.
I say that but looking at the press release, the sound palette is all acoustic and electronic, barely digital at all! And there's material, or constituents at least, in there that allegedly date back to the late '80s. Pre-Bugger Sod.
It's a headscratcher
Release irrationale:
All lyrics and stories written and performed by John Cushway. Instruments played here:. Piano (a real one and a software one). Guitars: Aria Pro 2, Yamaha acoustic, electric Italia Maranello, Double Bass, Congas, Bongos, Tambourine (wooden), Shakers (one egg shaped, the others are all made to look like fruit and vegetables). And synths.
2 samples though. One of a dog barking twice and a drum and bass sample from a 90's D&B Sample CD on the last hidden secret bonus track Techno Non-Stop (Party Party Drugs).
This whole album spans from the late 80's to now.
Recorded onto VHS.
credits
Music: Chris Bailiff
Lyrics: John Cushway
A bonus track not on the album
Oh and look here - a film about or involving Position Normal
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Activity from the village elders!
Including posthumous activity... which is pretty ghostological if you think about it.
Now I remember as a boy cycling past Pendley Manor and slowing to a near-wobble as the big lawn came into view - goggling at the contorted calisthenics cavorted by what looked like naked or nearly-naked figures. Turns out this was the dance troupe of Ernest Berk, an avant-gardist in exile, whose radical choreography was accompanied by equally radical electronic music for movement composed by his good self.
Trunk already issued a chunk of this stuff (Electronic Music for Two Ballets) but somehow I missed the heaping double-CD portions of Berktronica that came out last year via the Huddersfield Contemporary Records label - a bumper serving of the first of these two sorts of avant-electronic that I really really can't get enough of.
Release irrationale:
This double CD represents the first substantial publication of the electronic music of Ernest Berk. Only two works from his catalogue of over 228 pieces were published during his lifetime in the early 1970s. Following the collapse of the Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln in 2009 it was generally thought that all materials were lost. The project team comprising Prof Monty Adkins, Dr Sam Gillies and Ian Helliwell have managed to source early digitisations of some of the master tapes from Martin Kohler (who was a PhD candidate at the time) as well as other sources across Europe. The project team have then selected 18 representative tracks from Berk's oeuvre composed between 1957-1984. They have then worked with Dr Richard Scott and Jos Smolders to digitally remaster these works for this release. The CD features a bespoke cover design by Ian Helliwell and has been produced by Monty Adkins. Extensive liner notes about Berk's work have been written by Adkins, Gillies, and Helliwell.
Ernest Berk was one of the earliest and most prolific composers of electronic music in England and yet his work is almost completely unknown to the wider public. With only a few pieces ever made commercially available in limited circulation, much of his output has since languished in obscurity until now. Huddersfield Contemporary Records is pleased to release this newly restored and remastered 2CD collection of the work of Ernest Berk.
Berk was a true polymath, working throughout his life as a composer, percussionist, dancer, choreographer, teacher, actor, and mime artist, often assuming many of these roles in the same project. He composed over 228 works of electronic music between 1957 and 1984, many of considerable length and often used to accompany his own expressionist contemporary dance productions. Diversed Tapes is a compelling overview of Berk's revolutionary catalogue. The collection includes End of the World (1957), his first work for magnetic tape, and one of the first electronic works composed in England, and Diversed Mind (1967), his work for one of the first public concerts of electronic music in England at Queen Elizabeth Hall and performed alongside music by Daphne Oram, Tristram Carey, and Delia Derbyshire.
Berk's music is at once radical and yet still accessible, rooted in a deep appreciation for melody and rhythm. Listening to this collection in a contemporary context, one cannot help but be struck by how much his music prefigures more current musical trends. Tracks such as Wings Over the Valley of Death (1961) and Kali Yuga (1962) utilise the sorts of dark ambient droning soundscapes that are ubiquitous in electronic music today. Vibram (1973) is a long form electronic improvisation evocative of contemporary modular synthesis performances. Against 7/4 (1967) and Janet Calls it Blue Ribbon (1972) contain the kinds of sophisticated electronic music gestures that evokes connections to later works of acousmatic music by figures such as Bernard Parmegiani. This is more than just a document of the past – rather, there is much to be enjoyed here by contemporary ears with contemporary musical perspectives.
This compilation is still just a small selection of the music Berk wrote during his lifetime, but it is an attempt to illustrate the diversity of his catalogue. Richard Scott and Jos Smolders have worked tirelessly to restore and remaster these, until now, lost recordings to bring out their greatest possible shine, and to allow us to finally throw a light on this important body of work.
An older post on Berk and Berktronica
Below a BBC documentary with a section on Berk in his prime - the dancing and the sound-shape-making
For a glimpse of Berk's troupe at their most flagrantly nakedelic hie thee to this age-restricted video (the sonix are mental!)
Berk is described as a committed "naturist and eroticist" - his (ex)-wife Lotte seems to have been quite a freeethinker herself, abrasively so even.
Jack Dangers at Electronic Sound on Berk's solitary and incredibly rare release during his lifetime - and stuff on his life and Lotte.
More electronic ballet music from the venerable and (like Berk) long-no-longer-with-us Daphne Oram - Beauty and the Beast, a collaboration with the composer Thea Musgrave, made for the Scottish Theatre Ballet in 1969. Released with minimal fanfare only days ago. You don't seem to be able to buy it in solid or immaterial form anywhere - but it's out there on the streamers and YouTube.
Clangers-tastic stuff. From Daphne's heyday at the Institute up Dancersend way.
Standard Music Library seem to be putting out a bunch of vintage stuff, some of it a bit 80's and hyperbright, but some fine work by familiar names like Brian Hodgson, such as this spacy 1975 effort Encore Electronic, a collaboration - or perhaps simple adjacence of compatible works - with a less-familiar name, Reginald J. Lewis.
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Younger elders, if that makes sense - a rare sighting of... but I'm sworn to secrecy. Or rather charged with the challenging duty of alerting without revealing. Let's just say, if you ever h.arked to the waftings of A.R.Kane's fellow-travelers and sprite-children, give a glisten to these emissions from melody snakes. Not really "hauntology" but the next parish over, yet certain to trigger ghostly tremors in the memoradelic sector of the brain for some of us.
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A missive from our Canadian twin town East Gwillimbury!
Tony Price alerts us to his latest project, Requiem For The Ontario Science Centre - self-released on Maximum Exposure and described as “a sonic eulogy to my favourite work of art: The recently shuttered Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, a world-renowned brutalist architectural wonder designed by Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama as a centennial project for Canada. It is a stunning landmark that is largely representative of the post-war utopian outlook that permeated through Canadian culture in the 1960s. Last summer, the Conservative Government of Ontario announced its abrupt, unexpected and controversial closure, a decision that was supposedly based on an engineer’s report warning of a small percentage of roof panels at risk of collapse after decades of neglect.
“Musically, this record is almost entirely made up of synthesizers and saxophones, played by Toronto avant-garde saxophonist, Colin Fisher. If I had to throw you an elevator pitch I would say it sits somewhere between Terry Riley, Fripp & Eno, Boards of Canada and Don Cherry's "Brown Rice".”
Neat parameters and it does actually fall squarely into that quadrangle
God bless and protect Canada and the Canadian people!
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From our Italian twin town Potenza Piscene...
Fast approaching their tenth anniversary of operation, Artetetra (have we reached 6th World Music yet?) release the evocatively titled Crepuscular Elixirs by the German-Finnish outfit Grykë Pyje in just a few weeks time. You can hear most of it already here.
release irrationale:
It has been six years since Grykë Pyje (forest ravine in Albanian) stretched out their high sensitivity feelers for the first time into the greatest of outdoors to bring us fascinating, multilayered soundscapes and introduce audiences to their signature, crystal-clear fifth-world compositions. Working on the idea of using music as a way to pierce the fabric of myths from yonder thanks to a wide array of synthesis, sound superimpositions, patchworking and manipulations, blending hazy shards of experience and imagination, in their fourth LP, "Crepuscular Elixirs", Grykë Pyje spins further adrift from its previous works, trying to increase the level of intricacy.
If recent experiments engaged with the sonification of sacred herbariums and the reimagining of chants and myths from the animal kingdom, for the brewing of their latest musical potion, tracks were built around skew and Oddly-hypnotic resemblances of grooves dodging well-trodden patterns. These bumping and stumbling primal rhythms pervading the album were inspired by the inconsistent pulse and timbrical variety of animal noises: a hammering woodpecker, croaks and ribbits from frogs or the scraping of ants at work. Rhythmic backbones were used as free territory to imagine the entire and alien world around the sounds of this pseudo-fauna.
Indeed Crepuscular Elixirs is an apt title for this bizarre conflation of fiction and natural science, magical miniaturism and microscopic realism. With its bizarre world of supernatural charlatans, hazy incantations and invisible accesses to an impossible bestiary, Grykë Pyje creates sixteen tracks of pure audio alchemy where it’s impossible to retrace the songs’ various layers, rather compelling one to listen to the compositions as a moving thing in its whole. Sounds lift up one another creating texture, mimesis and confusion, incredibly entangled, blurring the line between transmutation and sonic manipulation.
With Crepuscular Elixirs, the duo’s organico-mineral soundscape is sharper and more detailed than ever before. A type of listening requiring allure and curiosity, but that repays with a seemingly endless rediscovery and wonder. Now let this seemingly alive bag of sonic illusions open a new chapter in the excitingly chaotic, fantastic world of Grykë Pyje!
"Potion Seller, I am going into battle and I need your strongest potions."
"My potions are too strong for you, traveler.”
Here's a recent-ish mix made by Luke J. Murray aka Stonecirclesampler for The Wire.
"The mix is a hauntological blend of washed out ambient, dub and grime, threaded together with samples from horror films and TV."
Tracklist
Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Stonecirclesampler Hauntology Primer (Intro)”
Stonecirclesampler “Television Of The Stones (Rainfall version)”
Liquid DNB-like Ambient Grime 2 “Forthcoming Untitled Ambient Grime Dub 12" (Old Grime White Label Wire mix version)”
Stonecirclesampler “The Stone Tape (Wire mix edit)”
Stonecirclesampler “A Drift In Seaburgh (Wire mix edit)”
Rainfall Widens The Cracks In The Concrete “After Dark (Stonecirclesampler version)”
Stonecirclesampler “Memorex Dub (The End Of Techno instrumental edit)”
Old Grime White Label “Forthcoming Untitled B-side (Superior London Pulp edit)”
Stonecirclesampler “The Drift VIP”
Stonecirclesampler “Save The Stones! (Deep Dream Ambient Grime mix)”
Stonecirclesampler “Megalithic Grime Radio Documentary (28 Stonecircle Wire mix version)”
Old Grime White Label “Unknown (Stonecirclesampler A303 Acid rebuild)”
Stonecirclesampler “Megalithic Grime VIP (Stonecirclesampler Wire mix version)”
Liquid DNB-like Ambient Grime 2 “Forthcoming Untitled 4x4 Grime Techno 12" A-side (Stonecirclesampler Rainfall VIP)”
Old Grime White Label “After Leaving The Cliff Overlooking The Pacific Ocean, Rainfall Began To Fall Silently On The Car Roof (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler version)”
Stonecirclesampler “Save The Stones! (Rainfall Widens The Cracks In The Concrete Slowed Down VIP)”
Superior London Pulp “The Real Occults In The Pubs Of The East End (Wire mix acid edit)”
Old Grime White Label “Untitled 2010 Techno (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler Fourth Dimension version)”
Stonecirclesampler “Haunted Goth Ambient Grime (Breakbeat mix)”
Stonecirclesampler “After The Ice Age (Frozen Grime mix)”
Stonecirclesampler “Penda's Fen (Wire mix edit)”
Superior London Pulp “The Green Man Inn (Old Grime White Label's Ambient version)”
Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Ghost In The Water (DISMAL edit)”
Superior London Pulp “Maybe A Door Will Open Somewhere (Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler Haunted mix)”
Stonecirclesampler “Deep Dream Derbyshire Gloom (Liquid DNB-like Ambient Grime 2 Dub)”
Old Grime White Label “Rainfall Falls Silently On Concrete Rooftops (Ambient Grime edit)”
Stonecirclesampler “A Bygone Age (Rainfall version)”
Travis Elborough & Stonecirclesampler “Shivers Of Weird Landmarks, The Time Is Out Of Joint (Outro)”
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Release irrationale:
Overspill Estates EP is a new four track EP from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, which delves back into the Your Community Hub sessions to uncover some gems that had been forced off the album.
Gordon Chapman-Fox, the genius behind WRNTDP says “I’d worked on these tracks for the best part of a year, and, in my mind, they were a fundamental part of the whole Your Community Hub project. I was heartbroken when they couldn’t make it onto the album, so it’s an enormous relief to see them come to life here.”
The initial concept for the fifth WRNTDP album was to expand beyond north Cheshire, and dedicate a track to some of Britain’s other New Towns. Being part of the project from early on, these four tracks were dedicated to Basildon, Cwmbran, Redditch and Harlow. To give an idea on how long these things can take to gestate, the opening track "The People Of The Town was performed at the End Of The Road Festival in 2022.
The album cover is an image from the half-modernist, half-mock Tudor houses that were built in Birchwood, Warrington in some of the last large scale building projects that were part of the New Towns.
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