In the new issue of The Wire, I have a big review of Trip to the Moon 2092, a six-disc vinyl expansion of the Acen classic "Trip II the Moon" - widely considered the greatest hardcore rave anthem ever, and originally released through the summer of 1992 in three successive versions, each more tempestuous and grandiloquent than the last. The 2092 box set is out any day now on Kniteforce Revolution. In addition to the print-magazine-only review, at The Wire website there is an interview with Acen Razvi. He gave me the lowdown on his journey from breakdancing on a sheet of lino in West London to building breakbeat symphonies for Willesden label Production House and talked about his love of film soundtracks (John Barry's Bond music and Ennio Morricone's "Chi Mai" being key sample sources for "Trip" and the killer B-side "Life and Crimes of a Ruffneck").
Talking of the movies... the winter 2020-2021 issue of Sight & Sound features my interview with Brian Eno about his career-long involvement in making music for film and TV, the influence soundtracks and scores have had on his ideas about sound, and what he's been watching during the pandemic. The piece is pegged to his new compilation Film Music 1976-2020. It was a real delight chatting with Mr. Eno - I can't remember the last time I laughed so much in an interview.
the other electrifying sample in "Trip II the Moon" - electrocuted diva Maureen Mason - here sounds freakily mellow in the original Tongue N Cheek Britsoul fave
look for the shadowy rave magus Acen amidst the amazing dancing twins (not actually twins apparently)
The "River Deep, Mountain High" of rave is how I described this mix of "Windows" here once
More box sets from Kniteforce coming this year I'm told, including one for this track, Acen's debut
Here's my NPRtribute to the wondrous and wise music of Harold Budd.
Who lived in South Pasadena and who I ran into on the street briefly a few years ago when I was out walking with Geeta Dayal (who knows everybody). By all accounts, he was as lovely a person as his music.
(See bottom of post for choice quotes by Budd and about Budd)
I reviewed the Cocteaus collab The Moon and the Melodies in '86 - I'm not sure I had a very clear idea who Harold Budd was then. The LP was the spur for some very flowery imagery. Maybe I'll dig it out later if it's not too embarrassing....
Cheeky Harold put out the same piece twice under different names, in the same year. You can see why though, what a beauty.
Another Moon + Melodies lovely.
Cocteau Twins "Eyes Are Mosaic ft. Harold Budd", as if this was a modern rap'n'B record! YouTube is pretty darn lax as an archive - of course it should be credited to Harold Budd. Elizabeth Fraser. Robin Guthrie. Simon Raymonde.
Eternity...
His music lends itself to the infinitely extended remix
Facts I wish I had known so that I could have included in the piece
That he taught himself to play the piano in his late thirties, in order to be able the music he wished to compose.
Things Harold said
"Being immediately pretty is the most important component."
"I really like to find as much life as possible in the smallest amount of material. A very simple scale, a relationship of note against note, especially a sustained note; I milk everything for all it's worth."
"One of the things was I got profoundly upset and bored to death with the avant-garde music that was being practiced around the world—the Western world—at that time. It seemed self-congratulatory, and for a small cadre of snobs, and I refused to go on with it."
"I really minimalised myself out of a career"
I cannot play the piano. I can play what I play, I can play me, but I have a dyslexia when reading music. I’m not a professional musician. I hack away at it and the piano is convenient. By no means would a proper pianist consider me one.”
"I slipped back into discovering something that no-one else was doing, or was likely to do in the very near future. I divorced myself from modern music in a sense, and began to develop a language which I thought was honest to God me, and totally outside of competition with my fellow composers.”
"I admire painters very much and I secretly wish that I were doing that"
"“Brilliant blasts of colour that simply engulfed you” - on Mark Rothko, Ellesworth Kelly, and other painters he admired.
"It's curious about The Plateaux of Mirror. It came so quickly and so easily that it was kind of a phantom"
"This whole 'new age' business is very distasteful to me. I don't like being even considered in that “category and I have almost no respect for it at all... It's very lightweight and very bothersome to me. .. I don't think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music”
"That one frosted my balls so much. I was just enraged every time I’d walk into a Tower Records or Virgin Megastore or something like that. There I was in the new age category and I just thought ‘Jesus Christ, how can I escape from these mindless bastards?"
"When I did the White Arcades album, I went to the studio with a list of titles and that's all."
"I've never worked with musicians who know how to read music. So that's always swell for me,
"A mature artist ought to be able to make a good record from the contents of a cutlery drawer."
"The one collaboration that never occurred and never would occur would be David Sylvian, whose work I admire above all others. I just love everything he does. There is a really good reason, it’s because although one thing is good and another thing is good, putting them together doesn’t make it twice as good. In fact it could be a disaster, and I’ve never wanted that to happen."
Things people said about Harold
"A great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician" - Brian Eno.
"I would set up a sound, he would improvise to it, and occasionally I would add something: but it was mainly him performing in a sound-world I had created” - Eno, on The Plateaux of Mirror.
“Harold Budd's intention was to make what he called "eternally pretty music", and his way of composing was to write a piece of music, then take out all the notes you didn't like! - Eno
"He was really down to earth, a ham 'n' eggs kind of guy" - Cocteau Twins, via David Toop.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
The news about Brian Eno creating a therapeutic sound-and-light installation for a hospital reminded
me of a morsel excised for space from the Eno in NYC piece. One
project during those years of ferment that didn't reach fruition was Music For
Healing, an album he started making in 1979 with Robert Fripp (also resident in
Manhattan then) but never finished. (In some accounts,
rather than just being a third Fripp/Eno LP, the album also involved Jon Hassell; Eno's projects during the NYC period
seemed to bleed into each other amorphously).
The tracks that survive from Music for Healing—a four-part series called “Healthy Colours”, eventually released on the 1994 anthology Essential Fripp & Eno --aren't particularly soothing or convalescent, though. They're tense and restless, combining hypnotic drums, brittle jitters of rhythm guitar, warped bass and gashes of feedback with vocal fragments from a radio
program clipping in and of the groove. They actually sound like the missing link
between Eno's first dabble with spoken-voice sampling ( “R.A.F.”, a Baader-Meinhof
inspired collage made with Snatch in late 1977, released as the B-Side to “King’s
Lead Hat”) and what he & Byrne achieved on Bush of Ghosts.
I wrote the cover story for the first issue of The Daily Note, the print newspaper that Red Bull Music Academy is putting out with astonishing frequency during its NYC stint from April 26 to the end of May. The feature is a long-time pet project I was delighted to have the chance to finally bring to fruition: Brian Eno's New York Years, the 1978-1984 spurt of innovation and collaboration encompassing Remain In Light, My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, Day of Radiance, Possible Musics, On Land, and much more besides. The free print edition is widely available to locals but non-residents can check out the piece online.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
There are times I wish I was still living in the U.K....
Mark Fisher and Justin Barton: On Vanishing Land - now open and running till March 30th at The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8
related events:
March 7 - Performances by John Foxx and Raime (Thursday March 7, 7pm)
March 16 -- discussion with Fisher, Barton, The Otolith Collective, John Foxx,
Frances Morgan + Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle
Twin). (Saturday 16 March, 3pm
- free, no booking required).
The Otolith Collective and The Showroom present On Vanishing Land, a new work by British sound artists and theorists Mark Fisher and Justin Barton.
On Vanishing Land (2013,
45m) is a magisterial audio-essay that evokes a walk undertaken by the
artists along the Suffolk coastline in 2005, from Felixstowe container
port to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo. Fisher and Barton
have conjured a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings
and prefigurations that pervade the Suffolk coast. The work includes
commissions from digital musicians, interviews and the reflections of
the artists. Inspired by the cumulative force of the Eerie that animates
this landscape, On Vanishing Land pursues affinities between the modernist reinvention of the ghost story in M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad (1904) and the atmospheric engineering of Brian Eno’s album On Land
(1982). “Themes of incursion - by unnameable forces, geological
sentience or temporal anomaly - recur throughout.” (Kodwo Eshun, The
Otolith Collective, Curator, On Vanishing Land)
On Vanishing Land
integrates new compositions by digital musicians Baron Mordant, Dolly
Dolly, Ekoplekz, Farmers of Vega, Gazelle Twin, John Foxx, Pete Wiseman,
Raime and Skjolbrot. For the
installation at The Showroom it will
be accompanied by an untitled sequence of a wide range of visual
references, produced in collaboration with artist Andy Sharp (English
Heretic).
Events accompanying the exhibition include a performance on 7 March by John Foxx and Raime of compositions from the project.
On
16 March, Fisher and Barton, with The Otolith Collective, John Foxx,
Frances Morgan (Deputy Editor, The Wire) and Elizabeth Walling (Gazelle
Twin), will explore the contemporary cultural
fascination with the
illogics of the Eerie.
Finally, a conversation at the Boathouse café
on the River Deben, Suffolk between the artists and Andy Sharp (English
Heretic) will discuss the reimagining of MR James’ ghost stories by
television directors Jonathan Miller and Lawrence Gordon Clark since the
late 1960s.
talking of wishing you still lived in the U.K.... there's an argument for On Land as the proto-hauntological work... the homesick conjuration of the East Suffolk of his childhood by Englishman-in-New-York Eno
(then again On Land
was itself shaped by an earlier memory-work with an
uncommonly spacious soundscape - Miles Davis's Duke Ellington elegy "He Loved
Him Madly" [that was Ellington's sign-off to audiences - "we love you
madly"] )
("a very haunting tune" says the YouTube poster of "The Lost Day")
someone affixes their own landscape-of-memory images to the tune here
(that's Cork, if you're wondering)
i have elegaic memories of my own attached to On Land , but they relate to the first time I ever heard the album ... it was in Paul Oldfield's room with-a-view at St John's... several stories up in a tall and narrow, modern-style concrete block of student accommodation... the rooms had floor to ceiling windows, which meant from outside and below you looked like your were kind of onstage ... that particular day the others had gone to see Eno's video art at MOMA in Oxford, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan... not sure why I hadn't accompanied them... naturally kick myself about it now... at any rate Paul had picked up the LP i remember the grey wintry light streaming through the window... that glinting bell tone texture on "The Lost Day," like something fluttering in the distancethat keeps catching the sun... the sound and the vision of that moment are indelibly linked in my mind it's an unusually vivid memory, that lost afternoon in early 1983... maybe even a thursday one.... it had inertial feeling that Eno loved to write songs about... yes the LP and "Lost Day" especially made quite an impression.... yet, despite loving Remain In Light and Bush of Ghosts, I never taped On Landfor some reason... probably my metabolism wasn't sufficiently placid in those days to make much room for ambient music
