Mund Musik

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS

Well, I like to think we're all mates at The Wire.  As it happens, some actual real-world mates are in this volume of the magazine's long-running Epiphanies column, alongside sundry fellow Wire writers and a host of musicians, musickers, authors and theorists: Little Annie, Jerry Dammers, Geeta Dayal, Paul Gilroy, Michael Gira, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jonny Greenwood, David Grubbs, Adam Harper, Stewart Lee, Lydia Lunch, Momus, Ian Penman, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Nina Power, Sukhdev Sandhu, Robert Wyatt, and another thirty-plus contributors. Plus yours truly, with a column on Scritti Politti that was one of the pieces that propelled me on the path to Rip It Up. Great  cover too, eh?

Compiled by Wire Editor-in-Chief / Publisher Tony Herrington, Epiphanies: Life Changing Encounters With Music is out now on Strange Attractor.

More information here.

mouth music (space whisperer)

Via this excellent FACT tribute / beginner's guide to the late Daevid Allen, a/k/a Gilli Smyth's partner in Gong and in life.

Mikey IQ Jones writes:

Produced by Allen and featuring a number of Smyth’s former Gong bandmates as well as a number of Allen’s new Spanish compatriots, 1978’s Mother was Smyth’s first solo album, and her first major post-Gong project. It’s a heady, uncompromising manifesto on the simultaneous powers and struggles of matriarchy, with Smyth cooing, murmuring, and storytelling throughout as a siren of psychedelia. She contrasts charming psych-pop throwbacks to Gong’s Radio Gnome sound with a number of disorienting tape collage pieces over which her space whispers vibrate and shimmer, while unflinching spoken monologues make clear that there’s a darker undercurrent to the peace-and-love hippy operandi.

Amidst the quiet atmospheres in which its songs are cloaked, Mother stands as one of the first and most uncompromising feminist dispatches from the progressive rock universe (a realm overpopulated by regressive and rather misogynistic views toward women) and while some of the content is very much of its era, the album’s explorations of gender roles, cosmic consciousness, and domesticity remain vital and rewarding.

Some more Gilli groovy: