Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize in 2008 for his video Industrial Lights and Magic . He's been featured on Doklands once before with the excellent March of the Big White Barbarians by his band Jack Too Jack. Here's an earlier piece of his by the quartet donAteller. One the one hand, Mmmm... might be just a bunch of funny noises set to a regular electronic beat, and on the other it might be a sort of archaeological investigation of popular sound. Probably never intended to be popular though, and therefore [...]
Andrew is a trumpeter in the pay of the local lord, and Annie is the miller's daughter. She loves him, but her family disapprove. They try to drive Andrew away by accusing him of witchcraft, and when that fails they beat Annie to death. Andrew dies of a broken heart. That's folk ballads for you. Actually in today's versions of the story, Andrew doesn't die in the end, making them relatively upbeat versions of this most gloomy of traditional songs. I love the arrangement of Martin Simpson's take on this. For comparison's [...]
Rock Ist Krieg comes from the 2011 album The Death and Resurrection of Krautrock: AUM . Given that Seven That Spells are absolutely one of my favourite bands right now, you might think I'd go along with their way of thinking, that what they're playing here is krautrock. Or you might, if you didn't know how much I like an argument. The trouble is with the English language: krautrock has become such a debased term. If they'd just stuck with calling it kosmische music I'd have no problem, that way you've got a term [...]
John McLaughlin has just celebrated his 70th birthday. At least I hope he celebrated it, he certainly deserved to. It's saying something when a musician is more famous for the work he did in his own band than he is for playing with Miles Davis on Bitches Brew . The Mahavishnu Orchestra was by no means perfect - at times the gloss sheen of prog can set your teeth on edge - but when they set themselves loose they were magnificent. One Word from the 1972 album Birds of Fire does [...]
Okay, knackered, so just a quickie. Pivixki are everyone's favourite avant-classical/grindcore crossover duo. Pounding chords, artful silences, great sense of timing. And of course, bloody great crashing waves of sound. Fantastic what can be done with just a piano and a drumkit and a desire to rewrite the rulebook. Proof positive that there's a crossover between those people who like allegedly scholarly classical composition and those people who like listening to an enthusiastic racket. Modernism fans: throw off your chains and get listening to Agoraphobic Nosebleed. You know I only every give good [...]
I love Viv Stanshall, and have done for years. Nothing's going to change that. The best of his Bonzos songs tell of the pain and fury of the outsider in a way that has seldom been bettered, and his Rawlinson End recordings are one of the highpoints of British (or rather English) comedy. And yet I can't help but feel rather uncomfortable about sharing this with you, from Stanshall's 1974 solo album Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead . It's not the lyrics. How The Zebra Got His Spots is Viv's ode to [...]
It's 3.30 in the morning, the rain is hitting the streets hard and your skin is raw. They say that the rain cleans things away, but it doesn't, not here. It just swills the dust and the grime around, bounces it back into the air in raindrop splatter. It smells stale. The dull orange sodium glow won't pick out the cracked puddle in front of you, but it will throw the decaying concrete of the garages into stark relief. The spaces between the tower blocks are even more empty than usual, yet you can't escape [...]
Here's a piece of Indian classical music with warmth, vibrancy, and sounds like it's the distilled sound of the 1960s. I don't know why that should be. I'm certainly not familiar enough with Carnatic music to identify playing styles. I think rather it's some element of the sound itself, perhaps the recording techniques. Maybe it's the medium it was pressed to: this is taken from a rip of a 1967 shellac LP. Chitti Babu, who died in 1996, was master of the veena, which is a sort of lute like instrument with lots of opportunities [...]
Welcome to 2012, everyone. Now look, just because we managed to get through the past year doesn't mean things are going to get better any time soon. 2011 was shit, a livid wound of a year, and I'm not entirely sure 2012 is going to be any better. All we can do is to carry on the fight. With that in mind, and with the hope of the new year upon us, here's a 42 year old song. That's a scary thought. What's even scarier is that Roy Harper's bile-fuelled classic I [...]
Jenny Holzer is a conceptual artist who has worked largely with aphorisms. If you follow @jennyholzer you will receive regular allcaps truisms in your timeline. If you would rather listen, here she is reading some texts. It's taken from a compilation album originally released by Just Another Asshole magazine. Jenny Holzer - untitled (alternate download)
Here's the deal: if you're a Bahamaian guitar player with a idiosyncratic approach to rhythm, you'll get touted as an outsider musician, whereas if you're doing it in the world of jazz, people will laud you as a creative genius. At least, that's the theory, although it's still not happened to Howard Riley and I really don't understand why. I've been telling people about Riley's music for 20 years, and I'm not sure I've ever really made a convert. You might think I'd see reason and stop trying, but it always ends up with me finding another [...]
You know how it is at Christmas, you want to break out the seasonal novelty songs. They don't come much more musically leftfield than Joseph Spence's infamous version of Santa Claus is Coming To Town . You possibly already know it, a lopsided stumbling beast of a song with wildly idiosyncratic guitar playing and eccentric vocal techniques. It was enough to gain Spence quite the reputation amongst outsider music listeners. But Spence didn't always pursue such a doggedly perverse musical trajectory. A native of the Bahamas, his guitar playing was admired by many [...]
Minimalist melody and maximalist sound: that's what space rock is all about, and Mugstar do it as well as anyone. They thrive on repetition, making broken, discordant riffs sound ever more familiar. CrempogSmultron is a bass-driven sonic massacre that really makes its presence felt right up until the moment of its sudden departure. Not for those who only like their music song-y. 1 It's from Mugstar's self-titled debut album from 2006. 1. You know, when I started this blog I'd have never dreamed of using made up words like [...]
Okay, here I am sharing a song with an unknown title, by an unknown artist. It's ripped from this YouTube video , and unless you can identify the alphabet that the subtitles are written in (I think it might be Tigrinya but haven't checked), those details will probably remain a mystery. We've had Tewahedo songs on here before, but I reckon this is my favourite. It's a meandering style of devotional music, traditionally performed outside Ethiopean and Eritrean churches and monasteries. There's some religious prejudice against actually performing inside, as I understand. We're [...]
Hello, I hope you all were able to enjoy Christmas. Me, I got to play with Meccano and drink whisky, and any day where I can do even one of those counts as a win. Not sure whether I can recommend doing the two together though. Here are the Ramones with some seasonal advice regarding how to best get through this most calorific of days. If you don't have a baseball bat to hand, you could perhaps try any stout piece of wood with which you can get a good swing, although then the song wouldn't [...]
Edward Barton is mostly known for two things. One is that he wrote the song It's A Fine Day , which went on to become a dancefloor classic via the cover version by Opus III. The other is his infamous appearance on The Tube , where his experimental performance piece I've Got No Chicken (But I've Got Five Wooden Chairs) was met with a mixed response. A Little Christmas Thieving is one of his songs. At least, I think it it. It's being [...]
Here's a track from Sam Rivers' terrific 1978 free jazz album Waves . It's a complete rush of a record, every track seeming to go at full speed. Flux certainly does this, driven by some dexterous bass (or is it cello - it sort of sounds like Dave Holland is playing cello here) and tuba work. Rivers does something remarkable here. It sounds as if he might be laying down some serialist piano lines, taking a bit of the 12-tone theory on board. The difference is, at times these spidery-fast atonal riffs [...]
Cellist Tom Cora died too young: he didn't leave enough recordings behind, and each of them is worthy of your attention. Saint Dog is from the 1991 album Bee by art rock ensemble Curlew, and it's a wonderful showcase for his arch, dry playing. Saint Dog starts with a long solo from Cora, the rest of the band seeming to be little more than an echo chamber. It kicks into a gorgeous, loping melody. There really is a top tune here, and Curlew seem almost ecstatic to be playing [...]
I do not know if Alan Sondheim is still making music. Last I heard, he was one of the cultural theorists full of the heady promise of the early days of online interaction. This was sometime before the internet became a delivery system for cats, so it's likely his theses are going to need a bit of revision. Anyway, back in the late '60s he was signed to the first incarnation of ESP-Disk. From the 1967 album Ritual All 7-70 here is the peculiar but alluring 779 , a solo improvisation for koto. [...]
Musically speaking, it's not too far from Mali to the Mississippi delta. Or indeed to Springfield, Massachusetts, which is the actual as opposed to the spiritual home of blues legend Taj Mahal. For Mahal, though, home seems to be wherever he can pick up a guitar. Even before his astonishing 1997 collaboration with Malian kora griot Toumani Diabate, he had a reputation as something of a world traveller. He'd always liked to play the blues wherever he went, to see how the music fitted into other traditions, but it wasn't until he reached Mali that he [...]
Doklands
Monday Music – 28 May 2012
Bison - Quill
