Eat Yr Hrt out, Scott Walker

Fellini's Casanova (1976)



Pola X - Leos Carax (1999)

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica

I must admit to only really giving Oneohtrix Point Never any sort of attention because of this

The fact that Daniel Lopatin could take such a ridiculously maligned fragment of music and honestly and completely unironically tease such immeasurable beauty out of it indicated to me a sonic alchemy: The ability to turn shit into gold or at the very least, to successfully polish a turd.

His use of pitch shifting, speed control and looping of short samples, while not new techniques were employed in such a way so as to forge a new path of psychedelic discovery as if parallel plateaus from the recent pasts were accessible when the grain or texture of these signifiers became more apparent.

The analogue synth, arpeggio dominated work from his official releases of Drifts and Returnal tended to paint in broader strokes, carving out infinite vistas, with the latter indicating the beginnings of a more digital world.

While his work with Joel Ford in both Games and Ford & Lopatin has placed some of these 80’s fetishist constructs into a more pop song context with varying successes sometimes erring on the side of self-parody, Replica, at least on the surface, appears to offer a best-of-both-worlds: That of the OPN rigorous compositional ear and synth drone and the echo jams of corporate identity as mantra.

Things start off as business as usual with Andro - the type of OPN track that shares some similarity with a certain type of Boards of Canada vignette – mostly due to the presence of similar analogue hardware. But while BOC are more likely to invoke a hash warmed feeling of head nodding familiarity Lopatin is always aimed directly at the heart of the sun towards wide-eyed wonder.

Only by the third track, Sleep Dealer are his intentions made clear as he imagines a new kind of steampunk where certain technologies have effectively stagnated alongside others accelerating onwards. A nanobot swarm awakens, each with their own archaic operating system boot-up chimes, forming a perfect segue into the digital Balinese monkey chant of Remember which in turn perfectly sets up the stately piano of the title track and 1st side closer. Piano should not be too much of a foreign instrument in the OPN universe after being employed with devastating effect on the reworking of Returnal’s title track in collaboration with Antony Hegarty. It is equally affecting here, together with some beautifully complex synth articulations and modulations, like some mechanistic search for sentience.

Deliberate or not, the rather chilling similarities of the album cover with a rather more famous Escher self-portrait and therefore, by association, to the work of Douglas Hofstadter, do no disservice to this album’s vision.

Naussau takes things in a rather pointillist direction verging on the annoying where Lopatin takes a rather incongruous collection of samples and forces them to submit to his composition's internal logic, or is that the listener who is being forced? There are some interesting similarities with some of the work of Books, Nuno Canavarro, Robert Ashley as well as the musique concrete hip-hop of El-P.

Submersible revisits more classic territory and then both Up and Child Soldier initially jar with their aggressive cut-and-paste assaults. The latter being marginally more successful in that it molds its beauty out of its own established internal logic rather than somewhat apologetically retracting its initial statements in favour of more serene sounds. Vocal “ah’s” and clipped phonemes over more familiar synth drone terrain of closer Explain round off this series of tracks that should be regarded as a triumph and indication that Lopatin appears far from exhausting his sonic palette or ideas.

www.24.com coverage

No Rest was one of a number of featured South African artist MP3's on www.channel24.co.za. last week.

What they said:

"Reclusive singer songwriter gives avant-folk rock fans their fix with this abstract impressionist guitar and thumb-piano filtered tone poem off his bewitching debut solo album, Outer Tumbolia."

I guess I need to get out more!

http://www.channel24.co.za/Content/Music/Player/760/b203e5b30c624d43af03eb3be55814c1/19-03-2010-09-41/Ramon_Galvan_-_No_Rest

http://www.channel24.co.za/Content/Music/Mp3/Archive

'Doh!

Being somewhat on the periphery in terms of involvement on a project involving shadow puppetry,

Blackmilk Music video for 'Kimono Dragon'

and then to a lesser extent on one involving the proto-stop-animation of a mutoscope,

'Girl & Rabbit' short film

I think I can take part in the collective slapping of palm on forehead after seeing this beautiful marriage of the two concepts into something delightfully original and bewitching.

Dialogue by Kumi Yamashita 1999 Light, Motor, Styrene, Shadow

Although strictly speaking not constructed as flip-books, I can't help imagining an asynchronous flipping of these 60 installations would make for a wonderful aleatoric ambient soundtrack somewhat akin to György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes.

Speaking of ambient soundtracks, watching these anonymous profiles baring their most intimate secrets keeps reminding me of the misheard whispers of Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing

Then and Now II

The JEW'S HARP or Jaw's harp is widely distributed among primitive and civilised peoples. At its simplest it is a strip of bamboo cut in the shape of a comb with only one tooth; when made in metal, the tooth or tongue is a separate piece soldered to the frame. In each case the instrument is set between the player's teeth, and the mouth cavity amplifies the sound made by plucking the free tongue of the "harp." It is essentially an instrument for the player's pleasure, being hardly audible to anyone else.

Plate 133 152 Plates from Bonanni's 18th Century "Gabinetto Armonic" Antique Musical Instruments and their Players 1964 Dover Publications N.Y

   

Daniel AIU Higgs interview and performance with Jew's Harp

Soap & Skin - Lovetune for Vacuum

Soap & Skin - Lovetune for Vacuum

Soap & Skin is the musical alter ego of 19 year old Austrian, Anja Plaschg. Although comparisons with Nico are unavoidable due to her very germanic vocal delivery and her use of European classical musical styles within her songs, her compositions are a lot more concise and focused.

Essentially Lovetune for Vacuum comprises of piano based songs augmented with Warp-like laptop textures, synth, strings and Anja Plaschg's vocals; sometimes amassed, sometimes very naked, making a virtue of their flaws and limitations.

The opening Sleep makes Plaschg's intentions clear. Its confessional, confrontational and stark tone playing with atonal, and hushed elements drawing the listener into the minutiae, only to fire a gorgeous bunch of ugly at you for getting too close, while the very pretty Cry Wolf with its clockwork-like elements, nursery rhyme melody and playful vocal processing beats Sigur Ros at their own pastoral game.

An influence worth discussing is that of Xiu Xiu. Like Jamie Stewart, Plaschg wields her vocals in a way that is both tender and embarrassing. Something similar to Stewart's popular style of vocal ejaculation such as the one in fan favourite I love the Valley OH! gets an airing on album highlight, the fable-like Spiracle. This is particularly evident and impressive in live renditions of the song. Elsewhere her use of synth noise, angry blasts of recorder and whistle and physical unmusical textures within a song exposes the influence further.

Similar in title though not in sound to Xiu Xiu, Mr. Gaunt Pt 1000 gives way to Marche Funèbre which is composed mostly of clipped orchestral samples and imagines a nightmarish meeting of Coil and Enya!

On DDMMYYYY Plaschg perhaps gives in a little too much to one of her influences, Autechre, but the results are very pleasing.

Brother of Sleep closes the album with a pleasant albeit innocuous sounding lullaby, but sinister textures right upon closure indicate that everything is not always as it seems

Hip Gnosis and Haunting of Interster

In the early 1980's, one of apartheid-era South Africa's ripostes to the cultural boycott imposed by the rest of the world on them was an investment in homegrown entertainment. An attitude of "whatever we are missing out on, we can do better" combined with a significant financial injection produced a number of films and television series with relatively high production values. The heights of which, are still being rescaled in some ways. The lifting of sanctions and the subsequent rescaling and reallocation of the previous financial investments as well as the access to a wider and richer international media has also called for a recalibration of so-called international standards versus the perceptions of yore. All the while South Africa strives for an identity and a best relative fit in terms of production for those stories yet to be told.

One of those productions was a television series called Interster. This was very much in the vein of Gerry Anderson's science fiction series of the 60's and early 70's featuring marionettes, such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. Set in a future Cape Town, South Africa (who had and still has no real space program to speak of) Interster was an inter galactic space trading company the apparent de facto centre of an international earth defence. No reference whatsoever is given to any super power nations as fortress South Africa alone defended all against a ruthless alien enemy.

While the older Anderson puppet shows were used as a template, some other ideas seem to have been pilfered from the more recent Buck Rogers in the 25 Century TV series. Characters like the robot Piki seem a direct lift from Buck Rogers own Twiki and the female protagonist Lydia and paternal Professor Zed are also both eerily familiar. Technologically, Interster was understandably a good decade ahead of Anderson's marionettes, employing Apple II computer controlled servo-puppetry and silicon rubber based skins as well as a wig maker credit! Somehow in it's search for realism and life like appearance the characters stumbled on their servos, trundling awkwardly into the dreaded Uncanny Valley.

Comparisons can certainly be drawn, in a fairly superficial way, with the musical hauntology concept mapped out by Simon Reynolds and others, as Interster does have a number of old-timey soundtrack delights:

Wide-screen analogue synthesizers scream out upon a bed of urgently strummed acoustic guitars punctuated by the dramatic dull thud of syn-drums during the title sequence.

Halcyon synth pop sounds perfectly canned and subtly piped out while the Interster staff relax in white, silken robes at the local nightclub Astra (which is alarming fitted with an intercom to receive orders from headquarters).

'Switched on Bach' turned up to 10 on the speed dial scurries around in the offices of traitor Dr Gorman's asteroid lair, all bedecked with fish tank and Beethoven busts, perfectly mirroring his calculating yet manic evil genius. All very 'Nintedo-esque'

Elsewhere, incidental music, often just warm, unstable analogue tones made even more irresistible by the noticeable billowing and aging due to the 'wow and flutter' of the original tapes, could often be mistaken for a Boards of Canada interlude.

Certainly, these are all good examples of the type of musical fodder employed by the aforementioned Boards of Canada and other similar artists in their musical re-imagined past and memory of an expected future.

However, deeper still than the music or quaintness of the future world is the menace or 'haunting' and this is where Apartheid-era South Africa's persecution complex takes center stage.

Firstly, our protagonists are not entirely sure who their real enemies are. Is it the humanoid but racially ambiguous Krokons, or is it the treacherous and self serving Dr Gorman, and what affiliation does he have to the so-called "freedom fighters"?

In fact there is in one episode a rather disturbing conversation between two of our heroes on the subtle differences between "freedom fighters" and "terrorists" and mention is made to a more universal objective treatment of these terms by the "Interplanetary League", who have also condemned Interster's cold war with the Krokons.

At this point, it feels as if for a brief second the fabric of 'Planet South Africa' is about to rupture and the producers could not quite decide whether they were making a piece of propaganda for children or an altogether more subversive bit of media.

Small hints at hidden agendas are quickly dispelled when you look at a number of far less subtle signifiers:

A lead character called Buks de la Rey

Spaceships directly referencing the Impala jets, as if to reassert the might of the South African armed forces.

Contact is made during another episode with a powerful sentient being, a giant hydrogen atom, the apparent physical manifestation of a radio active planet's consciousness (much like in Solaris) . This entity deems the South African earthlings more worthy and just than their enemies, the Krokons. This somehow manages to reinforce South Africa's nuclear program while at the same time displaying their righteousness in the eyes of a superior being or deity.

Interster's haunting comes from its history and its future. Not just the time in which is was made but the future it imagined for South Africans: Paranoid, persecuted, isolated and alone in the universe.

Happy Hunting...

All images taken from video stills from various Interster episodes Series 1 Part 1 viewed through an Educo(tm) diffraction lens and photographed with a Ricoh digital camera

Interster is available for purchase here

EDIT:

Great article here with screencaps, links to video clips

Outer Tumbolia in Isolation Blog's SA Albums of 2009

Outer Tumbolia made it onto Isolation blog's list of favorite South African albums of 2009.

This blog is maintained by Lloyd Gedye, a music writer from Mail and Guardian

This is what he said:

"This debut solo album from Ramon Galvan is a grower, that has many treasures for the patient listener"

Righard Kapp's Strung Like a Compound Eye also makes the list as well as offerings from BLK JKS and Dear Reader amongst others.

http://isolation.tv/archive/2010/01/14/2009-in-south-african-music.aspx

Outer Tumbolia CD and Digital Purchases

Happy 2010 to all.

A couple of commercial announcements

Outer Tumbolia digital sales:

distribution via Believe Digital

with sales and/or streaming via:

PLAY.COM

Rhythm Online Music Store

Emusic

Amazon

Gucca

Napster

Deezer


Physical CD sales online at SETCOM

Available at the following stores

The Book Lounge

Mabu Vinyl

EDIT: Copies also available at Other Music NYC

SUI Studios Recording 19/12/09-20/12/09

"Oh yeah, give it to a bone yard..."

"The minor left is all the difference made"


"I am a passenger"





"Enough to raise the roof"



A very big thank you to Dan at SUI Studios for making these sessions so extremely effortless for us


"As the smoke rises up"


(a minute after this photo was taken this ancient keyboard emitted some actual smoke!)

'I Will Rise Up' on Other Mother Podcast

Ramon Galvan's song 'I Will Rise Up' is available streaming on Other Mother Podcast Episode 4

Along with tracks from Us Kids Know, Sticky Antlers and others

Previous podcast have featured Givan Lotz, Ampersand and Kidoddoom.

Visit Other Mother Website here to find out more about them

Post Rock Community Outer Tumbolia Album Review

Ramon Galvan is a featured artist on Post Rock Community music blog

There is is also a review on the blog for Outer Tumbolia

"Each song is a new trip to new targets"

"a voice which reaches every cell in your body"

"postrockish arrangements, tones à la A Silver Mt. Zion, jazzy percussions, melodicas, cellos, glockenspiel, electronic elements and many many more..."

Ingredients

The cast in order of appearence on 'You Flossed the Stars'

when to steer's uncertain

and all objectivity is gone

the only thing to do is run

you want it all you flossed the stars

when to steer's uncertain

and all objectivity is gone


the only thing to do is run

you want it all you flossed the stars



ooooh!
er er er er


aah!

boom boom boom
in his purse he has supernovae


research has shown this is nearly over




Happy Hunting!

Folk II

Folklore definitions vary from country to country, epoch to epoch, scholar to scholar. The American Standard Dictionary of Folklore and Mythology alone offer twenty-one of them. All of them concur that folklore is developed and transmitted by 'the people', but neither dictionaries or professors agree on a meaning of the term that would be the same everywhere, leading Arnold Van Gennep to remark: 'What's the good of worrying about where folklore begins and end when we don't even know what categorises it?' Out of his vast experience, the best the great Belgian folklorist could suggest is that the difficulty is lessened by the kind of intuition scientists acquire though practice, so that just as a numismatist can tell true coins from false from their rough and soapy feel, the folklore specialist may 'instinctively' tell the authentic folk creation from, say the vaudeville song sung in the same company. Fortunately, intuition is not all that is left to us. Still, if musical folklore is a science, experience shows that it is subject to sudden caprices and its delineation is very hard to fix. In 1954, after long discussion, the International Folk Music Council adopted this definition:

Folk music is a product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. the factors that shape the transmission are: (i) continuity, which links the present with the past; (ii) variation, which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.

The term can be applied to music that has evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by contemporary or art music and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of the community.

The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and the re-creation of the music by the community that gives it its folk character.

Folk Song in England

A.L. Lloyd

Lawrence & Wishart Ltd 1967

Keeping good company on the wire(less)

Playlisted on Pseu Braun's show on 16th Oct on WFMU with the likes of Atlas Sound, Robert Wyatt, Tickley Feather, Sun Araw, Mika Vainio, Dodos and the post This Heat, Flaming Tunes!




Playlist online


Update: Bob W's show played 'No Rest' on same day

WFMU-FM is a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station broadcasting at 91.1 Mhz FM in Jersey City, NJ, right across the Hudson from lower Manhattan. It is currently the longest running freeform radio station in the United States.

The station also broadcasts to the Hudson Valley and Lower Catskills in New York, Western New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania via its 90.1 signal at WMFU in Mount Hope, NY. The station maintains an extensive online presence at WFMU.ORG which includes live audio streaming in several formats, over 8 years of audio archives, podcasts and a popular blog.


Also made an appearance in-studio, some months back on The Unhappy Hour on Bush Radio 89.5 FM. Righard Kapp and me both. We chatted with Toast who was DJ-ing that night, performed live on-air with our acoustic guitars, played some tunes off our respective albums and played songs from our own favorite CD's. Righard played some Tortoise and Andre Van Rensburg and I played some Linda Perhacs and Francis Bebey, but more about him another time...

Folk I

What are we to understand by 'folk'? A whole nation, with or without minorities? A single class (the lower class)? A section of that class (country workers)? In those parts of Western Europe and America where class distinctions, thought real enough, are rather blurred, some people, specialists as well as amateurs, have taken 'folk' to mean the nation, all classes, upper, lower, urban, rural, regardless of social, historical or spiritual differences. This was the view of German romantics of the time of Goethe and Herder and with modifications it has gone in and out of fashion several times since (in America at the moment it is rather 'in'). It is a permissible view in the attenuated sense that we are all bearers of some sort of folklore, if only in the form of the dirty story, apparently an indestructible type of oral 'literature'. The trouble is, such a prospect extends too easily to a boundless panorama going beyond all reasonable definition, so that in the field of song for instance any piece that has passed widely into public circulation is identified as 'folk', especially if one can pretend it somehow expresses part of the essential character of the nation. Thus, Silcher and Heine's 'Die Lorelei' is exhibited as folk song, likewise 'The bonnie bank o' Loch Lomond' (words and tune by a Victorian aristocrat, Lady John Scott), Stephen Foster's 'Old folks at home', and more recently with even slenderer titles, Bob Dylan's 'Blowin' in the wind'. To say nothing of Pottier and Degeyter's 'Internationale'. By this time we are not far from the vague contours suggested by Louis Armstrong's dreary axiom: 'All music's folk music: leastways I never heard of no horse making it.'

Against this broad and hardly manageable 'popular' view of folk song as national song is set the restricted picture offered by several scientists of musical folklore who follow Bartók in considering the term 'folk song' to be synonymous with peasant song, and who maintain that no other part of the nation but working farmers and farm labourers are true shapers and bearers of traditional verse and melody.

It is worth considering how Bartók came to this opinion for his conclusions are paralleled by those of Cecil Sharp, though Sharp's are by no means so firmly based. As a very young man Bartók was among those who thought that national music and folk music were one and the same. In 1896, while he was still in his teens, Hungary celebrated it millennium in a fever of nationalism that lasted for several years. Kodály has described the time. Everything was to be Hungarian not Austro-German: Hungarian words of command in the army, a Hungarian coat of arms on every post office, a Hungarian anthem to replace Haydn's Hapsburg hymn. he young Bartók wore Hungarian costume, then back in fashion, even on the concert platform. In his search for a Hungarian style of composition freed from German influence he was attracted to the verbunkos idiom of of the gypsy orchestras imagining, as Liszt had, that this was folk stuff; whereas in fact the repertory of the gypsy bands is principally made up of fanciful treatments of tunes composed from the mid-nineteenth century onward by educated amateurs of aristocratic or bourgeios birth; and though this kind of light popular air is often taken for Hungarian folk song, the real thing is vastly different, as Bartók discovered when he set off with his long-horned Edison recording machine to collect peasant songs in the Szekely-Hungarian villages of Transylvania

Folk Song in England

A.L. Lloyd

Lawrence & Wishart Ltd 1967

Then and Now

This is a notion of Kirchner's to demonstrate an acoustical effect. A metal bar is suspended by a thick gut string held to the ears. The sound of the bar being struck by a metal rod should seem to the hearer like the tolling of a very large bell.

Plate 145 152 Plates from Bonanni's 18th Century "Gabinetto Armonic" Antique Musical Instruments and their Players 1964 Dover Publications N.Y.

'A PICKET FENCE DOES NOT HAVE TO LOOK EVEN. IT CAN BE UNEVEN JUST AS WELL. WHEN IT IS UNEVEN, THE SOUND WILL BE MORE INTERESTING WHEN THE NEIGHBORHOOD BOY COMES BY TO DRAG HIS STICK ALONG THE STAVES.'

"Once I found a stone that was brown, irregular and very smooth. It was heavy, and looked a bit melted. I remember showing it to a wise, old, bearded rock-hound pastor from Morristown, Minnesota. Reverend Zimmerman's house and life were filled to overflowing with interesting stuff he had collected in his lifetime. When he saw my brown stone, his bushy eyebrows twitched, He looked at me and said 'Son, this is a meteorite - a star' That stone became special to me and I carried it around to surprise all my friends. I was the boy with stardust in his pockets."

Reinhold Marxhausen grew up in the 1920's and 1930's, the son of a pastor and one of eight children in Vergas Minnesota. He played the musical saw, he played water-tuned bottles, and he found piano lessons boring. He carried stardust in his pocket.

After military service, followed by degrees in art and biology, Marxhausen took a teaching position at Concordia College in Seward Nebraska, where he remained until his retirement in 1990. It was in 1962 that he first began to work with sound objects. "It was a boring Saturday at the sculpture studio; no plans for the day," he recalls. "I found a door knob on the table and welded some wires on one end just for the fun of it. I placed the door knob to my ear and strummed the wire on the opposite end."

"WOW."

Since his discovery, Marx has made a wide variety of sound sculptural forms, and he has developed the door-knob idea in two main directions. One form consists of objects with exposed, external spines. some of the most successful have been his manual walkmans, (below) made like a pair of headphones, with spines sticking out from the metal ear pieces and sometimes rising from the over-the-head connecting piece. They make a stereo concert of lovely sounds, on a minuscule one person scale.

The other form is a small, chunky, metal object, fully enclosed, with no hint of what is inside. Sound comes from within when you shake or rock it, audible only when you hold it close to your ear. What is in there? Marx is not telling.

The objects are just pocket-sized and, recalling the meteor of his childhood, Marxhausen has given them the name Stardust. He makes them as plain in appearance as can be; they look like worn and dirty stones. There's a Marxhausen message in his having put so lovely a sound in such a homely thing.




Gravikords Whirlies and Pyrophones

Bart Hopkin

1996 Ellipsis Arts

Galvan Trio Live at Obz Theatre 26/08/09

Click on images to enlarge







Photos: Alryn Culwick

Strange Loops

Bach Canon forward and reverse on a Mobius Strip



Strange Loops





An Eternal Golden Braid

Miscellaneous Links

An article online in Die Burger culled from an interview with Righard Kapp and Ramon Galvan shortly before both the launch of their respective albums Strung Like a Compound Eye and Outer Tumbolia

"Eintlik is ons die twee skaamste ­dudes in die wêreld"



Elsewhere, Righard is interviewed and reviewed on www.mahala.co.za on his album and the other Jaunted Haunts Press Releases.

"And of course what ties the artists together is an uncompromising dedication to their creative vision."

Music blog The Glass Forest reviews Outer tumbolia here

"This album is nostalgic and modern in one breath - timeless, true, emotional."

"The minimalistic sound of the guitar added by trumpet or other instruments and the dramatical voice lie in front of you like a wide carpet reaching beyond the horizon."

Gosh!