"the cries of mallards" (beak music #27)

 

Jump to 18.55 for the amazing "Farewell to A Hill" by Alice Shields - "a piece made in mourning for the death of a loved one", whose components include "electronically manipulated harpsichords, the sounds of small bells, and the cries of mallards."

This YouTube upload above is the quadraphonic version of the album (in fact this may be the only version of the album as originally on vinyl). 

Which obviously is not going to come through on your or my computer / phone / tablet / whatever,  but nonetheless - pretty fuckin' cool.

As is Alice Shields

Alice Shields is still alive! And still active.

Look at her holding her own amongst all these besuited ancient blokes at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

Although there is another female composer in there - Pril Smiley? (also on the album)

More top tunes from Ms Shields

Having done some beak music on "Farewell To A Hill", she did some muzzle music with "Coyote, For Tape" (1981), which - you guessed it  - incorporates the sound of that loping near-lupine, which occasionally can be seen in this very neighborhood of ours here in eastern Los Angeles...

In 1966 she composed a piece called "Wildcat Songs" - not a tape piece, so no actual wildcats involved,  but using a text from a Native American shaman.

I dimly recall that someone we met in LA once had a story about a bobcat settling and sunning itself on the diving board of their swimming pool.

We know several people who've had bears rummaging through their garbage cans of a night.

Actually a good mate of mine, a Brit expat here,  just posted a picture of a bear sitting up in a tree - don't recall if it was his own back garden, or while out on a hike, but... let's just say, I for one would not have lingered  there brandishing my cellphone and snapping away.... 

"El's Aria", another early piece, incorporating tape alongside instruments, appears on this unlikely looking release on Opus One, a label not unlike CRI in terms of being a home for modern composers

Among Shields's later works, there are Apocalypse - An Electronic Opera and  Shenandoah - Three Electronic Works

As is too often the case, there is a lot more electronic and tape-based - or electronic/tape inclusive compositions - by Shields that never got released, especially the earlier work.  

Volti (Dance Piece No. 1), dance piece, tape (1966)

Walking on the Surface of the Sun, tape (1966)

Domino, dance piece, tape (1967)

My Feathers are Growing Longer, dance pieces, tape (1967) [for Loizeaux-Murphy Dance Company]

Dance Piece No. 2, dance piece, tape (1968) [for Mimi Garrard Dance Theatre]

Study for Voice and Tape (1968) [electronic music with Shields’ prerecorded voice on tape, on poem by Shields]

Dance Piece No. 3, dance piece, tape (1969) [for Mimi Garrard Dance Theatre]

The Transformation of Ani, tape (1970)

Farewell to a Hill, tape (1975) [using bells, ducks, and electronic sounds]

Bicycle Music, film score, tape (1977) [for film on sculptor Helene Brandt, using the sounds of Brandt's bicycle sculptures]

Coyote, tape (1980) [using wolf-calls, coyotes, and manipulated human voices; from the opera "Shaman"]

El’s Aria, soprano, flute and tape (1983)

The Black Lake, tenor, cello and tape (1984) [text: Edward Barrett]

Rhapsody (an homage to Brahms), piano and tape (1984)

Voices, computer music (1989) [created on SUN computer]

Icarus and 4-H Club: Two Radio Plays by Sam Shepard, incidental music, [tape?] (1966)

The Witches’ Scenes from "Macbeth", incidental music, tape (1967)

We, incidental music for radio play, tape (1970) [with Vladimir Ussachevsky]

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Mallards - well they crop up in electronic music more often than you'd think!

Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co.

and the depraved scientist character Mallard in Blectum from Blechdom's macabre imaginary saga (first track here is "Rock-A-Mallard")

Gloomy Sundays

 

Three versions of the song made famous by Billie Holiday - all three covers released within three years of each other

Lydia Lunch was first

Then Billy Mackenzie (personally I always found it a rather lumpy obtrusion in Sulk)

Then Marc Almond

Actually there was a fourth cover within that timespan: Elvis Costello recorded a version in 1981 (but twas only released much later as part of a Trust reissue)

EC also did this Standard

The original was composed by Rezső Seress in 1933 as "Vége a Világnak" which translates as "The World Is Ending". 

Which made me think of this pop classic of teen heartbreak

Which in turn made me of a song about the world really ending 

"Gloomy Sunday' was widely known as the "Hungarian Suicide Song" and in its initial incarnation was apparently inspired by political doom more than amorous apocalypse (the Depression, rather than depression... Fascism ascendant also)

Later lyrics by poet László Jávor shifted it to heartbreak.

 Rezső Seress did actually kill himself, in 1968

During WW2 the BBC banned the song as potentiality detrimental to public morale

There are other well-known coverers of "Gloomy Sunday" where the tune fits well with their overall image / aura - Marianne Faithfull, Serge Gainsbourg, Diamanda Galas, Sinead O'Connor 

But back to 1980-83 and the cluster of covers, kicked off by Lydia 

Around that time there was critical chatter about the Torch Song - along with a general interest in things like cabaret, the bygone craft of jobbing songwriters knocking a standard out before lunch, etc etc

the idea being that this strict division of labour lead to better results than the rock-band-as-collective-auteur or the navel-contemplating singer-songwriter.... 

with the Brill Building / Nashville / Motown / Broadway / Las Vegas approach,  one professional does the tune, another professional does the lyric, yet another professional arranges and produces (although often those roles are separated too), others professionals play the instruments... 

the singer's job is reduced simply to doing a good job of interpretation.. the singer functions only within a narrow strip of professional expertise of their own, without creativity as such drawn upon... their role, vis-a-vis the song, is much more like an actor than a torn-from-your-own-guts-your-own experience artist.  

Related ideas at this time would be:

the idea of a classically structured Song with a capital 'S' as the elegant container for immense pain, or wild desire - passion controlled, expressivity stylized.  

the (once provocative, now a bit well-worn) thought that the softest songs can hit harder than the supposed hardness of rock. 

Concomitant with all of this was things like Julie London being rediscovered.  Scott Walker getting compiled and reissued. Nina Simone (although it would be the un-torchy "Baby Just Cares For Me" that eventually clawed its way back into the charts as a reissued single). 

Then there were the contemporary exponents... 

The critical apotheosis of August Darnell as an out-of-time / against-the-times figure, with his "Kid Creole and the Coconuts" taking us back to the days of Cole Porter and Cab Calloway.... 

Rickie Lee Jones's mostly-covers mini-LP Girl At Her Volcano (inc. "Lush Life", "My Funny Valentine"...)

Blue Rondo A La Turk 

Everything But The Girl doing "Night and Day"

And much else besides....

This was not so much the opening up into a post-rock world, as a wishful reversion to a pre-rock age 

The afterbirth of this current of thought resulting in the likes of Carmel, Swans Way....

Rubbish byproducts aside, I don't think the fond esteem for the original era of standards, the Great American Songbook, et al  was misplaced (I've been listening to Sinatra this very morning in fact). 

But there is a dialectic in music... and there is the supersession of earlier stages

Which is why later attempts to go back nearly always founder, if not commercially (Harry Connick Jnr.... Any Winehouse... Duffy) then aesthetically. 

Or even philosophically. For there is is something like bad faith or one of those concepts at work in any drive to "bring back" or restore.  

(It's one reason why the resurgence of the Musical in recent decades is such a zombie business, even as it does good business...  even the grandest musical theater success of today, at the cinema or on Broadway, cannot possibly have the same culturally central function as its precursor equivalents did in the original heyday of the form. Which started to sputter from about the mid-Sixties onwards precisely as rock came forward as the new Intelligent Music) 

But back, again, for the second time, to those three-years of "Gloomy Sunday"'s...

Confession: I have never really clicked with Billie Holiday. Despite repeated attempts over the years -  heeding the advocacy of esteemed ancestors - I have never felt pulled back to relisten. 

Oh it sounds fine in the moment of listening. 

But it does come to seem like it all sounds the same. Much of muchness. 

I suppose that is precisely what might be compelling for some about her as a vocalist (her extremely narrow vocal range..... narrower than many civilian singers in fact) and the fixation on a certain mood (even a certain tempo and gait of song - listening now, again, there's a jolt when you get a rare faster number. Woozy blue langour seems to be her true domain)

But I can't quite make the breakthrough to where you start hearing the myriad subtle differences within the sameyness.

Or don't want to....  something about the Mythos is just not alluring enough to pull me over into that necessary deep immersion. 

Perhaps related to this non-attraction is how vastly I prefer the sunny, upbeat Songs for Swingin' Lovers to the proto-ambient torch moodscape near-concept * album that is In the Wee Small Hours 

Keep wanting to say "snap out of it, man... plenty more fish in the sea"

* I feel there is a pun here itching to be made out of Ava Gardner and avant-garde but for the life of me can't get there

bonus: a Lydia Lunch cover I much prefer

Another bonus: great piece by Barney Hoskyns on the torturous double-LP (Mark Almond's debut solo album) on which his cover of "Gloomy Sunday" appeared - Shock+Awe regulars will note the theatrical / anti-theatrical tropes running through the piece 

rockstars in the nuddy (slight return)

 

Sounds again, of course - what was it with their compulsion to show hard rockers with their kit off? 

True, they went equally for salacious innuendos and cheesecake pictures of New Wave babes like Gaye Advert and Debby Harry

Perhaps it's just equal-opportunity earthiness

Readers responded in similar ways too - there was a whole running thing of letters drooling over Peter Perrett

Perhaps more honest than say, NME, about the element of concupiscence at work in rock fandom

That dainty, modesty-covering frond reminds me of the Harry G. Theaker-illustrated version of The Water-Babies, which my granny had a copy of 

Oddly the original illustrations by J. Noel Paton, despite being done at the height of Victorianism, are less coy

Or was it this Edwardian edition my granny had?

Previous installment of Halford-in-the-raw

Previous rockstar nuddy and New Wave nuddy

This post actually semi-banned by Blogger

Now it's Siberia

 

 fascinating BBC Archive dig up of a program made in 1963 looking back just a few weeks to the early wintry months of 1963 and the Great Freeze . The UK was brought repeatedly to a standstill, rivers froze over, even the sea froze up a bit in certain coastal places, people got trapped in remote villages and having to huddle in the school hall for shared warmth, helicopter rescues of people whose cars had been snowdrifted....  beautiful images of frozen waterfalls and brooks in mid-babble cryogenized crystalline

I was safe and warm in my mum’s tum for the duration  (born June 19). I asked her about it and she said she did remember it being challenging getting to the shops sometimes but had forgotten about all the rescues and frozen rivers (people skated to work along canals, the roads being impassable, train tracks smothered… also skied and sledded through the streets)

"I'm hot 'n' hard!" "Marquis de Sade!"

I initially misheard the lines as "I'm a hot retard!" "Marquis de Sade!"

Like an iD fashion spread turned to music 

Only in the UK could such flimsy nonsense prosper and become Successful Pop

But Haysi Fantayzee had two fun hit singles - this one and "John Wayne Is Big Leggy" (is that a penile innuendo?)

And there's something about the brazen McLaren-copyism that is likeable.  Fake-folk. Nostalgy de boo. Hip-to-be-square-dancing. 

The lisping feebleness of Kate Garner's voice is sort of endearing

They are better than Wide Boy Awake, at any rate. 

A direct graft off Adam and the Ants, and thus off McLaren

In my Rip It Up researching, did I listen all the way through Battle Hymns for Children Singing? I don't think so.

Kate Is Big Leggy, if anybody is round here. Certainly worked those gams at every opportunity, 

Whereas pint-sized Jeremy Healey is a sort of Bolan-esque goblin crossed with Dickensian urchin. 

The Artschool Dodger.

Apparently he went as Jeremiah Healey at one point.

Wait, there's more - two less successful singles

First is imitative of Duck Rock's Soweto stylings

And this one is more in the "Buffalo Gals" vein  - at least until the flaccid chorus

Healey went on to be one of the superstar deejays, jetting to gigs and earning inordinate fortunes for a few hours spinning, especially at New Year's Eve.

Before that though he was a selecta on the supercool warehouse scene of the Eighties - The Dirtbox, right? 

Kate went on to be a successful photographer

What ho? A Kate Garner solo single. A post-hitband career as bereft as Therese Bazaar's I fear.

One more time for the really good single 

Two more times

The Deep Purple Of ________

 

The improbable existence of this book of scholarly essays on Deep Purple fer fuck's sake made me re-contemplate this band's deep uncompellingness....  how they run a distant third to Led Zep and Sabbath....

And then to wonder what other examples of this clustering and ranking could be found across music history...

The obvious one is Beatles and Stones with The Who trailing some distance in achievement / charisma

In baggy, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays out front... with The Charlatans far behind (and funnily enough their big hit "The Only One I Know" owes more than a little to DeePurp's "Hush")

(although the Inspiral Carpets could also be a contender for Distant Third)

Britpop is slightly different as there's a Top 3 - Oasis Blur Pulp - with Elastica trailing at fourth (but I prefer them to Oasis and Blur) 

Does it work with IDM?  Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and (for me at least) Autechre trailing in third. 

For a true parallel with the Led Zep / Sabbath / Deep Purple relationship, there would need to be a sense of redundancy - that there is no function for the #3 band, since whatever it is they are bringing to the table, it's done better in one or others of its facets by the top two preeminent bands.

In other scenarios, the ranking is based less on this idea of overlap-induced redundancy and more about a level of quality and consummate achievement. e.g. 

Manchester postpunk - The Fall and Joy Division, with A Certain Ratio coming in third (as a largely unrealised proposition, based on the recordings at least.... 

Postcard -  Orange Juice and Josef K, with Aztec Camera far behind

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There must be "Deep Purples" of funk, of reggae...

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Of course fandom and taste being quirky, you can find yourself perversely more taken with  or invested in the bands that are objectively much further down the rankings.... John's Children and The Eyes mean more to me than The Who ever will... Budgie, with just two songs ("Whisky River" and "Hot as Docker's Armpit"), have given me more pleasure than Deep Purple

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Rainbow - as once discussed here I vaguely recall - are a whole other order of inessentialness - no sense of a vacuum being filled, a need supplied

Very much a case of "if they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to invent them"

That said I vaguely recall someone here asserting value and interest for the first two Rainbow albums

And someone else piping up in favor of "Since You've Been Gone"

The origins of the metal magazine name? Barton-birthed in the headline for a Ritchie Blackmore cover story....

More onomatopoeia inside

What a right puddin' he looks

Rainbow were on the cover of Sounds an inordinate amount, so to vary it up, they had Cozy Powell on the cover once, instead of Blackmore

Few drummers can have drummed on more inessential records than Cozy P:

Band timeline (not including session work)

Text in bold indicates solo work.

• The Corals (1964–1966)
• The Sorcerers (1966–1968)
• Youngblood (1968)
• The Ace Kefford Stand (1968–1969)
• Big Bertha (1969–1970)
• The Jeff Beck Group (1970–1972)
• Bedlam (1972–1973)
• Cozy Powell (1973–1974, 1979–1983, 1992, 1998)
• Cozy Powell's Hammer (1974–1975, 1992–1993)
• Rainbow (1975–1980)
• Graham Bonnet (1980–1981)
• Michael Schenker Group (1980–1982)
• Whitesnake (1982–1985)
• Phenomena (1984–1987)
• Emerson, Lake & Powell (1985–1986)
• CAJO (1986)
• Pete York/Cozy Powell (1987)
• Blue Murder (1987)
• Forcefield (1987–1990)
• Black Sabbath (1988–1991, 1994–1995)
• The Brian May Band (1991–1992, 1993–1994, 1998)
• Tipton, Entwistle & Powell (1994–1997)
• Peter Green Splinter Group (1996–1998)
• Yngwie Malmsteen (1997–1998)
• The Snakes (1998)

Not including his own solo smash, which I remember finding exciting as a kid

His birth surname was Flooks! He should have stuck with it.

Topping the Sounds readers polls in 1979!

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The Deep Purple delta of undistinguishedness - Rainbow,  Ian Gillan, Whitesnake

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I used to have a Deep Purple box set (sent unsolicited by a big record company in those days of major label largesse). And one thing of mild interest gleaned from the sleeve note essay was that Deep Purple were a singles band, unlike Sabbath and Led Zep (who never released a single, right?). Consequently they had a large number of hit singles and appearances on Top of the Pops. And their stuff is quite catchy and also quite groovy - metal as dance music. 

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It was the scholarly tome that made me think of the mysterious nullity of Deep Purple (one of those names that you saw scrawled on desks a lot, growing up in the 1970s.... and one of the names that first puzzled me as rock-innocent child... another was Bread... I used to be transfixed by the cover of a Bread album which was in one of those spinners full of LPs in an electrical goods shop on Berkhamsted high street... )

But something else swam into my ken recently that was Deep Purple related... one of the YouTube programs I've been slamming into my veins to keep me sedated through the last crazy weeks...

I don't know why it's Ritchie Blackmore Presenting this on his YouTube channel - since he's not in it, it's Jon Lord repping for DeepPurp.... but what a pleasant laidback sort of conversation on some long ago cable TV rock chatshow .... love the mustachioed ultra-chill presenter... Speakeasy, wot a title! 

Ritchie Blackmore is considered one of the Great Guitarists, isn't he? He's included in this book Big Noises by the late Geoff Nicholson, a very entertaining collection of short essays on loud, flashy guitarists

I just can't hear it. 

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As mentioned in the comments, Deep Purple have a higher stature in Japan

hips

 theory

praxis