Thursday, July 10, 2025

mouth music (ascesis ascension)

 Mouth music, although there's barely any sense of mouth or throat or any physical mechanism of breath shaping here, so pure and airy are these bodiless tones




Claire Thomas & Susan Vevey turn out remarkably to be an alias of Philip Sanderson of DIY microlegends Snatch Tapes

The whole project is well worth a glisten  - https://snatchtapes.bandcamp.com/album/reprint








The first track - which appeared on Cherry Red's 1981 Perspectives and Distortion comp - reminds me of this other Cherry Red etherealism


Which led to this 


and this


and this 



this too





Interesting facts about Kirsty Hawkshaw the voice of Opus III via a mutual friend

- once engaged to Mark Pritchard of Global Communication 

- now married to Adam F 

- daughter of Alan Hawkshaw, the library music legend (as Adam F is son of Alvin Stardust)


Reminded also of the "sexy psalm" action of One Dove and of Slowdive




They done it live in a place called St. Augustine's Ampitheatre - sadly it turns out not to be an actual ecclesiastical building converted for live music, a veritable Sonic Cathedral


What is it about "purity" and the erotic?

Something about the primness (c.f  those secular nuns: nurses and their uniforms), the constraint, and what might burn beneath... 

Deborah Kerr's clear complexion framed by the nun's coif in Black Narcissus 



Sultry Sister Ruth, delirious with repressed desire




3 comments:

  1. Have you come across Jacob Collier, who does a kind of pop / mouth-music thing using the audiences at his live shows? Most of the clips online show people singing, but apparently he gets them to make other noises including clicks, pops and whistles.

    The music itself seems to be not very interesting, but he’s quite engaging when he talks about it: https://youtu.be/RpCNaICb1FU?si=vsjdgSE8XyGEkfmR

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes they say it's good for people's mental health to sing in unison with a large group. Probably not good then that things like hymns, carols, and pub singalongs have faded out from the culture.

      Karaoke is a sort of revealing perversion or corruption of the pub singalong - main character energy instead of throng-energy.

      That said, the scenes in Terence Davies movies when salt of the earth working folk break out into collective song always made me cringe.

      I really have to force myself to join in with the crowd chants etc when on a protest.

      Singing along at concerts seems to be more of a thing than I remember back in the day - perhaps I just went to the wrong kind of too-cool small crowd show.

      I saw 21 Pilots with my youngest some years back and was stunned when every single person in the 10 thousand audience (except for me) sang along to every single word, of which they are a lot, the group being verbose. And even rapped along to the very rapid-fire verbose rap sections. I guess the lyrics video has enabled people to learn all the words but even so, it was quite powerful to witness this mass of young people singing their hearts out for songs that really meant something to them.

      What must it be like for the band?

      I suppose sports is another place where this crowd-body unison thing survives - chants, 'You'll Never Walk Alone', the Mexican wave etc

      Delete
    2. It’s a big part of the supposed appeal of Oasis, too. Noel Gallagher has talked often about how his aim was to create terrace singalongs.

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