Old Wavest of the Old Wave

 

recorded end of 'Sixties, released 1973

some vintage sexism in the liner note 

full details of the supersessions, plus reminiscences from exec producer + musical director  Moogy Klingman - no really that is his name. 

"The album was never released in America and when it came here on import from England, it was on two different labels with different titles yet! - Clapton and Beck didn't use their real names. Eric was "King Cool" and Jeff was "A.N. Other". So the effect of the record initially was muted. But with time, it did develop a reputation as being the ultimate super-session album....      There I was, around 19 years old at the time and I just kind of stumbled into working with all these superstars. And in many instances, I wasn't just working with them, I was running the show. Telling people like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton what to do..... It was almost an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation. At any moment someone could yell out "who the fuck are you, sonny,  to tell us what to do?", but that never happened. Well, it almost happened a few times, but I knew when to back off....

"My group, the Glitterhouse, had just broken up. We had done two albums for Bob Crewe's label Dynovoice, including the soundtrack to the movie, "Barbarella". I was playing with a big Long Island band at the time called the Vagrants featuring Leslie West. And I was always jamming the blues at the clubs and lofts around town til the wee hours, so I was pretty precocious. I tried to meet and hang and jam with many of best rock and blues musicians around then. I guess I was too young to know any better....

"... Todd [Rundgren] had to bow out and recommended me to Earl [Dowd] and I was given the spot. I figured that Earl would pay up eventually and what an opportunity! Earl Dowd was the producer of the First Family Albums with Vaughn Meader. Comedy albums that were big hits parodying President Kennedy and his family. Huge sellers till the assassination... 

"Earl knew nothing about music or recording music. He just had this idea which he brought to the Record Plant in New York. He wanted to produce a supersession album with the biggest amount of the biggest stars. Record Plant had just opened it's doors and needed people like Earl to bring stars to it's facilities, with hopes they might record their albums there. So they gave Earl as much studio time as he wanted, free!...  Earl had Carte Blanche as they say. He just never had any money. No one got paid....  So Earl was always telling everyone that the check was in the mail. But that mail never arrived...."

Collage Eyecandy (2 of ?)

 

all by Vanishing Twin or whoever their designer is 

Collage Eyecandy (1 of ?)

 

all Masaya Nakahara

hardcore you know the score (ANS up edition)

 

fragments from Eduard Artemyev's score for his music for Solaris as realised on the ANS synthesiser 

Coil's scores for their work using ANS

"Central heating for kids"

Recently, on what passed for a chilly morning in Southern California, I made some porridge for breakfast.

Felt like there was a small bonfire in my belly for an hour or so later. 

Reminded me of these cosy-yet-eerie commercials for Ready Brek oatmeal from back in the day.

They were eerier still in my memory, because I pictured them in black-and-white (but I guess that's only because we had a black-and-white TV - as did the majority of the British population then, still)

This washed-out, color-leeched commercial resembles my memory version more closely.

Perhaps some of the "eerie" is the faint suggestion of radioactivity - like this one lucky breakfast-protected kid is also somehow the solitary victim of post-nuclear fallout. 

 Ah, they carried them on well into the 1980s, here adding some hip hop breakdancing / bodypopping / moonwalk-glide "hepness" to the mix.  Nicely juxtaposed with one of those gasometers.

I assume this 2020 refix is one of those retro-commercials where they bring back the fondly-remembered template for nostalgic reasons. Here the pitch has been expanded from "Central heating for kids" to "Central heating for everyone"

I should imagine part of the success of the original ad campaign - alongside its appeal to mums, the idea of protecting your child from the elements in your absence, like an invisible blanket of TLC,  or internal cuddle even - part of it must have been because central heating was a relatively recent thing, with many UK home getting it for the first time.  (An alternate pitch could have been Double Glazing for Kids, or Loft Insulation for Kids). 

We never got central heating - our new-built semi-detached house may have been one of the last built in the 1960s that didn't routinely have it as a fixture. Instead, we had a fireplace, which in the dead of winter became something the entire family huddled around. (It had the curious effect of making the rest of the room colder - by contrast). Fueled by coal. As a result, we also had a coal shed round the back of the house. It wasn't big enough, so the whole side bit of the house was covered in a giant mound of coal, delivered annually by a truck from the Coal Board. As the years went by wood from fallen trees supplemented the fuel, gathered in missions often undertaken in inclement weather. Then sawn up, a chore done on wintry days, with much puffing of visible-breath and raw cold hands gripping the tool).

We also had a two-bar electric fire that was stuck bizarrely high up on the wall of the adjoining room, most of the heat from which rose up to the ceiling quickly and uselessly. And there was also a freestanding two-bar electric fire that could be moved around the house where needed - temporary possession of which was fought over jealously. It was around this orange-glowing device that I curled myself  -  after the trauma of dashing from the bathtub across a draughty landing to my bedroom - in an attempt to absorb as much of the warmth emitted as possible.

I'm not sure why we didn't get one of those freestanding, movable oil heaters, like other families had - they seemed to be more effective at warming up a room. Cost of fuel, I suppose.

But back to the original subject - I don't remember ever having a hot breakfast - certainly nothing hearty and insulating like porridge. 

We were shunted out into the world, walking to school no matter the weather - snow, fog, frost, bucketing rain. Clad in shorts too, even in winter, until the age of 14 - at my school anyway. Knees, red and chapped. Toughen them up was presumably the thinking. 

For some reason, children were not given umbrellas in those days. Not something you saw - a kid holding an umbrella. (Some kids had garments with hoods, like a parka - not me though). Many a school morning, I can remember sitting in my desk, dripping, vapour-ripples of steam rising off my drenched uniform.  

Central heating for this kid - fat fucking chance.

Polsktronika

                                                 if you've got a spare 5 hours

A different avant-Pole - Boguslaw Schaeffer -was reworked by Matmos last year in this cool project 

A not-really-a-sequel is soon-come from Matmos - it does similar thing to the Folkways archive (not the electronic avant-stuff though, more the science and nature sounds recordings)

Bit more Rudnik

bonus Polonotrica

Mond Muziek (dream weaver)

 

Dreams of madness : for choir with electronic manipulation (1991)

Choir: members of the Omroepkoor

Conductor: Tera de Marez Oyens

The composition is based on the music which was written for the radiophonic play "Lier" (text: Gerrit Pleiter), commissioned by the KRO Broadcasting Company. The voices are manipulated electronically, to give an illustration of the mad dreams of the farmer Lier (a free variation of King Lear), who suffers from the sound of many voices in his head.

Tera de Marez Oyens was a Dutch composer. She graduated from the Amsterdam Conservatory in 1953, where she studied piano with Jan Odé. After graduation she studied composition and orchestration privately for two years with Henkemans. Her earliest compositions included religious works, such as choral songs and psalm settings. Raising her four children stimulated her to write educational works and children's operas, such as Partita for David (1960) and Adventures in Music (1970), both for school orchestras, and the opera Van de vos Reynaerde (1966). She was firmly convinced that acquainting children at an early age with contemporary music would develop their appreciation for this type of music. In 1978 she wrote a manual for school teachers, Werken met moderne klanken, a progressive series of short vocal or instrumental, mainly graphically notated, études. Her own workshops on contemporary music, which she continued to present throughout her career, proved her to be a talented teacher. In the 1960s she became interested in electronic music and studied with Gottfried M. Koenig at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht. Many of her works show that she was often inspired by text. She also explored the sounds of words, stripped of meaning. In the choral work Bist du bist II (1973), which uses both graphic and exact notation, only four German words are heard in dramatic, emotional eruptions: 'da', 'der', 'du' and 'bist'. A number of later compositions, such as Litany of the Victims of War (1985) and Sinfonia testimonial (1987), the latter based on texts by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Mexican Rosario Castellanos, express her deep concern with human suffering. She also composed several large-scale dramatic works to texts by her second husband, the political scientist and philosopher Menachem Arnoni, including an oratorio, The Odyssey of Mr Good-Evil (1981). In most of her music the texture is spare. Short rapid motifs are repeated in ascending or descending direction in assymetrical patterns. This style effectively highlights the texts in Vignettes (1986), seven short haiku-like poems she wrote herself and set for soprano, flute, percussion and piano. From the early 1980s until her death she was involved in the women's movement in music, often representing Dutch women composers at international congresses. She also performed her own works for piano, and conducted amateur and professional choirs and orchestras on an incidental basis. Throughout her life she lectured internationally on music education, group improvisation and the role of women in music, and wrote articles on these subjects. From 1978 to 1988 she taught at the Zwolle Conservatory. She was a prolific composer with an output of over 200 works. Many of her compositions were commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and various broadcasting networks. In 1995 she was commissioned to write Unison for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. A few months before her death she married Marten Toonder, a renown Dutch writer and cartoonist.