November 25, 2003
Water 10.
Recently read in magazine that it's best to share your knowledge with a lightness of touch. Surely better to really ram your learning down other people's throats until their tonsils are sore?
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Don't go into the sea when you're on drugs kids! It's like adding another strain to the cocktail. Once upon a time, whilst in a very disturbed drug-induced state of mind I went surfing in Cornwall. It was an October day. I was wetsuited. Cold sand crushing between my toes. A thin mist over the rocks. A man with a goaty playing with a black labrador. The sky grey over the tumbling sea. I swam out on my board. Each time I came upon a wave I ducked beneath it. And.....amazingly.....found myself (zap) in a large black room....opened my eyes as I rose to the surface to catch breath and.....amazingly.....found myself (zap) bobbing on the surface of a stormy winter sea. Again and again. Pretending to myself that I wasn't struggling with the current. Drugs eh! You'd have to be crazy to take 'em.
All of these records have been meticulously selected from the racks at home. The concept is water. In fact, and now I'm showing you my cards, they're all tracks that I think could have been in the discography of David Toop's wondrous "Ocean of Sound." A few of these I'd love to play to Toop (some he may not have heard) but as the legend goes (ha ha I love this): "Needless to say, no correspondence can be entered into regarding the author's record collection."
Bill Fontana: Sounds of The Bay Area.
Post-Cagean environmental recordist Bill Fontana offers up the Sounds of San Francisco's Bay Area. All the recordings marked by deep sloshing water, foghorns, seals and gulls. Best track: "An Expansion Joint on the Golden Gate Bridge" Oh and "Amtrak Trains going through Level Crossings in Berkely" is ALL OVER the KLF's "Chill Out."
Plasmic Life Vol 1: Water Baby.
Burbling water straight offa Can's "Future Days." Squeezed superpitched drums on a Shimon "Predator" tip. Monkey noises. Are we forgetting that for a brief moment the suggestion of "Jungle" sonics actually meant something? Corny I know but also fascinating. Neil Trix visualising to Reynolds the fronds, creepers and marsh of the "Jungle" behind "Gesture without Motion". Strafing doppler effects. The skipping "on the boil" conga/fill/break pattern. That incessant soft phased signal riff issuing from the depths.
Pecheurs de Perles et Musiciens Du Golfe Persique.
One of the really great ethnomusicological recordings. The recorder sits at the aft of the boat clutching his Nagra tape deck as the crew groan, grind (really), moan and wail like a chain gang pulling the pearl fisher's boat further out to sea. Truly scary. Immediately bringing to mind the film adaptation of Steinbeck's The Pearl and The Wailing Soul's epochal endlessless "Row Fisherman Row."
Bruce Johnson: Pipeline.
Classic Disco innit. Starts almost stodgily. Ungainly strings. Bruce (former Beach Boy) Johnson's drums as high in the mix as you'd expect on his own single. But then the hook slides on in: "de de daa la da da da da daa da (la de da)" then "do do do doo" (am i getting this across?) As good a hook as any of Arthur Russell's (and damn he was sparing with them). We segue into the sound of the surf, seagulls caw, Bruce's drums come further to the fore inna tribal style. Yeah you might be in the disco, but your mind maan, your mind is on a longboard riding a ripcurl. Toobing baby! Back to the disco, your working it, the glitterball strobing, sweat glistening off your perfectly formed pecks and damn your date is looking hot hot hot.
Zap Pow: The River.
The greatest Lee Perry track. And it's on the "Voodoism" Compilation (Pressure Sounds) so there's no excuse for not owning the thing. That noise of Perry's tracks. It's tape hiss bro. It's what studio engineers call bad noise. Lee liked it. He liked it so much he'd feed his tape back into the reel again and again. He'd build that hiss up. He'd let the distortion envelop his tracks. He'd suck those 3 part harmonies into a whirlpool. Forget the 24-track fantasies of MBV this is blissed-out distortion made of mud, ash and guava juice. And the concept here is tighter than Peter Tosh's leather trousers. River of eddying swirling reggae man it's gonna take you home. Home to the spirits in the sky.
Sheila Chandra: Quiet.
All the tracks on this called Quiet (1-10). That's gonna make it easy to discuss. I'm not sure if the H2 on the cover is meant to denote water. But I'm going to give Sheila and Steve the benefit of the doubt. There were lots of of other choices: Tim Souster's "Sw1t Dr1mz", Dave Holland's "Emerald Tears", Seefeel's "Quique", X-103's "Atlantis", er LTJ Bukem's "Atlantis", Herman Chin-Loy's "Aquarius Dub", Drexciya's "Deep Sea Dweller", Julian Priester's "Love, Love", Hugo Largo's "Mettle" etc etc etc. But this is an exquisitely aqueous record. No drums just shimmering jathis, sargam bells, water wok, sitar, tamboura, dilruba, gamelan, whispered hi-hit, santoor, cabassa, wind chimes, cymbals, gongs, madhal, surmandel and eqtara. Truly lovely.
Nelson Riddle: Sea of Dreams.
My favourite track being the lovely "Drifting and Dreaming". Huge, empty, cheap, lazy, orchestral, music. Sublimely effortless and underdrawn with a little twinkling bell. This is what I'll be listening to as I dance with my beautiful wife and baby under the waves. Riddle is a curious one isn't he. Solo Exotica then orchestration for Tom Jobim and Sinatra and finally those CTI LPs. He probably ended up scoring for Broadway or the Movies. Superhack.
Bill Evans/Jim Hall: Undercurrent.
More girls underwater! I bought this record during my brief Blue Note fetish period. Round that time the Young Disciples and A Tribe Called Quest were checking the label. The cover totally sold me. The cruel ear would shout DINNER JAZZ. In fact there is nothing particularly watery about it, except for the way it flows, through the telekinetic improvisation going on between Jim Hall and Bill Evans. That there are no drums helps with this eddying to-and-froing. Anyway Bill Evans isn't as hip as he should be. Nice!
Bola Sete: Ocean.
Bola Sete was one of John Fahey's great contributions to music. Nicer indeed than any of Fahey's recordings. This dude can really play a 12-string guitar. Motifs travel across the fretboard like it was the Isthmus. All you bring to an instrument is your soul aint it, and Sete's is no puddle.
Michel Redolfi: Immersion/Pacific Tubular Waves.
One of my favourite INA-GRM records. I have, well I have shedloads. They're better than the Silver Phillips series because they benefit from beautiful modern production. You know there may have been a golden era of production. I reckon production now is inferior to what it was in the years leading up to 1977. You don't need to be a genius to figure out why. These INA-GRM records may be the best produced records ever.
The Redolfi's record's title is curiously and hilariously reminiscent of Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells."Maybe they thought they could shift a few units to hippy stragglers. I quote from the liner notes (well I'm supposed to be a crap writer so I may as well quote as much as I can): "In April 1979, I decided to utilize the work "Pacific Tubular Waves", composed the preceeding winter, so that I could play it and re-record it under the same waves that had been the source of my fantasy during the elaboration of the piece in the studio. Thanks to the water-proof equipment, I was able, hydraphone in hand, to cover the sonorized depths and listen to the natural remodelling of my sounds by the currents of water and the movement of the stones below." So he rebuilds the sounds of the ocean (you know those noises you hear whilst surfing) within the digital domain. The cover of this record is 3D, the specs with my copy have gone unfortunately, but the specs that came with the Detroit Techno "Virtual Sex" Compilation show it off splendidly. (Goggle eyes) Oooh!
Now kids, I've said it before and I'll say it again, that's HARDCORE. Michel Redolfi is hardcore. He's not doing it for money. He's not doing it cos everyone else is doing it. He's not doing it so he can behave like a pompous twat, to build up an image of himself. He's not acting. He's real. He's HARDCORE. He's a nutter. The rest of the world can go do it's thing as far as he's concerned. He's a dreamer, a lover, a believer. Gord bless im.
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Needless to say, no correspondence can be entered into regarding the author's record collection. (Only kidding!)
Posted by Woebot at November 25, 2003 11:55 PM