WOEBOT

The Silver Records.

I can't help but compare this current "blog-a-peligo" with the early days of Acid House. Then one might have Fabio, Richie Hawtin, Judge Jules and The Mover all on the same bill. Look at my current micro-gang: a philosophy lecturer, a poet, a few music journalists, me an animator. It's a wonder we're sharing the same page. Frankly I'm amazed that someone like Luka is even faintly interested by what I've got to say, it must appear to be sheer goggly-de-gook to him most of the time and completely boring. Flash on that classic situational comedy skit where the dog watches the family: "Blah blah blah blah BISCUITS blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah WALKIES", Luka must read TWANBOC thus: "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah WILEY blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah WRONGLY QUOTED MC." And yet I've noticed a few fellow record-collector geeks firing up their own ventures. Believe you me there's very few crew who are at the coalface like this represented online, and quite alot who (maybe more interestingly) digest culture with the aplomb of the media-savvy. Historically only this chick springs to mind, and in classic record-collector-autist fashion she failed to reply to my emails.

So now the goons are coming to the party I thought it was time I did a bit of the old bollocks-on-the-table. Let all you kids snapping at my heels know what you're up against. Which is an absolute disgrace because the records I've chosen to perform this nasty trick with are among the most important documents of the 20th century. It's a brittle knife-edge this record-collecting lark. I was admonishing the Furry Embryo for calling me a "hipster" the other day, because, and this is the essential drive behind Ian's (non-)attack on me, viewing culture within the frame of what's fashionable is spiritually bankrupt. There is no crime greater than to digest what should be nourishing and transformative as chips on the casino table, and yet so many of us teeter on this tightrope. Though that's not something I'd feel entitled to say if I was being paid to write it. He won't necessarily thank me for pointing this out, but Reynolds' championing of Ardkore and Rave culture was an attempt to give value to what only "people who couldn't be expected to know better" valued. To understand what no-one believed in, on it's own terms, without patronising it in the process of it's recontextualisation. That's a mean feat. Though in a weird (utterly predictable) twist, he succeeded in making it fashionable, when that was the precise inverse of what it was. It was genuinely SCARY, terrifyingly OUT-OF-CONTROL and anathema to the dominant values of the middle-classes and the media. People were paying silly money for these records before interest subsided in Ardkore. tWist informed me he sold his collection in the nick of time. For the record I paid about $8 a pop for most of mine. Often less. Reynolds' I know was a great $5 12" harvester.

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Various Artists: Electronic Panorama.

Certainly the most valuable record I own. At a time before the current economic crisis, when I was earning (what now appears to be) crazy money, I paid about $150 for this, which was an absolute steal. A friend sold a copy of this to The Chemical Brothers for $650 in 1996. I reckon I could comfortably sell it for about $1,000. It's the record-collector's equivalent of an Edward East Clock or a Gainsborough. It's the holy grail of electronic music. I recently read a mini article, a discussion with Andy Votel, who was boasting that he'd recently flown all the way to Poland with the sole intention of picking up a particular obscure soundtrack which (and this amused him greatly) he bragged at only having listened to ONCE. What a berk! I couldn't swear that I listen to this everyday (ahem) but every couple of months I take it out and give it an aural fondle.

All this music crackles with intelligence. Evincing the quickness and edginess of characters brimming over with sparkle. The box is a head-to-head of the four major electronic studios of the day; the GRM of the ORTF (Paris), The University of Utrecht (Netherlands), Radio NHK (Tokyo) and The Warsaw Radio Studio of Experimental Music (Poland...) and frankly once you've heard it you'll wanna dig a huge hole in the ground and fill it with with your Nurse With Wound and Autechre (et al.) records. Somehow no other experimental electronic music comes near this stuff. On a similar note I recently read Autechre going on about how they didn't think Stockhausen was "all that" and my lip curled. SHUT UP you dweebs! Go fiddle with your multi-tracks and leave the dude alone. If you had any idea of the gargantuan scale of the work involved in making this music! The slav-ish blinding toil these tape-edits constitute. Go on (you total saps) hit that "Avant Garde" Cubase preset and act all superior. There's a whole other dimension to this of course, the reason this music is so super-humanly powerful and unexpected is that it emerged from the ravaged psyches of the second world war. This is particularly true when you're talking about Stockhausen (here only in spirit) and Xenakis; the former whose mother was murdered by the Nazi's for being "insane" the latter who lost half his face fighting in the Greek Resistance movement. These people are drawing on emotional resources the scale and depth of which you can't even imagine.

Disc one is the cheese. Frankly the French have it. Parmegiani's "Ponomatopees II" is a dizzying seething swathe. A pile-up of snatches of speech folded and sliced, extremely influential on later INA_GRM alumni like Phillip Mion. Parmegiani was very much Pierre Schaeffer's protege, and as such he works close to the spirit of Musique Concrete. If you don't know it (and apologies if you do) the celebrated "essential moment" of Music Concrete came when Schaeffer cut the sound of a bell being struck from a recording, leaving only the sound of it's ring. The whole idea is right there, decontextualise a real-life sonic event and impel the listener to listen to it on it's own merits. Parmegiani's later work explores this sound-as-sound idea with breath-taking power. Also, and this EVERYONE should hear, Francois Bayle's "Solitioude" (1969) which the composer describes as such: "Irreverent movement, in spite of a series of light genuflexions (to Duke Ellington...Boris Vian...the Soft Machine)". To my mind it is the defining text for the Student Riots of the previous year, featuring elements of the sounds of the street battles of that confrontation and, get this, guitar parts provided by David Allen (The Soft Machine, Gong etc). In fact the Bayle and Parmegiani recordings, the latter of which is: "inspired by...some of the vocal ravings of pop singers" should dispel the lie that this music is in anyway an ivory tower undertaking.

The Japanese disc has, as one might expect, a more contemplative yearning. Toshiro Mayuzumi's "Mandara" has these flitting dragonfly in a swamp fx, and the tone is markedly less strident. Listenable even ;-) I also like Makoto Moroi's "Shosanke" which: "is a suite of six variations on a trumpet sound traditionally associated with the Buddhist "Ceremony of Water" It's amazing how the symbolic possibilities inherent in electronic music are seized on so early in the day. Decade after decade we run across the same themes, usually peaking from time-to-time as demand for "depth" in electronic music varies. For example you can hear scant evidence of these characteristics in Grime, though I'd argue Wiley's tracks are picking up on it, particularly the whole frozen wastes shtick he's peddling. Actually Erik Davis's "Techgnosis" book was pretty good on the mile-wide currents running between the esoteric and electronic music. The contemplative, the other (via 3rd world music and elements thereof) the occult, the convergance of high and low culture. It's all here.

The Warsaw and Utrecht crews also have a good bash. Krzysztof Penderecki's "Psalmus" (1961), the only purely electronic piece of his I'm aware of is splendid. Gabba fans take note, ha ha. Huge 2mm gaps punctuated by gloomy passing icebergs. Arne Nordheim also contributes a track. (I'm having real fun with this!) Of the dutch lot Koenig is "firing on all cylinders."

Bernard Parmegiani : Violostries.

The historic Avant-Garde eh! Gawd bless 'em. What a funny bunch of cranky old men! If I'm feeling at all low, I like to dig out these records and have a giggle at their lovely chops, their 3/4 inch thick lab spectacles, the abundance of all manner of facial hair, little pointed goatees, thick well-clipped beards, unkempt eyebrows spiralling off into the third dimension, those distant fixed gazes, that pipe akimbo, their wonderful seriousness and earnestness. Compare their benign troubled looks to those of the wave of the nu-electronic avant-garde. No don't, it's almost unfair! Those mean pinched expressions, ergonomic haircuts, clipped nostrils, arrogance, carefully-chosen foot-wear, the cloying allusions to street-awareness in their lean garb.

A friend of mine sees Bernard Parmegiani in the street in his neighbourhood from time to time. Apparently he looks like Hornblower bill in his nautical blazer and blue and white striped top. Smoking a generous pipe. I embellish; clutching a baguette and a copy of Le Monde. "Violostries" is from 1964 and is scored for solo violin and four channels. It's a deeply crass comparison but think "Strings of Life". Right from the outset with those stabby striations (I kid you not) and the wonderful deep repeating phased bass line. This record with the original green label spotters!

I implore you to find Parmegiani's "La Creation du Monde" or better yet "De Natura Sonorum" or better yet (well DNS is the accepted classic, but I have a personal fondness for this) "Dedan-Dehors" They're all available on CD.

Francois Bayle: Jeita.

If you look hard for these records, and France is the place naturally. You'll still find the occasional one or two, though quite a number are a bit dodgy. There's LOADS I've passed over, freak-out organ recitals at Notre Dame, endless records by Les Percussions de Strasbourg which you'll see all over the shop and incline to the dull. This however is an utter gem. Once again a purely electronic score, it's a soundtrack for the then recently discovered Lebanese Jeita Caves complex. A son-et-lumiere for the deeply twisted. As you might imagine for the composer of a(nother) piece called: "Espaces Inhabitables", Bayle was interested in the transportative architecture of sound, it's 4th dimensional attributes, unlike most site-specific sonic installations however (yawn), he's still impelled to take the listener somewhere. It's subtitled meaningfully "Murmur of the Waters" and thats what we have in this exquisite piece, synthesised drips, gentle spilling equibriums and aquatic fluctuations all amidst the cavernous yaw of echo. Ambient innit.

Francois Bayle: Various.

Cool!

Pierre Henry: Apocalypse de Jean.

What with "les jerks" his celebrated work with Michel Colombier (the man ALSO behind Serge Gainsbourg's "Histoire de Melody Nelson) you might be tempted to think Pierre Henry the joker of the pack. Not so, not so. While his "Mouvemente Rythme Etude" (also Phillips) is charming and technically stunning his work on the Prospective 21eme Siecle series is 'ard as nails. I'll confess to knowing next to nothing about the label itself. I've done a bit of nosing around, but can't find anything. Nothing too on the sleeves which are clearly classics of period design and match the beautiful but stern metallic music housed within. I'll wager there's some tie in with Varese and Xenakis's installation at the Pavilion Philips de l'Exposition Internationale de Bruxelles (1960), which I think I'm correct in saying was housed in a specifically designed Le Corbusier building, which drew on his pupil Xenakis's understanding of the qualities and possibilities inherent in concrete and which was summarily demolished after the fair. Nothing on the label in Roger Sutherland's excellent and comprehensive book "New Perspectives on Music" either.

Henry was a pupil of Boulanger's and Messaien's and it's clear as Pimms there's more than a smattering of Oliver Messaien's troubled catholocism to his work. Particularly in "Apocalypse de Jean", which is by some margin the scariest record I own. Surely a more fitting soundtrack to 9/11 than Enya? While slightly marred by Jean Negroni's overly sincere voiceover, in, er, French, there are some stunning passages to this: the rasping strident "Revelation"; from the "First tribulations, the Seven Seals and Seven Trumpets", "The Four Horses", notably the chillingly controlled overload of "The Black Horse"; "No wind on the earth" (I mean, these titles!); and from "Cataclysms II", "The third part of the sea became blood." On the cover shot, Henry looks like a cleric.

Pierre Henry: Le Voyage.

Not silver! Though squarely from the series. What do you think I am? Made of money! Though look here some greek chap is selling the original on eBay, a very few drachma for this great record which I routinely see for $240. I saw a wall of these silver records in New York as a matter of fact, not very good ones, all for $260 a pop, yikes. Buy buy buy! Actually the American 60's label this is on, Limelight, is a very interesting source of re-issues. I've seen a cool-looking Indian LP on it too. "Le Voyage", based conceptually on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the occult etc) is "a trip", and it's clear why this quite hippy-ish imprint should choose to license it. Ambitious stoner material... Like Apocalypse to Jean it's an horizontal record. Unlike those of, say Xenakis which are so vertically arranged as to be threatening to topple over.

Various: Xenakis/Berio/Maderna/Kagel.

I was really sad when Xenakis died. If you get the opportunity read Nouritza Matossian's Biography of him. It's the most wonderful book which I can unreservedly recommend to ANYONE at all. After completing it a few winters ago I almost left the house for good. And that's the kind of intense character Xenakis was. Other people value "Persepolis" (one of the other silver records) highly which you can now buy on CD. I'd also rate "La Legende D'Eer" incredibly highly. "Orient Occident" on this is a real bruiser, once again (like Stockhausen's "Telemusik") strong 4th World elements.

Les Percussions de Strasbourg: Americana

The best of their records. Nice version of Varese's "Ionisation" which succeeds in not making it sound like Gershwin (where many other versions fail). Good Cage track too.

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Well, you'd be lucky to find any of these at even halfway decent prices these days. But keep you're eyes peeled for a glint.

Posted by Woebot at September 4, 2003 03:11 PM