Heathen Child

In 2010 Nick Cave's Bad Seeds offshoot Grinderman released their second album, Grinderman 2. Grinderman was very much a chance to do something away from the sometimes heavy expectations and history of the Bad Seeds, to play and have a little fun, 'less narrative' and 'more impressionistic' according to Nick. The first single from the album was Heathen Child and the video was not a standard Nick Cave piece of filmmaking... 

'Hey little Momo/ Light as a rainbow/ Heavy as an asteroid/ Sitting in the bath tub'. A girl in a very milky looking bathtub. A wolf. Nick, Warren, Jim and Martyn dressed as Greek warriors. Laser beams blasting from eyes. Asteroids. Dancing. Horror. Sci fi. A smoke monster. Machine guns. Dancing. The wolfman. 

Heathen Child (Radio Edit)

Musically the blasts of distorted electric guitar and primitive drums are a garage punk thrill, as are the explosive, noisy choruses. It sounds like everyone had a good time making it. 

There was a limited edition 12" single with an alternate take of the song with Robert Fripp on additional guitar- slightly longer, a bit gnarlier and more heathen. 

Super Heathen Child

More? There was also an Andrew Weatherall remix, Andrew and Timothy J. Fairplay stripping Grinderman down to the basics and extending them out; some drums, isolated bits of Nick's vocal, percussion and laser beams and a large wobbly synth bassline. 

Heathen Child (Andrew Weatherall Bass Mix)

Monday's Long Song

In 1993 David Sylvian and Robert Fripp released a single- Jean The Birdman- across two CDs with different B-sides on the pair. CD Two came with Endgame, a beautiful, understated acoustic song, and the ten minute and fourteen second wonder that is Earthbound/ Starblind. Effectively, it's two songs stuck together. The first half is David singing over acoustic guitar, close and melodic with lyrics about magic and nature and a woman who is 'giving me questions and quizzical looks/ She tears up my papers and burns all my books', someone who has 'been through this world before'. At four minutes seventeen seconds the second half starts, six minutes of Frippertronics, the conjuring of ambient guitar soundscapes. The first half is earthbound I guess and the second half is starblind. 

Earthbound/ Starblind

Fire Tower

This is very good indeed, a ten minute advance on a full album coming out in June, from the combined talents of The Grid and Robert Fripp. Back in 1992 Dave Ball and Richard Norris worked with Fripp with some of these recordings saw the light of day on the albums 456 and Evolver. Recently Richard rediscovered the tapes from the sessions which included unreleased material, unfinished and unmixed tracks. Some new synths and drums, FX and some technical jiggery- pokery were then added to Fripp's '92 soundscapes and voila!, a new album called Leviathan. Fire Tower is a ten minute treat, programmed beats, long tones and drones, bags of texture and atmosphere- something to sink into on a rainy day. 

Monday's Long Songs

In 1985 Brian Eno recorded what could be his purest expression of ambient music, the sixty one minutes of Thursday Afternoon, a drifting, reflective piano piece, endless and unchanging. It seems to be as long as one of those Thursday afternoons we all experience as children where the rain keeps us indoors and there is nothing to do or the listlessness we feel as teenagers. An hour listening to this is time well spent- I suppose that's a lesson we learn as kids and in our teens, that doing nothing requires a certain kind of resilience. Eno captures the essence of doing nothing, something we've returned to at points this year. 

Eno's 1973 album with Robert Fripp (No Pussyfooting) was an experiment in tape delays and Fripp's guitar playing, parts of which were then turned into loops, creating this dense, layered piece of work. Side two of the album was taken up with a track called Swastika Girls (named after a picture from a porn magazine) and is a far less tranquil and reflective affair, an eighteen minutoe long experiment in disconnected bursts of Fripp's guitar and tape delay noises. Bowie and Iggy loved it apparently. 

Swastika Girls

Monday's Long Songs

David Sylvian's name has popped up in a few places recently, largely unconnected I think (although these things usually end up being connected somehow). I read about his solo albums in Rob Young's Electric Eden book, a long meandering trawl through British folk music and how in the 80s various people- Sylvian, Talk Talk, Cope- reconnected with visionary folk music in one way or another. Then, having moved on and semi- forgot about it he came back via social media and then came up in conversation with a friend who's a big Bowie fan when talking about Fripp. I dug a little into Youtube but didn't buy anything and again moved on. Then last week digging around Richard Norris' Soundcloud page, a proper treasure trove of tracks, remixes and versions, I found his 1993 remix of Sylvian and Fripp. Richard took the original track, Darshan (The Road To Graceland), a seventeen minute epic and remixed it, shaving a minute off in the process. An ambient opening section followed by a long, funky, experimental art- pop journey with a '93 house beat.



Sylvian and Fripp the turned up a few days ago at Echorich's place (linked on yesterday's post) with the dreamy two and half minutes of Endgame, ambient opening and then acoustic guitar and voice, which has sent me scurrying down a rabbithole. The Richard Norris remix of Darshan came out on a CD mini- album, only three songs long but well over forty minutes long in total. Richard Norris's remix, the original version and this ten minute ambient psychedelic swirl re-construction from the Future Sound Of London. Float on. Ambient special as i-D noted in '93.

Start Up

Far be it from me to take the corporate shilling and promote a multinational corporation- but almost all of use Windows don't we? If not Windows then Apple? And I'm not being paid anyway. Months ago someone directed me to these on Twitter, possibly Davy H of the much missed and still sadly inactive Ghost Of Electricity blog. To mark the occasion of the 20th birthday of Windows 95 ideoforms put these onto Soundcloud, the Windows 95 start up sound slowed down by 4000%, followed by the same slowed down effects for Windows 98, 2000, NT, Vista and XP.

All of them become rather wonderful, ambient, Eno-esque moods rather than the brief and sometimes irritating sound of your operating system bursting into life. Eno actually contributed to the creation of the 95 jingle and Robert Fripp did the Vista one. You could probably slow many things down and get them to sound like Eno and turn them into interesting ambient pieces. But like the person in the art gallery who points and says 'my five year old could have done that', it's the doing it that's important.