Francis Monkman - Energism (1978) & Paul Hart - Futurism (1981) (2015 compilation)

Two albums from the classic British libary music label Bruton, beautifully remastered on one CD from Dutton Vocalion - got quite a few CDs from the latter in recent months.  Their website (duttonvocalion.co uk) is worth a browse: very cheap in the "bargain basement", and they reissue tons of easy listening, exotic & library music in superb sound quality.  More will appear here in due course (Terry Durham already has, along with a couple of others early on, Stanley Black IIRC).

Bruton Music was founded in 1977 as a label that would produce modern-sounding library music with British composers and musicians, and were known for their iconic colour-coded LP sleeves.  Dark orange was for electronic music, and contained here are two cracking early examples of this line.  The reissue cover art above is an amalgam of the two, which are Engergism ("The doctrine of materialism that right action is the efficient exercise of normal capacities") by Francis Monkman, and Futurism ("Aesthetic movement pointing the way to the future") by Paul Hart - love those little text descriptions Bruton added to the covers, the first one in particular reads a bit like a Stereolab lyric.

The 29-minute long Engergism is a great little collection of mostly upbeat, bright themes by Curved Air/Sky keyboardist Monkman. Burbling synth arpeggios, nifty percussion and twanging bass abound, as do some really nice earwormy melodies.  This is definitely library music at its finest (just very good electronic music too - it was reissued on Klaus Schulze's IC label), and the 43 minutes of Hart's Futurism that follow are even better.  The tracks by this library music stalwart are in a similar vein, beautifully composed and arranged, but have longer tracks on average, two of them in fact nudging six minutes.  Program out the 11-second Pace Of Change reprise (a giveaway that you're listening to a library LP) and Futurism could again just be a really good instrumental synth record.  That Pastorious-esque fretless bass on Times To Come is another sweet addition to a great album.

link

pw: sgtg

Ashra - Blackouts (1977)

Third solo album by Manuel Göttsching, and second that he did under the abbreviated Ash Ra Tempel name "Ashra", before they became a proper band again at the end of the 70s.  Blackouts was a further refinement of the echo guitar plus electronics sound of New Age Of Earth, with Göttsching heading for shorter, melodic tracks other than the 17-minute Lotus suite at the end.  Opening with the catchy '77 Slightly Delayed, the tempo comes down next for Midnight On Mars with its intro's interesting resemblance to Marquee Moon by Television, and so on to make for a very strong and varied album.  The funky Shuttlecocks is definitely my favourite thing here.

link

pw: sgtg

Manuel Göttsching at SGTG:

Inventions For Electric Guitar

Le Berceau De Cristal

E2-E4

Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard & Steve Swallow - Trios (2013)

With the release of Trios, legendary jazz composer Carla Bley finally moved over from Watt, the ECM-distributed label that had released her music for decades, to the Manfred mothership.  This first appearance on ECM tied in with the re-establishment of the Bley-Sheppard-Swallow trio, whose last album in this format had been Songs With Legs in 1994.  They've since released a further two albums.

Trios offered no great surprises in the tracklist, being a Thelonious Monk-like revisitation of earlier compositions.  But like Monk, this just underlines how durable and outstanding Bley's iconoclastic body of work as a writer is.  The three lengthy suites here, with two shorter tracks upfront, might largely date back to the 80s, but they're cast afresh here as gorgeous immersions in sumptuous chamber jazz.  The simple palette of Bley's piano, Swallow's nimble bass guitar and Sheppard's breathy sax make for nothing short of a masterpiece that lets the strength of the writing and playing stand centre stage, and is a delight to return to over and over.

link

pw: sgtg

Carla Bley at SGTG:

The Jazz Composers Orchestra

Fleur Carnivore

Appearing Nightly

Shigeaki Saegusa & DKW-57349 - Radiation Missa (1981)

An electronic-prog mass for... I'm guessing Hiroshima/Nagasaki, given the album title?  That's all I can really guess about this incredibly strange release by composer Shigeaki Saegusa (b. 1942 in Tokyo, seems to have gone on to do both manga soundtracks and orchestral/chamber works); there's lengthy liner notes for this CD, but only in Japanese.  Googling didn't really help, generally just showing up copies of the record for sale with brief descriptions of its content.

 

The lineup details of the four-keyboard, vocodered vocals and drums ensemble "DKW-57349" who perform the work are written in English, so their names are Minoru Mukaiya, Hiroyuki Nanba, Satoshi Nakamura, Nobuo Kurata (all keys), Yukimasa Morimoto (vocoder) and Daiji Okai (drums).  From looking up their other activities, the only band name I recognised was the jazz-fusion outfit Casiopea, who Mukaiya was a member of.

Anyway, if you've always wondered what the standard Latin mass would sound like arranged for an early 80s keyboard army of prog-minded Japanese musicians, with the text sung through a vocoder throughout, you've come to the right place.  Radiation Missa certainly gets full marks from me for utter uniqueness, as well as some nifty fusion grooves here and there, and ingenious arrangements - especially on the 11-minute Credo.  That longest track even has a neat drum solo towards the end, with phaser effects all over it.  In another highlight, the piano-based Benedictus is a nice calm interlude from all the crazy twists and turns.  Just a couple of the lovely quirks of this odd record - if anyone knows more about Radiation Missa, I'd love to hear about how it came to be.

Original LP cover

link

pw: sgtg

Eno, Moebius, Roedelius - After The Heat (1978)

The second Cluster & Eno album (link to first one below), this time credited to their three individual names - perhaps with the more pervasive Eno influence, this one was felt to be a truer three-way collaboration.  

 

After The Heat is well named: there's a fair amount of cold and dark among the drifting ambient atmospheres on this album, and in the more rhythmic tracks like Foreign Affairs and The Belldog, the latter with a suitably unsettling Eno vocal.  Eno sings on two more tracks, Broken Head and the reversed vocal of Tzima N'Arki, which is also anchored by a Holger Czukay guest spot.  And of course, there's the requisite amount of Roedelius piano gorgeousness on Luftschloss and The Shade.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: Cluster & Eno

Frank Zappa/Mothers Of Invention - Roxy & Elsewhere (1974)

Had a big Zappa re-appraisal phase in the last couple of months, so expect a few more posts.  Here's over an hour of jaw-dropping musicianship and low-brow comedy based mostly on live recordings from December 1973.  With some of Zappa's greatest ever musicians on board, including Ruth Underwood, Chester Thompson and George Duke, Roxy captures the jazz fusion Mothers at their finest - never better IMO than in the pairing of Echidna's Arf (Of You) and Don't You Ever Wash That Thing.  Some of the humour might be dated, but the music is timeless from start to finish.  Village Of The Sun, a genuinely sweet (but still oddball) rumination on Zappa's formative years, might be my favourite thing here.

 

Link(s) updated July 2021!

source: Rykodisc CD 1995

source: Zappa Records CD 1992 (original mix: Cheepnis sounds distinctly different; other tracks may have minor differences)

pw for both: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG: 

Lumpy Gravy

The Perfect Stranger (live 2018)

John Martyn - Inside Out (1973)

Jazzy folkiness turned, yep, inside out, by the artist's quest for sonic experimentation.  The artist being John Martyn (1948-2009), who was first described to me as "Nick Drake discovering krautrock", and yes, that works here and there.  The almost-title track is one of Martyn's most striking examples of his mastery of the Echoplex unit, working up a Göttsching-like rhythmic storm.  It then dissolves into near-formless ambience during Bobby Keys' sax solo, but is always underpinned (as throughout the album) by Danny Thompson's rock solid bass.

Two completely instrumental tracks further cement this as Martyn's most out-there studio album: a nifty arrangement of the Irish folk tune Eibhli Ghail Chiuin ni Chearbhail and a superb piece named for his then-wife Beverley.  Beyond that are some superb songs, personal favourites being the lengthy Make No Mistake and the album opener Fine Lines, which sounds the closest to Nick Drake and also to this album's better-known predecessor Solid Air.  Inside Out always edges it for me though, with its much looser, live-in-the-studio feel.

link

pw: sgtg

Terry Durham - Crystal Telephone (1969)

Final edit: solved the mystery of this disappearing post.  Blogger pulled it as they wanted to check the YouTube link for viruses or something, and have now okayed it.  So here's the original back!

 

Sole solo album release (he also formed part of a folk band, Storyteller, in the early 70s) by abstract/figurative artist and poet Terry Durham (1936-2013).  This record was originally released on the Deram label, with by music by composer/arranger John Coleman.  Very much a product of its era, Crystal Telephone has become something of a cult item in recent years, positing Durham as "Yorkshire's answer to Serge Gainsbourg".  Have a listen to the clip from BBC Radio 6 Music in the YouTube insert below for a very funny broadcast of one of the album's tracks - for anyone confused about the announcer's references to "tabs", in this context it's a Northern English colloquialism for cigarettes.

With a crack team of British session musicians and jazz artists behind him, the album features Durham reciting his poetry (and occasionally singing) over a backing that's sometimes groovy and bluesy, sometimes sweetly orchestrated, on one occasion furious free jazz (check out the end of Branwell's Corner!), and always listenable and enjoyable.  Some tracks are amusing in a kind of cod-beat poetry way, others have aged better and are more affecting - Fryston Main is a poignant look at the decline of the British mining industry over a brass band playing Abide With Me, which works incredibly well.  One of these sweet little obscurities that's well worth discovering.

link

pw: sgtg

Keith Jarrett Trio - Standards In Norway (rec. 1989, rel. 1995)

Typically transcendent telepathy from Jarrett, Peacock & DeJohnette, recorded in October 1989 at the Konserthus, Oslo, then released six years later in what now sounds like one of their very best live albums.  A slinky mid-tempo All Of You gives way to a gorgeous Little Girl Blue (lovely Peacock solo there), to a groovy Just In Time, and so on.  So no great surprises in the song selection, but then this trio's essence was always in taking the over-familiar and making it shine afresh like material that could've been composed yesterday.

link

pw: sgtg

The Standards Trio at SGTG:

Setting Standards: The New York Sessions

Changeless

Tribute (recorded on the same tour as Standards In Norway)

At The Blue Note: Saturday, June 4th 1994, 1st Set

Tokyo '96

Iannis Xenakis - Musique Electroacoustique (2001 compilation)

Two great slabs of 80s electroacoustic immersion from an old SGTG favourite.  The first and longer of the two is Pour La Paix (1981-2) for tape, choir and narrator, and across 26 minutes it tells the story of two children who grow up to be enemy soldiers.  Even if you can't follow the lengthy French text (written by Françoise Xenakis, the composer's wife), it's still a great sonic experience that suggests various radio stations trying to tune in to the narrative, whilst the choir sing key words and phrases from the text.

The second piece shifts from earthly concerns out into space, in the 15 minutes of Voyage Absolu Des Unari Vers Andromeda (1989).  Commissioned for the Goethe Institute of Japan's International Exposition of Paper Kites, it was fully composed on the UPIC system developed by Xenakis, and is a striking evocation of outer-space exploration in the far future.  This track could've sat nicely on Xenakis' Electronic Muisc compilation (see Bohor, etc in links list), where it would've bridged the chronological gap between Hibiki-Hana-Ma (another exposition-in-Japan commission) and S709, one of his latest computer-generated works.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:

Nuits

Rebonds B

Akrata

Atrées, Morsima-Amorsima etc
Evryali/Herma
Phlegra, Jalons etc
Oresteïa
Synaphaï
Persephassa
Ata, Jonchaies etc
Pléiades/Psappha
Bohor etc
Kraanerg
Terretektorh/Nomos Gamma
La Légende D'Eer
Persepolis

Michael Rother - Katzenmusik (1979)

Third album by NEU!/Harmonia guitarist, and a further refinement of the melodic, cyclic music he'd established on his first two solo efforts, also collaborations with Jaki Liebezeit and Conny Plank.  Rother's increasingly clean-toned guitars (his formative influence of Hank Marvin really shining through) burn these simple, indelible melodies into your brain from the first listen, and make Katzenmusik a joy to return to over and over.

As well as the literal meaning of "music for cats", the album's title is also a German idiom for a "musical racket" - clearly an ironic choice on Rother's part for such sunny, joyous and ordered music.  Melodic material from earlier sections leads to variations in later ones, with the sparkling production adding to the constant gentle evolution as well as throwing the occasional curveball (the "everything reversed except the drums" wash of part 8 is one highlight of many).  This gorgeous record is probably the high point of Rother's post-Harmonia music, at least for me.  Anyone heard the new ambient album he put out last year?  Worth picking up?

link

pw: sgtg

Weather Report - Mysterious Traveller (1974)

After two initial exploratory records (links below) and something of a transitional third one, Weather Report were well on the way to the tighter compositions and funkier grooves they became famous for.  This didn't suit everyone on board, and amid general acrimony, founding bassist Miroslav Vitouš headed for the exit, represented here only by his brief co-write with Zawinul, American Tango.  Still a couple of years away from the arrival of their definitive bass player, WR's journeys into funk on this album, Cucumber Slumber and the title track, were underpinned by Alphonso Johnson.

As well as it being increasingly tighter and well-composed throughout (Zawinul writing the lion's share, with a Shorter feature in the middle), I love Mysterious Traveller primarily as an album full of atmospheres.  The production still sounds great, making all the more vivid (as does the cover art) the title track's evocation of visitation by the galaxy's funkiest aliens.  Also on the album's second side, Scarlet Woman is similarly eerie, and the closing Jungle Book returns to earth with the wide open space atmosphere of Pat Metheny's later experimental ventures like As Falls Wichita.

link

pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:

s/t debut

I Sing The Body Electric

Cluster - Sowiesoso (1976)

'Evening all.  How's your year going so far?

A few old favourites this week I reckon, starting with the Moebius & Roedelius partnership at its most majestic.  Well established in rural Forst by 1976, with the sunnier, melodic edge of Harmonia increasingly feeding back in to their main project, the results on Sowiesoso were sublime.  The opening track pulses on a single chord, gradually building until it dances around your ears.  Next are a pair of beautifully mellow tracks cut from the same cloth as the more sedate material on Harmonia Deluxe, setting the pace for the rest of the album other than the oddball Umleitung (which I remember being likened somewhere or other to "the sound of drunk shepherds").

If their reunion in the late 80s ended up being called Apropos Cluster, the three tracks that make up Side Two of Sowiesoso are nothing less than Apotheosis Cluster.  The aching melody of Zum Wohl stretches across seven minutes, gradually building like the title track as the green acres of Forst turn brilliant red at sunset, with bird and animals at play.  Es War Einmal comes closest to representing the album cover, gazing out at a gently lapping lake as the evening wears on.  Finally, In Ewigkeit takes us to twlight and beyond, and the forest life turns nocturnal.

link

pw:sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:

Cluster & Eno 

Live In Vienna

Curiosum

Apropos Cluster

Qua