Twenty Albums of Inspiration Part 3
11. Various-Goodbye
Babylon
I’m not
including this 8 CD set for any spiritual reasons but more (and only) for the
fact that it’s a massive collection of arcane music from 1902-1960 (135 songs, 7
CDs) and an extra CD of fire and brimstone sermons recorded between 1926 to
1941. Some of this stuff is over a century old and still, through all the
crackles of old 78’s and the swirling mist of time, with it echoing through the
house, it somehow seems much more present than most things made during the past
thirty years or so.
The eighth
disc of the eight disc box set is comprised entirely of sermons recorded mainly
in the 1920’s all by various Reverends and Elders with titles that are so
evocative that hearing them makes it a mission by itself. Rev J M Gates’ “Gettin' Ready For Christmas Day” and “Death Might Be Your Santa
Claus” give an indication that it wouldn’t have been the jolliest of times
at the Gates household around December 25th. Rev J M Milton’s “The Black Camel of Death” has to be
heard to be believed and as for Rev Emmet Dickinson’s “Hell and What It Is”, if anything is going to persuade me to have a
life of total abstinence, well, Emmett’s graphic descriptions of what’s
awaiting me would point me in only one direction. I fear though that it may be
way too late for me anyway, irrespective of the fact that I’m a 100% confirmed
atheist. There are 24 tracks like this on this one disc and although reviews of
the box set have said that it all gets a bit monotonous and heavy, quite
frankly, to me it’s the best part of what is already a superb compilation.
What is odd I suppose, is that despite my beliefs, I
really do like all this stuff. Looking at it dispassionately and if I only read
the words that the assorted Reverends belt out (rather than listening to the
inherent musicality of it all) I’d find it a whole bunch of nonsense. There is
however, an intangible element of something else extra. Most of the tracks are
only sermons and a few have small choirs in the background urging the preachers
on. None of them have any instruments at all and the preachers never break out
into much of any recognisable tunes (except at random moments when it all gets
too much for them), but it must be the mere sound of the voices and the heartfelt
passion that make them sound like the most musical things you’ve ever heard.
This track (below), by the good Rev A W Nix, is one
of two on the CD (I figure it must have been recorded on a 78 as “Black Diamond Express From Hell Part I”
on one side and part 2 on the other). Without going through the whole thing,
the sermon is based on the fact that the there’s a train heading for hell, with
pleasure as the headlight, sin as the engineer and the devil as the conductor.
It’s stopping at various stations on the way to pick up those who the Rev
thinks are destined to end up in the fiery furnace-liars at one station,
drunkards at another, gamblers at a third, conjurors at the next and so on.
There are stations for deceivers, cheats, those who dance the Charleston on a
Saturday and go to Church on a Sunday-the list is endless. He even seems to
manage to squeeze in a station for the leaders of his own Church just in order
to settle a few scores. The best bit is towards the end when he bellows that
the train is fully loaded and re-stoked with brimstone and the throttle is
fully for the final descent. It sends a shiver down your spine. He breaks out
into a snippet of a hymn at the very end and sings that he’s so glad that he’s
not on the Black Diamond Express before ending the whole shebang with a final
“Amen”. After hearing this I’m convinced that all songs, spiritual or not,
should conclude with that as a sign-off.
this is part one (above)
...and this is part two (below)
12. High Rise-High
Rise II
Asahito Nanjo is a Japanese
underground musician, best known for his pyschedelic rock groups High Rise,Mainliner, and the ethnic improvisation unit Toho Sara. He has been active on the Tokyo underground scene since the late
seventies.
Part of his sonic
aesthetic is to record, mix, and master using extreme levels of dsitortion,dynamic range,compression, and clipping making the sound of
the instruments unrecognizable. The results can be said to contain elements of noise music.
Below are the main groups with which he has
been involved from 1979 to the present:
- Red Alert (psychedelic punk group, 79-81)
- Red (experimental performance, 79-89)
- Conformist (dark psychedelic group, 81-82)
- Deaf and Dumb House (aesthetic improvisation unit, 81-82)
- Virus Freak (avant-garde free rock group, 81-82)
- Tako (avant-garde performance group, 81-82)
- I’m useless (strange free rock unit centring around Tamio Shiraishi, 81-82)
- Telepatys going bad of Rotness (psychedelic punk group, 81-82)
- Kosokuya (psychedelic avant-garde group, 82-83)
- Sweet Inspirations (progenitor of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, 83-84)
- Psychedelic Speed Freaks (the ur-High Rise, 83-84)
- High Rise (heavy psychedelic group, 84 - present)
- Shokubaiya (improvised music unit, 88-89)
- Nijiumu (improv unit formed with Keiji Haino, 88-90)
- Ohkami no Jikan (dark psychedelic group, 90 - present)
- Ten no Okami (avant-garde unit, with Keiji Haino, 90-91)
- Johari (ethnic meets experimental, 90-92)
- Toho Sara (avant-garde shamanism, 92- present)
- Group Musica (avant-garde symphonic group, 94 - present)
- Bibliotheca Hermetica (avant-garde, 94 - present)
- Mysterious Adni (avant-garde, 94 - present)
- Ancient Wisdom (avant-garde, 94 - present)
- Splendour Solis (avant-garde, 94 - present)
- Up Tight (free jazz unit, 94 - present)
- Musica Transonic (psychedelic improvised music, 94 - present)
- Mainliner (heavy psychedelic noise rock group, 95 - present)
- Psychedelic Background (trip psychedelic group, 96 - present)
- Minus Three Years Old (new psychedelic blues band, with Keiji Haino, 96 - present)
You’d wonder where he would get the time to do
anything else-sleep, eat etc.
If it wasn’t for
the internet I would never had heard of High Rise or indeed, Asahito Nanjo.
In days gone by, when there were only record shops-remember them?- you may,
just may, by chance stumbles upon an odd ,weird, imported album in the dusty
recesses of your local independent record shop, Even then, if you hadn’t heard
it on John Peel’s show it would be a total enigma. It would have been an
expensive punt on something that you had absolutely no clue about.
(Back in the
early 80’s, I very nearly spent £20 (then over half of a week’s dole money) on
an imported Japanese album by a band called Phew! simply because the cover art
was so good and I liked the name of the band. I didn’t know anything about
them, the whole sleeve was in Japanese and I hadn’t heard anything about them
at all. I kept going back to the record shop and prevaricated for weeks until
one day it had disappeared. Someone else must have bought it! It always stuck
in my mind though and finally, sometime last year, I saw it on the net. It was
a bit like the Holy Grail of records that I’d never got. Upon hearing it
finally it had been very worthwhile remembering it.)
Anyway, back to
High Rise. This track is from High Rise II which was an international release
of High Rise’s first album released in Japan only called High Rise. They also
released an album in Japan only called High Rise II which is totally different
to the High Rise II internationally released album. It’s all a bit confusing.
I first came
across High Rise II (international edition etc) on a music blog dedicated to
all things obscure/noisy/arcane. Being a bit of a sucker for the premise that
the more obscure the better it was a simple step to get hold of it. I fully
expected it to be-especially considering all the other stuff recorded by Asahito
Nanjo- a curio, but frankly unlistenable. I was surprised when it turned out to
be although slightly off the wall, it was quite a hummable rock album. Not
something you would whistle whist cleaning your windows but it did have (some)
tunes on there. For an album that I really didn’t have high expectations of, I
am always puzzled by the fact that not only do I like it a lot but that I keep
coming back to it and playing it over and over again. There must be something
about it that I just can’t put my finger on.
It sounds a bit like some of the more outré tracks from the Pebbles
compilations mixed with hard hard rock, though in its (obscure) defence, the
vocals sound like they have been recorded by a man with a paper bag over his
head, singing from the bottom of a deep, deep well half a mile from the nearest
microphone. What greater recommendation can there be?
12. The Blue Nile-A
Walk Across the Rooftops
I was loaned a
copy of “A Walk Across The Rooftops” not long after it was released one of my
friends who said, “If you like Prefab Sprout, you’ll love this.”
It was all new
but I was ready to give it a go. Back home, with no-one else in the house, I
looked at the sleeve of the album for clues. Not much to go on really. A small
simple photograph of the band on the front-framed in white-most of the sleeves
was white with just the name of the band and the album in a plain thin font.
The back of the sleeve just listed the seven tracks. There was no printed inner
sleeve; it was just one of the plain paper ones. The record seemed to have been
pressed on good vinyl-it felt heavy. The label itself didn’t give much away
either -it was a faded blue/green colour with a Linn logo and a list of the
tracks. I’d made a cup of tea and I put the record on the turntable, settled
down and was prepared to hear a sub-Prefab Sprout copy. (Not that I didn’t
believe my mate but I had been led astray by some choices in the past; Danny
Wilson for example.) However, in this instance I can still, to this day,
remember crystal-clearly what it was like hearing Blue Nile for the first time.
The title track builds up so slowly and from being so quiet to something of
complete and utter revelation.
And that’s how I
still feel about The Blue Nile. Whenever I listen to them it’s like proper
grown-up music. Not AOR, not Dad-rock in any way, shape or form. It’s not pop
music, it’s not rock music. There are no histrionics, no flash. It’s just
honest, truthful, serious music. It’s not grown-up in the way that sometimes
classical music is perceived. It’s different to that and beyond it. Its music
that whenever I hear it I think to myself, “This is the way music should be.”
14. Mbuti Pygmies of The Iruti Rainforest- Mbuti Pygmies of The Iruti
Rainforest
This is possibly
one of the most obscure albums I have. It’s from a pair of albums recorded in
the early 1950s and is a collection of field-recordings from the Democratic
Republic of Congo (Zaire at the time these recordings were made). I didn’t have
the original 1950 albums-I got it sometime off the net when it had been issued
as a CD just because it sounded different.
It certainly
does sound different though. Most of the tracks are just vocals and repetitive
chants and singing. The titles of the tracks are just descriptions of what is
happening; “Elephant Hunt Song”, “First Monimo Song Sung Only On Occasions Of Great Importance”, “Honey Gathering Song” and so on. The
first track on the album is entitled “In the Rainforest Approaching a Forest
Camp”, and is credited to “Birds,
Crickets and Young Mbuti Pygmy Boys in the Ituri Rainforest.” It sounds
exactly how it is described. You hear the rustling of leaves and the gradually
increasing sound of birds and insects slowly overwhelmed by chanting voices.
It’s over half a century old but just close your eyes and listen to it. It
sounds as if you are right in the middle of some green canopied forest with barely
any light; yet it’s from a strange continent and fifty years ago. The rest of
the tracks are hypnotic in the extreme; it is difficult to estimate how long
each of them lasts. They could be two, three or ten minutes long.(I’ve just
looked at the track times-the longest is 5 minutes, the shortest is 59 seconds
and most of them clock in at about 2 minutes or so.) This is not a criticism
but rather the reverse. The sheer repetitiveness and rhythmic nature of each
track makes time a slight irrelevance. There are a few tracks where basic
instruments are used-sticks to beat out a tune, simple stringed and strange
instruments and a flute song (called “Flute
Song”). According to the liner notes, these instruments were either
“borrowed or stolen.” It makes me wonder how old these songs and chants
were-had they remained unchanged for tens of thousands of years? Has it all
gone now? Is it all now listening to rap on beatboxes?
I do have to ask
myself, “Do I only like this music because it is strange and exotic or because
I actually appreciate it?” As with any music that is “different”, I think that
this is an impossible question to answer truthfully. Well, if not truthfully
but realistically. I don’t think that you can really disentangle what you feel
about this sort of music from any preconceptions you may have, or how you
respond to anything that has been labelled “world”, or “ethnic”, or whatever.
(By the way I detest the term “world” music; surely everything we listen to is
world music?). All I know is that I do enjoy listening to this- I wouldn’t have
played it more than once if I didn’t and listened to it on long car journeys
when driving alone. It makes a change from guitars and drums. (It is good however,
to pop the CD out and say to my 21 year-old son, “Enough of Coldplay, let’s
rock out with some Mbuti Pygmy music.”)
15. Kate Bush-The Hounds of Love
In my
stratosphere of appreciation there are only a few who tick all boxes. There are
some artists who have released great albums/singles over the years and some who
can be valued because they pursue interesting directions and push at boundaries
but sometimes flop and can’t keep the quality going. There are those who are
interesting in themselves but part of that that makes them interesting is that
they are inherently flawed. All of these are worthwhile and good and have
produced music that I have loved over the years. There aren’t many artists who
have consistently released great music and continually do challenging work. Off
the top of my head and without being a bit listist-Bob Dylan, The Fall, Flaming
Lips. There’s Bruce Springsteen and Blind Willie McTell. And Kate Bush.
Where to start
with Kate Bush? I know exactly the moment when the penny dropped for me. It
wasn’t upon the release of “Wuthering
Heights” or any of her first few albums. They kind of passed me by. I
thought that they were ok-ish but only really heard the singles and even then
only on TOTP. There was a lot of nonsense about Kate Bush being only for Dads
and her astounding beauty etc. I honestly can say that this definitely went
over my head at the time and even now I see it a total red herring. Between “Wuthering
Heights” and “the moment”, I was more preoccupied with post-punk stuff and,
in retrospect, had fairly limited horizons. It would be stuff that John Peel
would play by and large and tend only to be on indie labels. Major label and
commercial music was out.
Anyway, it was a
Saturday afternoon in September 1985 and I was alone in the shared house I was
renting. I know it was a Saturday afternoon as I was listening to a Radio 1
magazine-type show, hosted by Richard Skinner. I was cleaning the stairs when
he introduced an item about Kate Bush’s new forthcoming album, “The Hounds of Love.” I would have
normally let this waft over me or turned to Radio 4. Because I was busy and had
my hands full; the radio was in another room, I simply couldn’t be bothered.
The item was a fairly lengthy interview with Kate Bush and with clips of the
album. I listened to it with increasing wonder-this sounded brilliant -in all
senses of the word. The sound itself was so clear and sharp, quite unlike the
Rough Trade stuff that was my then current stock-in-trade.
The fact that it
was a semi-concept album should have put me off but it was intriguing in
itself-possibly a sign that I was getting a bit bored with the same old stuff.
I shouldn’t have liked this hippy-ish idea but found myself doing less and less
of the cleaning and listening more and more intently to the interview. By the
time the item had finished I was convinced and converted. I went into town
first thing on the Monday morning and bought the album. No
prevarication-straight to HMV at 9.00 a.m. It is still up there as one of my
all time favourite records-at least in the top ten and probably the top three.
(Looking at the internet for the release date of “Hounds of Love”, I see it was
September 16th 1985. Presuming that the item ran on the Saturday
before then that must have been the 14th of September. I do remember
it was a warm, sunny afternoon and recall sitting on the top of the stairs,
sunlight streaming across the landing, with a cup of tea by my side and the
duster discarded.)
Since then, over
the past twenty-odd years or so, I’ve got hold of all her studio albums, really
early demos and a couple of live shows. Without fault they are on their own,
head and shoulders above most other music, fascinating, brilliant and well,
just different.
Possibly stating
that they are head and shoulders above everything else is a bit much. Maybe
that are on a whole different plane from most other music would be more apt.
A bit like Kate Bush herself-a whole different
plane(t).
Part 4-the final part!-and what a way to finish is on the way....
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