William Basinski's Face (2)

William Basinski has entered the fray in the comments boxes here; and he offered a link to the real mid 80s Basinski:



His main site is here.

Cheers for the link....

A Curious Sucked Orange

As a continuation / logical extension of conversational tics here, I'm now thinking that the character from the front of the A Sucked Orange compilation might be the logical sidekick for the cartoon Professor Brawnstawm-Stapleton Undertaker... an elemental being, similar in theory to the daemons of the His Dark Materials books... an irrationalist Hobbes to Calvin... Leviathan Rising...

Maybe Mark E Smith could be another sidekick... in his ghost-hunter guise... his slipping false teeth themselves deadly weapons of limited range...

Maybe Joe Meek playing the John Barrowman role?

Professor Branestawm

Fangs And Arrows

Having fun here at the minute... becoming quite a little repository of cyclical sounds... including lots of OOP Pocahaunted / The Skaters stuff...

The Link that was here is no longer

Rainbow Arabia

I'm not sure: I've listened and read a few reviews and then listened again and while of course there's a playful ethnographic forgery about Rainbow Arabia's music, it's slanted with such a Western edge that it reminds me less of Congotronics or Omar Souleyman (who's all over their myspace site) than the drum-piles of a sugar-rushed 23 Skidoo (which in turn leads to Gang Gang Dance, I guess).

Rainbow Arabia - Harlem Sunrise

Rainbow Arabia - Holiday in Congo



But then I'd listen again and that doesn't quite sit either. It's odd to not be able to get a fix on these guys because the music is blissful and funny and not at all complex... maybe it's because the music is so wonderfully inauthentic (regular readers will know this is generally a good thing)...

- - - inauthentic has always confused me - - -

(they should drop the posing with guns though; very few people can get away with that stick and none of them are rainbows...)

...to me a lot of their stuff seems like the furrier, fluffier edges of dubstep, putting them alongside, say, Various Productions in the same way that El Guincho sits with Animal Collective and seem to be reading off the same page...

El Guincho - Kalise

El Guincho - Palmitos Park

Dubstep's tribalism never seemed particularly tribal but here, in the desert wails, the codas, the slumfested drums, the desert and the tiny tropicalic squiggles of Rainbow Arabia there's a few new patterns emerging...

Still don't get Gang Gang Dance though; music shape shifted all wrong. I'm gonna give up trying I think.

MP3s stolen from Test-Pilots

Tone Vale

Not-Kek's perhaps non-canonical comment somewhere below made me think of here... I think I might do a tour of derelict insane asylums for next years holidays...

Actually, reading the comments below all the pictures reads like a slowly unfolding horror story and I feel a bit guilty about all the vicious jokes that used to roll around school about this place...

Still "E's gone up the Vale in e? Like a ship without a sail..."

Sunn O))) - B-Witch

Disney-La-La-Landings

ittttss a smaaaall whirled, after alll....

Emeralds - Damaged Kids

In Disney, sound is everywhere... utterly controlled... ideologically sound and yet ripe for cherry picking... wishes merge with dreams... the attention to sound detail is exact; you'd think the songs would merge more than they do, you have to make a real (accidental) effort to stand in the right place for the harmonies to drift together... and then everything does start to sound like Vodka Soap or the messier bits of Emeralds or the cleaner bits of The Skaters, even Kylie Minoise...

And then there's Pocahaunted, of course; Disney's tangles slowed right down... their feminine fuzz is the sound of places here, you just need to know which way the wind is blowing...

Pocahaunted - Hideous

Pocahaunted - Demon

it's a world of laughter, a world or tears
its a world of hopes, its a world of fear
theres so much that we share
that its time we're aware
its a small world after all

And Disney is scary; there's masses of people here of course but look closely and you'll see that there's not masses of children...

Where have they all gone? How have they grown up so fast?

So, instead of childlike wonder and simplicity you get something akin to Children Of Men; imagine this place with the fugue of War, Disney as Crass Collage or else everything turning into brightly-hued rubble and sand-art; Europe After The Rain...

The place is full of Notre Dame gargoyles; turning this bright star into a Current 93 album cover; you can't quite see them but you know they're there... The Daemons... Jon Pertwee's Dandy Doctor would fit right in here, would slip seemlessly alongside the Mary Poppins guy, the nu ravers pumping out Mickey's Magical Party Time...

I've seen Bessie.

God knows why people would come here without children but they do; groups of teenagers (emogoth kids with Disney ears - brilliant), groups of adults, couples... yeah, for sure some are with groups of kids, students, whatever; some are just kicking their heels, some are pretending towards irony (though I wonder how many can sustain it to the end of the day?) but many many others are here because they want to be, because they understand that it is for them...

its a small world after all
its a small world after all
its a small world after all
its a small, small world

This is a brilliantly conceived adult environment, pretending to be for children...

We spent a lot of time secretly cursing the adults in the queue, turning into Parent Fascists ("...they shouldn't let them in without a child. Ban the fuckers..."), watching as people old enough to drive pretended to drive in tiny sports cars or space ships...

The space stuff is Jules Verned steam-punk space not the cleanlines of its American Cousin. The space of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, of Tesla coils, of Howl's Moving Castle...

There is just one moon and one golden sun
And a smile means friendship to everyone.
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It's a small small world

Take the adults without children out the place and the queues would just disappear... $$$$$$$$$lide... Disney would die... Walt's head would unfreeze, tumble out and frighten the children into playing football...*

It's a small world....

*cf. the loss of Sanity Points in Call Of Cthulhu when witnessing a gigantic severed head falling from the sky...

May

Bought May on DVD for 75p* at a boot sale on Sunday. Liked it, especially the bit about necks. Sure I've seen this film before and then forgotten it but can't figure out how to test my memory in that way anymore. The mechanic / love interest guy in it looks like someone I knew at Uni who seemed to believe he might be Jim Morrison (or maybe he meant James Morrison) and ended up singing himself into a bout of gangrene. I think he might have played Jesus at some point.

The final scene works despite itself and the slowburnings of the first hour or so make this something a little more than you'd expect from a (sort of ) Zombie and Cheerleader flick.

Slightly disorientating to see Anna Faris in there too; like watching Dawson in The Rules of Attraction. Great stuff.

*no idea why you have to know how much I paid for this but I'm working on it and i'll get back to you... I'm pretty sure I've done this kind of thing before

William Basinski's Face

William Basinski and a young Nick Cave

This is exactly what I was thinking. William Basinski's face is all wrong.

Not at all like i imagined... I guess I had Philip Jeck in mind; a face that was suitably crepuscular, a face borne from dust and late-night cheap studio space... didn't imagine Clint Ruin / Jim Thirlwell circa 1987 to be staring out at me...

This cannot be William Basinski...

I had the same with Joanna Newsom - i was convinced she was an old fisherwoman, a dry-haired, blockboned old woman, dragged from the depths or found in some Woody Guthrie backwater... and then when pictures started to emerge even the sound started to change...

This musical form of prosopagnosia might be everywhere... a completely different listening experience from situations where you see and hear at the same time... a beautiful lack of congruence...

For contrast, I can remember sitting around with friends imagining Bjork and getting it more or less exactly right... and doing the same for Blixa Bargeld, that Neubauten scream somehow forming a soundwave of his Skeletor / Ivan Lendl cheekbones like a pin-art howl...

Pic of Nic and Jim stolen from here

White Noise Records

In Hong Kong I found my favourite record shop room - White Noise Records - tucked upstairs and around corners in a place you'd have to be guided to - cheers Farmer Glitch.

Bought a few things, including a nastily orange Kemialliset Ystavat t-shirt which my son thinks is embarrassing.

No idea what these are; blindly posting, idiot. God.

Ceyhan Candlir - 41st Century Splendid Man

Daniel Vallejo - 41st Century Splendid Man