{music} – Page 29 – { feuilleton }

György Ligeti, a film by Michel Follin

2023 is the centenary of György Ligeti’s birth so here’s an hour-long French documentary about the composer directed by Michel Follin. György Ligeti was made in 1993, two years after Leslie Megahey’s BBC crew had paid a return visit to Ligeti’s apartment to film an update to the Omnibus profile from 1976, All Clouds Are Clocks. The two documentaries complement each other rather well, although you’ll have to take my word for this since Megahey’s film has yet to appear on any video site. Both films interview Ligeti at the studio table where he wrote many of his compositions, and where he talks about his musical interests and intentions.

The two films differ in their approach to the world outside Ligeti’s window. Megahey concentrated on the music, illustrating a number of lengthy recording extracts with footage of melting clocks, a wooden puppet, etc, whereas Follin attends to the biography, with Ligeti relating his personal history while also describing the evolution of his musical ideas. Ligeti’s youth was a tumultuous one, encompassing the upheavals of the Second World War, during which he lost half his family to the Holocaust, and the later Communist years in Hungary when the kinds of modern music that he was trying to write were proscribed by the State. It’s good to see him confirm the importance of Bartók’s music to his growth as a composer. Ligeti’s oeuvre contains many Bartók-like moments but I’ve often thought that regarding these as any kind of influence or reference might be a lazy comparison based on a shared nationality.

All of this reminds me that I recently picked up a copy of the 5-disc Ligeti Project in a charity shop but still haven’t listened to it all the way through. Charity shops can be useful (and cheap!) sources of modern composition if you don’t mind trawling week after week through iterations of the classics. Secondhand shops were my first introduction to music like this, providing the opportunity to sample the recordings of those mysterious names at a bargain price. Bargains are still to be found if you’re patient, as with the Ligeti box. Other recent discoveries include Without Sinking by Hildur Gudnadóttir, and Memoryhouse, the first album by Max Richter, both of which were bought for a fraction of their usual asking price.

(A note about the film subtitles. These are an amateur translation which fails to recognise the names of Gyula Krúdy—the writer whose work Ligeti describes finding at an early age—and Paul Hindemith, the German composer.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Grand Macabre
• A playlist for Halloween: Orchestral and electro-acoustic
• Metronomes

Weekend links 680

15 Miles into the Earth (1944) by Hendrik Wijdeveld.

• “He realized that there were individuals around him who had never appeared in the great altarpieces and frescoes, individuals who had been marginalized by the cultural ideology of the previous two centuries. And there were hours of the day—transient, yet unequivocal in their lighting—which had never been reproduced, and which were pushed so far from habit and use that they had become scandalous, and therefore repressed.” Pasolini on Caravaggio.

• “Reading Albert Camus and Mikhail Bulgakov by day, by night, crucially, they were listening to Chic, Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, Michael Rother and Grace Jones in the clubs.” Graeme Thomson on the atmosphere and influences that helped create my favourite album by Simple Minds, Empires And Dance. Borges was also a minor influence, apparently, which wasn’t something I knew until this week. I like it when your favourite things join up this way.

• “This being England, a ‘tea shop’ is not a shop that sells tea. That would be a tea merchant. A tea shop serves tea.” Mark Valentine on the perennial connections between rambling and tea-drinking.

Talking about generations as if they really existed and had sway over people is much more respectable and widespread than the belief that events and personalities are governed by the movements of the planets. But is there really much more substance and reality to “generations”? If not “a bunch of bullshit”, the discourse of generations is certainly generative of bullshit: tenuously grounded overviews and opinion pieces, specious analysis and analogies, platitudes and truisms. And yet, like astrology, it is a fun game to play along with. And far more than astrology, it’s a mode of talk that partially constitutes its object: generalizing about a generation actually brings it into semi-existence, shaping how people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by earlier or later generations. What may just be an illusion, a shaky set of alleged affinities, becomes a social fact.

Simon Reynolds analyses the generation game

• More Milton Glaser: PDFs of the Glaser Gazette, a memorial publication in three parts: Vol 1 | Vol 2 | Vol 3

• New music: Tractatus Lyra-Organismus by Lyonel Bauchet, and Grounded Rectangle by Ambidextrous.

• “A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives.”

• DJ Food found a handful of psychedelic posters by Nicole Claveloux.

• “Rights to Jorge Luis Borges’s work go to his wife’s nephews.”

• “Is this the earliest known phallic art?”

• Young Generation Dub (1976) by Augustus Pablo | Chile Of The Bass Generation (1990) by Mental Cube | Invisible Generation (1992) by Cabaret Voltaire

Telepathic Heights by Hawksmoor

No designer credited but probably the work of Adrian Self.

Too much unanticipated website wrangling has set my work back this week, but in the meantime I’ve enjoyed listening to more of the mostly-electronic music of Cabaret Voltaire (inevitably), plus the mostly-electronic music of Hawksmoor (James McKeown), whose latest album, Telepathic Heights, arrived a few days ago. According to the promotional copy this one “follows a path along the electronic skyways first created by the German/Krautrock electronic pioneers of the 1970s such as Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Roedelius and Michael Rother”. And so it does to an extent, although Hawksmoor’s buzzing timbres and synthesized rhythms are closer to those created by The Human League on their first two albums, Reproduction and Travelogue, a percussive pulse which an early reviewer of the League’s music compared to steamhammers in a mineshaft. The early League records, and the first album by Marsh & Ware as the B.E.F., Music For Stowaways, have always been cult items round here, so anything that approaches them is liable to catch my attention. Hawksmoor’s other albums push further buttons of interest with subjects that include Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches (no surprise there), JG Ballard’s Concrete Island and The Crystal World, the psychogeography of Milton Keynes, and Old Weird Britain. I’m looking forward to seeing what future paths this 21st-century Hawksmoor chooses to follow.

Telepathic Heights is out now on Soul Jazz.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews
• Serious houses: The Lud Heat Tapes, 1979
• German gear
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score

Fender guitar catalogue, 1976

Another post prompted by 70s Sci-Fi Art, and a publication that’s very typical of its decade. The Fender guitar catalogue for 1976 showcases its product range with a series of illustrations that carefully pastiche the kind of art you’d find in books of fairy tales. Selling rock’n’roll equipment in this manner wasn’t a trend-setting step by 1976, not with the punk hordes on the march, but corporations are seldom ahead of the general culture. The cover art by Ruby K. Lee is a copy of one of Kay Nielsen’s drawings for East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Lee also provides one of the interior drawings, with the rest of the art being the work of Bruce Wolfe. (There may be another artist involved since one of the illustrations lacks a credit.) This looks like a huge amount of effort for a small product catalogue but the illustrations were also part of an ad campaign with accompanying storybook copy. It’s good to see Busorama being used for all the headings. I’ve been using this font myself for its associations with the 1970s.

Since I keep borrowing tips from 70s Sci-Fi Art I’ll note again that Adam Rowe’s Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s will be published by Abrams next month.

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Talking time: Cabaret Voltaire interviews

Cabaret Voltaire, circa 1981. Left to right: Richard H. Kirk, Chris Watson, Stephen Mallinder.

…A few brief facts. CV came about from a mutual interest in producing “sound” rather than “music”, a few years ago, making very rare live appearances from time to time. Now an interest has developed in the band, we are playing live more frequently instead of just recording. CV dislike the sick commercialism which pervades most “contemporary music”.

At the moment we are working on a basis which involves two types of performance. A “set” which consists of songs, and a set which is completely improvised, lasting from 20 minutes to “x” number of hours. CV also use films + slides as lighting in live performance. A CV concert is like a bad acid trip; CV want to create total sensory derangement. MIT UND OHNE POLITIK, UNVERNUNFTIGKEIT.

INFLUENCES — “anything which is unacceptable”.

The band’s line up is —
RICHARD – Guitar, Clarinet, Tapes, Vocals.
MAL – Bass, Electronic Percussion, Lead Vocals.
CHRIS – Electronics, Tape, Vocals.

Early band correspondence with a German fanzine

Another week, another book of music talk. Cabaret Voltaire: A Collection of Interviews 1977–1994 was published two years ago but I only just discovered it as a result of my recent cycling through the Cabs’ discography. I’ve never been a great reader of music books yet here I am with three of them devoted to this particular group. Fabio Méndez’s collection joins Cabaret Voltaire: The Art of the Sixth Sense, the first Cabs book from 1984, in which Mick Fish and D. Hallberry interrogate Kirk and Mallinder about their progress to date; and Industrial Evolution, a reprint of the Sixth Sense interviews plus newer ones appended to Fish’s memoir about life in the Cabs’ home town of Sheffield during the 1980s. The Méndez collection is the most substantial of the three, gathering articles from fanzines, magazines and newspapers, and translating into English many pieces from European publications.

Badges not included.

As with Coil, I’ve always liked hearing what Kirk, Mallinder and Watson had to say. There was a fair amount of historical intersection between the two groups, Cabaret Voltaire having been a part of the first wave of Industrial music along with Throbbing Gristle, 23 Skidoo (whose records were produced by TG & CV), Clock DVA and the rest; later on the Cabs were part of the Some Bizzare stable along with Soft Cell, Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten and others. One of the interviews in Méndez’s book is from Stabmental, a short-lived fanzine edited in the early 1980s by a pre-Coil Geoff Rushton/John Balance. The zine ended its run with a cassette compilation, The Men With The Deadly Dreams, which included two exclusive recordings by Chris Watson and Richard Kirk. Watson’s piece, which applies cut-up theory to a radio news broadcast, is a good example of Cabaret Voltaire’s engagements with William Burroughs’ speculations about electronic media. Further examples of cut-up theory may be found in the group’s lyrics and in the video material they created, initially for use as projections while playing live, then later for their music videos which were in the vanguard of the form in the early 1980s.

A lot of the things we do tend to get glossed over. We’ll talk to anyone. We do loads of interviews with fanzines.

Unidentified group member, 1980

582 pages of interviews with a group that never had any kind of popular success is more information than most people would ever want or need. But as with Nick Soulsby’s Coil book, Méndez is doing future historians a service by resurrecting material from scarce and ephemeral sources. The post-punk period from 1978 to 1982 was a uniquely fertile musical moment, especially in Britain. For a few years absolutely anything seemed possible, with much of the wilder activity being logged and discussed in fanzines like Stabmental which usually had a limited circulation (often distributed by mail order) and a print run of a few hundred copies at most. The British music press also covered this scene, of course, but only up to a point, especially when the music was pushing the boundaries of the possible or the commercially acceptable. Méndez’s book emphasises the differences between the music-press approach—where the article is often as much about the writer as the group itself—and the fanzine interview which tends to be a list of questions with a small amount of contextual commentary. Fanzines were a circumscribed medium but they had advantages over the music papers; sincerity, for a start, allied with genuine enthusiasm and fewer of the tics that made reading the music press each week such a chore. The small publications weren’t always free of the bad habits of the weeklies but there was less of the journalistic posturing, the ignorant dismissal of whole areas of music, and the relentless snark and sarcasm which you’ll find thriving today on social media. The drawbacks of the fanzines were mostly about quality; fact-checking was often non-existent. Méndez’s book is littered with footnotes that log the errors present in the transcripts.

Which bands are influential on your music?
Chris: “Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Captain Beefheart…especially Can have influenced us.”

Spex magazine interview, 1980

Questions about influence are a common feature of any interview with creative people. Chris Watson’s reply is the first example I’ve seen of the Cabs mentioning so many German groups, as well as Captain Beefheart. A recurrent theme of these interviews concerns the group’s unusual trajectory, a career which evolved through a series of changes in direction that weren’t always predictable. The trio had started out in 1974 as resolute non-musicians and sound-collage provocateurs with Dadaist intentions; the music-making took time to develop. By the late 1970s the group that now called itself Cabaret Voltaire had become a more disturbed and disturbing counterpart to Sheffield’s other electronic music ensemble, The Human League. When Chris Watson departed in 1981 Kirk and Mallinder joined the Some Bizzare roster and followed the League to Virgin Records where a substantial advance helped the pair upgrade their equipment, launch their own independent music and video label, Doublevision, and record some of their best work.

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