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Fire works

Glowing in the intermittent spring sunshine, the new hardback, paperback and bonus postcard of Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire from Knockabout. The postcard is signed by the author, and only available with the hardbacks which are a limited run of 300 copies. Top Shelf will be publishing the book in the US (and also using my cover art) but I don’t know whether they’ll be following suit with signed cards. Anyone wanting more information about both editions is advised to check the publishers’ websites.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore

Switched-On… hits and misses

The first pressing of Switched-On Bach with a cover showing a Bach-alike confounded/dismayed by the sounds issuing from the machine behind him. The cover was soon swapped for the one below.

After mentioning the proliferation of Switched-On… synthesizer albums in the previous post, curiosity impelled me to see how many of these things were out there. A lot more than I expected is the answer, almost enough to make this cul-de-sac of novelty exploitation into a sub-genre of its own. As mentioned earlier, it was the huge success of Switched-On Bach (1968) by Wendy Carlos that began the trend. The album had a rare crossover appeal so that it could be sold to classical listeners as well as to a younger audience interested in electronic sounds, those for whom the words “switched on” echoed the druggy/erotic intersection of “turned on”. Carlos had an advantage over other musicians thanks to a long association with Robert Moog which meant she had a head start in exploring the recording potential of the new Moog synthesizer and innovations like Moog’s touch-sensitive keyboard. In 1968 few people could afford a Moog system; those who could usually needed to hire technicians like Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause to help them operate the thing. For a brief while it was enough to simply use the instrument to make strange noises, hence Mick Jagger’s droning score for Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), and George Harrison’s preposterous Electronic Sound (1969), 44 minutes of very amateurish Moog-doodling. Switched-On Bach sounds a little primitive today—it sounds primitive next to its follow-up albums, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969) and Switched-On Bach II (1973)—but Carlos and collaborators Rachel Elkind and Benjamin Folkman spent much more time refining their recording techniques than the knob-twiddling horde who rushed to capitalise on their success.

The rules of the Switched-On… idiom are as follows: a title that begins with the words “Switched-On”, obviously, although there’s a subset of the form in which an album may have a different title while a subtitle mentions something about “switched-on recordings”; the music must be cover versions of familiar songs or compositions, originality here is surplus to requirements; and it’s not essential but the cover art often alludes in some way to synthesizer technology and/or “the future”, with the latter represented by Space Age typefaces such as Amelia, Computer, Countdown or Data 70. I’ve not heard many of these albums, and I’m fairly certain that I don’t want to hear most of them, but I’ve heard enough Carlos cash-ins to know that the cover designs are often the best thing about them. The remastered CDs that Wendy Carlos released in the 1990s feature additional tracks that give some idea of the amount of work involved in the creation of each album. The early cash-ins, by contrast, tend to avoid time-consuming multi-track composition in favour of using a synthesizer as though it’s merely an expensive keyboard. The success of these albums musically may be gauged by the lack of reissues. They may be of interest to the so-bad-it’s-good “Incredibly Strange Music” crowd but I prefer to spend my time listening to other things. Beware.

Switched-On Rock (1969) by The Moog Machine.

Switched-On Bacharach (1969) by Christopher Scott.

Switched-Off Bach (1969) by Various Artists.

CBS exploits the success of the electronic album by packaging a collection of earlier non-electronic recordings.

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Hokusai record covers

Debussy: La Mer, Nocturnes (Nuages, Fêtes, Sirènes) (1959); Orchestra Of The Cento Soli And Choir Of The Paris Opera, Louis Fourestier.

Continuing an occasional series about artists or designers whose work has appeared on record sleeves. In the case of Katsushika Hokusai it’s all about the waves, or one wave in particular. The Great Wave off Kanegawa (1830) is not only the most well-known of all the prints in the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji series, but it occupies the unique position of representing to the rest of the world the nation from which it originates. Claude Debussy deserves much of the credit for elevating the popularity of the wave print after he used it in 1905 as an illustration on the cover of the sheet music for La Mer. Consequently, the print is an inevitable choice for art directors who require cover art for Debussy recordings. The example above is the first in a long line, many of which are omitted here in favour of other prints. The landscape format of this view, and that of many other Hokusai prints, means that the art is usually cropped to suit the square of the album cover. The results aren’t always successful.

Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Delibes, Adam: Ballet Favourites: Highlights From The Nutcracker/Carnaval/Coppélia/Giselle (1964); Orchestra Of The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Ernest Ansermet.

Switched On East (1971) by M. Sato. Art: Fine Wind, Clear Morning, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

A gatefold sleeve for one of the many “switched-on” Moog albums released to capitalise on the success of Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos. (Tomita recorded Switched On Hit & Rock a year later.) M. Sato gives a collection of Japanese folk tunes the synthesizer treatment.

Lyrical Melodies Of Japan (1980) by András Adorján & Ayako Shinozaki.

Sakura: Japanese Melodies For Flute And Harp (1990) by Jean-Pierre Rampal And Lily Laskine.

A reissue with collaged artwork by Paula Sher of an album first released in 1969.

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Weekend links 566

The Amida Falls in the Far Reaches of the Kisokaido Road. From the series A Tour of Waterfalls in Various Provinces (c. 1832) by Hokusai.

• New music: In Love With A Ghost by Kevin Richard Martin (aka Kevin Martin, The Bug, etc), a preview from his forthcoming alternative score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). In other hands I’d probably dismiss a further addition to the trend of creating new scores for films that don’t require them. Tarkovsky’s film certainly doesn’t need any new music, and we’ve already had an album-length homage from Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason. But I like Martin’s sombre atmospherics so he gets a pass with this one.

• “[Pauline] Oliveros wrote a piece for the New York Times in 1970 titled And Don’t Call Them Lady Composers, focusing on the difficulties of women being noticed and taken seriously in her field. It’s still online and could have been written yesterday.” Jude Rogers on Sisters With Transistors, a documentary about women in electronic music. Madeleine Siedel interviewed Lisa Rovner, the film’s director. Watch the trailer.

• Submissions to the 16th number of Dada journal Maintenant will be open at the beginning of October, 2021, following an announcement of the theme of the new issue in September. All you would-be (or actual) Dadaists out there have the summer to plot your potential contributions.

Our reverence for originals takes an absurdly extreme form in the recent craze for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), where collectors and traders spend huge sums of money on unique ‘ownership’ of a digital artwork that anyone can download for free. Since there’s no such thing as the original of a digital file, the artist can now certify the file as the one and only ‘original copy’, and make a fortune. Time will tell whether this is a transient fad or a new way of establishing the feeling of a relationship to the mind of the digital artist.

But our reverence for originals isn’t universal. Treating the original as special and sacred is a Western attitude. In China and Japan, for example, it’s acceptable to create exact replicas, and these are valued as much as the original—especially because an ancient original might degrade over time, but a new replica will show us how the work looked originally. And, as mentioned, there are studios in China where artists are employed to create fakes. Perhaps our culture teaches us to respond to artworks by inferring the mind behind the art.

“Works of art compel our attention—but can they change us?” asks Ellen Winner

• “What Don basically did here is find a series of one or two bar riffs, or parts, that he liked, have me write them down, and then say, in essence, ‘make something out of this’.” John French (aka Drumbo) recalls the making of Trout Mask Replica.

• From 1988 (and relevant this week because I’m reading a Pynchon novel): Thomas Pynchon’s review of Love in the Time of Cholera.

• Andy Thomas on fusion legend Ryo Kawasaki, pioneer of the synth guitar.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Dimitri Kirsanoff Day.

• Gareth Jones’ favourite music.

• RIP Monte Hellman.

• The Sea Named “Solaris” (1978) by Tomita | Solaris (2014) by Docetism | Solaris Return (2019) by Jenzeits

Charles W. Bartlett’s prints

Taj Mahal, Agra (1916).

In which British artist Charles W. Bartlett (1860–1940) applies the later style of ukiyo-e landscapes to his views of India and Hawaii. Bartlett was one of a handful of Western artists to have his work reproduced by a Japanese publisher of woodblock prints, Watanabe Shozaburo, so his mastery of the form may be taken as having been given a literal seal of approval.

Taj Mahal, Sunset (1920).

Considering the popularity and influence of Japanese prints I’m surprised that more artists haven’t attempted series productions like Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, rather than simply borrowing the familiar approach to line and colour. To date the only Western example I know of is Henri Rivière’s Hokusai homage, Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902). Charles Bartlett could have done the same with the Taj Mahal, a subject he returned to often enough, and a building which, like the Eiffel Tower, is recognisable even in silhouette.

Hawaii, The Surf Rider (1921).

Taj Mahal (1916).

Silk Merchants, India (1919).

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