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Space is one trip: the Hawkwind takes off

1: The album
Back in the 1990s, when it became apparent that record companies were committed to never-ending CD reissues of their most popular albums, I suggested to a friend that this development would eventually give us releases of the unmixed recordings which the listener would then have to mix themselves: “Now you can be George Martin!” My suggestion wasn’t entirely serious, and there are many reasons why this will never happen, but the wholesale remixing of “classic” albums has been a trend now for ten years or more, and will no doubt continue. It’s easy to see endless reissues as a pernicious development—how many more copies of The Dark Side Of The Moon does the world need?—but I can think of one or two albums which would benefit from a reappraisal of their original mixes. The first two sides of Amon Düül II’s Dance Of The Lemmings, for example, have always sounded sonically inferior to the group’s other albums. The first side in particular is swamped by bass, and the drums, which are so prominent on the previous album, Yeti, are buried in the mix. Given the overtly psychedelic nature of the cover art I sometimes wonder whether anyone in the studio was drug-free during the recording.

Hawkwind shared a record label with Amon Düül II for their first six albums, and the groups are further connected by bass player Dave Anderson who played on Düül’s Yeti in 1970 and Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space in 1971. The latter has just been reissued by Cherry Red in a variety of formats which include the three-disc package (2 x CD and a blu-ray disc) that arrived here at the weekend. The set features two new mixes of the entire album (one of them being the de rigueur 5-channel surround mix), a couple of outtakes, both sides of the Silver Machine single, plus the promo film for the single. The set also contains a substantial booklet which incorporates a reprint of the 24-page logbook that came with early pressings of the album. More about that below.

Hawkwind didn’t arrive as fully-fledged cosmic voyagers on their self-titled debut in 1970, it’s here on their second album that the group myth takes flight, presenting the band as travellers through time and space, or “Sonic Assassins” as they were depicted shortly before the album’s release in Codename: “Hawkwind”, a two-page promotional comic strip created by Michael Moorcock and Jim Cawthorn. Many British bands were playing with space themes in 1971 but Hawkwind were the only group to adopt the trappings of science fiction as essential elements of their persona, elements that persisted from one album to the next. In Search Of Space is loosely spacey on the musical side—You Shouldn’t Do That is the earliest example of a future Hawkwind staple, the extended mantra-like groove over which synthesizers swoop and burble—but it’s the album package created by Barney Bubbles and (in the logbook) Robert Calvert that dispels the ambiguity of songs like Master Of The Universe and Adjust Me in a science-fiction scenario where the “space” referred to by the title is dimensional as well as cosmological, with the group’s flattened spacecraft embodied by the physical album. None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well, but the book and the die-cut record sleeve help to frame what would otherwise be a collection of disparate rock songs into a complex artistic statement.

When it comes to the remixing of albums I’ve been sceptical of the benefits of the trend. For the past few years Steven Wilson has been the prime remixer of music from the 1970s and 80s; among other things he remixed Hawkwind’s Warrior On The Edge Of Time and the albums on last year’s Days Of The Underground set, all of which are worth hearing. Less essential have been his new mixes for King Crimson and Tangerine Dream, the latter especially where there’s little discernible difference between the old and new versions. I think the main attraction for many listeners will be the 5-channel surround mixes, especially in the case of Tangerine Dream, but I don’t have a 5-channel sound system so can’t say how effective they are. The new In Search Of Space mixes are the work of another Steve, Stephen W. Tayler, whose reworking of the album has taken me by surprise, giving it a radically different sound rather than the discreet adjusting of levels and instrumentation that I was expecting. Dave Brock has said in interviews that he always dropped acid before making the final mix of the Hawkwind albums up to Warrior On The Edge Of Time, which may explain why In Search Of Space has always sounded rather thin and dry, while the album that followed it, Doremi Fasol Latido, is a bludgeon by comparison, with everything compressed into the wall of sound which Hawkwind had developed in their live performances. Tayler’s new mix of Master Of The Universe is revelatory, bolstering the bottom end and emphasising the inverted echoes on Nik Turner’s voice, while You Shouldn’t Do That explodes into jet-propelled life. Everything sounds more substantial, and possibly more cosmic; I’ve not done a side-by-side comparison yet but I think Tayler has given greater emphasis to the effects throughout the album, especially all the swooshing and burbling electronic instruments. If you’ve ever shared my scepticism about the remixing trend then Tayler’s work here should be considered an argument in its favour.

Continue reading “Space is one trip: the Hawkwind takes off”

Weekend links 741

The Empty Mask (1928) by René Magritte.

• A Walk Across Northampton: Iain Sinclair and John Rogers wander the streets in search of significant historical locations before ending up at the home of the local magus, Alan Moore. I recently illustrated a new piece of writing by Iain Sinclair but can’t talk about that just now. Later.

• New music: The Invisible Road: Original Recordings, 1985–1990 by Sussan Deyhim & Richard Horowitz, and Through Other Reflections by The Soundcarriers.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger: the true story of a literary crime that fooled the world.

• At Colossal: Across rural Europe, Ashley Suszczynski photographs remarkable and ancient masked traditions.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Poetry by WB Yeats.

• At Unquiet Things: Maggie Vandewalle’s enchanted autumns.

• Richard Norris’s favourite albums.

• Tapedeck.org

• Preludes For Magnetic Tape (1966–76) by Ihlan Mimaroglu | Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy (1995) by Stars Of The Lid | Those Tapes Are Dangerous (1997) by The Bug

The Idea, a film by Berthold Bartosch

Having mentioned Frans Masereel in the previous post, here’s a short animated film based on one of Masereel’s wordless novels. Masereel’s The Idea (1920) concerns the birth and progress of radical thought in an illiberal society, with the troublesome conception embodied as a naked woman. When the idea escapes into the world the authorities try to cover her nakedness, but their efforts fail to prevent her image being disseminated by the printing press…

Berthold Bartosch was a Czech animator whose 25-minute adaptation of the book was released in 1932. Frans Masereel helped with the creation of the film in its early stages but he lost his patience with the slow pace of the animation process. Bartosch’s film is significant for being one of the first animated dramas to aim self-consciously at art rather than comedy or entertainment for children. Also significant is the score by Arthur Honegger whose use of the ondes Martenot is claimed as the first use of an electronic instrument for cinematic purposes. Bartosch’s animation technique brings to life cut-out figures in nebulous, layered compositions that anticipate the films that Yuri Norstein would be making decades later. It’s a shame that all the online copies of the film are so poor, it ought to be seen in better quality. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Destiny, A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel
• Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• The Nose, a film by Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
• Yuri Norstein animations
• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward
• Frans Masereel’s city

Destiny, A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel

Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward are the two names most commonly associated with the “wordless novel” of the 1920s and 30s, but there was another significant contributor to the form, Otto Nückel (1888–1955), a German artist whose Schicksal, Eine Geschicte in Bildern was one of the spurs for Ward to try something similar. I hadn’t seen Nückel’s book before, the pictures here being taken from an American reprint from 1930. The general tone is very similar to Masereel’s The City (1925), with the difference that Destiny depicts a single, tragic life in a nameless European metropolis where Masereel presents a tapesty of city-wide lives and events. The artistic styles differ but all three artists used engraving to create their pictures, a technique that no doubt helped sustain an aura of seriousness about these projects, keeping at bay any association with disreputable comic strips. Masereel and Ward used wood for their medium while Nückel preferred to engrave on lead plates. His book is still in print today via Dover Publications.

Continue reading “Destiny, A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel”

Weekend links 740

Winged Figure (no date) by Mark Severin.

• At Wormwoodiana: News of the publication of two uncollected early stories by Cormac McCarthy. I happen to be reading McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger, at the moment. Very enjoyable and very different to what I was expecting.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: Yayoi Kusama‘s largest permanent public sculpture arrives in London.

• At Colossal: A futuristic 150-foot installation imagines Chicago’s never-built architecture.

The record sounded like nothing else, seemingly came from nowhere and related to nothing I could identify with any confidence: whistling, whispering, mumbling, pig grunts, exhalations of breath, chants and vocal imitations of nocturnal forest sounds, arco double bass and electric bass, nursery rhymes, impenetrable accents and languages, tambourines, unidentifiable tuned percussion imprecisely struck, mandolin, banjo, flutes, congas, bottleneck guitar, second line drumming with virtually no cymbals, dense percussion, organ bass, harpsichord, reed instruments played through electronic effects and organ lines sounding like anything but themselves. There was no piano, despite what some later commentators have claimed, and in fact very little harmonic underpinning in the majority of tracks. Instead of piano or guitar chords to fill out the ensemble sound there is the celebrated Gold Star echo chamber, into which instruments and voices sank as if dropping away into the abyss.

Zozo la Brique, Jump Sturdy, Coco Robichaux, Queen Julia Jackson, Mama Roux, Tit Alberta—questions flared like fireworks. Who were these characters who populated the lyrics. Were they voodoo practitioners, alive or dead, fictitious or real? Ishmael Reed’s visionary novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, was published not long after, in 1969. Years later I read it and was startled to bump into Zozo la Brique once more. So these were real people, or named phantoms, or figures of legend at least. “O Doc John,” Reed wrote, “Doc Yah Yah and Zozo Labrique Marie Laveau the Grand Improvisers if I am not performing these rites correctly send the Loa anyway and allow my imagination to fill the gaps.”

David Toop in an extract from Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr. John’s Gris-Gris

• New music: Hidden Structures by Time Being, and Buried (Your Life Is Short) by The Bug.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Minimal and tranquil charcoal drawings by Masahiko Minami.

• New weirdness: Cat Location Conundrum by Moon Wiring Club.

• At Unquiet Things: The art of Dylan Garrett Smith.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Toshio Matsumoto Day.

• RIP Alain Delon.

• Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya (1968) by Dr John | Gumbo (1971) by Santana | Roochoo Gumbo (1976) by Harry “The Crown” Hosono