{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 623

A symmetrical ink blot from Gobolinks, or Shadow Pictures for Young and Old (1896) by Ruth McEnery Stuart & Albert Bigelow Paine, a book where the blots are much more interesting than the interpretative verses that accompany them.

• “…within a year, they were on The Tube, performing their German-language extrapolation of Throbbing Gristle’s Discipline to a visibly nonplussed audience.” Alexis Petridis on the return of Propaganda. The group’s debut album, A Secret Wish (previously), has long been an obscure object of desire round here.

• RIP Alan White, drummer in Yes for much of the 1970s (see Sound Chaser for details), and also—although nobody mentioned this at the time—the originator of the drum sounds sampled on a Fairlight for Beat Box by the Art Of Noise.

• “For the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, pareidolia is not a fringe phenomenon: it is at the core of religious experience.” Hunter Dukes on the interpretation of ink blots.

• “…self-righteousness is the one thing that I don’t agree with,” says John Waters. “We used humour to fight when I was young.”

• New music: October Cut Up by Black Glass Ensemble, and New Witness by Michael Begg.

• Also RIP Shiv Kumar Sharma, master of the santoor.

• “Scientists recreate Cleopatra’s favourite perfume.”

• Simon Fisher Turner’s favourite albums.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Len Lye Day.

• Cleopatra’s Barge (1962) by Alex North | Cleopatra’s Needle (1963) by Ahab And The Wailers | Cleopatra King Size (2002) by Jah Wobble & Temple Of Sound

Exposures exposed

This colossal collection turned up yesterday. I’m still working my way through its contents: 25 CDs, 3 DVDs and 4 blu-rays; the CDs all run for at least 70 minutes each so these alone provide about 30 hours of music. The box covers three phases of Robert Fripp’s “Drive to 1981”: his debut solo album, Exposure; his Frippertronics guitar recordings, both live and in the studio; and his short-lived New-Wave dance band The League Of Gentleman. All cult stuff in this house, obviously, you don’t buy 32 discs on a whim.

The original vinyl. Looks like I’ll have to hold on to my LoG album (see below).

Exposure is present here in multiple versions which might seem like overkill but it’s an unusual album that was compromised from the outset by record company interference. Fripp’s original intention in 1977 was for it to be released simultaneously with two connected albums, the others being Peter Gabriel II and Sacred Songs by Daryl Hall; songs from Exposure appear in different versions on the other albums, Gabriel and Hall both sing on Exposure, and Fripp produces all three works. The problem with this ambitious scheme is that Daryl Hall was subject to greater commercial pressure from his record company than were Fripp or Gabriel; RCA not only shelved the “uncommercial” Sacred Songs for three years but they also refused to let Hall sing on all the songs Fripp had planned with him for Exposure. Record company refusals also put a stop to a planned version of I Feel Love which would have been sung by Debbie Harry. In order to rescue the album several of the Hall songs were redone with new lyrics and new performances by Terre Roche and Peter Hammill, all of which has led to the contents of the album being fluid enough to sustain the various mixes which Fripp calls “Editions”. On this new set you get early drafts with extended mixes of the Frippertronic sequences, all the alternate takes including Daryl Hall’s original vocals, and a new “Fourth Edition” mixed by Steven Wilson which was much better than I expected. Wilson has had a parallel career in recent years remixing many well-known albums from the 1970s, not always to their benefit. I’ve been listening to this album for over 40 years yet the new mix contains things I’d never heard before, as well as being heavier and punchier than it’s sounded in the past.

Frippertronics explained.

But the real highlight for me here is all the Frippertronics material. I’ve always liked this period of Fripp’s career which was essentially a guitar-driven equivalent of Brian Eno’s ambient music, developing the process begun on the (No Pussyfooting) and Evening Star albums. Or it was in its “pure” form… “Applied Frippertronics” was the term given to the familiar Revox-looped guitar tones when used as a backing for disco-inspired instrumentals, and even a rather plodding and eccentric song, Under Heavy Manners, sung by David Byrne. In addition to copious recordings of pure Frippertronics there are also more of the applied variety in this set than I ever expected to hear.

There’s no point attempting a proper review of all this material, I’ll leave that to others. But there are a few surprising omissions worth noting. The original release of the self-titled League Of Gentleman album was framed by about 6 minutes of tape collage, Indiscreet I, II & III, made from Fripp’s recordings of friends and colleagues. These vanished from the cut-down CD release of the album in 1985, and they haven’t returned here. Also absent are similar taped moments that were mixed into the original versions of Cognitive Dissonance, HG Wells and Trap plus three shorter tracks, Pareto Optimum I, Pareto Optimum II and Ochre, all of which were tape-loop pieces with an organ as the instrument. I bought the League Of Gentleman album when it was released so it feels incomplete without the shorter musical pieces and the “indiscretions”. The omission of the latter is thrown into further relief by the proximity of Exposure which contains similar taped voices (Brian Eno, Fripp’s mother, the ubiquitous JG Bennett) scattered between the songs, yet all of these have been present in every release of the album. Worst of all, since it’s always been a favourite song, is the absence of Danielle Dax’s vocal from the new mix of Minor Man. The original sounds like this.

Another omission is this list of principles which appeared on the back of the Let The Power Fall album and also on a postcard inside the album. It’s not really essential to appreciation of the music but it was a statement of Fripp’s philosophy in the late 1970s, and his concern with being a “small, mobile, intelligent unit” working in opposition to those he termed “dinosaurs”, ie: the big record companies like RCA who were often working against the best interests of their artists. The booklet inside the Exposures box reproduces all the artwork from the original albums plus the artist photos that appeared as postcards with some of the releases but not this item. Even if Fripp no longer agrees with its sentiments it would at least seem historically relevant.

I think I’m done now with the big DGM boxes, and yet… If there was another one collecting all the studio and live recordings that Fripp recorded with David Sylvian in the 1990s I’d be tempted. The First Day album is one I like more than most of the King Crimson music from the same period, and the pair happened to play a version of Exposure (the song) on their tour. There’s at least one high-quality bootleg from that tour in existence, plus odd tracks that only appeared on EPs, so who knows what else might be in the archives. How about it, Mr Fripp?

Further reading/viewing:
• Exposure promo video
• Exposures contents list
• The Exposure pages at Elephant Talk
• Robert Fripp interviewed in Synapse magazine, 1979 [PDF]

Victor Valla book covers

Lancer Books, 1971.

Victor Valla’s cover for The Dunwich Horror has appeared here before, and his cover for The Colour Out of Space is very familiar, but I hadn’t gone looking for anything else of his until this week. There isn’t much to be found on genre titles, just the rest of these covers plus a handful of undistinguished paintings for Gothic dramas and Dracula novels. His Lovecraft and Derleth covers are the kind of thing I always like to see more of, however, being less illustrations of story details than renderings of the feelings the story generates when you read it. This is especially the case with The Colour Out of Space, a story that suggests far more than it shows, and whose central motif—a colour alien to the Earth—is impossible to depict at all. In the 1970s it was easier to get away with this on paperback covers; Lovecraft was still a niche author and there wasn’t the legacy of imagery there is today. Incidentally, the Richard Lupoff book below isn’t as anomalous as it may seem if you know that Lupoff later wrote a novel, Lovecraft’s Book, with HPL as one of the main characters.

Lancer Books, 1971.

Beagle Books, 1971.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive
• The Lovecraft archive

Drone Mass

Design by Florian Karg.

You’d think someone would have used the title Drone Mass prior to this new release but it seems not. The album is the premiere recording of a late composition by Jóhann Jóhannsson, performed by the composer’s regular collaborators in the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, together with Theatre of Voices and their conductor Paul Hillier. The album title and the presence of a choral group raises expectations of a religious Mass but John Schaefer’s notes draw attention to the title’s ambiguities, Jóhannsson having said that he was thinking as much about airborne drones as sustained sounds. (The Khephri scarab on the cover has a rather drone-like appearance.) Schaefer also notes that the word “mass” can refer to physical substance as well as religious ritual.

As to the substance of the music, there is a superficially religious quality to the first two pieces, a feature deceptive enough to make the album the kind of thing I’d like to play to the unsuspecting. Without knowing what to expect you could easily imagine the rest of the suite developing like an Arvo Pärt composition (and Theatre of Voices/Paul Hillier have performed Pärt on several occasions) until you reach the dissonant waves of the third piece, Triptych In Mass, after which various electronic rumbles and distortions arrive to take the album into a very different sphere. One of the pleasures of Jóhannsson’s compositions was this juxtaposition between the familiar structures and instruments of classical composition with sounds processed by computer software. The combination isn’t exactly new, Edgard Varèse was doing the same as far back as the 1930s (he also discussed his music in terms of “sound masses”), but in 20th-century examples the orchestral component is always striving to seem as fresh and as different as the electronics genuinely were. What you didn’t get then—because any such music would have been deemed old-fashioned or even reactionary—is this blending of traditional chords and harmonies with sounds that originate in the latest digital processes. After the release of Last And First Men I hadn’t been expecting any new Jóhannsson compositions (although previously unreleased soundtracks keep turning up) so this is all very welcome.

If you’ve looked at Florian Karg’s cover and are wondering what any of the above has to do with Ancient Egypt, an explanation may be found inside the album where a photo shows the 2015 premiere performance of Drone Mass taking place outside the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. That bright yellow Deutsche Grammophon logo has become something to watch for in recent years. The DG cartouche has always been a trademark of quality where classical recordings are concerned but the label has a somewhat broader remit today, releasing many more soundtrack albums than they would have done in the past, in addition to non-soundtrack works by Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter and others. Oddly enough (considering the news last week), the new direction was begun by Vangelis in 1985 when his Invisible Connections album was released on DG instead of its pop sibling, Polydor. This was very surprising at the time even though the label had been releasing avant-garde compositions for many years; the first Stockhausen album I bought in 1981 was a secondhand DG release of Mikrophonie I & II. Some of the recent remixes of old Berlin Philharmonic recordings will have set Herbert von Karajan spinning in his sarcophagus but the label hasn’t pushed things too far in that direction, and if the poppier works pay for new recordings such as this one then I’m not complaining.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jóhannssonia
• Last and First Men

Weekend links 622

Testa Anatomica (1854) by Filippo Balbi.

• The New School of the Anthropocene is “…an experiment. But it is also an act of repair. In partnership with October Gallery in London, we seek to reinstate the intellectual adventure and creative risk that formerly characterised arts education before the university system capitulated to market principles and managerial bureaucracy… (more)”

• “Every once in a while, you come across old music that generates a shock of new excitement.” Geeta Dayal on Oksana Linde whose electronic compositions are being released in a retrospective collection next month.

• More Walerian Borowczyk: Anatomy of the Devil, a collection of Borowczyk’s short stories, newly translated into English by Michael Levy, and with a cover design by the Quay Brothers.

• Washing machines, garden snails, and plastic surgery: A stroll through the Matmos catalogue. Related: “Why scientists are turning molecules into music.”

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Boogie Down Predictions, Hip Hop, Time and Afrofuturism, edited by Roy Christopher.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Exploring Japan’s historical landmarks and shrines in the middle of streets.

• New music: Adrian Sherwood Presents: Dub No Frontiers, music by female dub artists.

• Winners of the 2022 Milky Way Photographer of the Year.

• A Vision In Many Voices: The art of Leo and Diane Dillon.

• Molecular Delusion (1971) by Ramases | DNA Music (Molecular Meditation) (1985) by Riley McLaughlin | Pop Molecule (Molecular Pop 1) (2008) by Stereolab