Kris Kristofferson RIP

 

In the morning the sad news arrived that Kris Kristofferon passed away last weekend at the age of 88. He was the one that opened my ears for country in the early 70's. I first became aware of him when I watched a film, Cisco Pike, late at night, which in retrospect was commercially unsuccessful.

The plot is simple, a musician who, having fallen on hard times, turns to the selling of marijuana and is blackmailed by a police officer, but lives by the presence of Kristofferson. In this times I thought he plays the part like his own. The soundtrack included a few songs from his second album The Silver Tongued Devil And I and I bought this record a few days later and it got a good friend over the last decades.

Kristofferson brought a new sound to Nashville: people had always sung about alcohol, broken love and even more alcohol there. He added sex and drugs to the mix, which was tantamount to a revolution. 

I was lucky enough to see him live about twelve years ago and was impressed by what he could do on stage with just his guitar. He has always had great emotion in his songs, which I had never heard with such intensity.

Kristofferson had already made arrangements for his farewell and chose a line from Leonard Cohen's song for his gravestone: ‘Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.’

Rest easy Kris

Monday's Long Song

 

About ten years ago Thousand Foot Whale Claw, a Austin, Texas, based electronic collective released Dope Moons Vol. 1, a four song album that was on heavy rotation at this time. Phobos was the leading track and I featured it a few years back. In 2018 they released Black Hole Party and they remained true to their line. Instrumental electronic music for a time-out in space. Their music, a mixture of post rock, krautrock, ambient and psychedelic is unique and sadly overlooked by many people. For me the right one to finish the month and start into autumn. 

Thousand Foot Whale Claw - Black Hole Party

New Song On Sunday

 

Over the course of the week, The Cure released a new song after 16 years to much media hype. Even when I first heard this band, I was captivated by their music, it has accompanied me over the decades and I was able to see them live several times. 

Musically, Alone relies on tried and tested fare and there seems to have been no further development of their music. Why should there be? Does it always have to be something new and better? I personally like the song, even after the second listen when I had put aside the expectation of a further development and could be pleased that Robert Smith has remained true to his roots and has transported his sound extremely well into the here and now. 

The fact that the track then runs completely against the ‘mainstream’ with almost 7 minutes and an eternally long instrumental introduction rounds off these thoughts once again. Ultimately, The Cure may still offer enough points of reference in 2024 for younger goths who want to discover what ‘gothic’ originally sounds like. A little consistency is almost refreshing, especially given the diversity that gathers under the huge musical genre umbrella.

Female Punk Bands

 

A few days ago there was a documentary on television about the first women to perform as all-female bands. Essentially, it was about the hardships they had to go through to make it in the music business. Punk was the big thing at the end of the seventies and anyone could try their hand at music. Bands were springing up from all corners and achieving great things. The number of women involved can be counted on one hand. 

What they all had in common was that they brought a different perspective to their music, also in terms of aesthetics. I can't imagine many songs by these bands with male musicians.

The first to be mentioned are probably The Slits, who got together in the environment of The Clash. Dominated by Viv Albertine and the young Ariane Forster, they were among the first to integrate reggae and world music into their sound. 

Inspired by a Slits concert, Ana da Silva and Gina Birch also decided to form a female band. With The Raincoates, they also found their own style, which was largely orientated towards punk, but was able to set new accents with a violin reminiscent of the Velvet Underground.

One exception was X-Ray Spex, who had an outstanding female frontwoman in Poly Styrine, but whose other musicians were male. Identity has everything that made the band special: Roughness, emotion and a saxophone that was unusual for the time.

These bands contributed to the formation of women's bands on the continent. One of them was Kleenex from Switzerland, who had to change their name to LiLiPUT due to trademark problems. 

A German counterpart to Poly Styrene was Annette Benjamin from Hans-A-Plast, who made their sound unmistakable, but also featured musicians of both genders.

Bristol's Goth

 

Once again, Bristol Archive Records have dug deep into musical history and created a monument to the local music scene with The Bristol Goth Explosion. Many of the bands played at The Bastille, a club in Bristol that was something of a scene meeting place.

Goth can be described as the darker side of punk, was very bass-heavy and peppered with sharp guitars. At the beginning of the 80's, both the musicians and the followers of Gothic adopted a dark and gloomy outfit and some, like a school friend of mine, still celebrate this today and meet every year at the biggest Gothic event in Europe in Leipzig. 

This compilation clearly shows that there were other bands besides The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees who had the potential for more. 

Destination Zululand

 

At the beginning of the 80s, there was a very lively live scene in southern Germany. Almost every week there were concerts in various clubs by new, unknown bands that were still affordable. Dynamic pricing had not yet been invented and I was lucky enough to see many young bands. 

It was in spring 1984 when me and a friend went to see the next new and weird thing from England. King Kurt brought rockabilly back into music and they were famous for their excessive live appearance. We were not really sure what we expected but afterwards we were happy have seeing them live. As announced, we experienced a band that delivered a wild concert. Driving beats, classic guitars and a singer who danced wildly on stage. To top it all off, they threw wallpaper paste, eggs and flour around. 

Certainly not the best concert we have attended, but one of the most fun we have had.

When I was in London for the first time two years earlier, I experienced a similar concert in a small club. Tenpole Tudor were the band of the moment and in the charts with their first two singles. For a punk band, they played amazingly good riffs and had a feeling for melodies and a lot of fun on stage.

Monday's Long Song

 

It was summer 1988 when Les Negresses Vertes released their first album Mlah and became the soundtrack for this season. With elements of punk, waltz, polka, flamenco and rai, plus political lyrics, they are at the forefront of a movement that, with Manu Chao's Mano Negra, conveyed a new image of France internationally at the end of the 80s/beginning of the 90s. They sounded fresh and earthed and the whole album is still a forgotten gem. In 1993 they released a 10 Remixes, an album where artists like Massive Attack, Gang Starr and William Orbit reworked their songs and showed how much potential their songs had. 

Les Negresses Vertes - Zobi La Mouche (William Orbit Remix)

New Song On Sunday

 

Lykke Li is a Swedish singer/songwriter and active since more than ten years. You can describe her sound as a unique blend of indie pop and melancholy with introspective lyrics. Her unmistakable voice and minimalist style makes me sometimes playing her songs. Now she is releasing a song that didn't make it onto her 2014 album and it is another example for another song laced with emotions such as heartache and longing. Not that songs like this are necessary but when she manages to wrap heavyness in atmospheric sounds that are both vulnerable and powerful it is worth to give this a listen.

Hey You

 

Brighton's Higher Love Records are always good for surprises. This time with a new interpretation of a forgotten song by a band from the C-86 generation. 14 Iced Bears are from Bristol and lead by Robert Sekula and played an jangly indie-pop and got known by their love ballad Hey Fever they recorded on a Peel-show.

Now Kent's Puerta Montt City Orchestra, the project of Angus Murray and Tim Salter, recruited the original singer Robert Sekula to reorganize this song and transfer it as Hey You. The result is a song that could be from many albums by Spacemen 3, Spiritualized or Velvet Underground. Strung-out backwards guitar and sitar strains accompanying the fragile breathless ballad. 

And as if that wasn't enough, Jesse Fahnestock remixed the song and spiced it up with handclaps and synthesizers. 

Empyrean

 

In Germany, you can buy a monthly rail ticket for 49 euros, which allows you to use regional trains without limit during this period. As I can also travel to Salzburg, Austria, with this ticket, I decided at the beginning of this week to spend what might be the last sunny days there. The fact that it is tedious and slow to get to my destination this way with several changes is one side of the coin, the other makes it possible to travel in comfort.

Salzburg lies at the foot of the Eastern Alps and impresses with its historic city center and buildings from the Middle Ages and the Baroque period, as well as the Hohensalzburg Fortress.

After a day of sightseeing, I treated myself to a beer in a pub in a neighbourhood that is mainly frequented by students. To my surprise, I realized that the music selection was pretty much the latest music from local and international bands. 

This is where I listened for the first time to the new song by GLOK. It is from the upcoming album showing the collaboration with Andy Bell and Timothy Clerkin a London based DJ. It is a seven minute downtempo song built on drone guitars and sprinkled synth melodies. 

Pass A Wish

 

At the end of August Brazilian DJ Eduardo Ramos, the brainchild behind his project Pandit Pam Pam, released Pass A Wish including a remix by Jezebell. Jesse Fahnestock took the Brazilian vibe and added organs and a hypnotic and mystery groove to this song. Sounds a bit like African tribes but it works very well. 

Monday's Long Song

 

Flying Mojito Bros have been regularly releasing remixes since the beginning of the year. Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen, two DJ's and producers are the mastermind of this project. From the beginning I liked the idea taking songs from the post-hippie and Westcoast era and and give them a new look with their remixes. Often underpinned by a funky disco beat and a driving bass, they retain just enough of the original to make it their own. Somewhere I read that you can call it Americana Balearic and I think this describes their sound well. Enjoy and have a good start into the week.

New Song On Sunday

 

For some time now, Wunderhorse, a British rock band, and their second album Midas have been haunting all the music magazines. At first I thought, well, this will probably be the next hype to popularize a band. 

Despite all my reservations, I listened to their new album and have to admit that the words of praise are not entirely unjustified. The mixture of simple guitar riffs, which are reminiscent of Pearl Jam in the broadest sense, and a sound that is somewhere close to Fontaine's D.C. and Americana, is really enjoyable. 

Why Wunderhorse named their album after the Turkish king who became famous for his greed and stupidity (he was given the gift by a god that everything he touched would turn to gold. He realized his mistake after he also touched his food and his daughter, which also turned to gold). This album is not gold, but neither is lead. A solid and good work - and that's something not everyone can do.

Vacation In The Past

 

I have been following Robyn Hitchcock's work for years and he has always managed to inspire me with his small and intimate songs. Maybe some people remember him from around 1980 when he became famous with the Soft Boys and their own interpretation of folk and psychedelic. 

Now he himself has travelled back in time to 1967 to record songs by bands that inspired him at the time. Mostly songs that were in the charts at the time and are now reinterpreted by him in a new acoustic style. Anything but groundbreaking, but performed with a love for the songs that should not really allow any comparison with the originals. A sentimental journey back to times when many things were different, which I enjoyed accompanying.

Searching In Vain

 

Perhaps someone still remembers Tangerine Dream, a German band that dedicated itself to electronic music in the early 70's. For many, their symphonic electronic compositions were too closely associated with the New Age movement and were one of the reasons why they turned to punk and new wave. It was only in the last decade that I realized that this music can have its appeal. 

Peter Baumann was an almost permanent member of the band and played a key role in shaping their sound with his keyboards. In the mid-90's, he sold his record company for good money in order to devote himself to philanthropic themes in San Francisco. In 2016, he reappeared on the music scene and released an electronic album that is much more accessible. 

Now Sebastian Lee Philipp from the Berlin band Die Wilde Jagd has taken on one of Baumann's songs. Philipp describes the remix as ‘slow and fast, dark and light, systematic and aberrant - like life itself’. And yes, the new percussive basic structure and the flutes that flow in make this remix something fascinating, at least for someone who has always liked Die Wilde Jagd.

Our Darkness

 

Anne Clark did this successfully long before Kae Tempest came up with her songs, or should we say spoken words, which are underlaid with a rhythm. 

At the beginning of the 80's, she brought the post-punk scene to the surface. Her pre-techno dance sound combined with melancholic world-weariness quickly made her the darling of the season. Which is not such a bad thing, as her songs have lost none of their appeal even after 40 years.

In 2021 she released Synaesthesia, a remix album from her songs, showing how much potential these songs had.

The Wild, The Innocent And The E-Street Shuffle

 

I bought my first long-playing records around 1974, after I had earned some money with my first holiday job. To be honest, I bought three albums on recommendation. Yessongs and Dylan's Before The Flood because at the time I thought live albums showed the artists unvarnished and with a double or triple album I would have got more for the money I spent. I also bought Bruce Springsteen's second album.

Springsteen wasn't the boss back then and was largely unknown. I actually only bought the album on the recommendation of the salesman in the record shop, but I have never regretted it. The album is now over 50 years old and I still listen to it from time to time. It has none of Yes's overblown organ sound but a lot of Dylan, especially the gift of telling stories in the songs. 

For me, his quieter and atmospherically dense songs have always been in the foreground and here he has collected many of his best and most melancholic songs. With Rosalita he laid the foundation for his later status. A record that has stayed with me throughout Springsteen's career and shows what he was all about. A poet from New Jersey who dreamed his dream of rock ‘n’ roll.

Good Old Boys

 

On this day 50 years ago Randy Newman released his fourth album Good Old Boys. Newman was born into a family of musicians in 1943 and his three uncles were successful film music composers. After studying music, he composed songs for Gene Pitney and Manfred Mann before releasing albums under his own name in the early 1970's. 

His songs were so good that Harry Nilsson recorded an entire album of his songs. After recording an album with Sail Away, which he orchestrated lavishly with strings, he then concentrated on the basics of songwriting with Good Old Boys. Perfect songs with a superb melodic line and lyrics  that critically examine the different sides of the American dream and in particular turn against the conservative-reactionary inhabitants of the southern states known as ‘rednecks’.

There are probably few artists whose music has been influenced by Hollywood film studios on the one hand and current and past political issues on the other. For me, this album, along with his subsequent album Little Criminals, represents the high point of his career, although he was to be honoured with an Oscar for his film music years later.

Monday's Long Song

 

Much has already been written (including here) about Krautrock and bands that had a significant influence on this style of music. Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can are regularly mentioned, and rightly so, but too little attention is paid to a band like Faust. 

Maybe it's because Faust didn't have a distinctive song, let alone a hit, or that their sound was simply too experimental. But that's exactly why they should be mentioned or played again from time to time, because they set standards and gained international recognition with their love of experimentation. There is probably no other German band from this period that composed their own music in such a way and destroyed it again with Dadaist fury in order to rebuild it. Certainly not music that can be listened to in one go and that hurts at times, but they are one of the reasons why Sonic Youth and Tortoise were able to emerge.

Faust - It's A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl

New Song On Sunday

 

My inbox almost overflowed when emails arrived on bandcamp friday. I haven't yet got round to sifting through all the interesting ones and deleting the unimportant ones. One release has stood out as it's new material from John Bryden aka Eyes Of Others whose last year's album is still delighting. On closer inspection, Trust, Loss and Forever is a new album by Peter McFinn, a Berlin-based Scottish DJ who releases his work as pete.mcm.

During the pandemic, he found several cassettes with radio recordings in his late grandfather's estate and composed several instrumental pieces based on them. What they all have in common is a restrained rhythm with quiet, accentuated guitar passages. These were refined by asking Bryden to add vocal passages to some of the songs. The result is more than impressive. Dreamy, melancholic songs that are not revolutionary but more than worth listening to.

Liebesformular

 

There are currently only a few bands from Germany that can inspire me with their music. One of them is International Music from Essen, who are now releasing their third album. They themselves describe their music as timeless melancholic music and that hits the nail on the head. 

I like that they don't allow themselves to be pinned down to one style. Just when they had agreed with themselves that they must have heard the harsh guitar thunderstorms of the Scots The Jesus and Mary Chain, Fairport Convention flashed through unexpectedly. And when you were finally sure that you could place them somewhere in the Kraut genre, quasi in an ancestral line to Can or Neu, they released a pure summer pop song.

In the twang of Liebesformular (Love Form), there are hints of the first Summer of Love (California, 1967, think of the Byrds) and the second (Manchester, 1988, think of early Primal Scream). Nothing more or less than a great song for the end of summer. And it isn't necessary to understand the lyrics because they are somewhere between between sense and nonsense.

The Four Elements

 

When I recently went for a walk through the countryside with a friend, we came across the philosophical topic of being. We were discussing the extent to which the four-element doctrine created by the Greek philosophers - that all existence is made up of a certain mixture of the four basic elements ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘air’ and ‘fire’ as the principles of solid, liquid, gaseous and red-hot - can still be applied today. I disagreed with the thesis that the balance of the elements is necessary for well-being, as modern science breaks the world down into ever smaller particles, which in turn make up an element as a whole. 

In the end, we were unable to finalize the topic and discussed where the four elements are reflected in the music. Here are a few examples that came to us spontaneously, which are probably well known. We'll see if they become a series.

Ensoulment

After a quarter of a century, Matt Johnson is back with a new album. I don't think I need to say much about The The, as their records had a huge influence on music in the late 80's. The music didn't really fit into any particular style. Perhaps new wave underground art rock describes it best. I've always loved Matt Johnson's music and I put his records on regularly because even after all these years there's always something new to discover. So what do I expect from his new record? A repeat of his sound or something completely new?

He didn't and that's a good thing! On 12 tracks that cannot always be clearly distinguished musically, we can still hear Slow Train, sometimes more and sometimes less. What has remained are Johnson's enormous storytelling qualities, who presents the album's tracks in a memorable voice. The themes are all-encompassing. Of course, it's about love and violence, war and peace and nothing less than life after death - nothing new really. 

Ultimately, this is an album for those who have always liked Johnson's voice and who like to find themselves in his musical cosmos. A return at a high level.

Estelle

 

In the mid 80's one of the most hip places in Europe was a café located on the seafront in Sant Antoni de Portmany in the Cala des Moro bay on Ibiza. It became famous because the local DJ José Padilla regularly played a set at sunset, which consisted mainly of relaxed numbers by mostly unknown artists at the time. The term chill-out music was born and later solidified under the name Balearic ambient. 

So what could be more obvious than to publish compilations of these songs? In 1994, the first Café del Mar compilation was released, which included Sabres of Paradise, Underworld, Penguine Cafe Orchestra and A Man Called Adam. To mark the 30th anniversary, AMCA has now released various remixes of Estelle in the last few days. A song that is still a highlight thanks to its instrumentation with flute, interspersed word fragments and its Latin American arrangement.

Monday's Long Song

 

Last week The Residents, a band that isn't everyone's cup of tea, were featured over at The (new) Vinyl Villan. The history of the Residents is full of self-created myths and nobody knows exactly how long they have been active in the music scene. Most sources date their formation to the late 60s or early 70s. To me they have always been a performing art band of some sort, playing bizarre versions of classics from music history at regular intervals. They often shredded the songs beyond recognition and reassembled them.

That's exactly what they did with a song by Hank Williams. They turned a good country song into a pounding industrial monster that was to become a defining feature of the post-punk sound. Years later, various remixes were created that were to become a permanent fixture on Ibiza's dancefloors.

The Residents - Kaw Liga

New Song On Sunday

 

Some artists are inspired by their environment, others by literature. British singer-songwriter Hayden Thorpe, a former member of the pop-art band Wild Beasts, has been influenced by both. 

„He nears Ness. He moves through the marshes much as mud might. You couldn’t call it walking; this march matches no known gait. He pours himself forwards; pours, sets, melts and pours again, in a looping flow, learnt part from otter and part from water.“

These are the first lines you hear in He, read and looped by the author Macfarlane himself. The ‘Ness’ described in the book is actually called Orford Ness and is located on the east coast of Great Britain, a piece of land where the British Ministry of Defence used to carry out ‘top secret’ tests, including nuclear weapons. The restricted military area was converted into a nature reserve in the 20th century, and the pebble beaches in ‘Ness’ are among the longest in Europe. 

Far removed from classic songwriting, Thorpe has dispensed with the usual instrumentation and placed his falsetto vocals in the foreground, sparingly adding cello and clarinet. Not a song for eternity, but an exceptionally calm and beautiful one in a far too hectic time.