Good Morning

OMG!! The Ultimate Prince 1999!

Reviewed in the December issue of Wire and yes, it is an object of desire.



The 5 CD and one DVD expanded Deluxe box set of his iconic 1999 album. What a Xmas pressie that would be!

Unusual Musics #1

Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton - A Teaching Poem / Heron Dance

From the album "Ursula K Le Guin & Todd Barton - Music And Poetry Of The Kesh" (Freedom To Spend CD LP DL)


"First released on cassette as part of a box set with the first edition of Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, Todd Barton’s cycle of songs, recitations and sonic moods establishes a fitting music counterpart to the ethnological forgeries that sustained her original novel. Now available in separate formats, Music And Poetry Of The Kesh seems to detach itself from Le Guin’s book – not because of her recent departure from a world whose faults and tragedies she helped to reveal all too clearly, but because this collection has always been strong and complex enough to exist in its own right, even down to the sombre anthropological terseness of its title.
In this world, the truth often presents itself as a contrivance and only masks can be trusted not to lie. Always Coming Home is set in a California so far in the future that its inhabitants have forgotten how we met our end. Fragments of our materials and machines survive but the hands that shaped them have long since disappeared.
Part hunter-gatherer, part technological nomads, the Kesh are a people who share strong cultural affinities with the Indigenous Americans of the Napa Valley, where Le Guin spent the early part of her childhood. This connection is carried over into Barton’s score, which echoes and amplifies the gentle phonemes that comprise the Kesh poems, recited by Le Guin against light sonic backdrops and inserted as brief interludes between the songs. Although its presence is quite discreet, reserved for the gentle swelling of closing track “Music Of The Eighth House”, Barton proves himself to be another adept member of the Buchla tribe, sensitively tapping into its organic analogue rhythms.
Elsewhere he lets voices, drones and field recordings interact with each other to present convincing facsimiles of the songs and music of another culture. Sometimes the strains of western civilisation still manage to make themselves felt. “A Homesick Song” has memories of Stockhausen’s Stimmung in its distant impassive vocalism; while, for all its charm, “The Quail Song” quickly devolves into recognisable variants of existing speech habits. The Kesh communicate with each other through call and response – and it’s hard not to respond in kind. On this long overdue rerelease, the living communicates not just with the discreet ghosts of the recently departed, who require nothing now from us but a change of manners, but the feral ghosts of those who have not yet existed.
With or without Le Guin’s presence – and she will be missed – Barton’s music provides its own narrative coherence. The ghosts of past and future, at last, are free to go."

Ken Hollings, Wire magazine

(And yes, it is on my Xmas want list)

Card Wall

I started a wall of Xmas cards as I have received five already, and three of them from people here in Waterstone Place.



Thanks thespian15. Yours arrived today and now I am walking around all twinkly and sparkly because of the sparkle that fell off the card!

Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin (2018)

Here is a fascinating documentary on Ursula K le Guin.

Crisis Problem

I am just about to watch Supergirl and then I realised I have a problem. Of the five episodes of Crisis, I will only be able to watch four of them. The reason - there is no company in Europe or UK who have picked up the rights to Batwoman - not even Sky - and thus the second part of Crisis I will not be able to watch! BOO fucking HOO!!!

COIE Part 1

OMG!! What a start, and what a fast-paced episode centring mostly on Earth 38 - Kara's home which also includes Argo City where Superman is living with Loius Lane and their baby - a domed city replicating Argo of Krypton on the Moon.

Anyway. we have this antimatter wave destroying all known universes in the multiverse followed by the Shadow Daemons and the Anti Monitor! Yep, Nash Wells was the culprit who released the Anti Monitor and has now become Pariah!

So in episode one of COIE, we see both Supergirl, Superman and Arrow and his daughter working with The Flash, Ray (The Atom)and Sarah Lance (White Canary from the Legends.)

Oh, and Lyla - wife of John Diggle in Arrow - becomes Harbinger working with the Monitor (Mar Novu) to help save the multiverse.

Plus one of the Superheroes dies but for now, I will keep quiet if you not seen this episode.

Apparently, there are at least 89 Earths in the multiverse.

Phew!

Just Wondering

When you have a really bad headache, what seems to help the most?

Have you ever temporarily lost one of your senses because of an illness or accident?

What ability of one of your pets would you most like to have?

Carl Stone

A pioneer of electronic music and still going strong.

Carl Stone - LIM

West Coast composer Carl Stone was one of the first to plug into the possibilities offered by digital synthesizers, samplers and effects. Electronic Music included “Shibucho”, an audacious sample flip of The Temptations’ “My Girl” that connects Steve Reich’s Come Out to Chicago footwork, and two explorations of the possibilities of the Buchla synth. Julian Cowley said: “While Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were flamboyantly promoting sample-based hiphop, and John Oswald was openly flaunting the art of plunderphonics, Carl Stone developed his own idiosyncratic take on sonic bricolage.

Carl Stone - Shibucho

Carl Stone - Kikanbou

Good Night