For the Night People

Some cool music for you night owls -

Midori Komachi - Window

Brian Eno - Becalmed

Julianna Barwick - Night

Sona Jobarteh - Saya

Tuulikki Bartosik - Reflections

ENJOY
and Good Night

Good Morning

Foreplay

Thursday Music Selection

Time for some music - starting with the gorgeous vocals of Sylvain -

David Sylvian - Waterfront

No-Man - Heaven Taste

The For Carnation - Moonbeams

The Asphodells - A Love from Outer Space (Version 2)

ENJOY

Orblasm

Two from The Orb.


The Orb - Perpetual Dawn (Ultrabass 2)

The Orb - OOBE

ENJOY

P.M III

This one is for chocolate_frapp as I promised.


Paul McCartney - McCartney III

1. Long Tailed Winter Bird 0:00​
2. Find My Way 5:14​
3. Pretty Boys 9:06​
4. Women and Wives 12:03​
5. Lavatory Lil 14:53​
6. Deep Deep Feeling 17:13​
7. Slidin' 25:37​
8. The Kiss of Venus 28:57​
9. Seize the Day 32:00​
10. Deep Down 35:20​
11. Winter Bird / When Winter Comes 41:10



This is the first time that Paul has had an album featured in The Wire magazine. Although he has been mentioned before in the mag occasionally since its inception. There have been 90 citations of him since 1984.

The Inner Sleeve

The Inner Sleeve is a monthly page in The Wire magazine - here is one about Wings. from the September 2000 issue.

Epiphanies

Another regular spot monthly in Wire is a page called Epiphanies -

Here is one from December 2006 -

Barry Miles has a first-hand insight into The Beatles’ group mind and the power of experimental pop music to create a revolution


In the summer of 1951, I heard “How High The Moon” by Les Paul & Mary Ford on the radio. I didn’t know the title or artist, but my aunt took me to the local Currys – records were mostly sold through electrical goods shops back then – to try and find it. When asked what the record sounded like, I apparently told the assistant that it was like rainbow bubbles floating over a wall in the sunlight. I was just eight years old. That record turned me on to music. All through art school and my early days living in a communal flat in Notting Hill I sat around with friends listening to jazz: cascades of piano notes from Cecil Taylor, birdsong from Eric Dolphy, air sculpture by John Coltrane, honks and squeaks by Albert Ayler. When a new release entered the pad we would sit in the living room, smoke something to open our ears, and play it at least three times before anyone would dare venture an opinion. Although I had adored 50s doowop and artists like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard, 60s pop music passed me by until the summer of 1965, when I met The Beatles.

That year I co-founded Indica Books and Gallery. One of my partners, Peter Asher, still lived at his parents’ home, as did his sister Jane and her boyfriend Paul McCartney. The Asher household on Wimpole Street was only five minutes walk from where I lived and I used the Ashers’ basement to assemble the stock for the bookshop while we looked for premises. I got to know Paul McCartney pretty well; we went to concerts and plays together as well as nightclubs. That October he invited me to a Beatles recording session, the first of many. The fans waiting outside Abbey Road did not come as a surprise; there were always a dozen or so outside the Asher house. It was the contrast that was so extraordinary. Outside were the trappings of fame with girls thrusting presents into their hands; inside Studio Two represented total musical professionalism. These days people are familiar with recording studios from videos and films, but then it was unknown territory. Abbey Road was a mixture of the BBC and Flash Gordon: men in brown labcoats holding clipboards peered at enormous dials.

The equipment was huge and, though I didn’t know it then, obsolete. EMI built their own equipment and it was designed to last: enormous semi-circular VU meters and doorknob size pan-pots to position the stereo image; it all looked as if it came from the bridge of a battle cruiser. To listen to a playback was a complex business. A tape op would have to unplug dozens of patch cords and reposition them, like in a primitive telephone exchange. They were recording a new McCartney song, “I’m Looking Through You”, which eventually appeared on Rubber Soul. He and Jane had been having some difficulties because she had chosen to play a season with the Bristol Old Vic theatre company instead of staying in town with him. This song was the result of their arguments. The session began with a band meeting with George Martin to discuss the arrangement. Paul seemed to have a pretty good idea how the song should go but as I saw from later sessions,

The Beatles operated as a democracy and each Beatle had his say about the treatment of a song and what contribution he could bring to it. The first thing that astonished me was that they didn’t just set up and play as if they were in a theatre, they used the studio like an instrument, treating each song separately with an arrangement to suit its musical needs: a sitar, a string quartet, sound effects. For “I’m Looking Through You” the instrumentation was Ringo on handclaps and maracas, George Martin on organ, Paul playing a closely miked acoustic guitar and George Harrison on electric. It took some time to get the separation the engineers needed and to decide on the arrangement; who came in when. The mic positioning was all important to the sound, achieving a clarity and separation that I quickly realised was only possible in a multitrack studio, albeit a four track one. To an outsider like me it all seemed chaotic with people playing and talking over each other. Then there was a countdown and they began to play; perfectly in tune, musically as well as with each other. They were consummate players. The hundreds of hours in Hamburg and at the Cavern meant they knew instinctively what each was about to do: the ‘group mind’. They stopped before the end but already the song seemed to me to be almost there. They explained some of the technical details to me: for instance, they had the vocal microphone set slightly high so they had to stretch their necks to sing instead of looking down and constricting their air passages. There were so many ways this song could have been treated, but they knew almost at once how to approach it and by the end of the session had what sounded to me like a perfect take, marred only by an over-ambitious electric solo by George which could have been overdubbed anew. They had transformed a few notes on the back of a shirt packet into a work of art. (In fact they were not satisfied and rerecorded the song from scratch a few days later.) It really was a revelation to me.

I went out and bought records by The Beatles and Stones, Dylan and the Motown acts that McCartney told me about. From then on I bored my friends with endless discussions about the emergence of a new art form; how pop music – as it was then called – was the vehicle for musical experimentation; about the possibilities of the studio as an instrument; and how The Beatles were leading a musical revolution. Friends accepted my enthusiasm with amused tolerance, but The Beatles themselves were more receptive, and I had long talks with McCartney about the subject.

We listened a lot to John Cage, Luciano Berio, Stockhausen, Albert Ayler, as well as The Beach Boys, R&B and an IBM 7000 computer singing “Daisy Daisy”. His attitude to music convinced me that pop was the future. In a conversation I recorded in 1966, McCartney said: “With any kind of thing, my aim seems to be to distort it. Distort it from what we know it as, even with music, with visual things. But the aim is to change it from what it is to see what it could be. To see the potential in it all. The point is to take a note and wreck the note and see in that note what else there is in it that a simple act like distorting it has caused.” To me this was pop music taking over where Ayler, Dolphy and Coltrane left off. It was the rainbow bubbles over again, it was a revelation.

Book 22 - Christine Mangan "Tangerine"

Christine Mangan "Tangerine" (Abacus)





It is 1956 in Tangier. Lucy Mason shows up for an unannounced visit with her estranged friend Alice Shipley. The two had been college roommates and inseparable friends in Vermont until some unspecified tragedy resulted in their not having spoken in a year. In that year Alice married and moved with her husband to Morocco. How did Lucy find her? Why did she come to Tangier?

In alternating chapters, the two women discuss both the past and the present. Both are unreliable narrators. Alice is emotionally fragile; in Tangier, she struggles with anxiety and loneliness, and she speaks of “darkness and shadows” hovering above her “so that at times I questioned the accuracy of my mind, of my memories”. Lucy is more independent but experiences “a slight fluttering” in her ear which was diagnosed as “a nervous condition”. And then there’s her unhealthy obsession with Alice. Their versions of past events conflict so the reader is left to wonder who is telling the truth.

The pace of the first part of the book is glacial. It is only when the mystery of the tragedy in Vermont is explained that things pick up. Unfortunately, it is then that the reader’s credulity is stretched to its limits. The villain’s machinations suggest she possesses exceptional foresight. The success of her schemes also requires great serendipity, unqualified stupidity on the part of the police, and extreme gullibility on the part of several people.

Neither of the two women made a connection with me. Alice is the demure rich girl who lets herself be manipulated by the insensitive cad she married on short acquaintance. Lucy has more spunk but she also does stupid things like becoming involved with a man who has a reputation as a grifter. Both are emotionally overwrought and constantly over-analyzing everyone’s facial expressions, gestures, and words. There’s just too much needless drama for my liking.


So, on the whole, one not to recommend.

Just Wondering

What are gas/petrol prices like in your neck of the woods?

If you could reverse time to cancel out a mistake you made what would it be?

Do you have a favourite colour crayon, either now or as a kid?

On Reflection

As the time is approaching midnight and that wind or gale we had the last couple of days is finally in retreat it is time to reflect on when we shall see the halcyon days of summer again. In fact, I wonder if this year will see such balmy hot days as last year or not? The question is not just rhetorical. I feel we may have a cooler summer - it is just a hunch - but - well, time will tell.

One thing we did have and I almost got caught in it, was a spate of hailstones nonetheless. I just returned from the local convenience store with some food items and cider, and as I opened my flat door and looked out of the window it suddenly came down bouncing off the cars and leaving little icy stones!! Jeez, I would have been soaked!

So, I am hoping tomorrow is a dry day as I am out again on behalf of one of my companies.

Good Night

Winter Wonderland - Peter Straub