Tag: england

[RIP] David Bowie – Low, 1977

Last night I heard about David Bowie’s death with disbelief. I don’t think I’m alone in my longheld, subconscious idea that Bowie, if not altogether immortal, would at the very least outlive us all. I then found myself in four simultaneous 2:00 am text message exchanges of Bowie memorabilia: remember this live performance, that outfit, this song, that photoshoot, this scene in that movie, that moment with Iman, this album cover, this phase, that feeling. For Bowie, pictures are worth plenty more than a thousand words, because words could never do him justice. Instead of trying to express our loss, we just swapped images and stared in awe.

We’ve learned many things from David Bowie, whether or not we’re aware of just how much originated with him. What I’m most grateful for is that he lived out a fluid sexual identity under global scrutiny, and recognized that the public’s thirst to know exactly “what he was” was simultaneously ridiculous and a tool to be played with. That was particularly inspiring to me growing up, as was his shapeshifting sound and aesthetic. To call him a chameleon is incorrect, because he never blended in with anything. “Lightning rod” might be more apt. He’s always seemed like a particularly sensitive vessel for creative thought, and he acknowledged that divine inspiration in his lyrics: “I will sit right down / waiting for the gift of sound and vision.”

I woke up this morning agonizing over which Bowie record to share today. Low needs no introduction and defies explanation, but it feels the most emblematic of the depth of his interests and emotions. It’s a record about alienation, and that alienation rubs off on the listener: by the time we reach the saxophone outro “Subterraneans,” we feel disoriented, cut adrift and unsure what just happened. I can’t help but think of his family when I listen to it today.

Safe journey, David, and thank you for everything.

The Tallis Scholars – Spem In Alium, 1985

Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) is considered by many to be one of the most important English composers ever to have lived, and is definitively one of the most important composers of early choral music. His crowning achievement, “Spem In Alium,” is a ten minute long 40-part motet that borders on psychedelic: ceaselessly shifting, simultaneously hyper-precise yet almost shapeless. From Wikipedia:

The motet is laid out for eight choirs of five voices. It’s most likely that Tallis intended his singers to stand in a horseshoe shape. Beginning with a single voice from the first choir, other voices join in imitation, each in turn falling silent as the music moves around the eight choirs. All forty voices enter simultaneously for a few bars, and then the pattern of the opening is reversed with the music passing from choir eight to choir one. There is another brief full section, after which the choirs sing in antiphonal pairs, throwing the sound across the space between them. Finally all voices join for the culmination of the work. Though composed in imitative style and occasionally homophonic, its individual vocal lines act quite freely within its elegant harmonic framework, allowing for a large number of individual musical ideas to be sung during its ten- to twelve-minute performance time. The work is a study in contrasts: the individual voices sing and are silent in turns, sometimes alone, sometimes in choirs, sometimes calling and answering, sometimes all together, so that, far from being a monotonous mess, the work is continually presenting new ideas.

I’ve been listening to this album for ten years and it’s still disorientingly beautiful. The other works in this collection are gorgeous in their own right, with “Sancte Deus” and “Miserere Nostri” being personal favorites. Not included are his “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” cited as his other masterwork; I’m also a chump for “If ye love me“…there are plenty of other compilations worth seeking out. Happy December, but also, listen to this all year round.

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Bridget St. John – Ask Me No Questions, 1969

Peak British folk. Bridget St. John is most well known for the trio of excellent records she released between ’69 and ’72 on John Peel’s Dandelion label. This, her debut and the first in the series, is the most bare-bones and raw, with guitar that’s alternately sunny and somber. It’s also blessedly absent of the goofy optimism that made many of her peers less palatable (and, unlike many of its contemporaries, all the songs on it are self-composed). Her voice is remarkable not just for sitting in a notably low alto range, but for its consistency of non-expression, as if she preferred to let her androgynous bard quaver and her direct lyrics speak for themselves. The follow up to this record, Songs for the Gentle Man, is also worth seeking out, but it’s more padded out with instruments, and feels somehow less pure for it–I love how Ask Me No Questions is unabashedly moody, dappled with the occasional patch of sun (the eight minute long closing title track is dense with field recordings of birds and church bells). Perfect fall soundtrack.

Hildegard von Bingen – A Feather on the Breath of God, 1984

Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179) was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, poet, doctor, visionary, Christian mystic, and polymath. She founded the practice of scientific natural history in Germany, lived to the age of 81 at a time when the life expectancy was early 40s at best, and wrote the oldest surviving morality play (sometimes called the first musical drama). Despite having no formal musical training, she was responsible for some of the most hauntingly beautiful and enduring music to come out of medieval Catholicism. Her compositions broke many of the existing conventions of plainchant, using extremes of register, dramatic leaps of pitch, melismas and flourishes to express rhapsodic, overflowing emotion. Sublime delivery of this collection of her songs by UK ensemble Gothic Voices and soprano Emma Kirkby, globally renowned early music specialist. Perfect hurricane soundtrack music.

Virginia Astley – Hope In A Darkened Heart, 1986

A favorite that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Virginia Astley is a British musician who put out a small slew of full lengths and EPs in the 80s, but seems to have flown under the American radar. Her music is distinctive for its sing-songy, little boy church choir vocal delivery, and her lyrics, while sometimes indistinguishable, are as dark and ruthless as they come (“I’ve tasted your tongue like a worm from the grave / Had you inside me, then like a rock beside me”). She also used her extensive collection of field recordings to make a gorgeous instrumental concept album chronicling a summer day in the English countryside, which is way more expansive and less twee than it sounds.

My sister first played me Hope In A Darkened Heart a few years ago and it’s stuck with me since. While the songs are effectively pop in structure, the record defies the specificity of genre: it truly sounds like nothing else. Astley wrote all the songs except for the opening track, which is a duet with David Sylvian. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Astley co-produced the record, and it feels very much like both of them: Astley’s lilting, pastoral nostalgia on top of Sakamoto’s mechanical, off-kilter synth chug. Its darkness is belied by how damn pretty it is. Well overdue for a re-release.

Bill Nelson – Getting The Holy Ghost Across, 1986

Bill Nelson’s body of work is daunting, to say the least. In addition to his 139 releases, his work as a founding member of the legendary Be Bop Deluxe, collaborations with David Sylvian, Harold Budd, Masami Tsuchiya, and many others, his name is constantly popping up in liner notes and album credits. Over the course of 44 years, he’s made a name for himself as one of the UK’s most singular and prolific musicians. Picking an album of his to share was tough, especially since I haven’t spent time with most of them.

Getting the Holy Ghost Across has a confusing history: it was released in the UK on several different formats with many different track listings ranging from 10 to 18 tracks. Its subsequent US release was clouded by concern over “occult symbolism,” so the title was changed to On A Blue Wing, the album cover was changed, and a good deal of the music was cut altogether. (These fears weren’t completely unfounded, as Nelson had a longstanding interest in Occultism and Gnosticism.) That being said, Getting the Holy Ghost Across (posted here with the track listing from the original cassette release) isn’t all that esoteric: a lot of it is terribly catchy jangling new wave, replete with towering synth hooks and restless, occasionally tropical percussion. Vocally, Nelson is up there with Andy McCluskey, Dave Gahan, Tears For Fears, and Other Famous British Guys, which is to say, many of these tracks coulda woulda shoulda been radio hits. Flanked by gorgeous ambient tracks like “Suvasini” and “Pansophia,” Bill Nelson wants you to remember that he’s still a weirdo genius, and that even though you’ll be too busy bobbing your heads to think about the lyrical content, this is still a theological concept record. No complaints here!

LFO – Frequencies, 1991

Arguably one of the most important UK techno LPs ever. Just as happy to be heard in headphones as in a grimy warehouse. Gorgeous, heart-skittering, crunchy sci-fi futurism rendered in perfect detail. Perpetually surprising and joyful throughout. A fully-realized prediction of two decades of electronic dance music. Mark Bell died six months ago and I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently, partially because of the Björk retrospective (he co-produced Homogenic, among many others), but largely because of this record, which is a gift.

Baby Ford – Monolense, 1994

Not technically an LP, but enough of a world that I’m making an exception to our albums-only rule. I still don’t know how to talk about techno, so I’ll just say that this is a formative piece of minimal techno history and is as elegant as they come. Also, Richard D. James album and Amnesiac probably wouldn’t have happened without this.

Brenda Ray – Walatta, 2005

A personal favorite. Brenda Ray rolled around with a handful of musical projects in the UK post punk scene, where she explored African rhythms, dub, hip hop, and electro grooves. After hitting it off with the legendary Roy Cousins in the early 90’s, she helped him remaster and reissue titles from his label, Tamoki Wambesi. Legend has it that it was Cousins’ idea that she make an album using original tapes of Tamoki Wambesi roots reggae tracks. I think this was mostly recorded in the late 90s, released in limited numbers via Tamoki Wambesi, and reissued by Japan’s EM Records (I’m still working our way through their catalog, because holy cow it is good).

Unlike anything else. Responsible for vocals, melodica, keyboards, koto, pixiephone, chimes, claves, bells, cymbal, cowbell, ashtray (?), clavinet, xylophone, cabasa, triangle, idiophone, tambourine, vibraslap, scraper, whistle, recording, and mixing, Ray draped her breathy, 60’s-chanteuse vocals all over her reworkings of some of the best dub and reggae tracks ever made, resulting in what Forced Exposure called “very disturbing slices of psycho-dub/doo-wop/jazz-fusion/exotica music.” Grooving all over Turkey, West Africa, and of course, Jamaica. Alternately shimmery, bossa-nova-flecked, and funky, with appearances by Prince Far I and Knowledge. The sonic equivalent of pink plastic palm trees. A salve for a brutally cold February day. Enjoy!

N.A.D. – Dawn of a New Age, 1990

Guest post by Dru Grossberg

In 1990, Mustafa Ali had little under his belt before he began recording his sole 8-track LP as the perfectly suited nom-de-plum New Age Dance. Predicting several of the new decade’s themes and tones for Detroit, it’s not hard to imagine this as the precursor to Drexciya’s subaquatic sensibilities; here, however, synth washes that would be reserved for diving instead mimic interstellar flight. Displaying an otherwise distinctly American sound for a British record, Dawn of a New Age cameod his native isle’s bleep techno before Warp established a serious audience. It was prime for reissuing on Rush Hour, following the like-minded Virgo Four, Larry Heard, and Dream 2 Science.

On Dawn of a New Age, disillusionment with the modern world, primarily its spiritual state, runs rampant. Each composition opens and repeats a bar emulating archaic visions of cosmic technological disclosure in sound, strewn with a variety of samples from dinosaurs to the day the earth stood still. Tracks like “Everything Seems Different” and the eerie coda “Let There be Light” emulate the hauntingly simple NES sci-fi side scrollers. “Soul Search” delivers even bleaker synth waves, yet also draws attention to how N.A.D.’s narration co-dependently pairs to its musical counterpart: his repeated mantras weave in and out of the track’s minimal flourishes.

Much of this album plays like a disaffected, dystopian sermon in one’s own private diary. At its end, Dawn of a New Age leaves you exasperated, carnal, and dispirited. While the masses may never sip this brew, part of Dawn‘s ambitious thesis has triumphed by predicting spiritually imbued curation all throughout dance music culture. Mustafa left behind the sense he’d die more than happy pouring his soul into this recording, placing it as an unknown artifact never to be found again. Lucky for us that wasn’t the case.