Tag: flute

[RIP] Kraftwerk – Ralf Und Florian, 1973


Like many others, I was deeply saddened to wake up this morning and learn of the passing of Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider. I was delighted, however, to read an anecdote today that he built a giant speaker in his yard so he could listen to Bach while he mowed the lawn. While it feels trite to express a sentiment that’s currently flooding my Twitter timeline, it’s amazing to reflect on a collective experience shared by so many: the recollection of first hearing Kraftwerk as a teenager, and in spite of not being able to properly contextualize it because of how normalized and mainstream electronic music was at the time (2005 for me), still feeling a very specific and novel joy. Like many others, Kraftwerk was a musical gateway drug, and slowly understanding the depth and breadth of their influence on so many subsequent musicians who I’ve loved has been a consistently sweet experience that has continued through adulthood. We will probably never stop noticing glimpses of Kraftwerk in the most unexpected places, and it will always feel like a gift, like finding an arrowhead half-buried in the sand at the beach.

I wanted to share Ralf Und Florian today because while it is considered a classic, I think many of those familiar with Kraftwerk in a cursory way might never have heard it. It’s from 1973, a decade I didn’t associate with Kraftwerk at all as a kid, but it turns out they were busy being ahead of their time way ahead of their time. Amongst their early releases this one is considered a kind of turning point, during which they moved away from the more scraggly krautrock of their first two records and started exploring sounds that were unafraid to be obviously beautiful. They hadn’t yet become quite so dogmatic about electronics, and so Ralf Und Florian sits in a really beautiful midpoint between analog and electronic instruments, mixing flute, chimes, and strings with drum machines and synthesizers.

I love that much of this record is technically ambient (a piano–yes, a real one, and flute [!] are the bulk of the gorgeous “Heimatklänge,” without any percussion in sight [!]), and I love how much of it is cosmic in the literal sense–not laden down with guitar, kosmische, but light and luminous like the cosmos. Lap steel guitar and pastel sunsets. Glittering tiny chimes. What is so striking about Kraftwerk throughout their entire discography is that in spite of wholeheartedly embracing a futurist cyborg ethos, their music always sounds so warm–an adjective very at odds with the metallic, impersonal, hard, icy associations with electronic music. They always sound so human, in spite of everything.

I hear that the most on my favorite, “Tanzmusik” (which translates, so sweetly, to “Dance Music,” though to me it also sounds like the overwhelming joy of driving through the carwash, or like hot summer rain). It’s extremely sparkly, layered with diving wordless vocals and handclaps (both of which remind me a lot of early Animal Collective, speaking of finding influences in funny places). But that human warmth is all over this record. In fourteen minute long closer “Ananas Symphonie” (pineapple symphony!), you hear psychedelic Hawai’i exotica through an obviously German lens, with shimmering lap steel guitar, ocean waves, and the beginnings of their fixation on vocoders. It is extremely relaxing, an adjective many might not associate with Kraftwerk–percussion, when present at all, is only soft pulsing.

I don’t want to say too much more about it since so many others have already said it much better than I could, but I’ll reiterate that the musical world would look very different today–perhaps unrecognizably so–had Florian (und Ralf!) not been in it. Thank you for everything, Florian.

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Guest Mix: Appel d’Air Vol. 2

Guest post by John Also Bennett (JAB / Seabat / Forma). JAB’s debut solo album Erg Herbe was released on Shelter Press earlier this year.

This mix was compiled as the second volume in my “Appel d’ Air” mix series, the first volume of which is available here. It takes its name from the Michel Redolfi album of the same name. I’m always looking for music that uses flute or wind instruments, open spaces, and environmental sound in tandem, even if these conditions are only met loosely. In this collection I included two pieces of music originally composed as environmental music for video games (“Inside The Deku Tree” from Legend of Zelda and a Resident Evil Save Room theme), both of which  were designed to color the atmosphere of a virtual space, and both of which use flute (albeit electronic). Eva-Maria Houben’s “ein schlummer (a slumber)” uses flute and organ and their reverberations inside a large cathedral: the near silences between notes as the reverb tails off are as important as the notes themselves. I also included one of my own compositions, “Chanterai por mon coraige,” recorded in a decrepit mill in the French countryside, pictured above. Like many of the pieces included on this mix, the sound of the space in which the piece was recorded plays a role in the composition; in this case evening crickets and the churning of a nearby creek. You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist:
1. Daniel Kobialka – Organic Eternity (Excerpt)
2. Koji Kondo – Inside The Deku Tree (Legend of Zelda – Ocarina Of Time)
3. Mary Jane Leach – Downland’s Tears (Excerpt)
4. Vijay Raghav Rao – Raga Malkauns – Alap and Gat n Jhaptal
5. Jim Fassett – Symphony Of The Birds (Third Movement)
6. Eva-Maria Houben – ein schlummer (a slumber)
7. Steve Roach – Spectre
8. Mamoru Samuragochi – Resident Evil – Save Room (2002 Remake)
9. Harold Budd with Jon Gibson – How Vacantly You Stare At Me
10. Che Chen & Robbie Lee – This Was The Only Place That Was Green
11. JAB – Chanterai por mon coraige
12. Jefre-Cantu Ledesma – Joy

Javier Somarriba ‎– Llegaron Los Colores, 1981

Peak private press folk. Moody, gorgeous, stripped down acoustic guitar and flute, all written and performed by Javier Somarriba. Plenty of warm room tone and vinyl static if you’re into that sort of thing. The last track of the b-side, “Dos Samurais Continúan Luchando Aún En Las Nubes” (“two Samurai still fighting in the clouds”) reminds me, perhaps very deliberately, of the Kwaidan soundtrack, with its howling wind flute dissonance and metal-edged koto mimicry. Ideal reading indoors music.

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Peter Walker – Rainy Day Raga, 1966

I hope that if it’s still torrential downpouring where you are, this gets to you in time to be a helpful addition! Peter Walker is a Boston-born steel string guitar legend who left home at 14 to begin his lifelong project of musical study and research. He traveled, toured, and hitchhiked through America, Mexico, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco, and Spain, but it was seeing Ravi Shankar perform in San Francisco in the early 60s that sparked his fascination with Indian classical–he went on to study under both Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. In the mid-60’s he embedded himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, becoming close with Sandy Bull, Karen Dalton, Joan Baez, and eventually Timothy Leary, for whom he served as a “musical director.”

This was the first of two full lengths he recorded before a 40 year hiatus, until he was later coaxed out of retirement by Joshua Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records in 2007, at which point he went on to release a slew of new material and tour extensively. Though his interplay with Appalachian (and more generally American) folk, Indian raga, and flamenco was still taking shape upon the release of Rainy Day Raga (his follow-up “Second Poem To Karmela” leans into Indian traditions much more explicitly), I love it for its raucous joy, tumbling lines of masterful fingerpicking building into extended crescendoes before a long cooldown. A very appropriate indoor rainy day soundtrack. For fans of Robbie Băsho, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.

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Ariel Kalma & Richard Tinti – Osmose, 1978

From the liner notes:

“When forest and music meet.

Richard Tinti travelled to Borneo and recorded the sound of the forest. When Ariel Kalma listened to it, he could hear his melodies sung by the birds, even sometimes in the very keys he uses… Natural harmony and inspiration seems to flow from the same spring. Thus began the studio work: to tune, record, mix the different element together; to the animals and atmosphere of the jungle, answered generators, flutes, saxophones, bird-calls, synthesizers, organs. Some surprises also occurred, like this fly coming down to the mic at the end of “Planet-Air” …

Mixed at the Groupe of Research in Music (GRM), a department of French National Audiovisual Institute (INA).”

Deep, densely psychedelic synth experiments. At times it’s difficult to distinguish between insects and electronics, and difficult to tell whether the natural cadence of bird song has been looped to sync with synthetic rhythms or vice versa. Big harmonium, reverb-soaked flute, circular breathing saxophone, long delays, drum machines, flanged keyboards, and plenty of synth, alongside birds, forest sounds, and war drums. Mostly voiceless, with the exception of the stark and heavy “Osmose Chant.” Clever play with space and distance, with the music sometimes pulling back into the distance in a way that allows room tone (or even unintended noises, such as the aforementioned fly on the mic, which makes several appearances) to become a kind of third musical actor. The whole thing feels like a very well-executed joke about what “ambient music” is. Try it with good speakers, if you can.

Tracks 1-6 originally comprised Disc A of the 1978 double LP split with Ariel Kalma and Richard Tinti, with the second disc comprised of Tinti’s tracks (if anyone has these and would be willing to share, I’d love to hear them). Disc A was later rereleased in 2006 with two additional unreleased tracks that were recorded at the same time, credited as just to Ariel Kalma. While it’s just these Disc A tracks that I’m sharing today, given that these were made in collaboration with Tinti and with the aid of his field recordings (recorded on a Nagra recorder), I’m using the original credits. (I’m particularly fond of the closing unreleased track, “Orguitar Soir,” which is one of the more mellow moments in the collection: just gentle guitar plucking and a keyboard drone tucked into forest sounds.)

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Janet Bray & Edie Hartshorne – The Mystery Within, 1988

Super bare bones meditative instrumentals. Ocarina, Tibetan bells and bowls, bamboo flutes, and koto. I haven’t been able to confirm a release year, but my  best guess is 1988. It looks as if the pair later released a record with a similar tracklisting in 2010, though the songs that have the same titles as these seem like modified versions. Predictably gorgeous room tone. I love how intimately you can hear the inhales and exhales of the flutist–despite being recorded in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, there are moments where, rather than feeling drowned in cavernous echo, you feel as if you’re sitting a few inches away from the musician. From the liner notes:

We only use the pure sounds of instruments wrought from the earth: clay, wood, bamboo, precious metals. As we performed in the Cathedral, we experienced an interplay between the instruments and the reverberation of the Cathedral itself, as if the Cathedral were a sacred instrument.

The Tibetan bowls have been used in Buddhist meditations for many centuries. The ocarina, also called “huaca” in the Andes, means “breath of spirit.” In the Andean burial grounds, huacas call forth the Divine and assist the passage of souls to the next world.

The Japanese koto, a 13 stringed instrument made of Paulownia wood, came to Japan in the 8th century from China. The four-foot-long side-blown bamboo flute has only four finger holes, and uses the same pentatonic scale as the shakuhachi. We use Eastern as well as Western musical scales.

Edie Hartshorne has lived and studied in Japan, Europe, and South America, and has played Japanese and Western music for over 25 years. She uses music to create group rituals and ceremonies, and sacred spaces for individuals. She works with poets and artists exploring the synthesis of music, image, and words.

Janet Bray has worked with sacred sound for over 30 years in music and healing. She synthesizes disciplines of music, Ashtanga yoga, meditation, dream work and integrative hypnotherapy. Janet’s commitment is to guide those who seek inner growth and harmony.

If you liked this very good singing bowl cassette, you’ll probably like this. Thank you Sounds of the Dawn for the tip!

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World Standard – World Standard, 1985

Another one from the understatedly brilliant Soichiro Suzuki, aka World Standard. This is a completely different beast from the last of his records that I posted–it’s effectively lyricless, and is less a pop record than it is a somewhat anonymous amalgam of different folk traditions (though there’s plenty of Japanese folk in here). Hosono provides production and sounds; Hosono would later go on to release Soichiro Suzuki’s also excellent World Standard II on his then new FOA label.

This record is deceptive, heartbeaking, and again, understated–I think I probably heard it two or three times before I properly listened to it. It doesn’t command attention, but once it gets its hooks in you, they’re stuck. A slew of string instruments from all over, very tasteful percussion, and gorgeous wordless vocal layering courtesy of Pizzicato V (!) and Sandii (!). Alternately playful (opener “太陽とダァリヤ,” which, in perfect Hosono form, has an abrupt Beach Boys-esque reverb vocal harmony breakdown), moody (“逝ける王女のためのパヴァーヌ” is an appropriately cinematic version of Ravel‘s “Pavane pour une infante défunte”), and deeply emotive (“水夫たちの歌声” has left me in tears a few times). There’s something reminiscent of Penguin Café Orchestra–the music is pastoral and very evocative, but it’s not totally clear of where or what, and it feels oddly timeless. Weightless and heavy-hitting. If it’s for you, it’s definitely for you.

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Di Melo – Di Melo, 1975

Following in the steps of Jorge Ben, who began incorporating elements of funk and soul into samba music in the early 60s (eventually creating whole new genres that became integral to Brazil’s Black Movement), Roberto Santos (aka Di Melo, “tell me”) didn’t enjoy the international name recognition that many of his more prolific peers did. Perhaps it’s because until 2016, Di Melo was his only full-length release. Still, if the measly two copies of the record currently available on Discogs with a starting price of $732.56 are any indication, the record has since attained its well-deserved holy grail status.

Santos was born in the Pernambuco region of Northeastern Brazil, moved to São Paolo in the late 60s, and was signed to EMI/Odeon in 1974. Other than that, I haven’t found much information about him, and it’s not totally clear why he didn’t continue to release music on the heels of Di Melo, as he’s written more than 400 unpublished songs. From what I gather, he was in a severe motorcycle accident in the 80s that almost left him a paraplegic, after which there were widespread rumors that he had not survived, which might have contributed to his long hiatus. There’s a short documentary about him here from 2011–though it doesn’t have English subtitles, it’s well worth flitting through even for non-Portuguese speakers for its amazing archival footage, as well as some beautiful contemporary footage of him serenading his small daughter in their kitchen.

Sonically, Di Melo is rich and complex, effortlessly winding between funk, samba, tango, jazz, soul, and regional folk. Hermeto Pascoal (!) contributes, though it’s not clear in what capacity. Eight of the twelve tracks are original compositions. It’s a wildly ambitious debut effort, and, as seems to often be the case with Brazilian musical wunderkinds, it succeeds at all of its efforts. I’m far from an expert on Brazilian music, so rather than make uninformed statements, I’ll encourage you to listen to it–it’s a pleasure from the enthusiastically syncopated, brutally grooving opener “Kilariô” (which, as I understand it, was the biggest hit at the time of Di Melo‘s release) all the way to the sunny, cowbell-flecked cakewalk closer “Indecisão.” In between, the unbothered, sinewy “Se O Mundo Acabasse En Mel” (previewed below) is my personal favorite. Ideal warm weather listening.

Thank you Silva for the reminder about this terrific record!

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[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 23

Here’s my most recent episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. If it isn’t painfully obvious, I recently revisited the 1993 version of The Secret Garden, something I watched obsessively as a kid. This time I was struck by its gorgeous soundtrack, the moody world it lives in, its textural depth, and, as is often the case with my childhood movies, its easy elision of colonialism. This mix is about the pastoral, in the British countryside sense but also seeing the pastoral elsewhere. It’s about the projection and fantasy of exotica, musical migration as a result of colonialism, escapism, and essentialism; and is somewhat of a continuation of this mix. It’s also full of birds, bells, and field recordings, because it’s spring, sort of. You can download an mp3 version here. Thanks for listening!

Tracklisting:
1. Fernando Falcão – Revoada
2. Jean C. Roché / Birds – Palmar
3. Toshifumi Hinata – Fire And Forever
4. Mecano – Hawaii-Bombay
5. Per Tjernberg – They Call Me
6. Zbigniew Preisner – First Time Outside
7. Francis Bebey – Forest Nativity
8. Virginia Astley – Sanctus
9. Kudsi Erguner & Xavier Bellenger – Rahat-Ul-Ervah: Le Repos Des Esprits
10. Virginia Astley – From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
11. Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy – White Nile
12. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Yvette Mimieux & Charles Baudelaire – To A Passer-By
13. Raul Lovisoni – Hula Om
14. Bridget St. John – Ask Me No Questions

Fernando Falcão – Memória Das Águas, 1981

The first of three records by Paraíba-born poet, percussionist, and composer Fernando Falcão, recorded in Paris in 1979 and released independently two years later. I realize that I’m a broken record, but this one is truly uncategorizable–and while that word can frequently connote records that are too challenging to be fully enjoyable, too ambitious for their own good, or just plain incoherent, Memória Das Águas is an utter pleasure from beginning to end.

“What?” you will think to yourself when you listen to it, which you should. “Who is this guy? Had he been quietly making music for decades under a pseudonym before releasing this? How else does something this orchestral in scope spring out fully formed on the first try? Why does he share a name with a Northeastern municipality?” you will ask after you’ve Googled him. “How’s his poetry? Is this a hoax? When is this getting reissued?” These are all questions I also have, which is to say, I’m sorry, I have no answers. All I have for context is that Fernando Falcão makes an appearance on the very good Outro Tempo compilation, which I suspect is how I landed here in the first place, but I’m not sure, as this record has been sitting in my “things to listen to” folder for months.

Memória Das Águas is a trip, moving seamlessly between swathes of avant murk, African polyrhythms, cinematic ambient flecked with field recordings, exuberant Brazilian jazz, maybe some Balinese Kecak influence, and a stripped down percussive number that, even in 2018, still sounds like the future. (I’ll say it again: 1979.) Instrumentally, that means cabasa, tumba, pandeiro, ganzá, contrabass, horn, flute, piccolo, piano, sax, timpani, violin, jug, and several different vocal ensembles. Functionally, it means this isn’t background music. Sometimes it feels like Geinoh Yamashirogumi; at others, it brings to mind the outside-of-time alien quality of Nuno Canavarro–and it is very much unlike either of those things. Try it–if you’re here, you’ll probably love it.

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