FOTW Audio Productions

Eurovision is a music event that has an interesting history. In many ways, it is a chance for European countries to get together for something different – not sport or financial talks, but an old fashioned song competition.

There have been many interesting entrants since its inception in 1956. The above clip is a Swedish remix of a song that was in the 1989 Eurovision by Turkish group Pan.

Although Pan might not be that well known outside of Turkey, there has been some very big names appearing in the competition like ABBA and the British singer Lulu. Also, one of the subjects of my last post, Sébastian Tellier, represented France in 2008.

For 2012, the Australian multicultural radio and TV broadcaster SBS have set up a pop-up radio station for the next couple of months, showcasing the history of Eurovision. You can listen to it here online,  or download the free app and listen to it on your phone.

This is a brilliant piece of music, full of energy and power. It was written by Henry Purcell in the seventeenth century for the funeral of Queen Mary. Both he and Queen Mary died in their thirties, five years apart. During their life time, they witnessed the Thames freezing over which Purcell used as his inspiration for the Cold Genius aria.

Many of us would recognise the Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary through the soundtrack to Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. The film version was slightly varied, with some hidden motifs, composed by the very talented Wendy Carlos on the newly invented Moog synthesizer. (Due to copyright reasons, the original isn’t available, so here is is an 8-bit chiptune version, using the same technology behind the Commodore 64).

And this is Sebastian Tellier’s Sexual Sportswear, which came out in 2008, following a similar harmonic/melodic pattern, investing it with the same emotional energy.

It makes you think that all sounds, melodies and music, are part of a huge matrix, built over thousands of years of human history, and shared, perhaps, as part of a collective unconscious.

Okay, no major theme here, outside of awesome and eerie … and maybe old … and maybe italo … (okay,  so there is a theme!)

I’m reading Simon Reynold’s book Retromania at the moment, and quite frankly, all of this has me worried – the fact that italo-disco pops up in such large letters in my tag cloud.

Anyway, here you are . . .

Spacer Woman – Charlie (1983)

Flash in the Night – Public Passion (1986)

Take a Chance – Mr Flagio (1983)

Preview of the film “New Summer Wavelength” by Ghost Box co-founder Julian House. Music: Summer Round from new Belbury Poly album “The Belbury Tales”

In Australia, during the 70s and 80s, there were two major streams of culture feeding into the country – one from Britain, the other from the United States;  as well as a small amount of our own locally created material. Even though we were no longer a British colony – Australia gained its independence in 1901 – we still had a close cultural connection to Britain, and our national broadcaster, the ABC, purchased many of its programs from the BBC, and other English channels like ITV.

We watched everything from Doctor Who and The Goodies, to All Creatures Great and Small and The Good Life, and for children growing up in a hot and sunny climate, we still managed to soak up quite a bit of the brooding English countryside.

Unfortunately, over the years, as it is true of most countries, American programming has come to dominate the airwaves. But to be fair, there is also a much more global experience of culture with the syndication of reality TV shows created anywhere in the world (Big Brother originated in the Netherlands) remade for local audiences.

For many of us living in the antipodes, however, the unique music of Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box label opens up a kind of mental time capsule of these long-forgotten feelings and sensations of our British-influenced childhood.

Left, Jim Jupp (aka the Vicar of Belbury) and right, straightening up his tie, Julian House

Label founders Jim Jupp and Julian House, by exploring their own childhood experiences, have captured an old way of making sounds and images, a culture that was strongly driven by government education programs and institutionalised creativity like that of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. They have preserved and elevated these old media-making ways into a new and treasured artform, approaching them in the same way that someone might learn the art of blacksmithing to ensure that a valued cultural tradition is not lost through neglect.

But with no one to teach them, this strange world they have created has been of their own making, re-discovered through a process of reverse engineering.

Julian House looks after all of the album art and graphic design for the label (also releasing music as The Focus Group) and has a history of making music videos for Primal Scream and the Doves. His Ghost box imagery is a strange brew of village churches, sun shadows, and neolithic standing stones.

Jim Jupp is behind Belbury Poly, and the fourth album, “The Belbury Tales” has just been released. For this new work, he has enlisted the help of additional musicians – drummer Jim Musgrave and guitarist Christopher Budd – giving the Belbury sound a new dimension with fuzz guitars, vocals, and a synthesized choir alá Popul Vuh’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God.

The album title is a play on The Canterbury Tales, a cornerstone of British literary culture, but is also drawing on more unorthodox literary traditions, like British science fiction. Included in the album’s packaging is a fictional story by Wire Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Rob Young, who has written extensively about the Ghost Box label and Belbury Poly in his book Electric Eden.

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The Australian connection to all of this is an interesting one. In the sixties and seventies, many young, professional Australians moved to London to make their mark, feeling that the opportunities for advancement in their own country – which at the time had a much smaller population – were limited.

One of the people to leave our shores was the composer Ron Grainer. Born in Atherton, Queensland, he was a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In London, he became involved with the BBC, composing theme music and incidental music for shows like Maigret. One of his most famous works was the cracking theme for The Prisoner. However, it was his orchestral theme for Doctor Who that was famously transformed by Delia Derbyshire on electronic equipment and turned into one of the most instantly recognisable themes around the world.

A reverse journey was made by Tristam Cary, who after many years of composing his unique synthesizer music for Doctor Who (as well as helping develop its signature instrument, the EMS VCS3 with inventor Peter Zinovieff), retired to live in Adelaide, South Australia. A double CD of his original non-Doctor Who compositions was released by the Australia label Tall Poppies in 2000, and he appeared in the 2006 documentary What the Future Sounded Like before passing away in 2008.

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“The Belbury Tales” is out now, available through the Ghost Box website in a 12″ vinyl format, CD, and download. If you would also like to stay abreast of happenings in the world of Belbury, you can peruse through The Belbury Parish Magazine (though I have a sneaking suspicion that the Parish church is fashioned of the same stones that were once the local druid’s circle – so watch out!)

This is some crazy proto-techno for babies, from Raymond Scott’s 1964 album “Soothing Sounds for Babies”.

Scott had been a great jazz orchestrator from the 30s and 40s, whose music was licensed by Warner Bros and used by Carl Stalling for many, many Looney Tunes cartoons, particularly his composition Powerhouse.

After a successful career in TV, he began inventing his own instruments, coming up with the pre-Moog Electronium, which his soothing baby sounds was composed on.

His vintage jazz music was re-introduced to the public in the nineties, when alt-kids cartoon creator, John Kricfalusi used Scott’s music for his brilliant Ren & Stimpy show.

Speaking of John Kricfalusi, he also used music from the Capitol Production Music library, some of which had already appeared in Image Ten’s Night of the Living Dead.

Anyway, visit the Raymond Scott Archives; or have a look at the documentary recently made by his son, Deconstructing Dad.

Here we have medieval chants through the lens of eighties pop,  from John Maus’ latest album, “We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves.” (Phew, talk about a mouthful!) Thanks to my friend Robert for encouraging me to buy it.  More info about the album here!

Nwa Gezani My Love / SHANGAAN ELECTRO from s o u n d t r a v e l s on Vimeo.

The Sydney Festival 2012 has just begun, and there has been amazing line up of people and events: John Maus has already played, Prins Thomas will be here at the end of the month.

But one of the more interesting groups to be brought out for the festival are Shangaan Electro from South Africa, a collective of artists produced by engineer and talent scout Nozinja. A compilation of their music was released last year “New Wave Dance Music from South Africa“ on eclectic English label, Honest Jon’s Records.

It’s a free event this Saturday night 14th January in Prince Alfred Park, Parramatta.

Listen to an eerie and fantastic piece of film music for the 1971 Michael Crichton thriller, The Andromeda Strain.

Composer Gil Mellé was a Greenwich Village jazz musician, who also had an interest in electronics, and experimental styles like Musique Concréte, where music would be recorded onto tape (no wav files in those days) and then manipulated to create new sounds.

The first track here, “The Piedmont Elegy”, is a great example of a perfectly compact piece of music, experimental, but still following a conventional John Barry-like song structure.

However, keep on listening, and the tracks begin to get a bit more out there!

         Singer Kristina Brodowski basks in the warmth of an orange stage light

The expression biding your time is an important one to creative people; true artistic success isn’t always tied into youth, or being on the cutting edge of fashion. Often creative people spend a good number of years becoming good at what they do, perfecting their technique, and weeding out their imperfections.

The problem with music, though, as a creative art is that it is so tied into commerce and the “rock star trajectory”, that the only way to be successful is to capture the youth market — and that often means by being young yourself.  When you look at the bands that have had the biggest impact with a mass audience, they have often only ever been a few years older than the audience, and as they age, they take that audience with them, like the Rolling Stones have with the baby boomers.

German band The Sweeps, however, are a few years older than the average band and are working with the sounds they have grown up with, rather than a purely contemporary sound. A trio consisting of singer Kristina Brodowski, and Christoph Duwe and Niels Wesner, who both play synths; provide back up vocals; and add finishing touches with a glockenspiel and a melodica.

Their fourth self-released album, In the Night, showcases their affinity for analogue synthesizers like the Moog and the Italian designed string-synthesizer the ELKA. With many eighties elements in their music (think Cutting Crew, New Order and Clannad) they have acknowledged a love of Italian singer Valerie Dore and italo-disco, but also cite more recent influences like Röyksopp, Air and St Etienne. 

Falling into the same class, as acts like Sally Shapiro (who were also influenced by Valerie Dore) and Ontario’s Junior Boys, the Sweeps have a more mainstream pop range, reminiscent of, funnily enough, Phil Collins, and English band Talk Talk (Gwen Stefani covered their song “It’s My Life” a few years back).

They nail a particular sound that a lot of younger artists are trying to emulate — that cool, French Riviera, discotheque sound, their success lying in the fact that have grown up with it and have a natural infinity for it — and are not just fetishisizing it as generational outsiders.

The other thing that is very interesting about this album is that many of the tracks segue together, something often not looked favourably upon by big record labels who want something that they can market in distinct chunks.

But an album, as a whole, is often a programmed journey for the listener; musicians think carefully about how all the tracks fit together to tell a story — not always conceptually, but in the mood that the songs evoke, and what kind of  feelings the songs will stir in the listener. Major artists have often lamented about letting music executives make decisions about their track-listing in the final stages of their album, and wrecking the feel that they were looking for.

The Sweeps technical accomplishments on this album goes without saying; they have performed, recorded, and mixed the album entirely by themselves — and musically, its fantastic. Tracks like Days Gone By and Synthetic Lover are excellent; conjuring up an imaginative landscape, it would be great if at least a couple of these songs could make their way into normal radio airplay, or onto a movie soundtrack, the way that many neo-eighties songs were recently picked up by Nicolas Winding Refn for his Drive soundtrack.

Below is an extended remix by The Silicon Scientist of one of their earlier songs, Facing the Night, which was recently released on the fourth Radio Cosmos compilation. The original version appeared on their 2009 Missing Pieces album.

There is also a great video for another version of this song by Zak B, a dark trip through Laura Palmer country.

DISCOGRAPHY:

Electric Electric (2006)

The Great Lie about Eternity (2007)

Missing Pieces (2009)

Nostalgia for the Future EP (2010)

In the Night (2011)

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Want to get social with The Sweeps?

Find them on Facebook, Soundcloud, Myspace and Discogs.

As I mentioned in a previous post about Roland Sebastian Faber’s absence from the most recent Alba and Fred Ventura project, Without You, due to working on a new EP — this is just a quick post to say that it has finally been released.

Called Society, the new 12″ is three original tracks, the sounds of a motorik industrial dynamic, with melodic breaks washing off the grime and grease of nation building (think black and white footage of the early days of New York, men eating their lunch up on steel building girders, and you have the accompanying ”image-track”)

With artwork again by veteran Emil Schult, Society is a limited vinyl release available through the Aube shop. But it should also appear digitally through the usual musical outlets in the coming weeks.

Here’s a preview: