A celebration of music I've loved for a long time: electronic, synthesizer, new wave, post-punk, prog, soundtrack, avant-garde, industrial, ebm, and a lot more. Much of this material is long out of print. None of the links are stored on this blog; downloads are not my responsibility. If you like something then support the artist - if it's available, buy it.
The third tragic death early in 2011 is a difficult one to consider. Commenting on the passing of artists who have meant so much to me at a distance is hard enough, but to do so about someone I've known personally is far harder. Trish Keenan, singer with experimental electronic band Broadcast, died in Warwick hospital on January 14th from pneumonia after contracting swine flu on tour in Australia. She was just 42.
Since their first singles appeared in the mid-90s on Stereolab's Duophonic label, Broadcast steadily built a small but devoted cult following across the world. Their first album The Noise Made By People was released on Warp Records in 2000, followed by Haha Sound in 2003 and Tender Buttons in 2005. The rarities compilation The Future Crayon was released in 2006, and their last outing was the mini album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age in 2009.
Their sound is hard to categorize, chock-full of competing currents - Stereolab to psychedelia, loose avant-garde abstractions to tightly disciplined krautrock, cut-down minimalism to lush soundtrack sweeps - all held together by Trish's beautiful voice. The band attracted attention from fans across all musical genres and some celebrity endorsements; among them Blur's Graham Coxon, singer/actress Zooey Deschanel and Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who included them among his choices when curating summer 2010's All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Somerset.
I knew Trish through non-musical circumstances, having taught her at Birmingham university on the Creative Writing BA. It's to my eternal regret that when she told me she was a singer I assumed - based on my own careless stereotype of her personality formed through assumptions about her writing style, mode of dress etc. - that she was in a folk band and gave it little further thought. Only after she had left the university and I saw her on the cover of The Wire magazine in 2009 did I realise she was in Broadcast; indeed, from 2004 she was one-half of the band with her partner James Cargill.
She was fiercely proud of her Midlands working-class roots, had strong opinions and could be forthright in presenting them, but she was so unaffected and egoless that it's no surprise she didn't mention Broadcast in our discussions. I wish she had; we had a far greater musical appreciation in common than I'd suspected. Although I wasn't a Broadcast fan at that time I'd heard a couple of tracks and would certainly have delved into their back catalogue to discover earlier just how good they were. It only registered after looking through their youtube videos that I'd actually caught the band's appearance on Jools Holland's TV show back in 2000, but of course I'd forgotten all about it when I met Trish several years later. After reading the Wire piece I did get their albums and became a fan belatedly.
One always assumes there will be time and opportunity to catch up again and rectify old mistakes but alas, in this instance there is none; a further example, should it be needed, of our precarious and fragile grip on this existence.
THIS is a link to download a single 66 minute mp3 file of Broadcast's penultimate concert, at the Hi-Fi club in Melbourne on December 9 2010. Sincere thanks to youtuber insleepsound for providing.
You can download the tremendous Haha Sound album HERE.
BROADCAST - HAHA SOUND 01. Colour Me In 02. Pendulum 03. Before We Begin 04. Valerie 05. Man Is Not A Bird 06. Minim 07. Lunch Hour Pops 08. Black Umbrellas 09. Ominous Cloud 10. Distorsion 11. Oh How I miss You 12. The Little Bell 13. Winter Now 14. Hawk
The following videos are: Pendulum, from Haha Sound; The Black Cat - directed by Trish herself - and America's Boy live at KCRW, both from Tender Buttons.
Another untimely death in early 2011 was that of virtuoso guitarist Gary Moore, who passed away from a heart attack in a Costa Brava hotel room on February 6th aged 58. Not only an ex-member of Thin Lizzy and Skid Row before a successful solo career, but also - and far more importantly for me - one quarter of jazz rock fusion supergroup Colosseum II. Not that you'd know it from many of the media obituaries, obsessed only with the mainstream - if they mention Colosseum II at all they usually do so in a single dismissive sentence, as a mere passing footnote in Moore's oeuvre. Despite CII's lack of commercial success, nothing could be further from the truth.
In 1977 and 1978 they were among my most indispensable listening experiences, introducing me to jazz rock and taking it to phenomenal levels of dynamic interplay; in their own way every bit as accomplished/important as King Crimson, ELP, Return To Forever, National Health, Focus, UK etc. When I heard a couple of tracks on Alan Freeman's Saturday afternoon Radio 1 show in 1977, I had to get the album immediately. At that time there were two; 1976's Strange New Flesh and that year's Electric Savage. While it has its moments, I think Flesh is the junior partner among their recordings, where they were finding their feet and developing a style, while Savage is the pinnacle of their achievements; white-hot, electric and savage.
The line-up was Jon Hiseman on drums & percussion, John Mole on bass, Don Airey on keyboards and Moore on guitars. A child prodigy, Airey began his rock career in Cozy Powell's band Hammer, and has also played with a host of heavy-rock giants like Black Sabbath, Rainbow and Deep Purple. Hiseman, considered by many 70s critics the premier jazz rock drummer in the world (I'd still go for Christian Vander of Magma), had been in the highly influential jazz fusion band Colosseum almost a decade earlier, but CII was a far harder proposition; faster, dirtier, more eclectic, driven by Airey and Moore's constant frenetic leadline duelling. Moore had to reinvent his guitar playing style to keep up with Airey's flying fingers, and the first tracks I heard, Intergalactic Strut and Desperado, are perhaps the greatest examples of this - the musical equivalent of today's 'bullet-time' superfast motion film sequences. I found it utterly thrilling that they could pull off such complex music with such dazzling speed and sheer dexterity and I can still remember the buzz quite clearly.
COLOSSEUM II - ELECTRIC SAVAGE 01. Put It This Way 02. All Skin and Bone 03. Rivers 04. The Scorch 05. Lament 06. Desperado 07. Am I 08. Intergalactic Strut
Colosseum II's third and last album, War Dance (1978) is more of the same but with, for me, a distinct lessening of the inspired genius of Electric Savage, although I accept that I may hold a minority view on this. Perhaps it's that Savage was recorded mainly live and captures a furious vitality that War Dance's extended studio time and layering diluted. Perhaps it's simply that Savage was the first CII album I heard and loved, and they tend to be the ones that really stay with you. Who knows? Whatever the reasons, it is among my key formative musical experiences. It provided another much-needed alternative/antidote to mainstream rock and pop, and introduced me to a genre I grew to love as I gradually discovered its best practitioners.
The live videos below, The Scorch (from Electric Savage) and The Inquisition (from War Dance), are from BBC radio/TV's Sight & Sound In Concert simultaneous broadcast on January 14th 1978. If you don't find them inspirational I think you may just be comatose.
Thin Lizzy and blues guitar legacy notwithstanding, Gary Moore will always be a fundamental part of CII & jazz rock fusion, and I'll take my opportunity to say thanks and goodbye on behalf of that genre and my 16 year-old self's sense of wonder. I read a description of him as a combination of Jeff Beck and John McLaughlin. Hell, I'd even add Al Di Meola and Carlos Santana, and that's as fitting an epitaph as I can think of.
I had to put the blog on hold for a long time because of insane work commitments but here it is again after a sad start to 2011 with the unfortunate, untimely deaths of three music luminaries. First, MICK KARN:
On January 4th, multi-instrumentalist Mick Karn died from cancer, aged 52. Born Andonis Michaelides on July 24 1958 in Cyprus, Karn will probably be remembered as Japan's bass guitarist but he also made a number of memorable solo and group project albums following Japan's acrimonious split in 1982 after a falling out with singer/frontman David Sylvian. His life and career have been eulogised widely, and rightly, but to me his passing is wistfully symbolic of the gradual severing of connections to a great and misunderstood era. Japan were widely dismissed as style-over-substance 'New Romantics' by commentators who couldn't see past the extravagant clothes and make-up, or listen past the first few notes, but there was much more substance to them than almost any other band of their type.
JAPAN: Steve Jansen, Richard Barbieri, David Sylvian, Mick Karn
Japan were a little too cerebral to match the success of their more commercial electro (Gary Numan, OMD), or New Romantic (Duran Duran, Adam & the Ants) peers, and a little too 'artistic', i.e. complicated, for the pure dance crowd; that said, they had a large and devoted following, and were of course huge in Japan. They moved away from their initial glam-tinged post-punk spikiness, reducing guitars in favour of atmospheric electronics, but their sound was always centred around Karn's inspired, mesmerizing, fluid fretless basslines.
Mick Karn's first solo album, Titles, was released on Virgin in 1982. He retained the services of two ex-Japan colleagues - percussionist Steve Jansen and keyboardist Richard Barbieri - with whom he would continue to collaborate regularly. More esoteric than Japan, Titles pivots upon Karn's unique bass playing, often situating it as a lead instrument, and features his virtuosity on woodwinds and keys.
MICK KARN - TITLES 01. Tribal Dawn 02. Lost Affections In A Room 03. Passion In Moisture 04. Weather the Windmill 05. Saviour Are You With Me? 06. Trust Me 07. Sensitive 08. Piper Blue 09. The Sound Of Waves
The magnificent single Sensitive is below:
After guest slots with the likes of Gary Numan (Dance) and Bill Nelson (Chimera), Karn's next album The Waking Hour was the fruit of a 1984 project called Dalis Car with ex-Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy. It's strange, quirky, sparsely minimal, hypnotic, with tinges of Karn's solo arrangements behind Murphy's trademark vox, and it's a grower.
Karn produced his second solo album Dreams Of Reason Produce Monsters in 1987; certainly up to the quality of Titles and well worth seeking out. In 1991 the members of Japan reunited briefly for a one-off album as Rain Tree Crow - Sylvian did not want the old name used, and the music was very different from their previous incarnation - before, under Mick's name, Jansen, Barbieri and Karn released the stunning jazz fusion album Bestial Cluster in 1993. This video of the title track is from Dutch TV in 1997 and showcases three immensely talented musicians, augmented by Steven Wilson on guitar. Barbieri later became a member of Porcupine Tree, Wilson's art-prog rock band.
Karn continued to make music for as long as he could, both solo and a string of eclectic side projects. His final album The Concrete Twin was released in 2010.
Lastly, a dose of the mighty Japan in their heyday, with one of my favourite tracks of the era, Gentlemen Take Polaroids live on the Oil On Canvas dvd:
Karn was a tremendous musician/composer/arranger and I can think of no-one remotely like him, both in his overall stylings and the diverse musical paths he trod. Although he was a true virtuoso he couldn't read music and said he didn't really know what notes he was playing; it was just instinctive. I was lucky enough to catch Japan a few times and they remain among the greatest live experiences. One of my most spine-tingling memories from that period is of Karn, fretless held upright in front of his face, in jumpsuit and karate slippers, moving gracefully across the stage in a heel-toe-heel-toe motion. When the strobes shone on him it looked like he was floating from one side of the stage to the other.
That his latter years should have been lived out in relative poverty - so much so that a campaign was raised to bring him back from Cyprus and pay for cancer treatment in London - is a tragedy. In a just world he would have been at the very least comfortable through his musical talent and legacy. The guy could make a bass guitar sit up and talk like very few others and deserved much more recognition for it. The world is just too slow to tune into such innovators.
R.I.P. Mick. Your music enriched many lives, including mine. Thank you.
To find out more about Mick's music, and his sculpture, visit his site at http://www.mickkarn.net/ His autobiography, Japan and Self Existence, is recommended and available to buy from lulu.com here.