TRISH KEENAN [R.I.P.] BROADCAST - live Melbourne December 2010 + Haha Sound LP (2003) + Pendulum / The Black Cat / America's Boy videos

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.

- pendulum





Lastly, links to a couple of the better print tributes; from Pitchfork.com and Fused magazine.


Cheers for the music Trish. I wish I'd got to know you better.

GARY MOORE [R.I.P.] COLOSSEUM II - Electric Savage LP (1977) + The Scorch & The Inquisition + BBC Sight & Sound In Concert live 1978

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.

Download Electric Savage here.

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.





To download mp3 audio of the entire Sight & Sound concert, you can find it here: http://bootlegtunzworld.blogspot.com/2008/08/colosseum-2-uk-fm-broadcast-1978_2745.html

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.

MICK KARN [R.I.P.] - Titles (1982) + Sensitive + JANSEN BARBIERI KARN - Bestial Cluster live 1997 + JAPAN - Gentlemen Take Polaroids live 1982

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.

Download the album here, link courtesy of Totally Wired blog.

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.

AAAH... ! - Slip Away 7" (UK 1982) + ARTISTIC CONTROL - Dance With Me

Let's begin with a fantastic slice of home demo-style catchy-as-hell synthpop - but with a dark halo - from 1982, released on Flesh Logic Records.

As a synth-struck youth I was lucky enough to hear this on David 'Kid' Jensen's early-evening show on BBC Radio 1. I taped it, and poor non-FM signal notwithstanding, it sounded great - right up with the best of its 'professional' peers. The production is way better than the usual garage standard, and the track itself is a thing of beauty. I remember Jensen saying on air that it had been sent to him, and he knew nothing about its origins other than it was postmarked from St Austell, Cornwall.

After the coming of the internet I searched for it a few times without success, until one day last year I found a cover image on Minimal Wave (www.minimal-wave.org). The cover gave away almost no details, but one name stood out: Henry Kent.

The excellent Fantasmi Macchina blog finally provided a downloadable mp3 of the track and its B-side, the competent but less interesting Duty Calls - look for posts in May 2008 and you'll find it. That was a happy day I can tell you, and many heartfelt thanks to Fantasmi. A bunch of blogs have now cottoned onto the single, but last summer I think only he had uploaded it.

This discovery led to two things: an increased determination to complete my own cover version, which I'd held in abeyance until I could get a better quality copy to work from, and a search to try to track down the enigmatic Mr Kent somewhere in the global internet village. After much fruitless donkey work I came across one Dr Henry Kent, a research fellow working for International Paper in Sterling Forest, USA. The signs were just as unpromising as all the other blind alleys I'd been down. Surely this couldn't be the guy I was looking for?

I turned up a blog of Henry's that revealed some personal info: a 'mad scientist' with a Ph.D in Theoretical Physics living in Bloomingburg, New York. An Englishman whose favourite city was Venice and who could decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. And... a man with an electronic music studio in his basement who released 'a couple of crappy 7" singles in the 80s with my weird-haired synthesizer band AAAH!'

Eureka!

Dr Henry J. Kent's stumbleupon blog pic

In a state of near-elation I began looking forward to contacting Dr. Kent to see what he would say about the band, the music, and getting to hear the other enigmatic single release he'd mentioned in his blog. I went straight to the website address he gave: www.flesh-logic.com - this would surely answer some of my questions and perhaps provide contact details.

When I typed in the url, the link was no longer active.

Puzzled, I read his blog to see if I could establish why. Lots of quirky posts, evidence of a crazy sense of humour with lashings of innuendo, but no real information. Then I noticed the most recent blog was dated June 27, 2006. I was reading it on August 9, 2009, over three years later. Curious.

More digging needed.

A few minutes later I found a stumbleupon blog by one Denise R. , one of Henry Kent's 'favourites'. The entry was dated August 31, 2006. This is what it read:

'Dr. Henry J. Kent, a research fellow for International Paper in Sterling Forest died Wednesday, August 9, 2006 at his home in Bloomingburg. He was 53.

The son of Fredrick Kent and Margaret Wurzinger Kent, he was born February 2, 1953 in Plymouth, England.

Henry was a Research Fellow at International Paper in Sterling Forest from 1986 until 2004. His research included mathematical modeling of coatings and led a group of scientists in the design of novel instrumentation to characterize fundamental properties of paper. His published works include three papers in the Royal Society in London England, as well as numerous other contributions to the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI) in the United States. He held numerous U.S. Patents for his instrumentation. Recently he had been consulting for a number of companies in the U.S. and Europe. He was actively involved in the Save the Children programs.

He is survived by his wife, Patricia A. Reitemeyer Kent, at home; his parents of Austria; a son, Gene Kent of England; a daughter, Candice Kent of England; two stepsons, Keith Durchanek of Greenwood Lake and Christopher Durchanek of Bel Air, Md.; and a granddaughter, Caitlyn.

A memorial service was held Monday evening at the VanInwegen-Kenny Funeral Home in Wurtsboro.

Interment will be made in the family plot in Kindberg, Austria at a later date.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the American Heart Assoc, P.O. Box 628, Monticello, NY 12701 or to the American Diabetes Assoc., Lower Hudson Valley Chapter, 200 White Plains Road, Suite 523, Tarrytown, NY 10591.'

So that's the story of my abortive effort to track down Henry Kent, weird-haired synthpop genius. Note that, creepily, I found out about his life and death three years to the day after he passed away. The lyrics ('Oh I won't die, slip away...') now seem just a little too heavily laced with irony.

I wish I had tried harder, earlier. I wish - obviously - that I could have discussed a lot of things with him, and perhaps helped in some way to find a new audience for his work. For now though, I'll have to be satisfied that I got to hear Slip Away back in the day, and it remains one of my favourite synthpop tracks. I hope my cover version (which I'll post later when I can figure out more about embedding tracks on my blog) will stand as a suitable testament to my love of this piece of music.

This still feels like unfinished business, knowing that he used to have a website with other music on that I haven't heard. Titles like Input: Output and Rise Robots, Rise only serve to whet the appetite. If anyone has any further information about HK, or links to more tracks - especially that second single, Neon & Nylon - please post a comment and make my day.

To download both tracks, courtesy of the great Crispy Nuggets blog, follow this link:

Crispy Nuggets: Slip Away & Duty Calls 7" mp3 download



Lyrics:

Ther's one outside, there's one inside me
There's one in her eyes, and they used to be blue

Everything, everything, everything, every heart and mind
Oh I won't die, slip away
Oh I won't die, slip away

Cheer for the still, they sing in colours
Cherished and vain, she moves like a movie

We try, we fail, we die, every day
Oh I won't die, slip away
Oh I won't die, slip away

A young boy called science vanished one day
Invented hallucination, threw the rest away

Everything, everything, everything, every heart and mind
Oh I won't die, slip away
Oh I won't die, slip away
Oh I won't die, slip away yeah yeah
Oh I won't die, just slip away

Enjoy.

UPDATE: The wonders of the internet - here's another cool early 80s track by Artistic Control called Dance With Me. The singer is Kez Stone, who was the vocalist and co-writer of Slip Away.
Kez Stone in Henry Kent's studio, early 80s

Henry, Kez and Henry's ex-wife Barbie (who also played on Slip Away), Cornwall early 80s.

Kez's YT channel is kezstone1, and I'm indebted to him for pix, correspondence and enthusiastic co-operation. I hope to be able to further update soon to include an interview with Kez plus the second single by AAAH! and audio of Henry talking about the early 80s St Austell music scene. Happy days!