An amazing slice of unintentional avant-garde, minimalism before minimalism, and a kind of motorik version of light orchestral music.
A bizarre audio course for fluency in typing, this recording, which comes from the first decades of the 20th century, consists principally of what can only be described as an unrelenting click track of various tempi, over which an orchestral ensemble plays rigid and tightly locked in versions of popular classical music, occasionally interjected by a tersely voiced narrator repeating the phrase "Carriage Return".
"Sounds to Come" is the second installment of a series on Chinstrap of music and sound-design cut from public-domain horror and science-fiction films from c.1930-1970.
The aim of the releases is the reframing of digital artefacts - although the pieces have been recut and equalised, we are not aiming to present definitive versions of these recordings, we rather present the work for the possibility of further investigation into the composers, sound-designers, film-makers, and of course the films themselves, which are available, in the main, for free download at Archive.org. "Teenagers Battle the Thing" - Director: Don Fields "The Man Who Changed His Mind" - Director: Robert Stevenson * Music: Louis Levy "Svengali" - Director: Archie Mayo * Music: Vitaphone Orchestra "The Phantom Ship" - Director: Denison Clift * Music: Eric Ansell "Attack of the Giant Leeches" - Director: Bernard L. Kowalski * Music: Alexander Laszlo "Horrors of Spider Island" - Director: Jaime Nolan Legal disclaimer: This release is made under the belief that these scores and sound-design are in the public-domain, and is intended to disseminate and raise appreciation of this film music. If you represent the interests of any of the composers and object to this release, we will willingly (though a little grudgingly) remove it.
Poet, composer, gentleman, raconteur, and well-dressed person Pete Um has ploughed his own particular, distinctive and very fertile furrow since the heady days of the 20th century. A master of the miniature electro-acoustic song-poem, a form he has more or less invented and crystallised himself, his work displays a sardonic wit combined with a healthy misanthropy, in marvellous micro-collages of voice, instruments, samples, and electronics.
Mr Um is, however, far too inventive and curious a gentleman to isolate himself within one proscribed way of working, all of his work across countless Cdr, vinyl releases, and performances being marked by a ceaselessly exploratory and open-ended approach. This release on Chinstrap presents a cross-section of his work in Reel-to-Reel tape music.
Pete Um at Kettle's Yard Pt. 1 from pete um on Vimeo. Anyway, you can do marvelous things with computers, and over the years I’ve tried again and again to turn all that wonderful digital functionality into something that satisfies my restless poetic soul. Most of the time I succeed, and I couldn’t live without my PC for very long before some kind of horrible REAL LIFE SYNDROME started screwing around with my head. However, it is not unknown, as you may know, for computers to give me a bit of a hard time. I have a spiritual aura that conflicts with binary operations, and no PC I use will stay in GWO for very long whatsoever. Computers die on me, and I grieve their loss hard, for without them I cannot do my ART STUFF, as I say, and my mind starts to turn on itself. That’s when I reach for my recorder (Teac A-3340S). I switch off my PC, which is probably just a blue screen anyway, or parallel lines of various hues, or says DISK BOOT ERROR-INSERT SYSTEM DISK, or is pretending to be a statue like some irritating street performer (why doesn’t one of them paint themselves up like Windows and act crashed? I feel that people would get the joke) or has switched itself off or restarted itself fifteen times in the last hour, and I vengefully stride towards the reel-to-reel.
Fuck you world, I think, prepare thyself some fucked-up noise. It should be noted that I am typing this on Sam’s laptop because my desktop is all but deceased, and that while I’ve been doing so all the keys on her keyboard that aren’t letters of the alphabet have conspired to swap functions with one another so that they are opposites, so for instance I have to type the ? key to produce a – and vice versa, although, interestingly, the example I was going to give you now won’t let itself be typed at all. In addition, some keys have moved their functions along the QWERTY board by one key. Suffice to say I’m struggling to relay this information to you if you feel a bit lost as to what I’m on about. This computer has given Sam no problems in the year and a half that she’s owned it, I should add. Je reste ma valise.
Anyway, what I love about reel-to-reels is not just the quality of the sound; there’s a couple of other important considerations as well. First off, they look cool as fuck. To a music fetishist such as myself, with an evil jones for sick bollocks, the appearance of the reel-to-reel tape recorder is just about as cool as it gets. Only massive ancient synths that bring Raymond Scott and his work to mind rate higher in the eye candy stakes. The reels themselves are mainly what its all about. They spin, you see. Round and round. And the spinning makes the music, so that when they start to spin the music starts also, and when they stop the music stops. And when they fast- forward the music goes weebleweebleweeble and when they slow down the music goes roarrrrooow.w..w…w. This is a lot better than the graphic on any CD player. This is virtually better than porn. In fact it is a sort of porn. The people that make the tape know what goes on in the heads of the people that buy the tape, which is why they make the metal reels look like the illest shit they can, with beautifully designed holes of many different types cut in them so you can see where you’re at with your tape use. You have to use the tape that requires the nab hub adaptors to fix them to your machine for maximum aesthetic appeal. I got my machine for nowt so I didn’t mind blowing 20 quid on a pair of nabs. I even videoed my answering machine playing back the message saying “Hello. This is Ian from Roll On Tapes calling to tell you that your nab adaptors have arrived.” Jesus, I get emotional just thinking about that day, and Roll On Tapes, and Ian. Whatever happened to Ian? *
So, yeah, and the last cool thing about what a reel-to-reel can do for you is to totally chuck your normal music craft MO out the window. Personally I can’t be arsed to take the time and effort to record proper songs onto my Teac, and in particular those of the verse/chorus/verse variety, with a charming meld of rhythm and melody and so on. I can barely be bothered to attempt that sort of stuff with my professional digital set-up, so I definitely can’t doing with writing clever lyrics and learning basslines and rewinding everything a hundred times while the pubs are open. Ye Gods! I’m in far too much of a hurry to see the reels spinning and get on with the next song. So, what I do is record any old crap incredibly fast and see if it might just possibly work as art if you were stoned enough. Therefore a “song” might consist of.
1. A track of a looped snatch of audio from and old piece of tape played on another semi-defunct ReVox tape machine I have (at one point I had four reel to reel machines, but these days I have to struggle by with just the two) sampled onto my Line6 DL4 looping pedal, slowed down and reversed.
2. A track of me playing bass so badly that it sounds like someone gave a bass to a goat and pointed at a bag of rotten carrots, through echoey FX. I very rarely practice anything for too long because rewinding is a pain in the nuts, and I almost always just play the first thing that has some vague connection to what I’m hearing.
3. A track of recordings of Guatemalan bees, sped up, from my vast collection of BBC field recordings on 7” single.
4. A track of me producing noises with my mouth through a toy Fisher Price radio (with toy microphone), with the tape being randomly manually manipulated as it is recorded onto by switching the speed button from high (fast) to low (slow).
Let’s face it, it’ll all sound like dogshit, so this is where I rely on what Bobby J and I refer to as THE MICE. Mice music is just music played twice as fast as it ought to be, basically, so the vocals sound like heavy metal mice. Or of course you can slow things down. The basic rule of thumb is to play everything at the wrong speed. Additional cheap art can be obtained if you finish recording at different points on the tape, so that at the mixing stage the audio from whatever was on the tape when you bought it cheap at Resale will suddenly leap into one channel like some demented communication from another dimension. If you’re very lucky it’ll be Madonna, backwards, sounding like a man and in rhythmic sync with the nonsense you produced yourself. Lately I’ve been experimenting with adding additional FX at mixdown stage too, and it does sound pretty sweet. OK, so when you’ve finished with your labours do you thoughtfully review the fruit obtained, just to check on what the fuck you’ve actually recorded? No, that would be folly, for it is as plain as the nose on your own face that it will sound like a random clash of harsh noises, so you just get on with the next song. Now, in the fullness of time you’ll have done a whole tape of four tracks of audio recorded at varying speeds. You will also be drunk and stoned as a motherfucker. Play the fucking tape, for this is where the gold comes. OK, chances are that it still sounds a bit like fucked-up noise, but…maybe, just maybe, it will have a mercurial quality to it that appeals to the true seeker of the one true fucked-up noise. I think this magick quantity has a lot to do with the fact that the music has been created almost automatically, so that the artist barely recognizes themself in the work. The alien and strange quality of the tape music appeals to the poet’s sick lust for surprise kicks. This can be very refreshing if you’ve ever sat listening to a loop over and over again in Cubase or whatever. Your girlfriend may not dig it, and you can’t stick it on at work, but it is a pure and unspoiled and wild sound.
These are the reasons why I love reel-to-reel tape recorders.
So dip your toes into the tape music of a singular chap, who always Looks Sharp.
In a recent blog post, Ethan Iverson has a good swipe at anyone (and there are many) who wilfully, or stupidly, misunderstand the work of Thelonious Monk. Ethan said in a post a while ago that should he and I meet we’d probably disagree on most things relating to jazz - an opinion I’ve never really understood quite frankly, because I find myself in agreement on most things that he writes about in jazz, and in particular when he writes about the historical jazz canon. And in this post in particular I think he’s right on the money, both in relation to Monk and his other sidebar criticism of Martial Solal.
I’ve always found Solal to be brilliant, but almost too brilliant. His fluid technique and febrile imagination seem to conspire to refuse to allow him to ever settle on a vibe or an idea for longer than a couple of seconds before he’s off again to demonstrate some other kind of pianistic or improvisational legerdemain. His playing is the musical equivalent of being on a Roller Coaster – full of thrills and adventure, but not something you’d want to do all day.........
Having said that, he IS a true original with a style that incorporates Tatum-esque flourishes but with a very different harmonic approach. His ability to leap from idea to idea is startling and there’s obviously a brilliant improvisational mind at work. He was one of the first really original European jazz musicians and his style was almost fully formed from a very early stage. Here’s an example of his quixotic brilliance in a trio performance of ‘Green Dolphin Street’ recorded in the 60s (couldn’t find any more of this footage on Youtube, which is a pity – looks like a fascinating show) - check out Johnny Griffin’s admiring comment at the end - ‘Ridiculous!’. Yes indeed, it IS ridiculous
But despite the brilliance, or maybe because of it, I often find myself tiring of Solal quite quickly, especially because of his inability, or disinterest perhaps, in sticking with one idea for any length of time, or with letting the music breathe at all.
Which is in stark contrast to Monk’s approach – a man who had an incredible ability to explore and/or repeat small amounts of material for long periods of time. It was Solal’s public dismissal of Monk’s pianism, at a recent talk in New York, that set Ethan off on his angry rebuttal of both Solal’s opinion that Monk couldn’t really play the piano, and of the people who thought Monk’s music lacked seriousness. He also took a swipe at the many people who over the years have believed that Monk’s music could be reduced to a stereotype by just adding a few clusters or sudden displacement of a note or two.
Which is something I’ve felt for years too, and in reading Robin Kelley’s biography (which I previously discussed at length here) it’s clear that this kind of dismissal of Monk as a kind clownish amateur pianist who, as was sometimes grudgingly admitted, wrote interesting tunes, was an opinion that dogged Monk for years when he was alive, (doubtless denying him many work opportunities), and incredibly, seems to be still around in some quarters.
I’ve never ever understood the idea that Monk was a ‘bad pianist’. Unless you maintain the narrow view (and some people do), that a virtuosic 19th century classical approach to the piano is the only barometer of pianistic worth, then surely it’s obvious that Monk was one of the most original pianists in the history of the instrument. How can his detractors on the pianistic front, not hear the SOUND he makes on the instrument? It’s totally unique and has never, to my ears, ever been reproduced by anybody. He is a virtuoso of sound and sonority. And he is a virtuoso of rhythm – he swings as much as anybody, but in his own unique way. His use of rhythm is both extraordinary and ceaselessly inventive
Here’s an example of both of those attributes – the unique sound, and the rhythmic virtuosity and of course the amazing swing
Ethan also mentions, and is critical, about the anecdote in the book that tells of Monk flying through some Chopin, and how this was used in the book (along with the proof of his knowledge of the European classical piano repertoire), as some kind of validation of Monk as a ‘real’ pianist. Ethan makes the point that Monk was often erroneously associated by critics with the European avant garde and this is another point I would agree with totally. Monk’s roots are irredeemably, both socially and musically, in the community from which he came. The section of Kelley’s book that deals with Monk’s childhood in the San Juan Hill area of New York was for me one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. It really clarifies where Monk was coming from – black evangelist church music, stride piano, Duke Ellington – and I think all of that is evident in the Caravan performance that I posted above.
There are a couple of related stories to the Chopin story mentioned in the book, that involve anecdotes concerning Monk playing privately like Tatum or like Bud Powell. I’ve heard these stories before and they’ve always irritated me because they are based on the premise that the way Tatum or Powell played the piano was the correct way to play, and that Monk could do it if he wanted to, but he chose not to. So in an effort to defend Monk, the purveyors of these stories are just reinforcing the stereotype that Monk’s way of playing the piano was wrong. I do not personally believe that Monk could, or would have wanted to, play the piano like Art Tatum, any more than I believe that Tatum could or would have wanted to play like Monk. Monk does not need to be validated in this way – his piano playing represents a unique achievement and he did not need to play like Tatum or Powell (or Chopin!) to demonstrate his bona-fides as a pianist
(Monk's Advice)
Another point touched on in Ethan’s piece is the rarity of good interpretations of Monk’s music. Again musicians often seem to believe that just adding the odd cluster to any phrase makes the music into an authentic interpretation of Monk. But this is such a shallow approach and misses the point completely – in fact misses many points. One of Monk’s strongest opinions revolved around how his music should be played and he apparently said ‘Never mind the so-called chord changes, play the melody!’. And as listed in the famous ‘Monk’s Advice’ page, (transcribed by Steve Lacy from various nuggets of info given to him by Monk) this ‘play the melody’ theme was a consistent one as far as Monk was concerned - ‘Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play’, and ‘stop playing those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!’
Melody was sacrosanct to Monk, as was rhythm, and yet so many people playing Monk approach the music as if the melody was something to be dispensed with as quickly as possible in order to get to the changes. It’s a very bebop approach and one that just doesn’t work for Monk’s music. All the character and individuality of his music gets flattened by the blunt instrument of changes running. I remember seeing the band ‘Sphere’ in 1983 – a band with great Monk credentials since both Charlie Rouse and Ben Riley had spent extended periods with Monk – and being very disappointed with the music, mainly because of the pianist in the band, Kenny Barron. Now Kenny Barron is a GREAT jazz pianist, but to my ears he played Monk as if the music was just another set of changes to be negotiated. Sphere were a great band, but in my opinion, not a great band for playing Monk.
One of my favourite recordings of Monk’s music comes from what might seem like an unlikely source – Chick Corea. He recorded what was originally a double LP on ECM – ‘Trio Music’ with the ‘Now He Sings Now He Sobs’ group with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes. One of the LPs consisted of free improvisations, which never convinced me at all. But the other LP was comprised completely of Monk’s compositions and this was great. Corea really gets inside Monk’s music in the sense that the melody is referred to constantly during the solos, and his rhythmic sense is so strong – his phrases are carved out of the melodies.
Corea manages to both reference Monk and yet remain unmistakably himself – the sound he gets from the instrument has that bright sparkling tone that always characterises his acoustic piano work, and here it’s put at the service of the music, using his rhythmic prowess to point up the shapes and angles of Monk’s melodies while generating some of his most swinging playing on record. Having the addition of Haynes, himself of course a former Monk sideman, really helps the music and his bubbling snappy drumming dovetails perfectly with Corea’s clear articulation. Vitous is perhaps not the ideal Monk bassist, with the huge reverb applied to the instrument (by ECM or by Vitous?) making the bass a bit swimmy at times, but as always he’s an impressive soloist and of course this trio has some serious jazz history of it own.
Here they are, more than a decade later, playing Rhythm-a-Ning, and again Corea and Haynes’ affinity with Monk is beautifully on display again. (I have NO idea why Vitous is wearing headphones!)
I recently watched an interview with Corea where he told of working opposite Monk many times in the 60s and described Monk as being ‘one of the greatest musical figures of our culture’. Maybe he needs to have a chat with Martial........
Straight out of Cumbria, DJ North by Northwest brings an instant singalong sampladelic classic in the form of "Dan Bale (I Don't Know)", an ode to a man he transparently doesn't know. Working the underground scene in North-West England for the past ten years, DJ North by Northwest has constantly pushed the boundaries of the club going public. For him a week without a gig is a week without breathing. Going under various aliases, DJ North by Northwest is his moniker for his sampling and mash-up work. For his other names, you'll have to hunt.The virtual B-side here comes in the form of "The Full Moon Party", a collaboration with the Ambleside based band Hot Barn.
