5 posts tagged “music”

Books, movies films, music; what's in your top 5 right now?

Oh, I'm crap at all-time best-ofs, so I'll just list some good things I've read, heard and seen in the past week:

Books:

1. The Slaves Of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton is a really absorbing novel. It's a portrait of a wartime English petit bourgeois boarding house, but I'm only halfway through, and suspect it's turning into a mildly hamfisted allegory of WWII (the nasty-yet-charming German woman and dim, unpunctual American 'lootennant' are the giveaway characters).


2. The Recording Angel: Explorations In Phonography by Evan Eisenberg is a good-ish read, but in his exploration of the philosophical implications of listening to recorded music, Eisenberg relies too much (for me) on classical and jazz examples, which sometimes makes it hard to grasp his points, which are loose enough to begin with. Anyone who can mention Marx, Glenn Gould, Plato and the wee dog from the HMV logo in one semi-colon strewn sentence is fine by me, though. Nice character sketches of record collectors and music-listeners, too.


3. One Place After Another: Site Specific Art And Locational Identity by Miwon Kwon is something I'm reading for work, because I've never known enough about the history of this kind of work, and obviously it's something that crops up fairly often. I'm getting a headache from raising my eyebrows at the artspeak, but still interesting.

1. Brick is a right giggle - American high school melodrama filtered through noir. Amazing dialogue. And the boy from Third Rock From The Sun has growed up to be a fantastic actor.
2. I also saw a great South Korean film, which was batshit insane. Ran from hilarious lesbian prison slapstick to really grisly paedophile revenge drama (like, footage of bound toddlers screaming for their mothers), with a brief stopover in Australia, and a recurring tofu-eating motif. Will find out the name of it in the morning.

Music:

1. Folk Songs And Instrumental Music Of The Southern Mountains is a sweet 5 LP box set I picked up the other week - '50s recordings of jug bands, storytelling and folk songs, all but one previously unrecorded. Weirdly excellent sound quality.
2. And I'm still loving the RRR Records California and New England sets -  not exactly easy listening, but at times they have more in common with the mountain folk stuff than you might expect (Amps For Christ could probably do a gig with Miss Margaret Purcell of Albermarle County, Virginia. If she weren't dead.)

And, even though you philistines didn't ask about the art: Mark Raidpere, an Estonian video artist, is showing at Tramway at the moment. Bloody great. (800 words in the Herald tomorrow, should anyone Scottish be reading. Distressingly the third thing I've given 4 stars to in the last three weeks. Note to self: see something shit soon.)

Interesting:

...the programme derived its name from "a Tin Pan Alley phrase from years ago. When they got the first pressing of a record they would play it to people they called the "old greys" - the collective nickname for the office cleaners who would typically start work at 5pm as office staff were leaving. The tunes they could remember and could whistle, having heard them just once or twice, had passed "the old grey whistle test".

If you had a band, what would you call yourselves?
Question submitted by Zoot.

If it hadn't already been taken by my old friend Harry, I like Suicide Pact Lunch. (That band was largely conceptual - one member was sacked for buying a guitar, on the grounds that owning an instrument constituted 'selling out').

But since that's not available, Kin Hodder. I own a relavant domain name, with a view to distributing recordings of the crackles and hooting noises I make with stuff like this:

Bzzzz Hmmmmmn Squonk!

And this:

Vox Escort

2 comments

And this:

Record Player

And this:

Copycat

(Kin Hodder is a character in Year Of The Sex Olymics, a bizarre and bizarrely prescient BBC teleplay from 1968.)

What's the one CD that will totally remind you of the Summer of 2006?

Goodness, I don't know. Going by what's leaning against the hifi just now...

Some CDs:

1. Noma - A Drone Poem In Three Parts
2. Inca Ore with Lemon Bears Orchestra - Queen Anne's Place Tape
3. Whitehouse - Total Sex

And some vinyl:

1. Mahalia Jackson - Inedits Vol 1.
2. Can't (aka Jessica Rylan) - New Secret
3. Klaus Nomi - Simple Man
4. Kudos - The City EP
5. Lethal Bizzle - The EP Vol. 1
   

And a download, because I've played it every day for the last week:

1. Busta Rhymes - Touch It (The Mega Remix)

Nothing particularly Summery there, or even particularly current, save for Mr. Rhymes.