Categories
Uncategorized

Things that dreams are made of… Norman Wisdom?

When I heard this song recently at a venue, I was absolutely mesmerised by the main refrain. It’s one of those things that has a personal dimension which you know is also connected to a cultural force or instance (like a song and a particular time, the feeling of its uses and what it evokes). […]

Categories
Uncategorized

Cross-hairs all over the borderline – Jose Gonzales, The Knife, Andreas Nilsson

I adored the song ‘Heartbeats’ when it first came through in the early 00’s.  Attached to a particularly artful ad for a television.  Jose Gonzalez wasn’t just breaking out with an artful acoustic song (a ‘sensitive’ song, Neil Young might call it), he was breaking through with a sound and a body of work (namely […]

Categories
Uncategorized

Getting free of snares and nets – Atoms for Peace

It felt like quite a singular gesture, coming from the art assemblage when i realised about the name of Thom Yorke’s alternate band ‘Atoms For Peace’ as a kind of repositioning of the atom in state-power terms from its symbol and locus as science-militarism’s apogee of destructive scale.  To now be speaking (as it were) […]

Categories
Uncategorized

The deep-song looking glass of the world – Lee Mavers and The La’s

By the end of writing this piece, I had the feeling that my entire being was thrumming, vibrating with a kind of singular joy of being and feeling that really only the most special music creates.  It was also that the feeling included a sense of luck, that to live in the same world as […]

Categories
Uncategorized

Gothic elegies – Penny Dreadful’s OST and lost females of power

The piece  ‘Joan Clayton’ (below) from the soundtrack to the TV Series Penny Dreadful contains an elegiac movement in the middle of Abel Korzeniowski’s composition (which commences around 1:52) commemorating the death of the character of the old witch Joan Clayton, whose powerful turn in the show was always told in flashback.  The movement also […]

Categories
Uncategorized

Birth of Octopuses

I recently watched for the second time, the 2007 debut film by French writer-director Céline Sciamma, Les Naissance des Pieuvres (Birth of Octopuses) translated for its English language release as ‘Water Lillies’. I first saw this film about 8 years ago and was left with a feeling that it was one of those films whose […]

Categories
Uncategorized

past the zoo of the definites – 2

 space life in ambient electronic music Spaces of being If spaces are a key expression within ambient music then it feels like from early on, a sonically expressive animacy (or sonic-presence-as-being) has been another.  Partly because as per Young/Zazeela there is the question of ‘forms of existence’ being involved with sound, I think different kinds […]

Categories
Uncategorized

past the zoo of the definites

space life in ambient electronic music  (Part 1) Expressions of spaces I came across this great piece of music which is also a remix while recently checking in on the LA artist Deru (Bejamin Wynn) some of whose earlier co-credits have included amazing work and sound design on the Avatar /Korra US Anime series, as […]

Categories
Uncategorized

Senyawa at Cafe Oto

I was extremely fortunate to be able to catch Indonesian duo Senyawa recently at Café Oto. It’s rare to hear things this good. The story of originating elements in their sound appears to have been a kind of break-out towards avant garde and experimental music while maintaining a strong feeling for the tranditional, folk forms […]