You probably know 33⅓ by now -- they do book-length essays about albums of interest. It's a pretty broad-ranging series - Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love has had a round, as have (arguably equally) asinine rock standards like Let It Be, Use Your Illusion, Wowee Zowee etc. That's deliberately antagonistic, but for good reason -- the series is arguably part of establishing what 'canonical' music albums are, for which it serves a useful purpose -- while also re-asserting the existing canon, it's done good work in expanding it, or recognising that the average listener has a wider idea of canon now.
book review
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What the book does superbly is positioning the group as a product of their time period, whilst avoiding the great swathes of cliché that have swamped narratives of this era. It clarifies that, as much as punk opened the doors for bedroom Beefheart and Stockhausen obsessives, most of the groups that had any kind of commercial success were still largely in thrall to the glam tentpoles of Bowie and Roxy Music, as well as the tougher end of pub rock. It posits all this whilst articulating clearly how these influences percolated in the surrounding culture of the era, and how this created music that sounded so distant from its core initial influences.
Folio is a new thing that Greyfade are doing; on top of their gorgeously designed and delivered records,they're putting together books that complement and wrap the recordings in a load more context. We get a record, Three Cellos By Kenneth Kirschner and a book alongside it. The introduction to the book sets out their store in this regard -- a record is more than just the given digital artefact, it's an accumulation of a load of work. I don't think the idea is to take away the recording in its place as the primary 'form' of a work, but there's certainly a commitment to furnishing the recording with a bunch of context.
You get glimpses of what might have been and also an insight into how good at editing their own ideas Coil were. John Balance might have been canonised as the archetypal wide-eyed soul-in-flames, but here we can see the amount of revision he put into his work. Drugs and drink may have been a part of his stream of consciousness, but there’s more lucidity in here than you’d expect and a lot better editing. He’s more James Joyce than William S Burroughs.
What's being reviewed here is two things: a book, Subcontinental Synthesis: Electronic Music at the National Institute of Design, India 1969–1972 , edited by Paul Purgas, and a record, The NID Tapes - Electronic Music From India 1969-72. The NID of the LP's title refers to the National Institute of Design, a home for electronic music within India of the late 1960s. The book is a more expansive look at electronic music in that era, and one is a taster for the other.
A proper overview of Goth is probably at least a decade overdue. The first band who could arguably merit the tag as exponents rather than just forerunners (and more about them later…) trod the boards around forty-five years ago, and music writing has proved distinctly tardy around giving the phenomenon some decent examination and analytic heft. In an era when the bookshelves of major retailers are fair groaning under the weight of mighty tomes covering the minutiae of everyone from EMF to The Shaggs, it seems curious that a movement that encompasses such revered names as Bauhaus, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Sisters Of Mercy and The Cure seems to have remained so impervious to criticism for so long.
Conform To Deform is a must-have history for those of us who bought the records and saw those bands live at the time; but hopefully it will also inspire others to check out the label’s incredible back catalogue, even if sadly many items are now out of print. There will never be another label like Some Bizzare and thankfully Wesley Doyle has finally told its story.
Buried Treasure The slick satin soft-back cover – a sense of luxury housed in a warm bakelite grey, that Festival of Britain motif fanning out in ’50s spirographics. This is a beautiful artefact, a labour of love from Alan Gubby’s Buried Treasure label, an ode to those pioneering pre-digital days […]
Third Man (US) / White Rabbit (UK) Something that’s always useful, before going into a book, is to have some agency which is managing your expectations. Perhaps ultimately that’s why we have reviewers, like me, to hold your hand through a thing. We do the tutting so YOU, dear reader, don’t […]
Faber and Faber Cosey Fanni Tutti is likely best known to readers of Freq as a musician of some reknown, part of the imperative of Throbbing Gristle and with a substantial discography (Chris and Cosey etc). Art mavens know her variously for her work in pornography and mail art (also […]
Eastgate Music and Art In the past couple of years, us Tangerine Dream fans have been rather spoilt by the amount of high-quality historical pieces and releases that have come our way. First of all we had the beautiful edition of Edgar Froese’s biography, Force Majeure, a mammoth book that […]
Jawbone Attitudes to women were awful in the 1970s — pretty much like most of history preceding it, a whole half of humanity shoved into a subservient background, even worse seen as “playthings” to be used and abused.
Unbound Barely a biography, but… to say this book is a labour of love would be misleading; love is typically überflüssig. This is a labour of precision. And when I say it’s unsentimental, I don’t mean it’s lacking in affection; rather this is a sober, reasoned, and concise exegesis on […]
Omnibus Press Damo Suzuki will be seventy years old next year and has spent the best part of half of those traversing the globe with two distinct iterations of his musical caravan; first the Damo Suzuki Band / Network and latterly the ever-evolving global musical cast that are his Sound […]
Faber and Faber There’s so much here. This book has almost been written several times, but here we have it; the real deal. If much of this material has been covered in other places, David Stubbs injects everything with a new light and throughout he maintains a sense of reverent […]
Buried Treasure A book, a CD, a crackle, a cackle. It’s an undialled radio… buzz… Echoes a little of 2000AD’s Zenith… perhaps even the first few episodes of Hellboy… this is England Calling, The Delaware Road… a little graphic play, beautifully illustrated…. A Black Mass…
Faber and Faber tl;dr – you probably need this book if you’re a fan of Can. You probably need it if you’re a fan of well-written things about music.
Cherry Red I saw that car. You know which one. In Stockwell, where I used to stay at a mate’s brother’s squat. I think Thatcher On Acid or Blyth Power or someone lived there. It just sat on the street a few doors down and we took polaroid pictures of […]
Faber and Faber A long time ago, I wrote that Genesis P Orridge singing “marmalade” in Throbbing Gristle‘s “Hit By A Rock” on D.O.A. was the key moment in industrial music, a moment that most of the “industrial” artists that stomped around in the wake of TG utterly missed. You […]
Hornschaft Back in 2014, two guys spent one day recording music for a 10″ record in an old school in Nowa Hut to accompany a hardback book of photographs. The result of photographer Giordano Simoncini and musician Alessandro Incorvaia‘s labours, hand-numbered and limited to 500, I hold in my hands and it is […]