Korg has announce a new analog synthesizer, the Monologue, which features presets designed by Aphex Twin.
According to Fact magazine, the Monologue features a built-in step sequencer that allows users to record up to four knob movements for creating “motion sequences.”
The synth also supports microtuning, allowing users to create their own tuning outside of standard scales. Korg have employed Aphex Twin as advisor.
The new synth can also be powered by six AA batteries and according to Engadget, the Monologue costs just $300 when it is released in January 2017.
You won’t find a huge difference in tone between the past and present lives of David Eugene Edwards. When he wound up 16 Horsepower in 2005, after four studio albums of feverish force, Wovenhand were already a going concern, a nebulous outlet for his recurring themes of faith, conflict and salvation. The same gothic pall shrouded both bands’ music, a union of post-punk, leftfield country and galloping blues, Edwards dispensing lyrics with a restrained fervour in keeping with his status as grandson of a Nazarene preacher from Colorado.
Fifteen years in, Wovenhand still sound blazingly alive. What began as a solo side-project has gradually coalesced into a five-piece band of apocalyptic power, armed with a withering intensity to rival that of Swans or Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. Indeed, the Michael Gira comparisons are very apt on Star Treatment, an album that, for all its crushing heaviness, is ultimately dominated by Edwards’ voice. “The Hired Hand” finds him presiding over the sort of deep mariachi twang that recalls The Cramps or Jeffrey Lee Pierce, his words burning with Biblical authority: “He commands the grave and sea/Give up your dead/O give up your dead”. Old Testament imagery abounds, from the Samson reference in the thumping “Come Brave” to the allusions to Laban and Jacob in “Crystal Palace”.
Edwards says that his songs are often conversations with himself. Here they seem to be free associations rather than straight narratives, an index of thoughts and impressions that look to the stars in an attempt to decode the deeper mysteries of his own Christian beliefs. This tension finds a mirror in Wovenhand’s more experimental pieces, such as the unsettling “Swaying Reed”, or “The Quiver”, which gradually builds into a tempest, Edwards summoning something that feels ancient and fearful over doomy chords and a churning rhythm. Like Star Treatment itself, it’s a punishing and rewarding experience.
This week, the 40th anniversary edition of The Man Who Fell To Earth lands in a multitude of fabulous guises.
There is a Collector’s Edition, Blu-ray, DVD and a digital download courtesy of StudioCanal while the original soundtrack finally makes its debut, through UMC.
As you may already know, this new edition of the film has been pain-stakingly restored while the Extras on the Blu-ray edition comes crammed with new interviews and featurettes. Now it is possible to witness David Bowie‘s visiting alien in his full glory.
To mark this momentous release, we’ve got FIVE goody bags to give away.
Each goody bag includes: one Blu-ray of Nic Roeg‘s classic film, one tote bag and one copy of the newly-released soundtrack by John Phillips and Stomu Yamash’ta.
To be in with a chance of winning, just answer this question correctly:
What is the name of David Bowie’s character in The Man Who Fell To Earth?
Send your answer along with your name and address to UncutComp@timeinc.com by noon, Monday, November 14, 2016.
Five winners will be chosen from the correct entries and notified by email. The editor’s decision is final.
If you haven’t picked up our latest Uncut yet, the diverse pleasures of our free CD, curated by Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, will have eluded you. Kurt’s playlist acts as a kind of primer for the bold sonic reinventions of their “FLOTUS” album, which comes out this Friday, so I thought it might be useful to post my piece about it, and my interview with Kurt, on our website a bit earlier than usual. You can read our review of Lambchop’s “FLOTUS” by clicking here.
Meanwhile, our mammoth History Of Rock reaches 1981, with the arrival of this month’s instalment in UK shops this Thursday. Bruce Springsteen is on the cover, and you can order The History Of Rock: 1981 now from our online shop. In the event you’ve missed any previous parts of this encyclopaedic endeavour, you can buy back issues of The History Of Rock from our shop, too: please note we’ve also restocked some of the earliest volumes.
Anyhow, preamble over. Here’s John Robinson with his monthly History Of Rock intro: Welcome to 1981!
“These are suspicious times, and while the world of music flourishes, it does so with a lot on its mind. In the early part of the year, New Order emerge from the ashes of Joy Division – but what sinister preoccupations, some wonder, lie behind that name? Interviewed extensively, the band Kraftwerk reveal how their obsession with computers is a rebellion against control.
“Similarly, musicians are keener than ever to articulate which side they’re on. When Oi! band the 4-Skins play a gig in an Asian community, the gig ends in a riot. Madness issue a statement about where they stand. Later, Paul Weller comes out against nuclear weapons. When ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials reaches the top of the chart in the week of the royal wedding, it seems a particularly ironic comment on the nation’s priorities.
“Even through adversity, though, music still triumphs. From new and vibrant electronic pop, the lyrical new guitar bands from Scotland, to the passionate rock of U2, or our cover star Bruce Springsteen there’s plenty to lift the spirits.
“This is the world of The History Of Rock, a monthly magazine which follows each turn of the rock revolution. Whether in sleazy dive or huge arena, passionate and increasingly stylish contemporary reporters were there to chronicle events. This publication reaps the benefits of their understanding for the reader decades later, one year at a time. Missed one? You can find out how to rectify that here.
“In the pages of this sixteenth edition, dedicated to 1981, you will find verbatim articles from frontline staffers, filed from the thick of the action, wherever it may be. Witnesssing a taxi radio interrupt a Black Sabbath guitar solo. Talking criminal databases with Kraftwerk. Or hearing about the time Bruce Springsteen vaulted the wall into Gracelands, where the thought he saw Elvis at the window.
“Bruce thinks people may be losing the ability to dream. It’s his job, he thinks, to make sure they don’t.”
Roger Waters has hit out at Donald Trump, suggesting the Republican presidential candidate is “just as dangerous” as Adolf Hitler.
Waters – who used his recent Desert Trip appearance to brand Trump an “arrogant, lying, racist, sexist pig“ – shared his views in an episode of the podcast, WTF With Marc Maron.
“It’s a short step to all out-total fascism, a complete police state. It’s always insidious when it creeps up. It was insidious in Germany in the ’30s. National Trumpism feels a bit less insidious, but it’s just as dangerous,” Waters told Maron.
“The method for taking over the state and for it becoming a totalitarian police state, it’s always the same – it’s always the identification of the other as the enemy,” Waters continued. “In Trump’s case, it’s the Chinese, the Mexicans and Islam. With Hitler, it was the Jews, the Communists, the Gypsies [as well as] anyone who had a physical deformity [and] homosexuals.”
Trump is preying on a population that “feels defeated”, Waters argued, as “everyone’s standard of living is falling” and “the Bill of Rights are slowly being taken away from you”.
Iggy Pop has been recording with mystery collaborators.
He revealed he has returned to the recording studio since he released his Post Pop Depression album in March.
Pop claims he recorded five new tracks, all of which appear to be collaborations with other artists.
“I’ve made five recordings since then,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
“But they were all recordings not where I’m about, ‘Hey, I’ve got something to say!’ No, it was just, people called me up and said, ‘Do you want to do a vocal with me, about this, under this circumstance?’ More like guesting.”
He added: “I would prefer to do that for a while. You know, there are people I like. I like the people I’ve recorded with — I can’t tell you who they are! — very much.”
He is currently promoting Gimme Danger, a documentary about The Stooges directed by Jim Jarmusch. Watch the trailer below.
Now… about that cigarette. Casually positioned between Leonard Cohen’s index and middle fingers on the cover of his 14th studio album, it can’t help but seem like a provocation. For one thing, it flagrantly rebukes the notion that, at the age of 82, the music world’s preeminent Jewish Canadian Zen Buddhist is finally done with earthly pleasures and concerns. It’s a theme he’s returned to in many songs and poems over the last 15 years, as if the romantic and religious fatalism at the core of the man’s writing had hardened into an all-pervasive attitude of resignation. It’s there in You Want It Darker’s beautifully sombre title track, in which he variously imagines himself as a luckless gambler who’s “out of the game” and a bone-weary supplicant who raises his eyes heavenward and rumbles, “I’m ready, my Lord” in his best Humphrey Bogart. It’s there again in “Traveling Light”, a new number that seems tailor-made for the end of the night in some Greek tavern, empty save for a weathered bouzouki player and a broken-down Lothario who’s done with love’s illusions. As Cohen sings in a wry tone, “I guess I’m just someone who has given up on the me and you.”
That cigarette may also confound anyone who presumed he was cracking wise during a favourite piece of stage patter since he resumed his performing career in the mid-2000s. Having officially quit smoking in 2003, he claimed to be waiting until he turned 80 for his return to the “Parthenon of Tobacco”, when he’d pluck a stick from a silver tray held out to him by a young nurse in “white lisle stockings”. She’d light him up and he’d take his first drag. “It’s gonna be soooo good,” he’d say to the audience, eliciting an especially hearty laugh from the ex-smokers in the room
And here he is two years after reaching that goal. His son Adam Cohen – officially credited as You Want It Darker’s producer, handling six of nine tracks – recently explained the origin of the cover photo, which he snapped when his father joined him on a balcony for one of his own smoke breaks. “Truth is,” Adam claimed, “he smokes very little but it hits the spot sometimes.” Nevertheless, in a correspondence recounted on the fan site Cohencentric, the singer facetiously claimed the cigarette in the picture was unlit. He was reportedly amused by the site’s doctored version of the image, with the offending cancer stick replaced by a bunch of asparagus.
Regardless of fans’ health concerns, that cigarette suits the contents of You Want It Darker, the third and strongest of a very-late-career run of masterworks that began with Old Ideas in 2012 and continued with 2014’s Popular Problems. That’s because, with its spare but perfectly judged arrangements, its alternately sepulchral and mordant nature and its lack of the more contemporary trappings of recent predecessors, the album evokes the music he made back when he clearly didn’t give a toss who saw him smoking on a record cover. Exquisitely crafted, You Want It Darker follows a snaky line back to Songs Of Love And Hate (1971) and New Skin For The Old Ceremony (1974), the albums that nestle on either side of 1973’s Live Songs and its iconic image of Cohen looking like a condemned prisoner in the midst of his final smoke.
The parallels are unmistakable when it comes to the musical settings for Cohen’s latest lamentations. Whether it’s the men’s choir used on You Want It Darker’s title track and “It Seemed The Better Way” (recruited from the same Montreal synagogue where Cohen had his bar mitzvah), the lonesome pedal steel on “Leaving The Table” by the great Bill Bottrell or the judicious application of strings in several songs, the adornments here recall the kind favoured by Paul Buckmaster and John Lissauer on Cohen’s early ’70s recordings. That’s a far cry from the starker sensibility of his late-’60s albums with Bob Johnston, his overstuffed musical misadventures with Phil Spector on Death Of A Ladies Man in 1977 and – perhaps most dramatically – the emblems of high-gloss modernity he’s preferred in the last three decades or so. Though the murky electronic textures and beats deep in the mix mean that You Want It Darker is not a purely backward-looking exercise, the shadows in these songs are rarely troubled by the brighter sonic palettes of the synthesisers that Cohen has loved ever he since he fell for a cheap Casio in the early ’80s.
Indeed, Adam Cohen has often told interviewers how much he’d been begging his father to make a record like New Skin For The Old Ceremony, his favourite of the old man’s and a clear touchstone for many of his own albums. It’s this sound that the younger Cohen believes is the one they most identify with his father. “When I try to tell him this,” said Adam in 2011, “I don’t think he likes it very much.”
Evidently, he’s convinced his dad that a journey through the past needn’t just be some calculation to re-entice boomers who were thrown by the digital-era frills on I’m Your Man and The Future (1992) and have maintained a wariness about his studio albums ever since. What’s remarkable about You Want It Darker is how it melds that earlier aesthetic with the time-tempered outlook of the man he is in his ninth decade, a man who has as little interest in nostalgia as he does in the “me and you”. Better yet, Adam Cohen understands it takes more than a synagogue choir to give a song like the title track the requisite sense of grandeur. It’s also about leaving the right amount of space around his father’s doom-filled rumblings. By contrast, even the best songs on Popular Problems and Old Ideas can seem unnecessarily cluttered.
Less surprising is the high standard Cohen has maintained with his craft as a songwriter. Then again, he’s a master of making something new out of an old idea. “Traveling Light” is a reworking of a poem that first appeared in print in Book Of Longing in 2006. Another poem that dates back to the early 2000s, “It Seemed The Better Way” offers a typically astute and brutal commentary on the inefficacy of Jesus’ lessons in a world as crummy as ours. “It sounded like the truth,” he muses, “it seemed the better way/ Though no-one but a fool would bless the meek today.”
Presented in a string-heavy arrangement that deviates from You Want It Darker’s generally austere nature yet doesn’t feel overbearing, “Treaty” has been through multiple versions over the last seven years – according to his longtime collaborator Patrick Leonard, who produced three tracks here. The lyrics’ military conceit also makes it a successor to canonic Cohen songs like “There Is A War” as well as a companion piece to “Nevermind”, the Popular Problems standout that opened with the lines: “The war was lost/The treaty signed.” The difference here is that war never ended, leaving the lover narrator to wish “There was a treaty behind your love and mine.” He offers something like an apology, one that acknowledges the narcissism required of any skilled ladies’ man. “I’m so sorry for the ghost that I made you be,” he sings in a voice between a murmur and a croak. “Only one of us was real and it was me.”
Ruthless and revealing, the sentiment cuts straight to the heart of a work that frequently captures Cohen at his most self-deprecating and self-lacerating yet surprises just as often for its warmth and humour. A ballad that’s given a stately grace by its churchy organ and Bill Bottrell’s James Burton-like guitar contribution, “If I Didn’t Have Your Love” is destined to be a wedding-first-dance favourite as soon as Michael Bublé gets his hands on it. In “Leaving The Table”, Cohen may double down on the old-gambler schtick that first surfaces in “You Want It Darker” but he doesn’t bottom out. Instead, he leavens what could’ve been a bleak sayonara to this mortal coil with bone-dry quips and a sly suggestion that you may feel “the sweetness restored” once you’ve given up that ghost.
Propelled by an insistent violin figure, “Steer Your Way” forces listeners through a vision of a ravaged world, past “the ruins of the altar and the mall”. Though the journey ends in death (or at least in the fear of it), the effect is liberating. All that’s left to hear is the string reprise for “Treaty” and a few more lines sung with a softness that suggests the war may have finally reached a resolution. Either that or both sides are bleeding out on the battlefield.
It’s become a cliché to treat every latter-day Cohen album like a potential swansong but it’s hard to imagine a richer, finer or more satisfying finale than this. There’s no question the man’s earned his smoke break. One just hopes it remains a rare pleasure lest he squander any time left on the clock.
Radiohead will play a number of headline shows and festival dates in the UK and Europe in 2017.
These are in addition to previously-announced headline slots at Glastonbury, Northside, Best Kept Secret, Open’er, Rock Werchter and Main Square festivals.
For full 2017 dates, see below:
JUNE 7 Spektrum, Oslo Norway
JUNE 9 Ericsson Globe, Stockholm Sweden
JUNE 11 Northside Festival, Aarhus Denmark
JUNE 14 Visarno Arena, Parco delle Cascine, Florence Italy
JUNE 16 I-Days Festival 2017, Parco di Monza, Milano Italy
JUNE 18 Best Kept Secret Festival, Hilvarenbeek Netherlands
JUNE 20 3 Arena, Dublin Ireland
JUNE 23 Glastonbury Festival, Pilton UK
JUNE 28 Open’er Festival, Gdynia Poland
JUNE 30 Rock Werchter Festival, Werchter Belgium
JULY 2 Main Square Festival, Arras France
JULY 4 Manchester Arena, Manchester UK
JULY 5 Manchester Arena, Manchester UK
Grandaddy have announced details of their new studio album, Last Place.
It’s their first album since 2006’s Just Like the Fambly Cat.
Last Place will be released on March 3 on Danger Mouse’s Century Records. Produced by the band’s Jason Lytle, it also features Jim Fairchild (guitar), Kevin Garcia (bass), Tim Dryden (keys) and Aaron Burtch (drums).
The tracklisting for Last Place is:
Way We Won’t
Brush with the Wild
Evermore
Oh She Deleter 🙁
The Boat is in the Barn
Chek Injin
I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore
That’s What You Get for Gettin’ Outta Bed
This is the Part
Jed the 4th
A Lost Machine
Songbird Son
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v50LoackQM0
The band will be making a return to the road in 2017. Tickets for the following shows are on sale Friday, November 4 at 9AM.
March 26 – Newcastle, UK @ Hoults Yard
March 27- Leeds, UK @ Irish Centre
March 28 – Manchester, UK @ Albert Hall
March 29 – Nottingham, UK @ Rock City
March 31 – Bristol, UK @ Colston Hall
April 1 – Brighton, UK @ Concorde 2
April 4 – London, UK @ Roundhouse
April 4 – Brussels, Belgium @ AB Hall
It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that a record apparently named after the First Lady Of The United States, released four days before a former First Lady will hopefully become president, might have a polemical agenda. Hunting through the crumpled textures and digital folds of Lambchop’s 12th album, however, overt political content is hard to find. A song called “JFK” seems more of an exercise in dislocation, a rifling through of disparate images that coalesce around Kurt Wagner’s repeated declaration he “talks too much”. A lyric hidden in “Writer” might hint at the political climate of the past few months, as Wagner sings about how, “Now we walk with weather most uncertain/Now we weather things beyond control.” Then again, coming from a band who called their most famous album Nixon (2000) mostly out of mischief, it might be some entirely different, private, ordeal.
In fact, if FLOTUS has a subject, it is Wagner’s wife, and the enduring strength and nuances of their relationship. Mary Mancini is currently chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party, and has previously attempted to run for the state senate. Elections and policies, then, provide a wry backstory. In the foreground, emotional realpolitik dominates, so that FLOTUS shapes up as a tender exploration of a longterm marriage, and the acronym actually stands for “For Love Often Turns Us Still”. The first words that Wagner sings on “The Hustle” are “I don’t want to leave you ever/And that’s a long, long, time.”
Those words take a startlingly long time to arrive – five minutes, to be precise. You may already have encountered all 18 minutes of “The Hustle”, as radical a statement of intent as this capricious and cherishable band have ever made. For while Wagner has dabbled on the periphery of electronic music before, “The Hustle” and FLOTUS signify a wholehearted co-option of 2016 aesthetics into the Lambchop sound. These are songs built on a peculiarly hazy beat science, where Wagner’s cracked voice is manipulated through the magic of Autotune and myriad other digital processes. The horny-handed earnestness of Americana as some perceive it seems a long way away, as “Directions To The Can” tears away at the structural norms of a song. “It’s all in the modern problems,” Wagner counsels, “Take it on the chin.”
The miracle of FLOTUS, though, is how gracefully Lambchop negotiate the entente between their country-soul of old, and this brave new world. If Bon Iver’s 22, A Million sounds, to these ears at least, rather cluttered and overthought in its technological innovation, FLOTUS is remarkable for its perhaps illusory effortlessness. The space and measure of great Lambchop records like Is A Woman (2002) remain; the sense that there is time to breathe, and consider a whole spectrum of feelings, between each note. Even in the fractured terrain of a song like “Directions To The Can”, faithful retainers come to the fore: Matt Swanson, providing a through line with his discreetly funky bass; the pianist Tony Crow, a master of the minimalist fleck to the degree that he stands comparison with Chris Abrahams from Australian jazz improvisers, The Necks.
Autotune has become such a crutch for a certain kind of performer, these past few years, that its potential to synthesise sadness now feels rather clichéd. Wandering through a festival last summer – or through radio stations most days – it felt as if navelgazing solo artists in the vein of James Blake, and an attendant school of digitally enhanced moping, had become the new norm. Wagner, though, is still too whimsical a presence to be comfortably absorbed into a genre. His experiments betray the delight of a shy man able to subsume himself into the warp and weft of his music, and the joy of a smoker who discovers that his disintegrating voice can be reconstructed, and those lost high notes can be relocated. FLOTUS suggests, even, that the technology is kinder and more interesting when applied to singers whose voices are not naturally melismatic. The setting of “Directions To The Can” might be more audacious, but Wagner hasn’t been this close to Curtis Mayfield’s upper range since “What Else Could It Be?” on Nixon.
As one might expect of southern gentlemen, the shocks of FLOTUS are deployed by stealth, at least initially. For its first 30 seconds, as the flesh and blood band ease into the genteel groove of “In Care Of 8675309”, you could even be listening to one of those latterday Lambchop albums that have maybe been a little too easy to take for granted. A peremptory click of drumsticks, however, heralds the arrival of Autotuned Wagner, an electronically-augmented interloper in comfortingly familiar environs. Over 12 minutes, he pieces together an impressionistic narrative that keeps looping back to the “house of cancer” next door to Wagner and Mancini’s place; a property, blessed with asbestos siding, whose inhabitants would blast out the contemporary hip hop that fed into the Lambchop sonic upgrade.
More than those neighbours, though, it is the musical choices at work inside his own home that dictate the form of FLOTUS. The title track is like a vintage country ballad chopped and screwed into a groggy new shape, with its old-fashioned sentiments intact. “We used to be like children, we’ve taken a lot of turns, girl,” serenades Wagner, his authentic croak retuned to a sweeter frequency, “Still I wish it wasn’t late.” Yo La Tengo are a recurring reference point, as Wagner makes explicit with the mix CD that comes free with this month’s issue of Uncut, and there’s a further parallel with how Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley write about love: the small observations that accrue significance over time, the trials and changes that can affect but not, hopefully, destabilise a longterm relationship. It might not be immediately visceral subject matter like the hormonal gush of new love, or the trauma of a break-up. But “For Love Often Turns Us Still”, just like Yo La’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, is a testament to the artistic potential of romance sustained deep into middle age, and beyond.
“And I can take your lovin’,” Wagner coos at the end of “FLOTUS, “And I can take your love.” And FLOTUS itself emerges as the most selfless of gifts: not just because Wagner dedicates himself lyrically to Mancini, but also because the radical changes in Lambchop’s sound are designed specifically to appeal to her. Where once there was a band of 12 or more people to realise Wagner’s vision, now, at the heart of the project, there is only him, sat at the computer and crafting an album intended to satisfy her tastes, as well as her emotions. Over a 20-year career of oddities and paradoxes – how, we asked, can so many musicians make so little noise? – FLOTUS ranks as one of Lambchop’s most confounding to date: an album whose form and content are united in intimate, private purpose, but which may well turn out to be one of their best and most accessible.
“The Hustle” describes a Quaker marriage ceremony in rural Tennessee, and how the solemnities devolve into a dance party. There is a storm, and one of those wedding guest revelations about their own relationship, in the midst of a bigger celebration. “We’ll have sunshine/filtered through the phases of the fall,” Wagner sings, his own voice unfiltered now, “And I fell so very hard/For you.”
Johnny Marr has revealed that The Smiths almost reunited in 2008.
In an interview with The Guardian, Marr admitted that he and Morrissey met in 2008 in a pub in south Manchester, during a “rare period of communication” while Marr was remastering The Smiths’ back catalogue.
In their first meeting for a decade, the pair started “talking about the possibility of the band re-forming, and in that moment it seemed that with the right intention it could actually be done and might even be great.” Marr reveals, “For four days it was a very real prospect. We would have to get someone new on drums, but if the Smiths wanted to re-form it would make a hell of a lot of people very happy, and with all our experience we might even be better than before.”
“The conversation about re-forming came out of the blue. I didn’t go there with that in mind. But there had been quite a few rumours about it, so naturally we discussed it. ‘It could happen…’ ‘How d’you feel about it?’ ‘What if?’ And off we went.” Who was more keen? “I think we were both as keen as each other.”
However, communication later broke down when Marr went on tour with the Cribs. They briefly reconnected in 2010 Marr when shared an image of a student protestor donning one of the band’s t-shirts with Morrissey.
Marr’s autobiography, Set The Boy Free, is published by Century at £20.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Dylan described the award as, “Amazing, incredible. Whoever dreams about something like that?”
Dylan also confirmed that he “absolutely” plans on attending the gala in Stockholm – “if it’s at all possible.”
The Nobel committee had previously admitted that Dylan had yet to acknowledge receipt of the award, or indicate whether he will attend the celebrations.
Dylan replied simply, “Well, I’m right here.”
Meanwhile, in a separate announcement Friday, the Nobel Foundation revealed that they did finally get in contact with Dylan about the prize.
‘On 13 October, 2016, the Swedish Academy announced that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
‘This week Bob Dylan called the Swedish Academy. “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless”, he told Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy. “I appreciate the honor so much.”’
In the Telegraph interview, Dylan admitted he hasn’t considered whether he’s worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. “I’ll let other people decide what they are. The academics, they ought to know. I’m not really qualified,” Dylan said. “I don’t have any opinion.”
Steve Hillage has always had one eye on the future, experimenting with genres such as ambient and dance before many of his peers, and creating extra-terrestrial guitar sounds throughout his career with Uriel, Khan, Gong and System 7. Now Hillage’s futuristic past is being celebrated with an elaborate limited-edition, career-spanning 22CD boxset that includes early albums with Uriel and Khan, eight solo studio albums for Virgin (with bonus tracks), his work with The Orb as System 7, two CDs of BBC performances and, taken from Hillage’s personal archive, eight CDs of previously unreleased material constituting four live albums and four Sparks volumes of out-takes and demos dating back to his days in the Canterbury scene in 1970.
It’s an extraordinary haul, and is accompanied by a thorough 188-page biography, featuring original interviews with Hillage about guitars, drugs, spiritual beliefs and his collaborations with Mike Oldfield and Sham 69, as well as rare photographs from his personal archive. One musical highlight is the 40 minutes of unreleased material from 1972 that Hillage recorded with his second version of Khan. Khan’s second album never happened, although some of the tracks ended up on Hillage’s 1975 solo debut Fish Rising. “Madman’s Rap” is a wicked, swirling example of Hillage’s ambient psychedelia, which shows why he was such a good fit for Gong. And while Gong are the obvious absentees on this set, they aren’t completely missing. There are recordings Hillage made at the Gong house in France in 1973, many little more than extended aural concepts such as “The Dervish Riff” or “Water Trip”, but also near-complete songs such as “The Golden Vibe”, and there are two versions of the great “Beginning To See The Light”, a song Hillage played with Gong but has never previously been released.
Even without Gong, it’s possible to trace in this mass of music the journey Hillage was to take, with these early sonic experiments eventually leading to the breakthrough of 1979’s ambient Rainbow Dome Musick and then his work with System 7. The fourth Sparks volume has the best of this, featuring demos and out-takes of Hillage playing with a Roland 909 before he hooked up with Alex Paterson to form System 7, combining Hillage’s glissando guitar with The Orb’s ambient weirdness. System 7 rarities include covers of Pink Floyd’s “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” and Hendrix’s “Spanish Castle Magic”.
Alongside this weird, interesting stuff can be found Hillage’s more conventional but still mesmerizingly strange ’70s output, with his studio albums complemented by three excellent late-’70s live shows – dig that solo on “The Fire Inside” from Hammersmith 1979 and the thundering adventure of Munich’s “Unzipping The Zype” – as well as his performance at the 2006 Gong Family Convention, itself complemented by a 1974 take on L’s “Solar Musick Suite” recorded onstage with Gong.
Extras: 10/10. Bonus tracks, hardback book, three reproduction promo posters, two lyric booklets, enamel badge, 60-page scrapbook containing more photographs and cuttings and certificate of authenticity signed by Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy.
Ken Loach has produced much of his best work during periods of national affluence – the Sixties (Poor Cow, Up The Junction, Cathy Come Home) and the Nineties (Raining Stones, Land And Freedom). What, then, will Loach – a long-serving champion of social justice – make of Austerity Britain?
A lot, as it happens; I, Daniel Blake finds plenty to be angry about as his titular hero struggling to make his way through the welfare state. Blake (Dave Johns) is a Newcastle joiner in late middle age who is recovering from a heart attack; advised by his doctor that he is not yet fit for work, he is obliged to sign on.
Alas, computer says no – and Blake finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of box ticking bureaucracy where he is forced to apply for jobs he can’t take in order to quality for support. In scenes that are blackly funny, Blake finds himself on the phone with a “health care professional” who will refer his case to a “decision maker”: faceless Orwellian bureaucrats whose jobs are defined by the ticking of appropriate boxes.
During one soul-destroying trip to a Job Centre, he meets Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother who is struggling to make ends meet. His grandfatherly relationship with her children provides the warm, emotional core of the story; but also sets in motion another series of typically grim events, culminating in a heart-wrenching sequence in a food bank.
Werner Herzog is no stranger to formidable and uncompromising landscapes, from the Amazon Basin in Fitzcarraldo, to Alaska’s Katmai National Park in Grizzly Man and the Antarctic wastes in Encounters At The End Of The World.
For his latest documentary, he turns his attention to yet another vast and unfathomable environment: the internet. “This is the campus of the university of California in Los Angeles,” Herzog intones with the same wonderment as if he were introducing a base on the surface of Mars.
Perhaps realising that the internet is too vast to successfully document, Herzog wisely decides to split his film into 10 sections, each of which deals with a specific aspect of the net. One of the continuing pleasures of Herzog’s documentaries are the singular characters he invariably encounters during his investigations. Here, he meets a former Google staffer who reveals, “Whenever a self-driving car makes a mistake, automatically all the other cars know about it, including future unborn ones.”
Elsewhere there’s a college professor who dreams of the day a team of soccer playing robots will defeat the FIFA world champions, a neuroscientist who claims it will be possible to “Tweet thoughts” in the near future and a bereaved family who believe the internet is “the manifestation of evil itself”. In one sequence, Herzog meets Elon Musk, a business magnate currently exploring potential options for communicating with colonies on Mars via the internet. “Right now, we can’t even get one person to Mars,” Musk sighs. “I would come along,” interjects Herzog gamely. “I wouldn’t have a problem.”
Members of Blondie, the Heartbreakers, the Replacements and the MC5 are to form a supergroup at an upcoming benefit concert.
Blondie’s Clem Burke, the Heartbreakers’ Walter Lure, the Replacements’ Tommy Stinson, and MC5’s Wayne Kramer will perform The Heartbreakers’ album L.A.M.F in full at the show, which takes place in the Marlin Room at New York’s Webster Hall on November 15.
The show is part of an upcoming benefit for writer Stephen Saban.
Nick Mason will host a global screening of exclusive audio and visual footage from Pink Floyd‘s new Early Years box set.
The event will take place at YouTube Space London. The live stream will start on Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel on Wednesday November 9 at 6.30pm (GMT).
The Early Years 1965 – 1972 is released on November 11 and includes 20 previously-unreleased tracks, seven hours of live material, 15 hours of video and three feature films. A double-disc highlights album entitled The Early Years – Cre/Ation will also be released.
Mason will take part in a Q&A with fans at the November 9 event. It starts at 6.30pm, as does the online stream.
Vivien Lewit, Director Of Music Content at YouTube, says: “Pink Floyd have always been at the cutting edge of creativity and will be using the latest live technology on YouTube to bring something special to their fans.
“We’re so proud to host to this iconic band and experience at our YouTube Space in London, so that people can tune in and be taken on a tour through the magic of The Early Years from wherever they are in the world.”
Fans will be able to enter a competition for tickets to the event, with details to follow via Pink Floyd’s website. Questions can also be submitted ahead of the screening.
The Doors are to release a new album, London Fog 1966, which will consist of recently discovered live recordings, the earliest known to exist.
Available From Rhino/Bright Midnight Archives on December 9, they will be released in a Collector’s Edition Boxed Set on CD And Vinyl along with 8 x 10 prints of unseen photos and replica memorabilia.
The music was recorded during the Doors tenure as the house band at the London Fog, a Sunset Strip dive bar located close to Whisky a Go Go. The seven song set has been remastered by Doors engineer Bruce Botnick.
The set includes covers of standards like Muddy Waters’ “Rock Me” and “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”. The set also includes performances of “Baby, Please Don’t Go” (Big Joe Williams), “Don’t Fight It” (Wilson Pickett) and “Lucille” (Little Richard) alongside two originals: “Strange Days” and “You Make Me Real”, which wasn’t officially released on a studio album until Morrison Hotel in 1970.
London Fog 1966 track Listing:
“Rock Me”
“Baby, Please Don’t Go”
“You Make Me Real”
“Don’t Fight It”
“I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”
“Strange Days”
“Lucille”
Stevie Nicks is set to release deluxe editions of her first two solo albums Bella Donna and The Wild Heart.
Alongside newly remastered audio, the sets contain live and unreleased tracks and rarities. Both will be available from November 4 on Rhino.
Last week, we shared Nicks’ previously unreleased demo of “Bella Donna“. This week, we’re delighted to preview another of those unreleased tracks: the ‘session’ version of “Wild Heart“.
The Wild Heart: Deluxe Edition tracklisting:
Disc One: Original Album
“Wild Heart”
“If Anyone Falls”
“Gate And Garden”
“Enchanted”
“Nightbird”
“Stand Back”
“I Will Run To You” – with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
“Nothing Ever Changes”
“Sable On Blond”
“Beauty And The Beast”
Disc Two: Bonus Tracks
“Violet And Blue” – from Against All Odds Soundtrack
“I Sing For The Things” – Unreleased Version *
“Sable On Blond” – Alternate Version *
“All The Beautiful Worlds” – Unreleased Version *
“Sorcerer” – Unreleased Version *
“Dial The Number” – Unreleased Version *
“Garbo” – B-side
“Are You Mine” – Demo *
“Wild Heart” – Session *
In haste today, as I’m surrounded by removal men, acclimatising to a new computer, and trying to get two magazines out of the door by the end of play. Nevertheless, here’s this week’s selection. Notable new additions from Tinariwen, Joanna Newsom and Israel Nash that are well worth checking out, if you’ve got a few minutes to spare…
Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey
1 Pharoah Sanders – Kazuko (Live In An Abandoned Tunnel In San Francisco 1982)
2 Tinariwen – Elwan (Anti-)
3 Michael Chapman – 50 (Paradise Of Bachelors)
4 Miles Davis – Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series Volume 5 (Columbia/Legacy)
5 Joanna Newsom – Make Hay (Drag City)
6 The Silence – Nine Suns, One Morning (Drag City)
7 Chris Robinson Brotherhood – If You Lived Here, You Would Be Home By Now (Silver Arrow)
8 Jim James – Eternally Even (ATO/Capitol)
9 Mushroom – Psychedelic Soul On Wax (4 Zero)
10 The Afghan Whigs – Black Love (20th Anniversary Edition) (Mute)
11 Steve Hauschildt – Strands (Kranky)
12 Solange – A Seat At The Table (RCA)
13 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Skeleton Tree (Bad Seed Ltd)
14 Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition (Warp)
15 Hand Habits – All The While (Woodsist)
16 75 Dollar Bill – Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock (Thin Wrist)
17 Noura Mint Seymali – Arbina (Glitterbeat)
18 Kaia Kater – Nine Pin (Kingswood)
19 Israel Nash And The Bright Light Social Hour – Neighbors EP (?)
20 The Flaming Lips – Oczy Mlody (Bella Union)
21 Daniel Bachman – Daniel Bachman (Three Lobed)
22 PJ Harvey – Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (Island)
23 The Shins – Dead Alive (Youtube)
24 Gillian Welch – Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg (Acony)
