Skip to main content

Black Foliage

The internet as it was in 2003 alerted me to the existence of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, and, when I fell in love with that album myself the following year, the internet further explained that it had come out of something called the 'Elephant 6 Collective', an umbrella in whose shade numerous bands hand flourished, one of the most notable of them being The Olivia Tremor Control. Curious, I sought out the OTC albums on CD, acquiring them in reverse order, getting the second (and to my mind, the better) of them first.

I fell for Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One too. It's determinedly psychedelic record where Beach Boys and Beatles-inspired melodies and harmonies alternate with (or are overlain by) musique concrète-style tape manipulations, and where the lyrics recount a longing for, and a striving towards the otherworldly. I loved the songs but the sound quality on the CD left something to be desired: I imagined that may have been attributable to much of the album having been recorded in a kind of baroque lo-fi, with heavily overdubbed harmonies and effects all done in unsophisticated home studio set-ups.

Last year I went through a phase of replacing some of my Elephant 6 CDs with vinyl, this album included. Having been unable to find a copy of the LP anywhere else in the UK, I resorted to buying it from Amazon, a retailer I now prefer to avoid. This 2011 'Chunklet Magazine' re-issue (or more recent re-press of the same) sounds considerably better than my CD copy ever did, and the cover art benefits from having more breathing-space, so I don't regret paying the £25 asking price. Favourite tracks include 'I Have Been Floated', 'A Place We Have Been To', 'The Sylvan Screen', 'California Demise (3)' and the rousing finalé 'Hilltop Procession (Momentum Gaining)', but there are many other joys throughout.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...
Post a Comment
Read more