Music Tapes For Clouds And Tornadoes

This LP comes with a fold-out poster on which there are instructions on how to "Build Your Own Pop-Up Construction to Hold your Music Tapes Recording" (namely the CD you're encouraged to make of the downloadable versions of the songs), with part of the poster itself intended to be cut out and used in said Construction. The list of additional supplies the would-be hobbyist will need is: "one small acorn; a warm iron; scissors; a piece of stiff paper; glue". Among the instuctions is: "Draw a tiny musical note on your acorn". It's so very twee, as, to some extent, is the music, but it's also decidedly weird. Tweird, perhaps.

My belated discovery of the "Elephant 6" artists' work about fifteen years ago did not extend to The Music Tapes. Only last year did I happen to stray into their eccentric world. Music Tapes For Clouds And Tornadoes is unusual with respect to both its instrumentation and recording. The musical saw and the banjo are most prominent among the former. About the latter, the sleevenotes mention recording equipment including a '40s wire recorder; a '60s 4-track tape recorder, "a Hi-8 video camera, cassette recorder and computer".

How is the music? An acquired taste. One has to be in the right frame of mind. Julian Koster's vocals, it's safe to say, are untouched by auto-tune. It can get irritating. Much of it seems fragile and about ready to fall apart, but then things unexpectedly come together for moments of real beauty & joy. 'Majesty' is the highlight for me, a gem of a song. I'm also very fond of 'The Minister of Longitude' and 'Cumulonimbus (Magnetic Tape for Clouds)'.

Comments

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...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

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 ...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog