Log #134 - Transcendental Music From Another Universe

Father John Misty God's Favourite Customer 

Alice Coltrane Universal Consciousness

Popol Vuh In Den Garten Pharaos

John Grant The Queen of Denmark

Nucleus Plastic Rock

Harmonia Deluxe

Best of Easter bunny wishes to my readers this week. A week that sees a number of re-entries. I've come across a lot of new albums in the last 2 months and many have not had enough plays yet. So this week recent acquisitions from Harmonia, Nucleus, and Father John Misty make a welcome return.

The extended Popol Vuh drones retain a place. It's music that bridges the gap between ambient drone music and Berlin school electronica offering nice background music but at the same time having a lot going on. A recent message I received from London sound artist Keith Berry comes to mind:

Thank you for taking the time needed that my work requires from the listener.

... meaning that this sort of music does require a bit of time and investment but is all the more rewarding as a result.

The super talented John Grant slips in too on the back of my interest in the similar Father John Misty. John Grant is an accomplished pianist and solo singer (which is how I've seen him in concert a couple of times) but his albums are more experimental with a band employing electronics.

Most interesting entry this week is probably the Alice Coltrane. For many years dismissed by the jazz fraternity (I've seen her described as jazz's very own Yoko Ono on account of her influence over the late career of her husband John Coltrane) her own unique music has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in recent years.

I can't decide if this is the best or worst music I've ever heard!

Coltrane's albums are a mixed bag, covering many different styles including avant-garde, jazz fusion, drone, spiritual, chant, ambient, electronic, devotional, cosmic and orchestral. In groups ranging from a few players to many she personally played piano, organ (in particular the Wurlitzer) and harp. It seems in seeking to step from her husband's shadow following his death in 1967 she chose to push the boundaries and come up with something very new. New listeners should therefore proceed with caution. From what I've heard to date I can't decide if this is the best or worst music I've ever heard! Could this be another case of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter?

Universal Consciousness from 1971 is often offered up as Alice Coltrane's masterpiece and is probably the best place to start.

Art of the highest order, conceived by a brilliant mind, poetically presented in exquisite collaboration by divinely inspired musicians.

Thom Jurek

This album showcases her electronic organ playing and (to my surprise) mirrors the sounds of Terry Riley - a sound I'd previously never heard from anyone else (I was also very unclear whether I liked the Riley sound or not in a previous post but did say this was a good thing). Piano, harp and violins, very prominent on some of her albums, are less to the fore here, and there are no horns at all, but there is plenty of jazz drumming provided by Jack DeJohnette amongst others.

The opening (title) track is a force to be reckoned with. Coltrane throws everything at this. There is pulsing double bass, frenetic drumming, screeching violins, flowing harp and organ impro. It's a brave start and the omens are unclear at this point, but in fact this turns out to be the most challenging track on the album.

Battle At Armageddon is an intriguing track with a modal organ scale that repeats and steps up in key gradually rather like Robert Fripp's unique guitar solo in Starless. Rashied Ali (who played with John Coltrane) this time provides a great drum solo.

Oh Allah is a gentler tune with drawn out organ chords and more restrained soloing, drenched in strings, and drum flutters this time from Clifford Jarvis. It has a bit of a sudden fade out for some reason though.

Hare Krishna at 8 minutes is the longest track on the album. This is even more chilled than Oh Allah and is perhaps the most beautiful track on the album. If all Alice Coltrane music was like this you'd certainly be on to a winner.

https://open.spotify.com/track/1dQ691F7ixVFl9sTXM77XZ

Sita Ram has an Indian flavour with a tanpura drone upon which Coltrane impros treated organ and harp flourishes. The organ solos even sound a bit like Scottish bagpipes. This track is so very Terry Riley. Spoilt a little again at the end with an all too severe fade (why did engineers do this, particularly on recordings of this vintage?).

The final track The Ankh of Amen-Ra begins (and ends) with a beautiful Coltrane harp solo with wind chime backing which bookends a central section of Soft Machine like organ groove with the drums high in the mix.

I'm a little wary where to go next with Coltrane (it could be all down hill from here) but Universal Consciousness has been an exciting discovery.

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Log #133 - Sheep Chillin' On A Train Across America

Who are KLF and what does it stand for? I think they are a 2 piece, and I know they are famous for three things:

i) burning £1,000,000

ii) being rude at a BRITs awards ceremony or similar

iii) their Chillout album 

Time to investigate.

Let's find some footage:

So the burning stunt did happen (and it was brave, as they reportedly didn't have that much money to spare!).

Their appearance to collect the Best British Group award at the BRITs in 1992 saw KLF literally going out with a bang - showering the audience with fake gunfire as they announced their retirement from the music business, and that was it barring some recent reformation rumours.

Then finally there is the music. The album is a bit of a mixture, literally. There's lots of samples, special effects, explosions, cicadas, night trains honking and clattering (the theme of the album is a mythical night train journey through the Southern US States), rainforest ambience, farmyard animals (mostly sheep), sheep on trains?, car horns, and spoken word (some in foreign languages). You get the picture. Probably super original at the time although much more common place nowadays of course. Overall the repeated sounds and themes help hold the album together in a consistent whole.

Most obvious musical sample comes from Fleetwood Mac's Albatross through 3AM Somewhere Out of Beaumont. There is some country western Elvis in Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul. Also interesting is the slide guitar imbued throughout the album which recalls another classic ambient album, Brian Eno's Apollo. 

The samples and soundbites remind me of the Orb's classic Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld which came out a year after this one in April 1991. But the Orb's album is much more beaty.

Not that this album is as ambient as I was led to believe (Chillout is often held up as one of the early classics of the genre).

The brilliant cover is an obvious homage to Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother which coincidentally was in the player a couple of weeks ago. I heard there was a Pink Floyd sample in the album but I haven't spotted it (unless it's the sonic submarine pulses from Echoes? - help me out here folks).

And what does KLF stand for?

Well, it was a bit of running joke, and you'd expect nothing less from a band that apparently had contempt for the music business. The letters have been said to stand for Kopyright Liberation Front, Kings of the Low(er) Frequency, Kool Low Frequency, Keep Looking Forward, and erm... Kevin Likes Fruit.

Jean Michel Jarre Oxygene  

Floating Points Elaenia

Popol Vuh In Den Garten Pharaos

Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel / Why Patterns?

KLF Chillout

Various Neu Decade

Oxygene was one of the classic Jarre albums everyone used to pass around at school (in the 70s if you were at school then, or maybe the 80s). This is the one with the skull on the front. There was another one equally as popular but I can't remember what it was called now. Hang on...

Was it Equinoxe?  Not sure actually. I think the album cover is wrong. But actually looking at his discography it must have been this one too - it was released in 1978, 2 years after Oxygene.

Two classic Jarre's from the 70s

Jarre was never as cool as the other electronic music people were listening to at school like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. It was considered a bit more commercial. But on reflection, hearing this stuff 40 years later, it holds up really well. In fact I was listening to a very modern dance tune which reminded me of Oxygene (and Giles Petersson's storming Elle), which is why I came to put it on.

[Actually Eddy check your facts, Elle is from DJ Gregory, sure it was on a Gilles Peterson compilation but is a DJ Gregory piece. Ed.]

Indeed the Ed. is right. What a track though. Reproduced below:

Really enjoying all the Popol Vuh tracks now, including the two bonus experimental pieces.

The latter half of the Neu Decade compilation is very guitar and rock based - some new "Krautrock" sounds there to enjoy.

Lots of contemplative space in the Feldman, and Elaenia is a classy beaty electronic jazz fusion work. It's been a good week.

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Log #132 - A Mammoth Perfection

Soft Hair Soft Hair  

Sly And The Family Stone Dynamite! The Collection

Popol Vuh In Den Garten Pharaos

Father John Misty God's Favourite Customer

Cluster Zuckerzeit

Various Neu Decade

It's a sharing week in the 6 CD changer this week with an equal showing from Krautrock and Soul Funk (plus a considerable helping of the brilliant Father John Misty which has trumped both camps to be almost certainly the most played CD in the slots).

In the blue Krautrock corner we have more from the very interesting Cluster, a Mojo magazine cover disc and a classic early album from German experimental group Popol Vuh. In the red Soul Funk corner we have a quick return for the sleazy disco of Soft Hair and an overdue one from Sly And The Family Stone (I've also been enjoying another classic album new to me - this one from Isaac Hayes - but that's not here today and will be saved for another time). 

As I said in last week's post I thought I was pretty well acquainted with Krautrock but the Neu Decade compilation disc (touted as "modern European music from 1970-79) from Mojo would, again, indicate otherwise: There's only one track I'm familiar with on here and about ten of the actual bands I've not heard before at all;

Lots to absorb here but I was immediately intrigued by the Tangerine Dream track Ultima Thule Part 1 which sounds nothing like the Tangerine Dream I know. The track was recorded in 1971 around the time of their second album Alpha Centauri and released as a single. It's a heavy rock instrumental with drums and guitar and soaring keyboards. Rather like early Pink Floyd:

I don't have a copy of the band's first two albums but would be very surprised if they sounded anything like this.

We also have some solo works from the Cluster/Neu!/Harmonia personnel featured last week, and a piece by Hawkwind's keyboardist Tim Blake.

There's a nice quote from David Bowie's producer Tony Visconti on the CD cover:

The atmosphere really stimulated David. He loved it there. I think he spent less than two years in Berlin but it really gave him a new perspective and a new outlook on what to do. 

It certainly did, as Low, Heroes and Lodger testify.

"A Mammoth Perfection" - In Den Garten Pharaos so described by Julian Cope.

Popol Vuh were a German electronic avant-garde band founded by pianist and keyboardist Florian Fricke in 1969. In Den Gärten Pharaos (In The Garden Of Pharao) is Popol Vuh’s second album.

The first album Affenstunde (1970) is regarded as one of the earliest "space music" works, featuring the then brand new sounds of the Moog synthesizer together with ethnic percussion. German music guru Peter Cat tells me that Fricke was actually the very first musician to own a Moog in Germany. This continued to be used on In Den Gärten Pharaos, before Fricke largely abandoned electronic instruments, selling his Moog (to Klaus Schulze!), in favour of piano-led compositions from 1972's Hosianna Mantra forward. Check out this beautiful minimalist piano solo from Fricke for instance:

Eat your heart out Philip Glass.

Popol Vuh influenced many other European bands with their uniquely soft but elaborate instrumentation, which took inspiration from the music of Tibet, Africa, and South America (the original "Popol Vuh" was a sacred Mayan text - I love learning new stuff (and not just music) through this blog). With spiritual and introspective music sometimes described as "ethereal", they created dense immersive soundscapes through psychedelic walls of sound, and are regarded as precursors of contemporary world music, as well as of new age and ambient.

Popol Vuh went on to contribute soundtracks to the films of Werner Herzog, including Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, Heart of Glass and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, in which Fricke appeared.

In Den Gärten Pharaos consists of two side long compositions with the later reissue also adding two bonus tracks. The opening title track begins with water sounds and a gentle drone which are joined by tabla drumming and jazzy electric piano which even reminds me a little of the sound on John Martyn's Solid Air album. This beautiful restful track fades away as it begins, on washes of water.

The church organ and choir drenched second track Vuh is described as "a near religious experience" by Peter Cat. Beginning on a swell of gongs and crashing cymbals a triumphant cathedral of sound is built on three monumental organ chords.

It's truly fascinating to hear these revolutionary sounds at the dawn of the synthesizer.

Eddy Bamyasi 

The bonus tracks are two 10 minute pieces entitled Kha-White Structures (parts 1 and 2). These are a little more experimental. Part 1 has a very revolutionary off key synth loop which sounds just like some tracks from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II. Part 2 is a wavering drone with ghostly background most like a Stockhausen piece.

In Den Garten Pharaos is definitely in my top 3 Krautrock albums along with Tago Mago and Zeit.

Raphael Loubert 

All in all a fascinating record of ambience much closer to Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno than the "traditional" rock-based Krautrock of contemporaries Faust, Can and Neu!.

Florian Fricke, 1944 -2001

HERE THE WHOLE THING HEAR >>

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