Tag Archives | Music

(Reminiscences from) The Music Scene in LA in the Early Eighties

By on December 11, 2012 in News 5

Ray Mankarek, keyboards player of the Doors, at his home beside his beautiful blonde piano – March 1984

I have recently published The Forbidden Book, a novel co-written with Joscelyn Godwin, the noted scholar of western esotericism. Before publication, when our publisher was looking for blurbs, the name of Gary Lachman came up, himself a distinguished author in the field. He read the book and wrote a wonderful blurb. Then I noticed on Google that he went under another name, too: Gary Valentine, which opened the floodgates of memory. The Gary Valentine? The bass player for Blondie? We used to know and frequent each other in LA in what must be, for both of us, another life. I wrote to him to thank him for his blurb and refresh our friendship; he replied, “Dear Guido, my God it’s a small world! Yes, I remember meeting you and Stenie a few times back in the early 80’s with Lisa.… Read the rest

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Who Reigns Supreme?

By on November 14, 2012 in News 13

I’ve been listening to more music recently than I have reading new things, and even though I first heard this track a few years ago, it’s one I find myself often revisiting… cautiously. As time has passed, I have found with each listen it’s relevancy has increased, and it begs some uncomfortable and rarely asked questions.

Delivered with elegance and poignancy, this is  Recoil’s “Supreme”.

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Hit Pakistani Pop Song About Deadly Drone Strikes

By on November 13, 2012 in News 0

Dance songs reflecting the new reality. The Guardian provides context:

In the long history of love songs the attention of a beautiful woman has been compared to many things – but perhaps only in Pakistan’s tribal belt would it be likened to the deadly missile strike of a remotely controlled US drone. [It's] a sign of how the routine hunting down and killing of militants by unmanned CIA planes has leached into the popular imagination.

The repeated chorus: “My gaze is as fatal as a drone attack”. The hit for singer Sitara Younis follows her success last year with another love ballad, which warns a besotted man to keep his distance: “Don’t chase me, I’m an illusion, a suicide bomb.”

Maas Khan Wesal, a Pashtu music veteran who wrote the accompanying music, said the song had proved popular because it reflected the lives of Pashtu speakers on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

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The Rhythm’s Gonna Getcha: Music and Mind Control

By on October 21, 2012 in News 8

Picture: Benjamin Portland (CC)

Researchers at the University of Singapore have identified neurological mechanisms that cause the brain to synchronize with external rhythms. What’s more, this syncopation can have a direct effect on cognitive performance:

…the University of Singapore first tested subjects by flashing a series of images on a video monitor and asked them to quickly identify when an image was flipped upside down. While participants focused on this task, a synthetic drumbeat gently tapped out a simple four-beat rhythm in the background, syncopated by skipping the fourth beat of each measure.

The results showed that when the image was flashed on that missed beat, the subjects identified the inverted image much faster than when the image was flashed at times out of synch with the beat or when the images were presented in silence. Somehow, the brain’s decision making was accelerated by the external auditory rhythm and heightened at precise points in synchrony with the beat.

… Read the rest

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It Was 50 years Ago Today: The North Of England Taught the Band to Play…

By on October 7, 2012 in News 4

Picture: US LOC (PD)

The 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ UK release of “Love Me Do” is being celebrated by a number of media outlets here including The BBC and The Guardian. The latter carries a great article which reprints a 1963 review of the UK’s first home grown contemporary global pop phenomenon:

Written across the front of St George’s Hall, Liverpool (a building dear to the heart of John Betjeman), are huge chalked letters declaring: “I Love the Beatles.” There is hardly anything cryptic about this declaration to anyone who has ever viewed Juke Box Jury, listened to Pick of the Pops, or fathered a teenage daughter, for in the last six months the Beatles have become the most popular vocal-instrumental group in Britain, and as everyone with any pretension towards mass culture should know, the Beatles are from Liverpool.

In fact, there is a connection between Liverpool and the four young musicians that seems to go deeper than pride for hometown boys; something, perhaps deep in the mysterious well of English and especially northern working-class sentimentality.

… Read the rest

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The Music Of L. Ron Hubbard

By on September 21, 2012 in News 12

It’s little known that L. Ron Hubbard left behind a body of musical compositions, lyrics, and sound experiments intended as a soundtrack for the Battlefield Earth series and to promote the ethos of Scientology. John Travolta, teenybopper heartthrob Leif Garrett, and Frank Stallone, all heard singing below, were part of a Scientology super-group who recorded an album of Hubbard-penned songs in 1986. An odder, alternate version of “Road to Freedom” features L. Ron himself crooning in a low, booming voice, with the track retitled “L’Envoi, Thank You for Listening.”

Two stanzas include: You are not mind or chemicals / You don’t even have a form / You’re in a trap of senseless lies / It’s time to be reborn. / To you there is no limit / Knowledge is your key / Take the route of auditing / And once again be free.

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The Growing Silence Of The Natural World

By on September 4, 2012 in News 14

The rich, complex musical symphonies produced by nature are now being irrevocably destroyed. The Guardian writes:

When musician and naturalist Bernie Krause drops his microphones into the pristine coral reef waters of Fiji, he picks up a raucous mix of sighs, beats, glissandos, cries, groans, tones, grunts, beats and clicks. The water pulsates with the sound of creatures vying for acoustic bandwidth. He hears crustaceans, parrot fish, anemones, wrasses, sharks, shrimps, puffers and surgeonfish.

But half a mile away, where the same reef is badly damaged, he can only pick up the sound of waves and a few snapping shrimp. It is, he says, the desolate sound of extinction.

Krause, whose electronic music with Paul Beaver was used on classic films like Rosemary’s Baby and Apocalypse Now, has spent 40 years recording over 15,000 species, collecting 4,500 hours of sound from many of the world’s pristine habitats.

But such is the rate of species extinction and the deterioration of pristine habitat that he estimates half these recordings are now archives, impossible to repeat because the habitats no longer exist or because they have been so compromised by human noise.

… Read the rest

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An Oral History Of Gay Punk

By on August 24, 2012 in News 7

It’s exciting when something happens in the news that reminds you how subversive punk rock can be. Via OUT, a conversation featuring remembrances from Bruce LaBruce, Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould, and numerous notable others about a movement which changed the world, whether people know it or not:

The Queercore scene grew out of a generation that bristled against what it saw as the bourgeois trappings of a mainstream gay lifestyle and the macho, hetero hardcore scene that punk — a movement founded by women, people of color, and gays — had become. It started out as a loose collective, trading fanzines and letters, and evolved to include dozens of bands.

There was a gay element to early punk, such as the Los Angeles group The Germs — whose singer was the closeted Darby Crash—as well as Seattle transplants The Screamers, The Apostles in the U.K., and, in Texas, The Dicks.

… Read the rest

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