Bert Jansch’s “It Don’t Bother Me” master-tape 💫

 

AACM’s 60 years anniversary 💫🥇💫

 

A Martin 000-18WG 💫

 

A cool homage to Woody Guthrie 💎

What’s it? A Whammerdyne 💫

 

Whammerdyne Ultimate Truth 2a3 Amplifier (Legacy)

Unfortunately discontinued 🫣 but sooo cool!

Old strings

 

Doktor Faustus and Dodecaphony 💫

 

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's 'Doktor Faustus', Adrian Leverkühn, is credited with discovering twelve-tone music. The author learned the technical details from Alban Berg's student Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. Schoenberg wrote about this:

• I personally have not read 'Doktor Faustus' because of my nervous eye disease. However, I have learned from my wife and others that he attributes my twelve-note method to his hero, without mentioning my name. I pointed out to him that historians might use this to wrong me...

On the one hand, Schoenberg felt honored to appear in the novel with his own ideas - Leverkühn has some of Schoenberg's traits - on the other hand, he was annoyed that his name was not mentioned. Alma Mahler had to mediate and push Thomas Mann to make a note on this subject.

Letter from Thomas Mann to Schoenberg, February 17, 1948:

• Today, everyone knows who the creator of the so-called twelve-tone technique is. But above all, anyone who picks up a book like 'Dr. Faustus' knows it... In a novel that tries to give an overall picture of the era, I have reported a cultural phenomenon that is extremely characteristic of this era, of its true creator and martyr... Haven't you noticed that the entire musical theory in the book is imbued with his ideas, that even "Music" always means Schoenberg's music?

The disagreement between Schoenberg and Thomas Mann became public when the controversy was reported in the esteemed American literary magazine "Saturday Review of Literature". Thomas Mann declared himself ready for a later annotation, which again irritated Schoenberg.

Autograph draft of a letter from Schoenberg to Thomas Mann, Los Angeles, possibly from 1948: 

• I have not published this second letter because it has become increasingly unpleasant for me to defend... a situation that has become untenable through misrepresentation, falsehood and hypocrisy. And yet it would have been so easy to satisfy myself. A small footnote would have been sufficient: "These descriptions or derivations are based on Schoenberg's method of composition with 12 notes." At first he used stylistic reasons as a pretext... but since he finally had to give up this excuse and give an explanation, he now wants to make people believe that he had had other motives. One would have to assume that he had finally realized that he was wrong... but instead he is publishing this novel of a novel (*), with the intention of playing the greatness of his idea against the futility of a concession... 

At the beginning of 1950, however, a reconciliation took place between them, without the public knowing about it.

Nick Drake’s Holy Grail 💫

 

🫣😳🤩🤪

A one of a kind Garrard 💫

 

Ollie on double-bass 💫

 

The Beatles meets Tin Tin 💫

 

Possibly the first six strings guitar

 

Len’s

 

Very proud 💫

💎

One of the rarest 💫

 

The legendary Gioconda de Vito's original UK HMV ASD 429, here in its rarest test pressing, Theoretically one of the most rare violin records of the planet, more than that, the unique de Vito's stereo known LP, a truly Holy Grail of British violin LPs.

With de Vito’s marriage to EMI executive David Bicknell in 1949 so too began her main international career. It is mused that the platform afforded to her was an extension of her position, not necessarily her talent, a thought perhaps reflected by the very small production and hence extreme rarity of this recording. With her retirement in 1961 from all aspects of the violin at the age of only 54, her repertoire and recorded legacy is small. One can’t help but wonder whose hands have held this record over the decades along its journey into collectors. A true piece of classical music history.

Thanking Saulo Zucchello 🙏💫🙏

… and now for something different: Luigi Russolo’s IntonaRumori 💫

 

In 1916, Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), a painter and musician, published “L’arte dei rumore.” (The Art of Noise)

Russolo believes that noise in its irregularity is able to recall real life and that it has enormous potential for representation because, where the notes are limited, the noises are infinite. In fact, he theorizes a true musical revolution: he modifies the orchestral composition by inventing instruments capable of reproducing the sounds of everyday life, the so-called “intonarumori”. To represent these sounds, he also introduces a new writing of music that proceeds by lines rather than by notes.

The reflection on noise does not exhaust the complex personality of Luigi Russolo who through the arts proceeds “Beyond matter”: with him, noise becomes the protagonist of the new century.

The above disk I fortuitously found at my local records shop represents a cool follow-up of a century-old musical adventure… and Chris Cutler (Henry Cow, etc.) is also here.

What a disk 💫

Do you leave, Corto Maltese? Yes! 💫

 

“ Oh go quickly over the dark lands

And cross the sea

That seas and lands may not part us,

My love and me. “

James Joyce

What a sucker!

 

Thanking Robert Crumb (he knows how to behave 😉)

RIP Rutherford Chang, who collected more than 3,400 copies of the Beatles White Album 💫

 

RIP Rutherford Chang, who collected more than 3,400 copies of the Beatles White Album. 

In a fascinating obituary, the New York Times reports:

Chang, a conceptual artist, turned his collection of the Beatles’ “White Album” into a meditation on the aging of a vinyl classic. 

Mr. Chang was not initially a collector of the 1968 double LP “The Beatles,” better known as “The White Album.” He bought one copy of it as a teenager, but when he got a second one some years later, he realized that the two — with their plain white covers as blank canvases— had changed over time.

“The more I got, the more I could see how different these once identical objects had become,” he told the website The Creative Independent in 2017. “I didn’t know where it was going when I started other than that I wanted at least enough to see the differences between them. Then it just kept going and I can’t stop.”

Mr. Chang’s installation, “We Buy White Albums,” unveiled at the Recess gallery in Manhattan in 2013, took the form of a facsimile of a record shop, with albums in bins and turntables to play the music.

One wall was filled with albums whose owners had put their names on the covers, as well as written letters, poems and other ephemera on them. Some had drawn pictures. The covers also showed wear patterns created by rotting cardboard.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/arts/rutherford-chang-dead.html

The exhibition traveled to several cities, including Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, in 2014.

Prog at its best 💫

 

The Keith Tippett Group - Dedicated To You, But You Weren't Listening

1971 Vertigo 6360 024 (UK)

The second Keith Tippett Group album with the core members of Keith, Elton, Mark, and Nick augmented by a a stellar cast including Gary Boyle, Robert Wyatt, Neville Whitehead, Phil Howard, Bryan Spring, & Roy Babbington. 

The title comes from a Hugh Hopper composition from Soft Machine Volume II and a brief instrumental version of it introduces Nick Evans' "Black Horse" as the closing track on side 2.  The band have really progressed since their first album.  Keith's jagged runs are more pronounced and the three wind players feature more strongly. The cover is one of Roger Dean's earlier ones. The closing track on side one, "Green and Orange Night Park" would be further developed for Centipede.

I picked up this copy during the summer of 1971 second-hand at Cob Records in Porthmadog in N. Wales during the summer break.  Back in the days when you'd browse through the bins, see an interesting cover and look at who names of who played  on it and pick it up sound unheard. I was not disappointed.  I recall playing this, especially side one, a  lot. Sheer bliss, that rapid firing big-band sound, the hard driving riffs, the solos and Keith's inimitable piano. If I wasn't already an Elton Dean fan, his solo on "Green and Orange Night Park" would have made me one! Jazz-Rock at its finest. 

One reason I like the Canterbury scene is the broad spectrum of music which my ears were opened up to. And this is just one small region of that spectrum.

Thanks to Julian Christou 🙏

Neumann CF-3 & Studer 961 💫

 

I’ll be able to advise musicians when the tape is rolling and microphones are ON… without having to wave my hands 

😳😄😄😉☺️😄