A Record with a soul - Oar by Alex "Skip" Spence

The haunted genius of Alexander “Skip” Spence’s Oar returns at long last to its original format: the LP. Sundazed is ecstatic to be able to reissue Spence’s cult classic on high-definition vinyl, with original track listing, liner notes and photos intact. Spence — a founding member of seminal San Fran skullbenders Moby Grape — cut his only solo work in Nashville immediately after being released from New York’s Bellevue Hospital late in 1968. Unavailable on the collector’s market these days at any price, Oar vanished without a trace when first released in 1969.

Frequently compared to the likes of Syd Barrett and Nick Drake, Spence’s visionary work walks the tightrope between reality and delusion and remains a national treasure.

TRACKS: 1. Little Hands / 2. Cripple Creek / 3. Diana / 4. Margaret — Tiger Rug / 5. Weighted Down / 6. War in Peace / 7. Broken Heart / 8. All Come to Meet Her / 9. Books of Moses / 10. Dixie Peach Promenade / 11. Lawrence of Euphoria / 12. Grey-Afro


I wasn't aware of "Oar" by Skip Spence, despite knowing him as a founder member of Moby Grape, a West Coast, Psychedelic group as underrated as Spirits and Quicksilver Messenger Service (where Skip briefly played, as well...)

Wikifacts about Skip

The original Columbia's pressing was virtually unavailable in decades and the Sundazed heavy vinyl re-issue was blessed by heaven.

Skip's music is as natural as can be a young man - unperfect, raw - but also full of life, true, unfiltered and what his music gives to the listener is... a speechless experience, like when you look at your new-born puppy in your hand.

A miracle, needing no words at all to be fully appreciated.

The disc was recorded in few hours, in complete solitude in Nashville and ALL instruments are played and arranged by Skip himself... strangely, I noticed in "War in Peace", last track of side one, a copy-catted (an homage?!?!) guitar/bass part of the immortal Iron Butterfly's "In a Gadda da Vida"... only the just hinted theme...

The superb Iron's masterpiece was recorded only few months earlier, in June '69, while "Oar" dates Nov. 1969.

Strange, don't you?!?.

Gossip apart... I love "Oar" a lot and everyone should, at least, have a listen to it.

It's good medicine...

Schubert's "Die Winterreise": the best piece of music ever?

Don't know and cannot say... BUT, sure yesterday evening I felt extremely enriched at Toni's place, listening to his 1955 Hans Hotter/Gerald Moore's EMI mono "Die Winterreise".

We compared it with two more Fisher-Diskau/Gerald Moore, much more "modern" sounding, quicker and shorter versions and the old Hans Hotter's was so... so full of meanings, of noble sadness, we both had tears in our eyes while listening to "Der Leiermann".

I swear...

As rivers of ink flowed on the matter, I'll only humbly say I was deeply moved by Hotter's rendition, while the Fisher-Diskau's was barely pleasant... truly impressive, considering the beauty of same score, but filtered by different singers and musical sensitivities.

Winterreise survey

Toni's system was an "emotions machine" and Music was our only sincere concern and flooding us... like it should be.

Thanks to my friend.

Hans Reichel: an (extremely) well-kept German secret

Imagine a guy who recorded at home - with telephone ringing in the background and all - his (improvised) music for decades on self-built electro-acoustic instruments, whose far parent once was a guitar, BUT now a weird, alien object with two necks and a common pick-up or a completely, previously non-existing instrument - a Daxophone - and playing as the most skilled of luthiers and ebanists with hardwoods - i.e. Cocobolo, Zebrawood, rosewood, ebony, to produce runic objects, like "mallets" from Saturn and the like; also a successful fonts designer and the creator of a new maps drawing method for navigators.

I'll call him a genius, and the several discs I own, which I cherish and listen to every some years, confirm this.

When I listen to Hans' music I do so for pure pleasure and also to "remember" Hans himself and his infinite creativity "really" exixt;-) and he's not the creation of a Giger-like mind and dreams, but a man in his 60 in flesh and bones... also if he uses an electric-razor to play his "guitars";-)

His site is among the best WEB creatures I ever experienced in my whole life... his cartoons truly are little masterpieces, with a sense of "untold" like only Edward Gorey or H.P. Lovecraft were able to hint.

Browse here and buy "Bonobo Beach" or something with Fred Frith or anything he recorded on FMP. Keep a relaxed approach and... enjoy... differently, BUT enjoy!

It's not music you can whistle under the shower, BUT like Harry Partch or LaMonte Young, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker and other visionaries, this stuff is what really defines the concept of "boundaries" and "creative fever": something elastic like a giant rubber band.

Something so necessary to human-kind like breathing-air.

Tuli Kupferberg passed away on July 12th, 2010

Wikipedia about Tuli

Mojo magazine recently dedicated to him a nice, interesting article - The Fugs, Beat movement, etc. - and he jokingly - in his 86 - self-crowned himself as "the oldest rocker still alive and kickin'"...

I own - unlistened in eons - some Fugs' discs on ESP and Reprise labels and his 1967 "No deposit, no return" on ESP label, which I listened quite recently, is the produce of a genius: ALL original ads from '60s TV and newspapers and mags.

Weird... and a sort-of preview of "what" the world would have become later... and he was 150 % right.

Hypes and trivia and people victimized by shopping malls and TV ads.

More a careful observer and a poet than a musician, Tuli, as a Jewish Newyorker always represented the cricket on the wall against U.S.' (several) nonsense, too many to be quoted here.

His ugliness was like a mask... his greatness was his love for Truth.

I'll miss him.

WJAAS - Shigemi Takajo-san and insects and birds singing

Abrazemi, kutuwamushi and kohrogi (insects) and uguisu (bird) singing on a CD for audio tuning and demonstration?!?

Devils of Japanese, would say... Shigemi Takajo-san, a famous Japanese audio and music critic and reviewer insists since a long time about the following statement: "A recorded sound should be perceived, when played back on proper audio equipment, as identical to the original sound".

Not an easy task would way, having many detractors and also a logical limit - i.e. let's try to record a waterfall or a Stealth or a rifle shot... the 120+ db SPL. maybe captured by a condenser Schoeps' or Neumann's mike, will SURE be excessive, almost dangerous, for most of the audio systems.

Distorsion, compression, reduction in size, impact and trueness - to name a few of the possible issues ...

.... BUT, the wise Japanese critic, Takajo-san suggested "lesser", more friendly noises: natural sounds.

Mountain streams, insects, birds... in THIS very case, yes... it's possible to hear a "reproduced sound identical to the original sound".

I have a CD-R given to me by Shinichi Tanaka-san which included the above summer insects singing in the quiet Japanese countryside (it exists!) and these recordings are quite impressive: you're able to differentiate near to the mike and more far away insects and you can hear - like in an orchestra - when "members" of the "orchestra" remain still, while others continue.

The sound of these exotic insects (similar to Westerner crickets, cicadas and grasshoppers) is very complex and various, not simply a noise, but a true sound composed of wings, legs, maybe grass-chewing, ALL resonating together.

When I played this weird disk in Gotorama for friends... well, you'll not believe, I had shivers, and the definite, strong sensation was like someone opened a window on a living lawn in a quiet evening... at 12.000 km... as crow flies.

Known and - at same time - unknown sounds of Nature.

An interesting experience.

Wisdom

"Never miss a rest-room, never waste an erection, never trust on a fart"
Jack Nicholson (in "The Bucket List" w. Morgan Freeman - 2007)

I love this...

Ovary Lodge on Ogun

Zen and the art of free playing.

This album could have been subtitled: "Caution: Zen Poets at work"; Side two, track one, is definitely my favourite track title of the year: "A Man Carrying A Drop of Water On A Leaf Through A Thunderstorm."
Even Basho would have been proud of the vivid brilliance of that haiku-esque line. And, even more amazingly, the music actually paints the appropriate scene, in swirling Japanese water colours.
Ovary Lodge, the band co-founded between Keith Tippett and Frank Perry, is a wonderful, mysterious unit, with a vocabulary and identity all of its own, stylistically whole continents removed from what has become the mainstrem of British free improvisation.
Much of its uniqueness comes from Frank Perry, a deeply religious man whose drumming, so far as I can discern, owes precious little to either jazz as such or the 'classical' European avant garde.
When Perry plays his kit (which could win prizes as a sculptural exhibit, incidentally) the sounds that he draws often seem to have more in common with the meditational bells of Tibet, or the ethereal, time-suspending qualities of the Balinese gamelan.
With this kind of Eastern activity happening behind them, Tippett and Miller - resolutely creative just about all the time - are able to open up whole new vistas of inspiration that would simply be unthinkable in any more conventional jazz context.
And when Julie adds her highly unorthodox vocal improvisations, the net result sounds like some unnamed but very pure kind of liturgical music.
One could draw some slightly forced parallels. The opening of "Gentle One," with its male and female vocal glissandos over knocking and prodding percussion, could be said to reveal a certain relationship with the music of Penderercki or LIgeti, but the implications of what Ovary Lodge are attempting are broader than that.
Although Keith, in his sleeve notes, asks that we "(try) hearing it as an orchestra", that is, without attaching particular credit to individuals, or worrying about precisely who is playing what, I find it very difficult not to single out Harry Miller, whose bass playing imbues all of these far-reaching pieces with a sense of structure.
Only once do the musicians appear (and then but fleetingly) to lose control of their group direction, in the more violent closing section of "Fragment No.6", the most aggressive work-out on the record, and even here the randomness of the scattered sound is not unattractive.
But, for me, the fourteen-minute "Gentle One" and the whole of the second side comprise some of the most inspiring and naturalistically lovely free music I've heard in ages, and I only wish that Ovary Lodge played a whole lot more gigs.
Ogun Records are obtainable from your friendly neighbourhood jazz specialist, but in case of difficulty, contact Ogun Recording Ltd, 28 Richardson Court, London SW4 6RZ (remember this review is from 1975!).
And an ethnomusicalogical footnote: a hsiao is a Chinese bamboo flute, a sheng is a Chinese mouth-organ, and an er-hu is a two-string Chinese violin. Now have fun trying tospot them on the record - Steve Lake (Melody Maker, August 28, 1976).

Improvising at its best and one of my most beloved Ogun's discs.

Thanks to Steve Lake and Melody Maker and - most of all - to Frank Perry and his great site.

From Downunder - Not drowning, waving - Another Pond

2007 digitally remastered and expanded pressing of this Australian band's 1984 debut album featuring seven bonus tracks: 'Making A Desert and Calling It Peace', 'Moving Around', 'Frogs', 'Oliver Le Strange', 'Untouched', 'Pilon and The Tum Tum Tree' and 'Happy As Can Be'. Led by David Bridie (later of My Friend The Chocolate Cake), Not Drowning Waving mixed World Music with Pop sensibilities and created a unique and warm sound that was purely Australian, seemingly untouched by any musical scene or genre. 'Another Pond' has been out of print for some time and is now remastered with bonus tracks.

Track Listing

MAKING A DESERT AND CALLING IT PEACE
ANOTHER POND
HIBAKUSHA
MOVING AROUND
DARE NOT SAY A WORD
FROGS
WALK TIRED
JOHN WAYNE VISITS PORT AUGUSTA
PERFECT DESIGN
WATERDROPS
HOME ON MY OWN
MR SUHARTO MAN
MR POOH
OLIVER LE STRANGE
ONCE LIKE THIS
THE CHESHIRE CAT
HUNTING FOR NUGGETS
UNTOUCHED
PERFECT DESIGN 1990
ANOTHER POND 1990
THE WOODEN BOX
PILON AND THE TUM TUM TREE
HAPPY AS CAN BE

Imagine: Talk-Talk and Mark Hollis' tinted SUPERB, smooth music on a Sidney's beach in a sunny, lazy afternoon: a genuine Aussie well-kept secret!

Wikipedia's

I got the 1984 vinyl... WOW!

10"

.... funny title, don't you;-)!?!?

Seriously: my yesterday evening one-hour-of-music was highly specialized - i.e. listening to some of my 10 inchers discs...

I began with a Davey Graham's "All that Moody" and continued with more Davey's "Live at Hull University - 1967", both on RollerCoaster Records... such a nice player, he was... on the first, he's accompanied by tabla-player Keshave Sathe, later with John Martyn in his seminal "Inside Out" superb disc and, later on, with John Renbourn Group for long years...

... then, I opened Heaven (... or is it Hell?!?!) doors: I picked up two old Philips's disc (10")... Serge Gainsbourg's Vol. 2, a 1959 disc with Alain Goraguer's Orchestra and, after a loving listening, again S.G. and his Vol. 4, dated 1962.

You don't imagine - if you don't own/know these discs - how GREAT was the young Serge, accompanied by a superb jazz orchestra, with nice arrangements, light, yet swinging and groovy.

"Les Cigarillos", "Black Trombone" and other immortal tunes are flawlessly displayed on these small discs... and, hey folks, French (musicians) and Dutch (Philips' recording engineers) did know their business, too.

The recordings are of highest merits: awesome dynamic, trueness and the rock-solid at centerstage, beautiful, "Gauloise" voice of Serge clearly "shows" when the old smoking crooner moved his head in front of the microphone, in the studio.

I shot four (10") sides with greatest pleasure, like an appetizer before dinner.

... con gusto.

Thai Funk

Recently, we brought in the fantastic Thai Funk comps from Bangkok’s ZudRangMa Records, which you can purchase here, here, and here. The compiler of these fine Thai Funk obscurities is DJ Maft Sai, who just launched a weekly streaming radio show that airs Sunday nights. And boy oh boy, is it killer! (In fact, it even goes deeper into the vaults than what was unearthed on those sweet Thai Funk comps, which lead to many fascinating personal discoveries.)

You can listen to last week’s program HERE, but his newest Sunday night beat down should be available on the ZudRangMa website by the time you read these words.

A VERY musical book: "Il legno di risonanza della Foresta di Paneveggio"

(transl. - The resonance-wood of Paneveggio forest)

It's a fantastic, superbly interesting book in Italian (but with several synopsis in good English at the end of each chapter) with great pictures (B/W and colour) and drawings of luthiery timber which was lovingly published in 2002.

It's 207 pages of rich infos and pure knowledge about luthiery art and spruce, etc. etc. - incl. rare info about old masters like Guarneri, Amati and Stradivari and their building techniques.

It's not an easy to find book, as you have to phisically (no mail order available!!!) buy it at the Visitor's Center in S. Martino di Castrozza, near Paneveggio, in the most beautiful Dolomites' area, Northern Italy.

... but if you're a luthier, a violinist or a guitar player or simply someone fond of luthiery and woods... well, feel free to write to yours truly, as I have some hardcover copies available which I'll keep for friends from abroad.

Musings 4

Musings 3

Musings 2

.... if Mr. Bean would be the pope;-)

Musings

A funny blog...

Curtains?

Theater-wise, stage-curtains and music compares so unfriendly like (trying to) having sex and lacking erection;-)))

... nonetheless, after some elucubrations, I decided to give it a try... no, NOT the above;-))), but hiding the speakers in my studio behind a cool, elegant, yet the most acoustically transparent available... curtain!

I found - and every day getting harder - that listening to, say, Vivaldi's strings or Scarlatti's harpsichord, truly, VERY badly matches with the technically cold horns appearance, leave alone the tubes electronics.

I'll try in the next days to hang two light, yet effective, curtains to cover speakers, like in a Scherazade hide-and-seek affaire.

Will use some old, unused wide textured cotton curtains I should have handy somewhere, also if it will be, sort-of, like using short-trousers at a wedding;-))) - i.e. at home I have 3,05 m ceiling vs. the 3,65 m of the studio... improving the layout at a later date, if successful.

Will see...

広島市 (Hiroshima)

It was 65 years ago... yesterday: Aug. 6th, 1945/Aug. 6th, 2010.

Record of the Quinquennial: Holger Czukay - On the way to the peak of normal

Some records have a very unique power: to let you feel cool and hip and let you groove while they play on the stereo... Holger Czykay's is THE (today) one!

Like Miles' "Bitches Brew" and "Tutu", Trane's "A Love Supreme" and a bunch of others... yes, this very record is THIS good, folks;-)

Pre-digital loops, radio-waves, re-re-re-recordings, guitars, GUITARS... and music of highest quality.

Thanking my friend and Krautrock-guru, Franz, also the builder of my own Partridge/Allen-Bradley/paper in oil caps 300B triode monoblocks... he never miss a shot!

Also if my Can diet spans over about three decades, I wasn't aware of this disc: this record is so... so personally involving at several levels (aesthetic, musical, compositive jealousy, studio work, pure awe and admiration for Holger's job as a whole) I've no further words to describe it... no, just kidding: I'm lazier than ever, so only sincerely wishing to share with others the beauty of this record...

A great sounding recording, too...

BTW: the cover "painting" was made by the young son of (engineer extraordinaire) Connie Plank: clever, you little, young lotus-eater;-).

Buy it, period!

John Fahey's Holy Grail

John Fahey: "John Fahey" 198?, USA/Fonotone 3. Disc is in beautiful EX to M- shape, it's like new. Labels are typed and hand-applied, with a "FONOTONE" logo applied separately on top of the typed label. This is an expertly-made 12" metal acetate LP that was hand-cut on a lathe. The sound is excellent, it's comparable in fidelity to a standard vinyl pressing. It has a manila slipcase for a cover.

Frederick, Maryland musicologist Joe Bussard, Jr. recorded several local artists in his home studio, including John Fahey. The Fahey recording sessions began in 1959, and continued through 1962. Fahey left these early masters with Bussard, asking only that if he was going to make the music available to collectors, he do it himself on his Fonotone imprint and never license the material to another label. Bussard had the equipment for making acetates at 78 rpm, and this was how he shared Fahey's early recordings with interested collectors for many years. These were usually 7" acetates, with one song on each side. They were expensive to produce, and correspondingly they were expensive for Fahey collectors to purchase from Bussard. As a result very few were ever made. A small number of these handmade Fonotone 78s have turned up on ebay and have fetched considerable sums.

By the 1980s, Bussard had upgraded his cutting equipment to be able to produce a 12" disc at 33 1/3 rpm. He only made one "official" 12" disc available to Fahey fans, Fonotone 70001, labeled "Guitar Solo's". Beyond this, it has been widely believed that he never produced any other 12" discs, but I recently found four different ones in a collection! The discs are numbered FONOTONE 1, FONOTONE 2, FONOTONE 3, and FONOTONE 4. Predictably, there is a story about how they came to exist that I will relate below. On offer this week in separate auctions are FONOTONE 3 and FONOTONE 4, which as a set contain 23 instrumental guitar tracks that John Fahey recorded in Joe Bussard Jr.'s home studio between 1959 and 1962, and six blues tracks Fahey recorded with Backwards Sam Firk as "The Mississippi Swampers" in Joe Bussard Jr.'s home studio on June 15, 1962. Many, if not all of the tracks on these LP acetates were made available by Bussard as Fonotone 78 rpm acetate singles. But I have reason to believe that these acetates in my possession are unique, in that they are the only 12" discs playing at 33 1/3 rpm (LPs) of any of this material.

The collection I recently purchased had a lot of folk guitar records. Many early rare ones, like the Harry Taussig on Talisman and the Steve Mann on Custom Fidelity, the Fred Gerlach, stuff I'd never seen before. There was a lot of Fahey, and then I found the acetates. I asked the owner how he came to possess them and here's what he told me: I wrote to Joe Bussard Jr. in the early 1980s, and I asked him if he still had the early John Fahey recordings for sale. He wrote back that yes, he was still offering them on cassette. I wrote again and told him I really would rather have records, and he wrote that he could make me a set of 78 rpm acetate singles. But I didn't want 7" records, and I certainly didn't want anything that played at 78 rpm! I asked him if he could cut me 12" LPs at 33, and he refused to do it. I waited a year or so, and I wrote him again. By then he had the "Guitar Solo's" LP acetate available, and I bought one. It sounded great, which made me want the other tracks on 12" LP even more, so I asked him again. He told me he'd never made custom 12" discs to order for anyone EVER, because cutting full LPs by hand was a lot of trouble. I wrote him back right away and told him that I'd pay him whatever he asked, but I had to have LPs. I think it was another year before we closed the deal, but finally we agreed on a price and he sent the four LPs. He enclosed a note with them that said, "I can't believe how difficult it was to make these, I will never do this again for any amount of money!" I asked him if he thought they were in fact unique, and he said Oh, I have no doubt that they are. I chose the songs that I wanted from his master list and the order I wanted them in, and he cut the acetates. He custom made these LPs for me and told me flat out that he would never do it again for anybody!

You should be able to see the song titles on the scans below. For your further information, here is a list of the Fonotone label 78rpm acetates that are collected on this LP, directly cut from Joe Bussard Jr.'s masters: #1157, #1182, #1184, #1185, #6707, #6708. In addition, there are two tracks not bearing titles (see label side B) which may have been made available as #6801, which is identified in Bussard's catalog as "Two Guitar Solo's - Titles Unknown". Fonotone 78 singles are rare, I would guess each one has the potential to bring three figures at auction. This acetate LP collects at least six of them!

The winning bidder will also receive copies of Bussard's mid-1980s catalog of early recordings of Fahey and several other artists.

Be sure to look at my other auctions to see the companion disc with the other nine Fahey instrumentals, and the six Mississippi Swampers recordings.



Learning something new everyday makes living worthwhile!

Indeed.

Audio or validating our parking ticket?

... thanking Roman B. for hinting this... funny, indeed!


Enjoy!