“Aguirre gathers recordings made between 1972 and 1974 embodying the distinctive characteristics of Popol Vuh‘s early-’70s sonic identity: austere analog synth textures that inspired subsequent ambient artists and organically crafted, ethnically nuanced proto-new age music. The most memorable material here derives from the soundtrack to Werner Herzog‘s film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, which chronicles an ill-fated 16th century Spanish quest for El Dorado. The film’s central motif blends pulsing Moog and spectral voices conjured from Florian Fricke‘s Mellotron-related ‘choir organ’ to achieve something sublime, in the truest sense of the word: it’s hard not to find the music’s awe-inspiring, overwhelming beauty simultaneously unsettling. The power of the legendary opening sequence of Herzog‘s film (a breathtaking shot of the conquistadors descending a mountain path, dwarfed by the natural beauty that ultimately consumes them) owes as much to Popol Vuh‘s music as it does to the director’s mise-en-scène. This musical motif appears in two slightly different incarnations: ‘Aguirre I,’ which closes with Andean pipes, and ‘Aguirre II,’ featuring Daniel Fichelscher’s soaring guitar melodies. Elsewhere, the cosmic sensibility of those tracks is replaced with an earthbound orientation, but the results are no less mesmerizing. Built around acoustic guitars and percussion (and a fleeting contribution from vocalist Djong Yun), the 15-minute triptych ‘Vergegenwärtigung’ blurs the boundaries between East and West while incorporating nuances of early music. The album also includes ‘Morgengruß II’ and ‘Agnus Dei,’ versions of which appeared on Einsjäger & Siebenjäger. Compared with In den Gärten Pharaos or Hosianna Mantra, Aguirre doesn’t stand up as a consistently great album, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t contain some great pieces of music.”
allmusic
W – Aguirre (soundtrack)
YouTube: “Aguirre pt I, II, III”
YouTube: Aguirre (1975 – Full Album) 6 videos
Tag: Music
More Songs About Buildings and Food – Talking Heads (1978)
“On July 14, 1978, Talking Heads released their second album, ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food,’ a backwards exorcism of frozen-brittle guitars, smeared textures and super-ecstatic vocals. The record brought forth an essential darkness and didn’t try to extinguish it. These were songs about emotions that lurk, about the secret part of ourselves that knows people can see right through us on buses, planes and subways, all sung by a disjointed, ferocious, manic, shivering guy named David Byrne. It was a kind of State of the Union address, examining the nation’s health from a dozen different angles, including the sky. Now, almost 25 years later, what could be more relevant than songs about buildings and food and love and rage and sorrow and hope and fear? Today, VH1 specials document the Heads’ part in the CBGB years, centered on the downtown Manhattan club where they accompanied the Ramones, Blondie and others in a New York minute that inaugurated American punk. But the Heads were never really punk. For one thing, they looked like their Izod alligators should be wearing them. They were art-school geeks less given to slam-dancing than Polaroid experiments. …”
salon
W – More Songs About Buildings and Food
YouTube: More Songs About Buildings and Food (full album) 15 videos
Clash City Rockers/Jail Guitar Doors – The Clash (1978)
“‘Clash City Rockers’ is a song and single by The Clash. First released in February 1978 with the b-side ‘Jail Guitar Doors,’ a re-worked version of a song from Joe Strummer‘s pub rock days. It was later included as the opening track of the belated US version of the band’s eponymous debut album.The song was first played live at Mont De Marsan (Landes – France), in August 1977 and recorded the same year in the band’s October and November sessions at CBS Studios. Following an argument at the end of the band’s Get Out of Control Tour, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones were not on speaking terms, leaving Joe Strummer as a middle-man, relaying instructions and insults from one to the other. In December, producer Mickey Foote (Joe Strummer’s old sound-man from the 101’ers and producer of The Clash and ‘White Riot’) increased the speed of the tape for the finished master of the song after manager Bernie Rhodes decided the song sounded ‘a bit flat.’ This technique, known as ‘varispeeding,’ rendered the song one semitone higher in pitch. Strummer and Jones were in Jamaica at the time. When they heard the finished result, Foote was sacked. With the exception of the 2000 re-issue of the US version of The Clash, the original version of the song (at the proper speed) has been used on every re-release since. …”
Wikipedia
Genius – Clash City Rockers (Audio), Genius – Jail Guitar Doors (Audio)
YouTube: Clash City Rockers, Jail Guitar Doors (Video)
Massacre – Killing Time (1981)
“Spittle Records present an expanded reissue of Massacre‘s Killing Time, originally released in 1981. Following the breakup of Cambridge’s avant-rock legends, Henry Cow, guitarist Fred Frith moved to NYC in 1979, and soon found himself deep in the heart of the city’s robust post-punk and free-jazz scenes. He performed with Bill Laswell and Fred Maher, from the group Material, as a power trio of sorts under the moniker of Massacre. The group quickly garnered a reputation around town, and around the world for that matter, as a heavy and heady band that experimented greatly with rhythm, time signatures, and tone. As Frith himself put it, ‘the group was a direct response to New York. It was a very aggressive group, kind of my reaction to the whole New York rock club scene.’ Massacre released one album, Killing Time, before disbanding for nearly 20 years. Their first wave as a group crashed fast and furiously and this one album, recorded in part live in Paris, and in part at Brooklyn’s OAO Studio, is a perfect encapsulation of early ’80s NYC. In addition to the original album, first released on Celluloid in 1981, this deluxe three-sided double LP includes eight bonus tracks recorded live between ’80 and ’81 at The Stone in San Francisco, and Inroads and CBGB in NYC. Avant-jazz-post-punk-noise of the highest order from several legends and one of the most important projects Frith and Laswell were ever involved in. …”
Forced Exposure
W – Killing Time
YouTube:Killing Time [full album]
Gang Of Four – Entertainment! (1979)
“Debut albums are a tricky business. After a good ten years or so of dreaming about entering a recording studio a young group gets flung into the bear pit and expected to produce the goods. Most of the time, what emerges is a half-realised idea of their own ambitions yet sometimes the added pressure pushes the group to undreamt of heights. Released thirty years ago Gang Of Four’s ‘Entertainment!’ is one such album. Blending punk with funk, visceral rock with modern European philosophy the record turned established templates inside out. Lighting up the increasingly moribund post-punk scene the album has enjoyed a curious form of second life. More and more groups have emerged who are clearly influenced by Gang Of Four’s contention that rock music is made with your brain and not your cock. …”
Gang Of Four Track By Track
W – Entertainment!
Pitchfork
Genius
YouTube: Ether, Damaged Goods, At Home He’s a Tourist, I Found That Essence Rare, Natural’s Not in It, Anthrax, Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time
Autobahn – Kraftwerk (1974)
“Autobahn is the fourth studio album by German electronic band Kraftwerk, released in November 1974. It was the band’s first album to fully embrace the repetitive electronic sound they would become known for, although organic instruments still remained part of their sonic palette, and was inspired by the titular German highway system. Autobahn is not a completely electronic album, as violin, flute, piano and guitar are used along with synthesizers. The title track features both untreated and vocoded vocals; the remaining tracks are purely instrumental. Kraftwerk used a Minimoog, an ARP Odyssey, an EMS Synthi AKS, a Farfisa Professional Piano and various devices of their own design and implementation, such as their famous electronic drums. The title track is intended to capture the feeling of driving on the Autobahn: from traveling through the landscape, the high-speed concentration on the fast lane, to tuning the car radio and the monotony of a long trip. …”
Wikipedia
Classic Album: Kraftwerk’s Autobahn
Kraftwerk Autobahn (Video)
YouTube: Autobahn full
This Is His Music
“The jazz world came out last week to mourn the loss of Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist, band leader, and composer, who died on Thursday at the age of 85. Coleman was lauded as a rule-breaker and visionary who, despite initially hostile reactions from many of his peers, moved jazz past bebop conventions and into the ‘free’ explorations of the 1960s and beyond. Without Coleman, John Coltrane’s final years might have sounded very different, as would Miles Davis’ electric period, and the entire free-improvisation world down to today. … What helped make Coleman more broadly significant is that his revolution radiated beyond the boundaries of jazz to young seekers through the decades in every musical form. Musicians are widely aware of this, as reflected in the list of performers at a tribute concert in Brooklyn in 2014 that would turn out to be his last performance, who included Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Nels Cline of Wilco, members of Morocco’s Master Musicians of Jajouka, and even Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But non–jazz listeners tend to be less cognizant of it. …”
Slate (Video)
Marquee Moon – Television (1977)
“Marquee Moon is the debut album by American rock band Television. It was released on February 8, 1977, by Elektra Records. In the years leading up to the album, Television had become a prominent act on the New York music scene and generated interest from a number of record labels, eventually signing a record deal with Elektra. The group rehearsed extensively in preparation for Marquee Moon before recording it at A & R Recording in September 1976. It was produced by the band’s frontman Tom Verlaine and sound engineer Andy Johns. For Marquee Moon, Verlaine and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd abandoned contemporary punk rock‘s power chords in favor of rock and jazz-inspired interplay, melodic lines, and counter-melodies. Verlaine’s lyrics combined urban and pastoral imagery, references to Lower Manhattan, themes of adolescence, and influences from French poetry. He also used puns and double entendres to give his songs an impressionistic quality in describing his perception of an experience. Marquee Moon was met with widespread acclaim and was hailed by critics as an original musical development in rock music. …”
Wikipedia
Television’s Punk Epic “Marquee Moon,” 40 Years Later (Video!!)
Inside the Song: Television Shines Under the ‘Marquee Moon’ (Video)
How Television Made ‘Marquee Moon,’ the Best Punk Guitar Album Ever
YouTube: Marquee Moon full Album
Video 50 – Robert Wilson (1978)
“Video 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook, a highly original, visually dramatic and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated ‘episodes’ produced for television. Unfolding as a series of thirty-second vignettes, this enigmatic essay in style is characterized by a deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions and repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an ‘architectural’ sound score that includes spoken ‘phonetic patterns’ rather than words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and rhythms with unexpected temporal manipulations, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. — EAI …”
UbuWeb (Video)
‘Robert Wilson: Video 50’ installation redefines the nature of filmmaking
The B-52’s – Full Concert – 11/07/80 – Capitol Theatre
“… This is a terrific document of the group shortly after the 2nd album release. They play the 2nd album in it’s entirety as well as most of the first album. It’s b&w, but well lit, good audio and every second of it is here. The original lineup (they look so young!) bursting with creativity on their first tour as headliners. Fred Schneider – vocals, keyboards, glockenspiel, various toys. Cindy Wilson – vocals, percussion. Ricky Wilson – guitar. Kate Pierson – vocals, keyboards, bass. Keith Strickland – drums.”
YouTube: The B-52’s – Full Concert – 11/07/80 – Capitol Theatre
Punk Scrawled Artist 