Thanks to everyone who came down to Cian O’Neill’s excellent ‘Music and Paintings’ evening last week. I worked out that it was my first solo live performance for a good few years and although a pretty low-key affair (just me and a laptop) it consisted almost entirely of new material, including tracks from the Savamala project, a few rough demos from the preparatory sessions for Howlround’s live debut next month and even some outtakes from another rather large and shadowy comission-in-progress, about which I’m sworn to secrecy for the moment!
Hopefully all this new material will begin to surface in the coming months as I desperately try to finish off projects and make token efforts at meeting deadlines. But for the moment, this little extract is all I’m going to tempt you with. It features a number of tape loops created by myself and Chris Weaver during a feverish weekend spent in preparation for Howlround’s live debut at the Great Escape Festial in Brighton (further details forthcoming) and sounds rather good turned up loud, which bodes well!
We probably won’t win any prizes for imaginative loop titles…
Having had so many enquiries about the possibility of performing ‘Ghosts’ live, I must say that I’m beginning to wonder how closely such a performance is going to be able to replicate the very specific sounds and grooves heard on that album. Listeners expecting us to faithfully recreate the sound of those hallowed corridors on stage might well be disappointed, as the machines are already taking us off in strange new directions. We fed a few basic loops into our two Revoxes and suddenly we were off on a quite different path. As I’ve harped on about before, the beauty of working with tape and the thing that appeals to me the most is it’s unpredictability – you never quite know what you’re going to get. This can result in either triumph, disaster, or a weird combination of the two. I personally think it’s going to sound amazing, but how closely it resembles the original ‘Ghosts Of Bush’ album and whether you consider that lack of resemblance a good or bad thing remains to be seen. Only one way to find out, I suppose…
Good morning, my fine beauty. You’ve probably already had the feeling you may experience over the next few minutes – What are these people talking about?
In other words, welcome to one of my top hits. This week’s show will be just like a rock concert, except it won’t have the singers, the instruments and the crowd noise is ‘kinda missing’ too. It’s disappointingly sad. Are you beginning to understand? It sure covers a lot of material in one place, doesn’t it?
That’s awesome. You’re very smart. But it will sound strange to you. Let me give you a frosty drink from my thermos. Hopefully this will make you feel free and fulfilled as a woman.
[insert joke about ‘twelve inches’ here, woof, snargle etc…]This week’s missive slams together two diamentrically-opposed LPs into a titanic soundclash. The first is Stanley Z. Daniels’ 1969 LP ‘Sex For Teens – Where It’s At’. The second is one of the most astonishing cultural artefacts I’ve ever had the pleasure of dropping a jaw over:
GIRLS: Very Easy
If you can listen to Paul’s efforts to convince the object of his desires to spread sun-tan oil on his back without your own skin crawling you’re more of an alpha-male than I am.
There’s also a Green Goddess disco workout record bank-rolled by Renault Trucks. Listening to it, it’s hard to believe anyone born before 1992 would have the slightest idea of what sex was, let alone require instruction regarding where it was ‘at’ or how to easily pick it up.
Quite hard work – The Green Goddess lets the clutch out
OK, that’s probably enough staring at the Green Goddess for now. Many thanks to ace record collector and soundtrack obsessive Mr. Jonny White for pointing me in the direction of some of this week’s treasures. To show our gratitude, let’s all head over to his super blog, ‘Soundtracks, Library Music and All That Jazz’, shall we? I knew you’d come running for it. Tune in again next week for the final episode in the current series when things get REALLY unpleasant – we’ll be learning how to relax. The results are almost unlistenable…
Wotcha, Cock. Welcome to London. Home of the whelk, Old Joanna, The Pearly Queen and of course the mighty Resonance FM.
There it is, love, originally aired last Friday at 7pm, repeated this Tuesday at 2am. On this week’s show guided by the vintage voices of several competitively avuncular narrators and a grand piano, we’re taken on a whistle-stop audio tour of London, a fantastical city entirely populated by bad actors. We might go by underground. It’s quicker by tube, as you people say. The Police’ll be after you if you’re not a good boy. We’ll also have a cockney sing-song and enjoy a reggae tune about the joys of commuting. The great dome. A moon in the sky. Makes you think of horses, don’t it?
Join Robin The Fog as he digs up a plethora of inspirational, aspirational and instructional recordings of highly dubious vintage and embarks on a cut-and-paste odyssey that is by turns amusing, absurd and, on at least one occasion, almost unbearable.
Looking Good, Feeling Great runs throughout April, and I’m really rather fond of this week’s edition, which was consists largely of three separate ‘tour-guide’ records, a Linguaphone 45, and a man with an enormous 1960s tape machine concealed up his jumper, all edited seam-fully together with the usual bag of hammers. But, of course we’re by no means on virgin territory here. Almost as long as there has been a city on the banks of the Thames, there have been people being silly about it. In fact, let’s close business here with a completely spurious, unrelated coasting on other people’s brilliance, namely the greatest depiction of London ever made:
Call me old-fashioned, but that Palace Guard’s sudden about-turn from Parade-Ground bark to coquettish titter never fails to make me laugh. For ages. And then to demand that all of my friends and associates watch it, forgetting they’ve already seen it several times before. Not that I’m obsessive or anything, oh no.
Tune in next week where we’ll be learning how NOT to have a relationship, a subject on which I consider myself a veritable soothsayer…
I will have no part of the current trend for branding things ‘amaze-balls’ (or indeed it’s antithesis – ‘disappointi-balls’ at a guess), but if I did I would be amaze-balling all over THIS:
This is the work of writer and painter Cian O’Neill who is curating an evening of his work entitled simply ‘Music And Paintings’ next Thursday 19th April at Thursday 18th April, 6-10pm at Unit E, 199 Eade Road, N4 1DN Hackney
To shamelessly copy and paste from his very fine website, where you can admire a wealth of his other work: Cian O’Neill is an Irish painter, writer and graduate of Chelsea College of Arts School of Painting. Previous to Chelsea College, he studied at Central Saint Martins. He was selected for Futuremap, the University of the Arts New Graduates Show and short-listed for the Catlin Arts prize. [His] work is influenced by, amongst others, Max Ernst, Rembrandt van Rijn, Willem van Aelst, Francisco Zurbarán, Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez, Matthias Grünewald, Jean Ingres, Michelangelo da Caravaggio and Michelangelo Buonarroti.
That’s the paintings taken care of, then. The music will be supplied by no-doubt equally visceral live sets from the ever-excellent Brood MA, the redoubtable Yearning Kru, and the really rather splendid Joane Skyler, who’s recent ‘Orz Side 1’ for NTS Radio contained some of the dirtiest bass I’ve heard in a good while. And not forgetting Mark Barrett (though I can’t seem to find a decent hyperlink to regale you with!) and myself. I’m a huge fan of Cian’s work and Brood Ma and Yearning Kru are old friends, so it should be an amazing night. For those of you who insist on such things, there’s also a Facebook events page. And it’s FREE! What more could you insist on, for heaven’s sake?
See you there, then. At the moment I have absolutely no idea what I shall be playing, so I’m hoping to surprise us both. Possibly not Ant and Dec…
Good evening, citizens of Earth. Presenting the first episode of my new miniseries ‘Looking Good, Feeling Great’ for Resonance FM!
Join Robin The Fog as he digs up a plethora of inspirational, aspirational and instructional recordings of highly dubious vintage and embarks on a cut-and-paste odyssey that is by turns amusing, absurd and, on at least one occasion, almost unbearable. Essential listening for adolescent salespeople seeking holiness or anyone trying to give up smoking on the moon.
Episode 1 – What A Space Ovation!
For this first adventure our hero Bob (and a girl called Betty) journey to the moon in the futuristic year of 1985, the first human being under the age of 21 (and the first woman – Betty, not Bobby) to ever travel so far without parental supervision. On their way they eat some strange peaches, take a nap, dream of a horse from the West Country playing party games, listen to the hooting of space owls, learn about Hydrogen and, upon arrival, attend a lunar rave where they dance to a psychedelic version of ‘Greensleeves’. Worth a listen just to find out what happens when a crowd of scientists and technicians ‘go wild’…
Significant portions of this programme were culled from the 1965 Happy House LP shown above. Other excerpts were taken from ‘The Space Alphabet’ (with thanks to DJ Food for the tip-off), Vera Gray and Desmond Briscoe’s ‘Listen, Move And Dance No.4 – Moving Percussion And Electronic Sound Pictures’, something called ‘Ideas 2’ (which I can’t tell you anything about as I don’t have the sleeve in front of me), an US 7″ from the early 1960s that somehow manages to confuse space travel with home insurance and ‘Party Time With Alphonse’, although the less said about that, the better.
As a huge fan of rocket ships, octopi, witches hats and maracas, for me this sleeve has EVERYTHING!
Now that the dust has settled somewhat and I’ve had a few days to get my affairs in order, I’m very excited to reveal some of the results of Camenzind Belgrade‘s first week. Working alongside a team of local architects, students, artists and journalists, my role as a ‘guest expert’ was to help the participants create various radio and sound works concerning the Savamala area of the city. In addition I gave a lecture on radiophonic music as part of Camenzind’s series of salon evenings and made guest appearances on local stations FMK Beograd and the mighty NO-FM, for whom I contributed a live DJ mix that was perhaps a little more energetic than I’d originally intended. Not that anyone complained….
‘Has anyone seen the projector?’A good turn-out at the Salon. Baby Otto, in foreground, particularly enjoyed the augmented canary recordings.
As I think I’ve mentioned before, Camenzind is a Swiss magazine and research platform that deals with architecture from the perspective not only of architects but also musicians, artists, physicists, civil engineers, and any other kind of inhabitant or user of architecture. Or perhaps I forgot to mention this. Either way, you can read more about the magazine’s new Belgrade operation (invited at the behest of the Goethe Institute to take part in the city’s current ‘Urban Incubator‘ project) and have a listen to some of the impressive body of work the team created here. I must say I was consistently impressed by the talent and creativity displayed by my new Serbian friends, there’s some really dynamic and exciting work to be found on the website. And they’re only just getting started!
For my own part I’m currently creating a ‘sound portrait’ using recordings collected around Savamala (an early part of which I unveiled on this site last week) that will hopefully be finished in the coming weeks. But for the moment I’d like to present a couple of short audio-visual portraits made in collaboration with local photographer Milica Nikolić.
Milica Nikolić, in front of the camera for once. Which means I have no idea who was behind it when this photo was taken…
The images are culled from Milica’s beautiful shots of the riverside area, while the soundtrack uses percussive and reverberant sounds recorded inside ‘The Spanish House’, a ruined shell of a building perched on the riverbank with a flooded basement that provided one of the most delightfully evocative acoustics I’ve ever had the privilege of balancing precariously in. Perhaps surprisingly there are no electronic effects or artificial reverb used in these recordings, the atmosphere you hear is entirely natural. Milicia and I were assisted in our endeavours by Mirjana Utvić and Anita Knežić, architecture students, radio producers and amatuer percussionists who not only introduced me to this wondrous place, but also embraced our project with what I think we all agreed can be called ‘gusto’.
Mirjana and Anita getting into swing.
Here’s part one, recorded on a visit to the famous ‘ship’s graveyard’. I use inverted commas because although far from sea-worthy, at least one local has made a fairly cosy dwelling amongst these rusting hulks, while the others are used by fisherman as a casting point for their rods, despite the huge amount of rubbish and debris that has collected in this bend of the river. And they don’t just throw them back, either…
For part two we move to The Spanish House itself, situated on the banks of the river and with it’s brackish waters lapping in the basement. It was cold, wet and eerie and and also love at first sight:
As you can tell I’m a huge admirer of Milica’s work and hope that we’ll have an opportunity to collaborate again soon. I also hope that next time it won’t take four long hours just to upload two short minutes of video (dammit!). And of course I’m very grateful to Mirjana and Anita for allowing me into their special ‘Temple of Savamala’ and for providing voices and percussion. Here are a couple more photographs of us at work – taken by Milica of course.
Conjuring up ghosts in the basement.The most fun three people can have in broad daylight.
Unfortunately this has all been rather a brief summing-up of what was an incredibly exciting and rewarding week, partly as I’m flying off to Berlin first thing in the morning and partly because these videos took far longer to finalise and upload than was strictly proper and necessary. But I do urge you to visit the Camenzind Belgrade site for further listening and hope to be bringing even more exciting new work to your attention in the coming months. Once you start flying to Eastern Europe, breaking into abandoned buildings and banging on the pipes it’s very difficult to stop, as I’m sure you can imagine…
Trespassing on the railway in the name of sound art. Photos courtesy of Milica Nikolić
You join me in Zurich airport as I await my flight to London. I’m homeward-bound home armed with several new Learning English records (a personal weakness), an oil painting of slightly dubious vintage planned for my kitchen (which, amazingly, is the first thing I’ve ever unwittingly smuggled through customs) and a hardrive full of new and curious sounds and images. I’ll be writing more in the coming days (internet access here is limited, so I probably should have left out all of the above) but I just wanted to share with you the first fruits of my sound portrait of the Savamala area of Belgrade, produced in the flooded basement of the ruined ‘Spanish House’, balancing precariously on snowy concrete steps in an attempt to extract some Savamalian ghosts. All will be explained in due course, but for now I wish merely to say a huge thanks to all of the incredibly talented and passionate new friends I’ve made over the course of the week, and to urge you to visit the Camenzind Belgrade website to find out more about this amazing project. In the meantime, I’m going to start sifting through my folder marked ‘ship’s graveyard’ to see if I can find some audio treasure. And at a cost of roughly £4.70, this pot of Earl grey had better be the greatest ever brewed…
PS Would you believe me if I told you that the acoustics on this recording are entirely natural and that no artificial echo or reverb was used in it’s creation? I almost didn’t believe it myself! Working with sound never fails to surprise me, even now…
Steps leading to the flooded basement of the Spanish House. Looks even better when it’s snowing…
I hereby present the latest release on my bedroom imprint The Fog Signals for your approval, a mixtape of softs produced in collaboration with Mr. Dave ‘Hills Have Riff’s’ Briggs and recorded in the same basement studio using the same tape machines as The Ghosts Of Bush. And yet Earl Grey Whistle Test is not a sequel to that record, for Studio S6 is now well on it’s way to being turned back into a swimming pool and the tape machines have long since been either beaten senseless with a hammer and thrown into a skip (creditable rumour) or auctioned off for astronomical sums. There appears to have been very little leeway between these opposing fortunes, for which we can only assume the BBC is making good on it’s mooted attempts to dramatically reduce waste and recycle a much greater percentage of it’s material. Not that I’m bitter. Anyway, I’m drifting…
As l was saying, this album is actually something of a prequel. All of the music here was recorded in the few months before the Ghosts… sessions began, as Dave and I started to improvise and experiment with tape loops, whistles, mandolin and assorted objects we found lying around the studio, all while drinking copious amounts of the titular beverage. It was my first time experimenting with reel-to-reel machines and also the first time I’d gone anywhere near making music for several years. These late night sessions proved quite eventful – feedback snarled out of unexpected places, tape spooled everywhere, loops were snapped, mistakes were made, lessons were learned, punches were thrown*. But after a few of these clandestine evenings we had amassed a collection of brief, improvised sketches, largely recorded in mono and in a single take. It was all tremendous fun and definitely paved the way for the ghostly tape loops that were soon to follow, but I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them. It wasn’t until almost a year later when I was getting fidgety for what of something to tinker with over Christmas that I got the idea of extracting some of my favourite moments from the confusion of files marked ‘S6 Robin and Dave’ on my hard-drive and editing them together into a mixtape of sorts. So I did. And here it is.
It’s perhaps a little wonky in places, but I like to think ‘Earl Grey Whistle Test’ is the sound of two people on their way to a discovery, a sort of sketchbook where the tape manipulation techniques that would eventually go on to haunt the corridors upstairs gradually took shape. Plus there’s gorgeous original artwork by Dave and yet another classic photo from Hannah Brown. A physical cassette release was on the cards and may well still occur if enough people demand it, but I got a bit bored of waiting for the people at the cassette plant to get their s*** together and decided to put it out anyway. I hope you enjoy it and that, in the context of famous prequels, you’ll find it more Pre-Emptive Strike than Phantom Menace.
As for the official Ghosts… follow-up, that’s still some way off but with Chris Weaver on board and some freshly-repaired tape-machines at our disposal, work can now begin in earnest. Not that we haven’t been busy in the meantime. Noses have been firmly on the grindstone. I’ll explain more in a couple of weeks when I come back from Belgrade. Oh, yeah, I’m off to Belgrade next week to make some Serbian Radiophonics. Did I not mention that? Hoping to find some духови!
*This is a complete lie. Have you ever met Hills Have Riffs? I doubt he’s ever thrown a punch in his life. Kick-boxing is more his thing.
Do you know what a ‘Butt-fast Joy-Girl’ is? Or a ‘Hanky Panky Humper’? No? Well, pull up a sturdy pew and loosen some buttons.
You might remember a piece I made last year entitled ‘A Corner seat in a smoker facing the engine’ for the Radio 4 series Short Cuts. Presented by In The Dark founder Nina Garthwaite and produced by Eleanor McDowall for Falling Tree Productions, Short Cuts was a selection of brief encounters, true stories and found sound, ‘a showcase of delightful and adventurous short documentaries’. The response to ‘ACSIASFTE’, which went out as part of the first episode was fantastic, particularly the report I received from one anonymous listener who claimed to have ‘laughed until [he] wept and nearly crashed [his] car’. In fact, thanks to an excellent job by Nina and Eleanor the response to Short Cuts was so overwhelmingly positive that a second series was quickly planned and the call for fresh submissions sent out. Unfortunately by this point I was rather busy putting the finishing touches to ‘The Ghosts Of Bush’ and didn’t have much time to spare conjuring up new work. Luckily, inspiration soon popped up:
Yes, I’m afraid we’re back here again. Some of my more adventurous followers might remember the Mucky Mixxxtape I produced a couple of years ago, a dirty little voyage into some of the smuttier echelons of my record collection, featuring Blowers and Freaks aplenty. It remains far-and-away my most popular mixtape and one of the things for which I am best known, which just goes to show it’s unwise to question your public. Or indeed approach them.
Anyway, one of the mooted episode titles for this new Short Cuts series was simply the word ‘cut’, and my own genius idea was to apply this theme to my copy of the thoroughly odious 1971 American pornographic recording ‘Midnight Cowpoke’, a cheap and tawdry affair telling the story of a country bumpkin named Clyde visiting New York for the first time and somehow arriving at the front door of two women or ill-repute. A cloistered fellow, he has no idea of the ways of the flesh (indeed he assumes at first that they’re conversing about chickens and donkeys) and it’s left to our ‘butt-fast joy-girl’ duo Marge and Vicky to teach him a few decidedly unpleasant lessons. In short it’s three bad actors pretending to have sex over the course of forty-two grubby, tiresome minutes, entirely fake and pretty much unlistenable. My plan was to approach the recording scientifically like some kind of audio surgeon with too much time on his hands and seamlessly hack and snip away every last vestige of badly-acted eroticism, every last one of the record’s copious profanities, and every single moment of ‘there’s-no-way-you-could-actually-be-doing-that-while-providing-such-a-lucid-running-commentary’ incredulity in order to glimpse at the bare bones beneath. What, if anything, would be left? And so I took up my tools and got down to business (if you’ll pardon the…, er, well…)
Perhaps predictably, the results were pretty insubstantial. The original LP, as mentioned above, weighed in at forty-two minutes. After my comprehensive de-filthing campaign, the newly re-titled ‘All Cow, No Poke’ lasted less than two:
Synopsis: Clyde has come to The New York. He recently went to a big dance. His dad owned a farm but died from cancer. He sold the farm but kept the lumber rights on the remaining five hundred acres. He’d like to purchase some furniture.
That’s it.
Why did I do it? What did I hope to achieve? Well, perhaps it was because this record constitutes another entry to my aforementioned list of things that I couldn’t quite believe existed. And also because I can’t help but find the sheer banality of these left-overs fascinatingly surreal. At what point when making a pornographic recording does the producer decide that there needs to be some sort of sub-plot involving lumber-rights and the purchase of furniture and what does he hope this will add to the proceedings? Is it all in aid of giving bad actors a credible narrative to work with? The addition of dramatic realism? And if so, what’s so exciting about lumber? They even manage to miss out the obvious joke about ‘having wood’ which surely would have been covered before lunchtime on day one at porn school. Why bother including such drab, everyday pointlessness in a recording which is otherwise a piece of ridiculous escapism? Are purchasers of this record going to feel let-down if there’s not a good story to accompany all the dinging and donging? Would the intended demographic pay the slightest attention to such details even if everything else was removed?
In hindsight, I should have realised that these weren’t quite the kind of questions that the kettle-boiling listeners of Radio 4 were particularly desperate to find answers for, and although I’m told it raised a giggle round the Falling Tree offices, they tactfully suggested it was perhaps just a little bit racey for a daytime nationwide radio programme. A bit rich if a rumour I heard regarding a recent episode of The Archers turns out to be true, but let it pass…
Thanks, Bungle!
Anyway, the good news is that Short Cuts carried on without me and was of course every bit as brilliant as the first series. In The Dark have got some great listening events planned for 2013 and ‘All Cow, No Poke’ finally got it’s inaugural hearing last week on the Dexter Bently Hello Goodbye Show as part of Resonance FM‘s fundraising bonanzer. They proved to be far less worried about the impact it might have on the sensibilities of their lunchtime audience, but then Hello Goodbye has delighted in blasting it’s listeners with all kind of noisy filth for over a decade now. And while we’re on the subject, thanks to everyone who tuned into the four-hour marathon OST show presented by myself and Hannh Brown of Modern Day Magpie. We were really chuffed with the results and I’m delighted to announce that the test pressing of ‘Ghosts Of Bush’ fetched a whopping £77! All proceeds, as mentioned before, go to keeping the greatest radio station in the world on air and advert free for another year. Well done to you all!
PS If this is your first visit to this site, please let me assure you that all this smut is very much the exception and that I’m hardly ever forced to censor my material using stuffed animals. Honestly, hardly ever…
Those of you of a squeamish disposition had best look away now:
In the same week that we were booked for a major gig later on this year, I’m happy to announce that Howlround have finally made some progress on the tape machine front, as Chris and I journeyed to deepest Sussex yesterday to visit the home of reel-to-reel repair expert Paul Baldwin. We took three dodgy tape machines under our arms/in the boot, plunderphonic overlord Lepke B rode shotgun and the two-hour journey simply flew by thanks to one of Chris’s bizarre and confusing compilation CDs consisting entirely of Squarepusher, extreme metal and Ceefax music.
As you can see the machines looked pretty sorry for themselves as Paul pulled their guts apart, but the good news is that we finally found out what it was rattling around inside the PR-99 (not a bird’s nest it transpired) and it’s quite likely that the surgery hurt us more than it hurt them. Paul worked tirelessly throughout the day in his increasingly frigid workshop while his wife plied us (very thoughtfully) with tea and soup and his dogs presented us (equally thoughtfully) with endless squeaky toys for our entertainment.
“Torture me all you want, I’m still not going to play Katie Melua!”
The machines bore it all with tremendous stoicism and are now looking and sounding much better after their surgery. And in a happy coincidence we also discovered just how vastly improved MOR classic ‘Closest Thing to Crazy’ sounds when played very, VERY slowly. I expect Chris will soon add this to one of his CD compilations so you can all have a listen.
In other news, at the time of writing there’s still time to have a quick punt on the very rare test pressing of ‘Ghosts Of Bush’, in aid of Resonance FM. All proceeds from this week’s fundraising auction will be going to help keep the greatest station in the world on air for another year. The needle of the Ghosts Of Bush totaliser is currently nudging £42, but I reckon we can still better in aid of such a worthy cause. At the moment £42 barely covers the costs of building the totaliser in the first place…*
*I haven’t actually built a totaliser. I was just being silly. Sorry.
Robin The Fog 