Our friends Lora and Paul are having a launch for their Felt book at Rough Trade on Friday February 3rd at 7pm. Here are some details about the truly unique party they’re putting on:

“For the first time since their split Lawrence and other members of seminal indie group Felt will be on stage talking about their 10 year career, a career which saw them make 10 albums in 10 years, making some of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful pop music of the decade. This event is to celebrate the release of ‘Felt – The Book’ – a stunning hardback, limited edition book documenting the band’s career using exclusive photography from the archives and Lawrence’s text. Before the Q&A Paul Kelly will be screening relevant portions of his Lawrence Of Belgravia documentary and then this event will see the band field questions from both the organisers of the book, director of ‘Lawrence Of Belgravia’ Paul Kelly and members of the audience. After the event the band will be djing their favourite records and signing copies of the book.”

Stephen Clark, Katherine Harrington and Martin Schori. Congratulations.

As regular readers will know I’m really fond of the record and this review of the album by Erik Thompson on The Line of Best Fit sums it up pretty nicely I reckon. (JB)

From their new record, out on Monday and on sale in our shop, priced £10.

Bird Songs 9 has been compiled by Stephen Cracknell, singer, songwriter and all round good bloke. Along with his band, The Memory Band, Stephen is very much involved in an evening of ‘Folk on Film’ that is taking place at King’s Place, London on Friday, 27th Jan. Programme details and ticket information can be found in the following press release:

Listen To Britain: Folk On Film is a mixture of film and live music, celebrating folk music and culture on the big screen, featuring excerpts from such classic films as Far From The Madding Crowd, The Innocents, Barry Lyndon and The Wicker Man.

We are delighted to welcome special guest Lisa Knapp, returning to work with The Memory Band once more and bringing her amazing folk singing and fiddle playing. You can check out more about Lisa’s own work at her website.

Also joining us for the first time and our musical arranger for the evening is F-IRE Collective member and pianist Fred Thomas, fresh from composing his own musical version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.

our very own Lizzie Stutters will be showing off her recorder skills and the wonderful Jason Garth Steel, whose second album is soon to be released on Rif Mountain will also be singing with us.

The evening will open with a short set of traditional songs by myself and I shall be joined by Hannah and Caughlin and Jess Roberts for a few numbers. Then we will venture on to the main event.

Tickets and full details are available at the King’s Place website.

Tickets are considerably cheaper bought in advance.

We’re extremely excited about this show and would love to see you there!

Stephen

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“The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments”
Lindsay Anderson

Listen To Britain:Folk on Film is a programme of film and live music by The Memory Band, with a special guest appearance by folk-singer Lisa Knapp and new arrangements by F-ire Collective member and pianist Fred Thomas. The show celebrates pivotal pioints where modern approaches to both cinema and folk music in post-war Britain coincided to indelibly define so much of our visual perceptions of our musical past, our culture and it’s place in our landscape, whilst navigating the tension between realism and fantasy..

Although the Free Cinema movement was better known for it’s use of jazz and classical music, the occasions when those who emerged from it did employ folk music have had a far reaching effect. One of the most stunning uses was the song “O Willow Waly” which permeates the 1961 classic film The Innocents. The song was sung by Isla Cameron who was a highly regarded folk singer who had collaborated with Ewan MacColl and featured in broadcats by folklorist Peter Kennedy, responsible for forming Garland Films, the film division of the EFDSS.

O Willow Waly dominates the film right from the opening credits and it’s haunting, disturbingly seductive refrain is presages those of later films such as Rosemary’s Baby and Nightmare On Elm St. and creates a near-perfect template of spooky-folk:

In the early days Britsih cinema most folk songs in films were mostly the odd sea shanty in adventure films or as unrealsitic as those in Powell & Pressburgers I Know Where i’m Going like the over-theatrical studio based films they came from, they were rejected by a new generation which wanted location filming and music and acting which rang with authenticity.

Cameron also played a significant role in the majestic score to John Schlesinger’s 1967 version of Far From The Madding Crowd, which mixed Richard Rodney Bennett incrdibly lyrical yet modern score with songs collected by the likes of Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams. It also featured Dave Swarbrick as the fiddler and a young Trevor Lucas ghosting for Terence stamp, both of whom would go on play a part on the Fairport Convention story. But once again it is Cameron’s voice which dominates, no better than in this rendition of The Bold Grenadier so wonderfully amplifying the stunning photography of Nicholas Roeg.

But Far From The Madding Crowd wasn’t just realism, it’s sense of bigger budgets and a “heightened realism” was taken to a further extreme by Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon, perhaps his most British of all of his films, which painstakingly recreated famous paintings of the time and allied it with a detailed period score which included contributions from The Chieftains.

This tension between realism and high-art would go on to define the debate on cinema in the 70s and like folk music would lead artists along a multitude of paths. The amateur cast assembled by Kevin Brownlow for Winstanley sing folk-songs in the Digger’s camp and Peter Hall in the wonderful Akenfield, augment a similar amatuer cast drawn from a handful of Suffolk Villages with song from respected folk singers Dave and Toni Arthur.

Yet it was 1973′s The Wicker Man a film made in the French form of cine-fantastique which was to sneak up on the outside and speak to a younger generation, eager once more for new perspectives. The Wicker Man tossed realism aside and it’s score by Paul Giovanni, aided by the playwright Peter Schaffer merrily mixed up sources and cultures, to make a hybrid which has also stood the test of time.

I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces – Music in Vernacular Photographs 1880-1955.
Reviewed by Ian Preece:

I can definitely remember the point, some time in my late twenties/early thirties, when looking back at old family photos suddenly became really sad. 1970s holidays; rainy days in Lincolnshire; caravans and bungalows on the east coast; a day-long game of beach cricket; the wind so strong your nana is sitting in a deckchair wearing a headscarf – even if sunshine is forecast for tomorrow . . . life is all ahead, as opposed to heading downhill . . . These days I even find myself welling up over other people’s old photographs, never more so than when I came across I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces – Music in Vernacular Photographs 1880-1955 , a terrific collection of mildewed and torn black & white and sepia photographs, bookended by two cds of crackly 78s. The shellac and the photos have both been picked up at yard sales over the years and put together by Steve Roden, a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, and it’s all published by the ever-reliable Dust to Digital label.

It’s an undeniably melancholic package. The records tend to lonesome hill-billy blues and laments, mournful tales of loss and yearning, of roving gamblers, unfaithful good for nuthin drunks, lost wives and travelling salesmen. There’s the occasional redemptive moment, or peace and freedom finally achieved after a life of toil, beyond the shining river, ‘when they’ve rung the golden bells for you and me’ as sang Alfred G. Karnes in 1928. The same year Frank Ferrara’s Hawaiians were Pinin Hawaii for you (a track which has somehow cemented itself in my head) and three years later the equally mannered Roy Smeck Trio were Reaching for the Moon. When not pining for distant lands or lamenting the loss of a loved one, there was simple downhome bullying and small-town intimidation to deal with. My family are getting a little tired of hearing Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers’ (with Riley Puckett) tragic refrain: ‘Every time I come to town you boys go to kickin my dog aroun’ . . . but, well, without wishing to sound like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World, there’s seems something very contemporaneous about the mob picking on a poor guy’s dog. . .

In between the folk skits and tales of woe, Roden has interspersed some fantastic interludes from sound effects of albums of the 1930s: a flock of Canadian geese burst from the speakers; there’s a storm, and what sounds like rainfall but with ‘thunder not from life’, and some lovely clips of walking on snow and ice and ‘thin underbrush’, and wind blowing across a prarie in 1936 . . .Personally, I’m a sucker for muffled vinyl hiss and crackle, and there’s plenty here, as the cds seem to be direct transfers of the old 78s.

The records were probably in a similar state to the photographs. And the photographs are truly something else. Creased, blotchy, mildewed, underdeveloped or overexposed, you can almost smell the mustiness in some of them; some others are simply beautifully reproduced as clear as the day they were taken. Mostly posed for the camera and featuring folks with their instruments, poised for a hoedown, or simply seated on the porch or in the long grass (interspersed with the odd wrecked piano in a field) there’s an overwhelming sense of a simpler, purer way of being that knocks you sideways.

As Steve Roden writes in his introduction to I Listen to the Wind . . . who has not ‘at one time or another sat in the throes of loneliness, melancholy or suffering and held a communion of sorts with a record or two . . . as a group of favourite sounds enter us they move quickly to our souls and our insides are mended a little . . . even if it is only for an evening.’

Listen to Ian’s ‘Third light Home’ radio show HERE

I Listen to the Wind that Obliterates My Traces is published by Dust to Digital

Bill Ryder-Jones – If… (Domino)
reviewed by Rob St. John.

Context is important to how we hear and appreciate music. Knowing the backstory or intention of a record often spurs you to give more it time, attention, and perhaps the benefit of the doubt. Equally, coming afresh to a record opens up the possibility of being surprised by how the music affects you: uninfluenced by any expectations. If… by former Coral guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones is a funny mix of the two: an immediately beautiful and dense record which has seemingly come out of nowhere, yet, to be fully understood, it demands an adventure through a beguiling post-modern novel.

If… soundtracks Italo Calvino’s On a winter’s night a traveller, a 1979 novel in which the narrator (unusually in the second-person) takes the reader through a collection of fragmented stories. Set partly in the fictional country of Cimmeria, there are echoes of Nabakov’s Pale Fire in the novel, where as a reader you tiptoe on a tightrope between disorientation and immersion.

On first listen, this record conjures similar emotions: it’s beautifully arranged and orchestrated yet slightly disorientating in its variety. However, before long – and bearing in mind the structure of the novel – it’s this variety and depth that is revealed as If…’s strength. Like the novel it soundtracks, the record is fragmented yet cohesive, at times unpredictable yet narratively intact. Soundtracks to a book are a rare thing, yet Ryder-Jones has interpreted Calvino’s novel with style. The record is warm and reassuringly human, drawing on a tonal palette of swelling strings, echoing minimalist piano and muted percussion recorded across a variety of Liverpudlian locations.

Thinking again about a record’s context, without knowing about the record’s literary inspiration, it makes immediate sense as the soundtrack to some “lost” vintage film score. If… could quite convincingly be passed off as a Finder’s Keepers or Trunk reissue of the soundtrack to a cult movie, echoing the magical fantatisticism of Lubos Fisher’s sound track to Czech 1970 freak-out Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Yann Tiersen’s elegant film work and the collaborations between Falkirk pianist Bill Wells and Japanese oddballs Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

Album centrepiece ‘Enlace’ echoes Ennio Morricone or a restrained Godspeed, the ending breaking all inhibitions and swelling into an unashamed prog wig-out, calling to mind Pink Floyd in their post-Syd, pre-global-stardom period – Atom Heart Mother and More in particular. Perhaps appropriately given the fragmented nature of the novel it soundtracks, Ryder-Jones scales back this excess to a hush on songs like ‘Le Grand Desordre’, where a fractured vocal weaves a tale of remembrance over a bed of brittle nylon string guitar.

If… is a beautiful record, containing a wide sweep of intelligent arrangements, which whilst immediately enjoyable, yield a new depth and nuance given repeated listens and a delve through the record’s context and intention. I’ve yet to read Calvino’s novel alongside listening to the LP, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more this record can yield with time.

robstjohn.tumblr.com

If… is out now on Domino

Another one of my favourite records of last year.

Gillian Welch, That’s The Way That It Goes