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Soundtracks of Our Lives week ending 9 September 2012 CE
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spencer
spencer
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Edited Sep 10, 2012, 04:59
Re: Soundtracks of Our Lives week ending 9 September 2012 CE
Sep 10, 2012, 04:25
Apart from assorted live Neil stuff, not much listening this week - too knackered after work to get into stuff, except two.......1) Spirit - Future Games. Probably my most played album of all over the years; the other day I realised, amazed, that it was over a year since I'd last done so. That's been put right now. As they, along with Can, were my favourite band in the '70s, I got it as a hot off the press import upon release. A week or so later while I was listening Peel started to play it.. and didn't stop. At the end of side one he simply turned the record over and played all of side two. A very, very rare accolade. You cannot dip into it; it's all or nothing, a continuous suite of music with recurring themes. An at times surreal record of huge invention then that still holds its head up today, and one I hold dear.. some of the lyrical content has struck a chord in times of trouble, and Randy California, apart from playing the most beautiful guitar, had one of the most soothing and reasuring voices in music. I miss him. If I've ever had the musical equivalent of a favourite teddy to hold then this is it.......and now for record two - Lickey: This is an album of steam engine sounds by Peter Handford, sound recordist extraordinaire, who worked for Hitchcock, Losey and many more, and who won an Oscar for Out of Africa. He just loved the hugely varying and sometimes otherworldly sounds that steam engines made, and, when it was announced that they were to be scrapped, resolved to travel round the UK documenting them. This involved lugging a hugely heavy stereo recorder often to locations well away from the nearest road at all times of day and night and in all weathers. Whatever it took. The results were worth it, as were those of photographer O. Winston Link, who was doing sound recordings too at the same time in the States. This CD, which he recompiled shortly before he died in '07, was recorded on the Lickey Incline, the very steep bit of line connecting the Gloucestershire flatlands to the plateau that Birmingham sits on. Trains had, and still have to, work very hard to get up it: ideal recording territory. What sets his recordings apart, and why the thought of listening to them should not be flippantly derided is that Handford realised the imperative of placing them in a sonic context. He recorded not just the engines exhaust and their sometimes phenomenal and surreal echoes and the clickety-clack of train on rail, but, also, the sounds from the surrounding area, be they curlews and sheep on moorland, the calls of owls at night or the everyday activity of town, village or station.. in short, aural snapshots of Britain in the '50s. Listening to this one on 'phones with eyes closed, lorries and 'proper' sounding motorbikes and cars travel from ear to ear as well as the trains, birds sing in massed chorus, schoolboy trainspotters prattle away about life, and, on one track, a bumble bee seems to become loudly trapped deep within your brain. The coup de grace is the last two tracks, where the powerful locomotive that was used for many years to shove heavy trains to the top makes sounds that Irmin Schmidt would kill for. A sonic document from a bygone and, I am increasingly thinking, better time, or, as Randy California put it, 'Sounds from along the Time Coast'. The sound recording as art. I was born in a house within easy earshot of a busy railway, and, as a newborn drifting off to sleep in summer with the window open, the first beats I ever heard would not have been conventional music but those of steam engines. Thats the way I've been wired; I spent ten years in adulthood learning to fire and drive them, making my own music.. and am no more embarrassed about listening to this stuff as those here currently listening to Elton John should. Try it. You needn't tell anyone, and don't have to be a steam buff. Close your eyes. Take a trip back. http://www.spv.co.uk/acatalog/British_train_sounds_cd.html
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