The grim ..eh..guy with the lawn mower

The Thing & Joe McPhee in Brazil

The Thing & Joe McPhee dedicated Mongezi Feza´s beautiful "You Ain't Gonna Know Me 'Cos You Think You Know Me" to Nelson Mandela, when they played in Santos, Brazil (27 June 2013) (YouTube).

Peter Blegvad live at WFMU

A new CD with Peter Blegvad´s best recordings from visits at at the radio station WFMU (1988-89), has been released. To get it, it seems like you must donate at least $75 to WFMU.

Peter Blegvad (guitar, vocals)
Kristoffer Blegvad (guitar on 14, 15 & 16)
Kaye Blegvad (cover art)

Here are the tracks, and Peter Blegvad´s discography is right over here.

4'17 Wife of Usher's Well
3'51 Naked Shakespeare
3'44 Let Him Go
3'22 When the Work Was New
4'09 Real Slap in the Face
4'12 Strong Simple Silences
3'53 The Great Escape
4'12 Card to Bernard
1'20 Improv Tune
3'38 Crumb De La Crumb
3'49 How Beautiful You Are
4'22 Model of Kindness
3'25 Powers in the Air
5'31 King Strut
2'18 Vermont
3'48 The Incinerator

Lindsay Cooper

Let´s hear it for Lindsay Cooper (bassoon, oboe ++) today. She is perhaps best known from Henry Cow, but has played in numerous projects and bands (News From Babel, Art Bears, Hatfield and The North, National Health etc etc), and has released several solo albums too.

The other night I was listening to "Rags" (ARC 1980), her first solo album (and I´m sorry to say the only one I own so far). The album is a tribute to the needle women and workers of London of 1830s and 1840s, and the music is some kind of radical prog in the neighborhood of Henry Cow and Art Bears (please don´t hate me for that one). On "Rags" Lindsay Cooper is joined by Georgie Born, Phil Minton, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler and the singer Sally Potter, who is also a well known film director.

After playing "Rags" I found "Oh Moscow" on YouTube, recorded during the "Unidentified Movement" Festival in Volgograd (1991).

Musicians in the video:

Lindsay Cooper - bassoon, alto and sopranino saxophones;
Alfred Harth - tenor saxophone, clarinet;
Hugh Hopper - bass-guitar;
Phil Minton - trumpet, voice;
Sally Potter - texts, voice.
Veryan Weston - piano
Chris Cutler - drums

Wikipedia says that Lindsay Cooper was active until 1998. If you have other info, please comment.

And we have a Robert Wyatt link: "The Last Nightingale" (1984) with Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson, Lindsay Cooper, Robert Wyatt and Adrian Mitchell, released to raise money for striking miners.

Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto - By This River

We had a pretty peaceful blog post yesterday, and we are still taking it slow!

Here you may enjoy Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto do Brian Eno´s "By This River", from "Before and After Science" (1977), and we are still at Yoko Ono´s Meltdown in London.

Meltdown 2013

London´s Meltdown 2013 is over. The festival was curated by Yoko Ono, and there are lots of videos from the happening on YouTube (surprise!), if you feel like getting a taste.

Here in Robert Wyatt and Stuff we have chosen a couple of quite quiet moments for you this time. First you will see and hear Bill Frisell and Marianne Faithfull do "As tears go by", and then Yoko Ono´s "Sky piece for Jesus Christ".

Sketches of Pain

Now is the time to check out how rusty your German is (German readers should be fine!)!
Head on over to Un Discopgraphie De Robert Wyatt to read German Rolling Stone´s piece on Robert Wyatt from October 2007.

I have told you this several times already, but Un Discopgraphie De Robert Wyatt is THE place to go, to get info on all of Wyatt´s releases.

Me, I stole the picture there too.

Dans Dans: East Timor (Robert Wyatt)

I have already mentioned the Antwerpen trio Dans Dans, and their version of Robert Wyatt´s "East Timor", and now they are back.

This time we get a nice live video, recorded 6 April 2013 (Red Tape District, Kapellen, Belgium.
a MANIFEST event www.arrrrt.be).

Phil Minton: John Cage's Mesostics

Please watch the video in this blog post folks! And Listen! Phil Minton does John Cage´s "Mesostics", dedicated to Merce Cunningam.

It all happened during the Rotterdam Opera Days (2013), on an evening dedicated to yodeling!
Find more info on YouTube, and the guy behind this, seems to be Bart Plantenga, author of "Yodel in Hi-Fi. From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica" (UW Press 2013).

The video starts with Phil Minton explaining how he reads John Cage´s text, and believe it or not, i managed to find my copy of Cage´s "M. Writings ´67 -´72" (Calder and Boyars 1973) without turning the basement upside down! If you read down the middle of the text here, you will probably find Cunningham too.

Bob Ostertag

After reading Bob Ostertag´s piece "Why I No Longer Give Away My Music", on how difficult it can be to give away music for free (!), I bought his latest album on CDBaby for next to nothing.

"A Book of Hours" (2012) is 50 beautiful minutes of music, with the voices of Theo Bleckmann, Shelley Hirsch and Phil Minton, and Roscoe Mitchell´s saxophone.

While listening I wondered if it was all improvised, or if parts were composed, but wonder no longer, - Ostertag is writing quite comprehensive about the music on his own site.

Let´s borrow some from him:

"So the only electronic processing I have done is to use a synthetic reverb to place the musicians, who recorded their material separately in different locations, into the same synthetic "space.""

"What I have done is splice: hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of splices. I have also done some slight time stretching or compressing, and equally minor pitch transposition, of the original material. None of this was done to change the "sound" of the musicians, or to make them appear to sing higher or lower or faster or louder than they can. Rather, these slight changes were done to make the parts fit together better. And this was a difficult challenge, because the project began with each of the four musicians recording a set of solo improvisations, separately and without any knowledge of what the others were doing".

Check out this one!

Wyatt ´68

A very kind fellow whispered some words into my Yahoo mailbox, saying that a compilation of Robert Wyatt demos recorded in 1968, just might be on it´s way.

"Wyatt ´68" will (probably) be out on Cuneiform, and the info was found on the Avant Progressive group on Facebook (I´m still not back on FB!). Someone has already placed the release among the Wyatt compilations on Wikipedia too.

More info needed please! Anyone?

The tracks:

1. Chelsa
2. Rivmic Melodies
3. Slow Walkin' Talk
4. Moon in June

Karaoke

In November 2012 Wyatt and Stuff had a post on a performance called "NOT NIT NOT NIT NO NOT", where the artist Nika Breithaupt sang to a video of Robert Wyatt.

In May she did the performance again in Hamburg, in connection with the exhibition "No You", and the release of the book "Karaoke" to W(y)att.

Only 50 copies of "Karaoke" were made, but you may see it on screen if you jump all the way over here.

Burning Shed and Phil Manzanera

Burning Shed announce that they are now hosting Phil Manzanera´s store, and if you like, head on over there to buy signed Robert Wyatt albums.

Gurls

Today a new Norwegian trio for you all. Gurls are Emilie Nicolas (vocal), Ellen Andrea Wang (bass) and Hanna Paulsberg (saxophone).

They played at the Match&Fuse festival in Oslo recently, and have a couple of tracks out on SoundCloud.

On Facebook (Norwegian) they state that they move in a pop landscape where they may meet both Rihanna and Neneh Cherry!

Tusmørke

Tusmørke - En verden av i går from Martin Furan on Vimeo.

We had Gong in the previous post, and i wonder if you can take some fresh Norwegian prog now?

I attended an instore concert by Tusmørke ("Twilight") at the fine Apollon record store in Bergen Saturday (they played the Bergenfest festival later in the evening). And let me tell you, these guys are PROG! We talk hooded singer a la wizard, and far out lyrics (all in glorious Norwegian).
And believe it or not, this band was great fun!

Check out the video for "En verden av i går" ("Yesterday´s world") and decide if you want to fight for one of the 300 copies made of the 12" “Den Internasjonale Bronsealderen” ("The international bronze age") (FreshTea 2013).

Gong

Isn´t it about time with some Gong again in this blog?

Here is half an hour for you, with songs from "You" and "Angel's Egg", recorded in São Paulo 24 May 2013.

The songs: "Flute Salad", "Oily Way", "Outer Temple", "Inner Temple" and "Master Builder".

These days Gong is:
Daevid Allen - guitar, vocals
Dave Sturt - bass
Fabio Golfetti - guitar
Ian East - sax, flute
Orlando Allen - drums

All info from YouTube, and there are more videos out there from the same show too.

And how about Daevid Allen!? Still lots of energy and fun there!

Kevin Ayers Memorial Concert

If you are in Tokyo today, you may attend the Kevin Ayers Memorial Concert, with Dave Sinclair, Yumi Hara Cawkwell, Tatsuya Yoshida, Fushigi-gun, Simo-yang and Louis Inage.

I found the info over at Hibou, Anemone & Bear. I´m not able to link to single posts in that blog, but check it out regularly yourselves, if you are interested in news on the same topics that we happily focus on here in Robert Wyatt and Stuff.

David Thomas 60!

Congrats to David Thomas on his 60th birthday today!

Let´s celebrate with some of vinyl talk!

The Last Hurrah!: The Beauty of Fake (Rune 2013)

HP Gundersen and his band The Last Hurrah! just released the summer album of the year on Rune Grammofon.

"The beauty of fake" is a 35 minutes long suite, where you get a fine mix of (among other things!) sweet pop music, Norwegian and eastern folk music (Hardanger fiddles and all) and relaxing Hawaiian music.

I detect a smell of hippies here, so let´s just mention some of the suites subtitles: "The Trip", "In India" and my favorite "High in Hawaii".

I´m not really sure if HP Gundersen (drone guitar and other guitars ++) and Heidi Goodbye (vocal) are the ones defining themselves as The Last Hurrah!, and additional musicians are added when they drop by, but here are the rest of them: Ivar Thormodsæter, Yuyeu Zheng, Esau Pinto, Alex Grieg, Silje Solberg, Daniel Birkeland, Jørgen Sandvik, Viktoria Winge, Johanna Vatne, and the one and only Jon Irabagon (saxophone on "In India").

If you feel that 35 minutes is a bit on the short side, hurry up and get the double vinyl edition with a live recording from a concert at the Bergen Kjøtt venue, with Jon Irabagon in the band. They play old Hurrah! tunes like "Chromatic Hysteria", "Mother Nature" and "Melodi Grand Prix 63", and also new ones "Joe Meek" and "Hit Me". Only 300 copies made!

Playing on the live recording are HP Gundersen, Heidi Goodbye, Sonja Otto, Silje Solberg, Jon Irabagon, Alex Grieg and Nils Are Drønen.

Buying the double vinyl edition, will also get you the CD version of "The beauty of fake". Nice package indeed!

Make sure you check out the previous fine releases by The Last Hurrah! too: "Spiritual Non-Believers" (Rune 2011) and "The Great Gig In Disguise" (Rune 2011, 10" vinyl, 500 copies).

Cover: Kim Hiorthøy.

Personal Best #3

The third issue of Lasse Marhaug´s fanzine "Personal Best" is out, this time with the subtitle "fanzine for noise, music and random chaos", and is a must read. Again some great interviews with musicians, no pussyfooting, and not always about music.

This time let me mention the talks with Norwegian bass player Guro Skumsnes Moe, and musician and Miasmah boss Erik Skodvin (he does not like his Svarte Greiner project to be classified as "dark ambient". Now he says!). I also enjoyed the interview with the Australian drummer Will Guthrie very much, and i confess here and now, that I will never attend a concert by Torturing Nurse, if they still keep touring! No way!

Marhaug: You´re a victim of fusion?
Guthrie: Yeah, a victim of fusion.
Marhaug: I´m sorry to hear.

Order "Personal Best" from Marhaug Forlag, or fine stores like Tiger (Oslo) and Robot (Bergen). And don´t worry, the fanzine is all in English of course.

Here are a few words on #1 and #2.

Fire Room live in Bergen

I already mentioned Fire Room´s new album "Second Breath" (Bocian Records 2013), and their recent tour, in this very blog.

I´m glad i got to hear Paal Nilssen-Love (drums), Ken Vandermark (sax, clar) and Lasse Marhaug (electricity and turntable) do a great concert at Bergen Kjøtt 6 June. Only 25 people in the audience (!), and most of us got seated in soft chairs and sofas.

The trio play a really fine mix of jazz, impro and noise, and since you probably didn´t get a chance to see them this time, try to find the new album! The music on "Second Breath" is at least similar to what they played in Bergen, and was recorded at The Vortex in London in 2011 (released on both CD and vinyl).

Fred Frith and Evelyn Glennie at Moers Festival 2013

Watch and listen to the full concert of Fred Frith and Evelyn Glennie at Moers Festival 19 May this year. Enjoy!, as they say.

And don´t forget their album "Sugar Factory" (Tzadik 2009).

The Wire online archive

All issues of The Wire, from the beginning in 1982, are now available online for all subscribers.

Robert Wyatt has been mentioned regularly, and the above issues are from September 1997 and October 2007.

Martin Whatson

I was in Stavanger for about one hour on Friday, and managed to see Martin Whatson´s fine exhibition "Undercover" at Reedprojects Gallery.
Whatson had been working on some walls in the center of Stavanger too.

I tried to chat with a guy at the gallery, claiming his friend from Oslo had made the pictures. Wink wink, I believe.

More street art from Stavanger on Flickr.

7 x 7

Recently I found this short video on YouTube, with these words:
"This is the trailer for the film that French director Pierre Maillard is currently shooting about 7x7, the most amazing adventure in Art and Music. Robert Wyatt, Archie Shepp, Nile Rodgers, Sean O'Hagan, Mulatu Astatke and Kassin have joined forces with Belgian artist Jean Pierre Muller to reinvent the notes of the scale and the colours of the rainbow...".

Please check out a blog post from August 2012 on the same project, and do watch these videos too (Archie Shepp, Robert Wyatt).

Billy Bragg: Handyman Blues

Oh! Support groups for men with the handyman blues really exist?

Finally a song I can relate to!

Thanks to Billy Bragg. I will order the album "Tooth & Nail" (2013) right away!

Ten thumbs up!

PUNKT 2013

Kristiansand´s Punkt festival is happening 6 - 8 September, and the festival bosses Jan Bang and Erik Honoré seem to be almost ready with the program.

How about a world premiere with The Kilowatt Hour, a trio with Stephan Mathieu, David Sylvian and Christian Fennesz? You may also expect to meet a lot of the usual suspects, like Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvær, Stian Westerhus, Bugge Wesseltoft a. o. on the concert stages.

Punkt is famous for it´s live remixes, and the following mix masters have been announced: Vladislav Delay, Sidsel Endresen, Maja Ratkje, Mathias Eick, Rolf Wallin, Ivar Grydeland, Arve Henriksen, Audun Kleive, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré.

More info over here. Please see my pictures from Punkt on Flickr.

Punkt 2013 from Adrien Le Gall on Vimeo.

Yun Kan 10 Nattjazz Videos

Today a couple of videos for you, from Yun Kan 10´s concert at Nattjazz (Bergen) 30 May (see this blog post).
First out is "Lackritz" and then "Håll i hatten" ("Hold on to your hat").

Fredrik Ljungkvist - Reeds
Mats Äleklint - Trombone
Sofia Jernberg - Vocal
Katt Hernandez - Violin
Mattias Risberg - Organ, Arp
Per-Åke Holmlander - Tuba
Klas Nevrin - Piano
Mattias Welin - Bass
Jon Fält - Drums
Raymond Strid - Drums

Go Sweden!

Reggie Watts at Nattjazz (Bergen)

On the last day of Nattjazz 2013, Reggie Watts ruled the festival!
He had an audience ready to party, and won them all over, with rap, hip-hop, r&b, soul, jazz and wit!

The guy was in complete control, and looked like he had just as much fun as the audience!

Songs that speak for themselves

The Wire no. 352 (June 2013) focus on sound and the word.

In "Songs that speak for themselves" Rob Young mentions two of my favorite songs: Matching Mole´s "Oh Caroline" and "Signed Curtain" (both on the eponymous 1972 album), where Robert Wyatt describes the act of songwriting in the lyrics.

"Oh Caroline" (Robert Wyatt/David Sinclair)

David's on piano, and I may play on a drum
And we'll try to make the music work, we'll try to have some fun
But I just can't help thinking that if you were here with me
I'd get all my thoughts in focus and play more excitingly
I love you still - Caroline
I want you still - Caroline
I need you still - Caroline

If you call this sentimental crap you'll make me mad
Cause you know that I would not sing about some passing fad
And if my attempts at rhyming aren't convincing to your ear
Then memories betray you through the passing of the year
I love you still - Caroline
I want you still - Caroline
I need you still - Caroline

You must think it doubtful that I mean the words I sing
Or that all attempts to reach you this way could not mean a thing
But you must admit we both thought we'd be man and wife
And that I could make you happy for the best part of your life
I love you still - Caroline
I love you still - Caroline

"Signed Curtain" (Robert Wyatt)

This is the first verse
This is the first verse
This is the first verse
This is the first verse...
And this is the chorus
Or perhaps it's a bridge
Or just another part
of the song that I'm singing

This is the second verse
Or it may the last verse
This is the second verse
Or it may the last one
And this is the chorus
Or perhaps it's a bridge
Or just another key change
Never mind
It doesn't hurt
It only means that I
lost faith in this song
'Cause it won't help me reach you...

Both lyrics copied from Calyx ("Lyrics").
Now get The Wire, and find those Matching Mole songs!