RIP Adam West, Holger Czukay

Two more of my heroes gone, one musical, one thespian - I met Holger Czukay when Can released Rite Time, but I wish I had seen the band play live. I wasn't really aware of them when they were at their peak. 

I was always aware of Adam West, though - best Batman ever.

Change of Cosmic Address: New Music in Tribute to Edgar Froese, by Mark Jenkins and Chris Jenkins

Album available for download from Bandcamp now:

http://chrisjenkinse-music.bandcamp.com/

London live event and CD launch on April 11th, details on the YouTube video

Billie Ray Martin vs John Foxx - You Put Your Burning Arms Around Me

A little mashup I did of two of my favourite artists. Apologies for the quality, I had only a poor MP3 of the acapella to work with. 

Edgar Froese, 1944-2015

 

Very sad to hear of the death of Edgar Froese, founder and last remaining original member of Tangerine Dream, at the age of 70. It's impossible to overestimate the influence Tangerine Dream has had on music, and on me. It will be interesting to see whether there is any impetus for the band to continue, either with the latest members including Ulrich Schnauss, or with the return of previous members. Either way, Edgar Froese's musical legacy will be eternal. 

RIP Nash the Slash and HR Giger

Very sad to hear of the deaths of two of my heroes, Nash the Slash and HR Giger. Nash the Slash (the on-stage persona of Jeff Plewman) created gothic electronic soundscapes with a combination of acoustic, electric and electronic instruments which no-one else has quite matched. 'In a Glass Eye' was probably my favourite. I saw him live in Oxford in 1979, and again in London a few years ago. I'm glad I caught him before his disenchantment with the music business prompted his retirement in 2012. 

HR Giger, best-known for his designs for Alien, ploughed a similarly gothic furrow, and books of his work are I think essential artefacts for any lover of the macabre and imaginative.

He's been endlessly imitated, but again, never matched. I recently saw the documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune, which features Giger speaking about some of his most significant work.

RIP both.

CD - Je Communique by Sandrine Collard

I must recommend this album, which I stumbled across while looking for work by Dan Lacksman, who produced this and is of course best known for his work with Telex (I also discovered his rather bland solo album Electric Dreams, which seems to have been released in 2013 with no publicity whatsoever). Sandrine Collard seems to have had a couple of solo hits in Belgium, and worked with a band called Ideal Husbands, before disappearing from the music scene. I believe she's now back in a band called Dallas, though I haven't found their releases yet.
Je Communique is a tasty slice of Belgo-pop from 2002 with typically quirky Lacksman bleeps and bloops, and Sandrine's gamine voice suits the production perfectly. Pity she didn't do more in this style, but you can find her videos on YouTube.
   

New album - Klaus Schulze, Shadowlands

The release of a new album by the God of electronic music, Klaus Schulze, is always an event, though it's no longer a certainty that he'll come up with anything novel. Shadowlands isn't a disappointing album, but it clearly treads ground which is pretty familiar to anyone who has heard his output in the last five years. 
Though it has some vocal participation from Lisa Gerrard, Chrysta Bell, Julia Messenger and Thomas Kagermann, who also plays violin and flute, this isn't a vocal album in the way Schulze's collaborations with Lisa Gerrard were. Instead it's heavily reliant on washes of string pads, polyrhythmic percussion and ambient effects. It's pretty similar to everything he's come up with since Contemporary Works.
Nonetheless it bears the marks of genius - and not to denigrate Schulze acolytes like Fanger & Schoenwalder, there's a mountain of inspiration separating their pleasant but imitative output from that of the original master.
The only question is, when there's a 2xCD version with two extra tracks, why anyone would want to buy a single-CD edition of Shadowlands?
Order it from the ever-reliable C&D Services, http://www.cd-services.com/

  

 

     

Billie Ray Martin at HMV Oxford Circus

Just been to see the divine Billie Ray Martin doing a PA at HMV Oxford Circus to promote her album as The Opiates, Hollywood Under the Knife. First time I've seen her live, and she is wonderful! Robert Solheim provided sterling support and I got the album signed. It's well worth checking out.
If your copy of the CD acts the same as mine, you'll find that the song Dinah and the Beautiful Blue comes up on Gracenote listed as Dinah and the Beautiful Blue Dildo. BRM's management tell me this is NOT the title of the song, which is 'a wonderful, tender tale and nothing to do with a dildo. Some idiot has interfered with the track details, which we will get corrected.' So there you have it, straight from the source!

Tangerine Dream The Electronic Journey CD box set

Well here's a bargain, a box set of 10 Tangerine Dream CDs for £13.99 from C&D Services. Compiling what are probably 10 of the worst TD albums - Seven Letters from Tibet, Cyberjam Collection, Tangines Scales and so forth - it's a great way to mop up some titles I probably wouldn't have bothered with otherwise. Apparently the box photo is the same as that of a 4-CD box, Ballads, which was another compilation which I didn't bother with. But I look forward to skipping through most of the tracks on Electronic Journey at some time in the near future...

John Foxx at the Apple Store, Regent Street

I went to see John Foxx last night at the Apple Store, Regent Street. A bit shambolic - no sign outside or inside that the performance was taking place, and jabbering fuckwits fiddling with iPods throughout the show. But quite interesting - John played Yamaha piano and Alesis reverb over one short film from the Quiet Man project, read over another, then held a short Q&A. Mark Gatiss introduced. No chance so far as I could see to buy CDs, but I'll have to catch up with the latest titles eventually.

Klaus Schulze with Lisa Gerrard - Rheingold DVD/CD

Just got my copy of the Klaus Schulze DVD/CD package Rheingold. The DVDs feature the live concert from Loreley earlier this year, plus a documentary and interview. The CDs feature the concert plus a bonus track. All very gothic and Wagnerian, it might not be the best Klaus Schulze concert ever - there's too much of Lisa Gerrard 'singing' - but it's a great package, with Dolby and DTS surround sound on the DVDs. Despite Schulze's prodigious output there's very little of him on video. Okay, a figure who looks like a geography teacher hunched behind banks of synths doesn't make for great visuals - but this is the world's greatest musician, for goodness sake. The full SPV package is £30, the DVDs and CDs are available separately if you prefer. Get them from the ever-reliable Compact Disc Services, www.cd-services.com.

Nash the Slash on Phantomcircuit

Go to http://phantomcircuit.wordpress.com for a podcast of Nash the Slash interviewed and in concert in Birmingham the other week. Good stuff, better than the recording I got, or rather failed to get, in London...!

Nash the Slash in London

Saw Nash the Slash at the Purple Turtle in Camden last night; he was fine, though the set was a bit predictable. Got the latest Nash album, In-A-Gadda-Da-Nash; not his greatest, rather bland cover versions. Support act Young Things Don't Scream, an elderly Gary Numan tribute band, were surprisingly good. The three other support bands ranged from awful to embarrassing.

Barry Gray on the South Bank

On Saturday I had a marvellous time at the Barry Grey centenary concert at the Royal Festival Hall. The Philharmonia Orchestra, Voces8 vocal ensemble, pianist Crispin Merrell and Ondes Martenot player Pascale Rousse-Lacordaire played a rousing selection of pieces from Thunderbirds, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, UFO, Joe 90, Space: 1999 and more. Several fans turned up in costume, and we got a chance to meet Scott Tracy. Brian Blessed presided, and Gerry Anderson hovered around - I saw him in the hospitality room but didn't stop to chat. During the concert they projected scenes from the Blu-ray edition of Thunderbirds, but at £120 for the 6-disc set, I think I'll settle for my DVDs.

Jean Michel Jarre's hi-fi

I see Jean Michel Jarre has gone into the hi-fi business. Apparently he's designed a home cinema system, an iPod dock, a multimedia display and so on. So far, the iPod dock is for sale in France only at around € 450. The others are presumably in the design stage. I think I'll ask for a 5.1 system for Christmas 2012. See the website at http://www.jmjarretechnologies.com/.

Tangerine Dream, London Eye Concert 2008

I went to see Tangerine Dream at the Forum, Kentish Town on Saturday; here's a pic taken from the balcony, where the idiots who run the Forum had decided to have unallocated seating - so you paid for a seat but still had to fight for a decent one. Anyway, the three-hour concert was predictably hard going - Tangerine Dream haven't been much good since Chris Franke left, and the latest version, swamped with guitar, sax and percussion, sounds more like some Californian New Age soft-rock combo than a pioneering experimental synth band. Yet all the talk on the chat forums is of how great they were. Go figure. Well, at least they did Going West. Anyway, it's probably the last time I'll be able to whip up the energy to go to see them, but I'm looking forward to Edgar Froese's forthcoming book, provisionally titled 'Bouncing Back; or, Needless to Say I Had the Last Laugh.'

Nash the Slash back in the UK!

Details on his website - see Links