Berberian Sound Studio and Cathy Berberian

Cathy Berberian reads the score

The premiere of Berberian Sound Studio, director Peter Strickland’s follow up to his debut film Katalin Varga, has been announced for the Edinburgh film festival. It stars Toby Jones, so nobly affecting as the firm moral spokesman for reason and good in the beleaguered supermarket community of The Mist, and so creepily sinister as the game-playing dream master toying with the Doctor, Amy and Rory in the Doctor Who episode Amy’s Choice. Here, he plays an English sound engineer plunged into the world of 70s Italian exploitation film-making and slowly getting lost in the sonic worlds he’s creating, and in the feuding and personal politics of the cheap studio in which he’s working. All of which makes it seem like Strickland is putting his youthful experiences of travelling from Reading to the Scala Cinema in London, where the films of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and other Italian exploitation directors were a core part of the repertory, to good use. Strickland talks about his Scala experiences in a Sight and Sound interview (in the November ’09 issue) from the time of Katalin Varga’s release, recalling how ‘the cinema smelled of cats, dope and beer. The Northern Line ran underneath. It was a huge epiphany’. In the same interview, he talks about how important sound design and music was to his film, and to his enjoyment of cinema in general. He’d originally wanted the Popul Vuh music which Werner Herzog had used to such sublime effect in Nosferatu for Katalin Varga, although it’s perhaps a good thing that he couldn’t afford it, since it would have sparked unhelpful associations in the minds of some viewers. He remembers seeing Eraserhead at the Scala, and being particularly struck by Alan Splet’s creation of an unsettling sonic backdrop. Katalin Varga has similarly ominous and haunting music and sound, with the buzzing, swarming and throbbing electronica of Stephen Stapleton and Geoff Cox, and of Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound creating a sense of dread anticipation, and acting both as a projection of the dark emotions driving the characters and as an evocation of the landscape through which they move and which to a great degree shapes them. Strickland himself plays in an electronic music trio, The Sonic Catering Band, alongside Colin Fletcher and Tim Kirby, who make a kind of modern musique concrete using the sounds of cookery as source material. You can hear what this tasty culinary fusion sounds like from the extract of Live from the Canteens of Atlantis which plays over the end credits of Katalin Varga. Strickland also supplements his film-making work with the odd spot of DJ-ing, and the extent to which music and cinema hold equal weight for him can be found in his comment (again in the Sight and Sound interview) that Scott Walker’s song The Seventh Seal (whose opening trumpet flourish, which seems to relocate the knight’s quest from Sweden to Spain, ushers in the peerless Scott 4 album) ‘was more important to me than Bergman’s The Seventh Seal’. Much as I love Scott, and his soaring ballad interpretation of the film, I’d have to veer the other way and pledge my loyalty to Ingmar and his timeless film. With his love of music and care for the sonic elements of a film, it is appropriate that Berberian Film Studio is to be released by Warp Films, the cinematic offshoot of the Warp record label. It’s long been known that James Cargill, half of the partnership that was Broadcast, was to provide the soundtrack. But it has now been announced that this will be credited to Broadcast, and a soundtrack record subsequently released as such. This is incredibly exciting, and presumably means that the music will incorporate recordings of the late Trish Keenan’s vocals.



All of which brings me to the title. I’m assuming that Berberian makes reference to the mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, a remarkable singer who pushed the boundaries of vocal music and performance from her first recordings in the 50s through to her sudden and unexpected death in 1983 at the age of 57. Brian Morton, in his piece on Berio’s Sequenza III in his book The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Contemporary Music, describes her as being ‘one of the most significant musical performers and collaborators of the (twentieth) century’. Some people might now her through her album of Beatles covers, Beatles Arias, which is often cited as the height of the classical music establishment’s embarrassing efforts to appropriate the group’s songs as examples of contemporary ‘composition’ in the 60s (and which was almost certainly the source of the French and Saunders sketch in which they played operatic divas making a recording of Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky). In fact, as the hilarious film of her singing Ticket to Ride makes quite clear, Berberian was well aware of the absurdity of some aspects of the whole endeavour, and there were definite elements of pastiche and comical role-playing involved (unsurprisingly given the arrangements by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, who has always shown a resolutely disrespectful regard for classical norms). These indicated the degree to which performance was a key part of her art, which married the concert with the theatre stage. She had studied mime, drama and dance (and stage writing) at Columbia University in addition to her music activities (which travelled to Milan to explore further), and combined all of these disciplines to mesmerising effect in performance. This can be heard in the piece Recital I for Cathy by Luciano Berio from 1971, although hearing it on a recording (you can find it on the Recital for Cathy CD on RCA) you lose a significant dimension, as the staging is integral to its impact. She gets to sing in a variety of styles, Berio putting together a musical collage which could almost act as a sampler of her diverse range. There are moments of ‘legitimate’ classical recital (passages from two Monteverdi pieces), of atonal modernism, comical circus brass and louche Berlin cabaret (a snatch of Marlene from The Blue Angel, demonstrating Berberian’s talent for pastiche and imitation). The tensions between these warring styles occasionally threatens to tear the whole piece apart, with the orchestra intruding with noisy eruptions. In between these musical scraps, Berberian carries on a stream of muttering verbiage, an expression of the mental chatter circling the mind of the projected singer whose role she is inhabiting. This stream of consciousness occasionally burbles over into a dramatic version of the Sprechstimme which Schoenberg used for his 1912 expressionist horror fantasy Pierrot Lunaire, an amalgamation of spoken and sung text. For stage performances of the piece, Berberian was draped in steadily accumulating layers of costume, increasingly burdened by the multiple personae she was obliged to put on. She ends up in an ominous pose, with a rope noosed around her neck and a vividly bloodstained veil draped over her head.

Berberian and Berio

Berberian met the composer Luciano Berio in Milan in 1949, whilst she was studying in Italy. She’d been born and brought up in the Bronx and Queens districts of New York by her Armenian parents and become involved in numerous musical and artistic pursuits in the area. She attended Columbia University, from which she travelled over the Atlantic to France and thence to Milan. Berio and Berberian, whose complementary surnames seemed to presage their personal compatibility, married the year after their first meeting, and embarked upon a fruitful musical relationship which would endure beyond their separation in 1964. Brian Morton rightly asserts that she has to be regarded as a co-composer of the works which Berio wrote for her, so completely do they rely on her unique vocabulary of extended vocal sounds. In 1955, Berio helped to set up and became the co-director of the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan as a part of the Italian National Radio (RAI) station. This was one of a number of experimental electronic music ‘laboratories’ in Europe and the US, usually connected to state-funded public broadcasting networks or the research departments of technological corporations (The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre was one of the few associated with a university, and was established in 1952, a few years after Berberian had left for the continent). The first of these had been the Groupe de Recherches Musicale in Paris, set up in 1951 by the two Pierres, Schaeffer and Henry in conjunction with the Office of French National Radio-Television (ORTF). This was followed shortly afterwards by the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, where Stockhausen constructed his early tape pieces; the Centre for Electronic Music in Eindhoven (set up in 1956), associated with the Philips Research Labs, where Edgar Varese composed his Poeme Electronique (blasted through hundreds of speakers inside Xenakis’ Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussells World’s Fair); and, of course, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, established, after much lobbying by Daphne Oram, in 1956. Amongst the pieces created at the Milan studios was John Cage’s Fontana Mix (1959), one of his indeterminate works, whose broad instructions read ‘to be prepared from the score for the production of any number of tracks of magnetic tape, or for any number of players, any kind and number of instruments’. The score to which Cage referred was a series of transparent sheets, dotted, gridded and contour-lined with graphic notation resembling a map of sound. These suggested a dense, sedimentary layering of elements, a sonic geology. Berberian incorporated Cage’s own Aria (1958), another indeterminate piece using a graphic score which is little more than a series of coloured, subheaded squiggles with such helpful guidance as ‘not as a birth but as love’ and ‘will you give me to tell you?’. The colours indicate different singing styles, such as contralto (red), Sprechstimme (black with a parallel dotted line), jazz (dark blue), folk (green), and Marlene Dietrich (a category all to herself and, naturally, purple). Berberian’s considerable input into the shaping of the piece means that, once more, she can effectively be considered a co-composer, no matter what Cage himself might have claimed.

Musical cartography - part of John Cage's score for Fontana Mix

Her introduction of a vocal element into Cage’s electro-acoustic collision of sounds brought it under the overarching aesthetic of the Milan studios, which favoured the human voice as a source sound. Luciano Berio shared Cage’s fascination with the work of James Joyce, and with the musical quality of his language. His piece Chamber Music from 1953 uses poems from Joyce’s early collection which Berberian sings to clarinet, cello and harp accompaniment, the harp descending in single, steadily paced, deliquescent notes. Her US-Armenian accent, flavoured by years living in Italy, seems almost to take on a pleasing Irish lilt in places to fit in with the setting. The ‘Strings in the earth and air’ poem which is one of the ones Berio sets is also familiar from Incredible String Band singer and multi-instrumentalist Robin Williamson’s bardic interpretation on his first solo LP Myrrh. Joyce’s words were also the starting point for Berio’s 1958 tape piece Thema: Omaggio a Joyce, this time taken from the opening of the Sirens chapter of Ulysses, a passage in which the writer breaks down customary linguistic form and sense. The first line, ‘bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing imperthnthn, thnthnthn’, makes it clear that Joyce was seeking sense from sound more than meaning deriving from logically constructed grammar. Open-ended ow, oo and ee sounds are contrasted with closed ings, lisping th’s and sibilant ss’s (evoking the hiss of retreating waves). It’s a challenge to declaim it aloud, but Berberian’s initial sonorous and sensual reading (did Kate Bush hear this, I wonder?) is a thing of unadorned beauty in itself. Berio takes elements of sentences, words, and fragments of words from her interpretation of Joyce’s prose, isolating their different sound qualities and manipulating and superimposing them. The music inherent in Joyce’s language is released by all the splicing, multiplication, speeding up or slowing down and spatial filtering of the sounds articulated by Berberian. It really is like a language laboratory, investigating the fundamental matter of language, its affective nature. The elements of speech are transformed into pure sound, devoid of overt meaning but possessed of a musical quality which communicates on its own level. They also thus reflect back on the elements of pure sound in the original ‘nonsense’ text. The song of the siren bears its own meaning, bypassing the distancing logic of language and speaking directly to the heart.



Visage (1960-1), another electronic piece constructed through painstaking tape-editing and built around Berberian’s voice, dispenses with words altogether, apart from an ironic ‘parole’ (words or speech in Italian) clearly articulated in a breathy, ghostlike whisper towards the middle, as if to remind us of the language of a former existence. This really brings Berberian’s extended vocal techniques to the fore, as the piece relies entirely on her extra-linguistic palette of sounds for its colouration and expressive power. It’s a quite astonishing work, built upon an absolutely fearless performance. As with Omaggio a Joyce, the voice is subject to the electronic manipulation of tape edits and effects, but here they are much more extensive and sustained (the piece lasts about 21 minutes). The opening minutes are genuinely disturbing, all the more so for the use of identifiably human sounds which have gone beyond the normal range of human expression. They have been transported into the realm of the uncanny, of supernatural voices sounding from the beyond. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was this piece in particular which inspired the title of Strickland’s new film. It begins with a hissing exhalation of breath which expands like fog to create a chill, all-encompassing atmosphere. Sibilant, floating spirit chatter flitters through this mist, approaching from and receding into the depthless obscurity. A distressed voice makes stuttering attempts at speech, but gets caught on hard, jagged consonants, and is unable to articulate a single word. There is a sudden burst of jarring laughter, tinged with hysteria, and a voice muttering to itself in a nonsense language comprehensible to nobody else, perhaps not even to itself. It sounds like it is reciting a story, or swiftly recounting the fading recollections of a life before they all fragment and dissipate again. The moods of the piece shift and reconfigure themselves, often with disorientating alacrity or suddenness. Laughter morphs into weeping, which them modulates seamlessly back into laughter. These recognisably human sounds then undergo a transformation into staccato insect stridulation and the buzzing of swarming flies – sounds which could easily have been used on the soundtrack of Katalin Varga. At one point, an electronic space of glitter and sparkle is created through filter and echo effects, within which the moaning sounds of pleasure reverberate, a passage which caused the prudish Italian Radio Corporation to ban a broadcast of the piece. This spatial dimension of pleasure is all too soon torn apart by a violent, abrasive sound, as if some external force were also intent on crushing any trace of sensual delight. As a whole, Visage gives us the sense of being privy to the turbulent tides of a psyche which is either being assailed by an external force, or is tearing itself apart from within. It is a wholly remarkable work of immense power, giving the lie to the impression that the music of the post-war avant-garde was all bloodless, over-intellectualised serialism.



Berberaian repeated the vocal pyrotechnics of Visage in the 1965-6 piece Sequenza III, one in a series of compositions in which Berio explored the full range of a particular instrument. Here, she sings without the transformative magic of studio tape editing techniques. The piece allows Berberian to unleash the full expressive power of her extended vocal armoury. We are taken on an exhilarating, emotional and exhausting thrill-ride, which takes in the highs and lows of tongue clicks and rolls, mutterings, laughter, shivers, ecstatic sighs, trills, humming, coughs, neighs, croons, operatic outbursts, ululations, Indian whoops, screams, gasps, gibberings, full-throated declamations and a short passage in which she seems to become possessed and start speaking in tongues (although the piece as a whole could be regarded in this light). It demonstrates the huge variety of sounds which the human mouth and vocal chords are capable of producing, and comparisons with other pieces in the Sequenza series demonstrate that it is an instrument of far greater flexibility than anything else to be found in the music shop. Berberian’s performance is heroic, outlining a whole new vocabulary of musical sound, and also demonstrating how to use it in a directly affecting manner. Berio continued to write for Berberian after their marriage had ended (indeed, Sequenza III comes from this period), most notably in Folk Songs which, probably because it is quite straightforwardly tonal, is one of his best known pieces. It’s a suite of arrangements of songs from around the world with a traditional or folkish flavour. A good many of them, however, are actually composed or at least adapted from traditional material. For example, Kentucky-born John Jacob Niles’ Irish-style ballad Black is the Colour of my True Love’s Hair (also sung by Nina Simone and by Patty Waters, who turns into an extended Visage-style psychodrama) and the two pieces from Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne. Other songs take us to France, to Azerbaijan (via a love song unearthed by Berberian from a cracked Russian 78), Sardinia, Italy and Sicily. Berberian also gets a chance to reconnect with her Armenian roots (she had sung in an Armenian folk group when she was at high school in New York) in the song Loosin Yelav. Folk songs may be more conventional in form than the electronic pieces or Sequentia, but it shares, in a more stately fashion, their collage structure. The contrasting juxtaposition of divergent national styles takes the listener on a virtual global tour of Western songforms. There’s a utopian element too, with the drawing together of international songs through unified arrangements (and the inclusion of songs written by composers using material and styles from beyond their borders) highlighting their similarities rather than their differences, and pointing to the universal nature of the essential human concerns and emotions which they convey.



Other major twentieth century composers also wrote pieces specifically for Berberian, tailoring them to her musical persona, or simply trusting her to understand and communicate their particular artistic intentions. Stravinsky entrusted her to deliver his serialist Elegy for JFK in 1964, and William Walton wrote a ‘sequel’ to his famous piece Façade for her in 1979. This was cheekily titled Façade 2, perhaps in recognition of the dawn of the blockbuster sequel. Façade was initially written in 1921-2, and was a suite of light music with jazzy flavours wrapping around a recital of semi-abstract poems by Edith Sitwell. These poems, with their playful experimentation with sound and sense, and Walton’s musical evocation of them are an earlier example of a composer hearing music in the sounds of language, presaging the later Joycean text-based pieces of Cage and Berio. Walton’s Façade 2 was in fact a revision, replacing some of Sitwell’s texts and adding new numbers. Sitwell’s work also caught the ear of Trish Keenan of Broadcast (who mentioned her in a Wire interview in the context of the Witch Cults of the Radio Age LP track Seancing Song). Keenan was beginning her own explorations into ‘nonsense’ lyrics, associative meanings, word sounds and the electronic manipulation of the human voice on the Broadcast albums Tender Buttons (with its Gertrude Stein referencing title) and the Witch Cults LP (made with Ghost Box audio collagist The Focus Group), as well as in increasingly experimental live performances. These later trends in the band which had by this point been whittled down to the central creative and personal partnership of Keenan and James Cargill, seem very much in line with the work of Berberian and Berio. I wonder if she’d heard much of her work. There is a definite affinity with some of Berberian’s work, and immersion in a sound world which always remains rooted in the reality of the human voice. This makes Broadcast the ideal choice to soundtrack Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio.



Berberian also composed music herself. The 1966 piece Stripsody is a hugely enjoyable four minutes or so in which she vocalises the sounds of a comic strip, drawn for her by the artist Roberto Zamarin (the strip ideally projected during the performance). The strip effectively becomes a highly colourful graphic score, with Berberian voicing the noisy vitality straining against the boundaries of the frames in the best comics (and she was an avowed fan). It’s a mini-symphony of comic-strip sound effects, its quick-cut edits marking the jump from frame to frame, and from comic to comic (we get samples of hard-boiled gangster strips, westerns, superheroes, romances, animal comics and more). It echoes the rapid shifts and musical pratfalls of the Warner Brothers cartoon music of Carl Stalling (never was a composer less aptly named). There are kerplunks and the bang bang of pistols; the budda budda of machine gun fire and the sirens of police cars; the mewing of cats and the barking of dogs; stomping and thudding (as in ‘stomp, stomp, thud, thud’); the high-speed gallop of cowboys’ horses and the whistle of Indians’ arrows; the sucking and smacking of kisses and the revving of souped-up motors. At one point, there is a Charlie Brownish ‘good grief’, and a brief snatch of Ticket to Ride, pointedly not sung in the operatic style, a burst of which it unexpectedly emerges from. Towards the end, Cathy utters the immortal (if slightly altered) words ‘it’s a plane…no. It’s a bird…no. It’s Superman!’ The piece finishes with snores and zzzzs turning into the whining, whimpering buzz of a fly silenced by a terminal ‘bang’. A whimper and a bang to end. She certainly pulls it all off with a lot more conviction than Brigitte Bardot mustered for Serge Gainsbourg's Comic Strip.

A small frame of the Stripsody score

An audio version of Stripsody can be found on the Cathy Berberian site, as can her beautiful rendition of La Flute de Pan, from Debussy’s sublime Trois Chansons de Bilitis. Berberian died of a heart attack in 1983 on her way to a performance in Rome. She was going to sing The Internationale at a celebration of the centennial of Karl Marx’s birth in the style of Marilyn Monroe. It would have been a gesture which simultaneously celebrated Marx’s legacy and lightly mocked the humourless, ascetic earnestness of some of his acolytes. Now that would really have been something to hear.

Llama Festival 2012

The Llama festival returned last weekend after a year’s break for a rethink, its original ideal of an intimate, small scale local gathering having become rather overwhelmed of late, its friendly and warm atmosphere in danger of being lost. Llama is a cleverly memorable acronym for the Lynton and Lynmouth Arts and Music Association, which always allows for neat programme artwork, on this occasion by Nik Barrie, incorporating the long-necked South American ruminant (brethren to the wild goats roaming the precipitous heights of the cliffs and the Valley of Rocks beyond the borders of Lynton) alongside local landmarks (of which there are plenty, this being a particularly spectacular and characterful stretch of the North Devon coast). This year, the beacon-capped tower which forms a gateway to the short spar of the harbour wall (and which was reconstructed as a form of memorial immediately after the devastating floods of 1952) was outlined against a star-speckled sky in which the llama’s head floated, headphones plugging its prominent ears. It looked like the depiction of a benevolent constellation, an animist spirit of place looking down over the town to give it its blessing. The double-l, which also serves to acknowledge the South Coast of Wales, clearly visible across the Bristol Channel, was something of a misnomer this year, as events were confined to the green of Lynmouth. This is the lowest of the two villages which are divided by steep, rugged cliffs and linked by the umbilical steel cables of the vertiginous cliff railway. Both take their prefixes from the river Lyn, the two branches of which run down from Exmoor through wooded gorges to meet at the head of the village centre and rush the short distance to the sea.

Lynmouth from above - with the green marking the festival site

Both Lynton and Lynmouth have a pleasing feel of being cut off from the world, and seems to attract individualists and non-conformists, with a resultant sense of self-sufficiency and a dedication to building and sustaining a vibrant local community. This is manifested in the arts and music association which organises the festival, in the tiny cinema set up in the old church, in the arts and crafts group, and in the excellent community bookshop to the side of the town hall, a splendid Edwardian synthesis of gothic and Tudor fantasy (where I got a copy of Alfred Bester’s proto-cyberpunk classic The Demolished Man, Robert Aickman’s second selection of ghost stories in the Fontana series and Brian Aldiss’ elegiac 1964 pastoral post-catastrophe novel Greybeard). The weather forecast was mildly apocalyptic in the run-up to the weekend, and the strong winds on Thursday and Friday resulted in performance tents due to be erected on the foreshore left safely wrapped up. This necessitated a certain amount of last-minute re-organisation. But the Llama magic prevailed, and the predicted downpours never manifested themselves. Indeed, there was enough sun on the Saturday, combined with bracing winds, to leave me ruefully wincing at my red-faced visage in the mirror the following morning. The arts and music association must have some powerful weather wizards at its disposal.

The music was eclectic and wide-ranging, encompassing jaunty skiffle, heraldic instrumental prog with an eighties sheen, pogoing, arms in the air bhangra, sax quartet arrangements of popular tunes such as the Pink Panther and Simpsons themes, classic ska and reggae reproductions, exotically attired carnival drumming, and low-key folk blues contrasting with a more cocky, fretboard-wanking stunt guitar variety. The latter reminded me of Steve Buscemi’s 78 collecting character in Ghost World, who goes to see one of his old blues heroes, only to find his ‘authentic’ version of the music eclipsed by a swaggering group called Blues Hammer. A young chap assigning himself with a mono-monickered Harry informed us that he was 16, and won the crowd over with naught but an acoustic guitar, a winsome smile and cheekily insouciant manner, and a handful of breezily inoffensive x-factorish songs full of youthful yearning and bright optimism. A group of young women dressed as for a wedding (all, with the exception of the bride, in male attire) and having a conspicuously good time, formed a temporary fan club and enthusiastically cheered their instant idol. The Bideford Youth Pipers formed into a line in front of us, as if preparing to march into battle, rejecting the stage and the need for amplification (not really necessary or advisable when Scottish bagpipes are involved). Dressed in what was presumably Bideford tartan, they assailed us with versions of popular tunes such as Yellow Submarine, the drummers demonstrating some dextrous beater twirling all the while. We were exhorted to clap along by a small, round-faced character with a disconcerting resemblance to Wee Jimmie Krankie, whose animated manner and clenched fists suggested they’d smash our faces in if we didn’t. They (and their immensely enthusiastic lynchpin and cheerleader) were pretty damn fabulous, actually. A credit to Bideford. 3 Daft Monkeys, whilst not my cup of tea, were firm favourites, with their traveller and festival friendly brand of anarcho-folk set to tub-thumping rhythms and overlaid with fiddling jiggery-pokery. Many capered vigorously to their strumming and sawing, and there was a certain amount of ‘freaky dancing’ from those whose fried synapses had long since been disconnected from co-ordinated rhythmic motor responses. At some point in the evening, the beer and cider ran out in the bar tent, which resulted in something of a mass exodus to the surrounding pubs (strict licensing laws meant that not even a bottle of water could be brought onto the site). I temporarily withdrew to the Rising Sun which, although it didn’t have the legendary Beast, had a perfectly acceptable selection of other Exmoor Ales. I stood on the spar of the harbour wall beyond the tower, where the river met the sea, supping a pint of Stag, then Gold. From here you could gaze out to sea or back towards the festive throng, with the music drifting out over the rocky beach and the waves and maybe even faintly, barely perceptibly, reaching the keen ears of some Welsh folk looking back from the other shore.



The B-Music collective/family has been involved in the festival since 2007 and was a significant presence this year. Essentially a group of DJs, musicians and obsessive record collectors, they orbit around the home base of the Finders Keepers label and its offshoots. The DJ team (including David Orphan, former resident of these Exonian climes now returned to his native Manchester soil, as his revivified accent attests – you can find and indeed purchase an example of his fine graphic design work in the form of a Record Store Day poster here) played music in between acts on the Friday evening, unearthing rare and wonderful psychedelic treasures from all over the world which previously only they, their friends and about ten other living people had ever heard of. A projection of a 1903 version of Alice In Wonderland, included on bfi releases of both Jonathan Miller and Jan Svankmajer’s takes on the tale, pointed to the abiding interest in phantasmagorical, surreal and fairy tale cinema amongst b-music folk. This was also apparent in Jane Weaver’s short Saturday afternoon set, in which she introduced a song with a sample of the sublime nursery rhyme which accompanies the children’s enchanted night river journey in Charles Laughton’s film Night of the Hunter. This immediately won me over, it being a long time favourite of mine. Jane created a phantom band from a tabletop array of electronic devices which, alongside her own electric guitar, accompanied her dreamlike psych folk songs. These bore the light impression of influences such as Shelagh McDonald (on her Stargazer album), Wendy and Bonnie (whose album Genesis she covered in a previous Llama festival), Linda Perhacs (the electronic echoes of Parallelograms particularly coming to mind in this context), and even perhaps a hint of Laura Nyro on occasion (although this might more accurately be a reflection of my continuing obsession with the singer). She used electronics (including a rather splendid ‘sruti box’, which provided tamboura drones) sparingly to colour and subtly manipulate her haunting and captivating songs.



Later in the afternoon, Sam and the Plants were in a Radiophonic mood. Sam Mcloughlin sat behind an old wooden cabinet with protruding loudspeaker cone, which looked like a miniaturised version of one of Luigi Russolo’s noise making machines. A long, loose wire spring coiled from the box up to the framework of the tent roof, and was occasionally struck to produce shivering waves which were transformed from motion into sound by his magic box. Other garden shed electroacoustic sounds formed a sonic bed above which his musical partner Alison Cooper played Nico-esque harmonium drones and airy, floating flute. Paper Dollhouse claimed further filmic inspirations behind their name, in this case Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse, a 1988 movie which loosely adapted Catherine Storr’s 1958 children’s novel Marianne Dreams, about a sickly girl whose drawings seem to create a palpable dreamworld which she can inhabit and explore, but not alter. Citing female electronic music pioneers Delia Derbyshire and Eliane Radigue as influences, these two young women, gothily dressed in black, unobtrusively took to the stage, sitting throughout their performance and producing vocal and acoustic guitar drones which drifted out to permeate the site. With its diaphanous, billowing layers of echo and delay, their sound seemed to emerge from nowhere and everywhere, and their unobtrusive stage presence meant that this was effectively high quality background music. The impression given of huge reverberant spaces created the sense of a sonic sounding out of the local geology, creating an echo location map of the surrounding cliffs and gorges. Rather than Radigue or Derbyshire, Liz Harris’ recordings under the name of Grouper came to mind as a point of comparison, as indeed did Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening Band’s excursions into disused underground water cisterns and caves to take advantage of their rich quality of natural resonance. Ideally, they would have been better suited to a low-lit interior, with suitably atmospheric projections flickering behind them (something from Vampyr or The Haunting, perhaps). Any visual element would have been redundant here, however, as it would have been competing with a truly spectacular sunset, the distended orb of dull orange slowly settling onto and slipping behind the liquid horizon. Paper Dollhouse provided the perfect soundtrack to this spectacle.

Delays in the programme and a need to strictly adhere to the 11 o’clock curfew meant that Bristolian band The Liftmen had to confine themselves to a succinct and sharp fifteen minute set. Which was a shame, because it was a fine blast of jagged, scrabbling post-punk, with off-kilter rhythms and prominent bass combining with a keen melodic sense and playful lyricism reminiscent of Wire or early XTC. It was all over too soon, rather prematurely fulfilling the old adage to leave them wanting more. The Eccentronic Research Council emerged after dark, skulls perched precariously atop their vintage Korg and Moog analogue synthesisers, looking out at the audience through blank, shadowed sockets. They performed a series of songs and chants linked by a narrative which evoked the spirit of the Pendle witches, ten of whom who were tried and executed in 1612. This is territory which has already been obliquely explored by Lancastrian electronica duo Demdike Stare, who take their name from the alias of one of the witches, Elizabeth Southerns, a crone who lived in Pendle Forest. Autobahn 666, played on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone show on Radio 6 a few weeks ago, charted a modern route into this charged terrain (it was the A666 as read by Maxine Peake), and suggested that something of the spirit of those dark days was still inherent in the landscape. The music, pulsing synth tones driving repeated vocal incantations, was combined with a visual projection and narration, authoritatively spoken by Maxine Peake, whose pale visage and intense gaze was perfect for the part. I was reminded of the song Scarlet Ceremony from the Ghost Box LP The Owl’s Map by Belbury Poly, which samples Michelle Dotrice’s diabolical invocation from the 1971 ‘rural ritual’ horror film Blood On Satan’s Claw (another filmic touchpoint here, perhaps). The three female singers and keyboard players were definitely going for (and achieving) the witch as seductive temptress archetype, as opposed to the alternate aspect of the hook-nosed and waning moon-chinned crone which flashed on the screen against dark silhouetted woods alongside them (the fearful Demdike herself). Musical mastermind Adrian Flanagan skulked behind his synth, emerging to shuffle out to the front of the stage like a hulking inquisitor, ready to take his own sweet time. He suspended his microphone from one of the overhead stage stanchions, turning into the representation of a gibbet, the amplifying bulb at the end swaying like a pendant body (strange Lancastrian fruit). Jane Weaver appeared at some point in nun’s habit to sing a few condemnatory lines, effectively sealing the witches’ fate. But their spirit and power lives on, suffusing the barren plateau of Pendle Hill and its surrounds, awaiting the right incantations and electronic pitches to resonate through the millstone grit and awaken them once more.



The Eccentronic Project morphed into a short set by The Chanteuse and the Crippled Claw; same people, same synths, but a slight shift in emphasis towards electro-pop without any extraneous narrative element. Lucy Hope (the chanteuse) took centre stage, singing with a strong, jazzy voice, full of sass and swing. Are You One of Us was an infectious single which invited audience identification, and with its syncopated three-four rhythms, definitely had its jazz hat on. They had a home-made film projected alongside the stage featuring the three women wandering through autumn woodlands in a state of advanced mesmerization, which suggested an affinity with Hammer films (which often featured the beech woods near Bray studios) and Jean Rollin’s dreamy vampire fantasies (in which actors wander through picturesque settings – often chateaus – in a somnambulant daze). The Crippled Claw (aka Adrian Flanagan) joined them onscreen in his finest sinister Victorian undertaker’s outfit. His head was transformed at some point into what looked from a distance like a rotted tree stump, as if he were composed of woodland matter inexpertly taking on human form, moss, humus and twigs passing for hair, flesh and bone. An immensely enjoyable video for Are You One (Of Us) also features Maxine Peake, dressed in a pink and white rabbit suit and firing a bright blue water pistol for reasons its perhaps best not to enquire too deeply into. As soon as the clock struck 11, the show was brought to a halt, and no amount of occult incantation could influence the stewards to relent from their purpose. A final brief a capella song was sung, the Claw tapping out the rhythm on makeshift bongos composed of bony skull pates. Even if it would have been better to have heard more, local sensibilities had to be respected, and it was a good-spirited and intimate way in which to conclude the evening.



By the next morning, the Llama Lounge had been erected on the foreshore, the winds having long since died down. This meant that we could sink back in the comfortably worn sofas with a cup of the exquisite Tea Pigs brew and listen to Jane Weaver and Emma Tricca. It was like being in someone’s front room, albeit one with a fourth wall missing, and a view directly out onto sea and cliffs. Jane told the children to quieten down, and she could almost have been talking to us, settling us down in a Jackanory fashion for the tales to be sung. It was just her, a guitar and an effects peddle this time round, giving the songs an unadorned honesty, allowing them to stand on their own melodic merits. She was followed by Emma Tricca, an Italian singer who has recorded an album, Minor White, on the Bird record label which Jane Weaver runs, and which is dedicated to providing a sympathetic home for female artists. Seated on a wooden box, she sang in a hushed voice, which threaded its way between circling fingerstyle patterns woven on her acoustic guitar. It was spellbinding double-bill made all the more pleasurable by the intimate and informal setting. A fine way to start the day, and also, alas, to end the festival, since we had to head off at lunch-time. Hopefully, this has been a successful ‘relaunch’ of the festival (it certainly seemed so from my perspective, beer shortage and licensing strictures apart), allowing it to continue and thrive. If so, then I hope to return next year.

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, who died on Tuesday, was the last giant of the ‘golden age’ of science fiction literature, the era in which many of the genre’s themes and devices, already developed over the preceding decades, began to be used as a common currency which could be directed towards more richly personal and metaphorical ends. Brian Aldiss, writing about The Martian Chronicles in his history of SF Trillion Year Spree, points to Bradbury as being ‘the first writer to recombine the old props in his own way’. The prelude, Rocket Summer (with its assigned date, 1999, creating a nostalgia for futures that never were) is justly celebrated for its poetic evocation of a brief, technologised Indian Summer caused by spaceships departing for the red planet. It’s typical of Bradbury that such a futuristic scene should be observed from the pre-modern perspective of an ‘Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets’. The rocket takes off, turning snow to hot rain and ‘making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts’. It ‘made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land…’ This vignette shows how Bradbury used SF devices to draw poetic similes, in a metaphorical manner, and to create moods and atmospheres. He had little interest in scientific accuracy, and was always at variance with the approach of the writers to be found in John Campbell’s Astounding Magazine. There’s an amusing moment in an episode of The Simpsons in which class swot Martin proposes the setting up of an after school science fiction group, where they can discuss the likes of Asimov and Heinlein. ‘What about Bradbury’, someone pipes up. ‘I’m aware of his work’, Martin says, with an airily dismissive wave of the hand. The Martian Chronicles, whose alternative title The Silver Locusts is a more accurate articulation of Bradbury’s symbolic language, was originally a series of loosely linked stories published separately in pulp SF magazines like Thrilling Wonder and Planet Stories, subsequently ‘fixed-up’ to form a novel. Bradbury was always more of a short story writer than a novelist. Even longer works like Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes have an episodic rhythm, with the feel of discrete stories held together by a common cast and setting. Even Fahrenheit 451 was originally published in serialised segments in Galaxy Magazine (as The Fireman), along with two connected stories which are generally excluded from published versions of the novel. The tendency to point to the novel as the ultimate form of literary achievement has resulted in Fahrenheit 451 being presented as the central work in Bradbury’s career, the one upon which his reputation beyond the genre walls rests. This is a shame, since it is a fairly simplistic variant of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia on the society of mass production and consumption, Brave New World, shorn of its irony and wry humour. The refusal to admit that any media other than books could convey ideas and meaning with anything like the same degree of complexity or depth was in one sense a defence of his own profession (although he did write for the cinema too), and his passion, but also suggested a shying away from the modern world, and a refusal to confront its possibilities.



All of which makes it odd that Bradbury is regarded as a science fiction writer at all. His early stories were published in Weird Tales, and thus suggest more of an affinity with the fiction of HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and with contemporaries like Fritz Leiber and Theodore Sturgeon. His ur-texts were more Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain than HG Wells and Jules Verne. Many of his works partake of the trappings of American gothic, although he was too generous of spirit to ever get really nasty in his horror stories (although some, like The Skeleton and The Jar show delight in the macabre). Some have found this generosity to verge on soft-hearted sentimentality on occasions, particularly in the later stories of the 60s and onwards, when establishment led to a certain mannered repetition of familiar themes. Brian Aldiss, in Trillion Year Spree, writes of a ‘somewhat teddy-bearish view of the Universe’. His stories ‘are perfect in their way, and their way is the way of Wind in the Willows. They belong to an imaginary American past where every town had wooden sidewalks, every house a verandah with a rocking chair, and every attic a dear old Grandma fading out under the rose-blossom wallpaper’. In the story I Sing The Body Electric, which he later adapted as a Twilight Zone episode, this grandma turns out to be a robot, a manufactured ideal, but an ideal nevertheless, who is eventually accepted by her reluctant charge. The reference to the Walt Whitman poem in the title further indicates the extent to which Bradbury’s imagination was rooted in a pre-modern America. Many of his stories take place in mid-Western settings, like the Ohio of the opening page of The Martian Chronicles, or the Illinois of Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury himself was born in Illinois, moving with his family to Los Angeles at the age of 14 in 1934, as his father looked for work during the depression. His mid-western childhood and early adolescence stayed with him and was reproduced in his fiction, as if he were trying constantly to fix the memory of a lost Eden, a time of blissful innocence and joyful simplicity. His stories often featured young protagonists, with late summer or early autumn atmospheres portending the imminence of profound and not necessarily welcome change. Urban locales and the incursions of technology are almost always portrayed in a negative light, their baleful influence damaging to the human spirit. Perhaps this was a reaction to the rapid, unstoppable growth of Los Angeles in the pre- and post-war periods when he was living and writing there, which utterly obliterated its previously semi-agrarian landscape. John Sladek wickedly captures Bradbury’s styles and concerns in his pastiche Joy Ride, as by Barry DuBray. Here, an old man tells his grandchildren of the good olden times before the telco – the telephone company – took over the government, banned letter writing and forced everyone to wear personal phones. Fleeing from the Telco police, they retreat into an old hangar where an old mail plane has long since fallen apart. The old man tells them to get on board and go for a joy ride, and the boy seems to get caught up in the imaginative flight. “‘I can see it, Grandpa!’ he yelled. ‘Just like you said: There’s a carnival and cotton candy and the Cub Scout weenie roast and a band concert in the park. It’s a fine day and the flag’s flying over the schoolhouse and kids are playing sandlot baseball and Mom’s making popcorn balls…’ The cops blow the place up with their laser ‘telecommunications magic’ before the kid can finish rhapsodising.



My favourite Bradbury books are The Silver Locusts (of course, and I prefer that title), Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree, along with the short story collection The October Country. As the titles suggest, late summer and autumn are the quintessential Bradbury seasons, and also the ideal time at which to read his stories. The Halloween Tree, with its dream flight across the world and through time to observe different seasonal traditions, and cultural responses to death and the spirit world, is perfect All Hallow’s Eve reading. Dandelion Wine is perhaps the best and most rapturously sustained of his small town reveries. Its central poetic conceit of summers past captured in the bottled glow of racks of dandelion wine inspired me to try my own hand at brewing some – alas, to disappointing effect (the elderflower, on the other hand…). Something Wicked This Way Comes is a fine variant on the dark carnival theme, also to be found in The Cabinet of Dr Caligarie, Jack Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao and, later, in the Hammer film Vampire Circus, in which sinister sideshows offer the curious glimpses into the darker corners of their souls. It was made into a film in 1983, with a script by Bradbury, and was not wholly unsuccessful, under the direction of Jack Clayton (previously responsible for The Innocents in 1961) in capturing some of the novel’s spirit. Bradbury also expressed satisfaction with Francois Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 in his profile in Charles Platt’s collection of interviews Dream Makers, saying ‘I think it’s a beautiful film, with a gorgeous ending. A great ending by Truffaut’. This is interesting, since that ending (which he seems to be specifically attributing to the French director) is often seen as going against the grain of the book by having the recitors, who have each learned a particular literary classic, walk around in circles speaking the words in dull and lifeless voices. The words in books can also be drained of meaning and emotional expression, Truffaut seems to be saying, perhaps in the end defending the validity of the medium which he loved so much. Bradbury had no regard for the 1969 anthology film The Illustrated Man, however, which adapted his stories The Long Rains, The Veldt and The Last Night of the World, calling it ‘a horrible film’. He himself wrote the script for Orson Welles’ 1956 film of Moby Dick, which gave him the chance to provide his own take on an American classic which had fuelled his own imagination, and to further prove his literary credentials. Joe Dante’s TV series Eerie Indiana was also a modern take on Bradbury’s regular siting of the small town as a locus of the weird, with its two youthful protagonists a contemporary and slightly more knowing incarnation of his wide-eyed kids, receptors for the wonders and weirdnesses which surround them. Bradbury’s influence can be found in many successive generations of writers (and film-makers), many of them great favourites of mine. It’s there in some of Harlan Ellison’s stories; in Stephen King’s small town stories; in the poetic language and symbolic imagery of the 60s novels and stories of Samuel Delany and Roger Zelazny; in the novels of James Blaylock, particularly Land of Dreams, which transports Bradbury's mid-west small town magic to Pacific Coast Northern California; in the wistful and whimsical Twilight Zone stories (and in their declamatory titles and introductions). This is particularly the case with Charles Beaumont’s Elegy, in which three astronauts find a replica of small town American life on a barren asteroid, an idea with a macabre twist which echoes The Third Expedition from The Martian Chronicles; and with Rod Serling’s A Stop At Willoughby, in which an unhappy modern executive takes a train which stops off at an idealised nineteenth century small town. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is also suffused with the spirit of Bradbury, as are films like Groundhog Day and Pleasantville. It’s a spirit which found strangeness and the miraculous within the seemingly ordinary, and thereby recognised that, when you examine it closely enough, nothing is really ordinary at all. Everything is infused with the strange and the wonderful. Ray Bradbury helped us to discover it.

Saint Etienne at The Gate, Cardiff

Another day, another city, another deconsecrated church, and some would say another country. After seeing the sublime Trio Mediaeval play with Arve Henriksen in St George’s Hall, Bristol it was off to Cardiff for Saint Etienne, who re-sanctified the old Plasnewydd Presbyterian church in the Roath area to the North East of the city centre, now known as The Gate. Saint Etienne are one of my holy trinity of bands, along with Broadcast and Stereolab, and are, alas, the only one of the three I’m now likely to see again. The latest LP, Words and Music, is partly about the almost sacred role that pop music can play in people’s lives (it’s first track talks, only semi-mockingly, of a pilgrimage to see the Wiltshire home of Peter Gabriel ‘from the band Genesis’). So a church building was an appropriate setting for a celebration of its glories, and of the intimate connection it makes with its congregation. Intimate was certainly the word here, with the sell out show packing them in to the serried ranks of banked pews, with those who felt like testifying spilling out onto the central dance floor. The stage was very low, and the whole set-up had the slightly bizarre ambience of a church hall disco. This was particularly the case during the fairly long wait for everything to get going (the time on the ticket was wrong, so everyone turned up early). The empty dance floor seemed a testament to the uninspiring nature of the music playing through the speaker stacks, and brought to mind the awkward period a the start of a party or wedding disco when everybody is too reserved or insufficiently drunk to be a pioneer on the dancefloor. The cover of Words and Music is a marvellous A-Z style map in which roads, parks and amenities all have the titles of songs. For example, to pick out a few favourites, there is Gibsom Street (Laura Nyro), Montague Terrace (shaded in blue, of course – Scott Walker), Doubleback Alley (the Rutles’/Neil Innes’ take on Penny Lane), Hotel Particulier (where Serge Gainsbourg takes Melody Nelson), Clarksville Station (to which you can catch the last train, like The Monkees), and Jollity Farm (where ‘everything sings out to us as we go through the gate’, according to The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band). Apparently there’s an app available which allows you to find out where all the place-names derive from, or give yourself a little quiz. The cover reflects the record’s view of music as providing a roadmap to guide you through life, a vital and faithful companion which can let you know where you are, remind you of where you’ve been, and point you towards new routes and regions to explore. A map of Cardiff was certainly essential to guide me to the unassuming residential Keppoch Street in Roath, some mile or so out of the city centre, in which The Gate Arts and Community Centre was incongruously located.

Dusty gestures - Sarah Cracknell

Saint Etienne’s singer and live frontperson Sarah Cracknell took to the stage in a spangly top which reflected the lights and gave off the odd bit of dazzle. It was a touch of glam which was in fitting with the sense of joy in the unabashed melodicism of classic pop which the group have always displayed. They always perched rather awkwardly in the ‘indie’ camp to which they have generally been assigned, largely eschewing guitars (save for a bit of folky acoustic on recent records) in favour of keyboards and ‘get up on the dancefloor’ beats. If it has its roots in the 60s and 70s, then this is music which has more affinity with Dusty and Scott than with founding indie gods along the Velvet Underground and Stooges, Byrds and Doors axes. Indeed, part of the new album sound not unlike the Kylie of Light Years and Fever (no bad thing), particularly when Sarah sings in her most breathily light voice on Last Days of Disco. She had her trademark feather boa to hand, which was waved above her head at appropriately dreamy or ecstatic interludes. She was joined at the front of the stage by a backing and co-vocalist, who also joined in enthusiastically with the dancing. The boys (Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs) stayed in the shadows at the back, twiddling with their electronic gadgetry and keeping the machinery of pop functioning at full groove. They coolly produced all the music, except what was played by the guitarist, remaining seated in concentration throughout. They looked a little awkward, as if they still couldn’t quite believe they were here, on stage, with a hit-making pop band. A smile of quietly self-absorbed pleasure occasionally crossed their faces as they realised once more that this wasn’t all a dream. It’s always been thus.

The Boys in the Band - keeping to the shadows

Films were projected onto a screen behind them, a different one for each song. This was no surprise, given the band’s use of samples from London-based films, popular and obscure (I’ve yet to figure all of them out), on the So Tough album, and their role as producers of several films (one of which, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?, should see the light of day on dvd in the near future). Some of these projections were highly amusing. Clean cut boys and girls who looked like extras from an episode of The Monkees leapt into the air in slow motion, all bright teeth and white hipsters, multi-coloured balloons rising into blue Californian skies behind them – a bubblegum dream of 60s pop. For I’ve Got Your Music, a new song which celebrates both portable music systems and the experience of having a song circling around in your mind as you head out into the world, we had early 80s ads for Walkman cassette players, and Cliff squatting to rollerskate into the camera shot for Wired For Sound, getting down with the kids. For Popular, a hymn to pop transience, disposable chart filler and one hit wonders, which also marks the wistfulness felt by those whose brief moment has receded, there was a countdown from an old 70s Top of the Pops, in which the occasional Bowie was vastly outweighed by a welter of Showaddywaddys, Smokies and Peters and Lees. A secondary chart was filled with patently made-up artists, some previously and some freshly invented, some funny and some just sinister or creepy. There were a few genuine bands to spot amongst them, Peel obscurities such as Crispy Ambulance, who were never likely to trouble any chart. Another film provided an alternative and very appreciative audience from a Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club style show; boozy, brown-suited men and stout, Mrs Mills women, roaring with laughter and applauding with hearty abandon. They were intercut with a loop of a hirsute, cheekily grinning drummer who tentatively tapped away at his kit, apparently the object of all the hilarity.

They played a few songs from the new album; the aforementioned I’ve Got Your Music and Popular and the new single Tonight. In the context of the concert, this was a very self-reflexive song about the anticipation of going to see your favourite band, with its speculative line ‘maybe they’ll open with an album track, or a top five hit, no turning back’ (it was somewhere in between). DJ was an uptempo dance number which Sarah posited as a potential follow up single. The positive response it received prompted her to conclude ‘that’s a done deal, then’. Participatory audience feedback in direct and immediate action. Most of the new material played her focussed on the upbeat, danceable side of the album. When I Was 17 represented the elegiac element which has become a feature of all of Saint Etienne’s latterday albums (and was present to an extent from the beginning). This is perhaps best illustrated by the melancholic song Teenage Winter which concludes their previous record Tales From Turnpike House. It’s a natural condition of maturing and becoming more reflective, wondering what it’s all about. Sarah forgot a verse and berated herself for being ‘crap’, but it didn’t matter. It added a further element of humanity and intimacy to a concert which was never about slick showmanship anyway. We were lucky to have her here at all, as it turned out. Subsequent shows were cancelled as the sore throat with which she was battling (staving it off with the odd swig of G&T) erupted into full-blown laryngitis. Her voice has never had a particularly wide range, but it is the distinctive and characterful heart of the Saint Etienne sound. A cool and self-assured presence, sensual but always with an underlying element of wry amusement. She sounded fine tonight despite her ailments, which I wouldn’t have been aware of had I not subsequently read about them.

She wants to go home - goodnight

The rest of the evening was given over to the hits and album tracks promised by Tonight, ranging over the years (good grief, the decades!) from Only Love Can Break Your Heart onwards. For their housed-up version of Neil Young’s country plaint, a local boyo (in his 30s at least) felt compelled to get up on stage and revive the baggy spirit of the song’s era, dancing in an intensely self-absorbed, crouching trance. He never impinged on Sarah’s space, and she looked on with good humour. He received a loud cheer when he was eventually escorted off, and Sarah subsequently voiced what was no doubt on most people’s minds: ‘I didn’t know Bez was here tonight’. Another chap and his missus came back shortly afterwards, having exited to but more beer and sneak in a smoke. He asked his mates if they’d played Only Love Can Break Your Heart and, having been told he’d missed it, was clearly greatly dismayed. There seems to be an Aesop-like Fable here somewhere. The Man Who Went For More Beer and Missed His Favourite Song. You’re In A Bad Way was greeted with huge enthusiasm, and became an audience singalong, with the line ‘get your kicks watching Bruce on the old Generation Game’ bellowed out in unison. Nothing Can Stop Us, Sylvie and Who Do You Think You Are were other old favourites given an airing. There were also the album or b-side tracks, ones for the fans: Mario’s Café, on of their most archetypal London songs, with its ‘Kentish Town Tuesday’ café rendezvous; Good Thing, a danceable lament for love foolishly let go from the Tales From Turnpike House LP; Burnt Out Car, with its naggingly catchy synth hook getting those arms in the air; and Spring, from way back in their Foxbase Alpha days, a song offering hope in the face of romantic disappointment that was obviously appropriate for the season. The evening ended with an encore, Sarah rather unnecessarily apologising for the slight delay, explaining that one of the boys had to nip to the loo (‘it’s alright, it was only a number one’). They finished, appropriately enough, with He’s On The Phone, their biggest hit, with its lines ‘he’s on the phone, and she wants to go home,
shoes in hand, don't make a sound, it's time to go’. It drew everyone who was even remotely inclined to dance onto the floor or up from their pews, and was an uplifting send off from a hugely enjoyable show. I’m now looking forward to Bob’s forthcoming book on pop music, Do You Believe in Magic which has so obviously informed the celebratory and reflective focus on pop and its personal meaning which permeate Words and Music’s every song.

Leo Dillon

I was sad to hear of the death of Leo Dillon who, in close (indeed inseparable) collaboration with his wife Diane had been one of the finest book illustrators of the last half century. The couple met on a design course in New York in 1953 and married after graduating in 1956, and have been together ever since, apparently rather reclusive and living in creative domestic bliss. Their book cover designs, which have appeared since the late 1950s, have always been dually attributed, and the signature Leo and Diane Dillon was a guarantee of a visually distinctive and strikingly imaginative graphic style. This was particularly gratifying as far as their work in the SF and fantasy genres was concerned, where clichéd images of spaceships, aliens and mighty thewed, sword-wielding barbarians and bronze-brassiered amazons were the wearisome norm. The Dillons style was very diverse, but always with an instantly recognisable signature. They produced blocky, heavily outlined designs which had the look of prints; watercolours in which translucent figures interpenetrated each other, often creating further images at the point of overlaid intersection; pictures resembling pieces of marquetry; illustrations with the jewelled colours and oriental atmosphere of Leon Bakst’s designs for Diaghilev or Kay Nielsen’s fairy tale pictures; intricate, intertwining pen and ink drawings; paper cut-out collages; paintings emulating stained glass (the beautiful cover to CS Lewis’ Till We Have Faces); and bright pop art assemblages (the cover to the US paperback of Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat). They often arranged images representing the subjects or moods of the stories they were illustrating into larger designs, so that a peacock might be made up of marching figures, trees, a river with boats and a bridge; or a sad woman’s trailing veil containing cars, basilisks, levered and crank-shafted mechanisms, triceratops, ape-like faces and the outline of a carrion bird with a skull extending towards its hooked beak (Ellison’s Deathbird Stories). Leo Dillon’s parentage means that there is a significant representation of African American figures in their work, too, which again makes their work particularly distinctive (sadly). They worked outside of the field of book cover design, providing the covers for many LPs in the Caedmon series of spoken word recordings. I particularly like their series of paintings for the Sing Children Sing records, which cover various countries around the world. They all have a large planetary globe with the country in question prominently outlined, a choir of open mouthed figures in costumes associated with the place, and a distinctive landscape in which well-known or vernacular buildings are placed. For Britain, we have the white cliffs of Dover, the houses of parliament, a castle and a small thatched cottage and an array of figures which includes Henry VIII, a friendly bobby, a pearly king, a yeoman of the guard, a Norman knight, an extravagantly bewigged Regency lady, a judge and a Scotsman. I think they’ve captured our character rather well.

Deathbird Stories

They have enjoyed a long and close personal and artistic relationship with the writer Harlan Ellison, who has himself always sat rather awkwardly upon the generic shelves to which his intensely felt short stories have been consigned. Their covers for Ellison’s collections display a unique and deeply rooted understanding of his work. They are expressionistic, reflecting the heightened style and feeling of the stories within. The cover of one of Ellison’s rare novel-length works, Spider Kiss, has the pattern of the rock star protagonist’s pink shirt made up of the anguished faces of his worshipping fans, whose looks of devotion are indistinguishable from grimaces of agony. Gentleman Junkie is a study in cross-hatched shading worthy of Mervyn Peake, whilst Web of the City is one of their woodblock prints (by the looks of it) whose distorted faces are reminiscent of those in the Expressionist paintings of Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann or George Grosz. The cover of the original hardback edition of Dangerous Visions, the influential anthology which Ellison edited in the 60s, is a hugely inventive and imaginative design, which manages to conflate a diagram of the eye with a stringed musical instrument, also incorporating a portrait of Ellison as some kind of knowing harpie. The image on the front cover, contained within the eye and projected by arrowed lines focussed through the lens, is deliberately slightly out of focus. An indication that what lies within is a projection of reality, and not reality itself – a highlighting of the artifice of art, and its permission therefore to explore what would be taboo in the society in which it operates. The lens itself is rendered so that it appears transparent, with a lighter green limning the white disc making it stand out from the background. The Dillons also produced a series of small woodblock prints which illustrated each story. These were done as a last minute commission, which Ellison insisted upon with the publishers, and as a result have a raw, instinctive immediacy which fits in perfectly with the tone of the book. Unfortunately, they are not terribly well reproduced in the 70s paperback editions which I have, which are also lumbered with hopelessly inappropriate spaceships and aliens covers. All of which makes you appreciate the Dillons even more. Of the Ellison covers, the one for Deathbird Stories is a particular favourite (and the story The Deathbird one of my favourites of Ellison’s). The blending of the elements is done so effortlessly, the composition working as a whole and then drawing in the eye to examine the details, the component parts which go to make up the strange amalgamation of the mourning woman and the crow (a different sort of deathbird to the one which Ellison writes about). The way that the long black hair of the woman morphs into the upward sweep of the crow’s black tailfeathers is superbly done, and the iridescent colours which bloom at the core of the outer darkness reflect the balance of the stories within, which vary from the ‘heart’s blood’ tales of intense introspection and moral interrogation to the demonically comical, carnivalesque stories which delight in loosing chaos upon the world. The mournful, noble profile of the woman at first draws attention away from the two small, red horns spiking up from her brow, an indication that all is not always as it seems. Although in Ellison’s fiction, demons are not necessarily to be considered a force for evil. The way in which the human skull is incorporated into the curve of the crow’s silhouetted cranium is beautifully done, the bird’s cold, dead eye staring out of the shadowy socket, and echoing the upturned, nictating eye of the lizard on the opposite side of the composition. The woman’s veil becomes part of the pattern on the mask, whose upper browns, curved and crooked, echo the claws of the crow, which themselves connect with the semi-organic machineries above. Everything connects with, or emerges from, everything else and it’s all marvellous. The cover of The Beast That Shouted Love At the Heart of the World is also fine, depicting a chthonic beast curled up beneath the earth like a seed waiting to unfurl. It sends its tongue up through the soil, its tip forking into a pink heart which expands into a bubblegum speech bubble, containing the words of the collection and its title story.

The Essential Ellison - front cover

The Dillons included affectionate portraits of Ellison on several of their covers for his books, reflecting the extent to which his personality inhabits his work (not least in the introductions he writes to most of his stories). Some of these take the form of an Ellison warped and transformed by the products of his own imagination. These are variants on Goya’s print The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, except that in this case, the author is awake, and the monsters, demons and night creatures are invited in and welcomed. On the back cover of Strange Wine, Ellison (looking alarmingly like a young Prince Charles) is crowned with a Dylanesque thicket of hair comprised of fungi and locusts (suggesting he’s been spending time wandering through the cities of Ambergris and Viriconium in the worlds of Jeff Vandermeer and M.John Harrison). On the cover of the Savoy Books edition of his collection of TV polemics, he is a goat-legged satyr, his curling tail holding up the aerial whilst green imps watch him type, the colourful smoke emerging from the platen bearing up further demons. The cover of the US edition of The Illustrated Ellison has a respectably suited and bow-tied Ellison pestered by his double, a grinning, wild-haired trickster with horned hat and coat with watch-faces and cogs – clearly a version of Harlequin from his renowned story ‘“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman’. A further Harlan peers from a porthole in Harlequin’s hat, the writer as observer, watching this encounter with interest to see how it turns out, and how it can be used. A couple of particularly ingenious covers create portraits of Ellison from elements of landscape, architecture and assorted objects, in the manner of Arcimboldo or Dali. The Essential Ellison has his face composed of a ramshackle assortment of half-timbered houses on a mountainside, with a stream flowing alongside suggesting the lapel of a shirt. The same portrait is repeated on the back cover, but with a night full of stars having fallen, and Harlan’s eyes having shut. From the holes of mine shafts dotting the jagged rocks of his hair, figures fly in dream flight, the imagination taking wing. Ellison has always been effusive in his praise of the Dillons, and has clearly felt privileged to enjoy such a lengthy and fruitful creative relationship with them. He puts it clearly and unequivocally in his short piece on them in the 1978 collection The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, which includes a small portfolio of their work under the title An Ellison Tapestry: ‘Beyond my love for them and my understanding that they have influenced my ethical and moral life almost more than anyone else I’ve ever known, my respect for their artistic intelligence and their incomparable craft is enormous. Leo and Diane Dillon are the best. Simply put: the best’. Amen to that. Thankfully, you can find a large selection of the Dillons’ work over at the blog The Art of Leo and Diane Dillon.

The Essential Ellison - back cover

Trio Mediaeval and Arve Henriksen at St George's, Bristol

The collaborative grouping of early music vocalists Trio Mediaeval and jazz/improvising trumpeter Arve Henriksen played the last date of their current tour in England, organised by SoundUK, in St George’s, Bristol last Thursday (24th May). It was a perfect setting for their very Scandinavian take on early music and ethereal vocal improvisation. The early 19th century church, built in a Greek revivalist style, faces down the steep slope of Park Street, and is propped up by impressively monumental Doric columns. Inside it has the feeling of a temple as much as a church, with balconies on three sides resting on columns and a large relief of what looks like the Ascension high on the front wall, with prominent Greek lettering above. The interior allowed for the recreation of the hallowed ‘ECM sound’, both in terms of acoustic clarity and hushed atmosphere. The coming together of artists from the classical and European jazz wings of the ECM roster immediately begs comparison with the astoundingly successful collaborations between Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble. Indeed, Trio Mediaeval came together and developed their distinctive vocal style during the Hilliards’ summer schools towards the end of the 90s. Henriksen and the Trio have pushed at the boundaries of the classical and jazz worlds on their own accounts, however, feeling perfectly at liberty to incorporate elements of improvisation, folk music or modern composition into their respective fields. Henriksen employs the latest electronics to alter the sound of his trumpet, developing a line which runs through Miles Davis’ relatively crude use of effects pedals in the early 70s and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s mixing of his son Markus’ trumpet with synthesisers on Sirius and Michael’s Reise (the latter released on ECM). He also provides sampled and looped backdrops against which to solo.

The previous occasion on which I encountered him, he was playing with Supersilent, a Nordic quartet whose performances are entirely improvised. This group features both keyboards and the electronica of Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, and veers between stately ambient dreaming and hectic prog thrash. They were very firmly in the latter mood when I saw them, producing a relentless, unholy racket with little shade or variance, perhaps in an effort to rouse the somnolent Exeter audience. In the context of his collaboration with the Trio, however, his electronics created subtle atmospheres suggestive of northern landscapes, full of swirling wind and creaking ice. His trumpet had a softened, electronically filtered tone which gave it a wooden flute-like quality. This fitted with the folkish cast of the music, overlaying the brassiness usually associated with the trumpet with a less sharply plosive breathiness. This trumpet-flute acted as an instrumental accompaniment to the voices, as opposed to the fifth voice which Jan Garbarek’s saxophone added to the quartet of the Hilliard Ensemble. The folk element was enhanced by the replacement of Torun Ostrem Ossum by the Norwegian folk singer Berit Opheim Versto for the duration of this tour. She joined the regular members of the Trio, Anna Maria Friman and Linn Andrea Fuglseth, and demonstrated her solo singing style with an unaccompanied traditional song at the start of the second half of the concert.

The evening started with a piece of mediaeval chant, Alma Redemptoris Mater, which soon extended into drawn out, Perotin-style syllables, imbuing the sacred words with a folkish, dancing lilt. This set the tone for the evening, which deliberately blurred the lines between sacred and secular, ancient and modern. Sometimes the Trio sang alone, splintering off into solo or duet components, and sometimes they were joined by Henriksen’s trumpet and electronics. The Trio retreated to their seats at the back of the stage to make way for a series of interludes in which Henriksen played alone, or with his phantom band, coaxed from his sampling and mixing board. Both kept to their discrete areas of the stage, their particular territories. It was as if lines had been drawn, ensuring that a certain distance was maintained and a degree of separation made clear, an element of difference emphasised. This worked to highlight the contrast in their sounds and approaches, with the surprising confluences and occasional creative disjunctures all a part of the unique nature of this collaboration. Henriksen at times both held and played his trumpet with one hand, the other twiddling the nobs and pressing the buttons of his magic electronic box. It was like a less showy and more compact evolution of the Rick Wakeman-style keyboard wizards of the early to mid-70s. The precendent of prog and jazz-rock, world fusions and classical ‘crossovers’ offer (in their worst manifestations) a warning of the dangers of excess and the shallow apprehension of unfamiliar styles; of forced musical marriages which reduce one or both partners from their original sublime, vital or intuitive state to one of pomposity, confusion and insipidity. There is also the potential for an over-reliance on the latest technologies, which can swiftly come to seem outmoded and rob the music of any timelessness. But Henriksen’s electronic manipulations were discrete and natural, and completely lacking in grandstanding showmanship. Instead of the ranks of synthesiser keyboards which would be played with ostentatious simultaneity by the classical keyboard wizard, there was just a small mixer and perhaps a few effects pedals; and Hendriksen eschewed the sequined cape in favour of a jacket of restrained elegance. He also sat throughout, reducing the scope for ecstatic poses marking the execution of a particularly florid run across the keys which a Wakeman, Emerson, or indeed a Jan Hammer might once have been tempted to strike. Henriksen did let loose a couple of vocal outbursts, however. They were pained howls and yelps which at times seemed to echo the cries of the Sami singer Mari Boine Persen (who has sung on a couple of Jan Garbarek records, Twelve Moons and Visible World), designed to echo out across the icy steppes, and also the impassioned vocals of singers from the countries around the Black and Caspian Seas. Their slightly melodramatic forthrightness struck a minor false note when contrasted with the quietly concentrated power of the rest of the evening, which managed to be emotionally affecting without recourse to histrionics. Henriksen also played a short, squat reed instrument which sounded like a cross between the plaintive Armenian duduk and the dry Egyptian ney flute. It brought out a Middle Eastern element to his playing as he wove arabesques of coiling Moorish modes. The chill sub-Arctic mood was suddenly dispelled by the hot currents of desert winds.

Henriksen was good, but the evening was really defined, for me, by the singing of the Trio. The weaving counterpoint, harmonies and general vocal interplay were exquisite, with occasional passages which were genuinely sublime, leaving me quite blissfully transported on this balmy, dreamy evening. They performed a number of traditional Scandinavian songs – three from Sweden and several more from their native Norway (they hail from Oslo). Some of the Norwegian songs were sung in a style known by a number of onomatopoeic names: tulling, sulling or tralling. It’s a kind of folk scatting which involves stringing together nonsense syllables invented for their sound and rhythmic quality, and is directly related to the Scottish or Irish ‘mouth music’ style, often sung to get into the rhythm of repetitive work (as with Hebridean spinners, for example). It was utterly bewitching, building up a gentle swing which proved powerfully hypnotic. For the traditional Nordic song Till, Till Tove, the members of the Trio dispersed to the far corners of the church, one to the back, one stationing herself to the side, under the galleries, and one moving to the opposite side of the stage, beyond their territorial boundaries. This sounded out the acoustical space of the church, and also gave an impression of distance, which was entirely apt for this song. It was an example of the singing style known as lokk or laling, a utilitarian music of incidental beauty designed to travel across long, mountainous distances and call in the cattle. The high, keening sound was electrifying, the voices seeming to meet and coalesce somewhere above our heads. The effect was furthered by the use of the side blown, split-toned flute familiar in the music of the far North, and played here by one of the Trio. Meteorological atmospherics were provided by Henriksen, whose ambient electronic backing suggested the creaking and groaning of glaciers or the slow shifting of masses of hard-packed snow. One of the Trio also played a drone fiddle accompaniment (on a hardanger fiddle, perhaps) to one of the early mediaeval pieces, which brought to mind Stevie Wishart’s early music group Sinfonye. There are certain similarities in the way that both groups bring a modern sensibility to the early music repertoire, along with an ability to improvise and an awareness of traditions beyond the standard classical canon. The Trio also used ‘chiming sticks’, lengths of hollow, squared metal with round rubber ‘clappers’ at the end of loosely attached rods. These struck the metal when the sticks were thrust ceremonially forward, producing a softly resonant chime which seemed to blossom from nowhere, with no initial attack. They were useful for finding the pitch, but sounded beautiful in themselves, and added a ritualistic air to the songs about to be sung, an annunciation bell. The concert was programmed so that there were only a few pauses for the disruptive intrusion of applause. But when they finished and took a bow in a hand-held line (the two separate worlds coming together in the end) the applause was effusive and unrestrained, the whoops and yells indicating that this was an audience which extended well beyond the aficionados of classical music. They came back on for an encore, and sang what sounded like one of the mystical hymns written by Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, Henriksen softly blowing the melody on his downturned trumpet. It was gorgeous, a blessing to send us out into the warm night, where a hazy sickle moon hung in the clear night above the curve of the adjacent park. A wonderful concert in which the artists created a sense of suspended time, transporting us to a magical space apart from the readily apprehensible world for an hour or two.