The Filter^

Possibly the best thing ever...

Uniqlo once had a branch on Speke Retail Park, but I don't think it exists anymore. Shame. When I lived in Japan there were Uniqlos everywhere, and they had really great things for very few yen. I didn't buy much though. Shame.

Anyway, now Uniqlo have had the best idea ever! They seem to have teamed up with German Jazz label ECM (who have the most beautiful range of CD covers) for a line of printed T-shirts - the perfect antidote for those who are getting tired of their HAVIN' ITs and ROONEYs. They are also a pinch, at £9.99, or £14.99 for 2. I'm literally excited by this.

(cover image from Keith Jarrat's 'The Melody at Night, With You')

The only problem is that they don't have any stores outside of London, and you can't buy them online (yet). Shame. I'm considering a trip to the capital just to get one though.

www.uniqlo.co.uk

"the melodies and the rhythms of the gulag"

An article in The Moscow Times  introduces a new album called "Gulag Tunes":

Taking traditional songs tinged with rebellion and prison experiences -- the genre known in Russian as blatniye pesni -- Antipov gives them the surf treatment, adding energetic guitars, percussion and keyboards to create music reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack.

The Problem with Richard Strauss

The Big Brother re-run lost out to Richard Strauss' Metamorophosen this morning in the pre-work entertainment stakes. A no-brainer? Sadly not in an age when even the most respected intelects are considered frumpy if they don't admit to snatching a slice of cultural tripe in between their Ezra Pound and their Tennessee Williams (those Sezer comments on your Oxenholme piece weren't lost on me James).

So what's the problem with Richard Strauss? Well, there isn't one really, but The Problem with Richard Strauss is a better title than just Richard Strauss isn't it? Some people do say there's a problem with him, and accuse him of being a Nazi collaborator. In truth, Strauss just got on with his life under the Nazis, and as that life progressed, felt horrified and deeply sadenned that he had done just that. Many others did it too - emotionally tortured by their lack of defiance and seeming ignorance. I began to wonder what I would have done in 1940s Germany - but at that point the toast popped up so thankfully I didn't have to pursue that one.

There was one staggeringly effective moment of defiance from Strauss. Metamorphosen - A Study for Strings was the composer's elegy for the country he once loved and that he saw being torn apart by Nazism. Nice of him isn't it? 'Never mind what you're doing to all those jews, but for God's sake don't shut the opera house'. Well, that's the shortsighted view. In reality, if you really want to know how tragic Strauss viewed the progression of Nazism, you only have to listen to Metamorphosen. It's a work that shows the deepest pain and the deepest sense of humanity. It's a gesture of compact humility from perhaps the greatest large-scale orchestrator who has ever lived. It's a monumental struggle - which life itself is. Especially when you realise you've run out of milk and will have to wait until you get to work for that cup of tea.

LSC in Greenwich

Choral group LSC - which the Filter^ kindly supported last summer during its tour to Latvia - is making its first appearance in London this weekend. LSC was founded in Liverpool in 2001 by me and some other musicians who were hanging around in the city at the time - since then we've picked up some more musicians from various parts of the UK and I'd like to think we're on the way to being recognised as a decent group which has done a thing or two provoke thought about the way art music is performed and presented, and therefore concieved. Our performance on Saturday celebrates the output of one of Britain's greatest artistic talents, Thomas Tallis (1505-1585).

LSC presents Thomas Tallis: A Retrospective

Saturday 29 April 7.30pm | St Alfege Church, Greenwich | Admission £4 on the door

Music by Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Morley, Adrian Batten and Gregorio Allegri, performed in the church where Tallis was buried in 1585. Liverpool Schola Cantorum is conducted by Andrew Mellor with Anne Kan, soprano. 'A veritable lesson in the art of singing...quite staggering' Evening Herald.

Visit LSC's website here.

Alonso Lobo and Will Self

I'm not sure if Will Self has ever heard of Alonso Lobo. But, the two greats joined me on holiday last week in paperback and CD form respectively. Alonso Lobo (1555-1617) is a very exciting discovery. I first came accross him via the Virgin Megastore in Toulouse and a disc by the Monteverdi Choir (Santiago a Capella) which includes a ravishing recording of his Lamentations, discovered some twenty years ago in manuscript form in Seville. Lobo's music is indulgent, expressive and direct; it's the real deal - for once making Tallis seem the over-polite English genius that he probably was but which his own Lamentations and Spem in Alium attempted to betray. If you're interested, have a listen to the Monteverdi Choir disc mentioned above and also this disc by David Trendell and his KCL choir (if you can bear the hideous cover design) which includes the Lamentations and a couple of really special mass settings.

Will Self's world, in the words of Martin Amis, is all his own. Like Lobo, I wonder why Self hasn't collected more accolades and isn't regarded more highly. Maybe his stature is higher than my bleary-eyed and naive admiration is affording him. The handful of novels I've read by him are all very pleasing, but last week it was his fictional debut The Quantity Theory of Insanity that, like a deranged mental patient impotently brandishing the horn of an NHS fire extinguisher, formed the verbal accompaniment to Lobo's genuis. Now I'm no Martin Amis, but I'm convinced that this collection of stories is a work of supreme talent and a must-read for those Filter^ contributors and readers who are slipping so enviably into the world of academia. Like an obsessive leitmotif, Self's character Zack Busner, who's central to the novel Great Apes, appears delightfully throughout the delicately related stories in this set. By the end you're almost tempted to enter him into the 'phonebook' on your mobile. Self's work may bear no relation whatsoever to that by Lobo, but both men are astute and uplifting craftsmen - why shouldn't their worlds collide?

The Pet Shop Boys, bubbling under the radar

Following Thomas' theme of LUKEWARM, I'd like to make one quick point about the Pet Shop Boys: they are master innovators.

Back in 1993 the release of Very demonstrated an important realisation that the music industry was changing. The advent of digital music has redefined the architecture of a typical album, and bands are forced to look at innovative ways to replace the old formula. Very tampered with the hardware - the CD case itself is plastic, bright orange, and textures - whilst the 2003 album PopArt took on the software. Although billed as a "Best Of" it rearranges many tracks from the previous "best of" (the classic Discography) into a new arrangment split between traditional "pop" and experimental "art", added to with brand new songs. This appetite for  re-issuing old songs in new compilations isn't a crass moneyspinner, but a creative project that contextualises their history.

Nowadays we all deal with individual songs and upload them into our own playlists. The Pet Shop Boys ensure longevity and artistic validity by pre-empting this earthquake in music publishing.

They actively take part in the reappraisal of their own output, offering interesting playlists of their vast discography. Albums are must-have not only for their innovative designs and aesthetic beauty (the artwork for Release was breathtaking), but the attention given to ordering and context. In short, they offer a service that cannot be replicated by digital downloading.

Indeed they often pioneer technology and methods to disseminate content. Last night Channel 4 premiered the video for new single "I'm With Stupid", and it's now available to download: realvideo.mp3, windows media.mp3. It stars David Williams and Matt Lucas, and is typically self-referentially brilliant.

The Pet Shop Boys are true entrepreneurs, engaging in multiple and diverse projects such as Closer to Heaven (a West End musical now playing in Brisbane, click here.pdf for an interview) and Battlestar Potemkin  (a soundtrack for the classic film, perfomed in Trafalgar Square September 2004).

The Pet Shop Boys are political but in a non-pretentious way. I'm With Stupid (like I Get Along before it) is about Tony Blair, but the undercurrent of relevent commentary sits nicely within a humerous delivery. I'll be buying (rather than downloading) Fundamental on May 22nd because in so many ways The Pet Shop Boys are one of the most productive, imaginative, and accomplished creative acts in Britain today.

Norway's 'Cultural Prodigy'

Ketil Bjornstad played Manchester's RNCM last week. But should he have?

http://thefilter.blogs.com/the_filter_review/

In Bloom

From the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog:

British summertime is coming and so, in theory at least, is spring. Accordingly, next week's playlist will be songs about plant life: trees, shrubs, grass, flowers and so on.

I posted a link to this blog, and so they should pick up our suggetions. I thought that maybe we could compile a playlist to rival theirs. So far my suggestions are:

Sunflower, by Low
Sun Drums And Soil, by Fourtet
If You Are To Bloom, by Hum

Can people post further suggestions? Ta, Thomas.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/

Loose Fur

It's difficult these days to recommend anything for friends or family to listen to. The market is saturated with music: interesting, dull, annoying, retro, futuristic, folky, beatles-influenced, post-modern, ear-splitting. The internet has made music even more available, and hence, less desirable. I find it difficult to forge personal bonds with anything too popular. I don't like to share with too many people, it seems to dilute the effect. I tend to base my new purchases on a combination of factors, and we could here draw parallels between them, and Antonio Gramsci's analysis of 'legitimate' political power. First of all, Gramsci maintains, we tend to dislike change, prefering to grant legitimacy to what has gone before without a real and thorough critique of it. In my case this would mean going back to my current CD collection and choosing a new album by an existing artist, or one on the same record label. An artist or label endorsed by a current favourite artist would also suffice here. Secondly, Gramsci asserts that there are certain sources of information whose opinion we lend huge weight, again without a real or thorough critique. In short we believe what the media tell us, the fools that we are. For me, this would mean the unquestioning following of certain publications, namely The Wire and Plan B magazines, and the subsequent purchasing of anything that they might endorse.
How I have fallen prey to both of these false sources of power, how weak my mind, how soiled my soul. Anyway, through a combination of both of these sources i came across the new Loose Fur album, Born Again in the USA, and its my current recommendation to friends and family alike. Even Gramsci would have enjoyed its playful anarchy. Jim O'Rourke, of Jim o'Rourke and Gastra Del Sol fame, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame, and Glenn Kotche also of Wilco fame, play a willfully messy and lyrically silly country type rocky pop thing that brings together the best elements of their other projects. Here's a small sample:

Christ is on his way across town,
He was getting tired of hanging around.
He's back Jack, smoking crack, find him if you wanna get down.

For more: http://www.dragcity.com/bands/loosefur.html

Life in a Scotch Sitting Room

The poet and musician Ivor Cutler has died from a stroke at the age of 83. It is one of those odd coincidences that I had begun thinking about, and listening to Cutler a lot in just the past couple of weeks. Several of his songs are at present on my iPod and I have made my journey into work listening to Get Away from the Wall. So though it was perhaps not surprising that the old man should have died (I remember reading an interview with him some years ago in which he seemed quite reconciled to the prospect of his approaching death) the announcement still shocked me in quite a significant way.

It seems a fitting response.

'Old man dies', is not a headline that seems destined to surprise a listener to the radio, but it was surprise that Cutler revelled in; he took the everyday, the ordinary seeming, and stunned one with the most outrageous, trivial absurdities. No matter how often one listened, he remained unpredictable. Somehow, the lugubrious, Glaswegian voice fooled one into trusting there to be normality at the heart of his writing, as with his song ‘Where the River Bends’ the absurdity of scores of blind men falling into a river at this one point, still surprises me when it has been heard countless times:

Where the river bends,
The blind men fall in.
Where the river bends,
The blind men fall in.
Where do they come from?
(The blind men.)
Why do they all fall in?
I don’t know.
And neither do they.

Though Jim O’Rourke’s cover of ‘Women of the World’ is undeniably beautiful, it is Cutler’s original that I return to. I think Cutler believes it. The end of the world never seems too far away from him, and always a disappointing, tedious event; the battery of the little black buzzer on which the world’s most important message is to be tapped out, runs out after it has only reported the fact that its operator has a cold bum. There is never enough said, and one always wanted more from him even if he didn’t always want to give it, as his poem ‘No I won’t’ demonstrated:

I'll leave you with this thought.
No, I won't. It would not be fair.

Ivor Cutler, 15th January 1923 – 3rd March 2006