GLAM BOOK TOUR - DEUTSCHLAND + ITALIA - DECEMBER 2017

         

Pulling my gloves, scarf and woolly hat out of SoCal retirement as I head off to snowy Germany and only slightly less shivery Italy for the publication of Shock and Awe - titled GLAM in the Ventil Verlag edition (translated by Jan-Niklas Jäger) and Polvere di Stelle in the minimum fax version (translated by Michele Piumini). 

Details below on this whistlestop tour of  readings + riffing, records + videos, questions + answers.  

GERMANY

Berlin - Sunday December 3 

doors open 7 pm / event starts 8pm - Humboldt-Universität Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft, 

Georgenstr. 47 (S- und Ubahn Friedrichstraße), romm: Medientheater

Writing as Performing Pop. A Conversation with Simon Reynolds

panel with Sonja Eismann (Missy Magazine) and Bodo Mrozek (ZZF Potsdam). 

moderation: Stefanie Alisch. 

introduction by Dahlia Borsche and Fabian Holt. 

deejaying Marc Weiser (Palais Wittgenstein)

Berlin - Monday December 4 

7pm -  HAU2

Hallesches Ufer 32, 10963 Berlin.

7pm - 8pm readings + riffing + videos

break

8.30 - 10-30 „Plattenspieler“with Thomas Meinecke (FSK) - chatting about fave records of our lifetimes

Bremen -  Tuesday December 5th 

7PM - Schwankhalle

Buntentorsteinweg 112/116 28201 Bremen

readings + riffing + videos / Q+A

presenter Tobias Levin

Frankfurt - Wednesday December 6 

8-15pm - Milchsackfabrik

Gutleutstr. 294, 60327 Frankfurt am Main

8.15 pm - 10 pm – conversation with Klaus Walter + videos / Q&A

Köln - Thursday, December 7th 

9pm - King Georg

Sudermanstraße 2/ 50670 Köln

readings + riffing + videos  / Q&amp - presenter Mario Lasar 

München - Friday, December 8th 

8PM - Kammerspiele

Kammerspiele / Kammer 3 / Hildegardstr. 1, 80539 München

readings + riffing  + discussion / Q&A

Mainz - Saturday, December 9th

8pm -  Capitol Cinema

readings + riffing /  + Q&A with the audience

ITALY

Milano - Monday 11 December

11 am- 1 pm - live on Radio Raheem - playing favorite records recent and old + chat 

9.30 PM -  Santeria 

BUZZ: a discussion moderated by Fabio De Luca / Q&A

Bologna - Tuesday 12 December 

7 pm -  Gallleriapiù

riffing + videos  / Q&A

Catania, Sicily -  Wednesday 13 December

8.30 pm  - Sal Catania  (a Leggo.Presente indicative  production)

readings + riffings + music 

Roma -  Thursday 14 December 

7 pm - “Polvere di stelle Big Christmas Party” @ minimum fax

interview with Francesco Pacifico

deejaying from SR 

tantalising news

Often when a recording artist reaches that point where it feels fitting to release a 

best-of / greatest-hits -  or a career-spanning commemorative archival anthology -  it seems to signal  (or even, in some obscure fashion, precipitate) the end of their musical journey. A silence ensues. Perhaps followed, after a long interval, by a wan comeback. Perhaps followed by nothing at all. 

In Mr. Hodgson's case, he has not only returned punctually, at his usual time of year, but he has come back stronger than ever, with a triple-dollop of some of Moon Wiring Club's best work yet: the double-CD Tantalising Mews and the vinyl long-player Cateared Chocolatiers.
                                   
                                       


                                                                              

Noteworthy is the attractive new-look packaging for Tantalising Mews: a cardboard gatefold, with no information on the front, back or inside (indeed the release only identifies itself on the spine).

                                       


In a pouch lurks a fold-out insert that supplies the titles of the thirty-three  - thirty-three! - tracks on the pair of discs, and hints at the narrative framework that links them: "wireless telegraphy - from the immaculate ghost of an identical ancestor".  Perhaps informed here by the analogy that 19th Century spiritualists saw between remote communication with the dead and the recently invented telegraph?


                                      

Cateared Chocolatiers contains - in the form of a brightly coloured fold-out poster -  the board to a game that involves "a journey through a rococo town of rolled-up carpets and crumbling toffee buildings in order to catch a train from a weird rural station you know you’re going to miss." The boardgame can be played by following the rules printed on one side of the disc's intricately illustrated dust jacket and by consulting the cast of characters arrayed and described on the other side.

                                      

Noteworthy also: the sounds.  "Ghostly drifting molten landscape musicke" is how Blank Workshop characterise the contents of Chocolatiers.  And indeed that album especially, but all three of the discs,  push the ambient-leaning tendencies in previous Moon Wiring Club music to a new extreme of ectoplasmic exquisiteness and sickly malaise.  Beats, barely mustering the will to manifest, are decrepit and ineffectual entitities, rarely cohering into a pulse, let alone a groove. Voices droop and decompose, releasing vapours that fog the brain and obnubilate concentration. The mind wanders into mist-shrouded, boggy terrain...  mistakes marshy phosphors for beacons... gets lost... founders...

A true return to formlessness.

You can place advance orders for this Christmas hamper bulging with sticky delight here and here.

                                                        

Dü the Dü

 

Currently at your local newsagent or record store, the December issue of The Wire features an essay-review by me of the Hüsker Dü box set Savage Young Dü. 

Bit of a nightmare keeping the umlauts consistent throughout the review! I think I missed only one. If you inspect the front cover, you'll see that they actually forgot the umlaut over the Dü.

Apart from umlaut-anxiety, this was a most enjoyable trip down memory lane - taking me back to the mid-Eighties, the moment just before I went professional, and a time when Hüsker Dü was pretty much my favourite band on the planet. They cropped up regularly in my Monitor pieces as a touchstone. Then, after joining the Maker, I reviewed Candy Apple Grey and Warehouse: Songs and Stories in swift succession. Finally got to interview the Dü not that long before they split up. 

Actually, continuing the diehard streak of reviewing, I also handled Bob Mould's solo debut Workbook when that came out. That review languishes somewhere in my ink-and-paper archive. Never did get into Sugar, though.  

Some years ago I read that Bob became a drum & bass convert and even recorded a whole album in that vein (seemingly following the same trajectory as Kevin Shields).  That seems to have been an exaggeration: listening now for the first time, it seems more a case of an uneasy merger of Mouldian noise-pop and electronica, not unlike that Jesus Jones record Perverse, perhaps, or even Earthling. 

  

Also in this issue of The Wire, a fascinating cover story by Rory Gibbs on the post-geographical virtual digitronica collective Quantum Natives: Brood Ma, Yearning Kru (love that name!),  recsund, Rosen and others.  

A different kind of electronic collective is celebrated in the freebie CD that accompanies the issue, and it couldn't be more up my avant alley: a compilation of electronic and tape-music pulled from the archives of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio.

"Eloquent Rage"

A fascinating oral history convened by Joy Press of New York Radical Women: the Sixties feminist thought-cell and guerrilla theater unit, born in flames of rage 50 years ago, who pioneered consciousness raising, who coined concepts and slogans like "the Personal is Political" and "Sisterhood is Powerful," and who launched absurdist-satiric attacks on the Miss America pageant and Wall Street. Featuring the voices of Robin Morgan, Ellen Willis, Susan Brownmiller, Alix Kate Shulman, Shulamith Firestone, Kathie Sarachild, and more, this is an exhilarating memorial to a group whose ideas + spirit are more timely + urgent than ever in this savagely polarized political-cultural moment.

  New York Radical Women hurl cosmetics and feminine 

    accoutrements into the Freedom Trash Can at the 1968 Miss 

America pageant. Pic by Bev Grant. 

Protesting Miss America again, 1969. 

Hexing Wall Street, 1969. Pic by Bev Grant.

Hauntology Parish Newsletter (November): even Further; The Belbury Circle

Further returns on November 18th, with an evening of ghostadelic entertainment at the Portico Gallery in  West Norwood, London.

Press release:

DJ Food & Pete Williams present the second of their immersive  audio visual evenings at the Portico Gallery, London. Live music from Simon James and a not to be missed A/V set from Sculpture. Get lost in Further's multi projector light and sound show. Food, drink, a record stall from The Book and Record Bar plus plenty of seating.

Programme: 

7.30 - 8.30: Doors open, there will be a record stall with stock picked to compliment the evening by Micheal Johnson from the nearby Book & Record Bar and delicious local food served alongside the fully licensed Portico bar stocked with local beers and ales.

8.30 - 9.15: Simon James - former Simonsound and Black Channels member and one of the foremost exponents in today's modular electronics scene - plays a rare live set with his Buchla 200e Electric Music Box.

10.00 - 10.45: Sculpture bring their incredible live show to West Norwood via Dan Hayhurst's tape loops and electronics and Rueben Sutherland's zoetrope turntable visuals

10.45 - 12.00: DJ Food & Pete Williams (Further) will open and close the evening with their multi-projection Light & Sound Designs.

Tickets available here

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Ghost Box have a new release - Outward Journeys, a first and fine full-length from The Belbury Circle - that is to say, Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly + Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle- featuring once again contributions from John Foxx on two songs, in the form of  vocals and synths. Dig also the new style design from Julian House which has the air of Omni about it maybe...