UFO Mk2 (1967), a poster for the UFO club by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English & Nigel Waymouth).
• Link of the week without a doubt is Yuka Fujii’s raw video footage of the sessions for David Sylvian’s solo debut, Brilliant Trees, which includes appearances by Jon Hassell, Holger Czukay and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Czukay’s contribution to this and other albums in the 1980s included the use of a second-hand IBM Dictaphone, a machine which was often credited on album sleeves but seldom discussed in interviews beyond Czukay’s claims that it was a superior sound-sampling tool. You can see the mysterious “instrument” in this film and discover (at last!) more about the machine here. Big thanks to Colin for the tip!
• “Part of what makes watching it so compelling now is Berger’s fascinated immersion in the culture of images itself.” Olivia Laing on 50 years of Ways of Seeing by John Berger.
• At The Wire: David Toop on what happens when the performance of music is extended over long durations, from all night concerts to sacred rituals that last for weeks.
• At Bandcamp: Tony Rettman profiles Audion magazine and its editors, indefatigable Krautrock experts Alan & Steve Freeman.
• New music: W by Boris, a remix of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science by Arca, and a cover of King Crimson’s Red by Hedvig Mollestad.
• The latest exploration of psychedelic graphics by DJ Food is a collection of posters for London’s UFO Club.
• Wolf Moon: Nina MacLaughlin has some questions for our ancient satellite.
• At Dennis Cooper’s: Frank’s Box: The Real Telephone to the Dead.
• Mix of the week: XLR8R Podcast 731 by Anthea.
• At Strange Flowers: 22 books for 2022.
• UFO (1970) by Guru Guru | UFO Over Paris (1978) by Steve Hillage | El UFO Cayó (2005) by Ry Cooder
I hope some one (Fujji? Sylvian?) might consider making a proper release of the “Brilliant Trees” footage. Bits and pieces seem to have been floating around the internet for a while now. The album itself will be coming up to its 40th year anniversary soon if they needed a pretext. Although I suppose picture quality and showing the messy, hit and miss working towards a polished final product might torpedo that idea. Appropriately, watching this gives me a sharp jab of nostalgia. I was still a teenager when i heard Sylvian talking and debuting tracks on the David “Kid” Jensen radio 1 show one evening. It’s also happy/sad to see Czukay and Hassell again.
I was thinking the same. These things usually stumble over questions of cost, purchaser interest and so on. Are there enough people who’d want to buy a low-res video recording?
I think the best option would be to include the footage on a future release of the album if it was done as a blu-ray remastering. Robert Fripp did this with some of the recent King Crimson remasterings, putting TV appearances as extra tracks on the DVD/BR discs. That would also give Sylvian a chance to unearth Czukay’s guitar solo. The latter was another nice feature of the studio footage. I’ve known for years that Czukay’s high-pitched solos were achieved by recording onto a track running at half speed but this is the first time I’ve seen it done.
Unrelated, but might be of interest (?) – http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2022/01/manuel-orazi-magic-calendar-mil.html
Ordinarily it would be, thanks, if it hadn’t featured here already:
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2018/03/15/calendrier-magique/
Ah, sorry. Though I’m slowly trawling the back pages here I hadn’t seen it (or properly checked)
Heh, that’s okay, I’ve been doing this for so long I often forget what’s here!
Glad it was of interest. Mention of Brilliant Trees – my favourite Sylvian album alongside the achingly beautiful Secrets of the Beehive – reminds me that he produced new designs for some of his album reissues. I think though that he’s left SotB alone, but removed the marbled background effect of BT which is a shame. I’m not a fan of album covers being changed with the exception of Kraftwerk’s approach.
Yeah, I got all those CD reissues. I had an original CD of SotB and the only difference I could see after scrutinising them side-by-side was digital typesetting and a slight loss of sharpness in some of the photos. Not that you’d really notice at CD size…