Category: {music}

Music

Chris Corsano

Chris Corsano

I’ve seen a lot of drummers performing with various bands over the years but Chris Corsano has to be the most extraordinary and most talented, putting the often third class art of percussion centre stage and giving it status as an artform in its own right.

Corsano is a young American currently resident in Manchester. I’ve had the opportunity to see him play live twice so far, first time in a thoroughly mundane upstairs room in a backstreet pub in a duet performance with a soprano sax player (whose name eludes me just now…sorry). This evening he was playing with Mick Flower from the Vibracathedral Orchestra (both have played as extra members of Sunburned Hand of the Man).

Corsano’s playing takes improvised drum work beyond the usual jazz-stylings of similar improv performers with displays of incredible virtuosity that can still keep a recognisable beat when required. But there’s more than just great stick work at play, he comes armed with a host of different drumsticks, brushes, kitchen knives and other implements, and also uses pot lids, Tibetan bowls and other metallic miscellanea to extend the range of sounds an ordinary drumkit can produce. A Corsano performance is exactly that, a performance, where seeing the way he creates the sounds (pushing elbow into a tom, throwing things onto the snare, juggling pot lids and sticks) is as compelling as hearing the sounds themselves. Mick Flower’s drones this evening, created on some unidentifiable tabletop instrument running through a variety of effects, were a great complement to the drum pyrotechnics. A marvellous act on an essential bill (with Jack Rose and Denis Jones) in a packed venue. More please.

The lost art of sleeve design

stickyfingers.jpg

Listening to the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers recently had me musing about the great cover design by Andy Warhol, probably his most well-known after the first Velvet Underground album. The music may sound better than it ever did in the Seventies but CD reissues can’t reproduce the brilliant sleeve which included a real metal zipper on the front of the jeans. The Seventies were the golden age of cover design, popular music had evolved considerably since Sgt. Pepper and the “album as artform” meant that bands were searching continually for new ways to exploit the medium of the record sleeve. Gatefold sleeves became commonplace, then expanded into multiple foldout affairs; expensive gimmicks like the Stones’ zipper arrived pretty swiftly and there were other striking novelties like the first Faust album, a clear vinyl record, in a clear plastic sleeve.

Significantly, Warhol’s Velvet Underground design was also a) gimmicky, with its peel-able banana skin, and b) similarly phallic-oriented, as the banana beneath the skin was a pink one. (Original copies of this album are easy to spot in shops since they’re nearly always missing the skin). Joe Dallesandro is supposed to be filling out the trousers on the Stones’ album, a refreshingly homoerotic moment in the often resolutely sexist world of rock graphics. Nice of the Stones to be so daring but then Jagger at least didn’t mind dancing along the boundaries of sexuality in Performance and it was about this time that they were playing their scurrilous rent boy song, Cocksucker Blues. It’s also quite a macho image, of course, and aggressively sexual, so they get to have their cock cake, and eat it, as it were.

Fancy album sleeves fell out of fashion somewhat when punk came in but there were still things like the first Durutti Column album with its sandpaper sleeve intended to destroy the records it was stored with. I was fortunate to be able to do some vinyl design when I was starting out in the early eighties, even if I wasn’t allowed to design anything quite so elaborate. Some of the designs for the Alan Moore and Tim Perkins CDs take advantage of different booklet arrangements but it’s not the same as having all that space to play with. Now that music is thoroughly digital the visual component is reduced even further. A 300 x 300 pixel image in iTunes is a poor substitute for the tactile (and erotic…) pleasures of the album as artefact.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive