Irmin Schmidt – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 826

Hexa (1971) by Victor Vasarely.

• New music of the week is Tape 05, three minutes from Boards Of Canada following their thirteen-year silence, which was released on Thursday after several days of the group and their record label teasing a comeback with mysterious VHS cassettes and cryptic posters. I’ve been listening to the Sandison brothers’ discography for most of the week while trying to get a major illustration commission finished; this revelation has been the icing on a deteriorated, over-processed cake. I’m now looking forward to whatever emerges next.

• The Long London Uncovered: Alan Moore (again) and Iain Sinclair (again) in conversation. Alan’s second novel in the Long London cycle, I Hear A New World, will be published next month.

• RIP Chris Mullen. Not a name that most will recognise but Mullen’s sprawling website, The Visual Telling of Stories, has been linked here on many occasions. A remarkable resource.

• More new music: Boots On The Ground by Massive Attack, Tom Waits; Angel Lost by Luca Formentini; Phaser For The Ocean, Chorus For The Moon by Hatchback.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: Sensual Laboratories, Light Shows, Experimental, Film and Psychedelic Art by Sophia Satchell-Baeza.

• At Public Domain Review: “A beautiful purplish hue”: Frank Dudley Beane’s experience with ergot and Cannabis Indica (1884).

• Mixes of the week: An Invisible Jukebox mix for Irmin Schmidt at The Wire; and DreamScenes – April 2026 at Ambientblog.

• At The Quietus: Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) discuss their love of hiking.

• At Film Quarterly: Elinor Dolliver on the surprising folklore of analogue horror.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Gilway Paradox.

• The Strange World of…Spacemen 3.

• Tape Kebab (1974) by Can | The Attic Tapes (1975/6) by Cabaret Voltaire | The Black Mill Video Tape (2012) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 825

Hexagon Sequence II (c. 1970) by Rosalie de Meric.

• Boards Of Canada obsessives have been in a frenzy this week following the appearance of mysterious VHS cassettes sent at random to a small number of users of the Warp Records mail-order service. The contents of the tapes look like this. With the group having been silent for the past thirteen years there’s been an understandable flood of wild speculation on the BOC Reddit page, the supposition being that the tapes (and now an equally cryptic set of posters) mean that a new record release is on the way. We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, here’s DJ Food’s O Is For Orange 2025 (version 3), a Boards Of Canada-themed mix that I neglected to link to last year.

• “There is no artistic process that isn’t magical in that it’s an attempt to magically conjure an idea, something that is invisible and intangible, into material form…” Alan Moore (again) talking to Dominique Musorrafiti about art and magic. Also the comics business, which people really ought to stop asking him about when his reluctance to discuss his old work is so evident.

• “I’m not a commercial director—I’m not even a professional film-maker.” Jim Jarmusch talking to Amy Raphael about his career and his latest film, Father Mother Sister Brother. At Little White Lies, Claire Biddle examines the music in Jarmusch’s films and his collaborative albums.

• “Painting and sculpture influenced me greatly. You start to see the world, the outside, everything around you, the tone, with the eyes of seeing a picture that’s framed.” Irmin Schmidt talking to Adelle Stripe about his early life and Requiem, his new album.

• New music: All Clouds Bring Not Rain by Memorials; Afterlife Requiem by Those Who Walk Away; Where Light Pauses In The Silence Of The Sun by Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• At Colossal: Daniel Sackheim traverses Los Angeles’ noir side in The City Unseen.

• At Bandcamp Daily: Jim Allen on the sound of the ’70s French Underground.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Australian debut features.

• NASA Johnson

• Hexagon (1990) by Ruins | Octagon (1994) by Basic Channel | Triangles And Rhombuses (1998) by Boards Of Canada

On Babaluma

It’s never the same without the foil sleeve.

Since the death of Damo Suzuki I’ve been reading the Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt book about Can, All Gates Open. Can’s history isn’t exactly unfamiliar so it’s taken me a while to get round to it. I’ve been listening to their music for over 40 years, and bought the Can Box when it came out, a release which includes the Can Book, a substantial volume by Hildegard Schmidt and Wolf Kampmann containing career-spanning interviews with the core members of the group. Mysteries persist, however, so it’s been satisfying to have some of them resolved in the newer book, like the question of what exactly the title of the group’s sixth album, Soon Over Babaluma (1974) refers to. I’ve always liked this album, it was the second or third one I bought in 1981 when I found a secondhand copy of the original release in its shiny foil sleeve. Irmin Schmidt sings the words “Soon over Babaluma” on the second track, Come Sta, La Luna, a title which Young reveals as originating with Leonardo da Vinci. Then he has this to say:

Playfully extemporising from this text, Irmin cast his eyes across the studio to where Jaki’s girlfriend of the time, a woman called Christine, was perched on a sofa with accustomed stillness. “She had this really mysterious aura around her… She could sit there for hours like a cat not moving, or just drawing, or maybe doing nothing,” Irmin recalls. “So ‘Come sta, la luna’ was about Christine in a way. I’m talking about this girl who is going through walls. I don’t remember the words any more and I have never written it down. But there is something very spacey in the words—’Dancer on the rope, in the space’ or something. But when I wrote that, she was sitting in the studio and I was looking at her… I found her very mysterious and very beautiful.”

Almost by accident, the phrase “soon over Babaluma” emerged out of this stream of consciousness. “The word ‘Babaluma’ came out of a conversation with Jaki about the words. He maybe thought I had another word before, and he said, ‘What did you say? Babaluma?’ And because it rhymed with ‘luna’, it was a kind of playing with words—it didn’t mean anything. And it’s true surrealism. But the whole text is about something happening in space, out there. Seeing the moon and, from there, soon being over Babaluma—which must be another star or something. So it has another story behind it.”

So it was automatic writing after all. For a group whose compositions evolved out of endless improvisation this almost seems inevitable. Young makes a good argument for Soon Over Babaluma being Can’s cosmic album, made at a time when the kosmische idiom was peaking in Germany; even Kraftwerk were a little cosmic in 1973/74, with their Kohoutek-Kometenmelodie single being reworked for side 2 of Autobahn. There’s a lot of enlightening detail in All Gates Open, I recommend it. (Although I’m sure that’s a Stylophone solo on Moonshake, not a melodica as he seems to think.)

Meanwhile, Damo returns to the world this month with an official release for the Paris, 1973 concert. This one has circulated for years as a bootleg, and it’s a better showing by the band than some of the other recordings in the recent live series. More, please.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Holger’s Radio Pictures
• Jaki Liebezeit times ten
• Can esoterics
• Can soundtracks
• Can’s Lost Tapes

Switched-On… hits and misses

The first pressing of Switched-On Bach with a cover showing a Bach-alike confounded/dismayed by the sounds issuing from the machine behind him. The cover was soon swapped for the one below.

After mentioning the proliferation of Switched-On… synthesizer albums in the previous post, curiosity impelled me to see how many of these things were out there. A lot more than I expected is the answer, almost enough to make this cul-de-sac of novelty exploitation into a sub-genre of its own. As mentioned earlier, it was the huge success of Switched-On Bach (1968) by Wendy Carlos that began the trend. The album had a rare crossover appeal so that it could be sold to classical listeners as well as to a younger audience interested in electronic sounds, those for whom the words “switched on” echoed the druggy/erotic intersection of “turned on”. Carlos had an advantage over other musicians thanks to a long association with Robert Moog which meant she had a head start in exploring the recording potential of the new Moog synthesizer and innovations like Moog’s touch-sensitive keyboard. In 1968 few people could afford a Moog system; those who could usually needed to hire technicians like Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause to help them operate the thing. For a brief while it was enough to simply use the instrument to make strange noises, hence Mick Jagger’s droning score for Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), and George Harrison’s preposterous Electronic Sound (1969), 44 minutes of very amateurish Moog-doodling. Switched-On Bach sounds a little primitive today—it sounds primitive next to its follow-up albums, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969) and Switched-On Bach II (1973)—but Carlos and collaborators Rachel Elkind and Benjamin Folkman spent much more time refining their recording techniques than the knob-twiddling horde who rushed to capitalise on their success.

The rules of the Switched-On… idiom are as follows: a title that begins with the words “Switched-On”, obviously, although there’s a subset of the form in which an album may have a different title while a subtitle mentions something about “switched-on recordings”; the music must be cover versions of familiar songs or compositions, originality here is surplus to requirements; and it’s not essential but the cover art often alludes in some way to synthesizer technology and/or “the future”, with the latter represented by Space Age typefaces such as Amelia, Computer, Countdown or Data 70. I’ve not heard many of these albums, and I’m fairly certain that I don’t want to hear most of them, but I’ve heard enough Carlos cash-ins to know that the cover designs are often the best thing about them. The remastered CDs that Wendy Carlos released in the 1990s feature additional tracks that give some idea of the amount of work involved in the creation of each album. The early cash-ins, by contrast, tend to avoid time-consuming multi-track composition in favour of using a synthesizer as though it’s merely an expensive keyboard. The success of these albums musically may be gauged by the lack of reissues. They may be of interest to the so-bad-it’s-good “Incredibly Strange Music” crowd but I prefer to spend my time listening to other things. Beware.

Switched-On Rock (1969) by The Moog Machine.

Switched-On Bacharach (1969) by Christopher Scott.

Switched-Off Bach (1969) by Various Artists.

CBS exploits the success of the electronic album by packaging a collection of earlier non-electronic recordings.

Continue reading “Switched-On… hits and misses”

Weekend links 519

Cover of Minotaure no. 8 (1936) by Salvador Dalí.

• At Dangerous Minds: Irmin Schmidt talks to Oliver Hall about his new album of prepared piano, Nocturne, and also reveals more about the planned release of live recordings by Can.

• “Even the most zealous fan of the genre can learn something new from this book,” says Geeta Dayal in a review of Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, by Nate Patrin.

• The subject of a previous post but the video was later removed: Italo Calvino in a rare documentary feature for an English audience, on the BBC’s Bookmark in 1985.

• On 9th May, carillonneur Malgosia Fiebig played The Model by Kraftwerk on the bells of the Dom Tower in Utrecht as a tribute to the late Florian Schneider.

• Film footage of Alice Coltrane in her prime is a rare thing so even 17 minutes of TV from 1970 is something special.

• Dan Reynolds on the fantastic alphabets designed by Jean Midolle. See also Luc Devroye’s page.

• Mix of the week: Jon Hassell tribute, part 1: Jon and his collaborators, by Dave Maier.

• Nicolas Winding Refn on some of the films he’s been watching during lockdown.

• At Haute Macabre: Surrealist décor and tiny secret drawers.

• HP Lovecraft dreams of a Providence trolley car in 1927.

• The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things

• Xerrox Voyage, a new recording by Alva Noto.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jean-Pierre Léaud Day.

• The Model (1979) by Snakefinger | Model (1992) by The Balanescu Quartet | Das Modell (1997) by Rammstein