Music Review: Daniel Blinkhorn - Terra Subfonica

(Gruenrekorder Gruen117)
CD
A new entry into the Gruenrekorder Soundspace series and another very interesting and evocative experience of re-contextualised sounds.
I am glad that I listened to this a few times before I opened the booklet. I'm a fairly simple soul at heart and I'm not a huge fan of over-intellectualising music or of tagging cumbersome philosophies or explanations onto things. I just like the sounds. I'm not saying that any of those things are in any bad or wrong, I'm just saying I dislike them. Having now read the booklet that accompanies this album I suspect the composer would disagree with me as each track has been explained and analysed to within an inch of their lives with some quite cringeworthy text which to my mind destroys any mystique or even the art within the composition reducing it to a chemistry experiment or a cooking recipe.
If you'll forgive me the conceit of continuing with that latter analogy though, musically, this is a very fine dish filled with varied flavours and textures that are revealed with each bite. Prepared with ingredients that for the most part feel fresh and well sourced and the overall feeling of satisfaction upon completion is delightful. Just, whatever you do, don't ask the chef for the recipe.
www.gruenrekorder.de

Wonderful Wooden Reasons is a webzine dedicated to experimental and non-commercial music of all forms.
Please visit www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk to access our extensive archives of music, book and movie reviews.

Music Review: The Infant Cycle - Posthumousness Now

(The Ceiling CEIL036)
mini-CDR
I've had a real soft spot for the music of Jim DeJong and his restless and jittery approach to composition. His music is filled with a constant sense of propulsion as he uses rhythms in ways which others have seemingly not yet noticed. Married to this is his grasp of the fundamentals of a damn fine drone that can both hover and also insinuate itself into the cracks in your attention span until it establishes itself at the absolute epicentre of your awareness. But at the core of his music is a powerfully industrialised ambience that permeates through and gives the whole an addictively gritty quality.
This tiny little EP is, it seems, Jim's final word and he has chosen this opportunity to ride off into the sunset. I wish you well Jim and hope that whatever project you point yourself at next brings you joy.
(www.theceiling.ca)

Wonderful Wooden Reasons is a webzine dedicated to experimental and non-commercial music of all forms.
Please visit www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk to access our extensive archives of music, book and movie reviews.

Music Review: Gushing Cloud - Beat Wings in Vain

(Intangible Cat CAT 018)
CDR
The folks at Intangible Cat have been sending some interesting music my way for a little while now and this one is no exception although it is a little different to those others. What we have here is an altogether more melodic and decidedly psychedelic beast that the previous experimentalisms. With hints of krautrock, San Franciscan psyche and the crusty space dub excursions of folks such as Ozric Tentacles it makes for a fascinating listen as it wanders along its merry way . It's been a while since I've really delved into this type of thing although back in the early nineties when I was considerably more chemically assisted than I am now I loved me some trippy, bouncy music and this is bringing back some nice memories. It's really well done, has just the right balance of restless energy and swirly mesmerics and is filled with colour and wonder.
www.intangiblecat.com

Wonderful Wooden Reasons is a webzine dedicated to experimental and non-commercial music of all forms.
Please visit www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk to access our extensive archives of music, book and movie reviews.

filling the gaps

Hello. It's the beginning of April and I've finally got enough of a gap in my busy to stop for two minutes and say hi and explain what's going on with Quiet World and Wonderful Wooden Reasons. Since Xmas I've been frankly absurdly busy chasing my tail around the seemingly never ending piles of grading and admin work thrown up by my day job (college lecturer) whilst also suffering a bit of a relapse of some health issues I had a few years back.
As I'm sure is the case with many of you being able to pay the bills takes precedence over everything else and so, with the exception of a couple of weeks where it was just to difficult to get out of bed I stuck my head into my workload and kept it there. This meant of course that other things had to, temporarily, fall by the way side. Namely QW & WWR. Neither of them are gone though, far from it in fact. In a couple of weeks time there will be a new release on QW from Scottish musician Andrew Paine.
Whenever possible I have been scribbling done some notes for what I've been listening to and there are a few half written reviews sitting in my notebook that I will try and kick into shape over the next few days and get them online.
My apologies to you all for the lack of updates and info but I haven't had much opportunity to stop by and post and on the rare occasion when I had time I didn't have the inclination and usually opted for either eating or sleeping. I'm odd like that.
Anyway, the workload has lightened a little for the next couple of weeks at least and whilst I'm not feeling 100% I am certainly feeling better so I'm hoping to take the opportunity to get some stuff done.
Peace and love to you all and I'll be back in a day or two with some postings.
Ian H

Networked Blogs

If you scroll down the sidebar a bit you'll find a new addition to the blog.  As well as the usual subscribe and email notifications options you can now also keep up to date with Quiet World and Wonderful Wooden Reasons via Networked Blogs should that be the sort of thing that you'd like to be able to do.

Music Review: V/A - Classroom Projects

(Trunk Records JBH049CD)
CD
This newer release of music by children lacks the sheer gonzo insanity that made it's precursor on the label - 'Music For Children' by Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman - such an amazing and compulsive listen but has much to recommend it in it's own right.
Collated from a variety of recordings made by school children between 1959 and 1981 it features folk songs, experimental oddities and a version of 'Bright Eyes'.  For me the definite highlights are the moments of avant-garde wonderfulness scattered throughout the album courtesy of an album by the name of 'Sound & Silence' but there are many moments of simply sublime music littered across the album, and a version of 'Bright Eyes'.
I was in primary and secondary school through the 1970s (the year of the latest recording here is the year I started senior (comprehensive) school) and so this sort of free and rather bucolic approach to musical education brings back some strange memories and raises some odd feelings (even though the songs we sung in school were in Welsh).
It is a wonderful selection of tracks that manages to hold that sense of wistful nostalgia whilst also remaining vital and entertaining.  Even on a version of 'Bright Eyes',
(www.trunkrecords.com)


Wonderful Wooden Reasons is a webzine dedicated to experimental and non-commercial music of all forms.
Please visit www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk to access our extensive archives of music, book and movie reviews.

Book Review: Tove Jansson - Comet in Moominland

I found a great old Puffin edition of this in a charity shop recently and it turned out to be absolutely fantastic. Apart from having a beautiful cover featuring Moomintroll, Snork Maiden and Snuffkin on stilts walking across the seabed it also has sumptuous images inside such as Moomintroll pearl diving in one of Hokusai's waves and Sniff staring through a telescope at the titular comet passing through Van Gogh's Starry Night sky.
The story tells of Moomintroll and Sniffs journey to the astronomers to discover whether the comet they have been having premonitions about is going to hit the planet.  Along the way they meet a variety of weird and wonderful folk and have many odd little adventures.
The book is filled with awe, wonder, imagination and warmth and was a truly wonderful experience.


Wonderful Wooden Reasons is a webzine dedicated to experimental and non-commercial music of all forms.
Please visit www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk to access our extensive archives of music, book and movie reviews.

Music Review: Yann Novak - Paradise & Winchester

(Unfathomless U14)
CD
If I was to tell you (which I am actually about to do) that these recordings were made on the Las Vegas strip I'm pretty sure that the sounds that would start running through your head would bear little resemblance to those that make up this very lovely album.
The two areas of the strip where this was recorded, and after which it was named, are here represented at their 'quietest'.  Occasional sirens, disembodied and disassociated speech along with amorphous and dislocated sounds pass through the tonal wash that centres the piece.
It's a refreshing (a strange term for souds that are quite this claustrophobic) and oblique piece and one that is as nebulous as I imagine the place itself to be without once resorting to the conceptual cliches that haunt people's perseptions of the place.
(www.unfathomless.net)


Wonderful Wooden Reasons is a webzine dedicated to experimental and non-commercial music of all forms.
Please visit www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk to access our extensive archives of music, book and movie reviews.

Music Review: Andrea Borghi - Music per Nastro (Tape Music)

(Spectropol Records spect16)
CDR
This time round Borghi brings us 10 tracks of electric ambience realised using bass, mics, computer, effects, samples & field recordings. According to the inlay it's intended to be a tribute to 1960s tape music but in what way I'm not certain.
What we get is a pretty involved and restrained set of predominantly synthetic sounds - buzzes,  creaks, jitters, clangs - that together create an eerie and generally lonesome atmosphere of forlorn abandonment.
It's quite restrained throughout and never does anything overly obtuse or eccentric.  Instead it maintains it's pace and it's aura throughout to create something quite immersive and nicely unsettling.
(www.spectropol.com)


Wonderful Wooden Reasons is a webzine dedicated to experimental and non-commercial music of all forms.
Please visit www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk to access our extensive archives of music, book and movie reviews.

Yair Yona's - A Day in Tel Aviv

Yair is an Israeli musician who I've been in contact with for a few years now.  His current project is the absolutely fabulous Farthest South whose first album I wrote this about recently...

 

Farthest South - Omens & Talismans
What we have here is a new ensemble featuring a couple of guys who've, separately, made a big impact on us here at WWR and now have, along with two new faces, teamed up to collectively blow my mind.
Saxophonist Albert Beger and Yair Yona (bass / effects) are here joined by Barry Berko on guitar and Yair Etziony on electronics and bass have exploded into action via 4 tracks of warped and blistering jazz influenced improvisational fire.
It's a stunning set with Beger's sax and Berko's guitar soaring over a shifting bedrock of sound. Occasionally things turn to a quieter more introspective direction but for the most part it's a pretty euphoric and ecstatic cavalcade of sound.
(www.farthest-south.com)
here's what they sound like...


What I'm trying to direct your attention to today though is another side of his work.  When he's not heading South on his bass he is a very wonderful - John Fahey-esque - acoustic guitarist as showcased on this series of 10 songs recorded around and about in his home city of Tel Aviv.  I think this is well worth some of your time.

you can watch them here

that post-Autumnal feeling

Out today is the first of two new releases on Quiet World; 'The World After Autumn' by me.

I've been slowly piecing this one together for quite a while.  The album's longest track ' The Daughter of the Sea and Me'  is layer upon layer upon layer of sounds and took over a year to get to the point where I was happy with the mix.
In a way it's almost a follow up to the 'Simple Ghosts...' album I made with Rhod and Steve the other year in that it's almost entirely acoustic and is very much a product of my various environments with sounds sourced from my garden, my classroom, one of the local beaches and of course my cramped and cluttered studyo (part study / part studio).

It's available on CDR in the usual very limited signed and numbered edition of 50 from www.quietworld.co.uk or as a download from the Bandcamp link at the bottom of this post.

i hope you like it.

Wonderfully wooden reasons

now online are the first updates of the new 'look' Wonderful Wooden Reasons.  it actually looks exactly the same but instead of doing the monthly update thing that has been driving me nuts for the last few years I'm adopting a more writer friendly as and when method that I can fit easier around my workload.

here's the link to the WWR site - www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk

I've also just uploaded a new mix covering this months reviews..

 

Wonderful Wooden Reasons (October 2013) by Quiet World on Mixcloud

All You Need Is (Geoff) Love

The first album I ever bought was a copy of 'Star Wars and other Space Themes'  by Geoff Love and his Orchestra.  It was about 1979 and I bought it in a jumble sale in next town along from the one i grew up in.  I think i paid a staggering 10 pence for it but I can't be sure.  I remember my mother looking at it disdainfully and asking what on earth I wanted it for which even at the time - at the grand old age of 9 - i thought was the stupidest question ever.  i mean look at it.  it's beautiful

Almost everything about it was designed to ever so slightly avoid copyright infringement.

She relented and I walked home the happiest kid in town and only got happier when the needle hit the groove.  I cannot begin to tell you the joy this album gives me.  the version of the Doctor Who theme is to die for and Star Trek isn't too far behind.  This was the beginning for me of a love for rearranged cheesy lounge music that has never gone away.

A good few years later a friend - now sadly no longer with us - turned up at my house with a gift he'd dug out of the back of a cupboard where it had languished for about a decade.  he handed be the carrier bag and my breath caught in my throat as i pulled the ugliest LP cover ever made from the bag.

But, oh my.  the track listing.  The perfect, and I do mean perfect, sister album to the one I already had.

It's another frankly awesome experience of the finest cheese.  The drum break in Batman is blistering.  Steve Austin never sounded so kitsch, Wonder Woman would still be shaking her star spangled booty and Spider Man is doing anything a spider can but he's doing it with a strut.

There are a couple of odd choices in there that don't really live up to the Superhero billing.  Dick Barton, The Saint and Blake's Seven not really living up to the title.  But album run times need to be filled and there were only so many superhero films and TV shows.

It was on the frankly insane 'Close Encounters...' album - credited to Geoff Love's Big Disco Sound - that Blake's Seven (check out the copyright free Liberator on the album sleeve) really came into it's own.  Along with the Omega Man theme it's the highlight of a collection of very unlikely disco reconstructions of sci-fi themes.

Through the rest of his career Love continued to churn out the reworked themes.  Westerns, TV shows, Disaster movies all felt his baton waved over them.  The Bond one is another to look out for.

He also did many, many more albums of love themes, kids music, etc.  there's a banjo one, several with Shirley Bassey and the one with my favourite title 'The Biggest Pub Party in the World: 36 Boozy Ballads' which is one of the most 1970s British sounding titles ever.

Anyway,  if you live in the UK and have ever looked in the record racks of a charity shop you will have seen many of Geoff's albums.  I counted 23 in one box once. Most of them are pretty awful but in amongst them are some real gems like the ones above.  So, to celebrate Mr Love and his busy, busy orchestra here is a mix I've made featuring some of my favourites from the 4 albums I've shown you up there.  Hope you enjoy.

Quietude #14: Geoff Love and his Orchestra by Quiet World on Mixcloud

In Space No-one Can Hear The Quietude

I'm having great fun making Mixcloud mixes at the moment.  I thoroughly enjoy doing the WWR ones but I'm in dire need at the moment of finding a way of making the zine into something that fits into the busy busy of my life.  I have an idea but that's something to lay on you all another time.  there is a new issue almost ready to go i just want to get two and a half more reviews down and then it'll go online later this week.

In the meantime I'm exploring different sides of my musical tastes that don't really get a look in within WWR.  I adore lots of genres of music.  I'm a magpie for the stuff.  if i find a genre i don't know I'll attack it and strip mine it of everything i like.  The Quietude mixes I've been doing of late are kinda reflecting some of these, in particular the more spacey and / or library music based ends.

Anyway, there's a new one (#13) gone online called 'Outer Space & Outta Sight'.  It features some library music, some Daniel Padden, some ukulele Star Wars, some Krautrock, some Bernard Hermann and a little bit of nu-jazz.

it's here - i hope you dig it.

Quietude #13: Outer Space & Outta Sight by Quiet World on Mixcloud

Stewart Lee and the Children of the Stones

I'm entirely certain that there are plenty of people out there who share my love of the odd, the fantastical and the wonderful in British film and television of the 60s and 70s.

I was giving 'Children of the Stones' a long overdue rewatch the other day whilst simultaneously googling the show and cast members to see what else they got up to when i came across a 30 minute BBC radio docu on the series called Happy Days: The Children of the Stones narrated by Stewart Lee.  I already knew he was a fan from the segment he did a few years back for one of Charlie Brooker's shows where he compared 'CotS' and 'The Changes' to more modern fare, 'Skins'.




The 'Happy Days' doc is light but fun and is well worth a listen if you're a fan.