100 Various Artists - Gamelans De Bali 1964 Gamelan
Best Tracks; Le Gangdrung - 'Ouverture et Danse' and 'Air Sur le 3 Monde #2', Gamelon Djogéd Bungbung - 'Danse de L'eventail', Gamelan Saron - 'Musique Funéraire Pour le Lavement du Corps'.
And we'll start quietly, with this gentle pitter patter, chiming, smiling, beguiling. With this restless rattle and clang of percussion they call gamelan; a ancient music from Indonesia. It predominantly consists of melodic/percussive xylophone type instruments, but there's also strings, flutes and voice. This is a lovely collection of recordings from various gamelan ensembles made in the early sixties. The first three tracks by the Gamelan Selunding sound like some kind of medieval reinterpretation of soundtracks from 80s sci-fi films. The two tracks by Le Gambuh feature bamboo flutes which sound like ghosts turning over furniture whilst storming through an ancient temple. Gamelan Saron's twelve minute 'Musique Funéraire Pour le Lavement du Corps' chugs gently along with its chocky - blocky metallophones, stopping occasionally for the heavy thump of a drum, a tranquil train journey set towards that moment in the past you try to revisit but never quite reach.
The best tracks are the numbers towards the end of the LP. The L'Angklung and Le Gangdrung tracks are played with a cheerful intensity, dance numbers that startle with their effortless syncopation, complexity, chirpy melodies and percussion. 'Ouverture et Danse' in particular is an unrestrained, rickety joy, shuffling like a quite storm until the clouds part and xylophones appear and drop softly like rain on the dry earth.
My favourite gamelan compilation, and if you're unfamiliar with the genre there's enough fun and variety here to make it a good starting point.
It ain't so bad you know, lying there in the back garden during peak
summer on that awkwardly unfolded chair which nearly flips you over
backwards whenever you sit up in it. You can hear the snap and sizzle of
Mr Ramblebottom's BBQ next door, as smoke swells and swirls over the
fence and, lo! what is that? Rambles has some music playing! I never
knew he had it in him the drab old square! But what is this joyful sound
and sunburst? It's certainly not Pink Floyd. Why this moribund ball of
dregs might be worth saving after all!
The sound of some lazy
vibraphone patter mingles with the smell of burning delicious fat and
you look up to an aeroplane shooting streaks of white into the cloudless
blue and for that one fleshy moment you're locked inside that scratchy
reggae groove, hands as light as wisps of smoke, hungry, on fire. There
are wrens and magpies and alders and aspens and you are not separate.
You are soil you are silicon you are stone. You are God. You are swine
that's been sweating in the same t-shirt for three days. What joy! What a
dreadful musky stench.
You see a wood pigeon shi . . . .
AHHHHHHH! A fly! You flip over backwards from the chair and spill some
lemonade up your leg and you curse and compose yourself as the fly
decides to take a swim in the glass of severely lacking lemonade. What
would Mr Ramblebottom think? He's scratching his bum and nodding at his
beer can. I think I got way with it. Ah, bless him and his gluttony.
Then the buttery fingers of the sun creep up and around your neck whilst
a passing breeze caresses your cheeks and you relax and drink the
lemonade anyway. Such a treacherous life dear English summer!
But
instead you're in a freezing cold flat with dead spider guts on the
walls listening to some mildly irritating elevator music. In Croydon.
Main Source - Breaking Atoms
Spent the afternoon lazing in the garden's sunshine listening to this. It was fucking bliss. The rippling bass lines, the fruity organs,
the rays of the sunshine and the snap and crackle of the beats causing tingling feelings round the spine. The thoughtful humility of the words
with not an ounce of lazy misogyny in sight. There were several moments - the keyboard solo of 'Watch Roger', Elephant Memory's hazy "ooo aahh"'s backing 'Baseball', the bass line to 'Vamos', the cries of "he got so much soul, he don't need no music" - moments where I had a strange primal urge to run up my garden shed and cling on to the roof, pull myself up and take the big run and leap onto the roof of my house Parkour style and raise a triumphant fist up to the neighbourhood below. The fact that I'm recovering from a broken leg may have saved a few blushes. The entire LP kills it and
will receive a lot summer spins.
John Cale - known for his work with maverick underground artists such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, The Stooges and of course, The Velvet Underground - released his fourth Lp Paris 1919 in 1973. His backing band are boogie rockers Little Feat who provide this album with much punch and zing. Producer Chris Thomas last worked with Procol Harem and provides many lush orchestral tones although Cale himself dismissed the LP as "alright, but I don't want to make Procol Harem albums all my life." Ignore the bugger. Cos Paris 1919 is bloody brilliant.
'Child's Christmas in Wales' is the perfect opening track, instantly invigorating with its jaunty piano riff and wailing guitar sauntering over the hill. It's first example of the subtle experimentalism that is scattered throughout Paris1919, a six second riff with an impossibly complex time signature (or is it a standard 4/4 beat playing tricks on my mind? Either way you've won Mr Cale.) And then there's the opening line - sung, as always, by a man that sound like he could do with a warm blanket and a cup of coco - "The mistletoe of candle green, to Halloween we go", a lyric and image that threaten to rip at the fabric of the space time continuum. The cut and paste style wordplay on this album means I haven't got a clue what he's going on about most of the time, but when he throws gorgeous pastoral images at you like " the cattle graze bold uprightly" it doesn't matter. 'Child's Christmas in Wales' is uplifting and boogie-tastic, yet the scarred, haunted 'Andalucia' is even better. A song that's longing for people and places that will never return. Over lovingly plucked acoustic guitar chords and a Velvets style to-and-fro riff Cale sings his tenderest of vocals, especially with the line, "your face doesn't alter, your words never falter". Then he stretches his voice to the limit with a cathartic "I loooove you". Best of all 'Andalucia' its wrapped up with those beatific, twanging, sliding pedal steel guitar sounds, the type that were later nicked by Belle And Sebastian and Camera Obscura, and the type that get me all moist in the eyes and mushy at the knees.
Elsewhere closing track 'Antarctica Starts Here' is the only song I know that is twee and sexy at the same time. Then there's the retard reggae of 'Graham Green', a song sung with delicious disdain. I love the way he sings, "Stiffly holding umbrellas, catching the fellows making the toast", his welsh accent lending charm to his contempt. The accent twinned with his literacy know- how make for many exciting moments. Witness the moment in the title track when he rolls the words "how the Beaujolais is raining, down on darkened meetings on the Champs Elysée", all prim and proper.. When I first heard 'Hankey Pankey Nohow' I rather absurdly thought Cale was repeatedly saying "hackey paki nohow" in the chorus. 'Hankey Pankey' features one of the albums most evocative lyrics as Cale ponders;
"Nothing frightens me more
Than religion at my door
I never answer panic knocking, falling
Down the stairs upon the law
What law?"
These words strike with a pang when you realise that Cale was apparently molested as a child by a priest. (They're all at it aren't they?) This may explain why John sounds so unsettled on the title track where he sings "I'm the church and I've come to claim you in my iron drum" before a ominous violin darkens the corners of your mind while those words hang in the air. Otherwise 'Paris 1919' is quite a light hearted track, all jerky descending strings, 'Elenor Rigby' if she wasn't so depressed. It's also so dam catchy that I'm sure it's not legal. If you sat in you're bedroom and played the chorus on repeat for so long that you turned into a skeletal bag of excrement, with relatives that presumed you dead months ago - you'd still find joy in the way John briskly sings the "la,la,la,la,lal,la". (As a bonus 'Paris' is infectious on an international scale because everyone knows what "la" means".) In fact, for some one that's so renowned for their work on the mysterious and intimidating avant-garde scene, Cale is a stonkinly great pop songwriter.
The best tracks here may sound like likable but standard pop-rock fair at first. But slowly and steadily they'll creep up on you from all sides and gorge themselves into your consciousness until all other pop music sounds clumsy and inadequate. Its as if Cale took his experimental knowledge into a laboratory and, with the help of some adrenaline samples, grown man tears and a test tube full of post-gig sweat, conjured up an album of cosmic energy and chord patterns that seem to intertwine with your every thought and emotion, answering your mind and souls every whim releasing pleasure bubbles when and where you need them and I'm getting emotional now but fuck it, I'm hungover and I've truly come to love this record. I am Paris 1919. Paris 1919 is God. We are all God. We are all one. And you know what? I'm gonna commit the ultimate sin and admit I love this way more than any Velvet Undies Lp. Of course I like them and all that but Lou Reed always feels too cool for school, detached and exotic. Nothing wrong with that but there's not an equivalent in the V.U catalogue to Cale singing,"What's needed are some memories of planing lakes, those planing lakes will surely calm you down", as if he's got his arm around your shoulder, or "Needing you, taking you. Keeping you, leaving you", said with genuine regret rather than Reed's junkie nihilism and narcissism.
Cale, like me ( and I'll hazard to guess you. Yes YOU reading this) is one of the awkward ones, doomed to be an outsider looking in. (Or should that be inside looking out? Actually it should. The production of Paris 1919 means that hearing John's voice and trying to pick out the words is the auditory equivalent of squinting through the condensation on your window to get a glimpse of a blue bird, or spying on the neighbours you're to embarrassed to talk to.)
Empathy bounces between you and Cale throughout Paris 1919's duration. With Lou Reed you either want to punch him, fuck him or feel sorry for him. Or all three if you're feeling kinky (and he'd enjoy it.)
Paris 1919 takes us on a trip through Dunkirk, Paris, Dundee and Andalucia with music that evokes numerous time periods. To me it's like a travelogue pieced together years after the event, with all the distortions and half memories left unedited. But in the end you get the sense that Cale was never anywhere in the first place, slipping through the net ignored. And this sense makes . . .um sense when you consider that Cale was unable to communicate with his English only speaking father for most of his childhood. He's a ghost la, la, la, la.
If you've made it through this neurotic ramble of a review and have been left with an achy, muddled head, then do yourself a favour. Stock up on some Paris 1919 and feel it nourish the mind. It's unassuming charm will surely calm you down.
