" – Peu importe d’où l’on vient. Il n’y a pas de tonique. Le thème et son développement ne sont qu’un mirage…
Il y a une musique toujours inattendue.
– Et les dissonances ?
– Dieu les a créées, elles aussi…"
Jaume Cabré - "Voyage d'hiver" - 2014

”La terre, il se pourrait bien après tout que ce soit une espèce
de merveilleux petit appareil enregistreur, plaçé là par on ne sait qui,
pour capter tous les bruits qui circulent mystérieusement dans l’Univers.”
Pierre Reverdy - ”En vrac” - 1929

”J’entends tous les bruits de la terre grâce à mes oreilles et mes nerfs de cristal
dans lesquels circulent le feu du ciel et celui des volcans.”
Michel Leiris - ”Le point cardinal” - 1927

"L'écoute, c'est l'ombre de la composition"
Pascal Dusapin - 2008

"Go, go, go! ... Go! go! ..."
John Lee Hooker"

 

21/06/2013

Nature boy


Eden Ahbez (born George Alexander Aberle - 15 April 1908 – 4 March 1995) was an American songwriter and recording artist of the 1940/1960, whose lifestyle in the West Coast was influential on the hippie movement.
Living a bucolic life, he used to sleep outdoors with his family and claimed to live with three dollars per week.

*** here***  are interesting documents of one of his friends, Joseph Romersa, who archived Ahbe's story.



He composed many instrumental music in "exotica" style, and wrote the famous "Nature boy" for Nat King Cole, a tune which was covered as well by Franck Sinatra , Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, David Bowie, John Hassell, Grace Slick, Etta Jones and many others.

here the Nat King Cole version with the delicate jazz guitar player Oscar Moore

17/06/2013

Pacific 231 - 2


Despite of the movie version of Jean Mitry in 1951, there is an unknown earlier version directed by the russian painter and film-maker Mikhail Tsekhanovski (1889-1965) in 1931.


thanks to "les cloches d'Atlantis" and Philippe Langlois for information

13/06/2013

Experimental music



This 2005 ' BBC's movie, titled "Here's a piano I prepared earlier" , directed by John Warburton, was made with the searcher Jacob Blimsy.
It features John Tilbury, Stella Cardew, Hugh Davies, John White, Gavin Bryars, Sarah Walker, David Bedford & others.
It traces music's most daring innovators of the 60s as Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen, Michael Nyman, John Cage, Terry Riley & the Portsmouth Sinfonia.



Here's a Piano I Prepared Earlier (3rd Dec 2005) TVRip XviD from phil scorzonera on Vimeo.

12/06/2013

Visual sound


 A short movie around the work of the artist Christine Sun Kim.

"I'm seeking a way to rearrange the hierarchy of information, remove language constraints, and place value on non-linearity and spatiality. It's also about the ownership of sound; I'm reclaiming sound as my property and challenging its orthodoxy."

06/06/2013

Paint movie


"Paint movie" is an experimental film painted and directed by the artist Rafael Gray in 1995.
Each picture of this "voyage" was shooted and painted by the artist.
Featuring Allan Kaprow and lot of anonymous people, it describes a drifting travel across the USA.
The music is composed and mixed by Jean Jacques Palix & Tom Darnal, former of the band "P18".


04/06/2013

Incantation


 
Ashkeen Tamanyan is an obscure greek female artist  (1939 - ??) who met John Allen Cassady
and travelled with him during a journey in USA in the early 60s. After this "trip", her sculptural work did evolve to live performances.



"Incantation" (circa 1963)
from tapes called "Δυσπραγία της ψυχής"
recorded by Ashkeen and discovered in a storage by the independent curator Jack Perry Nolte.
 
III-o-III

03/06/2013

Pozzi Escot


Pozzi Escot is an american composer born in 1933 in Lima, Peru.
Graduate of the Juilliard School and the Musikhochschule in Hamburg, she is author of  "Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music" & "The Poetics of Simple Mathematics in Music", a study of the geometrical grounding and mathematical structure of various music traditions from the Middle Ages, Romantic era, Native American Indians or contemporary European avant-garde.
As a composer, the foremost American critic Virgil Thomson regards her as "to me the most interesting and original woman composer now functioning." 
In 1975 Escot was chosen as one of the five remarkable women composers of the twentieth century and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra premiered her "Fifth Symphony, Sands" (1965).

in conversation with Bruce Duffie


one of her works : Three Poems of Rilke (1959)