Journal
‘When You Walk Through Me’ on Resonance FM
Another section from the Quiet Man novel, is being broadcast by Resonance FM on 1 February, 2010. ‘When You Walk Through Me’ will feature John Foxx on piano and he also narrates the story. For further details please visit here
Synthesizers & The Futurists
The Futurists were right – (about Music and Noise, at least).
In 1913/4 Luigi Russola constructed and demonstrated the futurist version of new musical instruments - ‘noise machines’. The concept of these machines emerged from the Futurist aesthetic of admiration for the products of new technologies. They also considered the sounds generated by these technologies – such as mechanical and engine noises - as beautiful.
In this way the Futurists enabled music to be considered as organised noise – and this is the basic concept that later enabled synthesizers to function, when they were invented and developed later in the 20th Century.
All synthesizers are, at source, noise-makers - this noise is filtered and shaped at various stages until the much treated source noise is transformed into a desired or useful sound.
Luigi Russolo with his assistant Ugo Piatti and their Intonarumori (noise machines) -
As we can see from the above photograph, the futurist noise machines also anticipated the size and function of modern PA performance systems.
Today’s enormously powerful electro-acoustic sound systems, designed for clubs and concerts, are noise making machines which amplify the sounds of recordings and live performances.
This concept of music as organised noise now seems to be a central tenet of modern music – drawn on by both popular and avant-garde musicians and composers.
Into This Era
Frank Sinatra . . . and The Close Up
(by John Foxx)
Sinatra was the first electronic vocalist *. He always used a microphone, and his singing technique was predicated on the principle of singing quietly against an orchestra or band.
A microphone and amplification system allowed you to do this. It required a completely new way of singing and you could imply intimacy to the audience by singing in this way - yet paradoxically you were actually louder than the entire band.
This worked beautifully on records and on radio, since Frank’s voice sounded close to the ear of the listener, as if the listener was receiving a personal message from the world of Frank. › Continue reading
The H-Man Movie Still & The Quiet Man Bridge Still
(by John Foxx)
I saw a movie still in an old American mag - Famous Monsters of Filmland - I think - in the 1960s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_-EccZ5ZIA&feature=related
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famous_Monsters_of_Filmland
It was such a powerful image - an empty suit and something liquid oozing from the sleeve. What could have caused this? What happened to the wearer - was he somehow absorbed, or had he become the liquid?
The photograph gave me so many ideas that I wanted to create something similar - minus the liquid. (That became a song).
I set up the suit and the armchair in my apartment and photographed it - with the help of Herbie Yamaguchi - a friend and a very talented Japanese photographer.
Before that, in 1977, I’d found a photograph in another American magazine from the late 1940s or 50s - this time a shadowy image of someone on a bridge in winter mist. I was looking for an identity for myself, and ideas for songs. These two stills gave me both.
I began to understand that photographs like this force us to make a mental movie for them. We seem to be compelled to make sense of what we see - to fit everything into our scheme of understanding.
If we encounter anything that is not easily explicable, we tend to marshal everything we know and bring it bear on the enigma. I guess so we can be sure that there is nothing harmful in there - I think it must have been one of the ways we’ve evolved to ensure survival.
The more evocative an image seems, really means the more connections it necessitates before we can begin to accomodate it.
Artists often exploit this tendency - they make works that encourage us to invent contexts and scenarios and possibilities - stories, in other words, that might provide explanation - in this case, of the mystery of the empty suit - by using our personal experiences, memories and connections.
Later, I discovered Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series. It was on exhibition at MOMA in New York.
I looked at the dates of the work. We were working on the same thing at the same time. Not too surprising, since our generation was the one most affected by these photographs outside the cinemas - they were intended to intrigue you enough to pay to go in to see the film, which was inevitably never as good as the one your imagination built in the instant you saw the still. Children experience this effect much more acutely than adults seem to, and we were those kids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sherman
She’d located that marvellous body of work in the environment of fine art, whereas I was working in popular music. I still enjoy the coincidence, though - and for me, that series of untitled film stills is one of the most singularly elegant, effective and affecting pieces of contemporary art.
Electronic Music (2): Kraftwerk - Autobahn
(by John Foxx)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68C-r9kSLNE
I heard this on the radio when it first a hit in the early 1970s.
It made me smile because it is a restatement of Barbara-Ann by the Beach Boys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3rGMpSc0j4&feature=related
For me this is the most important aspect of the song - apart from its electronic instrumentation - and surprisingly, seems to have been overlooked.
Kraftwerk wanted to make electronic autobahn music, as opposed to harmony beach music. This was their witty and intelligent initial manifesto.
They greatly admired the Beach Boys (and also Iggy Pop). But they were wise enough to realise they couldn’t model themselves on either without seeming foolishly inappropriate. So they set out to make a music and image that would be equally successful in describing their identity and environment, both actual and mythical.
It was also their mission to refer to European music rather than American forms. Popular music was busy imitating America - even Punk came from there.
In this one song, Kraftwerk seem to announce a reversal of all that, and through its ironic conversion they manage to transpose all the wild energy from the enormous tidal wave of American cultural stuff that had dominated Europe for so long - Sinatra, Rock ‘n’ roll, Hollywood etc - back into a new form of European music.
They carried this out with ruthless design efficiency and complete consistency. The result is one of the most powerful and influential bodies of work in modern music.
Elizabeth Fraser
Great news - the best female singer in the world re-emerges - singing sparkling and shining . . .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/26/cocteau-twins-elizabeth-fraser-interview
The Shadows & Kraftwerk
(by John Foxx)
Interesting one, this. An overlooked piece of electronic DNA.
When I was very young, I heard The Shadows music on the radio. The dark name and sinister song titles grabbed my imagination immediately - Frightened City, Man of Mystery, FBI, The Stranger. It all appeared moody, mean, modern and sinister. Fascinating, I thought. This is the future.
Later, it was all a disappointment. In succession, I came across the twee dance steps, the religion, the family friendly image …and Cliff.
I’d just dreamt into them what I wanted to see – something much more interesting – dark, futuristic and sharp – and yet . . .
The Shadows used American electric guitars – streamline profiles and paint jobs transposed from automobiles such as Cadillac, Chrysler, Lincoln, Mercury, Chevy. Even the model name ‘Stratocaster’ is redolent of futuristic power and sci-fi optimism. They looked like ray guns from a teenage movie.
The Suit
(by John Foxx)
Clothing has interested me since I was a Mod in the 1960’s.
Through all this I became aware that clothes can alter the way others perceive you - and also the way you behave. You sprawl better in jeans and move more elegantly and formally in a suit, for instance. And you feel different inside too.
When I found the grey suit in an Oxfam shop in late 1977 I realised I’d found something else - a new identity, which I badly needed.
By then I was depleted by being onstage - being in a band had been a mistake - I just wasn’t cut out for that kind of life. I began to understand I’d done all this mostly because it was necessary to support what really did interest me - writing and recording, using the recording studio. I also realised I was attempting to use the studio like a painter or sculptor uses their studio, because that’s where I came from.
I’d also come to resent the amount of time performing demanded - at least 23 hours for every hour onstage. Touring also depleted nervous energy and left me in serious need of repair. By the beginning of 1978 the need to change had become urgent.
As soon as I wore the suit, I realised - this was it. A new identity, a new mode of existence, and new possibilities opened out - here was a passport to the world, a kind of invisibility, the ability to evoke disinterest, leaving me free to explore. Tremendously exciting. Off I went.
For me at the time, the suit represented freedom - anonymity and invisibility. Along the way, I began to realise that it also carries many other connotations - the subscription to certain values, for instance, a certain convention of manners and behaviour - reliability, discretion, consistency. It infers civility, constraint, a certain removal from the everyday. Further along the same spectrum, but moving towards sinister, lies control, suppression - even a kind of oppression.
The suit is largely an urban phenomenon - the shape of a life and a person, taking their place along with millions of others - a small unit carried on the tides and rhythms of a great city. Simultaneously isolated and integrated, ever hopeful of romance, attempting to maintain dignity among the currents and pressures of urban existence. There are even a few notes of pathos in here, a sort of stoic acceptance that we can all recognise, since we are all inescapably woven into our time and place. › Continue reading
London Overgrown
(by John Foxx)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7STB6q_lz8E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv2PcguCQk4&feature=related
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highgate_Cemetery
HIGHGATE CEMETERY
I came to live in London for the second time in 1973 and lived for a while in Highgate. Spent much time exploring it on foot, often walking over the Heath to Hampstead down into Camden, Primrose Hill and the other peripheral areas, discovering how it connected to the rest of the city.
I remembered Highgate tube station from some years earlier, a glorious spring morning after The 14 hour Technicolour Dream at Alexander Palace in 1967. Ally Pally was huge, dusty and dim inside. I seem to remember going out through some French doors to a courtyard fountain, walking through a drift of leaves and thinking how it all seemed so Victorian and romantically shabby and neglected. This chimed perfectly with how Britain felt at the time. But here was this new generation inhabiting the ruins of previous versions of Britain, pulling down the dusty curtains and letting the sun shine in again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzNM8dJqTM&feature=fvw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umTS-CTo2Ek
I clearly remember a leafy sunlit stroll the morning after. Part of a slightly dazed procession from Alexander Palace through Muswell Hill, then down the walkway into the station under a maze of overhanging plane trees. London seemed like a magical place in the 1960’s. The centre of the world.
I felt that I would eventually come to live there, and now it was clear where I wanted to be. That part of north London seemed just right – Victorian and Georgian buildings, broad leafy roads and lots of gardens, parks and green spaces.
Thought Experiment: Unrecognised Effects of the Media
(by John Foxx)
1. THE REAL MATRIX
We all believe many of the things we have never seen or experienced - and probably never will.
For instance, most of us believe in the existence of the President of the USA, and in nuclear weapons. We may also believe that men have walked on the moon, and that there is a huge amount of gold stored in the Royal Mint.
Yet none of us has ever actually seen any of these - except through media of various kinds.
We all know, of course, that media is very easy to fabricate. So how can anyone be sure that these things exist, or really happened?
Also, our actual, first hand experience of the world is very limited. Most of the time we wake up, travel to a place of work, chat to people we work with, eat lunch, return to our homes, eat dinner, spend the evening with families or friends, then we go to bed. Next day we do it all over again. That’s about it.
Everything else we know about the wider world comes from books, newspapers, radio, television, the internet etc - in other words, from media. › Continue reading