Bring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi

This should have been really interesting.

In two specially created performances for Southbank Centre’s ETHER 08 festival, expressionist avant-garage rock band Pere Ubu presents the world premiere of Bring Me The Head of Ubu Roi, an adaptation of Ubu Roi (King Ubu), Alfred Jarry’s landmark 1896 play that inspired the band’s name and is widely seen as the precursor to the Absurdist, Dada and Surrealist art movements.

At the heart of Jarry’s original production was the use of various performance media, and Pere Ubu’s show reflects this with a unique visual staging by the enigmatic Brothers Quay, accomplised through intriguing stop-motion animation projections. Singer David Thomas will feature as Père Ubu, partnering Sarah-Jane Morris (ex-Communards) in the role of Mère Ubu, and the production includes an original music score by the band Pere Ubu and 10 new songs. Gagarin, aka London-based former Ludus, Nico and John Cale drummer Graham Dowdall, will contribute an electronic soundtrack. …..

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I would be glad to hear from anyone lucky enough to attend either of these evenings

Tōru Takemitsu [武満 徹] Music for Films [cd3, cd4]

This is the second post regarding Toru Takemitsu film music boxset.

In todays treat are featured cd3 and cd4. As my friend continuo noticed and added to the previous post [I did forget it, thank you for pointing it out] each cd is devoted to one director. Cd 3 is devoted to Nagisa Oshima while cd 4 to Hiroshi Teshigahara.

CD 3

1. Ai No Borei
2. Tokyosenso Sengo Hiwa
3. Natsu No Imouto
4. Gishiki
5. Furyo Shonen
6. Mitasareta Seikatsu

part 1 / 2 / 3

CD 4

1. Tanin No Kao
2. Summer Soldier
3. Otoshiana
4. Shiroi Asa
5. Suna No Onna
6. Jose Torres
7. Moetsukita Chizu
8. Rikyu

part 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

These cd were ripped and are presented here in flac format. Quality does matter and flac will probably be the audio format of choice from now on for merzbau.

For cds 1 and 2 of the boxset and introductory post of these series look here.

Text and the Avant-Garde

Found while searching for something slightly irrelevant. Not extensive but nonetheless interesting article to read.

Text and the Avant-Garde

Berlin record stores

Shopping for records and cds in Berlin can prove really fruitful.

Staalplaat

Starting chronologically. The first ’boutique’ record store I visited during my very first hours in Berlin was the ‘notorious’ newly opened Staalplaat store, home also of Staalplaat label. Unusual and rather artistic in its approaches and tastes. Browse around while stumbling on variety of weird objects, rest you eyes on peculiar wall paintings and of course look everywhere [from old fridges and drawers to just plain selves for every audible curiosity you may or may not imagine. Alga Marghen boxes and cds, Col Legno, ridiculously small pressings of home productions, French avant-rock, PSF + other Japanese beauties, Luc Ferrari, Merzbow, Legendary Pink Dots, Evan Parker and a whole lot more.. Serve yourself a cold beer from the fridge and make sure that you have lot of time to spend.

Check pictures:

Address: Torstraße 68, 10119 Berlin

Opening hours : Tue-Sat: 14.00-19.00

Neurotitan

On the end of an alley, out of the dreams of an urban fetishist, lies the entrance to Neurotitan. Up a couple of floors using the stairs, walking by tattered and painted walls you reach the store. Not simply a record store but literally an art store. Featuring small edition books and magazines, comics and unique art pieces along with records and cds. There is also a separated space used as gallery equipped with a bar. Sparse furniture and open spaces, feels like a loft. Concerning music there is an expectable selection ranging from extreme electronics and noise, to improvisation and industrial. Look closely for some rare specialties. A lot of gabba and breakcore on wax. Shop around to your heart's content and rest assured that everything you buy is or feels unique.

Check pictures:

Address: Rosenthalerstraße 39, 10178 Berlin

Opening hours: Mon-Sat: 12.00 - 20.00, Sun: 14.00 - 19.00

[gelbe] Musik

Far from uber-hip Mitte [as if wilfully, to make a statement] [gelbe] Musik can be found. As minimal as it gets starting from the plain sign that reads Musik to the inside of the store neat, simple and tidy. Home of the ’serious’ avant-garde. Its boxes and selves are crammed with old magazines, books, cassettes, vinyl records and of course cds [most of them due to their volume are available only as booklets for browsing] of intellectual music, contemporary composers, free improvisation releases and some Fluxus audio documents. There is also a decent selection of ethnographic audio recordings and even some early music. You can of course hear to anything that interests you while looking for more. In case you are the only customer at the moment [probably not only then] you can enjoy what you have already chosen not through restricting headphones but on the shop’s speakers for complete freedom of movement. Owned and run by Ursula Block, whom you can see working on her sleek ibook one moment and the other one hear her typing on her typewriter. A visit to [gelbe] Musik is more than essential, dmtls was impressed.

Check pictures [dmtls 'on the work']:

Address: Schaperstraße 11, 10719 Berlin

Opening hours: Tue-Fri: 13.00-18.00, Sat: 11.00-14.00

There is no website but there is an email gelbe[dot]musik[at]berlin[dot]de for mailorder.

KulturKaufhaus Dussmann

Finally there is KutlurKaufhaus Dussmann. It is your one stop for everything from books and DVDs to music. A huge, multileveled store open from 10.00-24.00 daily except Sundays. A big selection of everything you might ask with a lot of ‘New Music’ titles on separate department found on the classical floor. Not really that cheap when it comes to common editions and releases [compared to other chain record stores / super markets] but with many many interesting titles in its inventory. There is also a cafe that might [probably] come in handy.

Address: Friedrichstraße 90, 10117 Berlin

There is also Cover, advertised as the biggest used cd and records seller/buyer in Berlin. Not really impressive on cd collection, nor on vinyls. There are although many ‘classic’ classical and opera vinyls rather cheap and a fairly good choice of hardcore/punk and techno/electronic on wax. For some cheap cds [seen cheaper] you should try one of the Saturn chain stores. Lastly you can always try your luck in flea markets.

dmtls reporting from Berlin part 1.

Back from Berlin / merzbau on Air

Back from Berlin! Five days with a single breath. Give me some time to catch up and unpack and I will get back to merz. Long shopping list : 19 cds, 2 cd boxes, 2 vinyl records, 9 books, 1 2nd hand leather jacket and various bric-a-brac. Expect a detailed merzbau guide on Berlin with dos and donts and a variety of useful [?] info gathered before going and while being there, plus a handful of shops that dmtls recommends. There will be [probably] some photos also. More soon.

BTW check also this comment at merzbau Liska posts:

Hello … I’m doing a special programme on my radioshow on WFMU about the music of Zdenek Liska, Thursday, April 24th, 6pm - 7pm. I wanted to let you know that the programme would have been virtually impossible without this great blog you’re doing, many thanks for the Liska posts - without them it would have been virtually all made up of music from the Svankmajer films. If it’s ok with you I’d like to point listeners in the direction of your Liska blogposts from the online playlist. The show will also be permanently archived in streaming-audio at www.wfmu.org/playlists/ER

Cheers!

Don’t miss the programme as it will most probably be of much interest. It is a great pleasure to know that merzbau helped on the completion of a programme like this. Cheers Ergo Phizmiz!

destination: Amie Street #3

Lately my interest in Amie Street was reheated and there is a whole bunch of pretty good reasons for this.

Out and about dmtls’s new favourite street many interesting spots are to be found. Crammed and hidden under overgeneralised and widely misleading genre tags, the likes of alternative (sic), experimental and so on, an interesting selection of artists [at least to merzbau standards] waits to be explored while still being free or generally underpriced. From Neofolk to Musique Concrète and from Punk to Drone the list goes on as following:

Merzbow

Z’EV

Muslimgauze

Nocturnal Emissions [check Glossalalia album]

:Of The Wand and The Moon:

Death In June [you might also want to check for Boyd Rice]

Der Blutharsch [you might also want to check for Strength Through Joy]

Crisis

Bodulf Songs

Charalambides

Steve Roach and Vidna Obmana

Asmus Tiechens and Vidna Obmana

Legendary Pink Dots [be sure not to miss Shadow Weaver album, strangely enough listed under 'Shadow Weaver' artist!]

Edward Ka-Spel [recommended: Tanith and the Lion Tree]

Daniel Menche [recommended: Static Burn]

Controlled Bleeding

Lionel Marchetti [highly recommended]

That’s it for now. There are sure many discoveries to be made in the pop/rock fields also, but that is another story, of small to no interest to merzbau.

There is something going on @ Amie st., be sure to be around.

[off to] Berlin

dmtls flies to Berlin in about two days time.

Any recommendations/suggestions to add to merzbau to-do lists are welcome

destination: Amie Street

Back after a long time to Amie street.

Found five releases from the eclectic catalogue of Fondazione Atopos.

Vinko Globokar - La Tromba è Mobile

still for Free!

Various - Les mains veulent parler aussi [Jean-Pierre Drouet]

at $0.79

Richard Trythall - Parts Unknown

at $2.04 (only a couple of days ago almost a dollar less)

Olivier Messiaen - Quatuor pour la fin du temps

at $1.53

Various - XX live dream flute [Roberto Fabbriciani]

at $1.87

Be quick and get them while they are hot. They will for sure sell for more day by day.

Probably the most interesting of the above is the Globokar release featuring rare material, a must-have.

Polish Collection of the Warsaw Autumn 1956-2005

A 10-CD series entitled Polish Collection of the Warsaw Autumn 1956-2005 was produced and released by the Polish Music Information Centre for the Festival’s 50th anniversary (2006), the 50th Warsaw Autumn (2007), and the 60th anniversary (2005) of the Festival’s organiser, Polish Composers’ Union.

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A grand edition, limited to 500 copies, for promotional use only (not for sale). Presented here in lossless format (.APE), complete with accompanying written material, as a torrent, due to the size of it (~3gigs). The torrent was found (not created by dmtls) and must be kept alive, given the nature and the small distribution of the release. Merzbau will seed it on a regular basis. [It will be immediately removed, if there are any complaints received by the artists featured in it or by owners of the material contained within]

get torrent

Tōru Takemitsu [武満 徹] Music for Films

Takemitsu’s contribution to film music was considerable; in under 40 years he composed music for over 100 films, some of which were written for purely financial reasons (such as those written for Noboru Nakamura). However, as the composer attained financial independence, he grew more selective, often reading whole scripts before agreeing to compose the music, and later surveying the action on set, “breathing the atmosphere” whilst conceiving his musical ideas. One notable consideration in Takemitsu’s composition for film was his careful use of silence (also important in many of his concert works), which often immediately intensifies the events on screen, and prevents any monotony through a continuous musical accompaniment. For the final battle scene of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Takemitsu provided an extended passage of intense elegiac quality that halts at the sound of a single gun shot, leaving the audience with the pure “sounds of battle: cries screams and neighing horses”.

Takemitsu attached the greatest importance to the director’s conception of the film; in an interview with Max Tessier, he explained that, “everything depends on the film itself [...] I try to concentrate as much as possible on the subject, so that I can express what the director feels himself. I try to extend his feelings with my music.”

[from wikipedia]

 

Takemitsu wrote the music for 93 Japanese films. He was closely associated with film-makers of the Japanese new wave, and provided the score for such Japanese classics as Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes and Kurosawa’s Ran. His film music was as important to him as his concert music, chiefly because of his obsession with the cinema. He was the ultimate film-buff, and boasted that he saw around 300 films a year, his tastes embracing Hollywood blockbusters, westerns, art movies and trash. When visiting a strange country, would often head straight for a cinema as his first port of call, whether or not he understood the language. He drew parallels between music and film, in their manipulation of time, perception and memory.

‘I learn a great deal about people through movies…even if I can’t understand what they are saying and don’t know anything about their culture. By watching them in the movies, I can get a sense of their feelings and their inner lives. I come to understand foreign people in ways that are different from talking to them…it’s a musical way of understanding’.

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In the early 90s there was an edition of six cds [unsure if there was a vinyl version also], released and sold individually, featuring Toru Takemitsu’s film music. From what I can tell this series did not get wide distribution outside Japan and the small number of copies available is long now gone [after some careful googling there is a slight chance of tracking some last ones, three or four months ago seen a couple of them @ a European distribution site which name I cannot recall, but certainly not the entirety of the series]. In 2006, a box edition, featuring the cds mentioned above plus one with audio documents and interviews, was released and distributed only in Japan. To the best of my knowledge it is already out of print, thus presented in Merzbau.

CD 1

[artwork is faithful to the design of the original releases, bearing slight differences]

1.Kwaidan
2.Seppuku
3.Moeru Aki
4.Karamiai
5.Nihon No Seishun
6.Kaseki

part1

part2

CD 2

1.Kaseki No Mori
2.Chinmoku
3.Utsukushisa To Kanashimi To
4.Ansatsu
5.Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke
6.Hanaregoze Orin
7.Akanegumo

part1

part2

Documentary on Takemitsu’s soundtracks

found on youtube where it was uploaded by the musician Edward Lawes, keeper of Complement.Inversion.Etc blog.

part 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6

Extra: Do not miss a Xenakis interview also uploaded by Lawes on youtube [part 1 / 2 / 3]