Erik Satie ...... Collected Piano Works
Kraftwerk ...... Minimum Maximum (laptop version!)
The Durutti Column ...... LC, Another Setting
Kate Bush ...... Hounds Of Love
Fonotone Records ...... Best of
Suns Of Arqa ...... Jaggernaut
Jan Jelinek ...... Kosmischer Pitch
British Murder Boys ...... various 12"s
The Fall ...... A Past Gone Mad
African Headcharge ...... In Pursuit Of Shashamane Land

Someone just visited my Last.FM page and I thought I'd see what they were listening to and I noticed the name Power Tools, hence the following post. Strange Meeting. 1987. Longer ago than I like to think. Antilles was a sometimes forward-thinking record label and this was its most interesting release, imo. Power Tools was a trio headed up by retiring axeman of the moment Bill Frissell, the inestimable Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums and sometime Arto Lindsay bassist Melvin Gibbs. I listened to Strange Meeting a lot at the time. As I only have it on vinyl, I put on some Naked City, specifically the creaking, spooky Leng T'che. I'm going to see whether I'm up to the 31 minute Absinthe when it arrives, I'm still on the radioactive horror of Fleur Du Mal at the moment. And now it's been sliced open by Artemisia Absinthium... Anyway, Power Tools. After a little checking, it seems it's been long out of print. An Amazon UK reseller is trying to sell a copy at the ridiculous price of £101... Amazon US resellers are trying for around $70 and on eBay a vinyl copy is going for $3.99 with 3 days to go. Of course my copy's upstairs in the cupboard. Another reason to buy a record player, perhaps, or more likely resurrect my old Leak Truespeed deck (for which Google returns no references). Anyway, Power Tools. Was a brilliant, shredding trio that I'd love to hear again. Frisell I lost touch with sometime after his sixth album, once he'd travelled too far from the me(n)tal path that I so enjoyed, Shannon Jackson faded into the shadows sometime round the mid '90s I think (last I heard he'd gone back to Texas to look after his ailing mother)... this is starting to sound like that lyric to Iggy Pop's Dum Dum Boys... Strange Meeting is one to watch out for anyways, it deserves a reissue. In the meantime here's a fine Naked City track in their death ambient mode...

PS Can't help but think that Leng Tch'e prefigures Sunn O))) by a decade and a half and the fact that Frisell was a floppy haired mid-westerner lends the music an extra frisson or three.

MP3: Naked City / Artemisia Absinthium

Just spotted via ILM:

We're delighted to announce that Scott Walker has completed work on his first album for the label. The long-awaited new album - called "The Drift" - will be Scott's first since the ground-breaking "Tilt" was released in 1995. 4AD will release the album worldwide in May. The exact date will be announced shortly. A documentary film about Scott's music - including the making of "The Drift" - is being made by the New York -based director Stephen Kijak. Titled "30 Century Man", it will also be released in 2006.

Expectation increases from this moment on. Also a degree of nervousness: I'd rather hear nothing more from Walker than anything that dilutes the impact of Tilt. Most amusing response on ILM has to be this one:

'Tilt' still hasn't quite sunk in for me. And now I've got a whole new album to ponder over? He should give us a little more time between releases.

Ian Penman's brief preview proves promising:

It's called "The Drift".Ten tracks (last one acoustic just like Tilt and Climate of Hunter). Like Tilt only more so - darker, stranger, further out, further in. Astonishing stuff. Three or four of the tracks (at least) career highlights: so powerful I had to listen to it in two or three track bursts. Tracks two and three actually disabled me for about 45 minutes after (the way "The Electrician" and "Farmer In The City" did when I first heard them, only more so). If you got Tilt, you'll love this. "Haunting" doesn't begin to do justice to its emotional complexity.
Inspirational: a 63 year old who makes musicians - artists - a third his age seem like cop outs; and makes 53 or 63 (or 46) seem like a good age to really start living... Worth the wait - and then some.

Assuming he's referring to Tilt's extension of Climate Of Hunter, a similar extending of Climate seems sort of unimaginable. There's a lot of good snippets of info on the ILM thread that make it well worth sifting through, including this link to The Wire's 1995 interview with him which starts thus:

Well, I have to ask. Where have you been all this time? "Who knows, right? Hanging out. Doing a little travelling. Nothing constructive."

... the kenning, a figurative device found in old Norse poetry in which a composite word is used as a metaphorical paraphrase of a common noun (e.g. "crowfood" for corpse, or "swordstorm" for battle).

from Borges, A Life by Edwin Williamson, p186

Just came across the above pictures of late '70s live Kraftwerk. As with their music, they've honed, but not radically rejigged their visual presentation.





Black and white stills have been replaced by a mixture of film and computer graphics; gone are the names rendered in neon light that stood at the feet of each performer; laptops replace the various tapes and small instruments of yore. But the four men are still ranged in a shallow semi-circle before a large screen. Those neon lights are surely housed in the Kling Klang studio somewhere, though perhaps Karl Bartos's was consigned to recycling long ago.

Jesus Command Systym. From writing on the wall of Lee Scratch Perry's Black Ark Studio. Spelling of 'systym' as it was written. Picture from Reggae Photos.