astral social club

Neil Campbell has been in service of noise/drone/thirdeye whatcha longer than most of it’s current practioners were very much younguns. His newest project, Astral Social Club, just had it’s first mass-market edition released on the holy VHF label. Why everyone isn’t jumping up and down about this is sort of beyond me. I guess this CD is a collection/remix of his first 7 cdrs, but all different and all new and all towards heaven. Lots of folks can make claim to taking influence from Taj Mahal Travellers and Wolfgang Voigt, but this man actually delivers. Go. get. now.

it don’t worry me….

RIP Robert Altman.

He made movies seem like music. Dialogue under his hand became fluid and beyond rote recitation. He did in his films what all good modern composers do; hire the best people and let them play within your framework.

There’s a great moment in a documentary for “Short Cuts” where he is instructing cinematographer Walt Lloyd how to shoot one of the wide shots in the “fishing with the corpse in the water” sequence. He says something along the line of “Just shoot that first, then move the camera over there.” What follows is a beautifully composed piece of film that looks like it was mulled over for months. That is how easy it can be: have an idea, get the best people you can to help you realize it and then be surprised.

And his surprise was ours, nearly every time.

listening this weekend

Cluster-Sowiesoso (Water)

Keep ‘em coming Water. German music (I’m not going to say Krautrock) from the 70’s has been out of price range for too long (oh, I know that is not supposed to matter, but that’s another post) but Water’s affordable reissue campaign of German electronic music and Italian Prog has been one of the more happier developments of the Please Buy CDs era we live in. The music is perfectly light and breezy, and you get to see great pictures of Mobius and Rodaelius in sandals. Good.

Klaus Schulze probably never owned sandles. But his Irrlicht (SPV reissue) record is a doomy blast, with lots of not-synth synth sounds. You can kind of tell he was having fun. Doomy fun.  Like Hive Mind.