i don’t usually go for transparent post titles but since the latest issue from yerbird (home to next week’s gig of choice in london) has such a great name, not to mention fantastic artwork too, well, why fight it.

(head over to salvage to read the beautiful quote from the inlay.)

pulling together the most interesting of the increasingly internet active new folk types, yerbird lynchpin, morgan has an ear for a storyteller in song. and what shouts loudly from this gently rousing intelligent collection of songs is how the oscillating hiss of a four track tape machine provides a level of intimacy you can’t replicate but which doesn’t get lost in the tendrils of myspace either.

the very homemadeness of folk music, warms me to it. not that homemadeness isn’t prevelant elsewhere, in fact electronic music is often more homemade than a lot of contemporary folk music. but i’ve a soft spot for a song who’s rhythm section doesn’t try to make you dance but reminds you of the heartbeat which made it. in fact perhaps its this is new soul music, or further reappropriation of the phrase r&b - created by musicians driven not necessarily to make crates of money, to work with will.i.am, pharrell or lil john, to get that david lachappell shoot or guest on a kanye joint but to lift a little something off their hearts and souls and tell a story.

the tracklisting is a healthy mix of familiar and utterly obsure, j.tillman’s barter blues is a moody cormac macarthy-esque story with uncharacteristic electronic elements, sarah white’s part of the story is slyly melodious, the hotel ghost’s appellation sounding plea to her family to pray for salvation on her death bed and hayden’s letter from london brings the percussion in at just the right moment.

the whole kit and caboodle is available now straight from yerbird and here’s a grower from massachusetts native oweihops.

oweihops - sad little drunks

i’ve been on the search for a pair of shoes recently which i think probably only exist in my imagination. which is not to say that they’re diamond encrusted or astronomically high or unfeasibly colourful but they are perfectly proportioned.

perfect proportion is something which fascinates me since its a concept which seems that it should be reducible to a formula.

and heaven knows formulae abound; vitruvious, fibonacci, da vinci, le corbusier, alberti have all posited universally applicable schemes for matching the most pleasing proportions to buildings, people, mathematics, and nature. and as appealing as many aspects of all of them feel, none quite manage it.

see, i think that pure aesthetics of proportion, like beauty can only really be held in the eye of the beholder and since our eyes are all at different points of latitude and longitude to our brains, subjects, fingers or feet at all times of the day its a sum so fraught with constantly shifting contingencies that its a waste to spend time considering whether it matches the golden ratio - when really all you need do is see how you feel when you engage with that chair, or building, that painting, or staircase or shoe.

which is not to say that i don’t gravitate towards all of the beautiful things produced according to those near perfect rules, frankly my obsession with most things skandi and borne of the idealistic modernist aesthetic has bored many of my cohorts (though not me - i still go weak at the knee at ercol chairs, artek tables and marimekko prints). so i’ll carry on my search for my implausibly perfect white calf leather shoes with six holes to thread a round jute lace through, a single inch of heel and an almond shaped toe all of which makes me look neither too short or too tall - and frustrating as it might be even to type out my wish list like that there’s a part of me which is gloriously happy that the ratio of heel to toe to height of arch i’m looking for is so specifically mine that no one else would ever make it.

here’s a track which i find perfectly proportioned in the most surprising of ways.

carl orff - musica poetica

people can do strange things in the name of love. they can kill, suppress, obliterate and deny. they can hurt, hate and destroy.

and then theres the things people do for love.

out of and in love.

it might be the joys of spring and bursting buds in the canalside hedgerows i’ve just walked past but i’ve been thinking that surely the best of life is that which is created in the expansive security which true love provides.

of all the beautiful things in the world, of all the art, music, architecture, literature, film, poetry. of all the feats of endurance, of sporting prowess, of academic, philosophical or scientific research and discovery. of all that was ever created to bring joy or to say thanks, the best and most affecting are those which came from the place of surity in the creator’s heart that they could and would accomplish what they had set out to do because they were doing it for love, with passion and confidence, with scope to fail and even more scope to achieve.

and despite what the first law of thermodynamics says about energy not being created or destroyed it seems that the exception which continues to prove that rule is when you open up to the possibilities of honestly loving something (or someone) it comes back at you ten fold.

and in a funny way that means the pressures off.

that old adage about setting that which you love free and having it return to you, i’d always thought was an angsty self sacrificial paean to accepting all manner of ill treatment in the name of love but i’d been putting the emphasis in all the wrong places in the sentence, in fact, maybe it should say if you love something then you let it free.

anyhoo, since we’re all a bit busy at hl’s various london outposts and things might be quiet this week i’m going to take the self indulgent liberty of posting my favourite birthday present, something which i’ve been looping so much that i’m starting to hear the hook in the city’s twilight chorus, passing shop doorways i think i catch it on a radio and the hydraulic closing of tube doors on the jubilee line mimics it’s tempo perfectly, from the crazy exclusive ‘in the light of day’ ep a man called horse spreads a little love in all your directions with this beautiful piece of work.

a man called horse - the way you want

And so as B-day rapidly approaches-thoughts (in my household anyway) turn to musical selections. Usually, I’m ashamed to say, it’s just a question of taking a few classics from the racks to bolster the virtual record bag I take with in the form of my laptop. This time things are a bit different-firstly I’m gonna be in the company of two of the most serious record heads I know and secondly this is a new beginning.

It’s time to start playing as well as I’m able (not just to tick the boxes of some mostly-rude, always-ignorant bar manager)-it’s time for basilika to start being about what it was always meant to-something about community, something about musical integrity, something true to the people who are involved, not compromised and hobbled by small minded people and the pressure to please some mindless drunk every friday night.

Sorry if this is turning into a rant-to be passionate about music is really difficult when you are also trying to make money from it-so Saturday will be all about the love and if you have the ears to hear the difference I think you will be moved and move (hopefully both at the same time).

Here is a track by a guy who inspired me a lot this year. Who made me want to take it back to my first love (the music) and forget about trying to please people who really didn’t care at all.

(sorry about the scratchiness of the recording-you should probably try and buy a copy)

Theo Parrish-Little Sunflower (ugly edit 3)

(photo taken from the amazing pallalink for the ‘swarm of angels project’)

 

i’m all for recognisable production styles - i mean i like nothing more than picking out the way a guitar is recorded or a handclap, or bass squelch as the leitmotif of a particular producer. and it can be a watermark of quality which’ll draw me closer to a recording like hand stitching on a lapel or limited print run publications but when a superproducer becomes so synonymous with a particular set of tricks or ticks within a particular genre then what happens?

its not something i’d particularly bothered thinking about before, i might find stephen street’s production relatively uninspiring or have got a little bored of chad n’ pharrell’s tweaking but amerie’s newest release produced by rnb brass obsessive and glitchy breakbeater rich harrison is so self-referential part of me is left wondering how it doesn’t implode. i even found myself checking the file size of my mp3 half expecting it to say 0kb.

now the latitudes aren’t for hatin’ and i’d like to make it clear i’m not ragging on this track.

in fact i think i love it.

i’ve certainly been hook repeating it all afternoon. but what’s bothering me a little is wondering whether i like it because its like simultaneously listening to the frankly amazing one touch and harrison produced superstomper crazy in love or is it something new? that opening bugle hook is semitones away from the chi-lites sample which drove crazy in love strutting into my headphones, and as much as i concede that a track with the same singer and producer is likely to bear more than a passing resemblance to any predecessor that stop start staccato verse brass-line/cymbal crash is also what made one touch and also tha rayne’s didn’t you know (one of my favourite rnb tracks of the last five years) so deliciously infectious. still, whats mildly unnerving is that harrison seems to have achieved a re-edit of his best work into one single track. and yes its derivative and familiar almost to the point of simulacre (check your baudrillard, scholars) but as someone very smart once said to me there’s a fine like between genius and p… well it works better if you say it out loud- but i’m sticking with the idea that this is genius if only for that last ten second percussion break.

amerie - gotta work (via idolator via kevipod music)

(apologies for the low bitrate too)

i grew up as far from the sea as it’s possible to get on these british isles… give or take a mile or two.the largest expanses of flat water for quite some way were mill ponds and reservoirs.

however the canals, which had once pulsed so vitally through villages like mine during the nineteenth century, spreading the veins of industry out from mills and workhouses played watery host to my halcyon childhood summer holidays. their sleepy, brambled banks fat with rosehips and sweet nettles were perennial forts and dens for our stick wiedling batallions. a place where twilight sent us cycling home in weary, weaving convoys with scraped knees, the stucatto graze of briars across our shins and lips stained with blackberry juice.

since i’ve just moved closer to the water, to a charter’d street near where the charter’d Thames does flow, its made me think about how i find the nearness of water an eternally calming, contemplation inspiring notion. stories of sailors and pirates, whales and silkies, harbourmasters and fisherwives have always stung my imagination like briny flecks of seafoam and the slippery brush of rockpool seaweed.

songs about the water get their own playlist on my ipod.

the ebb and flow of arterial streams and waterways, the rain fall, the ice thaw, dried river beds, the floods and droughts, the eternal centrality of water to the human story, a force for geographic, social and personal change - something so vital and nourishing that its easy to forget quite how important it, at once is, and always has been. routes for communication and trade; the basis of settlements; a force for life and death, peril and cleansing, trial and inspiration all mute without water.

so i guess now’s a good time to remind you that 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to a clean, safe source of water, and to encourage you once more to take a few minutes out of your day to check out the amazing work that scott harrison and others are doing with charity: water.

trusting the flow of water to deliver is a tradition which is older than the hills carved by those self same insistant rivers. from hiding moses in the reed beds to a game of pooh sticks from a stone bridge; messages in bottles and the hopeful trickle of a spring. dana falconberry writes love notes on paper sailboats and sends them to a lost lover.

dana falconberry - paper sailboat

…is worth two after, or so the early birds tell me. And boy were they ever right. Having a media-type-creative-type job I am lucky enough to compensate low income with late starts. This allows me to stay up late and soak up all those important cultural events that go on in our fair capital…or stay up to watch Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm after midnight.

So rare is the day that I am in bed before 2am.

The other evening all that changed. Exhaustion sent me to bed early and the importance of a good night’s sleep became clear. I had amazingly lucid dreams and woke up early for work fresh and ready to go. I normally put my sour morning demeanour down to cheap coffee and quitting cigarettes just under a year ago. Now I realise after a couple of early nights in a row. It was the lack of sleep.

Which is why I’d encourage all hl readers to tuck themselves up early on these wintry nights and check out the stories that your subconcious is trying to tell you. And if you need a little help to get to slumberland you could always put this on in the background.

http://www.firemusic.co.uk/music/archivemusic/sleepmix.mp3

TRACKLISTING:

Sleep Mix

Jungle Noises…
Petit Pays Cesaria Evora (Chateau Flight Remix)
Prelude and Fugue in C Minor The Swingle Singers
Psalm Detroit Elevator Company
Peace Piece Bill Evans
Psalm Detroit Elevator Company
1st Of Tha Month Bone Thugs & Harmony (K&D Session Part III Dub)
They Came In Peace Tranquility Bass
Summer Noises…
Meditation Carlos ‘Devadip’ Santana & John Mclaughlin
Ashes, The Rain & I James Gang (2nd Movement)
Cristo Renditor Harvey Mandel
With This Love Wells Cathedral Choir
Of These, Hope From The Last Temptation Of Christ OST
Open Peter Gabriel & Shankar
La Petite Fille De La Mer Vangelis
Small Hours John Martyn
A Wonderful Life Carl Craig….

 

 

A quick word about the mixtapes section

Astute followers of HL will know that not only do we take very seriously the task of dropping great music on y’all. But also that I, the newest member of the crew, have just been to Japan.

While over there I picked up some fantastic Japanese music and some hard [for me] to find American pieces. All in all a good time was had by all - spreading the love between myself, record store owners, bank managers, the credit card company, and a couple of loan sharks..

It was then suggested, as I would not shut up about my little Madlib story, that I put some of my new records together on a mix.

I am honoured to get the first bite at the HL mixtape cherry and I know there are some interesting things brewing from East London favourite Disco Jesus to come too. So here is an idea of some of the delights you too can unearth in Japanese record stores if you make it over there. All music is from vinyl, which is why I couldn’t include any Ino Hidefumi.

I hope you can look past the fact that “they are not singing in English” and enjoy the music within - and make sure to bookmark it as new things will be going in there soon…

Any people interested in a track listing, you are out of your mind. No, seriously, leave a comment below and I will get back to you. Thanks for listening. Keep on sharing.