Kraftwerk - Ruck Zuck Live 1970.

Amazing footage and truly intense flute from the earlier prog incarnation of Kraftwerk:

Linda Perhacs - Hey, Who Really Cares?

Listen to the full album Parallelograms here.  I'm not crazy about everything on it, but the title track is a weird folk classic.

Not Really Now Not Anymore: Alan Garner's Red Shift (1978).

 

Nominally a historical fantasy for young adults, Alan Garner's Red Shift is an unconventional and "difficult" book by any standards.  Partially inspired by an oblique piece of graffiti (Not really now not anymore) which the author noticed at a railway station, it interweaves three separate narratives taking place in Southern Cheshire over a period of some three thousand years: a motorway and a caravan park in the 1970s, a besieged church during the English Civil War, and finally back to a troop of lost legionaries during the Roman period.  A stone axe head persists through each period, providing an explicit link between the stories, while at times the fates of the most troubled and alienated characters seem somehow mystically interwoven.  Garner's novel offers us not so much a present haunted by the past, as a sense of time as being somehow synchronous and indivisible, with past, present and future all haunted by the threads which weave the whole together: not really now anymore.  It's not a easy read - Garner's books (this one in particular) demand a great deal of creative input from the reader, and his vision is unsentimental and even brutal at times.  But Red Shift is the work of a stubborn and uncategorizable craftsman who respects his readers in a way that publishers rarely do, and whose affect has often been compared to that of a long prose poem.

In 1978, Red Shift was adapted by the BBC's Play for Today (the series which produced the incredible Penda's Fen which I blogged about here).  The director was John Mackenzie, best known in the general cinema world for 1980's The Long Good Friday, but remembered by connoisseurs of the Public Information Film as the director of that Friday the 13th of farm accident prevention Apaches.  It's a noble and largely successful attempt to translate a very difficult and complex book to the screen.  Watch it on youtube here. 

Hat tip to feuilleton 

screen grabs from Alan Garner on the Television at Sparks in Electric Jelly.

Space - Magic (Discomare 1977)

Greek ruins (shot, as near as I can tell, here), retrofuturistic space disco, beautiful women......a heady combination indeed:

Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove: Pre-Chic and Solo Nile Rodgers.

Who doesn't love Nile Rodgers nowadays?  Nobody I'd like to meet.  The legendary producer, arranger, song-writer and genius rhythm guitar player has seen his distinctive style explode back into the popular consciousness this year via collaboration with Daft Punk on their controversial "back to real music" opus Random Access Memories.  Rodgers is particularly lionized by guitar players - Johnny Marr named his son after him - and as a somewhat modest strummer myself, he's always been a huge personal hero.  Random Access Memories and Get Lucky inspired me to scour youtube for some lesser known gems from the great man.  Before they became Chic, Rodgers, bass player Bernard Edwards and the nucleus of Chic were called (somewhat less promisingly) the Big Apple Band.  Here's a clip of them performing a super-tight and funky cover of the Bee Gee's You Should be Dancing:

Rodgers will always best known as a collaborator - whether with Chic or the multitude of artists for which he has produced and written iconic songs with.  He never found the same level of success as a solo artist (producing four solo albums in the 80s and 90s), so most of that stuff is not well-known today.  Which is a shame, because some of it is pretty damn good, particularly 1983's Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove, released while Rodgers was collaborating with Bowie on Let's Dance.  The solo stuff doesn't have the immediate melodic and euphoric rush of Chic, but given a few listens, the grooves are just as indelible and beautifully crafted: 

The next track - Yum Yum - is completely stuck in my head.  The lyrics are admittedly not profound, and not hugely PC either, but it should be borne in mind that this is a man who spent much of the latter 70s hanging out in the ladies rest rooms of Studio 54:

And finally, here's a track with a spidery, arpeggio riff which I suspect might have been a particularly big influence on Johnny Marr's Smiths-era guitar style: 

 

Sidney Sime.

Here's a few more from that remarkable selection of Sidney Sime images from monster brains.  Well worth checking out the full selection here.

Popol Vuh - Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht.

Here's Popol Vuh's fantastically atmospheric soundtrack to Werner Herzog's fantastically atmospheric 1979 remake of Marnau's silent classic: