Resignation

When Clark and I lately lingered over some small jumble sale somewhere in London a specific tape attracted our attention. It was labeled completely black on both sides, only the handwritten name "Resignation" and a hardly readable phone number were visible. When we asked the owner he could'nt tell us anything about it except that he found this piece on his former manchesterian house's attic. Being fixed we brought it home for 50 pence.

Back in Düsseldorf we couldnt really decide if we had found a jewel or a layman's work. After a short and fruitless investigation on the internet we at last dialed the number from the tape. The person answering was a man called Henry Square. When we told him of our found he started laughing. It was indeed one of Resignation's members and he still had the same phone number.

He told us that Resignation was formed in 1979 in Manchester and consisted of him, Joshua Steiner and Edgar Douleur (both pseudonyms, Douleur died in plane crash in 1986). In 1980 they published "I am not blitheful" EP (well, they recorded tapes) which became the only release in this band's history. Square went on that they broke up 2 years later when they were at the age of 22 and recognized that they would'nt have commercial succes in the music business. Him and Steiner lost contact after Douleur's death when Steiner moved to London.
Square promised to send us more demos and some band pictures they took in 1980 simultaneous with their EP.

That was 2 weeks ago and while we're waiting for the demos we already received the photos which are so typical for a Manchesterian band in the late 70s, early 80s.

Clark and I decided to already upload the track Angstlust (they were also playing with german words and history trying to provoke) and further to create a myspace for Resignation.

Angstlust is a synthie impregnated track with
a continous deep bass-line and spherical screeching which obviously doesn't fit to the image they played with. Their music was hearable influenced by the fact that Square's father owned a store for musical instruments where the band could borrow the expensive equipment.

Resignation - Angstlust

www.myspace.com/resignationuk

Some Random Beauties

Claude Bolling - Who Are You

Here we got a beautiful psychedelic pop pearl from french composer and jazz musician Claude Bolling. He wrote this song for the soundtrack of the movie "Qui?" from 1970. The Movie was directed by Monsieur Léonard Keigel and the female leading character was played by Romy Schneider. It was one of her early roles where she tried to get rid of her "Sissi" image. As Marina, she survives a car crash caused by an argument with her boyfriend who was driving the car. She is not sure whether he survived or not because the car fell into the sea. After this accident she gets to know her boyfriends brother who falls in love with her. But then Marina feels traced by a mysterious ghost which leads to a serious paranoia. However, Claude Bolling's track seems to be the perfect background music for this psych thriller!


The Velvet Underground - Ride Into The Sun

Early Velvet Underground have always been seen as the evil counterpart to the hippie movement of the late 60ies. Later Lou Reed continually changed their sound into a more conventional one. So it comes that we have an authentic stoned hippie ballad here. It's still supersweet! The song originally emerged in the early 70ies (during the "Loaded" sessions i think) but it first appeared on a bootleg in the late 80ies. It's said that the vocals are sung by Lou Reed himself. Not too sure about that.

The Klan - And I Love It So

Some really adorable psych pop from belgium to finish this. Loving the strings on that song! It's quite astonishing that the members of the band were only 18 and 19 years old when they recorded this song in 1967. They were seen as one of the first pop groups of belgium and played shows with Chuck Berry and even The Rolling Stones. The Klan quickly fell into oblivion though.

Burundi Black

In 1967 Sevac Ekian recorded a ceremony of Ingoma Tribe in the East African State Burundi. Back home he developed the idea to arrange a "musical marriage"(mariage musical). Therefore he asked the producer Mike Steiphenson to create a fitting tune to those absorbing drums he brought.

Steiphenson produced a psychedelic harmony consisting of e-guitar and piano and inserted it in Ekian's recording.



In 1971 the track was published under the pseudonym Burundi Black. On Side A there is "Part 1", the drum-solo version, on Side B ("Part 2") the version by Steiphenson. The single went top 40 in the UK. Later, Steiphenson released under his own name or rather aliases some further obscure stuff which didn't receive any attention.

If you like the sound of Quiet Village you should definitely check this out. It fairly reminded me of the remix they did for the Gorillaz.

Burundi Black - Part 1

Burundi Black - Part 2