Traditional Beauties

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Forbidden Colours

Forbidden Colours appears on the official soundtrack of "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", a picture from 1983 with Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie. It takes place in a Japanese prison camp during Second World War where Bowie plays an English soldier and Sakamoto a young Japanese Captain who has a homo-erotic attraction towards him: wouldn't that have been a genius couple? However, the soundtrack was produced only by Sakamoto which made him known to a broader public. Forbidden Colours consists basically of this song plus David Sylvian's vocals.


Holger Czukay - Persian Love

As the title Persian Love already reveals, Can-member Holger Czukay ventured to the empire of thousand and one nights where the mufti sings his morning prayer. It's taken from his solo work Movies from 1979. We were lately discussing if you could play it at a Saturday night, what do you think?


Akiko Yano - Rose Garden

Rose Garden appears on a British sampler called Tokyo Mobile Music, a project to support Eastern "talent, as much as possible". It was published in 1982, the year when Yano married Ryuichi Sakamoto (they divorced in 2006). Like this driving tune and the Japanese typical chant.

White Noise

If you're an attentive reader of kosmonautenschule, you probably downloaded our Settings For The Control Of The Sun. Track number 3 is called "My Game Of Loving" - a psychedelic blackly song with synthesizers, bongos, drum solos, various voices/languages and striking orgy groanings. In my opinion this is a masterpiece as it is the whole debut album, since we could have dropped any song from An Electric Storm without quality decreasement.

White Noise was formed by the American David Vorhaus in London 1969. At that time he was a student of physics and elecronic engineering there which explains White Noise's sophistication in using electronic devices for their sound. His musical know-how came from his classical bass-player education. Initially he was joined by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, both BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers and former members of an electronic music project called Unit Delta Plus.

On the album An Electric Storm that was published in 1969 on Island Records Vorhaus made use of the first British Synthesizer ever (remember: it was 1969): a EMS Synthi VCS3. He played with tape manipulating techniques and used a lot of voices to create this hardly comparable sound which was at that time totally new: "I use voices a lot too, but not as conventional vocals. I always use a lot of voices, and if somebody having an orgasm in the background is used as part of one of the waveforms, it makes the sound more interesting, without the listener actually knowing what they're hearing". He actually organized the orgies and joined them by the way.
Although An Electric Storm didn't sell good when it came out, it's nowadays seen as a milestone in electronic music's history and Vorhaus ranks among it's pioneers.

White Noise - An Electric Storm

A Mountain Of One

Wednesday, 27. February at Salon Des Amateurs - the Londoner Combo "A Mountain Of One" is playing a gig in front of an interested and homely crowd. Not sold out though - yet, I think.
Rough Trade describes AMO1, that consists of the three core members Mo Morris, Leo Elstob and Zeben Jameson, as a "drugged out" Fleetwood Mac, "the full 70's" Santana, Arthur Russel, Laurel Canyon, JJ Cale and Talk Talk. Vice Magazine already calls them a "Balearic Classic".
For me, as I don't really like this kind of comparisons, it is finally just great progressive music, hard to categorize. The drumming enchains you, singer Jameson's voice (he played keyboard for Travis before...) is intoxicating and even the endless guitar solos, during and between their songs, were fun.
Although they only played six or seven songs, the concert was beauteous and I'm glad that I got the chance to enjoy handmade balearic music at it's best.

I decided to upload Ride (appears on Collected Works), my favourite track and nightly highlight of the last weekends when resident DJ Tolouse Low Trax prepared his audience for the upcoming event and dropped it at peak.
I also took a video but the sound quality isn't that good.




A Mountain Of One - Ride

myspace.com/amountainofone

Captain Clark & Cevin Spacey Are Setting The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

1. Rare Bird - Vacuum

2. Halina Frąckowiak - Myśli twoje śnić zaczynam

3. White Noise - My Game Of Loving

4. Eberhard Schoener - Why Don't You Answer

5. Mudd - Speilplatz (Quiet Village Remix)

6. Justus Köhncke - Homogen (33 rpm)

7. Joachim Witt - Ich Fahr' Nach Afrika

8. Pink Floyd - Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

9. Edgar Froese - Pizarro And Atahuallpa

10. David Sylvian - Backwaters

11. Fleetwood Mac - You Make Loving Fun

12. Joakim - Peter Pan Over The Bronx

13. Peter Baumann - This Day

14. Soft Machine - Etka

15. PiL - Go Back

16. JJ Cale - Ride Me High (Joakim Edit)

17. S.B. Devotion - Tender Silence Of The Night

18. Vangelis - Multi Track Suggestion

19. Space - Ballad For Space Lovers

Captain Clark & Cevin Spacey Are Setting The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

Savage Progress

Let's attend to another forgotten synth pop pearl from the eighties today! ...did I hear a sigh?:) Ok, the picture above deserves nothing else than the grade "trash", i agree on that. But this British band made some über-cool stuff in the olden days.
Savage Progress was founded in 1982 by Rik Kenton (who had been a temporary member of Roxy Music) and Glynnis Thomas. A friend of them worked at a studio and used some free time to record a bunch of songs with them. The result convinced the head of the studio, so that he offered the band a contract. Kenton and Thomas recruited Andrew Edge as a drummer, Carol Isaacs as singer and also Ned Morant as percussionist though he actually never really learned to play percussions. But he helped the band to get a more rhythmically based style which seperated them from many new wave bands of their time. Anyway, now they were a proper band and released some singles and an LP called Celebration on "Ten Records". They toured with the Thompson Twins before they unfortunately called it a day in 1985 after Glynnis had left the band. Ok, that would be the story of Savage Progress, shortly reproduced. Let's talk about the music.

The first track is "Heart Begin To Beat" which was also released as a single. This song is one reason that the band is still remembered these days as it is such a great "unclassic" and was used by the DJs of the arising house scene in the middle of the eighties such as Larry Heard/Mr. Fingers and Frankie Knuckles. The song has got such an incredibly cracking beat that it is no wonder that it was dropped oftenly in house clubs like the "Power Plant" or the "Muzic Box". I really love those mixes from that era. It was a time were the DJs created a unique style by searching the past for useful tunes they could play out next to the latest modern house tracks. It was a great mixture of old italo-disco songs, some decent disco classics, industrial and new wave-ish songs like "Heart Begin To Beat". The track is very unique in its concetration on rhythmical elements and the cold and "fey" voice of Carol Isaacs combined with a funky bass riff. You won't get the lines "begin to beat let my heart begin to beat, begin to beat let my heart begin to beat..." out of your head, trust me! This tune is still a killer on every dancefloor today. i found a copy of the 12" for 1€ on a flea market over here in düsseldorf. Quite a good find i guess.

The second track "Hip Parade" is taken from their LP Celebration. It's the standout track of the record for me. The song is unbeatable in its supercooled new-wave-extravaganza! Carol Isaacs sings like an original Snow Queen on valium over a straight beat with some nice synthesizer action going on. You can even here some nice ice wind echoes in the background if you listen intensively enough! I guess it's really Isaacs' distinctive voice which makes the music so cool. Also in the actual sense of freezing you, hehe.

Savage Progress - Heart Begin To Beat

Savage Progress - Hip Parade

New York Recordstores

When I visited New York last weekend to escape from this great festivity called Karneval I used one day explore some of Manhattan's and Brooklyn's recordstores. In fact the ones I went to were tips from Andrew Hogge who I annoyed with emails a few weeks before.

The first destination on my list was Academy Records in Manhattan 12 W. 18th St. and being completely honest i didn't spend much time neither money in there. Academy is basically about classical music and even at the risk of coming out as a philistine I have to say that this was not what I was looking for.

My next stop was Academy Lps (415 E. 12 St.)
Just like Academy Records the East Village store is specialised. You predominantly find second hand jazz records next to some rock and pop. The atmosphere in there was kind of oppressing due to missing customers and aggressive instructions that told me how to touch the records which should obviously be funny but reminded me of overblown coolness.

A1 Records (439 E 6TH St) was at 12:30am still closed so that I went on to "Other Music" at 15 E. 4 St. which serves almost every genre and is more commercial than the previous ones. They also sell Cds and the vinyl section is comparatively small. I finally made my way to the cash desk together with Kreidler's faboulos Weekend, Glass Candy's Miss Broadway, a 1 Dollar single that doesn't even have a name and two Justus Köhncke 12". I especially fell in love with his track "Homogen" which gains a lot if you play it on 33rpm.

I now went to Brooklyn to look for so called Dope Jam's (580 Myrtle Ave. Brooklyn). There was no subway station near so that I had to walk half an hour through a droll African-American quarter until i finally stood in front of the recordstores black door. I had to knock and wait till the owners opened. In there it was really dusky and frankincense smell that rapidly made me feel dizzy was in the air.
They carry loads of disco records which are partly second hand and partly re-released, some techno and house. After a long to and fro I decided for Tango-Saty by Klaus Schulze, the melancholic Multi Track Suggestion by Vangelis, Walking On Thin Ice, a Yoko Ono disco-track from 1981, Washing Machine and Got The Bug by Mr. Fingers, Cerrone's Where Are You Now and the long overdue 12" of Pilooski's Re-Edit of Frankie Valli's Beggin.


Klaus Schulze - Tango-Saty

Vangelis - Multi Track Suggestion

Yoko Ono - Walking On Thin Ice


Further Recordstores advised by Hogge are:

Halycon (57 Pearl Street,Brooklyn)
The Thing (1001 Manhattan Ave.,Brooklyn)

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