Posts by Frances Morgan

my creation has drowned me
Fed has a false beginning. A sole electric guitar riffs absently through a melancholy blues progression; heads upwards; pauses; then, boom. Full band. Full colour. Tracking shot of a lonely figure walking through morning streets that are – suddenly – filled with light, movement and crowds; a sunburst of horns, strings and percussion, and all the world’s a film, each step’s a swagger.
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It’s easy to get caught up in sound, speed and fury, trade on intensity, feel that energy is all. Labels
like Holy Roar thrive on that energy exchange, but when the room stops spinning you notice the pop shards glinting in the wreckage of Danananakroyd’s bubblegum hardcore and byzantine mazes underpinning Rolo Tomassi’s noise-prog – structures that won’t quite allow for smashing up.
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We featured some stills from Emily Richardson’s film, Cobra Mist, a few issues back, alongside an interview with Chris Petit, who was to discuss the East Anglian landscape with Richardson at the Aurora Festival in Norwich.

Cobra Mist is a beautiful film, not least because of its sound design - the sound was recorded by Chris Watson and composed from those recordings by Benedict Drew, and is at once natural and full of foreboding and intent. The film’s subject matter is equally concerned with a relationship between landscape and technology, as it captures the former military site of Orford Ness - now deserted, and a nature reserve. Bird calls echo around industrial structures as Richardson’s camera circles the East Anglian moonscape, once used for atomic testing, where banks of shingle suck up to crumbling concrete. At first, it appears calm, meditative, with the “poignancy” rather quaintly described on the National Trust website but there’s a thrumming tension to the editing of both sound and vision, and disconcerting jerks of perspective as we suddenly, without warning, enter one of the abandoned buildings.

You can watch the film here, but London-based readers can also go see it tomorrow at Cafe Oto in Dalston, which is showing it with a live soundtrack performed by Watson and Drew.

There’s this Slits song called ‘Difficult Fun’. I don’t know what it’s about exactly but I love the title and chorus (“Difficult fun is hard to come by”) because difficult is the best kind of fun there is, and because it’s a great description of the outer edges of improvised music, and because it would have been a great title for The Fat Is Gone. As it is, there’s a pretty cool London micro-label already using the name, but its implications of endurance and euphoria are written all over this storming, uncompromising hour of free music, recorded live at the Molde Jazz Festival, Norway, in 2006.

If you were looking to get someone into the hardier, less contemplative side of improv, you wouldn’t start here – a better place would be Gustafsson and Paal Nilssen-Love’s trio with bassist Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, The Thing, whose knowing takes on art-rock standards (Sonics and Yeah Yeah Yeahs put through the wringer) would get them dancing in multiple time signatures before they know it. But while they’re always a good workout, the razor’s edge provided by free veteran Peter Brötzmann on alto and tenor sax and bass clarinet catapults this album out of any notions of a noisy safety zone and into properly alien territories.
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