Pals and cool links
This is intended as an ever-expanding list of heroes, villains and like-minded souls who deserve more publicity than they currently get.
They’re in no particularly order, have brief synopses attached beneath each url, and I don’t earn more than an air-kiss - if that - for inclusion.
Graham Collier
The website of my life partner Graham Collier - 34 years and counting; Teasmades and cutlery sets to the address below please - with news, bio, examples of his compositions and downloads of his music. Thirty-four years as his number one fan surprises even me...
Sigmatropic
Quite simply the most exciting personal discovery I have made while researching music for the Athens project. Scientist-composer Akis Boyatzis’s ad hoc grouping is best known for its modest masterpiece 16 Haiku & Other Stories, a setting of George Seferis poems that enchanted the likes of Mark Eitzel, Pinkie Maclure, Lee Ranaldo, Laetitia Sadler, James Sclavunos, the mighty Robert Wyatt and many others into contributing to a kind of post-rock mini-operetta in which Boyatzis’s eclectic tastes (Canterbury, folk, rembetika and other Greek forms, alt.country, electronica, minimal, post-punk, more...) are transformed into something rich and strange. The project is as ambitious as anything imagined by Carla Bley, Hal Willner, Van Dyke Parks, David Byrne, Kip Hanrahan, even, gaspo, The Residents. You’ll hear Can, you’ll hear the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but most of all you’ll hear a composer who deserves to earn enough to leave his dayjob and start concentrating on being a genius. (Oh, and on Sigmatropic’s following Dark Outside, you’ll hear the Hellenic equivalent to both Bark Psychosis and British Sea Power...)
Athens Arts Ensemble
Another new discovery for me: the Athens-based (and largely but not wholly) Greek avant/contemporary/post-everything string ensemble who might be described as the Hellenic answer to The Kronos Quartet. Their manifesto will give an idea of what to expect, and there are music and video samples at their website:
“This is what we love: Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Prokofiev, Szymanowski, Shostakovich, Britten, Xenakis, Penderecki, Ligeti, B.Guy, J. L. Ponty, E. Parker, A. Anissegos, The Cure, Kraftwerk, Rammstein, Massive Attack, Leftfield, Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree …” Expect more thrilling unexpected noise discoveries from Greece sintoma, which the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Greek assures me means ‘shortly’...
Blaine L Reininger
A funpark of a website for the guitarist, violinist, singer, composer and nowadays busy classical Greek actor (he now lives in Athens) Blaine L Reininger, better known as one of the co-founders of Tuxedomoon, but also an individual artist in his own right (dozens of solo works listed on his site) and these days to be found onstage in various Greek theatres performing classical Greek drama. This last doesn’t feature that much on a site that will cheer a bleary Monday morning and uptime as well as downtime too.
Paul Schütze
Rather more austere, but this is the site for a man I consider a genius, the London-based Australian post-minimal/ambient/improv/Miles-Davis-never-sounded-like-this composer and visual artist Paul Schutze. Like Bob Ostertag, he is currently making his sizeable collection of releases available for free download from his site, which also includes some of his artworks.
Bob Ostertag
Another little-known genius, working at the sharp end of laptop mayhem that crosses over into artworks, bizarre Harry Partch-like invented instruments and, in his ongoing Living Cinema collaboration with artist Pierre Hébert, improvised music and live hand-made movie animation. His work spans live/unlive reconstructions of jazz improv with the likes of Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway and Phil Minton, electronic noise supernovae recalling Cage’s HPSCHD with a touch of Ives and then some, and some trashy but divine queer dance aesthetics with the likes of lairy drag queen Justin Bond. Oh, and he somehow roped hard rock icon Mike Patton into the melee as well...
Spoon Records
Shrine to all things Can and solo works, including the ever expanding solo corpus of Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt’s alarming electro collaboratorations with KUMO, aka Jono Podmore. Actual proof that nepotism has its good uses; Jono is Irmin’s son-in-law...
The Residents
This is the place to go for everything about what is in fact San Francisco’s worst-kept secret. Thirty years or more of pseudonymously surreal sonic weirdness, and they get better by the year...
Nine Rain
Steven Brown, reedsman, keyboardist and singer with Tuxedomoon (unlike Blaine, he opted for Mexico, Oaxaca to be precise), isn’t as techie-interested as Blaine, hence this modest site dedicated to his thrilling Mexican/Tuxoid band frequently seen live in Mejico DF but rarely outside Mejico itself. Their latest release is a new soundtrack to Eisenstein’s ¡Y Viva Mexico! and I’m already petitioning for a world tour...
The Long Now Foundation
Website dedicated to the Long Now Foundation, founded by Whole Earth Cataloguer Stewart Brand, shiny-pated minimalist Brian Eno and other digirati to promote longer-term thinking about a culture where the lights might suddenly all go off in under a quarter century. Former Pogue Jem Finer joined and his 1000-year-long self-generating electronic piece ‘Longplayer’ is currently vibrating around a series of USB links and a series of noise-making Macs linked to
http://longplayer.org/
and Jem Finer’s own website Jem Finer has some fun projects to watch/hear, such as his ‘Score for a Hole in the Ground’ and a very peculiar video of Finer and collaborator Ansuman Biswas on flying carpets aboard a Russian airforce vomit comet as it nosedives into zero gravity...
Paris Transatlantic
Oh, OK, so I write for them, but PT is is the biggest and best web site devoted with love to new, contemporary, avant and free music. And everything is voluntary, so give their ‘hits’ clock a little nudge and discover a million or so words on the wonderful world of alternative music.