'rabbits are gifted archeologists... lobsters too'

Sep 27, 2010

horsemouth is a little tired by his commute across the seaside towns. apparently they once had donkeys on blackheath in london before the trade was driven out to the margins of society - now the beachside donkey ride is a semi-clandestine affair.

horsemouth discovered that one of jeff keen's films was soundtracked by legendary sound poet bob cobbing (in horsemouth's namesake ian helliwell's documentary in the gazwrx box set). he also discovered much pleasure in charles lamb's essays of elia - he has a minor obsession going on with quakers and a positive appreciation of their silences during meetings, but a dislike of scotsmen (pretendng not to quote swift's 'hints towards an essay on conversation' which gives some advice on attempting it with scotsmen).

 the title quote comes from a radio documentary on collecting, horsemouth liked the various versions of spem in alium on offer by modern composers. he found this documentary on joyce hatto quite sad. quite how much of her recordings were replaced by with timestretched or sampled parts from recordings of other pianists by her husband (and sound engineer) on his home computer is not clear. he claims his intention was to remove the parts of her recording that were not up to scratch due to the pain of her cancer, in any event her reputation is ruined.

 horsemouth thinks of glenn gould's recordings - the end of the notion of an unbroken document of a performance in the classsical music scene. and indeed the sheer amount of work horsemouth does on his singing and guitar playing once it has been recorded - let no one imagine these are documentations of performances. subsequently, researching american primitive guitar, horsemouth came across the story of a fan invited by john fahey to impersonate him, to re-play and re-record the entire of fahey's death chants and military breakdowns for subsequent release on the shanache record label. this was done but the record remained unreleased until some tracks were released by accident as being by john fahey after his death.