astounding sounds albanian music (no sleep til darmstadt)

sean has been in touch with a  correction:

"

    "It goes out of human hearing both ways, right - if it goes out upwards then your inner ear fails...and you fall on the floor and throw up and if it goes below human hearing that way it loosens your sphincter muscles and you shit yourself....we used to have a lot of fun with audiences...." - Lemmy, beeb4 Hawkwind film

     This clearly indicates familiarity with the works of William Burroughs, so my comments about Lemmy and Nova Express were mistaken (mea culpa). Maybe Moorcock was wrong too...for all we know Lemmy could also have been up on Stockhausen, not to mention au fait with the latest developments in lettrist sound poetry, twelve tone serialism, free-improv (highly likely, given the plans for Peter Brotzmann to play with Motorhead) and post-fluxus minimalism....

     

      While its tempting to go on and discuss the post-Astounding Sounds Amazing Show Trials purges - the 57 varities of Hawkwind - and the parallels with the crisis of late 70s Maoism when Cornelius Cardew broke with the Chinese line in favour of Enver Hoxha's glorious workers paradise of Albania (you couldn't make it up!) and the restructuring of the British state around an even more bonkers blend of pseudo-free market economic "theory" and police-state surveillance (we wonder how many of those 1973 Windsor festival heads voted Tory in 79) I'll have to give it a miss as this subject is now closed (the link between the second hit and run driver on the Leytonstone grassy knoll and Robert Calvert's "heart attack" will just have to remain a secret)

     the empire strikes back (Preview)

      Footnote: I see waltham forest council have included Cornelius Cardew in their list of local celebs - in with a bullet at number ten below David Beckham, East 17, a bloke from Iron Maiden, Baldrick from time team .... "

the prairie frogs - dating imperialist decline

horsemouth is back from an excursion to the south of the seaside towns - there he saw'the praire frogs' play - they played an improv set to soundtrack one of lucy's films on the colour red and then played 3 or 4 songs themselves in an improv blues style  (think john fahey's 'fare forward voyager' ) ending with what horsemouth took to be 'bullfrog blues' . it was good, horsemouth enjoyed it, he particularly enjoyed the slide guitar - it tempted him to get one. curiously on their way there horsemouth and howard heard a guy busking what seemed to be a slower blusier version of 'power of soul'.

sean has been in touch;

 "Well Hawkwind may not have been the Scratch Orchestra, let alone the Red Flame Proletarian Propaganda Team (that was a new one on me), but nevertheless......

      "Screw your politicians, harassment and laws" - Marx

      In his Age of Empire, historian Eric Hobsbawm notes the brevity of the British empire, observing that its entire existence - which he dates between the mid 1870s and late 1960s - fell within the space of a single lifetime (like that of Churchill, who he cites as an example). Being a Leninist, he was of course wrong; the British empire existed a lot longer than that. Doubtless he felt obliged to consider imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, but those of us of a more infantile and disordered disposition know that imperialism exists concurrently with capitalism from the start and, in fact, predates it (how else to obtain an initial accumulation of capital?)

      In passing, we note that in his capacity as jazz critic he was also wrong about Cardew and the AMM, slagging them off on the grounds that

      a. what they did wasn't music and

      b. even if it was, it didn't sound like Sonny Rollins.

      It isn't known what he thought about Hawkwind - we tend to doubt he had an opinion.....

      Anyway, while the treaty of Paris may have marked the beginning of a specific type of formality in British imperialism, it wasn't essentially anything new....yet we do understand Hobsbawm's point about the speed at which it declined. 

      When was it finally gone? I suggest the most suitable date to mark the definitive end of the British empire is 25th Aug 1973.

      This is when Hawkwind played the Windsor Free Festival (Preview) ; in 1945 Britain had the largest land empire in human history, yet a mere 28 years later all the forces at the disposal of the state were unable to prevent a few hairies like Brock, Turner, Lemmy, Calvert and Moorcock setting up a PA and making a racket in the queen's back garden, while a thousand or so of the dodgiest reprobates in the country took loads of drugs and did it in the road.

      "You can disappear in smoke" - Marx

      Definitely the end....

Not quite the end of the maoist ritual,,,,

    1.In all the excitement, how could I have forgotten to include the obvious meeting point - erstwhile Scratch Orchestra member and Lucky Lief  producer Brian St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno? All together now - "jonbar-bar-bar-bar-barian"

    2,I also forgot to refer to Cornelius Cardew finally joining the working classes when he was reinvented as an unemployed pipe fitter in comic book werewolf Alan Moore's early 80s ET meets Boys From the Blackstuff serial Skizz (2000AD). 

Aha, found it! From his autobiography Mick Farren describes the moment he decided to emigrate -

     "We were circling Parliament Square, past Big Ben, the statues of Winston Churchill and Richard ! - and drummer Al Powell announced that he was going to vote for Magaret Thatcher.

     "Someone's got to be in charge here."

     "Are you kidding me?"

     Was he winding me up? Apparently not. This was the moment I decided I wanted out.....If Al from Hawkwind could make such a statement  Britain as a nation had surely become

      [completely] demoralised....."

So there you go; perhaps I was wrong, and Hawkwind do serve imperialism after all.....(Although, to be fair, Powell was purged soon after). I just found these  cool pictures of anti-imperialist struggle in 1973 (hawkwind play the windsor free festival and the hairies build geodesic domes) to illustrate that last missive ( that must be Calvert in white, no?)

Dig the newspaper headline in the last colour pic. 'bomb goes off at the bank of england'

Couldn't find any pics of Cardew and the Scratchers playing Grunwicks. Doubtless the workers were suitably impressed (although they probably didn't build any geodesic domes).

the two-toned panther's beautiful daughter

sean has been in touch, the plot thickens:

"So, I thought I'd try and nail some of this stuff down -

 Cardew had some connection with the International Times and Group X/Hawkwind Zoo were Londonsoixante-huitard (French for sixties retard) hairies so perhaps a search of the IT archive would yield details, the exact jonbar point at which they could have met.

( Jonbar point being Brian Aldiss' term for the key moment that could have turned out differently, bringing an alternative universe into being. But I'm sure you know that - I just mention it for the benefit of your blog followers who may be less literate than what we are)

Except  the archive isn't indexed, and even I'm not stupid enough to read through every issue of some old hippy rag (the Jerry Cornelius comic strips are good though). But wait - I just found a different, single pagearchive that just summarises the contents of each issue.

Haven't had much time to take it in yet, but even with a quick glance it turns out that truth is indeed stranger than fiction (or at least idly speculative bollocks)....according to issue 33, Cardew played with the Incredible String Band! Fantastic - you couldn't make it up!

Ok, I think that means they were on the same bill, rather than actually performing as a single unit (which would, presumably have sounded like Japanese band Ghost) but still....not a bad bit of detective work for a coffee break.

The thing to do would be to through every issue in the full archive using the shorter one as a guide.....but even I'm not that stupid. Over to Horsemouth....

Maybe a slight addition to the post - a correction - is in order - a quick bit of research shows that the special branch raid was in fact at the Shaftesbury Ave place Farren moved to after Whitechapel (we pedants like to get the small details right).

The rest of them still lived in the east end, though, so my point holds.

Btw, it turns out that Paul Rudolph was also present, and got pulled along with Farren and Hogg...didn't Nik Turner also get his collar felt over the angries? This has been used as an example of how stupid the cops were - taking urban guerrilla seriously - but bearing in mind Moorcock's association with Stoke Newington 8 defendant (see - east London is where it was all happnin') Stuart Christie we find ourselves wondering if they were onto something....

we sing for the future/ space ritual (marxist-leninist)

horsemouth's friend sean has been in touch;

 "While I realize horsemouth is quite capable of coming up with tunes to cover without any help from me - and probably wouldn't be interested in my suggestions anyway - I'm still going to go out on a limb, and point him toward Cornelius Cardew's (much derided) late period. A version of Fight the Cuts would be very timely.....the music is of course terrible, but horsemouth is probably one of the few musos able to find the poetry in lyrics like - "The monopoly capitalist lackey government/ Lets finance have its way/ To increase their rate of profit/ To make the workers pay/ Fight the cuts/ That's part and parcel/ Of our class strategy/ Of proletarian revolution..." (Brilliant, eh?)

We Sing for the Future is probably the best of his singsong-round-the-old-joanna-like-common-people works, with what must surely be the most mind-boggling lyric ever (tempting to think it must be an exercise in avant-garde surrealist absurdism or something.....but no, he really meant it man). Its interesting to speculate on how Cardew's stuff would have turned out if, when looking for improvisors to work with in London earlier, he'd found the nascent Hawkwind Zoo instead of AMM. Which is not completely implausible - the comparison here would be with fluxus composer Takahisa Kosugi being part of post-68 hairies the Taj Mahal Travellers, who overlanded around Europe and Asia in an old truck playing free festivals, full moon parties and... err..... art galleries (btw, their mates the Rallizes could certainly have taught Robert Calvert a thing or two - their rhythm section famously hijacked a plane to North Korea)

 We might assume that if Cardew worked with the likes of Dave Brock and Lemmy his views on "proletarian culture" might have become somewhat different, but who knows...it could, of course, have gone the other way - Hawkwind's history of splits and exclusions suggests they might have made really good Maoists....

I for one would love to hear Space Ritual (Marxist-Leninist)
  "In case of imperialist attack on your district, follow these rules..." 
 "Cadres of spaceship hawkwind, your helmsman is dead....."

 I could probably keep doing that for a while. Which means - lucky for you - its time to stop (You wouldn't think I actually have things to do, would you.....)
 ----------------------

 horsemouth's response was;

  cornelius cardew in notting hill

 While we can imagine 'variation on 'el pueblo unido jamaserra vencido'' to the tune of 'shouldn't do that'(and it's breaking into a chant of 'there's only one lie and there's only one truth') and lemmy, dikmik, del dettmar, dave brock, nik turner, stacia and simon king participating in 'the great learning', the problem with cornelius cardew, ex-pupil of stockhausen, joining hawkwind zoo in 1969 is that he would ruin their essential innocence, as michael moorcock pointed out they were barbarians, they'd never heard of stockhausen.

'I wish I'd had one of these when I was with stockhausen' remarks cornelius as he views the prototype vcs3 synthesizer, 'who?' say dikmik, and ex-busker dave brock, 'ah-ha' says dave anderson (later to play in amon duul and so already ahead of the game), 'ah-ha. stockhausen eh?' say the ex-bbc synthesizer boffins gone renegade.

there's also cardew's repudiation of stockhausen's mystical kernel to be overcome and his excessive faith in the power of 'pure sound' - would cardew have managed to turn it on its head and stand it on its feet in the sonic warfare of hawkwind? how would he have been welcomed by the prime source of hawkwind's mystical gibberish, nik turner? would they have bonded over turner's improv skronk or split over it. would he have worked with robert calvert or michael moorcock (as the nearest things hawkwind had to an intellectuals) or driven them out.

 practically (but also symbolically) would cardew have commuted from leytonstone, or moved to notting hill? --------------------------

 sean replied;

 "Would Cardew have commuted from Leytonstone...?

 For all the talk about the 70s scene around the grove, a lot of those cats actually lived in east London (yes!). Most of the Deviants/Pinks, for example, lived in a notorious den of iniquity near Whitechapel . Which, as it happens, was where Farren and co got raided by the special branch looking for the angry brigade (before they used up all their magick powers) and Boss Hogg got nicked because he had a badge with a picture of mao on it (allegedly, a lot of resinous substances and chemicals were also found but the cops ignored them because they all hated "those slags" from the drug squad) Hmmm...its a bit embarrassing I know all that stuff. I really have to stop doing this now.....

 Well....ok, the point about Cardew ruining the...er, innocence of Hawkwind Zoo is a good one. Will have to give it a bit of thought, but for the moment two counter points spring to mind:

 1.They could have collaborated, and yet not shared very much.....recently watched Joy Division doc, in which Hook says he had no idea what Curtis was singing about til he started doing JD stuff live a couple of years back and had to read the lyrics. There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing among musicians...apparently, some don't communicate with each other well! (Who knew?) The AMM split in the late 00s might be a case in point - Rowe was booted out for Maoism. Surely this was nothing new, his maoism stretching back to at least Cardew's involvement, yet the others failed to notice for thirty years or so..... Calvert was clearly influenced by Burroughs and Gysin (Born to go, Orgone Accumulator) - and Moorcock definitely was (although you can't really tell from his Hawkstuff!) and yet its hard to picture, say, Lemmy reading Nova Express. Same could go for Stockhausen (especially as Cardew had broken him) 

2."Wish I'd had one of those when I was with Stockhausen" remarks Cornelius..... "Who?" says Dikmik, but completely ignores the reply as he's in a world of his own after being continuously awake for the previous ten days, and is blitzed on mandrax

reflection on creation and space

horsemouth is knackered and is self-medicating with beer at 5pm in the afternoon. he has been working for exactly 2 days. tomorrow afternoon he goes and works for a few hours - this should a) be all the work for this week b) be enough work to cover the costs of his parsimonious (but not uncomfortable) lifestyle (did I mention the beer). today horsemouth did badly in the 'reducing-his-lard-intake' stakes (cheese, spring onion and mayonnaise sandwich lunchtime - bad boy horsemouth - £1.75), he also did badly in the 'not-buying-books-faster-than-he-can-read-them' stakes (chekhov -'the island' - chekhov visits the prison island of sakhalin and finds it's a hell-hole - £5, and herman melville 'pierre' - £3 - melville destroys his literary 'career' with incomprehensible gibberish/ a book far ahead of it's time, both from horsemouth's favourite secondhand book dealer bell st. - just off edgeware rd. anyway). if horsemouth could only restrain his appetite for comfort food (or show a modicum of foresight and take sandwiches) he could, in good conscience, spend more money on books and... maybe it's better if he eats the lard rather than filling up his flat with yet more kipple. the trouble is it's not either/or is it horsemouth?

a photo has emerged of horsemouth dutifully recording a c chord (that most consonant of chords) surrounded by artfully chosen and well made kipple - sadly this is not horsemouth's flat.

the 'wide eyed presentation of actualities'

(in last quarter's episode without warning myspace disappeared horsemouth's blog which he had been dutifully writing for a full six years - now read on...)

so myspace will be sending horsemouth his 6 years worth of blogging and kvetching and all in a few short months. it will be arriving as one big html file (are you sure? it may be a bit big). of course it is now ancient history - but it does show unanticipated problem with the cloud storage in the malls of our digital overlords. but also opportunities for negotiation.

yesterday horsemouth wandered down to the beach of self-expression and went mudlarking just north of there. he found two pipe bowls (not complete but in a reasonable state) - one with a relief of britannia on it.  in the afternoon (bored) he snoozed.

the problem with horsemouth's digital life is that (like his real life) it's a bit dull - horsemouth wouldn't share with you the juicy bits (even if there were to be some).  horsemouth is searching for a quote from benjamin about boredom being the thing that hatches the egg of the imagination (or something like that) but it is evading him.

(ah sean has found it - "Boredom is the dream-bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away")

ishi (which just means 'man' proper names being hardly ever used in californian indian society but are endlessly used in modern californian society) is now safely lodged in the anthropology museum. he's even employed as a janitor. mostly he spends his time flint-knapping (he's just about the last person who ever had to do this as a matter of personal survival rather than folkloric re-enactment). next horsemouth will read zola's 'the dream' - a foundling (see otto rank's - the birth of the hero) raised as an embroiderer within the grounds of the cathederal by a childless couple. already we are in the land of myth.