YULE (21 December 2010)

The musick dedicated to this Sabbat is:

VARIOUS ARTISTS

PEOPLE TAKE WARNING! (Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938)


Original Issue: 2007 Tompkins Square (TSQ1875) Buy it here!!!

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Margot-meter: 5 moons / 5

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from Pitchfork:

Times are tough. Times are always tough. But times used to be much tougher.

A recent report noted the global rise of the standard of living, and the U.S. stock market keeps hitting all-time highs. Even if the relative prosperity of America is tempered by the troubling observation that, contrary to the usual positive economic indicators, life isn't getting much better, life in general doesn't seem that bad.

Every so often, though, we get a glimpse of what once was and what could very well be again. The precarious, precipitous housing market leads to talk of recession, which inevitably brings up depression. The Hurricane Katrina humanitarian disaster provided an alternate-reality view of the United States as Third World nation. The resolution of the United Auto Workers strike settled the weight of thousands of jobs bobbling in the balance. The death toll and number of wounded in Iraq and elsewhere creeps upward, reminders of a time when sacrifice was compulsory, not voluntary.

Yes, times are tough, but times used to be absolutely terrible-- rife with starvation, disease, extreme poverty, and senseless death. As relative prosperity continues unabated, perspective predictably fades. People Take Warning: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938 provides that perspective with three discs of abject misery, songs about misery, miserable people, and the miserable things they've done or that were done to them. It's the epitome of a bad trip back in time, and a riveting collection of musical snapshots capturing a country teetering on the edge of the abyss, looking down, and singing songs about what they see.

Titled "Man V. Machine", the first disc focuses on songs of train wrecks, plane crashes, and the odd car accident, and features lot of songs about the Titanic, in particular. The other two discs are titled "Man V. Nature" and "Man V. Man [And Woman, Too]", respectively, and tackle just what their names imply: natural disasters and good ol' fashioned murdering.

It's harrowing and horrifying stuff, but there's a twisted element of rueful humor to this set, too. "If it bleeds, it leads," goes the cynical journalism saying, and these horror stories, drawn from headlines, serve much the same purposes as the tabloids, providing tales of loss you can't turn away from. It's also a little like the scene of the accident on the side of the highway, with traffic slowed to a near halt so that everybody can get a good look, as if they don't already know what they're going to see.

You generally know what you're going to get here, too, but just because it's familiar sounding hardly means it's full of household names. The set inevitably includes a few songs from such usual suspects as Son House and Charley Patton, as well as often anthologized tracks like Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks". There are also plenty of well-known subjects, like the infamous Old 97 train, conductor Casey Jones, the doomed Tom Dooley, and the reliably murderous Stack O'Lee. But there are countless surprises as well, like "El Mole Rachmim (für Titanik)", a song that stresses how much the great ship's sinking resonated with recent Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

Music like this has always been the province of obsessive collectors, and it will probably always remain that way. But there's no question that having this music packaged together by experts and fans beats scouring estate sales for fragile 78s. Whether beautifully packaged (like the astounding gospel collection Goodbye, Babylon), thematically organized (the fun medicine show soundtrack Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937), or both (the still essential Anthology of American Folk Music, which, lest one forget, really was once just part of one man's collection), it's still remarkably powerful and moving all these years-- but really not that many-- later. As Tom Waits puts it in his introductory essay, "The scratches on the 78s sound like the ocean in a shell, and the songs are riding inside across time."

CRAZY MOON (incredibly strange musick)

ADDLESTON/MEUNIER/FAUSTMANN

17th AND 18th CENTURY WORKS OF FUNERARY VIOLIN

BABCOTTE/SUDBURY/EATON

THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF FUNERARY VIOLIN

Original Issue: unknown

Reissue: The Guild Of Funerary Violinists (No Number) Buy it here!

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Margot-meter: ? moons / 5

Read here the fascinating history behind the recordings.

If you have even one single drop of mittel-european blood running through your veins, you'll be moved (to death) by these sounds!

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Tracklists here and here

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from Aquarius Records (cut-up of various reviews):

What is more amazing than discovering a whole movement in music that had never been documented, let alone even heard of. EVER! No mention in any books, magazines, not a single trace. What if that music was in fact the music of Funerary violins. A music created and composed to be performed at funerals. The only evidence of these musics, some scratchy old wax cylinder recordings, some faded photos, and brittle sheafs of old sheet music.

Hard to say which would be more amazing, a wholly undiscovered hidden dark corner of musical history, quashed by the church and relegated to be lost forever, or an insanely detailed project, the ultimate conceptual art piece. Either way, we are in love with this stuff.
Simply from a musical standpoint, this is everything we could hope for. The recordings are fuzzy and staticky, bathed in layers of crackle and grit, and years of neglect and decay, but beneath the recording inconsistencies we love so much, are some truly moving and emotionally rich performances, the melodies are so intense and sad, minor key and mournful. truly funereal. It's impossible not to imagine some old funeral procession, a row of black clad mourners, trudging down a dirt road, with their deceased atop an old wooden cart, the sky grey, the music of the Funerary violinist winding around the procession like wreaths of black smoke. So goddamn lovely. We have been listening to this non-stop since we got it.

And then there's the story. The "history". Is it real? Is it possible that a musical movement could disappear so completely. So much so that not a single person anywhere EVER had heard of the Guild Of Funerary Violinists? Or is it all a huge put-on? A massive made up world? The ultimate outsider art project. Either way, we are completely blown away. If this is indeed real, HOLY SHIT! How utterly mysterious and romantic!! We do sort of want to believe it's real. It's so perfectly evocative of some other time, of death and sadness throughout the ages. But if it is in fact made up, it has to be one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed hoaxes of all time.

Wailing, plaintive funereal laments on solo violin, sad and morose, lilting and so completely lovely, bathed in all manner of grit and hiss, fuzz and antique distortion, sounding like the old wax cylinders these recordings purport to be. Imagine some old timey violin music treated by Tim Hecker, and spun in some ultra morose DJ set by Philip Jeck...
The music is so evocative, of dark clouds at dusk, rain swept fields, huge brooding stone houses, lush gardens beneath grey skies, and of course, funerals, and the slow stately trudge of the funeral procession to the grave site. We've gushed about pretty much every volume so far, and by now are probably just repeating ourselves, but we just love these discs, read the other Funerary Violinist reviews for more on the music and the mythology, and you'll realize just why it seems impossible to us to not fall totally in love with such a well executed piece of what ultimately amounts to performance art. The music, dark and delicate, creepy and so beautiful, even removed from the mythology is totally amazing, the story and the text is as well (there's even a book you can track down, detailing the entire recorded history of the Guild) but the two together, are simply magical....

Even without the fantastical back story, the music is worth the price of admission. Each piece is wonderfully crafted and beautifully performed, all solo violin, keening mournfully, minor key melodies drifting dreamily in some, the scrape and sawing of the bow constructing miserablist dirges in others, all except the more recent bathed in a thick cloak of crackle and static, giving it that Jeck / Hecker fuzzy-blurry-dreamy vibe we can never seem to get enough of. The fact that this music is set amidst such a dense and complex, passionate world of intrigue and mystery, love and death, only makes it that much more exciting. And the fact that every single bit of it is made up, well, as far as we're concerned that just seals the deal.

RUNIC MOON (nordic musick)

HAMRE KNUT & TIBBETTS STEVE
Å

Original Issue: 1999 Hannibal (HNCD 1438) Buy it here!!!


Margot-meter: 4 moons / 5

01 - Olav Bergsland
02 - Huldra-mi
03 - Trebakken
04 - Huldreslatter
05 - Noringen
06 - Ande
07 - Fjellmanngjenta
08 - Huldreslatt
09 - Spelar Guro
10 - Baansull
11 - Bygdatraen
12 - Baansull

from Roots World

Typically bowed for traditional dancing, the Norwegian hardangerfiddle (hardingfele) is equally well suited for pure listening. It satisfies in the audio chair by virtue of the intricate music played on it as well as the instruments own striking tonality. Asymmetric time signatures, where beats within the same measure can be of disproportionate lengths, combine with rustic harmonics to produce an irrational, organic sound.

This is perhaps exactly what intrigued Steve Tibbetts, guitar adventurer and recordist, for his next ethnographic makeover: its affinities with his own metrically elusive soundworld. With hardangerfiddle master Knut Hamre and musician/arranger Turid Spildo, Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson have created whole new fields of pure listening for the hardingfele teeming with possibilities on Å.

First contact with a Tibbetts production initially gives the listener a helpless feeling, of immersion in a universe constructed with evanescent strings of ornament and seeming little else. Tibbetts has been laying his trail to a new kind of parlor music for 20+ years. His approach is evocative of imagined place and scape, of time that is elastic, colored with distinctive, austere tunings, and marked by a serenely (and sometimes violently) free sense of motion. For the listener it is a realm that requires, at times, daunting feats of concentration while capable of fruiting enormous rewards.

This is the second such exercise, whereby Tibbetts has gone afield to record idiosyncratic but jewel-like musicians in a faraway place (Nepalese chanter Choying Drolma was the first). Some real-time collaborative moments are captured on location with his Nagra recorder, but for the most part Tibbetts plays to the tapes after the fact in his studio until exactly the right accident happens. Tibbetts is a perfectionist, and it can take a long time before the requisite amount of details begin to accrue for a completed product.

Tibbetts and long time percussionist/partner Anderson play with non-repetitious, Zen-like stealth to Hamre who makes music with unflinching deliberateness, focusing almost entirely on lean, ancient-sounding melodies, adorned with flawless trillwork. The twelve selections form a suite of Nordic chamber songs, slow, musically simple but texturally complicated. Tibbetts blends the multiple occasions of recording together as though of one piece with a brushstroke-less touch and cryptic, specially prepared "treatments".

The sound quality is as good as the recorded variety gets in these digital days. All instruments are immaculately focused but never etched, displaying a warmth that whispers sweet, secret analog. A remote stone church in Utne and in Tibbetts' St. Paul studio provide a modest amount of room ambience that suits the intimate air of the collaboration. Though not credited, Tibbetts takes great pains to produce sleeve art which resonates with the music, and this he has done with a grayscale (90s speak for black & white) photograph palimpsest.

Medieval-modernism, folkloric sound sculpture or post-pastoral improvisation do not quite sum up what happens on Å. Words never stand in for the experience of music, particularly in an encounter with someone like Steve Tibbetts.

Steve Taylor