The Liner Note

william_kent

Well-known member
Being a journalist, the phenomenon of the overpriced box set with liner note booklet commissioned from a journalist is of course something I can't decry. Indeed have one out in a few months as part of an Associates Sulk box.

an Associates box set?

tell us more....
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Well it's a box set 40th anniversary expansion of Sulk. Was supposed to be out end of May but I think is now July. Some new material (live) added and I believe it's been remastered (but not 100% sure). But of course the killer attraction that'll get the punter easing the credit card out the wallet is the essay, for which I interviewed the producer Mike Hedges and Martha Ladley (ex-Martha and the Muffins) and spoke to Alan Rankine for the second time and also got some bits from bassist Michael Dempsey too.
 

william_kent

Well-known member

Associates - Party Fears Two

I'm a bit of an aficionado when it comes to rock biographies, and when it comes to the book I got out of the library about The Associates I can, vaguely, remember that it consisted of "then he ate a load of barbiturates"*, which, unfortunately, puts it on the same level as the Aerosmith biography which was, basically, " then he ate a load of barbiturates and tried to write a song but then the record company intervened and said you WILL use this songwriter", but somehow the ugly grizzled guy could handle the downers but the pale skinned Scot couldn't...

* and then he died... R.I.P.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
it will never be the same again now, after in a silent way and after BITCHES BREW. listen to this. how can it ever be the same? i don't mean you can't listen to ben. how silly. we can always listen to ben play funny valentine, until the end of the world it will be beautiful and how can anything be more beautiful than hodges playing passion flower? he never made a mistake in 40 years. it's not more beautiful, just different. a new beauty. a different beauty. the other beauty is still beauty. this is new and right now it has the edge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has ever been before.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Who wrote that then?

ralph j. gleason

there is so much to say about this music. i don’t mean so much to explain about it because that’s stupid, the music speaks for itself, what i mean is that so much flashes through my mind when i hear the tapes of this album that if i could i would write a novel about it full of life and scenes and people and blood and sweat and love.

and sometimes i think maybe what we need is to tell people that this is here because somehow in this plasticized world they have the automatic reflex that if something is labeled one way then that is all there is in it and we are always finding out to our surprise that there is more to blake or more to ginsberg or more to trane or more to stravinsky than whatever it was we thought was there in the first place.

so be it with the music we have called jazz and which i never knew what it was because it was so many different things to so many different people each apparently contradicting the other and one day i flashed that it was music.

that’s all, and when it was great music it was great art and it didn’t have anything at all to do with labels and who says mozart is by definition better than sonny rollins and to whom.

so lenny bruce said there is only what is and that’s a pretty good basis for a start. this music is. this music is new. this music is new music and it hits me like an electric shock and the word “electric” is interesting because the music is to some degree electric music either by virtue of what you can do with tapes and by the process by which it is preserved on tape or by the use of electricity in the actual making of the sounds themselves.

electric music is the music of this culture and in the breaking away (not the breaking down) from previously assumed forms a new kind of music is emerging. the whole society is like that. the old forms are inadequate, not the old eternal verities but the old structures. and new music isn’t new in that sense either, it is still creation which is life itself and it is only done in a new way with new materials.

so we have to reach out to the new world with new ideas and new forms and in music this has meant leaving the traditional forms of bars and scales, keys and chords and playing something else altogether which maybe you can’t identify and classify yet but which you recognize when you hear it and which when it makes it, really makes it, it is the true artistic turn on.

sometimes it comes by accident. serendipity. with the ones who are truly valuable, the real artists, it comes because that is what they are here to do even if they can say as miles says of his music i don’t know what it is, what is it? they make music like they make those poems and those pictures and the rest because if they do not they cannot sleep nor rest nor, really, live at all. this is how they live, the true ones, by making the art which is creation.

sometimes we are lucky enough to have one of these people like miles, like dylan, like duke, like lenny here in the same world at the same time we are and we can live this thing and feel it and love it and be moved by it and it is a wonderful and rare experience and we should be grateful for it.

i started to ask teo how the horn echo was made and then i thought how silly what difference does it make? and it doesn’t make any difference what kind of brush picasso uses and if the art makes it we don’t need to know and if the art doesn’t make it knowing is the most useless thing in life.

look. miles changed the world. more than once. that’s true you know. out of the cool was first. then when it all went wrong miles called all the children home with walkin’. he just got up there and blew it and put it on an lp and all over the world they stopped in their tracks when they heard it. they stopped what they were doing and they listened and it was never the same after that. just never the same.

it will never be the same again now, after in a silent way and after BITCHES BREW. listen to this. how can it ever be the same? i don’t mean you can’t listen to ben. how silly. we can always listen to ben play funny valentine, until the end of the world it will be beautiful and how can anything be more beautiful than hodges playing passion flower? he never made a mistake in 40 years. it’s not more beautiful, just different. a new beauty. a different beauty. the other beauty is still beauty. this is new and right now it has the edge of newness and that snapping fire you sense when you go out there from the spaceship where nobody has ever been before.

what a thing to do! what a great thing to do. what an honest thing to do there in the studio to take what you know to be true, to hear it, use it and put it in the right place. when they are concerned only with the art that’s when it really makes it. miles hears and what he hears he paints with. when he sees he hears, eyes are just an aid to hearing if you think of it that way. it’s all in there, the beauty, the terror and the love, the sheer humanity of life in this incredible electric world which is so full of distortion that it can be beautiful and frightening in the same instant.

listen to this. this music will change the world like the cool and walkin’ did and now that communication is faster and more complete it may change it more deeply and more quickly. what is so incredible about what miles does is whoever comes after him, whenever, wherever, they have to take him into consideration. they have to pass him to get in front. he laid it out there and you can’t avoid it. it’s not just the horn. it’s a concept. it’s a life support system for a whole world. and it’s complete in itself like all the treasures have always been.

music is the greatest of the arts for me because it cuts through everything, needs no aids. it is … it simply is. and in contemporary music miles defines the terms. that’s all. it’s his turf.

- ralph j. gleason
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Ah but at this ZTT archival website - https://www.zttaat.com/release.php?item=280 - they have the full notes (apparently extracts from IP's "Cravings" - I assume some Barthesian never-completed-work)



The narcissist suffers from too much inner dialogue. The eye of one’s consciousness is forever looking at one’s own action. Yes — let us try to keep the notion clear — a narcissist is not self-absorbed so much as one self is immersed in studying the other. The narcissist is the scientist and the experiment in one. Other people exist, have value to the narcissist because of their particular ability to arouse one role or another in oneself. And are valued for that. May even be loved for that. Of course, they are loved as an actress loves her audience.

amazing… but true

THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE

INSIGNIFICANCE

the shape of the universe is INSIGNIFICANCE

side one

introducing Tony Curtis as the SENATOR

“it sure is a dog of a night…and tomorrow it’s going to be a dog of a day…”

Michael Emil as the PROFESSOR

“I didn’t choose America…I don’t care”

Theresa Russell as the ACTRESS

“We have an awful lot in common”

Gary Busey as the BALLPLAYER

“So you screwed another shrink”

1. A Dog Of A Night produced and performed by STANLEY MYERS

2. Remember Remember produced and performed by HANS ZIMMER

3. Relativity One and Two and Three performed and produced by STANLEY MYERS

4. Forever (What The Hell) produced and performed by STANLEY MYERS

5. Wild Hearts produced by David Briggs and Will Jennings performed by ROY ORBISON

side two

including dialogue spoken by Tony Curtis, Michael Emil, Theresa Russell and Gary Busey

1. B-29 (Shape Of the Universe) produced and performed by HANS ZIMMER

2. Life Goes On produced and arranged by Jon L. Waters performed by THERESA RUSSELL

3. Jupiter Suite produced by Stanley Myers and Brian Gulland performed by GIL EVANS and his orchestra.

4. World Of Theory (Explode) produced and performed by HANS ZIMMER

5. When Your Heart Runs Out Of Time executive producer Otto Flake performed by GLENN GREGORY and CLAUDIA BRÜCKEN

6. It’s A Dog Of A Night produced and performed by STANLEY MYERS album ticks off with no words WILL JENNINGS When Your Heart Runs Out Of Time

and…

so what is it to be said at this hour of Apocalypse? Whatever we say, it will be deferred. And we have been given Insignificance in the interim: a vision or version of the Apocalypse that turns out to be far from apocalyptic. It has adopted a different tone. In fact, and this is far from insignificant, it couldn’t be funnier. Or — and it may amount to the same thing — further from the truth. Apocalypse here is charactered into a kind of parodic America dream populated by nameless phantoms…

So that Insignificance will have taken in…a distress signal…a planned overthrow of names…a stroke of fate…one night in Manhattan…a bit of the American Dream left over…from the other who fell…a vanishing act…a catastrophe…the apple’s fall…the law above us and around us…the coincidence of ‘relativity’ with the ‘beginning’ of cinema…all the other doubles (double sexes) in Roeg’s camera…a roll of the dice…a play on eternity…a repeat performance…a disgusting mask…don’t look…two in one: the double reflexes…the coin drops…the curtain falls…perish the thought…the muzzle of desire…the face of God…the second hand…the work of time…the end of the day…goodbye (wave)…the shape of the universe…as insignificant as an autograph…a passion played…for the time being…AND WE WILL TAKE OUT

ACTRESS Have you got a watch…because you’re gonna need it. Now…we have to imagine this room is the entire universe. We begin together some place in space time. We synchronise at…what does your watch say?

PROFESSOR Eight fifteen.

ACTRESS Eight fifteen. Now I travel away from you at a hell of a speed…say one fifth the speed of light, and I travel for five minutes and it gets me here. Now. I look at my watch. It says twenty minutes past eight. But it’s not very reliable. So I look across the Universe to check with your watch. And what does your watch say?

PROFESSOR Twenty minutes past eight.

ACTRESS Not to me it doesn’t. It says nineteen minutes past eight. Because twenty minutes past eight hasn’t reached me yet. It takes a minute for me to see your watch. Because it takes a minute for the light to reach me. See? So your watch is getting slower and slower. Now comes the thousand dollar question. Remember, that if you look at my watch it’s gonna take a minute for it to reach you too. So now what do you say my watch says?

PROFESSOR Nineteen minutes past eight.

ACTRESS Which means…you say I’m going more slowly than you, while I say you’re going more slowly than me…So, given a constant frame of reference within which to experiment…according to Galileo’s original principles and accepting that light always travels at a hundred and eighty six thousand two hundred and eight two point three nine seven miles per second in all directions at once. Then the main point I have demonstrated is that all measurements of Time and Space are necessarily made relative to a single observer. And are not necessarily the same for two independent observers. And that is the Specific Theory of Relativity…Isn’t it?

PROFESSOR Amazing. But True!

We were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very staging: the traditional ceremony, and it the background the picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification…a great adventure in thought had at last come home to shore.

“He was no kind of fanatic…as incapable of true rancour, spite and animosity as a eunuch is of marriage…he faked it all and couldn’t understand anyone who didn’t…His whole method of operation was complicated because he would get a guilty feeling and get hurt after he had blasted someone…He wanted so desperately to be liked. He didn’t anticipate the results of what he was doing…”

amazing…but true

OUTER SLEEVE: BACK

ZTT IQ4

…is wasted

…is lost

…is found

amazing… but true

…in the nick of time…

“The Shape Of The Universe” is a long playing record souvenir of Nic Roeg’s Insignificance. The souvenir contains on Side One A DOG OF A NIGHT, REMEMBER REMEMBER, RELATIVITY ONE AND TWO AND THREE, FOREVER (What The Hell) AND WILD HEARTS (…time). On Side Two B-29 (Shape Of The Universe), LIFE GOES ON, JUPITER SUITE, WORLD OF THEORY, WHEN YOUR HEART RUNS OUT OF TIME, DOG OF A NIGHT and ticking…off. Artists: Stanley Myers, Roy Orbison, Gil Evans, Hans Zimmer, Theresa Russell, Will Jennings, Glenn Gregoy and Claudia Brücken. Trumpet solo in Jupiter Suite: Lew Soloff.

The souvenir plays at 33⅓ IN STEREOPHONIC for over forty minutes.

To be acknowledged…

Music recorded at Lansdowne Studioes, Lille Yard Studios, Abbey Road and House of David in Nashville.

Souvenir assembled and edited by Paul Morley at Sarm West London: engineer Bobby Kraushaar.

Jupiter Suite: engineer Chris Dibbell.

Wild Hearts and When Your Heart Runs Out Of Time mixed by Nick Ryan.

Keyboards on When Your Heart Runs Out Of Time: Midge Ure.

Soundtrack supervised by Ray Williams for The Pollyanna Film and Music Company Ltd.

Glenn Gregory (Heaven 17) released courtesy of Virgin Records.

Claudia Brücken (Propaganda) released courtesy of ZTT Records

Stills photography: Dacotah

Photograph of Nic Roeg: A.J. Barratt.

Notes: extracts from Ian Penman’s ‘Cravings.’

Sleeve framed by XLZTT ‘more time please’

Correspondence: Paul McDonald and Chris Auty.

The souvenir graciously takes it’s place as number fourteen in Zang Tuum Time’s infatuated Action Series: ‘It is the traditional task of the prophet to denounce systems of rule and life which deny the freedom of the flesh or the imagination.’

A round of special thanks to David Briggs, Tonia Duvall, Alan Mercy and Tommy Valentino.

Names missing from the credits will know who they are.

A volume of coincidences and wonderings compiled by Neil Norman and published by Sidgewick and Jackson to accompany the film Insignificance is recommended to those who wish to take their time further.

(Zenith logo) a Zenith production distributed by Palace/Recorded Releasing

And so we might say coming out of Insignificance, we were only on our way to this exit after all, an end which refuses the end.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
whoah!

dud?

I've never seen it, but I can think of ONE person who would disagree....

Oh yeah. After Bad Timing.... well let's be generous after the first 20 minutes of Eureka.... it's a steep downhill slide for my favorite film maker of all time.

Insignificance is just nothing.... what I call a "Time Out film", gushily reviewed at the time, barely remembered, leaves not an imprint in your "image-repertoire" if you'll pardon my Barthesism.

Track 29, though, Roeg's camera doting on his wife's pert bottom, is worse than nothing...
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
A sometime Dissensian writes:

Sometimes I feel I could rule the world if I could play guitar, but most of the time I regard the fact that I can't play any instrument as my greatest weapon. Either way, it's kind of funny to engage unreknowed singer-over-tapes Pete Um to write sleevenotes for an accomplished musician like Mr C Joynes. Funny, perhaps, but still damnably difficult.

 

Leo

Well-known member
Being a journalist, the phenomenon of the overpriced box set with liner note booklet commissioned from a journalist is of course something I can't decry. Indeed have one out in a few months as part of an Associates Sulk box.

I feel like I've purchase at least three reissued/remastered/expanded versions of "sulk" on cd. is this new one worth further investment?

also, I recall a time when I'd often find typos in Soul Jazz comp liner notes. hope they've hired a proofreader.
 
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