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July 2, 2010 Leave a Comment
Our new collaboration with The Advisory Circle is released today! You can order the 7″ vinyl from Ghost Box, Boomkat, Norman Records, Rough Trade, Resident or Jumbo Records. The tracks are also available as MP3 downloads from Bleep, Juno, iTunes, Amazon, 7digital, emusic and Play.com. Come freely, go safely…and, above all, enjoy!
June 25, 2010 2 Comments
They’re here! We received a box from Ghost Box HQ this morning containing our 7″s.
The vinyl is super heavyweight and beautifully presented, as you’d expect from the label.
This collaboration with The Advisory Circle will be available to buy on vinyl and as a digital download on 2 July 2010 from Ghost Box and all the usual vendors. You can preorder the 7″ now, however.
Here’s a beautiful English summer evening reflected in the vinyl.
June 17, 2010 5 Comments
At the weekend I picked up an intriguing Masters of Cinema DVD. The 40-page accompanying booklet – featuring an essay and stills from the film – led me to expect great things, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Director Nobuhiko Obayashi was an experimental film maker who had become a big name in Japanese commercials in the 70s, directing hit ‘CMs’ starring the likes of Charles Bronson and Kirk Douglas, but he had never made mainstream narrative cinema.
Toho’s decision to let this outsider direct a feature demonstrated the crisis facing Japan’s traditionally rigid film industry at the time. Obayashi was asked by desperate Toho executives to deliver “the Japanese Jaws“, and House (Hausu) is what he came up with.
The film was supposedly inspired by the director’s young daughter, who one night pondered how scary it would be if your house attacked you. Her nightmarish ideas – a piano chewing off your fingers; electric lights dropping on your head; being mangled by the gears of a grandfather clock – are all present in this kaleidoscopic, funny and visually-innovative film. I hope these images whet your appetite to seek it out.
House features a cameo from groovy pop group Godiego. I love their soundtrack song “Cherries Were Made For Eating”:
Finally, the brilliant Ubuweb has several early experimental films by Obayashi, all free to watch online.
June 16, 2010 Leave a Comment
2010 sees Puffin Books, the children’s imprint of Penguin, celebrate its 70th anniversary. As a child, I read an enormous number of Puffins and am still a big fan of their classic book jackets (and exuberant puffins, of course).
To mark this occasion I’m posting a beautiful Puffin Club film made in the 1960s about Joan Aiken, one of my favourite authors when I was young. The film follows Joan as she works, travels and talks about her inspirations – she has an amazing voice!
Excerpts and illustrations from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Blacks Hearts in Battersea, Night Birds in Nantucket and Whispering Mountain also feature.
The full Wolves of Willoughby Chase series runs to 12 books in all and these atmospheric historical adventures are probably what she is best remembered for. I, however, will always reserve a special place on my bookshelf for the anarchic Arabel and Mortimer.
June 14, 2010 2 Comments
I’ve just listened to a frustrating but interesting documentary on BBC Radio 4 called Chopsticks at Dawn. You can hear it on the BBC’s iPlayer here, until this coming Saturday:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sm4tg/Chopsticks_at_Dawn/
Presented by Anna Chen, the programme looks at inauthentic Chineseness in music, from Debussy to David Bowie. It’s an incomplete look at the subject, and I’m afraid I shouted at the radio on a couple of occasions, but it’s worth listening to if you want to find out the (probable) origins of the ‘ning-a-ning-nong’ melody from Kung Fu Fighting.
East-Asian influences in music – real or fake – are something that we’re very interested in, and we discussed the same subject when we appeared on Lucky Cat on Resonance FM a few months ago.
What’s probably more interesting to us is the flow of influence in the opposite direction – how Western pop norms were incorporated into East-Asian rock n’ roll of the 50s and 60s. I’ll gladly make a documentary about it for Radio 4 – they have only to ask.
Tim Scullion, Mei Yau Kan and Christopher Greenberg
