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Finders Keepers are plugging our ears with new releases on a seemingly weekly basis at the moment, and this week's compilation of soundtrack material from Lollywood's Lahore-based film industry is a particularly special little archival wonder of experimental Eastern pop. Many of these songs are dual language, schizoid bursts of punchy Pakistani funk, all of which have a cross genre appeal. Rhythm and melody, here it is folks, you need only turn your attention briefly and the hooks will catch you.
Ahmed Rushdi - Dama Dam Mast Qalander
Nahid Akhtar - Good News For You
Noor Jehan - I Am Very Sorry
Nahid Akhtar - Society Girl
Eric Fischl, Master Bedroom (Her Master's Voice) (1983)
In the Hainesville Cemetery by Alden Nowlan (1933-83)
Not all these stones
belong to death. Here and there
you read something
like
John Andrew Talbot, 1885-1955
Mary, his wife, 1887-
and on decoration day
Mary will come here
and put a jam jar of water and tulips
on her own grave.
The Talbots are people
who make the beds before breakfast
and set the breakfast table
every night before they go to bed.
To Sand by Brian Turner
To sand go tracers and ball ammunition.
To sand the green smoke goes.
Each finned mortar, spinning in light.
Each star cluster, bursting above.
To sand go the skeletons of war, year by year.
To sand go the reticles of the brain,
the minarets and steeple bells, brackish
sludge from the open sewers, trashfires,
the silent cowbirds resting
on the shoulders of a yak. To sand
each head of cabbage unravels its leaves
the way dreams burn in the oilfires of night.
Here are some recordings to soundtrack your day with, if most of your days are more swinging than outright interesting and are spent under the weak Mancunian sunlight, as mine are, and perhaps include a walk through the Whitworth Park and an inevitable visit to the Chester Zoo (?). Trunk Records have issued this just-shy-of-an-hour-long collection of music for advertisers and television from the Studio G LIbrary, itself still in operation if the interweb is at all reliable. A fashionable and listenable set of sounds for the 70s and 80s, simple, effective and perhaps even amateurish, as so many of us are.
Paul Lewis - Waiting For Nina
Douglas Wood - Five To A Bar
James Asher - Cosmic Dust
Frederick Judd - Sprockets
Harry Pitch - Elephants Dance
I would like to tell you as much as I can about Stuttgart-born composer and jazz pianist Wolfgang Dauner. I would use words like experimental and eclectic and end up saying something about Krautrock and weirdness and melody mired together by defiant rhythm. But the end result would lead you to the word 'fusion', and I hate that, I do, because it's just not taking us anywhere near what we have here, which is, in the end, some otherwise groovy, post-hippie tunes, including a mad Be**tles cover, with big drums, variation and ability. Now, how many can say that? Not many. And how many would want to? Not many.
Wolfgang Dauner Quintet - A Day In The Life
Wolfgang Dauner Quintet - Take Your Clothes Off To Feel The Setting Sun
Wolfgang Dauner Quintet - Uwiii
Wolfgang Dauner Group - Just Bring It Out
Imagine Doctor Frankenstein and Fernando Pessoa ham-fisted into a drug-happy music producer working in the south of the France in the 70s, and you have a safer introduction to the work Jean-Pierre Massiera than I've had, which was through the music itself. Massiera's name is synonymous with trippy, weird, indulging and indulgent musical productions all rocking and rolling from his own Studio D'Enregistrement Mediterranean (S.E.M.), which opened its doors in 1967. Finders Keepers have released a genre-defying, half-maddening, mostly entropic selection of Massiera moments from his first eleven years of work, including gems and strange from his glorified psychedelic period. Am I underselling this? I don't mean to. Step into the Chico Magnetic Band's free form pop, and arrive here from the stars with Visitors. There's no end in sight during these fifty minutes.
Visitors - Visitors
Jésus - L'electrocuté
Chico Magnetic Band - Pop Or Not
Les Maledictus Sound - Kriminal Theme
After Life - Secret la vielle dame
Henri Rousseau (1844-1910),Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) (1891)
Tiger in the Menagerie by Emma Jones
No one could say how the tiger got into the menagerie.
It was too flash, too blue,
too much like the painting of a tiger.
At night the bars of the cage and the stripes of the tiger
looked into each other so long
that when it was time for those eyes to rock shut
the bars were the lashes of the stripes
the stripes were the lashes of the bars
and they walked together in their dreams so long
through the long colonade
that shed its fretwork to the Indian main
that when the sun rose they'd gone and the tiger was
one clear orange eye that walked into the menagerie.
No one could say how the tiger got out in the menagerie.
It was too bright, too bare.
If the menagerie could, it would say 'tiger'.
If the aviary could, it would lock its door.
Its heart began to beat in rows of rising birds
when the tiger came inside to wait.
Finders Keepers are plugging our ears with new releases on a seemingly weekly basis at the moment, and this week's compilation of soundtrack material from Lollywood's Lahore-based film industry is a particularly special little archival wonder of experimental Eastern pop. Many of these songs are dual language, schizoid bursts of punchy Pakistani funk, all of which have a cross genre appeal. Rhythm and melody, here it is folks, you need only turn your attention briefly and the hooks will catch you.
