Sunday, November 24, 2013

Early Musical Instruments

Here are a few more clips from the David Munrow TV special posted earlier. The show was called Early Musical Instruments and aired in 1976. There were 6 episodes, each involving Munrow and a group of wan Englishmen making a racket with a certain family of instruments - reed instruments, strummed ones, percussion, etc. Some of them are positively evil looking, such as the gemshorn, a recorder made seemingly out of satan's antlers, or various guitar-like monsters with about twenty strings and nightmarish dragon-like tuning heads. The series was filmed at the beautiful and eerie Ordsall Hall in Salford, known for the ghosts of a White Lady and young girl that have been seen in its staircases.

Munrow tragically took his own life at 33, but his legacy carries onwards and upwards -- one of his recordings was on the golden disc accompanying the Voyager spacecraft into the heavens in 1977.



6 comments:

  1. Amazing.....!
    That 14th century jam is unreal....thanks Ben!

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    1. yes! so wicked. you would love this dvd... will try to dub for you...

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  2. He was such an outstanding talent. I particularly like his electro-acoustic score for Zardoz (1974) http://moundsandcircles.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/sound-of-zardoz.html

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    1. was reading through an obituary last night and was surprised to learn the zardoz link... i actually haven't seen the film. sounds awesome!

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  3. Great on so many levels. Hard rocking intellectuals.

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