Claude Lombard

I am now well and truly beguiled by this album. This song, "Sleep Well," seems to echo and answer Broadcast's "Echo's Answer." Such a haunting melody.

First two (and fourth) are Vera Neumann. Third one is Instant Automatons. I like the bright springtime tangerine color, with the skeletal autumny trees through the parachute.

Headed to New York today for this and this, among other things.

In the meantime, here's some Belgian outer space loveliness from Claude Lombard. The new reissue of her 1969 LP is totally great!

Asteriadh Poph & Pappas Lakhs

Know Place

Still loving this film.

A Girl is a Gun

AKA Une Adventure de Billy le Kid. Slapstick French Western from Luc Moullet in 1971. I'm posting this mostly because of the soundtrack by Moullet's brother Patrice. Wonderful leftfield celestial psych. Patrice Moullet was the leader of Catherine Ribeiro's backing band Alpes. Fem vocals in Frenglish by the actress (don't know her name), who actually sounds a bit like Ribeiro. There's one fantastic lyric where she sings "No I don't want to be a gun / Get rid of my butt."

Self Expression and Conduct: The Humanities

You may want to say: Suppose someone told you that plants come from a magic seed? How will you start? Then what will you do?



More tracks here. Don't miss this one. This one is really good.

L'une chante, l'autre pas

Here's the full soundtrack for the Agnes Varda film I mentioned earlier. DVD rip style. Cool film!

DeeDee Halleck

I was looking for interesting material on Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet theater when I stumbled upon DeeDee Halleck's website. Halleck is an independent film/video maker and media educator who has devoted her professional/political life to fighting for community access to media technologies. She also has cool glasses. Her earliest film, "Children Make Movies" (1961) involved children scratching the emulsion off of 16mm film stock (McLuhan took this film on his lecture circuit), and she later became co-director of the Child-made Film Symposium throughout the 70s. She's also one of the women behind Paper Tiger Television, a low-budget public access cable TV show featuring a wide range of radical programming. These might be strange things to pluck out from such a long and fruitful career, but they're the parts of her bio that, predictably, I gravitated toward.


Halleck has made two films about Bread & Puppet, neither of which I've seen. The most drool-worthy of these seems to be her 1975 film (with experimental animator George Griffin) entitled "Meadows Green." On her website the film is described as "juxtaposing graphics and fragments of shows" to create a vision of the Bread & Puppet Resurrection Circus, a peace happening staged in protest of the Vietnam War. How could this film not also have a cool soundtrack? (It probably doesn't even have any music, but please allow me my fantasy.) I haven't been able to find much of her work online, apart for the following mid-80s Paper Tiger production. Trippy! (the kids cooking show around five minutes in is classic.)

Broadcast for schools

Cool resource for UK school programming ephemera here.

house un-american cooking

I'm at home nursing a bad cold today, so I decided to make a mix. It's mostly inspired by the movie pictured above, Agnes Varda's "L'une chante, l'autre pas" from 1977. I had seen the screen grab before and always wondered if the music was as good as the photo promised. Well I've seen it now and yes, it is. Brilliant hippie sunshine pop with singing by Agnes Varda herself. She sounds a bit like Laetitia Sadier. Anyway I'm feeling a bit better now and looking out the window I see the sun has even popped out for the first time in about a week.

Here it is.

bell jubilee - peace ringers
chemin de marie et de l'âne-prouesse - hélène martin
přijela k nám pouť - petr skoumal
afghan dance - solid space
from "l'une chante l'autre pas" - agnes varda/le groupe orchidée
a girl is a gun - luc moullet/patrice moullet
prayer to aphrodite - kay gardner
mumsy, nanny, sonny & girly
audience reflections - painted ship
from "l'une chante l'autre pas" - agnes varda/le groupe orchidée
des jouets pour noël - benoit charvet
plastic pennies - giles, giles & fripp
exercises avec cerceaux no. 2 - patrice sciortino
marching together - damin eih, a.l.k. and brother clark
17 gifts for free children - bruce haack
from "l'une chante l'autre pas" - agnes varda/le groupe orchidée
marinetti - john sangster, clemency weight, susan howe & albie thoms
song of the mother - ojas
tongues - the wind children
the corner kids steel band - emmanuel ghent
wheels - victoria
from "l'une chante l'autre pas" - agnes varda/le groupe orchidée