Niscience

70s Christian folk weirdness from Ann Ree Colton's Niscience lay ministry. Pretty catchy! According to their promotional literature, the school of Niscience (NISH-ence) aims to develop a "knowledge of your personal angels and how to work with them" through "the study of the seven genesis levels and the family-atom." An additional awesome goal is to "interpret the 'hard sayings' of Jesus." Ann Ree Colton and her partner Jonathan Murro also made and sold really cool art (see below.) Ann Ree is in the pink toga.

Brian Dennis

Try to create magical sounds, sounds with an unearthly, mysterious quality. Create misty sounds. Use voices to make frightening sounds or the ethereal sounds of fairies, elves and spirits. Find suitable instruments to enhance these effects as well as instruments to create such effects on their own. Magical textures could themselves be created in this way.

Snow monkeys, nymphs, etc.

Coolest ebay auction ever. Weird Super 8 and 16mm films about pink Japanese snow monkeys, woodland nymphs, British children painting, and that film about snow with music by Daphne Oram.


There's also an AMAZING looking 70s documentary about an Islington playground. No pics, but check out the unusually lengthy and detailed item description, which pretty nearly walks through the film line by line, image by image.

"Even a small bit of tarmac is not safe for children: a group of 1970s urchins jump aside as a car horn toots at them as they play in their estate’s car park."

“Like a modern day pied piper of Hamelin, she led a march to lay claim to the land.”

“In the adventure playground you can build things, swing, paint…know what I mean.”

!!! Now all I need is a projector and a 90% discount please?

The New Soundscape

The New Soundscape - R. Murray Schafer (1969)

The prettiest (and the only?) song about Thanksgiving that I know about, by Pascal Comelade. (PS, that whole album is amazing.) To my American readers, happy Turkey Day tomorrow!

The Development of Shape

Scans from these Kurt Rowland books.

Eric Siday

Midcentury sound logos for your Orangina-sponsored art opening or training session. The vibe here is very Expo 67.

Also, for those of you who like mixes this page is kinda fun. Cool to see what people are listening to these days.

Zdeněk Liška/Jan Švankmajer

This post about the upcoming release of an obscure Czech soundtrack by Zdenek Liska reminded me of something I've been meaning to share: a collection of Liska's music for Jan Svankmajer's stop-motion films. I love these films, and I think a lot of the appeal has to do with the noises beckoning from Liska's magical music box. Stones dropping rhythmically into a bucket, weird echoes and electronic effects, marionettes shouting at each other -- these are some of the ingredients going into Liska's concrète lullabies and nursery rhymes, along with a silliness that keeps Svankmajer's menagerie of grotesques from getting too, well, grotesque. I find the weird slavic baroque earthiness of the Svankmajer/Liska world totally enchanting. And I could be wrong but I don't think anyone's ever bothered to put this music together on a record or CD.

So, for the last couple years I've just been listening to my own homemade Liska/Svankmajer bootleg, which includes most of their films from the 60s and early 70s, films like "Historia Naturae" and "Jabberwocky" and "A Game With Stones." Nice music for padding around the living room, making a cup of tea, dressing down your marionette, etc. Enjoy.

Things seen

Trzeba zabić tę miłość

Would love to live for a while in this opening credit sequence, frolicking in a water fountain to the sound of a rock/electroacoustic mashup with flute.

Protocole, Industrie et Paysage

Ancient/modern geometric sounds by Vladimir Cosma. Collage by R. Hilton.

Sally Potter

Beda Folten

Hope everybody had a nice weekend. I'm happy to present this little charmer after finally finding a copy. Another mid-70s mood music curio recorded for yet-to-be-made films and TV shows. The twinkly pixie-dust sprinkled chamber music here is cut from the same cloth as Luboš Fišer's score for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. It conjures up a whole woodland universe of adolescent mediums and secretive townspeople and village intrigue. It's the kind of music that could have been made entirely by children for children. Very simple mallet and woodwind interludes for surreal dream sequences and coming-of-age montages. Listen here.

guitar attack/listening center

Who would you ask to be in your band?

Werner Nekes

Pretty into Werner Nekes lately, although I see there's a learning curve ahead. Here are some film stills. "Hynningen" and "Makimono," two early-70s meditations on Finnish landscape, are totally captivating. A lot of these films feature music by Anthony Moore. Here's the lovely foresty blissout drone poem from the end of "Makimono."



And here's Moore's trippy guitar interlude from Nekes' "Abbandano" in 1970. The music on this one is the best of the lot -- experimental but quite moving and beautiful. Here's a link to the full score of about 30 minutes or so. Recommended.