The Third Eye

Through none of my own doing, you can now find the whole catalog of Third Eye TV serials from the early 80s on Youtube. The Third Eye was a Nickelodeon program that cherry-picked children's TV shows from the UK and New Zealand. Often the shows would involve an unusually sentient child or some element of pre-Christian folklore. "Children of the Stones" was the most famous, and the one that you're maybe familiar with. But the other shows -- "The Haunting of Cassie Palmer," "Into the Labyrinth," "Under the Mountain," and "The Witches and the Grinnygog"-- are special in their own right.

I didn't watch these shows the first time around, too busy watching Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact, but maybe I'm grown up enough now to handle them. They are creepy for sure. "The Witches and the Grinnygog" is especially good. It's all about a haunted rectory and the way its pagan past comes back to bite it in its ankle. REALLY good music by James Harpham which you can listen to with your third ear. (I've pasted in episode 1 part 1 below, but the opening is cut off so check episode 2 for the uninterrupted magic of Harpham's olde witche folke.) "The Haunting of Cassie Palmer" is also brilliant, with a lovely radiophonic theme of its own. Anyway check them out -- if you've read this far then you'll probably be into it. Here are the first parts of the first episodes of all the shows except "Children of the Stones."

F for Fake

Orson Welles and François Reichenbach's "F for Fake" (1974). Extremely meta history of hoaxing featuring art forger Elmyr de Hory. Some great footage of Welles wearing a cape and drinking wine in Ibiza. Cool soundtrack by Michel Legrand. You can watch it here, but it's such a beautiful film that I recommend the Criterion DVD. Have a good weekend!

Gymnorythmies

Been looking through some more French library records and thinking how rad they are. Somebody really needs to spread the gospel of Unidisc music/movement LPs. It's hard to describe but the music always seems to fit seamlessly with the sleeve art, together conjuring up some parallel art school universe where the children of Marx and Coca-Cola get together and do calisthenics. One Unidisc record I keep returning to is Patrice Sciortino's Gymnorythmies. There's something very Stereolab about the twinkly mallet-propelled pop art abstractions on this record. It's all very crisp and echo-y and inside-out and floaty, and surprisingly accessible for an avant garde percussion record. Below is my favorite track "Exercices Avec Cerceaux, No. 2" (half the tracks are intended for exercises with hoops, the other half for baton-work). Sounds like the weird instrumental prelude to a song off of Stereolab's Sound Dust, right before the bass guitar part kicks in, and in this respect it's a useful track to play for friends who don't know or care about library music ("No seriously, you'll like it, it sounds like Stereolab"). I also love the stick-figure graphics and Miami Dolphins color scheme. See Lunar Atrium and Continuo for more info on Unidisc, and see here for some great images of Unidisc LPs. I have heard a disturbing rumor that Sciortino is an arch conservative who composed fanfares for the gendarmes but I have yet to verify this and so probably shouldn't even be saying anything about it. That would suck though.

Technicolor Cèilidh

By Caleb Churchill.

Dívka na Koštěti

1972 Czech teen witch comedy caper, also known as "Saxana." Watch here. I need that polar bear poster!

La fleur de vie

This record reminds me of going on school field trips to see Mummenschanz, who for some reason often toured through the college town where I grew up. It's intended for children's music and movement exercises, but being French and from the 70s it fires off very different associations than the post-war British things I've been posting. More stretchy unitard than plimsolls and shorts, if you know what I mean. I always seem to find one of these Unidisc records when I visit Montreal. Never all at once, just here and there like buried treasures in record and book shops. This is one is my favorites. It's like a sound college of ethnic percussion, winds, narration, field recordings and electronic effets aimed at conjuring up magical forests and "tourbillon dans l'espace." Here's the side-long track where everything comes together as a kind of mini radio-play.

*soundclip taken down*

Hear and Now

I'm going out of order here. This is John Paynter's second book about children's music education, circa 1972. I'll post the first one in a bit. Who is John Paynter? There's a nice obit in the Guardian explaining how Paynter, like Carl Orff, revolutionized the music curriculum by moving away from rote learning and towards an emphasis on creativity, imagination and improvisation. Instead of teaching kids the proper way to hold a bassoon he was more interested in meeting them on their own ground by connecting sounds (not just musical sounds but noises, etc.) to feelings and felt experience. In another book, for example, he speaks of a successful music lesson about the idea of "vastness." "If possible we'd try to have some first-hand experience: going out on to a hill-top or a moor if we lived in the country; to the top of a church-tower to survey the landscape; to the beach to look at the vastness of the sea. If we lived in a town we might look at and talk about the canopy of sky above the roofs of a city, or the vast stretching-out of tall factory chimneys." Paynter also seemed to have a good sense of music's place in a broader spectrum of creative endeavor, and so his books always include lots of photos of sculptures, paintings and the like -- a bit like Kurt Rowland's Looking and Seeing series, not to mention Ghost Box releases. I love the photos in Hear and Now. The one with the crouching kids and Count Dracula figure is, I believe, a photo of Paynter's friend R. Murray Schafer, which somebody also posted up on Found Objects. There is a companion record to this book that I desperately need.