Month: March 2024

  • Three, Four Tet

    Three, Four Tet

    “It’s got enough heart that we won’t accuse it of going through the motions, yet if that was all you ever asked from Four Tet, this is surely a dream come true,” says the reviewer on Sputnikmusic of Four Tet’s new album, Four, in a rather passive-aggressive review that calls the album “solid” and declares ” its impact is too modest and its aptitude for mood music too diffuse”. I disagree. As much as I rate 2020’s Sixteen Oceans, I think this is a deceptively better one (though I’ve read that Four Tet’s Alexandria Palace live album from last year is really good). Philip Sherberne on Pitchfork thinks it’s pretty decent: “There’s much more here than meets the ear: interruptions you never see coming, intimations of sounds in the depths of the mix you can’t quite make out. That’s what separates Three from the merely chill; it takes a master craftsperson’s skill to create music that scans so simply on the surface but then opens up to reveal hidden rooms within hidden rooms”.

    So far, my favourite track is Daydream Repeat (possibly followed by 31 Bloom – the whole album more or less works as a single piece so it’s hard to decide!).

  • Bands as Saturday Morning Cartoons

    Bands as Saturday Morning Cartoons

    This is an enjoyable site: stuffbymark.co.uk, where Mark Reynolds presents imaginary retro cartoons, movie posters and the like based on songs and bands. I loved the bands-as-Saturday-Morning-Cartoons especially – but Reynolds’ great at this.

  • Gallagher & Squire

    Gallagher & Squire

    Eventually listened through Liam Gallager John Squire, the new album by.. er… Liam Gallagher and John Squire. Alexis Petridis claims: “it’s a noticeably better album than anything in Gallagher’s post-Oasis oeuvre, and indeed anything Squire has released since leaving the Stone Roses in 1996. The songwriting is melodically stronger and the performances more vibrant, with a pronounced sense that both parties are sparking off each others’ company.” Kitty Power says: “it refuses to disappoint the faithful of both bands while offering an often intriguing rearranging of the Roses/Oasis DNA”. I’m not so sure. It’s definitely got a mid/late-sixties slight psychedelic edge and isn’t offensive – especially on tracks like Just Another Rainbow and I’m So Bored. Liam does a sterling job of imitating Ian Brown, whose spectre hangs over the whole album (and to be honest, I’d probably enjoyed it far more with Brown’s vocals). Despite that, it is what Oasis/Stone Roses fans probably wanted. The cover shows a pile of commodities with the song titles as labels. You get what it says on the cover: an album by Gallagher and Squire. It’s ok but nothing special.

  • Reading & Writing for Pleasure

    Reading & Writing for Pleasure

    Just read the excellent Reading and Writing for Pleasure: A Framework for Practice and Approaches to Reading and Writing for Pleasure by the Open University’s Reading for Pleasure programme. Plus the TES interview with Professor Teresa Cremin about how to encourage more children to read for pleasure.

    The takeaways seem to me to be ones involving the authenticity of reading and writing activities:

    • a critical importance of developing Writing for Pleasure AND Reading for Pleasure;
    • the importance of motivating children to develop positive identities of themselves as readers and writers (“negotiated and co-constructed in and through interaction with others in different social environments”)
    • enabling children to feel they have agency, competence and social connection through reading and writing;
    • the importance of time devoted to access to (a wide range of) texts;
    • positive reading experiences lead to a desire to write;
    • learner-led social interactions (talking about/sharing reading and writing; open-ended discusions) is motivational;
    • teachers who are readers and writers themselves are positively influential.

    Added notes to this over on my digital garden for future reference.

     

  • OFSTED try to “do” literature

    OFSTED try to “do” literature

    Amusing – and chilling – piece by the wonderful Michael Rosen about part of the recent OFSTED subject report into English. Rosen examines the controversial paragraph 90 of the report which attempts to insist that only texts of “literary merit” should be studied in schools and attempts a sleight of hand to conflate “easy” texts with ones that have contemporary social themes. He views the paragraph as an attempt to smear teachers.

    Rosen does a close analysis of the paragraph and sensibly draws attention to the ideological purpose behind its recommendations. He dismisses the idea of there being a gold standard of “literary merit” easily – though notes that it’s an aspect of “power-play” and “Control through priviledge”. (As an aside: I find that the sort of people who fervently believe in the type of “literary merit” discussed here are usually those who don’t actually read very much.).

    The crux of the matter is the way that reading in schools is reduced to something called “challenging vocabulary and structures”:

    Now we know what these people think reading in schools should be for. We are in pursuit of the ineffable, unfindable mirage of ‘literary merit’ while doing hard words and hard structures because next year, there’ll be harder words and harder structures.

    Read Ofsted try to ‘do’ literature and end up with pap HERE.

  • Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

    Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

    Found this in a charity shop today: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, part of The Film Classics Library’s “most accurate and complete reconstruction of a film in book form”. It’s a comic book-like presentation of the whole of the movie and an absorbing read. I often find that stills from movies (especially old black and white ones) often make shots and scenes seem more weighty, more impressive than they seem when you actually watch the movies themselves. I’m not entirely sure why this is – or whether this is something that’s just me. When I was in my early teens I found a copy of the Hitchcock/Truffaut conversations which were accompanied by – what I thought at the time were – amazing sequences of shots. When I saw the films themselves, the Hitchcock ones, they never lived up to how I’d constructed them in my imagination. It’s a little the same here. I do think Psycho is an excellent film – but reading through this book much of it seems far better than I remember Psycho actually being. Look at the final scene with Anthony Perkins sitting on the chair after being arrested (below). That’s absolutely stunning.  It looks like there are other books in this series covering The Maltese Falcon (oh!) and Frankenstein.

     

  • Philip Glass Solo

    Philip Glass Solo

    There’s already a great deal of Philip Glass in my music collection but I couldn’t resist listening to this latest album, Philip Glass Solo – though it was Luis Alverez Roure’s striking portrait of Glass that caught my attention. I first listened to Glass in the 1980s when I bought a copy of Glassworks on CD from Our Price, finding it both challenging in terms of what I expected from “classical” music as a teenager and beguiling for the strange, circling musical pattens that I found almost hypnotic (plus I also was attracted to the album cover which seemed to me to capture the styling of the time). I have distinct memories of sitting in my bedroom in my childhood home listening to the album in summertime. In the mid-1990s, Kronos Quartet Plays Philip Glass – String Quartets 3-5 – (and the growth of the internet, of course) became the mechanism for me to listen to more and Einstein on the Beach, which I continue to find utterly compelling. There was a time when I worked in Canterbury that I’d listen to a playlist of Glass’ when I’d get into work early in the morning.

    Philip Glass Solo are 7 (mostly) short pieces played by the composer himself at home on piano during the lockdown. Glass says:

    This record is both a time capsule of 2021, and a reflection on decades of composition and practice. In other words, a document on my current thinking about the music. There is also the question of place. This is my piano, the instrument on which most of the music was written. It’s also the same room where I have worked for decades in the middle of the energy which New York City itself has brought to me. The listener may hear the quiet hum of New York in the background or feel the influence of time and memory that this space affords. To the degree possible, I made this record to invite the listener in.

    It’s a gentle album of well-known pieces which seem to me to be quieter, pensive, more intimate – maybe less large-scale atmospheric – than other recordings I’ve listened to. You get the impression of the 87 year-old composer sat alone at his piano playing with grace and poised craftmanship. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of unfamiliar, mainly electronic and experimental music, and it’s been lovely to listen to music a little more contemplative and – dare I say – nostalgic.

  • Feel More Again

    Feel More Again

    There’s something hits different about Cineworld’s current slogan. Being told that I can “feel more again” by watching an animated movie about anthropomorphised mallard ducks migrating haphazardly to Jamaica isn’t quite what I’m going to the cinema with my kids for on a Saturday afternoon. We just wanted to do something and it was raining heavily. Somewhere, I imagine, Cineworlds advertising consultants are leaning heavily on the Poetics as a marketing tool to convince us that the way to cut through post-Covid desensitisatised ennui is by sitting in front of a giant screen, drinking a slurpy and munching through a tub of popcorn. The therapy is the cost of admission (and the shockingly overpriced sweets). Of course, the slogan falls down when the supposed mimetic function is meant to happen in SF, superhero or animated animal adventures. I can’t say I had a cathartic experience – but the kids thought the animated duck movie was ok. It did leave me the impression I was sitting in some darkened, half-filled place in Oceania being told how to react, though.