Gathering of the Tribe: Landscape: A Companion to Occult Music On Vinyl Vol 1

By Mark Goodall

It is clear that landscapes have long inspired the consciousness of creative artists. By way of quick introduction to the links between music and territories, the 1977 KPM 1191 library music LP features a suite of pieces with titles such as ‘Country Lanes’, ‘Passing Meadows’ and ‘Memory Lane’ composed by Johnny Pearson to express the different aspects of (mostly rural) landscapes. The pieces are interesting as they try to capture an immersive experience of being in a land by using sound. This is a process by which many of the composers in this volume hope to express the wonder and mystery of landscape through sound. The music has been made to express a variety of landscapes: rural and urban; real and imaginary.

About the series:

GATHERING OF THE TRIBE is an on-going series about the mysterious power of sound and tone, with each book devoted to reviewing records that reveal divine and cosmic laws, voyages to other worlds or use sound as a tool for transformation. While highly selective, the series offers a practical guide to the ultimate occult record collection.

Rare album sleeves complement each review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Headpress
• Release date: Oct 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781909394841

Mark Goodall

is a lecturer in the Bradford Media School at the University of Bradford. He writes about film and music and is the author of Headpress' Sweet and Savage: the world through the shockumentary film lens. He is the singer and guitarist with beat combo Rudolf Rocker.

Book preview

Landscape

THERE ARE NO MORE FRONTIERS

(WALTER BOWART, EAST VILLAGE OTHER, DECEMBER 1967)

It is clear that landscapes have long inspired the consciousness of creative artists.

In A Land, Jacquetta Hawkes writes about the poetry of bird song, sounds which inhabit our collective ‘stored memories’ and the imaginations of musicians and composers. Moreover, as Hawkes claims, the land itself expresses sound: ‘the history of the earth’s crust has a rhythm’. The development of the interplay between land and sea is like a composition, ‘a tune that grows louder and louder’. Mesolithic peoples inhabited a world ‘lit by the sound of voices, by the faint flickering of mind’.

A passage in Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer also makes the connection between sound, landscape and psychology tangible:

‘Now and then the distant voice of a shepherdess, or of a boy calling from one clump of firs to another had risen in the great calm of the frozen afternoon. And each of these long cried across the deserted hillsides had made me start as though I heard Meaulnes urging me to go away with him, far away…’

The environment affects the unconscious mind. ‘Psychogeography’ is defined by French writer Guy Debord as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’. Widely misused since its situationist inception in the late 1950s, the term has come to mean any form of aimless wandering. It is the favoured method of poets, artists and writers (across western culture) for creating texts based around experimentation with place and time; an avant-garde practice turned technique. The dérive is another revolutionary strategy for the ‘writer-as-walker’ defined as ‘a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.’ (www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm

) These strategies have tended to be taken up by urban artists and writers. However, as Merlin Coverley argues in his book Psychogeography (2006), an interesting precursor to these techniques is Alfred Watkins’ book The Old Straight Track (1925), a study of the utilitarian then magical dimension to ley lines set in the rural landscape that is as much a part of the ‘visionary tradition’ as the city drifter or flâneur.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

So how has music tapped into this strange world?

According to R. Murray Schafer in his book The Soundscape, the rural landscape is more ‘hi-fi’ than the city. The ‘schizophonic’ nature of broadcast sounds and their proliferation makes a return to the pastoral irresistible (for example, in Hesse’s Steppenwolf, the character, speaking of radio, amusingly denounces sound that ‘takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction or discretion, lamentably distorted to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be’, a wonderfully apposite description of amplified modern-day busking).

illustration

By way of a quick introduction to the links between music and territories, the 1977 KPM 1191 library music LP features a suite of pieces with titles such as ‘Country Lanes’, ‘Passing Meadows’ and ‘Memory Lane’ composed by Johnny Pearson to express the different aspects of (mostly rural) landscapes. The pieces are interesting as they try to capture an immersive experience of being in a land by using sound. This is a process by which many of the composers in this section hope to express the wonder and mystery of landscape through sound. The music in this chapter has been made to express a variety of landscapes: rural and urban, real and imaginary.

This is music of the land and of those cities which ‘like dreams are made of desires and fears’ (Calvino).

illustration

Auto Jazz

Tragic Destiny Of Lorenzo Bandini

BARNEY WILEN

(MPS, 1968)

Tracks

>1ST MOVEMENT — EXPECTANCY

>2ND MOVEMENT — START

>3RD MOVEMENT — TRIBUNE PRINCIERE

>4TH MOVEMENT — HAIR PIN (VIRAGES DES GAZOMÉTRES)

>5TH MOVEMENT — CANYON SOUNDS AND DESTINY

Auto Jazz , a sound recording based on a real-life tragedy, chronicles the landscape of death by modern technology. On 7 May 1967, at the Grand Prix de Monaco , the car of the Italian racing driver Lorenzo Bandini hit a chicane guardrail, skidded, overturned and exploded. Bandini suffered third-degree burns covering more than 70% of his body and three days later was pronounced dead.

Barney Wilen (1937–1996) was born and grew up in Nice and developed a passion for bebop jazz following World War II (a period when many American jazz musicians were settling in France, albeit mainly Paris). In the early 1950s, Wilen opened a jazz youth club in Nice, obtaining a city