Fandorin Files

Beautifully Dissonant

2006-05-21T02:02:00.000+02:00

later this day i wondered what is actually beautiful
hm, i'm not the first person to guess what it is
but

the key is dissonance

the small breaks in the surface letting the brooding stream of beauty emanate. the too stern looks, the too lightswallowing blackness of hair, the crashing disturbance in a piece of music.

Once i had to play one fugue by Shostakovich

it was carefully avoiding any dissonant (non-third/forth/fifth, octave) sound
it was so consonant it becomes scary after a minute
you wait for the dissonances to tickle your nerves
but nothing ever happens
it's like
a person smiling at you
for more than three minutes
i think this was in eraserhead
this was a wonderous eraserheaded piece of scary scary harmony
you know all is wrong, but it's kept as a secret from you

careful -
everything might become a fad
fad is bad!
fad is the shallow!
fad is the idiots posing as something you might like
by repeating/echolaliating something you really love

you'll understand it if you'll stumble across
the bitterness in the serene
the icy wind in the idyllic
the throatclearing in silence
the flaw that contrasts with inherent beauty
the flaw that is not a flaw but the soul

and then it has to go away!

for instance, i captured two brazilian artists on that camera

elis regina & antonio carlos jobim
they have a major flaw, ok
they're both dead
and jobim wears an abysmally ugly sweater
and regina spoils her breath with a ciggy
now for the reward - can those people transfer into the most beautiful persons on earth..
oh yes, they can
the two most beautiful moments in their little song are

1) when they start laughing (and dont want to)
2) when they're whistling a solo, totally out of tune with the piano

see..look down!

anyway - my daughter is likely to become a cyclist. or a kickboxer. she could kick me before she knew my name...

Grant McLennan

2006-05-07T02:02:00.000+02:00

Crying for the first time in my life because some pop star died.
Grant, thank you so very very much.

Elis & Tom made my day again...

2006-04-12T20:11:00.000+02:00

The Dynamitron Tandem Laboratorium

2006-03-19T23:19:00.000+01:00

this entry is especially for those
who nudgenudged me
to enter something
even if there are matches between the old eyelids to keep them open
and the music playing is really disliked now..

well this was another vikend in boxum,
a really really nice ugly town at the border of
...you can see the dutch mountains
and really friendly people.

but the best thing is...
you dont have to see friendly people and mountains,
because you can walk for hours and hours and hours
without meeting someone....
walking without noticing where you actually are
it's perfection!
come to Bochum!
City of God!!

or...

no! don't come here!!
shhhht!
or..

come here, you chosen few, but dont tell anybody!
let's keep our litte secret
in those secret little boxes
and enjoy the forests and rivers and lakes and ponds
and the pond life, and the furnaces and bassins.
and of course
the Dynamitron Tandem Laboratorium

really -there is this sign, saying
"this way to the Dynamitron Tandem Laboratorium"
this utterly fascinated me as a child.

until this day, i havent found out what it actually is
i could do a noodle search, and find out.
but i won't.
and if someone would tell me, he won't live very long after
he won't live to tell the tale how another childhood mystery kicks the bucket

So the Fandorin enjoyed his little trip to Bochum
and for his arrival, the local soccer team destroyed some other team on Bochum lawn
and the sun was shining
and spring said hello
and it was warm, and the birches were scenting
and i suspected...
...it was all arranged especially for me..
and i felt a bit like Kim Jong Il, the ugly Northern Korean weirdo today.

everything in its place
just one piece missing in that improbably happy-day puzzle.

this is our contest -

if you can guess what was missing, you'll make a fortune
or not.

and i will go shleep, for i dont have much time!

technology fighting relevance

2006-03-15T22:48:00.000+01:00

The Banquet Tears

2006-03-10T21:02:00.000+01:00

Dug out Roger Shattuck's "Banquet Years", a terribly smart examination of that certain period we remember as the "Belle Epoque". Excess, ciggies, beautiful music, bearded men in striped swimsuits. Big moustaches. Weird inventions. Creepy bicycles. Wealthy sewing machine makers ordering harpsichord concertos for private puppet stages. As the 20th century grew colder, the moustaches, bikes, Hulots, hopelessly beautiful music went away, indignant, ironically, with a few raised eyebrows. We can find traces of these times on old records.

And just today I rediscovered some ancient songs by Edith Piaf

No, i won't mention "Je ne regrette rien" and other Big Pop Hits by this distinctive french singer (i honestly cannot stand them). Right now, I'm sitting in the semi-dark, it's one of these days when I'm terribly sad and I don't know why. I'm resisting to drown in a bottle of red wine. I'm just sitting, staring into the nothingness, while listening to early recordings of Edith Piaf.

It's jazz, very very blue jazz, combined with a hint of Belle Epoque funfair music. What is the opposite of funfair? sadfair? This music was recorded when Ravel was still alive, when WWII hadnt been unleashed.... and there is this song, "Mon Légionnaire", which happens to be the SADDEST song ever written, dramatic minor key, always tipping over to the major realm, thus tearing apart the soul of that lady.

she is singing about a one night stand with a soldier who "was small, beautiful and smelled wonderfully like the warm sand" ("sentait bon le sable chaud"), and she met him only once; in the second verse she is singing about the same soldier, who was "small beautiful, and they sent him under the warm sand" ("...mettait sous le sable chaud").

the first verse is a woman deeply in love, the second verse reflects relentless weeping, with resignation and dignity. and altogether, this is genius, and really moves me.

This is the one song that always makes me cry when I don't fight it. Tonight, I won't.

The Soft Ballistics

2006-02-27T00:17:00.000+01:00

the entrance wounds of waking up early right under my eyes
and i ask myself
who is in charge here
who lets me do this
who allows me to look at that pile of metal garbage
and who lets the river flow through another town
where am i?
they built a monument
of someone, because
monuments have to be built
so someone can see someone
to think
just something

THE WEIRD SISTERS - VOL.2: Linda Perhacs

2006-01-25T12:29:00.000+01:00

Linda Perhacs is a Californian dental hygienist in her late fifties. She utters phrases like

Energies. We are surrounded by them daily [...] The doorway to them is through inner quietness and higher attunement to the higher spiritual frequencies found thru meditation. [...] These higher light energies are God centered and they fill the universe bringing healing and higher creative energies and all things that are good.

In case you think that sounds like a cliche master-your-life bible sold in one of these shops with amethysts, tarot and pendulums on display, you are right. She talks about feeling energetic rays in churches, especially close to the altar and so on and so on..

For 35 years, Linda Perhacs did not say anything in public media. I can only imagine that she spent her days in CA, in her dental hygiene studio, caring for the bleached teeth of the rich. Hula-hooping, jogging, aerobicking. Sun-tanned, dressed in mother-of-pearl tights, pink shirt.

35 years ago, Linda Perhacs released an album called "Parallelograms". In case you have heard about Led Zeppelin's Fourth Album but never about "Parallelograms", don't be afraid. It was recorded and the record company decided it was so nice it didnt need any marketing. She never played live and quickly went back to the teeth cleaning routine. On this album, she sings lines like

Parallelollelograms Parallelollelollelograms Quadroedal Tetraedal Spirallogram Semiparabolic Semimetrabolic Radiolariarunicellular Round Round Round Round

Awful, it sounds like this record might be HEALTHY. I don't want healthy music!! Well well, when does he tell us why he is writing about this all. Hm. Guess, now!

It's just because Linda Perhacs' sole album Parallelograms from 1970 is one of the most beautiful pieces of music issued in this solar system during the last 3,5 billion years. There's a lot of nice music around, even really really great music. And fantastic and tremendous music! I mean, everyone should find something to rave about.

There are, however, very very little recordings that are so beautiful that they can disturb me. No, Napalm Death or Suicide or Throbbing Gristle do not disturb me. With very very few strokes, Parallelograms creates a world and I immediately wished to live there for a while, a big while actually. No healthy music for me please.

How does it sound like? I don't know. Some say it's Psych Folk and the whole bunch of Devendra Banhart sycophants cite Parallelograms as a main influence.

It never sounds like "A girl with a guitar", which is especially puzzling because of the fact that we are listening to a girl with a guitar. A happy, very happy flower child is marching through a field...bluebottles and poppies caress her legs and you're inside a kitschy fantasy, when she starts singing. Strangely, she adds bits of psychedelia, kraut rock, experimental Beefheart blues...of course, homeopathically little, but it's definitely there...What is most fantastic - this all is sung in a very understated voice, hardly any signs of mannerism, tremolo or whatever people spoil their voices with. Think a stronger, more female version of Suzanne Vega maybe. Twelve string acoustic guitars are jangling, a lot f weird background stuff is going on...hmm...

And then you suddenly notice that you are afraid this record might end. Like a child might fear the sun won't rise again on seeing a multicoloured panoramic sundown...please, everything not this. It's disturbing because it scared me that it might have been a dream.

If you check out the last song, "Delicious", really really listen to it.....shshhh!!.... you can notice a dozen ways to express love with a voice. Love in its whole diversity, the pleasant love, actually. Mrs Perhacs sings lines like.."oh how delicious....oh how i want you", and on iPaper, it looks sub-awkward and really really silly. Her voice adds a whole bouquet of dimensions. Opens a whole spectre of love with different pronunciations of "oh". Specre, you mean Eros, Agape, Caritas? No, there must be infinitely more colours of heavenly love and it's all expressed in a short short song.

It's silence forged to music, and it's neither ambient, nor artsy, nor Pärtsy....not one of these records where you'd love to have your money back because of all the Deep pauses between the notes.....you can listen to a song here...but it's nothing repreentative at all...and please forget what you see or read on this page. Better to avoid it.

Linda, help me...

usually our perceptual senses are too dulled by the frantic, nervous pace and noise of our lives. Only by quieting our lives can we feel and see these natural and higher frequencies that fill our world and the universe.

I almost believe her. I don't want to feel and see any higher frequencies...for the time being, it's perfectly enough to listen and feel her and her music. And whatever she says about rainbows and churches and rays, energies and, say, spoonbending and spontaneous human combustion... it's all logical and good because ... it really doesnt matter...

and now, S.H., please shut up

pipe
down

SH
sh!!!!!

oh how delicious...

THE WEIRD SISTERS: Judee Sill vs. Linda Perhacs vs. Vashti Bunyan. VOL.1 JUDEE SILL

2006-01-22T21:35:00.000+01:00

Judee Sill & Linda Perhacs & Vashti Bunyan.

Pop music's most discovered best-kept secrets. Where to begin? Three ladies, twice America, once England. Two thirds are still alive. They probably did not notice each other in times of activity, but there seems to be a bond between them. ALl three of them started ~1970 with records that were packed with emotion, fantastic song, beautiful voices and all three records sank without traces. Three flower children tiptoed into the music biz, two of them tiptoed out, while one perished on the steep rocks of the coast of the land of the bad metaphor.

God only knows what Judee Sill's mistake was. She had the voice of an angel, hell, the voice of an omnibus packed with angels, she had songs that shine like the last rays of a late summer sun. She had songs that spin their golden contrapuntal threads around your head. She sang of all kinds of love, the painful, the heavenly, the erotic and with each syllable she sang, you just had to believe her. Her self-titled debut is pulsating with joy and warm blood that Brian Wilson at his sunniest seems like a reptile in comparison.

Well, maybe this was her mistake. Doesnt exactly help to quote Bach, Pythagoras and Ray Charles as your main influences.

She recorded a second album, "Heart Food", and people should found religions on the feelings this record evokes. Then she recorded a few more songs, decided to quit music to concentrate on heroin, then she broke her back in a bad accident, lived through months of pain until she decided to lope along through the cosmos and OD'd.

There are two fantastic pages on Judee, no BS, many files to listen to, and you may find it here:

A kind of memorial page on Judee Sill with lots of links and everything the beginning Sillogist desires

Another tribute by a journalist who wanted to document her life and music.

He must have had a great plan, just to find out that

It's a life that's frustrating to learn about in many ways, characterized by many strokes of just plain stupid bad luck, with some foolish decisions and carelessness thrown in for good measure. So, I think it's probably better left undone. She wrote some amazing songs, and let's enjoy them and leave it at that.

COSMONAUTUL MIC

2006-01-22T11:42:00.000+01:00

COSMONAUTUL MIC...

As promised, the first one from a series of fictive title music. "Cosmonautul mic" ("The little cosmonaut") was a short-lived Romanian children's series that never ran on Romanian State Television in 1965 due to whatever.

However, when your faithful Fandorin hiked the Carpathians, he met an old Romanian herdsman, in fact, he was aayyyncient.... he sported a beard that was so long several lambs were hiding inside, for it was warm and cuddly inside and they had all they ever needed. I stroked the velvety lambian snouts and endowed the old herder with a cigarette and a warm cap, for the lambs had eaten most of the herder's hair and it was really really chilly on the way to Moldoveanu.

Forsooth, the old man looked fantastic with this little cap of mine, and he took me to his humble wooden hut, and it was a most modest place. A warm Romanian herdsman's wife smile invited me for several hundred grams of the finest Tsuica made from everything fermentable (probably fir cones, pine bark and those little wriggly whitey thingies you might find in an ant hill) and -

Lo & Behold!

his wife had been a sound engineer and TV composer (wearer of some long forgotten order, True And Deserved National Artist of Romania or something)
and her husband constructed the Romanian Socialist Answer to Hammond's organ (it filled several rooms and the rotating Leslie Cabinet had been replaced by something looking roughly like a helicopter)...be that as it may, both fell from grace when Ceausescu, the little scumbag took finally over, for their TV themes did not reflect the Greatness and Boldness of Dacian Culture...and so they had been living in exile ever since.

The old ones were as poor as you can be, but they were happy. Solemnly, they gave me a huge and dusty and old tape reel (for the woolen pompon hat was the real thing!), telling me it was a recording of the Little Cosmonaut title song. And I could do with the reels whatever I think would be appropriate.

Music is there to be released - if you go to Fandorin's music page, you might find a remnant of a long gone past that actually never existed.

Giant Normal Dwarf

2006-01-22T11:30:00.000+01:00

Today I listened to The Nits' Giant Normal Dwarf!

my 3rd favourite album, created by the trio of
Henk Hofstede
Rob Kloet
Robert Jan Stips

...and I want to find a way to describe it - somehow (which is in fact no Spaziergang)

well...Giant Normal Dwarf

Giant
Normal
Dwarf

the infinite féerique of
twisted places
twisted europe
space and time travel,
the myriads of mysterious little things going on

in the music, under the music, immersing into the music, in the lyrics

how things are just created by an act of really divine creation

and Henk said, let there be a telephone lake and there was a telephone lake
and Henk saw it was good
and Henk said, let there be
snakes, valves, skates
and it just all is there, just there.
and then Henk said, let's make booklets
so that 14 year old Fandorines might lose themselves in endless dreams in
colours, dots, gouache
and then Henk said, let's make a new kind of Physix, one that broadens conscience, knowledge, eyes

and then Stips said,
let there be sounds, noises,
the echoed tapping of little mice paws on a glass shield
the rustle of hair stroked, the crash of glass broken

and Rob said, let there be rhythm, and let it be a rhythm of life
following, and watching, disconnecting rhythm and metrum
and Rob said, let's stroke the drumpads, cuddle the cymbals, love the toms
for each tone needs a rhythm of its own
and each word needs a partner in pulse

and Nits said, let it be gorgeous, and endlessly sad,
and hopelessly silly,
and let this ship of loving fools, of faery taels be just the greatest story ever told,

and Nits said, leave space for imagination
and Nits said, for each man will make this album as good as his own imagination must already be
and Nits said, you have to dream it on, feel the bone, fly to Finland to meet your friend, skate through this static bauhoused imaginary Holland

discover discover discover
turn all the small pebbles to reveal vast spaces
beasties, princesses, fish

till we all fall through
the infinite shoeblack
(which, of course, just exists)

find the shoes
(of course)

and Nits said, let's make something the dumbfucks just won't understand
because we're intellectuals
and we know how to seduce you

Orange & Romanian Sci-Fi

2006-01-21T22:45:00.000+01:00

Do you know what's even better than the scent of a peeled orange? The same orange, sliced and covered with traces of sugar, cinnamon and bitter chocolate. Maghrebinian perfection. A shot of Cointreau is definitely non-halal and very haram, but who asked the book anyway.

The studio has been moved 500 miles and there's still a lot of music to be made. Took a day off from mopey psychedelic guitar excess to go back into time. I'm a huge fan of very obsolete, pre-60es imaginations of the future. I'd love to live in a world of Jules Verne estampes, of Lilienthal's accident and bearded scientists in tuxedos, fondling a piece of Radium without safety nets and stuff.

We were daydreaming about hypothetical Romanian sci-fi movies of the post-war time. Romania's not exactly home of the great modern sci-fi movie, but what is modern anyway. Imagine three Romanian scientists, Radium traces glowing in their moustaches, sipping Cointreau and having a good time with Hammond's organ, glockenspiel, surf guitar and drums. Of course, lots of wrong notes and distortion, but all in all a nice day, before chilling out in some huge Bucuresti cathedral. Frankincense and so on. Then we recorded the music. Should be up there in a few hours.

AT DRINK-TWO-FISH

2005-11-25T21:03:00.000+01:00

is a schnapsidee of a languid tired
evening. presenting my guts on a screen. here they are.