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Somat­ic Respons­es is the tag for two Welsh broth­ers, John and Paul Healy. Dig­i­tal Dark­ness is break­beat, rhyth­mic noise, or sound­scape, or some­thing like that. I like it. It has inter­est­ing rhyth­mic intri­ca­cies, with­in a rel­a­tive­ly slow-paced frame­work. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked the strings in “Strand­ed” and the grim bass line in “Human Bass”. Not some­thing you would play as back­ground or to make your­self feel hap­py, but stimulating.

20178. (Arcan­ge­lo Corel­li) Sonata da chiesa in A, Op.3 #12,
20179. (Arcan­ge­lo Corel­li) Sonata da chiesa in F Minor, Op.3 #9
20180. (Arcan­ge­lo Corel­li) Sonata da chiesa in B‑flat, Op.3 #3
20181. (Arcan­ge­lo Corel­li) Sonata da chiesa in G Minor, Op.3 #11
20182. (Arcan­ge­lo Corel­li) Sonata da chiesa in F, Op.3 #1 Read more »

Kwak­waka’wakw [Kwak­i­utl] music in British Colum­bia comes as a sur­prise to any­one who is more famil­iar with the pow-wow music of the rest of Cana­da. It’s meant to accom­pa­ny indoor cer­e­monies and the pecu­liar dance dra­mas with elab­o­rate cos­tumes that pre­vailed on the Pacif­ic coast. Orches­tras of log, box, and hide drums are accom­pa­nied by a vari­ety of rat­tles and whis­tles play with uni­son chants in Kwak’wala, sup­ple­ment­ed by solo “hollers”. It’s the rat­tles that car­ry the aura of sacred­ness. The rhythms are noth­ing at all like what you would hear on the plains. Some are rem­i­nis­cent of Japan­ese forms, like gagaku. I don’t know how this par­tic­u­lar album, by the Gwa’wina Singers of Alert Bay, com­pares to oth­er stuff from the Coast. This whole area of music is unfa­mil­iar ter­ri­to­ry for me.

Dur­ing the era of silent films, the­atre organ­ists were big stars. After the arrival of talk­ing films, most of them lost their jobs, but the best of them found work in oth­er media, or lin­gered on as names. Such was Jesse Craw­ford, who fol­lowed suc­cess as a film organ­ist with suc­cess on radio, as a record­ing artist, and as an instruc­tor. In lat­er years, he became asso­ci­at­ed with the pop­u­lar Ham­mond organs. I have a Dec­ca Vocalion record­ing, Sweet and Low, of him per­form­ing a dozen stan­dard tunes, and anoth­er album which he shares with Don Bak­er and Marv Mer­lin, called Organ Greats. Bak­er was a Cana­di­an organ­ist whose career close­ly par­al­leled Crawford’s.

This stuff was very pop­u­lar in the 1950’s, when it was thought of as sooth­ing and mel­low, prob­a­bly pro­vid­ing the equiv­a­lent of “lounge” music today. In fact, Bak­er’s ren­di­tion of “The Third Man Theme” is includ­ed in Capi­tol’s “Ultra Lounge” com­pi­la­tion, Organs in Orbit. With the pas­sage of time, this genre has acquired a sort of unin­tend­ed creepi­ness. You could use these albums quite effec­tive­ly as a sound­track for a David Lynch film.