Tuesday, August 18, 2009  12:00 am 

Listening time

Along the coast of our beloved Brighton & Hove runs a tarmac’d band separating the oft raging sea from the more refined concerns of Victorian terraces and Modernist apartment buildings.  This grey finger stretches out from the rote hedonism of our surviving pier along to the Shoreham Harbour Blues, a few miles to the west.  To journey along its expanses at dusk, to leave the imposing towers and perma-glow of the animated lights behind you, is to dislocate yourself from worldly concerns.

At least for a few hundred yards.

Long enough to imagine a decaying time when the City lurched from it’s violence tourism into an uncertain period of concrete regeneration.  A time of cod-futurism where imposing, brutal, blank structures clawed their way out of the sea and came to rest in delicate formations along the hinterland.  Their skin now chipped but steadfast in their permanence.

Passing them, allowing their forms and ambition to wash over you it’s perhaps only possible to appreciate them from their imagined future.  Gazing back at them I wonder if I’d love them as much if I was there at their birth.  Whether they’d inspire these flights of fancy, these exhilarating thoughts of alternate futures.

Maybe not.

Wolfgang Riechmann – Wunderbar

The curators of the flame Bureau B bring us the longed for reissue of Wolfgang Riechmann’s masterpiece Wunderbar*.  Mixing with 20JFG’s Düsseldorf heroes Michael Rother and Wolfgang Flür, Riechmann crafted an album that sits between the stark beauty of Radioactivity, the transcendental synth washes of Wendy Carlos and Tangerine Dreams’ knack for subtle, addictive melody.  Wunderbar itself brings the Morricone stomp to the glass fields of imposing crystal skyscrappers casually thrown down by an industrialist with no name.  Go get!

Spectral Empire – Black Shark

The ever-essential thisisnotanexit deliver once more with Spectral Empire’s Black Shark.  From the soundtrack to the remake of Radio On, scheduled to go into production 2022.  Directed by Lisandro Alonso who’s stated desire is only to shoot empty roads, white lines speeding under the camera, the occasional oil refinery disgorging it’s fiery fist into the night sky.

Here you have the as ever blinding video of this tune prepared by our homey mighty Tommy Boy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJjhBHMG87M[/youtube]

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*Reichmann was randomly stabbed to death three weeks before the album’s 1978 release.  RIP.

labels >> Spectral Empire, Wolfgang Riechmann, xxjfg

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