Newsletter July 2001

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Last month, we offered an anecdotal commentary on the defiantly Flowerpot Men version of Dr John’s I Walk On Gilded Splinters. Now, we follow up with the month’s interview with Adam Peters, one of the two members, whose eclectically varied course since graduating from London’s prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, has been far from traditional. Performance and production with Echo & the Bunnymen, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Lloyd Cole and Transvision Vamp. More recently, he has contributed to new CDs from Jeymes and from Anika Moa, due for release in fall 2001. His is not a traditional music trajectory, although we concede that he does play the cello. If you listen to his audio answers, you’ll get a sneak preview of the Universe Symphony’s timpani coming through the studio floor (not much else, though).

Our Walk On Gilded Splinters section is augmented with audio streaming of their first single and of Beat City, featured song in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Barry Reynolds’ interview now has his early version of Broken English from his album I Scare Myself. This song was made famous by Marianne Faithfull and defined her tough musical comeback style. Also in our streaming audio illustrations we add extensive selections from the first three Wire CDs to accompany the production commentaries about these ambitious efforts from a raucous time that still stand up over 20 years later. Even though a Wire fan is a serious animal not to be taken lightly, the music from the group once labeled ‘the Pink Floyd of the New Wave’ still remains mostly in an exotic, albeit intense, corner.

We’re not offering a remix for download this month, but there is a serious one in progress, based on Johnny Reinhard’s setting of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, from Johnny’s utterly unclassifiable album Raven. ‘Knocking at my window,’ wrote Mr Poe. Sounds like a cue for rhythm sounds. Off to the log and the computer. It’s hard to do a bass line microtonally, although our development of exotic drums do seem in microtune with the original. Major music energy this month went on Johnny’s realization of Charles Ives’ Universe Symphony, which is on schedule for release in the fall. 70 minutes and 85 performances have kept us busy and obsessed. The percussion was mostly recorded June 13-15 at the Stereo Society studios. We were careful, since early in Ives’ score is a quarter hour of percussion alone. Can you dance to it? We’ll find out in the fall.

Please feel free to forward this e-mail to a friend, and to drop me a note with your feedback about the site via the contact page (from which you can also E mail any of us backroom creatures as well as the artists associated with the site). I enjoy hearing your opinions, ideas and suggestions and will do my best to respond individually to each e-mail.

Mike Thorne, July 2001