WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
magical creeks
Rivers songs playlist
- Thread starter sufi
- Start date
william_kent
Well-known member
lol, the narration on this must be a joke
sounds alike "On Cripple Creek", fake YouTube clip fools nam vets?
I haven't got into my "who was Rod McKuen" routine but here is a taster of his style
"dudes with blue jeans
no shirts,
long hair,
VW micro buses"
"cars
so many cars
people started parking"
"my friends were deadheads,
one of them made a flag,
..
he made a big deal about unfurling it"
"it was the first time I was in upstate new york
and it was beautiful
there was Bruce..
and Bobby
...
RICK
he's a retired mailman!
...
*
I fucking love Rod McKuen, he is hilarious, he was also best selling poet of all time (well, the 1970s )
edit: highly recommended
sounds alike "On Cripple Creek", fake YouTube clip fools nam vets?
I haven't got into my "who was Rod McKuen" routine but here is a taster of his style
"dudes with blue jeans
no shirts,
long hair,
VW micro buses"
"cars
so many cars
people started parking"
"my friends were deadheads,
one of them made a flag,
..
he made a big deal about unfurling it"
"it was the first time I was in upstate new york
and it was beautiful
there was Bruce..
and Bobby
...
RICK
he's a retired mailman!
...
*
I fucking love Rod McKuen, he is hilarious, he was also best selling poet of all time (well, the 1970s )
edit: highly recommended
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blissblogger
Well-known member
Okay, this is a really nice one
The song title "Rheinita" fuses Klaus Dinger's "two great loves – the river Rhein, which flows through Düsseldorf, and Anita Heedman, his girlfriend who had moved to Norway in 1971."
Released as a single. this was big hit in West Germany, despite being an instrumental - I think it got to #2 in the charts. So perhaps people picked up on the feelings coming off it.
The song title "Rheinita" fuses Klaus Dinger's "two great loves – the river Rhein, which flows through Düsseldorf, and Anita Heedman, his girlfriend who had moved to Norway in 1971."
Released as a single. this was big hit in West Germany, despite being an instrumental - I think it got to #2 in the charts. So perhaps people picked up on the feelings coming off it.
blissblogger
Well-known member
A paean to the River Charles in Boston - the singer tells of strolling its banks, “along with lovers, buggers, and thieves”
blissblogger
Well-known member
Astonishingly absent so far
blissblogger
Well-known member
Remember this lot as a shameless rip-off of Bow Wow Wow.... but listening for the first time in 40 years it was more entertaining than I expected -Tenpole Tudor-ish pop nonsense
blissblogger
Well-known member
What must surely be the greatest song whose storyline takes place on a river
Ol' Neil's finest moment? "Cortez The Killer" runs it close but I think "Powderfinger" edges it.
Ol' Neil's finest moment? "Cortez The Killer" runs it close but I think "Powderfinger" edges it.
william_kent
Well-known member
Bow Wow Wow did have that pastiche photo of them by a body of water that could be considered to be a a river based on some famous painting
Bow Wow Wow - Go Wild In The Country
blissblogger
Well-known member
Not actually riparian in theme - the river here is a metaphor for thirst - but awesome cranked-up riff-engine from Wales’s heaviest.
blissblogger
Well-known member
And a thousand editors went for the "Only In It For the Manet" headline
Le Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe - but it was originally titled Le Bain (The Bath)
blissblogger
Well-known member
A favorite of mine, from an album (Mr. Gone) that Downbeat gave one star to out of five. Weather Report's idea of going disco.
blissblogger
Well-known member
I feel these river-themed songs are in a thematic and historical relation
The first is Led Zeppelin's dramatic expansion of an old blues song about the very real existential threat (to the people listening to and making that kind of music) of the Mississippi flooding. In Zep's hands, the scenario works as a figure of abstract dread (not that we don't have floods in the UK but yeah wouldn't have been a pressing concern for a bunch of Midlands lads in the early '70s)
And then Alice In Chains's "Dam That River" - I'm sure the Zep song is in the back of their brains, but the song's theme here fits in a general cluster of tropes that conflate mud / abjection / death / depression / junkiedom. (It also rains a lot in the Seattle area)
The grunge counterpart to Tricky's "Ponderosa"
The first is Led Zeppelin's dramatic expansion of an old blues song about the very real existential threat (to the people listening to and making that kind of music) of the Mississippi flooding. In Zep's hands, the scenario works as a figure of abstract dread (not that we don't have floods in the UK but yeah wouldn't have been a pressing concern for a bunch of Midlands lads in the early '70s)
And then Alice In Chains's "Dam That River" - I'm sure the Zep song is in the back of their brains, but the song's theme here fits in a general cluster of tropes that conflate mud / abjection / death / depression / junkiedom. (It also rains a lot in the Seattle area)
The grunge counterpart to Tricky's "Ponderosa"
blissblogger
Well-known member
"Songs" made out of the sound of rivers, part 1
When she's not rubbing glass to make noises or setting fire to pianos and calling it a concert, Annea Lockwood's always making "sound maps" of bodies of water
When she's not rubbing glass to make noises or setting fire to pianos and calling it a concert, Annea Lockwood's always making "sound maps" of bodies of water
blissblogger
Well-known member
"Songs" made out of the sounds of rivers, pt 2
Going one better than Jarvis Cocker singing about the Wicker river in Sheffield, here's a sound artist called Ben Tassie who created works using the sounds of the city's five rivers. In this case - 'A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time' - it's the Rivelin river. Tassie worked with instrument maker Sam Underwood to build a set of instruments played by the Rivelin itself.
"The album and the idea came out of some earlier work that I'd been doing thinking about music and nature, and how they can interact somehow – how art can give us new ways of relating to nature. Then it was hanging out in the Rivelin Valley actually, just walking there, running there. It’s such an evocative landscape – it’s beautiful there, all of this nature, but also these layers of history, this idea that the landscape has changed.
"The river has outlasted centuries of industry and yet has been shaped by the water mills, all the mill ponds and things. So I wanted to make something that interacted with that landscape, and that presented a pretty straight line to ‘I should build some water powered instruments’! It's not just imposing some art onto the landscape, but trying to have that be more of a symbiotic relationship.
"I designed and built [the instruments] with an instrument maker called Sam Underwood. Why the river playing?... I wanted two things really. One is that the river itself should have a role in playing the instruments – they're mechanical, so two have water wheels that then operate the mechanical mechanisms inside them. The other is a kind of organ that you submerge and it pushes the air out of the tank and plays these pipes.
"So the river plays them but it was also about having more of a harmonious relationship with the landscape. Each of the instruments is based on historical musical instruments: one’s kind of like a harpsichord, the other is kind of like a hurdy-gurdy. Then there's this organ, which is based on an ancient Greek instrument called the hydraulis. Historical instruments are very quiet on the whole – they're not as loud as a modern violin or something. So there's this idea of being less noisy in the environment, not dominating it so much...
"It was all about this balance and this sense of dialogue with the landscape. On some of the tracks I play alongside them – I played a medieval rebec, a string instrument, and a lap-steel guitar as well. And then Rebecca Lee played the bass viol and Rob Bentall played nyckelharpa. It really was like a collaboration, not only with the instruments but with the environment as well.... We played quite quietly and the flow of the river controlled the speed of the instruments. It did feel like a collaboration with the river...."
"Each track is one take, whatever happens within that take is the piece. Through field recording you listen differently to nature – you afford it more care and attention than you might do normally. It lets you really experience that personhood, if you like, of nature that you're describing. I think ecological sound art does that very immediately – when we hear things it bypasses a lot of the distance that has affected us as ironic, post-modern people! When you hear a river, when you hear those natural sounds, it bypasses all of that somehow."
Going one better than Jarvis Cocker singing about the Wicker river in Sheffield, here's a sound artist called Ben Tassie who created works using the sounds of the city's five rivers. In this case - 'A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time' - it's the Rivelin river. Tassie worked with instrument maker Sam Underwood to build a set of instruments played by the Rivelin itself.
"The album and the idea came out of some earlier work that I'd been doing thinking about music and nature, and how they can interact somehow – how art can give us new ways of relating to nature. Then it was hanging out in the Rivelin Valley actually, just walking there, running there. It’s such an evocative landscape – it’s beautiful there, all of this nature, but also these layers of history, this idea that the landscape has changed.
"The river has outlasted centuries of industry and yet has been shaped by the water mills, all the mill ponds and things. So I wanted to make something that interacted with that landscape, and that presented a pretty straight line to ‘I should build some water powered instruments’! It's not just imposing some art onto the landscape, but trying to have that be more of a symbiotic relationship.
"I designed and built [the instruments] with an instrument maker called Sam Underwood. Why the river playing?... I wanted two things really. One is that the river itself should have a role in playing the instruments – they're mechanical, so two have water wheels that then operate the mechanical mechanisms inside them. The other is a kind of organ that you submerge and it pushes the air out of the tank and plays these pipes.
"So the river plays them but it was also about having more of a harmonious relationship with the landscape. Each of the instruments is based on historical musical instruments: one’s kind of like a harpsichord, the other is kind of like a hurdy-gurdy. Then there's this organ, which is based on an ancient Greek instrument called the hydraulis. Historical instruments are very quiet on the whole – they're not as loud as a modern violin or something. So there's this idea of being less noisy in the environment, not dominating it so much...
"It was all about this balance and this sense of dialogue with the landscape. On some of the tracks I play alongside them – I played a medieval rebec, a string instrument, and a lap-steel guitar as well. And then Rebecca Lee played the bass viol and Rob Bentall played nyckelharpa. It really was like a collaboration, not only with the instruments but with the environment as well.... We played quite quietly and the flow of the river controlled the speed of the instruments. It did feel like a collaboration with the river...."
"Each track is one take, whatever happens within that take is the piece. Through field recording you listen differently to nature – you afford it more care and attention than you might do normally. It lets you really experience that personhood, if you like, of nature that you're describing. I think ecological sound art does that very immediately – when we hear things it bypasses a lot of the distance that has affected us as ironic, post-modern people! When you hear a river, when you hear those natural sounds, it bypasses all of that somehow."
blissblogger
Well-known member
"Songs" made out of the sound of rivers, part 3
Bow Gamelan - Offshore Rigs (1987)
A sound art / performance art / land art epic at Lots Ait, an island in the Thames. They lived and worked on the site for months, transforming it into a giant environmental sculpture garden full of noise-making contraptions, before doing a series of performances at night
I saw this! David Stubbs reviewed it! It was… cool.... not quite as amazing as the thing they did at the ICA the year before, where the more bounded space of the indoors venue created more intensity.
“Bow Gamelan Ensemble re-animated the wet and dry docks of Lots Ait, living for a month on this deserted island in the Thames. Scaffold was built into the river for audience seating, using pumps to create bubbling water underneath, as an overture. Working with many people who worked on the river including Thames Steam Launch Company and Eel Pie Marine, as well as people who had known the island as a working boatyard, they created a flotilla of boats and floating platforms, resurrected some of the old machinery and used the height of the space to create a huge red-dyed waterfall and a giant wind chimes of glass, as well as suspending about 30 metal filing cabinets found on the island played with high pressure water from pumps belonging to the London Fire Brigade fireboat. Aware of the dynamic Indian presence and culture in the local area of Southall, they invited the Treveni Kathak Dance Troupe whose delicate bell sounds and colourful presence contrasted wildly with their aluminium beer barrel ‘carillon’ and the dark industrial enormity of the site."
Bow Gamelan - Offshore Rigs (1987)
A sound art / performance art / land art epic at Lots Ait, an island in the Thames. They lived and worked on the site for months, transforming it into a giant environmental sculpture garden full of noise-making contraptions, before doing a series of performances at night
I saw this! David Stubbs reviewed it! It was… cool.... not quite as amazing as the thing they did at the ICA the year before, where the more bounded space of the indoors venue created more intensity.
“Bow Gamelan Ensemble re-animated the wet and dry docks of Lots Ait, living for a month on this deserted island in the Thames. Scaffold was built into the river for audience seating, using pumps to create bubbling water underneath, as an overture. Working with many people who worked on the river including Thames Steam Launch Company and Eel Pie Marine, as well as people who had known the island as a working boatyard, they created a flotilla of boats and floating platforms, resurrected some of the old machinery and used the height of the space to create a huge red-dyed waterfall and a giant wind chimes of glass, as well as suspending about 30 metal filing cabinets found on the island played with high pressure water from pumps belonging to the London Fire Brigade fireboat. Aware of the dynamic Indian presence and culture in the local area of Southall, they invited the Treveni Kathak Dance Troupe whose delicate bell sounds and colourful presence contrasted wildly with their aluminium beer barrel ‘carillon’ and the dark industrial enormity of the site."
blissblogger
Well-known member
"Songs" made out of the sound of rivers, pt 4
Another Bow Gamelan project in the Thames Estuary
"Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson worked with the WW2 concrete barges near Greenhithe over ten hours as the tide ebbed and flowed. They investigated the significant changes of sound at different states of the tide - particularly as the resonant chambers of the barges filled up - as well as the massive energy of this amount of incoming water and ways one could use this power to shift and shape sound. Passing vessels obliged by blasting their horns, adding to the Bow Gamelan's own foghorns and hooters."
Another Bow Gamelan project in the Thames Estuary
"Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson worked with the WW2 concrete barges near Greenhithe over ten hours as the tide ebbed and flowed. They investigated the significant changes of sound at different states of the tide - particularly as the resonant chambers of the barges filled up - as well as the massive energy of this amount of incoming water and ways one could use this power to shift and shape sound. Passing vessels obliged by blasting their horns, adding to the Bow Gamelan's own foghorns and hooters."
0bleak
Well-known member
Popular myth, that.
There are tons of cities (big and small) in the states that get more rain.
I lived in Seattle for a couple of decades, and where I am currently, we have a higher yearly precipitation because it often rains MUCH harder when it rains, but it doesn't have a reputation as a rainy city.
The problem in Seattle is that it's often overcast with maybe a slight drizzle (enough to drive people mad/be depressed for much of the year except for summer where it almost never rains or is overcast), but even then the funny thing there is that there are also other big cities in the states that rain more days of the year if you consider any kind of rain: https://www.redfin.com/blog/rainiest-cities-in-the-us
"On average, Seattle only gets 37 inches of rain over 165 days while 40 miles south in Olympia, there is more than 50 inches of rain received in the same span! For comparison: Houston gets 54" in 99 days."
