Lewis Allan Reed died today, aged 71, in Long Island. Our thoughts go out to his friends and family. His music has been a source of inspiration to many (including us here at Blasted- to an absurd level, in fact) and will continue to be so for a very long time. If you don't have the The Velvet Underground & Nico, White Light/White Heat, The Velvet Underground, Loaded, VU, Transformer and Berlin, get them all tomorrow and learn them all back to front, you may well find some of your favourite records. R.I.P. Lou.
Gainsbourg et Son Gainsborough: Serge and Jane's Family Album
This month sees the publication of yet another interesting (and rather lavish) music tome - a photographic book documenting the 12-year relationship of legendary Gallic musician Serge Gainsbourg with English model and singer Jane Birkin. This collection of intimate family portraits has been put together by Birkin's brother Andrew and offers an interesting and unusual angle on a very public and sometimes controversial union.
Jane & Serge. A Family Album by Andrew Birkin & Alison Castle is available now.
Image courtesy of Taschen
New Casual Sex video: 'Nothing on Earth'
The video for the brilliant Casual Sex's Nothing on Earth has just been unveiled. The track finds them channeling late-70s New York Mutant Disco to the backdrop of a nocturnal Glasgow. The song is taken from their forthcoming The Bastard Beat EP , to be released on We Can Still Picnic and launched on 22 November at Nice'N'Sleazy. Check. It. Out.
Review: 'Virgins' - Tim Hecker →
in Andrew R. Hill, music, review
Independent Label Market: Glasgow, 12 October 2013
This was announced a while ago but we thought we'd chip into remind/alert you of/to the fact that the first Glasgow Independent Label Market (presented by the Vinyl Factory) is this Saturday from 10 till 6 at the Barras Art & Design Centre, supported by AIM, SMIA, The List and Kiltr. There's going to be DJ sets from local heroes such as Edwyn Collins, Belle & Sebastian and JD Twitch, as well as gourmet food and of course a lot of exclusive records and merchandise. It's really very exciting - see you there. Penury, here we come...
See the poster below for full details.
Exclusive photo: 'A Scene In Between: Tripping Through the Fashions of UK Indie Music' by Sam Knee
Next month sees the release of a very special book indeed, Sam Knee's A Scene In Between: Tripping Through the Fashions of UK Indie Music. If anything 'book' seems barely an adequate descriptor, it's a labour of love, a precious document - something like that. Blasted will have an interview with Mr Knee up on the site within the next week, but until then we've got an exclusive (never before seen) photo of the Shop Assistants to whet your appetite. Cheers Sam!
The Shop Assistants, 1985. Photo by Martin Whitehead. Courtesy of Sam Knee.
The First Worldwide Cassette Store Day: 7 September 2013
in blog, Andrew R. Hill, events, music
Last year Glasgow’s own Volcanic Tongue, specialists in the most underground music going, run by The Wire contributor David Keenan and experimental musician Heather Leigh Murray. This year, it’s gone global, albeit without consultation with the original proponents. Original or not, as Blasted readers will no doubt agree, anything that gets people into real record shops and buying music that you can – kinda, sorta – actually touch is definitely a good thing.
So, the first worldwide Cassette Store Day is happening tomorrow in shops across the UK, Europe, the USA and even at one phonographic emporium in Argentina. There are releases by such Blasted favourites as The Proper Ornaments, Molly Nilsson, Efterklang, and many others. A particular highlight is bound to be The Pastels’ Summer Rain retrospective of “Some of [their] favourite music [they’ve] made for Domino, starting around 1995 with Mobile Safari and ending with songs from the Slow Summits sessions”, the title track can be heard below.
Review: Shun Li and The Poet
in cinema, Erika Sella, review
Remembering: Chris Marker's 'La Jetée'
in Andrew R. Hill, blog, cinema
A year on from Chris Marker's death, Andrew R. Hill looks at his revolutionary and influential short La Jetée.
Image courtesy of Criterion.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is both one of the simplest and one of the strangest science fiction films you are ever likely to see, but to pigeonhole the film with such a generic marker is arbitrary and simplistic – while time travel is central to the story, it serves as a narrative device to explore the natures of memory and obsession.
The form of La Jetée is extraordinary even now, over fifty years on: a sequence of black and white stills narrated in a brooding Gallic third person monologue (augmented by minimal diegetic sound effects) over the course of twenty-seven minutes. This can seem pretentious or just downright dull on initial approach but one settles into it fairly quickly. The film opens with a scene that haunts and obsesses our protagonist from its occurrence in his childhood through to the post-apocalyptic Parisian ‘present’. The man at the story’s centre is used by the victors of the Third World War as the subject of an experiment in time-travel – humanity’s spatial options have expired, only temporal ones remain.
Image courtesy of the BFI.
The man has to travel to the past by using his memory – it is surely for this reason that the film’s imagery is presented as it is, for what is a photo if not a memory? This film is a photobook in which the man returns to the time of the film’s opening sequence, the event that has obsessed him his whole life. Through the experiment the man enacts a strange courtship with a young woman that was there on the day seared into his memory, albeit then a stranger.
On one of their meetings (separated by gaps in her time, as well as his, as they are) they visit a cross-section of a giant redwood with historical events pinpointed on its rings, just as in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo; this explicit reference unveils other key notions at the centre of the film, the sometimes traumatic nature of memory, male obsessiveness and the dangerous effects both can have, particularly when they coincide. The idea of being ‘haunted’ or of ‘haunting’ are unavoidably applicable in analyses of Vertigo and so it should be for La Jetée; James Stewart’s Scottie is haunted by his ‘lost’ Madeleine (in itself a reference to Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu) just as La Jetée’s protagonist is haunted by the day from his childhood, and just as he haunts the young woman through their unusual courtship, appearing and disappearing as if an apparition. As with Vertigo, the film concludes with a fatality that could have been avoided were it not for the protagonist’s selfish single-mindedness. La Jetée’s images haunt the viewer too, lingering on to unveil their truth in the memory.
Gothic - The Dark Heart of Film
in blog, Erika Sella, events, news, cinema
The BFI have recently unveiled their next big project, a voyage into the dark heart of British film that will encompass over 150 titles and 1000 screenings, a number of special events, DVD releases and an educational programme. Revolving around four main themes (Monstrous, The Dark Arts, Haunted Love is a Devil), GOTHIC will explore how much-filmed characters like Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein made an impact on audiences in the UK and abroad, introducing them to taboo subjects along the way.
Courtesy of Janus films/BFI
We are particularly excited about Philip Glass' take on Jean Cocteau's 1946 film La Belle et La Bête, which will take place on 10th and 11th August (part of the Edinburgh International Festival). The Filmhouse should also reveal a series of screenings and events; for further details keep checking these pages. The BFI are also stepping into the art world: working in conjunction with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, they will launch the Witchcraft and Wicked Bodies exhibition (opening on Saturday 27th July) - it features works by Albrecht Dürer, Francisco de Goya and William Blake, as well as pieces by 20th century artists like Kiki Smith.
The GOTHIC season runs from August 2013 to January 2014. To keep up with BFI updates sign up to their newsletter.