All Ears 025 – 13th June 2019

This is what we played at All Ears 025:

You can find most of the tracks on this Spotify Playlist.

Videos of all the Bill Fontana tracks can be found here.

Bill Fontana – Simon East

Bill Fontana is a sound artist. He attended the New School for Social Research in New York and studied both music and philosophy. In a career spanning 40 years, Fontana’s sound sculptures use the urban environment as a source of musical information, conjuring up visual imagery in the mind of the listener.

Sonic Dreamscapes – Bill Fontana
Primal Sonic Visions – Bill Fontana
Shadow Soundings – Bill Fontana
Desert Soundings – Bill Fontana
Harmonic Bridge – Bill Fontana

Erland Cooper – Rachel Sedman

Erland Cooper is a Scottish multi-instrumentalist and producer originally from Stromness, Orkney. As a solo artist, he released the critically acclaimed album Solan Goose in 2018 on Phases. He is also the frontman of British bands The Magnetic North and Erland and the Carnival, with whom he has released five critically acclaimed albums. Cooper was born and raised on the Scottish archipelago of Orkney and now owns a London recording studio.

Bonxie – Erland Cooper
Cattie-Face – Erland Cooper
First Of The Tide – Erland Cooper, Benge
Lump O’ Sea – Erland Cooper
Sillocks – Erland Cooper
Spoot Ebb – Erland Cooper, Anna Phoebe
Sule Skerry – Erland Cooper, Astra Forward, Hiroshi Ebina
Whitemaa – Erland Cooper

Northern Soul – Hayley Cooper

In defiance of chart music, a youth subculture called Northern Soul saw 1970s working class kids from Northern England travel hundreds of miles to squeeze into dancehall all-nighters: drug fuelled clapping, stomping and high-kicking to a sound that’s since become praised as the older brother of the early rave scene. There is no real American genre called Northern Soul, it was created by the dancers and DJs on this side of the Atlantic. In contrast to Motown, the music was raw and unpolished; tracks were obscure flops or had been unreleased in the US. There are fewer strings and harmonies. But the most important thing is, it is dance music. Fast and furious.

I Got to Find Me Somebody – The Velvets
Tainted Love – Gloria Jones
Come On Train – Don Thomas
Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) – Frank Wilson
Gonna Be a Big Thing – The Yum Yums
I Got to Find Me Somebody – The Velvets
I Surrender – Eddie Holman
If This Is Love (I’d Rather Be Lonely) – The Precisions
Landslide – Tony Clarke
Lay This Burden Down – Mary Love
The Night – Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
There’s A Ghost In My House – R. Dean Taylor
Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up – The M.V.P.’s

Jazz Harp – Rachel Sedman

Alice Coltrane was born in 1937 in Detroit. She was an American jazz musician and composer, and in her later years a swami. One of the few harpists in the history of jazz, she recorded many albums as a bandleader, beginning in the late 1960s for Impulse! and other major record labels. She was the second wife and the widow of jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane.
Dorothy Ashby was born in 1932. She was an American jazz harpist and composer. Hailed as one of the most “unjustly under loved jazz greats of the 1950’s” and the “most accomplished modern jazz harpist,” Ashby established the harp as an improvising jazz instrument, beyond earlier use as a novelty or background orchestral instrument, proving the harp could play bebop as adeptly as the instruments commonly associated with jazz, such as the saxophone or piano.

Journey In Satchidananda – Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders
Afro-Harping – Dorothy Ashby
Shiva-Loka – Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders
The Look Of Love – Dorothy Ashby
Blue Nile – Alice Coltrane

Canterbury Scene – Duncan Cooper

The Canterbury sound was an early 70s precursor to prog rock combining elements of folk, jazz, classical, psychedelia and rock. Or alternatively, a bunch of long-haired men with guitars, keyboards and too much time on their hands. It centred around the sudden explosion of a group of everchanging and overlapping bands from Canterbury in Kent, hell bent on improvisation and pushing the boundaries of rock.

Pataphysical Introduction, Pt. I – Soft Machine
Om Riff – Gong
Fugue in D minor – Egg
Going Up To People And Tinkling – Hatfield & The North
Notwithstanding – Gilgamesh
The Isle of Everywhere – Gong
Hazard Profile, Part 1 – Soft Machine
I Never Glid Before – Gong

Art School Bands – Simon East

A selection of bands whose members went to some well-known UK Art Schools: Goldsmiths, Glasgow School of Art, Leeds University, and Central St. Martin’s.

The Universal – Blur
Limit To Your Love – James Blake
Perfect Couples – Belle & Sebastian
Take Me Out – Franz Ferdinand
Good Fortune – PJ Harvey
To Hell With Poverty – Gang Of Four
Sorted For E’s and Whizz – Pulp
Bad Girls – M.I.A.
Rock the Casbah – The Clash