landley school music project

THE LANGLEY SCHOOLS MUSIC PROJECT Music should be primal. Doesn’t have to be, sometimes is better if isn’t, but if we’re talking something as fundamental as rock’n’roll – and I believe we are talking something as fundamental as rock’n’roll here in Careless Talk Costs Lives – then it helps. You don’t need to be naïve to be primal, but it’s bloody hard without. The music I love is unadorned by knowing production (production that seeks to enhance listening pleasure is fine: production that is merely aimed at smoothing away all the corners). Except when it isn’t. Hell, there isn’t anything wrong with ABBA or Motown: or Godspeed You Black Emperor, or The Roots. Still. The music I usually love the most is that which, either intentionally or instinctively, recaptures the innocence of youth: the tunnel vision, that clarity, the self-absorption. Jonathan Richman, The Shaggs, Melody Dog, Ramones, James Brown, Brian Wilson, Jad Fair, The Dirtbombs… Writing about music, it sometimes feels that when I use the description child-like it’s an insult. It isn’t. It’s high praise. Solo, children’s voices can near break your heart. When those voices are multiplied a hundred fold, the thrill and trauma of being alive can’t kelp but come rushing through – take, for example, those voices chanting on Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall”, cynical and uncaring. They sound all the more chilling because of the juxtaposition of perceived innocence with adult values. It’s almost pornographic. “The Langley Schools Music Project”, a collection of 70s and 60s pop covers, sung with verve and instinctual fire is (my) Greatest Album Ever Made. Period. There are so many moments, moments when you are left gasping for joy or sorrow, the voices rising and falling behind the incredible, minimal orchestrated instrumentation: too many moments to list. To pick one moment of magic over another is too much. “God Only Knows” where the children destroy any chance I have of listening to The Beach Boys again; the raucous, undemanding exhilaration on the cover of the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night”, that girl singing all timid and lost on “The Long And Winding Road” … (And doesn’t McCartney sound like a hack, wouldn’t any adult sound like a hack, next to that)… the scarily mesmerising reading of “Space Oddity” where the music is stripped so far back, all you are faced with is beauty. This is beauty in the raw, almost as pure as the human frame can allow. Of course this resonates on every level with me. When I first heard Daniel Johnston – that supreme naïve poet – I started laughing because I couldn’t believe anyone could be so unfettered. The first time I heard this album, I was thrown by the production and the purity, voices ringing untrue in my jaded ears. It took another listen: halfway through, “Saturday Night”, before I understood. This is an ultimate expression of the music I love. It’s so blindingly obvious how you can create such wonderment: why doesn’t it happen everywhere? Maybe it does happen everywhere. Maybe it does. Find a nascent music teacher genius, one who empathises with the children in his care, allow him and them free rein to express their wonderment at life through the medium music, and record the result. The basics are: a 60-voice choir of rural kids; shimmering gamelan chimes and elemental rock trimmings; a two-track tape deck: a western Canada school gym in 1976 and 1977. The results… no, they’re not magical, because that would imply some trickery at work. “Innocence And Despair” is spiritual, in the deepest sense of the word.

I still haven't heard any of this. Langley Schools vs S Club Juniors FITE (or; why is fulfilling children's dreams less beautiful than merely documenting them?)

Rhiiaaaaaaaaaanoooooon!

I know, that kills me, but Sweet Caroline is my favourite

"desperado"

here's another idea: go to a thrift store and buy a bag of unlabeled tapes for 50 cents a pound. they also contain moments of mindblowing genius, and you can truly savor them knowing that no one else but you has access to them and you discovered them first

shut the fuck up res

hahahahahaha

come make me

go to a thrift store and buy a bag of unlabeled tapes for 50 cents a pound

99% of the time, you will get a badly recorded version of Billy Joel's greatest hits or some such.

Although I did once buy a c90, unlabelled, and got some bizarre experiments in sound from some family who had obviously used it to 'play' with their new cassette recorder, and got an old edition of Magic Roundabout, and a random edition of Top of the Pops, along with children shouting random nonsense.

"I'm Into Something Good" = ultimate crush tape ending music.

99% of the time, you will get a badly recorded version of Billy Joel's greatest hits or some such.

isn't this kind of cool though?

nah.

but it's like an intergalactic radio signal that you've intercepted!

back whenever it was, you'd often find an unwound cassette in a car park. I wound one in, and found it was Billy Idol's greatest hits.

What I was expecting, I dunno. Some ilicit discussion/conversation/discourse/etc..?

Last time I bought unlabeled tapes, I got a bunch of medical dictation and recordings of body-function monitors. Unfortunately, they were far less interesting (even as sample material) than they should have been from that description.

http://www.andrasklang.com/

Scroll down to Helium Dreams

These guys put out some really nice music