Month: April 2019

Well, I have to say it again, I love YouTube. Once again I find a new artist, to add to others I’ve discovered there, such as the brilliant Vulfpeck and, going back a bit further, the interesting antipodean King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

The last of these – KG&tLW – was a refreshing blast of young prog strangeness, a little off my usual map, but overlapping in areas (odd time signatures, some stuff leaning towards the jazzy/funky or even folky spectrum), whilst Vulfpeck (and Jack Stratton, Theo Katzmann and the Fearless Flyers, etc.) were gobsmackingly poifeck for me.

Louis Cole is somewhere between these two, in that his output is quite prolific, and kind of balanced between Knower, a duo/band project with singer Genevieve Artadi and others, and his own eponymously titled output.

The stuff he does with Knower is very interesting, and most often also very good.  But like KG&tLW, it’s a bit off my usual musical map. And, like the proggers from Down Under, that’s partly due to youthful exuberance. Knower has a level of intensity – I find their video-songs more enjoyable than the many live performances that are online – I find wearying!

You might say, ah, you sorry ol’ duffer. But, truth be told, I’ve always preferred the mellower thide of sings, even though I do like everything from Coltrane’s Interstellar Space to Slayer or some Meshuggah. And I love intense funk and rock, prog, folk, etc. It’s not intensity per se, it’s the particular qualities, or specifics of how it’s done in any given instance.

So, Knower aren’t always my cup o’ tea. But Louis Cole? Now that’s another matter! I love Vulfpeck and Jack Stratton. I really love ’em! But Louis Cole is somethin’ else. For starters, he’s a phenomenal drummer. And as a drummer I love that. Actually both Jack Stratton and Theo Katzmann (no to mention the many guest drummers they’ve had, which includes Louis Cole as it happens) are superb drummers. But LC is at an altogether ‘nother level.

There’s a drummer that used to live local to me, Ric (Byers?), who does stuff under the 05Ric moniker with Gavin Harrison. Any knowledgeable drummer will know Harrison is choptastically mind-boggling. But I actually prefer Ric’s ‘chaos jazz’ drumming style, over Gav’s metronomically polished super-clean super-tight style.

Louis Cole, on the other hand, can do everything from tight simple minimalist drumming to clattering jungle or chaotic jazz, and has that kind of bubbling polyrhythmic intensity that conjures all sorts of potential influences, from Tony Williams and Rashied Ali to Mike Clark, or possibly even Jake Leibezeit, or Dave Garibaldi?

Funnily enough (funkily enough?), however, it was only after I’d listened to him quite a lot that I realised how great a drummer he is. This was partly because several of the times I first encountered him found him playing with other folk (e.g. sitting in with Vulfpeck), or not drumming, but singing, playing keys, etc. (e.g. the monstrously magnificent Thinking Live Sesh, on which Nate Wood is drumming).

But even just seeing him pumping out the groove to Vulfpeck’s It Gets Funkier made it very obvious there was something different and special about him: looking like he’d just got out of bed, and still had on his jammy’s, he plays a deceptively intense funk groove open-handed – left hand on hi-hat, right hand on the snare – and looks like he’s in a world of his own.

And that last observation kind of captures the essence of LC: he really is in a world of his own. A musical one-man-band world of his own making. And it’s a beautiful world. It really is. Cole looks much more comfortable multitracking and multivideoing himself on YouTube than he does in most his collaborations (Knower excepted). As he says in an excellent talk he gave [where? Link?], when it comes to his own music, he’s a bit of a control freak, he knows what he’s aiming for, and he’s the best placed to realise his own audio and and visual visions.

I think he’s been putting stuff out, mainly/mostly via YouTube, for about a decade now. The vast majority of it is simply sublime. And even the stuff I’m less keen on (and there’s actually very little of that) is both very interesting in itself, and… well, I could blather on. Just check it out yourself.

His earlier material is slightly more lo-fi, not unexpectedly, seeing as he’s learning on the job as an online content creator. But it’s also more varied and eclectic. Some is downright weird, whilst other stuff can be quite ‘sweet’, it’s all both very good and very interesting. It’s still early days for me, in terms of exploring his complete back-catalogue, but at present my favourite of his earlier material is Below The Valleys:

That was a more recent discovery for me. The stuff I’ve been mostly diggin’ on is more recent, i.e. within the last year, and includes all of the following: Blimp, Weird Part Of The Night, Things, Sometimes, Thinking, Phone, Drive, blah…

So, not only is he a brilliant drummer, but he’s a superb singer – those high notes in Sometimes! – a sublime songwriter (and mixer/producer, etc.), an excellent keys player, and a dab hand on sundry other instruments, such as guitar, percussion, and so on. And as if all that wasn’t enough, he’s witty, edits/directs fantastic videos, and looks like (and appears to be) an incredibly cool cat! Damn!!

But whereas all this talent might make one nauseous, envious, deflated, or all three, Cole’s music, indeed his whole vibe, is so beautiful, so joyous, that many (clearly, from the comments on his YouTube videos), myself included, are utterly seduced and charmed, captivated and inspired, by his creative output.

I’m a bit of an occasional one man band myself. And I’ve got a fairly huge back-catalogue of music languishing on hard drives. The blissful intensity of experiencing the sound worlds of Louis Cole is making me wonder if perhaps I should pick up my own musical threads, and put it all out there.

After the drama of the world number one going out to an unseeded amateur, I watched Judd Trump go four-nil down to his older Thai opponent, Un Nooh. And now I’m watching two of snookers least charismatic players slugging it out at nine frames all.

In an interesting little article about how the BBC are wrecking TV sports coverage by changing the theme music from great originals to pale characterless modern imitations (e.g. the current snooker theme), the journo also bemoans the predominance of such ‘characterless bureaucrats’ as Graeme Dott in the modern game. Harsh!

But whilst ‘Beefy’ Bingham looks like a cabbie, and Dottie does indeed look like an accountant (in fact, he looks quite  like my accountant!), they both prove themselves to have some character after all, in a match which first sees Bingham go eight-one ahead, then nine-four. And finally, after Dott takes five frames in a row, they’re at nine all.

Bingham eventually won. Just. For two rather colourless players, this was a surprisingly exciting game.

I was unable to follow this match closely, as I was working on teaching admin at the time. But I had it playing (glitchily!) on BBC iPlayer, in the background.

I came into it with Ronnie down, five frames to Cahill’s eight. Ronnie then took three rapid frames to level, at eight all. His eighth frame was so quick I missed it altogether by merely popping downstairs momentarily!

Then, as I did my Summer Term timetabling, for one of my schools, Cahill took his ninth frame, in a game thatcsee-sawed excitingly both ways, with Ronnie looking certain to win towards the end. But Cahill stole it in the end.

And then he took his tenth and the deciding frame, potting right up to the black, after Ronnie had an unlucky red in-off whilst potting the blue. What a win! An amateur and Crucible debutant beating the World number one in the first round!

Ronnie seemed out of sorts the whole game, only occasionally showing brief flashes of brilliance. Mostly looking irritated and unfocused, making numerous odd shot selections.

Oh dear! I bought this for Teresa, for 50p, from a local charity shop. She likes her period dramas. And, if they’re good, so do I. This was pretty dreadful.

I could tell it was going to be duff right from the opening sequence, in which some stained glass is rendered in a very modern way, finishing in a portrait of Elizabeth I as a very easily recognisable Cate Blanchett.

Unlike the Catholic Church, who were upset by the way they’re villainised in this film – and they are a set of sallow faced pantomime devils, no mistake! – what offends me is the way that modern filmmakers seem obsessed with rendering history as soap opera.

Clive Owen’s Walter Raleigh is a smugly self-satisfied himbo, and Cate Blanchett’s Queenie and her coterie of giggling ladies are about as Renaissance as cellphone selfies.

The music is sub LOTR. Kind of what one might expect from scene-setting sounds in a made for TV fantasy series with delusions of grandeur.

Rhys Ifan’s villainous Robert Reston is, whilst allegedly based loosely on Robert Ballard, pure fiction. Indeed, the whole film is a ludicrous patchwork of fictions. More like a fantasy film than a historic epic.

Art critic Kenneth Clark observes that a great leap forward was made when Renaissance artists realised that they needed to depict other ages not as reflections of their own times, but as they might actually have been. We appear to have stepped backwards in time, in this respect.

Like so much modern media, it’s all about surfaces. As a Cambridge local, member of the National Trust, and someone who likes visiting beautiful old buildings, it was fun to identify numerous locations as they appeared (the River Cam and The Backs standing in for The Thames, and Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel all dressed up, etc.). It is visually sumptuous, but that actually becomes annoying when there’s no real substance underneath.

The idea that some viewers might watch this garbage and take it for a historical account is more than mildly worrisome. It also panders to the very strong and growing tendency here in England these days to airbrush royalty, be it ancient or modern, into some chocolate box idea of ‘real’ nobility.

Not sure if I saw the earlier Elizabeth movie, by the same director. But watching this does not incline me to make sure I have. Nor would it surprise me to learn I had actually seen it. And then forgotten it completely. If it’s anything like this, forgetting I’d seen it would be a blessing.

I remember seeing trailers for Elizabeth, The Golden Age, at cinemas around the time it came out. I half thought I’d like to see it, in particular for the recreation of the Spanish Armada. But even that, impressive as it is on some levels, was actually a real disappointment, being ridiculous in its panto level rendering of events.

Visually lush, in most other respects it is, at best, anodyne, and at worst, mawkishly sentimental. History and substance fall prey to set dressing and fantasy. Don’t bother.