Ritchie Blackmore
posted by murmurists at 10:29 pm
Friday, January 05, 2007
About Me
- Name: murmurists
- Location: Cafe Abdab, City of Dis, United Kingdom
Anthony Donovan is an artist, musician, composer, improviser and writer based in England. He works solo, either as Murmurists or under his own name, and is associated with projects such as Destroyevsky, Ou_pi Golgotha.undead, Spidey Agutter and the.clinamen. An ardent collaborator, he has worked with the likes of John Zorn, Jochen Arbeit, Geoff Leigh, PAS, Steve Beresford and Damo Suzuki. Donovan co-curates the respected labels Classwar Karaoke and suRRism-Phonoethics with Jaan Patterson. His interests are all either obscure or opaque, but morally authentic.
Contact:
dr.anthony_donovan@yahoo.com
Here Abouts
- Ian Gillan
- Roger Glover
- Ian Paice
- Jon Lord
- prog elvis
- High Street, looking towards Shap, with Penrith in...
- lab rat with pot noodle (not depicted)
- pataphysical ennui
- indefinite succession of days
- Lovecraft at Gethsemani
6 Comments:
That'll be Ritchie in his current medieval troubadour phase ... hey nonny no.
Great stuff.
and for awhile, just a little while, they, and he, were the dogs doh dahs.
CJ - have to part company with you on that contention, mate. Though I have fond-style memories of school mates liking Blackmore and his line, and I know Purple and Rainbow stuff, I was always into other things myself. I was not in the Jimmy Page and Zeppelin camp either - as it took me far too long to 'get' out great Zeppelin were. My mates divided thusly: Blackmore or Page. Hilarious! I liked Prog and Punk - everything from Rush, Yes, Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson, Gabriel, Gentle Giant, and Hawkwind, to Pistols, Magazine, and Stranglers, and including The Doors, Hendrix, Sabbath, Folk stuff, Joni Mitchell, some Jazz, some Motown, and 'I Feel Love' by Donna Summer! No apologies for any of that stuff, I have to say. I was playing 'In Rock' the other night; hence the titles. Pure nostalgia on my part. But weirdly surreal to see such names, I think. I like the cringe factor, too. I like to work with that idea! I love the idea of mentioning, say, Rush in 'mixed company', or Jethro Tull! One can easily get away with saying one liked The Buzzcocks, but Prog...! It still has that charge to it. I'm glad it does.
One time, in a shared house I lived in as a student, a guy played me Slipknot, saying 'listen to this' (ie. intense, heavy). I thought the inhumanity of it was interesting; it was pretty daft-sounding, but he was 20. I played him Killing Joke, 'Red' by KC, Sabbath, whatever. For me - years later - the original stuff still sounds more dangerous. I had same thing with a guy at my last job. He played me Opeth (Norwegian Death Metal type of thing). I like the one-dimensionality of it. But that's all it has. It sounds like Rush - open string arpegios, echo, chorus pedal, and Sabbath riffing. An old mate I bumped into said one time he just tries to find contemporary versions of the same stuff he liked years ago. I was bemused. What?! Pointless, I felt. Dangerous, too - as he had a Nickleback album! EMO - yuk!
Anyway, I'm ranting.
'Child in Time' - lots of memories.
rant away mate, rant away. i agree about the original being more dangerous but not about prog. i like prog in its early days and certainly the underground movement that pre-dated it. i loved king crimson, pink floyd and very much peter gabriel but not yes ater close to the edge and never ELP. (peel was right about them)!!
too many went straight up their own arses. not robery wyatt or fripp or gabriel though.
punk?
not sure. some. pistols, clash, ramones etc but stranglers were never punk and were my favourites from that period. they were soooooooooooo wrong they had to be right. also costello and talking heads and bowie of course.
i was always more into zep than purple but at the time (69 to 74) crimson ruled (along with bowie and roxy).
i love miles davies. shostakovich, john adams,and a lot of jazz.
modern pop is good BUT is now just a tradition that is being mainted like an old stately home. nothing new, and certainly nothing provocative or frightening, is forthcoming.
i heard the stooges on XFM the other day. doesn't sound like 69 at all sounds like 2007. bizarre.
ps. not to say that iam a muso snob and i share your views on mentioning jethro tull in mixed company (another band who pre-dated prog). and i find nothing wrong with liking macfly either. i was young once and used to bounce around on my bed singing an eden kane song!!!
Ah, the thorny one about Yes ... I love to cite Yes, as a kind of Black Comedy. Close to the Edge is an amazing piece of work. I love everything up to and including Going For the One, personally. That assertion includes liking Topographic Oceans and Relayer, therefore. Both of these are massively flawed, overwrought documents; bywords for sillyness and pompous excess. But both have magic of them, I feel. Yes's best stuff, for me, is CTTE, the actual pieces from Fragile, most of The Yes Album, bits of the first two LPs, Awaken, Turn of the Century, and the title track from Going For the One, and Gates of Delirium from Relayer. Take a track like Going For the One... that amazing withering pedal steel of Howe's, the way they go to the E major after that on the word 'love'; or the solos in Awaken; or the guitar runs in Turn of the Century.... Transcendent, sonic, dramatic.
ELP were not my thing. Lake was best with Crimson.
Strangers - punk or not punk. Well they were part of that movement, and happy to be at the time. But they had a lot of Doors and Velvets in them. But by extracting them from Punk, I think one takes something away from Punk. Those bands had a continuity with those earlier bands, which was disregarded or downplayed at the time for journo reasons. History says otherwise, I would say. I think Rattus is a punk LP. I think Black and White is, too. Take a song like 'Tank' - what else is it, if it isn't Punk or something to do with Punk? Or Five Minutes? Gonna put those on right now................!
Post a Comment
<< Home