Gorillas and bears

Last week BBC Radio 4 transmitted a documentary about the great french singer-songwriter Georges Brassens (1921-1981), the man with the walrus moustache who shot to fame in France in 1953 with a rude song about a hanging judge and a randy gorilla. The 30 minute documentary is archived on the BBC's site in RealPlayer format:

The Man With The Famous Moustache

It's a good basic introduction to Brassens for English speakers. I talk about why Brassens has been important to me in a couple of essays:

The Electroacoustics of Humanism

Le Grand Jake (Jake Thackray obituary)

Prompted by an entry about Broadcast on Toog's blog, I've also been listening to broadcasts by Broadcast, perhaps in a spirit of nostalgia for that school of 90s 'cold wave' represented by Stereolab, Komeda, and The Sound Gallery as well as people like Portishead and Goldfrapp: that place where the Easy Listening revival was less about capturing the warmth of the Beach Boys (High Llamas etc) and more about evoking the Cold War vibe of 1960s spy thrillers scored by John Barry and Ennio Morricone, or BBC Radiophonics, or weird children's TV shows like The Singing, Ringing Tree, a spooky production from communist East Germany (Potsdam, actually, right outside Berlin) which seems to have supplied the inspiration for the Mark Wallinger exhibition 'Sleeper' currently running at the Neue Nationalgalerie at the Potsdamer Strasse here in Berlin.



Wallinger dresses up each night as a bear, which is the symbol of Berlin, and wanders around the glass cube of the Mies-designed Neue Nationalgalerie. He did the same in London for the opening of the Frieze Art Fair, which just finished yesterday.

Mark Wallinger dressed as a bear Quicktime stream (available from 22.00 into the small hours each night until October 22nd).

Going back to 90s Cold Wave (and of course Wallinger also came up in the 90s), what interests me is that a lot of the people making that music (and I was very marginally involved) have transitioned, since then, into making 'sinister folk music'. You can hear the transition happening in Broadcast's broadcasts; they're playing Stereolab-like 60s French and Italian electronic formalist pop by Roger Roger and others, but also folk tracks by Vashti Bunyan and Comus. Of course, St Etienne's Bob Stanley also made this switch from lounge to folk, and so did I, although it's odd that people like Stereolab didn't. These cultural shifts are fascinating, and even the people who make them can't quite explain why they do. It's just 'something in the air'.