Les Rallizes Denudes - Enter The Mirror

SukiSuki Daisuki - Jun Togawa

Nahid Akhtar
I Am Black Beauty
FKR083LP (Finders Keepers Records
LP

“I am black beauty… love me!” A forthright enough request, one would think, from an artist whose music was indeed loved, revered and which played a hugely influential and omnipresent role in Lahore’s vibrant cinematic patchwork that covered the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, until now, it seems that this lost love letter to a potential global audience of millions of sonic suitors has been caught up in the pesky Pakistani postal system. Nahid Akhtar needs a connection.

Don’t blame the Khyber Mail. In a neat and tidy career that spanned exactly ten years, Nahid Akhtar came, saw and conquered, then relatively disappeared without even thinking about buying the t-shirt. Disrobing the vibrant finery that interweaved textures of Ghazals, classical music, Punjabi folk songs and Qawwalis (not forgetting a wide range of progressive pop music penned for the Pakistani picture house) from which this records track list is lovingly gathered.

It is virtually unfathomable that the multifarious music of Nahid Akhtar, combining textures, tempos, technologies, global influences and multi-cultural languages (and all this within the opening seconds of a song!), didn’t open the door to international stardom to match that of Asha Bhosle or Lata Mangeshkar from India. In the last few years the music of Lollywood’s golden era has enjoyed a marked resurgence amongst outernational music fans, with labels like Finders Keepers remastering and compiling the work of the Tafo Brothers and M. Ashraf for a global market with wide critical acclaim. Hopefully, with this collection as a sturdy stepping stone to a widely rewarding expanse of further listening, the music of Nahid Akhtar can find a place alongside your favourite international songbirds and her original love letters to the world of music will command a much justified RSVP.

www.finderskeepersrecords.com

I Am Black Beauty

Nahid Akhtar - I Am Black Beauty

Heron

Lord and Master

Suzanne Ciani
Help, Help, The Globolinks!
Finders Keepers Records (FKR094)

Finders Keepers - https://goo.gl/HwSZMK
Bandcamp - https://goo.gl/UZDosZ
iTunes - https://goo.gl/6GQZmP
Amazon - https://goo.gl/S5ymh7

As faithful guardians of the Ciani Musica Inc. studio vault Finders Keepers Records twist the key and return to their collaborative series of previously unreleased music from one of the most important and influential composers in the history of multi-disciplinary electronic music. Open-minded, unpretentious, enigmatic and consistently inspiring, Suzanne Elizabeth Ciani would shatter the mould and invert the stereotype of electronic composers in the early 1970s with a bona fide education in classical music, a clear understanding of technology and a genuine will to communicate and naturalise electronic music.

Unlike many successful electronic composers, Suzanne, as a serious and genuinely revolutionary artist, managed to evade the obvious typecasting of her music through the medium of shlock sci-fi cinema (Swiss composer Bruno Spoerri readily observes that all the best space film scores veered from this pairing) but within the realms of opera and education Suzanne found her perfect channel (scratching her other cosmic cinematic itches with android music in The Stepford Wives and as “the first female composer to score a major Hollywood movie” with The Incredible Shrinking Woman release one year after The Globolinks redux debut). Furnishing a plot of an ecological alien intervention worthy of a Magma youth starter pack and realigning early pioneering electronic operas such as Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s Aniara or Remi Gassman’s Electronics for family consumption, this virtually undocumented work by the hardest working woman in VCO business is finally preserved after just a handful of exclusive theatrical airings over 35 years ago. Having honed her craft in the close company of late synthesiser designer Don Buchla (a company of whose development she played a key role) it is plain to see how the young Suzanne Ciani combined roles as an abstract artist and an astute technician in equal measures, a rare duplicity which would be essential The Globolinks and all our musical quests for a brighter future.

www.finderskeepersrecords.com

Help, Help, The Globolinks!

Suzanne Ciani - Help, Help, The Globolinks! (Excerpt)

From the album, "Lullaby Waterfall" (Opus Abscondi, 2018).    
http://webshop.opusabscondi.de/epages/es413382.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es413382/Products/1017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QGZu2bfXxM

Music and lyrics by Misty Bywater.  Production and sound engineering by Michael Tellbach.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_2Mz0WQclrzv7Y_-0xnWQQ/videos

Paint Me Gold

Dredged from the bottom of a dead man’s gullet
Carved into the ugliest down-and-out
You’ll live with the smell in the heart of winter
Pass me in the summer, and you’ll wanna leave town
 
Poked by the sticks of a children’s choir
Coughed up something awful: they’ll never sing again
Bathed in the river, got a rash that feels like fire
All the fish decide that they’re amphibians
 
I know when I’ve finally outstayed my welcome
Stocks in pitchforks go through the roof
Weathermen have started using my name
They’d rather have a hurricane than see my face
 
In this ugly world I feel like a model
I’ve been the worst me that I can be
I’d rather have a purpose than having sod all
Even if it’s turning stomachs in the streets
 
You’ve walked by me with your mind on salad spoons
Spice racks, and brand new bidets
My black eyes rained down a monsoon
Right upon your godforsaken gilded cage
 
You set fire to me, but my diseases
Will take to the air like a pestilent fog
Try and hold your breath, there’s no avoiding
I’ll leave you like a ragged, wretched, plague-bitten dog

(Image taken from Twin Peaks season 3)

Pond Scum

A song about cross country running with friends in the outstanding Surrey Hills – in Winter, Spring and Summer.

Running in the Surrey Hills

A vineyard stretches out – intact in virgin snow
Pre-race espresso still tintangles in our blue veins
Take out the timer and get ready to press “go”
A northern blast will petrify these southern faces
Our swarm of crimson vests ascends the steady hill
And each pace crunches down the crystal powder chill

Running in the Surrey Hills - voices are swallowed in the soft acoustic
Running in the Surrey Hills - in the winter time

Now narrow trails twist through the bitter bluebell floor
And three-plank bridges straddle rattling cackling flow
Our ragged chain snakes down the boggy broken track
White Hawthorn hedges flank the broad acres below
Step over deep-ploughed waves across the country mile
And clasp a helping hand through kissing gate and stile

Running in the Surrey Hills – soaking our spikes in the storm at sunset
Running in the Surrey Hills – when the bluebells chime

Now nettles needle naked knees with open arms
In single file we weave through tall Indium corn
Epicurean view from Ranmore spire to Leith Hill
From blasted furnace fields to crazy shady cool copse 
At Greensand way, wipe stinging eyes from rosary sweat
Dense, deeply musky mustard yellow oil vignette

Running in the Surrey Hills - voices are swallowed in the soft acoustic
Running in the Surrey Hills - in the summer time

Pond Scum

Simon Maxwell-Stewart