Sounds great! Fun too! Also reposted :)))

Freeform Playlist 7

Elliott Smith - Let's Get Lost (Alternate Mix) - Thumbsucker (Soundtrack)

Black Hearted Brother – the new trio formed by Neil Halstead (Slowdive, Mojave 3), Mark Van Hoen (Locust, Seefeel) and Nick Holton (Coley Park, Holton’s Opulent Oog) – release the ‘Got Your Love’ EP on April 1. It will be available from iTunes and all download retailers and streaming services.

Get it from iTunes: http://smarturl.it/bhb-gyl-itunes

The EP’s lead track is an edited version of one of the standout songs on last year’s debut album, ‘Stars Are Our Home’, which always sounded a bit like a lost indie-disco classic, mixing moody Mary Chain melancholia with a thumping electronic beat and squelching sequencers.

“‘Got Your Love’ is really the poppiest song on the album,” agrees the band’s Nick Holton. “It started life on GarageBand, but we added a big floor drum, three big guitars, Mark’s bass synth and Neil’s catchy melody. It became a long song, clocking in at just under eight minutes thanks to Mark’s epic intro and outro. It actually features a massive hammer – and it is really massive – from Brooklyn as the pulsing percussion.”

There is also one brand new track. “‘Don’t Take The Weight’ started life in my large vault of instrumental ditties,” explains Mark Van Hoen. “One of the privileges of the Brethren is the opportunity to cherry pick from this fruitful orchard of sonic delights, and this one did the trick. This time Nick steps up on lead vocals, as he did on several cuts on the album.” The EP is rounded out by two very different remixes of the title track. Chilean electronica artist (now based in Paris) Ricardo Tobar turns in a brilliantly wonky rework which was premiered recently on The Quietus. The other remix is a gloriously downbeat, echo-laden reworking by Ultramarine – the legendary UK techno duo formed by Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper, who released ‘This Time Last Year’, their first album since 1998, last September.

Speaking of bands on the comeback trail, it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that, since Black Hearted Brother first released ‘Stars Are Our Home’ last October, Neil Halstead’s old band Slowdive have reformed and confirmed appearances at festivals around the world later this year. We’d like to think that BHB was a big step towards this being possible. Here are some of the nice things that were said about the album:

“Euphoric electro-shoegaze... It is damn good to hear Neil Halstead busting the effects pedals out of storage and making a dynamic, distorted racket after years of hushed, stripped- back folk music” - The Quietus

“A splendid, freeform racket” - The Times

 “Catchy melodies and infectious, poppy grooves” - Metro

“A super group that doesn’t celebrate itself... come up with an album of mournful pop played as tripped-out psych-gaze” - The Line Of Best Fit

The original version can be found on Black Hearted Brother's debut album 'Stars Are Our Home', which was released in October 2013.

Order LP/CD: http://smarturl.it/bhb-album
Get the album from iTunes: http://smarturl.it/bhb-itunes


Black Hearted Brother - Got Your Love (Ultramarine Remix)

From the album, 'South Wind,Clear Sky,' out now on Second Language Music.  www.secondlanguagemusic.com

Perhaps still most widely recognised for Dreaming With Alice, his 1972 psych-folk debut for RCA Italy as a 19-year-old art student-troubadour, Mark Fry has been turning his creative gaze on the world, and alchemising its elements into shimmering, quietly visionary works of art, ever since. Certainly not an artist who dances to the music of time in any conventional sense, Mark, a respected, and collected, painter, most often to be found holed up in his Normandy farmhouse studio, allowed more than three decades to glide by before recording Alice’s follow up, 2008’s Shooting The Moon. His subsequent musical activity has been frenetic by comparison.

Mark’s beguiling, Arcadian-flavoured 2011 Second Language album, I Lived In Trees, recorded in collaboration with The A. Lords – musicians from a more recent generation of psychedelic-folk experimenters – proved a major critical hit, demonstrating that Mark Fry’s musical stock lay not only in the Paisley-hued haze of his Aquarian Age youth, but also in the full glare of the postmodern, internet-facilitated present. A series of concerts in Japan and Scandinavia, and a widely reported ‘supergroup’ London showcase, featuring members of Mercury Rev, Super Furry Animals, Tunng and Lemon Jelly, further evinced the subtle but inexorable diffusion of the Mark Fry legend, something abetted by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme airing an interview with Mark in the wake of Trees’ release.

All of which brings us to Mark Fry’s latest, most exquisitely realised musical offering to date, South Wind, Clear Sky. Sung with that now familiar alloy of cool restraint and wondering innocence, and passingly reminiscent of the kind of English pastoralism associated with the likes of Kevin Ayers or Bill Fay, the album’s leanly arranged yet immersive songs are propelled by Mark’s glinting, plangent guitars and deliciously embroidered by John Parker’s double bass, Angèle David-Guillou’s piano and backing vocals and Katie Lang’s French horn, all bound together by producer Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab) into a delightfully iridescent whole. For all its finely honed arrangements, and the translucence of its recording, South Wind, Clear Sky is still very much the work of the man who made Dreaming With Alice; the mature Mark Fry’s feeling for wonderment and magic, for the dreamlike and the innocently surreal, is just as pervasive, and persuasive here, only more focused, and etched against a more luminous, even heavenly canvas.

Where the lyrics on his last album found Mark reaching up through the summer branches toward an azure sky, here that celestial dimension provides the focus for eight shimmering chamber-folk essays whose wistful narratives of flight and fancy and empyrean romance purr and soar with a stately grace, like the ‘Aeroplanes’ of the album’s richly melodic opening track.


Mark Fry - Aeroplanes

W S Graham introduces and reads the poem 'Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons' (from his 1977 collection 'Implements In Their Places'). Recorded and broadcast circa 1978. 

W S Graham: Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons

From the album 'It's the Talk of the Town', Basta 3090332

I Cover The Waterfront - Boulevard of Broken Dreams Orchestra

The John Coltrane Quartet Plays

Nature Boy

Darling you set me on fire
Won't you shine a Little light my way
Say that you're fine,I'll keep it with mine
What else could I say?
Darling I know you're tired won't u shine a little lovin my way
Say you are fine I can't tell by your lines
what else can I say?
Here it comes the sound
Let it go-my soul
Some days I die without trying 
Yeah I got it bad enough
The future's behind and I'll keep it with mine
Sometimes is always enough
Here it comes
Let it go
It's the sound
Of my soul

Sometimes Is Always Enough

I See Cuckoo

Been blogging, music sharing, etc. for a while now (see blog under this name) & DJing since 1982. I like all kinds of music.

Most of my playlists are not organized & just hold songs I'm interested in, many of which I haven't listened to yet. The "freeform current listening" playlist is as it says & will be updated regularly. Many of my reposts were unintentional, they were just random tracks I was trying to add to a playlist using my phone & I've got clumsy fingers.

I See Cuckoo

The Memory Band

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