Electric Eden - A book by Rob Young

“An exhaustive, widely researched, lovingly written book about the mythic roots of folk music originating in the UK... Beautifully panoramic in scope.” — Suzanne Vega

Rob Young was born in Bristol in 1968. He has worked as a music writer and editor since 1993, when he joined the staff of The Wire magazine. He was Editor between 2000-04 and continues as a co-owner, contributor and editorial member. He regularly presents The Wire's 'Adventures in Modern Music' on Resonance 104.4 FM, and edited the collections of Wire articles, 'Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music' (Continuum 2002) and 'The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music' (Verso 2009). He also wrote the first two in Black Dog Publishing's Labels Unlimited series of illustrated record company biographies: 'Warp' (2005) and 'Rough Trade' (2006). His latest book is a 650-page history of folk music and the British imagination, from the late 19th century to the present...

“Rob Young’s ambitious Electric Eden presents a flip side to the well-known story of the evolution of electric rock in Britain in the 1960s, a story of the rediscovery of England’s native folk music in the early 20th century by the likes of William Morris and Cecil Sharp, who went from town to town recording and notating the music that would hold great sway with those musicians who became associated with England’s less loud, more earthy music—the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Davy Graham, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, John Martyn, John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, and many others would each deploy traditional folk music to their own ends in various recombinant ways, writing new songs laced with the idealism of the exploding sixties youth culture, while paying homage to the spirit and traditions of old. Eventually the tide of this music swelled to inspire some of the most influential names in electric rock, from the Beatles and Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. Thoroughly researched and well written, this book uncovers the secret history of British popular music in the sixties and beyond. Highly recommended.” — Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth

“Encyclopedic and often mesmerizing... [Electric Eden] creates its own sort of timeless music.” — Tom Nolan, San Francisco Chronicle

“Rob Young has written such a richly detailed, evocative, and readable account of Britain’s fascination with folk music that it’s hard to believe it exists. Electric Eden begins modestly as an account of folk rock in the sixties and seventies, and soon is sweeping boldly through time, turning up an alternative and often darker history of England, and subtly undermining the received wisdom on tradition, nostalgia, pop song, and high modernist theories of culture. Those who care about American music have much to learn from this book.” — John Szwed, author of Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World

“Rob Young’s theme—the visionary instinct—allows him to treat British music of the 20th Century as a continuous narrative rather than one that begins or ends with rock music. As such, Electric Eden deserves to be shelved next to Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise.” — Wesley Stace, author of Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

“The author is blissfully quotable... These lines about the early years of the British psychedelic movement are so terrific that they contain the seeds of a sour, funny, lovely Philip Larkin-ish poem... Electric Eden is a lucid and patriotic guided tour, as vigorous as one of Heathcliff’s strolls across the moors... [Young’s] book throws plenty of lightning, and it will have you scrambling to download some of the music that’s filling his head.” — Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“I’m currently on my sixth album purchase because of this book. The guy should be getting a kickback from Amazon, he really should.” — Robin Turner, Caught by the River

“Hugely ambitious... A thoroughly enjoyable read and likely to remain the best-written overview [of the modern British folk phenomenon] for a long time... I’ve already made several precious musical discoveries thanks to this book and I expect to make more.” — Michel Faber, Guardian Book of the Week

“Young’s grasp of context is enviable, his knowledge encyclopedic... Electric Eden constructs a new mythography out of old threads, making antiquity glow with an eerie hue.” — Peter Murphy, Sunday Business Post

“Stunning... The thread of mapping modern instruments on to traditional folk tunes leads Young from Peter Warlock to Bert Jansch, Steeleye Span and the Aphex Twin, via the bucolic psychedelia of the Incredible String Band, the Beatles and Pink Floyd. This is no easy path to navigate but Young rarely wavers.” — Bob Stanley, Sunday Times

“A comprehensive and absorbing exploration of Britain's folk music, which serves, too, as a robust defence of the genre... Folk, be it traditional, mystical, mythical, radical or experimental, is a living, breathing form, Young believes. It is everywhere, in all the music we hear, in every song we sing. Electric Eden defies you to disagree.” — Dan Cairns, Sunday Times

“Electric Eden is a stunning achievement.” — Simon Reynolds, author of Rip It Up and Start Again

Faber and Faber; ISBN-10: 0571237525, ISBN-13: 978-0571237524.

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The films of Jean-Pierre Melville

"At birth man is offered only one choice --the choice of his death. But if this choice is governed by distaste for his own existence, his life will never have been more than meaningless."

"Jean-Pierre Grumbach was born on October 20, 1917 to a family of Alsatian Jews. In his youth, he studied in Paris, where he was first exposed to great films. Among them was Robert J. Flaherty and W.S. Van Dyke's silent documentary, White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). It left so deep a mark upon the pubescent Grumbach that he became a regular at the cinema, an obsession that would benefit him in adulthood. His own earliest efforts, home movies in 16mm, were made with a camera given to him by his father in this period. In 1937, however, his career was forestalled when he began obligatory service in the French army. He was still in uniform when the Nazis invaded in 1940; under the nom de guerre of Melville, he aided the Resistance. In fleeing to England, he joined the Free French Forces and took part in the Allies' liberation of continental Europe. After the war, despite a desire to revert to Grumbach, he found that pseudonym had stuck." - Steve Cohn, Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

"Melville gained most fame for such dry, laconic gangster films a s Bob le flambeur (1955), Le Doulos (1962), Second Breath (1966), and Le Samourai (1967). Expressionless men in trenchcoats and snap-brim hats stalk through gray streets to meet in piano bars. Almost completely impassive, they behave as if they have watched too many Hollywood films noirs -driving American sedans, pledging loyalty to their pals, dividing duties for a caper they intend to pull. Melville dwells on long silences as gunmen size each other up, stare at their reflections, or stoically realize that a deal has failed. The films teem with bravura techniques - hand-held camerawork, long takes, and available-light shooting… Melville loved to watch movies. ("Being a spectator is the finest profession in the world.") Many of his films are tributes to American cinema, and he brought to French film some of the audacious energy of Hollywood B pictures. If Renoir fathered the New Wave, Melville was its godfather." - Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction.

"Melville was a precise, methodical director with a predilection for themes of war and crime. The former preoccupation was attributable to his own experiences, and the latter was the probable result of his nostalgic admiration for the Hollywood cinema of the 30s... Beginning in the early 60s, Melville worked with larger budgets and with name stars like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon and showed an increasingly technical mastery of the medium." - The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia.

"He had a built-in breathlessness, in fact, an adopted resignation to transience and mutability that is partly an eccentric individualism and partly what Melville inherited from American mobility and obsolescence. It gives his gangster films a true supercharge - "en quatrième vitesse" - and he transformed Belmondo and Delon into beautiful destructive angels of the dark street." - David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

"Powerful endings and memorable set-pieces have a place in all Melville's work, even the earlier films, some of which are far removed from his later world of 'flics' and gangs', where the night-time photography glitters as cold and metallic as a gun barrel." - David Quinlan, Quinlan's Film Directors.

"Betrayal, revenge, and the criminal mind are significant elements in the work of Melville. His films are not so much reflections of the Hollywood crime genre as indications of a unique sensibility creating from the same source material - crime and criminals." - William R. Meyer, The Film Buff's Catalog.

Jean-Pierre Grumbach: Paris, France, October 20, 1917 - Paris, France, August 2, 1973.

More information here, here and here.












Filmography, as director:

Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d’un clown (1946)

Le Silence de la mer (1949)

Les Enfants terribles (1950)

Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953)

Bob le flambeur (1955)

Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (1959)

Léon Morin, prêtre (1961)

Le Doulos (1962)

L’Aîné des Ferchaux (1963)

Le Deuxième souffle (1966)

Le Samouraï (1967)

L’Armée des ombres (1969)

Le Cercle rouge (1970)

Un Flic (1972)

Lomography

The desire for spontaneous and unpredictable distortions of developed Lomographic photos have spawned an emerging Lomographic community and the Lomographic Society International, a group of Lomographic photographers with the intention to "speak in photos and know no boundaries in our mission to snapshot every corner of the world".

Lomography emphasizes casual, snapshot photography. Characteristics such as over-saturated colors, off-kilter exposure, blurring, happy accidents, and alternative film processing are often considered part of the Lomographic Technique. From Wikipedia.

Further information here, here and here.

Lomograph by R/J/L-H, using Diana Mini F+

Lomograph by R/J/L-H, using Diana Mini F+

Lomograph by R/J/L-H, using Diana Mini F+

Lomograph by C/E/L-H, using Diana Mini F+

Lomograph by Ben Spear, using Diana Mini F+

TV: Survivors (1975-77)

BBC, 16/4/1975-8/6/1977, 3 series of 38 50 minute episodes (colour). Created: Terry Nation. Producer: Terence Dudley.

Cast: Carolyn Seymour (Abby Grant); Lucy Fleming (Jenny Richards); Ian McCulloch (Greg Preston); Denis Lill (Charles Vaughan); Lorna Lewis (Pet); John Abineri (Hubert).

Terry Nation is probably best remembered as the creator of Doctor Who's Daleks but his writing credits also include comedy scripts for Tony Hancock and the creation of Survivors, a drama series set in a post-apocalypse, present day world ravaged by a devastating plague.

Nation's aim was to explore how humanity would cope in a world stripped of modern technology and comforts. His chosen device for achieving this naked state was the release of a deadly virus, graphically portrayed each week in Survivors' opening credits. A shot of a masked scientist accidentally breaking a test tube is followed by footage of international air travel and people falling sick - a series of images that is never explained, leaving viewers to imagine the chain of events.

The show's first season focused on how the handful of people left alive after the plague cope with the shock of being cast into a world without clean water or electricity, and how current social solutions no longer work in an environment where moral considerations are secondary to the more pressing need to survive.

Much of the early action centres on Abby Grant's (Carolyn Seymour) search for her young son Peter, who she believes may have survived the devastation. But Survivors' depiction of an increasingly fractured world quickly undermines any manifestation of optimism. The plague was only the beginning of the end of modern civilisation - in Nation's eyes society still has a long way to unravel.

Survivors ran for three seasons but disagreements between Nation and the programme's producer, Terence Dudley, resulted in the writer abandoning his own show. This echoed the stand-off between Dudley and Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, creators of the environmental drama Doomwatch (BBC, 1970-72), who stormed off their series claiming that their vision had been displaced by a less challenging narrative style. Nation claimed a similar intervention and professed himself unhappy at the ease with which his devastated world was so quickly put to rights.

Survivors' second and third seasons depicted a world in recovery, with the establishment of stable rural communities and even the return of steam trains. This abandonment of Nation's apocalyptic vision was arguably necessary for the show's development, but the speed and ease with which a semblance of normality is restored by a ragtag group of survivors, who only three years earlier were secretaries and bank clerks, is a little hard to swallow.

BFI overview: Anthony Clark



More information here, here and here.

Extra Sensory Perception (ESP)

"However incomprehensible it may appear, we are finally compelled to assume that there is in the unconscious something like an a priori knowledge or immediate presence of events which lacks any causal basis" Carl Gustav Jung.

Extrasensory perception (ESP) involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind.

The term was coined by English essayist and poet Frederic William Henry Myers.

ESP is also sometimes casually referred to as a Sixth Sense, gut instinct or hunch, which are historical English idioms.

Parapsychology is the scientific study of paranormal psychic phenomena, including ESP. Parapsychologists generally regard such tests as the ganzfeld experiment as providing compelling evidence for the existence of ESP. The scientific community rejects ESP due to the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain ESP, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results.

Perhaps the most publicized early experiments were those published by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine in 1934, in a monograph entitled Extra-Sensory Perception, which summarized results from his experiments at Duke University beginning in 1927. Although this work was published by the relatively obscure Boston Society for Psychic Research, it was picked up in the popular press and had a large impact throughout the world. While earlier researches had been fruitful, they were generally neither as systematic nor as persistent as Dr. Rhine's studies.

These experiments used shuffled decks of ESP cards with five sets of five different symbols on them -- a cross, a circle, a wavy line, a square and a star. This method reduced the problem of chance-expectation to a matter of exact calculations. Furthermore the cards were designed to be as emotionally neutral as possible to eliminate possible response biases caused by idiosyncratic preferences. However other studies have shown that emotionally laden targets can also work without impairing statistical analysis.

Rhine describes his early work with one of his more successful subjects, Hubert E. Pearce, a graduate divinity student:

"The working conditions were these: observer and subject sat opposite each other at a table, on which lay about a dozen packs of the Zener cards and a record book. One of the packs would be handed to Pearce and he allowed to shuffle it. (He felt it gave more real "contact.") Then it was laid down and it was cut by the observer. Following this Pearce would, as a rule, pick up the pack, lift off the top card, keeping both the pack and the removed card face down, and after calling it, he would lay the card on the table, still face down. The observer would record the call. Either after five calls or after twenty-five calls -- and we used both conditions generally about equally -- the called cards would be turned over and checked off against the calls recorded in the book. The observer saw each card and checked each one personally, though the subject was asked to help in checking by laying off the cards as checked. There is no legerdemain by which an alert observer can be repeatedly deceived at this simple task in his own laboratory. (And, of course, we are not even dealing with amateur magicians.) For the next run another pack of cards would be taken up"