The Online 78RPM Discographical Project

A popular feature in the latter years of the late John Peel’s radio show was the ‘Pig’s Big 78′, a daily dose of pre-war esoterica introduced by his wife Sheila. It could be a classic old blues, jazz or hillbilly number, some music hall novelty or something quite bizarre and singular. Some of these were anthologised on a CD collection released by Trikont last year (John Peel And Sheila: The Pig’s Big 78s: A Beginner’s Guide). For those fascinated by the early years of recorded history, there is one website that has to be visited – Oregon-based collector Tyrone Settlemier’s huge Online 78rpm Discographical Project.

The site is nothing less than an ongoing attempt to catalogue every 78 ever issued from the format’s inception in the first decade of the twentieth century to it’s late fifties death throes. The list goes from Actuelle to Zonophone, and each label is accompanied by links to between one and forty large spreadsheets listing releases in catalogue number order. The Columbia listings alone contain more than 10,000 different records. The majority of entries are for US labels, but there are an increasing number being added from Europe and the Commonwealth. Currently there are more than 130 different labels on the site ranging from the familiar Victor, Paramount and Blue Note to obscurities like Nordskog, Lasso and Flexo.

Each listing gives the artist, A and B side titles, catalogue and matrix numbers, recording dates and composers (where available) and cross references to any other issues of the same recordings. The thing can be a little unwieldy, especially if you are searching for a list of records by a particular artist rather than wanting a label breakdown. There is, however, a link to an external cross-reference database at the Honking Duck where you can search by artist or song title. A search for “Tiger Rag” came up with 74 different recordings, as well as many others such as “New Tiger Rag”, “Old Tiger Rag”, “Tiger Rag Blues” etc.

It’s easy to get lost in this site, wondering what all these old records sound like, and who on earth Judson House, Gladys Wilbur and Adeline Francis were (all recorded for Columbia in 1917). Some of these recordings will no longer exist except, perhaps, in a distant childhood memory. Others will sit forgotten in the back rooms of dusty old junk shops. Very few will have been dusted down and reissued for the digital age. Perhaps that should be a new project. To preserve this material for posterity, and make it available via download.

Song of the day: THIN WHITE ROPE – The Clown Song (1991)

The Thin White Rope emerged from the Bay Area of northern California in 1984 at the back end of the so-called ‘Paisley Underground’ which spawned such acts as the Rain Parade and the Dream Syndicate. The group’s early psychedelic tendencies were reined in as the years passed, and they evolved into a fairly dry, country-tinged hard rock band. They were led by Guy Kyser, a singer equipped with a raw baritone perfectly matched to the band’s desert rock.

1991′s The Ruby Sea was the best of Thin White Rope’s five studio albums. It was also their last – the band split the following year. The record closes with “The Clown Song”, a seventy second, acoustic vignette with only one verse:

Seems I have been a clown more than a friend
A clockwork response to tokens you spend
And when you stop and when I run down
I’m frozen and cannot escape from the clown

It’s a small, sad song that sums up the disillusion that Kyser was feeling at the time (when he split the group, he left music altogether). It’s funny that something so short, simple and quiet should be so affecting, but “The Clown Song” is a hard-hitting and powerful little song, and possibly the band’s best ever.

Album: URBAN TRIBE – Acceptable Side Effects (Rephlex CAT184 2007)

Much of the techno that came out of Detroit in the early to mid nineties has dated pretty badly. A lot of it seems quite cheap and tinny sounding compared to more recent electronic music. Aside from Carl Craig, Sherard Ingram’s Urban Tribe (which included Craig as an associate member in its early days) has one of the few catalogues from the era that still sounds relatively fresh. The 1998 Mo Wax album The Collapse Of Modern Culture was one of the best records the label released outside of DJ Shadow and DJ Krush.

Eight years passed with just a single Planet E twelve to break the silence before Ingram signed to Rephlex last year. His debut album for the label, Authorised Clinical Trials, saw the Urban Tribe sound undergo a radical overhaul. The expansive techno sound was replaced by a much more muted and minimal electro style in the same vein as Ingram’s other project Drexciya (with whom he records as DJ Stingray). Appearing less than a year on, Acceptable Side Effects is very much a companion piece to its predecessor.

The album seems strangely undercooked and unengaging. It starts excitingly enough with the high tempo “110101″, but even that sounds blunted and muffled. The portentious robot vocals feel tired and clichéd too. Elsewhere the beats range from slow to a brisk tempo, but often suffer from an anaemic production. Minimalism is fine, but a lot of these tracks simply don’t have enough in them to sustain more than cursory interest. There are exceptions. The slow shuffle of “Night Scope” has a simple, hypnotic melody line, “Outflank” evokes the spirit of early Warp bleep techno and the closing “Tangent” is a genuinely exciting two-step drum and bass tune given a robotic Detroit makeover. As a whole, though, Acceptable Side Effects sounds like a dozen sketches for tunes that could use a little more development. It’s not a bad album, just a tad mundane.

Song of the day: AINTS – It’s Still Nowhere (1991)

So much rock music is dreary, clichéd and about as exciting as a convention of actuaries. Probably half of my collection consists of guitar bands, but most of them sit there unloved and unlistened to. But when it’s done well, with spirit and passion, then there is little as exciting as a great rock tune. “It’s Still Nowhere” is one of these.

The Aints were a side project put together by former Saint and Laughing Clown Ed Kuepper as a vehicle for a more basic, rocky sound that didn’t really fit with his solo work. Ascension was the first album recorded by the group, under the twin influences of John Coltrane (the title) and the Stooges (the cover). The record consisted of six tracks of raucous, freeform rock, which culminated in the eleven minute avant-epic title track.

“It’s Still Nowhere” opens the record with a squall of feedback, and almost immediately the guitars are flying. There is a central simple riff that underpins the verses and chorus, but outside of that, the track is little more than extended soloing. Everything is so bloody loud, too – the sound is abrasive, and could blister the paint off walls. When Kuepper lets rip like this, he has few peers – think Neil Young at his free-est, Tom Verlaine at his rawest, garnish with late period Coltrane’s astral travelling, and you get some idea of where he is aiming. “It’s Still Nowhere” is seven and a half minutes of brutal, visceral rock that sounds as exciting now as it did when I first heard it fifteen years ago. If only there were young bands out there now with a grasp of how to make rock music as good as this, instead of producing endless retreads of the same half dozen ideas.

Song of the day: THOMAS TALLIS – Spem In Alium (c. 1570)

Sixteenth century Christian choral music is not usually my bag, I have to confess. “Spem In Alium”, though, is one of those rare pieces of music that has the ability to stop the listener dead in their tracks, open-mouthed in astonishment. Before I heard this, my only exposure to Tallis had been indirectly through Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis”, a piece that I’d loved dearly since childhood. If I had any preconceptions at all, it would be that his music would be all lutes and madrigals – him being Elizabethan and all. I certainly didn’t expect this.

Tallis was a Catholic who managed to emerge through the reformation and counter-reformation unscathed. In Elizabethan England, being Catholic not only counted against you, but could cost you your life. Yet Tallis served under four monarchs, and in 1573, along with William Byrd (another Catholic), he was given the extraordinary privilege of being granted an exclusive license for the printing and publishing of music in England for a period of two decades. He died in November 1585 aged around 80.

“Spem In Alium” was composed for forty voices, arranged in eight choirs of five. It was designed to be heard ‘in the round’, and was first performed at an octagonal banqueting hall at Nonsuch Palace, owned by the Duke of Arundel. It must have sounded awesome. Each choir is scored separately. It could have been the recipe for discordant chaos, but the result is mesmerising, with a grace and serenity that belies the complexity of the work. Notes are sustained for long periods, with harmonies and counterpoints weaving around. “Spem In Alium” was mathematically precise in its construction (there are ‘in jokes’ and little puzzles that delight ardent musicologists, but would conjour up only blank looks from the rest of us), but what really counts is the finished article, and it is stunning.  It is only at the very end that all the choirs come together on the same note, closing a twelve minute aural trip. The closest contemporary music has come to this kind of transcendent beauty would be something like Brian Eno’s “Ascent (An Ending)” from Apollo, or Stars of the Lid at their very best. It’s available (recorded in surround sound by the Oxford Camerata in 2005) on a Naxos CD for a fiver together with eight other pieces.

Album: BOLA – Kroungrine (Skam Skald022 2007)

Every couple of years Darren Fitton aka Bola comes up with an hour of melodic electronica for Skam, and releases it under an excrutiating, but often fiendishly clever, pun of a title. Thus far we’ve had ‘Bola Soup’, ‘Bola Gnayse’, ‘Bola Mauver’ (an ep), ‘Fyuti Bola’ (which literally took me years to work out!) and the direct ‘Bola Ks’ (a single). Kroungrine is the latest. Insert ‘jack’ joke here.

Fitton seems to work in his own little Bola world where trends and fashions in electronic music pass him by. His music is identifiably his own, but has enough variation and experimentation to keep each release fresh. Consequently, it really doesn’t date at all unlike the output of many of his peers.

Kroungrine is a bit more of a mixed bag quality wise compared to its predecessors. There are some sublime moments, but a few tracks that seem a little stale. “Noop” is glorious, a slow, sad, melodic piece. “Waknuts” and “Urenforpuren”, though, are pretty close to being generic Bola tunes, and neither sticks in the mind at all. Unfortunately, “Halyloola” does. It’s a twee, toytown techno track that sounds like Kraftwerk doing the title music for a pre-school CBeebies programme. It is probably supposed to, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.  

Things pick up towards the end with “Rainslaight”, a busy, but atmospheric, mid tempo groove that would grace any Bola record. “Diamortem” sails into uncharted waters. It’s multi-sectioned, fifteen minutes long, and has an abstract central part that resembles Zeit-era Tangerine Dream, before it picks up again with a forlorn, funereal beat. It ends in spaced-out, neo-ambient fashion with what sounds like a full string section. It’s a very unconventionally structured piece of music, with melody taking a backseat to atmospherics. At the same time, it seems quite sombre, almost stark, before the coda. Even the orchestration sounds more distracted than lush. It’s a fascinating track, and ends a curiously inconsistent Bola album – half top notch material, and half a little lame.