The Charles Theatre in Baltimore started the Ingmar Bergman revival series last week with Secrets of Women. Tomorrow there will be the second installment Smiles of a Summer Night. All together they are going to present 13 films by Ingmar Bergman. Ingmar Bergman on the big screen—a real treat every Saturday at noon…
Trisomie 21 were a French independent, electro-pop, ambient (difficult to categorize) band in the 80s/90s. A good friend of mine and EBM-fan introduced them to me in around 1990 with two vinyl records Raw Material and Plays The Pictures.
These two albums were just wonderful and I began to collect all their albums in the following years. Their music was also featured in a French movie, and I found very interesting how the landscapes I imagined while listening to this music actually matched the filmmaker’s vision, too. Thanks to the fnac-store in France it wasn’t too difficult to purchase them at the time.
A decade has passed since then and I don’t have these albums anymore. The music is probably completely outdated by today’s standards but I’m desperately looking for the albums below. If anybody is willing to sell them or if anybody know where I could find them, please please send me a note. I would be eternally thankful. The albums I’m looking for (CD and vinyl release) are:
T21 Plays The Pictures
Raw Material
The Songs By T21 Vol. 1
The Songs By T21 Vol. 2
Unfortunately, the other older releases were a bit redundant—The Songs includes almost everything they released at that time—and I didn’t enjoy Happy Mystery Child they released in 2004 after many years of silence. Maybe I should listen to their most recent albums again, but I would LOVE to get these four albums first.
Last Monday an old dream of mine finally came true: After all these years I finally had the opportunity to see Michael Brook play live, here in Baltimore!
I have known him and followed his work since I discovered his album Sleeps With The Fishes with Pieter Nooten long before I started collecting 4AD releases years ago. I enjoyed everything he has done since then. I loved his albums Cobalt Blue, Live at the Aquarium, Hybrid with Brian Eno, his later collaborations with Djivan Gasparyan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and so many others. He not only worked with Brian and Roger Eno, but also with David Sylvian, Robert Fripp, Russell Mills, on Rain Tree Crow with the other ex-Japan members, with Jon Hassell, Bryan Ferry, Peter Murphy…the list goes on and on and includes so many of my favorite musicians.
It is fascinating how he always has been part of my listening experience even when I haven’t listened to one of his own albums. As extensive his work with other musicians is, he also has a long history of producing soundtracks for television and film—films that coincidentally happen to be some of my favorites, Ashes and Snow, An Inconvenient Truth or Michael Mann’s Heat. Even if I didn’t know before that Michael Brook would be involved, it has always been so easy to spot his contributions and influence—thanks to his truly unique style and signature sound.
As long as I have lived in Germany I never had the opportunity to see him live in concert. He played the opening act during David Sylvian and Robert Fripp’s tour The Road To Graceland in 1993. I have a few live-recordings of this tour including Michael Brook’s opening, but although I have known David Sylvian’s work since about 1991, it took me as long as 11 years to experience my first show in Washington DC during the Everything & Nothing tour in 2002. My second David Sylvian show was in 2003 in Cologne during the Fire in the Forest tour—and this might have been his last live performance.
When I read that Michael Brook was going to perform live last year, I was as excited as about these David Sylvian shows or the Dead Can Dance concerts I experienced in the 90s. Unfortunately he had a biking-accident, so his concert was postponed to last Monday.
And it was such a wonderful concert. Michael Brook and Lisa Germano, as well as a wonderful violinist and vj made this made this event fantastic and unforgettable. They played recent material from RockPaperScissors and An Inconvenient Truth as well as some older songs of the Cobalt Blue era. The music was brilliant, the atmosphere was great, very personal and intimate.
But this concert had to feel very intimate with an audience of only 8 (later perhaps 10) people, Alice and myself included. We all could have gone out for dinner together. I found this really shocking and embarrassing for Baltimore. Everybody was relaxed and seemed to have a good time, but what’s wrong with this city that only 10 people would be interested in his music? I’m not a musician, but that must have felt terrible, not to mention the financial aspects. I really hope they were more welcome in other cities.
Of course it was wonderful for us, the audience. We not only could easily choose the best spot, we also got a very private concert during which he dedicated a song for every single one of us. But I felt bad for them. I think in every corner-pub they probably would have had a larger audience than at the Sonar. I hope they didn’t leave with too much of a bad impression. Somehow I feel this might have been his first and last visit to Baltimore. I hope not!
Even after several days since Monday I still think I was dreaming and cannot believe it. Baltimore’s population is huge in comparison to my hometown Mönchengladbach or Düsseldorf. There we stood in front of one of my musical superheroes…and only 10 people came to his concert? Sad…really sad, I don’t know what to say.
Maybe it was just a series of unfortunate circumstances…the fact that the original concert had to be postponed, no communication whatsoever from the ticket-service, maybe because it was a freezing Monday night.
But it was a great concert, and I’m very thankful they played for us and didn’t cancel the whole event. They already brought along a new album BellCurve, a more ambient remix companion to RockPaperScissors. It should be released in April if I remember right. So, thank you all again for playing in Baltimore!
I do hope that the lack of interest will not stop artists and musicians from making good music and following their artistic vision one day. It would be awful if the musical landscape was completely reduced to fast-food. Next time I probably should go out and make events like this known at places like the Charles Theatre or Hopkins campus.
Alice took some photos last Monday and posted them on her blog. Unfortunately, most of them didn’t turn out well because we didn’t take our Olympus, and the other camera doesn’t behave well in low-light situations. But thanks to YouTube I managed to find a few wonderful video-clips with Michael Brook and Lisa Germano. Enjoy and buy all their albums!
Michael Brook discussing his new album RockPaperScissors:
Some other music-news reached me a little while ago about some re-releases and remixes by Holger Czukay. His two albums Flux + Mutability and Plight & Premonition with David Sylvian have been one of my absolute favorites for so many years. Even after all this time I discover new things in these soundscapes I haven’t noticed before. A repeating journey of discovery, of deja-vu experiences and childhood memories…some of the most fascinating recordings I ever listened to.
Well, Holger Czukay will release a new version of Plight & Premonition, twice as long (!) as the original. This is another dream coming true. I always hoped to hear more of this music and different, longer versions… There are some remixed versions on David Sylvian’s Camphor, and there are some fantastic recordings available with Approaching Silence and Ember Glance, but that’s where my knowledge ends. I haven’t found any works comparable to these albums. Flux + Mutability and Plight & Premonition remained unique in all these years. I can’t wait to get this new release.
It was first mentioned in Holger Czukay’s news-article #111, but then postponed in news-article #112.
When I tried to catch up on the latest release I read that em:t closed again. That’s all I read, I didn’t get any further details and I haven’t searched for more on the web yet.
Years ago I collected all released under the t:me recordings label, but in 1996 they went bankrupt. The old em:t releases are still some of the most precious items in my collection, and this is not just because they have become very highly priced collector’s items.
In 2003 somebody relaunched em:t and released new albums including gel-sol, acid, gaudi:testa etc. With their latest international peoples gang release the line ended again. I saw that the price for this album immediately increased to 18 GBP, but I saw that Amazon still has some less expensive copies out there. I doubt that the new releases since 2003 will ever become as desirable as the early releases until 1996. In my opinion they had been ahead of their time in 1994-96, both in terms of music and design concept. The new releases since 2003, however, felt a bit behind of the time. But I might be wrong…
In any case, I feel sad about both times they had to discontinue their business and end a wonderful series of extraordinary electronic ambient recordings and very interesting artists.
A few weeks ago Richard Dalby aka Sugar Fire discovered my MySpace profile and invited me to his…and what I saw was very impressive. I could identify with his profile, his contacts, his influences, all of whom I’m very familiar with, his testimonials including one by davidsylvian.net’s Gerrit. Beside the thoughtfulness and good cause I also enjoyed his music. I believe I recognized bits and pieces from David Sylvian’s Approaching Silence and Ingrid Chavez in his songs. I agree with the words of other reviewers: “beautiful and comforting, soothing and kind-hearted.”
I mentioned a little while ago that I’m working on the aBschied2 website. Slowly but surely it’s all coming together and will be live in the next few weeks. Klaus and Christian are currently busy finishing a few more songs and writing copy for the website, but this project should be ready to be launched soon. Who knows, maybe I can announce this in April, too? By the way: They now also have a page on MySpace!