4AD 1984

The B-side to Kangaroo, the single by This Mortal Coil with the confusing name “It’ll End In Tears” is not included here, because I can’t find it on Spotify. It’s basically a short instrumental version of Kangaroo, though, so it’s not a catastrophe, I guess. But it’s a nice version. Somebody should fix that on Spotify.

But here’s 4AD 1984 on Spotify.

While 1983 was a year of change for 4AD, saying goodbye to many artists that had released music through 4AD in the early years, 1984 is firmly “new 4AD”. 1984 was the year that really signaled to the world that 4AD was an aesthetic thing: From the beautiful covers created by Vaughan Oliver/23 Envelope featured on almost all the releases, to music that sounded like nothing else.

Significant releases of the year are the first Dead Can Dance album, which is perhaps let down by indifferent production work. They fulfil all their potential with the 12″ that follows on its heels, Garden of the Arcane Delights, and I think everybody was won over.

As a thing that made 4AD a “thing” in people’s minds, This Mortal Coil was very important. If you want to look at it crassly, it’s basically label boss Ivo Watts-Russell and 4AD go-to producer John Fryer getting all the various 4AD artists into a studio and recording covers of Ivo’s favourite songs. This, along with the record design, gave 4AD an intimate club atmosphere… but perhaps too intimate, since some of the artists started resenting being looked upon that way.

If you’re a musician, you may want people to listen to your music and consider you as an independent artist, not part of some label collective. If you read interviews with Robin Guthrie from Cocteau Twins, this is a theme he seems to return to again and again, so in a way, This Mortal Coil existing may have been instrumental in Cocteau Twins leaving (well, being fired, sort of) from 4AD later. (And that people were offering up gobs of money to use Song to the Siren in various film, sung and played by Cocteau Twins but appearing on the This Mortal Coil album, and Ivo refusing all comers, didn’t help the relationship.)

But it’s a lovely album… and speaking of lovely albums:

Many consider Treasure by Cocteau Twins, released late in 1984, to be the best thing 4AD ever released, and some consider it to be the best album released by anybody ever… And why not? There’s nothing like it. Elizabeth Fraser is in peak form here, with her increasingly mysterious lyrics, hovering perfectly on the border of intelligibility, and Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde’s wall of beauty behind her is something to behold.

But I have to say that wonderful as it is, the drum sound gets on my tits, and it always has — even when it was brand new. The drum sound is just so… 1984.

Anyway, a class year for 1984, and basically from now on, until the early 90s, they would release no music that wasn’t excellent. This is 4AD’s imperial period.

1984

 BAD401
Modern English — Chapter 12

Chapter 12, Ringing In The Change, Reflection

 CAD402
Modern English — Ricochet Days

Rainbow’s End, Machines, Spinning Me Round, Ricochet Days, Hands Across The Sea, Blue Waves, Heart, Chapter 12

 BAD403
Colourbox — Say You

Say You, Fast Dump

 CAD404
Dead Can Dance — Dead Can Dance

The Final Impact, The Trial, Frontier, Fortune, Ocean, East Of Eden, Threshold, A Passage In Time, Wild In The Woods, Musica Eternal

 BAD405
Cocteau Twins — The Spangle Maker

Pearly-Dewdrops’Drops, Pepper Tree, The Spangle Maker

 BAD406
Colourbox — Punch

Punch, Keep On Pushing, Punch, Shadows In The Room

 CAD407
Xmal Deutschland — Tocsin

Mondlicht, Eiland, Reigen, Tag Fur Tag, Augen Blick, Begrab Mein Herz, Nachtschatten, Xmas In Australia, Derwisch

 BAD408
Dead Can Dance — Garden of the Arcane Delights

Carnival Of Delight, In Power We Entrust The Love Advocated, The Arcane, Flowers Of The Sea

 BAD409
The Wolfgang Press — Scarecrow

Respect, Deserve, Ecstacy

 AD410
This Mortal Coil — Kangaroo

Kangaroo, It’ll End In Tears*

 CAD411
This Mortal Coil — It’ll End In Tears

Kangaroo, Song To The Siren, Holocaust, Fyt, Fond Affections, The Last Ray, Another Day, Waves Become Wings, Barramundi, Dreams Made Flesh, Not Me, A Single Wish

 CAD412
Cocteau Twins — Treasure

Ivo, Lorelei, Beatrix, Persephone, Pandora (for Cindy)|=Pandora, Amelia, Aloysius, Cicely, Otterley, Donimo

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.

*) Missing from Spotify.

For Flacs Sake

Yesterday, I bought this Black Cab EP off of Bandcamp, but when I played it today, all I got was silence.

A new form of Extreme Australian Minimalism or a bug?

My music interface is Emacs, and it uses flac123 to play FLAC files. It’s not a very er supported program, but I find it convenient since it uses the same command format as mpg123/321.

I have encountered FLAC files before that it couldn’t play, but I’ve never taken the time to try to debug the problem.

$ file /music/repository/Black\ Cab/Empire\ States\ EP/01-Empire\ States.flac 
/music/repository/Black Cab/Empire States EP/01-Empire States.flac: FLAC audio bitstream data, 24 bit, stereo, 44.1 kHz, 29760127 samples

Huh… so it’s 24 bits, while the rest of the FLAC files I’ve got are 16 bits?

Hm! Spot the problem!

Yes, if the format is anything other than 8 or 16 bits, then no samples are copied over from the FLAC decompression library to the libao player function, resulting in very hi-fi silent silence.

So this should be easy to fix, I thought: Just copy over, like, more bytes in the 24 bits per sample case, right?

Right.

But… the libao documentation is er uhm what’s the word oh yeah fucked up. It doesn’t really say whether ao_play expects three bytes per sample in the 24 bit case or four bytes. I tried all kinds of weird and awkward byte order manipulation, and got various forms of quite interesting noises squeaking out of the stereo, but nothing really musical.

So I wondered whether libao just doesn’t support 24 bits “natively”, and I added some “if 24 bits, then open as 32 bits” logic and presto!

Beautiful music! With so many bits!

I’ve pushed the resulting code to my fork on Microsoft Github.

The four people out there in the world playing 24 bit FLAC files on Linux from the command line or in Emacs: You’re welcome.

May 1945: The Valley of Decision













Gregory Peck and Lionel Barrymore… And Greer Garson… Oh, I’ve seen her in Mrs. Miniver, which was very good indeed…

Uh-oh! It’s a movie about Irish in the US.

ME AM SUSPICIOUS

There’s something particularly dreadfully tedious about Irish cultural extruded product. The combination of religiosity, pomposity, sentimentality and forced cheer is positively venomous. If only these things had actual humour instead of some asshole saying and then going “HO HO HO” there’d been something to enjoy.

So I’ve got a totally open mind here! No prejudices! I’m sure this will be a wonderful movie!

[time passes]

OK, the first half hour was boring, and then the next three hours were annoying, and then the last nineteen hours were just excruciating.

It’s everything I expected. And more.

It’s a horrible, horrible movie.

Did it win all the Oscars? Hm…. No! Garson was nominated for best actress, which is well deserved, I guess, but then the entire world tried to forget that the movie ever happened.

But people liked it:

The film was a massive hit, earning $4,566,000 in the US and Canada and $3,530,000 elsewhere resulting in a profit of $3,480,000 in profit.

How many Irish are there anyway?

The Valley of Decision. Tay Garnett. 1945.

Popular movies in May 1945 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
13617.4The Valley of Decision
62907.4The Body Snatcher
2957.0Molly and Me
10106.9The Scarlet Clue
2736.7Pillow to Post
28366.7Back to Bataan
5076.6Thrill of a Romance
2036.5Boston Blackie Booked on Suspicion
7406.4The Bullfighters
3386.4The Brighton Strangler

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

April 1945: Blithe Spirit












*gasp* I can see colours!

Technicolours!

Well, this is a high-ticket item. Directed by David Lean from a script by Noel Coward (and also produced by him).

Margaret Rutherford is wonderful as the most unlikely medium ever.

It’s a very, very English screwball comedy: A deceased woman comes back as a ghost to visit her husband. Hi-jinx ensue where English people talk very rapidly at each other in exquisite Estuary.

I so want this to be wonderful, but it doesn’t quite connect. The jokes just aren’t funny enough and it doesn’t get screwy enough.

I mean, it is funny and it is screwy. But it lacks that certain something to push it over the edge into hilariousness and ends up in the uneasy “well, that’s amusing” territory.

Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings may be the problem — they just don’t have the chemistry.

Blithe Spirit. David Lean. 1945.

Popular movies in April 1945 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
38987.2Blithe Spirit
2287.1Counter-Attack
3877.0It’s in the Bag!
19646.9Tarzan and the Amazons
9576.8The Horn Blows at Midnight
7476.7Brewster’s Millions
3296.5The Power of the Whistler
5466.4Two O’Clock Courage
5556.4Son of Lassie
14276.2Blood on the Sun

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

March 1945: Delightfully Dangerous




















This is another cheap and cheerful B movie from that 50 movie box set.

Perhaps a majority of the movies on the box set are stage shows wrapped in a nonsensical excuse for a framing device. I don’t mind; it’s fun to watch those stage shows.

This is also an excuse to show a variety show, but it’s almost a real, proper movie, with great acting performances (a very young Jane Powell, for instance) and a real storyline. Well. Sort of.

It’s delightfully charming.

Delightfully Dangerous. Arthur Lubin. 1945.

Popular movies in March 1945 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
18877.7The Corn Is Green
94277.6The Picture of Dorian Gray
23287.5The Clock
6616.9A Royal Scandal
15426.8Without Love
4426.7Hotel Berlin
13206.6Dillinger
4356.5God Is My Co-Pilot
2596.4Keep Your Powder Dry
2476.3Thunderhead – Son of Flicka

This blog post is part of the Decade series.