Yesterday at work, for reasons there is no need to divulge, I was going through something of a minor though certainly, (on reflection), inconsequential anxiety attack moment. In order to arrest these kinds of events I tend to seek out music to answer the crisis. A good source of new, interesting things is always the Rough Trade Shop website and sure enough they met my needs.
A picture of a sleeve with a picture of a British green bus attracted my attention. The album by one , Gilroy Mere, (a pseudonym for a musician named Oliver Cherer) was called The Green Line. The record itself I discovered, is pure concept, inspired by the buses that once took people from Central London out through the countryside to Home Counties Towns and villages in the fifties and sixties.
The Green Line immediately evokes a specific time and place for anybody who grew up in England in increasingly distant decades. Underpinned often by the sound of a bus engine growling or the bell ringing it's instantly transformative in the most magical, evocative way, you're sat at a bus window watching the small landscapes, trees and fields steal past your view. Believe me, it works!
Entirely instrumental apart from a list of house names intoned on opening track Dunroamin' it's a beautiful exercise in nostalgia for a world that still exists for those of us who have experienced it, a glorious wallowing in the mundane everyday that makes life on occasion so exquisitely beautiful. You can't help but feel that Brian Eno, whose ambient work this echoes, would heartily approve. The still point of the turning world.
The Quietus (I think) was really high on a series of albums something like this last year - found sound and spoken word around a theme that I think was geographical. I'll try to hunt it down, since my memory is so poor these days.
ReplyDeleteThankful Villages by Darren Hayman. That was it.
ReplyDeleteI like what I've heard of his stuff. Hefner.
ReplyDeleteOh he's that guy. I didn't put that together. I think I liked Hefner. It's been a while.
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