Rob Young: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · music, music criticism, music history, united kingdom
In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators.
In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism.
An attempt to isolate the ‘Britishness’ of British music – a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity – Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain’s folk music and Arcadian dreams.
Publisher Faber and Faber, 2010
ISBN 0571237525, 9780571237524
664 pages
PDF (EPUB; updated on 2012-7-16)
Comment (0)Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998)
Filed under book | Tags: · afrofuturism, music, music criticism, music theory, popular culture, sonic fiction
“Less a critical survey than a manifesto for the neuron-altering powers of “breakbeat science,” this ingenious book traces the development of sampladelia from the “jazz fission” era of ’68-’75 (with excellent analyses of George Russell’s and Herbie Hancock’s sonic experiments), through the Parliament/Funkadelic groovescapes of the late ’70s (including close scrutiny of Pedro Bell’s subversive cover art), through Electro (early ’80s synth oriented hip hop) and Detroit Techno, to the present Jungle milieu of time stretching and spatio-acoustics. Eschewing a traditional music-crit vocabulary in favor of a riffing, neologistic verbal poetics, Eshun perfectly captures the sci-fi convolutions of the music he describes, and makes an infectious case for the birth of a new audio-paradigm.”
Publisher Quartet Books, London, 1998
ISBN 0704380250, 9780704380257
17+222 pages
Interviews with author: Dirk Van Weelden (Mediamatic, 1999), Geert Lovink (Telepolis, 2000).
Commentary: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2017).
Reviews: Kim Cascone (Computer Music Journal, 2000), Chris Mitchell (Spike Magazine, 2000).
PDF (4 MB, updated on 2021-3-17)
Music playlist (Youtube, added on 2020-6-29)