[sonicl]

From Bardo Pond's site:

"The long-mentioned Chamber Music compilation, featuring a Bardo Pond contribution, is scheduled to be released on August 1, 2007 by Fire Records (note: the label's site says November 5th, 2007). This compilation features thirty-six artists doing various takes and interpretations of the 1907 James Joyce poem. Other contributors include Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Steve Shelley + Lee Ranaldo (Text of Light), Mike Watt and Jessica Bailiff. This will be released as a double CD and 4×LP."

[sonicl]

 

Artist(s) on this Release:
Califone
Christian Kiefer
Coldharbourstores
David Hurn
Flying Saucer Attack
Gerry Mitchell
Gravenhurst
Great Depression
Jessica Bailiff
Lorson, Mary & Cote, Billy
Lovetones
Mercury Rev
Minus 5
Monica Queen
Mountain Men Anonymous
Noah John
Puerto Muerto
Sanna
Scacco, Lori
Silent League
Sneeze
Sphyr
Sweet Trip
Text of Light
Tromans, Owen
Virgin Passages
War Against Sleep
Willy Mason

http://www.firerecords.com/site/inde...&releaseid=300

[Moshe]

Thanks.

[Tokolosh]

Has anyone heard it, and is it any good?

[sonicl]

There's supposed to be a clip on the Fire Records page, but it didn't work for me. Damn good line-up though, and interesting that ToL are doing something based on literature, rather than film.

For anyone interested, James Joyce's poem Chamber Music can be read here: www.theotherpages.org/poems/joyce01

[Bertrand]

Thanks.

[racehorse]

thanks for this.

[terminal pharmacy]

is this something that lee possibly produced like the kicks joy darkness tribute album to kerouac

[Moshe]

out now

http://www.firerecords.com/site/inde...id=00000000300

Various Artists - Chamber Music (James Joyce)

(2008)


5 years ago Fire Records boss James Nicholls was reading an article about Chamber Music and how James Joyce always hoped that the poems (which chart love from innocence to experience in 36 stages) would find their way to being adapted to music. The idea was simple: find contemporary artists influenced (however loosely) by Joyce's style to finally turn the poems into musical works. Our only directive was to not mess with the words!

From humble beginnings of simply asking a few friends to take part, the project soon started to reach much further than was originally intended- so much so that Billboard in the USA commented “this will either be a landmark album or a pretentious failure”

We're confident Billboard would agree it came out the latter. Featuring a real mix of contributors; Peter Buck from REM (with his 'other' band <b>Minus 5</b>), Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth/<b>Text Of Light</b>), Bardo Pond, Ed Harcourt, Jessica Bailiff…the interpretations are different but are all true to the poem, resulting in a totally unique musical project with a beautifully cohesive interpretation of Joyce's poem of love.

In lovingly packaged double slipcase CD and double vinyl, its out 16th June (Bloomsday!) in UK and Europe, and 22nd July in the US. Order your advance copies and listen to samples of all the songs right here. inspired...shall surely be remembered a hundred years hence - Culture
should be heralded as one of the great interpretative works - PLAYLOUDER
- BBCi
A real treat for any fan of music and literature.4/5 - GIGWISE
- The List
the wait was well worth it. - NEW NOISE

[uhler]

i want to hear this!

[batreleaser]

i love james joyce. my senior ap english teachter was an old irishman, and he has us do two solid months of joyce studying and reading. not sure i understand what this compilation is about though.

[Moshe]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...8/boend128.xml

Tim Martin thinks James Joyce may be this summer's most exciting rock lyricist
More Endpaper "I don't like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it," wrote James Joyce to his brother Stanislaus in 1907 about Chamber Music, his first book of poetry.

 

"But some are pretty enough to be put to music. I hope someone will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like. Besides, they are not pretentious and have a certain grace…"
Joyce's classical training and his encyclopaedic grasp of musical tradition are well known, but it's anyone's guess what he would have made of this year's most unorthodox Bloomsday project, in which Fire Records has commissioned a virtual Who's Who of alternative music to set to music all 36 of the poems.
Over here is Lee Ranaldo, the guitarist from Sonic Youth, leading what sounds like an entire congregation in a dutiful spoken chorus of the 10th poem, "What counsel hath the hooded moon?/Put in thy heart, my shyly sweet", as an unearthly swooping guitar phrase rings out over the top.
Here's Peter Buck, temporarily released from axe duty for REM, clamouring over a fuzz of warm distortion: "Be not sad because all men/Prefer a lying clamour before you". All over the tracklist there proliferates the kind of esoteric talent - Bardo Pond, Venture Lift, Mercury Rev, Flying Saucer Attack - that will have know-it-all-blokes in record stores salivating with lust.
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Styles range from pastoral folk to industrial drone rock, silly band names from Mountain Men Anonymous to War Against Sleep to Green Pajamas. And all of them singing James Joyce.
So go on, say it: all of this sounds ghastly, doesn't it, the sort of right-on project dreamed up by Arts Council blaggers or Edinburgh Fringe groups from hell. Everyone's seen, read or heard one remake too many: whether it's Molly Bloom: the Musical! or Scarlett Johansson singing Tom Waits, sooner or later something comes along that spoils the icon it's designed to honour.
So it comes as a bit of a shock, at the end of its week-long tenancy in my CD player, to have to inform you that the new disc of Chamber Music is the most dazzling and fun piece of Eng Lit-related anything I've come across for ages.
Perhaps this shouldn't be such a surprise. Joyce, after all, did more to push the English language towards pure musicality than almost anyone else, and generations of scholars have kept starvation at bay tracing his classical training, his near-miss musical career, his theories of composition and the songs that run through his work. Samuel Barber, John Ireland, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio and many others drew inspiration from Joyce, and some, such as Barber, also set several of his poems.
One imagines that even Joyce would have doffed his hat to John Cage's Roaratorio, written in 1979, a so-called "Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake" that features Cage reading selected excerpts from the 20th century's most cryptic classic, arranged so that the name JAMES JOYCE could be read vertically through each unit of text.
Accompanied by Irish traditional music, it also incorporates 2,293 separate sounds that Cage drew from the text and courteously tabulated as follows: "Thunderclaps - Thunder rumbles and earthquake sounds - Laughing and Crying (Laughtears) - Loud voice sounds (shouts, etc) - Farts - Musical instruments (short) - Bells, clocks, chimes - Guns, explosions - Wails - Animals and particular birds - Music (instrumental and singing) - Water - Birds (in general) - Singing."
A full recording of Roaratorio is available from iTunes, providing, for the adventurous soul, a plausible sensory analogue to being the spider in the plughole of a urinal in an Irish boozer. And all without leaving your front room.
Popular music has had its share of Joyceans, too. Syd Barrett, rock's most famous acid casualty, handed in a spellbindingly vacant version of a poem from Chamber Music on his first album after leaving Pink Floyd: but even this paled by comparison to the full-scale weirdness of Jefferson Airplane's rejoyce, a four-minute head trip based on Ulysses that featured such lines as "Bloom/The only Jew in the room" and "Molly's gone to Blazes/Boylan's crotch amazes" delivered by the spacey-voiced woman who sung White Rabbit.
Kate Bush has also had a go: the final cut on her album The Sensual World was set to be a musical adaptation of Molly Bloom's monologue, until the Joyce estate intervened to protect its copyright.
Fire Records's Chamber Music is an honourable latecomer to this tradition. While some of its sparser folk arrangements bring out the plaintiveness of Joyce's simple lyrics to great effect, others actually improve on the originals, warping what often proves to be old-fashioned juvenilia (Joyce at one stage wondered whether to suppress the book) into strange new forms.
The singer Ed Harcourt muttering his way through the lines "O lonely watcher of the skies/Do you hear the night wind and the sighs", in the manner of Nigel Tufnell's Stonehenge introduction from Spinal Tap, is worth the price of admission alone.
And where else this year will you hear a grown man putting on his best rawk growl to intone, over a loping, squelchy beat, the words "And softly to undo the snood/That is the sign of maidenhood".
At a fiver to download the lot, this is, to crib a line from the best of sources, a real funferal. Now if someone could only do the same for Beckett…

[marleypumpkin]

Thanks for posting Moshe. This is a great introduction for the project & the influence behind it. I can't wait for my vinyl copy.

[RanaldoNecro]

ToL are doing something based on literature, rather than film.

Methinks literature would be easier to improv off of than film...

[RanaldoNecro]

These collaborative compliations look great on paper but never seem to deliver in that they create something all unto themselves

The mark never seems to be hit

[RanaldoNecro]

Lee's track sounds like something off of Bad moon Rising