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proger View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Topic: peter hammill- In Camera
    Posted: October 07 2005 at 13:30

its a wonderfull album.

but what is going on with the last 15 minutes on the song "Gog"(Magog)? 

 

...live for tomorrow...
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 07 2005 at 15:28
It's a piece of Musique Concrete, which Hammill released basically because he could. He once remarked in an interview that there's no way a company like Charisma would allow something like that now, but back in those days artistic experimantation was encouraged (or at least tolerated). It's one of the most genuinely avant garde things he's released, although he's always had an interest in more extreme musical forms - in the 80s he released the similarly challenging Loops and Reels. 
'Like so many of you
I've got my doubts about how much to contribute
to the already rich among us...'

Robert Wyatt, Gloria Gloom


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 07 2005 at 17:53

 

Peter Hammill is great, and so is In Camera !!!!

yet you still have time!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 08 2005 at 16:32
Originally posted by RaphaelT RaphaelT wrote:

 

Peter Hammill is great, and so is In Camera !!!!

tjank u Syzygy about the reply

and i know peter is great, but what he tried to express in that 15 minutes, i mean I only heard one time, but still...

...live for tomorrow...
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 09 2005 at 01:00
Wonderful album,one of my favourites,especially because of Gog Magog
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 09 2005 at 09:09
I suspect he is trying to generate an atmosphere of genuine demonic scariness, like a musical version of one of the nastier HP Lovecraft stories.

I think he succeeds admirably
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 10 2005 at 10:52
Originally posted by proger proger wrote:

its a wonderfull album.

but what is going on with the last 15 minutes on the song "Gog"(Magog)? 

 



He wrote  Magog to allow me to have a nickname on this site.(anyway it's almost 20 minutes)
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 10 2005 at 11:40

One of my absolute favorite albums. I love "Faint Heart And The Sermon" (that mellotron entrance!), "The Comet The Course The Tail" and "(No More) The Submariner" - and of course everything else on it is great too.

This, along with Silent Corner and Over are my personal fav Hammill albums. Right up there with the VDGG releases.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 10 2005 at 12:09
Fantastic album from start to finish. I think that In Camera and Silent Corner....are sister albums inasmuchas they have a very similar atmosphere which is probably due to the production and instrumentation

Do 'The Stanley' otherwise I'll thrash you with some rhubarb.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 10 2005 at 13:19

I'll post the lyrics for Gog/Magog here (the spoken ones are very hard to understand, so one should read them; they speak for themselves and will also explain the "noise"-part of that song).

Gog and Magog are named in Revelation, the last book of the bible, as bastions of the Satan. so it is quite easy about the noise: this is hell!

Gog

Some call me SATAN others have me GOD
some name me NEMO...I am unborn.
Some speak of me in anagrams,
some grieve upon my wrath...
the ones who give me service
I grant my scorn.
My words are
'Too late', 'Never', 'Impossible', and 'Gone';
my home is in the sunset and the dawn.
My Name is locked in silence,
sometimes it's whispered out of spite.
All gates are locked,
all doors are barred and bolted,
there is no place for flight.
Will you not come to me
and love me for one more night?
        
Some see me shining, others have me dull;
gun-metal and cut diamond -I am ALL.
Some swear they see me weeping
in the poppy-fields of France...
in the tumbling of the dice see them fall!
Some laugh and see me laughing
down the corridors of power:
some see my sign on Caesar and his pall.
My face is robed in darkness,
sometimes you glimpse me in the shade,
All friends have gone,
all calls are weak and wasted,
there is no more to say.
Will you not crawl to me
and love me for one more day?
        
Some wish me empty, others will me full,
some crave of me infinity - I am NONE.
Some look for me in symbols,
some trace my line in stars,
some count my ways in numbers:
I am No One.
Some chronicle my movements,
my colours and my clothes,
some trace the work in progress
- it is done.
My soul is cast in crystal
yet unrevealed beneath the knife.
All wells are dry, all bread is masked in fungus
and now disease is rife.
Will you not run from this
and love me for one more life?

Magog (in Bromine Chambers)

In Bromine Chambers
there can be no mercy,
no bitter flagellation for your sins;
no forgiveness and no sackcloth
can cease the dance
of ashes on the wind.
        
Too late now for a wish
to change all wishing;
too late to change, to breathe, to grow.
Too late to smother out the tell-tale footprints
which mark your passage through the greying snow.



A shot of me as High Priestess of Gaia during our fall festival. Ceterum censeo principiis obsta
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 11 2005 at 03:26
[QUOTE=BaldJean]

Gog and Magog are named in Revelation, the last book of the bible, as bastions of the Satan. so it is quite easy about the noise: this is hell!





Gog and Magog are also the folkloric protectors of London.

Do 'The Stanley' otherwise I'll thrash you with some rhubarb.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: October 11 2005 at 03:57

Words from PH about In Camera from his website (www.sofasound.com) :

1973. A time of flux, as always, as not before. Two post-VdGG Mk I albums had been recorded, "Chameleon" and "The Silent Corner"; both contained elements of band playing and the first truly solo-recording efforts. Tours had been done, both solo and band. Time to mark out another blueprint...time to get serious about solo recording.
By this time Sofa Sound, as a home recording unit, was fully established in a spare room at the cottage in Worth. This was, at least in part, the "Camera" to which the title refers. The recording machine remained 4-track, but I think I might have had something more of a mixing/recording desk by this time, and possibly some better microphones and outboard stuff. It was all still pretty primitive, though.

Anyway, even at the outset it looked as though this was going to have to be a project which I'd get on with by myself...and that this would be a certain blueprint for the future. At this point it seemed inconceivable that there would be any future VdGG activity and so...this was going to be my career. You can tell just how on the case I was about that from the subsequent song notes....

I was accustomed to solo recording by this stage and unabashed by any potential restraints. It seemed to me that the form should and could encompass everything from simple guitar tunes to pure noise. Obviously I still stand by that!

"Home" recording at the time did not allow for the luxury of limitless time or options. No click track, either, so sometimes the bar lengths got pretty abstract. I had already decided that a number of things, including, for the most part, lead vocals, were going to be overdubbed at the Trident stage of proceedings. Very, very open.

Additionally, I went into the sessions with only two songs in a finished state: "Ferret & Featherbrid" (written in 1969) and "Tapeworm" (1971). The rest came to me along with the recording; another blueprint for future methodology.

When I did get to Trident there was a certain amount of incredulity about what I was attempting and a stream of engineers came in to check out the lunatic with a (domestic) 4-track overdubbing onto 24-track using the then state-of the-art ARP synth. At the time synths were monophonic, so every harmony line had to be played in, rather than being a mere shift of patch. The synths and vocals were all done Very Fast...but I suppose I knew what I was doing. I'd have a great deal more trepidation about attempting the same kind of thing today...a certain audacity was involved. And today, of course, everyone brings in work they'ce done "at home" to be buffed and polished ready for release.

There are lots of mistakes, imprecisions, almost-but-not-quites on these recordings. This was, I suppose, always inevitable in view of what I was attempting. I'd put it down as one of those which are learning-curve rather than finished product, at least in a sonic sense. I mean this neither as excuse nor admission. I think I've always been fairly clear about learning in public?Anyway, I've no problem with the brutal bits...just that the beautiful ones could be a bit sweeter. You can't have everything. But check out that COMPRESSION on the guitars and bass! Not very correct but damn good fun....

Guy's drums were overdubbed at Trident, though I can't remember in which room. Possibly not the main studio area, but somewhere mre off-beat. He had a hell of a job, anyway, in view of my somewhat liquid approach to timing...at the time. David Hentschel also did fantastic work programming the ARP. It was always something of an unstable beast; but it fully satisfied my somewhat imprecise aural desires.

Nearly all of the vocals were done in a small overdub room in the Trident mix suite. No time for preciousness there. This was all in the land of slap it down and print it.

The cover? Some thought it was a tad Gary Glitter at the time; certainly it doesn't seem to have much to do with what's inside, apart from actually showing my mug for once in a while. I did wear the cloak, though, usually while scurrying through Gatwick Airport at three in the morning after having been dropped off at Victoria after a Northern show. In any case, I think my feeling of the time was simply "look, here I am, this is this....". The inner shots (not visible in any form on the - ludicrously simplistic Virgin CD release) were taken by Gordian - at the Aerosol Grey Machine sessions!

In any case, all of this is somewhat by the by. The most important thing, personally, about these recordings is that shortly after I'd started the Sofa Sound end of things my brother got knocked off his bicycle in Brighton and was in a coma for the rest of the recording and mixing. Nothing to be done but to get on with what had to be done. To the best of my memory I regarded it as my responsibility - my effort to make him well - to do the best work I could....in the room, in secret, in private. It's for this reason that, alone in all the work, this album came with a dedication, to my brother.

So, the songs:

"Ferret and Featherbird" was, if I recall correctly, something of a late entrant to the lists. I felt that something approaching a "sweet" song was needed to balance the other stuff. It had, of course, originally been recorded for "Aerosol Grey Machine". Wish I knew where my old lap steel disappeared to....

"No More (the sub-Mariner)" and "Faint-Heart" are united both in their subject matter (to a certain extent...reflections on past self/faith/identity &c.) and in their full-on use of synth overdubs. I must have known that something like these versions would emerge from an intensive spate of overdubbing in Trident, but I was definitely pushing the envelope a bit here.

"Tapeworm" is evidently the most conventional song here and wouldn't have seemed out of place being done (in a "Rock & Role" style, perhaps) by one of the groups on the preceding two albums.

"Again" and "The Comet" have been live staples of mine for years since these recordings. I suppose that means they have a self-evident strength as pure songs. Here, both were approached somewhat architecturally. "The Comet", in particular, was conceived as something of a guitar quartet (all self-played of course): bass, acoustic, electric, 12-string.

"Gog" was the high point in the recording of my Harmonium and was one of the tunes with which it graced me. Many of the others appeared, eventually, on "Usher".

It was also, of course, taken into the live VdGG pantheon of toons. Maybe in the course of making this I broke free of whatever chains I still had left about not-really-being-a-musician? This is wild, swirling, edge-of-control stuff. I still love it.

And then "Magog". I stuck Paul and Judge in the bathroom and fed them prepared and not-so-prepared tracks. Two passes of tape, I think...and then a lot of work. It didn't seem that odd to me to stick concrete stuff like this together with, say, "Ferret". The rules are the same: tension and release. Use of accident, captured on tape. The "sproing" (for want of a better term) sound which occurs at the end (and is the release of tension) was, for instance, a once and once only effect of hitting on the button of the bass compressor. As if you needed to know that. Such accidents are strewn all over these recordings and contribute, I think, both to their charm and to their other-worldly menace.

They don't make 'em like this any more. Actually, they didn't at the time. Then, you were a serious concrete artist, or a sensitive singer-songwriter, or an all-out rocker, or a Progmeister, or whatever. Weren't you? As now...aren't you? Get in your cage or box!

I begged, I beg, to differ.

Fair to say that some kind of future for me started here. Future, interrupted.

In the mixing room I got a call offering me a couple of (solo) supporting shows to Genesis in Canada. I'd been well away from all that band, big stage stuff for awhile by now.

You'll know what happened next....

 

Proud to be an un-banned member since 2005
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 14 2005 at 00:22
Just bought this album yesterday!!
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 14 2005 at 06:46
Originally posted by RaphaelT RaphaelT wrote:

 

Peter Hammill is great, and so is In Camera !!!!

I agree with you, colleaugue!

P.S. what was the topic of your final law discussion before graduation?

Mine was article 5 of the Brussels I Regulation (44/2001), about Civil Jurisdiction: in particular I had to focus on negative declaration and obligation to refraing from doing something.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: November 14 2005 at 08:21
Originally posted by Andrea Cortese Andrea Cortese wrote:

Originally posted by RaphaelT RaphaelT wrote:

 

Peter Hammill is great, and so is In Camera !!!!

I agree with you, colleaugue!

P.S. what was the topic of your final law discussion before graduation?

Mine was article 5 of the Brussels I Regulation (44/2001), about Civil Jurisdiction: in particular I had to focus on negative declaration and obligation to refraing from doing something.

Wow, more people with a law degree. Me too.

I won't plea for In Camera though. I own it, but I really prefer most of the VdGG albums. The say that The Silent Corner And The Empty stage is good. Maybe I have to try that one. I do like Over, though.

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