Baby Dee on Baby Dee:
Baby Dee is a child of light • A circus freak and a happy whore • How many seas would she make for you • If there were even half a chance • That one of them might find you by its shore • To cool your toes and make you laugh
She'd smile a sky from East to West • So wide that both horizons crack • And if some distant nations fall • Well, Isn't that just too bad! • For love has made her just like God • And God and Baby Dee are both quite mad
Baby Dee is in love • That's all there is to
say about Baby Dee
William Basinski is a musician, composer who has worked in experimental media for over twenty years in NYC, expanding the boundaries of the aural landscape. A classically trained clarinetist, he studied jazz saxophone and composition at North Texas State University in the late 70s. He developed his meditative, melancholy style experimenting with short looped melodies played against themselves, creating feedback loops. His early studies with piano and tape, from 1980–82, 'Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive', is available now on Durtro/Die Stadt.
For further information, or for details of titles available via mail order, please email Basinski at billy2062@yahoo.com.
(video still: James Elaine)
Born in 1924, Sveinbjörn was a farmer and a poet at Svíndalu, and was to become head of the Ásatrú religion in Iceland, which honoured the old gods—the Æsir. He was the leading exponent of the chanted rímur style of reciting the Icelandic Eddas, and was a hugely important figure in the rebirth of what is often known in the West as Odinism. He died in 1993.
Michael Cashmore is a composer and musician who has worked extensively with Current 93 and has written most of the music for the group during the last 16 years. Apart from Michael's continuing work with Current 93 his music can also be found within the releases of his own project Nature And Organisation, as well as an ongoing series of solo recordings that commenced with the release of Sleep England in May 2006. Born in the Black Country, England, Michael now lives with his family in Berlin.
Chi.med.rig.'dzin
Lama, Rinpoche
Chi.med.rig.'dzin Lama, Rinpoche was an incarnate Lama of the rNying.ma.pa school of Tibetan Buddhism, head of the Byang.gTer (Northern Treasure) lineage, a holder of many important Tantric initiations, as well as being a recognised finder of spiritual treasures (gTer.ma) left by the rNying.ma founder Padmasambhava in various subtle realms. The essence of his tradition was the direct transmission of enlightened mind free from all external influences. He passed away in India on 14 June 2002.
Shirley and Dolly Collins are widely regarded as one of the most important and moving acts to have appeared in the world of folk music. But to categorise their work as 'folk' cannot begin to describe the depth of their beautiful and moving musics. From Sussex in Southern England, Shirley started recording in the early 1950s, and was an early collector of traditional music in the Appalachians in the United States, along with the seminal folklorist Alan Lomax.
She recorded several folk albums, mainly on Topic, and her album with guitar genius Davey Graham, 'New Routes, Folk Roots', is considered to be the first blossom of what was to become electric folk. Joining up with her sister, Dolly, she went on to release two seminal albums on Harvest, 'Anthems in Eden' and 'Love, Death and the Lady', which joined folk music to mediaeval music, and which were taken on by the progressive movement. Both worked with the Incredible String Band. Dolly sadly passed away in 1995; Current 93's album 'All the Pretty Little Horses' is partially dedicated to her memory. Shirley continues to lecture on music; her last recording was on Current 93's 'The Starres are Marching Sadly Home'. She is presently working on a new album with Current Ninety Three; David Tibet has proclaimed her the finest and truest female singer ever recorded.
Very Voice of Very God. Remember thy Maker. Watch and Pray.
Arthur Doyle was born on the 26th June 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. Moving to Nashville to study at Tennessee State, he played jazz with ex-Sun Ra band member Walter Miller and rhythm and blues with David ‘Fathead’ Newman, Donny Hathaway and Gladys Knight. Shortly after arriving in New York in 1967, he discovered the extraordinarily gritty sound produced by singing and blowing into the horn at the same time and was soon in demand as a free player, sitting in with Sun Ra’s Arkestra at Slug’s Saloon on several occasions.
Throughout the 1970s he played with Bill Dixon, Sam Rivers, Andrew Cyrille, Dave Burrell, Hugh Glover and Milford Graves, Rudolph Grey and Beaver Harris.
In Paris during the 1980s he spent five years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Denied access to a saxophone, he occupied himself writing 'The Songbook', an extraordinary collection of nearly three hundred songs, the first of which were recorded later that decade in Doyle’s upstate NY home on a cassette recorder. Underground hero par excellence, Doyle toured Japan in 1997. In Paris on 1 June 2002 he recorded 'The Basement Tapes', which was released on CD by Durtro.
(photo: Thierry Trombert)
Simon
Finn I was born on the 4th March 1951 and came to London in '67. My first performance was about 3 months later, opening for Al Stewart at the Marquee on their 'Wednesday Folk Night'. I used to get paid a pound; Al probably got paid two or three times that. I was in heaven. And a pound goes a lot further if you don't squander it on shelter. Back then I could eat for three days on a pound. My songs at this time were sweet and Donovany and probably around half of them were about a girl who went out with me despite my sleeping on park benches. Her name was Jane and we have remained friends for life. (And if anybody's heard of me in Tasmania, please arrange a show; I'm dying to see her and her family)
A couple of months later I landed what I thought of as a 'really cushy number', regular employment, a bleat-while-they-eat job in a restaurant called the 'Borsch and Tears' on Beauchamp Place in London. The proceeds of this paid for a bedsit that was almost more disturbing than the street.
By the spring of 1969 I had completed a new batch of songs and played them to Vic Keary. Vic was just starting a new studio opposite the Round House. He liked them, which I realized even back then, made him a very unusual producer in the music world of that period. 'Pass the Distance', released on Mushroom Records, had started its rather long journey. Legal action connected to the cover forced its withdrawal from the market and deletion, and started its long march to rarity.
A few weeks after my meeting with Vic I ran into David Toop and Paul Burwell at the Round House, we jammed for an hour or so in the Café, after which I asked if they'd like to do a gig with me in a pub that Vic had organized for me for the following Saturday. They agreed to, and a week after the gig we were in Chalk Farm Studios together.
In 1974 I moved to Canada where I taught karate and tried my hand at organic farming with my new wife, Emily, (we also remained in touch—she's still tilling the soil). In 1980 I moved to Montreal where, (other than occasional stints in New York), I have lived ever since, writing books, songs, and for money generally chancing my arm at this and that, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
Recently David Tibet got in touch with me and after exchanging untold numbers of letters we arranged to meet in London. It was extraordinarily good timing; I'd been intending to go into partnership in a café/bar, which had fallen through. I was wondering what my life would turn up next. It turned up David and his lovely wife Dri. We spent a wonderful month exploring each other's thoughts and feelings.
Simon Finn, Montreal, March 1 2004.
Purveyors of Sinister Whimsy to the Wretched.
Founder of the School of Electro-Crystal Therapy, Harry Oldfield's research in the field of crystal energy is widely recognised as amongst the most important in our generation in the realms of new science and its interface with subtle energy. He has developed this science to an extent to which he has taken photographs of the human aura, the kundalini energy, and the meridians and points used in acupuncture. He is the author of several books, including 'The Dark Side of the Brain'. His 'Crystal' album is comprised entirely from sounds generated through crystals singing as the result of electro-magnetic pulses being passed through them.
The most innovative, and perhaps most important, experimental composer of the last fifty years. Palestine's celebrated works, often somewhat too glibly placed in the 'minimalist' category, are profound and powerful meditations on time and space, mediated through an incredibly powerful keyboard technique. His 'Karenina' album on Durtro is a 2CD lament for his Disappeared Dog; his other recordings are equally vital and expansive masterpieces.
PANTALEIMON (pronounced PAN-TA-LAY-MON) is the moniker of Andria Degens, who was born on the 8th November in the south of England. Her first live appearance was back in 1992 with the band Wire at the Clapham Grand, London, April 9th, as part of their 'Wall of Noise' (multi-guitarists). Andria also made a small vocal contribution to The Dirty Three's 1996 album 'Horse Stories'. She then disappeared, travelling for two and a half years throughout India and south east Asia. When she finally returned to England she worked with other groups before forming her own PANTALEIMON in 1998. Her debut album 'Trees Hold Time' was released in 1999 and still receives much critical acclaim. The EP 'Change My World', a beautiful meditation on Indian harmonium, was released in 2003. It featured her first studio recordings since 1999 and also live recordings from her performance at the Bloomsbury Theatre in April 2001.
PANTALEIMON have been unusually busy this year. As well as continuing work on their new album they have recently contributed to projects by Cam Archer (for the film 'Wild Tigers I Have Known'), Irr. App. (Ext.), Nurse With Wound, Susan Stenger ('Soundtrack for an Exhibition'), and Current 93 ('Black Ships Ate The Sky').
A new CD EP entitled 'CLOUDBURST' has just been released, with the first 100 copies being available with the book 'PEELING ORANGES INTO FLOWERS', and a new single 'UNDER THE WATER', taken from the forthcoming album, is due for release on 19th December 2006.
Photograph: Simona Dalla Valle
Diana
Rogerson
Sometime Crystale Belle Scrodd, sometime film-maker, sometime Soul Diva, sometime Belle de Jour, always...
Tiny
Tim
The greatest Troubadour the world has ever known, human museum of song, and true eccentric and genius. Having become an overnight sensation with his single 'Tip-toe thru' the Tulips', and attracting what was at the time the world's largest television audience for his marriage to Miss Vicky, Tiny plummeted just as quickly back to obscurity. But his bottomless faith in the redeeming power of both Jesus Christ and Showbiz kept him going and going and going, and he continued to releases some of the most startling and innovative records ever. David Tibet was lucky enough to meet him in the late 1990s, and released three albums by him on his label shortly before Tiny's untimely death.