Happiness Month - Tippett, Berkeley & Berkeley (1992) by English String Orchestra; William Boughton, conductor

I love string orchestra music; something about the masses of like-minded strings passionately bowing in euphonious rapture just gets to me, and there's an awful lot of great music in the medium that doesn't get heard.  That isn't to say that the album I'm spotlighting today is a treasure chest of exotic rep, but the group and the pieces they play don't get nearly enough mainstream attention.  In my article on Wilhelm van Wassenaer I spotlighted I Musici di Montreal under Yuli Turovsky, and today it's the English String Orchestra under the direction of William Boughton.  ESO and Boughton did a number of excellent albums of British classics for Nimbus Records in the 80's and 90's, and for some dang reason nobody talks about them, at least not in my circles.  While I could easily, and joyously, talk about their Gerald Finzi orchestral album or the album with music by Butterworth, Parry and Bridge, only one of their albums was secured by me for a penny, and that's the Tippett, Berkeley & Berkeley disc, just as out of print as the rest of 'em.

The two Tippett pieces are practically standards of the string orchestra rep at this point, rich and challenging throwbackers that show off Tippett's ecstatic approach to counterpoint and modal harmony.  The Little Music is more conventionally organized, cast in four movements including a "Prelude" and an "Air", and proves that you can have just as much multi-movement fun in 10 minutes that most people try to stretch out to 30.  The Fantasia Concertante on a Theme by Corelli, also pining for antique elegance, is much more expansive and surreal, kind of like Britten's Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge slurried up with a fine whiskey and currant bitters.  I was going to say that the bad news is that I can't find the recordings for these on YouTube, but recently some kind of goofy automatic function has created hundreds of "Topics" with the result of dumping nearly the whole libraries of many classical labels onto YouTube for free, a move I can only presume was an early Christmas gift to Mr. Y. Truly.

In fact, scratch that, as neither of the Tippett recordings by Boughton are up (though you can easily hear different interpretations through the same Tube).  Guess Christmas only came early in the "glass half full and/or empty" variety.  The full section is the other two works on the album, and as those are the less known of the two pieces the YouTube gods must know the program here.  The least known and least likely to be a closing piece on a concert or article is a premiere recording of a work by Michael Berkeley, the less-famous son of Lennox (who's coming).  The piece, Coronach, is part of a special tradition, of string orchestra works that are dark, full-bodied and rhapsodic, and the forebears in the line that may only exist in my head include Witold Lutosławski's Musique funèbre and Irwin Bazelon's Prelude to Hart Crane's "The Bridge".  It's also a piece clearly written by a young artist, as it can never sit still or form patterns too symmetrical, and is conceived with a passion and restlessness that old age usually dulls.  The key to the ESO's success is their rich, unbridled bowing, and Boughton takes full advantage of this to bring out all the hallowed terror in Coronach - overall a great debut recording and a fine counterpoint to the Tippetts.

To close let's talk about the opener, a piece so full of light and life I can't believe I've never seen it in concert, Lennox Berkeley's Serenade for Strings.  All of Berkeley's music aims to charm and delight and the Serenade is among his best works, starting with a bounding Vivace akin to watching poplar leaves shimmer in the summer sun.  Boughton and the ESO give a rapturous energy to this music where other recordings are either too smooth or too slow.

The following Andantino is diffusely sultry, leaning into sliding major thirds to add a crimson warmth to what was previously oddly threatening.  This menace doesn't get in the way of lyricism, though, the violins arching their backs to secure Berkeley's extended tonality.

The third movement, Allegro moderato, is a good-ol' hunting movement, the ESO attacking every downbow and octatonic charges down the stairs.

Lastly we have a Lento of the most British of stripes, unconventionally austere for a closer but there's some nice satisfying major chords.  It's much like the album, which might not be groundbreaking but was a welcome addition to my library and a great item for Happiness Month.  There's still time to get it for a penny, though not in time for Christmas, but I've at least filled half the glass and there are many other tippett recordings to meet your appetites.  As X-Mas approaches Happiness Month needs to ramp up, so keep the seat of your pants in a nearby chair and don't get too sick on nog.

~PNK

Greetings from Burkittsville by Sisyphus

Whether or not you like The Blair Witch Project it's hard to deny that it's one of the most important horror films of the past 20 years, setting the stage for the found footage genre and creating uncommon power from its hyperreal, less-is-more aesthetic.  It's one of my favorite horror movies of all time and I'll defend it to the ends of the Earth, but I'll also be the first to tell you that its sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, is an utter kick to the nuts for any serious horror fan.  I was reminded of Book's frustrating botched potential when I watched the Nostalgia Critic's comedy review of it, and out of curiosity I trundled to Wikipedia in search of answers.  Much to my surprise, I discovered that there was actually a whole slew of media as part of the Blair Witch "franchise", mostly made with little-to-no input from the original directors of the movie, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez.  Sure, there's plenty of unnecessary franchising for horror movies from all times (and I should know, as I have the novelizations of both Videodrome and Halloween III: Season of the Witch on my shelf), but The Blair Witch Project is notable for being made by no-name directors on the skins of their teeth.  Part of its enormous success is its brilliant marketing, tauting itself as a documentary/snuff film and claiming its "subjects" (actors) to be missing, and the overwhelming buzz it got before its release (helped by its excellent, and in some ways essential, TV mockumentary tie-in, The Curse of the Blair Witch) and after pushed its novice authors into the big time.  As the two of them had no idea how much of a money-maker their $25,000 experiment would be, they took little part in the larger Blair Witch "universe", leaving the sequel in the hands of Joe Berlinger, the director of the invaluable Paradise Lost documentaries, and have spent the last 15 years eking out separate careers in independent horror with respectable results.  Berlinger had a few good ideas for Book of Shadows but the movie itself is an insulting cock-up, and as it fades from our memory the rest of the franchise media will fade even faster (if it was ever known at all).  The spiderweb includes:

+ The Curse of the Blair Witch and Shadow of the Blair Witch, an awful TV tie-in for Book of Shadows

+ The Massacre of the Burkittsville 7, an excellent half-hour TV special expanding on a minor detail of the first film's backstory

+ The Blair Witch Project: a Dossier and Blair Witch: Book of Shadow, two "found documents" books by "D. A. Stern" - the first one is excellent, BTW

+ D. A. Stern's Blair Witch: The Secret Diary of Rustin Parr, a faux-diary from a backstory character from the first film

+ A photonovel adaptation of the first film

+ Three different comic book attempts

+ A trilogy of computer games

+ An 8-part series of young adult novels called Blair Witch Files

+ A stand-alone novel, Blair Witch: Graveyard Shift, also by D. A. Stern

+ A set of trading cards from Topps

+ A die-cast toy car for Book of Shadows by Johnny Lightning (did ANYBODY buy that?!)

+ A Blair Witch action figure set by Todd MacFarlane as part of his Movie Madness line
+ Not to mention various tie-in giveaways like t-shirts and baseball caps and other etceteras

Somebody ought to review every piece of Blair Witch paraphernalia, but as I'm not a gamer, toy collector or young adult novel tolerator I won't be touching on a lot of these any time soon, though as I got a copy of The Secret Diary for a penny it'll appear on these shores soon enough.  For now, we need to talk about one of the stranger pieces of the Blair Witch mosaic, a mysterious CD under the title of Greetings from Burkittsville.  It touts itself as one of those "Music inspired by..." soundtrack CD's with one of those irritating info stickers that's attached to the plastic wrap and requires itself to be thrown away after you open it:

Music inspired by the legend of the

Blair Witch.  The soundtrack

recording to one of the most talked

about horror films of the 90's.

Enhance your viewing experience.

"Music inspired by..." CD's are usually bad news, often hastily-thrown-together cash-ins that have nothing to say about the movie and feature music you'd either want to forget or can find on better albums.  A notable exception is Songs in the Key of X, an ambitious X-Files tie-in featuring songs written for the album by some of the most admired alt-rock artists of the day, but not only is Greetings from Burkittsville nothing like that album it's also nothing like any other CD of the "inspired" variety.  The Allmusic entry notes how it sounds like an alternate soundtrack to the film, and my hand immediately shot up to tell the Allmusic professors that The Blair Witch Project had no soundtrack, just the diagetic sounds of the forest.  That was part of the gag - the film purported itself to be real raw footage from an ill-fated documentary, so any hint of cinematics, such as a musical score, would've killed the "could it be real?" vibe.  There is one piece of composed music, but it only plays in the end credits when the mockumentary guise is dropped, and it doesn't sound like anything on Greetings from Burkittsville.

I hate to tell you this but I haven't a single YouTube example from this CD, though considering how ambient the tracks are you can just go to the mp3 album Amazon page here and play the 30-second previews - you'll get the gist of the thing.  The music is a very late-90's/early 2000's brand of ambient electronica, most likely influenced by Aphex Twin's two Selected Ambient Music double-albums and cozily rubbing elbows with the likes of Voodeux and Slang.  There are some really good ideas in here, both in terms of color and keeping things consistently soundtracky, but I can't say any of it reminded me of the movie. The titles certainly seem to think it should, considering monikers like "Slate at Coffin Rock", "How About East?" and "Something Out Here".  The music is quite atmospheric, building off buzz-warbling electric guitars and basses weaving in and out of each other, along with vacant punctuation from percussion and keyboards as well as a host of strange electronic creatures.  The harmonies are airy and distant, implying an eerie lyricism behind the atmosphere.  One of the most beautiful tracks, "On the Trail", is reminiscent of a glass harmonica played at the bottom of a valley which the listener can only peer into from above.  Many of the tracks can't stand to sustain their fermata'd emptiness for their whole length, and trip-hop drums-'n'-bass often fill the supposed void.  A lot of mileage is gotten from echoing piano notes (most likely ripped from these voices), or at least Sisyphus thinks it is, as that trick appears in a great deal of the tracks to varying degrees of success.  The synths don't succeed in sounding like anything but synths, but I've got no problem with that if it works and here it definitely works, like the cavernous sus-chord reverbs in "Morning".  Even tracks that kick the proceedings up the proverbial notch like "Evacuate" are still wrapped in the frozen, vaguely cackling* vibe from before, resulting in an experience consistently pleasing to the ears of horror geeks like me.  Horror geeks like me will also be glad to hear that the creepiest tracks are saved for last, and far be it from me to spoil a perfectly good horror ending.

Actually, I take that back about not having YouTube examples, because I can show you something...it just won't be from the album.  There's two things this album most reminds me of:

Silent Hill is one of the most acclaimed and influential horror video game series of all time, and its soundtrack is revered among the all-time great video game soundtracks for its innovative, atmospheric post-rock sound and vacant bluesiness.  Less well known is the 2002 film The Mothman Prophecies, in which Richard Gere investigates the urban legend of the Mothman in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.  I think it's one of the most underrated horror films of the 2000's, overshadowed by the similarly urban legend-themed The Ring (which was also excellent) and not helped by the anti-charisma of its star.  Among its many wonderful qualities is its soundtrack by tomandandy, a duo who mostly do soundtracks and had previously worked with Mothman's director Mark Pellington on Arlington Road.  It's here that we see a lot of that trip-hop drums-'n'-bass I was talking about earlier, a style firmly rooted in the late 90's and early 2000's that might seem dated to some but feels like an old friend to me.  The X-Files might have given this style a lot of exposure some years before, but there's also acts like Portishead and Massive Attack to take into consideration.  Either way, it's the best kind of era signifier - instantly timely and seemingly timeless in its appeal.  However, there's still the nagging fact that none of this, and I mean NONE of it, sounds like The Blair Witch Project.  The film has none of the chilled artistry of these soundtracks - in fact, one could call it artless in its adherence to its invented reality.  It's trying its hardest not to appear like a movie, so as much as I appreciate Sisyphus's alternate soundtrack it seems blasphemous to consider putting any of it in the film.

If drawing its intentions from the music and packaging seems difficult, you should know that its authorship is an even bigger mystery.  The artist, Sisyphus, is only credited to this one album, and looking at the credits page on Allmusic (as no names are written in the liner notes) reveals two names, Mark Scheltgen and Kurt Starks, and their forking musical collaborations are so disparate I'm not sure if the different projects are by the same people.  On the one hand they helped out on the chillout electronica album New Green Clear Blue by Dan Hartman (who?), and on the other they appeared to be the main guys of a comedic Christian rock group called Room Full of Walters.  I found Kurt Starks on Facebook and saw that he had a new group called Sunshine the Bunny, and I sent him a message to confirm or deny his authorship of Greetings, but he has yet to get back to me and might not go on Facebook much.  Asking the label, the obscure and most certainly unaffiliated-with-the-filmmakers Invisible Records, is seemingly out of the question, as their website says "new website coming soon!" and only has links to their Facebook page, and that's only for a guy named Martin Atkins, so I don't know WHAT the Sam Hill is going on over there.  It's a lot of loose ends that all suggest that the album was released in cash-in mode, and I don't think I'll ever get to talk to the filmmakers for comment.


Come to think of it, maybe it's better that I don't know.  The movie thrived on the mystery of its occurrences and even its very existence (for those of you who know, think about how the footage was found), and like so many horror movies part of the eerie thrill of viewing the thing is how it seemingly came from parts unknown.  The artist credit for Sisyphus is nowhere on the front cover or spine, and you have to look at the very bottom left to see it buried next to the copyright info, as if the makers wanted to downplay its authorship as much as possible in order to create that priceless air of the unknowable (a "colour out of space", if you will**).

Do I recommend Greetings from Burkittsville?  If you like stuff like the Silent Hill and The Mothman Prophecies soundtracks and other stuff from the era I recommend it wholeheartedly.  It's not the most innovative or surprising album I've ever heard but it delivers in glassy autumnal creeps in spades, and that's exactly what I wanted from it.  There's plenty of copies on Amazon of the thing for quite cheap, so if you're taking an early stab at planning your next Halloween party I know a little disc that'll make a home in your CD player.  It's a Penny Dreadful in the best possible way, so spin and hear to your horror-heart's content.

~PNK

*"It was total cackling."

**Apologies to Lovecraft, of course.

Penny For Their Thoughts - a Mission Statement

"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"

~Batman, Batman: The Motion Picture

Amazon Marketplace is arguably the largest used media store in the world - their selection of products and prices is staggering, and if housed in one place would probably cover an area the size of the Mall of America.  As a frequent AM shopper I come across items of a huge variety of prices, and the most mysterious ones (aside from enormous prices most likely borne from a misplaced decimal point) are the items listed for $0.01.  $0.01 is the lowest allowable price on AM, and the thought that immediately comes to the mind of most shoppers is that these are items the seller can't even give away.  These are items the seller just wants to get out of their building as fast as possible and sees that it has little to no collector value, so Rock Bottom listing it goes.  Even with $0.50 items you can imagine it on the shelf at your local library's book sale or on the We Don't Care If You Steal This rack on the street in front of a Righteous Record Rodeo.  Pennystuffs, no dice - this is the Please Steal This box that inevitably gets kicked into the gutter by passerby.  A lot of this stuff is just overstock, and you can find pretty much any big studio movie made in the last 10 years on DVD for a penny just because thousands of the things were printed and they have to go somewhere.  The Penny Ranks are an online landfill with the benefit of cataloging, and collecting them all together would make an impressive library, though not necessarily a quality one.

Penny For Their Thoughts is a blog dedicated to reviewing movies, music and literature that has been purchased by myself for the paltriest of Amazon sums.  The one question is a simple "why?", and a few guidelines will help keep the proceedings interesting.  Firstly, I'm going to avoid getting a new, bestselling item simply to avoid overstock blitzes.  This will also keep things at least a few years old so there's a chance the reader will discover something new.  For the same reasons I'm going to avoid items for sale at a penny but not actually purchased by me for that price, because otherwise I could just review copies of American Pie and The Godfather, and where's the fun in that?  Because I have to actually buy the item, the last provision is that I'll only do things that I wanted to buy in the first place, things that at least seem interesting from the viewpoint of an internet shopper and aren't just outright crap.  When applicable I'll also talk about the condition of the item, because sometimes you get sent plastered with library stickers and sometimes you get stuff that looks like the previous owner drove over it with an RV.

If you too want to sail the Seven Seas of Thrift, here's an easy trick: find the category you want in the search bar and press enter with no text entered, or just the letter "e".  You'll be shown every item for sale in Music or Movies & TV or whatever.  Next, go to the "Sort By" drop-down list and select "Price: Low to High" and BAM!  You now have a very long list of items for $0.01 in no particular order.  The order will be different every time you do it, so if you go through a bunch of pages and find nothing just try again a little while later and you'll get a brand new trough to snort through.

Will it be a grand adventure or a mild dig through the donation bin at Goodwill?  There's no way to know but go forward, so join me on my journey through the media adorned with the Scarlet Price.  Suggestions are encouraged, of course, so your secret favorite album may end up as an article someday.  Above all, Penny For Their Thoughts seeks to make life a constant adventure of art and culture, and what better way is there to spend a penny?

~PNK