(F'it . . . ) aMERICAN sHIRLEYCOLLINSIST!?!

a still from Ghost Box films by Julian House (yoinked off of the wire's page)

So a few days ago in an attempt to take a break from listening to Shirley Collins for a little while, I put on the The Focus Group (and various Ghost Box) tracks that I have.

All things Ghost Box (but in particular The Focus Group) were my musical obsession about a year or so ago. I didn't really have much to listen to just the few tracks you could download from the Ghost Box webpage but those few tracks were enough for me to become proselytizingly obsessed! That stuff was like the musics I always wanted to hear and also so evocative (of something? . . . gauzey half-memories of gradeschool filmstrips . . . seventies television furniture music?) that I felt liked I'd already heard it before? So I ended up listening to those handful of tracks nonstop for a few weeks, after some time I moved on to other things but I still wanted to get at least the two Focus Group albums that were out at that time. I finally did last October sometime? And was somewhat disappointed, not b/c the albums weren't great but that I had pretty much burnt them down listening to what I already had from each album over and over again. Then I realized after some time that I was listening to these albums wrong, they worked much more effectively as background music instead of studied minutely b/c the music is so completely ethereal upon close inspection it practically disappears! I came to that final conclusion a few months ago but since the onset of my Shirley obsession I hadn't really gone back and listened that way too much until the other day. So like I said the other day I'm listening to the first Focus Group album "Sketches And Spells" and I get to the track "Colouring Toys" and there was something there that I instantly recognized but it took me a couple of seconds to realize just what it was, not like when you hear the source of something that you've heard a million times sampled/looped in something that you are very familliar w/. When I realized what it was I just had to smile like an idiot, the guitar figure that is looped all the way through the Focus Group track is a somewhat modified sample of a Davy Graham phrase from the beginning of the song "Jane, Jane" off of "Folk Roots, New Routes", the album he did w/ (. . . wait for it!!!) SHIRLEY COLLINS!?!

. . . doing my best worst Pacino, "Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in!"


Colouring Toys.mp3

Jane, Jane.mp3