Delighted by the spot-on-ness of some of the familiar items in Marcello Carlin’s list of Further Listening for Scott Walker’s The Drift: especially by the inclusion of Britten’s Peter Grimes, which is unquestionably there throughout the fraught perplexity of Walker’s weird opus. Oh, yes: Peter Grimes! Peter Grimes! You have to hear it…

Xenakis, yes, but why not Penderecki’s Threnody to the victims of Hiroshima with its swooping planes, its sirens, its sussurrations, its corpse-chorus of ghostly taps and knocks…?

The other really right choice in that list, for me, is Portishead’s second album. I will have to check out the Barbara Bonney: “sympathetic and emotionally pained readings of songs by Dowland, Purcell et al“, sounds pretty compelling…

Update:

To Britten’s Grimes, I think one ought to add Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast; particularly the opening baritone solo “Thus spake Isaiah…”, and the mind-shattering “Yea! Drank! From! The! Sacred! Vessels!”. The core affect of The Drift is, it seems to me, a free-floating (yet intermittently attached to, fixated upon, very specific objects) sense of desecration.

The other thing that’s become quite clear to me, listening to The Drift, is quite how much Cathal Coughlan owes to Scott Walker, and how pervasive the influence is, from the eerie balladry of early-ish Fatima Mansions tunes like Wilderness on Time and Big Madness to the suppurating electronic soundscapes of Grand Necropolitan (which also owes no less of a debt to Portishead’s way with a twanging Morricone-esque guitar).

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