Scott Walker "Bish Bosch"

even if everyone's a fan, it doesn't work. you just end up feeling weird and laughing nervously to yourselves/each other.

I approach almost any album that fills an entire CD as Side A and Side B. Or if there are dud tracks I delete them forever (that doesn't work for Bish Bosch, though).

Here's a suggestion:

Bisch Bosch playlist one: everything except 'Zercon'
BB playlist two: 'Zercon' by itself

This album is definitely something you listen to alone. Preferably somewhere dark and cold.

I really like this record, but really, do you really need much more from it other than Epizootics! and Zercon? The rest just feels like sponge cake to those tracks' jam and icing so far (note I've only had this since Christmas).

ah xposts to Jon Lewis - this could be the best strategy. Luckily Zercon takes up a whole side. It's the one I seem to go back to the most, admittedly.

epizootics! and zercon are the ones that make the most immediate impact, but there are a lot of other tracks that are worth paying close attention to. Dimple has been a favorite lately.

The closing track is definitely a highlight, blew me away right off the bat.

I've been meaning to compile "The Drift" and "Bish Bosch" to add to my digital Scott box. For one thing, I can do without the sphincter symphony...

this album freaked out my dog. i thought she was gonna bite my speaker.

Guys what is this sphincter symphony i keep hearing about? It sounds amazing! Is it a fart sound collage or something?

'Corps de Blah'. You'll know it when you hear it.

FWIW I think it's awesome.

oh shit this is wonderful

it took me three listens to recognize the farts in corps de blah

As in... ID them?

I need some comfort in my commute, so I keep going back to Dimple.

yes

Finally gave this a full listen. It's as good as The Drift and Tilt. Different than either, etc.

What I didn't expect was, despite the singing, lyrics, and arrangements how LIGHT this was in comparison. It felt like half an hour total listening to it. Also, despite the long songs, Bish Bosch sounds all like one multi-part piece, except probably the final track, which sounds like a coda.

Bish Bosch should be the first Scott Walker experience for fucked up teenagers, then working backward from there.

I don't know, I don't dislike this album or "The Drift" or "Tilt" but I don't get very much out of them... so, I suppose, I'm not a Scott Walker fan anymore?

i first listened to this record in a room full of people, albeit it was a hotel lobby done up to seem haunted

what a fantastic album. Would enthusiastically await a cd full of tracks like Conducator.

Sun City Girls : Horse Cock Phepner :: Scott Walker : Bish Bosch

The only SCG album I don't have :(

The only rare one I DO have.

lest anyone think my apt is worth breaking into, a lot of them i only 'have' as mp3. But Horse Cock never turned up on P2P like the others.

I could hook a brother up

get at me

done

not their best album but def the most entertaining one

I expect it to remind me of Piano Bar in that respect

THANKING U

np

Scott Walker 70th birthday special

Scott Walker 70th birthday special

Woops, sorry my iPhone did that by accidump

A broadcast on what might have strayed Scott from the path. I don't see Ligeti as a component of what Scott is thinking on orchestration at all -- the movement from the Chamber Concerto is very fast, with agile (the mechanised thing maybe) interruptions and not at all on a 'nightmarish' kick. There is a myth that this music is a horror show soundtrack and its completely untrue.

Then when you get to the Greenwood - vacuous writing purely cast as a 'soundtrack to Hitchcock'. Cynical writing.

Loved it for the Galas - I need to see her in concert one day.

I know when he was describing what he wanted to Evan Parker for that amazing track on Climate of Hunter he referenced Ligeti.

Sure, and in the broadcast the presenters talk about how Scott mentions Ligeti. I can't hear it apart from 'dense' sounding strings but a few composers wrote that kind of thing.

I'll give The Drift a go again, haven't heard Bisch Bosch.

Evan Parker talks a bit about his work on Climate of Hunter in this interview:

http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/fulltext/mparkint.html

I've had to give Bish Bosch a bit of a rest. I listened to it non-stop over Christmas week but I think, like The Drift, it's not an album that's supposed to be listened to every day.

I did put Epizootics! on a mixtape for a car journey at the weekend, and watching the country road unwind into darkening mist was just incredible.

I do think The Drift is ahead/better than BischBosch, mainly probably because it came before it, but BB seems like "more of the same" in some ways.

Bish Bosch is an easier listen, in all. There's a humorous fourth-wall feeling going on throughout it where the listener gets let in on the whole construction of the composition, which at once draws me in but also stops me feeling completely enveloped by it. Somehow certain elements of The Drift have taken on new meaning in the context of Bish Bosch - the "WHAT'S UP DUCK?" bit was always ludicrous and terrifying, but now I understand Walker's not really doing it with as straight a face as I once thought. There's a very warm, human element to BB that has always been rather guarded throughout his career.

If you can bear Stuart Maconie then the Radio 6 interview was fun, Scott was in good form

... on good form.

.. under good form.

GREATEST THING EVER

http://soundcloud.com/adam-buxton/scott-walker-covers-scream

Anyone got any ideas about deciphering the lyrics? I want to know what all the 'XI V I I X I' bits are referring to on Zercon for example. It seems Scott revealed only a tiny amount of information about the record in interviews.

aargh @ that cover. I want 30 secs of my life back.

I don't know about the roman numerals, but have you read Walker's explanation of the song's subject?

The title contains two brown dwarves: one, the coldest sub-stellar body in the universe discovered so far; the other, Zercon, was a real-life Moorish jester at the fifth century court of Attila the Hun.

“I was interested in this thing about someone trying to escape his situation – in this case Attila’s wooden palace, which he regards as an immense toilet – and achieve a kind of spiritual sovereignty, and a height beyond calculation. As the song moves forward he imagines himself at different stages of height: he imagines first that he escapes and finds himself surrounded by eagles; then there’s the mention of St Simon on his pillar; then he jumps to 1930s America where it’s become a flagpole-sitter…’ Flagpole-sitting – trying to spend several days alone on a platform at the top of a pole – achieved a brief craze status in the 30s.

At the end of the song he eventually becomes a Brown Dwarf, known as SDSS1416. As with the majority of my songs, it ends in failure, Like a brown dwarf, he freezes to death.”

Here's an account from Priscus, which has more about Zercon.

So that first part of the song seems to be the jester doing his job at Attila's court (near the Tisza river in Hungary, which is mentioned) & insulting various types - accusing women of being prostitutes (the opening crack) or going like a gynozoon (which is a female animal trained to have sex with a man, apparently), throwing some national slurs at greeks, Gauls etc. (Basically, It's the chaotic international court of a ruler who's been terrifying the established powers of Europe.)

At the same time there's the rise of ascetic christianity – so there are eunuch lines in there & of course the section about throwing your own mother's food back at her, which is directly about Simeon Stylites i think - it's Zercon, I guess, thinking with a kind of disgust/fascination about this religion, which might be showing him a way to climb up, but is also grotesque.

There's also lot of end of antiquity/dark ages stuff going on in the background - like telescoped northern invasions - Norsemen, Nibelung are Norse-Burgundian kings, 'Basel-cum-Strasbourg-cum-Frankfurt-cum-Speyer-cum' – which is historically later than Zercon/Attila, but all adds doomy living-in-collapse atmosphere.

Those are random thoughts on the opening section. I'd need to read closer (and google harder) to get further.

Still no idea about the numbers though.

hehe, I googled "gynozoon" recently and, well, yeah I kind of wished I hadn't.

I'd read the press release, woof, but not the second bit of your post which is a great help. Would be nice to get a bit more lyric dissection going on on this thread - after all, that's part of the latter-day SW experience really.