muninnhuginn | Unique ravens

Well, since yonmei claims that it was really our idea, what do our unique interests say about us? And does it matter? Well, those of us who give entirely true, but completely unhelpful bios, maybe leave clues, especially in the unique or unusual entries.

Well, it has to be said that uniqueness varies over time. For a long while Pete Atkin (buy his new album, go on, it's really worthwhile! or we might have to review it!) was unique and we had one match on Clive James. The latter is now in the unique category and there are a few listers of Pete Atkin. There really ought to be a third interest "Pete Atkin and Clive James" since PA is a fine radio producer, Clive James as a writer, poet and broadcaster has been a hero of ours for years, and the combination of the two as musician and lyricist is also stupendous. As to what these interests say: we like beautiful, sometimes complex and clever, lyrics, given sympathetic and illuminating treatment and performance. And it's a reasonably obscure choice and we like the cachet of it being so. Poseurs, you say. Well, maybe.

The obscure music cataloger also includes Sui Vesan whose eponymous album we reviewed a bit back: she really did form a soundtrack to last summer and is therefore significantly embedded in our existence. Paul Downes is a member of The Joyce Gang (whose lineup includes a wind player with a, we think, WX7, rather than WX5, but this is hair splitting in the wind synthesis department). Very fine, and underrated and under-noticed folk with an interesting range of lyrics. Great live and some good albums, which they release all too infrequently. On the subject of folk with odd instruments, we were surprised when we added Jim Moray that he was not a unique interest. Folk and theremins--and entirely excellent. Scarily, we share him with friends of friends. Stanley Holloway, performer of great monologues and Elza Doolittle's dad in the movie version of My Fair Lady is a favourite because of his recordings of the Marriott Edgar (brother of Edgar Wallace) monologues about Private Sam Small and the Ramsbottom family (Edgar and Holloway amply illustrated here--a favourite site). This is not solely because of the surname connection, about which we intend to remain silent. We didn't think Stanley Holloway was obscure, but he's probably a very English kind of a taste. He's part of our childhood and part of our fascination with comic song and monologue.

Martin Rowson, he of the graphic novel version of Tristram Shandy (which we reviewed (gosh! isn't the memory feature handy!)) and other fairly savage cartoonery, is a long time favourite. Sharper than Steve Bell and very literary. Famous for upsetting the Eliot estate over his quoting of a line of The Wasteland in his graphic version of the same. We like political cartoonists, but we prefer literary ones.

Henry Treece was maybe our favourite childhood author. He wrote about Vikings, mainly. He also wrote poetry, for adults, flooded (we were going to write tinged, but it just doesn't covey the extent!) with Norse imagery. It's not the greatest literary stuff (as if that mattered) but if you like blood and doom and blood and death.... It appeals to the romantic streak we claim not to have (or rather we do, but it's a bit more grisly and horror tinged than say pointing out our love of medieval romance might imply). This the ravens only got hold of recently (tho' we'd known of its existence for a long time) and are now saving for various expensive and out-of-print copies of his poetry.

And the rest are all about words and the sections of books we enjoy. With a nod to our interest in structure as well as content.

That's what they are right now, those unique features of two ravens. What do they mean? We still hold onto some things from our childhood, both in music and authors. We like slightly obscure modern interpretations of folk music, generally English. We like unusual musical instruments, especially electronic ones. And we love words and literature, sometimes the odd and interstitial bits. It's all a little spiky in a way, the accretions around a text, the satirical cartoons, the generally quite unprettified folk music. It's not bad for a definition of what we care about. And probably what we are. Caw!