As with all the later Unknown Public series, this is a lovely object, which shames me for not having read the essays and sketches in the book part. I see one of them is written by Mike Adcock, which reminds me I ought to dig out his album again. From a quick skim, I see it references Lucy Green's How Popular Musicians Learn
I can't escape the feeling that the book part may be more rewarding than the music in this case. I listened to it in short bursts of a few tracks at a time throughout today, often with The Boy, who's getting increasingly opinionated, with me. Perhaps related to his missed his morning sleep today, he seemed quite taken with All the Pretty Horses. The unaccompanied voice in Matteo Fargion's Francesca Singing — which sounds like a kindergarten version of Brian Eno's 2/1 from Music for Airports — had him baffled, especially as I was playing it downstairs where he couldn't even see the speakers. It must have seemed to him like the very air was inhabited by this disembodied, multi-tracked voice. I'm doing a lot of clapping with him at the moment, and drumming in my very arrhythmic style on every available surface at the moment. He seems to enjoy it, but I have little feeling for how much he recognises the musical qualities of music — especially as some of the music I play him as very few musical qualities.
I like the piece that David Jackson (sometime of Van der Graaf Generator) has created with children with physical and learning disabilities. I researched his work with his Soundbeam technology many years ago, for the National Centre for Popular Music, but nothing ever came of it.
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