Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s ‘7 O'clock News / Silent Night’ is a sound collage from their 1966 album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. The song layers Simon and Garfunkel’s version of ‘Silent Night’, originally composed in Salzburg in 1818, over a performance of the evening news. The news reports real events from the summer of 1966, although the script was written for the song, and read not by a news anchor but by Los Angeles disc jockey and future
I wonder if you're aware of the Firesign Theatre, whose first three albums are masterpieces of multilayered recorded sound in service of comedy and storytelling? Although it may now be a case of "You had to be there...", 50 years on! Very popular in certain Balliol rooms ca. 1973...
Simon and Garfunkel are an interesting case study in how the differential synchronicity you were discussing a few posts ago can work. Compare, say, their album "Book Ends" of 1968 with "Bridge Over Troubled Water" of 1970. The former is strange, experimental, tentative, and clearly derives from the coffee-bar, beatnik era of the New York of the 1950s and early '60s, and I doubt whether many people under 60 even know the album. The latter is end-to-end hits, most of which you will still hear on the radio today, with no sense of having passed their sell-by date.
Sounds as if 'Tomcat Murr/Kreisler' would have been right at home in the secondhand bookshop depicted in Don Paterson's bathetic poem 'The Alexandrian Library' (1993), ie a dingy labyrinth of oddities, long-lost antiquarian relics and absolutely worthless mouldy tat, located in wonderful Cowdenbeath; where 'You edge past the stuffed thing on guard at the entrance' and take in the owner's sign which reads 'No Browsin - Dont Waist Your Time, Ask'!
I wonder if you're aware of the Firesign Theatre, whose first three albums are masterpieces of multilayered recorded sound in service of comedy and storytelling? Although it may now be a case of "You had to be there...", 50 years on! Very popular in certain Balliol rooms ca. 1973...
Simon and Garfunkel are an interesting case study in how the differential synchronicity you were discussing a few posts ago can work. Compare, say, their album "Book Ends" of 1968 with "Bridge Over Troubled Water" of 1970. The former is strange, experimental, tentative, and clearly derives from the coffee-bar, beatnik era of the New York of the 1950s and early '60s, and I doubt whether many people under 60 even know the album. The latter is end-to-end hits, most of which you will still hear on the radio today, with no sense of having passed their sell-by date.
Mike
Sounds as if 'Tomcat Murr/Kreisler' would have been right at home in the secondhand bookshop depicted in Don Paterson's bathetic poem 'The Alexandrian Library' (1993), ie a dingy labyrinth of oddities, long-lost antiquarian relics and absolutely worthless mouldy tat, located in wonderful Cowdenbeath; where 'You edge past the stuffed thing on guard at the entrance' and take in the owner's sign which reads 'No Browsin - Dont Waist Your Time, Ask'!