Mark Goodall — Gathering of the Tribe – Volume 2- Landscape(Book)

Here’s the second book in the Gathering of the Tribe series, which sees lecture/filmmaker Mark Goodall looking at the mysterious power of sound and tone within music. This vol which is subtitled ‘Landscape’, finds Goodall looking at thirteen albums, from different genres, that are themed around or utilizer's landscapes in their make-up.

The seven-inch-sized book comes in at the one-hundred-page mark. It features black & green texts throughout, with reproductions of each album's cover art/ related pictures in colour. With each album getting between a  six and ten-page write-up, and each of these write-ups is a good balance of track descriptions, album themes, and details of the records creators.

As mentioned in my introduction we get a decidedly varied genre selection of albums. I won’t detail each of the thirteen albums covered in the book here, as I found that part of the book's charm was that you just don’t know what you going to get from album to album.

The book opens with a four-page introduction to the concept of landscape within music. And as the book unfolds we move from the Jazz meets racing car field recordings of Barney Wilen’s 1968 album Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny Of Lorenzo Bandini.  Onto the Concrete music of Jeîta Ou Murmure Des Eaux, which found French composer Francois Bayle blending limestone cave field recordings with experimental electronic sound. Through to ambient electronica of Loscil’s  2013 album City Hospital- which is an attempt to recreate the inside and outside sounds of a 1930s New York Mental hospital.

We also briefly dart into slightly more mainstream fair, with a write-up regarding Pink Floyd’s Live At Pompeii- which is the only write-up in the book penned by Head Press’s David Kerekes. Though largely the albums selected are the more obscure/ lesser known side of things- which of course makes the whole thing even more worthy, as it gives the reader titles to track down/ hear for themselves.

Each of the album write-ups is a good/ even balance of record/ artists background, track write-up/ discussion, and album general themes. The writing remains informative, yet entertaining- with the text never becoming too pompous or pretentious.  With the whole book always remaining wholly readable/ fascinating

This is part of an ongoing series of books- so I very much look forward to seeing what themes/ albums are going to covered in future books.  All in all excellent book/ series- if you have a keen interest in discovering new sounds/ music in more experimental spheres, this is a must!. To order this direct, and find out about the other books in the series drop by HeadPress here.