It’s hard to overstate how important Marina Organ and her partner and collaborator Sean Worrall have been to building the thriving scene of interconnected and mutually supportive brilliant musicians that we might now refer to ‘Cardiacs Family’. Just imagining the people that might not have met, the connections that wouldn’t have been made, the music that might not have been heard without their tireless work over the past 40 years – the fanzine, the gigs, the record label, the blog, the advocacy – they are truly worthy of laudation.
We’re super excited to have Marina joining us to select some choice tunes for your ears and feet on Friday 6th December alongside Stephen EvEns live show. Aitch posed a few choice questions to Marina to give you a fuller flavour.
Q1: Why Organ?
Because of the organ of communication called… The Organ! A fanzine that I started with Sean Worrall in 1986 that never stopped like it was supposed to. The Organ ‘zine just continued and expanded into a record label (Org Records), promoting gigs, even a TV show for a while. I got known as Marina Organ because I sold many tens of thousands of fanzines by hand at gigs. I did have a proper Hammond organ for a while too, just to seal the deal.
Q2: We first met at Festival 23 in Sheffield – you were playing a Cardiacs track, I danced like a loon to it, you noted this dancing to Cardiacs was uncommon & we were then joined in Cardiac-tromony. How have the musical stylings of Cardiacs informed your appreciation of music and have you found anyone else that can actually dance to them?
Well, I think the maximum number of people I’ve seen actually, for real dancing to Cardiacs at once was, ooh, about 600, at the Town and Country Club /Forum, with Blur and Radiohead and Napalm Death in the pit come to think of it. It was kind of miraculous.
Cardiacs are of course the most important band in my life – they are now being appreciated as being a kind of eighth wonder of the world. If you’re lucky enough to encounter such a profound contribution to art at an early age, when few other people know of it, the first thing you think is, oh, this must be normal. (It really wasn’t.) The second is, oh, this must just be me and my funny tastes thinking this is great (understandable when you’re one of the mere thirty people in the audience). Been searching for ‘the next Cardiacs’ for almost 4 decades now and it’s not yet happened.
When Tim Smith was made an honorary doctor of music by the Royal Scottish Conservertoire in 2018, it was a vindication like no other. It also helps when faced with the difficult task of describing why they have such an impact – Tim began his composing by applying extraordinary musicality and skill to writing something close to punk rock, using rock band instruments, at this high end level.
They were hugely entertaining too – the musical quality was as important as getting an audience jumping around and laughing and crying.
[You can watch the wonderful celebration of Tim Smith’s music that surrounded the award of his doctorate on YouTube below]
Q3: You also have a passion for animation – are your musical appreciation and animation activities connected?
Oh, absolutely – I decided I was going into filmaking to make music promos, but thought I had a better chance of getting in to West Surrey College of Art and Design in the 80s by aiming for the animation degree. In the end it turned out to be exactly the right kind of filmmaking for music, because you’re automatically obsessing about timing – plus it was just at the cusp of all sorts of technological advances in moving image that animation was way ahead of. I rapidly shoehorned one of the project briefs (‘Make a film depicting childhood’) into a full blown three minute piece tightly animated to ‘It’s A Lovely Day’ by, of course, Cardiacs.
The college had just the previous year bought a newfangled video line tester, which gave animators the unspeakable luxury of seeing their work-in-progress the same day it was drawn instead of waiting for black and white super 8 to develop. I thought woah, let’s just forget film and shoot the whole thing on this. I was the first person to complete a whole work on it, and developed a bonkers but controlled style ‘boiled’ like crazy. You weren’t expected to finish an entire film in the first year, but I did.
Next thing I know, the head of department has (without telling me) entered it into the Snapper Awards, and it’s shortlisted with seven other films out of hundreds. It didn’t win but it got shown at the Bristol Animation Festival and on Channel 4 twice, on a special show presented by Peter Gabriel.
One of the judges, the legendary experimental artist and animator Robert Breer, loved my work and wanted it to win; the two super-traditional, equally legendary animator Russian judges hated it. Breer later came to visit the art college to lecture. One day he beckoned me into the dark of the video rostrum camera room for a chat, and confessed, almost in tears, that he’d messed up the voting, thinking he could only vote for each film once in the two categories, and if he’d voted I’d have won. I didn’t mind too much, I got £500 for each TV showing, though I had to wrestle the second tranche out of the hands of the animation department.
Q4: You bring joy, and possibly auditory confusion, to many adventurous music fans with your brilliantly curated The Other Rock Show on Resonance FM – how did that come about, what is your aim for the show and how do you find the music you feature?
I was at the Garage venue at a gig in about 2002 when I bumped into Magz Hall and when she asked how the latest Organ was going I had a rant about how much I hated writing reviews of unique, indescribable bands and how my dream was to have a radio show where I could just play the bloody things. ‘Oh, but you can’ she said.
‘Yes but the better the band the harder it is to write, oh how I hate it it’s dancing about architecture- ‘
‘- Marina, you, can you can have a show on this thing called Resonance FM, its – ‘
‘ Aaargh if only I had a -‘
‘YES YOU CAN HAVE A RADIO SHOW just write a proposal and send it in’ (takes shoulders, shakes).
‘I… I can?’
On investigation, Resonance FM turns out to be the most experimental, cutting edge avant, radical radio station on the planet. Lots of sound art, improvised electronica, and a lot of what I want to share has… tunes. But I realised that what turns me on as a listener was consistently music that has unusual time signatures, or ‘goes somewhere on an adventure’, in fact, the opposite of improvised music. Something between the Stravinsky/ Messaien inspired film soundtracks of childhood and the entire gamut of pop, rock and synth sounds available, anything new from the bottom up. Not just rock, but leaning towards ‘bands’ rather than studio.
LISTEN LIVE TO RESONANCE FM: player.resonancefm.com
I only discovered that you could play in other time signatures when I made my first animated test film – I’d chosen a track with seven beats to the bar – and once I’d twigged that my school music teacher had lied to me when I asked if there was more that 4/4 and waltz time, I realised that there was this huge variety of rhythm we were NOT USING, or using absurdly little. Like artists only every using the colours blue or orange, ever. So the Other Rock Show uses the absurd but useful remit of ‘if it’s in 4/4 all the way through, it doesn’t get in’ although this come with the proviso ‘unless it’s got loads of polyrhythms on top like Meshuggah’ or ‘unless it does something really dramatic with tempo’.
It used to be fairly hard to fill a show with new material, so I’d play quite a bit of educational prog, but within the year of starting the worldwide math rock scene started really kicking in, plus there were scattered weirdass rock scenes in Oakland, Chicago, then later Leeds and Lyon and these days I can premier a new band pretty much every month. There’s a worldwide groundswell of avant prog, and teenagers have absolutely no idea that prog was once verboten, they just hunt down what they like and teach themselves how to play it, and come up with more and more new uses for what was once considered experimental. It’s amazing actually!
Q5: You’re delivering a no-doubt delightful DJ set for us on the 6th Dec, providing the musical bread that will hold the tasty tune-type sandwich filling that is Stephen EvEns in place, so we can scoff all that musical gorgeousness without getting our hands all mucky (ok, maybe stretching a metaphor a wee bit there) – how will you decide what tunes to spin?
Oh crikey – well, I’m not going to totally befuddle people, I don’t just want people running up to me all night demanding to know wtf something was (nice tho that is) I want dancing, and there will be Token 4/4 Punky Bangers scattered through. And we all know what happened to you last time we did this, don’t we?
Q6 How do you stay so positive all the time?
Music is the best! No really, it is. There’s so, so many amazing bands I can hear any time I want. I save my grumping for the Industry and the music press. And the music in Tescos and Costas. Please don’t make me listen to those things.
Q7 Is there a danger of a wonk orthodoxy ?
Ooh, I don’t know what that is. Oh wait I do – the remarkable founder of the Immersion Composition Society (a kind of masonic club for speed-composers) advised members of the ICS lodges to never be afraid of or even expect a ‘bull whipping from the Avant Garde Police’ when speed-composing and I think that’s a rule to live by. The Other Rock Show attends to this in that I will play something cheezy as flip if it’s in 9/8 or 5/4. I’m pretty sure Cheer Accident have had airplay with one of their Burt Bacharach covers (or if it wasn’t actually a cover it sure sounded like him). That’s the beauty of the Other Rock Show remit – a funny time signature is just a foundation for making whatever you want to play sound fresh and different and interesting. Even a couple of extra beats lifts your ears, as perfected by The Pixes and even Outkast. We’re way past the showing off of the seventies, it’s all just new colours to paint with, and total freedom to rediscover the art of songwriting.
Questions imagined by Aitch Nicol, validated by Laura Holmes and supplemented by the Buds & Spawn team
You can catch Marina every Sunday evening from 9-10pm on Resonance FM on 104.4 FM or online, and you can catch up with previous shows on her WordPress site
https://otherrockshow.wordpress.com/
player.resonancefm.com
The Organ fanzine now lives online at https://organthing.com/
Marina Organ will be DJing for Buds & Spawn on Friday 6th December 2024 at The Dorothy Pax, alongside a live performance from Stephen EvEns.
This gig is FREE ENTRY, but please come prepared to put your hands in your pockets to show your appreciation at the end.