Seventy years after it was made Browning’s long-banned yarn about misshapen circus folk remains as unsettling

Seventy years after it was made, Browning’s long-banned yarn about misshapen circus folk remains as unsettling as ever. It is still a film to haunt the nightmares of anyone who sees it. One can understand the omission of the Universal horror cycle (Boris Karloff with a bolt through his neck, Bela Lugosi in cape and fangs, Lon Chaney Jr as a cuddly Wolf Man) on the grounds that the old Frankenstein and Dracula films don’t seem frightening today. This compilation mingles Moondog’s basic percussion pieces with his reed-based classical and jazz compositions, which recall the early works of Sun Ra.
DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘All Is Loneliness’, ‘Bird’s Lament’, ‘Dog Trot’, ‘Moondog’s Symphony 2 (Sagebrush)’. “That bitch!” snaps Kirsten Dunst, sotto voce, after being grilled relentlessly by a journalist about her relationship with Donnie Darko’s Jake Gyllenhaal.

The pair’s on/off romance has been the subject of gossip and rumour for some time, and now she is tired of the questions. She slides into a chair opposite me and lets out a long sigh “Hi,” she says, wearily, but not un-amiably. Still, the subject is bound to come up sooner or later – we are here to talk about a romantic comedy, Elizabethtown, after all – so after some icebreaking chitchat, I ask her how she and her boyfriend are doing. “Um, I don’t have a boyfriend,” Dunst replies, beaming sweetly “Who are you talking about?” Gyllenhaal, of course. Like the fellow hobo Partch, he invented his own instruments, such as the Trimba, Oo, Yukh and Tuji, and devised a musical form which reflected both his classical training and more primitive, elemental rhythms – in his case inspired by Native American beats.

He was the kind of character you might cross the road to avoid, except that the tricky, syncopated rhythms he picked out upon his portable percussion devices had an infectious quality that ensured he always drew a crowd. Though oddly, for all its consistency of mood and tone, Aerial is possibly Bush’s most musically diverse album, with individual tracks involving, alongside the usual rock-band line-up, such curiosities as bowed viol and spinet, jazz bass, castanets, rhythmic cooing pigeons, and her bizarre attempt to achieve communion with the natural world by aping the dawn chorus. Despite the muttered commentary of Rolf Harris as The Painter, it’s a marvellous, complex work which restores Kate Bush to the artistic stature she last possessed around the time of Hounds of Love.DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘King of the Mountain’, ‘Pi’, ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, ‘Prologue’, ‘Aerial’. Originally a bohemian fixture of New York, Moondog – real name Louis Hardin – was a blind street-busker whose godlike, white-bearded countenance was augmented by Viking-horned helmet, monkish robes and wooden spear. Reviewed by Andy Gill

Like those other musical expeditionaries, Harry Partch and Sun Ra, Moondog was an American Primitive whose seemingly rudimentary sounds disguised a music of extraordinary complexity and individuality. “I watched them going round and round/ My blouse wrapping itself round your trousers,” she observes, slipping into the infantile – “Slooshy sloshy, slooshy sloshy, get that dirty shirty clean” – and alighting periodically upon the zen stillness of the murmured chorus, “washing machine”.
The second disc takes us through a relaxing day’s stroll in the sunshine, from the sequenced birdsong of the “Prelude”, through a pavement artist’s attempt to “find the song of the oil and the brush” through serendipity and skill (“That bit there, it was an accident/ But he’s so pleased/ It’s the best mistake he could make/ And it’s my favourite piece”), through the gentle flamenco chamber-jazz “Sunset” and the Laura Veirs-style epiphanic night-time swim in “Nocturn”, to her dawn duet with the waking birds that concludes the album with mesmeric waves of synthesiser perked up by brisk banjo runs.There’s a hypnotic undertow running throughout the album, from the gentle reggae lilt of the single “King of the Mountain” and the organ pulses of “Pi” to the minimalist waves of piano and synth in “Prologue”. It’s there too in the childhood reminiscence of “A Coral Room”, the almost autistic satisfaction of the obsessive-compulsive mathematician fascinated by “Pi” (which affords the opportunity to hear Bush slowly sing vast chunks of the number in question, several dozen digits long – which rather puts singing the telephone directory into the shade), and particularly “Mrs Bartolozzi”, a wife, or maybe widow, seeking solace for her absent mate in the dance of their clothes in the washing machine.