So everyone has heard that version of Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan recorded, I think, in Manchester. As such we all know it starts with some bulging asshole shouting JUDAS and Bob Dylan's response is to deliver this stone bastard rendition of that song and everyone screams when he's done and he says thank you.
But man how are you meant to compete with that?
What was that guys tiny hole like when Bob Dylan pushed him back down into it? Probably smaller than it was in the first place.
I wonder if that guy walked out before Bob Dylan finished the song. I wonder what he went on to do.
It drives me crazy. I couldn't have got up until they dragged me out I don't think.
I wonder if there's a moral here, or anything at all.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Thursday, 18 December 2008
mescaline/conjunctivitis
For your careful attention:
Mescaline Mix
I've got the extra unwanted awareness of my own body that comes with not feeling fully fit. When I get phenomenologically minded and have that sense of myself in/as my body, there's something about collages and tape manipulations that really hits the spot. This real early Terry Riley tape work is like listening through a fever where everything creeps along at quarter speed, so languid its uncanny. I get a real sense that to make this stuff you have to pay attention to the act of listening, which is maybe what interests me most about music. I think the collage is the real listener's music because of the way it treats sound as something external, something that approaches and surrounds you rather than comes forth from or through you. Riley's got such a sensitive ear that this will give you 100% legit phenomenological shivers. This comes from the Music From The Gift cd/reissue which is some amazing listening.
Listened to Unknown Soldier twice since reading yr post Ro, yr completely right and I've got some more examples to post when I get back after the weekend.
Mescaline Mix
I've got the extra unwanted awareness of my own body that comes with not feeling fully fit. When I get phenomenologically minded and have that sense of myself in/as my body, there's something about collages and tape manipulations that really hits the spot. This real early Terry Riley tape work is like listening through a fever where everything creeps along at quarter speed, so languid its uncanny. I get a real sense that to make this stuff you have to pay attention to the act of listening, which is maybe what interests me most about music. I think the collage is the real listener's music because of the way it treats sound as something external, something that approaches and surrounds you rather than comes forth from or through you. Riley's got such a sensitive ear that this will give you 100% legit phenomenological shivers. This comes from the Music From The Gift cd/reissue which is some amazing listening.
Listened to Unknown Soldier twice since reading yr post Ro, yr completely right and I've got some more examples to post when I get back after the weekend.
big paintings
Mark Rothko said I paint big paintings to be intimate, or something similar.
As I read that something clicked. Instantly gone is the idea of intimate as something small, something close. Because close is big! I think of everyone I've half fallen in love with and never spoken to. Someone across the street or the room. Room or street in this case should be capitalised maybe, it is such a classic thing to mention - across The Street.
Intimate is big! You think of a body, the face of someone you love, as close as you can get. Intimacy, to me, is freedom. The freedom to explore a thing you're fascinated by, to express fascination by searching.
Sidestepping Rothko's ideas about emotion in his pieces, this is why he paints big. Up close the paintings are all encompassing; they never end when you're with them, the same as your loved one's face is all there is in the world.
For me it is the same with Unknown Soldier pts 1 & 2 by Fela Kuti, a song that's thirty minutes long. That song has such a distinctive beginning. I've heard it so many times I could recognise it almost immediately if you played me any part. But by the middle of that song there is no beginning, no end. For me, anyway. I'm sucked in completely. Partly it's the groove, partly the length and the expressiveness of the music itself.
Another good example is Down By The River by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Not as long but it has the same sort of slow groove that drifts in, rolls. The same bittersweetness. Maybe Babe, I'm on Fire by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds has it, but that's a bit more hard boiled, it runs with you, doesn't drift with you.
But the way you explore a person, a place or a painting is not how you do it with these songs.
The songs are just with you. No movement of eyes, of hands, just a soaking up, a wrapping round. It comes to you, shows you itself. But it's not a one way giving. These songs take time to work for me this way. I have to open myself up to them and let them open up in return. I mean listen to it I guess. Just to have it on and near me.
If I'm out walking with these songs my feet carry me, the song is what I see almost.
I wonder why a film can't work like this. You need to work with a film, to process it. A song can filter in, you can follow its meaning with just a heard word or two. This is why the short songs can't do this. Too many missed words and the whole thing's over.
Listen I know this is all subjective and overly romantic and really it's the understatement of these songs that makes them so effective. I wish I could write such a song. I love them.
As I read that something clicked. Instantly gone is the idea of intimate as something small, something close. Because close is big! I think of everyone I've half fallen in love with and never spoken to. Someone across the street or the room. Room or street in this case should be capitalised maybe, it is such a classic thing to mention - across The Street.
Intimate is big! You think of a body, the face of someone you love, as close as you can get. Intimacy, to me, is freedom. The freedom to explore a thing you're fascinated by, to express fascination by searching.
Sidestepping Rothko's ideas about emotion in his pieces, this is why he paints big. Up close the paintings are all encompassing; they never end when you're with them, the same as your loved one's face is all there is in the world.
For me it is the same with Unknown Soldier pts 1 & 2 by Fela Kuti, a song that's thirty minutes long. That song has such a distinctive beginning. I've heard it so many times I could recognise it almost immediately if you played me any part. But by the middle of that song there is no beginning, no end. For me, anyway. I'm sucked in completely. Partly it's the groove, partly the length and the expressiveness of the music itself.
Another good example is Down By The River by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Not as long but it has the same sort of slow groove that drifts in, rolls. The same bittersweetness. Maybe Babe, I'm on Fire by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds has it, but that's a bit more hard boiled, it runs with you, doesn't drift with you.
But the way you explore a person, a place or a painting is not how you do it with these songs.
The songs are just with you. No movement of eyes, of hands, just a soaking up, a wrapping round. It comes to you, shows you itself. But it's not a one way giving. These songs take time to work for me this way. I have to open myself up to them and let them open up in return. I mean listen to it I guess. Just to have it on and near me.
If I'm out walking with these songs my feet carry me, the song is what I see almost.
I wonder why a film can't work like this. You need to work with a film, to process it. A song can filter in, you can follow its meaning with just a heard word or two. This is why the short songs can't do this. Too many missed words and the whole thing's over.
Listen I know this is all subjective and overly romantic and really it's the understatement of these songs that makes them so effective. I wish I could write such a song. I love them.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
top billin
I'm not convinced by any of the usual explanations as to why people make lists of records. I've looked over a lot of end of 2008 lists and talk lately - individuals' mostly; magazine lists are just an aggregate anyway - and I've checked out some of the more tempting sounding objects of praise. The quantity of records some people listen to just clicks your perspective back a little. Some guys offer their top 100 records of the year. And people catch up on the just slipped away present by checking out each other's lists. Some of it seems like an attempt to make everything more scientific, a constant reassessment of the state of the field by all the practitioners of the discipline.
My thinking-patterns go in and out of fashion, and so this thought brings me to something I was talking to Roland about the other day. Seeing some Michelangelo statues he'd made for a tomb, I was thinking about the space ideas exist in. In a list of 100 records of 2008, what sort of space does number 24 have? I'd like to see a graph of the ideas to people ratio of the last 3000 years. A list isn't supposed to create new ideas but order existing ones, spread them. But so few lists have done anything for me.
Top 3 lists of records in my life:
1. A list I'd copied down onto a yellowed lined A-4 pad aged 15/16 of what Thom Yorke had been listening to at the time. This was a thrill to copy down, like some arcane knowledge I'd stumbled onto. It had "Jennifer" by Faust on it, "Dodgy" by Kid606, someone called maybe I.F. with maybe "Energy Vampire". There was Christoph De Babalon, "On The Block", and probably some Warp or Warp-styled electronic stuff. I didn't find most of the stuff on the list searching painfully on Napster, and I've forgotten it. I loved "Jennifer" and "Dodgy" and got into Faust in particular afterwards (I don't think kid606 has done anything as good as Dodgy), but I had a feeling of perfect trust and hope as I copied down this dutifully and that's what left the mark.
2. Glenn Jones' top 10 albums for Perfect Sound Forever. There's a lot of great top tens on Perfect Sound Forever, but when I read this aged 18 and it seemed to tie together a lot of different things I'd been listening to and thinking about. It's the top ten I dig the most, one I've increasingly felt at home with, though of course there's two or three I don't feel anything for. I'd heard of pretty much all this stuff when I read it, but Glenn Jones was another sensei to me and I was resolved to hear Forever Changes, Death Of The Rare Bird Ymir and AMMMusic 1966 afterwards. http://www.furious.com/Perfect/staff2.html
3. The great sixth form compiled list. A different animal, the list-making impulse in full effect but so localised and personal and in retrospect sweet that it fills me with affection. Does anyone still have a copy of this? I remember OK Computer came out top, that my high school English and form tutor Mr Morrison sent in a list via my brother, and that people kept revising their lists in response to each other.
But there are other sorts of lists I think.
"Dodgy" sounds too loud, like the sort of headache you'd get for having too many awesome thoughts, something out of Pi maybe. Check it out http://www.epitonic.com/index.jsp?refer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epitonic.com%2Fartists%2Fkid606.html
My thinking-patterns go in and out of fashion, and so this thought brings me to something I was talking to Roland about the other day. Seeing some Michelangelo statues he'd made for a tomb, I was thinking about the space ideas exist in. In a list of 100 records of 2008, what sort of space does number 24 have? I'd like to see a graph of the ideas to people ratio of the last 3000 years. A list isn't supposed to create new ideas but order existing ones, spread them. But so few lists have done anything for me.
Top 3 lists of records in my life:
1. A list I'd copied down onto a yellowed lined A-4 pad aged 15/16 of what Thom Yorke had been listening to at the time. This was a thrill to copy down, like some arcane knowledge I'd stumbled onto. It had "Jennifer" by Faust on it, "Dodgy" by Kid606, someone called maybe I.F. with maybe "Energy Vampire". There was Christoph De Babalon, "On The Block", and probably some Warp or Warp-styled electronic stuff. I didn't find most of the stuff on the list searching painfully on Napster, and I've forgotten it. I loved "Jennifer" and "Dodgy" and got into Faust in particular afterwards (I don't think kid606 has done anything as good as Dodgy), but I had a feeling of perfect trust and hope as I copied down this dutifully and that's what left the mark.
2. Glenn Jones' top 10 albums for Perfect Sound Forever. There's a lot of great top tens on Perfect Sound Forever, but when I read this aged 18 and it seemed to tie together a lot of different things I'd been listening to and thinking about. It's the top ten I dig the most, one I've increasingly felt at home with, though of course there's two or three I don't feel anything for. I'd heard of pretty much all this stuff when I read it, but Glenn Jones was another sensei to me and I was resolved to hear Forever Changes, Death Of The Rare Bird Ymir and AMMMusic 1966 afterwards. http://www.furious.com/Perfect/staff2.html
3. The great sixth form compiled list. A different animal, the list-making impulse in full effect but so localised and personal and in retrospect sweet that it fills me with affection. Does anyone still have a copy of this? I remember OK Computer came out top, that my high school English and form tutor Mr Morrison sent in a list via my brother, and that people kept revising their lists in response to each other.
But there are other sorts of lists I think.
"Dodgy" sounds too loud, like the sort of headache you'd get for having too many awesome thoughts, something out of Pi maybe. Check it out http://www.epitonic.com/index.jsp?refer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epitonic.com%2Fartists%2Fkid606.html
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