TH.G.ULAR

so this blog's going pretty well

2011-01-19T19:25:00.001Z

Yeah we're going to be staying on the moon, but there's still gonna be races

2010-06-03T21:19:00.003+01:00

Always a pleasure to see a man gain perspective by meditating on the methods & environment that sustain him w/ the help of a "dog having a fit" hook:

Having been very sharp in his use of media and existing almost entirely in ways other ppl had barely got used to using at all, here Lil B is kind of on a downer expressing worries about the technology he's been utilizing. B's concerns about the internet are inevitable for someone so closely tied & reliant on it and perhaps the nostalgia is being conducted w/ rose-tinted glasses cuz the sensitivity he's espousing wrt suspending judgement and being open has been made possible by the exposure to the other you get in the age of information, as he lays out. This song only exists on youtube anyway, our mate Brandon's way of coping w/ these stresses is his sedate desktop background (pretty curious about what it is) so he shld be more enthusiastic about the moon&c soon.

Or maybe it's just too much weed; this next song has some pretty bicameral mind panned shouts on it!!! But really, this is totally worth yr time and has a nice whimsical squiffy hook. Lil B is a very round-edged producer.

2010-05-08T15:40:00.011+01:00

the door is unlocked, the windows are open

2010-03-26T09:10:00.009Z

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Here's a playlist of Arthur Russell I put together after scouring youtube. 40 of the finest, all stuff which as far as I know is out of print or not easily available, so basically anything that I don't already own, or a different version.

The biography on AR by Tim Lawrence, Hold On To Your Dreams, has schooled me & made me aware of a lot of these recordings. It has so many accounts and anecdotes from his friends and collaborators that as well as providing an education on the downtown New York scene in the 70s&80s, it refracts a sense of how he thought & felt - open&indecisive, playful&stubborn - so that following his efforts and troubles becomes inspiring, warm, funny and horribly, overwhelmingly sad.

The man's breadth of friends and taste is unequaled, a guy that worked, played or hung out with Nicky Siano, Philip Glass, Talking Heads, Allen Ginsberg, Walter Gibbons, Rhys Chatham, John Hammond, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Merce Cunningham, Larry Levan, Ali Akbar Khan, Peter Gordon, Gary Lucas, Christian Wolff, and Vin Fucking Diesel.

The track the biog gets its title from illustrates this point v neatly w/ a ridiculous line-up of Holger Czukay (Can), Francois Kevorkian, Jah Wobble (Public Image Ltd), and THE EDGE. And, of course, lyrics provided by Arthur Russell. The sort of record James Murphy would invent in a dream, but no, here it is:

If yr feeling curious but lost in the face of these tunes, I'd extra-recommend Is It All Over My Face? (Male Vocal), Kiss Me Again (the 12" A side), Tell You Today, and Let's Go Swimming for kicks & bounce, but if yr browsing his more available stuff try Go Bang!#5 (Francois Kervorkian mix), A Little Lost, Eli, Lucky Cloud and Indian Ocean - Schoolbell/ Treehouse (Walter Gibbons mix). Enjoy yr swim.

"young at heart x tremely horny & ready 2 mate"

2010-03-20T22:19:00.008Z

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I'm sort of looking forward to my late middle age.

A lot of people say to me, "Tom, how come you know so much about TONETTA777? Where do you find out about all these great TONETTA777 songs? How do you filter through the prodigious TONETTA777 output to consistently find the sharpest anthemic TONETTA777 tunes?"

Well darling, arranging yr search results by date will only take you so far, what you really need is a word from the wise. You need a leg-up from a member of the Tonetta community, someone whose stuck with the man long enough to develop an eye that sees past the veneer of oil, dress-up box, wrist-flicking click & scatology, beyond the comfortable setting and through to the core the man is unveiling, the gender politics, the ex-lovers, the curiosities of the world & the scatology.

Fortunately for me, and now for you, HERE is a tumblr dedicated to working through notable items from the Canadian youtube-savant's catalogue in detail, identifying and following the key threads, unpacking the motivation. Explanation is most definitely required. We are in an era where previously unheard ppl are not just emerging but blossoming in online semi-anonymous fame. Tonetta has an album coming out this year, which is great, but feels almost like an afterthought. The man has already found his ideal medium.

He's like a Tom Waits w/ balls enough to be honest&upfront and funk instead of schmaltz. So much funk.

based and pretty in the new age

2010-03-10T00:24:00.007Z

"I don't even know if I'm even a rapper anymore"

Right this very second Lil B is sat in front of his bedroom mirror, stoned to perfection, naked except for jewelry and maybe a pharoah's headdress, his voice almost a whisper as he slowly intones a mantra about staying positive and what a pretty bitch he is, masturbating himself into a profound state of consciousness to the tones of the Twin Peaks soundtrack.

This is the best youtube video of all time.

Lil B is prophet and pretty boy, based as in mashed and based as in confidently independent. Comfortable in his role as playboy mystic, comfortable online, he's new age; he's not too fussed about format, genre or anything else that might get in the way of his DIY productivity. Not just putting out albums and mixtapes, the based god's youtube channel is fresh from the ether and he's pushing 1 video a day on there lately. Which is besides his work w/ The Pack and producing for Soulja Boy.

"No I don't have a job & yr a bitch for asking"

Brandon has also published a book of his text messages and emails to fans. It's my birthday in a couple of months remember. Lil B is a vision of a future, an age of the rapper as online cottage industry, closely in touch with a small, devoted fanbase.

How long would it take us to come up w/ a cover as good as this?

His new album seems to be as far-out and pastoral as we've seen him, and promises to touch on topics close to my heart:

"This is not a song, it's more like an emotion"

Maybe he heard the first cLOUDDEAD album, he's from the bay area after all. Or it could be Vangelis, or one of the 70s glacial minimalists, but it seems more likely that California inspires a certain mentality that they've all tapped into. Here's a rap album Windham Hill could put out. A man for our times.

(Yes, that's the X-Men theme)

Hard Sell

2010-03-04T16:52:00.002Z

Continuing my spirit of musical-exchange w/ you good people, here's some UK funky house tracks I've found awesome this last year that I'm going to try and persuade you are worth yr attention. Kind of a hard sell maybe, but Bob, Dave J & Lianne have all at least quasi-appreciated some of these so I'm hopeful. These songs owe more to UK garage than US house, the shows, radio &c., largely but not entirely centred round a certain part of east London, w/ strong ties in style &/or personnel to 2-step and grime. As is not unusual right now, a lot of the music exists only in digital form, but more than that, a lot of songs are not just unreleased (or slow to be properly released) but only found in DJ sets, not showing up consistently in any definitive form. Which is actually sort of great.

Crazy Cousinz have had a few well-known tracks, notably Do You Mind, and Bongo Jam, which had enough of their goofy charm to get them ripped by Harry Hill. Inflation is my pick here for a few reasons: plenty of funky's tuned percussion in evidence (& we all love that), it's amazing, it's free of any of the elements of funky some of you might find more offputting, and most of all the structure is exquisite. The way the steady cymbals, synth-string stabs and whoops combine with the looser snare builds a lot of anticipation for when the xylophone kicks in w/ that righteous riff. As I said elsewhere, 2009 was a great year for synth-xylophone.

Some pre-song chatter that is on the mark when it points out this song "has a lot of energy". Real strong Caribbean feel in the piano and snare, a great beat and a girl telling you to suck her balls. No need for me to contribute beyond that.

This song is really tight and w/ the bass tone has an 80s US house vibe. Listen to the beat here, sounding wrong at first as the kickdrum comes in too early every other bar but starts to make sense as the song develops. If something as specific as diva vocals is getting in the way of yr enjoyment then you need to pull an Axl Rose/John Cage analysis of yr dislike.

A Rihanna remix to play spot the funky with. More build&release in evidence; some great cowbell&similar & haunted house bass whistle and then the almost niche/bassline crash cymbal chorus that is ridiculous fun. Rihanna is a great fit for funky, and DJs seem to have a great ear for sympathetic songs to incorporate, rewriting their own canon in the process.

If yr enjoying those at all you have to hear a proper set, there are some great ones at rinse.fm and sometimes on BBC 1xtra (DJ Q/Cameo). There's some good DJ Reflex mixtapes you can find by yourselves also.

More on the way.

Ciaran's John Thomas

2010-03-04T14:56:00.000Z

Fuck you, tell me something new

2010-02-25T14:54:00.007Z

Well the decade turned and a whole lot of sites and magazines and blogs busted a nut coming up with LISTS and tried to build narratives. As we all mulled last year, lists are partly about controlling and (if yr going public) presenting your concerns, your experiences&such biz, but these 00s music lists tend to be more than personal, they're in dialogue w/other critics (&/i.e. bloggers), people want consensus w/ their history-making, and they whine and pick at each others snapshots.

Anyway, making the effort to number music because the date's gone all funny is borderline numerology (normally a boring way of being superstitious). And there aren't too many collectives whose lists I'd be interested in. I'd like to see a Top Jams heard in Baghdad in 762 list, sorta, but I'd prefer a guidebook or better, someone from inside writing about how those jams got to be jams, because I don't know those people, and tho' music can give you a certain view on them, you need a way in.

Lists at least show you've been paying attention, and maybe even give the illusion that you care. I've been wondering lately how much we (i.e. YOU) care about music, especially the stuff that's coming out now, because we've gone pretty quiet.

Music is tied to identity, especially collective identity, in a way no other art form is. Music is an event, it occupies time&space like nothing else and marks the moment. And it's more open, inclusive & diverse than any other art form; nearly everyone has their jams. Cuz more than anything else music is affirmation: of the moment, of position, of a sentiment, of status, of a sound (floop floop floop), of structure, of yr skill, of ideas, of desire, of mood, of other music, of hate, of memory, of dreams (high or sobre), of quality, of boredom. And it just is, it gestures and expresses in one killer move. Fuck you.

Tho' I've always done the majority of my listening solo, I've also shared a lot of my sweetest and heaviest musical experiences w/ ppl reading this blog, so I'd like to see a resurgence of music-as-social-fabric, as something for us to use when we're 'us'.

If yr reading this then I want to know where you've got yr musical kicks from lately, and what sort of kicks they are. Was yr music Entertainment? and/or revelatory? Seriously, it can just be a youtube link and a sentence, but more would be AL-REET. If you like I'll add you to the contributors list, whoever you are.

Let me kick this shit off with some of the stuff I've got into and loved in 09 while I've not been stewing in older favourites (yes the main course is ready):

Start w/ The American Dream, mmhmm, oooh, oooh, Fresh from killing the radio - Single Ladies; Umberrrella - Terius Nash retreats to his bat-cave for his second solo album Love vs. Money. First album - Love/Hate or Love Me All Summer, Hate Me All Winter - was breezy and open and just fucking fantastic enough to be ripe for goofy-grinned youtube covers. Lv$ (almighty dollar cuz he's 'merican) starts out pretty open, pretty coverable, w/ galactic-scale pop even, but steadily reduces focus and ends up much more myopic. He's there on the cover, hands to temples, ready to GO IN. And youtubers have struggled w/ covering anything after the first couple of tracks, (but there are a shitload of screwed & chopped versions) cuz not only is this more of a studio record, these songs also work a lot better in context, this is more of a SUITE, in fact.

So, have a listen to this at horrible youtube bitrate while we continue:

Hard to overstate how great this is, and believe me, people have been trying. The track's paper thin, a surface of the most deliberate clicks, synth stabs, slow-decaying kickdrums and little studio flourishes that leave exactly the right space for our asshole-protagonist to self-harmonize, slow himself down, parrot-himself, warble&croon, chant foreground&background and do what he do.

Dream spends a lot of this record laying out his jet-setting VIP lifestyle in so many increasingly-intense incarnations that he's making himself the villain, coming to a head on Fancy, forcing people to recognise their ambitions in what he's saying - "You can be from the hood/But I know you want to live fancy" - and pushing those desires to the limit - "They say you can't buy love/Man, they lying". Mariah might sing all sassy about her status, and Ne-Yo act gentlemanly, but they're all poses, whether for self-defence or Entertainment, that let them hit key issues that resonate, making some amazing contributions to love-ballads as a genre, and Terius is no different. Doesn't really matter but he's consciously exploring those desires, those constructed senses-of-self throughout his music; dude's name is The-Dream.

And he's SO GOOD at posing. Framing himself perfectly at all times so he can pointedly drop a "Cupid ain't got shit on me" or do whatever it is that he's doing on Walkin' On The Moon, a much-maligned single w/ a video that goes thus:

Cruising for babes on the Millenium Falcon, dressed like a gay-biker, watching stars fly by on a flat-screen tv! Here we realise on the cover he wasn't massaging those temples to focus tunes, but rather focus optic beams - from his eyes! - cuz here he's got that shit under control Cyclops-style. The perfect setting to relax in the safety of yr clean-freak cockpit and serenade lycra-space-honeys by crooning, pulling down clouds, dazzling them and gurning like some sly cat-queer. Wingman comes in the form of Kanye West, comfortable in the role of 'Knobhead Chewbacca'. Woo-ooo-hooo!

Here's Terius getting married, in Trousers:

I love this man.

Next&supposedly last album's called Love King, out later this year. Now do that again.

Yeasayer, Manchester Academy 3

2010-02-22T13:31:00.003Z

Central singer moves his hands around, when he sings, like I do when I talk. I thought maybe I’d dance around on stage like him, if I were the singer of a band, which is a shame, actually, because his movements annoyed me somehow.

His vocals wouldn’t be out of place in a stadium rock band. This is not a bad thing.

The best part of the night is when, just after a chorus, all three singers let out a long harmonised scream.

The bassist, Gaz points out, looks like he should be in Street Fighter. He’s right.

The sound quality is impeccable, the clearest I’ve ever heard at a gig.

Clapping stings, feels like a needle underneath my nail, since someone tried to bite the end of my finger off.

When I get home, having enjoyed the gig, I want to send a song to Ben. But it’s impossible to pick one. Not because they’re all amazing, it’s just I don’t particularly like any of them, when I think about it. I enjoyed watching the band, and loved all the songs I knew, but sitting at home it’s only when all the songs flow into one noise I am most satisfied. Then certain parts stick out, grab your attention. But there is no one song that holds you. For me, anyway, this is how it is.

The support band is Javelin. They have a couple of 8 bit sounding songs I like a lot. They dance like they're genuinely enjoying it.
"Ok, next, you know who are coming on and they're gonna pour their hearts out for you." The Javelin singer says.

Yeasayer come out, and it looks like they enjoy themselves. But only the singer on the far left, the guitarist, looks like maybe he's pouring his heart out when he sings, which he does with a plain, modest manner.

Well now Superman said to Batman

2010-01-24T11:22:00.003Z

Ro, I am looking you in the eye and telling you yr mood is about to pick up:

Prisencolinensinainciusol

2009-12-18T12:57:00.005Z

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Apparently this is a song called Prisencolinensinainciusol, written by Adriano Celentano in 1972. I am not sure about the details, but am very certain it is awesome.

It's meant to be a breakdown of which English syllables and sounds are identified by foreign ears. Probably. So the "words" are all gibberish, but somehow compelling anyway.

Last night

2009-11-23T19:15:00.002Z

I had a dream I had somehow travelled back in time to the Victorian era. I was able to do this more or less at will, but I was definitely not supposed to at all. I was sat down talking to someone, preparing to go home, when I realized they were Girl Talk and they'd travelled back in time and released all their music incredibly early. The public loved it, even though there was no way to produce, or, I suppose, listen to the stuff Girl Talk was making.

BLING

2009-11-23T02:40:00.001Z

BLING BLING BLING BLING BLING BLING BLING

Welcome to Big School

2009-11-13T08:40:00.032Z

Maybe it's just Iceland's position on a fault line, but I have dug Björk for occupying a peculiar territory on the brink of the mainstream as much as for her music. Thanks to her my adopted uni-town hero Chris Corsano has been on Letterman, Matmos have met Metallica, Konono No1 have been heard on MTV, and she also gets to open the Olympics and remain popular with RZA and Mr Butler. Creating that territory where refugee elements from disparate sources can make a new life being bawled over has allowed her to make some rare jams indeed.

Treatment of sources is tricky, with social concerns to navigate as well as engaging with the sound. I remember uber critic Scott Seward digging the Konono No1 record's release, but gently pining for the era when ppl like Talking Heads would hear African music and try and rip it off rather than release it. The point wasn't that it was anything less than necessary that credit and money is properly given, but that curating can be dull, and canny rehousing of a sound is a more satisfying method of integration. Through her collaborating, Björk has done a pretty great job of both putting the spotlight on artists and incorporating them, and turning it into an event. Her £s and peculiarly visible position allow her to rotate her collaborators on stage as she chooses; laying into her for trend-hopping plays down what a rare talent she has for it, what a sympathetic and imaginative band leader she makes.

So you can see why I'm pleased to see after their collaboration with that good lady earlier in the year, Dirty Projectors have been imported by Solange Knowles. Dave Longstreth's long made use of RnB moves in his singing, the band cited big sister Beyonce as a favourite. and they pulled off a languid, robed dance routine on top of a mountain for their video for Stillness Is The Move. So it makes a kind of sense for Solange to cover it, but it's still quite a significant step up for the Dirty Projectors. She's somehow got in trouble with Universal Records for this despite the fact it's not being released, and as she's specifically asked for it to be spread around, enjoy with a clean conscience: ["Solange - Stillness Is The Move"].

Thing is, performer's aside, this is less of a synthesis and less novel than the original. It's significant that Solange doesn't really have to stretch to convincingly repatriate Amber Coffman's vocal part as pure RnB. Longstreth's glassy alarm trill is replaced with slowed samples from Erykah Badu's Bag Lady, itself sampled from Dre's XXPlosive, the effect cool enough but kind of unremarkable. Which is, yknow, considering what this is, remarkable. It might be unreleased, but Solange's gesture is promising and will keep me going, but damn I would love to see Solange incorporate Longstreth riffing away on a hillside, silently rotating like a wizard. In fact if you guys could make me an animated gif of that, ideally on a tshirt, that'd be fine.

Highlights from the Comments Appended to a YouTube Video Entitled "Exogenesis Symphony Pt 1: Overture by Muse"

2009-11-12T15:16:00.003Z

this song gives the feeling of a black planet sized ship hovering next to a destroyed planet and on the other side theres a huge sun (GoldenEagle911)

Everytime I hear this song, I want to explode into a happy nothingness. (dewey4evur)

I think this is one of the most emotional, amazing, hard-to-believe-that-a-human-w rote-them songs Matt has written....I thank God for his life.... (Mintbubblegum95)

day-to-day troubles burns away to this song (doopydoop123)

this sounds like a love scene taking place in the sky..or heavens...in the roman era....very sensual (yerm669)

THE BEST (jasmn09)

Dr Ciaran and the Space Sickness

2009-11-12T01:33:00.009Z

I went to see my doctor. Dr Ciaran.

He is a bad doctor. Whatever is wrong with me, even if it's nothing, he prescribes Muse videos.

I hear it's the same for all his patients.

Watching them, I got a weird sense of deja vu. I realised it wasn't that they sounded like Queen or ELP, it was something more profound than just the style; there was some deep spiritual affinity I couldn't place.

Muse were trying to realise a vision, and with every video I watched, I got closer to working out what it was. I felt that I was recognising some common experience or history with Muse, and I wondered if this was what Dr Ciaran had foreseen, if there was some suppressed memory hidden in the music he wanted me to discover.

Then one evening as I watched Muse's symphony, Exogenesis, it clicked:

Well done, Dr Ciaran, well done.

Wilco (the gig)

2009-11-05T01:10:00.003Z

I went to see Wilco in Leeds and they were so good I may never need to see another band again. I’ve been waiting so long for this I’m not even sure I was there.

Three songs in and Jeff Tweedy throws someone out for filming the gig.
This is the wrong foot we have got off on.

“I’m sorry you had to see my scary face,” he tells us later.

Someone shouts, “We love you Jeff!”

“Oh, good!” He replies. “We love you too! We wrote a song about it. We played it already. We played it first.”

They opened with Wilco (the song) as we all knew they would.

I’m very sweaty. We had to run for the train. I’m there with Chris and he spilled coffee down his shirt an hour before our originally intended train. So he went to a dry cleaner then bought a new shirt.

In Leeds we are looking for food. We see a Nando’s.

“We’d have to sit in…but shit, for Nando’s it’s worth it, we have time,” I convince him, or I would have if not for the prices. We settle on Subway.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask when he sits down.

“Aren’t we eating in?”

“Are you fucking kidding? You think we have any fucking time at all?”

“But 10 minutes ago,” he begins.

“That. Was. Nando’s!” I tell him.

“So in America, when we play this song, everyone sings along and we all take a break,” Jeff Tweedy is telling us. He's talking about Jesus, etc

“I don’t expect it to happen here, but you want to sing along, feel free. If I think you’re doing a good job I’ll just step away from the mic, like this.”

It’s more a sway.

“This is a soft sell; we’re not a hard sell rock band. You don’t have to sing along!”

Almost immediately he’s stepped away from the mic.

He seems more into the gig now, swinging his mic and throwing it so high it looks un-catch able, yet he does.

The first encore starts with Poor Places, the psychedelic ending building and tearing ahead taking us to some immense and unrecognisable froth of distortion.

When I feel as lost as I ever have, I recognize the simple drum beat from Spiders and Wilco are concentrating so hard on making this music.

Everyone should be able to go and see Wilco whenever they need.

Jeff gets us to clap; he wants our arms as high in the air as possible. But my armpits stink from the sweating.

In the second encore, during Impossible Germany, the band members gravitate towards each other. Jeff and his second guitarist, Pat Sansone, I believe, face each other and John Stirratt drifts over to Glenn Kotche whilst Nels Cline, who never speaks, plays a solo that might have been going on forever. His face is constant motion. Only Mikael Jorgensen doesn’t move, since he’s at the piano.

All gig I’ve been looking over at this one sound guy, who wears the beard of a metal band. I can see him enjoying it, maybe taking some ideas, but he never nods his head along with the rest of us.

“Ok,” says Jeff, “do you want to hear something from A.M or Summerteeth?”

We cheer for Summerteeth.

“Man,” he asks, “why does everyone pick on A.M?”

Soon they’re playing Can’t Stand It, the song I wanted.

Chris and I stay with Eleanor. Inside her house I can see my breath. I watch Beetlejuice and spend time, instead of sleeping, just going in circles of I can’t be a writer, I can’t be an illustrator, I can’t grow old.

Jeff Tweedy screams like no one I’ve ever heard. It is exactly what I needed.

Ted Leo, optimist

2009-10-26T13:56:00.002Z

Ted Leo seems very smart. His music, the actual music, feels very earnest and whilst his lyrics can be self conscious, sometimes angry or bitter, the earnestness remains. Ultimately he seems very knowing, and his songs often feel hugely melancholy but optimistic. This is what I like about him and his songs.

putting the 'it' back in 'shit'

2009-10-21T23:04:00.003+01:00

It feels like all the cold in England is coming from this place, though really it’s just a road with some ferns.

I’m on Snake Pass with Gaz and Dave, driving to Sheffield to see Themselves play.

Gaz sings The Bad Touch by the Bloodhound gang like “making love to one another…like animals…do on TV.”

Dave keeps shouting not to look at the Ipod display while he tries to find some Themselves, so my passengers can hear some before the gig.
He’s already smoked half a spliff and he’s my driving guide for this journey; I haven’t even taken my theory test.

As we reach Snake Pass he tells me he doesn’t have his driving license with him. If we get pulled over I will never drive again. If I don’t make any one of these corners we will never do anything again. I make a joke about having the bends. No one else finds it funny either. The road feels like an animal trying to throw me off its back. I force myself round the bends at 50. I tell the others it’s ok, I checked the road on Google Earth.

Pete calls me before.
“I gather you’re planning to drive to Sheffield tonight?”
I tell him yeah.
“In what world is that a good idea? You’ve got nothing that proves you can drive and Dave last week drove his car home drunk and on loads of pills. And he’s going to be telling you what’s right and wrong.”
Dave can hardly believe this is legal, but it is if we stay off the motorway.

We make Sheffield and actually I hadn’t accounted for this. Snake Pass is a direct connection between Manchester and Sheffield. As soon as we have directional options I’m lost, technically.

The people downtown aren’t real. The black outside the car is replaced with light and hundreds of people. We pass Spartans. We see the venue, Bungalows and Bears. Seconds later we see Anoush for the first time in maybe a year. I shout him. Gaz starts singing all the single ladies! All the single ladies!

Dave joins in and whilst we’re waiting behind someone in a queue to leave a car park Gaz undoes his seatbelt and, a blur, lunges forward to jab the horn, laughing maniacally.

Anoush has a kind of smart innocence which can be too much but is also what I love about him. I’m thinking about the drive home. I might as well be about to slay my first dragon. Anoush is amazed I took snake pass. Tonight feels worthwhile.

At the gig we meet Frankie and her friends. That drive has made me the closest I will get to being a king and I can’t stop staring at Frankie’s friend, a pretty girl with this low cut top whose name I never learn but who has awakened some medieval lust I try to ignore, not certain if she’s staring back at me or my staring.

The support act is The Ruby Kid, a Sheffield rapper. He usually performs with a band but tonight just plays to instrumental mp3s from his laptop. His opening song is vocals only.

He name drops James Joyce and Jean Paul Sartre and I feel like if he was just a writer he wouldn’t be anything new, but since he’s rapping it makes all the difference, though I don’t think it should. But we might get on ok if we were drinking together, and he seems like a drinker.

The phrase each more lovely than the last was invented for girls who go to Themselves gigs.

“Hey shut the fuck up back there,” Doseone tells the people at the back.
“No, no, it’s a bar, dude, it’s a bar,” Jel tells him.
“I don’t care if it’s Mao Tse Tung and his closest advisors birthing communism.”

This was worth the drive. Doseone’s rapping has a force it doesn’t on record. I get the same feeling watching him freestyle as I do watching Bruce Lee fight.

About Jel Dave says, I had an MPC and I was fucking shit; this guy is FUCKING AMAZING. Dave’s hair is wet where he finished the spliff.
“Roland!” he says, “I’m drunk! But I sincerely love you!”
I love you too man, I tell him.

“I’m getting bored,” Gaz tells me. Talking at gigs is like standing in front of paintings.
“I can’t understand what he says and they don’t do anything with the songs.”
Aren’t they doing something now? I ask, but he doesn’t hear.

It feels like sometimes Doseone is trying to create a texture with his voice. Sometimes the pleasure for me is listening, figuring out what he’s saying and what he might mean, as with any lyrics.

Doseone looks like he’s been shot, like he might cry at any second, rapping in the face of and pushing audience members.

“Hey Jel,” he asks, “Would you rather go to Heaven or Hell?”
“I’d like to go to the hot death place. I think it’d be more fun.”

I think Doseone is a kind of persona. He seems very against commercial hip hop, something he’s become a kind of inversion of. Adam Drucker, Doseone, has maintained a lot of control over his creative output – the way he designed the covers for Subtle’s albums and the fact Subtle perform in costume, for example. And he seems so fucking good at what he does.

He asks questions: Are you a good person? Does anyone here have a best friend?
Where else am I more anonymous than a crowd like this? I don’t speak to Doseone all evening because I would be trying to answer these questions. I’d be proving points.

His energy is at odds with the Sheffield crowd. Almost no one is moving. He seems almost ridiculous taunting people on the balcony, asking how much Disney money is in Ice Cube’s bank account.

“When Jel’s mum had to get her dick removed I was the first one at the hospital.”

The last time I saw Dose was the basement club where we put Subtle on, so Jel was there too, the Bierkeller in Manchester. There was a feeling of vague reverence, perhaps imagined, everyone there to see them, see Dose speak. It seems like he played up to that some, undermining it with jokes and observations.

Maybe this time, performing almost as wallpaper with this bubble of people between Themselves and the bar, he’s making fun of all that. It just doesn’t matter if you say yes, I am a good person obviously.

In a song towards the end of the set Jel stutters this drum solo, then just stops.
“Ok,” he says, “That’s that.”
Doseone has been trying so hard not to let this happen to the whole gig, which has had this sense of stopping and starting. This is a bar, first and foremost.

“We’re going to make you a promise,” Dose says.
“Themselves will let you age but we’ll never let you grow old. Seriously. I’ll kick you in your dick if you’re getting old around me.”

It’s raining for the journey home. There’s nothing beyond the windows of the car. My blood feels like lead or something. We’re taking our friend Frankie home with us.

How’s the experience so far, I ask as we reach snake pass.
A bit bumpy, Frankie says.
“Bumpy?” I ask, “BUMPY?” Her words are a challenge. Staying above 50 is not. Staying alive will be if these bends stay as sharp. I tell myself respect the road. Tonight will not be the night I leave a good looking corpse, or rather one hideously charred.

I had a dream the wheel of my car was a croissant, making steering almost impossible. Gaz and I are singing and it is almost too much when the road does the wet dog getting dry thing again.

The final bend reveals a spread of orange lights floating in the black.
That is our home.

We’re on a motorway and everyone is screaming except Navigating Gaz making me think he planned this. Dave is screaming YEEEESSSSS! like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. We’re very illegal.

There’re no cops and I don’t get flashed when I go past a speed camera ten too fast.

We drop Frankie off and Dave tries to take photos of his dick with her camera after she leaves it in the car.

We drop Gaz off. Dave says,
“Man, I tried so hard to take photos of my penis on Frankie’s camera. I didn’t know what I was doing; then I realized I was filming. So she has three videos of my dick on there now, but it’s too dark to see anything.”

I don’t slow down for any of the junctions on my road.
You fucking dick, Dave says but he’s laughing.

I'm not saying that

2009-10-02T00:28:00.009+01:00

But I might do in future. Maybe I'll say: 'You can only Not-Be the Sort-Of-Band-That-Doesn't-Go-'Doo-Doo-Doo' if there's some contemporary/prior band out there to do all the Be-ing.' I'm pretty sure Derrida spent years making the same point. Which is interesting. But what I was saying was more that I'm pretty sure round Oh Sweet Nothin time Reed knew he wouldn't be able to pull the doo doo stuff off in a detached enough way to still get licensing money from Away We Go, so when Transformer time came round and he was feeling the McCartney lack and he came up with the idea of putting it in someone else's mouth, even better, COLOURED GIRL'S mouths, well, he probably felt so good he got up and did some tai chi celebrations and maybe he was on such a roll he penned a few lines of what would become THE RAVEN.

so you're saying

2009-09-30T11:55:00.001+01:00

that it's actually the presence of the Beatles that enabled "Oh! Sweet nothin'" to be so good?

ON THE CONTRARY

2009-09-27T15:33:00.002+01:00

The only reason Lou Reed held off on the affirmative jabber was because it was being done so well by the likes of McCartney et al but as soon as he felt the void he was all about doo do-do do-do do-do-do doooooo even if he had to get "the coloured girls" to help out.

Why the Velvet Underground are better than The Beatles

2009-09-23T00:59:00.002+01:00

Because at the end of "Oh! Sweet Nothin'" by the Velvet Underground, Paul McCartney isn't going "doo doo ba doo ba doo doo dooooo" which he definitely would be if it were a Beatles song.

Mother fucker!

2009-09-19T23:06:00.005+01:00

Mother fucker!

The turkey

2009-09-11T00:31:00.002+01:00

J.B, in Kansas, is asking me what Weezer I have which is the Blue album. Oh, and the Green one, but I don’t really like that. It feels like I’m done with that band, I tell him.

“But you don’t have their best album,” which he tells me is Pinkerton.

Across the Sea comes from this album. Melanie, my friend in Kansas, sent me this song, years ago. I think I took the same thing from this song she did.

I’m home, but that doesn’t feel like the right word. I’ve been to all the places I talked about in America. I’ve started a job where I have to sign my name a hundred times every day. You have a weekend and the first time you sign your name when you’re back you forget how long you’ve been away, what day it is, how long you have left on your shift. What doesn’t help is working in a massive sports hall with no windows.

Each day I start my shift with one of J.B’s thousand plus songs he gave me in my head.

Most days it is a song from Pinkerton. This is an album, I think, about a guy, girls and relationships. Rivers Cuomo, obviously, is the heart of the guy but it could be a concept album about a million people that would love this album.

It’s a fucking incredible description of loneliness, shyness, excitement, partying.

Its strength, I think, is that it’s basically a story that works really well as a bunch of songs.

The idea of it as a semi concept album revolving around Pinkerton from Madame Butterfly is sort of weak, but it’s enough of a thread to tie the songs together, to let you know “this is a whole.”

This is an album chasing its own tail – a lot of the lyrics come out of the self conscious over analysis of Rivers Cuomo.

How stupid is it, I can’t talk about it, I have to sing about it.

It has that rational side, also featured in Why Bother? And an idealistic, passionate side, as in Tired of Sex or El Scorcho – a song which ties the two together.

There’s a bitterness contrasted with playfulness, The Good Life a good example.

The confliction in the songs and the record is highlighted by the consistency of the album. If Blue album is a mashup of colour, Pinkerton is all the same hues. All the songs feel part of a tight whole. A couple songs even flow into each other. Compare that to In Dreams and Surf Wax America from Blue.

Partly this may come from the albums initial conception as a space opera where all the songs would flow into one, but whatever.

But that conflict thing is maybe what stands out the most. The wild emotional contrast of the feelings and ideas cover all my responses to relationships and the idea of them. I am in tight with this album.

The songs are incredibly catchy. I’m excited at the start of each. The style, vibe, is incredibly unpretentious, the excitement of the band massively endearing.

The drum fills especially come from, go beyond, those 70s rock bands that Weezer, so Blue album taught me, grew up with. This is the other way Rivers’ personality comes through, it’s how he chose to tell this story.

When Rivers doesn’t quite hit the right notes, it’s a self conscious thing, he could have done another take, but it feels earnest, makes the songs more expressive and approachable. It ends up very bittersweet.

It’s a record to listen to alone, whilst thinking about why you are and why you shouldn’t be. When you’re thinking about how frustrating it is trying to deal with other people, how easy it is not to trust anyone, to end up confused and why human interaction ends up so false, difficult and disgusting.

But it’s also about how easily you can end up falling in love with everything. How you can feel wretched but want to celebrate that in the most heartfelt way, to consolidate, just say fuck it and feel good.

This review has been Hell. In writing it I wanted to reflect the personal nature of the album, which was easy when writing about me, but when trying to apply it to the album and its content in an analytical way was much harder.

It is a deeply personal album, it easily moulds to your shape. Rivers gives the exact right amount of balance between his story and yours, but maybe that’s more to do with the subject matter. In which case I’d say this makes the album even better, as it could represent a sort of unity between people, which is what the album is most basically about.

I have needed this album, I wish I’d had it for years.

Terminator X quit the hip-hop scene in 2003 and has been running an ostrich farm in South Carolina.

2009-09-10T17:51:00.000+01:00

So, about that Tyondai Braxton thing...

2009-08-25T14:58:00.004+01:00

Pitchfork Media previews "Platinum Rows." Check it out.

A lot of the noise surrounding this record is of the "golly, he's made a classical-crossover album! How perfectly novel!" variety. Such terms as "New Music" (in the obnoxiously specific sense used by classical boffins, which implies that all popular music is "historically regressive") and even "nu-classical" (thanks again, Pitchfork!) have reared their heads.

I'm still out on this; if there's one thing to be said for Market Garden, it's that it's pretty much ploughing its own furrow. Bits of it sound like New Music (of the fleet-footed, Jennifer Higdon school), bits of it sound like Warner Brothers' soundtracks, and bits of it sound like GirlTalk sampling John Williams and Van Dyke Parks. So, it's either a visionary mash-up or a quasi-pornographic mess. With kazoos. Or fucking both...what do I know?

Late to the party

2009-08-05T13:58:00.004+01:00

FAO: long-haired headphone-bedecked bus-riding dial-uping uber-bummed sixteen year old Mogwai-adorned Tom: as yr elder and better, let me tell you that right now you are sleeping on a guy and this guy is the future.

Yknow, the guy that wrote that tune you've only heard through Jam's furious air-riffing with his leg up on a bench and his head circling with an intensity normally saved for Enter Sandman, the guy that JAMES STAFFORD has some pretend-hate crush on (his reports after seeing Wilkes-Krier in the flesh a dazed&deeply felt "he's a BEAST..."), this guy,

Well shit you might be missing out now but in 2009 you'll be reading his short-stories, watching news anchors fawn over him as he demolishes their shows, reading his mutant replies to fan letters that blast out epic calls to action and and and AAANNNNDD ! - REALLY fucking anticipating his instrumental new age piano record about his car, as in, once you've heard about, nothing will be as vital for you to hear, as in, there will be no gesture that could possibly compete with this; having enough heart that you can throw things SO wide open even George Winston is allowed in! I mean shit. I'd already heard how well he got on with donk, the man can't stop bringing us into the fold like the good shepherd he is.

I apologise unequivocally to everyone else for not being able to better prepare you for this event. I did not foresee this. On the other hand:

Guitar Solos

2009-07-30T15:19:00.004+01:00

Not a fan of them, in general. But this one ("Say Please") agrees with me.

x sweet x.

2009-07-12T02:37:00.004+01:00

Reading all my Meltzer over the last couple of months and looking at his formative listening experiences compared to my own, one thing I felt was a real lack of Japan. Now that isn't a cue for dwelling or musing on the relationship between Japan and some X, cos it's always been part of my X and that's my point, it's as unfamiliar and weird as California. But I'm going to share something I'd really like to see about someone I'm way off having my fill of:

And here he is redeeming my weekend with his undefeatable coat move and a champion guitar solo:

Away w/yr other, that's fucking homely.

Thoughts on that whole Tyondai Braxton album listening party

2009-07-04T15:51:00.006+01:00

"Strange, steroidal kitsch" was my suggested hook; my friend Alex responded with "classical Girl Talk."

The last time I heard any TB solo material was 2005--noisy, loopy electronic stuff, with a distinct emphasis on texture. I want to say "industrial," but I'm sure that Industrial afficionados will disagree. Central Market, Braxton's first post-Battles solo release, preserves the loops, and it's hardly quiet, but otherwise evinces a major aesthetic shift. It's more dancy (although not in a strictly danceable way--go on, prove me wrong), and the sound palette has expanded to include all manner of acoustic instruments: pianos, trombones, flutes, clarinets....

Considering that he used to be a one-man (plus copious effect pedals) band, Braxton's desire to exploit the resources available to an established recording artist with a built-in fan base is understandable. However, the results of his explorations are anything but: four-to-the-floor bone-shakers, built on Reichian keyboard loops and symphonic string swells, punctuated by fuzzy synth glissandi and pitch-shifted chipmunk vocals al la Battles' Mirrored; gloopy electro-ambient interludes; brass fanfares and flute solos; militaristic snare drum rolls (on almost every track).

Okay, so maybe that sounds like a blast (how would I know what a blast sounds like?), but the reality is thoroughly perplexing. Central Market is a stomping monolith of random episodes, confusing and (at a "listening party," at least--lights dimmed, voices hushed) kinda arduous. Maybe it'll come together after a few listens; it's certainly colourful, and there's an underlying sense of musical mischief that might just redeem the kitschiness, once properly apprehended. For now, however, I'm totally in the dark. What do Girl Talk sound like, anyway?

2009-06-16T18:41:00.003+01:00

Nothing like high-pitch all-gears-to-go exhileratingly crescendo-esque pop with a melody thats like a bucket of cold water and lyrics you can a.) have fun with and b.) sing along to, playing loud while you're running spring-footed on a day that is all cool, even warmth.

yes, I would hang out with Madonna for a day

2009-05-25T15:29:00.002+01:00

Something in the way you love me won’t let me be.

Not my words: the words of Madonna. Or whoever wrote them for her.

I know these words because I’ve been listening to a Flaming Lips’ cover, of the song Borderline, which I quite like.

I don’t want to be a prisoner so, baby, won’t you set me free.

I actually really like the lyrics. I like them more because Madonna did them first.

I get this sense of naivety which I find oddly earnest and which totally doesn’t fit with the rather epic end to the Flaming Lips’ version.

But it makes so much sense for the Flaming Lips to have covered this. The can’t-help-it-playfulness in the lyrics are there in everything Flaming Lips have done that I’ve heard (in fairness I only have Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I’ve heard bits of other albums, although I can probably rest my case on that title alone).

I don’t know if they covered Borderline with a sense of irony (“Madonna cover” is inherently pretty lols) but I like to think Wayne Coyne has a total childhood sweetheart love affair going on with those 80s songs.

I also really like Material Girl by Madonna and it has that same sense of playful naivety from Borderline. I don’t know how these songs fit into her career in terms of time or style or anything and I feel like it would be wrong of me to be bothered.

I was also thinking about fashion. I think I really like 70s shirts but I can’t wear them because I’m not willing to fully commit to a 70s look. You can pull off a vaguely 70s tinged shirt or something and it can look damn good, but I’m not that high level on the fashion subtlety scale (which doesn’t exist – so I could never get there).

We had 70s shirts and perms and all that. We had 80s mullets and garish t-shirts and socks with tights and etc. Then we had that 90s minimalist thing which I’m not even sure existed. Now we’re back to that 80s stuff. Like an unimaginative mountain or lazy fashion chasm – one side mirrors the other. Are we about to see a resurgence of delicious 70s shirts? Please, God?

And italo disco is resurfacing, another icon of the 80s, blended into dance punk and house: It’s back, but we do it a little differently.

This could be good news for 70s shirts is what I’m saying.

Brotopia

2009-05-19T20:33:00.005+01:00

I'm pretty sure everyone hates Animal Collective at least some of the time. I relistened to Feels a few weeks back, and it wasn't bad, didn't deserve to be the point I jumped ship, and I started to feel out the bromance of the Animal Collective sound.

Sufficiently well meditated, I present to you all a Bromantic Mix, more of a radio-style broadcast, romanticism without the romance, for yr hearty lols at my first ableton experiments. Because I love you, it's got fraternity, optimism, vocal harmonies, tenderness, gay guys freaked out by women, some obscurities&some favourites, all a little fragile. A lot of it just sounds like a string of fat handed mistakes to me but I guess my ambivalence about it is fitting considering how I feel about its inspiration. I've got a wav that sounds much better if anyone wants it, but otherwise, enjoy:

Magical Animals&Meaning In Real-Time

2009-05-13T22:10:00.009+01:00

It's painful being clueless&confused. And one thing that can bring on cluelessness is NOISE. Maybe its the sound of confusion. Thinking about it can give you a feeling worse than 36 hrs of ear-ringing, which is exactly what I got from Black Dice (gotta be louder than yr support), especially if you think about its relationship w/ROCK. You might hear a demon tell you all noise has one true face, one meaning, one effect but you don't need to be arguing w/a purist to notice its differing pedigree&lineage. You can make noise yr rotting end or the sound of yr insemination (yum!), its all on YOU, and maybe was all about YOU from the start anyway, which is obv.the most painful of all. You could put it to song as "you look to find direction but all you see is yr reflection"&in fact someone DID,&they provided a good bit of theatre to start the night out. We were in a big old hall w/very sweet bar staff. Lianne had got in on the guestlist and had inspired me to take notes. Our opening act started hid behind the monitors giving nothing away but carefully propping up a faded cream baseball cap emblazoned thus:

EAGLES
WORLD TOUR 1994

As a background accompaniment to this focal point we get some shifty looping clicks which form the basis of a gradual layering up to a thin brassy sheen, a sort of formless anthemic nostalgia, which framed the EAGLES hat pretty well. The nostalgia breaks into a bright&slightly frightening haircut buzz which gets lost in the Bill&Ben/bath-fart gloops that have been bread&butter to a generation of noise bros, and some birdsong trapped in chewing gum.

Wide pan-out and bringing the sunset indoors w/bassy rumbles&cosmic ice cream van tones to invoke the same very excellent Caribbean scene heard at the end of Panda Bear's Carrots. Treating us to the grand finale now, the EAGLES cap surfaces w/battered electric guitar and solos over the waves into eternity, in a gesture of Rock Generosity to the audience, leaving us w/a warm glow of fretwork vapour-trails of the past. This is the end of rock though over-exposure, meaning impossible because all moves have been made so many times, filled up so much space, that they cease to be discernible. This thought cemented w/an epilogue where our lonely hero strums out a washed-out ballad for the end of (rock) time, singing "In a house full of meers/it's not easy to find yr way" and the prev mentioned direction/reflection musing. & the name of this act?: DUCKTAILS

W/no noise but treating rock as a live option, were Experimental Dental School, who were polite enough to thank us after every song&are probably devoid of vices. They are a lean DIY duo -rock sustainable as cottage industry- w/chops and a bit of mentoring from Deerhoof. All small scale enough that me not liking them doesn't seem worthy but of more import: their guitarist Jesse Hall's short trousers&general buffness hint towards possible transformation into Zell from Final Fantasy VIII(&they've just released their album for free).

I decided to spend my t-shirt money on more beer. Now able to pronounce Zywiec, Neil Campbell from Astral Social Club stepped us his game for this kinda immense London audience w/assistance from Tirath Singh Nirmala (whose beard was blamed by some serious guy behind me on the first of three buses home for spoiling his enjoyment of the set - ...) and other hairy British bohos, including a makeshift choir. My feet planted, Campbell does everything possible to assist me in having the best pint of my life, saturating everything with harmony to turn it into one moment of endless immediacy. I'm waiting for the heartbeat bass drum to enter and underpin and sure enough, when it comes in you can feel a wave of people getting on board all at once. A mysterious wave and the choir of cider-drinking longhairs appears to goof and churn out drones. Campbell's wailing, back-arched and completely at home in the world. "It never was nor will be since it is now" they used to say as solace for minds stuck in bodies w/an aptitude for suffering, now Astral Social Club show everyone the same trick.

Lvl 100 Beastmasters Black Dice navigate audience-agony by not-really-giving-a-shit, tonight manifested in turning out the lights and STARTING just like that. It is night time now&I'm light on my feet, the stage filling up w/foliage, flares belched up into the sky, a bandana'd&bikini'd silhouette giving a Queenly salutation, Mizaru w/sideways belly move and powerstaff artfully drummed for emphasis, Kikazaru behind curtain of hair & Iwazaru staring out like a shepherd w/statue's eyes.

For ease of control magical animals are introduced so that our livers and spleens will be overtaken with herd instinct and get to it. But they're easy on us, gently eliciting conversation between creatures and also deploying their recent trick of animal song. Only once do they bring out the cane, w/the bass part from Kokomo, and jesus - 200+ haircuts&pelvises rolling in time! This is ridiculous. I've finished another pint without noticing. I take a cruise to&from the toilet through a menagerie of livers and spleens and toes. Of course that arsehole on the bus home prefers listening to the records. Of course he does.

Here's an interview between Black Dice&Genesis P-Orridge in self-titled magazine w/recording through skulls and some first class anecdotes

2009-05-13T15:40:00.003+01:00

Free jazz comes from theory? I don't know. Coleman certainly has some theories (he calls his system of organising musical material "harmolodics"; I know nothing about it, but the blending speaks of a desire to arrive at some sort of urmusic--something that deals with all the musical elements in a more cohesive way, dissolving the traditional hierarchies), but a lot of people say they're bullshit.

It came about naturally, I guess: a number of musicians were interested in bypassing the standard set-up to get to the heart of expressivity and interplay...something like that (consider the socio-political factors involved: the civil rights movement, Black Power, the rise of individualism).

I certainly don't see free jazz as a specifically cerebral music, any more than I see abstract expressionism as a cerebral art.

two thoughts

2009-05-12T17:15:00.008+01:00

I enjoy writing for you babes here, or at least, I'm enjoying the writing as PRACTISE, like I enjoy shaking hands and my old boss enjoyed tweaking his phone-manner to perfection. For all the shit&agony inherent in trying to do (anything) this, we have here an academy, documentation&a home for our 2&1/2 posters to take part in dialogue, which actually seems (a bit) good.

So,
Ro's talk stoked a thought I'd had going that w/all our media diffusing the attentions of us musically-curious, even the quasi musically-curious and nothing to force our gaze... I mean with WEBSITES getting all friendly recommending us music amidst the ads and with everything suddenly free and immediately available you MIGHT have a think about the motivations of this whole process that let this come about. Not to mention human untrustables w/their unknown allegiances and mysterious hype and whole musical movements being suspect class and race wise, I mean SHIT, this could push a weary man's critical faculties enough so that they detach and undermine themselves&he end's up w/more than a knawing sense of doubt, watching the chunder of a process nullifying itself fall into his lap as he tries to pay attention to the support at a concert. :-(

COMING UP: historicist noise&rock debate in the forest

well jazz then

2009-05-12T13:02:00.003+01:00

So basically free jazz comes from theory?

If we didn't have 12 bar blues or musical notation then free jazz couldn't exist?

But since we have all these systems which allow for loose improvisation, free jazz exists to kick against that?

Because then it's sort of a statement about that, isn't it? I mean movements in music...

Well alot of people, when it comes to movements and theories in art, have alot of big ideas. It should be done this way and that. In music people don't seem so drastically divided, like they're not trying to fix up one kind of perfect music to crumble all the others into submission. Except maybe Punk, they're really trying to kick against mainstream pop music and culture, perhaps the way post modernists are trying to turn away from modernism.

With that stupid point loosely made: what's the point in the stuff like what we saw on Saturday?

I mean I enjoyed it but if it's already been said why repeat it without adding anything?

I think I like free jazz

2009-05-12T00:16:00.004+01:00

The thing I like about FREE JAZZ is the level of abstraction. There's no melodic material, no proscribed rhythms, no tonal centre (well, in this sort of Ornette Coleman/Cecil Taylor stuff), so you end up having to listen hard to things that are usually secondary. Most notably, I think, timbre--the unique sounds of the instruments involved.

Something I was saying to various of our compatriots on Saturday is how you have to meet the performers half way (maybe it's just me--I'm sure plenty of people enjoy it as a completely visceral experience). You need to work a little to tune in to the consciousness of the music, if you'll excuse the New Age-ism. Because of this, it's a music of long durations: the players need time to identify the space of the improvisation and their respective positions within it; likewise the listeners.

Treatise, a 1960s piece by the English composer Cornelius Cardew, helps to illustrate this notion. The written music consists of a 193-page graphic score, containing hundreds of undefined symbols (very few of them taken from traditional musical notation); some of the pages feature nothing but a few lines. His idea was that a group of improvisers, working from the book, would gradually figure out a taxonomy--a way of translating the visual material into a consistent, "architectural" performance--ideally without ever discussing it. The length of the piece was Cardew's way of turning this into an intuitive process: just keep playing from one end to another and it should happen by default. (I don't think it ever did.)

My one caveat, regarding Saturday's concert, was that the players seemed too eager to slip into a particular idiom that FREE JAZZ has mined from the off: pontilistic, wall-of-noise skronking. The second "set" ended on an eerie, atmospheric note; I was hoping that they'd continue playing in that vein for a while. Instead, they stopped, soaked up the applause, and leapt straight back into:

piano piano PIANO pianO! piAno? PIANOPIANOPIANO pianopiano
drums drums DRUMS DRUMS drumsdrums! DruMSDRums drums
SAXophoNE SaxophonesaxopHone! SaxophoneSaXoPhone

comebacks

2009-05-11T22:49:00.003+01:00

So I heard Amy Winehouse had a fairly disastrous comeback gig the other day. But hasn't it only been like four months since she released something?

How can that really be a comeback? Or if it is are the Dirty Projectors etc etc, you see where I'm going with that already right? I mean the Dirty Projectors played 3 times in as many months last year, or something like that. I mean compare the level of impact this Amy Winehouse gig has had with the Led Zepplin comeback gig. Go on. Fucking compare them.

Is this a product of our society of instant gratification? Where if we aren't bombarded with constant shit we just forget all about? And where can I get some instant gratification? Apart from Spotify, obviously. Or the internet in general. What now hm?

Or was this just far, far too stupid to mention out loud?

cross over blog post

2009-05-10T18:36:00.006+01:00

Alun do you remember when we went to see that Free Jazz the other night?

It was quite good, wasn't it?

Except how good can Free Jazz really be? How good can anything really be?

I don't know. I barely know what I'm talking about.

I believe it was Evan Parker we went to see last night. He was playing saxophone. There was also a pianist and a drummer. The drummer looked alot like Skinner from the X-Files.

They were all great musicians and I kept wondering how they'd play a more conventional type of music. If they were playing some regular, 4/4 jazz standard. How would they embellish their parts and etc, etc.

But maybe that wouldn't be a good enough exhibition of their skill. Maybe constant soloing, their free jazz, is the only adequate way for them to express their ideas.

But maybe that's just a way to develop good ideas. And now they have all these neat ideas (the pianist put a sheet of paper between the piano strings, the drummer played a cymbal with his hands on his lap) how can they fit them into a song?

Perhaps there's no appropriate way; free jazz is the only vehicle for their expression. It is the best way to fully explore everything they have. It is self serving.

This makes me think, sort of, about an upcoming game: Beyond Good and Evil 2. Recently "gameplay footage" or something was leaked. Here it is (watch in HD):

(no one knows if this is actual gameplay footage or a trailer or something fake, incidentally.)

The similarity is this: the setting looks really interesting, with alot of detail, a fairly dense population and a lived in feel. But free running in games, so far, has annoyed me greatly. It's like a distraction from what is generally not a very good game. It's alot of surface.

But maybe, with a world this detailed, that kind of free running is the only adequate way to see it all, to take it all in and feel a part of that world.

You see?

It's just it felt sort of ridiculous when the band stopped playing for a minute, we all applauded, then they started again playing basically the same stuff. Since it's all improvised we're just supposed to revel in their playing? I guess that's fine. They all seemed very amiable.

I guess I can sum up by saying that if I'd been standing I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much. As it was I was sitting and I could let it wash over me if I chose. But then there were bits that were interesting which I might not have enjoyed if I didn't also play the drums. As something emotional it left me cold, but as something technical it was great (although I believe their playing was rooted in emotion, I'm not trying to criticise here or anything).

There were alot of ideas I intend to steal to one day perhaps create something other than free jazz.

Or whatever.

buggin out

2009-05-04T02:57:00.006+01:00

I want my reworked classics to be lighthearted, it's just more GRIST to play with. I don't know when rappers started copying parts of the rhymes from the songs they covered but I'm used to it, but a remade video is noo to me, and what with it being THIS video of all videos, I thought that made it worthy of our collective attentions. This is on the pretty great J Period Q-Tip mixtape which you can use yr smarts to find.

Not reverential, not cribbing too much, not recycling the more choice lines, not as good colour effects a full 18 years after the original wtf, not quite as charming in their goofing. But they're still goofing pretty hard, Cudi's got his skinnies on and even has a little go at the jerk dance (as best as I can interpret). Borrowed quality is still quality:

Eugene Robinson talks about Fighting

2009-05-03T23:17:00.004+01:00

I’d been building this gig up in my head for weeks, assuming it was going to be an evening of intense battle. I’d enter the room, the walls already drenched in blood, and a cage door would slam shut behind me. Immediately I’d have to face a pack of hyenas armed with my own arm which I’d have to sever just to get in (on top of the £5 ticket fee).

All I knew about Eugene Robinson was he was the singer in a band and he’d written a book, Fight, which he was coming to Manchester to talk about. I was certain I’d have to fight someone at this gig, either Robinson or a member of the crowd. No one else will be ready for this, I thought. I’ll sit there alone and when push comes to shove and some cretin tries to kick off I’ll break every bone in his face and walk out whilst Eugene alone applauds and says seminar concluded whilst, at home, I drink the blood of a lamb I just killed.

As may or may not be already clear: I have trouble assimilating violence into my “worldview”. I want to be a smart, noble, good guy. But I also want to throw a motherfucker through a table and I haven’t been able to reasonably marry these different approaches of style, which troubles me.

I wanted Eugene to have all the answers.

But I was also expecting him to be completely out of his mind, after a brief conversation with Tom about how I was going to go see him, Tom telling me he often appeared on stage in kind of nappy looking things, screaming whilst waving his dick at members of the crowd. Tom went to great lengths explaining the pun of “dick” and “members”.

Before Robinson began he asked if we could hear him without the microphone and I noticed this annoying hum coming from the speakers. I thought it’d be really jarring and bug me all night but as he continued with these melancholy stories I thought the hum would add a sense of poignancy in the moments of quiet. I got so sucked into the stories and the guy and I didn’t notice that hum at all.

By the end he wasn’t even using the microphone.

If I took any of the stories Robinson told us that night out of context he would sound like a complete psychopath. I never felt a direct threat from him though. He did seem distant during a couple of the more somber stories he told, involving his childhood, but he was eloquent, funny and just softly spoken enough to basically have me at ease.

He did tell us how he’d offended/threatened both members of the Manson Family and some kind of mafia and I began wondering if there was any way they could track him here and kill all of us in the room just to get back at him. That was a brief moment of uneasiness, but at the same time I thought I would have to kill a hyena that night, so what do I know?

Writing this article has been difficult, taken a couple of days and involved actual drafts.

This is partly because of my own view of violence, the main topic of the night.

It’s partly not wanting to retell Robinson’s stories, as I wouldn’t do them justice and I’d just be stealing his act.

It’s also because I just didn’t know how to take the guy. He began the night, sort of, talking about this. People are always asking about him.

Pointing out someone in the audience he said “I stayed with you, right? People ask you ‘how was Eugene’ and you said…”

“He was nice,” the guy replies. “Yeah he was nice, he was alright," Eugene continues, then he goes on to talk about this crazy fucking shit that he spent a long time doing, including working as a debt collector, flying round the world to threaten people. "I'm a nice guy," he says, "but maybe not a good guy."

It was more like an evening with Eugene Robinson than an analysis of the book, which is what I’d really been expecting. It was the background to the book, how Eugene came to be.

He told us these fucking crazy stories, really interesting, funny and well told and then we all applauded. It was exactly what I wanted but I left trying to figure out what the fuck to make of it.

Why was he telling us this stuff? What was he getting from it? And what were all these fat dudes and Haircut girls doing here listening to it? These are not fighting people.

It was like he was there as a spectacle: articulate tough guy here to make us laugh.

I asked him one question at the end: what sort of questions do people ask him at these shows?

His said it was divided into two camps: those who say he’s glorifying violence and want to see if he will and can defend it and those who’re interested in fighting technique and things, people from the fighting community. I think I’m a little bit of both, though I’m not part of any fighting community.

We had a guy there who asked “what was your favourite fight?” and made the whole discussion seem fucking ridiculous.

And we had a girl there who, in a stilted, self conscious manner tried to press him on defending violence and wanted us all to know she had firm opinions and thought it was wrong for him to glorify violence the way he did.

But I don’t know. He told us stories involving violence, and they made us laugh and think and all that, but I didn’t leave wanting to fight and, in terms of him glorifying violence, that feels pretty key.

2009-05-03T20:00:00.004+01:00

I'm going to skip over the fact of this being my first post because thats courtesy gone way off guard and instead just MAKE this post:

Listening to Pedro The Lion - basically a weird sidestep in taste for me since their existence is sortof buried years back, too deep to unpick but not deep enough its earned them any status in my memory of 'Things I Like(d)'. But, anyway, i was listening again today (to two of the three songs i really like by them) and i was thinking about what a great song Rapture is - and this is so much a subjective judgement, even in the realm of everything being relative - but it basically feels in some way the musical personfication of pin-pointed sentiment. Not the words themselves (though David Bazaan's strangely raspy but disaffected soaring breath is part of the picture) but all that clangy production and those shimmering guitar 'scapes, which are all sweat& warmth& haze and NOISE interwoven with something like melody, but i don't want to use that word.

Also. I dont think i have ever in my life felt so much that two songs are so much a pair as Rapture and Options which are so distinct and i hope TENUOUSLY linked subject-wise (not sure what the benefit is to feeling otherwise) but i am certain they are part of the same something.

The Juan Maclean

2009-04-30T12:56:00.005+01:00

Last night I went, with college friend pete, to see The Juan Maclean.

[the kids face at 0:36 is the best thing ever]

I was anxious because I'd heard one of their songs on Key 103, or some shit, whilst I was getting my hair cut a couple days ago.

And when I got there it was full of trendy indy types who think hey yeah I can get down but HELL ARE THEY WRONG.

I got down, and I did it full measure.

Yes, I was pleased by the foot, all around, of respect/fear that my dancing garnered. It was an adequate level of tribute from the lesser dancers of the crowd (i.e. the crowd) and sated my desire to destroy them and their families through dance.

The band were good with their final song going through this insane build up and becoming this psychedelic thing and before I knew it the whole thing was over. And now I can't remember how the tune went. All I can think of is Get Innocuous by LCD Soundsystem and it wasn't like that at all.

Also now, it appears I have swine flu and am about to die. But I can't tell if the sniffles I had yesterday are just enhanced by this weird hangover I have which means everytime I turn my head it's like I've been spinning round for fifteen minutes. In fact even sitting still gives the same sensation. And the shitting. Jesus Christ.

De-stressing and winding up wealthy and confused

2009-04-19T16:35:00.009+01:00

According to ama zon dot com the most valuable album I own - gotta be the most Sterlingsome medium for any kind of culture/art in fact, my books are worth f.a. - is Keiji Haino's mid-90s solo record, "I Said, This Is The Son Of Nihilism", which you can order second hand for a cracking £65.63 (or £62.95 new, or £34 from discogs dot com, or, y'know, free, which is the reason of a free-market w/its eye off the ball). And a CD to boot! I'm not one to speak (or do anything) prematurely, but I'm pretty sure this has been a good investment. Think it could form the core of my NEST EGG. Pops was always looking out for you, kids.

What a downer it must have been to live in the very-much-before now, the pre-industrial era, anytime before I could assess my assets and listen to a monolithic hour-long storm of electric blues at the same time. Any album that starts with so much mass makes me wonder what was happening before the album started, the preparation we're not privy too, like how thinking about the big bang leads you on to wonder about the previous step in the causal chain. To this know-nothing outsider, the most obvious instance of Ma is the silence before the beginning. Haino sez "IN THE BEGINNING WAS VIBRATION", which is sure true here, but as soon as it starts I'm thinking of the tension that's been created in the pre-beginning that allows him to milk out the vibration from the guitar.

A reflective individual & not one to lose sight of the source (he hates samplers!), Haino has refined the playing of his big rock idols so that he plays with the tension of the electric charge as much as that of the strings. And this isn't some anal technical exercise, like a good athlete or lover, he starts by blowing out all this tension of electric fields, stretches it all out to air, but really its rock qua blues, Hendrix style, rather than rock qua rock, cutting to the source again. Of course Haino's Japanese, which means he's collapsing direct/indirect, dressing up to express himself honestly, a true rock gesture.

This album is an extravagent gesture all round; clenched fist jitters, monochrome drones panning out to wide-scope watery chords, playing in the echo of his amplifier - and a real CHAMELEONIC thing too, refusing to settle and instead changing shape through marches and riffs and chord changes with this poor woman singing in Japanese over the top. And MAN! Since I first decided to write about this I must have got sucked into listening to it six times or so, and still it's elusive; every time you get used to one of his moves he gets restless and shifts, always getting tense again.

Contemplation of this part of my portfolio reveals it to be strong, maybe 21.876666667 times as good as the copy of Once Upon A Time In America that LANDO bought. I just need the value of the rest of my collection to increase now so that a financial animal like me has a reason to listen to it.

JANDEK GIG ENDS IN ORGY

2009-04-07T21:23:00.006+01:00

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssss, darling,

game to be played AT GIGS

2009-04-03T00:05:00.006+01:00

Ok so i have invented a game.
I apologise in advance; this has basically nothing to do with music, but then again what does these days really hm?

I invented it on the way to the Dirty Projects gig I went to last night where, incidentally, I fell in love with literally every member of the band.
I went to the gig with Chris, Alun, Andy and Nick (listed here in alphabetical order, but with Chris at the front) and for whatever reason I was expecting to bump into someone at the gig I knew independantly of those bozos (sp?)

I started thinking about how awkward this would make me feel, because sometimes I mean I get a little shy you know how it is and I was trying to think of a way around it when I came up with this game.

So basically the game is you go to a gig or a party with a group of people you know, in this instance Alun, Andy, Chris and Nick (hello all of you HELLO). And then say you meet someone at said gathering that you know, or maybe you get talking to a stranger, you each have to convince the new acquaintance that the other members of your friend group are actually strangers to you and have kidnapped you, at gunpoint, and brought you to the gig/party.
But you have to do it without any obvious signals, you can't come right out and say "help please THEY'VE KIDNAPPED ME THEY SHOT MY FRIEND CALL THE POLICE" because then your "kidnappers" will be forced to violent extremes and you genuinely fear for the safety of the nearby innocent bystanders.

So we all sort of agreed to play this game but I was thrown a fucking curveball to the max when three of my teachers turned up. Then later I met someone I loosely know, Toni, and her boyfriend Anton, but by then The Dirty Projectors were about to go on and I'd forgotten about the game.

I did try to convince this guy Dave (hi Dave! - he definitely doesn't read this blog, the flake) that the others had kidnapped me. Alun tried too: "they smashed my phone on a rock...ha ha ha". A caveat: my opening script was I don't really know these guys at all, you know what I mean? so if you're getting off anytime just let me know so I can come with you and it was accompanied by alot of frantic winking and the cry for help was not accurately communicated and in fact it appeared to be a much more homoerotic/insane signal which didn't go down well, really.

The future and it already happened

2009-03-31T18:32:00.006+01:00

Hello the great unpopular.

I want, once again, to break the boundaries you bring to this text your own selves. Boundaries of taste and quality as well as perhaps many social boundaries, we shall see.

We shall see because I haven’t written the article yet and that is the boundary I am breaking by writing it live, in real time.

Here I am about to expose myself to you, my skinned and gutted carcass hanging on the internet to be devoured like a pile of heroin would by a hungry cat[1].

This is unplanned, will be unedited and whatever happens gets written down.

It is 17:39.

I get a text from my friend Scott. Anyone fancy spoons. I say Sorry man. Too much work to do! Writing and illustration and, of course, porn are all calling.

Hopefully I’ll finish writing this before I get to the porn.

Unsure how to start this article, though I do know what it’s about, I put on some music. For what it’s worth by Buffalo Springfield. The song is so good I am genuinely tempted to write this article off immediately and write some horrendous piece of semi fiction about how much I love it.

No there is no time for such frivolity. This is a serious flight of education and we begin in the early nineties, the first time any of us played Streets of Rage.

I hit up youtube, trying to find a video featuring music from this retro game, relevant to this article. A suggested video for me to watch is lady popping out her eyes. I don’t click it but the featured video adjacent is a picture of a cat and some Chinese, possibly Japanese, writing I can’t read. Of course I click it.

Here it is:

Scott replies. Blimey you are a busy man. See you soon honkey.

I find a video, the first real video.

But I’m not sure if it’s what I want. This article has an agenda. Soon you will see.

I confirm with this video:

…and the article begins to grow.

Obviously we know what Streets of Rage is. We know those games. What I didn’t know about was Italo Disco and Raised by Snakes by Telex falls into that genre (sub genre?) of music.

The point here, and I intend to raise as many ludicrous and disjointed points as possible to provoke debate, is a lot of this Italo Disco could have been first presented as music for these games and no one would have suspected a thing.

Idly I look at this video (couldn't embed): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPgv7xXbY4g&feature=PlayList&p=5BA098731C20EA95&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=7

And I can shrug off the music but it directs me to Yuzo Koshiro who composed the music for Streets of Rage. A scan of wikipedia leaves me with no further ammunition to continue this misguided foray into Music Of The Past, but I came prepared anyway.

The parallels between this video game music, see also Turrican

…and Italo Disco, perhaps stem from the semi futuristic setting of Streets of Rage and, I think, Turrican. Though these games were released in the early 90s and Italo Disco was around in the late 80s and I think had basically finished its run by the time these games were released, evolving into italo disco house and all this horrendous shit and becoming this insanely monstrous thing in Japan where everything was speeded up with ultra fast vocals and etc etc please never speak of it again.

All this music was created electronically, with synthesisers and drum machines, obviously and whilst it all sounds essentially very kitsch and dated compared to our samples and guitars I can still see how it might seem really futuristic and cutting edge. For the best example of Italo Disco I’ve found, by the way, please refer to Stop by B.W.H

It’s called Italo Disco because it was in Italy that all this European electronic music (which came out of the 70s funk bands experimenting with various synthesisers and electronic effects and had previously been obsessed with space and science fiction sounding noises and costume) was distilled into what you hear above or are perhaps listening to right now, unless you’ve been listening to the entirety of each song posted in this article in which case I have no idea where you might be up to in your, shall we say, journey. But wherever you’re up to you should skip ahead to Stop by B.W.H and if you’re already listening to that song wait until it finishes and then start it again before continuing your reading.

Whilst this music might sound very dated and is undeniably 80s, unless you were bought up on computers games, like me, and thought, as I did, it was taken from an early 90s computer game, I would like to draw your attention, for the effect of provoking debate, interest and covering up my horrendous lack of content in what could be a genuinely decent article[2], to Joe Colombo; an Italian designer working in the 60s.

http://www.deconet.com/decopedia/designer.action?id=229#

I first heard about him at the City Art Gallery in Manchester and I genuinely love his work. I think it suffers slightly being represented here. It has significantly more impact when you see all his furniture and designs up close in each others presence and context. He was designing really efficient and stylish and, at the time, futuristic living environments which I think still look practical and stylish now, though I can’t tell if this is peppered with a kind of retro charm which would somewhat detract from my praising of it as something high brow (and I’m not even sure I’m doing that, so whatever).

I’m trying to think of his work in terms of fashion. If he was a fashion designer would I wear his vaguely 70s looking designs? Probably not but I would like to furniture my house with his chairs and lamps and cups and things. But how would that fit in the context of the world? If I brought someone home to my house and it is full of all this sort of 70s looking furniture would it look completely ridiculous, given that it would be inside an otherwise unassuming regular English house? Maybe just a handful of his designs, a chair or wardrobe or something and a couple of tables, would work better?

I remember in the exhibition seeing a kind of bedroom set he’d made which was a wardrobe, mirror, tv, bed, sink, all stuff in one thing and it looked fantastic and somewhere between that 70s retro sci fi looking chic and that vaguely embarrassing late 90s minimalist style Matrix/penthouse scene in Oldboy style furniture, but with more charm, less coldness.

Italy has a history of obsession with the future, to use a really pretentious sentence to make this article, which is quickly becoming a farce, into a massively pretentious farce.

Futurism, in art, began in Italy and I don’t want to talk about it really.

My point about the electronic music and games, which are electronic, is that they go hand in hand because, and I don’t mean this in a derogatory way about the music, games have no history or culture and are just fucking embarrassing all the time.

This has been something Alun and I have talked about many times, or rather I have said it to him numerous times whilst he smiles and goes “mm,” nodding and then politely laughs when I say a swear word for no fucking reason.

Cinema starts out with all this classy stuff like Napoleon and all the German Expressionist cinema. In fact Sergei Eisenstein, acclaimed Russian filmmaker from the 1920s (basically) said when films got sound they stopped being art, I think.

And now films are massive trashy big budget pieces of escapist bullshit like…oh god, I don’t even know. Mission Impossible 3? What a terrible reference. BUT FUCK IT no editing and actually that’s a great example of some vacuous piece of crap with another number on the end like Die Hard 4.0 FOUR POINT OH.

And we have games like Gears of War, Bioshock, all that shit that are exactly these massive big budget shoot fests thrown to a slavering pack of bloated dogs to distract them from dry humping vinyl action figures of the muscle bound, gun toting suits of armour with computer babes stuck in their heads that they definitely all own (that’s a Halo 3 reference by the by).

If Pong is like that old piece of film of a train coming towards the camera (with everyone jumping to one side to dodge the train or little square pixels when you miss the return shot) then Streets of Rage, Duck Hunt, Sonic are the Metropolis or Battleship Potemkin of games.

I’m not saying that it’s because of this association of electronic 80s music with early 90s video games that makes that music seem dated. Just that games are shit, and I wish they weren’t.

[1] I want you to die from reading this.

[2] That porn is looking pretty good right now.

2009-03-27T22:24:00.006Z

Life goes on very much like a piece by Morty Feldman.
Someone may object that the sounds that happened were not interesting.
Let him.
Next time he hears the piece, it will be different,
perhaps less interesting, perhaps suddenly exciting.
Perhaps disastrous. A disaster for whom? For him, not for Feldman.

John Cale looks just like my grandad

2009-03-25T16:44:00.002Z

jigs reels and airs

2009-02-23T00:54:00.001Z

Hello Great Unpopular, its late but not never and I have brought the goods.

We're all comfortable ignoring people's niche activities as a point of etiquette, but today I'm asking you go out on a limb and listen to some stuff which is going to trigger all the worst immediate reactions yr brain can come up with.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/o37176

OK so last night we got from the dyslexic bearded entrepreneur to his golden egg Tubular Bells. This is the paragon of very English recluse prog folk epics and its particular kind of Englishness is maybe more widespread than its low profile suggests (I mean those sales, jesus). Northumbrian Pipe music is a pretty niche tradition but intensely English, not consciously revived but still part of what goes on in certain parts of the actual north. It seems to share the same kind of slightly provincial dreamy mindset as Oldfield's more nonsense anthems, as well as lots of mandolins and a Warhammer and real-ale-friendly vibe (also see riverdance which expounded from this vibe w/some circus-ready 'celtic' shit which was absolutely poisonous). After rediscovering this album at Ro's house (oh yes you have this) I thought maybe Northumbrian pipes were going to be a big deal for me, some secret bounty, but exposure has dulled this feeling a lot. Other stuff I've heard has sounded rote, kind of kitsch and just isn't up to the challenge of making anyone give a shit. But coming back to this album I have to give it up because These Are The Jams. This is the greatest and least popular album I can think of and belongs here like nothing else.

As well as running over with tunes played by a 16 year old girl, it plays up a lot of more esoteric elements that the other stuff I've heard has flattened a little. This music is reminiscent of a really unusual range of stuff. There's a kind of Indian character to the solo pipe stuff on here, buoyed by those sweet reedy drones the melody is drawn out real slow and gradually beefed up. And then there are these breakdowns, god. The syncopation gets pretty hot and this is probably the first time I ever heard anyone do any sort of really nimble bang-on variation over a tight rhythm. With the guitar backing it gives it a kind of ragtime vibe at points and Blind Blake could totally get over some of these work outs.

Listening to track 6 and realising what pure prog it is made me laugh, some Oldfield-worthy stuff for sure, and a lot of this album would have appeal for fans of any kind of faintly folky prog or even Amon Duul II (maybe). The ideal listening situation is definitely ten years old on an impossibly long and dull car journey to the top of Scotland imagining yourself cartwheeling on fenceposts alongside the car, chopping down and swinging round trees, but you don't need the nostalgia, just the familiar ear that sort of exposure brings. So give it a try and see if you don't kind of start to feel some of these tunes after a couple of weeks. If you do you should definitely invest and subject kids to it on long car journeys. Don't feed the hater in you, bang on the citterns and BOUNCE.

side track: mini photo essay

2009-02-10T17:58:00.001Z

Dear The Great Unpopular.

Welcome to the age of Multimedia. With this post I introduce photos to the blog and take us roaring ahead to the future. So far advanced am I, in fact, I might as well be a hologram coming at you in your own house in the future.

The other day I bought Once Upon a Time in America on DVD in Fopp for 3 pounds.

I have recreated the moment with Andy for purposes of illustration. And with him buying something else.

Here we are actually pretending Zavvi is Fopp because Fopp was all the way on the otherside of the Arndale and Market Street.

Today, then, I bought a sandwich from Katsouri’s for £3.50, which means that it is globally accepted that a sandwich, from Katsouri’s, is worth fifty pence MORE than the film Once Upon a Time in America.

Here Andy is pretending to enjoy eating a Katsouri’s sandwich because we’d actually eaten our sandwiches before I remembered to take the photo of us eating our sandwiches.

My point is are Fopp destroying any artistic viability in music or film, or books or tv, furthering consumer culture and the need for constant information overload and therefore encouraging the mixing of intense, original work and dull and awful shit until you can’t tell the difference because everything that’s being shoved into your face is just a pastiche of something else being shoved in your face?

Or are they bastions of cultural hope in this global recession which has affected me not at all?

trumpet saxophone union

2009-02-10T17:43:00.002Z

I was listening to this song, Rock Fort Shock, that Bob sent me a while ago.

Here it is one youtube: (it's really fucking loud btw so watch out)

Anyway. The trumpet line works well with the saxophone in unison. The saxophone is way background on it all but you can hear it when the trumpet gets lower and it's subtle and good!
Also the trumpet that comes in at 1:35 is one of the best things ever.

On ritual and trumpets:

When was the last time you heard trumpets in a Fugazi song, or the Clash or Bob Dylan?
Ok so Bob Dylan has some trumpets and I think the Clash do too. But fucking Fugazi?
My point is those big campy rock fest quick fixes, like Live Aid are never going to work, but they're not unecessary gestures.

With a band like Fugazi, maybe you hear them and like their music and listen to their message and you decide to live your life a different way, to walk off the high street and find something new. I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea. I know this is going off topic and I've planned it out - it never gets back on topic, but bear with me.
Gigs, in their way, a kind of ritualistic. They're a big public gathering of people who have something in common. You don't go to a Fugazi gig, though, to hear a political message. You go to fucking rock. But the message is there; they're trying to reach out to you on a personal level.
The alternative, I suppose, music with no real meaning, is stuff like dance music or the fucking Killers or Razorlight or some shit, although I haven't listened to those bands. Maybe they're fucking prophets. But I think that kind of music that is more about the gathering than the personal.
People like doing stuff together. Does any of this make any sense? It's just a rant I guess.

world cup trumpets

2009-02-09T09:40:00.001Z

The most striking and key trumpet voice or tongue to use a Meltzerism, is to my mind the Iberian sound, the sound of Nietzsche's 'South' (an ideal and mentality rather than a place, the physical and lighthearted alternative Nietzsche could escape to from his home in hardened rational Germany).

In the ever increasing number of pan-European matters the trumpet sound wins out and provides the musical stamp; its the sound of national anthems (a meaty topic in itself) and the sort of ritualised quadra-party with military overtones that is a big sport event, specifically football. I'm not sure how long trumpets have had this sport tongue in their arsenal, but it was first brought to my attention by this:

This is the sort of genius propaganda as celebration that has made the EU the subtle force it is. If not the originators, Europeans were certainly first to master the sports spectacle as political event. You don't need to fight or argue, merely have yr ideology underpinning a huge festival and summon the people with trumpets.

Without ritual or trumpets, politics and music tend to meet clumsily as gestures born of frustration at epic shitstink rockathons. It's one thing to 'raise consciousness' but its not the stuff people are conscious of that effects them strongest. Make yr agenda explicit and all you do is ruin the party. In the words of drunk Conor Oberst, "Yeah, that last song has just made poverty history, you stupid fuckers."

This World Cup Trumpet deployed by Dario G (from Crewe I think) is all over Eurodance stuff, as well as appearing on Slippi by Animal Collective, which makes sense as they'd totally be down with some liberal hedonistic utopia. I'm always on the look out for this, I think the Young Jeezy track from my previous post is close, but too weighty and lacking carefree sunshine vibes of any sort.

Flutes and strings make things complicated. A lot of solo string stuff I find alters my consciousness, instilling looping brainworm mantras or shifting everything with some searing unbroken drone. Flutes are the maybe the most rapey instruments, used by snake charmers, Pan, Will Ferrell, and other untrustables. Lianne reckons my trumpet/saxophone binary is nonsense as it is, not sure I've got much left to ascribe to flutes and strings here.

Man mostly what this has done is make me go and listen to a lot of stuff with saxophones on. I've chewed through bits of Albert Ayler (late stuff with bonus trumpet from his brother, so heavy), Moondog's Sax Pax For Sax (with some awesome bass sax), John Coltrane's Meditations (opening whinnying call to arms fucking grips the now with no build up or prologue, an absolute THIS IS IT moment where you retroactively anticipate what yr experiencing, like waking up in the middle of the apocalypse) and the Jan Garbarek I mentioned before, which collapses the awful/beautiful gap so completely - there's even some discussion of Icelandic scenery in the liner notes - I really don't think the distinction is going to bother me for a while.

flute as rabbity sort of a thing

2009-02-08T06:02:00.001Z

That's probably only because the saxophone hadn't been invented right?

When was that thing even invented?

Flutes make me think of spring a kind of jumpy hoppy annoying rabbit sort of a thing. I bet in different cultures the flute was never thought of as any kind of sexual embodiment.
See also: guitar/jazz. Maybe actually that's why the sax is so sex registered? Because Jazz was kind of this sex thing. I'm oversimplifying because I barely know what I'm talking about here. Anyone?

Not that I deliberately set out to derail good discussions...

2009-02-07T23:49:00.000Z

...but that clip (or at least the first 22 seconds) puts me in mind of arty late-'70s porn: the voyeuristic camera work, which evokes the POV of a peeping tom; the woman (I think woman - this is the late '70s, after all) settling down to listen, and perhaps to be aroused by the music's sensual lilt; the way the men involved aren't obviously attractive...that's three things - enough for a compelling argument, right?

Naturally, saxophones tend to suggest 'eroticism', but that isn't the case here, partially because this one is a baritone; I'm not sure why, but this instrument seems to have escaped the cruel fate of its higher-register brother and sisters. 200 years ago the flute was considered to be the embodiment of male lustfulness...go figure.

Trumpets

2009-02-07T03:16:00.001Z

I don't exactly know what it is about the saxophone but I find it sort of embarassing. I think it's maybe the connotations it has for me of Shit Jazz, just totally overblown middle aged Party Time sassy saxophone misery.
The kind of saxophone I can deal with is how Fela Kuti plays his, or something softer like Festive Minor by Gerry Mulligan. Bob sent me this song a while ago with Chet Baker playing trumpet. I couldn't figure out how to upload songs but here is a youtube video of Mulligan playing that tune with someone else playing trumpet and you get the idea.

Both instruments here sound good, to me, but they are sort of playing the same way; the fact they're different instruments is almost irrelevent except in terms of voice I guess.

But this is more of that conversational tone you're talking about right, Tom?
The trumpets in that Young Jeezy song are pretty epic.
The thing is now, in my mind, recent bands that feature a trumpet, or even a saxophone, prominently do so as a gimmick it seems. Hercules and Love Affair is a good example of a band integrating a horn section in way that is not completely embarassing, but it is sort of a throwback to disco and funk and that, in its own way, is sort a gimmick too. But I really like that band.

So...trumpets?

String

2009-02-06T17:12:00.001Z

I guess this is partially to do with the grain of reed instruments - how they're more closely related to the human voice, and consequently more capable of intimate expression. Maybe. Brass instruments have a purer, more strident, more 'elemental' sound (never mind that they're about three times louder).

Bearing that in mind, where the strings at? Are they just too demure for the purposes of hook-hungry samplers? Then again, bowed strings have never featured prominently in African American music; they're too quiet, and the attack of a bow is not conducive to the sort of percussive, heavily syncopated playing that predominates. Then again again, they also have certain European, bourgeouis connotations; chicken/egg?

[End tangent.]

Allegiance

2009-02-04T23:05:00.001Z

Recently my mind's been occupied with the thought of a peculiar dichotomy, the crucial choice between trumpet and saxophone. The question of allegiance to one of these instruments has consumed me but also opened up virgin space in my thoughts and I'm unable to hear either without it feeding back to the dichotomy. I guess this really stands for a broader brass/woodwind conflict, but this is neater and has greater symbolic value. I'm hoping for insight from somewhere within these newly boosted ranks. Can I get a hell yeah? This is definitely a fake dichotomy, can I get a hell yeah anyway?

As I gradually got used to working with this notion, I came to respect the balance between the two but was soon ready to declare myself for trumpets everywhere. A saxophone was personal and had a distinct power, beauty and truth, but, fuck, a trumpet was bigger, united, it spoke as a we, it was the sound of crowds, of parties, it had a martial, Iberian sound. A saxophone was for conversation but a trumpet was for action, for yes-saying and solidarity. The trumpet blowing means reinforcements; its the sound of the cavalry.

Saxophones, thinking uncharitably using an older Duncanian binary opposition, are at bottom emo. For an enterprising modern romantic, they offer an unlimited scope for whining. Jan Garbarek whined back at a more collected past through the Hilliard Ensemble. Kaoru Abe whined at every other 20th century soul unlucky enough to be alive by blowing it out with the traffic from a motorway bridge. Whine against whichever form of the man best crystallizes your alienation.

But trumpets are totally rock. Young Jeezy knows a trumpet can carry even the most heavyweight voice. The Goldeneye Facility sound! That cold and sinister muffled trumpet, the perfect fucking sound for post-Cold War Russia, the sleeping dragon. Increasingly there's a lot of trumpets in rap that come from outside the jazz idiom, and your mom and I bet computer games have something to do with that. I'm wondering if jazz trumpet fucks up this picture as its sound went from danceable to conversational. Miles Davis had one of the iciest sounds going, but a different kind of cold, the sound of the arsehole-older-brother (Ro yr saying that's copyright now?). Definitely less emo than someone contemplating their humanity on the edge of the abyss though. So come on, if any of you shitheels read this, where's yr allegiance?

The National and Learning Boden's Mate

2009-01-26T23:31:00.011Z

Mar2009
I've suffered a lapse in my game. I'm not sure how it's come about, and I know it's not Bobby Fischer's fault, even though it is his opening (which I even use in defense; yes, defense) so I feel he should feel empathic about this, and absorb some of the blame (he doesn't care, he's been dead for five years). The message was clear; this has happened before, and I've improved upon my mistakes and weaknesses. I needed A New Opening. So browsing some of the all time great chess matches last week, I came across Samuel Boden's famous Boden's Mate, so named after its use in Schulder-Boden, London, 1853. Not an opening, but almost unique in its conception in that it uses the opposition's pieces to beat the opposition; Boden simply supplies the finishing touch. The enemy king is hemmed in after castling with the wrong rook, and Boden's bishops simply occupy the space left in front to produce mate. Here it is: (Even better, incidentally, is Peruvian grandmaster Esteban Canal's game against an unknown amateur in 1934, dubbed by biographer Fred Reinfeld as having "the blazing quality of a Liszt improvisation.")
I don't tend to listen to music if I'm playing, as I can't diverge my concentration from one outlet to another in so great a quantity without system failure, but I think I've found the niche; The National's Boxer has been on pretty much constantly for the last three weeks, which has seen me leap a heady 300 points higher in ratings. There's this wonderful gravelly quality to Matt Berninger's baritone; it always reminds me of Underworld's final scene, when the sisters return to the slum to see the huge portrait of the murdered homeless girl, flashed into life by the spotless commuter train, packed with workers and travelling New Yorkers. It's about the colours, the time and place I guess; I seem to remember a line from a film where a guy thinks he's experiencing a special moment for the first time, only he can't be sure because he can remember all the lines before he's spoken the words. I suppose there's a sense of presentiment here, a shared moment that will come to pass as everyone knew/ remembered it would; The National have that effect on me. As though I've endeavoured to create my own directions whilst consciously forming my own cul-de-sacs, so that the only choice is the one I made for myself without making it for myself.
So to last week, when I halfheartedly watched Obama's inauguration as President; I remembered reading that The National had campaigned long and hard for this guy, playing cheap support gigs across much of the Midwest and East Coast as means of fundraising, even lending Fake Empire to the then president-elect's victory speech in Grant Park, Chicago. I guess everyone had a feeling of presentiment about this; but I guess it was much more clear cut, and logical, and romantic? than my own blind dilettante wanderings. And what happiness it gave me that a politician should recognise a song in its own right; Fake Empire has been used by Grey's Anatomy, mostly for it's stoic yet slightly weepy piano line, but the tone and rhythm were so syncopated to Obama's speech I almost wondered if the whole thing were tongue in cheek, a nod to Reagan's famously dimwitted interpretation of Born in the USA.

*
Aug2010
About 18 months down the line and I feel more like I own a piece of The National than I own anything else; clothes, some (other) good music (full of my own hopes&dreamsand thwarted desires for something I can never have) a mean left hand for chopping vegetables (I am GOOD with the carrots.) and I guess, a few whispery outlines of my own chess game, which I played obsessively when writing odds&ends for cleaning companies in Manchester but which has all but been blown away by the ever-present breeze ever since I smashed a hole in my own ambition. This last bit is both an ever-present feeling, with me paycheck after paycheck, train journey after train journey (make what you will) and also presentiment; I am not being a miserablist here but seriously, who really wants to be able to predict the future? And of course, there is another National album for me to pour myself into, apparently desperate for some sort of mould and yet sort of depressed that my heartstrings can be plucked in four minutes of American rock. I recently read the review of their latest, High Violet, which I claim in victory from everyone and then throw it back to them, because for me, this is both mine and yours in equal measure. It provides real, tenable evidence to me of someone who is prepared to sit and wait and watch for weakness, a sort of defensive pattern reminiscent historically of things I do not possess the superpowers to describe. I am not referring to weakness in other people here, but rather a weakness in life, much as a small crack in a glass will soon yield and shatter with the right amount of concerted pressure. The review in question was right to suggest that the majority of these songs are 'sad-bastard songs' - I'd argue a band who toured for ideas/ 'change', compassionate public at home&abroad and an actual sense of how things are are probably going to be sad bastards right now, and for the foreseeable future - but several outbursts, like those found in Lemonworld and Anyone's Ghost feel like a slightly skinny guy settling deep into a hard sweat. They seem to do this without the puglist attitude you'd assume would sort of go with the territory here; in fact they feel elegant and humane, a highly-fussed affair which doesn't pull any punches despite its apparently brittle nature. They have previously released albums under the titles of Boxer and Alligator, not exactly confessionals but nonetheless the sound of four guys leaning into each other and finding that amazingly, they're still standing (Matt Berninger sort of remarks on this here, and reveals what makes them tick here). Vitally, above everything HV feels like what I need now, and this is, when I get down to it, why I so admire this band. It's easy to be uneasy sometimes, so that it seems embarrassingly affecting and then of course everything else creeps in on top, but it's fine to worry, I have learnt. Worrying is sort of normal. Worrying shows you care, and that you want a way out. Better still, it almost acts as a signpost for the rest of you, and you just have to keep fucking going. Take that Springsteen.

2009-01-15T01:42:00.001Z

if as an outsider i'm allowed to dream about the soul of america, i might dream of roscoe holcomb, singing while barely moving his mouth, an island of angular hat and tie amongst a bunch of slouching besweatered admirers. he's incredibly hard, like a man that never stops concentrating, but yeah, you know he's melancholic and wondering about the what-ifs. i dont know how you couldnt love such a person.

when i saw animal collective live

2009-01-15T00:24:00.001Z

I went to see the Animal Collective play. I haven't heard their last two releases but I love Sung Tongs, Here Comes the Indian and Campfire Songs.

By the end my t-shirt was stuck to me, though I barely moved the entire time. Although I was doing the chest thrust/head nod combo like everyone.

It was a dreamy gig; bookended by evening that featured only bullshit and worry.

The band appeared mostly as less than silhouettes: colourful quarter outlines with the lights above making the smoke a stage covering filter of colour and these massive vaguely psychedelic lights at the back cutting through making some really dynamic shit happen.

You couldn’t tell who was making what noises on stage and there was an easy link between the vibrating mass there and the constant fuzz and bass drum of the songs.

Sometimes you’d see, I think, Panda Bear move to a small drum kit and likewise out of the hum and groove you’d hear the beginnings of songs you knew and whilst all this was great I had massive trouble relaxing.

They played Leaf House from Sung Tongs and this weird and dreamy version of Slippi from Here Comes the Indian (one of my favourite songs ever and the first AC song I heard) and maybe it’s because I knew them so well but these were the real stand out parts of the set. It seemed like such a step up from everything else they played. I listened to a few new songs before I went and I recognized three of them and even then it wasn’t as intense.

Maybe if I’d worked my way to the front of the crowd, surrounded by all that heat (which I imagine was unbelievable), I would have felt more enveloped and caught up.

The last time I saw them was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Top 1 or 2, for real.

What I liked about that show was here again, just not as right on somehow.

I'm also thinking we could add some more contributors

2009-01-07T01:23:00.000Z

It's not like it's a whirlwind of activity here, and such figures as Benjamin Jenkins and/or Bob Marland might like to contribute. I'd have gone ahead and done it myself, but I'm no SUPER-DOOPER ADMIN MASTER.

Apropos of the Post Below

2009-01-03T20:53:00.001Z

I acquired 10 albums this year (not including the ones I omitted from the list because they would have made it longer than 10), but I don't feel like I really got into any of them, and I had a hard time putting them in order of preference. It feels like it's been a while since I engaged with an album as a complete entity/experience, rather than a carcass to be stripped of choice bits and pieces. Unless I'm making it myself, music is increasingly something that goes on in the background while I do something else. I know that I've heard all of the tracks on Hercules and Love Affair, Tragicomic and 12 Crass Songs, but I couldn't tell you what most of them are like (and I only remember the title track from Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!).

I'm probably exaggerating the extent to which this deviates from the way I've enjoyed music in the past, but it does feel like I've failed to give these albums a fair hearing; by not taking the time to explore them, I've missed out on a lot of interesting ideas lingering under the surface. Speaking as someone with musical aspirations (albeit pretty vague ones), that seems like a lapse in conviction. I feel as though I'm not keeping faith with music in general.

On a more positive note, here are a few bits of music that really did catch my ear in 2008 (although they've been around for longer):

Son of Chamber Symphony by John Adams

Are You Experienced? (NML username and password = 'minster') and The Little Match Girl Passion by David Lang

Various things by Anna Clyne

This all comes from somewhere in the modern classical/minimalist/whathaveyou diaspora, so maybe the only reason I'm feeling disillusioned with 'pop' music is that my tastes have shifted a bit.

Buggered if I know.

2008 Music Lists

2009-01-03T20:52:00.001Z

Top Ten Albums of 2008

1. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
2. 12 Crass Songs - Jeffrey Lewis
3. Mothertongue - Nico Muhly
4. Tragicomic - Vijay Iyer
5. Love Is Overtaking Me - Arthur Russell
6. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
7. Saint Dymphna - Gang Gang Dance
8. Women as Lovers - Xiu Xiu
9. Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
10. Harps and Angels - Randy Newman

Bottom Ten Albums of 2008

1. Harps and Angels - Randy Newman
2. Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
3. Women as Lovers - Xiu Xiu
4. Saint Dymphna - Gang Gang Dance
5. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
6. Love Is Overtaking Me - Arthur Russell
7. Tragicomic - Vijay Iyer
8. Mothertongue - Nico Muhly
9. 12 Crass Songs - Jeffrey Lewis
10. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair

being a person who sucks

2008-12-23T01:38:00.001Z

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.

mescaline/conjunctivitis

2008-12-18T23:54:00.002Z

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.

big paintings

2008-12-18T01:19:00.002Z

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.

top billin

2008-12-14T16:54:00.001Z

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

three short ones and a dumb not so short one

2008-11-02T18:19:00.000Z

I am always so optimistic in barber’s chairs. Not like last time, I think, it won’t be like last time. And every time; too short or too much a mullet.
And at home I have skinned knuckles and a broken arm courtesy of the brick wall and the car I ricocheted into on my bike.

------

What I want is endless pretty girls to write endless pretty songs about what I’m doing. Endless until I’m just so sick of hearing them I’m screaming “enough! get out! FORGET IT!”

------

A woman hits a boy on a bike in her car.
He pirouettes, hits the ground and her own child in the back says is he ok? What happened?
Driving on she says it’s fine, I know him. It’s fine.

------

I write the notes for this story on the back of a shopping list watching the clock I used to watch when I worked in the bar I am not working in now.
The bus I was on broke down a hundred meters away and I, tired but alert, wanting to gather everyone aboard for drinks but finding no one pretty enough, go to the place by myself.
I have come here twice since I stopped working and probably shouldn’t be remembered here but once I was, though not tonight.

I nearly hated working here. Except for the drinks I sneaked and the jokes and pretty girls it was bullshit. It worked out in equal measure of high and low.
Who doesn’t watch a clock every now and again? Maybe it is always ticking on but at every right now the fucking thing is holding me back. Just as it did when I worked here so it does again, telling me every second that I’m not on a bus going home.

Sometimes you learn to hate a certain bus. The bus I need comes one an hour and hating that clock I wait outside despite the rain and cold and the every five minutes other busses.
Each bus that comes around the bend you pray to fucking God it is the one you want. Three or four times of this, one coming every couple of minutes, you realise your bus will just never come. It breaks me and every other bus that comes is a shitball thrown hard and fast at my eye.

In the rain a homeless man talks to some woman he knows with her kid.
So I watch them promising myself she’s a good mother and tying to figure out where he has come from to get here and knowing I know nothing about life at all.
And me watching them knowing that when I get home I’m probably going to have a wank and start wondering about them and end up feeling nothing for myself at all.
The kid is all smiles but I watch the three of them guessing at what will happen to her, wanting to know so badly and feeling trapped and desperate as I just watch feeling like an asshole.

It must be written all over my face because some woman comes up to me and asks if I’m alright.
Then she asks but are you alright?

My bus pulls up and she starts screaming at the driver. Her accent is thick and I don’t understand. I just get on and go home and feel trapped by myself, in my house.

scooters, holiday, autumn

2008-10-19T18:46:00.001+01:00

Evening gents, got a bit I wrote a few days ago here that is probably better posted than deleted:

First up I don't read music reviews or much published writing like that because I tend not to get as much out of it as I do from plain, everyday discourse, mostly online. People who write pretty decent reviews often write much better fighting their corner in a crowded room. Obviously I know there are some fucking incredible reviews and bits of writing out there and it'll always be good to see someone working something out in words, but the balance of power (i.e. 90% of the writing I read about music) is with the informal. That's not necessarily me-narrative, you-narrative, we-narrative or any of the other tools in the box but often containing moments of each, including some analytical they-narrative. I'm thinking here we can have some slightly more intense, detailed discourse, gradually getting to grips with these tools but we'll see.

Twoly, Robert Christgau might think he's come out of himself somehow, but he still writes like a sassy, aging guy with blindspots, favourites, prejudices and limited patience. He's listened to an unbelievable amount of stuff, and has developed his own super language of punning and self-reference but I don't believe he's doing anything extra, anything noble or philosophically exciting. I also don't believe Richard Meltzer is a good writer. Or maybe I don't understand what Christgau means when he says that.

Similarly, and to pick on Christgau further, I think you can turn what he said around and accuse him or never properly getting inside himself, or anyone else. He listens, very professionally to huge stacks of records, eight hours everyday, assessing the lay of the land, noting anything that jumps out at him and reports back to us in his neat writerly code. He can unpack anything he hears and place it in the grand scheme or pop music truth he has laid out all these years, he is THE DEAN after all. But where's the value in any of what he or anyone similar does? Who needs an encyclopedia? Who hears Kate Nash and wants a quasi-objective unpacking of the whole deal and what use is that to anyone who isn't already up to the same thing?

--

Anyway more importantly: Arthur Russell's tuned in brain. It's very cool you got that record Alun, I've got an intention to get that and see the film that's come out (somehow), which I've heard is decent, even if it skips over his disco period pretty fast. Each Arthur Russell record I hear seems to sound peculiar at first while I get used to whichever styles and techniques he was playing around with at the time. What I consider more interesting than the breadth of his interests and listening though, are the constants that run through all the different styles. I'm thinking of loose, floating structures, and adding to that sense of lightness, his sing-song fragments of melody that drift in and out.

The thing I find most interesting is the way he treats his songs not as static, finished entities, but as processes that can have many possible incarnations and reimaginings. To hear the disco "See My Brother, He's Stepping Out (Let's Go Swimming #1)" after loving the World Of Echo version of "Let's Go Swimming" was uncanny and amazing. On World Of Echo it's like he's singing to you in the womb, everything delicately brought in close, it has that particular, intensely personal quality you get with some indie (I've thought before that the close-miced sound of World Of Echo reminds me of The Microphones). That he could and would choose to rehear the vocals and cello over a disco beat and blocky 80s basslines makes me think his relationship to his pieces was closer than a lot of people. Hearing "See My Brother" as part of a move from introverted, quiet, uneasy to this fun&light party tune makes it really affecting, I end up with this sort of "good for you!" feeling towards the song, like I want to high-five Arthur Russell. In the liner notes to World Of Echo he talks about wanting to "liquefy" (what the fuck is that spelling?) elements to create something new, and that seems like the way he interacts with what he heard, whether it was what was on the radio, at the club, from his childhood, or his own music.

So I got a promo of the new Arthur Russell record...

2008-10-18T13:37:00.002+01:00

...to review (by way of a lucky toin coss - although I choose to interpret it as providence). It's called Love Is Overtaking Me, and it's a collection of 21 variegated demos from across his career; from solo, voice-and-guitar country ballads to shiny 60s/70s folk rock (a la James Taylor) to more disco-oriented fare with dinky electronic loops.

It's very pretty it is, although it feels more like a (chronological?) jaunt through his responses to various influences than any kind of definitive artistic 'statement'. The label (Audika/Rough Trade) is promoting the record as a look at Russell's singer-songwriter persona, so I guess this effect is partially intentional.

Anyway, hearing Russell playing around with various pop forms has me thinking about the unusual quality of his musical career; ie synthesising cello lessons, Indian classical music, folk rock, disco & c (grammatical figure in memory of David Foster Wallace) into a versatile but highly personal musical language/methodology/episteme (ahem). Like how this compares to the classical/romantic image of the Artist and His relationship to the things that feed His work.

Hmm...hold that though.

Okfairenough

2008-10-10T17:58:00.001+01:00

but I worry that the response to the reductive, academic, uninspired/ing way music generally gets written about is too often to plunge into quasi-poetic Me-Narratives...or at least I'm afraid that that's what I'd do. Maybe that sort of approach is fine, as long as the person writing has The Knack.

This is all getting very B&W though; obviously it's possible to write intimately and emotively without subordinating your object, or just using it as a mirror. Well, not so sure about that last bit.

In the Christgau response to that Meltzer article (the one by Meltzer?) he counterattacks by saying that Meltzer, while a great writer, is not really a 'journalist' (I think that's the word he uses), and that the point of journalism is to bring writers out of themselves. That seems like an appealing notion, to an extent, although I've never read any Meltzer, so I have no first-hand evidence. At the same time, I sympathise with Tom's criticisms of Christgau: he does seem to have this heavy Kantian perspective where all music is part of some rational absolute and comparable and graspable, which ends up just enervating everything.

Which reminds me of something Camus said about Rousseau: his grandiose ideas about loving humanity in general derived from his inability to love any human beings in particular.

Anyway, that's enough philosophical name-dropping.

The screaming cock fiends been thinking bout the way you do it good.

2008-10-02T23:00:00.000+01:00

Alun's talking about the Peep Showification of his experience at concerts, an intellect pulling his awareness out of immediate experience and to a mediated 3rd person platform watching himself in the world, being a bit of a wanker. I found this sentiment deeply depressing and somewhat alien, but not surprising as such. Given this submital of experience before the intellect, combined with a little guilt maybe, Alun's account of mastubatory narcissism makes sense to me.

An examination like Alun refers to individuates the self; the thinker is distinct and alone. The majority of experience and human culture lies within the limits of what the thinker can know, but there are things outside of these limits. There are, to quote something I heard today, things that can only be "known through the body", things that "could never emerge from words". The gulf between my understanding of experience and feelings as expressed in language and thought and the immediate reality of the existence of the world has always struck me. The force of music, its very real transformative and revelatory power, lie in its existence outside of the realm of language and the sort of indirect thought Alun refers to.

What Alun expresses is the difficulty in trying to account for this immediacy after the fact. The process of pulling something into the realm of this reflective, analytic, language robs it of its haecceity and leaves it superficial, inane, "lovely". This inherent contradiction in writing about music in this way (the way I'm writing now) put me off writing about music altogether, until I came to see that it was possible to use language in other ways to write about music, and that those ways might have value and power. To develop these methods was my ambition in starting this. I am finding that the naturality of this sort of writing belies how difficult it is, and how easy it is to slip into this. So:

"The first step in learning how to play rock guitar is to unlearn how not to play rock guitar."

I think Ro's move in his thinking is similar and analagous to this. In the kingdom of the blind, everyone had perfect pitch and free telephone.

clearing up on dog fiend

2008-09-24T11:22:00.000+01:00

Alun, are you saying that the only value of a gig is self imposed? Because isn't that true of everything? I'm not trying to put words into your mouth or anything, just trying to understand. Because I feel like nothing is intrinsically good or bad, it's up to each of us individually how seriously we take something. Obviously there are outside factors and when it comes to personal enjoyment there's a nature vs nurture argument perhaps. I am certain you think this also which is why I think I don't quite understand your point.
The bottom line is I'm always very self conscious all the time about everything. Well not all the time, but enough of the time for me to say all the time. You see how I'm actually even self conscious about saying I'm self conscious?
MY POINT IS that for a long time I tried to be as objective as possible. And I managed to find a way to hate every single thing I did or decision I made or thing I said from some angle of looking at it or thinking.
Do we need to pick sides or something? Decide - these are my beliefs and I am prepared to kill anyone who disagrees with me?

Tom, are you saying I should volunteer at a dog rehab centre?

I Was a Teenage Dog Fiend

2008-09-22T16:31:00.000+01:00

I don't wish to diminish the many and lovely notions of musically-induced communal ecstacy, but examination of the matter always makes me uneasy. It may just be my psyche getting up to its usual tricks, but I can't separate any such experiences I've undergone from an essentially narcissistic impulse, and the (perhaps equally narcissistic) guilt that I feel about the whole deal when I reflect upon it. For me, much of the satisfaction derived from a really earth-rending live-music experience takes the form of self-satisfaction at being witness to a rather exclusive EVENT of serious STATURE, and one that's probably beyond the ken of regular working, sleeping, meal-eating types.

Certainly there's a strong sense of communion involved, but how much of that is informed by a sort of siege mentality? When I think of specific concerts that have really hit me, I can't help but conjure up a fiddling-while-Rome-burns image; reality is fucked but I am king of this rather excellent little shit storm. I think I already mentioned a debate I watched recently between William F. Buckley and Christopher Hitchens, in which the former fella (there's a pun on mortality in there) glibly dismissed the conspicuous end of the civil rights movement (parades, rallies, Woodstock etc) as 'masturbatory'. Hitchens, having been directly involved, did not strongly reject this notion, although he upgraded it to full-on copulative status. He IS a sort of grinning frog-man (is Andrew Lloyd Webber moonlighting as a former-Marxist political pundit and anti-religion hatchet man?), freelove champion or not, but that assessment seems depressingly close to my experience of...you know...fun.

Is all of this paradoxical?

woof

2008-09-20T15:14:00.001+01:00

Dogs and the Minutemen are a good match, domestic, unfussy, more about crotch breathing room than looking sharp, makes sense to put them together and that yr an endorser of both. Does you-dog camaraderie work mostly because you can project any tastes and feelings you like on to its blank hormonal enthusiasm? I don't have many (enough) good times digging music with people, even when we're both there listening a lot of the time our experiences are separate somehow, we don't communicate properly through listening. Or maybe thats not right, at concerts am I looking at the audience or with them? Sometimes the audience is an oppressive monster trapping me and polluting the music and sometimes it seems so idly lame I don't want to be in it. But sometimes, and for me this has mostly been at concerts, the audience feels like an extension of myself, like the music's a giant Katamari-style entity which has scooped us all into itself and its so immediate and strange and intense that we've all gone and shed ourselves and gone collectively crazy like its a brilliant and important new mission, a great breakthrough for understanding and mankind. Too rare. To even get a vision of that from a song is pretty good, nevermind if there is no dog out there with the same idea.

do you want to walk dogs

2008-09-19T15:33:00.000+01:00

If you were someone who walked dogs in care centers and you were driving a car with a dog in the passenger seat to a park and you're both singing along to a song on a sunny day. Would there be a better song than It's Expected I'm Gone?
I ask myself this as much as anyone.

a brief talk about revolution

2008-09-09T00:46:00.001+01:00

let me preface briefly by saying i barely know what i'm talking about. So don't take this too seriously.
This! Is in response to what you were saying Tom about feeling part of that audience, that sense of revolution in music, about being part of something big.
I remember sitting at home, a year ago or two now i guess, and getting a call from a friend of mine studying photography. Him saying there was some massive protest on in town and I should grab a fucking camera and get over there. And blah blah blah but getting there and standing on top of that old war memorial looking at a street full to the fucking brim with people chanting, singing, shouting, with signs and costumes and all sorts felt amazing. The protest itself was an anti war protest. And anti Bush and Blair protest, but that didn't really feel important.
I felt like if the right person was to come along and say the right thing we would be able to do literally anything.
I remembered reading some Hunter S. Thompson stuff, there was a line like "you could spark revolution on any corner, any time" or something. The way I understand it there was a real optimism back in the 60s with all this revolution. And being in the middle of that street, those people, I could totally feel that. But there aren't that many massive revolutions and protests any more. That feeling, that optimism is definitely gone. I don't feel it anyway. Maybe i'm not in the right place, but regardless.
It seems like we have the "benefit" of hindsight. None of those protests, those revolutions, got anyone where they were trying to get. There was obviously a massive cultural impact that resonates to this day but it has been coloured by defeat and pessimism, cynicism.
I don't know fully how this ties into music. But when I'm "creating" anything, illustration, writing or music, my best stuff is only ever an awful sham rip off of someone else's.
When looking back and researching all this Russian Constructivism stuff you could get a sense of that desperate need for something new. It's there in the music you're talking about too I bet.
But maybe enough people just aren't looking back and digesting all that stuff?

Corona

2008-09-09T00:09:00.001+01:00

A violent anxiety or I-don’t-know-what hangs around like the wringing out of my ribs and lungs. I have been awake only an hour and all I want to do is spit at what I could or should be doing.
This day, like every other day of the last however, is a fucking write off.
Over and over in my head I roll theeeeee people will survive.
It puts me on a bike in a field, air fresh and cool with a rain bringing me back to life. Everything is grey, but it’s a good kind of grey. Exactly the right kind of grey.
It will be the first day I’ve stepped outside my house in maybe a week.
The next half an hour is a shower and getting my bike out and I cycle up to the supermarket for some things. I go through that field and I hear different songs by that band, The Minutemen. But coming back over an old BMX track, rain just coming down, is when the people will survive.

Direction - Main trends in the world today

2008-09-08T23:11:00.001+01:00

I bought the beautiful Revenant Albert Ayler box a week ago and amongst the goodies is a blisteringly articulate article by critic, ex-Beat, poet and all round true scholar Amiri Baraka that's so good its stopped me from getting any further into the rest (when's the last time you could say that?). In between writing about the pure sound and improving my vocabulary (amanuensis - thanks!), Baraka draws up a narrative in which to place his old friend. He writes about the East Village & Harlem, 60s Black ideology and big free jazz figures such as John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor. The context Baraka provides is so rich you get news ears to listen to Ayler with, every note becomes fully charged and momentous, standing on top of a great jam of history and pushing it forward. Baraka quotes his 60s self, still called LeRoi Jones, excited and eager, desperate almost, to communicate what he hears happening - "Albert Ayler is the dynamite sound of the time".

It is, let's cut me short, great music writing; focussed and passionate and generous. Now I can listen more like a part of the crowd Baraka was in, and that's better than good, I can handle Ayler's sound like its alive and busy rubbing up against all that's going on around it. Leaves me wondering about the music surrounding me at the moment, about how to hear it, about what direction its going and why its being made. Baraka seems so good I bet he could have made pretty much anything sound like a dynamic piece of a big puzzle, but you know the ingredients he's got with Ayler are so good they'd look good for a mediocre writer, a third person after the fact ghostly writer. But today none of the music I listen to sounds much like its part of a revolution on first listen, I'm can't remember hearing much ideology or community in anything, noise or r'n'b or indie or garage but I think maybe I'm being forgetful, coming at it wrong. If musics going forward there has to be something pushing, and even if not there's always gonna be a history and a why to where its festering.

Alun here's that big book review berating the beraters, seems like big thoughts but slower than glass: http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=f3839c75-3724-4154-adc4-e0638e30448a