Monday, June 30, 2003
Who reads my blog? If you read my blog, please email me (nick@beatbay.co.uk) and say "I read your blog Nick". You don't have to say anything more than that!
Thank you.
Edit (Tuesday 9:44am); two people read my blog.
Edit (Tuesday 2.19pm); four people read my blog.
6/30/2003 02:24:00 pm
Epiphany 2
Disillusion
January 2002…
Part 1
Oh come now. What was I thinking? There’s still this moment that owes a bit more to Zappa than Smokey or Carole or Noel and it just jumps from the middle of nowhere and peals back a cloud and for once they sound like they’re actually enjoying themselves (you’re playing music for fuck’s sake, do you realise how many other people want your job? How many other people are better at your job than you are and don’t get half the success? - oh sweet irony; the success is long gone now boys) and at that point, the profundity aimed for and missed but closer this time, close enough to not be gauche and vaguely embarrassing (I always felt it, for heaven’s sake, I just had a desperate need to believe and you were there, you know, to believe in and that’s why I never said it till now). I don’t even like Zappa, but at least it’s pushing things a bit.
What did you do? Took everything back to zero, stripped away how you made music and put it back together again from the bottom up in the simplest terms. What was I looking for?- “the width and whoosh of The Verve, with Noel Gallagher writing the tunes” (I don’t even like Oasis either, for that matter, except for “Slide Away” and “Columbia”, a punch in the stomach and slap round the head done very slowly again and again until you get the message, and maybe “Bring It On Down”, just cos Bonehead tried to break a piano and not by throwing it out of a window, but rather by hitting it, in the same place, over and over again until it got the message). I caught about a minute of the chorus on the radio one evening after seeing something, live reviews, in NME, palpitations and really bad sweaters and greasy hair, and that was fine, more than fine, because you couldn’t afford clothes and I desperately wanted my hair like that too for about a month. Promise, promise, potential, potential. Oh I hated that word at school because people always used it about me. “You’ll never do anything, but you really could.” When you die, kids, there’s just darkness.
And I was writing, just starting out, what do I write, how do i do this, why does no one explain how to do it or who can help or whatever, so I wrote to them and them and them and you, and you wrote back, and hence a love affair was born. I remember Bristol. Richard made sure I had beer. The singer from Santa Cruz was in the bar. God they were shite. Gomez sat on some stools and got given an award for it. Mickey wasn’t even in the band yet and I stopped him on the stairs and asked about his other band and he was shocked that anyone would know (“WE ARE LASER BOY!” damn right you are).
The 7” I got direct from the bloke’s kitchen for £2.50 and played side a ten times in a row on my dad’s record player (cos back then I didn’t have one), and it was the only time I ever got into recording stuff off the radio. “Blind” on Mary Anne Hobbs at midnight and I was in bed with the volume really quiet, not 18 yet and still in so many ways so naïve and innocent, much as I’d smoked my brain out since I was fifteen I’d still been climbing trees and running round ponds not long before. And I didn’t know it was you, did I?, cos she didn’t say till after it had finished but I had the idea that it might be and that was hideously exciting because it was good and blue and metal and crunch crunch crunch, made Johnny Dollar deaf you know. Cost him £50,000 in lost earnings.
But it was the talking, the other bands, the stuff around the outside that really got me. Beastie Boys, Beach Boys, Sly, Otis, Marvin, Chemicals, Prodigy. Not fucking Oasis treading water and Cast having a right good swim. My Bloody Valentine and J&MC (god, you fucked that one up something chronic, didn’t you? Even that bit that sounded like The Clash didn’t redeem it). That first proper EP wrapped in pale blue and people sitting on a fence, BANG shush BANG shush, that first bang a shoegazer miasma, all strident though and thumping chains and riding a bike, the first shush a delicate cinematic sweep, airy and pretty much formless and with trumpets so fake as to be beautiful, that gentle percussive bass quite unlike any other sound you made (trumpets and piano were the key to those early bits, and guitar, reckless, twitching guitar played by a kid who liked setting fire to things and waving his hair around like a loon; yes, we liked that, our own little rock god jumping off bridges onto railway tracks and playing with a broken hand). The second and third EPs were governed by the law of diminishing returns but the live stuff (taped off the radio!) suggested things were good. Little snippets and hints of what was on the album (if this isn’t their best stuff then what the fuck are they holding back?!). Talking about the May 1998 single on the radio and underneath the instrumental piece of music was some electronic thing and I was so excited in case it was yours, in case it was the single, in case you’d thrown everything out and blown everything up and totally done what nobody expected you to do, making “Fools Gold” following The Stone Roses look like logic, yes yes yes, the only way to truly do something amazing then is to do the totally unexpected and impossible and do it well. And what was the single? “Come Back To What You Know”. The title alone is evil and regressive and backwards and safe and conservative and weak. What’s it smashing? Nothing.
6/30/2003 09:13:00 am
Part 2
What were you holding back? Two limp rockers (like I said above about MBV, J&MC and The Clash), a “Hey Jude” rip-off and a couple of rock ballads. What the fuck did you spend so long doing? Those two tracks in the middle that were going to be the total highlight, soaring, epic catharsis x2, done inside 3 and a half minutes each, why did you not realise how to do them? I listened to it again the other night for the first time in a long time and you know what struck me? How fascistic it is in it’s imperative, it’s adherence to its own orthodoxy and goals. We must we must we must do this like this and this like this and that like that. This is the chassis, this is the skeleton, this is the destination, this is the shortest route. So much emphasis to “make people cry with every tune”, such nastily narrow-minded adherence to that ideal that you entirely missed the fucking point, the beauty in the details, the punctum, the enjoyment, the little twists and turns and cul-de-sacs and mistakes and idiosyncrasies. Because it’s so completely militaristic and uniform and characterless. The character was that there was no character, and how at odds is that with the statements, the ambitions, the humanity and personality and pain and passion you were so desperate to impart and express? Plan, repeat, sidestep, repeat, plan, repeat. No build-up, no tricks, no possibility of stepping outside the diagram. And live it was so different. “That’s All Changed Forever” rolled on and round and round and up and got messy and loud and on the record it’s A + B + A + C + A again, no change to the melody lines, no alteration, no freedom. Oh I gave it 10, of course I fucking did, how stupid would I have looked if I’d admitted it wasn’t what I wanted, eh? You were making it for me.
And then I was displaced and lost and shoved aside and had my soul killed, utterly killed, and that year was so awful but I grabbed hold and hung on and hung on, through the shit the pain the absolute emptiness and futility, because you were going to make a record that was going to end all records. “Is the second album still gonna be psychedelic?” “Shit, we said the second one was going to be psychedelic.” “We’d better make it psychedelic then.” And you nearly did, and I thank you for it. Oh, there was a great record in their somewhere (I’ve just told the world via Stylus exactly what that great record is too) and fuck me if it wasn’t great fun running round the country, the sweaty nights of tears and booze and song, waking up on strangers’ floors, having people declare their love for me, opening up doors of chance and lunacy and opportunity that I’d always assumed were closed for people like me (people like me? – like there’s anyone like me, like I’m like anything, like I’m anything at all, that’s the thing you see, reduce all angles to zero, become nothing, because with becoming nothing comes the possibility of being, well, anything, if not quite everything [though I’ve tried that one too], taking any path, any idea, changing who you are – yeah, it’s the thing about the Buddha and the void again but I think it’s true, as true as anything can be), Blackpool and Hanover and Wolverhampton and the Astoria and a fucking forest glade by a lake where they tested the fucking bouncing bomb, as if that afternoon wasn’t perfect! (“Hippies!” – “Nick and J are here at last then…”) Oh I opened my heart and spilled my guts and we all did. I wasn’t the only one with chest pains that March (mine were from drinking too much, yours were from what? – holding your guitar weird?). I had to kick down somebody’s door. I fucked a ballet dancer because of you. I was, I think, mad there, for a while. It was good.
My problem is that I don’t need the straightforward signposts to emotion. You don’t either. I only just found out what its name is, but I’ve had the punctum for ages. I get it in the bits everybody else waits for to finish. The happy accidents. You found it most effectively when you stopped so earnestly searching for it. You’ve got an empty jar (your soul [if such a thing…]), the best way to fill it is not with pebbles (big, significant experiences, life-changing profundities) but with sand… Pebbles leave gaps. Pebbles get stuck in a jar; they cannot move and breathe and dance. If you shake the jar to try and get the pebbles into ever corner you cannot do it. Always some areas of the jar remain untouched by joy and sadness and punctum. Sand of even just the same mass as the pebbles which leave gaps, in the same jar, shaken, touches it all like bits of solid air. But even more than that, you can fill a jar with sand and have no gaps. This is, of course, a very long and boring and confused and ultimately stupid metaphor but I know what I mean and what’s more I think you do too. Yes. Sand.
6/30/2003 09:08:00 am
Sunday, June 29, 2003
Part 3
And so we continued but by this time I’d “found a nice girl to calm [me] down” (wise words, Pollyanna, wise words) and I wasn’t in the midst of it anymore. Too much water, too many bridges. And fuck me if that opening track wasn’t just far-and-away the best thing you’d done, a towering albatross, and behemoth, and not ungainly this time, actually infused with that baroque grandeur and catharsis you’d been chasing so hard. And I remember that misty morning when I got on my bike and peddled out to the end of the Warren and I was the only man in the world, mist and water on all sides, and I remember that first listen, thinking you’d maybe done it… No. No. You messed up “Redemption”, for a start. You took the looped piano hum out of “Make It Last”. You played everything a little too smooth, too plain. It’s the Coldplay fucker’s fault. You had so much more humanity and joy and grace and playfulness than he would allow you to express. Or maybe than you would allow yourselves to express. Pleasure is never a guilty pleasure.
And then that morning in January. In The Guide, of all places. Damascus never came out of something so deliberately irreverent. I forget the words now, of course. Did they mention Paul’s Boutique or was that me? “We want this and this and this and what’s more we can do it…” And I believed you. And you tried. But you couldn’t. Nobody ever made truly great record by trying to make a truly great record. What’s great anyway? The punctum is, you fule… An epiphany? I felt like I’d been sleeping with someone for four years and just woken up and realised they weren’t the person I thought they were, the person they said they were. Did I feel cheated? No… I felt bewildered and a bit stupid. It’s alright. It’s alright. I’m still waiting for the next record.
HA! HA!
And you know what the really funny thing is? It’s that she said this, about me, all those years ago. Oh for fuck’s sake. Not enough mystery… Well I tell you baby, there ain’t enough time in all creation to find what’s inside me. Cos there’s nothing there… Not enough mystery.
The other funny thing is that Steve, of all people, once got it and said it. That thing about Lyra and Will and losing yourself in something, in the task, finding the magic, the secret, by accident and as soon as you try and control it, you lose it. So you have to become it. And guide each other. And Steve told us this about “I’ve Been Running”. If only you’d read those three books then, maybe it’d have all been OK…
Because it’s nothing personal. It’s just me. Isn’t it. You’re all fine people. Good people. And we had a time, didn’t we? A mad one. And yes, I always went to the toilet during the slow ones. But there was that one time when the other bloke pissing in the trough was whistling what was being played outside. And that worked.
Don’t get me wrong. I love yer. I just don’t… It just doesn’t… Ah… I’m still waiting for that next record.
Unfortunately the all-new, more efficient and effective Blogger seems to be unable to handle posts of more than approx. 1,000 words. Hence I've had to cut up this second Epiphany piece into small bits and posted it across three posts. Rest assured I've had a bitch at them.
6/29/2003 03:40:00 pm
ABOUT SCHOOL
Anonymous
This poem was handed to a grade 12 English teacher in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Although it is not know if the student actually wrote it himself,
it is known that he committed suicide two weeks later.
He always wanted to say things. But no one understood.
He always wanted to explain things. But no one cared.
So he drew.
Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn’t anything. He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
he would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky and it would be only him and the sky and the things that needed saying.
And it was after that. that he drew the picture. It was a beautiful picture. he kept it under the pillow and would let no one see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it. And when it was dark, and his eyes were closed, he could still see it.
And it was all of him. And he loved it.
When he started school he brought it with him. Not to show anyone, but just to have it with him like a friend.
It was funny about school.
He sat in a square, brown desk like all the other square, brown desks and he thought it should be red.
And his room was a square, brown room. Like all the other rooms. And it was tight and close. And stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and the chalk, with his arm stiff and his feet flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching and watching.
And then he had to write numbers. And they weren’t anything. They were worse than the letters that could be something if you put them together.
And the numbers were tight and square and he hated the whole thing.
The teacher came and spoke to him. She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys. He said he didn’t like them and she said it didn’t matter.
After that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way he felt about the morning. And it was beautiful.
The teacher came and smiled at him. “What’s this?” she said. “Why don’t you draw something like ken’s drawing?
Isn’t that beautiful?”
It was all questions.
After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew planes and rocket ships like everyone else.
And he threw the old picture away.
And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big and beautiful and all of everything, but he wasn’t anymore.
He was square inside and brown, and his hands were stiff, and he was like anyone else. And the thing inside that needed saying didn’t need saying anymore.
It had stopped pushing. It was crushed. Stiff.
Like everything else.
6/29/2003 03:38:00 pm
Monday, June 23, 2003
Epiphany 1.
Guitar twilight…
November 1995… There or thereabouts…
Slow, distant peals of thunder late this afternoon, and again late into the night. For a stretch of early evening it cleared and the air was as fresh as you could ever imagine it could be. The brief rain dissolved into the hot tarmac of the road that runs through my estate, evaporated within seconds and, having fallen so far so recently and not wanting to ascend again right away, crawled around the driveways and garages like a lazy wraith. Clear blue sky. I walked to the post box and posted a mix MD to Scotland. Come 5am I will be wandering around the house in my underwear, unplugging anything electrical and listening to the percussion of the clouds.
The clearest blue skies are in November. Day after day of pale blue canopy, not a whisper of rain, the only vapour above our heads trailed by planes, the air chill but not abrasive. You feel it clean your throat as you inhale.
Autumn 1995 and my room was to be decorated. Sixteen years old now, and the grey-red-white-black racing car utility of my bedroom’s colour scheme, chosen as a boy, no longer fitted. The new carpet would be a deep burgundy, the walls a pale green, the curtains light and deep green and splashed with claret to tie the walls and floor together. For two months after decorating I had no furniture, just a mattress, CD player, pot plant, and three piles of stuff; books, clothes, and CDs.
The habit of falling asleep late and waking early for college had been found, and as a result I would often doze for an hour in the afternoon when I returned home. Normally it was the television, the banality of pre-6pm children’s’ programming, that accompanied my sleep, lulling my brain gently away as my attention wandered into blankness. This particular day though, a Friday, I flopped onto my mattress and set a CD to 5000 rpm.
The Stone Roses had weaved their insouciant, insular way from my older brother’s bedroom when I was ten and I had been ill at ease with their strangeness. I disliked them. Five years later, after The Beatles and George Orwell and Buddhism, one friend introduced another and the other introduced me, during a long car-ride to a destination where we would race remote control cars. I knew the songs but they were still mysterious; I couldn’t plot their destinations, their courses. I liked that. I remember one evening in another friend’s front room, waiting for a party to start, equipped with one compilation CD that held “She Bangs The Drums” somewhere in its running time, and I played it over and over again, each time fascinated by the lazy movement of it, the dispassionate passion, the obscured truth, the subdued euphoria. ”Have you seen her / have you heard? / The way she plays, / there are no words…” Simple, so simple, an entire scope of feeling hinted at with a few lazy words. You never fall so far as you fall that first time. The next January I would buy a t-shirt in London a few days after the IRA had started disrupting people’s lives again. Oxford Street would be slowly cordoned off and we would be ushered out of one shop after another. A t-shirt and a poster. The t-shirt is still in a draw somewhere, misshapen and faded, worn almost every day for a year. The poster creased and ripped and faded too over the years, but is still on the back of my door.
This particular afternoon the CD I put on was a recent acquisition, only a few weeks old but already often played and much loved. At 4pm it was still light outside, the pale and sharp and clear light of a late autumn by the sea. My mind began wondering during “Waterfall”, Ian’s mysterious, dreamy descriptions of a girl’s flight from “this hole she calls home” ringing through my mind, and before “Don’t Stop” had finished my body had succumbed and I was drifting in dreamless emptiness.
Unexpected, dreamless sleep could well be proof that, essentially, we are nothing. Safe in our beds at our allotted times, dreams secure the belief seated deep in our consciousness that we have essence, an intangible something that, even with our senses gone, can experience and feel and which continues to exist. Something that we hope will remain when it’s no longer slumber that robs our senses. But when sleep catches us unawares, in unfamiliar times and places, and deprives us of dreams to entertain our elusive, reassuring souls… It’s then that we find ourselves in the presence of dangerous nothing. The invisible nets and wires that hold up our souls against the gravity of emptiness are revealed as invisible not because they are magical but because they’re not there. There is no guarantee that we will ever find our way back from within this nothingness. No guarantee that there’s even anything to find a way back.
My eyes opened some 25 minutes after they had unwittingly closed, and in that time the sun had sunk behind the trees. My senses weren’t awake and their subjects were ebbing and fading in the twilight anyway. A handful of bass notes climbed up and then quickly, ecstatically tumbled downwards and forwards. Had I been fully awake I would have recognised the familiar path of the notes and beats and pauses, I would have expected the guitar to join, the drums to move just so, the arrival of a disembodied glisten above and to the left. I knew the moments so well. Half sleeping though, ambushed by nothingness, I was trapped in the moment and knew nothing of what had passed or what was approaching. Stuck in that moment that was in between the past and the future, dozed and immersed in twilight, I lost sense of who I was, where I was, what I was experiencing. There’s a quote from Sartre’s Nausea that I keep going back to,
“I am moved, I feel my body as a precision tool at rest. I for my part have had some real adventures. I can’t remember a single detail, but I can see the rigorous succession of circumstances. I have crossed seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have plunged the course of rivers towards their source or else plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and I could never turn back, any more than a record could spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where? To this very moment, to this bench, in this bubble of light humming with music…”
The realisation of one’s self within the world through music and light, the realisation of one’s self within the world because of the lack of a self at all.
Puzzled by reality and beguiled by unreality I picked up the jewel case, the anarchic spray of black and white and green, the slices of lemon, the tricolour bars and the gold letters of the cover, and it made no sense to me at all that this thing in my hand had anything to do with this bubble of music and waning twilight I found myself so blissfully within. What must it be? It must be magic. But of course it isn’t. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy he describes intimately the process of sublimation that accompanies great craft, Lyra’s loss of self as she reads the alethiometer, Will’s necessary surrender of thought as he wields the subtle knife. There are certain times when you can bring yourself to a point of this immersion, and there are others when you can find yourself within it all of sudden, only to find the realisation of the state must necessarily bring about its death. But to wake in music and find yourself there, unknowing, and to stay there for a time, an age when all you have is that present and no past and no future…
There have of course been dozens of occasions, maybe hundreds, since then, when I’ve lost myself in music. Not had my pain reflected in catharsis. Not sung myself hoarse. Not danced drunkenly with no care for what I danced to. Not hummed along. Not shaken my head and banged my hands against the steering wheel in (almost) time. No. Lost. My. Self. How pretentious do I sound? You know what I mean… Eight minutes and something into “Spanish Key” when that electric piano motif rolls around again, this time larger, more pronounced, the whole goddamn band subsumed in its movement, and the air stills a second on climax before Miles wafts upwards, beautifully, on a catch of notes that climb for a second and it could be forever… Caught in the double snare tip, hazy chords and draughty, resigned melodica in “Big Shot”, two minutes and eleven seconds in when the guitar first spirals like a solitary star’s shimmer… Immersed in the pulsing noise and blissful rhythm of “Soon” as it finally unfolds forever… The delicate blip, forlorn beat and angelic voice that mean exhaustion and hope in “Belfast”… You have your own moments… A joy not to be experiencing something but to be of something, even if only for second…
I’ve found it elsewhere since, maybe before as well, but that was the first moment when I realised it was what I wanted, where I felt most at peace, sublime, surrendered and lost and not wanting to return, in the final, tumultuous minutes of “I Am The Resurrection”, euphoria and redemption sought and almost caught. It’s not even the piece of their music that most sends me, and wasn’t back then. The sinister and divine seethe of “Something’s Burning”, the liquid, alien Krautrock of “Fools Gold”, the eerie promise of theft that is “I Wanna Be Adored” and the lovelorn shuffle of “Standing Here” all do it much more often and effectively for me. But that one moment, on that twilight evening, eight years ago… Every record I’ve bought, every song I’ve heard since, that moment, trying to find it again, is what they’ve all been for.
6/23/2003 09:21:00 am
Friday, June 20, 2003
British Incomprehensiblogs. I am tired. I am very very tired of Mille Plateaux. Chalie Blake says, with his wizard's beard and acid past and manchester home and children who he gives into once a month and let's eat in M's, Charlie says "I don't understand it but I know it's genius." Nick says "oh for fuck's sake." Don't even try.
You don't you don't you don't you don't.
Even try.
Mille Plateaux is sitting on my bedside table and I am studiously reading The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay instead because it moves me and I am enjoying it. Fire little stem cells, fire! Gorge, medula oblongata, cerebral cortex, gorge. Cerberus Cortez. Three heads and NO DOOR. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY I BOTHER, DO YOU?
I don't even FUCKING WATCH television. I've got one album by the band. I quite like it. When I remember I like it I play it and enjoy it. Dress me in a kaftan. Photography exhibition. Job application. Deputy UK Editor. Size nine shoes! I love what we've become, you and I and me. With our pages. AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...
It's only, it's only, it's nothing more than, it doesn't matter that, that's not relevent, it's only... it's a broken heart. It's having it broken a thousand times and each new time you realise that the last time meant nothing. It's not it's not it's not. It's a smile and a breeze and (rhyme this now bitch) endless possibilities... Oh yeah. It's pointless it's pointless, we don't mean anything and nobody cares. Nodboy would care if we did mean anything.
Sack it all off and go and get drunk. All this stroking and weeping and odd punctuaion, this... It wears me out. No no no, the words are wrong, that's what it should be, what I always thought it was.
No, you fucking imbecile, we've just got all the things to watch and nothing to watch them on. Because that makes sense.
Clutching.
At.
Straws.
All I wanna do is let you know how I feel so maybe you can understand and we can feel the same. Because I'm lonely. Not alone.
6/20/2003 04:15:00 pm
Thursday, June 19, 2003
Some vague thoughts on the avant garde...
I attended a lecture by film-maker and producer Don Boyd on Wednesday evening entitled "Is The Avant Garde Dead?" (it would have been rude not to attend, after having spent the afternoon helping him put together the tape of film clips he was going to use on our digital video editing suite). Don's a lovely, passionate, erudite and knowledgable bloke, but he's not a lecturer, public speaker, or academic, and as such his lecture was rather wooly, formless and erratic. Nevertheless, his talk raised some interesting ideas in me about the crossover between art and entertainment in film, and, of course, music, specifically the question of what the avant garde is for.
The saying has its origins in the French military, and literally means advance guard. But what's it actually about in terms of (popular) culture and our lives? Don's vague but purposeful list of adjectives and impressions seemed to focus around the idea of the avant garde bringing us the "new... unpopular... strange... [and] romantic...", of people seeing film as a medium through which to express (?- create) art, influence deigned as more important than impact/popularity, cerebral and visceral engagement (and shock) seen as a preferable goal... The idea of shock caused some problems. Helen Taylor, head of English at Exeter, pulled Don up for the fact that three of the clips he showed (in particular a segment of his own Aria and the Cinema Of Transgression piece The Evil Cameraman) portrayed violence towards women; the insinuation being, I think, that the avant garde is a male territory and that shock equates with male-on-female violence. What's the necessity of shock anyway? Shouldn't avant garde be about doing things first, finding new things, uncovering ground not noticed or else left fallow, rather than desperatly seeking to shock?
And why do we need the avant garde anyway? With it's recurrent refutations of commerce and capital, with its prickly desire to be 'challenging' (shocking), is it seeking to enrich our culture, our experiences of what it is to be human, to further our sense of self and our ability to appreciate life? Or, as I'm beginning to feel, is it just another cog in the machine, another subcultural generator primed by the very capitalist regime it ostensibly seeks to free itself from. 'Influential' in Don Boyd's terms then becomes a more sinister thing, meaning 'the next new thing to be interpolated, watered-down and sold back in many altered forms'; less a spiritual or aesthetic influence than another thing to be turned into products. Which would seem to be anathema to what the avant garde is about. The idea of it being a scout discovering new territories for the furtherance of capitalism is a bad thing.
Isn't it?
I don't know. I'm certainly less wound-up about the idea of products and marketing then many people. 'Selling-out' isn't something I see as a bad thing per se. In fact, the concept and the unwritten 'punkrock rulebook'* it comes from I believe to be a distinctly bad thing. I have neither the time nor inclination to go into it now (this is an obscure blog written by a nobody, for fuck's sake!) but suffice to say I don't think its necessarily as bad as people might instantly believe. Whilst at the same time believing it (capitalism) to be an evil, insideous, awful thing.
There was a brief flurry of emails a few weeks ago between Marcello and myself about what avant garde meant, inspired by his assertion in his CoM piece about The White Stripes' crapulent retro-fitted blues-whore opus Elephant that gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) was "perhaps the most avant garde album of the century thus far". I didn't fully understand then (hence the emails) and now, several weeks and two (wonderful) Gillian Welch albums later (Time and Soul Journey) I can grasp the essence of what he was getting at even if I cannot articulate it. It's not so much about why or how you do something, but rather what you do with what's available to you. Hence The White Stripes fussily only using pre-63 analogue gear to record Elephant (indeed, their whole stripped to the bone aesthetic) is a pointless gesture when all they're recording with it is pastiche and parody and witless homage. By contrast, Gillian Welch records with old gear in a stripped down manner because it is the only thing she knows how to do; the form and intensity (emotional, in this case) is what matters, not the method of its production.
A thread on ILM this week entitled When will we get bored of manufactured music? fills me with the occasional recurrent despair that, really, no one understands what they're talking about (least of all me). Indie/rock boy into 'real music'? All that old soul you love came straight off a conveyor belt. Those songs you profess to love, that you claim are superior to 'pop' songs? Swap their clothes, my friend, and I doubt you could tell the difference. It's all surface, all an aesthetic. Buddha teaches us that life is suffering... The desire for substance and the eternal frustration of that desire (in the face of there being no substance)... Ramble ramble ramble. That's part of this avant garde thing as well; can the avant garde (and therefore 'real' art) be manufactured? Two words - Andy Warhol.
Don Boyd's conclusion was that the avant garde (in film and art) had been subsumed and interpolated so much so that the arbiters of taste (Saatchi and the Tate seemed to recieve much of his ire) now define what is percieved as avant garde art by the average man, merely by what gets included in their 'controversial' exhibitions when they have them. The taste arbiters, wealthy men fishing for status (intellectual? class? bohemian?); for them avant garde becomes a nostalgia exercise in tourism, what has been much more important than what will be, even though what will be is what the avant garde was initially about. Don wanted a new 'post-gard' (look after that mail) of young auteurs, but that's never going to happen now, is it? Not now you can get grants and prizes and training on how to deal with (manipulate) the press. Experimental music plays to five men and a sweaty dog in a pit; 'sound art' plays at gallerys. All if it ends up filtered and packaged anyway. Find the package you like.
*Disclaimer (in case Mark Sinker ever reads this, which he wont); I don't mean punk, I mean distinctly punkrock which comes much much later and is American and is linked v.v.closely with Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain stencilling his garage with his own brain and culture-jamming and No Logo and other things instantly recognisable if not definable.
But what is punk anyway? It was already dead by the time I was born. What have Avril's fucked-up metaphysical ethics got to do with it? U2 claim to be post-punk but then what to make of Wire or Talking Heads or PiL or or or or or the fact that The Clash aren't punk and aren't post punk but yet I like them waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than The Sex Pistols (who I own no records by, and what's more, cannot ever EVAH buy any records by because I am 24; ie; I was minus2 when Never Mind The Bollocks came out and it's just tourism now for anybody under the age of 40 to go back there and claim to understand, all those strands of identity being eroded, all that destruction of history and future and unwritten law [and the placement of the seeds of future unwritten laws] and meaningless meaning. Shorn of being there [plunging needle into Sid's arm and dick into Rotten's mouth] you can't have it, no context, no realisation of what it menat. Have these boundaries broken permanantly? No, of course not. Crazy motherfucker. It means NOTHING to me. It can't. And I can't clap along or dance to it or anything anything because it's not mine and never was; it was dead before I was born and its ghost isn't related to its life, it's just still got the same shoes on.)
6/19/2003 11:35:00 am
Monday, June 16, 2003
A brief impression of...
Scott Walker
Tilt
Mercury / Fontana
1995
Never been scared. Never been made to feel sick. Not by a record. Remember the title from years past, I was 16. Was it mentioned in some long-forgotten end-of-year poll? A cursory entry at number 36 in NME or Vox or Select? I don't know. I don't know. It's one of those titles that's intrigued me for some time. One of those records that keeps getting mentioned by people I respect. Here... there... elsewhere. After a time I have to give up and buy it ("i", Spirit Of Eden, Remain In Light). I've either been 'not disappointed' or else 'blown away'. Count this in there too. I've had Scott 4 kicking around for years, never been that taken with it. Love the old Bacharach stuff, obviously. From him and his 'brothers'. It was Bacharach, wasn't it? 'Make It Easy On Yourself'?
This isn't. This is, aptly really, the fucking evil flipside nightmare of Spirit Of Eden. This is... Those words that start 'Farmer In The City', some Satanic auctioneer, they're obscene, grotesque, mannered beyond all manner, a huge baritone forced out of a constricted, contracted throat, "do I hear... 21... 21... 21...?... / I'll give you... 21... 21...21..." and what is 21, why is he asking for it? Who is offering it? And the underfloor to this is strings, strings deep like graves and ominous like a policeman at your door hat-in-hand, an occasional note or two of guitar less like a musical instrument than a touch upon your shoulder by a dead man. What is this? "I've never felt the pressure / I knew nothing of the horses..." What horses? What is there to know of them? If Scott 4 was baroque and dramatic, tinged with myth and sadness and a peculiar Englishness (an Englishness that could only be assumed by someone who is not English, indeed) then what is this?
You have to understand it was early, very early, on Sunday morning, 1.30am or thereabouts. I'd ordered Tilt on Thursday at 4pm from HMV and they'd emailed me confirming dispatch at 7.30pm. Prompt service. Saturday I left home at 7.15am to drive to Wales to play a louche Nazi in a war film. I'd been outside all day in a uniform in sweltering heat, speaking German, exploring abandoned buildings, my senses bleached by the sun and my brain broiled. I drove 2 and a half hours home, arrived at 9.30pm. Drank some beer, checked my emails. Took Tilt and a walkman to bed with me. Lay back and closed my eyes. The ominous hum of horsehair on steel. I already said 'Farmer In The City' was a test to get through, but at least it was somehow beautiful in its bleakness. Fuck knows what this man, this man famous and despairing of fame since he was a boy, this man now 50 (when he made this record), fuck knows what inspired him to produce it. What burnt in his stomach and behind his eyes as he sang these lines. But 'The Cockfighter'... I felt like someone had clamboured inside my skull and was scratching away at my brain, these tiny crawling and picking and etching sounds so close, actually emanating from my own head, two-minutes of nausea-inducing quietude that marked my inner ears and upset the balance of my consciousness. Scott whispers "clickety-click... clickety...click" and then ERUPTION... That gap after the second "clickety" lures you in, already disoriented and nausueous, waiting on edge for the second "click" and as soon as it arrives the song rapes your senses brutally, erupts in noise of an industrial intensity, all the more terrifying and effective because it is coming from a man who we all thought we knew so well, a beautiful man of art, and here he presents blasphemy and contagion and death so graphically and violently... We didn't expect this. I didn't. I was on the verge of sleep, when you are just able to realise your shifting parameters and shutting-down senses, and I shot upright in bed, terrified and nearly retching, consumed in this cavernous hell of noise and collapse...
I remember little about the rest of the record except that it did not ever find any light or solace, that it did not compromise. If Spirit Of Eden is a difficult ascent into heaven then this, Tilt, is a ferocious descent into hell. I look forward to furthering my acquaintence with it.
6/16/2003 10:59:00 am
Did you actually read what made you so angry? You certainly didn't even look at anything else. "I saw the name in the middle and saw red in that order. The rest of the words? What words?"
6/16/2003 10:17:00 am
Sunday, June 15, 2003
I've been in Wales making a war film all day. I am tired. But I got to play a Nazi and speak some German, which was fun.
That is all.
6/15/2003 12:28:00 am
Friday, June 13, 2003
!!!
Me And Giuliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)
Touch & Go / Warp
2003
The excitement's almost making me feel sick. Why has everybody else heard this but me? One copy in all of Exeter. £4.99. For two songs! I always reckon a pound a song is a good rate. Why don't I know about these things? Fuckers. Why are they google-proof? Are they wankers? I'm always behind the Yanks and the Londoners. Always always. And today it's hot. Man, so, so hot. I've got denim flares on anD they're normally quite loose but today they're stuck to me. It's stupid. My shirt's clinging to my back. Even at 8.30 when I got the train after walking down the cliff there was already a diagonal slash of sweat across my torso where the bag-strap had pressed too close. Too close. Too hot. It's only mid-June too, what's it gonna be like in August? Yesterday I saw the first piece of tarmac free itself from its grey bed, leaving a pock-mark of sticky molten black goo.
But I've got it now, it's in my hand. I get to play it. At work. Like that's any way to tell. One copy in all Exeter.
Sam and Marcello are all over this. Marcleoo's got it down as being freedom, I think, and loss of something (control? self? inhibition?) afterwards. After what? After that thing. I was just getting out of a car. I assumed it was a fool in a glider. An hour later, after talking about nothing but death, I got back in the car and America was falling down. Never mind London Bridge. The first real response to that? Maybe it is. Sam's all over it and dropping The Stone Roses every five minutes, Fools Gold here and there and everywhere and he's young, so he's gonna get it wrong sometimes but you know that it's still better to get it wrong with feeling than get it right with nothing. It's not Fools Gold, Sam. It's on now. That bass is crawling all over the floor. This is about, what? 8 or 9 years before Fools Gold? Not that I know my post-punk too well, hell, I was a baby, but, y'know... Oh, I dunno Sam. Those guitars are ghosts sure enough, touching your shoulders and whispering in your ear, maybe you're onto something too. And that two-note bass just now... That's Fools Gold sure enough. Why's it taken 14 years to follow? If this follows it. That particular wooze, all sinister and quicksand, still sounds to me like it was beamed straight in from somewhere orbiting Jupiter, in from Ganymede. This doesn't. This sounds like it was... I dunno. Beamed in from Marakesh maybe. No, that's Blur. This is beamed in from where? From whence? Yeah. I think we're onto something here. I like this. I can go with it. Gotta get some more, gotta get some more. I like the fact that the cover's some weird fractal explosion, Tron gone ecological, lines and lines and lines all heading back to this little hole these boxes jumped from. Back to a vanishing point. I like that its on Warp. That's good. Who says a rock band can't play weirdy-strung-out-post-punk-hyper-terrorist-dub-disco? Is this all going back to XTRMNTR? Cos man I loved that record but I've not touched it in a year apart from playing it to Billy. When are The Rapture hitting home? Are they gonna be delivering on the promise? Radio 4 melded it in together well and then played it the same on every track. These guys and The Rapture I'm hoping are gonna take it different places. Already !!! are ahead, just by coming from California and not NYC.
I've got £200 for the rest of the month and there are another whole bunch of records I need to buy. Every time I hear something I need to hear more. This is insane. I need to stop filling the little black book with names and dates and exclamation marks. Chks!.
6/13/2003 01:33:00 pm
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Urban Underground
Various artists
Decadance UK / Shaanti
What’s underground about dance music anymore? Absolutely nothing. Like anything that starts off in opposition to the mainstream, the culture-mongers soon get hold of it, polish the rough edges away, and sell it on. Punk soundtracks Hollywood blockbusters, Hip Hop sales overtake Country sales, Electronica sells cars. Up next? The Urban Underground. The title is a lie; for ‘urban’ read ‘Asian’.
So what’s here? Artful Dodger rhyming “room” with “Mills & Boon” and deserving to be shot. A remix of the Knightrider-sampling Punjabi MC tune (plus the original too, as if you hadn’t fucking heard it enough already), Ganja Cru and Transglobal Underground and a half-dozen others peddling anonymous, aimless drum n bass/garage/hip hop/Asian fusion.
About half the tracks are worth bothering with. Shabz knocks off a couple of cuts of wicked Asiatic dub on the first disc, all rubbery bass, droned melodies and eerie backing vocals. Asian Dub Foundation find themselves remixed into some jerky drum n bass that sounds like they couldn’t be bothered but is still the most underground thing here. Mindi Dhaliwal gets close to being blissfully brilliant and Beenie Man bangs it out on top. With so many compilations and mixes lining the shelves these days you’ve gotta be offering something pretty special to stand out, and this set doesn’t quite cut it.
Amazing Grace
Spiritualized
(Label unknown)
Jason Pierce’s sixth album as Spiritualized sticks two fingers up at the detractors of his last, over-orchestrated LP and shows that the Rugby Spaceman hasn’t forgotten how to rock. Stripped back to basics and recorded in secret, Amazing Grace is the heaviest and most concise thing Jason’s ever been involved with, and yet still miraculously finds time to throw in some inspired free-jazz skronk and beatific post-everything minimalism.
This Little Life Of Mine borders on unlistenable heaviosity while Cheapster puts the nu-rock revolution to shame (Jason’s been doing this since you were in nappies, kids) by shoving Chuck Berry into the twenty-first century. The Power And The Glory winds through rapturously spacious piano beginnings to find a seething, honking instrumental climax, and Lord Let It Rain On Me finally nails that gospel thing that’s been bugging Pierce for years.
Sure, the lyrics descended into abominable rock n roll cliché years ago and Jason’s now a respectable father fast approaching middle-age rather than a translucent teenage drug-rock messiah (who once wrote a song called Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To), but musically he’s a cut above anybody else even getting close to mining a similar seam. He’ll never make a record as good as Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space again, but he’s still more than capable of making an occasionally divine racket.
Soul Journey
Gillian Welch
Acony
Time (The Revelator), Gillian Welch’s third album of minimal roots country, saw her delve as deep as is safe to go into the realm of depressive self-realisation, the final, 14-minute track (I Dream A Highway) reaching a point of unavoidable exorcism as the layers of her very soul were stripped away to nothingness. Soul Journey shows that after reaching rock bottom, the only conceivable way to go is back towards the light.
To the uninitiated Welch’s fourth LP might sound like downbeat country-blues, but fans will recognise it as a bold embrace of positivism. Compared to the dust and bones of her earlier work, the acquisition of drums, fiddle, and *gasp* electric guitar makes this as revolutionary a step for Welch as Dylan going electric. Spiritually too, this is as gospel music next to the death and heartbreak of before. Look At Miss Ohio is a statement of selfish intent informing us that Gillian’s going to enjoy singing us these songs for once.
Don’t be fooled into thinking Soul Journey is all sweetness-and-light country-pop though. One Monkey’s steady drum pulse and cathartic repetition is as harrowing as anything Nick Cave could dream of lately, and the jaunty swagger of No One Knows My Name hides a confessional birthright lyric that cuts like a knife, while Wrecking Ball is a ravaging thrill. Soul Journey is already one of the year’s very best albums.
6/10/2003 01:17:00 pm
Monday, June 09, 2003
"Who put the 'cunt' in Scunthorpe?" Your mum and dad did, Adam.
No. That's harsh. There was a strange acceptance there, bordering on *gosh* respect. Almost. Like Iran broders Iraq. No, no, no. It was Mr Perry, wasn't it? Mr Perry who didn't have a clue. Who was a man without culture. Who spent his last year travelling America and who learnt nothing about it because what's America? To us? The east coast and the west coast and McDonalds and then a big void in the middle, which is, oddly enough, where the Americans live. As opposed to the Californians and the New Yorkers and such like. You are what you have on your walls... Are you? They close in on you; get some posters up fast. Make it yours, make it you. What did Perry have up? Two dozen pieces of plain white paper, landscape, scrawled; YOU FUCKING CUNT. How? How? How did he live and sleep in this room? How did, fuck knows her name, Sarah, from Brighton, who knew Dan from school, strangely enough, Sarah, who was basically a decent person, how did she sleep with him make love to him fuck him let him fuck her in that room?
And now you're having a dream and Jeremy Beadle is throwing things at you. With his little hand.
And these asian guys are outside being all fucking comeonthenyouwankahz and these fucking football hooligans doing degrees are inside the kitchen being all fucking comeonthenyouwankahz and all that's separating them is two thin panes of kitchen window. And that one, he doesn't even live in this flat, Adam, and you love him, in a totally non-platonic, full-on admiration and homoeroticism kindofway, only you're football hooligans and the thought is so alien that you'd rather, fuck knows, commit rape? Puke on your own face? Murder somone? Eat your own faeces? You love him and you hate it. And what's he doing? He doesn't even live here. And- fuck me -he's put his hand through the fucking window, you pillock, at midnight, drunken and angry and mob-headed and a fool, a fucking moron, put his hand straight through and I come into the kitchen and I see blood pouring all over this floor that I'm paying £53 a week to share with you, and what the fuck do we do from here? I pull shards of glass out of his lacerated palm, his fingerprints diced to beyond recognizable, William Blake and Miles Davis left alone in my room to ozmosis their words and sounds into thin air because I am in the kitchen preparing a meal of wankahzhand, wrapping my own pillowcase around his hand tight to stem the flow, picking bits of compressed sand from his oh-so-easy-to-find lifeline (easy to find? because it's pumping blood onto my shoes). In my kitchen. That costs £53 a week. And Dave was kicking a football against my door at 3am. And Dan and I were inhaling marker pens at 2am. And anonymous was bleeding at midnight. And Adam was distributing counterfeit clothes at 1pm. And Perry was fucking Sarah at 5am. And Psycho was missing his girlfriend at 8pm. And so I left.
6/09/2003 04:45:00 pm
Morning. Turned out nice again.
6/09/2003 01:09:00 pm
Saturday, June 07, 2003
It's now Saturday, so I guess it was yesterday that I ate a big, spicy wooden banana and a chilli pancake-omlette cooked for my workmate who is namesake with the future King of England by a camp man named Reginald who's father is chief of the village in Africa which he comes from, and who was first moved to write verse after the birth of said future King of England. An average day at work then.
6/07/2003 12:37:00 am
Friday, June 06, 2003
Magical realism in film? What are the dangers of super realism? Fargo claimed "this is a true story" and one Japanese woman took this for honesty when in fact it was a device... Did she?
No sense of the outside world? The inverse-sublimation device that causes you to really become the centre of your little solipsistic world; there is no outside world! Only these walls and this compound and this dead half-italian who can't remember the Cub Scouts' promise. But what about the opposite? What about Fargo? What about the japanese woman who went digging in the North Dakota woods for the loot? Who died in search of a myth that she thought was a given? From Tokyo too, not some village displaced from Osaka, from Tokyo, the fastest, busiest, hyper-metropolis. Where children seek counselling when Tamogotchis die. Maybe that's it. Where David Beckham is a deity. Where Fargo is real; or is it? Where people still hurt. A very interesting piece in The Guardian today about this.
Of course the irony of this story is that the real confusion of fact and fiction, the real submission to the desire to have the moments of one’s life follow each other in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered, to submit to the story, to be guided, to be carried along within the narrative of- of what? Of anything… The real confusion of life and non-life is not Takako’s. The confusion belongs to a police officer and a journalist and a receptive media-led public, eager to believe in the fallible, fractious minds of others, in the schizophrenia that must lead to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Takako’s act was not a deluded hunt for mythical loot. It was the snow-hidden suicide of a desperately unhappy woman, a jilted lover exiling herself to a cold and foreign world to die near her spurning love. And one woman’s true unhappiness is never a story.
Things rocking Nick's world this week include...
* Gillian Welch. I Dream A Highway - five minutes in you want it to continue; 7 and you think it could, should finish; 9 and you think it's too much, want it to stop; 12, 13, 14 and you're glad it didn't. I'm still not sure what it means, not explicitly. But I don't think that matters particularly. The new album seems to be turning a light on and I have responded to it in much the same way as I did Polly Jean's last album, which seemed to me to do a similar thing.
* Watchmen. New X-Men and E Is For Extinction disappointed me, as trying to revist childhood always does. Watchmen is on a different level. I look forward to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
* Four Tet.
* The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Beyond all the guff and hippy-speak and accoutrements there is something there.
* Jorge Luis Borges; at least, the anticipation of finishing the book directly above so I can get onto reading Fictions is rockling my world.
* Cayenne pepper. In every meal. Or not. No, not.
* British Sea Power, and in particular The Lonely from their debut album.
6/06/2003 02:01:00 pm
Coming soon...
Epiphany part 1; guitar twilight, November 1995.
Epiphany part 2; techno morning, April 1996.
Epiphany part 3; disillusion, January 2002.
6/06/2003 10:41:00 am
Thursday, June 05, 2003
The Decline Of British Sea Power
British Sea Power
Rough Trade
2003
What is the power of the British sea? An odd thing, for sure. A five-piece from Brighton, guitars and keys and drums and voices and too much strange clean salt-air, pot-plants onstage with them, cheeky and irreverent but honest with it. “We ourselves may be loved only for a brief time…even so, that will suffice…there is a land for the living and there is a land for the dead…” are the words writ upon the cover. British Sea Power’s Classic… A Gregorian-style chant gives way to a fingers-&-thumbs bassline, a clatter, a stiffed riff, a stabbing tempo, The Pixies, Apologies To Insect Life indeed, indeed? A minute-and-a-bit burst that doesn’t work.
For too long now we’ve been starved of new guitar bands with real personality, one tight-trousered grunter after another caterwauling and swaggering, too busy doing punker and rocker to notice the delightful oddities hidden in the melancholy joy of pop. Is this the turning of the tide? The Coral are crawling up a blind-alley of histori-scouse ballads, the vim and whimsy gone to The La’s, nodding heads, nodding heads, stroking chins. Something Wicked “this way comes”, organ and airy harmonies buried back there, a spooky hello, pop as can only be made by young men who spend too much time laughing at the sea and turning up guitars. The scent of Clouds Taste Metallic-era Flaming Lips on Remember Me, a better song than any on SFA’s last album, busy and hungry and a touch crazy.
Anyone who can rhyme “ebbing tide” with “formaldehyde” gets a Blue Peter badge, who can squeeze in more backing vocals that sound like pagan monks, striking guitars and delicate piano lines, British coastal psychedelic pop, emotional and strange and proud to be a little to one side. Peaks with The Lonely, a falling guitar line like The Stone Roses could have played, emptiness, impermanence, “haunt you with peculiar piano riffs / I believe bravery exists…” a direct comment on the emptiness and uselessness of song, this song, every song; “Casio electric piano” and still that stomach-pull that lets you know, winding up and down again in noise and echo and piano.
Peaks again with a 14-minute meander through half-a-dozen different tunes, some of them pop, some of them postrock, all of them fitting together, the start with guitar like rain and cymbals like strong wind through trees. “Lately you seem like another language.” Shimmering phases, FX, electronic ear-pieces, fuzzed-out distorted vocals, a shoe-gazing climax, sweet bass and angular guitar clicks and notes and more climax, more calm, and then too fast until it hums and feedbacks itself out.
British Sea Power dissolve ten, twenty, thirty years of skewed British guitar pop into their own solution, giving it their own personality rather than the past’s. A Wooden Horse with Morse code guitar and stately piano and a chorus that swings, that last-song-vibe, and easily melodic drift, the verse a broken version of the chorus. These are people making model boats and fly-fishing and butterfly-catching. Still young, weak in places, they can swim and fall beautifully and they will do this more often. “British Sea Power’s Classic”? Not quite. Not yet. But we can see the high-tide mark.
6/05/2003 10:28:00 pm
Read E Is For Extinction last night in about 45 minutes and I was disappointed. Sure, the art was good and the story was Ok and stop being magnanimous you fool, stop being nice, you were waiting for 45 fucking minutes for something to happen and it never did, did it? Cos really you were just after the Jim Lee stuff from ten years ago that you loved when you were 14 or whatever and now you're older and a; the artwork was NOWHERE near as cool, and b; really, aren't X-Men for somebody else? You bought Watchmen and volume 1 of LOEG too and from the first 20 pages of Watchmen you were intrigued and involved and felt a much greater pull to turn the page, didn't you?
Got Dialogue by Four Tet too, after wandering aimlessly for the last year waiting to find it just lying around in MVC or on Amazon or wherever, and it's great. Hurrah! Exactly the same as the other two, and yet different too. There's something about his sound that fits immediately with my aesthetic, my wants and likes and ears and brane, and all I can say is "wow, the man's a genius."
I need to do something about angels in music. Angels in machines. More angels, please.
6/05/2003 04:51:00 pm
Every now and then I realise I know nothing. And it's at those points I wonder why I bother.
Complete Works V.1 by Spiritualized got a lot of play over the weekend in tandem with their new stuff. Many of the songs I already knew, of course, but Anyway That You Want Me I didn't, and I was muchly impressed. Likewise the Medication EP versions of stuff, including Feel So Sad and the title track in particular. Amazing Grace is a very good album, better than the last, but CWV1 throws it into pointed relief; AG really isn't a return to anything, because he never really left anything. The drones are gone, long live the drones. Brevity is the key to the new Sprtlzd LP (can we call it an LP? It's a cyberspace construct only at the moment) but brevity is resolutely not the key to CWV1. Repetition, extension, elongation.
6/05/2003 04:30:00 pm
A swift email conversation with Marcello Carlin over the past two days about Big Brother, The Prisoner, Becket, radioactive light, Endgame. I can't watch Big Brother because it's Endgame, these dead people in a house with no outside, and I was made to sit through a godawful version whilst an undergrad that lasted two hoursand then some and had no humour or pathos or point, even the moving-the-ladder was not funny (and seeing Chekhov years ago in Plymouth and the stuffed dead bird wobbled and they knew it was going to wobble and so we laughed at the seagull, we youngsters at the back, and all the grey-and-purple hairs turn to face us and scowl and I wanna say back "did you not see that that was funny? it was funny! a stuffed bird! wobbling! and some fake russian woman staring out the window and proclaiming 'the geese have left for Leningrad' and withnail refusing to play whatsisface makes it more funny! can you not see that the wobbling bird is deliberate? there are no accidents in performance, lady" only I didn't cos I'd been scowled at). But yes. Big Brother is Endgame. Marcello tells me that the penultimate episode of The Prisoner was inspired by Endgame, and that theatre companies often play the two together. And then last night I (it's noticable that the most common typo I make, and I make lots, is missing the 'i' key when I press shift to type the self-singular pronoun which is ironic, if it can be, because the self-singular pronoun I see as the thing which most fucks-up this country, the fact that it's in upper case; no other language priviliges the self over the other so much as we do) get home, and take the cottage pie from the oven (a dash of cayenne pepper at my bequest and mmmmmmmm), and what's on the television? The Simpsons, and what's more, perfectly, it's the Movementarians episode in which Homer gets the family inviegled into a strange cult, and which takes-off The Prisoner at one point when Marge escapes and is followed by a big balloon-ball-bubble-thing. You are watching Fox. "We are watching Fox."
And the thing is, the films and TV programmes that always disturb me most are the ones in which there's no outside world, in which the cast and crew and set are all there is, not magical realism like Fellini or Ang Lee where what's going on is obviously a film, but the stabs at bona fide realism where tey forget to make sure we know about a world outside. Those ae the films that always throw me off-balance. American Beauty (as well as it being a despicably hollow film pretending to be full-to-bursting) does this. Like when Neighbours sheds a character, a family memeber and the clan remains and she/he is never spoken of or to again except for one phonecall, interrupted, every two years, only Neighbours doesn't care about being real and so it's false realism and insularity do not disturb. The second half of Fight Club finds this territory. The Invaders. Solaris.
6/05/2003 03:47:00 pm
Soul Journey
Gillian Welch
Acony
2003
Gillian could have come down from the mountains after Oh Brother and made the step into the wind that would have carried her to prosperity like it did the others, ones she shared microphones with. Lines were clear, doors were open. It was her songs with David Rawlings that were the highlights, for heaven’s sake, the embers of her call to sing that rock n roll that held warmth longest. It was her presence that made Krauss and Emmy Lou shine. Time (The Revelator) was a burning of bridges and an end of communication at a time when possibilities were clear and present. Anything that ends with a 14-minute voice & guitar symbiosis of the quality and mood of I Dream A Highway isn’t about sunrises and opportunity. Gillian wasn’t just trying to strip country back to its bones, she was trying to strip herself. And she got so close. So close.
But where do you go from there? I don’t think there’s doubt that Gillian reached the bottom of something during the course of Time. Soul Journey comes wrapped in cobalt blue, childish drawings and warm-sea-green, the grainy black and white of her first two albums gone, the stark plain late-afternoon colours of Time gone, the dust and dusk gone. The cynic sees that Acony is under Warners’ wing now and cries foul play. The listener looks a little closer and realises what you see is not as important as what you hear. Gillian never wanted to stay in Nashville anyway, she finished the last record wanting “to die with a hammer” in her hand. She curses it time and again here too.
After the musical and spiritual reductionism of her austere past, a tiny flourish of bass, drums, harmonica, fiddle or slide guitar makes Soul Journey sound like a leap into the future. How deep is that kick-drum? How electric that last guitar? How much fun is there in performing these songs? Where has the solemnity gone? Why should she still be tortured, precisely? There is light and ease here and for once it is not thrown into harsh relief by shade and hardship. Some people will not like this. “What good is my journey if I miss out on eternity?” is the question of I Had A Real Good Mother And Father. Maybe there is no eternity. Maybe it is foolish to spend your life hollowed with shadows. Maybe, knowing this, you should turn your journey’s path elsewhere. Gillian wishes she were “in Frisco with a brand new pair of shoes.” In her amended arrangement of the traditional Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor, she sings “no one here has had the blues like me” and it is the past tense of this that is key.
And so Gillian Welch takes her voice, often lone and true as if she no longer needs the strength of David Rawlings’ harmonies to hold her up, her voice of beaten copper, her frictionless monotone, her voice that likes to drink beer, that would neither melt nor cut through butter but rather spread it, and she wraps it here around redemption, a shy glance backwards to her family (“my mother was just a girl 17 / and my father was passing through / doing things that men will do…”) and her demons. “Gotta be a song left to sing” just for the joy of letting it be sung, “everybody cant o’ thought of everything.” Look At Miss Ohio admits she “wants to do right but not right now” and the drums and guitar and organs attest that this is for herself, that right is for somebody else, that it can wait. It starts with a downward glance and had you not heard Ruination Day (pt.2) you might mistake it for misery. “Drive to Atlanta / live out this fantasy…” forlorn until one and three quarter minutes in when the drums, languid and firm, strike in, and the sorrow you thought was due evaporates.
She was always good at repetition, at combining melody and harmony and rolling them over into country drone, but Rawlings is replaced here on half the tracks by a fiddle. One Monkey then is post-country, a refrain and little else pushed to point, strangely echoing People Get Ready and The White Album, almost a climax on the last four bars. “Here comes the freight train” but we’re not tied to the tracks, we’re encouraged to ride it on outta here. What happens when the quiet, dark-eyed girl wakes up and throws open the curtains, lightens her eyes? Do those who treasured her dark eyes feel betrayed? Those eyes aren’t dark for you. It’s explicit on Lowlands; “I’ve been in the lowlands too long… no fault but my own,” and that electric bass hook that ends the refrain is pure blues. What was she doing at the bottom? Why did she stay there? And now she’s getting out like Polly Jean did in New York. Wrecking Ball would be Dylan going electric only we can care about Gillian like we could never care for Robert Zimmerman, and so it’s Neil Young instead, tetchy and full of brimstone, eyes on the road, foot on the past, ragged and charged, the hammer-in-hand intent of last time’s ending taken through, “left home / headed for the wall / like a wrecking ball”. Soul Journey might sound downbeat and lonesome, wistful and dusty, but this is gospel music compared to what went before. Time (The Revelator) was country’s assassination, and this is a resurrection of sorts, not for the whole of country, floundering in the face of hip-hop on a global scale, retreating to bluegrass and the Appalachians, but for Gillian’s country, for Gillian’s soul.
6/05/2003 02:43:00 pm
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Why don't I download music? Firstly it's not practical. Dawlish isn't broadbanded-up and probably wont be for a while, so I'm stuck with a dial-up connection at home. At work I've obviously got a very quick connection, but no CD burner, so what's the point?
But sod practicalities. The real reason i don't download MP3s is cos they sound shit. Radio 1's compression I can at least forgive because it works very well in the car over engine hum; what's the point in listening to some 'open' jazz or classical (or anything) in the car on Radio 2 or 3 when all the space is filled with engine revs?
Friends say to me me "but you can't tell the difference between Cd and MP3" and they are so, so wrong. Maybe they can't tell the difference, but MP3 quality sound when played on a decent stereo/hifi or through good headphones gives me a headache. I'm far from an audiophile but it's clear to me how much less room the sound is projected into, how much less sharp and clear it is. Now, as Jason Pierce attests, a good song is a good song whether it's played on a £10,000 Naim set-up or a £9 transistor radio with a fucked cone, and I fully agree with this. But equally, a good song is made better and more readily appreciable when it's played on something that can do it justice. MP3s work OK on shitty PC speakers because they're generally so crap that even CDs sound rubbish on them (I'm not talking about big expensive speakers with seperate subwoofers like you can buy - I'm talking shitty bundled beige things the size of coffee cups). And I see no point in forking out for decent PC speakers when I've already spent a grand and a half on seperates and have some delicious Tannoy R1s on lovely stands anyway.
How can people not tell the difference? For a start, MP3s actually give me a headache if I listen to them for any prolonged length of time. I assume this is because I'm so used to listening to a clearer format that I'm stretching my ears at all times to hear things that little bit sharper, and end up 'straining my ears', if that's possible (and as someone who's had glasses since he was 12 and knows all about straining your eyes, straining your ears must be possible). Plus, and this is by far the worst thing about MP3s, because the sound is dulled slightly (and it is only very slightly compared to the amount of compression the Radio 1signal undergoes [CD to MP3 = digital telly to analogue tele, but CD to Radio 1 = DVD to VHS]), it becomes unmemorable, like a lifeless film; diverting and enjoyable enough while you're actually watching it, but once it's over it's... I'm sorry, what was it we watched? Oh yes, that was the one with, um, whatsisface in? What happened again...? And hence Let It Come Down was listened to on a burnt CDR of MP3 quality a half dozen times before it came out and I was nonplussed and could remember nary a thing about it. Once it was opened up on proper CD (vinyl even better but fuck it, convenience has to play a part somewhere and I'm not that fussy) the difference was amazing, shap clear and powerful, and it left it's mark firmly when the dulled MP3 simply could not penetrate. And so what's the point? The new Radiohead and Spiritualized albums have both arrived on my doormat in MP3 format recently, needing to be reviewed, and this has necessitated some serious attention-paying and note-taking, listening to them across different stereos and systems, on headphones, a shitty old mono set-up, th proper hifi in the music room, the walkman, etcetera, etcetera... Both are very good albums (Radiohead in particular is a wonderful record), and yet I know full-well I'm not going to be able to properly enjoy either record in a simple, non-critical capacity until I get hold of the proper CDs.
6/04/2003 09:05:00 am
Even though my back is stiff, my knees and shins are sore and bruised, my head is woolly and my lids are heavy, the walk down the cliff at 7.30am on a calm and clear morning still gives the early day that sense of serenity that just does not come from elsewhere.
I want to stand at the top of the cliff and listen to Halcyon+on+on.
6/04/2003 08:47:00 am
Monday, June 02, 2003
The Sunday Times yesterday gave away a free ten-track Stereophonics CD, featuring three tracks from their new album (out today luddites!) and an assortment of old 'favourites' in various incarnations (ie; live - as if Kelly could stomach being remixed). The band's 70s-aping faces were also plastered over the cover of the Culture section, and inside there was a two-page article about how much they've grown and how they nearly split up and how they like their mum's cooking and how they're nice down-to-earth valley boys (Eno is a down-to-earth boy who drinks his own piss, try that on for size Kelly). And yet the double-spread music reviews page didn't feature a review of You Gotta Go There To Come Back (so down-to-earth that they eschew grammer), the Cwymaman three-piece's fourth album. Why ever not? Is it because any publication that gives three stars ("unmissable!") to Spring Heel Jack's avant-free-jazz-rock-tech-fusion live document, and two stars ("very good") to Gillian Welch's new LP, and picks Eels as 'album of the week' would have to slag Stereophonic's brand of joinerly down-to-earth valley-rock? Imagine the discussion with the PR prior to the interview;
Sunday Times; "Hiya, we're booked in to talk to the band next week - is everything set?"
PR; "Yeah sure. You, um, got the promo copy of the new album ok then?"
ST; "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, um, sorry, yeah, yeah we did. Went down a storm in the office."
PR; "Look, um, please, if you're gonna go ahead with this whole interview-and-free-CD thing, we'd much rather you didn't give the album a bad review, please."
ST; "But it's shit."
PR; "Look, I know that, you know that, half the music-buying public knows that, but Kelly doesn't. Remember what happened last time? Eh? He started writing fucking songs about being badly reviewed! Do you want another Mr Writer? Eh?"
ST; "Good point. But, look, I know our music coverage is cursory at best, and we're well behind what's cool, but even we can't give this steaming turd a good review."
PR; "I'll have to pull it then. The interview's off."
ST; "No! No, we've already pressed the fuckin' CDs! How about, um... er... How about we review the album next week?"
PR; "Oh, alright then."
Wimps.
Thom Yorke's been telling NME that Hail To The Thief is "OK Computer part 2" and that Radiohead "will be unrecognisable in two years." Now I don't know whether Thom actually believes that, and even if he does I can't imagine for one second that he'd say it, least of all to the NME, so I must conclude that he's taking the piss here. Want another OK Computer, do you? Fucktards. Well, here it is then you fucks, you lapdogs of capitalism, here's your OK Computer part 2, only you're too thick to recognise it aren't you?! You're gonna have to change your tune a bit now aren't you, especially when the kids all lap it up! Double bluff! It's not even OK Computer part 2 anyway, you fools, and now you've changed your mind and said it's great just because I told you so! Double fucktards!
Finally picked up Justified on Saturday, as it's only £8.99 in Woolies (well, it was last week, who knows what's on offer now?). Like I Love You is still the best single of last year. And now, allegedly, Justin's shagged Baby Spice. All this acclaim is going to his knob.
Listened to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Libertines albums last night; both of them strike me as being a serious cut above your average 'new rock revolution' band (The Thrills, The White Stripes, The Hives, The Lice, The Wankers et al). The Libertines LP was recorded live and produced by Mick Jones, and you can tell on both counts. It's as raw and edgy and now as Is This It? was meant to be, and they've got a tight rhythm section to boot. The Yeah Yeah yeahs album, on the other hand, is interesting because of what it smuggles in underneath the new rock radar; the second side moves into strung-out, almost psychedelic territory, after Karen O's Rid Of Me yelps and squeals distract the tight-trousered and greasy-haired rock kids just enough with 2-minute punkers. They're from NYC though, so I guess it was it be expected that they'd have art-rock leanings underneath all that wam-bam-thank-you-ma'am hype. Give 'em another two albums and they'll have gone all Sonic Youth.
6/02/2003 09:03:00 am
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