Saturday, July 19, 2003
Colder
Again
Output Records
2003
Marc Nguyen is a Parisian video producer and graphic artist, and Again is his first album, recorded solo at his home studio in between commissions for his day job. If I was a cruel man I’d say that I hope it’s his only album. Oh, look what I’ve gone and done.
Nguyen meanders through dub, electronica, post-punk and krautrock during the nine tracks of his album, all sounds that are incredibly ‘hip’ right now, and what’s more he does it with a supreme sense of effortlessly tasteful Frenchness which goes even further towards stapling his fingers to the zeitgeist map. Unfortunately his music is also incredibly dull and lifeless, the utter valediction of substance as style finally takes over completely. “Crazy Love” and “Version” bounce along nicely enough on drum machines (the former), hiphop beats (the latter) and rubber-band bass (both), “Version” even rising from and then dissolving back into a shallow tide of radio-noise and found sound music concrete. “Shiny Star” melds Germanic repetition of simple musical figures and motorik rhythms to Nguyen’s comically French accent, while “One Night In Tokyo” does a limp dub which Nguyen is once again conspicuously French over the top of. The production is clean and sharp but never outstanding, the ideas conceived and realised with the minimum of fuss, and therefore also the minimum amount of serendipitous discovery, resulting in a characterless exercise in imitation and flattery.
The most interesting thing about Again is the inclusion of a DVD in which Nguyen flexes his day job muscles and adds videos to five of the songs from the CD, but even this adds precious little depth and sense to the record. In fact “Crazy Love” is made mildly irritating as opposed to merely inconsequential once it’s allied to the imposition of Nguyen’s own peculiar synaesthetic vision of a minimalist animated running figure. “Vision” is treated better, with a highly visually affected video of a car ride that echoes the seminal Stan Brakhage and the dizzying motorway journey from the first part of Tarkovsky’s soporific Solaris, but “Where” is given an impossibly dull sequence of a man shuffling some photographs. “This River” slowly melts a man standing at the aft of a ferry into nothingness, creating a sense of ephemeral beauty which put me in mind of Chris Marker’s exquisite 1962 short film La Jetée. The video for the title track is easily the best, a beautiful and iridescent shimmer of light and texture oddly redolent of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. If only the music weren’t so imperiously fucking bland and Nguyen had resisted the urge to plaster the lyrics of the song over the centre of the image making it look like a Beneton advert, it might’ve been approaching the greatness it clearly aspires to.
Again is an opportunity missed by such distance as to become pointless and even irritating.
7/19/2003 04:30:00 pm
Thursday, July 17, 2003
Elbow
Cast Of Thousands
V2
Guy Garvey's voice is fractured glass, opening your skin and letting loose blood which coalesces with tears and the trace of her eyeliner.
The new Elbow record is beautiful.
7/17/2003 10:09:00 am
So I finally heard a Dizzee Rascal track on the radio last night in the car, and I was all like 'meh'. Shuh. I guess I'll pick up the album out of a sense of obligation to know what's going on, but really, this isn't going to be my record of the year.
Plus it was being played by Zane Lowe, who really is the indie Tim Westwood (most intelligent comment I've seen in NME for years).
Oh, and Neil Kulkarni I'm sorry. I didn't realise it was you. I will buy the Aspera record by way of an apology.
7/17/2003 10:05:00 am
So I borrowed some Ludacris off Emma’s brother Pete, who is 17, because I figure if I’m gonna be known for arguing with Simon Reynolds about Ludacris I ought to actually hear Ludacris. I’d wager I wont really like it. I wont dislike it, I wont mind it. But I wont be blown away. I’m a 24-year-old white guy from Devon, I live by the sea. Much as I love Public Enemy or De La Soul or Tribe or El-P I feel like a complete cultural tourist when it comes to hiphop, as much as I would (and do) listening to Polynesian music or Buena Vista Social Club or Russian folk or heavy metal or hardcore. There you go. But I’ll give it a go.
New Muse track. Went to school with Muse, saw their first ever gigs. Used to sit next to Chris in science on Thursday afternoons (it could’ve been Monday mornings or Friday lunchtimes but you get what I mean). Bought their first album the day it came out, an inconsequential Monday in Northampton. And it fucking sucked, so I took it back and swapped it for a Leftfield album (the shit one). I never bothered paying attention to the next album cos the cover looked like Orange Can and they suck. But “Stockholm Syndrome” rocks like a demented demon with dementia. I’m tempted to get in touch with Bellamy and the others and try and sort out an interview for Stylus.
7/17/2003 12:07:00 am
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
What's my voice? My authorial voice? My written voice? The personality of my words? Do I even have one? I'm all over. I have no essence.
If you know what my essence is, email me. I need to be told. What am I good at? Anything?
7/16/2003 04:43:00 pm
Graduation day here. The girl from the campus shop is wearing a gown and cape and hat and shoes and stuff rather than a green t-shirt. The kid in the Stone Roses t-shirt and bad shoes is in a gown and cape and hat and still bad shoes. His mum's taking a picture of him next to the Tianeman Square statue (apologies for the spelling of Tianeman). She's so proud. I wouldn't be. His girlfriend's minging and he's 22 and still obsessed with The Stone Roses. Even I'd got over it by then. And my girlfriend is not minging; she's pretty as sin. I'm such a fuck. He'd have been 15 when they split up, and 8 when they were good. Shucks.
All this gown wearing shite.
Maybe I'm just jealous because I didn't go to mine out of some bizarre sense of idealism and inverted pride. I will not bee seen smiling and mugging for you fuckers to take publicity shots after you treated me liek shit.
Sitting in The Ram Bar at lunchtime, Erin eating chips and me eating a Mars bar, watching these be-gowned kids and their gurning parents sip Pimms and champagne and eat strawberries (oh, it's such a shame it's overcast today), it's fitting that the video jukebox is playing Coldplay and goth-Xtina (has she watched The Cell one too many times?). I guess this is the last real rite of passage. Off to work now.
7/16/2003 04:16:00 pm
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Auspicious fish are / is a Buddhist sign of happiness. Which I did not know until just now.
7/15/2003 10:18:00 am
I almost feel guilty because it’s one of the most indulgent, solipsistic things you can do, and I already do enough indulgent, solipsistic things, but I enjoyed it, and really, if there’s a better thing to do on a hot July evening, especially when you live where I live, I haven’t come across it yet. Part of me wonders, for a brief second, about authenticity, whether what I did this evening loses some of its charm and magic and power because it was pre-planned and not at all spontaneous, but what the hell’s authenticity anyway? Gavin’s been mulling it over for weeks (note to Gav; smoke less weed, man) but as ever I think I stand with Heidegger. It’s not about being real or natural or anything like that; it’s just about knowing what you’re doing, engaging with the world, being aware, aroused from the everyday world by angst (yeah, right), understand the existential structure of your life, etcetera ad infinitum. And there’s no doubt that I fully understood the ontology, the significance, the beauty, the preparedness of this evening. Hell, I’d been thinking about it all day. Do I stay in and work on my CV so I can apply for that job? Do I make notes on that David Sylvian record so I can review it? Or do I go to the beach with my walkman and skim stones across the mirrored surface of the river? Fuck me, it’s not a hard choice. And if I’ve got to set Pause recording onto minidisc while I have my tea so I can listen to what I believe to be the perfect accompaniment to the evening’s festivities, then so be it. That’s not fake, is it? I may have thought about it, planned it before it happened, but for the time I was doing it I actually was doing it.
Dawlish Warren is a sandbar which spits out from a big lump of sandstone at the end of Dawlish beach called Red Rock into the mouth of the river Exe. The Exe estuary is a haven for wildlife and seabirds, and while the seaward side of the Warren may be a tourist beach, the riverside is a nature reserve and members-only golf course. At the far end of the Warren is the Point, at which you’re closer to Exmouth than Dawlish by about two miles, which is strange, because to drive to Exmouth you have to traverse the river Exe as far as Exeter before driving down the other side, and the trip takes about 2 hours there and back. From Warren Point you can throw a stone and, if your technique is hot, hit Exmouth beach. On misty autumn mornings you can stand on the seaward side of the sandbar and see neither Dawlish nor Exmouth nor anything at all further than 20 yards away, and at those times you could be the only person in existence. On the riverside of the Warren the sandbar curves back in on itself in the river like a shepherds crook, and forms what at low tide is a wading-bird-friendly mud plain, and at high tide is a beautiful, calm, freshwater bay that faces onto Cockwood harbour and Starcross pier. It is, as far as I know, the perfect place in the world to go skimming flat pebbles across the water.
Walking across sand dunes is one of the most energy-sapping things you can do, each footfall absorbed into the sand, kinetic energy stolen by the drift of nature’s most luxurious shag pile, equal parts joy and frustration as grains both caress and irritate your feet. Marram grass absorbs any wind, leaving the dunes stultifyingly hot and bereft of breeze, whilst stinging nettles and thorn fronds scrabble for your bare shins and ankles. Signs warn against the dermatological nightmare of brown-tailed moth caterpillars, eager to leave 3mm long spikes dripping with mild poison embedded in your flesh. Dune-flies and rock pippets leap from bushes as you approach, the tiny brown birds flapping their wings two, three times before drawing them into their puffed chests and falling out of the sheer joy of descent before splaying winds and rising into the air again. Thin trails of ants traverse the dune-paths like conveyor belts, convinced no more humans will disturb their unified foraging now the sun has risen, peaked, and begun to descend again. By the edge of the sea strange, malevolent-looking flea-like flies jump and skip and hop and avoid the lapping, rolling water as people invade their territory with rippled paddling.
Kieran Hebdon’s Pause is one of my very favourite records, a beatific document of the pastoral idyll made with the very latest technology, the perfect synthesis of man, machine, and the world we live in. Take Heidegger’s notion of authenticity over any other and it is one of the most real and honest records I’ve heard. It is fireflies, breaking waves, balmed branches, loquacious nature. I love it. In many ways it’s like the environment of the dunes; seemingly arid and windswept at first but actually teeming with life and vibrant colour once you take a closer look and immerse yourself in it.
Leaving my little red automobile at the far end of the car park I put on my walkman and strolled the beach, hurriedly passing the tourists and early-evening sun seekers until I was safe on the uninhabited area of shore past the third groyne. From then on I filled my pockets with flat pebbles, five, ten, a dozen-and-a-half, each more potentially perfect than the last, until my shorts were so burdened with car keys and walkmans and pebbles that I had to pause and tie a knot in the waist cord to keep them from slipping down, all the while harps and clicks and broken beats and electronic bliss heightening my consciousness, the breaking waves of “Twenty Three” mixing with the breaking waves of the actual sea five yards to my right. And in the midst of this I hesitate a second and think two things- one; that the people on the beach are looking at me filling my pockets with flat pebbles and listening to my walkman and they are thinking I am mad (a good pair of headphones does wonders for your ability to not give a fuck), and two; that I don’t know whether the music is accentuating my appreciation of the world or if the world is accentuating my appreciation of the music… Art, life. Life, art. By the time the twitching melody of “Everything Is Alright” rolls around I neither know nor care.
Skimming stones requires a canny touch over brute force, a flick of the wrist and finger more important than a powerful swing of the arm. It’s all about surface tension, rotation, momentum and gravity. Even a round stone will skim if its momentum and the surface tension of the water outweigh the pull of gravity upon it. Large stones, the size of the palm of your hand, are best if your technique is good, their surface area helping them skip the undulating surface better than smaller, lighter pebbles. Paddling through the freshwater bay hidden behind the sandbar of the Warren, listening to Four Tet and flicking stones across the water, dead crabs and live crayfish, my old, old trainers, Superstars with orange trim that I’ve had since I was 19, so far past warranting keeping dry that I willingly wear them in the water because they deserve the sensation more than I do, not a person in sight, a long-sunken boat’s mast thrusting at a drunken perpendicular through the water, shags and herons and myriad other wading birds adding their coos and chirps as layers of melody to the music bound only for my ears, the ripple of the water as it gently tides into the beach behind me adding rhythm… At best I managed 18 bounces across the flowing pond. Champion. There really is no better thing to do.
As I walked back along the beach, my feet lapped at by the microcosmic surf, I switched the minidisc to a copy of Hex by Bark Psychosis. Over the dunes to my right the sun was beginning to set, caught behind clouds, golden drafts of light searching upwards in a comically perfect sunset like the word of God in some 50s Biblical epic. The lurid pre-twilight turned the sea vanilla and the far sky pink. I sat on a desiccated tree trunk, long washed up onto the shore as driftwood, and listened to “Absent Friend”. What else is there?
7/15/2003 09:38:00 am
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