i hold the sound.

relation to music is a strange thing, how it changes for no apparent reason - how, for maybe an entire year, i trawled through all of the prominent mp3blogs, and quite a lot of the littler ones, trying to get something. trying to get something new and, as i think i learned more in retrospect, something of a quick fix. it was almost about riffs and hooks, although not in the conventional sense...it was kind of about gimmicks, i suppose, even when it was very aware of this shallow need for gimmicry, hooks, whatever, it still had its own special way of letting them in. out of all those bands that released mp3s day after day, each hour, to this little clique, i think i actually discovered maybe one or two that i still listen to. bound stems is one, for sure. right now, i can't really think of another. actually, the national as well. and those bands, you know, i love. i listen to the national a load, and while 'baby we'll be fine' was the one that reeled me in, where i listened to it constantly and obsessively for a solid couple of weeks, the other tracks are real growers. like, real growers - to the point where they seem annoying at first before they reveal a load of hidden layers...'secret meeting' fucked me right off when i first heard it, but then later 'looking for astronauts' soundtracked a beautiful sunrise, that i believe i've detailed before, and 'city middle', 'geese of beverley road' and 'mr november' still get the occassional obsession. but, this post isn't really meant to be about the national, that was just an example of...what was that an example of? i think i'm saying that it became like the pop charts or something. gimmicks, popularity and hooks, often without much substance.

but now, i've begun to notice something that's been going pretty much throughout my music listening life - cycles. there was a big noise cycle, where that's what really excited me, and that was pretty short and intense, just because of the sheer sonic nature of noise. also, i couldn't really share that with anyone. that kind of cycle, i think, is different for everyone. it's likely that noise will never appear on any best of year lists, because its just a complete shot of something that you don't always need. having said that, brian chippendale's black pus project, and specifically 'black pus II' was beautiful and amazing and actually made me sweat sitting down with excitement (which must've been kind of rank for everyone else), and it has managed to get into an almost permanent place in my bag of CDs. so, i think that'll be on my best of year list, if i ever get round to compiling one.

notice how i keep digressing onto certain bands. sorry, i'll try harder.

cycles. there was a big one with kind of...i don't know what to call it, but blood brothers and part chimp and some others, where i had to listen to very, very loud stuff. and before that, i was intensely into the kind of folk thing, but i just couldn't really listen to it when i was in the loud cycle, because i just wanted things that were very, very loud. it's hard to explain, and completely irrational. now, i think i'm in a drone cycle, which was really opened up by belong's 'october language', and incorporates things like growing, tim hecker, some of those daniel higgs tracks from 'ancestral songs' and the buddha machine...and kind of developed within a larger cycle of repetition, like sunburned hand of the man and such. and at the moment that seems to be an even larger cycle, that is all about repetition and the accumulation of all these cycles, where drones and ambience are the top of this chain, and everything else is contained within them. with the drone cycle, i've been released from the cyclic pattern that has grown more intense and...cylindrical every time, and now i am listening to everything at once. i am in one of those explosive stages where you just find a shit-ton of really great music, and where you want to listen to all of your records at once. i am back listening to six organs of admittance, and obsessively to joanna newsom and califone. and then there's psychic TV, and also, i'm coming back to the Thermals, who are perfect in their brilliantly simple construction of songs, and heavy lyrical themes. there's a whole post's worth of stuff to talk about with the thermals...i mean, come on. a power chord album based on the concept of a distopian christian facist state...more importantly, a power chord album based ont he concept of a distopia chrsitian facist state that not only works, but turns out to be really great...come on! that deserves some discussion.

noah's ark? no problem - 'god said "here's your future: it's gonna rain."'

what a sarky cunt! reminds me of that Evelyn Waugh letter...hold on...

In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy [Lord Birkenhead] & I have bet Randolph [Chirchill, Winston's Son] 20 pounds sterling that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud `I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible "bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave'" or merely slapping his side & chortling `God, isn't God a shit!'

another digression. how out of character.

what was supposed to arrise from that little bit is that there's something that seems to react inside you, the way a lot of people discover things at the same time, taking their tastes to the logical extreme conclusions, and opening up everything else that brought them along that path. kind of like the constant reproduction of meaning with every new person who experiences a text...only within yourself. everything you have ever listened to over a period of time (a period of time that, often, is too large to see till it's over - i didn't see myself coming back to the thermals, really, even though there is nothing wrong with them and now, clearly, i have a lot to say about them) becomes new and different and exciting in new ways, often just through time, and often through a new set of situations, and a lot of the time through a new learning curve or musical experience. and even when you're aware of yourself going through these little explorations and cycles, you can't stop it. you crave the farsifa riff from 'laser life', or you walk through the city listening to 'primitive associations/great mass above', or you drive along turning up 'pillar of salt', or constantly placing the needle back on 'black metal valentine', or ripping lettuce leaves to 'in the pines'; trying to find a perfect place on a mixtape for 'radio spiricon', obsessively tracking the history of 'the orchids', reading short stories to 'are you of the body?'.


it's endless, and it's inevitable, and it's fantastic.


the blood brothers - laser life
growing - primitive associations/great mass above
thermals - pillar of salt
califone - black metal valentine
smog - in the pines
tim hecker - radio spiricon
psychic tv - the orchids
daniel higgs - are you of the body?