[press the eject and give me the tape]

Survival guide.

2009-12-07T18:10:00.006Z

I really couldn't tell you which albums I've heard this year and which I heard last year, and it's very unlikely that the albums I listened to this year were released this year anyway. So I suppose this is my equivalent of a year-end list, but in a kind of Billy Pilgrim fashion.

Also - there's aren't really albums that I've necessarily heard recently, and it's definitely not a definitive list. This list is the written commentary for a DVD's worth of music I made for Oli, cut off as he is in London...cut off, at least, from me saying "Wow, listen to THIS!...now listen to THIS!...now, listen, to: THIS!" every couple of days. So it's got some stuff on, but a lot of the stuff that could be on here is already sitting on some rusted CDr, on the back burner, covered in dust.

So,
1. Not a list of the year;
2. Not even a list of my year, irrespective of release date;
3. Not even a 'best of' list, but more a 'here's some best stuff and some other stuff that you missed'.
4. It's hand typed, and therefore:
a) riddled with mistakes.
b) you will have to click on each page individually.
5. Give up now!

Black Toast, Savora

2009-07-09T19:12:00.002+01:00

just a test for now. This is the new mixtape.

Tape Club - Black Toast. Savora. Cayenne. Salt. Gorgonzola.

Hope it works.

"I had a dream, which was not all a dream."

2009-06-15T19:05:00.009+01:00

I'm going to talk about two songs, two songs that are not as they seem.

When alone, especially in headphones, I often think about the reasons why I listen to noise, or noise music. The reasons are both new and not-new (but not old); the first time I heard anything that could be really considered noise was in sixth form, and I was on my own at a computer. I often attribute many characteristics of my personality (insomnia, walking, writing, vocal inertia, (attraction to) the sea, (love of) solitary time, (connection to) loneliness, etc.,) to the fact that I am an only child, and I think this initial noise connection is probably important in the same way. I remember listening to a few of these people from a certain city scene, I don't remember which city, I remember switching to something more palettable pretty quickly. But still, it remained somewhere. Of course it did. I had never heard anything like it.

In the first year of uni, I remember sitting in one night when all my new friends had gone home for a week. I was left alone in the flat with Nick, a student over from france. We got on well enough, but he was just getting into poker, whereas I was not. He stayed out late with a tall blonde swede, and another guy from kent. I stayed up late with a bottle of wine, the window open (the same Nick told me that my room was "cold and dark, like death"), reading this and that in whichever way the internet leads one; one of those nights where you are lead from one article to the next, or to several others, and you are constantly learning new things, very very quickly, things which open up new vistas, and new articles, and new interests. I finished listening to a CD, wondered what to listen to next, and put on the noise I had downloaded two years previously.

Oh my god. I remember sweating.

I remember reading an article, when I was mildly obsessed with Harmony Korine, by a guy who had seen Gummo in the cinema and started to jump up and laugh, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the quiet auditorium. Later, a few years later, the same author would find his way into an award ceremony and punch Harmony Korine in the face.

I knew, at that moment (I had never had such a visceral reaction to Gummo, but my experience with Julien Donkey-Boy came close), what that young american was talking about. I was sweating with excitement or adrenaline - are they seperate? - soon after that I did a 'noise special' on a radio show I had on the university airwaves. I remember sweating, laughing on my own in the studio. All the lights out, rendering the webcam impotent, registering only the red lights of the mixing board and the ocassional mad bottle silhouette over the computer screen. Jack, the only other ideologically-sound member of Livewire (we once had, soaked in cheap whisky, an on-air discussion about Planck time), switched the light on in Studio B, looked at me and pointed to the speakers, with what can only be described as a quizzical gaze. I gave the universal 'rock out' sign, greasy neck sweat surely visible in the harsh strip light, and a shit-eating grin. He responded with a look that I knew meant that he understood, even if he didn't totally understand.

Since then, it has been a gradual and incessant interest. About four months ago, I wondered what would happen if I listened to nothing but noise for an entire day. I have a few days off from uni in a week, and amy is at work, and I usually get up when she leaves at 8am. This gives me a solid ten hours, until she gets back at six, of self-imposed confinement.

That experiment has passed now, a hundred times or more, mostly by luck rather than judgement. Noise is my first choice, and I now spend most of my music-listening time on my own, so first comes first.

----------------

So. Onto the subject at hand.

There is an album by the Goslings, called 'Grandeur of Hair' (a fantastic title), which is a lot different from their other albums - it has these hints, these barely perceptible hints. There are two reasons why these hints are perfect: 1. The album was issued on a label called archiveCD, which releases beautiful beautiful packages which contain CDs, in limited numbers, and beautiful packages really deserve beautiful music and, even more, vice versa, music that is not only beautiful but is special, and these beautiful packages rarely receive special music.

Grandeur of Hair is special. 2. The first hint sets you up for the second hint, and the second hint is actually not a hint, but a small, perfect crystal of light.

The first hint is a song called 'croatan', which has this quite heavy-handed way of introducing a distinctly traceable melody back into the Goslings songbook.

(((

Wait. This is coming out all wrong.

)))

I want to talk about two songs, which are not as they seem.

The difference between the poststructuralists and deconstructionists is one that is almost completely arbitrary until a point can be made from the distinction; the difference exists in the same way as quantum mechanics, which is to say that it changes on observation, which is to say that each subjective distinction exists only to elucidate a certain point, and more or less ceases to exist after the metaphor has been played.

Hear me out.

The reason deconstruction and poststructuralism are so interlinked is because so many of the theorists came from the same background, and when talking to certain people about certain things, they assumed the terminology was pretty much the same, even if different words were used. The truth is that poststructuralism was born out of lacan, of lacan's use of the word 'real' to mean precisely everything that was opposed to the real (or was unreal), and then out of (people like, and including) derrida, who liked lacan's counter-intuitive reasoning, and decided that he was going to try out a method of critique that would take lacan's theory of the opposite meaning, and tie it up with sasseur's (sp?) distinction of a 'sign' as being made up of a signifier (e.g., the word 'dog'), and a signified (the four-legged hairy thing we recall whenever we hear or think about the word 'dog'). He took the words that we associate with things, and flipped them over...much like Foucault's conception of history, poststructuralism developed into a schema of recognition that defined things by what they were not rather than what they were. Some nice visual metaphors - sasseur said that the signifier and the signified were like two sides of a piece of paper: logically inseperable. This is the structuralist image. On one side is the word 'dog', and on the other side is a picture of a dog. You know what I mean. As soon as your ears hear it, your mind's eye can see it...etc., etc., etc. Simply put, the poststructuralist image is a piece of paper with a picture of a dog on one side, and then on the other side is every word that does not mean 'dog'.

I'm rereading the paragraph above, a few months later, and I'm not sure how much of it is true. But, seriously, I think I'm going somewhere with this.

The word 'deconstruction' has more of a violence associated with it than poststructuralism; a seperate thing, where the thing is a kind of birth-canal-existentialism. Are the two connected? I have no idea, but this is a little narrative that I have recently come across, and is (I think) kind of relevant:

Hegel wrote a load of stuff, and one of the books he wrote was called 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'. The book is so, so, so dense. I have routinely spent three hours in a group trying to decode five pages, and the book is nine hundred and something pages long. There are at least 5 thought-stopping ideas on every page; and then, after ten pages or so, he has a little flurry of poetic philosophy and creates beautiful images that slide off into a colour wheel of possibilities, making all the previously incomprehensibly dense passages completely forgiveable.

Later on, Karl Marx read a load of Hegel, and read the work of people who had read Hegel, and said - wait. These people are all wrong, Hegel was saying something else! He then tries, for ages, to convince people of the political-left side of Hegel rather than the more obvious-ham-fisted political-right side.

(((

One more time. Sorry. That last section would have worked, if I had finished it all at once.
So.

)))

I want to talk about two songs, which are not as they seem.

I.
The (assumed) difference between poststructuralism and deconstruction is that one inhabits the other; and then the assumption is that they are the same thing; and then, at some point, the difference is felt on an intuitive level. The difference, as I tried to say in the previous bit, is violence.

II.
There has, I think, been a lot of application of these ideas to music, but a lot of the time I have come across it through avant-garde/orchestral pieces, or music that is really trying to be 'out there' in one way or another. There have been less applications to popular music.

III.
This is where the difference between poststructuralist and deconstructionist conceptions of music really matter for my purposes -

A.
Wilco, with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, made an album that took a typical album structure, a typical chord structure, a typical song structure, a perfect and imperfect cadence, and took them apart and put them back together, not always in a logical way. Well, like a flat pack - they took it apart, and some screws were left. But the difference between that album and a flatpack is the fact that they had seen the building before they took it apart, before they rebuilt it: they knew what they could take out. And then, once they had taken it apart and were putting it back together, it became even more obvious what they could leave out. Why do we need this? We don't, that's all. We don't need a bridge here, but we need something that seems like a bridge. We need a bridge filler, and what we can do is take the filler from the bridge and make it interesting - fill a different mould, or wait until the filler is nearly ready, and then fuck with it a bit.

Poststructuralism keeps one on one's toes. It happened again in the third movement of Nico Muhly's Mothertongue (The Only Tune, specifically part two - The Old Mill Pond), and it replaces what you know with the pure essence of what you love about an album, or about a song. In the original sense - in the sense that means a dog is not necessarily a dog - highlighting this fact was enough. With music, highlighting that fact and changing it is the logical extension.

B.
If poststructuralism (this mould is very specific and not altogether true), in this guise, treats the traditional song-form with a certain benevolence, promising to put it back together in some form or other, what does deconstruction do?

IV.
The Goslings have a song called 'Overnight', which is big and noisy, very noisy, probably even 'noise music'. I had the same reaction to it as my reaction to...[[this is where I got to when I last left this post, and I have no idea what I was going to say. But I think I have a point, so I'll carry on with something.]] I had the same reaction to 'Overnight' as I had to My Bloody Valentine, which was an experience of being assaulted, in a good way, by pop music.

(The moon is so close to perfect right now. I read some Proust, and there's a bit where he says that when the moon appears in the sky in the daytime, such as on a hot sunny day, it's like an actress. It's like an actress, before she is supposed to be on stage, coming out of a side door to view the performance with the rest of the people in the theatre - but trying to stay silent and invisible, so as not to break the half-illusion. Those who make eye contact share some singular connection.)

V.
I read a reflection of noise music recently, and it was actually the first time I've realised and acknowledged what it means - it is what 'they' think 'we' listen to. But it would be wrong to leave it at that - we revel in what 'they' think. 'we' also think it, to a certain extent; it's undeniable, that we love the selfperception as much as the perception: there is always a moment when we are surprised with what we hear. the nuances. the jazz. at what point, before this moment, did we think we would be so subjectively inclined towards one type of drone over another? we can describe one as full, and layered - we can describe it as interesting, as not another clone. we want to describe it in these pedestrian parallels because we cannot believe how much it seems to sing with the strings buried throughout our body. we feel it like tendons: it is not everything, we might not even know how to use it. but it sure as hell keeps everything together.

VI.
I can't discuss the first song without the second: The Gosling's 'Overnight' is loud, and has a melody, but in these ways it is explicable. Emerald's 'Damaged Kids' is different, but helps to explain both.

Damaged Kids starts off, and it starts off how its supposed to start off. This is the only way to say it. It starts off how you think it will start off; it starts off like so many tapes, like so many garage projects. The important thing here is that it starts off like a simulacrum of every noise or drone or ambient track you have ever heard; it's got those so-distinctive blobs of mixed reverb and delay, and it's got that underground hum that you can sine-wave to the artist's amusement until you run out of battery. We've all done it. But just as you think this is going to be everything else, it takes what you've heard and completely recontextualises it. It puts it in this volume - and it's a synth, but I think the most important point is the fidelity and the volume - it sounds so unlike what has come before. I read an interview with one of the members of Emeralds, where he said that the main difference between a tape and a full cd album, for him, was the reception: the tapes are experiments, and the cd is a statement, the revision and conclusion of everything that has ocurred in the gap.

The theatre director Michael Thalheimer always tries to reduce plays to their essential element. To revitalise their striking power by removing the history or, possibly, by removing their verissimilitude. He takes everything that could possibly divide human emotion, and slices it off like a fillet from the cartiledge. In an interview, David Levine cut him against Castorf, to which Thalheimer replied:

"Castorf is often regarded as a deconstructionist, whereas the opposite is true. Rather than condensing pieces to the minimum, he’s pressing them together. The piece remains intact; it’s denser, rather than being taken apart or reassembled."

Within the context of the interview - and I may be wrong here, let me know - this is a criticism. The observation in itself could be seen as something different, could be seen as a vague compliment, or a tipping of the hat. The sentence itself is conservative, but everything underneath it is cutting. But I don't mean to analyse the sentence here - I just mean, why is there such a difference?

'Overnight' takes a song and stretches it over a longer period - it's as simple as that. We enjoy the riff for longer, simply because it is longer. But it stretches it over this rough drum, so, in essence, it is cut. And what is she singing about? The song has a speed and a silence that is almost impossible to decode. We know it is happening, and we know that this melody is just a louder version of something else. I have no idea what she is saying. In one section, it sounds as if she says 'I'm on the way down', which seems like a perfect disintegration.

I think i've got it: we expect disintegration. So many albums are to do with falling apart, but they rarely do. We want performative songs. We want songs and albums that do what they say they are about; we want them to finish in a death, or in the collapse of one building into another until the song cannot recognise itself. This is what Overnight provides. 'staying overnight', as in, at someone else's house, is not only slow, it is incomparable - i hope i'm not the only one - it is a constant battle, even in sleep. Everything in your body tries to organise and calculate the situation of the relationship, everything tries to make it special and bearable.

(((

One more time.

)))

Here are two songs. Both songs are a dream. Both songs stretch at the seams.

Both songs are pop songs. Both songs are pop songs in the sense that they are a history of pop-songs. 'Overnight' does this by condensing the history into one solid, glorious mass; 'Damaged Kids' is more like a textbook, with an ethereal chapter on The Future when we close the pages on history-so-far. When we read it again, we can see something different. Maybe the text is glowing. Maybe the pictures move around the page. Wherever it goes, we get it all.

They either succeed in eliminating all the high points of pop music and condense what really hits the button into a finite statement, or they take all the failures and do the same. It's really a personal decision. Everything that has happened before leads up to these moments, these songs. Wait, did I say performative earlier?

The history of pop music is the intertwined history of noise; the double helix of what is acceptable and unacceptable. Damaged Kids is at the top of the arc - it can see the mirror image across a canyon of dead air, it can look at a distance and say: this is what it is. Overnight is the middle of the decline, the acceleration, the moment when the chicane crosses over. The crash.

The crash.

'You can go blind, waiting'

- Michael Dickman, Seeing Whales

The Goslings - Overnight
Emeralds - Damaged Kids

Lament.

2009-04-10T20:13:00.003+01:00

I have just realised, tonight, that I often play a game. The game is - I play the Blackout Beach version of Claxxon's Lament, and then I play Wolf Parade's version (cover) of the same song, and then I repeat this cycle, constantly trying to discern which is better.

I start by just playing them back to back - maybe I will play one, and then think, do I prefer this one? and consequentley play the other - almost in the background, not really listening. I think it will be an easy decision to make. Like covers of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' - it's kind of a no-brainer. You can tell a good cover almost within the first thirty seconds, and go from there. Same with Pixie songs. Ever hear that Nada Surf cover? What the fuck. Nada Surf have, in turns, made me cry and made me cringe. But: that's beside the point.

The second time I listen, i'm listening more attentively, realising that there isn't a straight-cut winner. And, I mean, I'm listening properly, but still...I guess I miss the moment. I miss the moment that sets them apart, and so I listen again.

This time, I'm kind of annoyed with myself. I pride myself on being able to digest multiple listenings with one listening; what I mean is, I can detect longevity. On one level, this sounds like bullshit. But, on another level, I can tell you a specific fact about a specific song from only hearing it once, and I can probably tell you where it occured in the career or the singer/band - I can definitely present you with a narrative of whatever band you are listening to. Basically, I don't really like football. The kind of osmosis (I was going to write 'osmotic knowledge', which I may try to invent in some essay or other) that I am capable of with music is the same that a lot of people I know are capable of with football. People think my osmosis is unusual for the simple fact that is it unusual - not exceptional. What's that? You can remember every player on every team in the fluctuating premiership and champion's leagues among loads of other leagues and world cups and tournaments and where each player has recently transfered from and where they have gone after this team and who from each team has scored this week and the specific place they are in multiple leagues of twenty or more teams?

I'm sorry. I can't help you. In the world of football, that's a kind of knowledge that is available in the same way as musical knowledge...but, the difference is, most of the actual performance of this conversation is conducted away from the computer (unlike, e.g., music blogs), and not only that, but is a replacement for small talk and, even further, a replacement for conversation that would indicate that you are not sober in a pub...this a kind of statistical database that I could never hope to possess.

Anyway.

I listen to them again, and then again, and I'm thinking, why am I not concentrating? So, finally, after a good ten listens of each, I sit down on the floor and I close my eyes and I play them back to back, and I wait and see. I wait to see what happens. What happens is - I have no idea which is the best.

When it starts, the Wolf Parade version is the best. In this case, Wolf Parade is mainly Spencer, with these beautiful little eccentricities of a ghostly choir (a ghostly choir for a cover song? That's dedication) and a small horn section for a discharged coda.

When the Blackout Beach track starts again, it's intentionally muggy, and the guitar doesn't cut as cleanly through that mug as the Wolf Parade one, so I think, OK, the Wolf Parade version is better. The voice is great, the guitar is great, the production is great. But then Carey's voice kicks in, and it's a voice that is made for songs. It's a voice that is made for his songs, and it is a testament to an incredible creative mind that he has managed to realise what it is that he does best. It finishes quickly, and the chords aren't as well defined as the Wolf Parade version - and the chords play an important backbone for this song in particular - but the voice carries the song above the instrumentation in the most extra-ordinary way; it's almost as if the guitar is clean, the guitar is a perfectly focused picture - but the voice is high above the earth, and it's like seeing a picture of a canopy, with all the individual leaves and birds flying between, and then rising up into the near atmosphere to see it all from above. Sure, the tree's look all green and stuff, but it's the near atmosphere you're concentrating on. How can it be green and blue at once? Wait, how can it be blue and black, and have more stars than you have ever seen, all the colours and the lights at once? And, sure, the earth looks great, slowly fading into the distance so we can see the entire population of the world between the gaps in our toes - but look at the fucking sky! Mercer's voice is the fucking sky, and his guitar is the tree tops.

And then, the Wolf Parade song starts again...and I can't help but stare at the birds and the leaves among leaves among beautifully perfectly defined leaves. I didn't realise it was possible to sustain two versions of a song where they are not only of the same quality, but better than each other at the same time. We have a winner(s).

(I'll post the actual songs later...now off out to meet someone who has 'washed their body'...)

(edit: here they are)

Blackout Beach - Claxxon's Lament
Wolf Parade - Claxxon's Lament (cover)

--mx.

memberless clubs

2009-01-16T20:00:00.007Z

For those of you looking for the most recent tape club mix, it's in the post below this one.

While uploading all the tape club tapes to sendspace instead of megaupload (people seem to find sendspace easier), I found a load of my old mixtapes. I am an incessant maker of clubs - clubs, as the title suggests, that don't necessarily have any members, or members who aren't necessarily conscious or willing of their membership. Does this come from being an only child? Possibly, maybe, probably.

So the first major example of this was the mixtapes I made in the halls of uni. The first one was the demo for my radio show on the uni airwaves at the time; i didn't have a usb stick, and i was very worried whether i would be able to switch the CDs in the disarming space between the beginning and end of the previous track. After I got the show, I put the cd in the kitchen, and used to play it when I was cooking and had forgotten to bring in some other music from my room. I got bored with it soon enough, and so made another, and another...eventually I made a little wallet, and stuck it to the wall...and then I wrote all the tracklists out on a typewriter and put them next to the wallet, in case I wanted a specific song.

At some point, I realised that people were listening to them in the kitchen, and subsequently taking them to rip onto their computers - I didn't expect it at all, but it was super awesome. This spured me on, and it didn't really stop from there. The tape club as it exists now was really just a way to coagulate a disparate kitchen by email. It's not the same as a big table and some beers and some wine and a cheap cd player and that delicate ballet of hungry people making hungry food at the same hungry time, but then, what is? The ones I'm making at the moment are more for individual use, anyway. I've never really thought about it before, but I'm still making them for kitchens. It's just that, now, our kitchen is a lot smaller.

There is a profound connection between making food and listening to music, perhaps almost as unique as driving and music or, the pinnacle of all catalystic connections, walking and music. I don't know if its connected with that specific kind of knowing creation, where you are either following a recipe in a book, with points one, two, three, four, or are making a dish where you know that this step is here and this step is now and i must do this in a minute; where, at the end of it all, you will have created something truly meaningful - not without effort, or without skill (the delicate balance of chopping and throwing and stirring is underestimated when connected with drinking and listening to music), but with an unfailing certainty that you will have something to enjoy on an aesthetic and viceral level.

It could be this notion of process, and I've seen it happen with things like knitting and the radio, or ironing and television. Where the mind is actually, literally, concerned with two seperate things at once. We must make the distinction here: sometimes reading and listening are not seperate. Sometimes drawing or painting does not allow you to listen to someone speak. And yet, with knitting, where a high level of (generally) autonomous actions are taking place, the mind is not disengaged (as with, perhaps, the monotonous pattern of factory work), but is actually able to concentrate, fully concentrate, on two things at once.

As with cooking. For some reason, reading a recipe does not occupy the internal voice that also digests and facilitates music. Even when it is important to listen closely to the food you are making, listen to it bubble and make sure it does not pop, the mind can still hold these things in perfect harmony, actual parallel, as opposed to switching rapidly between them, like taking notes in a lecture.

Of course, it may be the fact that you are listening to something that you have heard before. I have had experiences where something new has struck me with that unrelenting beat, but I know that while cooking, we all mostly take something that is equivalent to 'going out music': music that you know and love, and has a kinesis that you hope to be infectious. When you know it, both the kinesis and infectiousness is doubled by the fact that you anticipate it to a certain extent, and know that you already love it. 'Passing judgement' is an ugly phrase - and maybe even uglier in its action - but we all do it, and it can deplete us. We are all wary to begin with, unless the first notes are instantly likable, in which case we become more relaxed and malleable.

I have, for the sake of argument, two sets of friends. One set cannot listen to music while writing academically or creatively; the other can. I fall into the latter category. Does this mean I am listening to music, when I am writing, as background music? I hate the idea that this is true, and luckily (or concidentally...) I don't believe it. Perhaps to qualify the statements further: one set cannot listen to music while writing academically or creatively; the other must. At this moment, it is hard for me to imagine the two even occupying the same sides of the brain, because I am listening to the yellow swans. Certain types of music, and certain bands - like yellow swans - do not seem to enter through my ears, but through my throat. Through my fingers and into my eyes, through my mouth and around the bones, where it sits and radiates. It is a physical reaction to music in the purest sense, but it is important for me to say that this doesn't not mean it is an unthinking reaction.

I have heard certain types of music, or certain examples of a type of music, described as 'academic'. This distinction is ridiculous in and of itself...but, nevertheless, it is to a certain extent necessary. Or, maybe not necessary, but more accurate than any I can think of. Let me explain.

My understanding of something that is academic, and this is an understanding that I have continually reminded myself of, is that it is difficult; it is unknown; it takes some time to comprehend. When studying a book, this can manifest itself in two ways - either the book itself is hard to read in its experimentalism or style (i.e., Ulysses, Tender Buttons), or it is difficult to comprehend the implicit or attached 'deeper'/scholarly meaning to the book (i.e., Ulysses, Tender Buttons...umm...The Magus?...Metamorphosis...). This is my problem with a lot of metafictional books at the moment - what they are doing is not necessarily intelligent, and is closer to the vein of 'anti-advertising', and is actually the dilution of experimentalism to the mainstream...instead of making the reader feel uneasy, or allowing them to realise something profound about the nature of the author or of reading itself, it skips the breakdown and goes straight to the sugar...but that's a different point to make in a different place.

There's another important aspect of the 'academic' work, and that's the way it grabs you at the beginning, when you first read it or hear it. There is something exciting about trying to comprehend something that you previously thought you understood. This is the essence of noise music, initially, before you marvel at differences between noise artists, at the way such a seemingly absolute sound can be guided with the infintely subtle grace and skill of a classical orchestral composition.

I guess at this point I might seem to be putting forward some kind of doctrine for listening to music, or for what music you even should listen to - that's not the point of this. I'm not denying that there is genius in conventional music, conventional songwriting. You can take something mainstream and subtly subvert it in the most unbelievably intelligent ways; you can sense genius in the most crystalline example of a pop song. There is genius in motown, not just in an obvious way - there is an incredible understanding of suspense and release, and of minimalism. Sometimes it even seems like they are trying to get away with as little as possible to secure a hit: a beat, a voice, and a bassline...maybe a spirit of violin. dance music took that further, and managed to whittle it down to 'a beat', but that, again, is a different conversation...

what I suppose i'm trying to get at is the fact that difficult music is often visceral, and the 'academic' way that it affects you is the reason it is classed as such. you don't understand why, sometimes on any level, why you like this certain piece, or why you like a lot of these things that are similar. And it's not just 'like', it's 'love'. This is the only reason you would invest as much time in something in order to qualify it, at least in the literary academic world, as worthy of further study. it is the same in the music world - certain labels obviously have a reputation for releasing 'academic' music, most of them are electronic labels. but there is music that you and i know of, that I don't want to name because I don't want to categorise it as one thing or the other, as 'academic' if we think about it. Something that happens with my friends from home is that we don't see each other for a while, but when we do, we happen to be reading the same book - W. G. Sebald has been one instance of this, another has been the Master and Margarita. What I mean is that there are certain books that we would read to challenge something, often ourselves, and though 'academic' is not a justifiable term, it illustrates what i mean. I won't use it again.

In music, this challenge has to come again and again, as you listen and relisten to the same album. It does with yellow swans; you hear something new every time. It does with certain books and essays; I have read Benjamin's 'the storyteller' over and over again within the last four years, and I can honestly say that I have understood and gained something new about it every time.

Music is that shape, between a perfect sphere and a circular saw, that comes around and cuts you, no matter how well you think you have mapped the surface. The blood is clean...actually, i've just found a better end to this post: Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.

A poem by Stephen Crane -

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter", he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

yellow swans - broken eraser/time stretch

--mx.

tape club, tape five: garret.

2009-01-11T15:50:00.006Z

Hey! It's that time again - tape time. I've been sitting on this one for the longest time, content to listen to it myself without sending it out. I think I actually finished it in november or something. Sorry to those of you who are new, and have been waiting a long time since I said 'hey, i'll email it to you in a couple days'. There's info about back issues near the bottom of the email. Also, this is a new email address, if some of you are wondering.

Tape Club, tape five, part one - decaying valet by aveclaudenum

Tape club, tape five, part two - sublimatoria by aveclaudenum

Tape club, tape five, part three - apnoea by aveclaudenum

It takes me a couple of minutes to start these emails. It's like: sorry, I owe you a tape. Or: sorry it's been so long. But - and let's be honest now - who is actually waiting for these apart from me? The answer is approximately no one. But don't feel bad - I have no problem with this. It is not a thankless task. Occasionally I get emails saying, hey, I liked that. Every now and then people tell me that they've listened to them on the way to work, or on a long walk, and that's just awesome.

So let's get down to it.

--------------

This one doesn't necessarily have an overarching theme like the last few...well, I guess they've all had a theme of some description, but the last two were definitely more concentrated. The 'theme of some description' for this one is actually Samuel Beckett's novel 'Murphy', but to be honest I couldn't tell you why. I finished this one in the hours of the night and the morning, and while that certainly isn't a new thing, I was in a completely different state than I had previously finished tapes in.

Naming the three sections after words/phrases from the novel seemed like the absolutely right thing to do at the time, and the title of the whole thing, 'garret', is where Murphy sleeps in the hospital - it's the space in a roof that isn't an attic, but is more than a top floor...the walls are the roof, sloping down to the floor of the room. I guess it's like an Attic with painted cement walls.

In the house before the one I'm currently living in, I lived in what I now know was a semi-garret...I can only imagine reading the novel in there, thinking: this is it. But, I didn't get that experience, seeing as it was two years ago. How might my path have changed if I had read Murphy in that semi-garret? It is impossible to say, but I have the feeling that it may have profoundly affected certain things about my current life and obsessions.

Another difference with this one is the gestation period. But that sounds kind of disgusting...how about, Another difference with this one is the incubation period. While a lot of the other tapes sat half finished for a while, turning the back of my brain matter into toxins, this one was thought about for a long time and then realised very quickly. I did all three sections in one sitting, which is another paradox i'm trying to reign in - sometimes, the completely instinctive or five minute mixes are the ones that you listen to for the longest time, because you're not expecting the next song. Sure, a lot of that is based on some vague notion of nostalgia, but a lot of it is genuine in its own way. This is almost contradictory to the way I do everything (essays, photos, stories, mixtapes), but it's something I want to try and get down with.

I guess the most important difference - in terms of you, the listener - is the amount of noise in this one. It's not so bad, really, but it's definitely in a higher concentration than the previous tapes. I played the first section to oli on the way to the cash and carry, and he was kind of confused about the first blast and kind of liked the second blast. This is progress - and this is almost the point of this particular mixtape. progress, with a small p.

The transition that I was thinking about for the longest time was the first one, between alva.novo and dntel. I knew that the dntel track lent itself specifically to emerging out of something unpalettable, and so here the alva.novo track isn't really noise music at all in the actual sense. without the context of the rest of the alva.novo album, it's just noise - it's just some sounds. like, static, and what sounds like a helicopter.

That's another thing about this tape - I made it in headphones. That first track vibrates through your teeth, and when you are typing, it's as if you can hear the sound of the keys in your eyeballs, or as if someone is cleaning your spinal cord with a stick. By that I mean: it feels kind of weird, but is not altogether unpleasant.

But the first section has all the 'noise' noise, I think, and it only takes up a minute or two. The other's have a couple of instrumental tracks that work with it, but nothing major. No Merzbow, etc, etc. I'm finding it hard to write about the tape at the moment because I don't have it in front of me, and I've been sitting on it for a few months, so I can't remember what I was thinking about while making it. I think this is the tape that i've listened to most myself though, so I think it's the one I'm most proud of.

My favourite bits:

- The end of Ben Frost, the start of Grizzly Bear
- All of that Low track. It starts and ends before you think it does, and before you know it the middle has arrived, she's singing with that voice, and there's that furiously quiet violin fragment in the background.
- Sunburned Hand of the Man. Best Sample Ever.
- The clicking from 'Africanized Beatniks'
- The birdsong in the third section, especially over the start of Blur's 'No Distance Left to Run'. What a song. The highlight of a career full of highlights, hey? Hey? Who's with me?

Something that i'm noticing more and more, about music in general rather than these tapes specifically, is how the gap between songs, the spaces inbetween what makes a song one song or two songs or one on top of the other, are getting more and more indistinguishable. I'm not talking about the wall of sound thing, but about that restlessness that makes an album flow, or a song unfinished. It works especially well in this context, where one song can be swallowed by the next, or you can flesh out a skeleton and no one will notice. I like it on the Deerhunter track, where it feels (in the middle eight bit, the little jam near the end) that another track is creeping in, but then there's the spring-reverb kick that sounds like a splash, and it all comes back to the basic bass line and 'strip down, strip down, strip down.'

----------------

So, enough of all that. Here's the linear tracklist, and there's also a pictorial tracklist just underneath that you can open and download (it's a little hard to make out, but it should all be decipherable if you use the tracklists together):

part 1. decaying valet
1. alva.novo - spray/f117
2. dntel - to a fault
3. (fritz lang speaking)
4. carlos giffoni - this is how you pull the trigger
5. the present -africanized beatniks
6. autolux with UNKLE - persons and machinery
7. una furtiva lagrima (l'elisir d'amore) - this one is a little piece of opera
8. atlas sound - let the blind lead those who can see but cannot feel
9. elliott smith - needle in the hay

part 2. sublimatoria
1. ben frost - theory of machines
2. grizzly bear - shift (alternate version)
3. autechre - bronchusevenmx24
4. calla - fear of fireflies (shrapnel remix)
5. sunburned hand of the man - every direction
6. deerhunter - after class (rare book room session)

part 3. apnoea
1. lichens - m st r ng w tchcr ft L v ng Sp r t
2. luyas - in my next life, a workhorse
3. low & dirty three - down by the river (in the fishtank session)
4. (assorted birdsong amid various songs)
5. (audio clip from 'breakfast at tiffanys'
6. blur - no distance left to run

...and it can be found here, now with a slightly easier process...but you'll still need an extractor (winzip, winrar, etc.)

...and here's the pictorial tracklist

----------------------

I've tried to make the download process easier, and I've started using SendSpace. So now you have to just click the link and scroll down the page for the download - no special codes or waiting time. It is still in a zip file though. Sorry, no getting round that one yet. Although, Chris tells me I should put it on a podcast? I never really knew what that entailed. I'm not sure if you put something 'in' or 'on' a podcast, or...but i'll have to ask him about that one. Maybe next time.

---------------------------

One more thing. A few more people are being added every time, and rather than continually sending them four or five massive emails at a time, I'm putting all the previous ones on a blog that I used to use for other writing about music - blurryphotography.blogspot.com. So if you ever want to download them again/need tracklists, it should all be up there.

Hint for the next tape: Yellow Swans. I've actually started putting it together even though this one hasn't gone out...some kind of fucked up schedule going on there.

Until next time,

your brother in sound,

--mike.

tape club, tape four: an afternoon, an evening, a night.

2008-12-22T02:01:00.006Z

I've been making the next mixtape for a really long time, which, if i'm honest, is too long. too long for all of you, too long for all of me. we all thought this was just a massive piece of procrastination. part of me is with you, but part of me is saying: fuck you, of course i would carry on! hey, lets just....let's just hug, and pretend this never happened.

Tape Club, tape four, part one - an afternoon, an evening, a night. by aveclaudenum

Tape Club, tape four, part two - there is no life without a double life by aveclaudenum

so the problem with this mixtape was the first half. after the last hemingway one, i realised that a constant overlapping of tracks was the right format for me to advertise everyone else's songs; but it was slightly annoying, having burned the compilation to a cd and having to fast-forward it to the place i left off. so, i started thinking about splitting the next tape into 'movements', to really get into that classical dialogue (if not the sound), and i thought four movements would be the perfect amount - like 'the four seasons' or something.

in the end, i rejected the four seasons in favour of two halves. me and amy have been watching a lot of older films recently - pictures that i watched a long time ago in some kind of college or uni-based film studies, or some just through that whole film noir craze that happened 'round these parts a few years back. tom bought a hitchcock boxset, where a lot of them have come from, but also things like chinatown and north by northwest, and brick and both the french connections (incidentally, the second french connection is actually as good (if not better) than the first, which is almost unique in the world of sequels) and soylent green, which i guess is "a detective film" in the weirder sense.

so i started thinking about songs to do with the police, and with crime, and with murder and detection and guns & knives...and if that combination in-and-of-itself isn't a good enough reason, watching old anti-heroes reminds you that solving a case and cutting someone's nostrils open are, more or less, the same thing. probably.

as i said at the beginning of this spiel (i'm really fighting off the urge to write this email in flat out hard-boiled dialogue), the problem was with the first half. the second half came together almost without my input - i went upstairs, sat down, and the tracks fell together just beautifully.

but the first half was a total bitch. i couldn't find the balance between the plodding detective themes and the fact that the music itself has to constantly hold interest; hard-boiled noir music is notoriously brilliant, but you wouldn't want to listen to a lot of it in a row. unless, maybe, it was ennio morricone.

so what we have here is a line of music interspersed with choice cuts of dialogue. i didn't want to intoxicate the mix with dialogue, because i'm always very aware of mixes that seem to use dialogue as a 'hook' to compensate for the poor quality of the cuts and fades. some of you will no doubt see my crime mix in this light - but i would draw your attention to the first crossfade. here, the morphine track (their best, in my opinion) cascades beautifully with the tension and dialogue pauses of chinatown - i placed the track almost randomly, and the resulting combination of light, tapping drums with dialogue and delicate violin was pure serendipity. it's the yellow brick road of mistake as creativity and, brothers and sisters, i believe in it.

here's the pitch for the first half:

The endless questioning (Who Told You This Room Exists?), the existential self-destruction in that one cafe, the gun-fight-car-chase (John Wayne), cocktails with the rat's wife (Only You), and the morning after (She's Gone)...the mysterious death of that sad mafioso (Miles Davis' Funeral), the obsessive collector, and that priceless McGuffin everyone is chasing (The Perfect Map); meeting the man in the white suit with a cigarette holder and a scarred lip, and, of course - the detective theme (M. Dagurre).

-------------

And, like i said, the second part simply fell into place. i would suggest the tracks are more an implication rather than an outright accusation, in the way that they suggest crime without being necessarily related to it. for example, the title "the man with the shovel is the man i am going to marry" could imply a farmer rather than the mafia, if it wasn't for the given context. but the track itself is the sound of three hours of whisky - "buried under the influence", as someone once put it - submitting an experience that only a tortured man could stumble upon. that place where you exist as a secondary function to all of your senses, and to all other inhabitants of the city; where the music is duller, the words are smooth and blurry, and the lights are streaming. but, through this, we are not numbed: we are accelerated.

tracklists...

part one: an afternoon, an evening, a night - the story of a detective.
1. Audio clip from 'Chinatown'
2. Morphine - Miles Davis' Funeral
3. Tindersticks - She's Gone (BBC Session)
4. Boards of Canada - A Is To B As B Is To C
5. Electrelane - John Wayne
6. Rachel's - M. Daguerre
7. Belong - Who Told You This Room Exists?
8. Portishead - Only You
9. Audio clip from 'French Connection Two'
10. Thee More Shallows - The Perfect Map (BBC Session)
11. Audio clip from 'Soylent Green'

part two: "there is no life without a double life" - the criminal mind.
1. To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie - The Man With the Shovel, Is the Man I'm Going to Marry
2. Murder Mystery - The Reason Why
3. Ennio Morricone - L'Uccello Con le Plume Di Cristallo
4. Blood Brothers - Crimes
5. Whitehouse - Dictator
6. HEALTH - Crimewave
7. The Cooper Temple Clause - Murder Song

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tape Four is to be found here.

I've also reloaded the previous three mixes for the new people added to the list, so if any of you want them again, here's the linked list so far...

Tape 1: a beginner's guide to quiet noise
Tape 2: earthquake music
Tape 3: "...the stream."
Tape 4.1 & 4.2

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

notes:
- 'Dictator' repeats, it slides in and out of the second half, like a little audio nightmare. personally, I like the track, along with most of the Whitehouse records...but I can appreciate everyone else's dislike. Both biases work here.

- The Ennio Morricone track is actually played forwards behind the end of the Murder Mystery Track, before being played backwards as a solo after that...and then this same pattern is reprised over the Cooper Temple Clause track and Dictator, with the whole piece ending on a failing heartbeat. It occurs so many times in this mix because I was amazed at the simple difference between the original track and the reverse - without going into too much detail, the simple reversal changed the audio connotations from that of an orgasm to that of a slow death.

- This reversing theme was repeated with the Soylent Green clip (if any of you haven't seen Soylent Green - forget this clip, and watch the film a few months afterwards), and the reversed sample is barely distinguishable above the end of The Perfect Map. I'm not sure about the technical aspect, but it made a really weird kind of deja vu, where everyone knows they've heard the (forward) clip before, but they're not sure quite where...i guess i tried to make the befuddlement worse by putting it at the end of the track, and making the role of the detective a role of the loss of understanding. with the detective unable to solve crimes, and the criminal haunted by the white noise of Dictator, the end of the mix is kind of bleak.

- I might make one of those long picture tracklists again, like the one for "the stream", but i thought i would just send out the actual music first.

So, hey! Bring me another whisky.

email me for any back-issue commentary emails. as always, forward this to anyone you think would like it, and send me their address to be added to the (sub)monthly instalment.

until we ride again,

--mike.x

tape club, tape three: the stream.

2008-12-22T01:52:00.004Z

Hey, again. Too soon?

Tape Club, tape three - the stream. by aveclaudenum

First of all, I apologise for the way I 'get into' writing this email. I have been thinking/writing my dissertation all day (in between buying two records and changing money into other money), and I just can't seem to wind out of that theoretical thought-space. Two things will happen - I will either slip into the jug of wine groove, or I will remain in the fake theory groove. The wine groove will be good for you, because it will take away pretension and crippling self-consciousness and replace it with wild nudity (so to speak). The fake theory groove would be better for me, because I will be able to slide straight back into my dissertation tomorrow morning...but - keep this a secret - I'm with you. I'd rather slip into the wine groove. Let's make it happen, ok? Ok. Ok.

What follows is Hemingway's longest sentence.

"That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing - the stream."

I first read this in a book called The Garden in the Machine, due to the fact that my dissertation is on ecocriticism. At first I thought, wow, that was amazing. That was amazing. But then, for a while, I thought I might've missed out on something - I didn't read it in the original context. I didn't read it on page 148 of The Green Hills of Africa. I didn't read it surrounded by Hemingway, who has (at least in A Farewell to Arms) a way of jumping through your conscious and unconscious reading habits (the way you drift in and out of a book) and piercing you in the throat (in true Hemingway-using-a-horse-as-a-shield fashion) with some subtly intense event, straight out of the blue.

But then I felt even better about reading it in this other book. I thought, "goddamn," in a book which had not so far provoked me to think in such a way, "goddamn, that was some awesome shit." Not that Garden in the Machine wasn't a really awesome book - because it was, and analysed Shoah and a load of Brakhage films, and 50 Feet of String...but it was as if just the inclusion of that Hemingway sentence made it so much more human. I guess.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, Hemingway's longest sentence jolts you, in any context. And, finally, here where i jump out of the pseudo-literary-critic thing and jump right into the bullshit-mix-tape-maker thing.

The title of the tape, 'the stream', draws attention to the last clause of the sentence, and it brings up some interesting questions in terms of what you feel when you're reading it. I read it, and I thought, yeh, ok. This is ok, and it's slightly impressive - if a little annoying - how he's stringing those clauses together. there's a part of you (of me) that just wants the sentence to give up. But - and this is the important part - you don't quite know where you want it to stop. And by the end, you forgive it. I guess it's a kind of really short Stockholm Syndrome.

I'm thinking, when I finish the sentence and I can still see the dash and '...the stream,' I'm thinking straight away that I want to make a mixtape out of this. But I have no idea how. I think, shit, he really did it there. He really brought it together: and even if you don't go back and analyse it (I didn't), you get the feeling that it was perfectly metered, even if you're just judging it on the dash before those last two words. The way the sentence is definitely finished, but the way that everything he talked about within the sentence is still continuing and resolved in that ending. I still have no idea how to do it, but there was a couple of ideas:

1. Do it all in one night.
2. Make one continuous track.

So...here's the result.

tape three, "- the stream." tracklist:
1. mum - abandoned ship bells/hu hviss
2. amina - skakka
3. lightning bug situation - beginning of the expedition
4. oceansize - savant
5. broken social scene - all my friends (kcrw acoustic)
6. the microphones - sand (eric's trip)
7. tim hecker - untitled, part ten
8. the national - cardinal song
9. stars of the lid - a meaningful moment through a meaning(less) process
10. sufjan stevens - seven swans
11. labradford - midrange
12. the dead texan - aegina airlines
13. arab strap - i would've liked me a lot last night
14. broadcast - tender buttons (bbc session)
15. grouper - down to the ocean
16. neutral milk hotel - two-headed boy, part two

...as always, you should be able to download it at this link.

notes:

a) It is my personal belief that every great mixtape will begin with a creaking sound. the tracks aren't divided up, so it's one continuous 56 minute mix. If that really pissed you off, there's a program which I think is called 'Medieval CUE Splitter' which I think you can use to split up the tracks, manually. Like recording to a minidisc! Remember those?

b) It's 3am now, which means i've been doing this for around six hours, I think...I didn't get all the songs I originally thought of on the mix, but I think it worked out anyway. I can't be sure where song instinct and a silent mind merge, but there was a weird moment at about half 1, where the candle relit itself after about half an hour of darkness.

There's such an awesome cavern in my wax right now.

c) The (long) little map attached to this email is the proper tracklist, where you can see the progression and overlaps in a bit more detail. The idea came from Godspeed's tracklist to Lift yr Skinny Fists...

It would probably work best to click the picture for the big version, and then download that and zoom in, or print it off.

d) The new Sliver Mount Zion album is some hot loud gas. Good gas.

enjoy,

--mikex.

tape club, tape two: earthquake music.

2008-12-22T01:48:00.003Z

so, wow. did anyone feel that? here, it was a shaking and a low noise. i was lying at the wrong end of the bed, and had just drifted off, watching records spin. but i can't imagine not waking up - the whole house was actually shaking, noticeably creaking and vibrating, and the noise was like a low pulsing - like the engine of a bus. afterwards, we were awake, so we watched an old audrey hepburn film - in which she attempts to commit suicide with five cars turned on in a locked garage, and humphrey bogart shoots at indestructible plastic - which made the whole thing a bit more surreal. this is the great thing about knowing people in other places - what was it like?? i didn't take geography - are any of you near hull?

the idea for this one has been in my head since then, and i've held a few tracks in my head for a couple days. there's a feeling that i should send it out as soon as possible - to be as close as possible to the vague, "pseudo-aftermath" - but also because i'm trying to read some essays, and over the last 3 paragraphs, i noticed that i'd mentally written 4 or 5 paragraphs for this email instead. the specific words aren't here (which could be attributed to this extravagant glass jug of wine we're pouring from), but i hope the atmosphere is.

i've been getting into the habit of making playlists quickly; or if not quickly, at least not obviously. there was a bit of a rut (at least, i felt a bit restless) with the radio over the past couple months - i came home from work at the library, and we would have already thought of a theme, and we would simply search keywords pertaining to that theme on our combined digital-media based catalogue of music (i.e., my winamp and amy's itunes). this started to feel a bit shit, and a bit static, and a bit obvious and unexciting. ever since i started thinking seriously about mixtapes (in other words: since my first mixtape for someone else), i've tried to be aware of the dangerous 'clever' attitude; basically, in my own short-hand, the 'clever' attitude is the one where someone receives your mixtape, sees the song titles, and is impressed how cleverly you've connected the theme to the names of songs. i'm not saying that's never enjoyable - it is, especially when you've remembered that old song by that guy that no-one else has heard of who sung this one song that was called something to do with 'mountains' or 'fire' or 'animals' or whatever your theme is; or when the recipitent has to play a word game with the titles or the lyrics in order to figure out the connection. but, still, it's incredibly aesthetic. its: bam, here's your titles, and some songs i like.

so what i've been trying to do very consciously, recently, is to get the theme in the sound. i suppose i've always had that in mind to a certain extent, and hoped that the songs with the relevant titles would bring with them the sound - for example, that song called 'water' by that old american blues guy would sound like water rushing under your feet, or waves engulfing a stranger, or the huge ocean supporting a tiny boat. but that doesn't often cut it, and even when it does the title can often obscure the sound.

so what we have here, hopefully, is a document of sound rather than of titles and bands. sounds that evoke the shaking of the earth.

as a side note, a general though about these mixtapes: there are kind of two audiences i have in mind when making them, and they can often (infact, most of the time) be contained within the same person. first, there is the audience who knows the songs, and who is pleased with their inclusion on the tape because of the nostalgia or re-discovering of that awesome band. second (but not secondary) is the audience for whom these bands or songs are new and exciting - and if this is you, you should totally check out that band or get in contact with me for more of their stuff, because there is undoubtedly some more awesome stuff that you will want to engulf.

i realise that i'm analysing all this to a greater degree than i have licence to do but, again, i would like to draw your attention to the extravagant glass jug of wine: she is my 'cog', which is to say she is my achilles' heel in an obscure reference to a cartoon. (if anyone can get the obscure reference, i will make a personalised mixtape and actually send it to you in the real post, on a real tape and/or cd and with a real letter and a real piece of origami. no joke.)

slightly off the point: i hear some of you had problems with the last mixtape. that is all completely my fault - in sexual fetishistic terms, i am the 'enabler'. i should provide you with everything you need (and some thing you do not wish for, even in your darkest dreams), and this should not be a struggle for you...if we are to take the metaphor further, i should have slipped your the auditory rohypnol hours ago. i apologise - i understand that some of you even recieved the whole thing as one long piece of text, without lines between paragraphs (!!) or even lines between tracklists (!!!). i also understnad that someof you were confused by the '.zip' file. this, too, is my fault. for now, i'm going to ask you to download winzip (there's a free version on there), but in the future i will fix this.

if you were to (again, in your darkest, most masochistic moments) re-read this email, you could easily plot the destructive path of that "extravagant glass jug of wine". maybe, in fact, you could even note the points at which i took each sip - i tend to get increasingly regal as i get drunker. i wont deny that this is a sliding scale of advantages and disadvantages - when i am tipsy, i am wearing a smoking jacket and drinking cheap spirits from a charity shop brandy glass. when i am slurring my words, i am also delcaring my right to ride a horse down the acle straight. a few more glasses, and i am actually riding that white horse, naked (a symphony of moonlight and arsecheeks), apart from the smoking jacket, tied around my neck like a cape - a stolen fire poker in my right hand, my left hand gripping the stallion's silver mane.

ummm....

tracklist.

tape two - earthquake music.
1. carla bozulich - evangelista, part one
2. radiohead - i might be wrong
3. mogwai - 2 rights make 1 wrong
4. aidan john moffat - good morning
5. six by seven - european me
6. do make say think - bruce e kinesis
7. the album leaf - malmo
8. OOIOO - sai
9. frog eyes - the heart that felt its light
10. david lynch - ghost of love
11. bitcrush - prologue

...the tape should be available here...

remember to unzip it with winzip or something similar.

notes ("notes", he says! but what was that incoherent rant before the tracklist, may i ask?):

a) the mogwai track reminds me of skateboarding, although i was never very good at skateboarding, and only actually tried it once or twice.

b) it was a hard choice between radiohead's 'i might be wrong' and 'hunting bears', but i went for the first, hoping that the word 'wrong' would occur more in the titles. it didn't, but i think it might've in the vocals.

c) aidan john moffat was the singer for arab strap, and this song is the best from his new solo album of poetry. the lyrics are truer than many of us would like to believe, and the sample of the violin stuck under then needle makes it the best song on the album. amy bought it, and to be fair, the whole album definitely grows on you after you hear this song.

d) there is no doubt that the OOIOO track is 'different' from the rest. but, i think it's definitely 'important' to earthquakes and their motives.

e) frog eyes is always, always, always a beautiful apocalypse. i firmly believe and wish that the last song i will ever hear will be a frog eyes song.

f) the david lynch song is actually lynch singing, and it's from the 'inland empire' soundtrack. see inland empire, preferably in a small cinema.

g) i suppose this mix is mainly darker songs, but then, that might just be a product of my taste rather than a selection of it. i remember lewy charlton telling me, in middle school, that i only listened to depressing music.

h) as a final reflection, i think a lot of these songs (you'll figure out the ones that aren't) are supposed to represent a short aftermath - 10, 20, 30 seconds after the quake; when you know that in england (or canada, or wales) the earth shouldn't move. and you don't know what you are supposed to think, and there are no shitty cameraphone pictures on the internet or the television of some bus in london or some journalist telling you the levels of outcry or the levels of damage...just turn all the levels to eleven.

love,

--mike.

p.s. - does anyone have glen's/fred's/rob's email? plus anyone else you think would like this club...

p.p.s - i probably should have put this at the beginning, but for the people who are new to the club (i.e., who didn't get 'number one' - hi polly!, etc.) - i will probably send you an email about it. probably.

tape club, tape one: closer - a beginner's guide to quiet noise.

2008-12-22T01:36:00.006Z

wow, i mean, how does anyone actually keep in contact? letters are great, but...i'm not even sure if half these addresses work anymore.

anyway, so, i was planning to start a (bi)monthly mixtape club, where i just send an (electronic) tape out every couple of weeks/months. i guess it came from being awake at night with a load of albums, and also from the lack of contact i have with people just in general. seriously, i have no idea how most of you are. i don't even know where most of you are! i mean, i've got newport, leicester, canada, sheffield, leeds, nottingham here, and more. it's difficult. more difficult than it should be, i think.

this first one has come from a lot of amazing records from last year that i've just caught up with, and listening to them late at night..what can i say, that make you want to give something, to a load of people.

closer: a beginner's guide to quiet noise

1 tape - sunrefrain
2 bj nilsen - front
3 growing - fancy colours
4 stars of the lid - requiem for dying mothers, part 2
5 belong - i never lose. never really
6 elegi - spill for galleriet
7 tenniscoats - hirei
8 mono - palmless prayer/mass murder refrain part 2
9 tim hecker - blood rainbow

...and it should be in a zip file here.

notes:

bj nilsen's 'the short night' was just released at the end of last year, and there's something about the album which seems really different...there's certain structures to ambient/quiet noise/whatever music that you seem to subconciously notice after a while, but this guy seems to jump over them completely. something to look out for is the massive bass note around the eleven minute mark, with the river flowing over the top. it sounds like the low note should eclipse all other frequencies, but the river is right there.

growing is really good to cook to? i don't know why.

belong build up...and the whole song is the build up. it's a new kind of emotional trick, i think.

stars are the lid are probably one of the most well known ones here, apart from mono, and tim hecker who seems to be creeping into a lot of homes. i spent the longest time choosing this track from most of the stars albums (apart from their newest, which just might be their best, but i have no way to convert vinyl to mp3), and i finally went with this one because it reminds me of the first year of uni so much. i used to put it on when first opening my eyes, that moment just before you close them again and sub-sleep for another few minutes. the birds at the end, and that euphoric ebow/violin loop at the beginning.

i like the ticking on the elegi track, and the voice reminds me of the woman at the beginning of 'inland empire', making the whole thing a kind of clockwork suspense.

this isn't supposed to be some kind of crash course or something...i'm the beginner in the title of the tape, really. but i've had some of this stuff for a while, and it really fixes some memories, and i had a big glut with christmas money. there's a load of people missing from here, but i suspect they'll creep up on later mixes. they won't all be this slow, by the way.

ok, so, i better send this one before the half-sent email before confuses too many people. if you know anyone else who would want this, feel free to forward it or send me the email address to add it to the thin list i've got already.

i hope you all enjoy it, and let me know how everyone is. you can even let me know how each other are. i keep seeing pictures of people younger than us from school with kids. hopefully noone has kids yet?

--mikex

oh, also, i should say, the radio is still going - livewire1350.com, electric sails for underground ships, listen live. every tuesday, nine till half ten.

i hope you are all amazing x

on sound

2008-01-09T18:24:00.000Z

before christmas, all my speakers seemed to be following my own path of slow exhaustion. many words were written, thankfully a portion of them were creatively motivated - but then the writing of creative work, knowing that it will be judged on a 1-100 scale and contribute towards one's degree, end up having the effect of the production of many more words than are actually handed in. add to that the ability, in an appendix, to explain one's creativity (which at first becomes a task, and then a liberty, and finally a monolith), and we have what can only be described as an intensely productive final few weeks. a final few weeks that inflamed the nerves along my left shoulder, up my neck, and behind my eye.

all my speakers started to rattle. there was so much stuff all over my desk, fanning sheets of paper, spilt and molten wax making rivers through empty glasses and mugs, cracked biros as bridges and pivots of vibrating sound. my computer speakers started to sound as if tey were failing, and i believed that they were, such was the sheer amount of shake and (death)rattle that emitted from their radial surroundings. even the keyboard - fairly new and in constant use - shuddered beneath my fingertips, so that i felt the keys before touching them, felt them shudder as i rested a thought upon my hands, and left my fingers tingling and numb after an afternoon typing.

my cd player, who's speakers have always buzzed, ignored the taps that usually put them right; or heeded them for moment or minutes instead of the usual space of time that passed between having to lean over and swing at them again with the back of a pencil. even my record player, who's massive, wooden panasonic's never buzz through sheer weight, somehow became duller through the corner of the mattress, lost the bite of the violins.

but now i am back, and they are back. i sat listening to xela yesterday, and falling asleep half-hallucinating to sunn O))), and the tones were perfect and uninterrupted. it seems obvious that the speakers were not worn out, in the way that you or i are worn out by work, or writing, or running. but we wear it out, all the same. we chose the sounds that will seemingly destruct the atmosphere around us when we haven't the strength to do it ourselves; we produce difficult listening environments with old drafts, empty books and spent pens collecting dust around suffocating speakers. we wear our sound as our coats, freezing as we realise we chose this song for background music rather than something to listen to.

i'm not sure if it's the weather, but the weather has never affected it before - i've been buying a lot of ambient music. now, this isn't the stuff i'm complaining about in the previous paragraph - i don't mean background music, i mean drone music or noise music. there's even something about it that refuses to be background music, jumping into your head through your ears, or sometimes through the eyes.

bj nilsen, earlier tonight, came straight through my ears. there's is a moment, about eleven minutes into the first track on 'the short night', where an enormous bass note swells up and drones on for a good while. by all logical possibilities, the sound of this bass note is so strong and so loud that it seems like it must cross the entire spectrum of sound, not only drowning out all the other frequencies but overcoming them and crowding them into a corner. and this is something that i love about 'the short night' - after a few seconds, above this tremendous deep sound, you can hear the sounds of wind, and the sounds of moving water. it's not as if the wind is anywhere in particular; it could be in the middle of an iced-over lake, or on the top of a factory. wherever it is, it's loud and directionless and strong. the same with the water - at first i thought it was trickling, as in a small waterfall. and then it seems more like a stream, with the sound projecting of the middle of the running water rather than it's conversation with the rocks around; or even a river, with the current jumping to the surface and down into the bed, sliding vertically around corners. it's this type of thing - where thoughts of frequencies are interrupted by actual wind, or, as a counter-argument, the patronising 'relaxation' or 'meditation' or 'background'-ness (any shutting eyes or quiet stereos at quiet parties) is kicked in the face with a long, stubborn drone of agressive, difficult rumble - that i love about this type of music.

a couple of days ago, it came through the eyes, where polmo polpo was playing in the lounge. i got the album on vinyl for christmas, and since the only record player at my parent's house is in the lounge, it was hard to make space for an album who's first side is less than breathtaking. so christmas at my parent's came and went, and on the lounge record player i listened to xela's amazing 'the dead sea' a lot, and to the fuck button's picture disc single (picture discs still scare me), and to moondog's 'snaketime series' when getting ready to go out somewhere - it's a surprise party record. and i listened to the first side of 'like hearts swelling', the polmo polpo record, and then i had to go somewhere or do something.

so it was not until a couple of days ago that i managed to reach the second side, sitting at home, in a lounge that was more my own. i didn't really have any great expectations for it, seeing as how, as i said, the first side was less than spectacular and under his own name, sandro perri's 'tiny mirrors' was nice, but not amazing.

out of the blue comes this side b, and out of that revelation in itself comes a beautiful argument for vinyl. i'm reading camus's 'the plague' at the moment, for a course, and i was reading it then on the sofa. i'm reading about doctors arguing about contagion and quarantine, about rats dying with blood in their mouths and people with pulsating glands but, almost out of my control, i'm seeing this image relating to the polmo polpo record. the last track has a constant rhythm of confused and contrary beats, tribal instruments and looped elelctronic sounds coming together, and while it repeats at a constant pace it is nevertheless cacophonic. and i'm lying on the sofa and i see this loop as a confusion, more precisely the confusion of a city, in the evening when some are still working, and some are trying to get back from work as soon as possible, and others are running in all different directions going to shops and trying to do things before the day closes. cars are stopping and starting, and refusing to start and haulting at traffic lights like an old cartoon, and people are walking too quickly along blocks, bumping into each other, walking in rounds and the squares of the street.

and above it all, on the top of a building, there is a man with a violin, his eyes closed, trying delicately to drown out the confusion below - he sweeps the bow quietly and tentatively, not as if to become louder, but as if to encourage silence to join him in his playing. and then i realise that it's not just one man on the roof, but a quartet, and they're getting ready. they're testing the air with conflicting notes and textures from their instruments in much the same way you would roll a ball of putty in your hands to warm it before sculpting a figure. they're getting ready, and they all start at different times, so it's not a big classical burst: it's a parallel to the city below. they're just as unrhythmic and directionless as the rushing masses on the streets, but the difference is a plea for the aesthetic, for once - even if they are panicing and as confused and uneasy as the rest, they are trying their hardest to sit still, and convey their anger and speed through the vibrations of a bow, the plucking of a string, the shaking of a reed.

bj nilsen - front

polmo polpo - like hearts swelling

here

2007-11-27T19:10:00.000Z

I don't really go on buses anymore, but today I got on the wrong bus.

No, wait -

I got on the wrong bus. I don't really go on buses anymore, but today I was on one, going the wrong way. At first I thought, shit. It's way too hot on this bus, and I was inappropriately dressed, wearing two jackets. But then, after we got out of the traffic jam, a breeze came in through the single open window and it wasn't so bad.

We went passed the Village, where I used to live, and a broken tree I remember photographing. It's grown older now, more jagged, and definitely thinner. We hit the inside of the roundabout in the hospital complex, and I saw a road called 'The Runnels'. We went over a river I didn't know existed, and past some horses in a misty field - I know the mist, but not the horses, or the trees. I think I saw a ladder leading over a wall, and I definitely saw (in an outlying village) a pond filled with mud.

I had a book full of psychoanalytical essays on my lap, and I remember thinking: leaping into the symbolism of your dark, strange thoughts is all very well and good until you get on the wrong fucking bus.

I am still on the bus, and now we are rolling down a long, steady hill. the scariest moment are when I think I recognise something, and then an unknown corner plunges me back into anonymous villages and thin streets. The onset of darkness seems to be accelerating, and just when I think I am further away from anywhere I have ever been, I see the B&B opposite our house.

(I stay on the bus.)

the national - driver, surprise me

left and right

2007-09-28T20:39:00.000+01:00

we've moved house, and so we walk a different way to uni. initially this seems like a shitty prospect, because the avenues has a great name, and echoes a riptide down either end - if you're going into uni, you walk on the left. if you're going home, you walk on the right. and this is almost a constant flow. the flow is only disrupted by the early morning (when everyone cycles in line towards the entrance, no matter the side) and the late late night (when it doesn't matter the side, and the middle works too, with regular gaps to lay on the left, or the right, and look through the branches to the stars).

but this way is better. the short burst of traffic makes you all the more aware when you break from it, physically veering off to the left. no, wait - this way is better than that, when i am walking in at 6pm, at this time of year. after the veer, the hospital garden lights are already on, but you're walking straight towards the sun. the sun is leaning down and aiming through the gaps and straight into your eyes, and it's all bathed in an haze that doesn't actually seem to push a colour, but just makes everything less clear. blurs silhouettes, and even familiar noises spring around your head instead of interrupting from the front.

but the best thing is after the traffic lights. when you're walking down, and the path slowly turns into dirt. you're kind of aware that it's going to happen, because there's been this endless graveyard on your left, but you don't even notice until you're in the midst of it, ducking under dripping branches and crunching beech nuts underfoot. you start to get protected and covered, even when you're right next to the road. you're squelching and dripping, and everyone is on the other side, on the black spotted concrete, with the curved curb.

occasionally you meet someone walking the other way. and there's this unwritten excitement, that the path is secret, but you're sharing it with someone. they come past, and you don't even have to look at them. you can tell even from looking down, from the corner of their shoe, that they're smiling. it's like, hey, hey - we've found the secret path. we've found the secret path, and they don't even know about it even thought they can see it! they can see it - they're only on the other side of the road! they're right there, and they don't even know! we have the mud, and the crunch and the rotting vegetation, and we have the perpetual graveyard.

Frog Eyes - The Fruit That Fell From The Tree

on driving, bare feet, blueberries.

2007-08-28T08:42:00.000+01:00

something changes when you get to a hundred miles an hour. you're just driving along, and then you notice something different, without looking at the speedometer - the car isn't forcing against the wind anymore, or the drag, and the road is pushing you forward rather than sticking the tyres. it seems slower than eighty, too.

there are smells on the road that are much more pronounced and consistent, if only because they are some of the familiar smells of the road, and are blasted through the dashboard along with the cold air. the smell, of course, is oftn the same one - manure. but sometimes it's not manure: sometimes it's blueberries. and, even when it's not blueberries, i reached the point a long time ago where manure stopped smelling bad, and just smelled like farms.

(a school trip in first school, to a local farm, and the guy showing us round cut us up a piece of sugarbeat each. it had the same texture as a really hard pear, and the slice i had was off-cyclindrical in the same way. it didn't have a lot of flavour, apart from a vague sweetness, but i enjoyed it anyway. and there was this constant smell of manure arond, and being little, everyone was doing the erggggggg and raaaank and whatever noises, and holding their noses and scruntching their mouths in a pronounced fashion. we moved on from the sugarbeat onto another part of the farm, and he was showing us some piece of machinery, and i dropped my much-licked slice of sugarbeat. i was hugely dissapointed, but the farmer saw and told me i could go back an cut another piece of, which was awesome, so i did. finding my way back through the barns, i came to realise that manure didn't really smell that bad, and the smell has got to be buried somewhere in the sugarbeat anyway, considering it had been growing in it. and i got back, and loped off a generous chunk from the abandoned beat with a big, sharp knife, which was probably the beginning of my lifelong big-sharp-blade obsession.)

a moving vehicle seems like the modern equivalent of a meditation mat. i always remember a quote from dubliners, 'rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money,' and i thought he must've thought the first one while in a car, about the car; and then the second two as further meditations on elation, while in the car. it's easy to think, and even easier not to think, to be completely peaceful - loud music, filling an enclosed space, and vibrations, and movement, ever changing scenery, with the constants of the road and the vanishing point. it's a lot easier to spot moments of intense natural beauty when the land beneath you advances without changing. when a huge moon lights up the darkest corners of a cloud, creating a struggling, moody glow, it's not hard to keep half your eye on the car in front and half on the sky. at least, until the road peels away, or the cloud envelops the circle.

andrew bird's bowl of fire - two way action

2 or 3 years ago, in the summer, i was working 3 jobs, which meant i was working 12 hour days for 6 days, mostly. and sundays were just 5 hours, or something, cutting grass. i'd just recovered from PVT, which was quite a severe case of post viral fatigue...at one point, they thought i might have ME. but i didn't, and i was working, and i was a zombie. i remember those weeks almost exactly the same as the weeks i was on a load of drugs for having all my wisdom teeth out - zombie weeks. in the zombie weeks of the wisdom teeth, i couldn't complete sentences very easily, if at all, and would have random, unstoppable bursts of lucidity, where i felt it was important to write every thought down incase i needed to access it in the interim.

in the zombie weeks of the 3 jobs, it was the first time, and i kind of revelled in it. or, not revelled in it, but just accepted it for a while - if i didn't think properly, i wouldn't work out that i was fucking crazy. but, i remember driving back from norwich, after working until 6, and knowing that i was going to get back and work till at least 9, cutting grass. and i remember the 12"/80 compilation that i borrowed from the library, and driving in the dark, down the acle straight, listening to the extended version of the cure's 'a forest'. but more, i remember listening to the 12" version of soft cell's 'tainted love', and wondering why it was called 'tainted love/where did our love go', and i remember hearing it morph into 'where did our love go', and that moment of absolute, pure revelation, and how the fuck did they manage to turn that halloween-thump into a tightrope bassline, and this is fucking awesome, i am so fucking happy about this.

at that point, for about 15 minutes, i am alive again.

the cure - a forest (extended mix)
soft cell - tainted love/where did our love go [12" mix]

when you walk places barefoot, as i have been doing (intermittently) for a while, you have to watch where you're going - really watch. every bright, twinkling object becomes a threat. every gravel driveway is a slight discomfort. and, just forget about your footprint in melted bitumen.

but, you have to watch where you're going - really watch. you see all the imperfect tarmac, the lines covering plumping or cables, the strange little stones, all the pennies, and the black. but it doesn't mean you're a constant shoegazer, even if your are headphones distorted and your hands are in your pockets - when you look up, it's even better. colours, birds, light, sky, people: people's eyes.

ash - walking barefoot

sandbank

2007-08-11T09:22:00.000+01:00

i picked up and old six by seven cd the other day, 'the things we make', for 49p. i thought it was one of their more dodgy ones, and i only really bought it for 'european me', the beautiful second song. but then i put it on in the car, driving back from my parents house, and it was just right, exactly what i needed to hear, right at that moment in time. driving too fast down a dangerously straight road into the end of sunset, with a black into blue into yellow into pink sky, and clouds amassed above the land, and then off to the left the clouds actually tracing down into lower clouds and reaching down, and even through the land - while this lyric, 'the things i make have no use, but they have the most beautiful shape', is right there in the car. the way music is in a small, moving space when you turn it up.

six by seven - beautiful shape

widows

2007-08-07T00:45:00.001+01:00

i think you can see it better if you click it.

celebration - evergreen

dark heights. ghosts, death

2007-06-06T00:38:00.000+01:00

i haven't written on this thing in ages.

it's not like i don't want to - i do, i do. i have this thing that i want to talk about, which is the frustrating state of music reviews. and it's like a block or a mountain that i have to climb over (break through, fly round) perfectly before i can set it down. i don't work like that, ideas are rarely even formed when they are actually down on the paper or in the mind, but later on their aquire some kind of truth. so i think i just need to get rid of it (blow up the mountain, take the bypass, travel by water), so i can move on (backwards, through, inside).

the score system has become an institution, where it need not be - but this is very hard for us to comprehend. it has obviously grown out of insecurities in reviewers, insecurities that are for once justified - if i write this sentence, will they think it's a plus point or a negative one? by the end of this review, will they want to buy it or burn it?

adjectives are thrown about, especially in music reviews, at an alarming rate. you can get through a review without combating an album at all, just by throwing subjective words around. sure, every word is subjective - but some are more than others. washing, sprawling, enveloping - even words like experimental and progressive don't really have a solid meaning anymore (if they ever did).

however, i'm not saying that this is a bad thing. in fact, i'm not saying it's a bad thing or a good thing, because a review should be wholly and remarkably interpretive and intuitive. i'm not saying that a review should be objective - this is impossible. but you should not try and convert people, even if you are giving them your undiluted opinion. statistics, or scores, do this. they manipulate and evangelate pure, naked writing. people read 7.6 and judge from that rather than with that in mind. here, sites like pitchfork half seem to be knowingly taking the piss, giving decimal places to their point system. pitchfork, just with the score rating, can judge an album in...wait a minute...82 different ways. or, maybe, around 100 different ways. (i'm not sure which is closer.) on top of this, a score rating of 0.0 or 10.0 has even more connotations, above the simple signifier as just a numerical score. we need to allow space for 'sprawling' to mean all-over-the-place or droney, and we need all-over-the-place or droney to be wholly subjective again. stop double-loading words.

or maybe, a cigar is just a cigar.

low - coattails

(one line is enough.)

skin tone work load

2007-03-29T21:14:00.000+01:00

the start of the song reminds me of star wars, and this fact has somehow trancended it's geekiness in my mind, and made the song that much more tender. 'you have a father' is a noir-perspective on the 'i am your father' scene/line, and 'there is another' is an actual quote - when luke has just launched his x-wing from the dagaba system, the ghost of obi-wan speaks to yoda, something about 'that boy is our only hope', when yoda says 'no....there is another,' just as the red from the boosters blanches across his face. it's one of the most underated moments in the trilogy. 'you have a sister' could also be a quote, when obi-wan lets on about leia.

this whole parallel turns the first verse into a montage of the films, with little sequences accompanying each line, turning both the song into an inevitable tragedy, and the film sequences into a desperate freudian web. 'there is another' destroys the sinister hope yoda gives us, the same hope that occurs again and again throughout any kind of hollywood narrative or a forced personal-narrative; the hope that is the turning point, or the reason we keep digging. it turns it into an inevitable dissapointment - it's telling us, it's delivering the line, but the quivering quiet gives away the fact that, they know better. they are the ego scriptor. they have written the rest of the lines - they know how their story unfolds. you will not come out well, and they have a really hard time hiding that from you.

but then, we get theresa - 'it's Theresa you love the best'. whenever i sing it to myself, i can't help singing it with the 'th' rather than just the 't'. it's because Theresa is so similar to there is another - THEREiSAnother. what does that mean? have we hope again? is Theresa the actual other, rather than the abstract hope/inevitable misery? or is Theresa the one who steals our life - is she fire? is she a sister?

i have no idea if Theresa fits into the bible, but we've got some half references to noah's ark - there was a flood, a world of water', but the story is, again, ripped from it's roots - they tear a steeple down to survive, and the boat is less a boat than a mass of floating shards of wood, and Theresa seems to snatch a piece of driftwood that you might've got.

'from near his heart he took a rib, all fires have to burn a life to live'. at this point i thought that Theresa might be Lilith, the first woman. She's taken the name, and some virginity...but she's also not there any more. and eve lives because she doesn't. lilith is some kind of dichotomy, a slaughtered lamb and simultaneously a social outcast, seen as evil. eve's heart is lilith's death.

i don't know what that means.

swan lake - all fires

a chronicle of early failures, part two

2007-03-21T21:21:00.000Z

here's another. i don't like the way i wrote the beginning of this, but i like the (true) story. i also remember a couple of people telling me they liked this one in particular, so, here we go. and i like it near the end.

repetition of failure! this was written 04/Oct/05

---

more of the same

"i had a lot of things from birmingham that i wanted to write but completely forgot about, and was consequently frustrated. very frustrated. but i remembered one - i went into a guys room. basically, there was an ajoining door between my room and the "executive suite" or some shit like that. i opened my door, and then there was a second door that was, obviously, his door. his connection to the ajoining door-ness of it all. late at night, very late at night, after staring through the massive, pristine, sterile windows at the building opposite (and after trying to work out whether the lost in translation-esque red neons were reflecting off some windows, or if they were above my room, or if they were, indeed, radiating from this prison-like building across the way) for too many hours to count, i drank some coffee, drank some hot chocolate, and then drank some more coffee, and wrote a letter to the cleaner for the next day. i got up and tried the ajoining door. mine opened, as i had control over it - the lock was on my side. i pushed his, and it fucking opened. it opened. i only pushed it with enough force to make it ajar, but it was obvious that it would open all the way if i pushed it. of course, i pulled it shut as quickly and quietly as i could, and jumped back onto the bed, completely with an adrenaline rush pulsing through my arms and chest. fuck, that was probably the most exciting thing that's going to happen in an empty hotel room at 4:00 in the morning. after a while, i drifted off to sleep. actually, that's a lie. i didn't fall asleep. about 20 minutes later, after trying to take my mind of it any way i could - reading a book, reading some of the bible, watching wrestling on the tv (controlled with a keyboard!), watching a bad, bad film on some sky channel, i got up again. i was fucking juiced by this time, high on caffine, sugar, the bible and adrenaline, and the loudest thing in the room really was my heart, beating through my ears. i opened my door, and i was a little nervous that maybe he'd heard my jarring from before, and locked his side. but he hadn't, and i was confident, and i opened it fully. there was a single, compact bag on the table, open, and not much else. there might have been a jacket on the back of a chair. then i heard him sleeping. when i look back, he could've been awake. he could've even been awake when i heard him breathe, but i was pretty sure it was the sound of sleep, while i took a few tentative footsteps round his executive suite. i saw some books on the middle section of a shelf but i couldn't see what they were, buried in shadow, so i took one out. guess what? the books were the complete works of charles dickens. i always wondered what you paid for with an executive suite. at least, i think he was asleep. i went back into my room, and although i didn't sleep, i didn't go back, and watched through the peephole in the morning when i heard him leaving. he was the person you are imagining. the person who occupies the executive suite on all the films, the one who will cause the eventual fall of the capitalist society with his kidney failure and his stress, along with 50,000 other workers/rulers who will fall into the ground on the way to work, work, work. ok, so maybe not the last point, i get carried away. pity i don't get carried away. but, he was the executive. he was the person that this room was designed for, indended for. he is the person who will pick up a dickens novel, and think, yes, i am in touch. i am cultured, and i am high up here. and then he will go to reception and say, i enjoyed the dickens collection, and that he will stay here again. of course, i'm taking the piss a bit here. there is only a 85% chance i could tell all this from his partially opened compack bag and the back of his suit viewed through the skewed eye of the convex peephole, through the skewed eye of this concave youth. maybe he watched me. amy's got a baby in her stomach mike*"

---

90 day men - i've got designs on you

mediator mixtape #5 - donna summmmer?

2007-03-11T14:21:00.000Z

it's weird how, in summer, these tracks just fall into your hands. it's not even that they're being advertisied to you at this point - earlier, i just happened to get a few mp3s off insound's back catalogue, and they all stank of summer, of hot swamps and dragonflies on red brick.

it's a bit more understandable when summery tracks appear on a mixtape made while staring out the window, at light across a roof, while i'm supposed to be writing an essay. i would probably describe telepathy constants as a winter tape, but then again i would never hesitate to describe belong as summer music. so, summer isn't necessarily short songs, or twinkling songs, or songs with words in; i don't know how much of a coincidence it is that the new do make say think is incredibly sunny and open compared to anything they've done before...how do you create that atmosphere on record when you're writing in winter? maybe it's different in a barn, or a cabin, in canada.

so, here's an admittedly summery tape. it seems that most music can adapt to a season, but it must all be played loud.

mediator mixtape #5 - donna summmmer?
tracklist:
1. akron/family - blessing force
2. desert sessions - in my head...or something
3. black moth super rainbow - jump into my mouth and breathe the stardust
4. ted leo and the pharmacists - the sons of cain
5. the national - about today (live)
6. beirut - scenic world
7. dirty three - i really should've gone out last night
8. frog eyes - bushels
9. pavement - range life
10. caetano veloso - clarice
11. the thermals - i hold the sound

i was walking into uni the other day, and i merged in with everyone who just got off the bus. the end of about today kicked in, and i've left all the clapping at the end on. it feels really good to listen to in headphones - your own private audience, telling you that you're fucking great. i thought, i bet you could make a whole cd of this, and feel really awesome every single morning, if you set it as an alarm - to wake up to applause. then i thought...i bet some of the people around me can hear the clapping, and think that i just listen to clapping to motivate myself. do they think i just need it to have a good reason to walk to uni - so i can play the clapping track, over and over? or do they think i need it, constantly, to keep smiling? will i be in front of their bus home, when the cd player cuts out? none of them hand me sweaty batteries from a cold palm, so i presume the former and smile. what else can i do? i'm listening to thirty seconds of solid handclaps.

i also uploaded all the previous tapes again, because i found an easier way to keep them up. which is also known as procrastination.

mediator mixtape #4 - crooked polar night
tracklist:
1. mugison - salt
2. sufjan stevens - alanson, crooked river
3. growing - primitive associations/great mass above
4. black moth super rainbow - hazy field people
5. colleen - i'll read you a story
6. joanna newsom - only skin
7. belong - i never lose. never really
8. labradford - midrange
9. tindersticks - miles davis' funeral
10. august born - more dead bird blues

mediator mixtape #3 - telepathy constants
tracklist:
1. godspeed you black emperor! - divorce&fever... (edit)
2. belong - all equal now
3. hood - intro
4. bjork - an echo, a stain
5. múm - please sing my spring reverb (isan catena remix)
6. thom yorke - skip divided
7. slowdive - cello
8. six organs of admittance - regeneration
9. wilco - i am trying to break your heart
10. final - sorry
11. thee more shallows - perfect map (bbc session)
12. devendra banhart - dragonflys

mediator mixtape #2 - oceans never listen
tracklist:
1. manitoba - bijoux
2. weird weeds - sweet thing
3. akron/family - before and again
4. the books - all our base are belong to them
5. jana hunter - k
6. adem - everything you need
7. psapp - tricycle
8. broken social scene - ibi dreams of pavement (KCRW acoustic session)
9. cat power - satisfaction (planet claire session)
10. mice parade - the boat room
11. sunset rubdown - shut up i am dreaming of places where lovers have wings
12. secret stars - wait
13. múm - the ghosts you draw on my back

mediator mixtape #1 - drive north
tracklist:
1. set fire to flames - wild dogs of the thunderbolt/'they cannot lock me up...i am eternally free...' (from the lips of lying dying wonder body #2)
2. amina - skakka
3. low - lordie (peel session)
4. espers - widow's weed
5. efterklang - bright
6. six organs of admittance - black needle rhymes (live on KVRX)
7. saul williams & blackalicious - release
8. jeff tweedy - crack a smile
9. peter and the wolf - red sun
10. the album leaf - spinning makes me dizzy
11. beirut - mount wroclai (idle days)
12. four tet - my angel rocks back and forth (live in copenhagen)

a chronicle of early failures, part one

2007-03-10T22:02:00.000Z

how far did narcissus lean before falling in? what i mean by that, is - that i think i'm going to post a few things from my old weblog - back when they were called online diaries, or some shit like that. i remembered a post i did about pavement's shady lane, and i looked it up, and it wasn't as bad as i thought. i also read some others while trying to find the shady post, and they wern't too bad either. and, i think they're quite good at showing some kind of progression. but - i'm not trying to say i write better now. it's probably time to employ that samuel beckett quote, fail, fail better or whatever. the one that every writer ever, even before beckett, has quoted. i'm trying not to say much, because this is kind of unforgivable...so, sorry. i hope you can take this for what it is. all the bold, italic, and mistakes are from the original text. also, when something went wrong with the site these were hosted on, i lost all the linebreaks. i am a fan of linebreaks.

a fan of linebreaks, right? okay?

...but maybe it's better this way - so it won't be so connected with my thoughts now, but more with the ongoing patterns and emotions. hah! i'm already slipping back into the style...

i am in love with mistakes. this was written 09/Jul/05

---

have we missed an opportunity//

"the smallest bits of music are the best. those moments that you know only after listening to a record again, and again and again, something that is becoming increasingly harder with the malestrom of music that assaults the mind and the senses to some kind of sadomasochistic orgasm. there's a bit in pavement's shady lane where malkamus (who shares a birthday with me) breathes in just before he starts to sing and just before that beautifully, fucking beautifully simply riff kicks in, and it sets off the whole song. even after that strange break where the song starts again, that breath still hangs and makes the song feel completely perfect and at home for it's exact duration. it's a thing that you wouldn't notice the first 30 times you listen to the song, but you will notice it the 31st time, and you will repeat the intro again and again to hear it, and then it will be there every time you play the song again. it's like a little secret message between you and one of the most influential and brilliant indie bands ever, and that's something special. that's something to be proud of, on your side and theirs. i struggle to think of any more examples right now, brighten the corners now playing in it's entirety, blissfully drowning out and coating all other thoughts in a thick layer of golden honey and sunshine; but you know what they are, and you have your own special moments like that. and they make you smile, and you know there will never be a time when they won't make you smile - no matter what kind of explosions are happening anywhere in the world or your mind, these things will remind you of the inevitably beauty, the indestructably subtle perfection that is about as frequent as a lottery win - but, fuck, so much more rewarding. what with live8, the g8, the london incident, i've been thinking a lot about what i want to write about it, because i do want to write something. but maybe this is it. maybe what i want to write is a defence of the little things, the little bursts of joy. i guarantee that i'm even more surprised than you, what with my usual deathly cynical outlook. yes, these events make you feel sick, especially when you realise this is how it will always be - money, greed, war, death, religion. the continuous strength of evil over good, or, even worse - the continual rise of the evil good (the ones who pretend to be) and the rise of the gray/grey area between it all. nothing is black and white, my boy. but. but. no one can deny the light on your hands, the dust in the air in the morning, the reverb from your favourite note. little things. when you notice the stripes, the dirt in your fries. i guess i don't have much good to say after all. but not much never lost. watch her reinvent the wheel, i don't need your summary acts to give into the narrative mike*"

---

Pavement - Shady Lane

p.s., i'm thinking about doing another mixtape pretty soon?

there are no roads

2007-02-18T22:16:00.000Z

i remember reading a review a good while ago, of kid dakota's the west is the future, and there's something about the title that really resonnates with me. whenever i start to talk about it, though, i track onto manifest destiny from high school history lessons, and mr. batrick's 'crude maps' of america, which mostly turn out looking like scarred elephants. the reviewer seemed pretty disappointed with the mediation on D. Jackson's drug addiction, in 10,000 lakes, where he sings 'I didn't come for ice-fishing, I didn't come for duck hunting,' and finishes with 'I came to get better.'

i see his point, although i don't think that 10,000 lakes is jackson's cathartic blanket. looking at their press photos, which one is jackson - which one was the addict? i'm not sure, it's not something i'm ever going to guess at. i'm not even sure that he had the problem when they recorded so pretty, but i'd say that the cape in 'smokestack' is jackson's expulsion. but it's not even about the cape - it's about the second half of the song, where the slightly amplified guitar is just being idly strummed, over and over on the same chord, where the usual songwriting process breaks down. again, it's hard to talk about what would have driven him, but i think that those notes paint a picture of the absolute desolation of the west. and here the notions of manifest destiny actually work - the phrase 'the west is the future' was never as false as the ironic tool its used for, never the easy slice of stereotypical propaganda that runs alongside Careless Talk Costs Lives and Working Less Helps Our Enemies. the future was pretty shit, and so was the west. the west was looking out further than most people could ever see before, and it was exciting, and it was scary, and it was an opportunity, and it was scary, and it was really fucking scary. we can say it was narcissistic, that moving to the west was stripping your thin skin off, that it was crying in front of your wife and child when the crop failed - when it rained too hard, not at all, or when animals ate it. it is the only time when barbed wire has not been sinister. it is the stretched hand of a president shouting go, go, there is your future. your future is in a needle and pills, because there is nothing scarier than dead wheat and a mountain range in the distance. over there, over there you will see a map of your psyche, and you will be able to see unstoppable trouble - hours, days, weeks in advance. your inward becomes your outward, and you can watch yourself be destroyed.

after the few seconds of chords comes these little notes, this time slightly more amplified, slighty distorted. they've made this half-tune that fits over the space - i'd like to use the barbed wire analogy again. they're the backdrop for a few tuneful words, but they really don't need to be; the notes are a desperate last cry as much as the words are. one, two, three: pluck, pluck, please, please. but this is one of those rarer times when lyrics add another layer, rather than being the only layer or something in the way.

the first cry is like a little excuse. he's carrying on this story, he's pretending that he's pissed off about something, or that nothing is wrong...'and when i came back it had wasted away', like a punchline or a twist. and then a stuttering qualification, 'by "it," i mean, most of the best part of the day', and then you remember that constant chord underneath. it's hanging around there, it's the moment in a film where the camera is cutting back and forth between two people who aren't talking.

'i promise to quit if you promise to stay,' and that little half-tune that he brought into the house earlier is still his only hope, it's repeating again under the lyrics like another stretched hand over a table. we've got the dead, sandy flats of repeating chords; the failing hope of a couple of found notes - and then we've got this different thing, an actual plea, one that he genuinely thinks will work, and one that admits what he's been hiding all the way through the dry winter and backward spring.

and then the repeating chords stop, just for half a second. he hits muted strings instead of a solid note. he scratches the pick downwards quickly, and then starts again. it almost seems like a freudian slip.

i read that so pretty was 'a sinister twist on the classic breakup album,' on the kid dakota site. i would never have thought of it that way, but after the fact, it seems important that i'm picturing this guy with his dead crops and his track marks, and he's pleading to a woman over a table. what if she didn't stay? and in the same way that the west is the future, is quitting the best thing, or the american thing, or the unknown thing?

i have this green candle in a dirty, white candlestick. there is about an inch and a half left, my eyes have been itching for a while.

kid dakota - smokestack

it seems unfair to plow one piece of land and leave the other intact.

i hold the sound.

2006-12-30T19:00:00.000Z

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?

cracking stones

2006-12-06T16:57:00.000Z

so i had this dream.

the bit i wanted to get down was the second part, and i woke up after it and wrote it down. but as i was lying there i remembered the things before it, and they might be important...or worth putting down so you can see what kind of thing was going on.

so in these first bits, a couple of friends of mine were killed by a car that ploughed straight through the chairs they were sitting on. the next part of the dream was quite long, a kind of very psychological montage of me and someone else who witnessed it trying to get through what had happened. there were a lot of extreme reactions, and sometimes there was just a lot of silence and staring at things, and going blind or falling over. in terms of what i've experienced of people close to me dying, it was brutally realistic. and then luke was injured in a war, which was quite hard considering he's just started some training for the army or navy or airforce or something. i read through a conversation he had with tom (which had been copied down by another friend, but that's a seperate anxiety that i don't really want to talk about), and it was one of those conversations where it starts off with normal stuff, and then both parties start to bridge onto what they really want to talk about. it ended up with luke detailing the things he had to do because of his injury each day, how difficult it had all become. i was crying quite a lot and had to stop reading.

that's the first part.

then there was the second part, which was a lot shorter. it happened around some strange dream logic, where i was sometimes having the conversation, sometimes just hearing it and in others i was just reading it, as i had done in the first part. also the images i could see where sometimes right in my field of view, and sometimes they were only described or evoked by my minds eye...so, i could experience them but not actually see them. i don't know how important that is. i could also hear certain noises, but they wern't really noises in themselves so much as an atmosphere.

i was having a conversation with someone, and i was aware they they were having problems mentally, as in an illness, like schizophrenia or something similar. but i was having this conversation, and i remember them saying something about thought as a liquid, and seeing all this imagery of a bowl on a table and stirring it, stiring this stuff that had the colour and texture of melted toffee, and this person was describing and making these images. they were describing all these everyday things in the most beautifully descriptive, evocative ways, describing all these perfect events and perfect imaginations of walking in empty parks and under trees. and i can see all this stuff they're describing, but i can also somehow see that spoon stiring the bowl, and its got some smoke or steam coming off it and drifting up, and its a bit thicker or more solid than smoke. and that, the person tells me, are ideas and thoughts, and the way they drift up and around the room, and transfer within a conversation and between people, and how you can blow them to and fro.

and now i'm really excited and relaxed and in love with this conversation, and i say, keep going, tell me more. and they say, 'hello?', and i say, i'm still here, keep talking, and they get very worried and panicky, and say 'hello? hello?', and a lot of incoherent words and sentences that don't make sense. and it was completely heartbreaking. like, they only had the ability to express themselves in language for a moment, and i was there for it, but the rest of their existence is darkness and confusion, and fear, because they're different, and confined by their mind and the physical things around them. things that i have gotten used to and use, but that they find terrifying and unnecessary and violent.

and it was that moment, when i realised that, and reading the words 'hello? hello? sorry sorry' off this piece of paper that our conversation was turning in and out of, it was harrowing and bitterly sad, and i didn't really sleep after that. and i kept climbing out of bed and using my phone as a light to scrawl all this down on the side of a newspaper, so i wouldn't forget it. because i knew it was so important to remember it. but it turns out i remembered it anyway, because i was laying there for hours thinking about it, climbing in and out of bed writing it down.

i've been thinking about it a lot, and while it doesn't have to mean anything, i think it has something to do with my grandad around his death, when he was in a home. he loved it when i went to visit, and would tell me all these amazing stories about the war...ones he'd tried to tell before, but when nan was alive and everytime he started one, she would always snap 'charles, no one wants to hear about that.' i think mum is a little upset about that, that we didn't get to hear more, but i think my nan only said it because it must've been painful for her, to hear about that time of their life when they were apart for so long, and wondering every minute if he was alive or dead, and just remembering the whole experience of the war. my grandad wasn't a soldier explicitly, and was a carpenter and so did things like fix planes and build stuff. while he obviously saw the killing and things, he also remembered the really exciting times, and the brotherhood, and the adventure. and he would tell me these stories, laying in his bed, and it's really sad but i think its the first time i thought of him as a younger person, or even as a person rather than as just 'grandad'. he couldn't really see me well enough to notice, but i could see this excitement in his eyes when he was telling these fantastic stories and it made me nearly cry all the time. i constantly had to bite my jumper wrapped round my hand to stop it. but, all the time he was telling these stories, his wife had died and he was getting thinner and thinner, becoming half a man, and he had a kind of colostomy bag and the room constantly stunk of piss. and later, after he died, and they examined him for cause of death and stuff, we found out that he might've had a few small strokes in that bed, and even broken a bone in his leg, and had too many bed sores, because he wasn't looked after properly by the nurses. sometimes, he would be telling these stories, and he would stop and have to sleep, and other times when we went to see him he was utterly incoherent, and his eyes had nothing behind them, he looked through us. and i know that it all happened because nan died. he died as soon as she did, really. there's a beautiful picture of them both sitting on a wall, smoking, and laughing together. i remember it being a chore, going round there sometimes, to nan and grandad's house. but i also remember sitting on the couch, wearing my nan's hat inside out, and nan and granded sitting on the couch and i was the bus driver. i don't know why an inside out hat was a bus driver hat, but it completely was.

and i remember when nan asked me to pull her boot off, and i did and she fell over and broke her hip, and i called the ambulance and mum; and made a cup of tea, but i forgot to put the tea bag in it, and i was scared, and she was too, but as soon as that happened, as soon as i brought her this cup of hot water and realised, we both started laughing and it was all ok. mum got home and the ambulance came, and she was fine. and i remember her buying chipolatas from tubby's butchers at the bottom of her road, and they were really thin and amazing with gravy. and up until i was about 10 i thought caister was just her road, and never really thought about it. i guess what i'm saying is, i miss them a lot, and wish i had another chance to appreciate them. i wish i recorded some of those conversations with grandad, and i really hope mum has kept his diaries from the war, where he got really excited about having tea in africa or something.

they had this telephone with really big numbers, and had the tv on way too loud. and they would sometimes grow broad beans, and nan would cook incredible sprouts.

lindsey buckingham - shut us down

i am here out of habit

2006-11-23T11:39:00.000Z

tsotsi is, in my opinion, not such a great film. but this isn't a negative post, because there's this one line in it, 'i like to feel the sun on the street'. i have 'party' written on one side of my hand, and 'non-bio' on the other. i guess what i'm saying is, things could be worse. avoiding essays has never been as fun as over the last few days. hardly an original sentiment, and probably a pretty useless one.

my dyslexic friend has just cut the top of her thumb off.

arguably, i swear too much. but there are moments when its totally applicable, no matter what your opinion on the loading of language. like:

i just noticed that you can see the opposite coast on one of my pictures of the sea.

fuck, that felt incredible.

calla - fear of fireflies

the wrong feelings

2006-11-15T20:12:00.000Z

the best bits of the tindersticks are when stuart's voice cracks. when the surface is split like a crème brulée, and it's completely covered in this manky sheen, like the glow of a lonely pub or the way the wine creates a red amoung the shadows; the way the smoke fills the room, and you know it's romantic, but you also know that it's deadly.

tindersticks - tiny tears
tindersticks - waiting for the moon
tindersticks - until the morning comes
tindersticks - she's gone

you can feel that he's consumed by the stuff he's singing about. the only thing that detracts from it is the fact that they're not all on the same album. i would crystalise that thing. i would cover a room in wet paint, and craft a museum in the middle for this artifact - i could say, this is where it happened. this is where he was fucked over, this is when he walked into the studio and stubbed a cigarette out on the microphone and spat on his shoes, this is when he bought a bag of apples and locked himself in, because he genuinely thought he would spend the rest of his time here. this is where he poured hot coffee into his guitar to disrupt a perfect take, and fiddled with his bracelet when the new year turned over.

mediator mixtape #4 - crooked polar night

2006-11-13T03:03:00.000Z

one of my earliest memories is doing that thing where you bump into someone on a street, and you're both trying to get past, but you keep dodgeing the same way to get round the other person. but it wasn't on the street, it was at the very end of a grassy dirt path in the countryside, which was just about to open up onto a big field. he was a lot taller than me, and i only ever saw his midrift, stepping where i was stepping. he was getting stuck after having all this room, and i was getting stuck just before having too much room. i also remember the birds screaming in the skies, and that i needed to go to the toilet.

that last sentence isn't all true.

mediator mixtape #4 - crooked polar night

tracklist:
1. mugison - salt
2. sufjan stevens - alanson, crooked river
3. growing - primitive associations/great mass above
4. black moth super rainbow - hazy field people
5. colleen - i'll read you a story
6. joanna newsom - only skin
7. belong - i never lose. really really
8. labradford - midrange
9. tindersticks - miles davis' funeral
10. august born - more dead bird blues

i made a cd of this, but the newsom track was replaced by the decemberists' the tain. i felt a bit guilty about putting that whole thing up here, though. so, change that if you want, but only skin is an amazing, amazing track from one of my albums of the year.

like little monuments. gets a bit like an addiction.

friendly displacement

2006-11-13T01:54:00.000Z

i wonder what people think in the library, when i am about to serve them, but i sit and rub my eyes for a while before calling them over. if they think about it at the time or after, if it's not what they expected - or if it's exactly what they expected from a student, or from a young male, or from a library worker or a low level worker. in terms of rising up, rubbing my eyes isn't really cutting it. but the thought is there - why am i rubbing them? do they itch, will it be long before i can no longer see? am i going over the events of the previous hour in my mind, wondering how it escalated to such a violent level? more importantly, will i snap when i serve them? am i regretting...that moment where you can change things, how i let it slip even though i had the feeling in the pit of my stomach. and now, that i am tired, and i cannot sleep, and when i do it just gets worse.

or maybe they think, it's not that bad, it's not that bad. maybe they think you can change anything, slowly and carefully.

mixtape tomorrow.

leave quiet

2006-10-01T20:52:00.000+01:00

J. G. Ballard - ...as a writer I hsve always relied on my obsessions. I have always follwed them.

(that was part two.)

six organs of admittance - spirits abandoned

One of us is not as stupid as all of us.

2006-09-29T23:32:00.000+01:00

in the last few days, i've had this little addiction or need, i'm not sure which, for dub. just, something cerebral in the most primal sense, something that makes your spinal column excited to accept pure vibration. Also, more specifically in a similar vein, to bassy electronica, stuff like ambient afx, or analord or whatever, which is kind of seperated from my current arc. so i'm not sure what to talk about in this (long...overdue) post; either one thing or the other, which, when we come down to it, have more in common than in-between. pulled together, torn apart.

so. we think of something like this,

aphex twin - tha

and then we think about the next thing. some of you will have scrolled down already. do whatever you want. but this next guy is, and will probably be for the forseeable future, a little obsession for me. a little gremlin in an enigma that doesn't want to prove to me why he is rationally still on my waking dreams, and my sub dreams.

six organs of admittance, or ben chasny, hasn't been one of my usual obsessions. usually, i hear something among the haze, and it sticks-the-fuck-out, and i learn everything and aquire as much as i can, and its like a little expulsion. sometimes i think it might not even be about the music or whatever, but just a need to be briefly extroverted, to be briefly hugely consumerist for a personally justified cause - to buy without a vague, tumorous guilt. a guilt i treat the same way, actually; vague outbursts at clear/inopertune moments, the rest of the time submitting to the therapy.

i don't even know where that metaphor went, sorry.

examples of previous obsessions have been beulah, broken social scene, and the first big one of radiohead - endless reels of usefull and useless information, indistinguishable from each other or anything else, congealed in signal maps and line vectors. there are others.

the first six organs of admittance track i heard was a kvrx session track of black needle rhymes, and it didn't blow me away...actually, it didn't blow me away like a hurricane or anything. i recently read a short essay (by another current obsession, david foster wallace) about being hit by a freak hurricane like storm. the whole essay was about tennis, until you reach the end, where you realise that it wasn't about tennis, at all, even though 90% of it actually was about tennis - it was about a few lines here and there, a few lines that meant nothing seperately until you finish the essay, when they just pick themselves out in your brain. i read the essay while visiting a friend, in leicester, after seeing kid 606 and mogwai the previous night, and lying on this found couch in the morning, struggling to find a section to lay my head on, where it wasn't stripped by a helmet of weeks-old embedded smoke.

before i reach the main point, i'm kind of going to go off on this big tangent, and i'm not sure what's going to happen in here. so if you're not a fan of the clusterfuck lantern, you can probably skip ahead or something.

i walk in this house, and the corridor is long. loooong. there's a checkerboard floor, and a semidoorway at the end, which is actually a huge curtain of peeled wallpaper. in the next room is a table, and next to this table is a large window looking out onto miles and miles and miles of leicester, but unfortunately you can't see fuck all of it because of this dead brick wall directly in front. the window somehow seems like a ploy to make the house use more heating - the window is like a energy sucking hole of heat, but less obviously so. its hard to even look out it without having one and a half eyes lingering above it, at the strangely-edible-looking fungi growing respectfully just above the curtain rail.

if you walk without looking round, from the checkerboard mask, here's the kitchen, which is full of colours, to put it in a flattering way. full of colours that can be wiped off. actually, there's a distinct possibility that some of these colours can't be wiped off anymore. some are the colour of lethargic litharge which, to save you the trouble of looking up the second word, is described as a yellowish or reddish, odorless, heavy, earthy, water-insoluble, poisonous solid, and some are the colour of pure mass, pure energy, and some are the colour of someone who has much better things to do that clean these fucking colours up - and that's not an insult, some of the people in this house have an immesurable quality, something above and below genius.

the lounge, a hairpin at the wallpaper entrance, alternates between being awake for three days and asleep for three days, and it absorbs everything into this routine - there are half empty, yellow filled glasses on the glass table, packets of tobacco that look optimistically full but pessimistically like a vegetative future, placemats that defy style, a television two feet away that is decidedly new but undecided whether it should have started off life as a microwave - such is its girth-to-picture-size ratio, and it seems to contemplate this decision every day. the contemplation is almost never good. there is half a set of shelves tucked neatly into a corner, stocking such objects as a thick, thick guide to cinema, and coltrane's blue train.

next to this is the couch on which rests the apex of this point, as did the writer of this point.

opposite the bookshelf is a door behind another couch, and it never occurs to me to find out where it leads, just as it should never occur to you. penis size is speculated upon unconventionally; how skillfully can you kill intruder daddylonglegs-es and dispose of their bodies. smoke layers the room and the light from the sad television the same way feedback layers across loveless - in other words, the smoke is jaw droppingly beautiful. the single greatest thing about this room is the fact that there are a few cards from a deck on the floor, and the black and white joker is on the see-through, glass table.

in the bathroom is a 'psycho' shower, which no less that three inhabitants of the house point out to me. make no mistake, i am in envious awe everytime, and imagine a new scenario for that film in this landscape, in forced grayscale. the single greatest thing about this room, however, is the fact that a roll of blue toilet paper holds down a copy of wired, with dr. octagon on the front. i also love the way the opening of the door is a small art, a double-barreled assault on the locking mechanism, that makes your shits so much more exhillerating - as you wonder, vaguely, unworryingly, black-humourly, what if i don't get out. there is no question mark. it is largely rhetorical; which means it is mainly aimed at your unconcious and your infinitely irrational common sense. you stare at the door from the top of your head, while reading wired. you read wired for too long. i sleep in a lonely (read: the absent inhabitiant has lazily ejaculated into the sheets) bed, and i am pretty fucked, i am beautiful fucked, i have fucked pretty and beautiful and now i am on a matress stained with spikes of unrequited love. i don't mind accidently touching it, so much as accidently feeling it, and instantly knowing what i means.

i wake up at seven something, and i read. i read about tennis, and know about hurricanes.

here's the end of the tangent. i guess what i'm trying to say is that six organs doesn't detach my retinas like a hurricane, but it abuses my trust and haunts my tennis like a hurricane, it attacks my surrounds with observation, like a story about a hurricane.

maybe i'll have to continue this another time. i really thought it would only take one post.

six organs of admittance - black needle rhymes (kvrx)

mediator mixtape #3 - telepathy constants

2006-08-31T18:19:00.000+01:00

this little phrase appeared in my head, 'jacobean fantasy'. i absolutely have no idea where it came from, and then i changed it to 'jacobean telepathy', and decided this is what the next mixtape would be called. then, i had to look up the word 'jacobean', because i had no idea what it meant. i had a vague idea it was to do with royal jesters. that's not a pseudo-political remark, i actually did think that, i'm not saying james the first was a clown or anything.

anyway, it turned out to be nothing so interesting as jesters. but i saw a link to 'jacobean architecture', and it wasn't very exciting, but i formed the idea that this mix should accompany a hand moving slowly through a wall. and then, as the mix was forming, the idea of jacobean - either its real meaning or my jester meaning - didn't seem to have much to do with the mix, so i changed it to telepathy constants, the second word in honor of a papa m song i had to take off the mix. (that's kind of a semi-obscure reference, but papa m had a song called travels in constants on his b-sides collection...the song i took off wasn't travels in constants, it was krusty. wow, i am in some mood.)

take what you will from that - is the hand really sharp or strong? is the wall like treacle? does the hand have to force or does it just glide through, is the wall a semi-permiable membrane (thanks, gcse biology)? is the wall a metaphor, is it an infinite wall of old, dark blood? you tell me, for you are my poststructuralist heroes. readers of the world, unite!

too much sodium. this will sound strange, but this mix isn't meant to be a lot of fun. at least, that's the impression i'm getting compiling it. it might lower your blood pressure though, and make you vibrate. maybe that's what the hand and the wall does. it's my favourite mix in a while, and i had an extra amount of fun putting it together.

mediator mixtape #3 - telepathy constants

tracklist:
1. godspeed you black emperor! - divorce&fever... (edit)
2. belong - all equal now
3. hood - intro
4. bjork - an echo, a stain
5. múm - please sing my spring reverb (isan catena remix)
6. thom yorke - skip divided
7. slowdive - cello
8. six organs of admittance - regeneration
9. wilco - i am trying to break your heart
10. final - sorry
11. thee more shallows - perfect map (bbc session)
12. devendra banhart - dragonflys

yes, the belong track is meant to sound like that (and by no means the best song from an incredible album). yes, the múm track is meant to sound like that. yes, the final track is meant to sound like that.

no internet for a few days, moving into the new house. our own house. with it's own garden and postman.

so, so great.

also: holy moly, it turns out jacobean fantasy is a website about embriodery that i have never seen before.

also: i don't care about embriodery!

mute the horn

2006-08-23T22:07:00.000+01:00

cont. re: a scanner darkly;

its animated, but a strange kind of animation where its kind of based on actual movements and characters, and then kind of animated after...its based on a philip k. dick novel, but a good philip k. dick novel rather than do androids dream of electric sheep or supertoys last all summer long, where the films kind of saved dodgy, boring sci-fi technology dystopia stories. that's a little harsh, but what i'm saying is that the story is a lot more original and key to this story, while still being based wholly in the conspiracy/future dystopia thing.

actually, i can't remember what i was saying. i wrote that quite a few days ago, and now i don't care so much about it all. also, there was this step up to pynchon-like paranoia when i also heard amon tobin's cat people on the advert for the chrlotte chrch show, and so i have no idea if it was actually in the film, or just on that advert and...fuck. anyway, here it is, just that song. i've spent too long trying to find out if it was in the film, so the mix might come later.

amon tobin - cat people

also! i saw broken social scene in oxford last night, who were plagued with sound problems, and i also went to watership down - the actual place, and the pub too!

also! sorry to all the michael zapruder fans who were linked here. i only posted one song, with not much of a review or anything, so i am not really sure why he linked from his news page. but: go, frolic, enjoy the other stuff. as a special treat for you, here is something else that is very, very good:

jesse sparhawk - light cycle/tetrahedra

as far as i know, jesse isn't related to alan (sparhawk), but this song has been pretty addictive. it's on the second installment of the imaginational anthem (series?) cd, and it's kind of a perfectly modern progression of john fahey. that's a pretty big claim for some people to digest (and to those people i say: don't worry about it, i don't know as much as you about j.f.), but he just seems to revel in the guitar-picking playfullness that fahey loved so much, without trying to just mimic something undescribable that most contenders try out. i can't remember if i've ordered the cd yet or not.

i blame dubrovnik and oxford for my lack of recent home taping. but i can feel mediator #3 coming along soon, my ears are burning with ideas. or tinitus.

it's probably tinitus.

dead cloud season.

2006-08-23T21:06:00.000+01:00

back from the reflective floors of old-town dubrovnik, welcomed by a few days of on an off rain. the weather (oooh, weather talk) has been real strange - the first night we were in dubrovnik, there was a weird kind of electrical storm (note: probably not an electrical storm) that just seemed to be very, very frequent sheet lightning inside certain clouds, with no rain or thunder until about 45minutes later. but, i didn't really want to talk about the weather.

not really a great returning paragraph, that.

it's just the one song right now - but i'm planning a short mixtape for tomorrow, based on the feelings i got from seeing a scanner darkly earlier today. it's only going to be short, and i don't think it will be very digestible...it could take a few listens. the ideas i have for it so far came from one moment in the film, where i saw a june of 44 poster and immediately after heard a incredibly short snippet of a song, half a drone of a note, which i then concentrated on so hard that i nearly evaporated - it was from cat people by amon tobin. (which, too, is a great film.) before that moment, i had been thinking, do i like this? is that animation really annoying or not quite annoying? are they digitally improving keanu as an actor?, and generally paying half, armchair-politics-level attention. after that sinister whisper, i seemed to dedicate myself wholly to the film, loving every bit of it. i'm a sucker for well placed film music, and this one will be up there with the end of fight club and the final diary scene of cruel intentions. so, i think the mix will be kind of droney and bleak...like desert virginity bleak.

fall fast, fall free.

this song is from the howlin' rain album, and the distorted solo is always the thing that brings me back to it. when it kicks in, i don't so much imagine the guitarist stamping on a pedal, so much as him stamping on an actual beartrap, making it spin into the air, catching it, and ripping its clenched teeth up and down the guitar, splitting the wood and the metal into nothing but one hovering, vibrating string.

howlin' rain - calling lightning with a scythe

we are made, defined by, wholesome, massive hyperbole.

all eyeliner and nailpolish, and rainbow-coloured bracelets circling your skinny arms.

2006-08-06T11:19:00.000+01:00

it's no secret that meanwhile back in communist russia...'s anatomies is one of my favourite songs. i used to absentmindedly write out all the lyrics to the song when sitting on benches or on bus journeys, and leave the little scraps of paper around yarmouth buses and on pavements, wedged into billboards. i've since forgotten the lyrics and moved onto leaving paper cranes around (which, actually, caused a funny reaction with one of yarmouth's less colourful individuals...when i fixed a crane made of a mcdonald's wrapper to the top of a bus stop sign in the centre of yarmouth, he insinuated that my childhood must've been troublesome...although, i must admit, he didn't say it quite in that vernacular. in fact, he didn't really say it to me at all, rather than launch it at me from somewhere in his throat. i said that, yes, my childhood had indeed been troublesome, with my parents both dying before i was born, and having since been raised by birds. he then made the face that means 'at this moment, i am confused and unable to react to or deal with this social situation,' in other words, the face that directly precedes hit fist hitting, or even going through a part of my body. so i ran away, jumping with my arms flapping, and squarking.), but that's another story.

this morning i found a brilliant version of the song, one that might not seem wholly different to the casual listener, but one that really excites me, the obsessive listener. so many little differences to a song that i've heard an uncountable amount. it's the version they recorded on their 2003 peel session, just before the release of 'my elixir; my poison'.

meanwhile, back in communist russia... - anatomies (peel session)

this leads me onto another point, the point of where i got this session. it's from the perfumed garden, probably the first mp3 blog i started looking at regularly, and pretty much the only one i still visit regularly while away from uni, using this media-repellent shell of a computer. i highly advise you get the rest of this session and the earlier one, on the same page.

the perfumed garden has been host to some of the most amazing sessions, introducing me to thee more shallows, a brilliant darren hayman session, among many others, and making me see that low are, actually, really fucking great - with my terribly biased and uneducated opinion, i would say the low peel session is easily one of the top 3 ever recorded. if you look through the archives you're sure to find some real gems (like a few jesus and mary chain sessions that brought me to the site), and it's even better now that kris waaah (i'm pretty sure this is his real name) has his own space to host the sessions, eliminating the need for rapidshare. if any older sessions are down, i'm sure if you send him a friendly email he'll be happy to put it back up. but, don't take my word as gospel, i'm just guessing really, i don't even know the guy.

i missed most of these peel sessions the first time round, and the perfumed garden helps to quench that firey dissapointment every single day.

you must have known, i'd do this someday.

2006-08-04T22:33:00.000+01:00

i've only ever seen shooting stars on film.

i wrote that two days ago, and we're still talking about it.

i was reading some reviews on amazon today, of an album i already own (i often do this, to see if i'm agreed with...it keeps me thinking my opinion is valid rather than just a copy of the hype bridage), the album in question was the national's alligator. and suddenly i had a flashback.

last year in the flat at uni, i didn't sleep that much. hell, i don't sleep much ever, but for some reason i remember this night. it was in the middle of my exams, and i was kind of trying to reread a passage on 'the death of the author' (from splintered memory, i think it was by barthes), and it wasn't working out, so instead i made some coffee and cooked. for the sake of storytelling this is quite frustrating, since i threw the cooking away and have no idea what it was; i have no idea what was sizzling or boiling in that pan, frying or sauce.

but what i do remember is staring out over the courtyard of the other raised flats, watching the sunrise through clouds, the rays hitting every window but ours, i cleaning a pan that was dirty in vain, and a named cafetiere, and 'looking for astronauts' was playing. when 'you know you have, a permanent piece' escapes from the cheap, trebly cd/tape combo, i feel this thing - this really, really dissapointing wash...not like apathy, but the same wash when you wake up after a heavy night out. "that was a good night. wait,..., what have i done?"

it's that point between realising you've fucked your best friends relationship up by sneaking into a dark corner with his girlfriend, or when you realised you haven't done anything wrong, and you were the perfect gentleman to the girl you were courting. but, obviously, completely out of that context. it's a tightrope of the human condition.

the national - looking for astronauts

the national - daughters of the soho riots

the national - baby, we'll be fine

this was the triplet of songs that i've tied to the moment, the ones i remember playing just at that period of bleach white, sky and room and mind.

2006-07-28T14:31:00.000+01:00

been reading a lot of great comics recently.

flight 3 just arrived, i'm a little way through, it's beautiful stuff so far.

read the back catalogue of dresden codak, which i've really enjoyed, one of my favourite comics in terms of both art and subject matter. and it's really consistent, too - some of my favourites are free will and easy wandering, and nuclear wessles, and the dialogue in absinthe makes the heart grow fonder is perfect. for some reason it reminds me a lot of a lesson is learned but the damage is irreversable, which is also one of my favourite drawn/scripted comics. maybe that's the link! check out david's comments on this one for an amazingly detailed analysis and look into why comics are awesome, which is concurrently the same reason that you are not good if you think comics are not awesome, and are just for babies. with no teeth.

today i am enjoying: simple sentences! with exclamations!

perfect stars definitely gets better as it goes along, i'm reading it backwards for some reason. actually, as i get deeper into the older comics, it appears there was just a rough patch. they're getting better again. let's kiss each other so much! i can't wait for 2007, so i can get the calandar.

i wish copper updated more often, go and read all of those.

i think i liked this one because it's all on one page. just the immediacy.

i've also just started reading minus from the start, which was linked from dresden. minus is a really great name for a kid, and some of the comics are magic. actually, all of them are magic - what i mean to say is, they are magic and also to do with magic, in a little world. get what i mean? oh, oh, you'll see! you'll see, my friend! this one is good, as well as this one and the first one. and a lot of others, too.

whoa, i've just come across a minus that i read the other day, without realising it was a minus. it was linked from this new webcomic colective called koala wallop, which hasn't started yet, but i'm quite excited about it since i read all of the comics its members draw. one of them is the secret crocodile adventure club, and if you aren't a member, then you are an anus. seriously, it's hot stuff - i think i might even like the newsposts they email better than the comics. and the idea of a secret club! it used to be a lot more secret, but now i think they've open it up to everyone. i don't even think you need to be on the mailinglist anymore, which used to be one of the conditions of being a member. but i hear you still get some secret stuff as a member...i don't know what that stuff is, as i've always been a member. ALWAYS AND FOREVER.

here is another secret club! the secret friend society. i'm in the middle of salamander dream. hope larson contributed to flight comics. kazu (writer of copper) kind of orchestrates it all.

i've been trying to have some old ragtime kind of stuff playing in a room in the house a lot of the time - just so you can hear it as you walk past that room. it's felt really good, coming in from the garden and hearing 'georgia....geooorgia' with a brass band playing, it really takes you to another place, or back in time. i highly recommend it. here's a couple for you:

Mr Freddie - Let's go Riding

Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks - Georgia On My Mind

Let's Go Riding is a real feelgood song, you can play this one loud and dance along, it doesn't have to be other-room music. I've made a whole CD of this stuff, a lot of it is off the Ghost World soundtrack, because i wouldn't know where to start really. maybe it'll be my next avenue to explore.

Vince Giordano does a lot of the subdued big band stuff like this, they all start out fairly incognitoulously (i totally made that word up!), but then develop into real little gems, not the bing crosby stuff you're expecting. you can hear this perfectly in Georgia On My Mind, where it starts with that bland violin line, before adding the horn and the minor chord. that's the way, vince.

i think that's all. i went on for a bit, didn't i? sorry about that.

georgia, the whole day through.

inky stars (or, you were right about the stars, each one is a setting sun)

2006-07-20T18:18:00.000+01:00

so, i just threw a tissue at the bin, but it flew nowhere near the bin, and actually just hit a soft monkey hanging from the bookshelf and landed in a rack of holiday brochures.

urgh. got the cold and the sore throat, need the drugs. i've got some bitch-ass lemsip. it tastes amazing for the first couple of sips. and then it tastes like the repetative chewing of soft, semi-liquid tinfoil. so, ups and downs with that one.

there are two things that i want to illustrate right now, and luckily enough, there are a couple of kelly vivanco paintings that are perfect for the job.

number one:

i have heard that some starfish can live forever!

number two:

i want to get an ink well and a good inking pen.

i don't know if it's the same with you as it is for me (wouldn't that be nice?), but i prefer the fact from 'number one' and the picture from 'number two'...however, neither would be as good without the other half. it's like a banana - a banana has to have two halves, otherwise you would just say "i don't think i'm going to eat that...it has gone brown where the naked flesh has been exposed to the air and, besides, where did the other half go? i don't want to be caught up in some kind of power struggle against the original owner of this banana, we may end up making a big hole in the middle of the street, or breaking the lamppost."

also it would only be 'bana' or 'na' without it's other half. and that just looks silly.

i got it in! i got it in that time - the tissue into the bin, cushioning off two walls, "flum, flum, rest".

the lemsip is at the tinfoil stage right now. nothing a good night's sleep can't handle - if only i could get one of those! the mirth of my sinuses. sinuses? sinus? sirius?

Michael Zapruder's Rain of Frogs - Butterfield's and Baker's

i don't know why there's apostrophes on the end of of butterfield and baker, but that's what they are on the file. maybe they're shops? or owners of houses? i'm not going to argue with mr. zapruder - he's got a fucking rain of frogs! i don't want to have to scoop a gaggle of lightly charred, convolsing amphibians out of my gutters. no sir.

there's something very intelligent about this song, although i have no idea what it is. in fact, i know next to nothing about either the song (i only catch a few lyrics at the time) or the artist. i did a quick google on rain of frogs..and to cut a short story almost to decimalic levels: aside from the whole bible plague stuff, i came across an article on the new scientist website entitled 'Return to Paradise - If the people flee, what will happen to the seemingly indestructible?'. this is a question i want asked more frequently, and with arms flailing; possibly with hands in claw-like shapes, reaching towards the sky as if to pull it down around like a blanket, or to kneel on it and steal its lunch money. maybe in a wickerman pose, but with a perfectly pressed creme suit, or a super mario costume.
alas, i can provide you with no answers, mr mario, for i would have to pay to read the entire article rather than just the seemingly unrelated opening paragraph.

anyway, it slightly reminds me of the eels, if they lost themselves in a firefly lagoon, and their instruments became trees and vines. and were helped out by turtles!

*sneeze*

ok, i'm going to have to go and look up the place the mean lady lives in the rescuers - it's nibbling at the back of my brain. just above where it connects with the spine. turtles are nibbling there!

enjoy the song, and ms. vivanco's art. check out her comic, too - there's a good shirt there.

hope, away!

mediator mixtape #2 - oceans never listen

2006-07-11T17:56:00.000+01:00

i never knew tearing a photograph was so easy! i always thought you had to burn them, but now i'm thinking that's just polaroids.

mediator mixtape #2 - oceans never listen

tracklist:
1. manitoba - bijoux
2. weird weeds - sweet thing
3. akron/family - before and again
4. the books - all our base are belong to them
5. jana hunter - k
6. adem - everything you need
7. psapp - tricycle
8. broken social scene - ibi dreams of pavement (KCRW acoustic session)
9. cat power - satisfaction (planet claire session)
10. mice parade - the boat room
11. sunset rubdown - shut up i am dreaming of places where lovers have wings
12. secret stars - wait
13. múm - the ghosts you draw on my back

i made this one for my girlfriend, who has just gone back home. it's a really happy set of jewels, starting with the unbelievably twinkly and euphoric bijoux, and then getting a little more ethereal towards the end. it looks like it may have been lost in the post, which i'm kind of annoyed about - i drew an inventor on the envelope and everything. i'm hoping it's just delayed because i didn't put enough stamps on it. i had a dream last night where i went to the postoffice and bitched for about half an hour, i was the real awkward customer.

now, if only the postoffice worker who lost it would have a dream about me bitching at him, then everything would work itself out.

i feel arguments held purely in the collective subconcious are a lot more effective.

inicagin kte.

2006-07-08T19:05:00.000+01:00

one of the great things about working in a library (in fact, there aren't many bad things) is the books. all the books. this is plainly obvious, but it often takes a while to actually thing about it and see the opportunity you've got there. it's like when you first realise that the sky is an inverted bottomless pit.

adrienne is studying photography as a degree away from uni - not open university, but i gather it's kind of a little like that; as her old college as a touchstone. she ordered in some books from another library that arrived today, and i was looking at them on the staff reserve shelf out the back, and it was like my obsession with light and 'light bleeds' in photographs (i don't know the technical term, sorry) was just made legitimate. i'm looking through this beautifully presented book, and there's photo after photo of overexposure and reel after reel of blocks of colour. the photo above is mine, and i've really struggled to find one of the photographer's pictures online to compare it with (for reasons that will become apparent in a moment), but the similarity to some of his stuff is amazing. it made me feel like i'm not just wasting my time, or that my stuff is too easy or lazy or something. i know you're not supposed to need validation and stuff...but, come on, it's encouraging. really encouraging.

when i finished my break, i told adrienne how much i loved the photo's, to which she replied, 'you know who did those, don't you?' in a non-agressive way; in a way that she knew i didn't, and wanted to tell me because she knew it was a really good fact. the same face when you tell someone that some starfish live forever. i'm not sure if that second fact is true, but i've heard it said from the staff at the sealife centre.

i had seen the name 'viggo mortensen' on the side of the book, but to be honest that name meant nothing to me. sure, i'm taking a degree in film, but i don't really base my knowledge on secondary characters in films that i didn't fall in love with. that's not meant to be elitist, it's just not something i know.

anyway, if you don't want to follow those links and know more actors than me, then you will know viggo played aragorn in lord of the rings, among other things like main performances in history of violence and hidalgo...in fact, he's been in a lot of stuff and i should have known him really.

anyway, i found it really comforting - i had completely overcome that feeling of embarassment when you discover you're admiring the art of an actor or similar. it's really elitist and childish, but i'm sure all of you know the feeling: the example that keeps coming to mind is when russel crowe released a single with his band. ok, it was shit, but what if it had been good? and good in a non-ironic way? would the community have acknowledged that, or ignored it? it's the white label syndrome - do i like this, or am i not supposed to like this?

anyway. this has gone on for long enough. viggo mortensen is probably my favourite photographer, and you would do well to seek out his books - especially 45301, which i will probably buy tomorrow. maybe you will get the same experience as i did, washing all trace of irony away from these photos. here is one of the only photos i could find online, and it's from 'Miyelo'. it's not one of my favourite's, but it could be one of yours. it's also longer in it's actual proportions.

i'll post some music with this a bit later, but right now i need some food to go with this wine.

mediator mixtape #1 - drive north

2006-07-05T11:42:00.000+01:00

i'm trying out this new diet.

i don't have any breakfast, and then i have a bowl of cereal for lunch, and then i have like a couple pieces of toast around 7:00, with some salad. and then i go out, and when i come back, i have a little snack to take the taste of blood from my mouth.

mediator mixtape #1 - drive north

tracklist:
1. set fire to flames - wild dogs of the thunderbolt/'they cannot lock me up...i am eternally free...' (from the lips of lying dying wonder body #2)
2. amina - skakka
3. low - lordie (peel session)
4. espers - widow's weed
5. efterklang - bright
6. six organs of admittance - black needle rhymes (live on KVRX)
7. saul williams & blackalicious - release
8. jeff tweedy - crack a smile
9. peter and the wolf - red sun
10. the album leaf - spinning makes me dizzy
11. beirut - mount wroclai (idle days)
12. four tet - my angel rocks back and forth (live in copenhagen)

also: name change! this one's a keeper. a bee keeper?
we
shall
see.

today's task: shout 'weird weeds!' from a foggy mountain

2006-07-04T15:25:00.000+01:00

this one doesn't seem to have taken off like the last one; i think i had less people to talk about stuff with back then, and so it worked out that i was telling no one in particular, and that was good enough.

now, obviously, it seems pretty shit, and i'm much happier that several friendships have come to a point where i'm happy to talk about everything and nothing, and both will be ok.

first time i've used that scanner in a while. have you ever started a comic journal? i did it a lot a while ago, got quite a rhythm going, before i just stopped, drawing something every few weeks if i remembered, and then not at all. i'm sick of dripping out like that. i've got a few ideas to start a new one, but not just with writing (like this one) or comics (like the other one), but with both, and some photos as well. maybe i'll go out right now and get an awesome book to put it all in.

of course, before creativity must come materialism.

i'm enjoying a lot of simple guitar music at the moment - the kind of songs that could be created at anytime and live forever with their beauty. i'm also listening to a lot of efterklang, too, and that free weird weeds EP. as free EPs go, it's right up there, and there's one song that is really making me smile everytime i hear it, called 'sweet thing'. it's just a simple fingerpicking affair with really strong vocals, the kind that you would be happy to sing along to on the top of a big sunny hill, or a foggy mountain. it was also the inspiration to make another mixtape, and there can be no higher praise than that. i'll post a mixtape i was particularly proud of later in the day or tomorrow or something, it starts with a beautiful creak of a ship at sea - or, at least, that's what i always thought it was. it's probably just some floorboards in a house...but think of it as a boat, and it sets the whole compilation up a lot better. i would say the whole tape has that atmosphere of a creaky boat, lost at sea.

efterklang - bright (from the springer EP - i recently got 'tripper', but i need some time with that.

weird weeds - sweet thing

(link to the whole free weird weeds EP)

2006-05-22T11:50:00.000+01:00

You thought i'd stopped didn't you? Maybe I did. But maybe everything's changed now. The first half of this was written quite a while ago; the second half - well, that was written right now.

finished my last exam about half an hour ago. you don't want to hear about it, but i don't think i've ever written 'Hot Sex!' in an exam before. Or, for that matter, capitalism without discretion is an ugly religion.

A strange thing happened on find some quiet the other day, where a guy posted the link to our humble student radio on some online community. long story short, we had over 1000 listeners at one point, on a radio station that usually draws about 14 at any one time.

now, i do a specialist show, which basically means i play what i like. i thought my personal politics on this topic were unwavering; but, alas, i found myself kind of trying to keep up the energy and adreneline of the previous show, to try and keep the listeners. of course, i was playing good stuff - beulah, apples in stereo, anathallo...but it was all basically pop. i had a lot of stuff with me, and to say 'it was not all pop' would be a gross understatement. i was disgusted with my pandering to the masses, considering that, right there on the show's page, we've got the motto - nothing is any good if other people like it (thanks, mr. stevens).

so, i played something different. which brings me onto the second half of this post - sorry, i don't think there's any mp3s today.

i played some woody allen, something i've been doing a lot of recently it was a segment of one of his shows in 64 or 65, or 68, where he was playing in little posh nightclubs. you can get the CD pretty cheap - it's almost identical to 'standup comic', but about a pound less.

but the point is that i tend to do this from time to time; embody a slightly different persona. this time it's been watching lots of woody allen films, listening to his standup, and reading freud..i'm not sure how that's connected, apart from the neurosis. i picked up a nice copy of freud's general introduction to psycho-analysis, and i'm getting into the dream section. there's also been a fixation on maths, infinity and forever. did you know that there are two types of infinity? infinitely big and infinitely small? and that fibonacci numbers (where the next term in a sequence is the sum of the two previous terms - 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etcetc) spring up all the time in nature? for example, a sunflower's seeds are set out in spirals, clockwise and anti-clockwise. the number of spirals going clockwise is always relative by fibonacci numbers to the amount of spirals going anti-clockwise - so, say there was 5 clockwise spirals, there would be either 3 or 8 anti-clockwise spirals.

i think the thing that attracts me is the way maths can be applied like this, to make it completely romanticised. did you know that as soon as you have been outside, as soon as you are visible from space, that your image will live on forever? think about how we see light from stars that died 50,000 years ago or whatever it is, it's the same principle. the light reflected off our bodies is now travelling through space, and will do so forever. far enough away and with sophisticated technology, someone could see us standing in a field long after we're physically dead, and long after the earth has been destroyed. it's quite comforting.

but.

i haven't forgotten about this blog, and i'm sure i'll pick up on it soon - it's just annoying that if i want to post any music, it'll have to be through yousendit. maybe next year, we'll have some kind of webspace from that broadband deal.

i have yet to come across a serious downside to all these upsides of living in a house with 11 people.

writing prompt number eleven

2006-05-16T02:33:00.000+01:00

let's go for a writing prompt. sure, they're satirical, but a couple of them make your mechanisms start to hum.

11. Write a short scene in which one character reduces another to uncontrollable sobs without touching him or speaking.

i've got quite a few ideas for this one. but i'm not feeling too good tonight, so it's probably not best to realise them just yet. let's start with a short one.

a man buys a coke from a stall on the marine parade, the strip of road that seperates the endless line of arcades and amusements with the colourful beach gardens and, finally, the sand.

the man turns from the vender, watching the bubbles on the top of his drink, and looks up as he reaches the curb.

on the road, one car hits another, and the driver ejects from the windscreen of a blue vehicle, twisting violently as contact is made by the spine on the roof, and with the thigh on the spoiler. the body lays entirely motionless behind the car.

our man has gripped his coke; the cheap paper cup has split, his hand and legs will soon be sticky and ripe for wasps when the brown liquid dries.

the passenger of the blue car opens their door. the emerging lady is approaching middle age, and one of her legs is floppy and covered in blood; she was looking in the glove compartment when the cars connected, jolting forward and shattering her kneecap on the open compartment door. by this time, the driver of the other vehicle and his son have gotten out, and run and walked respectively to the body. the boy is rubbing his head, the father vomits at the sight of what he has done.

our man can't tell the difference between anger, fear and pain from this far away.

he sees the woman half-crawl over to the body, weakly holding the standing father's leg as she sobs.

the woman starts to grip slightly harder on the man's leg, at which he reacts with emotion (our man cannot tell which one from this far away), and kicks her off, eratically and violently.

the woman lands on her back and quickly steadies herself on her palms, level with the forceful driver's back door. the driver is moving quickly now, with purpose towards the front door, grabbing his son's hand. but the woman is alert now, and grabs the childs leg, ripping him from his father's grasp. she elevates herself onto one knee, and drives the boys head throgh the rear window, before pulling him back out and cracking his skull on the tarmac.

our man watches some shards of glass skid to his feet.

when he looks up again, he sees the driver's foot rise from the woman's head, before cradling his lost child. the driver is not crying, but shaking.

our man looks at the shards again. they get closer, as he falls to his knees, his palms onto the glass. the shards rip his conceptions as his processes what he has just seen. he realises that humankind is vengeful and merciless above all else, and starts to weep, for what he hopes will be forever, and everafter.

i think there's a few spelling mistakes in that, and i know there's grammatical errors. i'll correct it tomorrow, or after my exam on wednesday.

exams stress me the fuck out.

in the caves behind my house, i found a softer world.

2006-05-14T00:52:00.000+01:00

i'm a reasonable man - i try to shower at least once every three days, i can speak in a way that is (at least) semi-understandable by most people, my handwriting, while leaving much to be desired, is legible. i have a carefully honed appreciation for music, a critical and creative eye for photography, as well as a vigourous appetite for the understanding of art. my regard of literature is the highest it has been in my life, and i am slightly drunk.

so why am i in love with joey comeau?

i draw a line - an incredibly thin line - between young talent and unjustified pretention. true, i have been known to be overly harsh; sometimes incredibly harsh, some would say. the equivalent of beating someones face into a sandbox laced with dogshit - this is a criticism i have heard of my...criticism. but, then, everyones a critic. they can say what they want.

anyway, it's fucking annoying. this guy, "joey", can do nothing wrong in my eyes. it's not my fault! i wish, oh, how i wish that i could change this. but everything he does - from a softer world, to over qualified, to his first novel, to his (not currently on sale) prints of a softer world comics, to the loose teeth publishing thing that he seems to be integral too. even his short stories, and his fucking math porn! i mean, MATH PORN, what am i doing?!? why am i just letting myself be sucked in by this prolific 'artist', when, were i at full-mast-arseholery, i would nail him to a cross of art school martyrs and burn his body with a satirical bottle of teenage angst.

i better post this before i change my mind. joey, you cunt. you better hope i don't start reading your lj, too.

(NOTE: i haven't started reading his lj yet, i promise. ok, so i read the story about his neighbours, big deal. don't stage an intervention or anything.)

Peter and the Wolf

2006-05-10T11:15:00.000+01:00

i've become re-enamoured with peter and the wolf, and all things Red - the guy, you understand, rather than the colour. although, the colour is nice too. in fact, it's a pretty good word altogether: rolls of the tongue. rrrrrred. roll those r's.

anyway.

here's a couple available on the website, as well as a nice radio station idea - 'the phone in' seems to be where the music is literally phoned in...and as i'm writing this, i can sense that it's probably a very old concept, and i'm really, really behind the times. kind of scary, considering i'm 18. shouldn't i be on the cutting edge? is that right?

peter and the wolf - the fall

red hunter - couches by the sea

fuck it. i thought it was a cool idea. so, here's one of your phone ins, which i'm sure have gone out of fashion. the presenter has all the personality of a car crash, but i like the way they don't really care how shit the quality of the phone line is, and the way Red keeps checking to see if the phone has cut out. sorry, i can't remember which radio station this is from. in fact, i can't even remember how i found it. the wonders of those inner-nets.

peter and the wolf radio session

the fall is a song i will probably always love. you know those mixtapes you always imagine, the ones that contain all the perfect songs on? this would probably be on there. maybe i have bloghyperbolicitis, but i'm going to just go with it.

couches by the sea always swings me around, because it's got that 'is this really a good idea?' philosophy hanging around it. on the one hand, "here on the island/no one's gonna find us, darlin'/no one even sees us unless we want them to" sounds great, really great. "disappear with me" brings it into slightly more sinister territories, but really subtley - you wouldn't think there was anything dark about it unless you were thinking about it already. it is complete and utter solitude - of that much we are sure. but is it blissful solitude or ignorant bliss? 'disappear' is all too often used romantically; but it also reminds me excessively of film noir, something like cat people, where dissapearing into the shadows is all kinds of sinister. are they disappearing onto an island, or is the island just a representation of some 'other place'?

i have no idea what the couches signify, but the way they're just sitting there, "we will watch the moonlight from these couches", it always gives me the image of them sitting there, mouths open. not happy, not sad...in fact, completely emotionless, numb. "on these waves of blue", you've got some very light and free imagery, and while the lotus flower (mentioned slightly earlier in the song) is often associated with purity in body, speech, and mind (reaching towards enlightenment), it is also used, in buddist symbolism, to represent 'floating above the muddy waters of attachment,' which i immediately associate with milan kundera's (somewhat plagurised) idea of lightness and weight. it's important to get a balance rather than be totally weighed down, or be completely off in the clouds. the song is definitely a tightrope in similar ways to kundera's loose philosophy, and the beauty of the lyrics, guitar and vocals melodies is really offset, at least for me, by this idea of floating off, never to return. it's infinitely appealing, as well as a little scary.

wow. sorry, i really didn't mean to rip the song apart like that. it was just going to be a short thing, but i guess i've been thinking about it more than i realised.

is anti folk?

2006-05-06T12:54:00.000+01:00

just woke up, and that layout looked hella disgusting. wow. you don't even want to know what it was. usually my judgment is best in the early hours, but it appears this was a...rare miss.

not sure if he's been covered by any other blogs, but i was really taken by kid harpoon. i'm afraid i'm going to have to direct you to his myspace page for some downloads - sorry about that. i don't know about you, but that place makes me feel a little ill...all the sticky floors and second hand smoke. make sure you listen to the colours demo, it's got some really chilling segments in it, where his voice matches the guitar perfectly. as well as downloading the others. its one of those artists that makes you think 'yeh, yeh, i can write a fucking song!' that's the kind of stuff i need at the moment, and i hope you do too.

this diane cluck song is all kinds of flawless. i love the way her voice overlaps itself in a way that, while not necessarily 'new' as such, always sends chills down my spine. especially when the voice and lyrics are as good as this.

this is probably my favourite of the tracks i'm posting today. there seems to be a feud on whether its dianne or diane, so i'm going to just go crazy and put one n. even if her name was double n, i'm sure she'll change it now. just for me.

diane cluck - easy to be around

by the way, all this stuff keeps being describes as anti-folk...even by some of the artists in the scene, which is kind of abnormal in terms of the way labels and genres opperate. i'm not really sure what it means, but if you're into that, make sure you get these guys.

last one is lupen crook, who we can probably go ahead and lump in the same bag. sorry, i have had little sleep - i'll be a lot less contrived in the future. anyway, he apparently comes from Victa, in the south east of england...which could be described as the same section i'm living in, but i've never heard of the place. i doubt i can even spell geography.

ok, so let's go ahead and say that lupen reminds me a little of an english, more lo-fi page france. there we are, how's that for your comparison table? i'll say no more, and just let you rip that parallel apart. go for it. make my day.

lupen crook - exactly ? the planet
(i'm not entirely sure what that question mark is going for)

lupen crook - urban fox hunting

that's a good idea, mike - start a new blog just as you start revision. maybe it will last only as long as your exam period, maybe it will keep on after that, maybe it'll lower your grades with the infinite distraction. whatever it does, i hope it doesn't continue to nurture this third-person-reference thing.

2006-05-06T04:38:00.000+01:00

i'm thinking about eating a raw egg. just cracking it on the side, and emptying it into my mouth.

i'm not sure what will happen; if it will just slide straight down my throat, no questions asked...or if my body will tell me to chew it. i kind of have the feeling that before it even gets part way down my throat, i will convulsively throw it up - the whole egg texture isn't one i can see my throat loving. there's also the possibility that, if i do throw up, it will really hurt if i'm currently trying to chew. my throat will be spasming both ways - trying to force down with the swallow muscles and push up with the vomit muscles. you know what? they might be the same muscles, i'm not sure.

besides these points, it should be cool, simply for the fact that i've never done it before. and if someone else is in the kitchen...that would be a good reaction shot.

///

i thought i would mention these spin videos, originally found at some other blog...i can't remember which. (actually, better check that out...yes, it was thinktank.) you can just head over there and get them - notice how the violinist (is that even a word?) and guitarist from the clogs are sculking down the back there. yes, yes we see you, you musical whores. who is it, hey? are you with the books? or the national? maybe you should hang out at the state library, get yourself some national books.

wow. sorry about that. it's pretty early.

i'm not aware of the delicate intricasies (sp?) of spin magazine, but, apparently, it's part of their Spinhouse sessions. I have no idea what this means, but you can go right ahead and believe it.

as an aside...hi. it looks like i tried to avoid the whole 'well this is my new blog! hope you like it, hahahahaha, HAHAHA, ROOARRRR' monologues, and that's just fine with me. i used to have another blog, started a long time ago now, back when they were called 'weblogs' or the, frankly, cumbersome 'online diaries' (when i was moving from high school to college...that's something like...3 years ago, maybe? is that right?), but drownedinsound, the site it was hosted on, had a big 're'design (read: went for a big 'we want to look like pitchfork' design), and to cut a boring story even shorter, it took out all my line breaks from the weblog.

now, there is something you must understand.

i really like line breaks.

like, a lot.

so, i was crippled by this, and lacking the motivation to change it, it kind of faded into obscurity. which was a real shame, because i got some awesome comments about that thing. it even succeeded in breaking up a couple of relationships, and forging new ones. but, you don't want to hear about that.

at least, you shouldn't want to.

after i've had some fun with the template (meaning, when i've stolen an awesome template from somewhere else), i'll try and post regularly. who knows, maybe it'll turn into an mp3blog. they're always cool.

so, night. actually, 5am is the morning really, isn't it? here's a tip - if you're not too good at sleeping, don't get into a stagnant mood, drink, and fall asleep at 11. i paid for it by waking, wide-eyed and ready for the day...at 3am.

saturday tomorrow. i hear good things happen on saturdays.

tM*x