wow

i finished my exams today. hmmm. feels weird to have nothing to do. maybe i'll get working on the new songs that i've kinda half written over the last couple of months.

after the exam i went to get a haricut, because it's good to start afresh sometimes. plus the fact that i was beginning to look like javier bardem:


p.s. the new times new viking record OWNS.

back in the game

wow. it's been a while.

summer was a long, arduous affair that, whilst punctuated by the odd voyage towards the outer reaches of Yorkshire with parents/friends/self in search of something marginally exciting to do, consisted mainly of spray-wiping tables and telling the difference between the Kimberley and Steak & Ale pies before exiting the kitchen swingdoors and depositing one or the other on someone i couldn't really care less about's table.

resultantly - is this even a word? - few gigs were attended, and most musical writing was devoted to DEADLINES DEADLINES DEADLINES rather than leisurely contributions to this thing. consequences: itchy screen-eyes, coffee bellyaches, late nights, early mornings and some good, good times inbetween (and sometimes during).

by way of commencement (and comemmoration), a list:

Things Summer Taught Me:

1. it is impossible to function in a remotely work-oriented/productive environment without a broadband internet connection. this is a disheartening indicator of THE SAD TIMES WE LIVE IN.

2. Kieran Hebden sees off all comers and crashes headlong into "at least my top six" (c. Ella Swain) and "the good gigs list, which isn't very concrete and depends on current emotions, but still - the man's the second coming." (c. Lauren Strain)

3. some truly defined and by varying degrees beautiful artists are ruffling their wings amidst the grey bleariness of Manchester at the moment, and i was REALLY REALLY slow in eventually getting around to marvelling at their work. but i did, and so now i present you with a sub-list:

Nancy Elizabeth, for earthsome, rumbling, gentle, existential balminess: http://www.myspace.com/nancyelizabethcunliffe

Denis Jones, for irksome loops and bodily thumps (we've got him playing Trof on 26th September - come, nonexistent readership, come!): http://www.myspace.com/denisjones

Liz Green, for an excursion back ninety years' in time: http://www.myspace.com/lizgreenmusic

err, oh heck, there were more. this will be updated.

4. it is possible to enjoy a set by Brooklyn's Matt & Kim even if you are doubled over in excruciating pain.

5. it is possible to learn to embrace Kate Nash.

6. the new Castanets album ('In The Vines', out November the somethingth) is a hellish storm in a finely-crafted teacup, and a stunner. i'm pretty sure i read somewhere that Raymond Raposa wanted to kill himself whilst making it, and i'd be playing things down to say this wasn't near-suicidally good.

hmm. too many scraps of things have been written over the past few months to dredge up and partly publish here, so i reckon the best approach is: a completely fresh start. GET SPACEWATCHING!

we leave on THIS note (below), and hope that things can only improve from such all-time nadirs onwards. --->



ahem.

Daniel Johnston - 21st May @ The Comedy Store

It's hard to think of many people in the world of alternative music with as ubiquetous a presence as Daniel Johnston. On his journey to the semi-mythic status he now enjoys, via his first job in Austen, at McDonalds, various mental institutions and swathes of critical and artistic veneration for both his heartbreakingly lo-fi music and his tortured felt-tip drawings, Johnston has crossed paths with some of the pillars of indie rock - Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Okkervil River, Half Japanese, to name a few. When he finally emerges tonight it's hard to connect the figure on stage with the legend; in baggy sweat pants, a loose t-shirt that barely covers a bulging stomach, he looks like what, realistically, he is - an aging man who has spent large periods of time struggling with serious mental illness. Yet at the same time he is 'Daniel Johnston', with everything that entails; the man who once chased an old woman out of a second story window, who wanted The Beatles to reform as his backing band, and whose music had a similar effect for a generation of 90s artist as Dylan had thirty years earlier - if this guy can do it...hell, anyone can!

The presence of Jeff Lewis and Adem on the bill is testament enough to the wide draw Daniel still has, over twenty years after he first emerged in Texas. You can tell that the two come from very different places musically, Jeff the sketchy comic book artist with a guitar little more than a composite of a thousand stickers, Adem the multi-instrumentalist and seeming consumate professional. Of the two it's easier to see Johnston's influence in Lewis's music, witty and self-deprecating as it is. It's always great to see him perform, to see the ripple of pleasure that passes through the crowd as 'Will Oldham Williamsburg Horror' reaches its convoluted climax. Adem's music may be more technically proficient than Jeff's, bursting with earnest amour, yet, next to the two American eccentrics tonight his songs fall slightly flat; his Beach Boys cover reveals a playfulness and spontaneity more in keeping with the occasion (this is the Comedy Store, after all).

Eventually the man himself emerges. There's almost a voyeuristic tension in the audience; stories abound about how he buckled at his first set at ATP; as he struggles to plug in his guitar, standing alone with the helpless dependancy of a lost child, you can sense that the crowd are unsure how to react, whether to maintain a studious silence or offer encouragement that can't help but sound mildly patronising ("you can do it Dan!"). Part of me doesn't want to think that a small chunk of the people here tonight are here to see the Daniel Johnston circus - will he crumble? Will he freak out? In the end, despite a noticable shake in his left hand, he's remarkable composed. His set is split into three parts, beginning with a solo performance divided between guitar and organ. He's particularly uncomfortable on guitar; as he intensely and nervously brings his hand, clenched in a tight fist, down over the strings I wonder how much the man onstage can even relate to songs he wrote decades ago now, when the extent of his mental illness was yet to manifest itself in its most severe form, the kind which left him imobilised in the early nineties.

Yet when he gets behind the piano-organ he noticably eases, the struggling guitar playing transformed into playful jangling. Extraordinarily his voice has only slightly dropped, that boyish (literally, little-boyish), slurring intonation still noticable. When he jokes with the crowd, telling us about a dream he had about being sentenced to death for trying to committ suicide ("I was saying, 'No! No!'") the layers of nervous intensity peel away to reveal a glimpse of the artist with a painfully innocent vision of love and life. Adem and Jeff then join him onstage to go through some of the pillars of the Johnston backcatalogue. Adem's accomplished musicianship allied with Daniel's still crackling warble bring the songs to life; suddenly you're not faced with a man struggling to play the most simple chord on a guitar, but a gifted and unique songwriter, capable of lyrical insights of extraordinary beauty. No song better demonstrates this than 'Go'; with Adem on guitar the song seems set free, hopeful and alive.

Maybe Daniel Johnston means so much to people in the world of 'alternative' music, fans, critics and musicians alike, because, in a way, he embodies so fully the struggle to be liked, loved and understood that such a large chunk of 'us' can relate to, and occasionally struggle with ourselfs. Daniel Johnston is just the extreme of that struggle, where an innocent view of art blurred lines with an unstable, clinical inability to draw the line between real life and that art. During 'Go' for a moment I can see the years peel back - in front of me is the young twentysomething you see onstage in Austen in 'The Devil & Daniel Johnston', so full of boundless, electrified sincerity, desperate for fame and mad about music. By the time Former Bullies join him onstage for a rollicking rock set, he seems to be really enjoying himself; when he comes out for a sing-along version of 'Devil Town', I'm just delighted to be singing "I found I was a vampire with Daniel Johnston. The Daniel Johnston.

p.s.

i would like to declare Erik Friedlander's cello part on 'Moon Over Goldsboro' by The Mountain Goats as the single most beautiful sequence of notes ever set to wax. maybe i'll try describe it someday...

spanish men in pink lycra

a couple of weeks back i went to see two dudes from Madrid in catsuits trash up a cafe.

some words were written, and a few of them are here. meanwhile, i took photographs to give myself something to do to detract from the fact that everyone else had gone home for Easter and i was sat shyly drinking a lemonade on my own...



"...Grabba Grabba Tape smell bad. No; reek. “On this tour, our costumes have not been washed!” Lol-OH!-Vot confesses jovially in adorably stilted Spanglish. “I am sorries; is bad for you, think how for me!” His mouth gurns beneath the fuscia lycra like the movements of one of those weird rubber massage things department stores try to sell you; saliva seeps through the shiny elastane into a neat little oval stain that expands with each syllable. It can’t be nice for him. It’s not very nice for me."



"...Stories of sparkly sea creatures and fuzzy rodents seem pretty innocent and chocolate-y, however, for a band who’ve taped the effigy of an inverted crucifix to the blood red wall behind them and choose Satan over God because Satan is groovy and celebrates “dark love and stuff.” Lol stands akimbo on his kit, re-capturing the upside-down cross with his sticks before wrestling each crowd member into a pungent Chewbacca-hug. Meanwhile, their songs are banana splits of tinselled tinnitus and bastardised beats – strawberry splurges of keyboard are like a hundred chipmunks laughing scornfully in your face whilst the clattering junkshop drums sound far too strong and scary for a bloke wearing what is, essentially, a big girly leotard with extensions."



elsewhere, phrases like "gunky gack attacks", "marginally disturbed" and "American cream soda for brains" appeared. further photos are here, shortly: www.flickr.com/photos/lockthedoorsandswallowthekey

Lucky Dragons - Widows / YACHT - I Believe In You. Your Magic Is Real.

One of my favourite things about bands on Marriage Recs is their irreverence. That is to say, for groups like YACHT and Lucky Dragons music is a playground, where the movements of everyday life can be swung and distorted, emphasised or repeated without detriment to the sentiment of the song. Lucky Dragons in particular make music in pieces, the various components glued together with an exuberance that makes me imagine Luke Fishbeck (the Lucky Dragon) prostrate on his knees, deep in concentration with glue still on his fingers. Live Lucky Dragons use a magical carpet, upon which all whom sit will whenceforth gain the mighty power of music:


Like, it's through people that the pieces of life come together and make sense. Like, every sound is already out there, humming and buzzing, just waiting for a human being to collate it into a scheme, to turn a piece into a jigsaw. That every sound is there at our disposal, and with laptops we can become the Gods of found sounds. As on 'Sheep And Sneezes', the first track off Lucky Dragon's last album, Widows, where sneezes speeded up suddenly become music. In fact, throughout the whole record there's barely a cognant word spoken, just whizzing voices and dreamy humming: human humming on a par with electronic noise - neither directly mean anything, both can affect the listener; a melding of man and machine for the greater benefit of the race.

Or something. Most of the time it works; sometimes you want someone to actually say something. Often the record resembles Caribou's kaleidascopic Up In Flames, with it's similarly hushed vocals, flutes and understated acoustic guitars. Yet the best track off that record had lyrics that added to the poingnancy of the song, Koushik murmuring over 'Jacknuggeted',

"I met you
then we fell apart /
Now I'm nothing more
than a broken heart"

At times you want the pieces to compose themselves: 'V Pattern' exists as a collection of noises, horns and slight percussion, that exist not side by side but in spite of each other. Eats Tapes did a banging megamix of this record, pulling together the found sounds, trumpets and little unidentifiable noises to create a totally bitchin' techno track. The last proper track on Widows, 'Snowing Circle', could also be it's best, a song where Fishbeck brings coherence to a song without the need for outside intervention, magic carpet or otherwise.

Eats Tapes also appear on YACHT's (aka Jona Bechtolt) latest, I Believe In You. Your Magic Is Real, introduced on 'It's All The Same Price' with a brief, "ladies and gentlemen, Eats Tapes" as the track explodes into that stupidly bouncy, instantly recognisable Eats Tapes beat, sirens et al. After all, for bands like Lucky Dragons and YACHT music is a plaything - why bother to pretend there's any distance between the band and the listener when you've released a record specifically for a listener: YACHT opened his last album, Mega, by chirping "Hello?".

Yet sounds do sound right in a certain order, YACHT more than proved that with his work with The Blow: 2006's Paper Television was a giddy mix of silly beats and meaningful lyrics. I Believe In You... comes to life when Bechtolt's bouncy enthusiasm totally pervades the music. 'Drawing In The Dark' starts with the title drawled in a self-consciously lazy falsetto until Bechtolt exclaims "wait!" and slips in a beat, the same words eventually reappearing at half speed.

I have a track of YACHT's that samples an argument between Devendra Banhart and Andy Cadic of Vetiver, one excitedly telling the other, "it's just music!". The second last track on I Believe In You... thanks a long list of people (including Thanksgiving's Adrian Orange and Mt Eerie's Phil Elverum), ending with "you, thank you!". What makes Marriage Recs, Lucky Dragons and YACHT all so great is that they can be inovative without excluding their audience. In fact the audience, the listener, you and me, are the most important part (no more so than in a Lucky Dragons live show). Making records for records sake is great 'n' all, but the really fun thing about art is the sense of community. It is, after all, just music.

so i'm preparing some stuff for an interview with this guy from Noo Yoik (i think?) called Barr; scribbling half-finished syllables whilst listening to his garble-garble over tinny drum pitters and trying to keep up with how quickly his weary, cracked and cracked-up voice moves across the seconds, flickering around on the internet to read snips of past press - or at least i would be, were the internet actually available and not intent on steadily consecrating all current evidence that wireless is, actually, mankind's most pathetic invention to date and reckons that just because we don't want cables we also don't want, y'know, THE INTERNET EITHER - and all that stuff and man, his words are tough. shrugs and nonchalance and pathos and being fed up and breaking out of relationships and vomiting and all sorts of that everyday stuff we seem to be doing with alarming frequency are the subjects for this weedy, nasal, weaselly voice that's like a hunched pair of shoulders in a creased and still slightly damp shirt that you find at the bottom of the washing basket 'cause there's nothing else left but you can't be bothered to load the machine with powder and fluid and blah blah blah.

you'd want to give him a hug but he'll probably be all tense beneath his wilting collar and unthreaded buttons. he's full of bitterness and sarcasm and observation of the surreal jigsaw patchwork of weird crap that happens daily but accepting, too, 'cause this is just the way life is, and your body is just a map for various routes of pain and happiness and hunger and thirst and satisfaction and quenching and back to the emptiness again, and you may as well write and talk about it on varying monotones above upright slightly untuned piano keys and splice autobiography with playing about with the truth and back to autobiography again, right? and you really may as well listen to someone do that, too, because every now and again he says something that strikes. right. through. to. the. bone.

take:

'my father had a beautiful wolf-dog named Kodiak; he gave him to the shelter because he couldn't care for him anymore, and i worried about Kodiak and was sad that maybe he'd be put down - and then my dad died.
your dad dies
and the earth dies a little every day -
cats die, snails die,
it doesn't mean that your dad didn't die:
he died
and he's dead
and what does that mean?'

on the stewing festering relationship where the relationship-ees grow gradually towards hatred for each other:

'we couldn't talk before but at least then i could try to read you
but now there's nothing; complete nothing except the rumours and hearsay and the
small kernels that can be gleaned from fucking whatever, and asking, and...*retches*
and that manifests itself into a nervous working present,
like,
"how about you get your own shelves for your own house and i'll get mine
and i won't come to your dinner party,
i'll buy my shelves DURING your dinner party down the street so i will know that
you won't be there buying shelves;
actually, i will try but they'll be closed."'

on watching (or not watching, which is usually worse) your loved one go out and get persistently, self-destructively, unassailably, wrecked:

'but i do get scared when you're three days in on a binge and i'm actually texting you back: "please don't die."'

then they probably say they promise they'll never do it again and they're going to try real damn hard to get a job and get some responsibility and stay in and watch a film with you and eat some good food and not look like they've been dragged through the apocalypse sideways - before going to an all-night crack party the next day or something.

yeah.

he's on Upset The Rhythm. they have a page for him here:
http://www.upsettherhythm.co.uk/barr.html

and this is him. looking quite small.



go forth and listen.

Kieren Hebden & Steve Reid - Academy 2

The evening begins with plans to watch England's game against Israel. Within seconds, it becomes clear that McClaren's tactic to distill all talent within the squad has been truly maximised; clearly training in the England camp consists of little more than trying to avoid being happy slapped by Rio Ferdinand. The torture of watching the game thankfully avoided we settle down to a nice game of Pro Evo, the Playstation equivalent of a succulent truffle, beautifully indulgent and utterly unecessary. Realising we've been playing for almost two hours, and that doors for the gig opened an hour ago, we make haste towards Academy Two, a nasty school-hall type room in the shape of a perfect square. And maaaan the Fence Collective are boring. Seriously. All their songs sound the same. I feel like bounding on stage to liberate James Yorkston from the clutches of their mediocrity.


Kieren Hebden and Steve Reid are, of course, a different kettle of fish altogether. Firstly, I'm astounded that these two people could have met and associated in the first place, one a genuine jazz legend who did things like play with Sun Ra and escape the Vietnam draft by playing in Nigeria with Fela Kuti, the other a twenty-something from Putney. Putney! I know Putney, and there can be few places more antithical to Sun Ra. Barnes maybe. But there they are on stage together, Hebden all hip nob-twidling and button pushing, Reid some thirty years his senior dressed in a floral shirt, behind a kit that becomes an extention of his body as the gig goes on. Reid grins and gurns throughout, twisting his face with every shift in tonality, smiling like he and the music are in on a naughty joke together, old friends happily reunited every night on stage.


I'm surprised at just how unjazzy the music is, closer to Hebden's last Four Tet record (Everything Ecstatic) than anything Reid did with Ra or Miles Davis, all buxom drums and bouncy beeps and squibbles. In fact, the predominant theme here is rhythm, Reid delighting in simply keeping time while Hebden bounces his samples against the beat of the drums, like a powerball against granite. The best moments come when Hebden abandons randomness and puts in a proper beat; the hugeness of the hall suddenly slips away, all that's left is a crowd of people revelling in rhythm, like at the last night of a festival.

Jason Molina - Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go

“Night wind and the crossroad and the blue ghost’s name / all start with ‘danger’ / the letter ‘danger’”

Live Jason Molina’s diminutive figure belies the power of his voice; slight and rotund, singing contorts Molina’s face into a living metaphor for his music – pained, beautifully expressive and full of yearning. He’s been releasing records under various pseudonyms (Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Co., Amalgamated Sons of Rest) for a decade now; strangely, apart from production values, little has changed. The first Songs: Ohia record was just him and his guitar, subtle and sad in much the same way as Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go. Perhaps the most notable development has been his work with Magnolia Electric Co.: part Neil Young country, part Richard Thompson folk, a collaboration with, amongst others, Mike Kapinus of Okkervil River.

Let Me Go…, however, exists in a totally different realm to either Magnolia Electric Co. albums. From the first track, ‘It’s Easier Now’, with its desolate timbre and lonely piano, the record shivers under the weight of its melancholy, Molina explaining, “it’s easier now that I just say, ‘I got better’”. Similarly on the following song, ‘Everything Should Try Again’, he asks, in something between a wail and whisper, “you’ve been tired and a little sick / you’ve been trying to work with it”. Throughout ‘Let Me Go…’ there’s a pervading resignation in the face of decline and sadness, a gnawing sensation that the end of the line has been reached: on ‘Don’t It Look Like Rain’ he calmly intones, “the wolf outside my door don’t need anymore of my blood”. This is a desolate, desperately sparse record, so bare that it feels starved, sapped of love, drained of any life-force.

In many ways Let Me Go... is a sister album to Damien Jurado’s And Now That I'm In Your Shadow, also released on Secretly Canadian. But whereas that record was drenched in a cloak of narrative (relatives shot, lovers missing), Let Me Go... exists in a vacuum; the title’s repetition a clue to language’s powerlessness. Francis Bacon’s paintings are so visceral and engaging because they exist outside of story; framed by only a self imposed cube, the figures are taught and tight, almost trying to stretch off the canvas to escape their pain. Molina has in the past sung of “the dark / and the events that take place in the dark”: on Let Me Go... he's created a universe as tortured as Bacon's, where actions and their setting are totally removed from each other. ‘Get Out Get Out Get Out’ echoes the album title, an imperative that can never be answered, yet desperately needs to be: “get out while there’s still something left of us”.

On ‘Don’t It Look Like Rain’ he sings, “I live for nothing anymore”; with just a solitary guitar for accompaniment his voice sounds like it’s dissolving into the emptiness, fighting its own futility, repeating words in a vain attempt to avoid evaporating forever. At just 34 minutes long Let Me Go... is frighteningly intense, a tiny, self-enclosed, claustrophobic world bereaved of hope.

I imagine Molina alone on an empty street, singing to the owls that populate all of his records, the rain falling, gradually growing at his feet.

“Some things never get better / some things never try”

P to the I to the CTURE.

picture! picture! A PICTURE!



um, we can delete these, right?

bloggy bloggy blogg blogg. I believe this is the beginning of something beautiful; something cheesy and just a little appley. To celebrate:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5dfb55