Kemiallist Ystavat

This works well with pork or cheese and plays perfectly with the kind of parboiled potato suppers common in these parts. This track is made with a range of BBC Radiophonic Workshop slices, ranged through a mixer made of gravel trains and lumpwood and is noisier than most on the abum, only with tiny buzzes and twists sewn into the fold by oddly-hinged dwarf ladies in Edwardian eccentrica coats and stiff gloves. There is a lack of xylophones here that might destablise deep listeners but overall this is the prettiest thing that Chemistry has come up with since the sodium pump.

Kemialliset Ystavat - Tulinen Kiihdytys

A Yousendit freeeeeeeefuolking

Psychic Secession

This sounds like the cover art, only slightly louder. Be at ease in the bedroom or the kitchen and with an orginal AGA and dual aspect lounge diner, this is a must for any discerning doomdroid, sludgeathonic neckbender or freespinning noisegoat. The blinds and carpets are included and the vendors are willing to throw in a whole horse-tub of ultra-strength chlorine tablets to use in the pool. Don't delay because this little babyblue is likely to be in editions of 5000 or less. It's the nicest thing that Novocaine Homes have built for quite some while.

This track, though, is untypical.

Yellow Swans - The Belocity Of The Yolk

A Yousendit Eas-e-drone present-ation

It's All Greek To Me

Following on from my Jarre post (inspired by Simon's 'Cosmic' article for the OMM), one of those funny incidents of synchronicity occurred recently when I came across a handful of Vangelis albums at my local branch of the PDSA (and call me an old fart, but I still get more of a visceral thrill from finding music this way than from mooching around on Soulseek). I love that shop - nine times out of ten it'll just be a bunch of old Des O'Conner or Bert Kaempfert records, but then the other time you'll find something interesting, and with all records sold for a mere 49p, it encourages one to take a few wild chances. I was fairly dismissive of Vangelis previously. The only thing of his I've listened to since my school days is the Bladerunner soundtrack (and in private correspondence, Simon admitted that this was the one that first inspired him to explore Vangelis' back catalogue - with negligible results!). I can't say I'm converted in the slightest either. It was almost pleasant to hear "Chung Kuo" (the opening track on 'China') again, and some of those collaborations with Jon Anderson are still quite listenable (although Donna Summer's version of "State Of Independence" is far superior), but mostly it's either too overwrought with grandiose arrangements or too damn cheesy, uncomfortably close to some of those dodgy Moog records I spoke of a while back. All told, I don't think the world's quite ready for a Vangelis revival. But wait - what's this? Crazy free-jazz intro, atonal splurts of ring modulated synth-mucus, spiky phrases like something from Pertwee-era Radiophonic Dr.Who scores, glacial waves of speculative ambiance...mmm, maybe there's something there if you really dig deep...

Vangelis - Beauburg Excerpt

Techno Tuesday

If you'd told me a couple of years ago that I'd be buying austere Techno twelve inchers again, I would've almost certainly laughed in your face saying "that sooo mid-nineties, maaan". But somehow it happened, and frankly I can't get enough of the stuff. The kind of techno I'm focusing on here is the minimal, frequency-obsessed variety, so faceless in it's presentation that I can't even think of a suitable image to accompany this post. Perhaps I should've just added a bit of random eye-candy for all the sad thirty/forty-somethings out there who maybe liked a bit of Hawtin or Dave Clarke a decade ago, but nowadays listen to Radiohead, Coldplay or whatever it is their kids have got stored on their iPod Nanos and fantasise about shagging that fit Irish bint from Girls Aloud. C'mon people, get a grip. It's not too late to get obsessed about mindless pulsating blips, squirts and swooshes again. And where better to start than Berlin. Christ, I love them Germans. From Cluster 'n' Kraftwerk via Monoton, Holger Hiller and a bit of Neubauton, through to Basic Channel, Chain Reaction and the whole Hard Wax axis, my appetite for electronics with a dash of sour kraut seems to flare-up at irregular intervals. Some freshly digitised vinyl nuggets, for your consideration..

Sleeparchive - Null Sekunden

Marcel Dettmann - Getaway

Substance & Vainqueur - Reverberate

Monkeying & Bear

Avey Tare & Kria Brekken - Sis Around the Sawmill

A Yousendit 'Here We Go Lupine Lou' Gifttrough

Because if there's 2 things that I can reliably be shown to like it's urrrrfolk songs with vaguely ethereal baby voices and pictures ofGiant Bears having sex with women.

More here.

Hell Is Invisible...Heaven Is Her/e

PTV3 step back into the slightly knotty hyperdelia they were churning out circa 1985/86. There's an air of triumphalism about this record, as if finally Gen feels he's getting some kind of recognition. There's a fair amount of 60s retroscending - traces of Acid Drops, Fug throughs, various Nuggets but to me it mostly sounds like an old Cordelia Records tape sampler, gradually unravelling, perhaps being tugged by The Bevis Frond, perhaps letting an Ozric Tentacles sub-species fuck around with the synths.

For those of you easily appalled, I mean this in a good way.

There's always been an arch sweetness around the eyes of PTV (though the only time I ever came face to face with Genesis, he terrified me) and even when that lovable dope Gibby Haynes from The Butthole Surfers steps in on vocal duties (on Maximum Swing) there's a manic love in the air, a Banana Splitting that seems to lead inexorably to the ten minute Just Because which could have been on Live In Tokyo - in fact, I think it was on that record, only called I Like You...

There's people who'll hate this with a passion usually reserved for the Hanta virus but there's something utterly magic(k)al about Gen's voice that shatters symbols and stops my cynicism dead in it's tracks. I have a feeling he might be Derren Brown in another life. Though Gen, of course has prettier hair.

PTV3 - Lies, And Then

A Yousendit ? and the Mysterians Rated X Tissue Sample

Alan Vega Interview (Part One)

More or less transcribed from an accidental interview in a Cowboy Bar, East of Butlins. Exclusive to An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming.


Me: Alan, don't you think that TV could be improved?

AV: Vietnam is the new Gulf. Tanks coming round the cor-ner...

Me: I mean, everything should be more related - don't you think? That everything should be related - so that the actors are really characters and they drift through various types of programmes, doing their thing, being themselves and seeing what happens...

AV: I'm not sure-

Me: I dunno. I guess I mean that, say the Lucy Liu character from Ugly Betty... what if she were to pop up in all programmes, once in a while? The Ugly Betty appearances would be more often because currently that character is where she's at, if you know what I mean...

AV: No.

Me: Well, she might turn up in Tikkabilla or something but be the same character, have the same issues and so on... She could relate to what happened in the Ugly Betty storyline but also remember her past life in Ally McBeal, that film with Mel Gibson where she was kind of a dominatrix.

AV: I... Blast First?

Me: Yeah, and she'd hook up occasionally with other Ugly Betty characters playing it straight in other shoes. Shows, I mean. Other shows. People turning up in Coronation Street or Friends re-runs... I think she's work well in Dr Who. I can't believe they haven't thought of that.

AV: The timezones wouldn't work out... The Costume Drama Fuck Machine.

Me: One example among many. I always liked that phrase, is it from Beckett? - "he kicked him amongst the balls..." - I can't remember.

AV: And you'd be stuffing popcorn, watching Supernatural or something and Johnny Vegas as the guy in Ideal would stumble on.

Me: You're near namesake.

AV: Exactly.

Me: And people could follow characters through various shows, rather than follow the shoes themselves... It would be a new way of watching TV. People would watch anything with the Lucy Liu character in, whatever it was.

AV: What's with Lucy Liu?

Me: It's just an example.

AV: I always thought someone should make a film with the entire cast of another show, acting differently - context-dependency, if you will - but still being them. Consistent.

Me: It's a good idea.

AV: It's a great idea.

Me: After all, as it is, the characters aren't even that consistent within their own shoes. I hate that in Eastenders, when people suddenly go evil.

AV: I hate it when anyone goes evil.

Me: Exactly.

AV: We should write that film. Get the entire cast of Hollyoaks.

Me: Put them through the mill.

AV: A different mill.

Me: Maybe something like Lucky Number Slevin.

AV: [INAUDIBLE]

Me: Or the Transporter, with Jason Statham. I think Max from Hollyoaks would make a great getaway driver. Eyes close together.

AV: You may be right. I hope he is the new Doctor Who.

Me:

AV: Jason Statham. We need more high kicks.

Me: The more the merrier.

AV: Get him kicking his way through Dalek teeth one day then pulling limbs from Where The Heart Is extras the next.

Me: I'd like to see that.

AV: We'd all like to see that.

Alan Vega - 13 Crosses, 16 Blazin Skulls (edit)

A Yousendit Brokenbacked Electronia

Jo Meek's Initial Moustache

There are only existing pictures of the artist / celebrant Joe Meek with a moustache, all of them now safely hidden in the archives of Coventry Cathedral (the Devil looking down, the angel looking up) or thereabouts. You have to wonder what he had to hide then that he didn't later (cf pictures of senior politicians as students in the 70s, trying to outdo June Whitfield for hair, cf Psychbloke, cf me).

Mrs Thatcher liked Telstar and played it while Dennis was egg boiling. Little Mark Thatcher, soon to be deadheaded like a fragile Daffodil ('wandered lonely with a cow' etc), grated his teeth and thunk for England.

The great thing about The Blue Men is that they still sound like a skiffle group. Debased perhaps or based but still resolutely earthly amongst all the space that Joe Meek opens up. It's otherwordly I suppose but it's closer to the attenuated mnemonica of the Ghost Box people - or else it's less like life on other planets than it is life on ours, seen from other planets. Which was maybe the point.

Still, if anyone has any of those pictures of Joe Meek with a moustache then let me know. I'm thinking of starting a collection.

Rod Freeman and The Blue Men - I Hear A New World

A Yousendit Thatcherati C-House Selloff

Goya: Yard With Lunatics

There's a scratch n sniff edition of Nietzche's Birth Of Tragedy, available in red or green, that comes with authentic Greek olfactions. Rub off the tiny smudges and breathe deeply and you're transported, like an eidetiker, right into the heart of it.

Collide - The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum

A Yousendit Hairbraner

Simple. Yet. Effective.

I like the idea that darkwave kept going on, when everyone else was turning away from it. It helps to remind me that The Wire, The Observer Music Magazine and the blogs are probably not still going to be there when you open your eyes.

Of course, I don't listen to this stuff anymore; that would be foolish but occasionally I like to dip my feet into the water to see how warm it is.

Werewolf By Night

*

Blubird - The Way You Thought It Was

A Yousendit Indie-Unlikely

Werewolf by Night, watching helpless as someone is suspended from ropes of pure energy, their arms outstretched, something voodoo happening. All is gnash and impotent howling while out of the aether a songform begins, making slow, uncertain, perfectly-pitched tiny gabbles and wings and goffs...

Indie-scent

Indecent.

This will turn into something else.

These girls seem to be 12 and 13. No longer policemen getting younger. Burning Star Core has an average audience age of 15 - a median of 7, if you can believe it, while latent 3 year olds (i.e. 4 year olds) are in a more or less constantly agitated state of denial with regard to UK Subs tunes played on electronic bubble machines and sent over their cot by well meaning, Morrissey-quiffed monsterDads. The target population for Modest Mouse marketing is 19 but the hotter the sound (with heat operationalised as the number of contact-mics used), the younger the audience - stick your nose in to the average Focus Group focus group or take a spin with the braves and squaws in the latest Racc00-00-00n release van marketeering venture - a Bedford, stacked with vegetable matter and Marshalls, playing Iron Butterfly records backwards and loud. Colchester next.

33% of the people who bought the latest Throbbing Gristle long-player were less than 13 years old. Think about that for a second.

The children are taking over. This time last week, Blubird would've been 17 or 18. They'd have scabbed their knees in the playgrounds of Camden and the University of East Anglia (hereafter UEA). They've had drawn rough arcs in the sand as bigger girls twisted their arms in odd crochets, forcing ligetiesque timbres from their mud-soaked throats.

But now.

But now.

12.5% of the people who bought Hair Police t-shirts in the last tax quarter had not yet finished their primary education. Think about that.

*source of the infamous 'from-the-ground-to-the-air slapping technique is unknown. Maybe Eastenders. Maybe early J.Chan.

ATP at Butlins

You get there and it's like the processing camps. Like Belsen or Larkhill or Dachau (especially Dachau, only with the sepia tones washed out and replaced by reds and blues and pastels; if it suddenly snowed here it would be perfect).



It's a little creepy, truth be told. A giant bear is-

Everything is oddly quiet, polite, ordered. Everyone seems a little disorientated by their surroundings. It like some kind of arch political trick, a Nazi swerveball; they've invited all the pencil trousered, 50s flashing, floppy haired indie kids to come to this place and they're gonna line them up and shoot them or Zyklon B the soft little fuckahs while they sleep off their Magners and Marijuana headaches (even then they'd see the Throbbing Gristle reference before the danger, even then they'd nod in recognition and smile at their friends). These people in high places, these Government lackies are plain fed up with these shambling ex-students, these sad Dads (or perhaps sad Uncles), these people who just won't give up and grow up (tomorrow Bobby Gillespie will play maracas in Grinderman; the whole time showing you can beam like a fangirl and growl like Jagger with jkust one facial expression).

Irritated with all these people who still insist on still listening to music, the Government have prepared Extermination Camps and snuck them through the Lords.



We missed The Only Ones but I think they might always have been shit.

You come out of the fish and chips shop and just around the corner, surrounded by lights yelling out Pizz Hut and Burger King and Jumpin Jacks, the Dirty Three are playing their guts out.



Mad pirate music for lonely souls, staked out for the birds, liver open.

Warren Ellis is the most enthusiastic man ever, he's totally, brilliantly, lost his cool and accepted his bands role as curator with all the childish glee of a blogger - he's high kicking whenever he can, making great windmills with his arms and sawing away at his violin like his life depended on it (which I guess, it does).

He probably has a mortgage, some sprogs, problems getting his 5 a day but he's ecstatic right now because he's curating ATP and that's got to be sky high on any music fans wants list, got to be the closest thing we get to the sheer compulsive frenzy of mixtape making and top ten lists...

He's not cool about it but he doesn't have to pretend it's not an honour. He knows everyone out there would swap places with him. You can tell he had his list of bands for ATP well before anyone asked him to put it together.

In fact, none of the people here are that cool. This doesn't seem like a festival for poseurs or preeners - a totally unexpected treat when you see the line-up and imagine all the stackhairs and the Birthday Party fetishists and Joanna Newsom luvvies. In fact, there's a thick streak of nerdiness running through the crowd - people clearly know their stuff and love it; no real chancers at ATP, no one coming in blind.

(By Day Three everyone will look suitably dank and deathly and like they haven't washed for a week but they'lll smell of Organics conditioners and coconut soap)

After the Dirty Three, we made our way into the oddly Lynchian Reds (an attenuated Vegas), rapidly lost a minor fortune (one G & Ts worth) of 2p coins in the arcade and then settled for drinks and the potted noodling of Brokeback, some Tortoise offshoot or other which sounded worse than that might suggest.

I liked Djed, bits of Millions Now Living Will Never Die, but Tortoise have to be the worst thing to come out of Chicago since Steve Silk Hurley.

Or -

Or -

Or any of those Chicago Housers.

Back at the chalet I force Kempernorton to ingest large amounts (actually, small amounts - he's a total wuss) of the ultra-strong, genetically modified spazzweed I bought just for this moment and we spend the evening listening to music in some semi-paranoid, sub Withnail state, watching as drunk folk lurched against our windows in nicely pressed Neu! t-shirts.

In the morning, on ATP TV in the chalet, we watch Elvis documentaries and begin to sense a theme emerging.

Day Two properly kicks off with mini-golf, a savagely contested game in which the hugely average Kempernorton won, my wife came second and I dripped in a miserably mediocre third out of 6. I mumble something about being distracted by the Nick Cave rehearsals (the Elvis theme spreading it's wings). He's gonna do quite a lot of the old uns.

Alan Vega's set is more mental even than the group of small 0ff-their-tits girls dancing madly to his beats. A woman who looks like she should be on the cover of one of those 'Wild Women' books you can only by in Glastonbury bookshops with crystal waterfalls in them is playing some kind of primitive theramin while taped beats and noise and general mayhem* spew out and Alan Vega rants over the top about marines and nastiness and potty-mouthed politics before inviting some small child up on stage to play harmonica.

No, it really is a small child.

There's an energy that only Alan Vega has. He plays with primitive parts; the beats, the noise, the vocals, the throb but he clearly believes and that drives the music onwards, makes it relentless rather than boring, elemental rather than basic. It's a great set and the Elvis theme is further extended. Only Muhammad Ali and Johnny Cash are more Elvis than Alan.



There's an unwritten rule that I thought everyone knew: you don't wear a t-shirt of the band who are playing. You can wear opposing or complementary t-shirts but never the actual selfsame band, I mean... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ A few are breaking that rule tonight; wearing their Spiritualized and Spacemen 3 and Neubauten t-shirts with no apparent shame. This is a coolly presented, laid-back, festival but - Christ - rules are rules.

This kind of disregard for basic social norms puts me into the kind of manic spiralling descent that only Gin and Tonic and Spiritualised Acoustic Mainline playing Spacemen 3 songs will drag me out of so I guess it's lucky that the transgression is happening now, when I can just lay back and smile at my friends and bathe in the wafts of nostalgia that drift around the room. Over an eighth of these people once had those For All The Fucked Up Children In The World Spacemen 3 t-shirts and over a half of them would still have them if they hadn't thrown them out because they didn't want to encourage their kids to have foul language...



Spiritualized may be terminally uncool these days but on this form they are sweet and lovely and just what's needed in this giant deflated balloon of a main stage.

Nick Cave and Grinderman are on. Everyone's willing Cave up from the piano. Yeah, we like those ballads, we love them, but we can put them on later, when the kids are trying to sex or something, when they're swapping b-sides like saliva back in the chalets...

Right now we need to grin and grind and Nick pushes most of the right buttons as himself and then even more as Grinderman, picking up a guitar (it looks odd on him, somehow) and having a good thrash at playing it, while the rest of the band spazz and go around him and he tries to play the organ and the guitar and sing and tell everyone that he is the Grinderman.



I used to love Gallon Drunk and they used to love The Birthday Party and didn't the guy from Gallon Drunk once play with the Bad- ?

Honey Bee, let's fly to Mars.

Then it's a long wait and more superskunking while we recuperate back at the chalet / processing pens (actually very comfy), watch the rest of Match of The Day (it doesn't seem to matter that Liverpool lose) and wait for Neubauten to come on at 1.30...

1.30. Jesus. A band I've never been able to see and always wanted to and they stick them on at 1.30.

Excellent. The timing's perfect. You need to be a little fucked for Neubauten.

But my friends are falling and my wife's already fallen. She goes to bed and falls into a cosmic coma, looking beautiful but so wasted she ought to be listening to Donna Summer (which, coincidentally the rest of us are, since my smashed ipod can only blurt tunes out at random and almost all of them I've never possessed, I'm sure - I mean, there's whole chunks of freakish jazz sometimes, stiffloads of Coil obv. but then also an odd predilection for shoegazing nonsense which I'm only just up to admitting.

I awake with a faceprint of cottonette, not remembering being asleep. It's 1 AM. Neubauten.

The place is packed. Plenty of industrial skeletons in these closets. Inside I'm sqealing with excitement, outside I'm Lee Marvin cool; no one can tell how my eyes are getting glassy because I'm filling them with smoke.



They come on and everything's ablaze...three songs in and they've gone for pure krautery, motorocking, NNNAAAMMM style... Blixa is in a talkative, pisstaking mood, gently bitching and moaning about no one subscribing to their records... a mentalist near me yells out Tanz Debil every now and then... there's some kind of commentary by Blixa on the nature of rock and roll...

"We're not an industrial band, we're a shoegazing band..."

There's ballads in here, songs about colours and light and hellos, all sung in alternating english and german (though by now no one can really see the join. It strikes me how magnificently beautiful and understated their music is, even when they crank up the metal-bashing and start throwing the spanners - out of the strong, came forth sweetness - and the band is also tighter than you'd believe, stopping and starting on a sixpence, even when there seems so many things going on that it's all having to revert to some entropic, oedemal tangle...

Kempernorton is already sweating trays (why buckets? that seems excessive) and has had a real-life near death experience even before A N Unruh starts crinkling polystyrene but this sends him off on one, Polystyrene being to Kemper as Kryptonite is to Clark.

But Blixa is right, they are a shoegazing band... the songs stretch on and on but the first time I look at my watch is 2hrs later when the finally go off. Almost everyone in here wants more, it's compulsive and everyone's woken up. 3 AM seems early. Even my cast-iron indie kid mate N is caught up in the moment, saying it's the best gig he's ever been too... and this is the guy that Psychbloke's always saying goes down the front of more or less every band in existence...

On the way back there's a man who looks like Elvis hanging around the football pitch. I'm too wasted to offer him a game but I make a silent vow to seek him out later on tomorrow.

I'm- Sleep comes uninvited, right in the middle of. Dintseethatcoming.

It's morning and first on is the skewed minor dementia of 'legendary' Mary Margaret O(h) Hara, now recombined via gene therapy as half Bjork half Bill Cosby in scat mode...



Mesmer would've been proud, Mary seems to have wandered onstage with almost no preparatio, but there's a touch of Neuro-Linguistic Programming about her performance; you get the feeling that you're being somehow coerced into being fascinated by her against your will... as if it could be Tori Amos (Or Tori Spelling) up there and you'd still be laughing and pressing palms and drinking your cider too quickly.

Could be just charm, I guess.

We catch the happy hippy chops of White Magic (pretty, but they didn't do 'keeping the wolves from the door'- a shrooming contagion of mine) but the wait is all for Joanna Newsom, who Pre-Raphaelites and Faerie Queens behind the safety of her huge heart / harp in a way that should be unbearably twee and forced but never does. She's quiet as death but the crowd are rapt; she's very stareable. She plays favourites from the two albums and leaves as softly as she came.

I'm not hungover but I wish I was. This is perfect music for soothing and swaying.




It's Nick Cave again, but he plays too m,any songs from his first set. He's great to watch but we've seen him and people are starting to get twitchy. After honey bee, the last of us head back to the chalets and prepare for the 5.45 bus back to work.

All the Elvises are leaving the building.





*The diving line between Mayhem and Mayhew (as in Christopher, as in Mescalin experiments on TV) is a theme running through my drug-addled mind on the second day, while waiting for Neubauten. It's flashing back even as I type


All photos nicked from Flickr people - mine were all shite or undigested.