Neon Indian Remixes

Finally getting through all the emails and adverts and sentsongs that have caused ripples and digimountains in my inbox over the Festivities. This one caught my eye for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who ever reads this blog.

Grizzly Bear - Cheerleader (Neon Indian Sega Genesis P Orridge Remix)

Though I think I actually prefer this one:

Grizzly Bear - Cheerleader (Neon Indian ‘Studio 6669’ Remix)

They both remind me a bit of the stuff that Weird Tapes get up to; this hollow, shining sound that's creeping into all kinds of things post Ariel Pink.

No Zombies, though.

Hang-ing, Barcelona

Just back from Barcelona; new obsession.

Somnipathy

Martin great on the best music to fall asleep to. There was a number of years when I could only fall asleep to music so I must have done my own accidental experiments. Though this makes it sound like a Humphrey Davy laughing gas party when I guess it was more the sound of elongated (Damon and Naomi) sigh and the occasional winsome (NWW) creak. I think I tried a lot of the same things as Martin - this was the only time I listened to Soliloquy For Lilith; I found it an excellent tool for sleep and dreams - but I understand what he means about Time Machines; it's too invasive. I can barely listen to it when wrapping presents (tried this recently, with spectacular results not dissimilar to Christo's wrapping of the Reichstag).

Time Machines (Coil) - Everything Keeps Dissolving

The best music was music that dribbled. Music in dots. The first two Aphex Twin albums were always good. Anything produced by Peter Namlook, of course, was more or less intended for people to lie down and start counting as were various Divination albums, a few of the Mixmaster Morris I Think Therefore I Ambient albums, later on I guess I found sleep attracted to Fennesz and a lot of the Touch stuff, including the odd freakish turn towards Chris Watson's recordings of swallowing cranes or wading hippos. At some point I tried to make my way into stuff like Ligeti or even the dronier side of Xenakis but there were too many odd angles and surprises in there for a true sleep-dip and...............

(read Martin's stuff, I'm getting all sludgy just thinking about this)

Finally, Wiley Finds The Formula

Trying to explain to my kids why this is so much more exciting/important than Cheryl Cole, Alexandra Burke and The Black Eyed Peas. But they ain't buying it. But at least we all seem to like Lady Gaga, though I suspect for different reasons.

Christopher Mayhew Says

This footage set me on many paths a long time ago. Can't even remember the programme it featured in. I loved The Shamen circa Christopher Mayhew Says but I always thought they should have come back to this guy and made a more fitting tribute; the one they made had too many square edges for my liking.

V.0000: There Is No Favourite Album of The Noughties.

Favourite album? No. I can't join in. I won't.

I'll have none of that, see? Yep, I'm none-stering. I'm empty, I'm done. I'm peeled, hollow, completely nu(u)m(b).

The Noughties are/were well-named. The Nothing Years; The Chameleon Decade. Post-Nowt.

"Declare Decade Zero!" "In the year zero-zero-zero-zero..." Oh-oh-oh-ought. 0000.

I entered 2000 as I left 1999 (and the year before that): in poor physical and mental shape - housebound n confined to bed - convinced my life was pretty much over. Dead, done, gone.

Music was a luxury I could no long afford. The sound hurt my ears. I'd stare at the walls, taunted by my own record collection. But sometimes - somehow - I'd push myself into listening to things again - a few minutes here, a few minutes there - tho the sounds were often more than I could bear. To never go to a gig again, to never dance...

UK Garage passed me by. The idea of 'glamour', of slickness and sheen seemed an afront to my illness. "Feminine Pressure"? Ha! Fuck you. The whole world was having fun and I was jealous. How petty I must seem.

From my sickbed I created my own obsessions, tried to semi-track the few things that I could bear to hear. I bought late 90's/early 00's Hip-Hop records, played them at almost subliminal levels. Mumbled raps over needlefluff beats. Occasionally, when the thyroid-fuelled mania and the rage bubbled over to volcanic proportions I'd listen to the arse end of Drum n Bass - a dying-genre soundtrack, a failing, flailing musicform whose days were numbered, like mine. The harsher the better. I'd get off on it for a few minutes; its intensity matched mine and kept me semi-sane. A punishment of luxury.

I had no social life. A handful of friends stuck by me while everyone else melted into the shadows. (Tho the truth was I was like a wounded animal and I didn't want anyone around me.) But in the midst of it all, there were gestures of kindness - tiny things that meant a lot; kind words of encouragement. I remember exactly who did what and said what when - you don't ever forget things like that. I've never told them how much those moments meant to me. One day when they need me the most I'll be there by their sides. And only I will ever know why.

My wife was fucking amazing. She rode it out when other women would've bailed.

I couldn't read. Words wore me out. Couldn't follow films any more (cognitive disfunction). Even TV exhausted me.

There was a really bad period around 2001 when my health deteriorated even further and I sank to the point of, well...

At one point I was up for four days hallucinating. I left my body: near-death experience, the whole works. I met 'God' or, rather, I flew through the suburbs of something vast and terrible. The White Metal Shadow of 'God'. An inverted sky. I saw...stuff.

But my wife held my hand and brought me back.

After that, I would stay up all night, sitting up in bed in the dark, disturbed, unable to sleep - guts and lymph system melting down; liver throbbing and raw - listening for hours to a French radio station on an old radio (English voices scared me); I wanted to hear someone talk, but hear them saying things that I couldn't understand. "Stop making sense". Again, I gained something approaching comfort from that quiet, almost subliminal bubbling of sound. Sometimes an accordian would play cliched 60's eurocheese - barely audible - in amongst the static and dial-sliding stationblur.

Music was a luxury I could not afford.

As my strength came back I began walking to burn off the excess adrenaline - to be so frail and weak, yet be so awfully, constantly fucking wired is a terrible, terrible thing, almost impossible to comprehend. I would walk in the evenings; at first a hundred yards, then slowly a bit further, then a bit more...this twilight world seemed so strange to me with my head awash w/ toxins. TVs and Hi-Fi's leaking thru windows in the cold autumn nights; muffled sounds, still not quite music. Trees creaking, the wind whirring in my ear. Audiollucinations. The world looked and sounded sinister to me, like a DJ Vadim instrumental album played at half-speed.

The sounds I heard in my head. I...

My body was toxic, raw...I'd walk and stop/walk, stop and watch; look at lights coming from the nearby windows and wonder. Shadows behind curtains: replays of Blue Velvet and Zodiac. There was an embankment 300 yards from our house; I'd sit on it at night, stare at a strange-shaped bush lit by orange street-lights, watch cars go by. Listen to the distant hiss and boom of their speakers.

I'd sweat out toxins in the bath - an hour at a time. I'd walk, walk, walk. Sleep, vomit, take my meds, cry.

Slowly, slowly.

One night my wife came home and caught me listening to an old Pavement album so quitely you could barely hear it. She smiled.

Another year, and another after that. 14 mercury amalgams removed carefully, cautiously - one at a time, full protocols; each time I'd get sick exactly 21 days later (it was the antibody titre levels, see; I was ubersensitive to metals, despite all the protective measures we took during an extraction) - it was 6 weeks between each extraction; I'd count the days, the hours. It took a year for the anorexia to recede. At one point I was eating half a chicken a day, nuts, avacados, fats, just to maintain my weight.

I walked, walked, walked, sweated, took my meds, then switched to a bike. Rode, walked, rode, walked. I flushed my liver, sweated, flushed my liver again, repeat until you're sicksicksicksick of feeling sick. Like a never-ending session of chemotherapy.

I started listening to The Fall again. Crappy bootleg CDs. Endless live versions.

I liked it when I couldn't decypher the lyrics. Sonic mush.

I loved "Are You Are Missing Winner?" Loved it without realising it. I embraced music that was disfunctional and wrong; proto-Wonky.

Some friends took me to see Ennio Morricone with the Rome Symphony Orchestra, tho they virtually had to pour me - at gun-point - into the car and out again. My body hurt for days afterwards.

I bought some Mego LPs and CDs; I liked the granularity of them - the spizzz and spackle. Then more laptop stuff, tho it felt like the end of something - something I'd missed - not the beginning. I was kinda micro-obsessed w/ Famer's Manual for a while: it seemed like some ultimate end-point; a partial eradication of everything that had come before.

After that I got into beats again: Matmos, Kid606, Madlib, the funkier, non-moribund end of dying D n B, blahblahblah. It took another 2 years of detoxing to get myself (mostly) functional again.

And music helped carry me on my way.

I still remember the first time I was strong enough to get on a train and go record-shopping for a couple hours. I can't descibe to you how that felt. I don't have the words and if I did then it's just too fucking personal and powerful to tell you what that meant to me.

After that, my decade splintered into moments.

Not songs or albums, but moments. Of being places - seeing and hearing - being part of the forward flow of time once more.

I started making 'music' again on my computer: loops, fragments, almost-songs. A soul coming back together again. Reforming.

Too many moments. Too, too many. Many too personal to share.

The birth of my children.

Spaz-dancing with Circle Brophy and Rehane to Bernard Parmegiani and Coil. Seeing The Fall again. And again. And again.

I loooooved Sunburned Hand. Sunburned n Jackie-O live were a fucking revelation. And Wooden Wand and The Vanishing Voice blew me away. A deluge of records, CD-rs, tapes. The These Records shop. Hearing Black Dice's early stuff. Wolf Eyes. Grime. Dubstep. El-B. Shows in Bristol n London. Seeing Boredoms for the first time in a decade. Shit and Shine / AMT.

Garm. Brothers of The Occult Sisterhood. Golden Oaks.

The world opened up and said hello. "Negative Attitooood!"

I made new friends. I did stuff.

I'm only telling you this so you understand why I can't play this game, why there can never be a Record of The Decade for me. Or a Record of The Year. Or...

I'm sorry: I. Just. Can't. Do. It.

It's bullshit.

So many records, so many moments.

There's never enough time. Enough moments.

I'm so grateful to be alive.

Favourite Album Of Noughties V.2

Well, I've osciallated wildly; flipped back and forward, found myself caught in several ontological traps of my own making: attempts at out-cooling or under-cooling the others, attempts at de-anxietizing or contextualising, at attempting to avoid the obvious and the unheimlich... I've had a number of ideas floating to the service since Gutter's post, each with their own reason, each seemingly prosaic or flabby or otherwise distasteful. The more I think about it, the more this choice seems really like something to send out. Something that might make people click their teeth or eye-roll. A tremendous pressure, building behind the eyes, forcing me to change my mind over and over and over until, finally, I go with the rather predictable (for anyone that reads any of this):



Yeah, I know. Coil again.

It's quite possible that Love's Secret Domain (or here) was my favourite album of the 90s and Horse Rotovator my favourite of the 80s (though I might have chosen The Cure).

But Coil it is and will be. The way the major Coil releases magic mirror my own state of musical mind (Mmmm) is uncanny:

The 80s semi-Goth phase (a half-hearted Goth? Surely that's not Goth enough... I was a Goth afraid of black, replacing it instead with a massive jumper that made me look like a Fly Agaric), Western Lands, Maldoror, Pasolini obsessions through to the...

90s Acid Kid phase (kid becoming less appropriate as the decade wore on) where the only symptom of schizophrenia was delusions of grandeur and everything was seen through the psilotripitarka'd gauze of Glastonbury Festival mushroom socks, trance, Fraser Clarke ("Give us back our treeeees!") and..., well, you get the picture.

And so to the (now) unquestioned album of the noughties: the Moon's Milk compilation of the Equinox EPs. It works better as an album, I think ; it slips between tracks and moods as seamlessly as the British seasons. Moon's Milk evoked the crackling (cf: A Book Of Idiot Dreams) and the twig snapping lycanthropy of my childhood at a time when I was just arriving back in the West Country after 10 years of being away.

Moon's Milk is also apposite because it has a vague folkiness to it; in fact I think it'll stand in years to come as a direction for British Folk music that never quite came off, perhaps akin to the Comus album or the imaginary EPs series of folk classics (Gyre and Joanna Newsom's Duck With Two Backs) or even to my oft quoted (by me) rufflings about the missed Acid House opportunities suggested by Jack The Tab album (also here).

Coil - Amethyst Deceivers

As the decade wore on I found myself getting more and more into folk in all it's various forms - The Sunburned Hands, Ice Bird Spiral, Kemilliaset Ystavat, Devendra Banhart, the Time-Lag contingent, Joanna Newsom (who was Kemper Norton, who outfolked lots of people and will outfolk others in the times to come) - and any album choice needs to reflect this gentle, subtle calming of the psychedelic ways.

Here there be swirls:

Coil - U Pel

Moon's Milk also seems home-made somehow and this has been another theme for my musical decade; the regrowth of folk-art and CDR culture, the return of absolute effort into making musical artefacts; funny that when lots of commentators are talking about the death of CDs and musica as tangible object, my experience of the noughties has been one where the product has often been central; I play Moon's Milk on my iPod yeah but it exists only as a package, within the artwork, even down to the hidden track which presupposes that the CD is somewhere, left running. Lots of little musics existed in beautiful forms with spectacular and necessary artwork. The margins flourished.

So, the music itself. Well, drones rise, electronics nestle up against acoustics, voices rise and fall; this is not just where folk might have gone but also where classical music might end up. It works as a tidal album much better than the on the surface more river orientated Astral Disaster and allows just the right amount of dissonance to creep around the edges of all the beautiful songforms. There's long and short songs. Fat and thin ones. It's a dangerous record too: a breath either way and it's a pretentious, portentous nonsense of a record. Moments of great beauty and slivers of ugliness.

There's even a Christmas song.

Coil - Christmas Is Now Drawing Near

Of Coil's other big releases this decade, The Music To Play In The Dark series had their moments of divine clarity but don't get played right through that often while the hugely anticipated The Ape of Naples felt like a letdown. Moon's Milk took a few breaths to get into but have stayed with me. There's not a month gone by when i haven't played it right the way through and there's very few albums which I can honestly say that about.