Then...

Just after posting about my disco-demons below, I was looking for these, after seeing some of this person's work in, er, Mixmag...






When I came across this.

Disc(l)ocations

I don't choose music these days. It chooses me. I'm temporarily without CD or Record player. Trapped in a room with just a little black box* and a big iPod on shuffle. I load it up and it chooses the mood, decides on which kind of day it is. I'm learning to live with it, learning not to press on through the tracks, learning to believe that, if I've put it on there, it must be worth listening to all the way through.

Mostly, there's a tangle of sounds. Mostly, there's no rhyme nor reason - The Chesterfields to Ramleh to Fourt Tet to the soundtrack to Barry Lydon - but occasionally it gets a feel for things. Sometimes, there's something in the air. Yesterday, shuffle had an odd liking for the new Kempernorton EP (and in some Jungian synchronicity / complete coincidence, I found the Iron John book in a Glastonbury second-hand shop the same day) and various Pantha Du Prince tracks (of more in a later post perhaps; I've come to this guy late but it's stirring, interesting stuff) and today, apropos of nothing (so far), it's got a disco head on.

It's quite relentless.

There's been the odd bit of Patrick Cowley, some Ze stuff and, especially, Giorgio Moroder. In fact, out of the tens of thousands** of tracks it could choose, more or less all of them have a disco twist (over 15 songs played so far today, all but three have been disco). I can't get a fix on it. There's clearly disco in the air, the tranciest kind. The kind that keeps going. The day doesn't feel disco but I can't escape the sense that maybe it'll become so. There's a few hours left. It's out there, trying to get in. It's insistent music at the best of times. It's trying to get into my bones.

Giorgio Moroder - The Chase

Giorgio Moroder - First Hand Experience In Second Hand Love




*I might mean this. I can't be sure. Wasn't this in Rapid Eye or something?

**Maybe the iPod is trying to comment on the obscenity of having this much music on your person at any one time, maybe it's making a comment about the implied self-denial of Free Will, maybe something's just missing a time when the best bit of any journey was deciding which tapes to take with you...


UPDATE - I think this may be responsible. I'm looking into it.

Andrew Liles Ear Wax

Andrew Liles of Nurse With Wound and Andrew Liles has released a way cylinder of his latest tune. This is an authentic wax cylinder especially lathe cut and surely the future of limited edition releases.

Didn't realise they still made this babies but seems like there's a gfew places, out there on the periphery, looking in and tutting. Great stuff.

The cylinder is (apparently) playable on the Edison 'Home' & 'Fireside'. They will play on any non-Edison machine and on any Edison machine that is equipped with a Model 'B', Model 'C', Model 'K' or Model 'O' reproducer. Edison Amberolas usually will not play them but I guess we all knew that. I blame the Tories.



In case you don't know what you're looking for in Dixons, the Edison Fireside model looks like the picture on the left here; a fabulous beast, one faintly redolent of the aquatic dream-forms on Andrew Liles site. You can see what drew him towards this project and I'm hoping someone I know buys one so I can see it in action.

Cthulhu Bench

Stolen from here

What's New In Mnemonics?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this.


Image stolen from here which stole from life

Everyone Loves Werneck-Wretchmond

"This is Not For You."

Or

"Only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity."

Where to go with this slice of slurr?

It makes no human sense; the machine sense is there and cows are just food is right: these aren't angry machines, not machines wanting to destroy or Merzbow the place into submission...



Instead, this is the sound of bored, neglected machines playing, the humchatter of unrecyclable machine-fuzz, miniDisc mutterings, the machine equivalent of jump-rope songs, pitter pattercakes, handclapping games...

If there's moaning, it's soft moaning. It's a machine's irritation at it's own limitations. It's the sound of an old wordprocesser chip, laughing at it's own green screen.

There's nothing human which isn't unusual, I guess - remember Stakker? - but this lack of humanity comes with a different slant; there's the intervention of listening in these manipulations and this brings it closer to these ears to the chargings of ElPH, a cross-reference with Ice Bird Spiral that I heard way back at The Croft...



Kek's trying to hear these little machines, they are calling to him. He doesn't want to control them, he wants to help; you can hear the love and attention in every little wave of sound, it's ridiculously personal, almost intrusive... this is how he hears the world... and this makes this a different kind of thing to other stuff that's on the surface similar; you'll find manipulated field recordings all over the place but they won't have this attention to detail, this attention-surplus disorder...

They won't understand the tyranny of attenuation that means many of these sounds are sucked out of the world or bypassed with mp3 players or uneccessary phone conversations

...

Dig deeper and you'll find some excellent field recordings out there but they won't mean the same thing at all and they won't come packed with little postcards of Butterflies or Jean Dubuffetish Art Brut crayon covers or blotter paper CDs...

They won't come with the meaning or the feeling for the plight of these abandoned, forgotten twitchings...

You probably need to spend a little time over here before any of these songs make sense. The Open University is the visual equivalent to these catechism-calls; there's a sadness to both projects that makes you wish you hadn't pulped all those broken-backed machines, all those hiccuppertronical potentialities.

A final image: imagine Europe After The Rain with the fluid earthshapes replaced by old Atari boxes, Burroughs adding machines and Dragon computer piles...

This is Not For You.

To Iron John

New Kemper Norton e.p free to download here.

Take care everyone.

Processed Meet-Reality Sandwich

Anyone interested in the machinations of the Process guys will know about this book by now but, as a taster of interesting things to come, there's a great article by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge - unusually (?) precise / concise / lucid for those who have occasionally struggled through his TOPY stuff - documenting the early days of TOPY.

Uffie's Pop Sexing

In the old spirits, flying... there used to be scenes of wonder in here. Cheryl bringing her milkshake to the yard...

Uffie - Pop The Glock

But Uffie seems resistant to breakthrough. Pure Pop, but congealed somehow; stopped in her tracks. Not real? Too real?



The hyper-sex doesn't help; you wouldn't catch La Roux or Little Boots sexing like that all over the place; there's comes in little slivers of sex, tastefully distributed, not slutting all over the place like a, well, European...

It's been a while since the little indie boys suckered up over Beatrice Dalle's plucked eyes; Uffie might not be French but it's in her bones now.

Mr Oizo - Steroids (Feat Uffie)

And all the while Uffie is a label that seeks a solace. The places for her are fast receding. 2010 might see a return to pop-sex, to brutalist-pop but she needs to hang in the right places, do a M.I.A. - extricate herself from the gallic shrugging semi-seriousness; go full on from the Valentine's Day release of her album and shear the world.



Glastonbury, Other Stage, 2010? The Pop Queen of this year?

Pop would be better for it, I think. There's a little light at the end of the tunnel. Lady Ga Ga might show the way to go - bring some cultural noise, keep your teeth bared at all times, remember the bad old disco days, stop needing to be Peachy, start needing to be Cheryl Cole for the blank generation, the nuits blanches...

Uffie - Hot Chick

Swine-floozy

Stolen from here.

Snooker's not the same without him.

Christian Yoga

Some of this creeped onto my ipod somehow and now it's wrestled the shuffle function away and is using it for it's own ends. Whatever else it plays, there's a Christian Yoga chant just a few songs away. Cleansing.

Also mentioned and reviewed here and here.

Shamanic Depression w/Widgets

... the weird little post Post widget I added seems to regurgitate some odd combinations and as you get deeper into the archives, the spread gets wider and weirder... one thing I came across HERE and HERE reminded me that I thought at one time I'd invented the term Shamanic Depression only to find out that Julian Cope had got there first with the subtitle of Repossessed (and annoyingly I MUST have seen it before since I love Julian Cope, on and off). This in turn reminded me that in the early days of the blog, before I'd met Kek face to face, I suspected he might be Julian Cope (can't remember why).

I also thought I'd invented the phrase: "Cheap thrills for Noddy Part 2 in 3D" when I was nine but I don't think it really caught on.

I'm not sure you can invent combinations of words.

Test Dept

I never much liked* Test Dept but they did give good picture.






*I dunno: maybe too ordered, too propulsive, too militaristic, too lean, too controlled, too muscular... Or maybe I did like them. Actually, I loved Ecstacy Under Duress and Beating The Retreat and used to know pretty much all the words to Goddodin and was really annoyed when they got bottled off stage in Swansea and an early version of King Mong / Dada Ix Tab was pretty Test Dept orientated and....

Still preferred Neubauten though.

Dolphins Into The Future

I don't hear what other people (e.g.) seem to hear with these guys. I keep thinking that a bit of me is turned off or inside out or something. It's passing me by. The fug is not my fug (doesn't even sound like a fug).

The knockers suggest it's drug-addled but I can't think what drugs they mean; none of the fun ones anyway. Maybe Music for Salvia Divinorum, a drug which doesn't like music much, a drug that requires stillness and silence and secrecy.

I'm thinking to myself not addled enough, too literal by half. Pleasant, a little dreamy, but not in the least psychedelic (cf lots of psychedelic music that meanders, that doesn't propulse, cf the 50 Years Of Sunshine CD that I only just listened to and found a definite deficit of understanding about the kind of music that might be psychedelic - it's not the same thing as dreamy, not the same thing as being in a dream at all)

There's mp3s here and here, if you want to test things out for yourself; for me, it's too watery; reminds me of course of that terrible John C Lilly 'ambient' disc released years ago.

I haven't heard much, admittedly, so maybe there's much better stuff out there and all I've heard is their sell-out, wasteful, spring at the mainstream hypnogogia that they did despite their better instincts.

But does anyone else feel like this?

I'm sort of feeling a bit the same with stuff like Black To Comm as well. I'm getting old, I guess, but hasn't this kind of thing already had it's day with the likes of PGR or Empirical Sleeping Consort or any of that stuff? In the early, dark (and mostly crap) days of dark ambient, Music From The Empty Quarter had a stew of these kinds of things every issue...

You read the reviews and it's like there's a weird kind of auto-suggestion going on here...

There's no new new age, is there?