Maybe this has already happened.
An album, vinyl only. A treasure trove. An ambient stew to help 30,40,50,60-somethings sleep through their night terrors, their fear that 6Music might be sacrificed to the Gods of public ownership...
An ambient stew. Every record they've ever heard (Gentle Giant tugs at Ivor Cutler tails off into The Frank Chickens which grins at Bogshed who opens the heart of 70 Gwen Party and nails cLOUDDEAD), pulled together and undistorted and smoothed into a thick indie paste and above it all, in the mix and above, there's John Peel's voice...
...he's just talking, unrelated words spilling, following the ups and downs of slightly warped records, wrong-speeded...
...just words coming out - "flexi, fanzine, sorry..."
...the words are irrelevant, as always.... it's the tone people are after, the tone they need to help them drift off into an older, more naive world...
and these words are taken and stewed into some broken-back beats (maybe some Bolt Thrower / Electro Hippie echo(ic) trails, just audible in the background), maybe tangling with guitars in the breakdown but not letting anything get too whiny...
...because these people who can't sleep are OVER that now... they've found their little indie girls, or settled for a Coldplay fan with a rack to die for... or settled for someone who looks like Cheryl Cole but doesn't mind Bon Iver...
The album - the price sticker is as much of the art as anything - will be missing the crapness, the ARCH of the Covenant but it'll remind them of older times, gathered around the wireless or the (ahem) Ghetto Blaster... remind them of the hard click and soft burr of a tape-to-tape machine... remind them that there was once a time when music was for amateurs, when all they ever wanted was an appearance on the already failing Snub TV...
This ambient stew, this Mogadon haze
Will keep them - US? - safe from harm.
There must be plenty of Peel out there, unlicensed, doing no more. A thousand tiny Peel sessions, micro-moduled into submission, made passive and re-charged...
There could be a series of albums, one or each night of the week, for each month of the year.
Turn on, listen, crackle, sleep.
Like leaving the fridge open.
There's people out there that need to sleep.
UPDATE: It's possible this has been thought of long before by non other than Delia Derbyshire, the pert, uber-geek's knob twiddler of choice. She always gets there before me.
I say possible because I'm at work and haven't actually heard this yet. Still, shot in the dark...
8 comments:
OHMYGIDDYJESUSFUCKINGAUNT!
This is an absolutely genius idea!
Somebody has to do this.
what could go wrong?
so you're allowed to take hallucinogens and write this crap whilst at work? any vacancies in your dept?
you can do anything you want. ANYTHING. Anytime, anywhere. As long as you don't get caught.
It's my life philosophy and it has served me well.
ONLY vacancies in my dept.
i like eitherorbored's philosophy though...
i've been after a copy of that album for ages.
the hard click and soft burr of a tape-to-tape machine
i like yr words here fella.
I'm working on it - I'll let you know how/if it turns out, kinda labour intensive
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