Law Abiding Citizen

I'm mentioned this before but I find it hard / don't find it hard / ought to but maybe don't always find it imprecise and/or difficile to understand the message (even the syntax) of Deleuze and Guattari - I try, page by page, line by line and I'll keep trying ("I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." etc) but now I'm faced with an even bigger philosophical conundrum...

You see, I've just watched Law Abiding Citizen

and...

well...

I'm trying to understand the ethics...

I'm sure it's there: the 18 Certificate suggests it, the DVD extras imply it but....

I can't find which ethical system they might be using, or trying to use.

It's a brilliantly misconceived, potentially dangerous and destabilising film (in all the wrong ways). It twists in turns in ways you don't expect i.e. the plot doesn't twist, the plot is brutally obvious but the morality twists, in a way oddly more confusing and certainly more disturbing than any Haneke film. If there's a commentary implied here, it got lost in the edit.

You kind of want one person to win, then the other, then everyone....

Actually...

You want one person to lose, then the other, then everyone...

That might be the point.

It might be unintentionally brilliant but I'm pretty sure it's unintentionally shit. I could be wrong. I feel almost certain that i must be wrong. I can't be wrong. I'm wrong.

Dead Music (or Jello does Jazz Hands)

Jello Does Jazz Hands

...watching the Synth Britannia at the BBC thing on Saturday in a slightly hypnafug, itchy-eyed, drowned state and Bryan Ferry kept morphing into Jello Biafra... watch again, they've got the same drawl with only a slightly different accent, the same head movements ( Ferry is 1/3 of the pace, is less frenetic), they dance the same.

When Jello gets all croony, like on:

The Dead Kennedys - Saturday Night Holocaust

the spirit of Ferry takes him, makes him an awkward, flip-haired, jazz lounge ghoul... it's where Jello should have gone; gone some way inbetween the spazz chords of The DKs and his spoken-word pops of the later years (I love them but they're not keepers... or at least they don't get much play)... maybe something like the Steven Jessie Bernstein album, with more singing... more eruptions (The SJB album has it's moments but it meanders rather than propulses).

Yeah, I know he did stuff with Country dudes and HipHoppers (the Coldcut stuff was excellent, I thought) and dabbled with the WaxTrax boys but his singing didn't really go too many places and I thought that voice of his, that Ferry Ghost, could have pulled us all along into some odd places...

Alex Chilton

Well, he died.

Can't pretend to know much about him - his records kept bumping me at Record Fairs until i eventually bought a few. Some friends hurled Big Star records at me against my will until I eventually gave in, and came to love Kanga Roo etc with all those beautiful blends and swells and curls and waves. A great guitar sound, proper surf guitar...

Actual surf guitar doesn't sound anything like the sea, much more like newly laid tarmac and slightly fucked tires.

As far as these things go, Alex Chilton seemed very real, not that I've ever really respected that as such but still... there was no artifice, he seemed to love the music he played and produced to it's very bones... didn't try too hard to be cool, didn't play the postmodernist, just played.

Loved his production work with The Cramps, very, er, uncramped... let them breathe zombie fuzz over everything... let the guitars open doors... let the drums thud like Bargeld's ribs...

R.I.P.

Benders & Alveoli Inc.

Well, I wonder whether eBay'll eventually become a new trove of unspeakable treasures; the old synths seem to be going very cheaply these days, compared to a few years ago, but the modified, cyber-synths are still clinging on...

Like the added video, too... Maybe the future of all selling on eBay: "here's a video of me enjoying the Satin Chickens double 7" in the comfort of my own home. Please don't mind the mess, only my friends were staying over and some of them haven't got autistic spectrum disorders."

That was surely the future of music selling circa 2009/10? The niche, the personalised, the soup-chucked, egg-stained pre-release CD, with added polaroids of the tour bus?

Where next? I want DNA... I want a coughed-up bit of lung inbetween the covers. let's keep people going into record shops on the off-chance that a new bit of alveoli has crept onto the market alongside the re-born 12" ers.

Ekoplekz

Well, expect a full review a little later when I've digested and molested but for now I'd just like to say a massive thank you for letting this little fellah drop // through my door /into my pigeon hole/ :



Actually, while I'm hear/here and it's actually ON...

I'l just say that so far (I'm 3 tracks down; not listening in order, nowhere near - I'm sensing this can be double-dipped) I've heard:

1) the Chris Carter end of TG, the stuff a little in awe of Disco but tangled up in wires...

2) a definite Cabaret Voltaire about the eyes of some of the tracks, bits of the live bass, bits of the way the drums seep into the sides of the tracks....

Clicktracking // Back and forth /

<<<<<>>>>>> (this as sound)

3) Dr Who soundtracks circa The Silurians / Sea Devils - episodes just a little before my time: John Pertwee? Nothing especially Delia'd so far but...

EDIT: I've just noticed there's a track called Malcolm Clarke (i wasn't referring to that one but he's in there, definitely) - this must be a freaky auto-suggestion or perhaps just a bit of subliminal reading... either way.... The Sea Devil's are ROCKING this place...

I'm 4 tracks, I'm 5...

4) An Anti-Group record that I swear I used to have but can now find no mention of anywhere*

*I know what you're thinking but you're wrong... it is out there....it's just slipped through... as all the other Anti-Group records were supposed to but never quite managed

5) It smells of a Copy Cat tape loop (you either know the smell or you don't, I'm nowehere near talented enough to even attempt a decent description) but I don't know if he's got one.

It's all <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< cheap as CHIPs (or as expensive as CHIPs once were).

Or maybe He's just reminded of those crusty old machines, of the little catches and loops,

There's lots of little drum machines through fuzz or wah (through both). There's

Casio in there, I'd swear; a calculator wanting to play with the bigger boys...

6) At times, of Cosey Fanni Tutti's 'solo' track Hometime comes to mind. Not the voices, just the background ebbs and flows. They're following the same pace...

I'm 6ing and 7ing...

7) Nocturnal Emissions are in there, somewhere...

8) Screen Test, especially the bit where they showed award-winning kids animations about eating eyes.



9) The intro to B%^ B*@£ tracks before they get to the crappy bits.

10) What OMD thought they sounded like...

11) A TV show where giant chess pieces battle it out on a map-rendered 3D blanket, while Richard Stilgoe look-a-like competitors pick fights with glass-eyed child/snake hybrids...

12) The sound of Too Much Golden Nuggets**, of transistor radio music heard from inside concrete playing apparatus (tubes, coils, mounds)

**cereal sounds, a West Country Cluster...

13) Actually the Krautrocking Cluster isn't far off the mark... the shady bits of Harmonia...

Great stuff....

The Kek quote is priceless and very apposite.

Inspiring stuff from a guy let loose.

More later..

Colour Sound Oblivion (again)

Mental.

The Sunday Times

Well, my wife wanted the engorged Sunday Times Style Magazine so I bought this on and was amazed (okay maybe not amazed, maybe slightly startled) to see White Hills and The Advisory Circle with full album reviews in The Culture.

The new White Hills sounds pretty good. I loved Glitter Glamour Atrocity and then sort of stopped following them. I think I'll start again now, work my way backwards...

NOTE: a quick google image search for the cover of Glitter Glamour Atrocity and the first thing that pops up is, our friend and yours, Cloudboy, with a review from the heady days of 2008... the internet is a lot smaller than it seems sometimes...

And Stewart Lee bangs the problem with The Advisory Circle right on the head:

"Is there a word for an album that you know is excellent, but that you really don’t want to listen to?"

The Skull Defekts (attacked by Rats)

NOTE: For some reason this post has been attacked by a virus that adds lyrical flourishes from the ever-popular, hardcore punk band (Charged) GBH . Apologies for this.



The memory lingers on when you were the same as us.

Well, these guys appeared from the pages of the latest Bad Acid magazine, which feels (and reads Three months old a child) like it picks up a little of the slack left over from the demise of Music From the Empty Quarter,

City baby, city baby, city baby attacked by rats.

...minus the techno and still you lived off love and fuss 'dance' and with a few added grammarslugs and spelling lapses.

Residing in a squalid place, I haven't heard much and haven't dug around that much yet but so far The Skull Defekts seem to wander through all kinds of blasted (it can't be too much fun) terrain: there's psychedelia here, from tubthump and krautrock grinds (elements of the kind of exploded Judas Priest tracks that Circle were putting out there a few years back) to elements of the the electronic razzle / Kosmiche style drones of recent H (A mutant at the age of one) word bands.

Your brain is getting eaten away by the rat living in your skull.

They are also suprisingly good at the more or less straight rock of Blast First era Sonic Youth et al... whilst still occasionally dipping into pure, heckling, noise...

A human rodent cabbage.

Okay, I've heard maybe 5 tracks and they all sounded a little different. I'm not really sure where these guys are now or where they're coming from / going to... they may have broken up by now, or eaten each other...

They may be outside right now.

It's hard to think a tiny thing can do that much damage.