Bicycle Day and the NOT 70th Birthday Of LSD

Some people will tell you that the 19th of this cruellest month is the 70th anniversary of Albert Hoffman's infamous bike ride and thus that LSD is 70 years old. They'd be wrong. It's nowhere near that old. LSD never really got a good innings, got curtailed and bludgeoned before it really got going - 70 years old implies a hell of a run up but that didn't happen and we should all take the blame for not having the confidence or the conviction to change our world to accommodate it. Aristotle was right in suggesting that beauty was a visitor from another world but he'd have been more convinced by acid. This is the visitor we sort of let in but then never really addressed. It's been 70 fucking years and... nothing. The world seems worse now. Not even a war film.


It's perhaps spectacularly idealistic and naive to think that this little molecule (or all those little molecules: the mushrooms, the spores, the rot) might actually have changed things, that we might actually have ceded to its influence but... Fuck it; I still kind of believe that we genuinely might have, that we only just missed the moment, that things might still be different.

This book, for instance, seems like one of quite a few that are... piping up. There is something in the air.

Perhaps.

Yeah, Leary was an messianic arse perhaps, Kesey lost in mostly bad music and a desire to lose, Cassady a hammer spinning emotional aggregate and misogynist... Yeah, maybe the McKenna brothers got a little too close to the Sun eventually, perhaps RAW just wasn't sure after all... Yeah perhaps there really hasn't been the advocates of late that could have visioned a future for acid and we ended with the subtly mystic Breaking Open The Head which sort of accidentally got commodified and coffee-tabled into something else...

In fact, we lost the eloquence of acid quite early, with the death of Aldous Huxley... we lost it to Americana or the Military or to silly hats and Ozric Tentacles...


In fact, you can see the slippage right on that page, on the noxious introduction to the Huxley video: "Did you know that Aldous Huxley died whilst frying balls on multiple massive injections of uncut ACID? Trippy..." that delicate turn of phrase, that implied machismo is where everything went wrong...

Oh...

I'm not about to rant about how LSD could have changed the world. I know how that'll sound in print, on screen, at a time when I should know better but there's smaller little bitches to make instead.

The music itself let LSD down... The fact that there still isn't anything that only makes sense on LSD (no variation on Chris Morris's Cake music) is a massive missed opportunity (yeah, perhaps I will... Just wait and see... Maybe that's a way for IX Tab to go, it needs somewhere to go) - Acid House doesn't count because it's really suitable for ecstasy rather than acid, even psy-trance and all that hippie trance ethnic-techno isn't perfectly aligned with the chemicals, it all makes perfect sense on speed and alcohol and E and Coke... It's not music that engages with the sensibility of LSD, just music that engages with the engagement of LSD, that is it complements acid but only in the way that all music sort of complements acid (people use Bach, Beach Boys, Burzum - ok, not many use Burzum). LSD needed a music that was its own but instead it got what was simply called psychedelia. The map is not the territory etc etc etc etc


When we were kids we made stuff that only made sense on LSD. I had a stereo that could play both tapes simultaneously and we'd experiment with different mixes: two different Shamen albums, bits of Jack The Tab and Coil, bits of Monty Python and Shamanarchy albums, Bach and Autechre, Front 242 on half speed and Philip Glass... Outside of those few hrs at the peak of the flash these primitive little mixes sounded terrible (of course they did) but inside new things were born and music stopped dominating and became dominated; we chose the mood and the music followed us. In the age old battle between drugged-out humans and music we won...

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
If you don't know about this battle then you haven't been on drugs. Everyone I know knows about the battle. You take enough drugs and the music nearly always wins... You see the people lurching from microspace to miniplace at Festivals, unable to take, to stand what they're hearing, needing to find a place where the music wins but in a good way... The music nearly always defeats people, bends them to it's will, takes them on and off... the battle between the drugs and the music, with people as the battleground, are what Festivals are

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
But... In 70 years, we haven't really got much further (back and faster) than The Grateful Dead / Pink Floyd axis... And they're not even particularly good at being LSD music... They work (again, everything works) and they are functional (even The Grateful Dead who I've tried and tried to understand but just can't) but that is all... They are just music... They are for something else, like Techno and Trance are for dancing, like Autechre et al are for curing headaches (unaccompanied, Autechre et al makes no sense on acid because it makes sense on acid, becomes plodding and empty, becomes about the lost beats that are suddenly found - no, Autechre's mysticism is about thinking things through while perfectly straight, they are a crossword puzzle and you should keep them the hell away from LSD).

Even the trippiest, trickiest music of the spheres (Parmegiani, I'm looking at you) is just...not...quite.


At the time, we often talked about this as if it were a synaesthetic problem; with bendy, circular, rhizomatic music (those Mille Plateux Deleuze and Guattari albums were NOT remotely rhizomatic, even if they thought they were) being the music of choice (we all got Coil, got stuff with phasing, got some of the Psychic TV stuff, understood where the pre Mr C Shamen were coming from) but I'm not sure even that way of looking at things was truly appropriate; I suspect there was better stuff around the corner and always suspected it.




There wasn't. It never happened. Acid House really let us down, at a time when it didn't need to. It punked / Punked out. I still remember the MAARS single coming out and seeming like a throw in the right direction (us geeky guys had been trying variations of those cut ups with old Derek and Clive and New Beat records for ages). It wasn't quite right but with AR Kane involved it was almost right - and the idea of dream-pop sounded like it might be the right idea (ie music that could only make sense in a dream) but...

No. That didn't happen. Another missed opportunity. Instead dream-pop became the ultimately disappointing (mostly execrable) shoegaze, whose very genre name (laughable that some bands are deliberately adopting that as a signifier, as stupid as the Tories adopting that "I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher" song) gave up the ghost, the dream and conceded without ever throwing a single limp-wristed punch (that punch might have been You Made Me Realise, played live but it really wasn't Loveless, whatever you think)

There was Spacemen 3 back then but we knew that was just our Grateful Dead and even at their most abstracted and dissolute, the music was just so damned listenable in any circumstances. My kids love Suicide. Everybody loved Spacemen 3, whether they were LSD'd or not. And, to be fair, the boys were perhaps thinking of other, more appropriate, fuzzes.


There's been plenty of other false dawns and lots and lots of music that worked well with whatever. Christ, this blog used to be full of it back in the earlier days. Here, for instance, where I rhapsodied about Kahimi Karie (Still love this version):


Yeah, this. Whatever. I haven't linked to it in a while. I still worry about this kind of thing.

So, what I meant to say is that its sad that we've already had LSD for 70 years and haven't really done anything about it. In fact, its a spectacularly unpopular and uncool drug; one that barely registers as anything other than some faintly ironic plod towards nostalgia, towards the dreaded hippies... The arch capitalist wow of Cocaine has taken over, people still suck on Es, try variations of Plantfood & animal tranquillisers - anything to avoid the sheer hard work and effort required for a decent acid binge. No one seems to know what to do with that amount of time anymore. To concentrate on all those utterly prosaic things for 12 hrs or whatever seems almost unthinkable and maybe even slightly ridiculous and deceitful (what might anyone be looking for, when all the world is here?) and indulgent...

LSD was always indulgent, is indulgence, always brings to mind the fin-de-siècle guys and girls, who would have loved the arse off of it and maybe actually changed the world because of it. Moorcock (Did he just mention fucking Moorcock? What next? Hawkwind?) knew it - Dancers At The End Of Time, for fuck's sake - and you can sense in that book how he misses that future. Are The Focus Group gonna spin off into that missed opportunity?

****Update: in the comments this great little mix has appeared, so i thought I'd stick it in... Cheers for that!


Lord, can you hear me?

Anyone?

I'm off to make something that I can't listen to.

Here's to the next 70 years!

dendrite

Liking this from dendrite, his first album. It's similar to lots of this kind of thing (these bedstuffed industrialists, these mad acid Averys) but definitely has something about it. This track, in particular, is softly intense, dead-eyed and lost. Odd and scratchy, like wearing someone else's face.

Mega Mystery Band

Digging into the inbox for the first time in ages. Fluff and nonsense, mostly, with a few gems curdling to the surface (more later, perhaps) and also this:



It doesn't the matter that the music is a bit. Or that this will end up as a. Or even that the idea itself returns yet again and will bite it's tail until.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>

(please let the truth not be revealed, let the identity founder, let whoever it is just slip silently away; at least, let it have due course, let the prosaic truth turn up when)

...

This Hardy Boys mystery is irrelevent, a nasty little retrovirus - I don't want to find out who the MMB (though wouldn't it be great if it turned out to be Maurizio Mufti Bianchi?) are, but I like the idea of pretending to be them. More things like this should happen, I think. The internet's easy giving is killing this kind of mystery: even being able to buy Power Electronics et al killed it for me a little.

As Martin Beyond The Implode says in the comments there:

"...if anyone wants to preserve any mystique about early Whitehouse, whatever you do don't watch the Come Org video...."

But still, I like the idea of everyone pretending to be everyone else. Before the internet it seemed very possible that those people you were seeing up there weren't really who they said they were. Images couldn't be tracked down easily. I went to see Autechre and Orbital and there was no way to tell if it was them, or just some lackies with a CD player, an echobox and a shuffle function...

In fact, it didn't matter if it was them or not...

Aphex kind of killed that, of course; made the face central, put himself about, made things Rock... but until then, the anonymity was everything, which lent itself to sampler as pirate, sample as unmarked pirate gold: the anonymity was the music and had to be. When Richard James said "I don't use samples" (can't find the source of this, maybe he didn't say that) it was a anti-revolutionary retrogressive act, a Rockist uplift, a return to the old days...

But back to MMB, it reminds me a little of a silly dialogue (followed up by an email conversation) I had with Terre Thaemlitz in the letter pages of The Wire...

See here, for the letters...

I wrote that because it ought to be true. That was 2004, now it really ought to be true.

I wonder.

Maybe we need a partial media blackout. Stop any information leaking out. You can see where Burial was going with this and you should have shivered at the hungry pack, hunting the poor sod down.

Make your next release a release.

Demdike Stare Are Just... Okay, Aren't They?

I keep looking. I like the covers, I like the music, the video projections. I like the idea but...

I can't seem to see what other people see about Demdike Stare. It's just... okay, isn't it? It's turning into a Shibboleth.

I mean, it's hard not to like this kind of thing, especially with all the pulsing nakedness:



But, I dunno, I'm creeped out in a different way; can't escape the feeling that I'm being manipulated somehow. It's really hard to define. It seems so calculated.



It's like it's checking boxes, boxes that I like but... the emotional aspect is missing for me. I haven't seen them live, maybe it'll make more sense then, maybe I need some fungal accessories, or maybe at the bottom of a k-hole I'd find illumination but, right now, I feel about them the same way I feel about, say, Love Actually: it presses buttons that I'm not sure I want pressed - it's sad that Emma Thompson just gets the Joni Mitchell CD, I'm happy that Colin Firth has found love, I'm vaguely understanding of that guy from Teachers being in love with his best friends missus but...

Does no one else feel like this? Seems like lots of people (everyone?), whose opinions and taste I value, love these guys - Demdike Stare have been elevated to the status of untouchables (cf some of the Ghost Box stuff) and I just don't see it. And when there's no visuals to distract...



I dunno... I've bought quite a few of their releases, mostly because each one seems to get a better review than the last and I want to like them so much that I end up thinking: this one will be the one, this one will sound like people say it sounds, this one will dig straight into my ZNS and I'll get it but then I put it on and... Nothing. It's like some kind of cruel joke, the Emperor's New Clothing for the new generation...

I need someone, anyone, to write an article counter to the prevailing opinion. I'm gonna go mad. The consensus is crushing. It's making me suspicious; it feels (ironically) like a Witch Hunt. Like even writing this (if anyone reads this fucking thing anymore) might be an act of revolutionary suicide. I'm dreading the time when I'm at one of their gigs and the whole crowd is going with them and I'm standing there, thinking about going outside for a cigarette...


UPDATE: I should have mention that, as well as asking for anyone who agrees with me, I am interested in anyone who disagrees... disagreement gets more done, I think....

Barry Bauman

The Star Thief. Born without any of the five senses. Senseless. Kept alive for 24 years. Started eating the stars with his brain.

This Warlock story has stuck inbetween my brains since I read it as a child. A sort of quiet, unspeakable, cosmic horror; unheimlicks...

To celebrate being reminded of this, here's some no-input mixing board shenanigans, courtesy of Toshima Nakamura, which seem rather apposite:

Toshima Nakamura - NIMB 19.1

Feel that lack of input; play around with it; fuck around... Millions of people now living will eat stars.

More at UBUWEB...

The Voice Of The Devil

Ulver - The Voice Of The Devil (Plate 4)

Bits from here. Blake seems very musical, I think. Seems like music. He'd have been into Witch House, I reckon. Or spotted you for some Bauhaus covers. Or smoked some bracken with you, out on the heath, and got drizzled to some Death metal. He'd have heard that Raime 12" by now. We should pull Blake into the mix a little more, he seems to have been forgotten. Not sure that Ulver should be the testament in music; we need an In The Blake Midwinter mix...

The Versatile Henry Mancini

Picture stolen from this little treasure trove, where you can probably steal the album too

I hear the word 'versatile' and it's only ever about sex. It's an unsure word, plenty of slippage. I don't know what we're supposed to imagine that Henry can do... Can we use him as an occasional table, a water pipe, a way to stop motorists speeding through villages?

I want to use him. I do. I'm gonna use him in just a minute, before I get into the shower.

I'm gonna Pink Panther him up.

And then I'm gonna have a crack at that Reynols interview thing, also on here.

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?"

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?

Delorean - Ayrton Senna EP

In the midst of a hellish day, when all music seemed wrong, Delorean's seasun came on and made me happier. There's elements of Global Communications 'benevolent' music plus the usual dollops of acid-house stranded shoegaze (as opposed to the mythic, blank-eyed, white-night strand of shoegaze); it's friendly in it's DNA, one of the least antagonistic musics I've been able to hear this week. A beuatiful, rose-tinted gauze when needed. It also contrasted bluntly with the understated malevolence of the next track - Shackleton's Moon Over Joseph's Burial - which made me want to throw someone in front of a train.

Download Seasun here and smile along.

Gola Trance (Screen Test Degradation) Redux

With [] to the likes of Kek, Doppel[], K-punk...
The secret of Hauntology lies in the corners, the liminal frames of the photographs. No, it's not what you're thinking; nothing remotely Ligotti or even The Dark Is Rising about it.

Nothing Green Knowe.

Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of Twenties and Thirties tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly's 'It's All Forgotten Now'

It's no surprise that[ ] hid at first because it's only [ ] you suddenly understand where they are coming from. The critics who argue that hauntology is nostalgic are missing the point entirely; this is not at all about looking back fondly but rather the desire to reanimate SOMETHING [ ]; a kind of rose tint in reverse.

To understand, you need to look at the(ir) trainers.

The picture of [ ] (etc) in the June edition of The Wire [ ]; Gola trainers, even now partially hidden.

The Caretaker - what a world, what a life, what a love

Simple, classic styling with a nice bit of suede or canvas, possibly a gum sole here or there and you won't go far wrong. If they look like they've been stolen from a school gym circa 1979 then you've hit the jackpot. We've been campaigning for Gola to introduce some retro "heelies" but we don't think they're gonna deliver the goods. Bottlers.

Yeah, now they've found a way to be cool; even made a virtue of their [ ] (instead of the Adidas Littbarskis you were after). Everyone living in the hinterlands of the 70s and 80s, the upper reaches of the classic 'Ghost Box era' (from Gutterbreakz) will recognise The Gola trance, the slipped disc look [ ]. It's something that would have shaped most kids* around the classic [ ] Steel, Children Of The Stones, Screen Test era and it's not surprising that it's these sounds that find themselves worthy of excavation. By reclaiming these sounds, The Caretaker, The Ghost Box boys et al, can also reclaim the false consciousness that pretended that these [ ] were okay, had something about them, were somehow non-conformist.

((([ ] non-conformity didn't have the same allure then, did it?)))

And this angst runs deep; keeps wrecking dreams way after the individuals have come to terms with their own status, keeps haunting....

If the Anterograde sessions used Kubrick’s The Shining as their conceptual kick-off point, then the Death of Rave series occupies another sort of haunted ballroom. Kirby wiped rave music of its musical signifiers to create something that sounded hollowed-out and spectral, a sort of MDMA-depleted snapshot of a 1990 Leeds warehouse party. And, somewhere along the way, he managed to make ambient music sound cool again.

Cf; Burial - the lost spaces being the music. Burial hid like hell because of the Gola Trance he found himself remembering... you hardly need mdma-depletion...

And anyway ---- MDMA damage is neurologically aligned to STM rather than LTM i.e. the inability to create new memories rather than the loss of exisiting ones... a theme which was mentioned in the liner notes to The Caretaker's first collection but then gradually, ironically, degraded into a whole other beast...

A shame, because anterograde amnesia explain hauntology as a theory better than anything (of course people are looking at reinventing the past; they've forgotten that the present exists - a kind of awful reversal of that John Peel dictum:

"People ask me, ‘what was the best year for music?’ I always say, 'This year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year"

I also get a little twitchy re: the nuum(b)ness that seems to be pervading the blog hallways these days...

And as for (often the same) people wishing for the heady days of the early 1990s... when rave crossfired into jungle.... well, in my experience that's when music also started to reassert it's masculinity again; the early days of Jungle round these parts saw girls heading for the hills while the boys spasticked along to the beats in sweaty, disconcerting waves...

I'm not saying that these boys had difficulties with girls and were grateful when they all left and started listening to happy house and psytrance but...

;)

(((maybe not))) - i'm still stuttering; at the unfortunate My Generation stage of development; can't feel that the past needs to be better because i had Puma and, annoyingly, I still have Puma.... though once they were black and white and now they are pink and purple... the analysis of that shouldn't be too difficult...

Rave didn't die, perhaps?



Yeah, Sapphire and Steel was scary, for a zeitgeist [ ] hugging child [] slow for slow's sake []

We shouldn't be [ ] unknown here (((((((())))))))) isn't ontological, it's just logical; an extension of the way TV worked back then. S and S is creepy and unfinished, a real stare into the abyss... [ ] 3-2-1's arcane symbolic systems meant to be - Levi-Strauss would have struggled with Ted Roger's semiotic ((((())))))

The conceit of The Caretaker's Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole album's worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

Being in a Gola Trance [ ] those savage Green Flashes a while back [ ]

You go round to Ghost Box HQ and look at their trainers, you know what you'll find.

*[]

The Last Of The Butcher's Arms

...saw this title as a Facebook photo album and wondered whether my old haunt, the cross-legged, hook-nosed, broken-backed Butcher's Arms was finally giving up the ghost; twinged by the Weatherspoons (jackboot on every face etc), tossed to the door dogs...

Oh well. Haven't been there for almost ten years; don't know what I'm moaning about.

In the photo album there was certainly some people I recognise being there from years back (Kek'll know 'em) - some of the wreckers of civilization from a party that inadvertently shunted some of An Idiot's Guide To Dreaming together, many blog years ago...

For no reason at all, I think of Amon Duul II when I think of The Butcher's, so...

Amon Duul II - Wolf City

Stolen from here

RHOd(amn)esia - a review of Kempernorton's latest without hearing it

Rho - a value of 100; Moment, Um (Ohn?) or: the endtime for RNA synthesis and
((((Road)))
Rhode(s)- and associated Colossus; Helios archetypes... Sunburned Hands of God
Damn - the exclusion from Heaven or the separation from the GODhead; the Rhett row...
Amnesia - Fugue in E (Morris Dancer) Minor - a cow's eye looking at the pathway to the Tannery at Pittards; yellow elbowed men from the sticks, eyes burned by chemical vapour...

Kempernorton's road roaming, in music... ripping the wheel from the Motorik: Kraftwerk's Autobahn, Neubaten's Onomatopeic Nnnaaammm, various Highways to Hell...

British Roads mostly resolutely not motorik, not beat-driven but altogether slow and crumbly and ambient... glitches abound, mis-steps, fumbles, false starts - Elvis's Are You Lonesome Tonight dissolving into man-giggles and choking makes much more sense as a soundtrack to West Country roads....

Kempernorton is keeping with his Sus-Sex theme but he's a W/C lad at heart, can't not be...

So...

Comus perhaps... the stop/start, the possibility of burning Christians in the fields... Comus the band and the deity.... The Wicker Man outside Bridgwater, Junction 23, sunk in a trench to avoid the

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

of local Bridgey boys, confused and aroused at a bare wicker bottom...



... the Westonzoyland Road.... past the old abandoned airstrip, now full of kids learning to drive in clapped out taxi cabs .... a territory mapped out in another life by JG Ballard... Psychogeographers in the surrounding woods, digging out trenches, hiding in Hides, watching the anthropology unfold...

The 303... the squiggle and the sound of deer hitting your windpipes... the related sound of the car behind licking it's lips...

80s style burst johnnies..... Nnnaaammm

Roadtrip to Sutton Bingham.... The Spice must flow...

Cows burning in the fields during the Foot in The Mouth days / daze... Punch drunbk farmers wandering the fields.... walking like the Scarecrows in Dr Who... the traffic slowing down to watch and then catching the barb-e-cue smell...

More.

Cheval Sombre

Attracted to this because of the links with Galaxie 500, Luna and Spacemen 3 (Sonic Boom produces) and I got a complimentary copy through the post last week sometime, causing me to turn on my turntable for only about the second time this year - I'm a fervent anti-purist, snuggle myself up to the degradation of MP3 and CDR, care not for the loss of crackle and sonic depth; mostly lose myself in music whilst walking or cycling and therefore don't pay the attention I used to to packaging and sleeve-notes... a loss I know, but one I'm starting to come to terms with...

God knows what Kek would think!

Both sides of this 7" (despite what I say above, it was lovely to get an actual bona-fide record through the post; altogether magical) softly string together, rise and fall like breath, exhale quietly... there's a slight hint of the first Sonic Boom solo album, which I've always loved, only if anything Cheval Sombre is even more fragile...

...the sound of eyes glazing over, of emotional cataracts forming (I mean this in a good way), of quick glances never returned... there's an acceptance of sadness and melancholy here that is almost joyous...

1) Shoegaze spun from awkward moments (the soft sounds, the creeping self awareness) and slightly shuffling feet (the pitter patter of drums)...

2) Shoegazing as ten yard stare (looking at the girls from across the playground, wondering)

The Supremes slurred: where did our love go...

3) Shoegaze is to men of a certain age (my age; men hewn from seeing My Bloody Valentine live, or hearing the mid period singles in Indie Discos, men stepping out of the mosh pit to gaze longingly and motionlessly at Slowdive girls) what prog must be to the older boys - a period of music quickly dominated by mediocrity but which was more or less new and therefore ours. Acid House for going out, shoegaze for staying in, for playing when girls were around; sex music for indie kids (The Cocteau Twins started it; a few opening chords and the clothes would already be falling off their shoulders as they were designed to)

3a) Shoegaze as onamatopeic extended sighs from girls wearing stripey tights and hairbands...

Anything that taps into that collective memory is going to be looked upon nostalgically, mnemonically... it'll twitch memories, busy sinew, flop fringes all over again: I think of Maps and Luminous Orange and any of a million shoegaze revivalists... even if you weren't rapt by it's gently sexed appeal at the time (especially if you weren't, I'd imagine) then later on you will be, will be drawn into the waves, will love the sensory planing of the shoegaze sound even more...

My Bloody Valentine return and the audience is full of memory, will pay out of their ears for the barest scratch and sniff of the old daze....

Autechresis

Little shots like this is why the internet is great... little moments of autistic endeavour, unexplained brain itches that beg to be scratched... you get the feeling that dhex has been mulling this for some time, scrolling the noticeboards, grinding his (?) teeth at the ILM and Pitchfork message boards, waiting for his moment...

Lovely stuff and said with such a deep listening passion that it makes me want to go back and try again with some (ALL) of those Autechre albums I've stopped listening to since living with girls...

Autechre - Altibzz

Autechre - Cavity Job

Autechre - Foil

Autechre - Arch Carrier (atolyth remix)

The Cranes Across The Sky (Burial)

Had the Burial album for awhile but hadn't really got round to listening to it - as background music it doesn't work because it is background music, not wallpaper or Eno but literally the music of the background.

(Insert here a mix of the following: half-heard, calpol drips, dopplereffect car sounds, soliloquy for the M25 raves, rain-drenched taxi ranks, light pollution, soul-munching beats etc)

All true, of course and it's almost impossible to believe a kind of music that is less responsive to ambiguity in its reading: it is all those things above and intended to be and seems utterly resistant to any further understanding or philosophy. No interpretation necessary, not even when you consider that, in interview, Burial gives up that much of the input and images stem from meta-memory, that he never personally experienced the rave culture he's memorialising. This makes perfect sense; the vocal snatches are like the end product of Chinese Whispers; old e-soaked ravers on a permanent comedown, awaiting the results of longitudinal studies and neurological tests into how ecstacy effects their memory.

There's the Tricky comparisons, of course but in tracks like this

Burial - endorphin

A Younsdenit DrownedSoundWorlding

I keep hearing Cranes, especially Cranes as heard under hash and bio-yogurt; Cranes as de Clerambault syndrome. The same smeared vocals, child-like echoes, the sound of calpol sliding onto a spoon in the middle of the night...

Which then led me to the image of the cranes flying overhead at the beginning of Lautreamont's Maldoror - Burial inhabits the same kind of world as Maldoror; half-real, half-imagined, schematic and partly skewed, sidereal. The same world transposed to a resolutely urban environment (one thing with Burial, it's impossible to imagine greenery when listening to it, the colours that are synaesthically beamed in are almost all shades of blue and grey and black - like some vaguely Ballardian motorway junction or conference centre that never ends).

No trees, no lakes except those caused by ruptures in concrete, no leaves, no grass.

But mostly, the greatest impression I get with Burial is that this is music that allows interruptions and absences - you can easily imagine the tracks skipping slightly or stopping and starting midway through and it wouldn't destroy the atmosophere of the track. There isn't much music that doesn't depend to a certain extent on flow but for this watery album flow could be absent entirely and I doubt anyone would notice. A bad mp3 rip might even enhance the spaciousness because Burial seems to be about holes, about absence. A few seconds of silence as an i-pod struggles and whirrs seems to me apt for this album and I'm sure I'm hearing more gaps than there are.

If You Leave Me Now

3rd in the series; this one with the cherries, I think. Or maybe the jellyfish. Either way there's something chilling about this; the kind of music you find stuffed down the side-pockets of a Serial Killer's Honda Civic.

Chicago - If You Leave Me Now
A Yousendit Headrip Manifolding