Cats In Pajamas

found via here

Puerile, creepy, odd. Equal measures. Stir in some whimsy. Bring to boil. Just. The bit where they takes off one mask and...

People Who Live In Solar Houses (and what they say about them)

Found this in a Goodwill Store in Boston.



The subtitle is key here. Giving Solar dwellers an alien status, lost in time. What might these kind of people think? Are they like us? 1979 seems two worlds of 'what if?' away.

Twin Infinitives

Songs that come as twins. Both of these conceptually the same. Different spins on the same template. Both sluggish, Loploping, frazzled. The female voices running in, with and against the beats, the slurred delivery reflecting shellshocked Nicaraguans or drunken South Bank forays. Villalobos and Coil stretching parameters and humanising music that can be unsettlingly alien (Coil generally masquerading as black elves, Villalobos letting a robotic sheen drift over him). Actually, that's not quite true. These tracks take care to humanise music that is already human - neither of these artists ever fully embrace(d) the machine-ethic of techno, there's always a radical, spinning, error-strewn basis to their music and these tracks simply emphasise this to people who don't listen too hard.

Coil - Things Happen

A Yousendit shellshocker

Ricardo Villalobos + Andrew Gillings - Andruic and Japan

A zShare gurning

In case you were wondering.

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.

Second Band

... from punk to post-punk, a wrench in time, a spastic transposing of the timeline from the Sex Pistols USA tour to the launch of PIL into the late 80s, a decade on and nothing has changed; same troubles with the lead singers who more or less get ditched in favour of group chanting (the 'Healy is Dead' chant inspired by our Chemistry teacher who self-destructed in the town centre to the general gossip and bemusement of all) in a vaguely Furious Pig style (The Animal Collective are but a glimmer in the eye, the freakfuckers still years away from the collective mushroom jamborees)...

The Rejected ditched all the musicians, ditched the name and the silly hats, ditched the Crass (crass?) stylings and ditched most of the instruments and replaced them with a Test Dept / Neubauten inspired array of metal girders, steel sheets, chains and oil drums - add in some bottleslide guitar played through fx and a couple of tasty Casio SK5 sampling keyboards (the king of samplers - so small you could strap em on and take em for a ride)and Dada IX Tab was born... a band so loud that we had to do all the recordings three doors down, on a little condenser microphone inspired by the recording of TGs First Annual Report.

If there was a lead singer then it must be the feral guy down the front, just a few months away from vomitting fake blood onto the teaching staff during an orgasmic rendition of Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' in the School Leavers Assembly - the clapping was polite, even through the sheen of blood and wine, the teachers might even have been proud that this time someone wasn't singing The Snowman...

It might have been him but it's quite impossible to tell in the filthy flip of orange semi-dreadlocks and cider-eyes. Foetus in his blood. He's got a scream Bargeld would still die for, doesn't even need a microphone to cut swathes through the multiple crashes from the oil drums and sheet metal; sounds like a guy having his arms mangled up at the steampunk Yeo-Valley cattle factories, at the East Coker bacon ranches, at the Tanneries (where the social club beer is cheaper than life itself).

There was rhythm, in places. Tiny micro-house anthems extrapolated to the Clyde ship yards - thin middle class boys with wild eyes and metal drumsticks specially lathed by my Dad. The slide guitar kept sounding like the cattle at the end of The Butthole Surfers 22 Going on 23. We kept it in. We loved that song. Punk sensibilities disbanded, as Dr Benway never said but we continually misquoted: "This is art, pure art".

It was noise. Catharsis. None of us had girlfriends. I think I was wearing a psychedelically-dyed dentists outfit.

There was more sexual rage in the moaning from the Casios. Sometimes they'd malfunction and we'd get La Marseillaise blasting out, complete with barking dog samples, train whistles and lion roars. We thought about playing an entire gig of thoe preset sample tunes, standing arms crossed like Laibach while they blasted out at Boyd Rice / early Swans volume. Later, Dr. Octagon.

The finale was always the same; a legoland micro-recreation of the GPO / Neubauten ICA gig, where they drilled through the stage and wrecked the place (Did I read somewhere that someone actually tried to recreate this event? - that has to be a worse idea that the remake of The Wicker Man). We threw oil drums around, trapped each other under migraines of iron, blasted the frail walls of the assembly hall with sliding scales of steel.

It sounded less good than that.

The Dead Beachboy

When he first came out of the sea, his lungs popped like kelp. One eye kept staring out to sea while the other fixed beachside, waiting for the boys to sweep him up into their arms. He wanted endless love and knew that they could never provide it. His hair was salt and moan, sea and fortune. When he exhaled, he breathed out their names: Brian, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Alan - seamless and drifting, they looped in endless coils right the way up the beach and over the dunes, an odd plainsong that dragged even the wounded birds from their nests.

In time, he found rhythm and rhyme in the piles of sand and seaflash and made himself a voice - degraded perhaps, and pulsing but a voice nevertheless. He had one hand by the end, dragged himself around in crop circles like the wounded birds, found a way forward with the flaps of whaleskin and cuttlefish that bleached at the edges of the rockpools.

He made a crown of deep thorns and lichen and wore it proudly. He sang a song, still waiting for brothers he couldn't be sure were ever alive.

Fennesz - Endless Summer

But still they didn't come and so he curled into a shell, a mollusc, a tango in taupe and waited for the sealaps and the moon.

A threeday past.

The sea never ranged and roared; everything was ghostly still (the idea of a frozen ghost was still the only joke that made him laugh) and the wind went upwards to play in the trees a thousand miles inland.

Every cough was an oyster drop or a lampworm. Every hooked crescent he drew in the beach was a sign upstairs to where God lived or outthere were God played. He called again but got nothing except cools and cawls from the seabirds and Puffins (he didn't see Puffins as seabirds and told them so, in his way).

He scared some children but they were jammed and birdpecked and anyway were down beachscrobbling to feed asphalt and mandrake and yeast to the gulls. They saw his lone arm and sad eyes and burst into enough tears to fill a sandpool.

"Do you know my brothers?" he called out as they turned and fled but by then his sandpocked cheek had already puffed out to issue forth a final, desperate song:

Panda Bear - Ponytail

All Yousendit Denigradations

Monkeying & Bear

Avey Tare & Kria Brekken - Sis Around the Sawmill

A Yousendit 'Here We Go Lupine Lou' Gifttrough

Because if there's 2 things that I can reliably be shown to like it's urrrrfolk songs with vaguely ethereal baby voices and pictures ofGiant Bears having sex with women.

More here.