Mirage Men Mirage

We know about Mirage Men. I saw it on NOCHEXXX's twitter or something - I want to believe (etc). It looks good, I haven't seen it yet but... I met someone who did. At a bus stop. No, wait; come back. And he said that the film was a Mirage, a triple bluff, maybe a quadruple bluff (he lost count, I lost count). I wanted to get away at this point. He said Mirage Men was simply a Hall of Mirrors inside a hall of mirrors and that the book - I wasn't aware at the time that there was a book - was a well-meaning investigation into what it said it was a well-meaning investigation into but the film of the book had secrets and new lies that deliberately attempted to obfuscate. He was just a young guy, maybe 25. He looked a bit like Rorschach (mask off, naturally). He seemed normal, except around the eyes. I'm not sure what to think. He was interested in my job as a Philosophy Teacher, though wondered if I'd been tricked too. I've wondered that too. He had a working knowledge of Plato but I didn't think I should hold that against him. The conversation laster only about 5 minutes and it seemed a little like that film about the meaning(s) of Kubrick's The Shining. I haven't seen that, either. He went the other way.

Mirage Men teaser trailer from Roland Denning on Vimeo.

Really want to see this now.

There's a wordpress thing here, too.

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!

Momus, Retromania & Wormholes

Well, it seems like I fell into a wormhole in January and missed this:


But, as a result of the wormhole, and now partly inspired by that cover and partly by a throwaway comment here about musical thievery not being chronological, I've been settling on an idea to cover songs not yet written by the artists...

You heard.

I know that, perhaps, this has been done already (for instance, this is how the new My Bloody Valentine album sounds to me) and will (obviously) be done again but I feel it needs to be done with more intent and the proactive interference made more explicit. In fact, while Retromania covers some of this kind of interference from the past, I reckon Simon missed a trick by focusing mostly on the conscious aspects of this appropriation, more on the Present looking back than the Past looking forward which seems to me the dominant thread in music... Yeah, it's a Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick but it's my Burroughsian 'future leaking through' shtick.

You'll have guessed by now I have absolutely no idea where I'm going with this (but that sort of fits, doesn't it?); this is just writing (what Beckett would call plumbing), the theory itself is a long way off... but it is there, tinkling around my skullshape, itching like that guy with the flies in The Wasp Factory (so sad about Iain Banks but he's going out wonderfully).

Right now, with this sleep-deprived melatonin deficiency I've got going almost anything could happen... Ivor The Engine, for example, is playing right now and a 2 year old is locked to the screen in his own Retromaniac Maze of sound and vision. He's even playing with a (AHEM) 'vintage' Fisher Price USA School Bus (which wasn't right even when it was made).

So...

The next IX Tab album will probably be a selection of cover versions that haven't yet been written. The first one contained at least three. Some of you clearly spotted the Coil and Cluster reunion singles (answers on a postcard).

I need sleep.

Pulses.

An episode of Sapphire and Steel where Sapphire and steel are actually elements.

Suzanne Ciani & The Problem Of Primary Teaching

Available via the ever reliable Finders Keepers. Almost everything they've released is worth a look and they do cheapo compilations too.

Because I've been listening to the inspired lunacy of Music Minus Music (great title, great music for bouncing on a bed with a two year old, great music for shuffling to work, waiting for your morning body to unfold) which is almost exactly half silly / half sublime (and each part of the silliness is sublime and so on...) I've been re-investigating Suzanne Ciani.

Now, I've heard of her and heard her before, she's someone I've been (The) Wired to listen to before but never really got - I think I heard the wrong things, went scurrying down the wrong holes because the stuff I heard only made sense in a retro awe kinda way (cf lots of the Radiophonic Workshop stuff, of course) rather than because of any actual Form or content it might have had. It sounded like the kind of thing I might want to like, especially if it was done by an, er, lady... and she had nice bouncy hair like Delia Derbyshire and...

...the joke is not a joke; the presence of female electronic composers (or any composers beyond the go-girls-go rattle of The Runaways and their descendents) is an unsettlingly dense issue - people still continually comment if girls are even at the kind of gigs I tend to go to, as if as Plato rapped: 'beauty was a visitor from another world' (I doubt he was talking about girls) but then almost immediately feel bad about making those kind of comments, as if there's a new form of sexist rubicon to cross (there is but I'm guessing no one really knows where it is)

Electronic music is laughingly still in a similar, but opposite, position to Primary Teaching, which is even more laughingly in the same position its always been in: we need desperately some vague sense that a gender balance could be maintained in the real world , as a simple matter of fact as opposed to merely being temporarily addressed by dabblers and dilettantes - I tried to be a Primary Teacher years ago, lasted about a year, scurried to the warm arms of FE teaching.

Trying is key, I think... and, though the electronic world doesn't seem particularly macho in it's current manifestation - I've yet to meet the Henry Rollins of Post Radiophonic Electro-drone Gristle, of Hauntology, of Chill Wave et al - there's still that sense, more or less palpable, that girls are somehow different (not girls?) if they happen along with this geeky thing (it almost requires those little hats with flaps - we've all got them! - and beards and jackets with badges and unkempt hair and... well, you see my point...) or else they are appendages and afterthoughts, inspired by their artful boyfriends (and this kinda crap been going on forever), or else they are simply suffering all these ridiculous and undanceable bleeps and drones and whooshes because they are lovely people and maybe later one of these guys will actually take them dancing or remember to come off the modular synthesiser and start playing with them...

I'm not sure where I'm going with this (not sure where that modular synth metaphor was going, seemed like it was heading to some dark dark places). I'm glad I'm not a proper writer, can simply derail this... I'm not sure I'm being at all consistent here, or even that I want to be... I think those NLP patches I bought are starting to bleed into my brain.

I think the point I'm trying to make is exemplified by this piece of video, that I pilfered from here (which also has some other great Suzanne Ciani clips). Peter Ustinov's opening line is fantastic too. In fact, it's all fantastic:



So I bought some Suzanne Ciani stuff and it's really good... like a Raymond Scott where you can't see the joins. And she's hotter than Daphne-

No.

IX Tab - Spindle & The Bregnut Tree

Well, I finally finished the IX Tab album; it's called Spindle & The Bregnut Tree and it's available from here, if you're interested... along with a host of guff and goans about it...

There's a full colour (sort of) 4 page CD booklet with associated information about all the tracks plus a not at all full colour leaflet with the early copies. Limited to 50 or so copies, unless I get more printed...

If it helps, it's sort of themed on West Country bad turns and lost tidings; all of the tracks mean something to me, maybe to you... and there's guest appearances by the usual suspects: Doris Stokes, Glenn Close, Austin Osman Spare, Marshall Applewhite, Gene Hackman, Rock Hudson, Nietzsche, Crackling Dubb and Olivia Newton John...

12 tracks, 70+ minutes of fine slurr, lost sound, crackled graft and logbeats...

You've heard this one:

But here's another:

Ponycore/Broniecore

Late as ever to the party but...

Yeah. A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic based continuuuuum. Eating all, spitting them out in multi-coloured goo; replace acid with skittles and here's your audio toxin, a Brasseye slab of cake...

In fact, simply add skittles (& maybe a sprinkle of magic dust) to acid and then start fucking around on Fruity Loops... this is the music FL was designed for; this is the music in FL's bad bones...

You have to love humans. This is perhaps another meta-genre /non-genre, a mere s(l)ideshow and circus, but I like that the collective can just take something and run with it, vomiting all the way. The lightning quick, feeble-minded stew of 4chan is brilliant at this kind of thing; inspiring bad trips and lost hours in bedrooms all over the world. It strikes me that the producers responsible for these minorly brilliant atrocities will have super-short half lives and the names will disappear almost as quickly as they've arrived (as Zizek says, it seems harder to image a ponycore revival in 2023 than the end of capitalism) but this is it's prime strength... the imagination run wild, stuffed with bad tidings and loosely tied ends.

This is, I guess, analogous to the kids' TV sampling debacles of the late 80s, early 90s (Sesame Treet, Charly, Roobarb) but with an elan and an elasticity that seems less cynical and more, well, if there's a internet meme-based definition of polymorphously perverse....

And yeah, you'll hear a lot of Rustie in there too if you're as old as me...

But oddpop exists...

It's mostly dubstep, 8bit, techno-popping, electronica of course, but the genre is elastic enough to include death metal as well:

These are not necessarily exemplars but there's ome demented mixtapes here, for starters. Tread carefully. As Lautreamont said, at the beginning of Maldoror:

"This is not for you."

Mokum

A throwaway comment on Twitter ended up throwing me back to some old Mokum tracks... didn't even know these guys still existed... thought the scene/label had been annihilated /sublimated by the I Wanna Be A Hippy crossover/dance-smash...



...the pisstaking sub Blue Sunshine look on the video seemed to cause a rift between the appearance (from outside The Netherlands) and the reality but it seems I missed the point a bit about what it was about... i.e. from here, gabber seemed inexplicable / impossible in a broader cross-cultural mileu... only worked whilst vaguely tainted w/ actual insanity, facism, inarticulate rage...

That seemed to be the marketing scam in the UK: 'Look at these crazy motherfuckers - it's like Rapido gone stabmental!'

while... in reality I think gabber was more complex than that - there were undoubtedly lots of nerve-shredding headbanged skins but there were also sub sub sub happy hardcore fans, shaking their booties with big smiles on their faces....

Anyway... digging a little deeper and you'll find that the Mokum artists were never counter-cultural in the sense I thought; Technohead had already had a hit under the Tricky Disco name, itself an exemplary pop bleep from Warp...



And Tricky Disco were, of course, Greater Than One/GTO who had more than a few industrialish connections way back to the mid 80s...

The links between Technohead/ techno heads and Industrial are not spurious: Mokum, for a moment, in the UK, stood apart from the bleep artists... the early releases were out there, talked about (pre I Wanna) in similar breaths as Power Electronics; the racks weren't far apart... your Whitehouse fan would consider a Mokum track as a first wedding dance.

I bought a few of the Mokum compilations and used them to shed people at parties that had gotten out of hand - people didn't go mental, they went... it seemed like outsider music and, in the absence of the internet, it was impossible to find the sources that would prove it otherwise... then I Wanna Be A Hippy rolled out and things started to change...

(compare and contrast with how people felt about Whitehouse etc before and after you could access info about them - in fact, I talked about that here...)

So, I drifted off... gabber became another genre that died in me... it never fitted my drugs (made the error of taking the wrong drugs in a gabber field, didn't make the same error twice), didn't fit where I was heading musically, seemed simultaneously inaccessible and over-accessed; snobbery ensued and I assumed that everyone else lost interest too...

But they didn't. It's still out there, Mokum's still going strong, gabber's morphed into even more ridiculous highspeed angles: speedcore, cybergrind, splittercore...



and then extratone...



which comes fullcycle with the Nazi imagery and kinda outCakes Chris Morris... Shatner's Bassoon will quake...

The Act Of Naming

Not everything Holy is good. cf. Wolf, Ghost, Panda, Fuck...

But... as the genres cleanse, fold and manipulate; maybe it's time to rearrange our musical thinking around the act of naming. You can't rely on the existing labels either (haunt, hyp, step, skwe,) - why not put the, er, Jung in jungle? The Act of naming may seem throwaway but there's a reality in there, waiting to get out... cf. bloggers internet names - Loki seemed plucked from the air, seemed hasty but... there's a few bitches of malevolence here and there on these pages, a few fake moves, some tiny pranks (this may be one, I'm yet to decide if I'm serious) and some afterthought actions that only retrospectively made sense.

I was serious about this being a good idea, for instance. I still think it's a great idea, especially with regard to The The - Girls Aloud should cover the whole of Infected, a la Pussy Galore.

Cat could be a genre, a nominal.

So, if they haven't already started doing this, I propose record stores start organising their stock by names rather than genres (or even, urgh, decades). You want to buy everything with Ghost in the name?

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.

Mati Klarwein

Yeah


Miles Runs The Voodoo Down




Labradford - Grate



Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Brkng Cnvtn

via Breaking Convention via Strange Attractor

w/music by the dronescapedelicans Ragnarok, amongst others

The Bran Flakes Revisited

In the early days of the blogs, I got a lot of innocent, spazz-dancing fun out of these guys and then kinda forgot about them. In the meantime, slightly less psychotic successors like The Go Team have been Mercury nominated and hosts of bright-eyed, (Kate)Bush(y)-tailed sonic clusterers, appropriators and sludge-fiends have come and gone, beat-digging the life out of every genre imaginable.

But there's something just.... further out about The Bran Flakes. They seem resistant to categorisation (contrast those artists - they know who they are - who seem resistant to not being categorised, lest they miss out on being included in the latest Pontone mix or something) and lost in the music itself... I'm pretty sure The Bran Flakes started off being ironic but have now found themselves trapped/immersed into a kind of Rainbow Hole, a soundworld where nothing can escape, where the teeniest hint of hipster funk is pulled apart by rabid toys and where the only sex is the sex-o-lettes.

And if this stuff is all sampled then fuck knows where they dug these beats up...

The Bran Flakes are as unselfconsciously odd as anything Drag or Witch or whatever. This music which makes me want to go score some Crystal Meth in double-quick time. Now, where's that guy in the Chelsea tracksuit...

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...

Shit And Shine-ings

Bit late on this maybe but Shit and Shine go dubstep? What could go wrong?

Sounds necessary... there hasn't been enough genre bending / genre baiting in recent times...

and too much genre-creating...

Haven't even heard this yet but I know it's a good idea, even if it doesn't quite come off... actually, especially if it doesn't quite come off... more follies, I say...morfe mistakes,less worry... Take on all the genres, play with them, ruin them if necessary...

don't spoof them though... forget irony... go with them...

be a have a go Hero...

what does dubstep / chillwave / psychfolk / goth / amphetamine crunk mean to you?

your take is the best take... how could it be otherwise?

Let's see everyone's take on dubstep...

H kr Fm 1.3

From The Wytch Machine...



...Never re-edit blog posts, never check for relevance or spelling or, urgh!, facts... but I'm going to reverse engineer these, send some thoughts back through time...

You'll have to click the photos to get the full effect.... The Wytch Machine seems to like only to post the left side of the photo, the Left Hand Path...

At times, Kek looks a little like Masonna, I think... the way he's grappling with that thing in his mouth, it's like a man grappling with ectoplasm or electrical currents, like his body itself is wired for sound...

They're not making a racket though... this is often quite beautiful stuff... the Farmer's beats are wrought in iron...

Psychedelic Iron >>>>>> Butterflies...

Ha ker Fa rm 1.2

From The Wytch Machine...



...you hear a lot of bands who seem to be wreathed in noise... this band really is... wreathed is perfect... noise circles the beats, occasionally strangling them, occasionally letting other voices through... I saw this performance mostly through video... through a little screen that concentrates the eye... flipping from one to another... it's a perfect way to intensify the experience* especially when....

(is that a cow with it's head psycha-dela-melting?)

there's no crowd... where the fuck has everyone gone? This little event is gonna have to scream like hell to get noticed.... and it's a shame that more people aren't here to see this because, to my ears, this is very listenable.... the young dubsteppers at the College could dig this... there's easily enough to grasp onto... more say than the excellent but amorphous Ice Bird Spirallings that Kek used to do...

I know, I know... mates etc... but I really liked this stuff... get a CDR to us, guys!

I filmed the whole set - but there's 23.23 of perfect stuff, i think; well, perfect is probably not the right word. Not sure about stuff, either. Not sure it's as tangible as that...There's 23.23 of Ghosts using Machines. I hope they'll put it up somewhere...


**Sorry if the footage I shot for you guys was a little shaky.... kept forgetting to not bob about... some of them beats are funky...

Hacker Farm 1.1

References? Well, I heard a fair bit of Coil about the edges, the way the beats slid in and out... anyone who knows me knows that that's about the greatest compliment I could give. Also some of the more abstracted dubstep - I'm thinking a solarised Actress, of the top of my head. There's spirals of a lighter Merzbow... certain hint of the East around the eyes... one thing that kept recurring as I was filming them - this is the most unAmerican music I've heard.... no idea where that comes from... but this seems rooted in either the Far (South) West or the Far East (Anglia* and Japan)

Doesn't matter... could only be misleading... references aren't what this is about... this is it's own reference and will remain that way....

Though Farmer Glitch was talking about spending time in Hong Kong so...






*not sure where that came from... never even been to East Anglia (or any Anglia) but there's something, well, indistinct about it in my imagination... and this music could curl beautifully around the edges of an abandoned munitions testing base, looking out over the sea...

From The Wytch Machine...

Sun Araw

feelin' a little Sun Araw today, sun-bleached...

if you don't know Sun Araw then you should... you could argue that there's others out there ploughing the same lo-fi spangles but, really, Sun Araw keeps coming up with the goods...

you already know that I listen blind to mostly everything.... just load it up and let it fly from my iPod, letting the complexities of the Shuffle Al Gore Rhythm bust a gut as to the mood... I rarely even look at the track titles / artists... preferring to let things blow... a lot of the music washes over me... but every time a Sun Araw track comes on I find myself caught up.... it's devastating music.... guitars swirl like nothing else... percussion sounds like skulls or chemical containers... and it swirls... in a very psychedelic way... the voice, the guitar, even the drums swirl... dance music for Ayahuascans, for Magic Mushroom Modettes... it's music that vocalises the unvocal, that tries to speak what shouldn't be spoken...

Keep with me here. I know. I know.

Sun Araw - Horse Steppin

Sun Araw - Deep Cover

Music for walking out of the desert. Scab picking psychedelia of the highest order. Music with it's face burned off. Songs that arrive in town over the back of a mule. Creepy as hell. It would make a perfect soundtrack for a Jodorowsky film. In fact, for Jodorowsky filming this little special needer...

(must get round to writing that someday)

Relentless stuff but intoxicating. Hard work like acid is hard work.

You need this.

Glastonbury

...tiny cidersplash sparkles are already decorating my clothes - Owlwoman made a return, for those in the know - by tea-time on Friday and the mud is threatening, preparing for mayhem, for a recreation of some Chapmanesque Hell... Jimmy Cliff is on the Jazz World stage, belting classics to a crowd of people who all previously thought they were too old to come (later, they might be right): they suck in pear cider, close their eyes and sing along to I Can See Clearly Now

(The Rain Has Gone)- yes, blown away, the Sun will be scorching everything by daybreak

and Vietnam and You Can Get It If You Really Want and, especially Wild World, which pleases the Skins-frazzled teenagers who have been brought along by their parents with the express direction that they must LOVE Jimmy CLiff before going off to get mashed on Ketamine at The Glade....

"You know I've seen a lot of what the world can do
And it's breakin' my heart in two
Because I never wanna see you a sad girl
Don't be a bad girl
But if you wanna leave, take good care
I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there
But just remember there's a lot of bad and beware"
Jimmy Cliff is about as transcendent as a 60 year old man with a backwards cap on can be - no mean feat.



then off on the usual 9 mile hike to find whatever's still noisy... with people's sense of vision already impaired and their sense of smell switched off at the cortex through necessity and mouth-breathing it's sound that drags everyone onwards, towards morning... people attracted up endless Auschwitz style leafy lanes towards the dull thud of dance music, which takes over everything by nightfall and just spins off in different directions... accordian house, dubstep, disco, bagpipe Style, eastern mangling techno, Buddhabeats, fuzzed out takes on old Anita Harris tunes in abandoned Diners...

Sleep is almost there but then the Sun is coming up and there's just enough time for a three foot long hot dog...

Saturday and the Sun has put its hat on, hip hip hip hooray

Well K is dead in the (no) water in the morning so ended up watching deranged mini Moby singing for Autokratz and then The Teenagers, those Parisian pottymouths who try maybe a little too hard to win over the non-teenagers in the crowd (who know all the filthy words and would jump to car alarms ) - the sound isn't really loud enough until the middle of the set by which time they've already invited a bunch of teenage girls to invade the stage and belt out the lyrics to Homecoming, an act that more or less saved The Teenagers from drowning in canvas...



people are high-fiving all over the place, Glastonbury is a beating heart of slightly soiled palms...

...The Imagined Village collective are on , Billy Bragg seems to be everywhere, along with various McCarthy's and Sheila Chandra and some Afro-Celts... over to The Park next for MGMT (underwhelming, as expected) and then descending into the 20 min Battles take on Atlas... they noodle their way into it and then back out but Atlas itself is a crazed nitrous oxide shock to the system (the guys with NO2 balloons are sucking everything in, even the warmth), forcing a few at the front into some speculative Cosack dancing...

"This is so weird
Am I sleeping? Is this a dream? ... No!
Am I a Mouse?
Am I an elephant?
And I had just sliced your tongue

So tell me he-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-hey:
Do you wanna drink some alcohol?
I'm just a boy (girl) but I have a very strong punch
And I had just broken your nose..."
a guy with an LCD for a face can't stop winking

CSS come on and blast out the hits, silver wigs, balloons...music becomes their hot hot sex... their enthusiasm infects everything, even the slower numbers are played with such joy, even the crap numbers... everything is slightly smaller than real life, more child-like, ecstatic, immature in all the right ways... they'll play better and louder but it's the playful kick in the pants that's needed before

... the trek to Shangri-La begins all over again and the Diner erupts into old soul disco classics, The Prodigy, The Clapping Song and, er, The Police's Roxanne

(you have to wonder why people don't always Rave to Roxanne - maybe they do)

"3, 6, 9, The goose drank wine
The monkey chew tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to
heaven in
a little rowboat"
ever-presents Babyhead next in a packed tent, masquerading as a Freak Show... it's basically Madness, downdated (no bad thing), with a lead singer who looks like a compressed member of King Kurt, dressed for an interview at the bank and bounces around the stage, wrestling with his clothes and the outsize Trombone guy (the guy, not the trombone) like an oddly quiffed Machine Elf...

people happy themselves awake...

It's 3.30 AM but people are still everywhere... can't face the Titled Disco or the lunatic stylings of the Drag Queen house in Trash City...



tea, yes, tea... God, yes.

Sunday begins slow, The Cave Singers lamenting some awful past, documenting the slow coming of the final acts...

(or else being unneccesarily cognicent of the hell that is leaving this place)

I'm intending to try and catch Leonard Cohen but know I never will, it's not really the place to see things, unless by accident - you always end up where you need to be, rather than where you'd intended...

saw an old friend from Yeovil, JF, looking blonde and pink and well and with a tatoo of Neubauten that matches mine (and Henry Rollins) ... time lines converging, JF is working as security, yelling out

KEEP LEFT

to the travelling hordes of weekend refugees.

It occurs to me that almost no one here knows where they're going at any given time...

somehow we make a slow, lysergic past Goldfrapp (wish you were here, Kek!) on the main stage towards Crystal Castles who suffer a little from the John Peel Stage's soft sound but try hard to break through regardless, with Alice Glass attempting to climb to the top of the lighting rig and nearly getting the show stopped by anxious Health and Safety executives.... they play at most 5 songs and then implode in static: good, but you sense this was a little big for their intimate 8bit take on showdown power-electronics...

to end, old timers Tristan and Eat Static at The Glade... must have seen Eat Static about 20 times over the years but they just fit so well at Glastonbury:

aliens landing? whatever.

Plants mushrooming up through the cracks in the floor? whatever.

people raise the roof, stumble over themselves, find a million little grooves to wind themselves into... the DJ looks like one of the futurekind from Doctor Who, snarlingly beneficent, shaggily ecstatic... Eat Static are the comfy shoe you can slip into and wave your hands in the air like you just don't care...

you will care later, at work on Monday, with your knees busted at the seams and your legs feeling like they've been subject to a 24hr Charity deadlegging and your arms a good 20 cms longer than they should be...

I'm pleased to announce that after my fairly anaemic last visit, back in 2004 or something, Glastonbury gained Sun and a new, chaotic heart...

the man i saw became a bird....

NYE Amsterdam

Spent New Year in Amsterdam and ended up at the above, dancing like a bag of spastic elbows all night at the mysterious Ruigoord, an old hippie commune / hangout about 22km outside Amsterdam (that 22km seems a long way at 5 in the morning on freezing New Year's day). A great barnstar venue, in a village full of fog and fireworks and odd sculptures and old hippy buses and an old church that they've turned into some kind of psychedelic temple, complete with a DJ mixing dutch folk with tribal techno and oddly affecting Snow Patrol covers. Reminded me a lot of the old Megatripolis nights at Heaven, with any number of people who could be Frazer Clarke's progeny bouncing around like machine elves, tossing firecrackers and generally grinning themselves an injury.

The music was good too: none of yer poncy dubstep or minimal here, just balls-to-the-wall techno and trance - I'm as headnoddingly awed as the next man to the lure of a Villalobos remix (that Fabric 36 album is a killer, isn't it?: constantly skidding along the divide between pretension and genius / delirium and death-eating) - but sometimes (and NYE is one of those times) you just want sound to be energy, you want to feel the drums in your eyes and you want multi-coloured hippy girls dancing around you like their beads depend on it...

I buggered my leg with so much dancing...

NOTE TO SELF: adopt less frantic, less bouncy dance style for next year.

The night ended when we managed to catch a lift back to Amsterdam with some decidely dodgy, bourbon quoffing homeboy ravers in a car that seemed somehow whittled.

Anyway, the pics come courtesy of Rob Triskele's site (most of my pictures look like they've been to the cleaners). I'm in there somewhere!