This thing is Melting

This thing has been in our house for a few years now. A Christmas present from a work colleague.

Seemed innocent enough. But I think it might be melting now. Strange sounds are leaking out and it seems only I can hear them. This could be the new humchatter. We'll see.

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.

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.

Cher's Gaze Of The Other

From the disco-tastic, Sophie Ellis Bextor-baiting days of 1979... Cher reinvents herself as a Flesh Gordon extra for this album cover... the music is light discofunk and can't hope to match the lunatic genius of the album art...

Whenever I think about Sartre's gaze of the other, I think about this and shudder.

Paul Young's Love Will Tear Us Apart

...is (deep breath) still my favourite version of the song. Not only do I have the same confession as Liz (though why we feel the need to confess, I'm still working on); that Paul Young's version was the first I heard but also that when I heard the Joy Division version a few years later I thought it was a ropey Paul Young cover - and in fact, that's how I still see things now.

When No Parlez came out I was perhaps 11 or 12 and Love Will Tear Us Apart played a significant part in an early on-off relationship I had with a spectacularly endowed (for 12) girl who perhaps I ought to have been better off being mates with. The cruelty and despair of love wasn't really available to me then, I didn't understand yet how much of a gut-kicking emotion it could be but this song seemed to hint at other ways that love could take you; darker ways, paths only hinted at by my understanding of girls and passion and so on at that time.

There was a darkness here, a love that pulled you under, a love that could tear you apart.

This was all intensified by Paul Young. He had a clear, untainted voice and paired with these dark mysterious lyrical images, I can remember being very unsettled, an unusual feeling when mostly I was listening to stuff like Wham! or The Style Council or maybe at the indie top end The Jam (who, anyway, I liked for the same reason as I liked The Specials - you could dance to them without looking like a twat in School Disco's - the interest in social commentary came later).

When I hear Ian Curtis singing it, or later Michael Gira or Robert Smith or Nick Cave or whoever, they seemed to miss the point of the song; it didn't work for me coming from those kinds of mewled, blank, seen-it-all faces, the song couldn't be captured by people who already knew these paths. It was a dark light that Paul and me and her were discovering for ourselves.

I can remember me and her playing this in her bedroom and the feeling that somehow this was a wormhole into new, undiscovered, country was almost unbearable. It used to make her cry and it confused the hell out of me why she'd want to keep playing it. This was pre-sex, pre-understanding. I wasn't sure how things could ever turn out between a man and a woman, much less a girl and a boy who only a few before had been happily rolling in fields with no lingering sexual tension, no real understanding of gender at all...

This song, sung by Paul Young caught a frozen moment in our adolescence and meant that no songs would be the same again. I can still feel this song and no matter what anyone says: the Joy Division version is a lost and ropey cover.

JG Ballard

One of my favourite authors, perhaps the only one I've kept heart with since my teens is dead. Annoying. I liked the way the last few novels were sort of the same one, only turned slightly sideways - I was hoping that, eventually, they'd flip right the way around and face me, stare me down, scare me off.



Ballard was truly unique; unfussy, shark-eyed prose, deadly timings, with a unique sense of pace - the scattershot pop-art of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, the slow burning stupour of Millenium People, Kingdom Come, Cocaine Nights etc

(the dull thud of a tennis ball on a hard court beating out a psychic retreat)

He understood the prosaic horror of the shopping Mall, the gated community, the open plan apartment - took Henry Miller's Air Conditioned Nightmare at face value and then extended it into inner space, making mind-maps and neural connections out of endless hospital waiting rooms, rehabilitation suites and middle-middle class entertainment centres / twilight homes.



He wrote buildings better than any writer I know.

(a cleaner, blanker counterpart to the flowery sleight of hand of Jonathan Meades)

His writing acted as a kind of accidental neuro-linguistic programming, he wrote a listtle like Derren Brown speaks, and I've spent many hours listening to other middle-manager doublespeak, imagining a Ballardian nightmare of an endless conference centre; repeating corridors, Escher twitches, infinite white walls, Magritte prints echoing the sad figures of lone salesmen, cannibalising their laptops and keeping just alive...



Ballard's science fiction lost the science over time and never had action as such - his version of Apocalypse Now would have consisted of the LSD and Playgirls scene endlessly repeated as a descent into madness - and this made perfect sense; his world's became gradually quotidian and echoed the slowturns and machinations of Capitalist economy... the banality of evil has never been better expressed.



Wonder what he made of Twitter?

More pretty pictures here.

Aloha(tings) In Notting Hill

For some reason this picture has deeply unsettled me. I can't put my finger on it. I mean, it's obviously meant to be disturbing but there's something genuinely awful about it.



Maybe I glanced it once during one of my once mammoth record flipping searches in the depths of one of Notting Hill Gate's Record and Tape Exchanges - a glance that kills slowly, like a one-inch punch, worming through the system, undetected, waiting for someone to activate it by innocently posting the sleeve...

I don't even know why it reminds me of record flipping.

Or why it reminds me of Notting Hill (could this be the reason I don't like the film as well?). Could this be everyone else's reason too?

Maybe it's some kind of accidental post-hypnotic suggestion; the quick flicking of all those cut price records in those dimly lit basements acting like an accidental flip book, accidentally full of arcane commands... like the light flickering through lines of trees along the motorway, sending people crazy, sending drivers off into hallucinatory states, into dream sleep, messing with their alpha beats.... like Native Americans using their fingers to make dream machines out of the Sun...

...thinking about it, there was always an auditory element to the record flicking in the basement as well... the sounds of slapping record sleeves, making tiny micro-rhythms... the beginnings of Mille Plateux glitches? Slap slap slap... vaguely pornographic, easing the way into the unconscious... the nodding head symbolic of the nodding off into semi-consciousness - (Peter) Tripping into some vaguely altered state with no redeeming functionality....

anyone who's been in there, or an equivalent record store can recognise the symptoms, can see where dubstep came from...


...sometimes I used to flip two rows of LPs at a time, forcing one eye to watch each row (or rather forcing both eyes to separate, to obsessively monitor for bargains, to pan for Gold...)

(((((someone on here once tried to answer the question: what do you see if you pull out both eyes and face them towards each other...))))

... maybe something there caused that Henry Kaiser LP to slip into my barely conscious... maybe it combined with the seeping scum leeching out of the never-washed leather jackets of the people in there (Crass logos, black dyed hair that looked like it was melting), flicking alongside me as if they were humans too...

Or maybe I'm making too much of this because, on another level, this picture makes me feel weird too:

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

Belle De Jour

Still ploughing through the Bunuel box-set. I'd seen this a long long time ago and I only have a few comments:

1) Lacan apparently showed this instead of a prepared lecture on female masochism.

2) I think I might have seen this first at a critical period in my psychosexual development.

Cabaret Voltaire - Sensoria (The Bloody Beetroots vs SirBilly Experience Remix

That Obscure Object Of Desire

Got the Luis Bunuel DVD box-set for Christmas and have only just got around to watching it. First up, That Obscure Object Of Desire - think I might go backwards, see if they get unwatchable, in the same way someone once recommended to a friends they approach Swans albums..."Start from White Light...Keep going backwards until your soul crushes..."

There's something somehow resistant to criticism about this film but...

Desire is everything; the title is as literal as it gets, could almost be one of those mistranslated titles you see in China, where Face/Off becomes "Who Is Face Belonging To? I Kill You Again, Harder!" and Pretty Woman becomes "I Will Marry a Prostitute to Save Money" (a personal favourite off mine) - The Object of Desire is always Obscure...

In particular, the film seems to be about the desire to desire and the desire to be desired (Imagine a gently surrealist, French-Spanish take on Duncan Norvelle's "Chase Me!" routine... and then wipe it from your memory like a bad uncle).

Both characters are locked in a groove of their own making, doomed to circulate; matter and anti-matter, Moon and Earth - gravity pulls each of them together and forces the embrace that neither of them wants to make... an indesctructible object (the shape of her back might be a colourized Man Ray photo) versus an unstoppable force...

Neither character can exist on their own, their concept of wholeness simply a mirror of what the other can give. On the surface, he's dealing with his middle age in typical crisis fashion; wants jouissance and sees it in her.. while at the same time she's wrestling with a desire for objects (houses, clothes) when really she feels nothing for anything - even as she gives herself to a younger man to taunt her older suitor, she convinces herself it's fakery and pretence - a Jenny Haniver Orgasm.

There's a hefty dose of Lacan of course: the attempt to transcend the pleasure principle, to embrace life despite the constant urge to embrace as little as possible, to give in to the pull of unsatisfied desire...

And all this human sexual political wrangling is echoed by the constant hum of terrorism in the streets below them; another indication of the impossibility of
desire - it's never clear what the terrorists want; they break into factions and come together again under the mantle of the Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus - the key words being revolution (circular reasoning, ouroroborous, the need for a counter to every culture) and infant (Lacan again; the infant looking into the mirror and wanting).

Peverelist and Appleblim - Circling

2562 - Moog Dub

The Curse Of Reality (Or A Post That Wasn't)

Here's a post that never was. I was flicking through some old posts on the blogger dashboard and found some that I never published, due to forgetfulness or loss of heart or whatever... since this blog has recently re-animated I figured I might air a few of these (and there are others that I swear I've never written - anyone own up? That piece on Nico?) in their original, unfinished, unvarnished form...

This one comes from three years ago when the world was very different. I think I still believe what I was saying but some of the phrasintg and the spelling is just... well, maybe something told me back then that this shouldn't be out there, not without thought and research and rigour but, I dunno, research and thought and rigour is never what this has been about and won't be. It's about half-remembered events and theories and ideas and songs, it's about knowledge as it's actually used; half-arsed, semi-thought, attenuated:

So, several things coincided.

I was re-watching Children Of The Stones with 8 year old middle Loki, sorta discussing the pagan/christian war (add in delusion and minus proud Dadness here for detail; his grasp on pre-Christian theology isn't as good as it could be...) and then I came upon this post from the ever-synchronous Kek and everything started to slide together...

When did film-makers, producers, directors etc start demanding that people needed TV and films that were about something? When did they suddenly feel the need to explain everything? Nowadays it's like we're slowly retreating, returning to midperiod Hitchcockian values where every little psychological detail is neatly tossed off at the end, just in case we missed it...

Actually, that is more or less true in Hitchcock except from The Birds. They don't explain about the birds do they? Wonder why? The film is very explicit about there being no apparent rationale behind the attacks - I seem to remember the characters discussing that vrey issue - which perhaps suggests that Hitchcock regarded the Freudian motifs sufficiently out there to render further explanation uneccessary. Certainly, my experience in A Level teaching suggests that Freud is best experienced intuitively and that the understanding can be clouded slightly by looking too closely... but that might be just because I'm shite at explaining things...actually, this is probably a post in itself: Freudian Themes of Goddess-baiting, Oedipal blindings and the immanent chaos of femininity in The Birds...

(to follow)

(perhaps - but it sounds like something that has already happened)

Anyway... I don't want reality to start intruding too far into my entertainment; the nasty pull of the real has a terrible, analgesic effect on viewing; I can happily spoil an hour and a half's senseless fun with a badly placed "but they'd never do that" or "can the Doctor be so lonely when he simply has to go back before The Time War began..." etc and I can't see how this can be good.

I want to shake Rationality off a little but people keep insisting I need it because I'm human.

Rationality, the need to know, to understand (I can hear colleagues whining Verstehen behind me, even as I type) is a terrible addiction because it gets you gripped so deep that it's only very rarely that you even think to surface. Before you know it, you're watching Donnie Darko and you're thinking: Is this internally consistent? Can I find the flaw? Where is it? and then, too late, you remember it's a film, an entertainment, a kind of brain-stretch that doesn't require an answer.

Rationalisty is a form of Schizophrenia. A nagging auditory hallucination that doesn't seem to want to go away.

Who is it that wants us to have all these answers? Why does the guy in Life on Mars have to be in a coma? Why can't he just fart around in the 1970s having the time of his life? I mean, the least mysterious sections of the whole series so far is the mystery is-he-isn't-he elements, the ghost sections, the spooked-out Testcard girl... you wanted to skip those bits too didn't you?

The end of Life on Mars lets us come full circle. We always knew it would. The story circle, not the character arc is all in film and TV. Or maybe the arc is a rainbow...

The curse of reality permeates through everything, even football matches have to be endlessly explained, as if they could somehow be controlled or manipulated by the ultra-expensive software tactical mapping packages that the major teams seem to use. Reality clings to a game when chance can take everything away because the blandness of USA style batting averages is eating away at the pleasant misunderstanding of belief. We know that Chelsea will win. It is all over.

And yet, there is still the lure of the dionysian, the abyss of the FA cup, the beautifully empty myth of the impossible underdog - a myth that every fan clings too as if it were a Pagan Goddess... "it's only 11 vs 11. Anything can happen...."

We need more of this ridiculous belief. I know that Yeovil Town will be destroyed by pretty much whoever they play but that doesn't stop the almost certain knowledge that will rise within me, a Warp Spasm that nevertheless makes me believe despite everything.

It's as if there's an unknown seat of consciousness, just beyond our measuring devices, an electrical

MyNameIs

And then this came in, on return from Paris, where I played Burroughs for a while outside the old Beat Hotel (now posh, with the odd picture of dream machines and Brion Gysin dotted around the walls), Rue Git La Coeur (see the picture, further down - trying the Burroughs walk, one foot in front of the other, dead straight.... and failing, of course, and resolutely not wearing a hat....

and, anyway, this came in, another net freebie, a perk of this place, beautifully packaged, with a little card introducing herself and an explosion of colour - the record sounds like a rainbow, unashamedly immersed in joy and light:::::::::::

--- you'll know by now perhaps that despite my dark leaning towards Gristle and Sunburned and slur-folk and Industrial etc etc i've always had a weakness for the beautiful - female - voice ----

and besides, even in Coil and Nurse With Wound and all my longtime loves; it's the light coming out of the cracks that I've always really loved, the oboe coiling from the wind and the wreckage of Chaostrophy, the little yappy dog at the innermost heart of NWWs Cold...

So Leerone is playing in my kitchen , like it's jammed into the machine... someone who puts this much hope and love into her work deserves a few plays... the music kinda evokes a happier Regina Spektor perhaps, maybe a less mannered Tori Amos (you might say Feist(y) but you'd be a sadder soul than me - or, rather, exactly as sad as me) but others aren't really the point; the songcraft and the tunes put this above most of the singer-songwriter stuff that comes my way.... there's tunes you can whistle, tunes you can hummmmmmmmm....

the album title, Imaginary Biographies is important...helps to acknowledge, perhaps, that all biographies are imaginary; that we are what we do, as Sartre said...

---- looking like that, we could hardly be what we seem to be... in Paris we sat outside the Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots - the intellectual hubs of Paris, the places where Sartre wrote 'we are condemned to be free'; tried to soak some learning - headed to the Shakespeare and Co ex pat bookshop, which looks like you'd imagined it always looked; with Gysin and Burroughs and Henry Miller and Anais Nin scrawled all over it, etched in the shelves; ghosts lounging in the reference library upstairs---


Loki, Rue Git La Coeur, 2008

...that we imagine our lives as much as we live them...

more perhaps

which is why a photograph of william burroughs heading past the Beat Hotel on Rue Git La Coeur has been reimagined with me and by me for most of my post-teenage life... a stupid thing, a trifle, utterly self-pretentious but something that had to be done, the countercultural equivalent of putting your head through the holes on the Pier...



They've removed Jim Morrison's head from the grave at Pere Lachaise - I imagine someone has it in their garden, amongst the trolls and the fishing gnomes...

There's more tallying and yattling to get through but for now a simple message:

Thanks Leerone, I wasn't looking forward to coming back...

God knows what's next through the door...