James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual (remix)

An ever so slight detourn from the version at Freq.

History is a virus. A fifth horseman of the apocalypse. It’s brutal, beyond reason, full of rage and memory; brittle with the fear of being forgotten. A terrible, seething mass of tendrils, an Athazagoraphobic moron, shifting it's feet and trying to breathe, trying to suck your air, forgetting itself...

History loves and hates it’s host. It smothers it with affection, wraps it up warm, cools it's feverish brow with gentle reminders and emotional aggregates... but the terrible cytopathic effects are just a little while away. Them little fuckers'll get you in the end...

I know you think you're immune.

I know you think you're immune.

Nostalgia is a dish served cold and for a long time now people have been struggling against it, trying to reheat old spices (and Old Spices), attempting to bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuur their way out. But history is winning (had already won before the battle lines were drawn) and now we’re on the retreat, if unable to move.



Buzz and blur, crackle, hum.....

It’s coming (through the trees).

It's still coming. It doesn't stop once it's got here. It'll never stop because it knows that it's never really even got started...

Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making.The virus comes in waves (but, what ends when the symptoms shatter?) and it can take a lot of shaking. You can struggle against the pre-settings, tread lightly around it or ironically through it or stomp all over its kindly old man face but you can’t avoid the inevitable and neither will you want to, when it comes to the end times.



The eschaton will be immanentized (etc).

And heaven is a tune you can whistle, a sound you’ve already heard, played endlessly and without motive. If you think you remember, you do. There’s no trick. At the end, you’ll lie back and laugh. It’ll make a Donnie Darko out of all of you.

Some resist longer, some even believe they haven’t started resisting yet – the Futurists are then, as now – some burrow themselves into a (w)hole, believe they’re not letting in any light at all, only to find that their dark isn’t a darkness at all, just another form of light, shone from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. The light will tear them apart too, as it tears all of us.

You know who they are:

E************

F****** F******

G*** and Y*****

Add your own.



This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted.

James Ferraro wasn’t easy to catch. He flirted with the history virus for longer and harder than most. He played all the angles, tried to wrestle with the memories, tried to break them, to cover them in snot and grime and fuzz. He added nauseous waves of his own.

He's tried, you've got to admire him for that.

Endless medicinal cassettes (themselves a symptom), CDRs, LPs have tumbled out, attempting to feed an antibody that was always just one protein shake off oblivion. His music has been magical at times and he’s played the sorcerer role well (even if he thought he was playing the alchemist), dabbling in Crowley magick, in Paris Workings, in symbols. He dabbled in motifs and tropes and Casio licks like Death In June dabbled in Eugenics and tooth and claw (but, what does end when the symbols shatter?). He fiddled in things he only thought he understood better than anyone else. He’s spawned numerous monsters, whose names cannot be said, whose names begin with the cross of H and end in Chris De Burgh, in daytime TV movies, in crane shots and stock footage of shopping malls and queues outside the Commodore 64 shop.

He thought things through, I think. Tried to play all the sides all the time.Perhaps thought this wasn't history at all, but some kind of uchronic intervention, a parallel, reverse-spin world of nu dreams and nu-reality.

Oh James. Remember James?

He thought that he could iron out the creases of history, maybe even thought he would escape but he was always at the Event Horizon and now he’s falling further in. In space no one can hear you scream. No hands clapping. The inside of the ping pong balls that cup The light he’s shedding will be seen by us as glimmer, as sheen, as surface.

C'mon... James. Jim. Jimbo...



Now, he’s letting the virus in, he’s accepting it, embracing it, loving it even more than it needs. Far Side Virtual is what happens when the real embraces the real; when you stop remaking and start making. History has him. His memories have suddenly burst through, unclouded and almost free of hum and chatter. This is thick, glossy soundtracking. This isn’t ironic, no cosmic joke, nothing haunted. The thick Calpol gloop of history is here, shining.

This is a time machine heading into the very near future when everyone gives up the ghost. This isn't even music anymore; it's History incarnate, is indistinguishable from the original, may even be the original...



But it's not a joke. We're not being played. Or rather, even if we are being played and this is all a Jim Ferraro Fuck You and next thing he'll turn around and say: Really? Chris De Fucking Burgh? Daytime TV? Holy Hot Tamalean Hell! Even if that's what happens next it doesn't matter (and why be paranoid when you know they're out to get you?) because he's going under, the virus still has him, is just keeping him alive for his take on the crispy shells(uits) of the 90s...

Do I like it? Is this artefact, this album actually any good? Yeah, it’s brilliant. But then I’m as infected as you.

MemoryHouse - The Years Or... PRESS:RELEASE

via here

Memoryhouse

((((...an amended and reconfigured press release))))

To avoid doing a Hari, the actual Press Release is in bold, as befits it's worth, its status, its totemic power.

A name, an art, a slice of Canadian now presented as memory of then... Evan Abeele (composer) and Denise Nouvion (vocals), hail from Toronto, which...

1) has a secret subway stop

2) stands in for New York (in films like.... add list, with snark) which was where I saw them play and where I bought their Lately single from a lovely earnest guy on the merch stall at The Mercury Lounge

Their music blends the contemporary with the forgotten, the traditional and the technological, the visual and the aural, within the sonographic landscape of pop.

It might... but this is a Press Release, and I'm starting to zero in on the:

1) PRESSING - which of course gives us urgency, agency, earnest persistence, insistence as well as the obvious record and cider presses

and the

2) RELEASING - which gives us removal of bondage, of confinement, of life... or calls into question our callous use of almost-language ("I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go...") or maybe implies loss (good or bad) or even catharsis



via here

So, with an eye on words:

AXIS 1: Blending contemporary with forgotten - calls into question the Memory of Memoryhouse of course but may simply be a causal reflection of the name rather than a stimulus for it. The contemporary is actually slightly missing from their work in my ears, which is one of the reasons I like them, think they stand ever so slightly apart from their (yes) contemporaries... forgotten I'm willing to go with since this is the key to the difference... sometimes they sound like the bands that have been forgotten, that have names but don't keep cropping up in press releases... they sound like music that was around late 80s, early 90s and was even listened to then but has since fallen away, hasn't inspired the same adoration and hasn't appeared in Press Releases...

I'm thinking of bands like Whipping Boy. Not Whipping Boy; they sound nothing like Whipping Boy.

AXIS 2: The traditional and the technological - now this one is odd; I'm pretty sure that technological is kinda traditional now, especially with all the retro/downgrading that people are eager to promote these days:

100% analogue!: No digital post-processing: Thick vinyl: Released on Superferric cassette only: Any pops and glitches are entirely intentional/unintentional

So I'm not really sure their PR company has thought that one through...

AXIS 3: the visual and the aural - this is an interesting one and often mentioned but in my experience the two generally compete rather than blend (i'm no natural synaesthete). Certainly, the visual won on the night I saw them, the dreaminess of the visuals trumped the slightly less dreamy music, which is definitely slurrier on record...

Did I mention? They have a record out soon. And it's really good.



On September 12, 2011 Sub Pop Records will release a fully re-recorded, remixed and re-mastered version of The Years, adding two new tracks entitled “Modern, Normal” and “Quiet America.”

I was listening to it and tweeted "dreamlogical & immersive; like a dead slow drive at 4AM through unfamilar country" and I think that holds; that is what's its like (my Twitter self and my Blog self often disagree, we're different beasts) but I feel I should clarify:

a) dreamlogical because it doesn't ebb or flow, it's edited into a slowburn, no ragged edges... the situation/people/location/characters change? no problem, dreamlogic smoothes things over... the edits between scenes are too sharp? no worries, our casually causal little minds will simply condense and assimilate...

b) immersive because it's so visual... you can't help but swim in imagery (so much so, that sometimes you forget you're listening).... it's thick, you could swim in it... of course, you might not want to....

c) when I meant dead slow, I mean dead slow... i mean the kind of driving we used to do

Oh, I know you often don't jump to those old blusters so here's what I'm getting at:

We were somewhere around Sutton Bingham Reservoir on the edge of the Somerset/Dorset desert when the drugs began to take hold.

It's 2 AM. We're driving maybe 3 miles an hour, crammed into Rs hopelessly fucked 1978 Mercedes Benz, the lights all blown so it seems like we're just floating, like the car isn't even there. We're heading towards a usual druggy haunt, the deserted ruin of a Chapel Perilous on the edge of the water.

Which more or less brings me to:

AXIS 4 (WHICH IS NOT AN AXIS AT ALL): Within the sonographic landscape of pop - which implies that Memoryhouse are attempting to delve inside pop (the landscape I'll let go, poetry needs some space), to find an imprint, to go beyond the naive realist view that the body is simply the body (read: the canon is simply the canon, the art is the art, the music is the music) and to discover the constituent parts, the whirrings, the beating hearts and valves...

now, this could be nothing (IT COULDN'T BE) and I'm not exactly hearing that kind of in-depth exploration so far in their music...

THE TERM BETTER SUITS SOME OF THE RECENT JAMES FERRARO RELEASES ACTUALLY

...but the intention is honourable and maybe makes sense of the affinity I feel these guys have with David Lynch... they could soundtrack his movies and their music would benefit from his direction since he is almost unique in the ability to use sound and vision on (more or less) equal footing and so they wouldn't find themselves swamped by imagery... like his films, they deal in simple, but multi-layered, realities... they weave complex story lines out of simple patterns and echoes...

Someone sent me a black and white photograph of someone in a bunny suit riding a motorbike.

Am I Real?

As a partially relevant add-end-um... to Kek's piece on the Britney/Salem collaboration (it's not a remix, even if both parties say it is) this seems to encapsulate the fluffier side of the chillwaves, with the assumption that a slightly slowed Britney is less witch-like, more glacial/glazed and should therefore sit snugly with the likes of Nite Jewel...

...but it's the title that really adds something here. The song is Nite Jewel, whatever that means to you (to me, it means a fantastic Summer last year in New York) but the song isn't really where we're at here - it's the plaintive cry of Am I Real? Am I Real? that shoves this to the front of the queue and will no doubt see it on the Chillwave 3CD sets sold for £6 circa 2013...

It's an important question in this genre (cf. witch house, hauntology, whatever) and becoming increasingly difficult to answer... in fact, the 3CD set should only contain versions of this song, or versions of other songs that incorporate this phrase...

Am I Real? she's asking... the TV turning to static... the debt to Twin Peaks extended character assassinations exemplified... Am I Real?

And maybe someone ought to sample this guy, a Borges stemfish, grappling with Who Am I? in mixed metaphor and shifting language....



Time for a shift in the shift... Kek is right, there's something scurrilously upended about the way music's going... the You in Youtube becoming less and less key... the Tube taking all with it... sucking it down... sluicing history like it means nothing because it means nothing...

Lots sounds like lots but I'm beginning not to care. Let it fly. There's still a lot of stuff to coalesce out there, we shouldn't be afraid... we're only at the beginning of the revolution...

Another year where music bites itself and finds new flesh...

Add.

End?

Um...

How To Dive Well

How To Dress Well : "Suicide Dream 1"

I've been undecided about How To Dress Well, but this little mindmeld of vision and music has a definite grace... it's maybe a bit (i.e. less than a tad) literal, given the watery nature of How To Dress Well's music, but I think it's somehow better for it...

...and it feels heartfelt; you get the sense that Tom Krell is influenced by his, er, influences at a very deep level; this isn't appropriation or casual sideways-glancing irony, the R&B flicks (not really evident here) are from someone who really felt their pull and is perhaps due to be a dominant strain in a long line of 'indie' (shudder along with me) artists influenced less by The Velvet Underground, Can, Stooges axis than by the half-heard glitches, tics and tickles of prime-Beef Timbaland and Blackout era Britney...

There's a mix by Tom via The Wire:

How To Dress Well Mix

A Dream Of Wessex

I'm about 40 pages short of the end so don't know what's going to happen but that seems an appropriate place to review the book - the end might not be, after all.

Cheers to K-Punk for the heads up on this one; it really could be the dreamtext for Inception - I'd be surprised if it hadn't been swallowed somewhat by Christopher Nolan. Maybe not swallowed whole but...

This is Inception if they'd decided it didn't need to be an action film.

It's a simply disconcerting ride; nothing wild-eyed about the prose - I like Priest's matter-of-fact style; things lollop together and then slowly ease apart. There's no quick about turns, even in a novel where allthings are clearly not as they seem... it reminds me a little of John Fowles, though without the uneven sense of literature that Fowles brings...

But A Dream Of Wessex really reminds me of Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle - both books seem to share a character: Noboru Wataya in Murakami, Paul Mason in Priest... both of these characters are peripheral to the story, even if the story is largely about them... the main characters' journeys are inconceivable without them, they act as terrible distorting/distorted mirror images...

Both books deal with sex in an uniquely realistic way: we see it as a gentle union and a brilliant desecration, an (actual) violation of consciousness which shudders Julia (and David) with self-loathing, obsession, yearning, fear, hatred and love... people are drawn together for reasons they don't understand; loss is felt literally and symbolically...

I wonder if Deleuze (or especially Guattari) might have read this? I think they'd have smiled.

...you could say it's about Virtual Reality and Dreams and the Collective Unconcious but you wouldn't be right... they are the subject, the great Jungian theme that perhaps just about tips this into the realms of Science Fiction but it's about memory and how it invades the present and sends us scuttling towards the future with imperfect background knowledge...

It's about how other minds are irretrievably tangled with ours and the contortions we'll go through to try to extricate ourselves from the past.. it does hold hope for collectivist dreams, but only just... Soviet Britain dissolves almost as quickly as it arrived... read this now and wonder that, in 1977, the future looked like Mad Men looks now... only with the American sheen-suits taken off and replaced by...

May contain flashing images.

Ariel Pink's 4AD Graffitti

I like that Ariel Pink's on 4AD now. Don't know why. I guess the smears of sound that characterise the Ariel Pink sound seem to fit happily in the little snug recess of my brain that used to amaze over old 4AD record sleeves, wondering what the hazy girls in the 23 Envelope artwork would look like in the flesh, without the fuzz or the glaze or the soft focus...

Now, of course, I just have a tendency to impose soft focus on everything; not wanting to look too, er, clinically at the world, not intending for anything ever to have too much clarity, in case I turn into a worried Lancome or Oil of Olay model.

They didn't ask.

And Haunted Graffitti must have come from looking at the 23 Envelope typefaces mustn't it? I can't think of a better description for all those roccocco curls and skews and frazzled perspectives...

V23 was the visual representation of the mistaken empathy of many a young, earnest, overcoat-wearing, Mary Chain-haired carrier in the 80s... A visual poem, mirroring the scrawl at the back of your roughbook, mirroring the posh signature you're still trying to develop, in the hope that one day someone will ask you to write a cheque...

I'm glad Ariel Pink is on 4AD. I don't know why.

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?

Fangs And Arrows

Having fun here at the minute... becoming quite a little repository of cyclical sounds... including lots of OOP Pocahaunted / The Skaters stuff...

The Link that was here is no longer