Succubus & the Heuristics of Video Shops

People will miss video-rental shops. Lovefilm etc is a poor remedy. The pleasure of finding 'classic' movies wasn't related to the pleasure of being told about classic movies; this wasn't a place for recommendations, in fact, 'recommended' massively missed the point. This was about pure discovery, the pleasure of a badly misinformative blurb or a nastily rendered bit of artwork.

This has been inspired by finding this image over at the ever reliable Breakfast In The Ruins:

Mostly, I just like the 'This Motion Picture is rated Adults Only, naturally'.

I still haven't even seen Succubus yet but I can remember gazing at a poster of it in the dilapidated backroom video store in some Yeovil offie or other... it wasn't the best looking video rental shop (that was a mythical place somewhere East of Forest Hill) but it was the only one which would reliably let clearly 13 year old boys take out Certificate 18 movies so it was the one we always used. One wet Summer we trawled through hundreds of terrible / brilliant movies: Italian horror gores; odd mini sexfests with cheerleaders (never quite got over that one); Herschell Gordon Lewis splatters; 'banned' zombie flesh-eating and muto-movies; strange badly recorded 'death documentaries'; The Hitcher, with Rutger Hauer; various stuff with Nerds in the title and teens vs Commies 'agenda' movies like Red Dawn (and it's even duffer progeny) - I reckon I could 'recommend' about 7% of them but I'm undoubtedly a better, less-balanced, person for watching the crap ones too...

Maybe there needs to be some kind of collective 'non' recommendation system - I have no truck with 'ironic' recommendations, either - an in built bit of (almost) randomness, a retro-configuration, a heuristic that prevented knowledge creeping into our choices. Maybe that's what Youtube will become. Maybe there's still a place for .mkv files out there in the net, with labels full of signifiers (GORE-SEX not GORE-TEX; UNSEEMLY; BLOODBANKS; SM-UT) or newly commisioned artworks (there's a place for all those great DeviantArt guys*).





*it's non-gendered and you fucking know it...

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.

Sone Institute, the Radiophonic Workshop & Sea Devilling

Another remix of a Freq review....

This gives me the gargles. It reminds me a little of the tone behind James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual (it doesn’t sound much like it at all) in that it’s like Roman has found himself unable to distance himself from the music he’s riffing on. This seems respectable, seems right, seems like these aural artefacts (I’m talking about library music, mostly) ought to have a little bit more respect in themselves, rather than simply as cultural signifiers or soundpools for discerning (pillaging) Hauntological hordes and wraiths but.. then we’re faced with the slightly uncomfortable question: do these sounds by themselves really offer us that much?

This album is great in parts and then in parts it’s (mere) library music. Maybe the ‘mere’ is snobbery; maybe there’s gems to be found in unadulterated library music (“after all, Tod Dockstader…” etc) but if there are gems in library music per se, why listen to something that isn’t library music and is intended (perhaps) for something quite different? This is an album, this isn’t (I think) simply intended as something to be used, as something by definition incidental. 

To some extent (actually, to the whole extent) this crosses over with my feelings re: the redevelopment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in that it seems doomed to failure because the new artists will be continually looking over their shoulder expecting their incidental music to be acclaimed as something other than incidental music and thus will make music that isn't incidental per se, is focused on listening rather than helping the visuals elaborate, is readied for the CD boxset rather than the programme itself... 

I mean, I'm a long sugffering Doctor Who fanboy and I have several of the BBC soundtrack cassettes from the 70s/80s and the music doesn't sound at all like music, isn't at all structured in a way that makes sense in the kitchen... it makes sense only when I add in the visuals (the emerging Sea Devils, the flutter of a Sontaran landing) and then it gives that sense that some people seem to hear without having the original programme in mind... 

 I say it wasn't intended as music but that is a speaker, right?

I could be being snotty here: assuming that the music doesn't stand on its own, doesn't have power in itself without the heavy load of culture and memory (I was there; you can't hear it like I can hear it) but... it really doesn't have that power. Someone like Ekoplekz is much loved because he adds a musical sensibility (albeit via Cabaret Voltaire, Robert Rental et al) to a set of sounds not usually associated with music. He adds a skewed, er, pop (he'll hate me saying this) mentality that helps us along, that helps us treat the music qua music.

I'm digressing. I like this album. I like Sone Institute. He's doing something unusually tangled; introverted and outro-orientated. There’s undoubtedly a lot of skill here and a lot of real playing (and often playfulness) and many of the tracks, especially in the latter half of the album, find their own bouncing frequency but then there’s often a scything, cheesy guitar /organ sound to derail you and send you back to thinking: what if this were library music? Could we tell that it wasn’t? For this reason, the tracks work better alongside words; the spoken/sung passages help to clarify, even if they in fact lend a gauzy surrealism that matches the beautiful sleeve. I like the words. They make sense of this album and elevate it.

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...

Washed Out

Been enjoying Washed Out recently, one of a long string of bands genred into chillwave etc that all sound like the Hipstamatic app takes pictures. Vaseline-smeared as Pitchfork put it (for once apt). Perfect dozing music; instantly evocative of nothing in particular. I just like the name, really; think that it'll go places where the mass choirs of other similar artistsi will founder. Names seem more important than ever. Posters. Sleeves. The album artists are coming back, I think. Album artists. We'll see.

Washed Out - Hold Out

Washed Out - New Theory

Washed Out - Feel It All Around (Toro Y Moi remix)

Reading Festival '89 (Day One)

I only went to Reading once. Glastonbury was my thing. But a recent twitter torrent (well, a twitter twinkle) of nostalgia beans from various people about Reading 1990 kickstarted hardly ever dormant (i.e. formative) memories about Reading the year earlier... I found this and, well, the retroscending began....

This is why events unnerve me,
They find it all, a different story,
Notice whom for wheels are turning,
Turn again and turn towards this time

I mean, look at this bill (okay, the Sunday's a bit crap, except for The Pogues) and imagine you're a 17 year old slightly left of centre indie kid. The whole Industrial tangent aside, lots of my favourite bands came to Reading that year; the schoolyards of Yeovil were ablaze with rumours... Reading was going to be different this year, something had happened, the metallers had been defeated, we were taking over...



Obviously, all this has to be imagined through the gauze of Thunderbird (Tundy), Kestrel Super, Moroccan Black/Red Stripe(?), Autumn Gold Cider (for sophisticated afternoon drinking), Lambrusco screw cap wine - white n red = rose, badly rolled cigarettes (I smoked only for effect then, and the effect wasn't very impressive, it has to be said):

Well, I had Drill Yer Own Hole etc but, really, I was too excited about seeing Spacemen 3 to remember much about Gaye Bikers On Acid. They were probably okay. I can't remember them being much better than that. It didn't matter. It was a good background to drinking in preparation for the Spacemen.

Now, Spacemen 3 were a big deal in 1989. No, really. Their 'fucked up children' t-shirts were everywhere (I wasn't allowed to wear mine; my Mum disapproved and I sold it to a friend who didn't even come - wanker). Back home, we'd prepared for this by betting my mate's sister £2 that she couldn't mime the guitar all the way through Revolution... she forgot it changes just at the end and lost the bet. We had at least £2s of Tundy to play with, even before we'd got there.

What'd (you say you'd) find
Then come, come, come
Get the hell inside
You can close your eyes
Well you might as well commit suicide

They didn't play much from the then new album but we pushed down the front and waved floppy fringes into each others faces. Then they played Revolution and I tried to get my third eye opened, just to give it a bit of an airing...

My Bloody Valentine next. They'd just gone good. We were still a little cynical, to be fair; most of us had seen them in their jangle pop guise and, though we liked the new direction, we felt it wouldn't last...

It's not raining yet, but somebody is encased in mud and blood; more than one person looks like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.


That Petrol Emotion? Nah. It's gone. I spent a little time arguing with t-shirt sellers instead. I'm not sure that the Swans t-shirt I was trying to buy was altogother there, it seemed strangely insubstantial, quite literally lacking in substance, in matter... "It's just the Tundy!", I hear you yelling but, believe me, this was a point of some various principle and, at 17 years thin, I had plenty of time to start the ethical ball rolling - the t-shirt seller had enough facial hair to throw me into doubt; I still possessed a pink cassette of The Pistol's Never Trust A Hippy and I just wasn't sure that this guy's pineal gland was entirely on the level...

I didn't buy the t-shirt. Convinced myself it would disappear anyway.



Picture stolen from Reading Museum

Tackhead were on, or rather not on. People were wondering around on stage but the sound was blown almost from the off. This has a huge disappointment; I'd dragged at least a couple of friends to the middle of the crowd with the promise of bodyshaking bass, cementer mixers thrown into the mix, collapsing new buildings, wraparound sound...

In a garden in the house of love
Sitting lonely on a plastic chair
The sun is cruel when he hides away

Instead, one of the Sugarhill Gang played a frankly mental guitar solo; sort of a bass line on the top strings and and a guitar line on the bottom. I can't remember the rest of the set, except that I strained my neck trying to see what Adrian Sherwood was doing.

Then Swans, rain, Swans. Immense. Barefoot Gira. Folk-sludge as heavy as hell. Rain. More rain. "Let it come down." An Invocation. Hair and feet. A wailing Jarboe. The air thick with... horsehair? I can't quite place that thickening... it's like being in Asia...

Thread worms on a string
Keeps spiders in her pocket
Collects fly wings in a jar
Scrubs horse flies
And pinches them on a line
Ohhh...

There's no justice I can do to Swans. They were utterly intense. The sky's had to open, just to release the pressure. The Burning World album might have been regarded as a little lightweight at the time but on stage it's so... immense

The thing I remember most is that no one is talking. The field empties a little with the rain but those who stay, stay silent.

This was like bumping into Nietzsche in a Caspar David Friedrich painting and arguing about the structure of the world.

Some Of Us We Run From A Shapeless Form
And Some Men They Hide From A Howling Storm
Now I Will Wander Through The Falling Flames
And I Will Drown In The Burning Rain
Sha La La La La La La, Let It Come Down

This gig is one of reasons this blog got started, one of the reasons that I thought music was worth writing about - take a little trip back to the Dog Days of 2004.

I don't remember anything about The House of Love.

But hold on a second
I smell burning
And I see a change
Comin’ ‘round the bend
And I suggest to you
That it takes
Just five seconds

The Sugarcubes were at their most shambolic. I'd seen them before in a cramped London venue and they'd been an intense thrash of pop, this time Einar had the arse and was yelling and trumpeting through all the best Bjork bits... a little petulant, if truth be told, a band not quite at ease with sliding this far up the bill... The Sugarcubes could have been perfect pop, could have transcended things - this time they chose not to.

I down the last of the Tundy. The Sugarcubes are at least a great drinking band - like CSS are now. Maybe they weren't all that shambolic, maybe I've simply dislocated myself a little with fortified wine.

New Order sobers me up a little. In fact, a lot. I can't afford to be this sober. I'm camping with several other teenage boys. I don't want my olfactory systems to be reconnected. It's gonna break my bank to get drunk enough to sleep.

New Order are one slick unit. Everything note perfect, pristine. It could be a CD. A laser-disc. It's hard to tell whether or not they're even actually here. It could be a ruse, a rupture, a con. I've always liked the idea of New Order more than most of their music; it doesn't seem live at the best of times and this performance is... well, you can hum all the tunes, you can sing a long, you can even dance, a little but... there's something a little soulless about them on record and live this is even more apparent...

I'm gonna have to start trawling the beer tents... night is drawing in.

Shuggie Otis

Well, Aht Uh Mi Hed has been smoothing it's way around various i-things since it appeared on Skins a few years back but I didn't realise what a dude this guy was.

I mean:



Yeah. You know it.

Shuggie Otis - Me and My Woman

Shuggie Otis - Purple

Shuggie Otis - Slide Guitar

Shuggie Otis - Bury My Body

Shuggie Otis - Sweet Thang

Ring-a-ding-ding.

Apparently he played bass somwhere on Hot Rats. Least that's what they say here.

Frank Zappa - Peaches En Regalia

Actually, I'm not sure I like anything by Frank Zappa, except Ich Bin Maroon (which is apparently actually called Once Upon A Time and which was once sent to me in the middle of a mixtape full of NWW and Coil and Skullflower and Laibach bits and gave me the goosing giggles) but you get my point. Good covers.

Hauntology and The Dead Genres

(Opening stabmental music of Battlestar Galactica)

Well, it started happening almost before it began...

It's had legs, creeped under The Wire (stomped on The Wire's face).

It was foretold.

And tried to reason with French Philosophy and

even Jodie Marsh had a little dig.

Once, it even started to decay, right before our eyes...

But

Now

It's

Coming

To

An End.

This is what the Mayans meant. Hauntology's just the beginning. All genres will start to crumble, a Musical Eschatology is being born, ready for the end. The Genres have been tearing apart for a long time and the consequent creation of new ones has been escalating, trying to keep pace.

Too late.

No New New Age Advanced Ambient Motor Musik Machine.

No Gola Trance.

How fitting that Hypnagogic Pop wasn't especially hypnagogic or pop.

Never liked the End of History argument but...

Simon, seems to have a cackle in his post though. He saw it coming. Played the game and will continue to play the game right to the end. My suspicion is that he was done with the genre a while back and was already looking for a some kind of fix.

And now little Wikipedia, that bastion of Peer Reviewed mulch, is kicking off..

There may be life yet, of course. Hauntologies. And a resurrection can't be impossible in a genre like this... when every turn of every timbre may cause some thud of awakening - yeah, right now it's Open University programming, old Doctor Who, Children Of The Stones but tomorrow the New Haunts might be evoking Timbaland or Jam and fucking Spoon (I hope it goes the way of LSD Nikon, loved that track) or...

yeah...

C'mon!

A rebirth of

Clonk!

(Honestly, back in the day; we all thought this was gonna be huge, didn't we?)

Sweet Exorcist?

Hmmmmmmmm

Sweet Exorcist - Test Four

Sourced from Harpski.com

What's New In Mnemonics?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this.


Image stolen from here which stole from life

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.

The Spice Has Stopped Flowing

Ian Loveday AKA Eon, one of the early Rave superstars (i.e. before there were rave superstars - are there rave superstars - etc) has died.

Had some fun times with Eon; out here in the wilds, hearing him through bucket bins hidden in the trees, through tinny car stereos, where the bass couldn't flow and you were just left with the samples and the tunes and the bleeps.

Maybe this is just the beginning; the old MDMA soaked ravers starting to bow out as their neurons twist and their bodies strain... an old school pandemic, gradually tearing them apart...

Perhaps more of this to come: Altern8 crumbling in front of our eyes on the Thursday night at Pilton, falling apart from the inside out,leaving just their boiler suits and enviro-masks discarded like a Joseph Beuys sculpture, or a Christo coast....

Graveyards of dummies and Vicks inhalers, day-glo whistles sticking out of the ground like swollen arms in the aftermud of the Somme...

Malfunctioning LCD t-shirts from Cyberdog, left in piles to blink out blank, cut-up, neuroded messages...

Everyone listening to the death of rave...

Eon - Inner Mind

Eon - Spice

R.I.P. Eon...

The Last Of The Butcher's Arms

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

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

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

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

Amon Duul II - Wolf City

Stolen from here

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

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

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

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

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

So...

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

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

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



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

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

80s style burst johnnies..... Nnnaaammm

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

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

More.

The Mighty Hush Lemon Now Drops

Gradually getting round to listening to all the promo CDs that are tumbling through the door at the moment... this one came ages ago but relates to the last post in that The Hush Now are evoking the softer, indie-pop end of the shoegaze spectrum... think House Of Love, though with less levelling; crispier... funny also that the Mighty Lemon drop David Newton is involved in the production because I was reminded slightly of their second LP: more indie ghosts creeping around the margins, indie equivalents of Cathy Dennis; lurkers, keeping their hands in the indie pies, waiting for a sound to catch their attention and kickstart a mini-revival or a spree of eBay activity...

The Mighty Lemon Drops released 8 albums.

I wonder... Aphex Twin claimed he wasn't aware of any of Xenakis, Stockhausen, Tod Dockstader, David Tudor et al... that he came to similar conclusions from different directions... could this be true of the new indie mobs too? ... something in the aether (the ether - a bad pint dream)? ... a sound-meme that travels down the generations, half heard and attenuated, from the kicking fields of Sherborne's Woolmington Pub (some will know) to Portland or Baltimore or Venice... ends up being recycled back into TOP SHOP indie uniforms; a spannered take on the anorak and badly fitting jeans (i.e. jeans requiring effort) of the late 80s...

The Mighty Lemon Drops released 8 albums.

The Ages of Ontological Musicology 2

Older readers may remember this, my run down of the ages of musical understanding. It ended with a heart-warming, energy-sapping descent into nostalgia and vaguely oedpipal murk that seemed destined to pre-determine future musical understanding and perhaps even further decline. Attention being redirected to other things (home improvements, promotions etc) allowed quasi-nostalgia (nostalgia for something we never had) to creep in, almost undetected. At the time of writing (Dec 2006) that seemed to be the end point, the last development but now I've had a re-think, things have changed and I think there's another stage...

13 The Post-Idealistic

This in some ways echoes my earlier sentiments on emotional bulimia, in that the stage is characterised by an acute understanding that emotional manipulation through music is happening but should not be rejected. Thus I've found that increasingly I'm listening to music which reflects my emotional state (at the moment this is dreamy techno minimalism or electro - The Field, Pan-Pot, Villalobos on the one hand and Simian Mobile Disco, CSS, Crystal Castles etc on the other) rather than music which allows me to experience emotions i'm not currently feeling - i.e. I find it difficult at the moment to engage with 'sad' music or 'angry' music. I find myself irritated by music that isn't (even cheesily) 'happy' music (which kinda kills off 3/4 of my collection).

I know the deep-seated psychodynamics of this situation are easy enough to spot for those that know me but it seems an improvment (though, of course, every stage seems like an improvement on the last) to drag myself away from urFolk miserablism or nasty twists or undanceable beatings in favour of, well, a softer surface to skid around on. I've even bought some Fabric CDs and play them all the time, happily jumping around the house until my calves pop.

The Idealistic is a clear return to the The Zeitgeist (see earlier Stages) and is perhaps motivated by much the same thing, with a spin that takes in The Forage and parts of The Inclusive and focuses primarily on affect: music as a tool of manipulation rather than emotional discovery. I'm entering the self-medication stage and it feels fine. The Idealistic stage presents an alternative reality, one that seems graspable, if improbable.

And the good good thing is that now I've returned to the club scene in some small ways (still can't handle a school night) I've discovered that loads of other people around my stage are returning too...

Blackbeard Dub

I go through phases with reggae. In recent months I've been listening to old Roots and Dub elpees almost exclusively for the purposes of home relaxation, or when 'chilling out', if you will. The rest of the family are somewhat ambivalent towards this, but at least there's no outright hostility this time. Occasionally the kids might pick-up on a tune, though usually for entirely the wrong reasons. The Congos' "La La Bam-Bam" proved popular for a while, but only because they thought the words were "what a yellow bum bum" resulting in much sniggering whenever dad was caught singing along to it whilst cooking the dinner.

Pretty much anything that went through the mixing desk at King Tubby's, Channel One or The Black Ark is fine with me, although I've been finding great comfort in music created closer to home, notably the work of UK-based dub meastro Dennis 'Blackbeard' Bovell, who some might be familiar with for his production work with post-punkers The Pop Group and The Slits, or his musical arrangements for Lynton Kwesi Johnson's dub poetry albums, or his pioneering development of the Lovers Rock style. But he was a master of the dub mix too, and occasionally got the opportunity to make a whole album to himself, such as "Strictly Dub Wize" (1978) and "I Wah Dub" (1980), featuring the kind of warm, fluid fluctuations of equalisation, reverb and echo that we take for granted from a Tubby's mix, yet offering a slightly gentler and more musically varied set of ideas, possibly owing to the fact that most of the riddim tracks were derived from the soulful, melodious arrangements associated with his Lovers Rock output.

One of Bovell's most successful productions was Janet Kaye's "Silly Games" (a UK #2 hit in the summer of '79), which I'm sure many people of a certain age will have fond memories of, particularly for those dangerously high notes Janet hits near the end of the song. Many years later I was surprised to discover an album called "Dub Dem Silly", which is basically Janet Kaye 'in dub'. It's a beautiful record, full of Bovell's rich dubwise invention, yet hearing "Silly Games" stripped down into "Silly Dub" with Kaye's vocals fractured and scattered across that disrupted riddimscape for the first time was a strangely moving experience. The spaces opened out by the dub mix seemed to mirror some inner feelings of loss. Nostalgic familiarity glimpsed through the shattered lens of uncertainty.

Dub can mess with the mind (even without herbal assistance).

Blackbeard - Ska-Be-Doo-Za

Winston Edwards & Blackbeard - Ronald Biggs The Great Train Robber

Janet Kaye/Dennis Bovell - Silly Dub