Tuesday 29 March 2011

The Way We Work, The Way They Rioted

Started watching ‘The British At Work’ the other night but could only stand a few minutes. Although I was braced for all the inevitable footage of yuppies in wine bars, or holding brick-sized mobile phones (ooh, look!), nothing prepared me for the one-time au pair proudly boasting of her entrepreneurial success in marketing (or something), and Kirsty Young fawning over ‘Howard’s Way’ as if it was a TV milestone (well it was for her, apparently, representing all that was great about the ‘sexy’, aspirational 80s) – ‘kin hell! No doubt it was auto-balanced according to the BBC rule book but I didn’t get as far as the unemployed chewing crusts of stale bread in squalid flats or whatever. When I did flick back a ‘fashion’ designer was demonstrating her outstanding creation (the piped lapels for Herr Thatcher ) – enough already. There may be good footage in this series but it wound me up in the first episode with Young spouting fantastical claims for ‘we’, the modern worker, being so content blah blah. If she meant in comparison to 13-yr-old boys hacking coal in three-foot wide chambers deep underground she was still missing the fundamental point about Work, which is that no matter how comfortable ‘we’ might be in offices ‘we’ are no more satisfied than pit ponies or their yellow feathered friends. And I hate it when presenters profess to speak for me. Almost as much as I hate the notion that yuppies represented anything good in an age supposedly devoted to nothing more than privatisation, greed and other Thatcherite ‘virtues’.



The ‘anarchists’ must be stupid, so stupid that I’m tempted to believe the theory that they’ve been infiltrated by the forces of evil in order to help push through new laws relating to protesting. I don’t know what those laws will involve...perhaps ‘No Hoodies’, ‘No Masks’, ‘No Red Flags’? Anyway, who else but the intellectually-challenged would set about dismantling symbols of the tyrannical capitalist empire on the day of a mass demo, when it’s quite likely that the police will be out in force? With just a little thought, they could get away with much more on any other day of the year. Especially Christmas Day. But I suppose they have to be at their Mum’s then.

Friday 25 March 2011

Flame Out on Soundcloud

Here's a recent comp I made...very eclectic so hang on in there... enjoy.

Flame Out by timewriter

Thursday 24 March 2011

Go Away!



Please leave the blog now. Go on, clear off. I’m trying to establish a zero rating for viewers here and if you’ve got this far you’re not helping.
   A friend recently joked with me that now his blog has been reviewed in The Wire with comments regarding the lack of viewers of his site he has somehow trumped me. Well, I’ll point out the obvious, as I did to him, that a review in The Wire is only going to up his ‘hit’ rate. It’s self-defeating, but at least he didn’t submit his blog in an effort to grovel and get publicity.
   There are two ways to go, further towards a highly obscure niche, or out into the land of...whatever constitutes blog popularity. I’m doing neither, of course, being quite content to sit where I am and talk to you and a few others. That’s how you become a cult, you know. I said cult.
   But if I were to go super-niche, what subject would I choose? My domestic chores of the day, that might be a good one. The washing-up, how many knives, forks, plates, dishes. How much dust was encountered whilst hovering. And so on. How about what’s on my desk? A photo, yes, of the contents of my desk, every day. I give up, because I believe that for every madcap idea I could come up with it’s already being done by someone. Everything’s being done by someone somewhere on the internet, as you know.
   A friend recently asked how to get more traffic to his blog, not realising that asking me that is akin to asking Fred Goodwin how to win friends.
   You’ve probably guessed by now that I write purely for my own satisfaction because when I’m not working on prose this provides an alternative outlet for the vast amount of creative energy that wells up inside me and simply has to be released. That is partly true. I don’t actually have vast amounts of the stuff...just a small puddle, not a lake, but it has to be drained all the same otherwise it floods my brain and makes me moody.
   With your help I can stay less visible than my friend. All you have to do is clear off and tell your friends never to visit. Post all over the place about how worthless this blog is. It’s one way that I might succeed in failing to attract more readers.
   Now go away.

Wednesday 23 March 2011

Apple Head (Pre-Cert Home Entertainment)



This is the second, limited, vinyl-only release from Pre-Cert, the specialist sonic grave robbers. You can read about the first here. That was only 22mins long, but most music goes on way beyond the time it should have ended. Ornette’s ‘Free Jazz’ would be heard by more people if it was also 22mins long...on second thoughts, scrap that idea.
   Now Apple Head offer 24mins of music. They’re not generous, these guys, but I’m OK with that. Less is more or less always good, and it suits our low attention span era. Even a Twitter-brain could sit through this...possibly...well, one side at a time. If Apple Head were on Twitter I like to think they’d amass a million followers who they would lead into a room and torture with some ludicrous device involving blades, needles, and glass.
   This is less original than AK’s debut, which pulled off the miraculous stunt of sounding completely fresh (although with ‘A.Kirk’ printed under Mr Potato Head on the back sleeve there is some connection). Just who is responsible I don’t know, and don’t care much. It’s a secretive coven Up North...a gang of couch potato heads being drip-fed giallo films via VHS whilst sampling the soundtracks, probably.
   A few passages here feature woman speaking in Italian. She may be Italy’s answer to Fanny Craddock telling us how to make the most of gnocchi, but I doubt it. ‘Villa Scott’ sets the template for the longer pieces, and if you like Argento-style soundtracks, you’ll be Goblin’ it up – ha!
   And of course, in homage to Ennio, there has to be some stressed-out female wordless vocals, as in ‘Crepaxian Interligne’. Obvious? Yes, but that’s fine by me because they do it well. Gothic Organ? Why not – chuck that in too.
   Add to the mix a lot of subtle electrickery along with that trademark Carpenter percussive tick and you have a heavily referential but still satisfying trip through the sicko sound world. Now, I really should send this to my Italian friend for a translation.

Saturday 19 March 2011

Writing, Reading, Reminiscing...



Alistair Gray’s wry commentary on writing via Lanark states that there are two kinds of stories: ‘One was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn’t do very much’. It made me chuckle, and start thinking about my friend who once said that if the deal he was hoping to make with a publisher didn’t work out he would give up. I was surprised, and dismayed, saying I would never give up. That was in The Social bar, years ago. Now I don’t know where he is, although he did have one novel published before that conversation. I guess it wasn’t enough. It didn’t sell many copies or get any attention from the press. He disappears...his book disappears, although still sits on my shelf.
   I’m still writing, but to be honest have changed my approach a lot over the last couple of years. The old forms were no longer satisfying, and I don’t mean that in relation to the quality of my efforts. It just came to me then that I was tired of trying to write the old novel. ‘Writing is 50 years behind painting’ said Brion Gysin, over 50 years ago. Nothing’s changed. The old methodology still reigns supreme. Why? Because every loves a story, of course. I like a story, but as I was saying to a friend this morning whilst we both expressed our disappointment with Hans Fallada’s ‘Alone In Berlin’ I don’t rate a lot of novels that are supposedly ‘brilliant’. She was after language that was vibrant, poetic or creative, basically, and I’m after anything fresh, really fresh...I supposes. Although, you know me, a good yarn involving a detective, dame and lots of corpses will do. That isn’t strictly true. I’ve got lots of pulps that I’ll never read because they’re generic, but have wonderful covers. I’m not against genre, it’s just that those who take that genre by the scruff of its neck, shake the hell out of it, stamp on it, kick it around and give it life are more my shot of scotch.
   I could never get on with Pynchon (join the club?) because I found his prose so ordinary, even if the ideas are ‘big’. But then, as you may recall, I no longer tackle books bigger than a couple of centimetres, and although ‘The Crying Lot of 49’ is small, I’ve not been seriously tempted. I am currently breaking that rule by half a centimetre, I confess, by rereading Alistair Gray’s ‘Lanark’. But hey, rules are made to be broken, even your own. I’m reading it again because I found it cheap and thought I’d see if it still amazed me 30 years later. The opening Elite Cafe scene reminded why it chimed with my life at the time, back when I hung around certain cafes and bars in Aylesbury, none of which had an elite gang, but did contain cliques. The Green Man contained on any given night Punks, Skinheads, Rockabillies, Greasers and the Intelligent Mob in long black coats, for whom Joy Division were tailor-made. All that’s another story. It was in there that I met a girl I ended up seeing for three-and-a-half years. She said later that it was me being a writer that really got her attention. She might be surprised to learn that I still am.

Friday 18 March 2011

Music For Thomas Carnacki – Jon Brooks (Cafe Kaput)



In this era of upload, download, overload there’s a danger of so much sound passing through that more is heard than actually listened to, but this album is worthy of your attention.
   As a composer for film and TV it’s no surprise that Brooks knows exactly how to evoke a mood in a short space of time. He also has keen ear for a simple, infectious melody, and arranges the components artfully for maximum pleasure. Some amount to a kind of pastoral music for the digital age, wherein we stroll through Derbyshire country, yes, but Radiophonic influences aside, the impressionistic piano pieces are also a delight.
   ‘The Yellow Finger Experiments’ stands out as being different in mood and method to most other tracks. This touches on the kinds of sounds created by early exponents of electronic music. Side-by-side, ‘Electric Pentacle’ and ‘Certain Manifestations’ take us into far darker territory, and whilst The Devil Rides Out atmospherics may still be very much in vogue, Brooks does it brilliantly. Those two are followed by a lovely homage to Louis and Bebe Barron’s ‘Forbidden Planet' soundtrack; the monster approaches indeed.
   Elsewhere there are further manifestations of the spirit world called up by the medium of the synthesiser, along with the closing ‘Carnacki Theme Two’ in a John Barry style.
   First class album.


   Buy it here.

Friday 11 March 2011

How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Live Without Success



Before I go any further even though I haven’t started yet I should tell you, not should tell you, but feel compelled to tell you, that I’ve mastered an art just recently. I’ve not tried to master one before, although I do write, have created collages, even painted and failed as a musician – without thinking I was trying to ‘master’ any of these arts – why? Because in all honesty (would you expect anything else?) I believe, truly believe, Art to be something one practices through the sheer pleasure of creation, as opposed to being driven by dreams of success. That should be Success (the upper case makes all the difference).
   We know what Success is – it’s...when you get on telly as an Artist, or sell loads of your chosen art form...all of which should lead to making money, and for the sake of this argument I mean a lot of money, therefore gaining the qualification of being a Successful Artist in terms as unwritten but believed to be true by the standards of our beautiful materialist society. As opposed to arts practiced by indigenous peoples of countries you can’t pinpoint on a map, who sit in their huts making things for the pure pleasure of it or, most likely, as part of a ritual wherein said object takes on enormous significance. The same could be said of making a hit record. It is, after all, in this society anyway, apparently significant if one should appear on telly, with a hit, and garner rave reviews in such esteemed organs as The Sun (do they write about Pop?), The Wire, or Rolling Stone (assuming it still exists). Success is hereby measured in financial gain, by default, as well as...well, that’s it really, since all else follows (festival appearances, tours, t-shirts etc).
   When I scribbled a fanzine long ago someone once wrote asking me if I was a well-known journalist working under another name – as if, being a professional, I would waste time Zeroxing cut’n’paste stuff for the fun of it. But I did understand why he thought it possible in that he did see the potential for a little ‘zine as an outlet for ranting and, yes, ravings that would not be accepted by the editor of a proper magazine – an outlet, if you will, for personal opinion unfettered by editorial restraint.
   Well, truth is, I once dreamt of being that professional music journalist when I was in my teens, when Punk happened and Anything seemed possible – ha! It was for Julie and Tony, but not for me. I couldn’t even rant in an acceptable manner, although as I recall I offered a few gig/album reviews, to no avail. So life wet on, mine being a succession of menial jobs, whilst the music scene went on from Punk to New Wave, Indie and so on. As the scenes came and went my ambition just went. I came to the opinion that interviewing these bands wasn’t a particularly interesting thing to do because they weren’t interesting, to me. I spent almost ten years in the world of Jazz (it can possess you like that). And upon re-emerging into the world of modern music found Jungle to be the most exciting thing since Punk. But I didn’t want to write about it.
   At some point during my exile from modern music I came to the conclusion that Doing It was admirable in itself, if only to the creator. Yes, just do it. Why not? And if three people get to see what you’ve done and like it, all the better. More than three people liked my fanzine because I have at least five letters of appreciation.
   Now, in this world, countless people may alight upon these words and who knows what they think? Of the Art? Prose? Scribbling? I know some bloggers crave Comments and that’s understandable, but I also know that I’ve come across many fine blogs and not Commented myself, therefore I can delude myself that a few people respond similarly to this thing – by not responding in a definite (or any other) manner.
   On the subject of Comments, I had to laugh at the Telegraph journalist on The Culture Show the other week who was riled by some vicious responses to his blog, even to the extent of phoning one. What does he expect? He’s writing for The Telegraph. It did make me grateful for the fact that my audience is tiny, therefore drastically reducing the chances of trolling, attacks, etc. It also made me glad to succeed on my own terms, the only worthwhile terms, even though to simply blog is not in itself necessarily a successful venture. I succeed in giving a few things to The World, and getting stuff like this out of my system.
   Meanwhile, the art I mastered was to wash my hair in the time it takes the kettle to boil. You may scoff, but I’ve been working at it for a few weeks now and have finally judged the amount of water needed in relation to the time it takes to boil and for me to wash my hair. Never let it be said that I have not achieved anything in my life...

Wednesday 9 March 2011

Historical Recordings 1 – Various (Gagarin Records)



A Pigmy hunting ritual, Norwegian whaling festival music, Goebbels being given a demonstration of a proto-synthesizer, a séance at Sibelius’s house, a Situationist teaching a child, acoustic energy created by plankton, pig music, machinery recordings, a track called ‘Futurist Foot Soldiers’...what more do you want? This is sonic archaeology at its most extreme by Felix Kubin, who presents sound artefacts gathered over five years from various institutions, private owners and archivists. The vinyl-only gatefold sleeve LP is a much a part of the experience as what’s on it, being beautifully designed (looking like an ECM record) with extensive notes on each track. So you get both slick, minimalist design and the scratchy crackle of history. Some suggest it might all be a hoax, but I can’t believe it considering the effort needed to create both the written and sonic fiction. If so, it’s quite brilliant and even more impressive.


You can listen to some of the tracks here.

Tuesday 8 March 2011

'Flame Out' Compilation Download



A compilation I made is now available here.
An hour-long selection of titilating tunes and saucy samples.
It's an electro-jazz-prog-horror-sci-fi-classical-soundtrack kind of thing.

Monday 7 March 2011

Memowrekz - Ekoplekz (Mordant Music)




At last an album to get excited about in 2011 – the first and hopefully not the last, but regardless of things to come this will be one of the best, in my bunker anyway.
 Nick Edwards states that his music is ‘conjured into existence in an entirely analogue environment. Recorded to four-track cassette, ignoring all basic rules of good recording practice. Absolutely no post-production during mix-down/digitisation other than some very discreet ‘nips and tucks’. All extraneous noises including tape hiss, crackle and hum are intrinsic to the recordings.’ All of which make this such a compelling piece of work, yes, the crackle and hum, the noise, nuts and bolts of machines being manipulated...being driven to do their masters bidding, rather than seducing him into polishing every sound to ‘perfection’. But this is a kind of perfection, the kind that made Punk so appealing, the imperfect variety which shuns slick musicality in favour of raw self-expression. And, you know what? I haven’t even played all 33 tracks yet. ‘Toxic Shock’ is currently pummelling my brain.
   It wouldn’t matter if the remaining tracks turned out to sound like Enya – ha! – what are the chances? Slimmer than winning the lottery, or the Culture Show discovering new electronic music. Besides, if this album took a drastic nosedive, I’d still urge you to buy it.
   If Edwards has a sound like anyone else, I’ve yet to hear it, but you could say there are elements of Lee Perry, Pan Sonic at their most bone-crushing, Demons...that’s enough references. There’s some olde wobbly bass now and again, some raucous knob-twiddling, screaming synths, grating noises...a kind of ethereal grunge, and I mean that in a good way. I imagine Edwards taking a hammer, pliers and screwdriver to the controls, twisting, beating, squeezing sounds out of equipment held together by masking tape. In the spirit of not only Punk, but also classic Jamaican productions, the unrefined noises here reek of spontaneity without being artless.
   Not wanting to give the impression that this is all a discordant din, I should stress that it isn’t. When sounds are stripped down, however, it’s no less seductive, as on one of the more generic tracks, ‘Spielzeit’, where the Dub influence is most obvious. Despite having a ‘sound’, Edwards also has many ways of exploiting his methodology, more than enough to keep you listening and interested in what’s coming next.

You can buy it here

Thursday 3 March 2011

When The Music Stops - Tom Morse (1971)


'It is believed that, sooner or later, LSD will blow the mind of a user. I have seen ample proof of this. The weird words and sounds produced by these sick minds seem to release the very essence of evil.'

 



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