Clom

Buried treasures

2010-04-16T09:53:00.004+01:00

Dave Mothersole takes a look at the 80's goa party scene in "The Roots of Trance" over on Bleep43. Fascinating look at an oft-derided and misunderstood genre with a belter of a mix to accompany it. For long periods the music sounds like a good night at Optimo- really enjoyable stuff especially the fucked up Italo and synthpop of Laser Cowboys and Boytronic. Lots of the music there is available for buttons on Discogs too so i'll be getting in about it!

It's Record Shop Day the morn so I'll be tootling off around Underground Solushun, Avalanche and Coda desperately searching for a vinyl copy of Calling Out of Context!

In celebration of RSD have a wee look at Stefan Glerum's warning to Crate Diggers!

Whish!

2010-04-14T11:02:00.005+01:00

That's the sound of more than six months flying by.

Neglect of blog due to absence of much inspiration and impending/new parenthood.

Will hopefully be making some more time for this in the coming months.

Anyway, on to "current events", aka the quintannual constructed illusion of choice.

Image by Tom Leonard: have a look at his fantastic journal here. And buy some of his poetry here.

Interesting to see SupaDave and the Conservatives making a play for the old community engagement wheeze with their whizzo hard-bound, nu-serious manifesto. Seems to echo the increasing popularity of harnessing the power of the volunteer sector amongst the upper echelons of local authority management. Delightful, sounds great and resonates strongly with all them high level competencies about leading change in the organisation, challenging existing thinking and most importantly will contribute to those efficiencies we're going to be hearing so much about in the coming year! All we have to do is replace all these pesky, awkward militant stick-in-the-muds who cling to the old notion of being paid for something you're good at with a shiny-eyed army of unpaid volunteers! It's the 21st century! It's not like anyone needs a full time job any more anyway eh?

The blind side of this "Volunteers as service providers" scheme is that it inevitably requires the recruitment of the two cadres of employees that are portrayed as the villains in the narrative of public service employment: managers (to co-ordinate this army of volunteers) and bureaucrats (to administrate it). Ironic that single most significant employment drive of this Conservative attempt to diminish the size of the state will probably involve the re-employment of the quangocracy, so despised by the Tory base.

It will also be interesting to see how the Tories try to sell their schools and police forces run by "Real People" in Scotland considering they have, um, neither the mandate nor the power to implement these changes.

Or will it just end up being a massive sell off of service provision to private companies who will tender competitive bids to local authorities only to begin immediately charging more for "additional services" once they get the contract?

Still, in the race to the bottom this inspiring political message from Scottish Labour wins it by a nose.

Probably as close to saying "DON'T EVEN BOTHER" as the parties are willing to go.

Which is ultimately what they want.

Festival (Edinburgh)

2009-09-26T12:37:00.003+01:00

Brief, synoptic rundown of things i saw, did, enjoyed, hated.

Art:
Jane & Louise Wilson "Unfolding the Aryan Papers" (Talbot Rice Gallery):
Stunning, visually overwhelming meditation on Stanley Kubrick's abortive "Aryan Papers" film, abandoned after months of pre-production and characteristically meticulous research by Kubrick. Repetitions and revisitations of history, archive and memory. Cinematic without being vacuuous. Images, both from Kubrick's archive and orchestrated by the artists that live long in the memory.

Eva Hesse "Studiowork" (Fruitmarket):
Lots been written about this, endless coverage and 5 star reviews. Fragile and enigmatic sculptures. Really interesting in terms of how these small experiments constitute "work"; masterclass in how process and practice rather than finished artifacts are the elements that artists themselves find most interesting/worthwhile. Or something.

Theatre:
The sound of my voice. Citizens Theatre adaptation of Ron Butlin's superb meditation on alcoholism. Intense stuff which possibly hewed a little too close to the text to let the production really come alive theatrically. The cramped setting heightened the tension as the narrator descends into a white knuckled, mud soaked alcoholic white out. Billy Mack's performance elevated things. I definitely preferred the book which permits sufficient shades of grey to allow you to begin to like the profoundly disfunctional protagonist.

Up. First play by a good friend of mine. About a man committed to an NHS psychiatric institution, replaying the circumstances of his commital to an unseen ward-mate. Funny as fuck and dark as pitch, a really successful meditation on mental illness, depression, sexuality and alienation. Really well written, thrilled (if a little jealous) of James for his success! Laurie Brown's performance was nothing short of astonishing, he got nominated for a Stage Award for it and well deserved it.

Books:

Tons of stuff as I was working as part of the childrens festival. For fun I saw...

The Moth: Baffling New York based storytelling night relocated to the Spiegeltent for one night only. I hated it while it was happening but was thinking about it for days afterwards. 4 storytellers got onstage and had to tell a 10 minute true story. Some were good. Some were awful. There was a definite disconnect between the american performers expectations and a characteristically sceptical Edinbugh audience with many pregnant pauses for applause lengthening into chasms of silence. Also, not entirely sure the atmosphere was helped by the setting, a large, billowing tent with every emergency vehicle in the city (and a military plane fly by for the tattoo) disrupting the vibe on a number of occasions, more suited to a darker, more atmospheric situation. Definite highlight was George Dawes Green's breathless Georgian saga.

Alasdair Gray: True to form Alasdair Gray departed from his brief to read from "Fleck" his adaptation of Faust to read from "Voices in the Dark". Magic, anarchic and occasionally infuriatingly digressive it was vintage Gravian fare. I got my copy of "The Book of Prefaces", Gray's amazing anthological history of introductions to a thousand years of literature inscribed to me by the man himself which was a massive, massive thrill!

Colm Toibin & Patrick McCabe: Two of my favourite writers on the same stage. Probably the most enjoyable hour I spent at the festival this year. Real knockabout fun, both authors have clearly done this before and managed to provided insight and entertainment despite disappointing chairing and an unavoidable "What does it mean to be Irish" line of questioning.
Audience seemed to be more interested in Toibin than McCabe but both writers engaged in a meaningful, if meandering discussion with one other. You can get the audio from the EIBF website. It's well worth a listen.

That's it for the time being...

Backlog...

2009-09-26T12:29:00.004+01:00

It's been an insanely, insanely, insanely busy few months round my way.

This is a desultory attempt to catch up in whatever way I can.

Will try and split it into three posts.

Festival (Edinburgh)
Festival (Croatia)
Edinburgh Club activity (recent)

Onward!

Forthcoming.

2009-08-27T09:34:00.002+01:00

Tiny Hairy Disco Deathmatch.

2009-08-14T11:35:00.003+01:00

Get yourselves along to Kris Wasabi and David Barbarossa's disco grudge-fuck* at Sneaky Pete's tomorrow (Saturday 15th) night.
6 hours of non-stop disco shennanigans.
I'll be there.
Dressed as Grace Jones.
On the cover of Island Life.
In my mind.

Mega, mega busy round this way. Even though I'm on holidays. And have spent most of the morning on teh internets.

And another thing, i'm increasingly thinking that the festival is Edinburgh's Christmas. It's impossible to walk down the street without meeting someone you know and inevitably ends with the question "Fancy a scoop?"

Sure, it's fun to complain but there's something in the air this year.

* I know, eww.

Robomanticism

2009-08-06T14:43:00.005+01:00

Edinburgh Art/Music collective FOUND unveiled their emo-robot band creation, Cybraphon at the open of NewMedia Scotland's Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition at the InSpace gallery yesterday.

Cybraphon embodies the type of new-old-new aesthetic I was talking about previously. "Cybraphon consists of a number of instruments, antique machinery, and found objects from junk shops operated by over 60 robotic components, all housed in a modified wardrobe" (although the majority of Cybraphon's functions run off custom software). For the how, go here. The why, go here. It reminds me a little of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's "Opera for a Small Room" that was exhibited last year.

Cybraphon is resolutely modern too, being obsessed with social networking and the web, to such a degree that its prowess and popularity online impacts on its emotional state, which in turn has an effect on the music it composes. There are rumours that Richie Hawtin consulted with Cybraphon on Myspace and stole some of its ideas in surveying fans about what they'd like the return of Plastikman to look like.

Cybraphon, like many others, is naturally livid with Hawtin. Not because he stole his idea but because Cybraphon only sees the online component of its existence as informing rather than directing its practice as an artist.

There's a face off between FOUND and Cybraphon next week, unfortunately the website is saying it's sold out. Hopefully Cybraphon will notice I've written about it and grant me some sort of special robo-guestie.

Retro Stylings

2009-08-05T16:42:00.003+01:00

Two seemingly disparate articles looking at similar tendencies in disparate musics floating around just now.

Philip Sherburne's column on Pitchfork looking at the return to analogue prevalent in the post-minimal climate. He's got some interesting points, most notably about Clone's increasing quest to refine and redefine the electronic canon, looking at the (small c) "continuum" of musics that have been growing out of the roots of disco/house/boogie/techno/acid/etc. Talk of innovation (although Sherburne uses the neat phrase "sonic novelty" in addressing the excesses of the minimal boom) has moved to talk of authenticity, a phrase that in all cultural forms is loaded with as much baggage as i've seen being lugged through the streets of Edinburgh this week.

Michael Tumelty's piece in the Herald looks at the Edinburgh International Festival's current programme and the furore over the sheer volume of Early/Historical/Authentic music in this years lineup. His point being that after a number of years where Historically Informed music was percieved as a niche, specialist pursuit it is now ready to go (for want of a better word) mainstream.

There's a lot of pleasure to be gained in seeing artists who've grown in relative obscurity getting plaudits for their mastery of their chosen form. I'm eagerly anticipating watching Legowelt break out his boxes at Substance this weekend just as Tumelty seems excited at the prospect of seeing Bach Collegium Japan.

So this is really just a wee screed, saluting all the interesting music programming this year in all its forms in Edinburgh's festival this year. It's a welcome relief from the depressing uniformity of a lot of the fare on offer at the major Fringe venues- acres of posters on boards plastered with easily recognisable visual references on posters.

Self Service (Polemic 2)

2009-07-16T17:13:00.005+01:00

The current furore surrounding writers, child protection and school visits sheds more light on the self-serving imaginary landscape around which of the appointed cultural titans roam. It is a classic demonstration of writerly vanity and illustrates the vacuity of much commentary about culture in our society. It's a manufactured, orchestrated bunfight in which the shrill voices of our doomsaying heroes drown out any semblance of reasoned or illuminating discourse.

The bunfight centres around new requirements in England, Wales and Northern Ireland requiring everyone who wants to work or volunteer with children or "vulnerable people" to be vetted by the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The requirement will make it compulsory for anyone who has "regular" or intense contact with children or vulnerable adults have the checks.

This provoked the following measured responses from a predictable assembly of people what write kids books and have publicists:

"The whole idea of vetting any adult who visits many schools, but each only for a day, and then always in the presence of other adults, is deeply offensive," (Anne Fine)

"It's actually rather dispiriting and sinister. Why should I pay £64 to a government agency to give me a little certificate to say I'm not a paedophile.
Children are abused in the home, not in classes of 30 or groups of 200 in the assembly hall with teachers looking on." (Philip Pullman)

"In essence, I'm being asked to pay £64 to prove that I am not a paedophile.
After 30 years writing books, visiting schools, hospitals, prisons, spreading an enthusiasm for culture and literacy, I find this incredibly insulting."
(The database)...poisons the special relationship that exists between children and authors they admire". (Anthony Horowitz)

What is revealing about this is the manner in which the systemic insult is personalised.

No matter that this requirement covers a massive range of people who work with young people, this is transmogrified into an attack on the integrity of some of our most beloved childrens authors. Particularly hard to stomach is Pullman's sanctimonious, simple-minded assertion about abuse; coupled with both Pullman and Horowitz having the moxy to suggest that they'll be paying the £64 (unlesss blockbusting authors have ceased engaging the services of accountants these days?) we're left with a masterclass in vanity and self-regard disguised as social conscience.

For the thousands of us up here in Scotland who for a few years now have had to go through the Disclosure Scotland procedure when starting a job working with children or vulnerable adults it's less of an insult than an inconvenience. I don't believe for a second that my potential employers think that I'm a paedophile, it's just that they have to check. And that's fine. Although my flexibility in this regard may have more to do with the fact that I have to work to earn a living.

The likes of Horowitz, Pullman and Morpurgo, for all their undoubted talents, can afford to hold forth at length about "sinister" "insults" from a faceless bureaucracy. Just don't expect me to applaud their fearless decision to stop bothering to do something they don't need to do very often anyway.

It's heartening to see that the new childrens laureate, Anthony Browne offering some some much needed perspective:

"I feel that as writers we shouldn't necessarily be granted an exemption. If all people who work with children have to be vetted by the police then we shouldn't be an exception. It seems a bit odd that we have to pay for it, though."

Don't worry Anto, I'm sure you'll be able to write it off against tax.

Even better was Robert Muchamore's suitably combative Twitter message:
"Irritated at another round of whinging by the usual grey haired mafia of 'renowned' kids authors"

Anyone who works with vulnerable and damaged young people will tell you that even ordinary experiences require extraordinary effort. In their unwillingness to demonstrate even the slightest flexibility in this matter our heroes have demonstrated the true extent of their commitment.

Polemic 1

2009-07-10T14:11:00.007+01:00

Irksome post on the guardian bookblog gives way to discussion in which the usual observation-commentary-extrapolation continuum betrays one of the classic intellectual blindspots of our times whereby broad, uninformed statements based on imaginative interpretation of a strangers behaviour is presented as some sort of psychological/sociological insight.

Where Sebastian Faulks WWI snoreathon "Birdsong" soothes the savage Staffy-wielding proletarians our heroine is forced to share public transport with, the spectacle of a man reading a novel by a national treasure is a transparent (and creepy) attempt to seduce and destroy. I acknowledge that my irritation probably stems from the possibility that people would misinterpret my adoration of Smith's work as an attempt to curry favour with the sisterhood rather than the fact that she is bloody marvellous.

Anyway, this tendency seems to extend throughout the literatosphere: the use of observation as a springboard from which the (normally reasonably well established) author can vault headlong into a soup of their own anxieties and present them as a problem for society. Frequently, observations of this nature reveal more about our author than it does about the subject. This is something that makes my heart sink as the "hook" for the author is that the subject is, in itself, interesting.

An example?

Let's have a look at a recent profile of arch-charlatan Sue Palmer trailing her latest notional treataise on the plight of 21st Century boys:

"NOT SO long ago, Sue Palmer was walking through Edinburgh's Queen Street Gardens. She had her dog on the lead and was minding her own business, when she happened upon what she describes as a "dreadfully upsetting sight".

"There were these three young women from a nursery having a chat, and they had nine little children with them on leads," says the Edinburgh-based author, who has published several acclaimed books about modern childhood. "I looked at those children and thought, 'they're getting less attention and time than my dog'. I don't think the women were being uncaring, but the fact that the children were on leads was just symptomatic of the fact that we seem to have comprehensively lost track of one of the most important elements of raising children: personal, loving contact."

I don't know if Ms Palmer has ever experienced the butt-quaking terror of trying to organise a group of young children anywhere out of doors but it does betray the fact that the origins of many of her theses reside in a school of thought we can call Nosey-Parkerdom. Furthermore, there is no indication as to whether Ms Palmer made any effort to ascertain to what extent these children were being denied personal, loving contact. Is the fact that these young children in nursery in itself neglectful? Or is it the use of leads? Coupled with Palmer's suggestion that children should not enter primary education until age 7 we're right into stay-at-home-parent territory aren't we?

"We've got screen saturation in our homes now, and we've got lots of ways little boys can and do end up in front of screens. We've got faster and faster in terms of the amount of technology we now use, and we've sort of forgotten that children are still the same creatures they've always been. They're born with these stone-age little brains and in order to bring them up well we have to slow down a bit and acknowledge they exist in biological time not technological time. We're fastforwarding them into the 21st century and that is contributing to an increase in emotional behaviour and social problems."

Speaking to people with experience of working with young men who would be considered as having what is charmingly titled Social Emotional and Behavioural difficulties I can't see how screen saturation (or technological exposure) necessarily feeds into their specific problems. The vast majority of their problems stem from broader social problems, poverty, neglect, deprivation, delinquency, early exposure to alcohol, drugs, solvents, absence of a strong or coherent community outside a peer group. You know, the kind of stuff that doesn't really stoke the ardour of Conservative Party Conferences as much as the simplistic Modern Life is Rubbish agenda peddled by high profile chuckleheads like Palmer.

"Boys need a lot of outdoor activity and play in order to develop the control of their limbs and minds that will allow them to sit down in class. If you have a little five-year- old boy trying to make a den or build a fort, it doesn't matter in play whether it falls down or not, but if we put them under pressure with targets in a classroom, they know this is the grown up world and they've got to please grownups, and if they're not capable of doing that at that age and they fail you've got a good chance of turning them off for life."

Here again we have a simple, innocuous statement (children need exercise) acting as a springboard for a Flying forward one-and-a-half somersault, pike
into an imagined pressure cooker school where p1 & 2 where boys are expected to knuckle down and forget about all that nonsense about playing and sharing or ever going outside again.

We have the imagined world of worried little boys, locked up inside with no place for creativity and fun, this is a world which, in the interview, has been entirely fabricated without recourse to any basis in fact. It is the authors OWN NIGHTMARE.

This, again, doesn't tally with experience of working with young people on the sharp end of the behavioural spectrum. The circumstances that lead young people to fail at school and to be turned off education for life are likely to have more to do with disruption in their educational experience. Every local authority will have a number of children (boys and girls) who from an early age are percieved as being SEB. The profound sense of alienation from education they will almost certainly experience will be learned by these young people as they are bounced from class to class, school to school, unable to settle into groups and perpetually viewed as a burden on the schools physical and human resources. This has precisely nothing to do with Palmer's imagined dislocation and everything to do with the all too real psychological horror of vulnerable children being pushed to the margins of mainstream society at an age when their need for basic education is most pronounced.

"With teenage boys, the peer pressure is to be edgy – to do bad things that are anti-establishment, anti-education and anti-social. They want an edgy, cool image that comes from media and marketing and computer games."

The gobsmacking revelation that young men want to be seen as individuals in their journey towards adulthood is so self-evident and banal as to inspire skepticism of practically everything that's gone before.

So what's my point? That the current urge to pathologise every aspect of youth development only fuels the profound sense of unease with young people, the fact that this perspective is marketable by publishers to an affluent and influential class of people who are psychologically and socially remote from the vast majority of ordinary society only serves to tighten the discursive circle where a diminishing clique claque about the "crisis" in their imagined childhoods.

Where previously a tension existed between the adult worlds instinctive protective instinct and natural generational distaste at adolescents, the adults are now locked out in the cold. The adult world observes, annotates and wrinkles its nose in distaste at a youth culture they can't understand and so they attempt to imagine they understand. And by imagining they understand the problem, their solution is rooted in how they imagine the world rather than how the world actually is.

Important caveat: This is merely an anlysis of the profile of Palmer and not a review of the book (which, despite my deep seated reservations, I will read on release and attempt to trawl through it without harrumphing the world back to the stone age).

Whatever you do...

2009-06-26T01:02:00.003+01:00

...don't turn on the telly...
...for the next 3-4 months...

Let there be night.

2009-06-12T17:17:00.003+01:00

Off on a wee holiday around the Baltic.

Gdansk, Shipyards, Herrings, Vodka, Old battlefields, Lakes and all manner of Hanseatic hi-jinks.

Oh, and this.

To say I am excited would be an enormous and reckless understatement!

We're jammin'

2009-06-05T15:29:00.014+01:00

As the weekend approaches I wearily notice I haven't updated this in an age.

Work is the curse of the discursive classes. Or some old winsome guff like that.

Any road. This week is the last chance Edinburgh residents will get the chance to check out the unmissable Francesca Woodman retrospective. Anyone who doesn't bother to do so is on the shit list forever. Or at least goes into the book as a philistine who chose not to take a rare opportunity to gawp at a distinctive and unnerving body of work by a fascinating and obviously uniquely talented photographer.

There's some great background information and online galleries at the Ingleby site for those of you who can't make it along but it's well worth the trip. There's a limnal, haunted melancholy to Woodman's work, the circumstances of her death (by suicide, aged 22) amplifying the already creepy and disturbing erasions and distortions in the pictures- it's absolutely incredible to think that many of the earlier pictures featured in this exhibition were taken by Woodman when she was (by my calculation) only 13 or 14. This poignancy is heightened by the knowledge that few prints saw the light of day during Woodman's lifetime.

The exhibition coincides with a smaller collection of Woodman's work in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as part of the Artists Rooms series.

The experience of being in the Ingleby pristine, quiet, sun-drenched gallery is slightly disconcerting as the building previously housed Edinburgh's legendary dark, sweat and booze encrusted "Venue".

Anyway. Event of the weekend is the Firecracker night at Jam the Box in GRV.

Local friendly vinyl pusher Fudge Fingas goes back to back with Linkwood Family member House of Traps in a three hour vinyl pile-up. Hopefully it'll whet appetites for the forthcoming Disco 3k weekender in Croatia.

Deviants may want to check the bizarro burlesque bacchanal Confusion is Sex tonight with FriendOfClom Kris Wasabi playing bangers in the main room after Gutter Klinik, a band "specialising in gayer-than-cum-on-a-moustache pop". Indeed.

I'm tempted but I'm a one-night a weekend man this weather.

More to come soon, I promise, including something about all these fuds who've retrospectively decided they never liked Sonic Youth because they were never really a band anyway more a late-capitalist curatorial project enslaving us all in some sort of po-mo whorl of tasteful countercultural signifiers until you just can't tell what's properly avant-garde anymore! Or you can obviously, and do, with a side order of obfuscatory dialectical mince.

Two baldheads fighting over a comb.

2009-05-14T17:57:00.005+01:00

Delightful story in which bland, soulless venues operating as nighttime holding pens for Edinburgh's burgeoning no-brow Edinburgh market slug it out over customers who, in my experience, exhibit a manifest absence of discernment regarding where they choose to catch dysentery off the toilets on a Saturday night.

It's not clear whether the citation of acts like Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs and the Sugababes formed the basis for Simon Frith's evidence.

Or whether any answer as to for the love of fuck WHY these shitholes are so successful.

Is it any wonder the weejies smirk knowingly whenever Edinburgh's nightlife is mentioned?

Anyway.

To dispel all thoughts of indie-gonk-moppets wiggling their uncoordinated arses and braying along to the Kaiser Chiefs I'm off to Riddim Tuffa tomorrow to see Jahtari Riddim Force at the GRV.

Waxy treats.

2009-05-01T13:14:00.004+01:00

Things that are making my life worthwhile.

Nacho Patrol- Futuristic Abeba- Danny "Legowelt" Wolfers' new album is getting a lot of attention and i'm looking forward to checking it out but this, his second release as Nacho Patrol, is a surprising beautiful slice of african influenced, organ-soaked joy. Everything is so organic, summery, warm and delicious. Quite different to last years spiky imaginary soundtrack "The Maze of Violence" (a record my wife forbids me from playing when we have company round!).

Juju and Jordash- Dekmental 001 12"- Dutch producers first release on their own new label. Great, bit more driving than usual but retains the interdimensional galaxian feel that they always bring to the table. The end of "Super Blue Meanies" stopped me in my tracks when the lads in Underground Solushn played this when I asked for it. Made me go immediately to Levon Vincent's "Six Figures" from earlier in the year. Lerosa remix on the b-side is a loping dubbed out treat too. Online mixes provide a superb introduction to their sound, a rich, varied no-boundaries style that i can't get enough of.

Hieroglyphic Being- So much noise 2 be heard- Impeccable future machine jazz. Geniunely mindboggling emotion and feel from pretty much everything on these two 12"s. Hard to classify, there are just so many ideas. Everything feels so, so, so right. Sensational in every sense of the word. Checked out the Les Aeroplanes 12" on Mathematics that's getting a lot of attention just now. It's also very good but times is hard and I had to leave it.

Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics- Inspiration Information- Was really looking forward to this and not disappointed. Saw Heiliocentrics live a few years ago at Headspin and was really impressed with the way they manage to keep it weird as all hell and so tight at the same time. Reminds me a little of the underrated Up Bustle and Out when they went to Cuba and really opened up their sound but there is a lot more depth and experimentation here. I always get the sense that UB&O were never given the credit due to them, especially for the slightly demented feel of their later, live sessiony stuff. Mulatu Astatke is a complete legend, there's a nice piece on him (and further stuff about Soundway, Strut and Analog Africa) here.

Banda los hijos de la nina luz- Dejala Corre/El Sapo/Crees Que Soy Sexy- Demented Afro/Latin medely version of If you think I'm sexy on Soundway 7". Woot!

Politics, Protest, Resistance.

2009-04-23T12:41:00.004+01:00

While I generally find a lot of online political discourse pitifully by-numbers and prone to simplistic, "so, what's in the papers" nodding-dog-ism you occasionally stumble across a screed of online opinion that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Below is possibly the most inspiring thing I have read this week.

Some small edits from the posted article and addition of my own emphasis.

" My experience of union meetings though is that there is a vast reservoir of libido waiting to be tapped; at meetings, there was an animated disaffection with auditing and new bureaucracy which immediately dissipated when the 'official' agenda - pay and strikes - was dutifully returned to.

New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism.

For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members...

What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labour which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without.

Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it's time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up the crisis - their crisis, our opportunity... - to begin to rid public services of business ontology. (When even businesses can't be run as businesses, why should public services?)"

The increasing managerialisation extends beyond education into every sphere of social engagement, the necessity that outcomes of unstarted programmes be drafted and agreed on before anyone's got in a room to discuss the practical work of funded projects, pervades most forms of cultural engagement (in the broadest sense, including the arts, sports and any form of work with young people). The priority to legitimise all money spent rather than the boring, invisible, yet substantive and crucial element to any form of engagement, namely the development of human relationships and the time and effort required for these to bear fruit.

This managerialisation prioritises an immediate, ephemeral, illusory impression of work ahead of the sloppy, unreliable, frequently tardy yet real and lasting reality of any form of constructive and deeply engaged practice. With the papers full of spending squeezes and efficiency savings the overriding impression is that more time will be spent accounting for money spent and less time spent engaged in actual activity.

In times when there's less money around surely the one resource we should be afforded more of is time?

Upside to Downturn with Downsize Reprise

2009-04-01T16:06:00.006+01:00

Belated bleating return to the lately neglected posting.
Last Friday saw the long awaited return of Downsizesound, a sort of preparatory post-apocalyptic hoe-down.

Volk-mensch Drew Wright aka Wounded Knee ("A man hard at play"- Plan B, "a collaboration between Scatman John, Steve Reich and Alasdair Roberts"- Alternative Ulster, "Tuvan-Paul Robeson throat singing"- Buzz, "We won’t be needlessly cruel, but avant-garde is still French for bullshit"- NME) was joined by Alisdair Roberts, Issho Taiko Drummers and One Ensemble's Peter Nicholson for an evening of strange, ageless chicanery, electricity free.

Wright's opening gong assisted incantation welcomed us in a cheery, well considered hymn before getting down to his purple scanties, jaunty socks and snug fitting vest in a shameless piece of exhibitionism designed to get a large turnout on side. Mission accomplished and away we went. Plugged in the Knee ranges over a lot of territory, incorporating ideas from super traditional Scottish folk to noise, to Sun Ravian freeness, to house music and out to a ever sprawling transit through world musics. In downsizing he still managed to fit a lot in, an audience-assisted noise piece dedicated to ill friend, collaborator and drone prince Fordell Research Unit, some old favourites (21st century worksong "Lanyard", the hummable, plaintive ecological call of "Canary"), devastating, age-old folk songs like "Glenlogie" and "The Dowie Dens of Yarrow" were interspersed with illuminating and engaging introductions to the songs and great singers and recordings of them. He finished positing the interesting and convincing theory that come a world where our worst predictions are realised that the humble cassette tape will be our only remaining available connection with recorded history before wondering whether his final tape would be the ones we treasure more. He pressed play on a battery operated tape machine and a tape of birdcall, complete with RP-inflected commentary. A magical and evocative beginning from someone who is clearly comfortable in their skin, practice and possessed of a burgeoning creative energy. Well done fella!

A quick pee and beer break later and One Ensemble's Peter Nicolson launched into a stirring set with a (open to correction) Central European folk song that suits his soaring voice and cello to a t. He played a longer free piece that was riveting, as he careened up to the bridge, playing high, jarring staccato, jagged wrong notes and leaping around matching his voice to each and every note. I don't know enough about Nicolson's work to speculate but he's a virtuosic player without ever shutting an audience out, although some people I spoke to found it really intense, coiled and nervy and dark. Not necessarily a bad thing.

I was a bit overawed by the Alasdair Roberts performance, had heard a couple of his albums but never really returned to them, this was the first time I was able to see him live after repeatedly been too lazy to go and see him. It's difficult to describe the music he makes, you could call it folk or traditional or even stick him alongside the likes of Smog or Will Oldham or Joanna Newsom but I don't think it really does him justice. Some of the new songs from his new album "Spoils" are absolutely fantastic, especially "Eternal Return" and a hilarious and cynical about the three aspects of Man that inspire us all to be "complete bastards". His lyrics are complex and on the surface can seem a bit hokey, there's much talk of types of trees and birds and esoteric heraldry but have a pleasantly baffling contemporary resonance. He's a really inquiring, questing writer and his lyricism is occasionally flabbergasting. Sometimes when he delivers a line it's a bit like the sun coming out, it actually warms your face to hear it, the lines elemental inevitability is exhiliarating. Steady!

To finish the evening off we had the Ishoo Taiko Drummers. Four Taiko drums dominated the setup all evening and I alternated between excitement and apprehension, I've been to too many places where bombastic, directive massed drumming completely batters any sense of nuance out of a performance. Ishoo are a fundamentally "plugged" group, as a band member said early on the show required a significant rethink of how they'd perform. A beautiful introductory piece with restrained taiko tempos, acoustic guitars and flickering flute stops quickly dispelled any fear this was going to be a juddering, predictable drum circle. A later piece used four tuned acoustic guitars played with steel skewers, letting the reverberations echo through the space. A later piece saw two performers demonstrate the xylophone's hypnotic synthy possibilities in a piece that was strongly reminiscent to everything that's wonderful about Steve Reich, a sort of motorik, percussive Mogwai.

I ended up buying a CDR on the strength of the performance which was a great end to an interesting and varied evening. Well done and thanks to Drew to organising it.

Hopefully I'll get some pictures from the evening.
Everyone loves pictures of a man in purple pants.

Credit to the Nation.

2009-03-18T13:06:00.004Z

Thanks to all the fine Irish patriots who last night contributed to the stinking lake of boozy urine all along the Cowgate.

There's nothing that makes an Irishman prouder than the rancid pissreek of his compatriots.

Hail. Glorious. Etc.

Adjective invective

2009-03-17T15:39:00.004Z

Jonathan Meades, broadcaster, writer and most wonderful man on the planet sticks his exquisitely polished loafers into "iconic" and its lazy, arbitrary usage in a profession that is evidently aware, but way past caring it's on its deathbed.

"Here are some nouns and compound nouns that have been prefixed by this most dismal of vogue words. These are all found constructions of recent provenance: none is my invention.

...

iconic injury-time winner, iconic itinerary, iconic jihad target, iconic jigsaw, iconic jingle, iconic jockey, iconic joke, iconic kitchen utensil, iconic knife, iconic knowledge, iconic lawnmower, iconic leprechaun, iconic light fitting, iconic lion, iconic lip balm, iconic mascara, iconic milkshake, iconic mittens...iconic radiator, iconic relationship, iconic restaurant, iconic retail mall, iconic robot, iconic rodent, iconic saddle, iconic sandwich, iconic sausage, iconic shampoo, iconic shoe, iconic shoehorn, iconic shop, iconic silhouette, iconic snack food..."

Impassioned, erudite, thought provoking and delivered with characteristic rhetorical élan, I could read his prose all day and night.

For those who haven't entered the invigorating, sardonic cult of Meadues you could do worse than to dig up the BBC DVD of Jonathan Meades Collection which is a compilation of some of his unique TV programmes from 1990-2007.

Try to ignore the fact that the dullards at 2entertain didn't bother their lazy arses licensing the original music and you're left with dreary MIDI tracks where a brilliant soundtrack enhanced Meades' high-falutin' grand guignol on topics as diverse as 1960's church design, uterine yearning in Finnish modernism and East Anglia as a marooned extension of Holland.

There are also links to a number of articles on Clive James page who describes him as "an educated upstart who not only doesn’t know his place, but knows far more than his allotted share about all the other places."

More Meades related wonderfulness in the New Statesman in which he digs up Kenneth Clark and defiles the memory of the respected"Civilisation" series saying "If the Edwardians had had telly, this is what they would have put on it: it was stately, formal and ponderous."

Oh sweet suffering...

2009-03-17T11:59:00.005Z

Archived music press' feature on early live UK techno.

My particular fave is Reynolds' contention that "Yank Dj's can't compete with Brits when it comes to building peaks and plateaux".

Peerless and utterly groundless snarking from the 'nuumfinder general, along with some supreme prime high-hattery about "regressive strain in rave culture...exacerbated by the fact that half of them look like they're only 13".

Dirty Deeds Done Dead Cheap

2009-03-10T10:01:00.005Z

Amazing stuff here with an inventor/creator/mad genius making an instrument a day for a month. There are so many great ideas here, the best/most useful design is probably the mobius strip but i think the garden turntable (pictured) is the barkingest, most wonderful thing I've seen this year! Photos, videos, sound samples; follow the link.

This was a part of a wider "Thing-a-day" project where people made one item per day for the entire month of February, the kind of thing that makes me feel phenomenally lazy.

Seen on and stolen from AudioLemon.

A square peg in a round (k) hole

2009-03-06T12:07:00.008Z

The seemingly endless theoretical wrangling over the existence and extent of the fabled "Hardcore Continuum" reaches something approaching a tabloid bunfight today as noted theory gonk, Simon Reynolds (someone for whom the existence of the HC represents a something of a meal ticket) kicked wonky to the HC curb for ideological heresy.
The crime? Not fitting neatly with Reynolds' thesis and key producers rejecting Reynolds' analysis (and possibly implying that he's, like totally old). What emerges from this little narrative can be summarised thus:

Reynolds

doesn't really like wonky. He can't dance to it. It's influenced by musics outside those universally decreed to be part of the HC "canon". Some people might take Ketamine at dances. It smells. Luke Vibert probably did it first. It involves producers from outside London engaging with a broader community, enabled by the internet. There are no 'zines. Or if there are the 'zine authors are insufficently conversant with Marxist theory and refuse to engage with an overwrought dialectical style birthed by hip young journalistic gunslingers in early 90's London.

Heaven forfend! The struggle for the discursive high-ground regarding wonky fails to see the energy, invention and excitement in that "scene" at the moment.It seems Reynolds would prefer if the major players conformed more to geographical or ideological boundaries, he seeks to

compare/contrast it with sounds that have a more philosophical basis. He doesn't seem to want them running around, hanging out, collaborating and learning from producers from all over the world. It's disappointing that a writer, who professes allegiance to the energy, anarchy and vitality of hardcore seems so intent on decrying ideological heresy among young producers.

I like Reynolds' writing, he's written some superb analyses of significant recent music history. But there are limitations to how far you can apply theory to reality. Throughout the history of dance musics there has been a "folk" element to certain scenes, locality and the sense of community that's formed through friendships and going to the same parties, listening to the same records, hanging out in the same pubs all contribute to productions.

Disco in 1970's New York was a diverse genre with certain clubs forging a distinct musical identity. From this chaos history is made, certain records were deemed "Garage" records, certain ones "Loft", certain ones "Studio". The Glaswegian Numbers crew are clearly influenced by Dopplereffekt and other US musics, undoubtedly through the Club 69/Rub a Dub crew. This is its own continuum, one that doesn't begin and end at the Watford Gap.

The Scottish Hardcore continuum (if such a thing even exists) is a significantly different beast (and has a different legacy) to that of, say Ireland. Through donning the straitjacket of Reynolds' theory we only see part of the picture, and one that is possibly seen through the rosy tinted specs of hindsight.

In a recent post, ISM's Pipecock really articulates the excitement of discovery, the simple joy of playing, listening to and losing your mind to records; looking to a musical continuum that isn't theoretical, one that's personal, that's formed through friends, great parties and just fucking doing it without fully understanding it.

One that "inspired damn near everyone I know to go buy record by cats like Drexciya and Basic Channel and start throwing them in the mix with any old funky electronic shit we could find."

Amen to that.

My/Your/Our

2009-01-24T12:10:00.006Z

I'm unconvinced as to the extent to which My Girls and Your Love work together. It feels a little forced. Isn't the whole idea behind this mashup malarkey to juxtapose unlikely things over each other rather than just spotting similarities between synth lines?
Thoughts?

I don't think it quite syncs up either, although towards the end the addition of a kick indicates that lurking inside My Girls' baggy shuffle there's the makings of a great disco mix.

Anyway, if it's reworks of Your Love you're after you're better off with Edinburgh's xvectors who covered it a few years ago. Imagine a grumpy Chic fronted by Elvis Costello and you're half way there.

They play Optimo in Edinburgh on the 31st and will apparently be playing a heft of new tunes.

blush

2009-01-21T19:32:00.005Z

crivvens!

persons unknown, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that this blog merits nomination in the "Best Personal Blog" category of the Irish Blog Awards!

thank you mysterions! i am flattered and charmed at your benevolent generosity in the face of repeated procrastination, barely comprehensible rambling and inelegant, overcomplicated phrasing.

the lovely logo at the top was created for the wonderful Confessions of a Film Critic blog by Annie and stolen by me from her comments on the Irish Blog Awards site.

Together we're stronger.

2009-01-16T09:30:00.011Z

So, Merriweather Post Pavillion is finally out after what feels like a whole year of claims and counter-claims as to its ability to cure the sick, lame and wounded. It's a wonderful, charming piece of work that will surely satisfy anyone who has taken an even passing interest in their varied and extensive body of work over the last 8 years. I got a vinyl copy and was delighted to get a little card that entitled me to a 320kbps mp3 version although I had to wait for the official digital release date last Monday to redeem it. Thankfully this meant I was able to listen to it on the bus through to Glasgow on the way to see them. As the bus trundled along the M8 and the setting winter sun blinded me through the window I got completely lost in the spiraling, morphing beauty of the closing "Brother Sport". Most of the talk has been about "My Girls" but for me they've kept the best 'til last- from the opening round-singing to the blistering finale it represents the band in all their exuberant, yelping glory. The album had a real buzz about it, I spoke to someone in Glasgow's superb Monorail shop who said that they'd sold more than 35 copies in the first week of release, pretty much the biggest seller they've had for years. He also said a lot of those sales were to people they'd never seen in the shop before. The record has obviously captured the imagination of the storied Download Generation as well as format gonks like yours truly.

The anticipation was palpable at the Art School with the venue jammed well before the start of the gig and queues at the bar delaying much needed liquid refreshment. The Art School used to be cheap for beer, it appears that even in Glasgow you have to work hard to find a pint under £3.
Even Nice and Sleazy's, Glasgows alterna-mecca isn't immune, I was charged a mindboggling £4.50 for a pint bottle of Deuchars as I waited for the wife to come through from Edinburgh.

The band were on promptly and launched immediately into "In the flowers". All three stood in front of a big bank of lights and speakers behind their consoles of synths, samplers and various electronicey odds and sods. As the music built to the first collective peak, the lights behind them ignited, dazzling everyone and creating a neat visual ambience to go with the circling, spiralling pulse. Some of the people I was with found it offputting, a little blinding and disorienting whereas I was transported back to my window seat on the CityLink earlier that day with the sun blinding me as I pressed "repeat" on the album as we pulled out from Harthill.

The set was probably the most conventional I've seen from Animal Collective with them playing more than half of the new album and songs from Strawberry Jam alongside a number of extended works in progress that is their trademark (see edit/apologia below).

Still and all the gig was superb, a blinding carnival of sound, light and euphoria and the crowd lapped it up. "Summertime Clothes" a highlight with it's repeated layered refrain of "I want to walk around with you" and a hint of Battles' robo-deathkill anthem "Atlas" clattering its way through the second section. With the arrival of the spiralling opening synth line of "My Girls" and the attendant whoops and cheers, I found myself thinking that this band's time has come. Avey Tare bouncing on the balls of his feet, whooping his heart out, as Panda Bear intoned as simple and heartfelt and beautiful a love song as I've ever heard. I was left with the feeling that the song has been sung better. In fact, you get the feeling that this incarnation of Animal Collective could really change someone's life in a different setting, outside, on a big stage, in front of a huge crowd, there to maybe see someone else. In an ideal world they will follow Orbital's return to the stage at this years Big Chill and emulate that bands fabled Glastonbury "arrival" in their own way.

The lengthy version of "Fireworks" strangely enhanced by smatters of clapalongs from some enthusiasts down the front, a supremely tense, trembling "Peacebone" (edit 21/1/09: i haven't remembered correctly, it was actually "Grass", well, at least as far as I can remember it was, a subsequent interview indicates it might actually have been another, at the time unrecognised, gem from the back catalogue!) and a rousing rendition of "Brother Sport" saw them leave the stage and return for three more works in progress. The wheels occasionally come off in these jams with ideas disappearing off into the ether. As I said before it's possible that the muddy sound and indoor venue meant that the gig never quite soared, there was no massive epiphany, no bombast, just an ecstatic babbling throb. And no mean feat in itself.

They're a superb live band that have been on a rich and complex musical journey, similar in a way to Four Tet in the way that they've consistently subsumed musical influences into their work without ever really sounding like anyone else. The crackling, burbling effects and clickety-clackety drumsticks never far from the sprawling horizon they conjure. But what's strange about a band so rhythmic is how resolutely unfunky they are! Sure, there are technoey tinges to the new material; Panda Bear and Geologist are clearly talented electronic musicians but there's no bounce to the beats, it's impossible to really cut a rug to this stuff beyond doing what a friend described years ago as the "indiekid twitch". On the mix CD that accompanies the vinyl in Rough Trade shops, Kode 9 & LD's "Bad" sits alongside Erykah Badu's "Telephone": These are tracks with some serious bump. You get the feeling that elements of these tracks are more aspiration than reality, it's the next frontier for them; how to move from a pulse to a throb, from a jam to a groove?

This is where they maybe lag behind fellow travellers Black Dice, Gang Gang Dance and TV on the Radio, bands from similar backgrounds achieving similarly jawdropping feats with recent releases. All of these bands have the funk, particularly Gang Gang's appropriation of 2 step and TV on the Radio's searing Princeadelic stylings on their albums from last year. It's not that I don't love Animal Collective. It's just I feel they, as artists, are funkier than they sound. They're not incapable of it, parts of Panda Bear's "Person Pitch" album and his collaboration with Scott Mou on the Jane albums contain the elements I'm struggling to describe.

Anywwhat. No trip to the weej would be complete without a trawl through the racks of rubadub and monorail!

Pole: Alles Klar/Alles Gut (~scape 12")

Great detailed dubbiness from Herr Betke. Heard this live a few months ago and have been eagerly awaiting its arrival.

Bim Marx: Stronger (stilove4music)

Nice edit of a Loleatta Holloway track but the real gold is on the b-side. 2 deep groovy slowmo disco treats!

Sprigs of Time: 78's from the EMI Archive (Honest Jons)

Beautiful beautiful beautiful time capsule of a variety of old 78's from all over the world. Bengali begging songs, a phonetic guide to the english alphabet to a beautiful old folk song "Sprigs of Thyme" sung by Joseph Taylor.

Note: Late night edits. Tidying up "grammar", occasional revisionism and general award-nominee anxiety going on here. And additional tag malarkey afoot. Drink taken. Etc.

...And shake it all about.

2008-12-23T15:50:00.004Z

One of the most dependable aspects of life in Scotland is that in the week preceding any Old Firm clash that there will be a story in the newspaper that insults the intelligence of the entire country more significantly than the thousands of braying 90 minute cretins that will no doubt pack the pubs all over Scotland and Ireland on the 27th.

It is also inevitable that these chancers will turn up at some point offering juicy cliche-riddled anecdotes of a time when men were men and an Old Firm would result in nine men on the pitch and everyone questioned by the polis after.

The stinking farts of publicity going both ways.
Plague. Houses. Etc.

Christmas Gifts

2008-12-18T16:58:00.005Z

Edinburgh's wonderful shazzblat shaman, Wounded Knee, is offering his peerless seasonal sleigh song "Cold Enough to Snow" for free download from here until January 5th.

The 'Knee has a couple of belters on his myspace just now including an extract from his new release "Orpheus" on Distance Recordings which is a spine tingling live recording of extended vocal improvisations in the tunnels under the Victory Column in Berlin. Oooh, get him. The featured extract "Canary" is my favourite Wounded Knee song and I have frequently given renditions late at night on on drunken nights home. Thankfully there are no surviving recordings of these as he is notoriously litigious.

There's also the wonderful skaters-referencing "My Wooden Cupboard" that featured on the Wire Tapper a few months ago.

Live 'Knee action tomorrow the 19th of December at Canongate Kirk along with other artists from the Edinburgh Composers Collective.

So much, so little

2008-12-12T17:07:00.007Z

Apologies for lack of action in recent weeks. My work life has taken a turn for the hectic. In all a good thing, but exhausting.

Hoping to get some time over the weekend to write up a few things.

In the meantime here's a haul of some recent, thoroughly irresponsible purchases.

STL- 51 North (Something): Gold. Absolute gold. Insistent, hypnotic, mysterious house music. This completely transports you without seeming to actually go anywhere. Was looking to get some STL having heard the name discussed in end-of-year discussions. Was buying the doublepack and my local record dealer told me to take this too. Gorgeous. To such an extent I sent an incoherent gushing and obviously drunken email to all the staff at the record shop about how much I loved it. So now.

Zomby- Rumours and Revelations (Brainmath): The usual high quality from someone who's going to be huge next year. I'm very, very annoyed that I couldn't find a copy of "Liquid Dancehall" earlier on this year. Eagerly awaiting spending more of my dwindling funds on Hyperdub 16.

$tinkworks- Coelacaenth (strange life records): *Blub*. This record makes me feel funny.

Mikkel Metal- Peaks and Troughs ep (part3) (Echocord): Bought the last one for the Pole remix. And this for Mike Huckaby. Beautiful stuff,

DJ Stingray- Aqua Team 2 (WeMe records): Don't really know what to say about this yet. The usual Drexcian malarkey but I think records like this give up their secrets slowly. Or something. *Update* This is superb. The second record has a stateliness and poise that's all too rare these days. Like being in a deserted church at midnight. For fans of Tri-Repetae period Autechre.

Reggie Dokes- Rain Redemptive Love EP (Philpot): Class. Bought as a few people on InfiniteStateMachine were boosting it as one of the tracks of this or any year. They're not wrong. All three tracks are superb.

Moodymann- KDJ23: I've passed over this record loads of times thinking "Nah, I'll just get it some other time". Having missed out on a couple of beauties this year I decided not to leave it to chance. The bells on A1 remind me of being surrounded by pealing bells while walking through a park.

Peverelist- Clunk, Click, Every Trip (Punch Drunk): Sweet. Yet more goodness from Punch Drunk high heid yin, Peverelist. Serious Underground Resistance business going on here. A sister piece to his Shackleton remix earlier from this year. And he released Gemmy's fantastic "Bk 2 the future". Is there nothing the man can't do?

I'm off to the Giant Tank/Missing Twin Christmas Party tonight for some Usurper/Muscletusk insanity and the drinking of strong beer.

for the love of god

2008-11-30T02:49:00.003Z

i know
indeed
whatnot
etc
doodledoodledoodledoodledoodledooldoodldoodldoodoodoodloodloodloodeedoodleood
and that
yknow

Disco with a kick.

2008-11-21T08:44:00.004Z

Everyone in Edinburgh should stagger on down to Sneaky Pete's, the Cowgate's premiere sleazy dive bar tomorrow the 22nd of November for the launch of Wasabi Disco.

Hosted by Pure-alumnus and tiny rave hooligan Kris Wasabi it will feature a five hour mix of "mutant discoisms for beards, queers, freaks, straight folks and the over 30...".

Kris is an absolutely incredible DJ with fantastic taste who's been playing all round the place (Optimo backroom, Pandemic@Sleazy's, X-Vectrian happenings, weddings, bar mitzvahs, Welcome home from prison bashes etc...) for years. It's going to be a messy one.

Bafflingly this is his first foray into running his own club, I'm really excited at the prospect.

And better again it's free.

If you're still not sure then check out his fucking incredible slow-mo disco mix. There are a load of other mixes available on the myspace site.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/17474967d23bbc34/

TRACKLISTING JOHN WATERS - THE FILTHIEST PEOPLE ALIVE

HOLGAR CZUKAY - ODE TO PERFUME

CLIVE STEVENS & BRAINCHILD - MYSTERY MAN

BELLE STARS - CLAPPING SONG

FLEETWOOD MAC - TUSK [BEARD EDIT]

ROOTS MANUVA - WITNESS

DABRYE - HOT MATING RITUAL

CODEK - TIM TOUM

BRAND NUBIAN - SLOW DOWN

FUEGO - WE ARE THE CHILDREN [TAKO EDIT]

FRANK HEBLY - DE TUINSLANGBOOGIE

ZZ TOP - TV DINNERS

ALI RENAULT - CUFFS

VIENNA BOYS CHIOIR - BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE [TALKING HEADS]

CHINESE RADIO INTERFERENCE

MAP OF AFRICA - BLACK SKINNED BLUE EYED BOYS

BLACK SABBATH - RAT SALAD

DATASHAT - STOP THE MESSAGE

NAUM GABO - SPESSIVTSEVA

MADONNA - BURNING UP [PLAYED AT WRONG SPEED]

LINCONSHIRE POACHER

BASSHOLES - MOODY [ESG]

~Scape sound

2008-11-04T13:13:00.007Z

Thanks to everyone who came down to the Voodoo Rooms last night.

Great turnout for a Monday night. TR I/O FON were absolutely fantastic, scrambling brains with scattergun clatter early doors. Inspired me to pull out Autechre's Envane EP to follow up.

Played Donnacha Costello's newie too before Araya followed on with a gorgeous set of bright shiny shimmer. Really looking forward to forthcoming releases. Then a few more tunes, Photek's 2 sword technique giving way to Peverelist's awesome remix of Shackleton on ~scape, those technoey kicks sounded brilliant over the Voodoo's sound system.

Then Pole came on and flattened everyone with a great set, starting with his rework of Shackleton's Shortwave and blasting through some Steingarten goodies and the forthcoming 12" "Alles Gut/Alles Klar". A great set from an absolute gent that neatly dispelled the notion that Betke's music is all about the sound design, really physical and great fun. Dancing amongst Edinburgh audiences is as rare as hens teeth and it was nice to see the floor moving!

Superb photos of the night by William Stark.

Pole, Dancing

2008-10-31T09:47:00.005Z

Exciting weekend coming up, between going out to see Prins Thomas at Ultragroove for Kris Wasabi's birthday and then playing records between the acts at Pole in the Voodoo Rooms on Monday.

Support on the night from Benbecula's Araya as well as dub techno trio TR-I/O-FON. I've never heard of them but if there's a phrase that gives me a warm tingly feeling just saying the fucking words it's "dub techno trio" so get there on time.

Your ticket also entitles you to go along to Pole's production workshop at 2pm in Alison House at the University of Edinburgh.

On sale in Ripping, Underground Solushun and for our wild western buddies Rub a Dub and Monorail.

Thanks to Gav for asking me to do this, I'm a big fan of Betke and his superb ~scape label.

Swoon! Drool! Ooooh! Bok! Whoo!

2008-10-30T14:38:00.007Z

"Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks - impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib?Isn't it chic?"

This kind of thing makes me feel all gooey inside.

A sexy little updating of ideas from George Perec and assorted other difficult French avant guardians.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Again.

2008-10-23T10:42:00.010+01:00

Adrian Searle gets it wrong wrong wrong in his analysis of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's excellent "The house of books has no windows" exhibition which has upped sticks from Edinburgh's Fruitmarket and moved close enough to London for the esteemed London art critic to bother his behind attending. There's the statutory London bashing out of the way. Lovely. I saw this exhibition in Edinburgh and have rattled on about it at length already but some of Searle's arguments are ill-construed and occasionally just plain wrong.

Firstly the Killing Machine, the “interactivity” (the installation is activated by pressing a mundane red button, like you might find on a building site) which Searle derides in an infantile manner is entirely the point. It is an effective and vivid statement about capital punishment and the public discourse in the US relating to the state sanctioned murder of wrongdoers. It is a mechanical and dehumanised process which has become disinfected of all the messy business of stoning, shooting or beheading. This antiseptic process is perfectly elucidated in Erroll Morris’ “Dr Death” in which “death systems engineer” Fred A. Leuchter shamelessly declares himself a humanitarian for speeding the passage of his charges. The cabaret/disco/entertainment elements of the piece are surely echoes of the legal/media and political circus that surrounds the death of the condemned, all distractions from the ugly clacking truth of the chair in front of us.

And on we go to the risible notion that Opera for a Small Room is less successful than a Tom Waits song. It’s a little tragic when art critics start talking about music, especially when they appropriate Waits’ vocal affectations (“He don’t need no etc…). If anything Opera… evokes the more recent work of any number of Godspeed! You Black Emperor/Silver Mount Zion projects. There’s doom, regret and isolation in the narrators voice, Waits’ world teems with humanity, his lonely songs sung when everyone’s gone home, not alone in the dark in a shed with an owl. The real treat, as in the Killing Machine, is in the clanking eccentric mechanics of the piece (in a way, this is where Bures Miller & Cardiff actually do share something with Waits)- the way that automation is used to create an unnerving post-human atmosphere in both pieces contributes to the eerie, uncanny atmosphere that both pieces but particularly Opera for a Small Room, evoke. When left to themselves the machines will find their own way to express themselves, recontextualising the work of long-disappeared humanity.

It appears that Searle didn’t even bother to go back for a second look at the Dark Pool which is packed with funny/silly/spooky little details, a tense repetition of words chopped out from books that become a declaration of love laid on a musty old jewellery box, a patented wishing machine, fractious back-and-forth arguments to be listened to through ear trumpets, scratchy radios evoking Dorothy’s deserted home after the tornado in Kansas. All of this is done from memory and it’s months since I’ve seen the work. Perhaps Searle has tasted and tested too much. Dark Pool was lovely, a bit impenetrable at first but I returned to it a number of times over the months it was at Fruitmarket such was the “purchase” it made on my imagination.

The final and most glaring oversight in Searle’s review is that he doesn’t once mention the title piece “The House of Books Has No Windows”, perhaps he walked sniffily past thinking that a big house made of books doesn’t merit the Guardian art critics attention. And that is his loss. This is the newest piece and was commissioned by the Fruitmarket and Modern Art Oxford specifically for these exhibitions! encapsulates a lot of what they’re about beyond the mechanics and the creaks. It’s a house, made of books, with no windows. I loved it, climbing inside the door was profoundly moving, an immediate, emotional experience that evokes the disappeared who once owned the books, the smell of the books triggering memories of clearing out the houses of the dead, the moldering smell of disuse, obsolescence and forgetting, the slow impassive solitary death of objects as a counterpoint to our own messy, rapid and smelly fate. If you want quiet, undirected understatement Adrian, this is where you’d have found it. But you wanted to climb in the chair.

Frenetic Noise Splatter

2008-10-22T22:13:00.007+01:00

Argh. Lack of updates recently due to constant onslaught of freneticism.

Caught Spencer Clark in his Vodka Soap guise at Sneaky Pete's last week with support from Heather Leigh Murray and the mighty Muscletusk.

Muscletusk were superb, a howling squealing morass of nasty and other such overburdened verb chunder. They rock. Anyway. If they play anywhere near you, you should crawl over dead bodies to go and see them. In fact, I think they'd probably love to see the street in front of the venue strewn with corpses so if they're playing in your town try to kill a few people and leave the bodies in front of the venue as an offering. Like a cat. In fact, if you are a cat you should probably go too. But if you're a cat, a fully grown human is probably going to be a bit too much for you to knock off so either get a load of your cat mates and gang up on a person (the elderly and infirm are usually an easy target, and remember, allergies can often do the work of 10 cats so try to keep it indoors), or alternatively bring a mouse, or just get your devoted owner to do the killing for you, they're great like that.

Right. Onwards.

I didn't really feel the Heather Leigh Murray piece all that much. There were some really interesting sounds, particularly when she was playing those really high notes on her pedal steel and using the harmonica but any time it seemed to be going somewhere interesting things seemed to get bogged down and not really progress all that much. This was a bit disappointing because I saw her with Tarpis Tula at ATP a few years ago and loved it but there you go. Saying this probably consigns me to some sort of gulag for a while but it kicks the fuck out of lying about it eh?

Spencer Clark is half of the Skaters and was completely and utterly fantastic and wonderful. I wasn't too familiar with the Vodka Soap stuff beforehand but it was a lovely piece with Clark playing behind a small shrine with a load of burning incense sticks sticking out of the top of it.
The piece was ritualistic, tribal, ecstatic and nicely bananas all the words that usually get trotted out by folk at these things and a lot more accessible than you might think.

Some people feel alienated by the indescribable, tiny noise/improv/out shindigs that are happening all over the shop but I generally find there's always something to enjoy, although I don't go as often as I'd like and by all accounts have missed some absolutely brilliant performances. Still, I've had some nice dinners and nights in by the fire and I wouldn't exchange them for the world.

We left just as DJ Bennetti was kicking off ItaloBlack, an Italo night that's been going every Thursday in Sneaky Petes for a few months now. The visuals, done by DJ Cassavetes were really, really good. I've been to it a few times now and really enjoy myself and indulge in bad/good dancing. More people should go.

Finally, check out the Shazzblog for a great little interview with hyperliterate zonk-monster and Pjorn-King, Fordell Research Unit.

Message to the markets...

2008-10-10T10:32:00.003+01:00

Here's a little weekend "to do" list for any jittery stockbrokers out there.

My love is like a Red Nord Lead.

2008-10-09T20:03:00.005+01:00

Today is Notional Poetry Day.

I was going to celebrate this by inflicting a poem on readers.
Then I got lazy, and couldn't manage to squeeze anything out.
So, as some sort of consolation here's some poetry-related malarkey.

Don Paterson wins award with poem about Georgian electronic musician.

Colour me seriously conflicted.
I love Paterson's work.
I also love obscure electronic music.
But this entire article makes me queasy.

There are excerpts from the poem at the end of the article.
Copy & paste them into a more forgiving viewer to read them if you must.

I'm not entirely sure this is the best introduction to his work.
Get Landing Light, Gods Gift to Women, or, if poetry isn't your thing dive into the Book of Shadows and giggle wickedly to yourself late at night over too much booze.

Skittery Jittery

2008-10-09T12:28:00.004+01:00

Thanks to Gavros for booking me to do a wee dj support slot for crackly German dub hero and ~scape records founder, Pole in the Voodoo Rooms on Monday 3rd November.

I'm a bit nervous about this because I'm not really a "DJ" dj, it's been a good 4 years since I've played in public!

Expect dub, of the -trad, -techno and -step variety along with a raft of dated electronics and disembodied grumbling.

If you're in Edinburgh come on down, it should be a belter.
Betke is giving a talk in Edinburgh University (Alison House) on the afternoon, entry included on your ticket (which you can buy from Gav at Ripping Records or the other Gav at Underground Solushn').

Proper support from Araya fresh from his great live set at the recent Benbecula label showcase.

a brief fiction

2008-09-30T22:29:00.003+01:00

A 25 pulls off from outside the James’ Centre too late for a boy in a flattering sporty black jacket. The type that takes its inspiration from Japanese motorcycles without the merciless insulation, wholly unsuited to the exertions of the cheek by jowl bus commuter. Thinking quickly he breaks into a sprint, down the hill and the entrance to the Caledonian Thistle Hotel car park, he has to beat the bus over 100 yards, down to the stop outside John Lewis. Get there he’s thinking, go on, just get there. He’s too keen, hasn’t noticed the electronic sign telling him there’s only 2 minutes to the next 25. Picking up speed, funneled down the banked speedway under the pedestrian overpass, he relaxes seeing the bus lurch to a stop halfway along the stretch to let in a Transit. Upstairs, onboard, a slow moving suit with a trench & briefcase is sent stumbling up the aisle, his specs fly off and clatter around the bar on the front window that he also grasps to break his fall. The glasses hang there for a second before he settles himself. Back to the boy, he’s slowing, blinking, strides easing down to arrive just as the blonde girl at the stop steps on. Made it. A joyful moment. All’s right with the world. Off the bus clanks again, into the oppositetheOmni maelstrom, two rows of cars vying for two rows on the far side with another two rows entering from the left. A theatre of false politeness and naked ambition. The bus slows, on the street, a pair sozzled drinkers embrace another. Their faces a mask of drink and grime, one’s rolling a cigarette, the other swigs from a litre of strong cider, the white type. All three seem upset but it’s not clear whether this is for a specific reason or just the general miasmic despair that’s shrouded the city today with the rain battering down and no-one able to get anywhere. All three have slight cuts on their noses, caused by something striking it very hard (L-R, a bottle? a forehead? a pavement?).

On down into the valley of nightmares, the two lane mini-roundabout with an inverse camber and three queues marshalled by temporary traffic lights. Wait. Lurch. Wait. Go! The suspension attacks the camber with gusto, the top deck treated to the now familiar lurch to the right that accompanies any northward transit of this new and already infamous boundary before passing buses edging the single lane of oncoming traffic into the 25’s path on Elm Row. A barely perceptible moan wafts through the top deck as from here you can see forever, down the endless tail-lit serpent, flanked by bandit screens and bollards. Leith Walk. The sensible disembark at the corner of Brunswick Road deciding just to walk it. They’ll be wet but won’t have to breathe the simmering, impatient resentment fogging the windows of the bus.

Passing the Krakow Café and the blonde meticulously painting the incongruous medieval cladding to the wee shopfront, a tiny glimmer of artistry, beauty peeking up and out from the upheaval and chaos all around. Down, down, down the walk the traffic inches. The stop by the KFC just at the entrance to the counterflow, a train of 4 buses all buffalo out into the single lane of exasperated private cars, two make it through. A man gesticulates to get on the stop, the bus driver is ignoring him, his impassive 1000 yard stare silently screaming “I’m away fae the kerb and sitting in traffic pal, cannae let you oan”. Things are getting heated, the man is shouting, angry, there’s a screaming baby, the bottom deck is packed with folk breathing on each other, trying to keep calm. They’re stuck here now, can’t get off, stuck waiting for this light. Light changes and along it goes. Towards the Foot the road narrows, two bare lines of traffic sandwiched between two cages of bandit screens. Nothings' moving the other side, a workie with his high-vis jacket isn’t directing traffic. There’s folk leaving their cars in the oncoming traffic and running into the lane to see what’s going on. There’s quite a bit of exasperated gesticulation. Some guy nearly gets sideswiped by a little digger coming the wrong way up the road. He refuses to move, some of the workies get a bit shirty. The 25 still inching through the tight lane, then stranded as a purple Astra moves out of the oncoming lane and directly into its path trying to get past. The 25 moves forward, the driver not taking this provocation lying down. Out the window, in the corridor along the pavement a beautiful woman wearing a cap is walking up the road with her husband. A passer by grabs her hat, she turns around and runs him down, snatching the cap from his hand. She’s roaring “give us that back you, fuck sake”, her man turns around bewildered and starts walking back. Here’s one of the other guys pals now, roaring “Dinnae touch ma fuckin’ pal or ahl fucking kill ye” at her man. The guy is shitting it, not knowing what to do, way out of his depth. Before he knows it the Head the Ball is on him, the guy doesn’t say anything just tries to get clear, he gets a few boots on his way. Then his missus gets in the way and the Head the Ball pushes her. Her man goes “fuckin’ steady man”, not seeing the bottle in this Rocket’s hand. Smack. Blood everywhere. The 25 hasn’t moved in a while now, the polis on their way. The top deck riveted. The sign beside the road says “Taking you to work in 2011”; in the meantime, you’re going nowhere.

Droids, Slugs, Riddims.

2008-09-24T21:25:00.002+01:00

The wearie-curated Blogariddims series is coming to an end, the second last installment is just up.

Droid and Slug joining the dots between todays fractured dubby electronic output and a previous pulse of fractured dubby electronic output.

Just get along and get listening.

"Krib" off Autechre's Cichlisuite EP retains to power to alter my reality.

Ridiculous/Sublime

2008-09-24T13:43:00.004+01:00

(Similar starting point from last time, let's see if I get to say what I initially intended to say this time eh?)

Life is infuriating.

There are ways of dealing with it.

One is by portraying yourself as the only sane person on the planet raging against the petty injustices of the world and the cretins who are responsible.

Unfortunately this path is fraught with danger. It frequently leads of ill conceived screeds of muddleheaded bile whereby a hasty rush up the staircase of metaphor leads to a stumble on the first flight, a knock on the head and the remainder of your time spent clinging desperately to the bannister, blood pouring down your face, incoherently ranting about women's bottoms.

The other is to take a deep breath, try to remember that it's probably not that important anyway and there's probably something at home that will remind you that life isn't all that bad. Or at least distract you until bedtime.

DFW RIP.

Can't spell "Who Cares" without "H", "R"

2008-09-24T12:46:00.005+01:00

Life is infuriating. Generally when anyone asks me "how's it going" my automatically respond "surviving". This is rooted largely in my linguistic heritage, it's the kind of thing an auld fella might say to a passer-by when he's on his way to the pub, existence being a struggle until you manage to get the first pint down your gullet.

But I'm starting to think that "surviving" is an accurate, if unfashionable, statement that existence itself is an ordeal. The notion that someone might find the whole process of life exhausting is something that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Frequently in work people will remark that I'm "looking stressed". Sometimes I suppose I do, sometimes I just look annoyed because I would rather be anywhere than there, sometimes I've just read about another sequel to Legally Blonde and wish that the insects would just get on with it, rise up and enslave us all.

The mask that we project to the world is now, bizarrely, crucial to others perceptions of us as professionals. It's not good enough any more to merely be good (or even great) at your job anymore, no, you must be able to create an illusion of serenity while you're doing it. I was recently called up by a co-worker for arriving at a meeting looking exhausted and pissed off. This was related to a difficult aspect of my work, a problem that's frustrating and one to which there is no apparent solution. The meeting was productive and we managed to make a little bit of progress in terms of discussing the matter at hand. I was asked by this co-worker whether everything was alright and whether I thought I needed to take a few days off. I found this disturbing, for a variety of reasons. For me, the entire process of being "off sick" is a depressing and stress-inducing situation which formally isolates the subject from the activity which they're nominally taking a temporary break from.

More disturbing is the notion that my co-worker had taken it upon himself to pathologise my bad mood. Managers frequently take it upon themselves to assume the role of diagnostician in the execution of their management function. One way they do this is by interpreting unhappiness, either professional or personal, as a potential risk to the organisation, co-workers and the employee in question. Once you start looking at unhappy employees as "risks" you are required to begin thinking about elminating that risk as it may, in future, result in damage to the organisation. This is where things start to get sinister to someone of a paranoiac disposition. The primary objective of the "Human" aspect of management is to protect organisations from entirely "human" behaviours exhibited by the organisations "resources". So where does that leave us? In most organisations the "procedures" for absence/disiplinary/stress management exist in order to depersonalise the experience for everyone concerned. This is a neat trick. It creates a control mechanism which generates an illusion that no individual is actually responsible, it is only the "procedure" which decides for dismissal, re-deployment or disciplinary procedures. Sure, it "protects" the manager and the employee from personalising any dispute, something that can be profoundly unpleasant. But I wonder whether it creates a dangerous antipersonality and fosters an environment in which any conflict is seen as "negative" (contemporary shorthand for "evil") and something to be avoided at all costs.

This creates a charter for cowardice to operate at the heart of an organisation. A place where nothing is said or even suggested without being absolutely certain of the answer, an enveloping thicket of predictability; devoid of leadership, vision or humanity.

Hmm. That started in one place and ended up somewhere else.

Monumentalism

2008-09-21T13:23:00.005+01:00

80's Flashback

2008-09-21T13:11:00.004+01:00

"The US government prefers that public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich."
(Gore Vidal)

Between market turmoil and italo disco being trendy again things feel very '87 this weather.

Which begs the question...

2008-09-01T12:46:00.004+01:00

Is it really worthwhile charging 12 quid into Optimo's bi-monthly do in Edinburgh if you know it's going to have an effect on the crowd? Especially given that it's usually half the price in Glasgow?

Is it time to introduce club etiquette lessons to the secondary curriculum? Lots of shoving. And couples mauling each other.

If someone you'd never met before accidentally gave you 20 quid instead of a fiver to add a pint to your order would you correct the mistake?

What kind of a bawbag thinks it's funny to deploy stink bombs in an underground club on one of the muggiest nights of the summer? Twice? Seriously dude, you're a gowl.

Aren't Joakim like a really neat amalgam of Sonic Youth, Franz Ferdinand and Scion?
Ok, that's not really a question. More an observation.

Matthew Bourne loves the sex doesn't he?

Why have all the good techno records gone so expensive?

Further into the fringe.

2008-08-23T13:21:00.010+01:00

The mother and the sister were over during the week and we really did the dog on the festivals! My sister is a musician and composer and every year she comes over and puts me to shame with her energy, basically she probably sees more in 3 days than I see in the whole month. We'd done a bit of homework and booked some good stuff in the Traverse. First up was Mong Yeon (A love in dream) a beautiful little Korean production. Really interesting visual and musical piece about a widow grieving for her dead husband. Kind of like a really lush version of Ghost produced by an undergraduate Wong Kar Wei. It's a bit of a curates egg in terms of trying to explain what's going on with slightly heavyhanded exposition getting in the way of sublime musico-visual set pieces. A wedding scene is absolutely fantastic, a sugary shimmer like an ice cream in a childrens book. Another dream sequence walks a bittersweet tightrope as the widow dreams of lying in bed with her beloved, a sublime evocation of the giddy thrill of mundanity. The cockerel is a morning demon rousing the bereaved from her dream of love. The piece sags a little towards the end as the young cast hammer a little hard trying to get the message across. Despite these slight flaws it's a beautiful, big hearted and generous production that's performed with joy and conviction by the cast. The sister was seriously impressed by the multitasking actors who managed four part harmonies, live instruments, acting and dancing over the course of the hour. Hard working heroes!

Then it was on to the Fruitmarket for Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's "The House of books has no windows" which is the best thing I've seen anywhere in ages. Heh, hyperbole alert but it really is that good, a beautiful, immersive, witty, playful, disturbing playpen of wonk. As in wonky. Which is clearly a fantastic thing. The "Opera for a small room", a recreation of an isolated shack stuffed with records, turntables, suitcases, disembodied voices and lights playing on a 20 minute loop is a beautiful introduction to the world of Cardiff & Miller. It's sinister, joyful and doomy all at the same time in much the same way as Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Walking around the pitch dark room surrounded by insect noises, rain (which after the last week's weather I never thought I'd enjoy hearing again) and passing trains you feel transported, despite the often crowded space. Shadows from the window change on the walls creating an uncanny spooky rural backwoods atmosphere. The "House of Books has no windows" piece created for this exhibition is a simple idea executed sublimely and provoked a profoundly emotional response. Sitting in the house breathing in the luscious smell of old books I felt at peace, protected, like a child clasped to an adult. I'd had a stressful day and sitting in there I felt a real sense of peace. The "Killing Machine" is the piece that's getting all the press and it's an absolute belter. Basically a sinister musical torture device that's operated by the viewer it's genuinely chilling. The rest of the exhibition is really accomplished and I've spent the last few days excitedly dragging everyone I meet along for a look.

We went to the Abbey Theatre production Mark O'Rowe's "Terminus" in Traverse and were completely blown away. I'd heard mixed reports about this with some people finding the three rhyming monologues tiresome. I disagree and thought it was a compelling and lyrical piece. Sure it's violent, gory and really lurid but there's a phenomenal imagination at the heart of it. O'Rowe undersells it in the programme notes saying the piece is at least "full of crazy people doing crazy shit". It is but there's a real humanity to the characters. The acting is very strong with Eileen Walsh demonstrating subtlety, power and phenomenal balance in her performance. The script is an absolute revelation with rhyming used throughout. This creates an urgency and rhythm to the piece that drives the story forward, O'Rowe frequently wrongfoots anyone attempting to pre-empt the rhymes and this made for some great comedy allowing the audience some tension relieving laughter in his visceral tale. Reviews of this piece got a bit lost in a phenomenal lineup at Traverse, it deserves more consideration. O'Rowe has a reputation as a "muscular" playwright, something that maybe puts off more lyrically minded theatregoers, this is a pity.

Following night we went to Enda Walsh and Druid's "New Electric Ballroom" in the same room. This is a companion piece to last years "Walworth Farce" which went down a storm. The similar devices are there; isolated, desperate people re-enacting their past to cocoon themselves from a frightening outside, cakes in the face, jet black humour and family secrets. This created a bit of debate afterwards, the wife and my mother both loathed it, found it less enjoyable than the Walworth Farce. I really enjoyed it, particularly Rosaleen Lenihan and Mikel Murfi's performances. The similarities with the Walworth farce are there but the piece is more a meditation on Irish village and family life than the Walworth's treatment of how we deal with trauma. Or at least that's what I got from it. The audience didn't seem to know what to do with it, particularly the penetrating minds who seem to think that wolf-whistling partial nudity is normal theatre-going behaviour. I don't like to be a fuddy duddy but what a total numpty. Strangely, the effect of Terminus the night before meant the initial stages felt a bit lumpen in comparison with O'Rowe's stacatto patter.

More to come, covering clubs, more theatre, more art and a little rant about books.

Festivalianianism

2008-08-17T16:38:00.007+01:00

Been plenty busy of late between work commitments and the rigours of the festival season taking its toll. I've seen quite a bit but can't really draw on that enthusiasm to write a lot of stuff up. We went to the Traverse the first weekend for some 2 for 1 preview action and really enjoyed the Almeida production of Adam Rapp's Nocturne. It's a beautifully constructed monologue about grief, family breakdown, loneliness and trauma. But entertaining for it. The entire thing hinges on Peter McNamara's stunning performance as the nameless narrator, a writer still grieving over his accidental slaying of his sister in a car accident. The monologues slowly unpack the narrators stacks of baggage in a humane and artful fashion depicting a fraught atmosphere of family tension where the piano, a Steinway, is an ever-present, impassive and malignant presence. The narrator repeatedly invokes Greig, Chopin, Tchaikovsky", names spat out by the narrator, personification of his torment at the familial expection to perform. Each scene is intercut with beautiful, haunting and jarring bursts of piano music, little miniatures of pressure, rhythm and tension in a glorious hour and a half of haunting and musical language. The work really put me in mind of some of Michel Faber's darker short stories with tragedy spun in a scintillating web of gorgeous language.

Last week we pottered on to "Etcetera" at the independent Universal Arts venue on Hill Street. A wordless 50 minutes of puppetry by Polish company Teatr K3 is a wee gem. It's difficult to describe this piece as it suggests much more (play, automation, commercialism, our "metro, boulot, dodo" culture) than it initially appears(three evil sisters tormenting dolls). There's something mythical about it with the three performers stalking the stage selecting their next manikin victim and then, to some wonderful wonky/spooky music, pulling them in hundreds of different directions until they tire of it, discard it hanging on the wall and move in search of their next candidate. The piece is poetic, funny and haunting, the greatest draw being the palpable pleasure the performers take in their exertions. A fantastic piece which seems to have been overlooked by a lot of critics.

Monday evening involved an orgy of classical music with a double header at the International Festival. First up was the Estonian Philharmonic Choir conducted by Paul Hillier. As we took our seats in the top circle of the newly (and not-quite finished) refurbished Usher Hall (after a climb up a scaffolded staircase! one wag said it was a bit more like a Fringe Venue!) I was a bit worried we weren't going to get the full benefit of this well-regarded Choir. That all changed once they launched into Veljo Tormis' "Jaanilaulud"- starting with sounds like the wind in trees or a distant sea at night. The repertoire stayed around the Baltics with Finland and Estonia taking centre stage. Highlights included Toivo Tulev’s 2006 work "Summer Rain" which had a peculiar. lollopping cadence and Arvo Part's beautiful "Magnificat" and “Nunc dimittis”. The final piece, Bergman's "Lapponia", a non-lyrical semi-improvised evocation of the Lapp landscape in winter and summer was a bit more challenging with the 2nd movement "Yoik" integrating LKSDJ song techniques evoking a desolate arctic wilderness. A final piece from (I think) Sibelius left us home with something a bit more tuneful. Not a bad evening's entertainment but the programming lacked a bit of fun and levity after the first, flush of enthusiasm. It got some very positive reviews from people who know far more about this stuff than I do.

Then it was a quick dash through Tattoo Traffic, a quick fortifying Malt in the Bow Bar and on to St Giles Cathedral and Naji Hakim's second performance as part of the Messiaen centenery. The first night was very well reviewed. The performance skewed a little more in favour of Hakim's own work with the second piece Offrande au Saint Sacrement instead of the programmed Offrande et Alleluia from the Livre du Saint Sacrement. This was a little disappointing and confusing for the audience who didn't applaud in the break between "Offrande au Saint Sacrement" and Hakim's "Sakskøbing Praeludier”. I always find this the most offputting aspect of classical music where the neophyte often doesn't know when to clap for fear of appearing to be some sort of thick tongued teuchtar dragging muck in on someone's nice carpet. Still, Hakim was a blast, hammering through the Messiaen and then firing into his own two compositions. The Messaien (a composer I know very little about) sounded to me very like some John Carpenter scores. What I love about Faure, Satie and Poulenc, who are all forerunners to Messaien, is their playfulness, the lightness and beauty that lurks even in their strange works. A few years ago me and the missus went to "Punch Drunk Love" on Valentines Night and she described it as being like a lovely light pudding. That's how the more beautiful modern French music sounds to me, whimsical, slightly bonkers but amiable nonetheless. There were aspects of this in the Messaien along with more discordant spookiness staggering off down the Cathedral to the dark. I expected it to be a lot more difficult and less enjoyable than it was. Someone with more education about this might smirk at my artless listening skills but there you go. The "Sakskøbing Praeludier" is a collection of hymns that seem to come from outer space. Really entertaining, overblown and completely, utterly original. I can't imagine the kind of church this comes from, sort of like looking at the weird space creatures in the bar in Star Wars. Some pieces were quite like video game music, partifularly Hitoshi Sakimoto, the God King of Japanese video game composition who wrote the influential music for the Final Fantasy series. There was also some John Carpenter, but less menacing. The half hour of Sakskøbing Praeludier and the Glenalmond Suite was as entertaining, fresh and enjoyable as I've enjoyed musically for ages. After some well timed applause from a very mixed crowd Hakim treated us to some improvisations which were similarly witty and playful before he tickled us all with a big cheesy deconstruction of Scotland the Brave and some other Scottish airs. He took his heartfelt applause with a big smile that reflects the openness, good humour and accessibility of his music. There's a good youtube of him merrily improvising away for himself here!

As I’ve previously intimated here I’m not all that into stand up comedy. This is largely due to overdosing on mediocrity in the first couple of years in Edinburgh and the frustration that comes from spending extensive amounts of cash to sit and listen to a bare hour of complacent, smug and faux-intelligent wittering. By cutting out the comedy I've had the money to spend on tickets for much of the above so i feel my instinct is right for me. This year I made an exception for both of the Amsterdam Underground Comedy Collective going to both Micha Wertheim and Hans Teeuwen. Wertheim was reasonably funny, largely because he’s quite an astute physical comedian with a really amiable manner. He seemed a little rusty though (this was in the first weekend) and at one stage looked like he was about to corpse. Teeuwen is a class act, a sly and sneakily intelligent comedian as well as accomplished pianist. The hour we spent listening to bizarre ranting setups that blossomed into delicate and intricate routines was as good I think as I’ve ever seen. Days later I’m still unpicking parts of the performance, the interplay of music, language, physical theatre and edgy surrealism left everyone I’ve spoken to about it completely stunned.

More to come during next week, hopefully more theatre at the Traverse and a stroll through some more highlights in galleries.

Berk-Berk-Berk

2008-08-08T14:52:00.003+01:00

Another bauble for the claws of Nils Olav, decorated Norwegian soldier.

The Butley did it...

2008-08-07T17:55:00.002+01:00

Farewell then Simon Gray.

RIP

Bookshelves, Carpentery and The Living End

2008-08-06T19:37:00.008+01:00

And so begins another Edinburgh Festival. A few posts ago I referred to it as the Truly Detestable Edinburgh Festival, largely to shoehorn a gratuitous Edwin Collins pun into a moribund review. It's also because every year I feel an ache of apprehension at the invasion of this sleepy burgh by marauding hordes of fledgling PR's with gawping turistas cluttering my normally serene progress through town. Then it starts and I spend the first week manically running around going to a scatter of varied events and staying up way too late. The festivals are what they are and what they are is a fantastic excuse to to run around going to a scatter of varied events and stay up way too late while dodging fledgling PR's and gawping turistas.

First up was the launch of the Edinburgh Art Festival with the Cockburn Street Party joint-hosted by Stills and the Collective Gallery. Thanks to superbly timed downpour the "street party" become "two openings opposite one another with people pegging it between the two". The Stills exhibition of the Martha Rosler Library is right up my street being, well, a library. Had a great time riffling through things finding some superb book titles. Favourites being a translation of Paul Auge's "Non Places: an introduction to the anthropology of super-modernity", "The New Mauve- a collection of flower arrangements by Constance Spry" and the sublime "Grammar of Motives". The library is Rosler's own collection as such has loads of postcards, tickets and other ephemera stuck in as place markers.

It reminded me of Myles NaGopaleen's business idea for "Buchhandlung" in which the libraries of the rich and vulgar are finessed by a qualified person to make it appear that the books had been read. This would be on a sliding scale to suit all pockets:

"Popular Handling" would ensure that all books would be:
"well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket...or other comparable item inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark"

"Premier Handling" would involved each:
"volume being thoroughly handled...a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil"

"De Luxe Handling" would leave smaller volumes with:
"the impression they have been carried around in pockets..., an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book mark, not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter and whiskey stains, and not less than 5 volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors. "

Then we come, inevitably to the Superb Treatment or "Le Traitement Superbe, as we lads who spent our honeymoon in Paris prefer to call it" in which books are subjected to all manner of thorough and learned handling by master handlers:
"who shall have to his credit not less than 550 handling hours...suitable passages in not less than fifty per cent of the books to be underlined...and an appropriate phrase from the list inserted in the margin, viz:
Rubbish!
Yes, indeed!
Yes, but cf.Homer, Od, iii,151.
Well, well, well
I remember poor Joyce saying the very same thing to me."

At this stage Le Traitement Superbe is only getting into its stride,
"Not less than 6 volumes to be inscribed with forged messages of affection and gratitude from the author of each work, e.g.,
'From your devoted friend and follower, K Marx.'
'Dear A.B.,-Your invaluable suggestions and assistance, not to mention your kindness, in entirely re-writing chapter 3, entitles you surely to this first copy of "Tess". From your old friend T.Hardy.'"

This is by no means the full extent of Traitement in store for the hulking libraries of the wealthy illiterate and I would heartily recommend finding a copy of "The Best of Myles" from which these incomplete and completely un-authorised quotes were culled.

Anyway, I digress. The exhibition is a fascinating and compulsive space for a book lover. It could also serve as a fantastic resource for passing new bands who are looking for names! The launch itself was quite busy so not really conducive to the really deep pointless browsing that the exhibition deserves. X and the Living End deserve special mention for providing tunes and flawless crowd control.

Over the road then to Collective and The Golden Record which is a cross platform/cross festival event that looks to recreate a record portraying the diversity of life and culture on earth. More than 100 artists contributed work to the exhibit in the gallery. This is combined with a weekly comedy hustings in which a variety of comedians stand for election in the vote to decide who is the Representative of Planet Earth. There was a projected film in the back with BBC4-esque narration that makes this sound a lot less interesting than it probably is. I have issues with stand up comedy, I enjoy laughter but would tentatively suggest that the last thing Edinburgh needs in August is more comedy. That said, the lineup is good and John Hegley's record cover in the exhibition is a thing of stark brown-baggy beauty. Collective are brilliant at joining things up and have done some great stuff in the past with the Book Festival and National Library of Scotland.

The launch was rammed and good fun with Karen Carpenter (she's looking GREAT) entertaining the crowd. I'd forgotten how much I loved "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft". Entertaining raffle too with Karen and Miss Le Bomb holding court!

There's loads more in the Art Festival over the month and I hope to cover more of it in the coming weeks. More to come from the Book, Fringe and International festivals too.

Comments, quibbles, gripes and declarations of undying devotion gladly accepted.

Ladies Love Cool Cohen

2008-07-19T15:50:00.004+01:00

Myself and herself went along to the Leonard Cohen love in this week on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. Got last minute tickets on a slightly tipsy whim when I was alerted to a last minute allocation going on sale the week before the gig. Pals and family had gone to the Dublin and Manchester shows. By the time I realised the only tickets available were expensive "hospitality" tickets I was completely committed to seeing him. So, a pile of money and seven days later we found ourselves guzzling free champagne (well, insfoar as it came free with a £75 ticket!) in a covered pod at the back of the open air auditorium.

My memories of Cohen permeate most phases in my life. My father loved his records and I remember him being played and his songs sung when my folks' parents stayed late drinking wine. I remember "Famous Blue Raincoat" as played by the busker opposite the O'Connell Mall soundtracking tearful ruminations after a drunken teenage drama on the night of my 18th birthday. The rain pouring down and my tearstained frustration at a thoughtless insensitive remark that ruined my own evenings entertainment.

My grandmother, in the later stages of her alzheimers, paranoid we were poisoning her, slipping crushed up anti-anxiety meds into her tea still remembered she hated Leonard's "Mrrrhm, mrrrhm, mrrrhm" droning down from my fathers teenage bedroom.

Cohen's music means things to people. It clearly meant a lot to the lady sat beside me. She stood up and shouted "YOU, JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP" to a gent three rows back who was chatting softly to his mate through the first song. Scary stuff! Clearly she understood Leonard better than everyone else.

The passion that Cohen inspires amongst women of all ages is staggering. The overwhelming impression of carnal quasi-religious fervour was epitomised as a woman dressed in white walked up the aisles in front of the stage like a bride to get a snap of our hero sauntering his way through "That's no way to say goodbye".

The strange sexual undertone was heightened for me by the two women behind me whispering every line of "I'm Your Man" into my ear creating a kind of sexy invisible Greek Chorus alongside Cohen's beautiful baritone. The intensity of the "hear a pin drop" reaction to his reading of "One Thousand Kisses Deep" was a real highlight with a palpable waft of lust in the air.

His band were fantastic if you're into the kind of glistening, virtuosic Adult Oriented Lobby Jazz de rigeur for late period 60's icons. Being a snooty pretendy-avant-gardian git I'd prefer to have had Leonard playing with acoustic backing and treating us to doomy readings of Blake and Burns. But that would require a time machine and an audience of about twenty. This was, despite the wrong-headed myth of Cohen as some sort of tortured hermit, entertainment in the broadest sense and the experience was all the better for it. The crowd were there to enjoy themselves and my apprehension that we'd be stuck with inattentive liggers proved completely wrong. A couple from Shetland offered some of their wine to the people around them and apart from the early intensity of the cultist beside me everyone was friendlier and more open than a lot of trendier gatherings.

Despite not playing any of my four favourites (The Partisan, Famous Blue Raincoat, Last Years Man and Chelsea Hotel #2) the two and a half hour show didn't disappoint with Tower of Song, Hallelujah, Suzanne, One Thousand Kisses Deep and the rambunctious closer Closing Time being the dazzling gems in a cave littered with treasure.

Cohen's chops as a poet seems to have inspired some great work. I stumbled across genius Julian Gough material in comments on a Guardian BookBlog about Cohen. This is number IX in a series of X written late at night and made my heart sing.

You get up at five in the morning
And write poems about poetry for an hour and a half.
You are forty and you have no money and your trousers have split and nobody reads poetry.

But your wife is beautiful.
And your daughter is beautiful.
And you’re wearing a great shirt.
In a few hours you will all have coffee together.

You make a note at the top of a new page
“Write to Leonard Cohen and thank him before he dies.”

*Swoon*

I have fond memories of Gough's old band Toasted Heretic, particularly "Songs for Swinging Celibates" which my cousin and I used to sing along to. I'm glad I've managed to master my enthusiasm in recent years as I fear my "genius" idea of singing "Galway Bay" at my wedding to my father in law may have contributed to recriminations that probably would have necessitated another fiver in a buskers' guitar case and a request to "Just play "Raincoat" man".

Freedom of speech baby.

2008-07-06T17:40:00.002+01:00

Free for all comments now enabled!
Apologies to the huddled masses without ID's that have been itching to comment on my
staggering insights.

Heaven and Bloody Hell

2008-07-04T13:26:00.002+01:00

The return of My Bloody Valentine has provoked all sorts of half-informed lazy myth driven guff over the last few weeks. These can be roughly summarised thus:

1) Kevin Shields is, like, a total genius.
2) It's pretty loud.
3) You get free earplugs! Score!
4) Loveless is the greatest thing since antiseptic
5) Feedback is the purifying visceral voice of God
6) My Bloody Valentine haven't played live in a while
7) There's a 20 minute section at the end called the Holocaust/the Apocalypse, this is very loud.
8) They're not very chatty are they?
9) Kevin & Belinda have, like, totally awesome guitars! Look a Fender Jaguar! Woo!
10) The fans are delighted they've reunited. The critics smile benignly and offer 3 star reviews and vaguely sour comments about no-one looking like they've aged.

After seeing MBV at the Barrowlands I can say that the above is pretty much all I heard anyone in the crowd talking about before and during the gig. I was surprised that there was so little atmosphere, everyone just standing politely around waiting to have their ears blown off (and relentlessly checking whether their earplugs were in properly or asking their neighbour whether they had their earplugs). The show was pretty good, it delivered pretty much on what you imagine My Bloody Valentine Live to be like (unremarkable early 90's indie music played at thunderous volume) with no surprises. Fantastic. Sort of. But still strangely unsatisfying despite doing everything you'd have hoped. I imagine it's like a middle-aged virgin waiting for years for "the one"and realising, after their first ride, they could have been spending the last 20 years having as much fun with different people. You Made Me Realise (that I've wasted the best years of my life waiting for safe, unspectacular congress with a similarly inhibited old codger) if you will.

Too far? Probably. But this is the problem. The fact that MBV are very loud and very mysterious seems to set them apart from some of their shoegazer alumni, although I did have a soft spot for Ride, Lush and Submarine era Whipping Boy. But there's been absolutely zero growth, no progress, no notion that anyone, fans or band alike haved moved on from 1991.
Between the old-fashioned venue, the throwback visuals and the identical setlist to 1991 the doors of the Barrowlands could actually have been a time portal in which we actually were transported back in time. For all the talk about the physicality of the MBV sound but it pales into insignificance when compared to my personal extreme noise benchmarks: Deepchord over the Berghain soundsystem, Jah Tubby's soundsystem at the Bongo Club, Pan Sonic at the Venue and Wolf Eyes at All Tomorrows Parties. I had expectations that all four of these gigs would be incredibly loud but still left surprised, giddy and blown away.

This is ultimately the problem. I don't think I could have been blown away by MBV unless we all boarded the MBV Starship and blasted off into space destroying the planet and all unbelievers with Kevin Shields' Death Ray. Now that would have been surprising. And something that exceeded my expectations. The effect of the MBV sound on the body is captivating and the noise, coupled with the strobing lights and the overpowering heat a disassociative, transcendent state is created where your mind fills in the blank canvas that the void of noise creates. Some people said they could "hear" guns and air-raid sirens throughout the "Apocalypse" section- my brain told me I could hear crowds cheering, motorbikes roaring across plains, laughter. Ultimately the best thing I can say about them is that they make everyone in the audience use their imagination. And that's a neat trick.

Before anyone gets bent out of shape, Loveless is one of my favourite albums of all time, it's been a friend to me throughout my life and hearing the songs live made me a very happy man. The gig was enjoyable and well worth attending. It's just that the scales have fallen from my eyes now.

Just a (very loud) band.

Calling all kids

2008-07-01T21:31:00.010+01:00

Wild Combination: A portrait of Arthur Russell is a documentary by Matt Wolf about the strange magic produced by Russell throughout his too-short life. Anyone who isn't aware of him should, in my opinion anyway, drop everything and get listening. Although you may have heard his music before, in ads, in clubs but the strange thing is, for such a supremely talented avant garde disco savant to remain so slept on is nothing short of incredible. The story is unremarkable at the outset, talented but mixed up cello-playing MidWestern kid runs away to San Fran in the late 70's and joins a commune. What transpires afterwards is like a skewed version of a folk tale in which, befriended by Allan Ginsberg, Russell decamps to New York where he lives in a building with the aforementioned Ginsberg, Richard Hell and no end of pale and interesting residents. Here Russell, who was sent to the closet by his fellow communards to practice his cello, set about creating a bewildering array of music starting as from a singer songwritery to becoming an amazing bandleader through making "Instrumentals 1-5" with former Modern Lover Ernie Brooks and Saxophonist Peter Zummo and a number of other players. Russell worked in collaborations on a type of Buddhist Pop music that even now sounds bizarrely contemporary- a few years ago while on holiday i put on "First Thought: Best Thought" which contains the aforementioned Instrumentals. Difficult to describe, these instrumentals have a strange, almost ritual quality, slightly off kilter, trancelike but still rock music, reminiscent of a very breezy Tortoise. That's Tortoise, although the similarity extends to our little shell-wearing buddy too as it has a persistent unhurried charm and seems entirely self-contained. Laboured metaphors abound when dealing with Russell because his music is so unique and unfathomable that coupled with his early death earns him the unhelpful "lost genius" tag. Wolf prefers to use "Icon" which i think fits well. Russell, at this stage developed a reputation as being frustrating, difficult to work and collaborate with and obsessively perfectionist (Tom Lee, Russells lover describes how he took nearly 6 years to complete the title track That's Us/Wild Combination!)

Russell was at this stage "out" and immersed in the New York underground disco scene. Here was a new, emergent subculture that allowed him to mess with a whole lot of equipment, techniques and instruments. Ideal. Russell produced some of my favourite disco records and when Go Bang! appears I practically fainted with pleasure. There's a good treatment in the film of this period although by Wolf's own admission at the Q&A afterwards he does get feedback that it doesn't deal with disco in enough detail. For me that is the tragedy of Russells life and more broadly the disco era, AIDS and drugs decimated this subculture and this is palpable in the film by the absence of so many people. In my opinion this is a strength of the film and the absence of so many key players communicates the sense of loss that many of the contributers felt (and obviously still feel).

The film uses interviews with Russells parents, lover, collaborators along with a few others. There are reconstructions of the Loft and Iowa which put russells music into a sort of context as well as a beautifully realised recreation of Arthur listening to his own tapes on the Staten Island ferry. This evocative image was the first thing that sparked Wolf's imagination to make this affectionate portrait of Russell. His parents are funny, worldly people who loved and encouraged their strange little boy. Russells partner Tom Lee is really moving and a real sense of the love between them is exquisitely portrayed. The music Russell left behind (hours of reels of tapes, DATS, regular cassettes- all unreleased) is the real legacy- songs that never saw the light of day are now being released by Audika. Many of these songs (particularly on Another Thought and Calling Out of Context) describe togetherness, the kind of mundane spiritual wonder that you feel on a boring Tuesday evening when sat on the couch together eating crisps. Other work is entirely individual, like being alone on a pier in the middle of the night. The magic of Russells music is the way the music creates this transportative power in ordinariness, the zen of living completely in the moment, whether losing your mind on a wild dancefloor, cuddling on the couch or listening to music on the deck of a ferry.

Hannah McGill paid tribute to Optimo's DJ Twitch for introducing her and countless others to Russells music. He deserves it, Optimo have been pushing the NY Disco sound long before the haircut brigade cottoned onto it. For my own part I have Greg n' Shane to thank for introducing me to the wonky rhodes organ wonder of Loose Joints.

She got one thing wrong though, the "best club night in the world" is obviously Subculture!

Errol Morris and the Power of Nightmares.

2008-06-23T19:03:00.006+01:00

Hannah McGill served up a massive treat when she booked Errol Morris for an In Person event to accompany the screening of Standard Operating Procedure at the Edinburgh International Film festival last Saturday. Morris is the Oscar-winning director of Fog of War, a commercial director who makes visually stunning and thought provoking nonfiction films on a "not for profit" basis. That's not to say he redistributes millions in box office green, just to say that the man doesn't seem to make money on his documentaries. This is as baffling as it is depressing; his consistently interesting, provocative work represents one of the great achievements in modern film.

Morris isn't to everyone's taste, a criticism often levelled at him is that the films are as much about Morris as they are about their subjects. This is a wilful and rather gratuitous slander in a period where popular documentary film is personified by the Ordinary Joe tendency. Morris is iconoclastic and his approach is distinctive using re-enactments to enhance the narrative but you never feel driven by his authorial voice. The interviews in Fog of War, Mr Death and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control allow their subjects to speak for themselves and generate wildly divergent opinions as to their likeability/believability. This is where Morris' genius lies, in the ability to challenge the contemporary fallacy that there is a "right answer". When asked why he decided to interview Robert McNamara for Fog of War he said that he felt that people's "first instinct with Robert McNamara is to shout at him" and that anyone who didn't do so was somehow "morally comprimised". For me, this goes to the heart of Morris' work and was the central theme in the extended conversation at the In Person event. Morris' isn't an easy raconteur, his laconic thoughtful ramblings frequently slow down and stop mid-sentence. But it was illuminating, thought-provoking stuff. Morris' films require us to think and look again at what we think we know. Mr Death, his mindbending profile of death-engineer and holocaust denier Fred Leuchter Jr is a fantastic meditation on vanity, self-destruction and delusion. It creates a humanity to this toxic self-important functionary, requires us to see the man as human, even likeable, one of us. A member of the audience picked up on the scene with Leuchter in a death chamber with a cup of coffee all his films are peppered with stunning visual ideas that enhance the story Morris is trying to tell. Morris refers to McNamara talking about his work on developing automobile safety and dropping skulls down stairwells- about the visual idea taking root in his head as McNamara described.

Fog of War is a riveting portrait of a man struggling with his own conscience, a man loathed by people of Morris' generation. Why does Morris work against prevailing orthodoxy, why pick demonised and unrepentant protagonists like Leuchter, McNamara and Lynndie England? Morris answered "because if they're not like us, where does that leave us?"

We're in a period where the "right" way of thinking has become essential to social acceptance. It is no longer socially acceptable in certain circles to dissent from conventional wisdom relating to a whole raft of topics. This, for me, represents a denial of our humanity, of our inherent flexibility. It transposes the media-fed Red/Blue state view of the world where we are Liberal/Conservative/Religous/Secular/Hungry/Thirsty/Rapidly losing the will to live and shouldn't hang out together. This isn't even a debate anymore, it's become an industry where newspapers, blogs, TV news, zines and films tout opinions as products, creating a world where a persons position on current affairs become a surrogate for thought. This is pernicious nonsense and Morris is one of the few mainstream non-fiction filmmakers attempting to challenge this. Morris' work requires the viewer to draw their own conclusions, to think about the work and come to ones own conclusion. That's not to say Morris doesn't have his own view, one which was voiced at the In Person event and the Q&A after Standard Operating Procedure- but he doesn't allow his view to be expressly stated in his films.

Standard Operating Procedure is one of the first mainstream films about Iraq to avoid editorialising as to the morality or otherwise of the misadventure/catastrophe/oil-grab in Iraq. As Morris said in the Q&A "there's plenty of other product in the market" that treat of this issue.
The film treats of the evidence that emerged from Abu Ghraib, attempts to put it into context and allows those who took the blame to articulate their sense of rage, frustration, anger and hopelessness at what transpired. This sense transmits to the audience (at least from where I was sitting) where we're all sat at the end wondering how the hell we got here and despairing at providing an answer as to what we should have done about it. The film is interesting in providing a snapshot of how unaccountability at the command level contributes to despair which in turn drives a disassociating effect from the immediate circumstances. This could apply to Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman and Roman Krol(easily the most sinister and unrepentant character in the film) or just as equally to the US/UK itself, inured the the horrors played out daily throughout the world but completely devoid of any idea of how to resolve the problems. The photographs are returned to again and again and again.

Morris said that it has been his ambition to make a film "where the audience would wish they'd never been born". In Standard Operating Procedure (the term means the lawful manner in which prisoners can be mistreated without the act being, in itself, criminal) he comes close to achieving the goal. We are forced to confront our complicity in the acts that created Abu Ghraib, a POW camp in the middle of a free fire zone, devoid of authority and accountability in which the lowest orders were punished for preparing prisoners for the undocumented and enhanced abuse at the hands of CIA and Military Intelligence interrogators.

Standard Operating Procedure refers to the lawful manner in which prisoners can be mistreated without the act being, in itself criminal. In a harrowing sequence in the film an army CID investigator differentiates between photos depicting criminal acts (those featuring sexual humiliation, threatening inmates with dogs etc) and those depicting SOP (the most famous being the Hooded Man but others including men chained to railings and left to stand for hours). This is where the film really achieved Morris' goal of a non-fiction Horror movie; we now live in a world where prisoners can be chained, standing against bunks for hours before interrogation and strictly speaking there's nothing criminally wrong. It makes you feel dirty.

And that's before you get to the substantive issue of the photos which are central to the confusing and upsetting litany of degradation and horror that follows. The film is very ambiguous about the photos, their inspiration and the content- there is clear enjoyment of the act of photographing prisoners, corpses and abuse. There are revelations in the film which are profoundly disturbing and made me unsure about my disgust at the photos given that they are the only ones surviving from a damage limitation exercise- the horror at what you see gives way to the horror at what you haven't seen. It is the limitlessness of the despair of these conclusions that we truly wake in Morris' nightmare.

There's a lot to the film and I'm still processing it. I quote Morris from memory as I (stupidly) failed to bring a notebook, any corrections, comments and gripes welcome. I'm also eager to get the book co-authored by Morris and Philip Gourevitch. Morris' site and blog are really illuminating resources and are probably far better informed, argued and written than this.

Sardinian Salve.

2008-06-07T11:04:00.011+01:00

Just back from a week's holiday in Sardinia. Relaxing.

Myself and the missus took drive into the mountains to check out the mural art in Orgosolo.

Orgosolo is a small rural village in the mountains in the islands interior. From a distance it looks like every other sun-baked italian hill town. As you approach the town you see the "Hungry Landowner of Orgosolo" a haunting image painted on rocks which brought to mind Titan's "Saturn devouring his son".

There are hundreds of murals all around the small town. Is that Robert Burns below?

It's really inspiring, the murals were initially painted by local schoolchildren in the '70's. The first murals were actually posters stuck up throughout the town.

Early themes covered the commemoration of resistance from World War II but also local issues such as the controversial proposal of a National Park in Gennargentu which would have displaced traditional shepherding in the area.

The Shepherd is a totemic figure in Sardinian culture and is a recurring motif in many of the murals.

Other themes cover the traditional obsessions of the Italian Left over the last 30 years, the war in Vietnam, industrial dispute, workers rights, political corruption, fascism and violence among the police.

The majority of murals have been painted by Francesco Del Casino and Pasquale Buesca with help and input from local children and citizens of Orgosolo. There is a real sense of vibrancy in the murals, contemporary subjects include the attack on the World Trade Centre, Gaza, the war in Iraq as well as global poverty, AIDS, debt and profiteering.

The style isn't particularly sophisticated, Picasso and Miro seem the overwhelming influences with Guernica being the obvious and repeated touchstone. But other influences seem to intervene, TV news and even Banksy references crop up in some of the more recent murals.

It was a great trip and the variety of murals was mind boggling for somewhere so small. Street art, whether murals or graffiti, is predominantly seen as an urban art form and it was captivating to see this kind of work in an unexpected context. There's one mural outside the town where two people are pictured in an embrace under bushes. It's a touching and magical piece of work, largely because it represents an intimacy and romance that is unexpected in a form that's ostensibly propagandist.

Politically many might find the earnest declamations a bit naive but it's a geniunely engaging piece of folk art with a genuine sense of community and moral authority than an awful lot of bland impenetrable contemporary public art in more urban surroundings.

Orgosolo reminded me a little of Stokes Croft in Bristol in a way. The two environments couldn't be more different but the direct intervention of local people in forging an independent creative environment that reflects the world as it appears to them is something that's inspiring.

Sardinia itself is a really wonderful place. We stayed near Bosa in the west of the island. Ate our own body weight in superb seafood and just hung about. There was an amazing barbeque in the place we were staying so we had some great steaks and sausage! Yum!

Explored some Nuraghe and churches and sat on the beach (in my case hiding under rocks with things tied around my head reading and listening to tunes!). Read John McGahern's amazing "That they may face the rising sun" which is an absolutely stunning meditation on community, age, farming, love and the passage of time. The description of agricultural life in Leitrim amongst my grandfather's generation provided a neat echo of the serene agricultural rhythms of an island that hasn't yet lost its sense of the pulse of the seasons.

It lives...

2008-06-07T10:51:00.004+01:00

No updates for over a month.

Naughty, lazy, feckless wastrel.

Work's been busy and I've been on holidays.

Recent Underground Solushun acquisitions:

Four Tet- Ringer EP (Domino)
SL Break- Laguna Seca 12" (Philpot)
Luke Hess- Real to Real 12" (FXHE)
James Pants- Welcome LP (Stones Throw)
Daedalus- Fair Weather Friends EP (Ninja Tune)
Terrence Dixon- Climb EP (Nightvision)
Sub Club- 20 years underground CD (Soma)

Absolutely loving the Luke Hess and Terrence Dixon 12"s.

The subculture CD on the Sub Club compilation has me happy as a clam.
The Martian, Steve Poindexter, Jimmy Bo Horne, Galaxy to Galaxy.
*Sigh*
Harri and Dominic are just dreamy.

Anyways, enough guff. It's the Leith Gala today so that means heading down the Links this afternoon for some food and cold beer in the sun listening to Stevie Messenger's good time selections. The weather's looking good so it should be a nice afternoon, at least until the local heid the baws start getting surly.

Then it's off to Techno Matt's 30th birthday party and the inevitable dawn of random.

Nooz Rekirdz

2008-05-02T17:08:00.004+01:00

It's payday friday, the missus is off away for the weekend.

All this means an hour was spent in record shops buying new tunes!
I've was seriously broke last month but there was lots to keep up with.

Sterac- Rond Bot EP (Delsin)
Theo Parrish- That Day/How I feel (Archive)
Darkstar- Need you/Squeeze my lime (Hyperdub)
Juan McLean- Happy House (DFA)
The Clone Machine- The Clone Machine (um, Clone)
Moodymanc- The preacher (Moodymanc)

oh, and finally found a copy of Omar S- Psychotic Photosynthesis!

WOOO!

313/0131

2008-04-29T18:20:00.004+01:00

The curtain on Triptych came down on a non-Bank Holiday Sunday night with a service from Detroit wizard Theo Parrish. Not the biggest crowd you’ve ever seen but from the moment the Parrish Priest hit the turntables around 1 you could see they meant business. A motley crew of Parrish obsessives, shandy-drinking Houseboys, sleazy grope monkeys, party casualties and some old heads in obscure Detroit t-shirts all started getting down to Parrish’s mindbending selection of jazz, disco, funk, techno, hip hop and house. Late on during a particularly intriguing jazzy funky section as Parrish’s hands fluttered around the EQ building drama and grinning merrily as the crowd went politely bananas a guy beside me asked me if I knew what record he was playing. I couldn’t quite place anything (apart from the hefty selection of Parrish’s own productions) in the set- it was like that Billy Connolly sketch about someone saying a comedian’s performance was hilarious despite being unable to recall any of the jokes.

This was a serious trip into a music lovers mind and the majority of the crowd seemed happy to allow for fuckups that would have ruined most other big name guest sets. About an hour into the set a mystery power failure knocked out the mixer- this was resolved within five minutes where the crowd decided to create their own erratic little Sound Signature drum loops by stamping their feet and a couple of particularly lubricated fans struck up a halfhearted chorus of “Young Hearts, Run Free” (they looked like they’d been out on the town since Candi Staton’s gig at the Bongo on Friday). The music returned and off we went again through spacey UR-ey techno before a trademark tempo drop into some beautiful jazzy/discoey numbers. Parrish was rummaging around under the decks at one stage when the record he was playing just ran out. Ironic cheers but no real animosity as a sheepish Parrish blithely popped up from behind the decks and just put the track back on. Other DJ’s would have been pilloried for this little faux-pas but you get the feeling that no-one was that upset. There were a number of mixing disasters but again you got the sense that none of this really mattered all that much.

Parrish is a DJ in the old style, playing a range of tracks and tempos to bring people on a journey. You do suspect that some punters did feel a bit let down by the lack of showstopping tricks on display as the crowd thinned from 3am. The final hour was a complete masterclass in building expectation using music that you doesn’t scream “dancefloor” with a load of spacey jazz music and a couple of Parrish favourites (people were actually singing along to drum loops at this stage!!) before a beautiful 15 minute version of what sounded like an Erykah Badu track followed by a sweet soulful a capella at the end. Most other DJ’s end with a bang, Parrish’s stubborn allegiance to his sound made for an extended and emotional goodbye both to Parrish and to a festival that has brought such luminaries as David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Kenny Dixon and Parrish to Scotland for the last year and this was an apposite if low-key end to proceedings.

As I walked home I was reminded of a party in Dublin years ago at which myself and a pal of mine were DJing. Early on we were playing a Moodymann record. We were approached by a woman who stormed up to us and roared “Play us something we can fucking come up on”. This struck us as both tragic and hilarious at the time and it’s become a sort of in-joke whenever we hear a DJ rapidly change tempo after losing the floor. Parrish’s selections mightn’t be to everyone’s taste, the music might be too “deep”, too reverential, too connected to an obscure and personal musical history, the mixing might be offhand and varied in quality but the man knows how to play the shit out of his record collection. He’s playing these records because he loves them and that was more than enough to make the evening memorable.

Smack my 'tych up.

2008-04-25T09:37:00.005+01:00

So goodbye then Triptych. Since I first saw your natty posters and groovy lineups I've enjoyed your all too brief appearances on the schedules. Sure, your publicity did consistently and hilariously overegg the pudding, your tickets were pricey, you never brought in the weekend ticket I desperately craved and the Weejies kept all the good gigs but hey, it was fun while it lasted.

The world and its ma is doing a Triptych "memories" feature so I thought why don't I.

Best 5 gigs:

1. Wire/Liars/Pan Sonic all on the same bill? The best Wednesday night I've ever attended. Despite the hour and a half wait for Wire to start. Pan Sonic lay the bedrock for an evening of scary madness with juddering sub bass, Liars in full-on Blair Witch mode clatter and moan and squeal, then Wire lead a singalong in a room full of misty eyed drunk old men. All for 14 quid.

2. Animal Collective. Miles down a bill which included Explosions in the Sky (or as a wag in the crowd called them "I can't believe they're no Mogwai") and Four Tet, Animal Collective breezed through Sung Tongs and I fell in love with them. One of those moments when a band you've never heard of before suddenly gives you flowers. Also notable for the experience of seeing a very earnest drunken man give someone from Explosions in the Sky a bollocking for being "middle class white music" and that the "real shit" was downstairs where the Soul Jazz Soundsystem were playing. I'm not a fan of EITS but his response to this lord of irony("Hey, fuck you buddy, nobody's making you listen") made me love them a just a tiny bit.

3. LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip- A fantastic night at the late lamented Venue. Hot Chip seemed like the cutest thing I'd ever seen- like a cross between Belle and Sebastian and the Happy Mondays. A few hours later the place was rammed, the busiest I'd ever seen the venue and James Murphy and Co were tearing the roof off with their version of "Throw".

4. John Peel playing Teenage Kicks to a mixed crowd of techno nutters and reggae fiends a few months before his untimely death. Knifehandchop melting heads upstairs, Dr Alimantado being the Best Dressed Chicken in Town.

5. Maher Shalal Hash Baz. 2 days before I got married, my last weekend of "freedom" was a weekend to myself with a fistful of tickets to Triptych gigs. Watching this band, like the gentlest version of the Fall ever, you got a sense of the joy of discovery, of learning and friendship. If you get the opportunity to see this band drop everything and go!

Best memories:
1. Dancing with my pals when Optimo's DJ Twitch played their track just after LCD went off stage and the whole crowd went absolutely mental.

2. The hilarious publicity hyperbole. The 'Knee is right, pick ANY band- a veritable smorgasboard of superlatives!

3. Getting to see Madlib and Jaydee rip it up in the Venue.

4. Having a shite after Pan Sonic had rearranged my bowels.

5. Seeing Bob Moog and Jean Jacques Perry in conversation in the Queens Hall.

Biggest disappointments:
1. No shows. Danger Mouse, Matthew Herbert, Juan Atkins, Cannibal Ox. For shame!

2. Greedy Weejies: For keeping ESG, Model 500, Rhythm & Sound, Aphex, Derrick May, DJ Pierre, David Mancuso and countless others.

3. That Madlib and Dilla never got on the decks despite their constant reminding of the crowd that "we're just DJ's". And that Quasimoto turned out to be the "Very Special Guest".

4. The overreliance of a shallow pool of Glaswegian band talent. Triptych didn't really do anything for emerging Scottish artists over the lifetime of the festival.

5. The absence of a "Festival Ticket" that would have enabled festival goers to go to everything without having to pay for tickets and booking fee for every gig.

This weekend I'm off to see Jah Shaka, Theo Parrish and hopefully the RZA.

Goodbye Triptych, here's hoping we come up with some other way of luring maverick geniuses to Central Scotland!

Acting the maggot

2008-04-24T18:26:00.005+01:00

In keeping with the acting the maggot theme I've decided to start a semi-regular photography series. The photos were taken at times when the photographer was too intoxicated to reasonably be expected to be in charge of a camera but through a massive stroke of luck and/or drunken inspiration managed to take something that might actually be interesting.

So... on we go.

ARGH! A RAT CARCASS!
No, just a mad looking tissue opposite the Capel Street Flats on the walk home after a very, very, very long night in Dublin. Thought long and hard about bringing it home.

My pals Mer n' Kat looking deeply disturbing at ATP the year before last. I have no memory of this photo being taken. This may have had something to do with Wolf Eyes.

Found object. Spider. Jaggy Plastic. Location: On the floor of a club.

A photo of our Christmas tree ornament and the sun setting over Lochend. Taken by me at about 2pm after getting home about 10 minutes earlier in a condition which can only be described as guttered.

All submissions of mystery/baffling/beautiful/drunken photos gratefully accepted.
Criteria: Must have been taken in either error or flash of intoxicated "genius".

Time, like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away

2008-04-24T17:55:00.006+01:00

"I used to be 'with it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' seems weird and scary."

The feeling of getting older is never pleasant. And the onset seems to be happening earlier and earlier what with "it" changing every 15 minutes.

It's crushing when it happens, when you go on a night out thinking you're the big hepcat around town and all of a sudden your favourite venue is overrun with madourravih teenagers wearing clothes that seem more suited to, well, high concept TV drama about impossibly cool and beautiful young people than a dingy booze-sodden kip in a condemned building in the Old Town.

This happened to me years ago, when I moved to Edinburgh and the crowds at gigs and clubs seemed younger, cooler and way, way, way more connected than I did. A lot of that had to do with the fact that in reality I was never particularly cool to begin with. Unfortunately my own sense of self is often completely out of step with reality so trying to settle into a country with amazing clubs and a much wider variety of gigs than where I was used to was a tough transition. It played on my mind, wasI just the old fucker in the corner? Are those women dancing with me because they're flirting or ripping the piss? As it turns out, no more or less than they used to which is predominantly the latter. Are there ways in which you can cocoon yourself from this?

I found the best way was by having a few drinks and not caring. I was there for the music to start with so why let a few hyper-confident drug pumped infants ruin it for me. You can also do so by acting your age. This is difficult for someone with a personality that is half infantile and half grouchy sanctimonious pensioner.

Anyway, on the bus home today I heard a song that put me in mind of this. It was on a mix and being completely out of the loop I thought it was a lost 80's pop classic. It turns out it was Chromeo and it's a fantastic way to take the edge off that "are they dancing to flirt/take the piss" paranoia.

Cheer up everyone! It doesn't matter. It's all good and that. And when you look closer at the crowd around you you'll probably realise that it's actually full of old gits and gitini too, you've just been distracted by all the neon sunnies.

And chances are you'll look back on the gig as the night when you realised that the world is moving faster than you ever thought possible and will smile at how upset it made you.

Ireland's funny in a way, there's a suspicion of trendies that is nowhere near as pronounced as it is elsewhere. The summer before last I went back to Dublin for a weekend. At the time as a lengthy and ill-considered shaving experiment I was sporting what I thought to be a raffish 'tache. I'd had it for a few months in Scotland (which, as a society is no slouch when it comes to the slagging people for affectation stakes) with nary a comment on it. You'd swear I was wearing fur the way some people reacted. Including a couple of randoms at a gig I was at who seemed to think that this gave them the right to rip the shit out of me for it despite not having spent the time to even bother speaking to me.

Anyways, have a listen to the Chromeo, although everyone's probably seen it about a million times ago thus proving my point as to the futility of trying to keep up with everything.

Gosh! Pow! Go! Now!

2008-04-19T13:30:00.008+01:00

A new project from Gosh Wow/Blackcape comics illustration overlord Iain Laurie!

Powwkipsie!!

Just go right and have a shufty right?

First episode features sad sack comic goof being assassinated by shadowy alien demon secret service punters. Magical stuff really. The "Next" page at the end is a masterwork of restrained menace and foreboding. Well, it's like pure scary and that eh.

Myself and Mr Laurie "worked" on a very short lived fanzine in times of yore.

Even then it was abundantly clear that his talent lay in circles far more elevated than a rabble of surly drunks being artlessly cruel about the patrons of the truly detestable Edinburgh festival.

If you haven't already seen his work with Fraser Campbell and Derek Dow (along with a whole raft of other talented loons) on Blackcape you should give that a wee shot as well. They've just celebrated their 50th edition! Happy Birthday!

Speaking of Edwyn Collins we're off to see him in the Queens Hall on Monday. I suspect it will be a love-in of quite nauseating proportions considering it's his first gig in Scotland since he was taken really quite frighteningly ill a few years ago. He's one of my all time heroes so I don't feel like too much of a ghoul for going to welcome him back to the stage.

If he doesn't play Falling and Laughing I'm going to get up and lamp him though.
If he does I'll probably bawl like a big Mandy.

Bristol

2008-04-04T17:02:00.009+01:00

Just about recovered from a weeks holiday which featured a lot of driving on tight South-Western and Welsh roads.

Visited my brother in Bristol which is The Nicest English City I've Ever Been To so far.
A nice laid back town with lots of relaxing things to do. Tons of green space too. As well as a really amazing variety of street art in some sections.

Everyone goes on about the Banksy bits around the town but there's loads of other stuff.

Here are some photos.

Stokes Croft is a vague little area with its own agenda and spirit. It reminds me a bit of Leith in the fierce pride the denizens take in their area. It's by no means trendy being a bit too louche for many but I really enjoyed the vibe here.

The PRSC (Lots of People's Republics on the internet) is the epitome of some of the spirit here, calling on people to use street art to brighten up their neighbourhood. By identifying sites around the area, many of them hoardings or derelict buildings they encourage people to paint on them. Permissions are sought and advised upon although in some cases they haven't but say "it would be difficult to make the site worse".

I'd be inclined to believe them.

They've also put up noticeboards for community information, tags, stickers etc.

Went to some lovely boozers too, the Beaufort in Montpelier was a lovely old mans pub with a great wee jukie full of lovers rock and ska 7"s. Went to the Bank as well where I got completely floored by some crazy cloudy cask cider and went out to Tape. Saw Jay Le Surgeon and Bass Clef but had to head before Peverelist was on. Grr. Thanks to Richard and all the rest of the Tape crew who gave me a great welcome, the club had a lovely relaxed vibe and the folk were very friendly. I ended up being dragged home early after drinking some evil fruity cidery thing that had me forgetting to look at the time. There's something to be said for just going to clubs you want to by yourself rather than drag people who aren't necessarily into it along and then moan when they've had enough. Anyways I had had enough of drinking at that point as I was slurring incoherently yet enthusiastically about the tunes and the nice wee club.

On my birthday I went to Bordeaux Quay which is a beautiful big brasserie and then strolled along by the water for a bit. There was a guy playing a Kora which took our minds off the cold and the rain for a minute or two. Then off to the Rummer which is a nice old school cocktail bar and drank Negroni in front of a huge fireplace. Sweeeet.

Didn't manage to get to any record shops which was disappointing, I think my travelling companions managed to steer me away from them. In hindsight it was probably a good idea, I'm broke enough as it is.

Went to my pal's wedding and DJ'd which was a great success despite being shackled to a request list as cheesy as it was long. Still, who knew that A-Ha and Five(?!) could cause such dancefloor mayhem. It was on in Wells which is absolutely gorgeous if a little genteel. We saw a terrace of houses that was built in the 1350's! Who knew!? Huge cathedral, Bishops Palace surrounded by a moat that's crystal clear because it's fed by a well which overflows and sluices water through the town. Serious hobbit action going on there.

Back through Hay-On-Wye (Bookish, bank machine out of order, frustrated at not having bought more!), Shrewsbury (Busy, baffling and boooring) and Manchester (Flash, stayed in posh hotel, nearly got battered in a 24 shop queue for juice at midnight).

Holi-holi-holi-day.

2008-03-20T19:27:00.002Z

That's me off on holidays for a week. Thank jakers for that, things have been insanely busy at work hence the crapness in updating.

I'm off to Bristol to see my brother and get along to this.

Please stay tuned for some stuff about classical music, leith artists and hopefully some music from the 'Knee!

Kill Meeee!

2008-03-13T19:00:00.005Z

I'm currently insanely busy and not updating as much as I'd like just now.
This has something to do with work.
And also something to do with sorting out the music for a friend of mine's wedding in a couple of weeks.

I drunkenly volunteered to do it a few months ago, our taste in music would, how do you put it, diverge somewhat so i've found myself trawling the nether regions of 80's hair metal and really embarrassing 90's pop music.

To such an extent that I was just listening to "Pour some sugar on me" by Def Leppard and about 2'55 into the song went, "that really sounds like the guitar from Digital by Joy Division"

I feel dirty.

Moronic (the Hedgehog)

2008-03-07T17:23:00.005Z

Just away and watch yourself some Videogaiden for yourself.

Superb Scottish video games magazine programme with lovable presenters, peurile humour and geniune heart.

Nice starting point is Episode 5 of series 3 (all of which you can watch at the site) around 11.30 into the programme when they set about Mario & Sonic Olympics.

Hee.

When the cat's away...

2008-03-03T13:24:00.008Z

...the mouse will go through to the Weej, buy records and go to gigs.

With the wife back in ireland this weekend I toddled across to Glasgow on Saturday for some record buying and gig going.

Started at Rub a Dub and spent a lovely hour going through a big stack of vinyl. Made some good purchases and heard probably the worst house track I've ever come across in my life. Was interested in hearing it as it's very early and thought it might be worth investigating. Enormous mistake. The years have not been kind to this forgotten slice of House history. Maybe I'm missing something here but it was disappointing.

Ended up picking up some good new stuff there and the staff at Rub A Dub are dead friendly and helpful.

New purchases include:
MLZ- Crossed Swords (Modern Love)
Nubian Minds- Africa Man EP (Delsin)
Gescom- A1/B1 (Skam)
Shackleton- Death is not final (Skull Disco)
Deep Chord- Coldest Season EP2 (Modern Love)
Dubbyman- Dubtroit EP (Deep Explorer)
nsi.-Non standard institut (Cadenza)

Pretty varied stuff there- I'm most happy with the nsi. and nubian minds releases- both are really up my street. I love the bonkers satie-esque piano sounds on the nsi.

Then it was on to Monorail where my pal wanted to pick up an import CD of Japanese Geniuses/Idiots Afrirampo. I saw them live a few years ago and they were fantastic- a really fun witty show by two absolutely amazing musicians. While I was there I found myself idly browsing through the racks and couldn't resist picking up remixes of Delia & Gavin Russom "Revelee" and the new LCD Soundsystem 12" "Confuse the marketplace". I'd promised myself I'd buy these for a while, largely for the Carl Craig remix on the former and "Hippie Priest Bum-Out" on the latter. There's a really good dubby remix of "North American Scum" on Confuse the Marketplace too. I also bought a couple of 7"s because they were conveniently located on top of the cashdesk. I can't help myself sometimes, especially on the weekend of payday and I'm off on my own with no-one to rein in my excesses.

With the record buying part of the mission over it was on to the gigs...

Started with Monade at Nice n Sleazys. This is a side project for Stereolab's Laetitia Sadlier and some of her pals. Support was from the Phantom Band. I wasn't overly impressed with the Phantom Band, they were ok but tracks meandered on trying to take in lots of ideas and influences without really going anywhere. Suggestions of Neu, Gram Parsons, David Kitt and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Which unfortunately promised more than it delivered. Maybe it was just one of those evenings and they're actually fantastic.

Monade came on around ten and played for an hour. They're not enormously different in sound and tone to the poppier end of the Stereolab spectrum. They reminded me a little of Deerhoof but loungier. Loungehoof so to speak. The deerhoof similarity comes largely from the fact that a lot of the songs feature radical time and key changes which gives a real sense of dynamism and spring to some of the songs. Everything was beautifully balanced with Marie Merlet and Sadlier harmonising sweetly along to spirals of choppy guitar and neat tones from Nicolas Etienne's keys. The last few numbers, from new album Monstre Cosmic were really good despite the crowd seeming quite distracted. You hear a lot of guff about Glasgow crowds being more up for it than boring old tweedy Edinburgh. Tonight wasn't one of those nights with people standing around chatting rather than really engaging with the band at all which was a pity, because Monade are a fantastic grown-up dreamy pop band that doesn't need to hide behind sexy design and arch theatricality.

Then it was off to the Art School for Numbers birthday party and Autechre in all their live glory. I'm an Autechre nerd and have been throughout their many incarnations so i was very excited about this. A charge often levelled at Booth and Brown is that their music is too "cerebral"- I've always taken issue with this, yes the later records from LP5 through to Untilted have been quite process-heavy and contain tracks that require repeated listens to unpick their secrets but Autechre in concert have always been an exhilarating and eminently danceable prospect.

SND started the night off and were diverting for a while. I prefer the whole glitchy thing on record a lot more than i do live. Although I did have a bit of a boogie to a couple of the more funky electro moments. Then we were treated to Skam head honcho Rob Hall lashing out a scatter of clatter which seemed to warm up the crowd a little. There was little of Glasgow's fabled ambience here either- although I did meet one cheeky wee west coast headcase who was completely out of his knackers with his t-shirt tied around his head well before midnight. I love these guys. Particularly at gigs like this where everyone's got their big serious faces on.

By the time Autechre came on the room was pretty full but strangely there wasn't a huge amount of movement from the crowd with the majority of people content to just stand about. This is surprising because straight from the outset Autechre seemed determined to get people dancing. The hour and a half live show used much of the source material from Quaristice but put it through the distinctive Autechre live blender- everything is slightly hectic, twitchy but still distinctively rhythmic. We were even treated to a rare suggestion of humanity with actual human voices breaking through the clattering storm of breakbeats on Quaristice's "IO". What a bunch of sellouts! The insistence amongst critics of Autechre's post-Tri repetae material that it's too cerebral but in the live arena Autechre completely destroy this notion- on this tour it appears they're casting off the mythical stereotypes of them as unsmiling mad-professors running their equipment for days and inventing their own software to generate the music from nothing. This is Autechre in more relaxed form and enjoying the live environment- to which their music is better suited than people seem to assume.
This was what they did from the outset; the material has always approprated elements of dance music before scrambling it out of shape then pulling it all back together again. Live versions of "Perlence", the dark digital hip-hop of "Rale" and particularly the chiming musicbox chords of "Simmm" from the new album have echoes of older material like Envane, Cichlisuite and Chiastic Slide. It's interesting that Autechre critics who decried their move away from the original sound are now the ones who are down on the new albums conservatism. Basically Autechre are caught between a rock and a hard place, unable to make all their fans happy all the time and therefore deciding to please themselves. Listening to them tear their way through a rumbling version of the dubby "90101 51 1" you'd need a heart of stone not to smile and get that ass bouncing. (Update: There was an interview with Autechre on the (gawk)Today Programme which covered their gig at a car park in London. A lot of overintellectualising from the journos but the punters seem to have enjoyed themselves. Still, at least the Beeb journalists made an attempt to engage with the music unlike Dave Simpson's mean spirited Guardian gripes.)

Following on from a discussion about men and women dancing in clubs over at House is a Feeling I was inspired to make a random headcount of the split. The stereotype does have some basis in reality as there was a hefty 70:30 split in favour of the boys. I have extensive data on the ubiquity of square spectacles and architectural t-shirts that are available on request. Despite conforming to all the sneering demographic stereotypes about an IDM/Glitch night by the time Autechre had hit their stride there were at least some people (of both sexes) interested in getting down. In fact, the area in front of the stage the split was down to about 50:50. Unscientific it may be but it seems the dancefloor, heady as it may have been was where the majority of the ladies appeared to be. What does this mean, probably that women would prefer to dance in a club than sit around trying to figure out how the music is being made.

It's been 16 years since I'd first seen Laetitia Sadlier and 12 since I first saw Autechre. Time passes so quickly! Both Autechre and Sadlier have been around a while and amassed a phenomenal body of work, it's encouraging to discover that neither seem to be stepping off the gas in terms of developing new ideas and new ways of working.

Then Rob Hall was back on with more clattering acid before a brief stop off in the bar for an ill-advised last pint and a bit of a boogie to the Castaways "Liar Liar" before taking to the insanely windy streets of Glasgow.

I am now looking down the barrel of a very lean month during which i will eat nothing Spaghetti Hoops on toast.

The sloping brow of a stagecoach tilter...

2008-02-21T18:27:00.012Z

photo copyright Joanna Kane.
Somnambulists is a fantastic little exhibition of work by Joanna Kane a photographer and artist based in Edinburgh currently showing at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
It features photographic digital prints of life and death masks from the collection of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society.

The photographs have been subtly manipulated to create an illusion of life from these casts. Through this seemingly straightforward process Kane has extracted an extraordinary amount of humanity from a subject that mightn't appear that gripping. Phrenology is seen as an unfashionable and embarrassing excess from the gold rush of scientific enquiry throughout the enlightenment. The notion that someone's character can be alluded to through their skull structure is laughable but Kane has created the impression that there's something more to these masks than the simple imprint created by the subjects head.

There's a variety of people featured, a fair few doctors and phrenologists, a couple of mining engineers from Leith, some unknowns and a remarkable smattering of early 19th century writers. The photograph of James Hogg's cast was a wonderful surprise as I have been fascinated with him since moving to Edinburgh and first reading The Private Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg's face is as I'd imagined it, a long drawn spade of a man reminiscent of Noel Browne in his later years. This got me thinking about the kinds of visual games you play with yourself when you go abroad and meet someone who puts you in mind of an old friend.

This also struck me when looking at some of the poets featured. Wordsworth's face is an absolute joy and was completely unlike I'd imagined him, somehow he's just too manly in real life. Keats and Coleridge are also there along with William Blake. Blake's portrait is superb, a stern blank canvas upon which you can project pretty much anything. There's a touch of Brando (as Kurtz) and more than a hint of Terry Gilliam too in his stern sleeping mask. The book accompanying the exhibition refers to a friend of Blake's expressing his disappointment that the cast captures none of Blake's good-naturedness. The book features extensive notes about all the photos and features a hilarious spat between Hogg and the Phrenological fraternity.

The whole exhibition is a fantastic evocation of a period before photography where many exciting ideas were flying around. Kane's photography is based around Phrenology and alludes in the title to Mesmerism which was a fashionable movement at the time.
It also has a great sense of Edinburgh as a place at that time with it's engineers and it's doctors and it's poets and philosophers.

I've always had difficulty imagining real people in the past. I've always had this irrational notion that somehow people looked different. This killed that notion stone dead, the photos could be of people you see in the street- all the more so in Edinburgh where I'm sure I've seen some of the "unknown" casts on the number 25 bus in the morning! They have a life to them that had me imagining them yawning and winking at each other after we had left and the lights blinked off.

If you're in the portrait gallery go into the gift shop and look at the portrait of Edwin Morgan by Alexander Moffatt over the door. It's a stoater.

Disaster!

2008-02-16T14:12:00.004Z

Tragedy struck the internet this week when the peerless Curry Chips went to the wall.

Follow the link for a rundown of the greatest hits.

If there's anything funnier than DIDL I want to know about it.

Enjoy your retirement Nat.

Clever/stupid.

2008-02-15T18:12:00.003Z

It's difficult to ascertain which side of this axis I come down on.

I try to keep each foot in both camps.
This frequently gets me into trouble.

Here's some youtubage that I hope demonstrates that...

monks- boys are boys and girls are choice

American Movie- prompted by the mention of the Yes Men on Ronan's blog .

Superb and inexplicably slept on.

Madvillain- All Caps.
Comics. Beats. Mad flow. Beaaaautiful.

Muppets + Extremely foul language = quality.

Texans. A warning from history.

2008-02-07T20:05:00.006Z

Or...How a film is improved immeasurably when you're sure of what you're trying to do...

Charlie Wilson's War is almost one of the Great American Satires. Unfortunately the "almost" is what marks it out, a missed opportunity. Mike Nichols' dramatisation of George Crille's book "My Enemy's Enemy" works as a prequel to the all too real events taking place in Afghanistan since the mid-90's. Telling the story of Charlie Wilson, State Senator for Texas, who through his position on the Defense Appropriation Committee, lavished US funding to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan during the Soviet Invasion after 1980. It details how charming, freewheeling good old boy Wilson begs borrows and steals his way into the heart of the US Security family bringing his banker, Julia Roberts' Joanne Herring along for the ride. Herring is portrayed as the dark presence at the heart of the film and one that neither Sorkin nor Nichols seem to know what to do with it- they paint her as a cold, calculating evangelical. I was immediately struck by the potential for Herring and Wilson's partnership as a metaphor for the birth of Bush II who seems effectively to be an amalgam of Herring's red-knuckled Evangelical Christanity (subtext: evil) and Wilson's amiable, buffoonish but shrewd political horse-trading (subtext: good). This element in the film seems to have sailed past Sorkin and particularly Nichols' in terms of presenting this as the central relationship at the heart of the film, Roberts must also take the blame for her performance which completely fails to inhabit the role of Herring .

It prefers instead to focus on the buddy-buddy relationship between Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) and Wilson who both perform the roles handed to them with gusto (Particularly Hoffmann, a vicious pre-911 throwback who just wants to "kill Russians") but you get the feeling that this is more of a vehicle for Sorkin's strong suit of snappy retrosexual dialogue and some great interplay between the two leads. Which is not, in itself, an entirely bad thing. The film is quite entertaining but the longer things go on the more my shoulders sagged in resignation as it hurtled onwards towards the events we all know so well. The problem lies largely in Sorkins' quaint but irritating faith in the good inherent in the American Project. The movie seems to be saying "wouldn't it have been great if only we'd invested and helped the Afghans get back on their feet none of the events which followed would ever have happened!" It sounds laughable but it's exactly what happens. The film has a tacked on remorsefest with a mournful Wilson lamenting the missed oportunities with Gust in the closing frames. Like any of this really matters.

Again, Nichols almost hits the button with an extraordinary sequence of news footage of Afghan Mujahadeen shooting down Russian fighters with surface to air missiles that would have bookended the movie perfectly. Had they chosen to end with this sequence, bookended with the congratulations scenes, where Wilson is given the unprecedented honour of being welcomed as an "Honoured Colleague" in the CIA's Near East Division, we would have been left with a sour irony which fits the noxious fallout to the entire Regan-era covert ops fad which opened the doors for the neo-cons. Sorkin and co seem to be at pains to distance themselves from any explicit comment on this matter which is depressing, principally because it's fertile ground. The covert funding of private wars by the US in the Cold War period was the primary catalysing agent in many contemporary conflicts- the arms proliferated in that period are still being used but more damaging are the relationships established- either between the CIA and its myriad sponsored covert militas and the Yeltsin period outsourcing of former KGB operatives to the highest bidder. This decoupling of military force from the body politic has had serious implications in the post-cold war world. Rather than explore how this came about Sorkin is content to have us snicker at the impropriety of forthright Herring saying "Zia did not kill Bhutto" at a Pakistani fundraiser. Sounds familiar when played alongside George W Bush's repeated denials of US torture even as the the architecture of rendition was established practice in US intelligence and counter-terrorism.

The entire problem here is that Sorkin and Nichols don't know what they want to say. The inherent flaw in the film is that both director nor writer lack the courage to explicitly say "we did this"- preferring to say "we screwed it up". Firstly that's not good enough, secondly it's just not that simple. I'm probably being a little too earnest about this given that this is a star studded political adventure story but the movie markets itself as a satire. But the entire film is undermined by the suspicion that no-one knew what they were trying to say about this. It would almost have been better if they'd made a "Red State" movie with an unapologetic gloss given to the whole affair and let people make up their own minds but Sorkin can't help but try to do some tidying up at the end with his patented misty eyed hand-wringing. There is far more interesting material in Crille's book which details how a small group of people, many of whom were unelected, funded and pursued a military strategy which has repercussions for US foreign policy today. If Nichols and Sorkin had the courage to satirise the birth of Neoconservative practice (rather than the ideology which was being forged simultaneously by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al), rather than Good Old Charlie's proclivity for first-class, bourbon and dames, they could have made this film a whole lot more important than a knockabout comedy drama about a self-funded elite within American Government waging war without Congress' approval.

Yeah, party on Clom.

Nothing draws in the crowds like Congress' approval.

Easy does it...

2008-02-06T19:53:00.001Z

Hello.

Here is where things will be thought and typed about.

I don't really know what about just yet but the broad area would be culture, whatever that means. It's largely an exercise in making myself write things.

Thanks.

Below is the first post. Some of my thoughts about Charlie Wilson's War.
It probably features run-on, rambling sentences replete with suspect grammar.

Please comment/suggest/gripe etc.