Asleep on the Compost Heap

From the top of my head down to the tips of the toes on my feet

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:43:00 +0000

I promise, I resolve, I will blow the cobwebs off this dusty old internet hole over the coming weeks, to keep it ticking over so that the moss doesn't grow over it and the squatters don't move in.

rad owls: because, why not?

As I explained before, I've been dividing my time between work and writing fiction, and I'm hovering in an anxious limbo, where everything is a work in progress, incomplete. Because of this, whenever my thoughts turn to this blog, it is with a bit of guilt, the guilt that the time could be spent writing the draft novel or whatever. And it is a properly anxious limbo, because, not having submitted the draft to anyone yet (it's some ways off that), I have no idea whether or not the whole endeavour will amount to any more than a big hill of beans.

Though that's not entirely true. Because even if I never get published, the process of taking the time every other day to write something as long as a novel has enriched my life. It has enriched my reading life for a start. I now notice how books are engineered, how some novels might as well be cobbled together from pritt-stick and sellotape, though others, the ones touched by greatness, still seem as smooth as hewn marble from where I regard them. So, yah, I suppose that writing has taught me (slow learner that I am at the age of thirty two) to become a more discerning reader.

Writing has also taught me to notice things. And noticing things has put the brakes on time in a way. I carry a journal with me everywhere, and scribble down anything that strikes me as worth filing away for future reference. These are the writerly little details that will help me win my battles against cliché, I tell myself, as I jot something like "dapper old fella with snaggle tooth and cane... a parakeet among dun-coloured sparrow ppl on no. 11 bus." The more of these details I write down, the more I record my days in this way, the more time seems to slow. Nothing makes the days rush by like blind habit does, that shuttling along through workaday routines. Slowing down and noticing things, savouring the world, mitigates against this.

Try it.

In music news, I'm going to see Danny Brown play the Sugar Club at the end of June and I can't wait. I might go to the Longitude festival thing too, probably on the Kraftwerk day. My favourite album this year so far is John Grant's Pale Green Ghosts though Vampire Weekend are currently threatening to usurp this. GMF from the John Grant album is easily my favourite song in yonks. You can watch it below.

If you still read this blog, a very real thanks for sticking with it through a fallow period.

taken by trees

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:02:00 +0000

Of all the dumb shit my father has gotten up to in his back garden, last Friday's dumb shit was the dumbest shit yet. And before anyone calls me out for being a bit hard on the man here, I'll add that I was very much complicit in the dumb shit.

A couple of weeks ago, the monstrous leylandii trees which towered over my family home for three decades were cut down by a tree surgeon hired by the local residents' committee. The endeavour left the back garden looking very baldy and grim, though I'm sure summer's growth will temper some of the severity. It also left one tree behind, a silver birch that had forced itself up among the leylandiis, becoming shaped by lack of light into extreme, spindling lankiness. Imagine a 40 foot twig. That is what this silver birch looked like.

The tree surgeon told my parents that there was some sort of clause in his contract preventing him from cutting any trees other than leylandiis and this is why the silver birch was pardoned.

My father couldn't bear the sight of the silver birch. He anthropomorphised it (like he anthropomorphises all things, animate and inanimate), and the first thing he told me when I visited last weekend was, "that's an awful sorry looking excuse for a tree. The other ones destroyed it. We'll have to put it out of its misery."

Not long later he was sitting in its crotch, twenty feet above the ground, ready to engage in some DIY tree surgery with my mother's least favourite item in the entire universe, a chainsaw that he impulse bought in Lidl last year (actually, the chainsaw might be her second least favourite thing. Her least favourite is the portrait of Michael Collins that my father keeps placing in innocuous places around the house in a game of cat and mouse that has been going on with her for years).

While my father sat perched in the tree with his chainsaw, and my mother (and all of our neighbours, I later found out) watched with dread from the kitchen window, I stood in the football pitch behind the garden, holding a rope tied to the piece of the tree he was to cut off. The idea was to pull the piece of tree free and into the football pitch so that it didn't damage the shed on its way down.

As ideas go, it turned out to be a pretty bad one.

When I pulled on the rope and the chainsawed piece of tree came away, I knew that things were going to go tits up, mostly because they started to happen in slow motion. I watched my father flail in slow motion, then topple sideways in slow motion, then fall fourteen feet onto the shed roof in slow motion. The next thing I remember is holding him in place on the shed roof as I screamed down the garden at my mother, who stood frozen and ghost pale in the window.
"Ambulance. Ambulance. Call a fucken ambulance."
I think that's the gist of what I shouted.

This is the actual tree - the red arrow shows the point from which he fell.

My father was bleeding from his nose and he looked at me with an intense, weirdly innocent gaze I never saw before - confusion, desperation and fear all mixed up together. His trousers were torn and one bare leg jutted up away from him at a bad angle. He made a low croaky whistling noise - air going back into winded lungs. Naturally, I thought he was dying. So did many of the neighbours.

It transpired that almost every neighbour with a line of sight on our garden must have watched my father's ill-judged battle against the birch, because, within moments of his falling, the garden filled with people. They all helped out in a cool, sensible manner, calming my mother's nerves and helping me put my father into the recovery position. In stark contrast to the neighbours were my parents' chickens, which streamed maniacally through the back door, into the house, squawking and shiteing as they went, confused by all the people in the garden.

By then, my father was sitting on a chair, joking that he had messed up his hair, and insisting "no, I'll not bleddy go to the hospital." He signed a report, filled out by the flummoxed paramedics, describing how he had been implored to go to the hospital four times, in front of witnesses, and had refused to go four times, meaning it was his own problem if he died during the night.

taken by trees

Later that night I woke up chewing the air, chattering curses to myself. The back garden had filled my dreams, rolling far into the weird, space-and-time-traversing geography of sleep. All night, I dreamt of people falling out of trees. At 4am, I went to check on my father. He snored away peacefully, as if nothing had happened at all.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 07:58:00 +0000

I'm acting upon a dream I had last night where, I shit not, popular Irish music blogger Niall Byrne was trapped within the trunk of a Leylandii tree in my back garden (turning into wood like something out of this radiohead video) and we had a lengthy conversation about music blogging. So here I am, driven by my vision of Nialler, trying to dust off the compost heap for the second time this year.

In the meantime, I've still been writing. Here's something I wrote for Siren magazine, who have relaunched with a great website. Stick around and look at other stuff on the site. They ostensibly cover feminist issues but their remit is very broad - there's a lot of great writing there. Good luck to them, I say.

I've also entered a few short story competitions. These things spring up all over the calendar like mushrooms - every small town in Ireland would seem to have a literary festival and short story competition attached. So I sent a few stories off to various corners of the country and will continue to do so as I write more/ the rejections pile up.

chipper lane is in my ears and in my eyes

Which brings me to something very cool and Kells related ("oh, look, he's put the words 'cool' and 'Kells' in a sentence together again: YAWN" - you, probably. But wait... this is very cool. I promise). Kells, through some desperate gimmicky fluke (or, more likely, astute maneuvering by bookish people in the chamber of commerce) has ended up attached to Britain's biggest literary festival, Hay. So, at the end of June, the town is going to play host to a bunch of well-known writers such as John Banville and DBC Pierre. I wonder will Banville have a full Irish in Taypots? Will Margaret Atwood survive a lock-in in Smokey O'Rourke's pub? Will DBC Pierre pass out with an open batter burger on his chin in chipper lane? Only time will tell.

EXCITING, ISN'T IT?

The format of this blog dictates that after I waffle for four or more paragraphs I should mention music in passing. So here's some music in passing.

My favourite producer, DJ Koze, has a wopper album out named after a deeply primordial part of the brain, the Amygdala. Perhaps too wopper (it's 80 minutes long and feels a little bit stout around the middle), but the highlights are a blast, such as the following collaboration with Matthew Dear which, in addition to being a squiggly neon techno slow jam, gives great life advice: when life throws you lemons... take a bath.

I've always thought DJ Koze's colour is purple, and this album has a nice purple tinted cover (with the man sitting on a reindeer and wearing a crash helmet, I might add) to go with the very purple music - purple's funky, right? Get on it, like a sonnet.

Fun facts: I'm on the bus to Kells and this blog was written between Cabra and Navan. Not bad, eh?

I'll be back again very soon. Promise.

spotterflies

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 14:27:00 +0000

Walking to the shop in Ranelagh I noticed a touch of Spring in the air. A few small things - the bright sunshine, a small breeze running over a pygmy daffodil in a garden, and construction workers laying down tarmac in the main street - heralded the change. So, I took out my phone and texted to myself "write a blog about Spring being in the air" - because that's how us bloggers perceive the world, as potential content. Then, at that precise point, when I was thinking of new life and regeneration, what should roll slowly through the main street? Only a full funeral cortege. The universe having its laugh.

I spent a lot of my extracurricular time on two activities this past week, curating the @Ireland account on twitter and messing around with spotify (which I only began to use recently).

The moon over Ranelagh last night - photo, as usual, from my crummy phone

The @Ireland account, which you can view here, has 12,700 followers, so it was very interesting to experience twitter through that lens. I can see how having so many followers might go to your head. For example, any tweet you write, no matter how mundane, will gather at least a few favourite stars and perhaps one or two retweets. That's for 12,700 followers. Now, imagine being a celebrity with ten times that figure. You'd surely end up deluded, feeling like Moses coming down from the mountain, your every word, even the clichéd old "toast for breakfast" tweet, taken as wit or wisdom, gathering retweets, favourites and responses galore.

Ahead of doing the @Ireland account thing, I figured that I would have a lot to say. It turns out that I didn't really. I found it hard to maintain a daily presence and I ended up waffling about relatively tame stuff - garden birds, things in Kells, etc... There's no doubt that I'll probably spend all of the coming week having little ideas and saying "fuck, I wish I was still @Ireland."

One last funny thing about the account - there were people who treated it as if it were the official face of the country, like the office of the Taoiseach or some shit. As if the person curating the account at any given time has an obligation to pass comment on news stories relating to Ireland or the Irish. On the day the pope resigned, I had an apoplectic man tweeting "on the evening the pope resigns, what does the @Ireland account do? Tweet pictures of his dinner #fail." Clarifying his tweet later, he said he "at least expected some comment" - and then I briefly wished that I was, in fact, Muslim - as I might well have been - so I could properly show up the assumption about religion that was inherent in his angry tweet.

Spotify was my other distraction this week. I downloaded it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and began using the service deeply, in that I tried out features such as the radio and playlist tools. I love it.

I love:

(i) Being able to nose on my friends. Apart from the kick (don't call the guards. It's non sexual) I get from looking in townhouse windows at nights, I never thought of myself as much of a noser. Yet, looking at what my friends are listening to in real time on spotify is an unusually gratifying activity. I'll give a specific example. I have a friend, Ciarán, who is entirely obsessed with historic pop charts, and of a Sunday evening, I can watch his weird, hyper-specific, almost certainly OCD behaviour from afar - "Ciarán just added Joe Dolce's 'Shaddap Your Face' to his playlist 'English Pop Charts for the Week Ending Februay 21st 1981.'"

(ii) Making weird playlists. This is always a work in progress. Here are some of my playlists.

Drone lake
Songs that are probably perfect
Jazzberries

I like the app so much that I think I'm going to upgrade to the premium service shortly, if only to get rid of the annoying male voice from the ads. You know him; he's the smug knob who says completely nonsensical things like "plug in to the twittesphere", "I like listening to show tunes but I don't want my friends to know," and "EVERYBODY loves lists." If his only function is to drive people around the bend until they pay for the premium service, then I salute the genius in their marketing department.

you'd nearly swim in it

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:49:00 +0000

Suddenly, coloured lights swing up through the dark... a silver flurry of ribbon and paper falls from the ceiling and over the upturned faces of teenagers who dance awkwardly with their arms... here's a glam rock drumbeat and some descending guitar chords... Gary Glitter begins to sing... HELLO, HELLO, IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK.

gently, we sail back out onto blog lake

I took a couple of months' break to work on what I vaguely called 'a project.' It's actually a novel, but I was reticent to say much about it because that's a cliche that leaves you open to snark, isn't it? At least that's what the self-effacing chickenshit part of my brain (which is pretty much all of my brain) told me. I also remembered a pretty funny Peter Cook joke I read somewhere: "I met a man at a party. He said 'I'm writing a novel'. I said 'Oh really? Neither am I.'"

I've tried to say "I'm writing a novel" out loud without cringing, but I can't do it. I'm clearly battling some deeply ingrained prejudices of my own in that regard.

Yet the writing itself is coming along well. Up until shortly before Christmas, it felt like I was working on a dozen little vignettes and I feared that I lacked the skill or vision to draw them together. Then (in a moment analogous to one I experienced during my PhD write-up) I passed some invisible divider and found myself working on a relatively cohesive single thing. What a lovely feeling.

As with the PhD, once I got to this point I realized that vision might have less to do with it than bloody-mindedness; repeated evenings spent squeezing out reluctant words have brought about an accretion of material that reads more harmoniously than I dared hope. Whenever the blinking cursor tries to take the piss out of me, as it often does, I breathe deep and easy and then remind myself that anything - even one sentence - will move things along. So far, (55,000 words so far to be precise) stubbornness has served me well.

"But is it any good?" - Kells accented voice at the back.

"umm... here's some music."

"Is it drone? It behher be fucken drone."

"...none more drone."

Over the past couple of weeks I've listened to Mountains' new album Centralia a lot, so much, in fact, that I can second guess every little bleep, bloop and musical curlicue in its rich textures. It's as good a drone album as I've heard in years, especially in and around its middle section where a piece of music called Propellor manifests slowly and quite majestically over the course of twenty minutes.

At 9 minutes and 40 seconds all goes fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy - and it sounds so inviting and warm that you'd nearly take a swim in it.

Yum.

blog, interrupted...

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 09:09:00 +0000

Hi all,
I am going to take a break from the blog until January or February. I am working on another writing project that is taking up all of my spare time at the moment. Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for coming back if ye come back.
See yis on the flipside of Oh Thirteen.

Me IRL

Destroyer in Whelans

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 16:48:00 +0000

I've waffled long and hard about Dan Bejar on these pages, and about his knotty songs that can sometimes disappear up his arse but which are more often redeemed by an unappropriated romantic sincerity that is all too rare. Live, with his band Destroyer, he is great value. I saw him at ATP years ago and came away from the gig converted (who'd have thunk it, I thought: the cranky oddball from the New Pornographers has a big back catalogue of his own. And I plundered the fuck out of it with enthusiasm).

His latest album, Kapput!, was one of my handful of favourites of last year. On it, the excesses of his lyrics are tempered a bit (prior to it, people sometimes accused him of parodying himself) and the band's music explores a new style, a sort of warped and vaguely psychedelic take on Yacht Rock, the genre's keytar and saxophone tropes subsumed into into haunting swirls and squiggles that communicate sadness and loss.

Destroyer play Whelans (Wexford Street, Dublin) tonight and you'd be nuts to miss them.

Tickets are €18.50

MP3: Destroyer-Blue Eyes

Interruption to a Journey

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 22:31:00 +0000

Last weekend saw me emerge blinking and pale from my Northside box-room to take a train down to Waterford to visit my good friend Frank, a man so filled with curiosity and enthusiasm that being around him is like taking good medicine. We took the car to Kilkenny and walked a forest trail along the river Nore. What a tonic. We picked mushrooms, climbed mouldy tree trunks and even ended up chatting to a pair of nine-year-old boys for the twenty seconds it took for us to realise how incredibly ropey it was for two thirty-one-year-old men to do this in a secluded wood. As the young lads ran off (to revise their stranger danger civics homework, one hopes) they managed a cheery parting insult about my silly jumper and hat, which reassured me that the future might not be that fucked after all - things seem right enough in the world of young lads anyway.

me, looking at some trees

What else did we get up to? I pretended to drive a digger that was stalled in a field and we tried to sneak through the thick hedge of a very fancy eco-house in order to take photos of it (impossible, sadly). Then we chilled by the river and philosophised, as we always seem to do when we hang out. One subject of conversation was a poem that I remembered from the 1996 Junior Cert called Interruption to a Journey. In that poem, a car journey is interrupted when the car hits a hare and the occupants find themselves standing out in a dark, unfamiliar landscape of cornfields, suddenly becoming aware for the first time of surroundings that they often passed through on their way "...from one/ important place to another". The hare's sacrifice wasn't in vain, the reader feels, as it brought the car's inhabitants closer to their environment.

On the way back to Waterford, Frank played a track from Grandaddy's Sumday called 'Lost on Your Merry Way'. "This is fucken class" I shouted, temporarily forgetting that I had chucked Sumday into a bin back in 2003 so disappointed was I with it.

Come back into the fold, Sumday, all is forgiven.

MP3: Grandaddy-Lost on Your Merry Way

regrettable drunken incident #1

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 18:54:00 +0000

Know the one that's one too many, said the TV ad, and I liked to think I did. As I necked what was surely my sixth pint of Guinness in that raucously packed pub, I figured it'd most likely be the next one. That, sadly, was my last coherent thought of the night.

It was three days after my 21st birthday and my twin brother, my father and I were out celebrating in Geesala, which is my mother's homestead in Mayo, a tiny village crouched between two cruel geographies, the bog and the Atlantic (the name literally translates as "the salty wind"). The pub was full of so many emigrants home for Christmas, that the word "home" itself seemed to fill the air, peppering every red-faced and laughter-filled conversation under the glinting tinsel. This atmosphere was a drug in itself, and it emboldened me to engage with first and second cousins in the sort of banter that didn't otherwise come naturally. As pint after pint disappeared, I brayed nonsensically about Gaelic football and politics, my voice loud and false and full of shite.

Soon, I found myself propped by one hand over a urinal. The world had narrowed down to small handful of sensations, the cold of the tile on my palm, the smothered hubbub of noise in the pub, the smell of urinal cakes; it was one of those inlets of calm I often experienced during the churning chaos of a session. I breathed deliberately to keep nausea at bay, and told myself to "cop on" between breaths. The urinal suddenly coloured purple. I watched the liquid drain away and realised I must have switched to rum and blackcurrant. I wiped my mouth and went in for another.

A second rush of euphoria swept me along, but this time all was chaos, a tinsel fairground of shouts and faces and faces and shouts, and my own disembodied voice dropping in from time-to-time, communicating terse little one-sentence commentary on my decrepit state - "you're in ribbons, man", "go to bed". Was I saying this stuff out loud?

Shakin' Stevens played distorted over the PA and I slumped in a seat in the corner nodding in and out of sleep, verbally chastising myself in the interludes. My brother was beside me. "We're walking home", he said. "I am home. I came home with Podge", I replied. "Get a fucken grip. Podge is in Kells. We've to walk home. Daddy left hours ago" - he was drunk too, but different. He was capable of making sense. This would always be the difference between us. I got up and walked away from him, towards the bar.

That night was the coldest night of the year. Outside the pub, a peat wilderness stretched under hard stars, glittering silver all the way to the sand-bar and the sea. Minus eight degrees inland and minus four near the sea was how the RTE weather had it earlier in the day. I walked out into it without my coat, my thin shirt clinging to shoulders saturated with sweat. I'd had enough, and had decided I was going to bed.

My brother tells me the rest. He tells me how he only looked up by chance and saw me exit the pub. If he had looked one second earlier or later, he'd have missed me. He followed me out and shouted after me as I crossed the frozen road. I didn't look around but walked purposely on. Then I vanished. I had fallen through briars into the eight foot drainage ditch cut alongside the bog. When he had eased himself down into the ditch, he found me sitting in freezing running water, completely oblivious to the cold, carefully taking one shoe off and then the other. I was getting ready for bed.

It took us two hours to walk home. I remember the journey in fragments. I remember the squat black shapes of cow sheds and houses. I remember slurring "push on, keep going" to my teary twin who clattered me more than once out of frustration. I remember the smells of things manifesting so pungently in the frost, things like cowshite and my brother's fag, and I remember the sound of the Atlantic ocean, miles away, rolling dull and vast and unthinking, somewhere off in the west.

MP3: Wendy Carlos-Winter

My favourite albums of 2011 (#1 Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 22:46:00 +0000

Just in time for me to begin my list for 2012...here's Daniel Lopatin with my favourite album of last year.

Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica begins with a playful bait-and-switch. 'Andro' starts with a hiss followed by the slow revealing of the sort of deep space synthesizer that will sound familiar, perhaps even comforting, to listeners acquainted with Lopatin's music on his previous albums as Oneohtrix Point Never. And then something disquieting proceeds to happen. Voices, just on the brink of intelligibility, begin to layer on to each other, rising up around the synth, crowding it out, and foreshadowing the enigmatic postmodern Babel that Replica is. Lopatin is making a huge sidestep in both his music and in his themes, and his signposting of it for us in this way underlines how important he feels that transition to be.

Replica not only sounds unlike anything Lopatin has done previously, it sounds unlike, well, anything. On its surface, it is an album of ten microscopically constructed and deeply, weirdly, evocative pieces of music. Each one of these compositions is assembled from sampled shreds of old advertisements archived on youtube, some looping tightly, others just playing out, all layered on top of each other in such carefully interlocked arrangements that the effect is nothing short of staggering - an orchestra where the instruments are replaced by tiny unrecognisable bits of ads.

As Replica succeeds musically, drawing the listener into these alien sound-worlds (each with a very distinct mood), it also succeeds conceptually. Lopatin is very careful in how he presents his work and it is no coincidence that the official promotional video for Replica is made from the flotsam of uprooted TV material (a cheap looking cartoon) edited, like the music, in such a way as to be lent deeper meanings as it plays in sync with the track. Like Duchamp, who famously turned art on its head by placing banal "readymade" objects such as a urinal and an upside down bike wheel in a gallery, Lopatin is challenging us to perceive something familiar made alien and investing this stuff, this junk, with all sorts of significance and indeed beauty. It's magical really. It's alchemy, transformation.

Lopatin isn't the first to do this sort of thing in electronic music. Replica feels like an end point of sorts to what Boards of Canada began with their Music Has the Right to Children album, which draws (albeit to a much lesser extent than Lopatin's use of ads) on samples taken from old educational television shows. Of course, many artists in the so-called 'chillwave' genre have tried this stunt too. But they seem to have failed where Lopatin and Boards of Canada succeed and it seems to me that their key error is the inability to re-purpose the source material in such a way that it transcends what in lesser hands remains a simple exercise in making nostalgic musical gloop. Lopatin and Boards of Canada are above all conceptually high-minded composers, and they have created their music so that the layers of ambiguous meaning that accumulate like sediment around their samples are not happy accidents but rather the deliberate end result of brilliant composition.

And what does it all mean? Well, the mode of composition is a definite key to unlocking some of Replica's conceptual layers. Lopatin is perhaps telling us something about the relationship between the contemporary adult consciousness and the material that shaped it in its formative years. How much TV did adults, who are perhaps in their twenties and thirties now, watch growing up? More specifically, how many hours have we spent consuming computer games, videos, ads and music? What has that done to our memory and, more than that, to our very modes of perception? How has it seeped into our individual consciousnesses and into the collective consciousness? Maybe this flux of perceived material has shaped the modern mind as Don Quixote's books on chivalry shaped his. If it has, then what works of art will meaningfully reflect this shift in thought?

To start, I'd like to propose Replica. It rather handily depicts a mirror on its cover art, after all.

MP3: Oneohtrix Point Never-Replica
MP3: Oneohtrix Point Never-Power of Persuasion

I'm waiting/ please come back/ I've got the guts now/ To meet your eye

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:28:00 +0000

My wisdom teeth have come back to haunt me. The lower gums on both sides of my mouth swelled up a week ago and refuse to deflate. After a week of gobbling nurofen and rubbing clove oil on them I went to the dentist. He prescribed me an antibiotic with the caveat that I might need surgery to get both teeth removed. Teeth - the cause of and ~~the solution to,~~ actually just the cause of life's problems. They say men think about sex every few minutes. Well, I can't say that statistic makes any sense to me. Teeth, however...

On my way back from the dentist, which is in Kilbarrack where I now live, I saw this house...

ghosts and goblins yo

It's typical of the area. I remember a few years back, during the Celtic Tiger, houses in the working class areas used to run so many Christmas lights that it surely cost them thousands on the electricity meter. I reckon the Halloween thing is motivated by the same good-natured desire to show off, but without the bill. Another house, which I couldn't photo because a hostile old lady (she became hostile the second I held up my phone - and who could blame her? I didn't ask permission) was in the garden, had a luminous skeleton (it was day but it had the luminous colouration) sprawled over a privet hedge, legs akimbo, in a pose that could only be described using sex prose. I wonder if it was deliberate? Weird stuff.

Kilbarrack's soundtrack is the magpie's dry chatter. They sound like the old fashioned clacker children used to bring to football matches (according to the Beano anyway). They perch on every chimney, commandeer every bin, fight over every scrap of cod batter outside the chipper, and generally appear in such numbers as to render the old folk poem about them meaningless. These birds are taking over urban Ireland with ease.

A confluence of things - a dry leaf rustling past my shoe, a bus turning a corner lit brighter on its inside than the dimming suburbs outside, a child on a bike shouting "wahoo", something (a bin?) rattling, the DART slowing down to a stop - drew me back to Vancouver Island in 1998. I spent two years in a scholarship driven international school there. One of the things we had to do there was a community project. I ended up working with a couple of my school mates and some hippies in their twenties on a bus called "the sustainable living bus". It was a gutted school bus that we worked on, filling it with tiny interactive exhibits about living sustainably and minding your ecological footprint.

Looking back honestly, I can see I was only half committed to what the bus was about. It didn't help that I felt alienated from the well-to-do and well-adjusted Canadians who worked with me (all lovely). But aside from that, I had lazy ignorant attitudes to the environment that I never checked before then. Put stuff in the bin, forget about it - that was me. Anyway, my overriding memory of the experience is the sense of North American 'Halloween'. The bus was parked on an avenue in a wealthy suburb of Victoria. The street was flanked on either side by old trees with leaves turning all the autumn colours. Late in the evening, as we worked in the bus by the light of a generator, we'd watch the odd child cycle past the window in a flurry of leaves. I would feel at those moments like I was in an 80s kids' movie. The houses nearby had pumpkins and bunting. I felt like I was in a pleasant dream.

I bought a cassette tape in Lyle's Place which was Victoria's cool record store, and played it during the four days we worked on sustainable living things inside the chilly bus. The tape was Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me. I'll never forget the dorky twentysomething hippy dude who owned the bus telling me: "wow, it's thanks to an Irish teenager I'm finally digging this album". We listened to it every night, turning the tape over at least three times. I can't hear the album now without thinking of that bright yellow school bus parked on a street of dry leaves, pumpkins, nocturnal cold and the shouts about high-school, homework, the bowling lanes, the dairy queen, and everything else that concerned the local teens who lived in a fascinating alien world that was to me the world of TV.

MP3: Dinosaur Jr. - Sludgefest

Fennesz: Unitarian Church

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:33:00 +0000

Christian Fennesz is the artist I probably write most about on here. He is a true compost heap hero. He'll be playing Dublin tomorrow (October 20th) in the Unitarian Church at 7.30pm, where he will surely create sheets of grainy cubist music to fill the darkened air. Donal Dineen will provide the visuals, but your mind's eye will probably bring some visuals of its own (I always listen to Fennesz with my eyes closed: true story).

Get there on the button to see the talented guitarist (and sometimes singer) Cian Nugent too. You can get tickets at tickets.ie for €19 or for €20 on the door.

MP3: Fennesz-Shisheido

My favourite albums of 2011 (#2 Tim Hecker - Ravedeath 1972)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 19:14:00 +0000

#2 Tim Hecker - Ravedeath 1972

not a single fuck was given that day

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" writes Yeats in his famous poem The Second Coming. Throughout the poem he uses the language and imagery of apocalypse and revelation to indicate humanity spiraling towards a moment of terrible change, and in its wild last line ("...what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?") there is palpable horror at the unknown future that lurks around the corner. It's no stretch to read Tim Hecker's Ravedeath 1972 as musically analogous to Yeats's poem.

Ravedeath 1972's cover art depicts a group of lads about to drop a piano off a tall building as part of a student ritual carried out in MIT university. It's a cunning image as it is impossible to look at it without imagining the ferocious sound it implies. We are spectators at the scene of the instrument's imminent and violent death. And with its howling and droning treatments of pipe organ music, Ravedeath 1972 seems to invite us to spectate at a death ritual and funeral service that might be for music itself, but which, because it is so powerfully metaphorical, should not be limited to just being about music or indeed 'the LP' as plenty of critics have speculated. Like Yeats' poem, Ravedeath 1972 could be about the fear engendered in any violent change or transition.

A key aspect of Ravedeath 1972's dreadful power to fascinate is how there something not whole about it. Things are not just falling apart, they have been corroded too. The music is loud and visceral but gibbering ghosts roam over it in the form of that stereoscopic flickering that Hecker does so well. It must be noted here too that there is no percussion on the album; by having a piece called 'no drum', Hecker seems to want us to notice this. Are some of these tracks former rave songs, moaning in a death-trance after having their percussion tortuously removed? Interestingly, Leyland Kirby has released a series of singles, close in their sound and themes to Ravedeath 1972, called (if you can believe it) 'The Death of Rave'. 'The Piano Drop' in particular sounds related to Kirby's explorations - another one of dance music's ghosts.

Sitting at the heart of Ravedeath 1972 is the music of an organ playing inside an Icelandic church. Over the course of the album Hecker does many unnatural things to this organ yet he never lets us lose our sense of it entirely. Even as the accumulating layers of its collapsing parts pile on top of each other, passages of beauty remain. When I sense the organ communicating to me from different distances within Ravedeath 1972's slow chaos, I am hit with the full complexity of Hecker's extraordinary achievement. He gives us a final glimpse of beauty and life even as we spiral slowly into Yeats' "widening gyre" of uncertainty, violence and fear.

MP3: Tim Hecker-The Piano Drop

compost mix 4: the clouds are piling up

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 21:54:00 +0000

This is the first continuous compost mix. The main reason it is continuous is because it is full of techno tracks that would have me busted in a second if I individually hosted them in dropbox. The secondary reason is that I wanted to create a mix with a feel (cold and plunging) without learning the sophisticated tricks of proper mixing.

Kingscourt brickworks in the early 90s. I found this cool pic on flickr

If compost mix 4 sounds too relentlessly techno, fear not. My next mix will be very pastoral and dreamy. Sure the last two tracks on this one are a clue.

MP3: Compost Mix 4 - The Clouds Are Piling Up

1: Mr Kirk's Nightmare - 4Hero

(Mr Kirk's son is dead. The news is broken over a mean breakbeat)

2: Morphosis - Too Far

(A cool thing that happens in Berghain sometimes is the portentous vocal that explains to everyone in the club that they are fucked up and have gone too far in their hedonism. The vocal normally gets the knowing cheer of the night or morning)

3: Silent Servant - Moral Divide (Endless)

(This is a track off one of the Sandwell District producers' latest albums. It's completely representative of the current resurgence of 'proper techno'; i.e. it's beefy, completely melody free, and white label)

4: The Groove - Austin Cesear

(Some American freak smoking skipfuls of dank and corroding his techno down to a fascinating toxic weirdness that you probably could not dance to. See also: Actress/ Vessel)

5: D'marc Cantu - The Power

(John From Solar Bears turned me on to this. It's just muscular, paganistic house. Pretty effin class)

6: Peter Van Hoesen- Nefertiti-Always Beyond

(If you own a pair of Beats by Dre headphones...)

7: Drexciya - Journey Home

(Kraftwerk had an Autobahn. Drexciya proposed an Aquabahn. This is a pitt-stop along the Aquabahn).

8: Robert Hood - Drive (The Age of Automation)

(The ghost in the machine - techno's love affair with the automobile continues)

9: Neu! - Negativland

(Winding down now with the first motorik song. I was wrong on what was actually the first motorik song until my friend Dan corrected me a couple of weeks ago)

10: Grateful Dead - Ripple

(None of their songs are catchy but this has so much love)

The sun-comprehending glass

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:01:00 +0000

A funny feeling crawled over me as I walked back from the shop and saw an ad for Fosset's circus snapping against a lamppost in the windy half-light. I remembered an afternoon spent mitching from school years ago. I had gotten into the habit of mitching towards the end of sixth year because I won a scholarship to a fancy international school and had arrogantly ceased to give a fuck about the leaving certificate (something I'm still punished for in anxiety dreams 14 years later). Using a deep hedgerow as cover, a friend and I circumnavigated the wide fallow field that fell between the secondary school and the housing estate where we lived. At the end of that field, and at the corner of the estate, was another small field where travelling circuses and carnivals decamped whenever they came to Kells. That afternoon, a circus was setting up for an evening performance. We decided to poke around in the trees and stinking elder bushes behind it all in order to spy on what was going on.

The circus must have been English because the chatter of swear words and jokes around the afternoon's activity was mostly cockney accented. In my memory, which might not be reliable, it was all "facking this and facking that". There was a peculiarly domestic routine going on, llamas being fed like pets, costumes being hung on a clothes line, all that sort of thing. We felt like we were spying into something genuinely unusual and unseen - the secret life of the circus.

I moved further along the ditch and climbed into a familiar place where I used to sometimes sit, the nook of an ash tree at the very corner of the field. It overlooked the back of a caravan, and, craning my head, I could see the jumping glow of TV set behind the caravan's net curtains. My friend had climbed up beside me. We sat in the tree for a while and soaked things up, sniggering about the double German class going on without us. Then the door of the caravan opened.

A clown emerged. His face was not fully prepared. Only the lips and one eye were done. A fag dangled from his lower lip. He stretched unhooked then dropped his dungarees, squatted, and began to shit. All this occurred about fifteen feet away from the tree that contained us, two gawky leaving cert students sitting awkwardly in full sight. I don't know what went through my friend's mind but I felt a slowly churning and sour mixture of clown-terror and mortification rise through me. I also saw the clown raise his head, so inevitably, before it actually happened. A hot coil of poop had barely hit the ground when he clocked us. "YOU FACKING [SOMETHING, SOMETHING] FACK OFF [SOMETHING] PAY FOR THE SHOW [SOMETHING] YOU CAAAHNTS".

We were already leppin' through the elder like hot snots before he had his dungarees back in order. I remember laughing like a drain but it was hollow. Inside I felt bad for the clown. We had violated one of the most private moments of all, the unguarded human shitting. Later that night it was myself I felt bad for, because every shadow beyond my bedroom curtains took on a wriggling clown shape across a mowed lawn in the landscape of my imagination.

MP3: The Beatles-Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite

My favourite albums of 2011 (#3 The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond this World)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:13:00 +0000

Leyland (James) Kirby's An Empty Bliss Beyond this World is an extraordinary concept album about Alzheimer's dementia.

#3 The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond this World

Lovely painting no? Time as matter (or something).

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece about a dementing man I worked with called Gearóid. In that piece I remarked on how my reflections on Gearóid's own memories disturbed me, mostly because he was disturbed himself and those memories were clearly quite traumatising. Yet Gearóid was one of many people in the hospice, and some of them seemed to be fading away peacefully into a sort of bliss. A man called Vinny, for example, loved old showband music and this often played on repeat from a small CD player near his bed. When I'd check on him, he'd sometimes have a look of such faraway serenity on his face that he was somehow outside himself, lost in time, halfway to heaven, or somewhere far beyond the physical world anyway. It was the music. He was traveling somewhere with it.

Kirby's album does something staggering and quite visionary in a way. He takes as his central concept the idea that the last thing people with Alzheimer's remember is music, and he uses that concept to musically simulate the mind of someone with the disease. To do this, he loops carefully curated samples of old ragtime and music hall records from his own collection and treats them with varying levels of distortion, creating an overall impression of the demented mind as a haunted ballroom. Indeed, the samples are treated in such a way that they often sound like they are playing out in a large empty space (think of a gramophone turning by itself in a dusty hall).

In case I have made it sound like a dry exercise in conceptualising, I must iterate that there are many ways to listen to An Empty Bliss Beyond this World. The music has a value that can be separated from Kirby's concept. Like William Basinski's thematically connected Disintegration Loops the tracks can make for meditative ambient listening, not least because Kirby's selections of source material generally tend towards the comforting and serene.

However, I can only listen to this album with characters like Gearóid and Vinny in mind. If I really get lost in this album (and I often do) I wonder what it might possibly feel like to be stripped of all language capability and to have only music left. Imagine that; imagine having no words left in your head to describe things. Everything in the visible world becomes a nameless object, and there is nothing left to guide your consciousness except a few old tunes looping through the waves and static of your disease. Would those tunes still communicate something to you about your life and the human condition? Would they be able to tell you things without words? Sad things? Consoling things? Loving things? And would these associations eventually strip away entirely, leaving just the music itself, free of all association except for the near empty bliss of the thing itself, a simple melody playing in the void.

MP3: James Kirby-Tiny Gradations of Loss

My favourite albums of 2011 (#4 Andy Stott - Passed Me By/ We Stay Together)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 19:59:00 +0000

This is a two for one deal; as both albums are quite short and as they both compliment each other, it makes sense to lump them together. Wait a minute, why am I writing this justification? Who actually gives a fuck?

Andy Stott, who seems like a thoroughly likable character in interviews, clearly knows the value of a good soundbite. He cannily gave himself the last word on these two albums when he coined the term 'knackered house' to describe the turn his productions took in 2011. It's knackered alright, slow, deconstructed techno, always on the verge of falling apart, and never bright, its mechanisms operating in dim recesses. The music is 'filthy' too, which is another adjective Stott likes to throw around. The production on these two albums sounds grown over and encrusted, like the decay is somehow organic.

Yet, weirdly, in spite of being recorded at such sludgy tempos (barely topping 110bpm) and in spite of being so outwardly in thrall to notions of rot and decay, both these albums have an unlikely vitality. They excite. I can't for the life of me work out what the precise nature of the spell is, but there is some sort of mad voodoo at work. The tempo certainly has a lot to do with it; when the monstrous kick drum starts to churn through the distorted house vocal on 'New Ground' the feeling is of something ritualistic and primal, and that is a side of electronic dance that might not immediately come to mind when we think of the clean pulsing vectors linking Kraftwerk's famous 'Man Machine' music to stuff like minimal techno and trance (although it has a clear precursor in Basic Channel). I also think of comparisons outside of techno, like doom and stoner metal. Bands like Sleep and Bong use huge riffs and staggered tempos to evoke that almost sacred notion of 'heaviness', music with so much mass and gravity that it is like a force of nature.

There's a very interesting and unconventional Donato Dozzy mix on the mnml ssgs blog that explores some ideas that I think are analogous to what Andy Stott does on both these remarkable albums.

MP3: Andy Stott-New Ground

My favourite albums of 2011 (#5 Destroyer - Kaputt)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:39:00 +0000

Five albums remain. I'm going for the troop surge in Helmand approach for the rest of September here, so we can pull out of this sorry mess and face the winter with bright hearts and clear consciences yah? Of course, there'll be a grotesque loss of innocent life and post traumatic stress disorder too. But as in war, as in lists on obscure music blogs.

#5 Destroyer-Kaputt

The other day, one of the jokey twitter accounts I follow tweeted something like: "My favourite bit in any Destroyer song is the bit where a brick hits him in the mouth three seconds after he opens it". It got retweeted a shitload of times. There are lots of people who cannot stand Dan Bejar and I can understand why. For a start his singing voice is a nasal marvel (or horror-show) that can whip itself into a one man pack of dying donkeys when he is at his most emotive. Then there is the whole emotive thing itself. Some people will say it is affected, forced, and in much of his early work it surely is, though I would argue that's part of the point with him; there's plenty of truth to be found in knowing theatricality as Jarvis Cocker will vouch. Finally, there's thing that probably pisses most people off about him - which is the thing that is hardest to defend - his tendency to reference his own work, quoting older songs inside the newer ones as if they were Shakespeare. I enjoy all of his work but I can find the more excessive self-referencing hard to swallow. Thankfully, you can experience all of the above problems with Dan Bejar and still enjoy Kaputt.

Kaputt is very easy to listen to. It is smooth 80s referencing music that you might call yacht rock if you were being a bit reductive about it, though there is more going on than simple aping of Hall and Oates or Roxy Music (one listen to 'Bay of Pigs' will convince any doubter. It's the album's closing track, a peerless one off of a song, and a high point in Bejar's catalogue). The funny paradox about Kaputt is that the cocaine sheen production seems to have allowed Bejar access to his most simple and unaffected lyrics. Instead of the usual blustering grandiosity, he serves us melancholy self-disclosure. Of course, there are still plenty enough references to his own and other's music (New Order and the Beatles to name two), but this tomfoolery knows that its place in what is ultimately a very delicate album is not centre stage. The same goes for Bejar's voice. It's toned down a bit to match the temper of the songs and it's far more warm and likable because of it. You wouldn't run away from his table in a pub, like. In fact, you'd sit down and listen to him.

I haven't even mentioned the melodies of these songs yet. They're beautiful without an exception.

MP3: Destroyer-Chinatown

A sunny day in september

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:52:00 +0000

You see a yellow kite frozen against the sky along Bray's sea front. The sea seems to crest in little white paint-marks and they are perfectly still because they are painted on. Everything is painted today.

The curve of Dublin bay mirrors the bay of Naples. The sugar-loaf is Vesuvius. You've heard this but you'll notice this on a sunny day in September and you'll notice too that it's not snotgreen today but the deepest blue.

A Teddy's ice cream and a stroll along the seafront and your mind going back to that line in Ulysses where Joyce says God "is a shout in the street".

(click the pic - it looks great)

MP3: The Clientele-E.M.P.T.Y.

Gearóid

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 22:23:00 +0000

The bleep of my mobile phone woke me at 5.14am. It was a message from a nurse on call. I opened the glowing envelope expecting the usual details about a night shift. “Gearóid passed away an hour ago. We thought you would want to know” it said. I got up fifteen minutes later and made a bowl of cereal, my head filled with sad and relieved thoughts.

Gearóid was a man with Down Syndrome who I first met during my part time job as a care assistant in an Alzheimer’s hospice. On the evening he first arrived, Gearóid walked in confidently, full of jokes and chatter about his old home in Clonakilty, horses, and his favourite TV sport, World Wrestling Entertainment. I was surprised by how healthy he looked, how ‘with it’ he was compared to the others, many of whom were in advanced states of catatonia. But then, I hadn’t worked there long, and I hadn’t seen any of the others on their first day.

That first evening, Gearóid shook my hand. He squeezed it so hard that his knuckles went white and he cracked wise about being “a strong boyo with a strong handshake”. Before bed, he showed me his collection of vampire movies and wrestling memorabilia, then challenged me to an arm wrestle which he won easily. “I like this guy”, he shouted to one of the nurses. Even though it was work, I suppose it was the start of a friendship.

During the following weeks I was often assigned to go on day trips with Gearóid on account of how well we got along. We’d take the bus together to a leisureplex in Coolock, where depending on his humour we would bowl or take in a film. He was very skillful at bowling and, like the arm wrestling, he could beat me easily. Then one day, two or three months after he arrived at the hospice, he lost the ability to bowl. It was that sudden. He dropped the ball on the ground and stared at it as if it was something else entirely. I encouraged him to pick it up and try again. He managed this successfully a couple of times, but then wandered down one of the lanes after the ball. Before we got back on the bus he had started to cry. “I’m scared”, he said.

The hospice was built in an oval loop so that the patients didn’t get lost as many of them wandered. Gearóid used to watch one of them, Liam, walking around the loop and laugh. “You’re going in circles man” he’d say, creasing himself. The night he forgot how to bowl, Gearóid did not want to go to bed. Instead, he walked around the loop past midnight, pausing sometimes to call out to his deceased mother.

Gearóid had a lot of money he inherited from his parents and the nurse manager helped him plan how to spend some of it to enjoy himself. “I want to go to the horses with Darragh” he said. So we planned a big day out to the races in Ashbourne. First, Gearóid needed a suit. Because he had Down Syndrome, his body was shaped differently around the torso and legs. We took him to a famous tailor in town, Louis Copeland’s, and had him fitted for a suit. It cost a fortune but it looked great on him and the day he first put it on a glittering light came into his little dark eyes. He spent most of the morning in front of the mirror with a tub of brylcreem and one of those old metal combs.

Then he did something voluntarily for the first time in months. He took his shower bag into the bathroom and began to shave. He did this with great coordination and precision. I thought of him only the morning before, how he stood with two of us trying to steady him, and how he fell against our every movement with the tears streaming silently over his cheeks.

In spite of it raining in torrents, the racing day was a success. We found a spot near the finish line and watched the horses thunder past so closely that clots of dirt landed near us. Gearóid introduced himself to every single woman he met, making bawdy comments that sometimes made me laugh but other times made me uncomfortable enough to ask him to rein it in. It was hard to deny him his delight though. He made a few small bets and lost, but had forgotten about them by then. It was the independence to do it that mattered. He was being his own man.

That night as soon as he took off the suit, he seemed to change permanently. When I helped him undress I was shocked by how much less of him there was. He needed more help than usual too. I encouraged him to hold on to the front of his bed to steady himself. “Help me” he said. So I did. It took a long time. For part of it he was as cooperative as a toddler going through smoothly practiced motions. But for part of it he was stubborn and resisting, shifting his weight with the expertise of a wrestler while he stared blankly at me.

There was then a gap of two months when I didn’t work at the hospice. The night I was called back I became very upset when I saw Gearóid. He was curled into a small shape on his bed and whimpering. His beakish nose and small black eyes had become more pronounced in his thin face and he reminded me of a baby bird. We tried gently to help him relax his body in order to bathe and change before bed. He resisted fiercely - the final stages of his illness were characterised by this resistance to almost every task. Every movement applied to his body resulted in a counter movement. Again, I thought of the wrestling he loved so much. “There, there” I said to him, “it’s okay”, and other consoling things that I later realised were my mother’s voice speaking through me. His eyes burned fiercely, and he grasped my wrist with a strength completely at odds with his atrophied body. “Hands off. NOT FAIR. LEAVE ME ALONE”.

One of the hospice’s core therapies was reminiscence therapy. The idea was that music, photographs and movies from the patients’ pasts would stimulate happy memories and help them through the later stages of the disease. It worked well for many of the patients, but I sometimes wondered if all of them wanted to remember their past? The history of treatment of people with intellectual disabilities in Ireland is a mixed bag, and some of the more elderly have sad personal stories. Gearóid had many happy memories but he had one tragic memory that I knew of, his parents’ death in a car crash. As his other memories faded, this memory increasingly seemed to be all Gearóid had left. The lighthouse by which he steered through a sea of black confusion was the most upsetting thing that ever happened to him.

The last night I worked with him, I spent much of the night in his room rubbing his back and telling him things were going to be okay. He stood at the end of his bed, with his fists clenched tightly by either side. “Mammy, Mammy, come back. Mammy come back”, he shouted as the night turned to grey dawn. I couldn’t get through to him. But he got through to me. I broke into sweats. “Is this all there is left when the magnetic tape of memory flakes away?” I thought. “Is this the only consolation prize for a good man’s life? A naked scream for Mammy in the dark?”.

That morning when I arrived home, I phoned the nurse manager. I told her I would have to switch to a different unit, that the Alzheimer’s unit was too difficult. She was very understanding about it and within a week I began work in a sheltered employment facility. In spite of promises made to myself, I never saw Gearóid again. The night my phone bleeped to tell me of his passing I beat myself up over this quite a bit. But then I thought how likely it would have been that he wouldn’t recognise me. In all honesty, the function of any such visit would have been more to quiet something in myself than to help him in any meaningful way. I’m not religious, but Gearóid was, and I hope that before he passed, that memory, that horrible memory, gave way to something better. I hope his mother answered his cry.

MP3: The Flaming Lips-~~Do You Realize~~

(Gearóid's name was changed as well as some small details about the setting. This is for anonymity)

Songs on a Compost Heap (Our House - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 19:12:00 +0000

The strange ways in which music moves in and out of life and memory means that up until about three weeks ago I thought the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song 'Our House' was a bespoke recording for a Halifax advertisement that came on TV at the start of my teens.

Similarly, when people say nowadays that Jona Lewie's 'Stop the Calvary' brings on thoughts of Christmas, I don't fully share the feeling because more primal memories burble up, linked to a sequence of proto 'lad culture' beer ads from the mid to late 80s (the point when I began watching television and my memory becomes unreliably bound up with it. Remember the bit in Scrooged when Bill Murray realises that some of his memories were actually episodes of Little House on the Prarie? That's me, except with ITV children's shows).

Since I always associated 'Our House' with the Halifax advertisement I never properly listened to it. Isn't that funny? I guess this is similar to how you can be familiar with great art but never really look at it. People go to places like the Uffizi gallery to look at Botticelli's Primavera, for example, and they do look at it but they often don't look. So much stuff comes between the viewer and the painting itself - the gulf of history is a big one, but also associations to do with reproduction on biscuit boxes, posters, and all of that. So it's possible to stand in front of it and feel, well, not much.

A few weeks ago someone gave me Crosby, Stills and Nash's Deja Vu. It's one of those classic albums I always figured I'd like but never heard. Halfway through the album, the song 'Our House' began with that plain lyric as welcoming as a Christmas tree shining through a fogged up city window - "I'll light the fire/ You place the flowers in the vase/ That you bought today" - and my first reaction was this powerful ripple of nostalgia which, of course, was related to that ad from the early 90s. My second response was "woah, I've heard this song probably thousands of times, but I've never really listened to it". Only then, in the context of its album, did I pay attention to the sentiment in the lyrics - a celebration of domestic love drawn from Graham Nash's relationship with Joni Mitchell. I only appreciated the song's lovely structure then too, something I never clocked at a deeper level when it was just some catchy ad jingle.

At a moment in time where art is reproduced everywhere, it's not that easy to value it any more. I often think appreciation of art in a world of distraction requires mindfulness and discipline. It does for me anyway. We need to fight continually against all those reproductions and devaluing associations to finally see and hear these objects for what they are. But what rewards they give.

MP3: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young-Our House

It's not a question for your head

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 11:43:00 +0000

I couldn't let an Animal Collective album go by without a longer consideration, so here are a few thoughts on Centipede Hz (pronounced "Centipede hurts" - says the middle guy in the human centipede).

Centipede Hz is a sidestep for Animal Collective after the electronic pop overtones of Merriweather Post Pavillion. It's a more prickly and weird album, and definitely contains a lot of Avey Tare who is the more aggressively experimental of their two main songwriters. Whereas Panda Bear tends to compose the band's most harmonic, conventionally pretty, and restrained songs ('Brothersport' excluded), Tare often works as the band's id, abandoning himself with yelping gusto into states that often sound ecstatic and sometimes sound anxious or fearful. On Centipede Hz he is at his most shamanic, constantly gnashing at the edges of the music.

So it's not as easy to get into this record as Merriweather. The best way to approach it is to take Tare's invitation in 'Today's Supernatural' at face value and realise it's "not a question for your head". This is classic psychedelic counsel to detach oneself, similar to "tune in, turn on and drop out". The truth is Centipede Hz is a ferociously psychedelic album. It is multiple sounding and amorphous with a busy surface (it's no wonder they named it after an arthropod which has so many legs moving at once). You can hear this multiplicity most clearly when the vocal melody begins on 'Moonjock' and the music bulges and ripples in a way that seems to threaten to change into something else entirely then back again in an instant. Listening to it, I kept thinking (pretentiously, tangentially, and subjectively, I know) of that enigmatic Captain Beefheart line that has come to sum up the possibilities of psychedelic music for me, "a squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous". 'Moonjock' sounds "fast and bulbous".

Once you detach, listen a few times, and break through the panicky and quick surface of Centipede Hz, it rewards richly. The jewel for me is the album's lead single 'Today's Supernatural' - a four minute exhortation to abandon oneself along the lines of Merriweather's now famous line "if I could just leave my body for a night". I think the song's middle eight is one of the finest things on any of their records, a short sequence that rises and falls like the edge of a teacup ride in a funfair and which resolves itself in a beautiful curl of melody.

There is more than a touch of the funfair to Centipede Hz, perhaps a touch of the circus too. As with the funfair and circus, the noise and mayhem sometimes derange and give way to darkness. Songs like 'Rosie Oh', 'Father Time' and 'Monkey Riches' have spooky undercurrents of delirium that make them first cousins of the Olivia Tremor Control's music and grandchildren of John Lennon's 'For the Benefit of Mr Kite'. Many of the songs end on discordant notes too. The maniacal-mechanical laugh at the end of 'Wide Eyes', for example, is terrifying.

The loose concept behind Centipede Hz is that it's inspired by the band members messing around with short wave radio dials as children and imagining an enormous atmosphere charged with mysterious music and possibility. In spite of its deceptively cluttered surface, it is an expansive seeker type of an album in the mode of much American psychedelia. Animal Collective are explorers on that old-as-the-hills quest to dissolve the self into the universal and (along with their equally important live shows) every album is a new step on that journey. When the last song 'Amanita' grinds to its almost cartoonish halt, the feeling is one of exhaustion but also of having participated in something bold and pure. We're one step further beyond.

(PS - Welcome back Deakin).

Centipede HZ

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:20:00 +0000

Animal Collective have a new album. Listen.

"Bionic Hee Haw"

Best psychedelic jam band of all time.

My Favourite Albums of 2011 (#6 Leyland Kirby - Eager to Tear Apart the Stars)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 14:15:00 +0000

Well what do you know, I'm still at it...

#6 Leyland Kirby - Eager to Tear Apart the Stars

shouts out to another beautiful album cover

Leyland Kirby, conceptual artist, ambient musician, unfortunate Mick Wallace lookalike, and man of many aliases, is one of the small handful of ambient producers with an identity and sound entirely of their own in a genre that tends towards pleasant anonymity.

Kirby has a major theme - the march of time and all that goes with it, memory, ageing, sadness, and above all decay. Each one of his albums, either as himself or as The Caretaker, explores these themes from a slightly different angle. Together, they are beginning to amass into something huge and awe-inspiring, a musical analogue of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Where the Caretaker's work uses samples as its base materials, Eager to Tear Apart the Stars is an album of his own compositions, piano and synth melodies mostly. They play in a thick, almost overheated, atmosphere of static and distortion. A good comparison in terms of technique might be with what Christian Fennesz does with guitars during certain overwhelming moments the Venice album where the music seem to rise up from the ground all around you like atmospheric distortion in a heat mirage. How better to explain it? Well if this music was a liquid, you would probably hang suspended in it.

As I mentioned, I think Kirby is trying to tell a distinct story about time and all that ties in with it on each of his albums. Here, the song titles, beginning with 'The Arrow of Time' and ending with 'My Dream Contained a Star', read like a tangential variation on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The musical narrative seems to accept death's trajectory before seeking spiritual solace beyond that acceptance. While the album starts off with a frighteningly final and symbolic piano chord, it then moves into a death dream of great beauty. By the time 'They are all Dead, There are No Skip at all' rolls around with a twinkling music box melody played over a churning ocean of melodic distortion that sounds vaguely like 'Silent Night', you might be forgiven for thinking you were approaching The Light. This is potent stuff.

On the final track, 'My Dream Contained a Star', the atmosphere abates somewhat and what is left is a very pure and stark melodic pattern. It feels consoling, though perhaps also a little acquiescent, sad, and dwindling. Listening to it reminds me not just of the trajectory of all human life but possibly of the universe itself. Everything ends.

MP3: Leyland Kirby-They are all Dead, There are No Skip at all

taste the rainbow

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:20:00 +0000

Let's take a moment to reflect on how we don't think that much about the names of things. Like, how names originate and the meanings embodied in them? Well, I don't, or didn't, that much. Unless it carried a dead obvious meaning, my default way to consider the name of a thing would be to think of it as something arbitrary. Since I've started reading poetry seriously again a few years ago, I feel that one of the gifts with which it has provided me is the renewed ability to think about the names of things. For example: (and bear with me this is a kind of weird example, but we'll go on) the rainbow-coloured fruit sweet, skittles.

I genuinely never thought about why they might be called skittles until about a week ago when I was sat in that geographical focal point of my geographically limited adult life, Bus Áras. A corpulent ould fella was sat across from me. He was the sort of man you'd fancy you can smell, even though the scientific implications of his distance from you mean the smell is likely a figment of your mind. He was eating a bag of skittles in an unusual and disgusting way. He'd remove a few sweets from the bag at a time then place them in his mouth. After that, he'd suck very slowly and deliberately on them for a while, stripping them of colour, then spit...no, not spit, slickly eject them from between his lips like little white eggs, and watch with detached eyes as they moved across the tiled floor. The sound the sweets made? It was a skittering sound, of course. Then I thought of the sweets in the bag and how they all move and click together, and it hit me, AHA, so that is why they are called skittles.

Thanks corpulent gross old man with no sense of self-respect, you gave me a little moment of insight. But mostly, thanks poetry, for helping me think about words again.

Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan also enjoyed Arctic dips

Today's music is real asleep on the compost heap stuff, the sort of rich ambient music that used to be the blog's bread and butter (and still is, I guess). It's the first track from Novaya Zemlya which is concept album by Thomas Koner that he based around the physical place of the same name. Novaya Zemlya, the place, is an almost barren archipelago in the Arctic that sounds from descriptions like the place at the end of the world. It was used as a test site by the Soviets, where they detonated the largest nuclear bomb in human history. Additionally, the place lends its name to a strange mirage, the Novaya Zemlya effect, where the sun not only appears to rise before it technically should, but where it is shaped like a rectangle instead of a circle.

Pretty good place on which to base a concept album, no? Koner's drone constructed music clearly imagines the place as a sort of eerie metaphor for post nuclear humanity - the album starts off with sounds which might be construed as underwater explosions. As the work progresses the music moves through compositions that are spacious while not entirely as minimalist as some of his other droning work. There is an aquatic feel to some of the music - everything sounds lurking, submerged or semi-submerged. You might think at times of those spiny naval mines bobbing in an empty sea, or wind blowing over a rusting hull. Human voices enter the stereo field every now and again, but they sound distant and staccatto. I am sure they are military radio transmissions. The drones are constant and truly frigid. There is no warmth to be found here, but the record's stark strangeness is bracing and implies a horrible beauty of sorts. Do listen.

MP3: Thomas Koner-Novaya Zemlya 1