Asleep on the Compost Heap

Stuff and bits part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:09:00 +0000

Ian, who's always in first with breaking news over on thrillpier, has already pointed out that Silvio from the Sopranos, AKA little Stevie from the E Street Band will be broadcasting his radio show Underground Garage direct from Tower Records on Sunday (1PM to 3PM). Should be a pretty ace way to spend an afternoon for non-Oxegen goers. I believe he is into all sorts of classic rock, but primarily garage rock. He took a big interest in Dublin band The Urges a while back. Did he sign them or something? I dunno. I was always sorta curious about that Nuggets style scene in Dublin. All those resplendent mod guys turning out Lester Bangs-type music as if it were still 1968. I criticised one of these bands once saying they were pastiche, but in fairness if I ever formed a band it would be a Guided by Voices pastiche.

Ahem - Speaking of which, this brings me neatly around to the most recent Times New Viking MP3. I have a hardcore grá for these guys, even though they are best buds with that Psychedelic Horseshit dude who seems to be on a one man mission to bully Wavves.

I'll have to digress a bit before getting back to the TNV tune. The Psychedelic Horseshit stuff came on the back of an overall intimidatory journalistic beat-down against Nathan Wavves. This was ignited by a music website who clearly should have known he wasn't ready for the fame hoisted on him by said site. Yet, they blabbed MELTDOWN! during Primavera like they were an association of judgemental indie elders sitting proud on a moral cloud. The Greek Gods of alternative music.

Some musicians struggle live. Thome Yorke has done. Kurt Cobain clearly did. Bright Eyes too. Recently, I've seen Beirut 'melt down'. Less recently, Grandaddy. It happens. Good bands will fuck up, with the aid of illegal substances or not. They are all too human. And sometimes a bit more difficult even than that. But just because one disgruntled Pitchfork writer had a blackberry at the right time, a vulnerable enough lad (if admittedly youthfully arrogant with - God forbid - a wee fondness for dope) was dragged through the coals like a sacrificial lamb.

The information pitchfork.com (who didn't cover said festival properly anyway) provided about Nathan from Wavves was subsequentially digested by many other music blogs and bigger sites like NME. Also, in extension to their 'meltdown tweets', from Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork followed up with a stinkingly childish, linked interview from a member of the Black Lips. Here, said macho hero blabbed explicitly about how a friend of his band gave Nathan the drugs he couldn't handle. That to me was the saddest part of all. What was the message there? Some pitchfork favoured bands are big and clever at taking drugs, others aren't?

Oh look! it's the poor fucker who had the MELTDOWN! (tm) God have mercy on him. Heard it was worse than when Posh Spice stopped atein' celery last week. He'll never get over it.

Nice promo for 'no hope kids'. It includes some fun clips from Dublin.

And now, that Times New Viking Tune. It's awesome. They recorded it on videotape (VHS) apparently. It sounds clearer than the last album which was probably recorded on used fanny pads or something, even though it was still ace.

MP3: Times New Viking - No time, No hope

I suspect they'll battle it out with Jay Reatard this summer over who can get out the most nihilistic record title. They currently pip Reatard, because despite this TNV badboy having a ginormous melody, its refrain, "no time, no hope" sounds like an existential howl that mocks the generally accepted chirpy rules of life. Jay's almost equally life-affirming effort is called "you're gonna lose" and contains the heartwarming nugget "don't you know/ you're gonna lose". Giddy up for some REAL positive tunes on Matador folks!

MP3: Jay Reatard-you're gonna lose

The next post in the pipeline will be about Irish music.

I did an interview with Deerhoof for State.ie. It's here. They're playing around Ireland this weekend and are well worth seeing.

stuff and bits Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:40:00 +0000

My techno listening buzz continues unabated. Which is funny because I am mostly reclining at home with this shit on my headphones. Any sort of exciting night-life is more or less out the window for me these days. PhD. There, I give a three letter word a sentence of its own.

Regardless, this cut from Slovenian producer Petar Dundov is a stratospheric plateau of repetition - heady techno in as close to its purest form as you'll get nowadays.

MP3: Petar Dundov-Oasis

It's all build and no breakdown, like a Sting and Trudi Styler humping marathon on a posh rug. The album which the track is taken from, 'Escapements', is a slithery, galactic beast with a relentless forward groove which never lets up despite the deceptively repetitive arrangements. It's all a bit of a masterful sonic illusion really, one that reminds me of The Field's Daytime track on his 'Sound of Light' EP. Anyone who likes their dance music brimming with a touch of the transcendental should check Dundov out. Actually scratch that, if you are one of those late-nineties Underworld nuts who never shut up about 'Rez' you'll find piles to love on this album.

waxing gibbous

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:43:00 +0000

The local Niteclub, Vibe, had a full moon party last Saturday. The concept was to capture the wild spirit of one of those trancey all-nighters that go down on the beaches out in Thailand. Some of the local boyos must have come back last Summer with the faces peeling off them and tales galore of the craic they had out there, atein' funny mushrooms and hittin' the sliotar around the beach with some ladyboys at dawn. Last week, it was time to bring a bit of that exotic magic to Kells. Forty tonnes of sand were dumped inside the niteclub and a hot-tub was placed in the smoking area to create that authentic beach experience. Not to be outdone by the lack of a full moon (it was a tiny fingernail on the night in question) the organisers bravely raised a huge smiley helium balloon against the uncooperative lunar calendar so the good people of the town could get wild n'funky. I went down with a few mates and we had the most magical, enlightening, loved-up night of our lives...

Only kidding. It was pure shite. I knew in my heart we were chasing rainbows as the twelve euro cover charge was bled out of us at ten minutes to fucking two. "Typical Vibe" we muttered, the opening incantation of an inevitable, grim ritual. Subsequent highlights included someone getting sick in the sand, a local girl in a bikini horsing around the hot-tub with a ripped Germanic dude while a shadowy conglomeration of paunchy young farmers with buckeldy belts and wranglers looked on intently, and someone telling the black toilet attendant "ye must feel at home tonight with all this sand." Kells, I love you but I hate you.

full moon party Thailand

full moon party Kells.

Something good is happening in Kells this weekend though, the yearly town festival which actually has a lot of engaging looking events. I know a few people end up on this site when they search for useful information about the town, because I tag the word 'Kells' a lot. Well, Kells information seekers - if you are looking for something fun to do this weekend may I suggest taking a visit to the Arches bar from 8pm on Sunday night (5th of July). Two talented local comedians, Aodhgan Comiskey and Fred Cooke, will be doing their thing and there will be an open mic too. If you see me, try to stop me going to Sunday night Vibe. Why? Because it is a bleak vortex of career alcoholics and cougars. Yet, despite all our best intentions it will start to exert an inexplicable gravitational pull on us the very minute the barman in the Arches yodels "Time now folks!"

No one can succeed like Doctor Robert

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:51:00 +0000

Ah lads, I can't handle this humid weather. It's suffocating. Earlier, a trip to the shop for a cooling lolly nearly left me collapsed in a wheezing heap. Night time is worse. I ended up rooting around the freezer for bags of frozen veg to put under my sheets last night. They sort of worked too, like reverse hot water bottles with broccoli florets in them. In case you're wondering, I didn't share my bed with the foodstuffs. I patiently watched a bit of BBC News 24 as they worked their magic. I can be a bit gross at times, but even I wouldn't sneak a bag of veg back in the fridge after it was semi-defrosted by the radiant heat from my crotch.

John Daly: Keeping the Jimmy White flame of smoking in sport alive.

My friend tells me it's terrible bad weather for 'golfer's hole'. This unsubtle euphemism describes an otherwise unspoken rash that will be familiar to any man who has spent a hot day doing repetitive physical activity in Penney's underwear. The aformentioned friend and his golfing chums periodically suffer from this embarrassing scourge. They've a lot of extra nylon to deal with, y'see. Indeed, it's so common in the golfing community that they talk openly about it in the pub and compare treatments. The slathering on of Vaseline at 7am, the sly dock-leaf dropped down your jocks behind the fifteenth tee. It's all part of a hot day's golf.

I'm going to post a techno-y MP3 because I haven't done that in a while.

MP3: Deepchord presents echospaceelysian

This track is a cut from the monolithic dub techno album 'the coldest season', which is produced by Stephen Hitchell and Rod Modell. I associate dub techno with two wildly different types of situation. The first normally occurs on a bank holiday Sunday afternoon. You find yourself wobbling through the blasted wreckage of a house-party to open a window, any window, as long as it lets out the mong. Invariably, a few survivors are splayed on couches, staring at lampshades and muttering about heading down to others of their ilk in the Bernard Shaw. An impossibly cheery techno-wonk's ipod, running on the barest shred of battery, will be burbling through the speakers. What's playing? Why, dub techno of course.

My second experience normally occurs at home, late at night when I am feeling a little down in the dumps. I put my headphones on and surrender to this music. It's a security blanket. So deep, dark, cavernous and luxurious. All those soft undulating effects following the sparse bass, echoing, hissing, drawing the mind further and further into space or perhaps more aptly 'a space' where everything melts away except form and texture. Often dub techno music is barely representative of anything (one of the tracks from the deepchord album I mentioned is called "ocean of emptiness"). Such a meandering, repetitive journey through texture maddens those who criticise the genre. But, to me anyway, it is the very abstraction they criticise which provides the ultimate means of escapism.

You're listening to atlantic 252

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:42:00 +0000

Back in the days when my mother used to cover my schoolbooks in pattern-embossed beige wallpaper with my name on a sticker, and my music collection consisted of C60s with titles like Maximum Rave, I couldn't get enough of the charts on Atlantic 252. They tended to have a lot of poppy hardcore and rave in them back then. 'Twas 1991, ye see. I remember fuck all else about that year except spending a lot of the Summer up one particular ash tree, daring myself to climb one branch higher every day. By the time the August days were drawing in, I was hanging precariously from some bendy new growth at a height of about 25 foot when I copped the couple living in the neighbouring house. They were both standing full-frontal, and staring me out of it at eye-level. During my aborted scramble from this apocalypse of real life wrinkly-bits, I knocked the wind out of myself by falling into what botanists call the tree's crotch.

My twin brother and I had an old skool '70s Hi Fi in our room those days. This abomination of a yoke consisted of two gigantic silver cuboids; one was covered in chunky dials and a tuner, and the other was a double tape deck and record player. To this, add a pair of crusty speakers that were blown to shite way back when by my Dad and his hippy brother. God knows what sort of an unholy mixture got played through them. Most likely rebel songs and Irish showband swingers. And definitely the odd Incredible String Band or Donovan tune to freak things out if it all went a bit too Declan Nerney - on my uncle, like.

Actually, come to think of it, maybe I fucked the speakers? My bro might correct me if this is not true, but I distinctly remember water falling on to one in horrifying slow motion as we spazzed maniacally around the room with our one-inch-thick step haircuts bouncing disastrously out of tempo to this...

and this...

Sunken-faced Mancs with vicks vaporub up their bums weren't the only beneficiaries of UK Hardcore. The funny voice imploring "it's time for Trumpton" during said tune, spoke to me. It more or less filled me with an overwhelming desire to spaz around my bedroom and throw shit at my brother, like pillows. Mind you, I was ten at the time. Although, I suppose that probably put me on an equal mental wavelength to some of the monged nuttahs who featured in the tabloids every morning. Indeed, I remember us being ten and our Mam cornering us, clutching a paper, to ask if the music on our tapes was "rave".

My point, and there is a point here I hope, is that chart music hasn't figured as explicitly in my life since shortly after those days. I suppose I got into in a scene (Green Day punk in my case, followed by Britpop) and suddenly the charts melted from being the central soundtrack to my life to being snippets of incidental music in my life. Yet, as I grew older and began to rediscover that pop is brilliant, I also found that the charts had turned to anonymous shite. Nobody bar Rain Man could realistically follow the quick-fire confusion of the charts any more. They were pumped with over-hyped, burnt-out earworms that pissed everyone off before they even hit the top-spot, and nothing climbed any more. In at the top, in for the drop. Things had the hyper-accelerated turnover of staff in an Eircom call centre. This, crucially, removed the whole sport of chart watching, a pleasure deeply ingrained in the heart of many pop fans I know. Moreover, it reduced the shelf-life of genuinely quality singles, thus keeping them at arm's length from the collective consciousness.

But it is acknowledged that things are changing chart-wise, and changing for the better. The charts are once again a byword for quality pop. I'm no Jim Carroll, but I suspect the relatively new system of including downloads is making for a strong chart where the cream slowly rises. And best of all, where songs linger long enough to have the luxury of playing yearningly out of chippers at 4am for a few weeks, and to float on tarmac heat while youngsters' cars with rolled down windows hover impatiently at traffic lights. You might hear it from the flat downstairs. From your radio. Out of the shit radio at work. Or even from the Rover's Return jukebox in Coronation Street. But you'll hear it enough to remember it. Great chart music is everywhere this Summer, and I suspect it's great because the charts are once again on its side.

I can't post MP3 chart music here for obvious reasons. But here are two youtubes of stuff I like right now.

BONKERS!! Dizzee Rascal
This makes me nostalgic for prime Basement Jaxx. When you throw everything PLUS the kitchen sink into a mix, it's likely to be a right proper mess. Van Helden and Rascal deserve a big prize here. Why? Because they threw the fridge and microwave in too! Yet, from such mental eclecticism, they managed to make one of the songs of the year.

Paparazzi: Lady Gaga.
In this promo Gaga drinks from the same oversized teacup she whupped out during the weird Jonathan Ross interview. I like how because it is the 'lesser' single from her overplayed album, Gaga appear to be messing around a lot more with her image and all her gloriously pretentious Warholian affectations during the overblown narrative. It's nearly 8 minutes long! She jerks around like an injured stick insect in a steel S&M costume for half of it! On crutches! HEYYY.... I like the song too, OK?

'Cos often-times, the later singles of loaded pop albums may lack the whizz-bang appeal of the previous releases. Yet there can be a languid insistence about them which gets revealed gradually and makes them the perfect soundtrack to a sweltering July night (see Kylie's 'Come into my World'). Or even better, can you taste that last chip from the chipper van in a town gone so still on a Summer's Sunday morning that you can hear a cow mooing somewhere as you savour it? The more relaxed pop songs drip and trickle through Summers like that. Paparazzi might be one of them.

(Possibly not for) Children's Classics: Night on the Galactic Railroad

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:33:00 +0000

A famous painting by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin depicts somewhere called the Isle of the Dead. At the turn of the 20th century, people (particularly Germans) were apparently obsessed with this dark riddle of an image and prints of it used to hang off walls in houses in that part of Europe. As much as it fascinates me, I really can't understand why someone would casually hang this freaky shit over their mantelpiece.
"So eh, nice new flooring you got put in there Friedrich - but what about that picture, the one beside the cuckoo clock?"
"Ahh that thing? Well, I don't know for sure - but when the kids are messing I tell them they'll get ferried over to that eternally still island by old chalky the boatman there. And chalky's boat doesn't come back, oh no. Works a treat."

This post is about a Japanese children's animation by Gisaburô Sugii called Night on the Galactic Railroad, which is based on a well known Japanese story of the same name. My waffling about the freaky Swiss painting is because I can't think of a better way to put the disquieting and very alien feelings evoked by this unique animation into context. The work, difficult to find here, was marketed as a children's film when it was released in 1985. I think the marketing was something along the lines of 'a little cat goes on a magical adventure through the milky way'. Err right.

On a superficial level I guess an antropomorphic cat does get on a train. And said vehicle travels through the cosmos. But the journey is as slow moving and obscure as treacle running thickly over a pane of glass, packed with more symbols than the rules of the road, and - here is the big thing...its main theme is death. Death dealt with in the same still, otherworldly manner as it is in the painting above. Now, I'm a firm believer that kids can get their heads around some fairly sophisticated shit but I doubt that even in Japan, the land of symbolism and ellipses, your average pokemon fan would have a fucking clue as to what this particular storyline is about. So lets keep the young 'uns away from this one and briefly look at it from an adult perspective. Because it really is something else.

The protagonist of the book the film is based on is a young boy called Giovanni. In the film, which begins at school, he is depicted as a cat. Indeed, all of the characters in the film (bar an inexplicable appearance by a human family at one point) are cats with variously coloured fur who walk around on oddly human back legs and wear clothes. These creatures instantly lend the film an unreal feel. Giovanni is bullied at school and only one other cat called Campenella will stick up for him (note the Italian names - some of the film seems to invoke Dante's Divine Comedy).

After a lesson about the milky way at school, the class disperse - excited to take part in a festival of stars later that night. Giovanni is ostracised at the festival and runs from his village into a corner of shadowy countryside under the stars. Lying in the night flowers above the village, he considers the milky way overhead and suddenly finds himself in the path of a giant steam train rattling dramatically from the centre of the sky.

Once he climbs aboard, he discovers his friend Campenello and the train takes them on a languid journey through the cosmos, past beautiful psychedelic sights which slowly reveal themselves to be manifestations of various versions of the afterlife. There is a glowing crucifix the size of a galaxy standing in a curved ocean of undulating neon. The Elysium fields of ancient mythology roll past and Giovanni wants to step outside the train to pick flowers. Stranger and stranger visions and characters soon join the young lads on the train, such as a grizzled old cat who catches magical herons on the outskirts of space and turns them into sweets. A blind telegraph operator appears and, like a metaphysical Wichita Lineman, hears crackly Christian hymns of heartbreak through his receiver. As the journey reaches its end, a swirling Buddhist void at the very edge of it all, the cats are beset by heartbreaking revelations.

Original trailer.

Animation-wise, the film is like little I've seen. It is drawn in a deceptively simple but expressive style that is unusual for Anime. The angles of the houses in the cats' village are skewed and defy perspective. They look Italian and glow with a burnished Mediterranean light. Space, on the other hand is full of flourescence, gliding geometric shapes and general incandescent trippiness. Think the mad shit at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey but with added felines. The overall slowness is unusual too. The frame often lingers for miniature eternities on Giovanni's saucer eyes. Indeed, I found a few of the slower bits trying.

A final word should be saved for the excellent music. It's composed by the electronic pioneer Haroumi Hosono and it mixes ominously structured synth composition with a Clockwork Orange style electro reworking of a few classical standards and hymns. It's suitable milky way music.

I'm not even going to try and conclude what the film ultimately means. It is very enigmatic. Yet there are clear messages about how to hang onto happiness through suffering, and stranger ones for us non-Buddhists about surrendering to death and the void. One thing is for sure..the misleading tagline about a young cat going on a magical journey has probably caused more punters to exclaim "what the fuck is this shit?" than the film deserves.

Requiem for dying Summers: Compost Mix 2

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:41:00 +0000

Hullo, it's it's my second lash at making a mix for the 'Heap. Unlike my previous mix which consisted of ambient, late-night burblings, this is closer to what I mostly listen to generally...hangdog indie that is sometimes uplifting and other times a little shabby and sad.

My idea for the mix was a fairly loose concept. I don't know if it will succeed or fall flat on its pretentious schnozz, but here goes.

You know how summers aren't always a barrel of laughs? Granted, there are halcyon memories from childhood where it seems that you did nothing except spend months on end forming gangs with the lads, eating He Man bars, and running through the blurred foregrounds of memory-polaroids of the fields beyond the town. Well, that's for another mix. This one is a little more inspired by a sadder side.

A tiny twitching fly in the nuclear green remains of a loop the loop whupped from your hand. Sunburned men in Celtic Jerseys - down at the Bundoran amusements to escape the marching season - nutting each other in front of their bawling kids. The first thistle burdock floating across your field of vision in August; innocent harbinger of another shadowy September to be spent growing up. And those long days in musty schools containing the odd 'belligerent ghoul' of a teacher from Morrisey lore.

Download-Compost Mix: Requiem for Dying Summers

Tracklisting

Grandaddy: Non-phenomenal Lineage
Kurt Vile: Freeway
The Boo Radleys: Does this Hurt?
Jim O'Rourke: Prelude to 110 120 women
Woods: Gypsy Hand
Adem: Everything You Need
Mercury Rev: Something for Joey
Patrick Kelleher*: Wonder
Robert Pollard: Subspace Biographies
Built to Spill: Else
Guided by Voices: Jar of Cardinals
The Lesuire Society: It's a Matter of Time

All the songs are crammed into a 45meg zip file and should come springing out with the correct tags and in album format.

*saw him and his gang at an odd collective-type gig under a block of flats on Clarendon St. Exciting, exciting time. More of these types of things in Dublin please!!

EDIT: here is one more of these types of things - hooray... I would encourage anyone who will be around next Saturday and who has a taste for adventurous Irish music to pay the flyer below very close attention.

Finally, a mini prize for whoever first recognises the mix picture!

Lolomix 11: Lolo's Elephant 6 mix.

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Well looky here...Lolomix is back. Lolo emerged from her extended hibernation this week and bumbled into the sunlight carrying a big mix of her favourite bands from the Elephant 6 recording company.

The Elephant 6 collective began in the early 90s around a core group of musicians who would form the Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Apples in Stereo among other bands. What tied these groups together (apart from the midnight goat sacrifices and lubed-up orgies in Jeff Mangum's shed) was a sort of anything goes trippy aesthetic - probably best exemplified by the Olivia Tremor Control. While much Elephant 6 music is sunny pop, some of it is plain batshit. Like broken bulb on the mad-o-meter levels of weirdness. For example, I can't listen to the mysterious Major Organ and the Adding Machine album without feeling a few brainwaves misfiring.

Check out Lolo's cover. It reminds me of the famous scene in Dumbo when the poor sod gets the DTs and suffers teemining proto-psychedelic visions of eyeless elephants. Kinda apt.

Download Lolomix 11-Elephant 6

Tracklisting:

Olivia Tremor Control- Love Athena
The Apples in Stereo- Ruby
The Gerbils- The Air we Share
Beulah- My Horoscope said it would be a Bad Year
Circulatory System- Overjoyed
The Sunshine Fix- That Ole Sun
Chocolate U.S.A- Isn't a Lie . . ./Gloworm
Pipes you See, Pipes you Don't- Ken Freeman Inslaved
Neutral Milk Hotel- Two Headed Boy Part Two
The Music Tapes- Tornado longing for Freedom
Major Organ and The Adding Machine- His Pet Whistles
Elf Power- New Lord
Von Hemmling- A Fine Appleseed
The High Water Marks- The Leaves
The Minders- Hooray for Tuesday

Finally - I think there is no Of Montreal on this exhaustive mix 'cos the compiler is not that enamoured with them. Enjoy :)

I'll be grazing by your window, Please come pat me on the head

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:22:00 +0000

The local young lads are playing football in the pitch outside, and my window is open. If I let my hearing 'blur', the same way you might let your eyes if you relaxed them, their voices melt into curious repeating patterns. One fella, in the mid register, barks something like "Badjur Badjur Badjur Badjurrr" as the game ebbs and flows. Another rasps out a big skwawky "COME HEEEYURRR" intermittently, and a rarer voice sometimes breaks into an ascending "ho hO HOH!".

If this miniature avant garde opera has a chorus line, it's the one that urgently burbles "HandballandballHandBALLallHANDBALL" in overlapping pubescent tones. They handball a lot out there. Underneath all this is the dead whack of ball against foot, which I guess I've heard through that window since early childhood. It's deep inside me, that sound.

Speaking of Musique concrète type things, I was given an intriguing album to review a while ago. It's by Charles Spearin from Broken Social Scene and it's called The Happiness Project.

MP3: Charles Spearin-Mrs Morris (Reprise)

Spearin based the album's arrangements around recordings he made of his neighbours talking about what the word 'happiness' means to them. The voices' rhythms and cadences became the jumping-off points for little jazzy patterns that often lead into more expansive instrumental passages. Twee, I know. And it doesn't always work. There's a touch of well-intentioned community arts project about the endeavour. But one or two of the tracks are super and remind me of the Books' Lemon of Pink.

There is an unquestionable musicality in human speech, especially in those early soupy moments before we attach definitions to sounds. At times when I am deeply absorbed in instrumental music, the passages which grab me most often sound like vocal utterances. Arresting fragments of vocal sound from my past, reeled from just outside the rim of meaning - my granny's sonorous Mayo accent floats up a chilly bungalow corridor as I lie tucked in bed and it's two nights after Christmas 1985.

Except it's June 2009 and I am listening to Stars of the Lid on my sitting room stereo.

and it feels like it should today...

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:42:00 +0000

I just fell in love with a song. Hard. So hard, I'm worried that I'll be tearfully fucking it into the recycle bin next week and blubbering "it's not you it's me" to it after playing it an abusive amount of times.

MP3: Woods-Rain on

Woods are on the trendy Woodsist* label (Vivian Girls, Wavves) and 'Rain On' is from their new record Songs of Shame. The album is gorgeous and uncanny. It's mostly tape hiss folk, but with the odd grungetacular assault of early Mercury Rev guitar. There's no pinning down what makes it so wonderful. I'll just say the band have managed to tap into the spirit vaults of dream America, where one can sit out on a creaky porch at dusk to watch human-sized crickets square dancing with skeletons in the dusty fields.

Rain on might refer to Neil Young with a rhyming couplet containing the words "setting sun" and "damage done". Lead singer Jeremy Earl sings in Young's odd falsetto too, though he's perhaps a little closer to Jonathan Donohoe in his more spooked choirboy moments. I really do not want to find out much about Woods, because I'm sure it'll wreck the illusion.

*Edit: Just found out Jeremy from Woods runs the label - hence the name. Dur.

Children's Classics: Kirikou and the Sorceress (Kirikou et la Sorciére)

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:05:00 +0000

Kirikou and the Sorceress has a lot of boobs in it for an animated kid's movie. It's heaving with them. Wibbly, wobbly, nipply, child-corrupting chest weapons. Or so those puritanical Americans, who avoided the film like the plague upon its release, would have you believe. You see, Kirikou and the Sorceress is set in a tribal African village, meaning those controversial titties are of the non-erotic National Geographic variety. Indeed, I'd rather expose my (hypothetical) child to an entire village of these than allow them a solitary glimpse at the bulbous cranium of one of those plastic Lolitas, the Bratz.

I found out about this wonderful movie while reading an interview with one of Studio Ghibli's resident geniuses Isao Takahata, director of Pom Poko and Grave of the Fireflies. Takahata spoke of his admiration for both the film and other works by its French/African director Michel Ocelot (who also incidentally created Bjork's Earth Intruders video).

Kirikou and the Sorceress (loosely based on an African folk tale) tells the story of a courageous and mouthy little dude called Kirikou who - in an instant indication of the films folkloric strangeness - speaks from his pregnant mother's tummy. He decides to give birth to himself when she tells him that any child who can talk from the womb can surely manage his own delivery. So out he crawls, and...yikes but he is tiny! Like five inches tall tiny. Yet we soon find out that the diminutive Kirikou is very resourceful and gifted with great speed; the scenes where he rattles around the place like a tiny jet-propelled toy are comical. He's also bull-headed and full of himself like scrappy doo, but endearing rather than annoying. After the nonchalant self-birth, he immediately begins asking his mother questions about things. Where is his father? Eaten by an evil sorceress, she tells him. And his uncles? The same. Of course, Kirikou will have none of this, and moments after birth he's away off to teach the evil sorceress a thing or two.

From here, Kirikou sets about a series of tasks in which he uses his ingenuity to outwit the sorceress and her fetishes (evil wooden helpers who move around in an alarmingly creepy way). He fights magical trees, a swollen water monster and eventually climbs a mountain to meet his grandad and receive the wisdom that will ultimately help him save the village.

Reading the synopsis above you've probably already clocked that this is not the Lion King's Africa - Simba, for all his charms, is about as African as peanut butter and jelly. The Africa presented in Kirikou and the Sorceress is a rather stranger place, laced with the magical logic of folklore and sometimes quite scary.

The art in the movie is ultra stylised. The fluidly animated characters are rendered to look elegantly monochromatic, allowing them to stand out against backgrounds of bejeweled intensity. The areas around the village are geometrical and are infused with a timeless, eerie stillness that reminds me at once of both those empty plazas painted by the surrealist De Chiricio and of ancient Egyptian sculpture.

It is the jungle art that properly wows ya though. Taking the fantastic imaginings of the primitive French post-impressionist Rousseau (illustrated above) as his starting point, Ocelot paints an emerald wonderland for little Kirikou to adventure through.

I could go on, but I won't - except to say that there is a smashing soundtrack by Youssou N'Dour and the film is available in its entirety on youtube starting here. Chesticles included, this is a stunning children's film.

the rain in spain falls mainly in my brain

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:14:00 +0000

In a few hours I'm going to Primavera in Barcelona with Lolo and lots of headcases mostly drawn from Kells. One last party in the shadow of a PhD which thrashes on the horizon like the Kraken. I'll be writing updates over the weekend on State.

MP3: Funzo-Arrested Development

Anyone knocking around Dublin this weekend should really check out a band called Funzo, who are about the brightest and poppiest thing in town right now. Funzo's music is very chunky if that makes any sense - like it's made out of Duplo blocks. Stompy happy-go-lucky psych rock that tips its hat to pop wizards like Harry Nilsonn and Macca but sometimes comes on a bit ska-inflected too. They wouldn't sound out of place on Elephant 6. Definitely a band for those (sensible) people who prefer the Beatles to the Stones ;)

Funzo launch their album at 8pm in Radio City (Isaac Butt) on Saturday May 30th.

Adios Amigos!

Homestead fiuntas, ag theacht chun tí

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:39:00 +0000

There's a pub in the centre of Kells I hate to walk past. The outside of it is falling to shit. Diseased flaps of maroon paint peel from its sign and even on the warmest days streaks of dampness taper from below its windows. The outside walls are full of worryingly deep cracks which make me think the building itself is fucked beyond repair. It depresses me and symbolises something about the whole town at the moment. A shabby hopelessness. One out of five are unemployed in Kells these days. We are a cliché from a David McWilliams essay, the failed commuter town. Kells Angels - that's the hideous little catchphrase he used to describe people (sorry Pope's children) working in Dublin but living in the towns in the adjacent counties, and who are now rapidly becoming jobless.

In the new estate nearby, lights only come on in half the houses at night. A sign with bleached bunting from 2007 hanging uselessly from it still advertises show houses. To top things off, I'd swear there are more magpies around the place. I see them and hear them rasping everywhere. You know that poem "one for sorrow, two for joy...?" Well what happens if you see 12 of the beaked bad omens? Because that is how many magpies I counted perched at various levels in the hedge adjacent to the Gael Colmchille centre recently. Carrion birds and flaking paint. Thank fuck I'm off to Primavera next week.

Séamus's freckles rendered his tattoo somewhat redundant.

Righto. Irish bands part 1. Parts 2 and 3 are coming soon.

MP3: Subplots-Poltis
Subplots On Myspace

When I first heard Subplots I thought they weren't my cup of cocoa. "Too lush and slick with all that OK Computer style counter-melody and sweeping production", I pretentiously muttered, lashing another Jay Reatard C90 into a knackered cassette player. I was wrong. They are fab. The best songs on the Nightcycles record share a spooked beauty. Poltis is a real nocturnal summer song. Soft darkness, night-scented garden plants and concrete walls still cooling down from the heat of the day.

MP3: Super Extra Bonus Party-Mark Hughes Top Corner
SEBP On Myspace

I can't exactly put my finger on what this instrumental romp from the new Super Extra Bonus Party album "night horses" reminds me of - The Go Team maybe? Anyway, the resplendent trumpet riff running through it celebrates a Welsh soccer player booting home a goal. Exhilarating and childlike (as opposed to childish) goodness.

MP3: Hunter-Gatherer-You're Dead After School
Hunter Gatherer On Myspace

This is tonal, otherworldly electronic stuff that never loses sight of its unnerving melody. The hissing effects on this track from Hunter Gatherer sound like distilled anxiety and the image which accompanies the track is of someone holding their creased brow in their hands. A bully once told me he was going to kill me after school. He stuck to his word and split my nose open with a fist encased in a leather BMX glove. On a cold day.

And on that note I'll be off.

You were My God in High School

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:44:00 +0000

I'm still moving to wordpress folks...but will continue posting here in the meantime. The Irish round-up is nearly ready, so that will be up tomorrow. In the interim here is a review of Deerhunter in Andrew's Lane Theatre t'other night.

Deerhunter: ALT

Phrases like “sweat box” and “sausage factory” are being bandied back and forth about the ridiculously large, mostly male, and mostly damp crowd down to check out Deerhunter in Andrew’s Lane Theatre. At a time when some of their contemporaries are seeing undersold gigs and tickets being slung around the place in giveaways, the level of devotion evident in Deerhunter’s Irish fanbase tonight is impressive. In recessionary times, it appears that a bit of consciousness-obliterating white noise is yer only man. And for the most part, Deerhunter bring the noise.

Not only that, but before their encore, eccentric front man Bradford Cox throws in an uber-weird monologue about dead babies and censorship for good measure. God knows what he is talking about. The normally implacable bassist Josh Favreau – who looks like Pacey from Dawson’s Creek gone off the rails on valium - doesn’t seem to know either, judging by his impatient glances and raised eyebrow. It’s an awkward interlude, but it’s quickly obliterated by a killer encore that ends in a pulverising version of ‘Calvary Scars II’, an epic song about Bradford imagining himself as a crucified Polish boy at a Gorgoroth gig. By the time this twelve-minute, feedback riddled, sonic assault concludes, the audience members up front can go home and confidently tell their mates they know how a goose must feel when it gets sucked into the rotors of a Boeing 747 jet engine. That’s the crowd up front, though. Unfortunately, it’s a different story nearer the back.

It seems that as one moves further from the front of the crowd there is an exponential drop off in sound. During a rare lull in the set, I squeeze toward the back to stand nearer a mate of mine. The difference in acoustics is remarkable - like listening to the band from the inside of a fish tank. Deerhunter are playing a blinder, but what is layered and dense a few rows ahead, sounds shot through, formless and mangled. What is to blame? The shape of the venue? It’s P.A? Either way, punters toward the back hear a bit of a mess. Which is a shame; because, in spite of looking a little disengaged at times, Deerhunter are thunderously tight.

What stands out most during the gig is how muscular their music sounds in a live setting. Deerhunter are often described as shoegaze revivalists but in truth that description sits easier with Cox’s and guitarist Lockett Pundt’s expressionistic and floaty solo material. The real engine that drives this band live is a German ‘70s model. All their big songs are delivered over a clanging motorik rhythm section that never misses a beat and creates a sensation of perpetual forward motion. The band are driving the crowd headfirst into a storm, and judging by contorted and upturned faces near the front it’s a blissful experience for some. Strangely though, one of the songs that best exemplifies the band’s Krautrock motor – ‘Nothing Ever Happened’ – seems to lose something tonight. The speakers struggle with the nebulous high end guitars and the suspension of disbelief is shattered. It isn’t a hurricane after all, just guitar noise coming through equipment not made for this sort of thing.

No matter, over the course of a long set there are plenty more thrills. Tellingly, the bands faces flicker into life when they get a chance to air material from their new EP and ‘Famous Last Words’ in particular is a pounding revelation. You can add to that a visceral rendition of that primal scream of a song ‘Flourescent Grey’, a bone-chilling ‘Cryptograms’ and more droning, nervy, wigged-out music than a young John Cale could shake his cello at. A success.

Ian's review is up Here

Neanderthal versus Seagull

noreply@blogger.com (STORKBOY) — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:02:00 +0000

qaStaH nuq?

That, I am told is Klingon for 'hey what's happening?'. I don't understand why they capitalise letters in the middle of words, but then again these are a race of people with foreheads that look like the folds of pastry in a cornish pasty. Klingons are not real, though you could be fooled for thinking otherwise these days. Neanderthals were once very real though, and this week it was revealed that the first Homo sapiens enjoyed Neanderthal meat....sort of disturbing, where is the line drawn with meat for most people? I think there is an increasing chain of unpalatability that goes something like this: Chicken, cow, horse, rat, dog, monkey, chimpanzee, neanderthal, human.

A few weeks ago Darragh asked myself and coLoUrS mOvE (yes, he is of Klingon descent) to put together two wee mixes for this blog. Colours Move did his stuff nicely, and if you scroll down the page it's there for download. I've finally got round to putting my own mix together. I'm off work sick you see, and I am hobbying the shit out of it. Mixtapes, songs, reading...good times all round. So anyways, here's my mix. I made it this morning and it's rough round the edges, but it's just a few good tunes that I think kind of work together.

I'm going to bullet point the tracks.

The first track is by Moderat (Modeselektor and Apparat mutually masturbating), it's called A New Error and it's easily the best track on their recent album. It comes over all Boards of Canada at first before the big Berlin sound kicks in. The rest of the album is patchy to say the least; and a very poor cousin of the much more integrated work that Apparat did with Ellen Alien.

The second track is Euphoria by Zomby. It's more bonkers than a bag of spiders at the Berlin love parade. I love this sound. That's all I am saying.

Almost 20 years ago LFO released Frequencies on Warp. Have a listen to track three of my mix, Simon from Sydney, and tell me that the phuture aint the past bro!

Track four is perhaps my favourite techno track of all time. A melancholy descent into the pulsing labyrinths of mongville with Ricardo Villalobos. The majestic Dexter. I could listen to this tune forever. How did he do it? I will never know, but it is the benchmark against which I compare all other techno.

Track five is by Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb. I'm not a huge fan of Pink Floyd, but I love this tune and it seems to be coming from the same beautiful anaesthesised place as Dexter. It was playing in the background when Christopher crashed his car in The Sopranos. Powerful stuff altogether as they say in Mayo.

Gang Gang Dance, only got into these dudes recently. St Dymphna is savage stuff, this track (vacuum) is a pure My Bloody Valentine rip off, but it's forgivable because they are progressive and as far removed from insipid shoe-gaze revivalism as you can get. Tynchy Stryder does a nice collaboration with them.

Finally, I only said, by My Bloody Valentine...sound like anything you just heard?

That's my mixtape. I enjoyed assembling it. I hope you guys enjoy listening to it. The link is below:

MP3 STORKBOY'S SAVAGE FUCKING MUSIC

AAUGH!

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:53:00 +0000

yeah, you said it charlie.

You may have noticed that one of my posts disappeared recently and I had to pull it from the google cache. Well, after Hugger gave me a heads up I went through my archive and found a further three posts are missing. I will try my best to fully articulate why this makes me so angry, but rest assured I am seething...no...fucking boiling with anger.

Google (who own blogger) have recently started pulling entire blog posts when the American recording industry (RIAA) indicates to them that the post contains a link to copyright material. The sneaky thing is, they do it without notification or explanation. Whup...and there goes a few hours worth of writing and a whole bunch of comments. GRRFUCK...GRRRFUCK...AAUGH!!!

Now, I am fully aware that I am arguing from a bockety platform. I know that the stuff I linked to was copyrighted. I also know that I am availing of a free service. But still, I feel angry and, honestly, a bit violated. Because I invested so much time in this blog I suppose I imagine an ownership over it that in reality I don't have. And google (with a small 'g' because their motto is don't be evil - pfffnrrr) acutely reminded me of this today. All of my writing on asleep on the compost heap effectively belongs to a giant amorphous global corporation. And what means a lot to me, means nothing to google. My words are just inconsequential packing around something that obviously did matter more than a hot fart to them - a few hotlinks to songs on major record labels.

I wish they notified me before whipping the posts. Is that too much to ask? I would have instantly removed the links and held on to my words. Now all I can say is fuck you google, you didn't play nice so I am heading to wordpress.

Colours Move to Techno Classics

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:22:00 +0000

The Holy Roman Army will launch their debut album this Friday May 15th with a gig in Crawdaddy with support from Tenaka and Storkboy Choons/Colours Move. This should be a fine gig for anyone who enjoys their electronic music song-driven and finely wrought. The Holys (also known as Laura and Chris Coffey) were invented by Donal Dineen in a secret lab in Kerry and come equipped with a sack of rich and languid sounding songs that sit somewhere between Low and Portishead.

Tenaka recorded a nifty free EP of bedroom electro-pop earlier this year which whirred and clicked like that really early Badly Drawn Boy and Andy Votel stuff.

And Storkboy Choons/Colours Move are techno muckers from Kells. One works in a joke shop. The other is my brother. Although they make their music separately, it works well mixed together. They both love brain-damaging beats, but decorate them prettily and dose them with woozy nostalgia.

Here's a brill free gift for everyone in the audience from Colours Move. He mixed a playlist of techno classics that should suit any occasion that requires rhythm, from whisking a meringue to toning up that flabby rear on your aerobostep. It's stonking.

Colours Move Mix
Popnoname - idCard
Paul Kalkbrenner - Gebrunn Gebrunn
Modeselektor - Kill Bll 4
Autechre - Eutow
Underworld - Rez
Aphex Twin - On
Orbital - Lush
The Field - Everyday
Jurgen Paap - So Weit Wie Nach Nie
Brian Eno - The Big Ship

MP3: Colours Move-Mix

Irish music round-up coming. I promise.

Retreived Post

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:28:00 +0000

My post on asparagus disappeared mysteriously and my fileden account was suspended. Web sherrif? Meh. Anyway, here is a retrieved version from google cache minus your comments - sorry. I'll try link the songs again too.

Asparagus is in season. The cookery writers in the English Sunday papers go bonkers this time of the year, describing the stuff in wibbly monologues. Nigel Slater - whose recipes I love - can be especially hilarious. A recipe for asparagus omelette might describe how he waits, quivering in the moonlight, for the first tender cock-like spears to rupture forth. Then, under cover of darkness, he'll harvest them, lay them gently out on his picnic table, and oil them up for the pot. As they steam merrily away, the cock-like aroma of the asparagus, its cock-like shape, and memories of rough sex from back when he was a working class lad will overwhelm poor Nigel - causing him to spurt buckets of adjectives all over the place before passing out peacefully with his hand down his trousers and the omelette burning.

Something I wonder at this time of year is whether there is such a thing as fresh Irish asparagus? Like to buy? A quick straw poll I conducted on Facebook suggests not. But then, only two people responded, my mate Niamh and a Canadian. Is there something wrong with our soil? Maybe Irish soil is conducive only to the growth of lumpen and misshapen veg like the spud.

MP3: Bat for Lashes-Daniel

The new Bat for Lashes album is great. Though it's hard to listen to it without thinking of one of those 80s films full of animatronic creatures, and a talking wall that asks you a riddle before you can access the amethyst palace.

"Driver..take me to the Bat For Lashes gig!"

While we are on the subject of ethereal music here's a good 'un from Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's 'Evening Star' album. Like most music of this kind, you'll probably have heard it burbling away in the background of Prime Time at some point, or during the emotive climax of a TV3 documentary where Barry from Kent is reunited with his family after painful scrotum surgery.

MP3: Fripp and Eno-Evening Star

Finally, two from the wonderful Television Personalities because I am listening obsessively to 'Don't the Kids Just Love it?'. Dan Treacy's lyrics are terribly affecting and can make me well up. I think the melodies of his songs sound honest in themselves. There's a little instrumental called the crying room, which features a melodion and plucked guitar and it's just the saddest thing. It sounds like a heart disintegrating.

MP3: Television Personalities-Look Back in Anger
MP3: Television Personalities-The Crying Room

comments

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Sat, 09 May 2009 04:37:00 +0000

Hi all,
because of some odd circumstances, I need to take the unfortunate step of moderating comments - a move which doesn't suit my nature as I am not the censoring type. Please write whatever you like, still - even if it is in the unlikely event that you don't think my blog is the best thing since sliced pan ;) I would never block a comment here without very good reason indeed, and vanity is not a good reason.

You can try me out by telling me I smell like a diseased cat, look like a vagrant, and my writing is seven kinds of shite - or something to that effect. It'll get through my loose screening, guaranteed. Well, maybe I'll also deny the odd post from overly matey blokes with names like Bamba Xioa who 'luv this writing piece WOW! and gr8t interesting topics..fancy nipping over to my spyware infested forum for a relaxing cuppa strained from ground up rhinos and the world's last Snow Leopard? - it adds inches!'

I'll hopefully take the moderation off at some point.

See yis!

hedgehog football

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:49:00 +0000

There's a small stretch of road near our local pitch n putt club that is a death trap for hedgehogs. Every other week, one of the poor spiny fellas gets turned into magpie fodder. Yesterday, I saw a young lad drop kick the most recent hedgehog corpse at one of his mates. It seems the youth of Kells will find plenty to keep themselves occupied during this recession.

MP3: Robert Pollard-Subspace Biographies

Here's an MP3 from the master of lo-fi rock Robert Pollard. It's taken from his first solo album 'Waved Out'. Robert is on my stereo a lot these days. He formed a new band called Boston Spaceships with a Decemberist among others. Although every new Bob release gets wishfully hailed as a return to form in some quarters the fact is that most of his post Guided By Voices output is hot runny shite. However, the Boston Spaceships gang sound like a proper band and their songs, while not scaling the ridiculous peaks he once climbed with ease, are solid and fun. Here's a good 'un from their new album 'The Planets are Blasted'...

MP3: Boston Spaceships-Headache Revolution

There's a great night called PANDAmonium! returning to Dublin after being on holiday for a while. It will in Spy on Friday and I will be DJing there intermittently.

Lolo is the captain of the ship. Expect a very eclectic mix of music, old and new, from Steve Winwood to Zomby by way of Elephant six. Oh, and those ten euro bottles of wine on promotion 'til nine are far from shite...they go for around eight quid in spar and are very drinkable.

A forthcoming blog will be a round up of the Irish stuff I'm listening to at the moment. If there is anything you would like to point my ears towards send it on. The email address is at the top right of the page here.

Plug it in...

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:21:00 +0000

I'm getting left behind by internet lingo, or maybe I just don't care. Zombies? FAIL? Zombie-FAIL? Am I the only person who finds internet humour is increasingly becoming weirdly clandestine and unfunny? Or are you all laughing at the sad grouch from your big fuck-off roflcopters..?

ZOMG zombie kitteh? Laugh? I nearly fell out of the fuckin' roflcopter mate. Whatcha mean you don't get it? Haha zeitgeist FAIL!

STUFF

After Alphastates, Villagers and So I Watch you from Afar successfully mated with each other last week, there will be another cross border initiative in the Purty Loft this Friday at 8pm. This week it costs €5 and will feature The Rags, Escape Act and John Shelly & The Creatures.

Former Analogue and current Hummingbird Mentality blogger, Gareth, could be insane. Why? Because he has recorded the most mental series of humour podcasts I ever heard. If you put them into your brain via your ears you will hear a batshit, possibly sexually deviant old professor called Frump guide you around various famous Dublin locations. It's called the Invisible Tour Guide and you should check it out here.

Jason Lytle, the man behind Grandaddy, will soon return to the fray with his new solo-album 'Yours Truly, The Commuter'. Remember how mopey and destroyed Grandaddy sounded on their last two albums? I do. That shitty, grey day of the soul I bought Sumday. Listening to it was an exercise in spiritual drainage. Here was a document of a band who all hated each other and were chugging along on autopilot. It wasn't terrible, just average, but it was so bereft of life and energy that it upset me. After a few weeks I threw it in a bin. It remains to this day the only album I ever threw in a bin.

Well, Jason has come on a good bit, but not fully, since then. He's still bawling into his beer, 'drinking wine in the morning', sometimes maudlin, othertimes sentimentally optimistic, and always obsessed with prettiness. All of Grandaddy's musical stylings are present and correct on this record. The borderline cheesey melodies, the bashed up acoustics, wavering vocals and cheap synths - all there. In fact, this is a Grandaddy album in all but name. After one or two listens I have to say I like it but it makes me feel sad, even when it is trying to be happy. A lot of the lyrics are terribly raw and beat up. No alcoholic robot allegories here. Just an open look into the eyes of the hurting man behind them.

MP3: Jason Lytle-Yours Truly, The Commuter

The album boasts the best song title I've heard so far this year: Birds encouraged him.

From here we go....sublime again?

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:07:00 +0000

Swedish uber-aesthete The Field is returning to the dance fray in a few weeks with his second full length album, Yesterday and Today. Lead single 'The More that I Do' is knocking around right now. I've had a few listens and am including it below so you can too.

Dude looks like he could do with a Lemsip or something.

MP3: The Field-The more that I Do

So what's it like? Well, errr, more of the same really. The utterly distinctive sonic template from Sublime remains intact on every level. Perhaps this isn't a surprise from an artist whose work derives so much of its power from a hypnotic feeling of stasis (most of his tracks involve lush layers of tiny melodic variations interlocked around an oscillating central sample). I couldn't help but feel a little selfishly let down on first hearing this. I think I was expecting him to reinvent the wheel or something. After a few spins, though, it has absorbed me and made me excited for the album.

The piece uses a vocal sample from an old Cocteau Twins track as the metronomic base for a typically dizzying staircase of pretty stuff (including calypso drums) going forwards, backwards and inside out all at once. Cosmic.

Perpetual Motion Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nearly every Sunday, through one circumstance or another, and despite not buying it, I end up exposed to the Sunday Independent or something in its pages. It lies waiting around the house for me like a coiled foe in a dungeons and dragons computer game. I hate it, but always end up reading it; normally while on the bog after a hard day's roast beef.

To assuage the self-hating fits the paper induces in me as a reader, I've determinedly decided to write a pointy blog having a go at it tonight. And what do you know, such is the embarrassment of plain wrongness contained within its disingenuous broadsheet format, that I've found it hard to specifically take a pop. I mean where do you begin with such a grotesque, knowingly evil, ruptured haemorrhoid on the arse-starfish of Irish journalism? Ignoring Barry Egan for sanity's sake I'll have to randomly cast my die and start at Niamh Horan, who is behind a troubling story about thin women buying diet pills in spite of regulations saying said drugs should only be sold to obese people. This should be a well-meaning piece of investigative science writing, shouldn't it? Oh Nelly, let me count the ways in which it is not.

Apparently, according to the Sunday Independent, "Irish chemists are selling a new 'over the counter' diet pill to healthy thin young girls -- despite reassurance by the drug's manufacturers that staff will only sell the drug to people who suffer from obesity".

So far, so hmm. But how do we know this? Well, the roving Sindo doorstepper decided to find out for herself. Her sensationalist non-story proudly asserts that she is "just" eight and a half stone. Below, is the picture that accompanies her courageous piece. Now imagine, for one minute, the Guardian's (handsome) Ben Goldacre thrusting his sexy bod out at you on a weekend morning to illustrate a serious story about HIV retrovirals. Does that image work? No? Well, that could be because he has honourable reasons to modestly substitute an image of himself with a picture of Frankenstein's monster when he is writing objective science journalism.

If this woman, or whoever asked her to write the story, really gave a hoot about eating disorders, why in the name of God is she posed, hand smugly attached to hip, like she is a glamourous celebrity advertising this fuckin' stuff? Why are we given her exact weight? Surely, if you write a piece about eating disorders, and have properly researched said piece, you might conclude that this level of unnecessary detail might be questionable when addressing such a media-sensitive psychological disorder? You might consider that vulnerable people could possibly ignore the story and see the glamorous, successful journo's body-weight as not only the real hook but a target to hit and go beyond? This sort of transparently insensitive, self-serving shit does not just sicken me but makes me die a little on the inside every Sunday. I know Sindo journalism is a self-fellating spectacle at the best of times, but this pushes their writer-as-story shtick to a new, distasteful level.

Also, because it really does matter, it would be more interesting to see the nuts and bolts of what peer-reviewed studies make of the specific claims surrounding the so-called "wonder drug" (claims so unquestionably reproduced in this cynical piece that it reads like a subversive advertisement for the ropey product it ostensibly attacks)? Maybe the real story is right there.

And don't even get me started on the fucking Herald.

Plug it in...

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Pluggy things worth plugging before bed.

The Secret of Monkey island 2, now there's a game. I used to enviously read reviews of it in computer games magazines when I got my first PC and wonder what it would be like to play. Now, thanks to an MS DOS emulator I am happily clicking away at it before bed every night and it is every bit as good as I imagined it would be as a teenage sadcase. You can get all sorts of old PC computer games (known as abandonware) here. In addition to Monkey Island 2, Ultima VII, Betrayal at Krondor and Tie Fighter are swarming around the bloated spectacle of my work like flesh-eating insects. I discovered abandonware at an unfortunate point in my write up.

Speaking of computer games, Vinny, the bespectacled uber-gamer of Adebisi Shank and Vinny Club fame, writes an excellent blog about them here. Vinny will also be DJing at Soundcheck in Spy on Thursday night along with part-time compost-heap monkey Lolo. She promises to play Japanese Pop, and I'll make an educated guess that Vinny will be playing snippets of Hulk Hogan's Hulkamania album through a rewired Atari 7800.

If you like Irish music and are looking for an excuse to get out of the shitty city centre this weekend I'd advise heading out to the Purty Loft in Dun Laoghaire this Friday night (24th). There will be a sort of cross border music magazine night organised by AU and State. This will be the first of a series of nights cross-pollinating music north and south through the medium of inter-band group sex (I jest). The next will be in Laverty's Attic, Belfast on May 1st.

It kicks off at 8pm and features Alphastates, Villagers, So I Watch You From Afar, State and AU magazine DJs. All for ten euro and all until 2.30am. Class, no?

Do do do do this is Insania

noreply@blogger.com (Gardenhead) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 21:57:00 +0000

Warp Records, the label beloved of greasy computer science postgrads with thousand yard stares and serious men with record bags biologically attached to their hoodies, is twenty years old this month. For a long moment, in the early to mid nineties, Warp was at the vanguard of the type of headphones electronica that is sometimes called intelligent dance music (IDM) by cretins - 'cos all other dance music is by that definition not intelligent, right? I know it feels alienating to these sorts when more rhythmically inclined people enjoy it in social contexts...but unintelligent? In its heyday the label spewed out classic drum n'bass, tech house, dub and ambient releases by the likes of Aphex Twin, LFO, Boards of Canada, Sabres of Paradise and Black Dog.

As the headphones electronica scene is now as quaintly mid-nineties as an episode of Home and Away with Donald Fisher in it, the Warp roll call has recently expanded to move with the times. They've signed bands who play instruments such as Maximo Park, Battles and Broadcast. Also, after hiccups with bigger distributors, Shane Meadows now releases his films on Warp and Chris Morris will be putting out a project rejected by channel 4 on the label, a film satirising that hot halal spud, Islamic fundamentalism.

All good stuff I'm sure you agree. And though the label doesn't set the electronic agenda in the way it once did, it still spits out the odd brilliant artist from the wotthefuckhappendtomyearsjustthere?? school of music. Musicians like Tim Exile and Hudson Mohawke. Exile's recent album Listening Tree is so staggeringly new-sounding I suspect those Warp wiseguys might have signed him in the future and sent him back for the craic to mark their 20th birthday.

MP3: Tim Exile-Family Galaxy