supersonic 2008: friday (a snapshot in three parts)
the gunmetal grays and graffitied browns of some languishing city welcomes me into it’s squat modernist folds with near pornographic delight. the rain? the rain beats down on me like i’m an errant child, hissing with ponderous squall and tormenting silence. the rain, it’s a gift from home. everything’s crumbling and broken down. everything’s newborn and post-something.
cutting pink with knives: it starts as it always does with the kids kicking up a fuss; with the shrieking and kicking and cursing. i threatened to stop the goddam car, turn round and go home. it was an empty threat. they saw through me like a fetishists cling-film sex act. four years of blurred juvenilia and gay abandon comes to a pleasant end. the last roll of the dice. the final bow on stage. the final bow off stage. is this stupid easy or dismissively hard? is it spastic performance or absurd theatre? i know who j dilla is. what does it matter? they brought with them the sun and funshine. they have the sly wry grin of a young fucked michael hutchence, tearing up hearts and soiled bedsheets with a casual blow of cigarette smoke and a bass hurled everhigherandbackdownheadwards time upon time upon time. then? then they’re gone.
dalek: in the beginning there was the hiss. the hiss begat the crunch. the crunch begat the klang. the klang begat the thump. the thump begat the pulse. and in the end it’s just two guys. two guys and the sound of factories and abandoned cars, the sound of streets and near suburbia, the sound of brooding and festering, relentless. they own the confines of that locked-down window, that open void to somewhere else, to someone else, to stories, words strung together like meat and sinew and bone and gristle. they prowl the cage spitting verbs at passers-by. echo’s broken, noise smeared, scratching at windows with dark contours and iron will. the tension is palpable.
the osaka invasion: it was always about the beats this neon friday, this migraine evening, under the fug of too-much-whatever-it-is. always about the beats and the plastic electronick hellboxes. the japanese are here. with the beats. the bass. the drums. the oversubscribed crush and sweaty pulse of too-many people. this is the new shit. undulating dub, wave upon wave vibrating like earthquake water. those primal urges of thing on thing. the flail and thunder and knife-edge flow. the fear, a score of forty thousand and a gentle trembling beneath me. the desperate search for light and the desire to smoke… now. explosions drowning out chatter. the windows come in, blow out. there’s lizards in the fucking pavement cracks. there’s someone screaming bloody murder into distorted mic. i’m dizzy with glee and disorientating biology. it’s the spontaneity of electricity and the crackle of old riots and e-numbers and addled madness.
- so bad brains: maruosa
- mudamudamuda: ove naxx
- (something(s) live): dokkebiq
- scotch hausen: dj scotch egg
it’s three:am strange city walk home. it’s the scurrying of things towards dark. it’s the fuzzy headed whistle of noise in ears and the dulled thump of feet on pavement. i tap out the rhythm till i fall into somewhere and fall somewhere else.
