i grew so tired of movement so one day i stopped.

how it happened;

picture me as occam’s razor. with tits.

picture me as emmeline pankhurst. with catheter.

how it happened;

the opposite of awakening.

the sun rises one morning and you don’t. there are no more choices only slogans. you lay comfortable with the realisation that there is no freedom only consumption. medicine is an illusion. love is panic. it all fades. clouds lift. doors forced open in the most obviously phallocentric way. when i get famous they’ll talk like this. they’ll dress it up, but what they’ll describe, reduced, is cock and cunt.

so here i am.

the comedian frozen on stage.

i gather moss.

lost in biology.

so here i am.

the opposite of shark.

what i am not is collectivism or compromise or default.

what i am is as certain as a plane hitting a building.

this is not an exit.

what happens is my eyes dry up quicker than you’d think. light hits like a rock to the head. each photon burst an apocalypse of self-abandonment.

i dream of refusing, not flinching, not struggling.

what i fear most is subconscious.

what i fear most is involuntary.

what i am is body politic.

the doctors dare me to move, wet for reaction. what they do is start hurting me for fun. i am bone scratched by hypodermic. i am vivisection for sniggering rationalists. i am marcel marceu offering my sincere apologies. i am a pinprick in the sky.

what i am is tabloid and broadsheet. one talks of foucault, the other expounds illness of the year scares. they all attach meaning to something as obvious, as ridiculous as me. there is no intellectualisation.

i am not new labour or neo-con.

i am the blue tinge on your lips.

i am a redefinition of myself.

i am a terrorist.

i see my cunt as a zipper.

i am so much wasting meat.

i am seven years old. i weigh fifty three pounds. i am four feet tall. i am explained in numerical terms. i am defined by the slit between my legs. what i am is the product of someone’s hunger.

sores spread like catholic guilt. the church sees me as a child of christ, as joan of arc, as original sin. i am a protest against war. or homosexuality. or celibacy. i see islam as the enemy. i am aryan. i am slave. i am apology.

i wallow in my filth.

my mother prays. my father struggles.

as my body breaks down, swelling changing and growing in so many new and interesting ways:

they gather outside, some with bombs strapped to their chests, moist brown thumbs itching for eternity or finality.

they gather outside, some with candles and poetry. they talk of gaia, of blood and sisterhood. i think of them in dog years.

they gather outside, some in ecstasy with the blood rush hard anxiety of the newly converted. i am a prophet and we are linked by lack thereof.

there is nothing outside. it all happens in here. genesis through revelation. armageddon and kingdom come.

my heart is a fist.

i am true. i am moral. i am happy.

i am here, in this moment, me.

i want to stop progress. cease going forward.

we should un-evolve, un-enlighten.

i want to be the first butterfly to emerge from the cocoon as a caterpillar.

• current 93: twilight twilight nihil nihil

anonymous with creaks and fear spidery in her throat, a voice insinuates itself down wires too distant for comfort. i keep secrets, swollen and slug-like, echoing with other peoples panic, breathy and wet; sweat strangled confessions with masturbatory aloneness. the four a.m. fear a damp shower curtain of catholic guilt and self-help abandonment. no-one is in love. everyone has more tumours than fingers. clinging to kittens and bottles and god.

• tindersticks: 4.48 psychosis

want to know what kinda place this freaky skeletal shit is coming from? read erika anderson’s liner notes:

listening to this recording evokes a time when we were barely holding on by our fingernails. ezra had broken bones in his foot, which the cold and rain didn’t help. there were points during that tour where i just kind of lost my mind, and during the recording of heaven there was a moment where i completely forgot where i was, who i was, and what i was doing. can you hear it?

by christ you can. bad drugs. bad vibes. bad things. a veritable swamp of dread. but a surprisingly beautiful one at times.

so gowns. one of them used to be in the mae shi. one of them is in amps for christ. they come together like spook-rock power rangers. churning out some majorly bummed disjointed jams, reworkings, composed of noise and pop and folk and electronics and whatever else you want to chuck avant- in front of. hey, at least it’s a change from post- somethingorother.

it’s like a forty minute fucked up charalambides album for want of a better comparator product. just replace the sweeping warm texan-psyche tones with some haunted mutterings and scratchy string abstractions. the fractured violin scrapes and barely controlled whispers of feedback actually put me in mind of those drawn-out velvet underground stumbling garage drones.

in amongst this folkish personal apocalypse are burbling electronics (yr man ezra was the mae shi’s synthy module music box fella) in the nervy horror movie soundscape mould, oddball deconstructed balladeering and cracked kindof spoken word soliloquies. it’s the spectral confessional on dog that sticks unsettlingly in my skull. disjointed murmurings of rednecks with dogs and child abuse, full of claustrophobic ambiguity and all delivered in this confessional narcotic drawl. an all too real haunted house tale.

this seems more gnarled and vicious and jagged than the two previous records i’ve heard, or maybe that’s just from all the connotations tendriling out from the dark heart of this one. the whole thing seems highly bloody strung, teetering on the edge of some troubled precipice or trapped in a room full of wrong medicine with only the voices in yr head for company.

white like heaven or dark like space?  more latter than former on this one. another razorblade filled treat from southern.

myspace / gowns / southern / latitudes

quelle surprise mouth breathers, yet more racket. and boy is this clever stupid. wonderfully so. like kevin drumm’s noise work there’s a sense of humour behind the squall (impotent hummer anyone…) which frankly in this ever so po-faced scene is a minor miracle. and this mad rubbery bugger is chock full of chuck jones style exclamation marks and tex avery aural ultraviolence. like a tramp waving his diseased cock in the street, it disturbs as much as amuses and no matter how hideous it gets you can’t quite not look at the grotesque swollen monstrosity and it’s filthy sour discharge.

it comes lunging at you like some engorged dayglo beast, track one urging us to take it! take it!  take it! exclamation mark. take it! and take it we do. say! oh oh oh we do.  over and over again. five times. in every orifice. all holes filled. punished. brutalized. double, triple, quadruple penetrated. leaving us depleted, spent, ragged, soiled, gasping for release, for let-up. ‘no more’ you beg, as the convulsions take hold, as the adrenaline wears off, ‘no more…’

the unreserved dastardly fuck of volume here is horrendous. if you’ve heard hijokaidan (you’d remember if you did) you know what to expect. excruciating pummels of corruscating machine noise, the hissing fizz and klang of exploding electricity pylons, the wrongbrained shrieks of middle-aged man-mentals. hysterical. in every sense of the word. it’s disorientating in the most excoriatingly psychedelic way. wave upon wave of amorphous evil energy, ultrarawk electroverload, all lovingly presented in the most hideous fidelity, unnecessary twisted crystal clarity, so you don’t miss one vicious heaving (un)note.

not something i’d choose to listen to regularly but when in the mood to be musically disembowled, aurally enucleated, acoustically asphyxiated this is the disc to spin.

my skull’s busted… should come with a goddam health warning…

domo arigato mikawa et kosakai.  domo arigato…

incapacitants / harbinger sound

so as i lurch from one depressing personal tragedy to another i figured i need something ugly and harsh to soundtrack these rather grim days. and i figured what better fella to get involved in this than kevin drumm. the man who spawned, vomited, shat out, sheer hellish miasma. which at times provided the most gutjuddering ferocious noisemongerry (see the inferno for details) i’ve heard in long while. like burzum being fed legs first into an industrial shredder, recorded onto damaged tape and played down a long distance phone line on loudspeaker through amps the size of andre the giant.

but no. the fucker’s let me down. kindof. instead of an hour of self-flagellating aural brain scour i’m presented with an hour of thick-bliss melancholy, a slo-mo blizzard and the (un)welcoming sleep of a snow blanket.

y’see i haven’t heard anything of his since the miasma rerelease. haven’t heard imperial distortion, so i foolishly assumed he’d continued the loud sound (of a seven year old record, i realise…). not that miasma is entirely ugly, but it’s pretty far removed from this.

one track. just lay down and forget it. all the connotations that come with that title apply musically. how to describe something so inherently minimal, so utterly unwordy? why with my usual verbose prose, irritating hyperbole, iconoclastic phrasing and repugnant non-sequiturism of course.

be prepared to focus (on the hour of music, not this crumbling bilge), concentrate that mushy mulch of a brain of yours. there’s no point dipping in and out like some flitting, flittering, flighty a.d.d. haribo addict. you could play it in the background but frankly you’d zone out and think somebody next door’s hoovering. no i recommend a sit down, eyes closed, big headphones on. or go one better. on saturday i submerged myself in one of those isolation booths, you know where you float on salty water in a pitch black tank for an hour and feel yr consciousness bugger off to another place altogether. t’was an odd heaven. use this shit the same way.

it is quite frankly akin to substance abuse listening to just lay down…. it’ll alter yr mindwaves in a subtle hypno- way. reductionally it is nothing more than some ultra low frequency drone, a mildly fluctuating hum of submerged electrickerry, an all encompassing immersive wash of monotonic tone. but given time, zonked silence and a fortress of solitude, it offers a veritable pandoras box of minimalist delight.

drumm’s ouvre (man i dig that word…) inhabits some odd venn diagram overlap between merzbow (if his laptops voice broke) and popul vuh (at their most static). and like masami akita he’ll either test yr patience or deliciously warp yr fragile morrison-like wooly cotton infant brain.

it’s textured, smooth and cold and soft like someone playing wine glasses in a gentle snowstorm or delicate whiteout. notes, tones, sustained for seconds minutes hours, hang sometimes threateningly in the air. it undulates almost imperceptibly, unfurls indiscernibly, vacillates and mutates and fluctuates om-like. it gazes at you with the blank soothing terror of nietzsche’s void.

i dare you to stare back.

hospital productions

endless endless endless: black talisman – this frankly is rather beautiful. in every way. handsomely packaged as some kind of laser etched shamanic artefact. and aurally the kindof shit that wouldn’t sound out of place on not not fun or next to james ferraro’s holy mountain output. self described as a post-noise duo that plays guitar and gameboys. i came expecting dj scotch egg instead i got a fountain of bliss. a balming wash of drawn out orgasmic whale noise, korgesque squelch and nes eight bit percussion.

they inhabit a soothing elseworld of guitar plink and fuzz and twinkling klang. it’s noise, but one enveloped in a snowy blanket of collaged and unwrapping, unfurling, evolving swoosh. oddly organic despite being made by machine, black talisman is a soothing, warm, pre-comedown elated treacle of melting harmony. it’s all blurred polaroids and repeated electrick agitation and loop upon loop of gentle tongue inside ye earholes. it’s occasionally unsettling, with a creepy boards of canada on downers feel, an almost psyched-out folk vibe. imagine the skaters brighter, murk-free sound filtered through the synthy japanesey machine clank and street chatter of blade runner’s ambience. a crude trope that in all likelihood makes little sense outside my head but fuck it, that’s where this music belongs.

if i had more time this would’ve been in a post of it’s own. but i don’t. so go to the bandsite. there’s a tonne of albums for free. and for the love of christ buy this.

e.p. hall: mommy crow - more beautifully packaged noise. noise as noun, not genre y’understand. this has proved a rather fitting introduction to morning-time following last nights jack rose fingerpicking slideguitar beer excesses.

remember regina spektor before major label antiseptic turned her into a saccharine produced sugary shadow of her former self? well this is what i’d rather she was doing. chucking out occasionally noisy rattling folk murmurings. all things bookish, creepy, and thinky. quoth the raven. in other words (and there are a lot of those) there’s something of the heart and brain and guts about this. something stripped and bloody and bare-boned about the whole affair. but one rich in emotion and language and imagery.

most of the time it’s just lady singing with guitar (a voice that reminds me of a less naif-ish joanna newsom (and i dig joanna newsom)) and then it branches out into xiu xiu style electronickery or cello drone or birdsong or burbling noise or avant percussion, as on churchyard. hell, the emperor’s note even chugs into fizzing arcade fire moves. it’s a decidedly robust, satisfying listen, and one that despite it’s apparent monochromatic minimalism rewards repeated listening.

anyway this is out on the twenty fourth november followed by a euro tour with drekka (whose bluesanct recently put out a fabulous screenprinted boduf songs vinyl). go get. go see.

sentient machine: sentient machine – fuck me this is slick and sexy. like an oil spill on a white alaskan shoreline. sounds like what trent reznor does now but with fire in their ample bellies. is it just me or has rez written some spreadsheet formula for composing nine inch nails songs over the past three records? anyway this has all the spit sheen and polish of million dollar studio album. how the hell they got this to sound so bloody expensive i dunno. maybe i’ve been lo-fi too long and gone all aural mr kurtz…

so hints of faith no more, in the quirky pop-metal of architecture man. hints of killing joke on she blew me away’s tribal stomp (which develops into pure bombastic synth pomp in a stupidly awesome seventies prog, power metal vein). it’s an unrelenting twenty odd minutes, unafraid to inject the punkfunk, toot some big-ass brassy brass, weedelyweedeley solo like zappa (i demand more schmears of zappa over more songs!), chomp down on some disco biscuits, angularly grind out those geetar chops and get all eighties l.a. sleazy on hard enough, a song which has a jazzy breakdown that smacked a big grin across my ugly mug. yr man adam insists there’s an albini influence in there. i don’t hear it. but then i didn’t write the goddam thing. decide for yrselves and get this sparkling pile of audio wonder free from the bandsite.

errata: errata – i s’pose you’d have to class this as post-something if you were in the classification business. post-metal, post-hardcore, post-whatever. what they do is that kindof epic soundscape meets thundering uber-chordage and throaty roar-vox that envy (should that be inveja…) and cult of luna (if they were amphetamined out their swedish heads) and will haven (make up yr goddam mind grady…) do. they’re portugese (as if you could tell…) and really rather good. niftily keeping the right balance between deranged bellows, guitar battery and widescreen ambience. a bit like the brutal stick violence dance of jogo do pau. i like this.  a lot. 

i was totally destroying it: horror vacui - been hearing a lot of this kindof thing recently. feels like i’ve somehow regressed back to my teenage years. nirvana at reading on cd. yo la tengo live in glasgow last night. pavement, sebadoh, dinosaur jr. all playing again. this? this indulges some decidedly tuneful power pop. bit like superchunk or veruca salt. roughed up tunes aplenty. incredibly pleasant (not meant in the pejorative) powerchording and choruses. the radio friendly shit that for some reason never gets played on the fucking radio. makes me want to dig out those old cheap trick records. which is never a bad thing. and even if you don’t like their musical shenanigans there’s a fairly intellectual / amusing emo-boy rant by their lady singer:

male emo-pop bands are laughably effeminate at times in their mannerisms and personal hygiene, to the point where i, a lover of all things feminine, am almost offended by it. androgyny should be an exploration into the metaphysics of gender, but in this case, i feel that it’s just a thinly veiled mockery of women. all girls are to these boys are nameless entries in their lyrical diaries. we break their hearts, we cheat on them, we love them, we fuck them, and sometimes we even get back together with them. as jessica hopper puts it, “our existences, our actions are portrayed solely through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglements of the boy singer – our region of personal power, simply, is our breadth of impact on his romantic life.” our faces are their album art and tattoos. we have doe eyes, long flowing hair, we need validation through our relationships with these boys. they either have us, or they don’t. it makes me want to throw up.

oh and i rather like the band name too.

turzi – and a track i totally dig but know nothing about for some reason. it’s a bit of a curious hybrid, some utterly mental chimera that somehow reminds me simultaneously of goblin, iron maiden, harmonia, guapo and pounding fucking techno. it’s all very exciting and excitable and i suspect a rather sweaty danceable live show to boot. i need more. if you sent this, send more. moar! as the internet kids say.  it’s driving.  it’s pounding.  it’s relentless.  chuck any vaguely sexual metaphor at it you want.  oof.  and i love the fact the french still totally dig prog… 

califone make so bloody little out of so bloody much. that’s not meant in the pejorative y’understand, just sometimes they’re so damnably subtle you’d hardly know anything was going on.

born of chicago’s red red meat (bunny gets paid being one of the last few finefinefine records released by sub pop) who (and which) paved the way for califone’s folksy murmurings and electronic burblings. and with each album they refine this formula to bare-boned perfection.

all my friends are funeral singers is part companion piece, part soundtrack to califone honcho tim rutili’s movie of the same name. it’s a film i know bugger all about beyond the psychic-living-with-ghosts-in-old-house premise, but this don’t impact on the absorption in / enjoyment of the album. i guess the themes and stories overlap and complement, but one isn’t required to understand the other. i hear the tour will incorporate both into the live show.  which should be pretty ace.

the music is the usual mix of brittle blues and electronic textures. it sounds simple, hushed even, but when you start unpeeling the oniony layers and collage overlaps, picking (hoho…) through the banjo, guitar, piano, fiddle, drum, horns and vintage organs, the complexity of their compositions dawns. reduced you could call it skewed folk but it’s so much more, like if william basinksi recorded dylan’s basement tapes.

it has strange contradictory qualities, whereby it’s junk-rough at times, while also softly tactile, organic yet industrial, tender but unsettling. whether it’s the bass squelch opaque electronics of giving away the bride, a song which radiohead would give up their wonky right eye for, or the more straightforward pop structure of polish girls, which has an understated melody of such weary beauty it brought a little warmth to even my black heart. it is within these disparities califone work so well.

all of this combined with the queered folk threads which run through the whole album, the string-picked stomp of ape-like, the psyche insinuations of buñuel and evidence result in a listening experience so rich, yet so light, you can gorge yourself like a vomit speckled roman emperor for hours. dig deep people, this album is incredibly detailed, a subtle agglomeration of sounds that have a delicious lush cinematic quality.

facetiously i could describe them as wilco’s little brother, or uncle tupelo’s weird nephew — the correlation being jeff tweedy’s willingness to grasp both the dissonant experimental, bucolic blood and dust sides of americana. but i won’t. i’ll leave you, dear readers (listeners), to decipher those mumbled symbols and splashed cymbals yourselves. enjoy!

califone / dead oceans

the only good thing the smiths ever did was not reform. when that day comes as far as i’m concerned my personal seventh seal is broken. not just because i have a pathological loathing for all things smithsian but also because i have a pathological distrust for band reformations. a peculiarly new phenomenon ( i think…) within the indie world. i’ll lazily lay the blame at all tomorrows parties circle-jerking feet. it continues apace with recent pavement and public image ltd reunion tours announced. all good bands split up. all bad bands eventually reform. that’s a ninety nine percent fact.

the one percent exception to this rule is mission of burma (and to a lesser extent dinosaur jr. coz the new stuff’s pretty ace and it does mean less time available for lou barlow to release dreary fucking indie pop solo albums). in essence what i expect, nay demand, is that you continue as you were, as a working band. write, release, tour etc. not to be some fucking nostalgia act, some slick karaoke kash kow, touring festivals, playing older fatter versions of your classics at gigs attended by thirty-something mid-mid-life-crisis twats trying to reclaim their youths from a mediocre stereophonicked adult life. paying yr forty quid gets you the pixies in some giant soulless corrugated warehouse playing a greatest hits set (ie doolittle and a handful of songs from other albums) and a desperate yawning void inside that says you’ve been so fucking had, here’s yr entirely unironic ‘ha ha we’ve reformed for the cash’ ironic t-shirt. is this different from bananarama or inxs without the dead guy? no. accept the fact your time has come and gone. yr just dying with a little less dignity, a little less of your scrawny black souls in tact, with yr trousers round your ankles like some fat balding indied version of the king…

anyway, bile spewed, rant over. back to the main event folks.

mission of burma’s third album proper since the regrouping. it’s slightly unsettling to think that signals calls and marches and vs. are twenty seven years old. but they are. and the sound the speed the light comes on like it’s nineteen eighty two all over again. with maybe even a nod to this on ssl83?

it’s the spikiest spunkiest record of the three newbies. fairly unrelenting in it’s boisterous pace and with that rather tasty mix of brains and brawn, noise and melody, that made me fall in love with the buggers’ music all those years ago. it is, reduced, a straight forward (punk?)rock record. relatively speaking. you can still see the minutemen-style we jam econo in them. not so much in the music but certainly in the attitude, the aural politics the sheer bloody belligerent verve and nerve of them.

opening with the wordily humorous – one, don’t look at anyone / two, drink only when drunken to – decidedly tuneful and frankly singalongable power pop of 1,2,3 partyy! is a bold move. kindof reminded of the newer buzzcocks albums on this one. the video’s below.

and from there on in it’s the usual mix of miller, conley and prescott’s differential aesthetic poise. and it’s this meshing of the divergent styles that makes mission of burma so fucking great. whether it’s peter prescott’s percussive intensity and more overtly confrontational writing as heard on good cheer with it’s occasional link wray distorto twang and shouty thumping rockerry. or clint conley’s brash melodic bombast (who oddly also provides the record only slowish moment with feed). or roger millers more intricate numbers, dense and tense and wiry textured, building like the feast of angled geetar scratch (plus a fuzzy delight of a solo) and ferocious drum rattle and thud that is possession.

everything on here stands up to the ballad of johnny burma or that’s how i escaped my certain fate. an indication, i think, of how good this shit is. so treasure them while they’re still at it because prescott stated last year that they only had a few more years left in them. as burma anyway.

exceptional stuff gentlemen.

mission of burma / matador

i went home last night, fell down on my bed, i got to dreaming so, i was talking all out of my head…

robedoor have only gone and bloody done it. fully embracing the lysergic blues hinted at on the transitionary exorcism blues joint. not that they’re playing some twelve-bar boogie, more an annexing of the existential howl and the eerie wail of blind lemon, that hissing otherworldliness of pre-war ghost recordings re-recaptured by alan lomax.

when you’ve made as definitive a statement as rancor keeper, the only aesthetic option is to keep moving, keep changing. you stop, you die. says the shark. and trying to follow that thuggish yowl of pure cthulhuan vinyl evil with more of the same would have been the most redundant move since lydon’s public image reformation (which i know is chronologically illogical but it sticks in my fucking craw…)

whereas old school robedoor was thick like tar and murky like crowley these new jams have a discernible stoned blooze throb, choking in a fug of hell-cellar trance moans. now they’re channeling the deranged almost-garage not-really-punk drone sprawl of suicide. i dig it. this is slightly less restrained than exorcism blues, less underdriven and semiblown amps-set-to-six. there’s an almost bardo pond third eye clarity to this collection. but more of a buggered bardo pond performing next door in a fog of hash plumes and miasmic bad vibes.

frankly it’s a kindof beautiful record, but an ugly beauty, a terrible beauty. like knowing the hot chick in ‘v’ has freaky lizard shit going on beneath the softsoft skin and totalitarian fetishistica. yup. from the first echoed morricone twang and splash incantation of countdown to depression, through the zonked vu / joy division shapes of indo shadow and people of the book to the monstrous chugging squall of the downcast eye, this is a swollen voodoo dream of a record.

maybe it was the pocahaunted / woods tour that injected a bit of organic head fuckerry into their cavernous soup. maybe it was the dead voice parade of ancient 78’s. maybe this damaged foetus has been growing in there all along. maybe. whatever. their scrawled signature is still smudge-smeared over this; the discombobulating echo and isolation, like the cavernous space within a space in house of leaves; the same psyched-out rumble and thud of satanik ritual discordia; the same sprawling grimy fog.  ‘cept now it’s as much transcendental as physical, as much flickering light as nicotine dark. 

robedoor / not not fun