Burial Hex/ Zola Jesus

Up to date, as ever.

Well, more or less what he said. Had this split album kicking around for a bit and didn't really give it a fair shot but it's actually pretty great, especially the Zola Jesus side; very creepy headphone music (ideal for marking student essays, as it happens). She even gets the title right (I worry about song titles in these genres) - Julius and Ethel has an easy-going horror about it, that works well in an understated don't-mention-the-chasm-of-demons kind of way. Implied horror. Unforced. Unless of course it's about Julius Caesar and Ethel Merman, in which case I'm utterly bereft.

I guess Plague Mass era Diamanda Galas might be somewhere near the mark sonically - though Zola Jesus is not such an eruption, it doesn't obliterate, which makes it much easier to listen to. I mean, how often do you play your Diamanda Galas records these days? I know you've got them somewhere. Under the bed, gathering T-cells.

This is my kind of wailing, as Barrymore might have said.

But no, it's not as creepy as that.

High Wolfings

Here is good.

And I like the Maclook of this blog which looks to have died after just a short run. Shame.

Ekoplekzing All Over The House

Many thanks to PunchDrunk records via Nick for sending me a white label of the inaugural Ekoplekz 12". It's great stuff... perhaps showing off Nick's (Basic) Channelling influences rather than his motorik or Cabs side... sounds great coming through the floor... digs deep, lurches, crackles...lovely release and now I guess I'm gonna have to fork out for the fullcover version when it comes out, especially since it's minimal splatter design is by our boy 2ndFade, purveyor of the finest Kierkegaard in the East...

While we're here, all the fuss and vinyl fetishism has caused the second Ekoplekz CDR to be a little pushed under the carpet... it's called, gulp, Volume 2 and way worth picking up if you're after a longer fix or you can't negotiate your way into one of the limited 12"s...



It's a kin to Volume 1, with perhaps added squiggle... it still sounds haunted (actually harassed) by the Radiophonics (and you'd want it to be...) but now Nick is fighting back, pulling things sideways, letting the subsystems of electronica (even, um, triphop in places?) through...

A bargain.

Goth All Too Goth

Well, this doesn't have to be about Goth, it just is. It could be about Shoegaze (it probably is somewhere), Sarah Records/C86, postpunk in any (all?) of it's forms, Industrial, punk in some of it's forms (maybe the anarchopunk revival is missing, but surely it's on the horizon)...

(Though even Nietzche's subtitle was A Book For Free Spirits - altogether now: Woooooooooo!)

In fact, more on this later perhaps. There's a few things curdling after a brief twitter last night...

Have we reached a time when new musical re-runs/reinventions ONLY serve to send people back to the originals? Wytch House >>>> Goth? I hope not; I like a lot of the new takes on goth, postrock, shoegaze, rave... Some more than I liked the originals...

But I'm going to deal with my feelings on this in a different post (even that sounds portentous, sounds Goth). And I meant to say postpunk not postrock - I can't even imagine what a postrock revival might sound like...

For now, back to Goth. Goth has been in the air. All of these (and there's more a out there) are great takes on the genre which have stopped me posting my own... all you need is here, honestly... some great music, memories and musings... Besides, I've wittered enough about Danielle Dax and Kensington Market

Instead, I'm going to contest that this is the Gothest / nonGoth thing I can remember, especially the bit where the actual shivering man gets into the action (around 1.22):



Bruce Gilbert of Wire on the music. Interesting to think that sort of notGoth Goths The Fall had a dalliance with Michael Clark during the mostly excellent Kurious Oranj thing circa:



So, NotGoth? Perhaps. But make-up doesn't make the Goth; the Goth is inside, the Goth is in the veins of history, the Goth could only occur in the deadheartlands of Britain, as Glam got tainted and rubbed raw by Thatcherism and unemployment and the little dayglo daftness of Glam went a whiter shade of pale.

Which brings me to Leeds, Goth(am) City and especially to the Goth poem extraordinary: Tony Harrison's V:







When this was shown on TV it was a shudder, a brutal slap, a beautifully straightforward, non-residual, non-allegorical punch in the face; a proper TV event, a ghostly presence that reminded everyone that Channel 4 was independent...October 1987 seems closer now than it's every been, I'll not be surprised if V gets a re-screening soon, some wag'll see the fun in showing it all over, people are noticing, the eighties are coming back to haunt us in a way unimaginable just a few years ago...

Unimaginable and Inevitable, those Two Tribes of Doom.

Where next?

MaHaBone 1

Jack: Treacle Eater

Psychic TV - The Orchids



Califone - The Orchids



This song. Yeah. Long time ago now in the wind-blasted Barwick dunes. The God of Hell-Fire. Two out of four of the people I associate with this place and this song are dead. Blood arching through the air like a loose artery. Fire. A beautiful, cursed place. A hinterland.

This guy as well, of course.

Zola Jesus

Oh, so that's where Danielle Dax has been. Knew she couldn't just be fucking around with UnicaZurn album covers. Scrubs up well, our Danielle.

Welcome too, to our new-old post label: Gert Big Goths, inspired partly by Speakers Push Air

Zola Jesus? I'm still undecided - the dubbier it gets the better. I think I might really like it, but I'm not willing to commit, just yet. Actually, I think Zola Jesus hasn't quite decided either - the music lurches from album to album, refuses to settle; I like that, even the stuff I don't like, I'm glad it's there. Certainly, there's bits I love and I really like the collaboration with LA Vampires (hate the name LA Vampires though) - love the No No No cover/reinvention.

Quite like this one too. As 80s as a Vaughan Oliver sleeve, though.

Zola Jesus - Sea-Talk

Via MBV

Burial Hex Runs The Voodoo Down

Burial Hex vs. Maya Deyens. Well, not exactly vs. Apposite, if anything. Saw some of her films in NY over the Summer... haunting, like watching Hungarian footballers in the 1950s.

Burial Hex in quite a restrained mood here. Dainty, even.

High Wolf & The Lycans

Because I was listening to High Wolf on the bus late last night and a werewolf got on. It freaked quite a few people out; one guy moved away so quickly he almost fell over. The werewolf smelled of weed, oddly enough and only lasted two stops before heading off into the night, perhaps to rub Virgin fat onto his alopecia-ing chesthair.... I know what you're thinking but it was a werewolf, a lycan, they used to be all around here, you used to be able to spot them out of the corner of your eyes, just before they dissolved into the bracken... they were relatively harmless then, the odd bite, the odd scratch and sniff... many of them were young, cubs even, barely more dangerous than the torch-wielding feral kids being chucked out of the Action Zone slums of Bridgy...

But still, the Lycans are creeping back. This one was an adult male - red eyed, yellow-toothed, hair like a dirty ripped dress. He looked like he meant business. Haven't seen them in a while. Not this type. They've been lying low, perhaps afraid of all the publicity, perhaps annoyed at how shitty the novels about them have been. Last time they were this out in the open is back in the CJD farm-culls...

Interesting. I'll keep you posted.

Other than that, High Wolf's donated organ tumbles are quite fetching, I think. Diverting. A little transporting. Tiny little squiggles of puff. Substantially insubstantial. Better than Ferraro et al, I think; more.... honest. Makes me think I need to start taking extra gulps of cough syrup.

Trainings 2

Sir Richard Bishop plays in the same ebbs and flows of the guy in the seat in front of me's sleep breaths, when the drums kick in I think they might wake him; The Residents version of Paint It Black sounds miles better if you imagine it hummed in the head of the woman reading the Jodi Picoult novel, especially if you imagine that, at the last beat, she's gonna go Purple-Assed Mandril Amok; Harvey Milk's comedy angst works well as you pass Newbury and realise you're not near half way; Mount Vernon Arts Lab's The Fog Detonator is exactly what you'd hear if you were watching televised coverage of a terrorist attack on this train; Spaceape sounds less good the further away from London you are; Johnny Cash doesn't work in the dark, even if he was The Man In Black; El-B's Amazon can, under certain conditions, give the distinct illusion that peoples' wrists are responsible for drum slaps; Earthmonkey always makes me think I'm in Rome, even if I'm actually just approaching Pewsey...

From The Wytch Machine...

Trainings

A few musical observations on a train journey:

Xhol Caravan makes Reading Station glow; Coil's Die Wolfe Kommen Zuruck played loud sucks the train sounds into it and then spews them out sometime in the 30s, making everyone with a hat or facial hair look like a Poirot baddy - maybe not the Time Travel intended; LCD Soundsystem have always been Music For First Rail Adverts, they haven't *become* Music For First Rail Adverts; Dinosaur Feathers work as a beautifully adept/scornful soundtrack to children squabbling over polystyrene WW2 (Hurricanes, I think) fighter planes; Summer Dregs gave the effect of actually turning off the weather, if only for a few moments - in this instance, this isn't a good thing but you'd be an idiot not to see the future utility; Circulus sound 3x better when soundtracking a fat woman eating a homemade sandwich (mayonnaise though, will never look the same); Creation Rebel intros sound like the inside of babies' heads; Dennis Wilson works well if you imagine it being sung by the guy arguing with his wife about the nature of 'reserved'...



From The Wytch Machine...

Ekoplekz and Hacker Farm live on Resonance FM

Bottom row, extreme left - Farmer Glitch, second from left - Ekolad, extreme right - Loki, second from right - 2ndFade; middle row, second from right - Kek-W, extreme left - Bob; top row, extreme left - Time Attendant, second from left - John Eden, third from right - Mugwump, extreme right - Cybore. We don't know who the other guys were, or why they turned up in near-identical outfits. Embarrassing.

...


...great live show, Ekoplekz almost early-Aphex Hard, Hacker Farm more ambient than I've seen them before (though ambient like an acid rush, ambient like an accidental theramin, ambient like the beats have gone round the back to meet the children of the night...)

.... whooosh; fizz ... thudddddd ... flick flick ... crackle crackle crack-le... fizzzzzzzzzz ...

scatter scatter scatter drummmmmm ... scatter scatter scatter drummmmmmm ...

Pics, audio, etc here...

Johnny Mugwump was a brilliant host; putting up with the liggers and the hangers-on (i.e. me) and generally being gutsuckingly charming... lovely to meet you Johnny!

....

...and on that note, wonderful to see John Eden and Woebot / Hollow Earth / Cybore / in the flesh too... (cheers for the drink, Matt)... John especially I've had a lot of dealings with over the years. I say dealings, I mean mostly just envy-ridden seethings over the gigs he got to see in the 80s / 90s which me and my Yeovil mates were often trying to get to as well, only somehow getting derailed by falling car doors, exotic illness, bad tidings, fleshfalls, cold readings and non-specific Chaos Magick (in roughly that order - I'm serious: a car door falling off on the motorway stopped us getting to two different gigs)

...

and, almost forgot that the equally charming Bob from West Norwood Cassette Library was also in attendance... as was Time Attendant, who jammed along with the West Country boys in their final flings... Monotron a go go...

... truly a great Blogger meeting of minds... though by then mine was a little, er, aft via Red Wine and Gin and Mojitos

... still, didn't bite anyone...

Gira Does Britney

Michael Gira sings 'Me' like Britney Spears sings 'Me'. Just a little pitchshift, even imagined, and you're there. It's not just the way they sing 'Me' either, the 'Me' itself is the same, or has the same intention, the same semi-autobiographical distance. Not true, but not false either. You can't rely on that 'Me' but you know that there's more to it than words.

This song would suit Britney. In fact, a lot of late period (haven't heard latter period yet) Swans would suit her. She ought to get on it.

Swans - Love Will Save You

Washed Out

Been enjoying Washed Out recently, one of a long string of bands genred into chillwave etc that all sound like the Hipstamatic app takes pictures. Vaseline-smeared as Pitchfork put it (for once apt). Perfect dozing music; instantly evocative of nothing in particular. I just like the name, really; think that it'll go places where the mass choirs of other similar artistsi will founder. Names seem more important than ever. Posters. Sleeves. The album artists are coming back, I think. Album artists. We'll see.

Washed Out - Hold Out

Washed Out - New Theory

Washed Out - Feel It All Around (Toro Y Moi remix)

The Voice Of The Devil

Ulver - The Voice Of The Devil (Plate 4)

Bits from here. Blake seems very musical, I think. Seems like music. He'd have been into Witch House, I reckon. Or spotted you for some Bauhaus covers. Or smoked some bracken with you, out on the heath, and got drizzled to some Death metal. He'd have heard that Raime 12" by now. We should pull Blake into the mix a little more, he seems to have been forgotten. Not sure that Ulver should be the testament in music; we need an In The Blake Midwinter mix...

Existence (_) Precedes Essence

One day, I'm going to make these.

They are like the essence of humanity, the things that separate us from animals.

Found via spime.

Regina Spektor - Us

Cults - Most Wanted

Akron Family - Woody Guthrie's America

Dedicated to all the bloggers out there, living feral, in six quid tents.*

Sonic Seasonings: NY booty

Found this on vinyl for 99cents. Even has the poster with it...



Haven't heard it yet since the record player is yet to come out of storage - moving house in about 30 mins! - but, really, who cares what it sounds like. Beautiful artefact.

BTW big thanks to all those twitterers who gave me advice on NY record shops - found most of them and lots of bargains.

People Who Live In Solar Houses (and what they say about them)

Found this in a Goodwill Store in Boston.



The subtitle is key here. Giving Solar dwellers an alien status, lost in time. What might these kind of people think? Are they like us? 1979 seems two worlds of 'what if?' away.

New York Sandings: Governor's Island

These are from a free gig we managed to get tickets to, on the recently opened 'military' Governor's Island, just off the South-Eastern tip of Manhattan. A fantastic, slightly spooky, beautiful location. It was held on an artifical beach, with sand and psychelled palm trees and little tents selling beer and hot dogs. Love finding these little things in cities, these little creeps.



Didn't see the headliners, Neon Indian, because we had to get back - did see some actual neon indians though; little indie trash in headgear, splats of neon pinks... as the sun went down everyone's wristbands went fluoerescent for a few minutes...



Minature Tigers were perfect, quietly dramatic little openers...letting things set...

liked Nite Jewel a lot, they captured a little disco kraut groove at times... danced prettily... people danced or lay back in the sand, or both... check the guy making little angel wings in the sand...

Dom were heavier, heavy surf, a little brash.... smacked the place around a bit (just a tickle, the company they're keeping here is chillwaving all over the place....); psychedelic but stupid, in the best way... cassette tape rock

"It's so sexy/living in New York"

then Prefuse 73 snarled and glitched and off-beated and old-school scratching like they've been rubbing heads with manky 7 year olds... the definition of angry lilting... no smooth edges at all... even the lights clashed... I'm not sure; could have been brilliant, maybe was a bit crap... you kinda had to be there, rather than just be there... with the right chemicals boring through the right places they could have been transporting... but I didn't have my time-spazzing head on.

I...

God, I'm tired...

Camp Bestivalling 2010

EARLIES...I've never seen so many munkins... children everywhere... the place looks like a multi-coloured Slaine battleground...we took 3 little Lokis, one unborn and, yeah, Camp Bestival is the ideal family Festival... adults are incidental, are baggage handlers, workhorses... some of them are dressed like children but... this place is like a tidy Glasonbury, one without the flayed and the straggled, a Festival almost without litter, which is an odd site as evening approaches (think Green Man without the beards and with fairy costumes)...

PHILOSOPHY...Bad Science has made a definite impression on this place. there's a very systematic (i think) pro-science, pro evidentialist, anti-Glastonbury stance seamed throughout: in the acts (lots of children's science), the messages, the lack of spiritual and holistic guff... there's the trappings of the Festival circuit: flower powers, dayglo, flags (though no ones waving them, thank god - maybe those people who do wave them at festivals are using them as child surrogates...)

Ear candles? Fuck youuuuuuuuuuu

No bugger is sitting in a goddamn healing field orbing, no one is doubling up on Orgone, no one is sucking in Egyptian plasma juice...

Flags as children waves...



TRICKS: the 2 Lokis (9 and 12) are instead listening to The Fall while trying to ride clown bikes or Tinie Tempahing to the beat of juggled balls and hoops and tightropes and someone's playing The Threshold Houseboys Choir's 'So Young It Knows No Maturing' and this is the perfect soundtrack because all those little underpitched slurred voices mixing in and out of the crackles and flurries is the sound of this festival... munkins chatter that Shpongle would be proud of, that Terence Goddamn McKenna would be proud of...

CHILL: Tired? Been Still Walking? Them lil' feet need a rest? Let Icebreaker feat. BJ Cole perform Eno's Apollo for you, let the sap rise again and let the actuality of the Moon Landings be there for all to see: it happened, no conspiracies here, you see?

MYSTERY: Where's Joker though? I keep going back in (lots of 14 year old girls in headbands dubstepping it up like there's no tomorrow, smoke curls and hair tosses allover) but he's never there... I hear he turned up, I'm not convinced...

There is a guy djing in The Bollywood lounge who looks like Aaron Funk...




CLICKS: The Fall are getting good as a festival band despite continuing their resolute anti-Vibe grumbling; they are kinda kicking it, though don't tell their friends...

FUNKADELICATESSEN: Missed some of the point by being a little too adolescent for this crowd (the kids mostly gone to bed now or lapsing consciousness); funk should be everything to this place and people really want to dance but the onstage sweary antics seem out of step, leaving the same kind of - oh, come on - taste that Mark E Smith left when John Peel died and he was asked to comment.

OWN GOALS: What the hell is Gruff Rhys up to with that guy, that VCR repairman, Tony Da Gattora... I've been a Gruff-skeptic before but I loved him at Green Man a few years ago and now he's, well, he's just making a racket and stretching everyone to the point of... it's not even endurance; people simply leave... shit, mate... as shit as a Peter Murphy solo alb



um

EAT: Question - how long does it take three people to serve pasta and sauce? Answer - Longer than a homeless guy's toenails, longer than a Namlook discography, longer than a Desperate Housewives pre-credit sequence.

EATING: Yah, food excellent ... expensive but reasonably profound Tapas and Vegfare and lovely Thali... coulda done with a Burger King halfway through Saturday though; the phrase Gourmet Burger makes me weep a little... it's a burger, deal with the fact you're eating it...

JOUSTING: There should be more of that at Festivals, I think...



MISSED: lots and lots, more than I saw, as always and as always that's hardly the point; would've liked to see Marc Almond and The Human League and I'm still looking for Joker...

MATERIALS: if you have kids, go next year; it really is very do-able, very quick, very easy.... if you don't have kids it might be a VERY weird experience - check out the very small, quickly dematerialized groups of older teens looking a little spazzed out - this is no place to be hammered; too many munkins to crush, to many rolling eyed parents, too much knowledge on show here... I guess there's a few creepy virgin late teens (yeah you, with your floppiness and your fringe, with those low swinging lobes - frontal and ear) hanging around the haremic/bulimic 14 year old girls which might remember this as a Festival of dreams but I seriously doubt that a Festival veteran sans kids would understand this place...

EXEUNT: This was great and timely for us Lokis though: I honestly couldn't imagine festivalling with a pregnant wife and two kids anywhere else.

PHOTOS: they've all got the family in so this was all I had left. Sorry.

Camp Bestivalling

...that scene in Alex Garland's The Beach, when they're all half-dead from squid poisoning, the beach sliding into new sewage and it all gets a little Hearts of Darkness? That's my last memory of Lulworth Castle... Fecal fluttering, bad tidings, hallucinatory stumblings... the castle looming like it's made of bones, the ground swallowing when I couldn't, some kind of Medieval Banquet taking itself a little too literally; finding historical accuracy in Campylobacter jejuni, in Shigella, in hordes of prettily dyed exotoxins...

But that was then.

I'm going back to Lulworth Castle, this time for the clean air and puffed chests of Camp Bestival, packed full of children, and stuffed full of sun-starch... it's gonna be a big one, literally nothing can go wrong. Like Glastonbury, the music is hardly the point but still: Marc Almond, Lee Scratch Perry, George Clinton, Madness, The Fall, The Human League... with Joker and Joy Orbison and Jonny Trunk on the decks...

Asking around long-term Camp Bestivallers, it seems like Jonny Trunk might be the natural soundtrack to this place; cutting-egde circusssssssssss music, Freaks, library reels, spitting/spoken word rolls, tie-dyed electronics, sheep worrying frequency mods... "violently pretty" someone described it (I think they meant the Festival as a whole, rather than the girl he brought back who was, frankly, tarnished by her experience) and I'm still hoping to concur, or at least understand... maybe we might all join in with Bill Drummonds ultra-socialist/pirate show choir The 17; sing our bits out, playback everything...

It seems that Camp Bestival might be a feedback loop worth pursuing; it's certainly the only time I've ever felt brave enough to venture to a 3 dayer with the whole family...

And littlest Loki might get to see The Ballet and The Gruffalo and wear as much fancy dress as the heat allows...

Inception: Dreams as Memory Consolidation

Spoilers, if you look hard enough.

I liked what jonnymugwump said on twitter: "inception may be flawed but I feel that's a little like criticising Dali for having the wrong time on his melting watches" an apposite image and critique, there's surrealism shot-through this movie, surrealism before marketing, when it was just a few guys in suits fucking around with each others' dreams. Inception is flawed perhaps, but not vitally. As an experience, an immersion (and a suspension), it sets itself apart; Nolan has taken a huge gamble with a bad old dream theme and he's come out, well, enhanced. This teeters, almost falls over itself, but works quite beautifully in places and does provoke new thought... for an unashamedly Summer Blockbuster this is a simply astounding achievement.

Even the weaker - predictably snowbound - action/adventure scenes are full to the brim of memory (this is Nolan's thrash at the Bond movies, playing with the archetypes... I was reminded of someone's -2ndFade?- memory of watching the Bond 'The Spy Who Loved Me' Union Jack Parachute Jump in the cinema and the crowd going mental - an impeccably old cinema story, an entirely different time) and memory is the real theme of this film...

Dreams as memory consoldation, as process rather than product, verb rather than noun. Dreams as essentially layered constructions, added to and substracted from memory, as forming new schemas; new ways of looking at the world. The dreams are the memories struggling towards the dark, wanting to be forgotten... this is the reverse of Psychoanalysis, an indictment even... I'm wondering who had what crappy experience with which Psychoanalyst...

Inception seems especially about the way sadness and regret (and joy, and happiness) detourns events, perception, experience... the way it changes the world.... causes roads to contract and flip over themselves (I have similar, very personal, feelings about Paris as, I suspect, does Nolan), causes time to expand...

...a dressing gown cord becomes a noose, a mirror becomes a shield, a home becomes a prison, a view becomes a dead drop, a watch becomes melting camembert...

Even Leonardo De Caprio's face(even the name Leonardo)follows the theme; it's a face unravaged by memory, or at least untarnished by it, his weaknesses come from not looking old enough but in this film (in most of his films - he chooses well, I think) this works to his advantage; he's old literally beyond his years, he's not allowed Chronos in at all... his memories are old, his body is not...

Contrast, if you've seen it, with the Ken Watanabe's character and then look again at Joseph Gordon-Levitt, at Ellen Page, even at Tom Hardy and consider whether this is a cast chosen at random...

Look at the hollows in the face of Cillian Murphy and the re-emergence of Tom Berenger...

There's a million strands to this film, it's brilliantly, beautifully considered and very difficult to alternate (i.e. hard to say: "What if this guy played that character..."). There are flaws and Hollywood sops (I'd like to see the him and her story foregrounded and the action flashbacked) but Christopher Nolan went for a bigger audience and I hope he finds it. Can't wait for my 12 year old to see this; it's the kind of thing we talk about all the time and now it's up on screen, shining brighter than any mainstream Hollywood film I can think of in, um, recent memory...

Crawling To Lhasa

Found this album via the cosmic/kosmichings at the brilliant Tonton Mahood - here, in fact - and it's been on a light rotation ever since. Pretty, occasionally threatening, odd combinations of firethrottled acoustic guitar and pan-pipes. Comus is perhaps as good a reference point as any; the deity and the band. I hear that bar/club from Fire Walk With Me during Tante Olga and the whispering nasties from Current 93 in Nearby Shiras... there's morsels all over this album, tasty bits of meat, plucked from teeth...

Ritualistic and Golden. Thrown from shadows. Gongs and bongs.

Trust me, if you're normally a cynic about these kinds of wig-outs, these little Golem tangles, these nonsense psychbits then forget all you know... this is as good as Krautrock gets and it's a little hard to believe that someone hasn't re-released it. Maybe they have.

If you find it, buy it.