this is a thing I wrote about Bella Union/a Bella Union gig at Union Chapel:

The appeal of London’s Union Chapel as a live music venue is in its simplicity as much as its grandeur. It’s hard not to appreciate the cavernous ceilings and air of reverence in the main hall, but essentially, when an audience is sat facing the small stage, nestled into the rows of seats, the experience becomes a fairly uncomplicated example of what is beautiful about a good live performance. You can forget about dancers and strobe lights, in this environment, only one thing takes center stage – the sound. Despite the impressiveness of the room there are no frills, in the best possible way.

A similar thing could be said of Bella Union records. A label with a reputation for quality, an incredibly strong discography and an authenticity that many a major label would love to buy; their success simply comes from an ethic of artistic freedom and nurturing over exploitation and is measured in the beautiful records they help to produce.

A luxurious line-up, then, of four Bella Union acts: Alessi’s Ark, Lone Wolf, Mountain Manand John Grant, sharing a stage at Union Chapel for an evening, is quite a proposition. One that TLOBF would’ve found it monumentally hard to pass-up if we’d wanted to, which we emphatically did not, especially since we were given a chance to interview each of the frankly brilliant acts performing on the night.

Alessi’s Ark

Hi Alessi, I really like the Sole Proprietor EP you put out on Bella Union.
Thank you!

I’m looking forward to the album, what’s happening there?
Well, I am in the middle of recording, I did some recording in Wales just before I went to do a tour in April and then I did a bit more last week in Brighton with the Willkommen Collective, Sons of Noel and Adrian, they’re people that I got to tour with and just got to know from playing places and being on the same bills and they’ve become friends of mine, they’re really comfortable to play with and easy to be around. So I did some recording with them and yeah, just working on it. I guess the Autumn is when I want it to be finished, but I feel like maybe it will be finished before then…

Going well?
Yeah it’s been fun! The loose plan would be to put it out in January, we’ve got a bit of time, but I thought that it’d be better just between shows and things just to be doing stuff… so I’m busying myself with that!

How have things changed since Notes From a Treehouse? Are things a bit different now?
Well I think it’s only healthy, traveling on – but I don’t think the music is going to be anything too dissimilar from what I’ve done. The common thread is that I’m singing!

No rapping?
No, I haven’t started rapping yet! Nothing too groovy! Yeah I feel like it’s a continuation of the last record, but the environment is different, for Sole Proprietor, which is the only thing I’ve put out since that -besides a split EP I had with thunderpower that was done at a friends house- I mean, the first three songs were recorded ‘as live’, so apart from a few songs on Notes From The Treehouse because there were quite intricate arrangements and things, the nature of the recordings were such that you couldn’t really do that many things ‘live’ and so it was quite fun to record some of these songs almost like a show, you know? And then the fourth track on that EP was made to sound like how it sounds when I play with the Willkommen and it’s fun because there are cornets and bits and bobs, things that I hadn’t really entertained before. But now, stick cornet on anything, anything can have a bit of cornet on it, hahaha! Yeah, it’s been fun – there’s a bit of harp on there and there was harp on the album so there are instruments that are re-occurring but um… I don’t know where the music is going, but it’s fun!

It’s going there by itself and you’re just following it, right?
Yeah yeah! I feel like it’s leading me… on…! Hahaha!

Opening the night to a still-growing crowd, Alessi cuts an unassuming figure standing alone on the Union Chapel stage. Her disarming, informal greetings flutter by and she begins to play. Some artists can peel their material back to the bare bones while losing none of the essential spirit, Alessi is one such artist. The sound of a beautiful voice working through a collection of sweet songs is a simple but powerful pleasure, one amplified by the dimensions of Union Chapel and the effortlessly likable character that threads through this performance.

Alessi’s Ark: ‘Shovelling’

Lone Wolf

Hey Paul, so you now have a name that isn’t… your name… so how did that come about?
Well, it came about from me realizing that I have a really shit name.

Heheheh. Right.
And also, I got sort of sick of being pigeon-holed as a singer-songwriter. And many would say “well you were a singer-songwriter” or “you are a singer-songwriter” but there’s a problem and a weird little stigma that comes with that sometimes.

Absolutely.
And you know… how many records probably drop on radio DJ’s desks every day – “John Smith”  “Michael So-And-So” …

Johnny McPowerballad…
Yeah, you know and the thing was… Vultures was very much about ‘Paul Marshal’, the songs on that record were brought in from all kinds of different timeframes and stuff, it wasn’t meant to be an album originally, it was kind of a compilation of my work as it were. And then when it came to recording this record, I always wanted to just push things a little further and it came to making the demos and I just wanted to shake off that initial sort of immediate singer-songwriter label because I wanted people to sort of give this a chance, like maybe from the point of view of thinking that it’s a full band at first – I don’t know, I think I wanted to create a little bit of an illusion I suppose.

I don’t think you’d be alone in that, I mean it happens all the time, doesn’t it? People instinctively approach something with more of an open mind at the moment for some reason if it’s given a name that appeals – I mean Beirut, St Vincent… the list goes on.
Precisely. And it’s not because I think I’m worth any more than anyone else or anything stupid like that. I guess that after I signed to Bella Union I just felt that I wanted a fairer crack of the whip, really, rather than just have people make that assumption that I’m this singer-songwriter, which is why in a way I was happy we put ’Keep Your Eyes On The Road’ out as the first single because I wanted people to hear that, and then have responses coming back like “Who are they?” and “Where are they from?” and it’s – Aha! it’s not actually a “they” it’s a “he”, you know?

So now that you have the new name and it’s sort of a fresh project in that sense, how do you feel things are moving on?
It’s certainly moving on in the sense that I’m getting a lot more opportunities than I ever got as Paul Marshall and it’s weird actually because we’re in the location that I think a year and three days ago that Paul Marshall metaphorically died! It was the last gig in here. But yeah I mean at the end of the day it… it’s only a name.

Have you been doing a lot of live stuff for the new album?
Yeah, quite a bit, I went on tour with Wild Beasts which was great, did that solo. Then there’s Blue Roses (Laura Groves), she comes out with me and we do it as a two piece, then we do it as a five piece like tonight. But we’re doing bits and pieces, we were in the Royal Festival Hall on Monday, supported Broken Bells, which was pretty…

That sounds amazing.
Yeah it was pretty much one of the best nights of my life, got to play the Steinway hidden, you know in the Royal Festival Hall. Well, you only have to imagine it really, it was pretty spectacular.

Yeah, I am imagining it, right now…. Any other highlights to look forward to?
Green man. Oh and I don’t know how 100% confirmed this is, but I think I’m going to be touring America with Wild Beasts, only for like four or five dates or something but that’ll be fun.

So what with changing the dynamic so often, five pieces, two pieces – how does the music translate? Do you have a favorite way to play the stuff?
Favourite way is always full band, always, because that’s the closest to how it sounds on the record. But the one advantage I have, whereas some bands might have an ‘acoustic set’ where they strip the songs down, for me that’s where the songs started, so when I do it on my own or as a two piece the songs are just going down to were they started from, the core of the song is still there. But yeah I prefer it when I have James smacking the crap out of the drums and the synths going. Also, it’s nice to hang out with my friends, you know it’s nice to not have to be on the stage by myself all of the time you know?

While it could be argued that the sound of some of the other acts tonight might take to the cavernous echo chamber of Union Chapel like the proverbial duck to water, Lone Wolf’s set up might find the acoustics from the stage a slightly less comfortable variation in environment. Adaptability, however, is the key to success, and with the thrumming alternative rock teased out with a measure of restraint, fighting to get away and thunder around the room, gaining richness and drama without losing too much in the way of clarity.

Lone Wolf: ’15 Letters’

Mountain Man

Hello! How long has Mountain Man been a band for?
Molly: Just over a year, like a year and three months…

And you came together and started writing songs?
Amelia: We already had a lot of the songs that we sing. Alex wrote Animal Tracks and we learned it and I wrote Honey Bee and so… it was.. an amazing event.

So you turn up to indie clubs or maybe these black boxes where a lot bands show up with drums and guitars and pianos and everything – and for most of the set is just you guys singing. A lot people probably don’t expect that.
Molly: No and they especially don’t expect to see three women appearing under the name Mountain Man!

Amelia: Usually it’s the initial shock that gets people in. And that’s nice, but usually we can’t string them along further based on the fact that our songs are authentic and interesting. Sometimes it’s really hard.

Alex: I mean bars are definitely not the best venue for us to be performing in.

Molly: But sometimes they’re great!

Alex: Yeah sometimes it feels good to fight for it.

Amelia: …and it feels deserved and earned when you have to really work to get the audience to be there. And once they’re there, they’re there.

Molly: I think it’s really refreshing sometimes for people to hear just three voices without drums and guitars and everything else on top of it!

Amelia: I think those things are wonderful, but it’s refreshing to be without them sometimes. Especially in the land of reverb that we currently live in.

So do you guys just hang out a lot together, singing all of the time? Is that how you practice?
Molly: Actually we don’t really practice, we just hang out.

Alex: I live in Virginia, which is a nine hour drive from Vermont. So we don’t practice unless we’re together.

Amelia: But we can learn to play it right in like fifteen minutes? We’ve got it down within an hour. We have good communication.

So what inspires you to make songs? What do you think about when you’re singing in harmony?
Molly: I think about going inside people’s chests with my voice.

Huh. That’s interesting.
Molly: Yeah because everything else is already there and what we have is already there, I don’t have to think about it.

Amelia: By now it’s just muscle reflex, like our bodies know how to sing and so we don’t really have to think so much about the song, just about the emotion.

Alex: Yeah it’s more that we just have to tap into that emotion when we’re singing… I think about family … and being a woman and being a human that conducts sound, particularly in this hall, it felt really, really amazing to feel that “okay I am going to open my mouth and my voice is going to be like synthesized with these other two voices”.

Molly: Sometimes I think about people I really love and care about and try to share that.

Union Chapel seems almost purpose built for what Mountain Man do here tonight. Having seen the room and decided to perform with no amplification at all, the three ladies stand hand in hand on the stage and wind together layers of vocal harmonies with incredible skill, accompanied only occasionally by a solitary acoustic guitar. Their voices reverberate around the lofty ceilings, the intelligence and playfulness of the vocal-only compositions could never fail to raise a smile. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to describe a performance like this as unmissable, the audience are hearing the layers of a contemporary folk band peeled all the way back to the core, and it’s fascinating how luxurious and expansive it can sound with the right amount of skill. If one were to risk spinning a cliché, a Mountain Man show such as this one is a truly organic live music experience.

Mountain Man: ‘Soft Skin’

John Grant

Hi, John. So let’s start by talking about the new album. Are these songs that you have collected over the years, or songs that you wrote specifically for the album?
Three of them are ideas that I had before, but the other nine all came about during the course of recording. So it’s all pretty fresh.

And you worked with Midlake on the album, how did that come about?
Well we’d both been on Bella Union for a long time and we met at SXSW down in Austin whilst having breakfast one morning with Simon and everyone. We just hit it off right away, kept in touch a little bit. Then Eric Pulido asked me to come down and sing at his wedding and that sort of cemented out friendship, I got to know them all a little bit better. They knew that I was struggling with the music… that I was sort of giving up on music because I had such a nightmare experience with The Czars and that the music business in general is just really disheartening and they started asking me to come and do my first solo album with them. And the Czars basically had very little success, we were together for over ten years and so I was really just unsure, I was living in New York when the time came to go and record the new record and I was doing well, I was doing Russian medical interpreting which is another big passion of mine, languages. So I was working at a really high-end restaurant and I had insurance and I had started to put down roots in that city, which is a hard thing to do, I would imagine it’s the same way here in London, it takes a long time to get to know this place? Like years?

Yeah, absolutely.
And so I was thinking “Well you’re forty one years old, are you really going to go and try again, aren’t you just fooling yourself? Shouldn’t you just give up? The reason that you didn’t make it before is that you’re simply not good enough, so just quit.”

But I felt like it was an offer that I just couldn’t refuse, it was just too good. And I felt like deep down I still had something to give and that I should be doing it. And Midlake really encouraged me, they said to me “we feel that you are far from done, what you need to do is simply keep going..”

So it was more than simply guys that you started to hang out with and play music with they really were a huge source of support. Without those guys it might not have happened?
It’s hard to say, I think the music would’ve gotten to me eventually, it would have kept coming. But, I don’t know. I’ve been asked this question several times and I am still not sure, it is very special the way it happened and it could not have been this way if it hadn’t happened this way of course. I know that sounds obvious, but you know what I’m saying.

That balance you have in your life. Having that dream, that passion and wanting that to be your life and also needing to commit to having another life, sometimes we have to admit harsh things to ourselves about how realistic our dreams are. Sometimes we need to re-evaluate the role that something like music for example might end up playing in our lives…
Yeah.

But having someone to tip the scales for you in a certain direction…
They kept after me. They kept saying “Come on man, we’re here. Let’s do it. Let’s go. You can live here for free, you can use the studio for free and we will be your backing band for free.”

That’s amazing.
Yeah, it’s huge. And that was encouraging in itself, that people I respected that much had that much faith in me as a musician. That I was respected as a musician and an artist by these people that I respected myself. That was nice because I really felt down on myself. I really felt like a failure. So that really helped me out a lot.

Yeah, you said earlier that you would tell yourself “you’re just not good enough” and I think that’s a place that we can all go to very easily.
Well, I was there you know, I kept showing up, I kept doing it. But the thing is, it simply does nothing for the situation for you to call yourself a failure and that you’re not good enough.

What is the difference at the end of the day? What’s the difference between doing it and being terrible and doing it and being under appreciated? I mean, does it matter?
I see your point and I sort of agree, I think the thing is that there are so many variables involved that you can’t understand.

When people talk about The Czars being ‘cult’. What does it mean?
Nothing. Nothing. Because you’re thinking “well I can’t pay my fucking rent!” I don’t care if everyone thinks I’m great when I’m dead. I want to figure it out now. I’m not asking for much, I’m not going to have the world’s greatest architect to build me the house of my dreams on prime real estate in Beverly Hills and I’m going to own half the world and hang out with Mick Jagger, but I can probably have a life doing music.

And why shouldn’t you?
And why shouldn’t I?

John Grant: ‘Marz’

The sense of John Grant’s vulnerability has not faded, although at this stage it does seem to form major part of his charm, his appeal, the the feeling from sections of the audience as they applaud out each song is that they feel personally invested in John’s well-being, his journey. For his part, John seems well, while not completely devoid of tension, fairly happy and comfortable. He mentions, as he has before that London holds a certain significance for him and that he particularly wants to play well while he is here. For tonight at least, he doesn’t disappoint- he delivers his heart-bearing laments, all of the passion, occasional twists of humour and surges of emotion with a with a certain open intensity. The sense of catharsis runs through the performance, perhaps, some dare to hope another stop in his road to that final success, redemption and final validation that his fans might feel he has long deserved.

All photography by Paul Bridgwater

when you don’t update your blog for over a month you start to think certain things. these are some of them.

‘wow, I haven’t updated that blog in a long while’

‘shit, when was the last time I did a blog post?’

‘people are going to stop reading my blog, I hate myself’

‘everyone is going to think I am a twat because I have forgotten to write anything on my blog’

‘why do I even have a blog?’

‘what the fuck am I supposed to write on a blog’

‘I will definitely update my blog soon’

‘my life used to be more interesting when I was making it seem interesting by having a blog’

‘I wish I never started this blog’

‘I wish I was better at blogging’

what have I done during all of this time?

I can’t remember. I am finishing the chapters of ‘a fucking awful weekend’ and readying them for the ‘print edition’. I am playing songs with other humans that play other instruments and making music that way now. I am ‘starting a whole new work of fiction’ it’s about a man and things happen to him.

I am re-reading random chapters from all of the Haruki Murakami novels I own. I think I still like ‘Norwegian Wood’ best, even though that’s not what a good reader/writer would probably say. I am also reading my friend Chris’ novel The Bird Room again and wondering if he’s just written what I was trying to write but a few years earlier and wondering if this is even fair since he’s a few years older than me. I am going to see Chris and ask him about this on Saturday, I think.

On last Thursday I went to a Bella Union concert at Union Chapel with John Grant, Lone Wolf, Alessi’s Ark and Mountain Man and I interviewed all of the bands and watched them and had a general nice time. My writing about that will be on the line of best fit very soon.

Erm..

…

Hello everyone, today myself and some other great young guys launched a literature/culture magazine called ‘other’.

Hello everyone. My blovella is still going over here. I am approaching the planned forty chapters. Am hoping that I actually manage to keep it all to forty chapters. After I have finished a fucking awful weekend I am going to print up little books and get one of my artist friends to do some drawings and then do some readings and sell them. Would you buy one? I know of three people who would. I would probably charge £3.

I have written a little story called Richard Dawkins and the A++++ blogger ana c. has published it on New Wave Vomit, so you can read that if you want to.

I have done 1546.

click:

After the lo-fi rockout session that was the Mexican Teenagers EP it should have been abundantly clear to us that Kaki King’s lateral ‘progressions’ from record to record are little more than the difference between the methods that she selects to express herself. Lo and behold, Junior opens with a rock song about spies. Who had a mind to disagree?

The word ‘genius’ is banded around a lot, often far, far to lightly. If it were possible to justify use of the term in a musical context, citing an artist with a fluent ability to use music as a pure vehicle of expression with true flair, beauty and a beguiling sense of apparent effortlessness, then this woman is surely a valuable reference. It’s entirely possible that Kaki King, however, is not a genius. A safer description might profile her as an immensely talented musician and composer with impeccable technical ability and inspiring imagination. And if this sounds unduly sycophantic, you manifestly haven’t spent a dreamy evening alone with her albums.

Master of the ‘grower’ album, King has shown here that while she has a firm grip on the those creeping knockout punches that burrow into the brain and explode (see Until We Felt Red for thirteen such examples) she also has an ear for a quick-landing pop-rock melody, and can varnish it with just enough of that abstract, underwater soulfulness to make it warrant much more than a casual in-the-car blast past.

There is more to Junior, than ‘Kaki King goes pop-rock’ however. Tracks such ‘Everything Has an End, Even Sadness’ are richly, satisfyingly vintage Kaki King. Lighter, simple melodic outings such as alt-rock head-nodder ‘Falling Day’, riff driven and opiate-level-addictive ‘Death Head’ and the almost unbearably cute, surely Mirah-nodding(?) ‘My Communist Friends’ might even have stood a chance of being stand-outs on a lesser album. It’s on tracks like sparse, slide-laden dreamscape ‘Hallucinations From My Poisonous German Streets’ that Kaki routinely manages to hit the jackpot and score the gut punches.

It could be argued that epic, head-like-a-cosmos masterpieces such big builder ‘My Nerves That Committed Suicide’ and ‘Sloan Shore’ could have easily turned up on the last LP, Dreaming of Revenge but it has to be said (and this is no slight) that it’s in this tried and tested approach that the throbbing kernel of King’s midas touch really lies.

It’s not a surprise that as such a competent musician, Kaki King can do most things extremely competently. Maybe, however (just maybe ) for her next outing it might be nice to hear her do what she does so well, and throw herself exclusively into those billowing, wandering, overwhelming compositions and guitar performances that make you want to throw your hands in the air and learn piano. Because what she does well, she does so very well.

because aside from all of the plans you make, when a new Broken Social Scene record is due to show up and soundtrack it nothing can fail. the new double a side is out now. if I made a habit out of blogging about record releases then there would be a lot more (boring) posts on here, but really this is significant because it’s the first time hearing the music that I’m going to wear out until September while I do stuff like wear t-shirts outside, go to barbecues and drink cider with ice in it.

anyway, make up your own mind and take a £1.80 punt

“The Forced To Love/All To All Double A-Side single is out now via iTunes and GalleryAC.”

Post has been boring for ages. This is mostly because it’s been winter when everything is shit. But now Spring is here and Alex from Thee Single Spy has sent me a promo copy of their new album. They have tracks from it up on their myspace and have loads of gigs coming up.

1. Thee Single Spy are good live. People say good things about them on things like twitter.

2. The album production/tweaked arrangements from the demos/new dynamic makes the whole thing sound like a ‘fully formed entity’.

3. It’s all slowly building, dark, crooked, broken down rock music but with rousing, billowing crescendos. Like a gig under a dead tree in the rain but they’re serving free ice-cream.

4. Get it.

P.S. yeah, I have graphic design down

There are two things I can say with confidence after looking at these top searches for about a year now.

1. If you are a woman and I have mentioned your name on this blog, the chances are that someone out there is scouring the internet for pictures of you without a top on.

2. Considering some of the shit people search for to end up here, I have a worryingly low bounce-rate.

“the less permanent,  annie clark,  photograph of fucking,  nipples-r-us,  my five bad habits”

1. always always carry a moleskine everywhere with you in your pocket and sit in a coffee shop and write pages and pages of ideas that you have had that morning in perfect, beautiful handwriting. never make any mistakes that have to be scribbled out, never write anything that you might find embarrassing later. never write down any ideas that wont make it into a novel. never, ever, ever forget to do this. write every idea you have in your moleskine, write every note you write in your moleskine. only use a fountain pen and an unlined moleskine and black ink. always make sure your notes are complete with immaculate illustrations.

2. always write all of your notes on the computer first. write them in text edit on the mac (if you don’t have a mac buy one) and then in one long Word document. Write the notes in bed but the Word document at a desk with music on.

3. never, ever, ever use similes or metaphors. never try to explain how a character is feeling. never ever start a chapter on a saturday morning.

4. always write fully dressed.

5. always write in bed.

6. go for a run before you write – write all of the ideas you had when running down onto your iPhone, then in a moleskine, then on the computer. Any ideas you have after getting home from your run must be immediately written on the computer.

7. never, ever write without a set of rules given to you by someone else.

8. set up a blog, never ever publish anything on it until it has been read eleven times (no more no less) and edited three times.

9. throw stuff up on your blog without thinking about it.

10. never publish anything until you have sent it to an editor who works for a publisher or literary magazine or journal. if it is criticized in any way, change in completely and then delete it. if it is ignored edit it another eleven times and put it on your blog.

11. make sure that all of your characters are people the reader would like to have sex with.

12. never mention the weather

13. never describe your characters

14. always change your mind about where the story is going and who the main character is.

15. always make sure that lots of stuff ‘happens’ and that there is ‘a point’ to the story, always make sure that the main character ‘has balls’.

Airplanes by Local Natives from Infectious Music on Vimeo.

awesome video too.

best song ever written about someone’s grandad ever.  credit due to Gerlin of neon enlightenment for twittering me about local natives first.

Chris did it, not me. I’ve been singing ‘word mole’ a lot while doing things.

…. ‘word mole!’ dad da da…

… ‘word mole..’

It’s going to be really nice. If you want to write a poem for it, do so and then e-mail me at :

hellothere[at]lesspermanent.com

…

bandcamp

EDIT: So the link stopped working. The bandcamp site for this album is gone.

Team Teamwork’s tumblr offers some explanations. Gutted about the cease and desist on ‘Ante Up’ because that was my favourite.

For those of you who missed it - here is an alternate place to download the album. Do it quick, don’t miss it.

I am up to episode nine. If you decide to read it and you enjoy it, please ‘follow’ it and/or tell your friends about it and how you like it.

It’s got me looking forward to sitting somewhere quiet near a tree when the leaves come back and also looking forward to watching them fall off again.

One year in 120 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

Is the British latter-noughties penchant for for bone-china Scandinavian voices and imported fresh-air pop finally reaching it’s zenith with the turn of the decade? Hopefully not for Swedes Janne Kask and Kalla Kåks who together form Lake Heartbeat, Trust in Numbers being their opening shot on scandophile indie –pop purveyors Service.

Immediate contemporary comparisons gravitate towards Phoenix and their seemingly like-minded, unabashed, soft-hitting pop stylings. But while Trust In Numbers is undoubtedly on-the-nose in an era of painfully self-aware post-post-modern inside-out irony, there’s a glassy shell of sadness and that lends this album a certain cloudy-eyed charm.

At Trust in Number’s core is a featherlike melancholy that flutters down like snow on a deserted beach resort.  It constantly thrums under the sheen and sparkle of Dan Lissvik’s midas production. Outwardly a swirling procession of crisp dream pop, under the steady drift is a throbbing kernel of sadness that adds weight, like a solitary, drooping raincloud in a summer sky.

Janne Kask sighs his breathy vocals that unselfconsciously meditate on life and love and loss. Seemingly unconcerned by any impulses to use abstraction to disguise the heart-opening lyrical subject matter, negating the obligatory parade of endless tortured analogies that might have knocked the wind out of the breezy, elegant compositions.

Indeed, it might not sound like it, but this risky music to make. To write a collection of shimmering bittersweet songs, openly wandering among such well-trodden ground as love and loss is to risk ending up with a slew of bland, broad, dinner-party silence filler unless you really have a good idea of what it is you’re doing.

For the British listener opener Mystery instantly invokes a more authentic era of pop music, setting a standard early on with a purposeful roll of lush hooks swirling into a satisfyingly crisp three minutes of melodic introspection. Similarly Southbound resounds with the appeal of a more innocent pop music philosophy, it would sound at home crackling through the cassette player of a 1984 Astra on a rainy drive home, steady claps and relaxed synths gently splashing into cascade of blissed-out vintage pop chorus melodics, an honest-hearted and well rounded track that epitomises the spirit of the whole record.

Trust in Numbers is the chilly sensation of viewing Summer though the frosted lens of Winter. A vision of warmth through a icy veneer of cold. Kask uses this to peer at the universal yearning for an intangible truth, a mystery that lies just outside of the borderlands of perception.

Latter album wobbles might threaten to drift dangerously into dreary Starbucks ambience territory at times, but a constant flickering pulse and unflinching sincerity lends Trust in Numbers a sufficiently fresh and intriguing aural aesthetic to make it a very worthwhile alternative Wintertime listen.

8

This is a photo taken by Sonny Malhotra of Aisha and her friend Eva. I have had this song by her in my head for ages. I keep singing the line ‘Leave the branches bare, we’ll fill them in another year.’ - it’s a beautiful line, sung beautifully. Plant Your Feet is a really, really good song. We recorded it in a basement a while back and while the recording itself is a little rough around the edges, it’d be a real shame to let this sit around on a hard drive without anyone hearing it.

Aisha’s Myspace

Oh yeah I forgot to add – this is from when Art and Things met up with Aisha.

Odd Blood, Yeasayer’s follow up to 2007’s All Hour Cymbals is due out on the 8th day of February in this bright, fresh new year. I spoke to Ira and Chris about pop music, visual aesthetics and if the American indie music scene has started to lead the way over the British.

TLOBF: So first I want to talk a little bit about your perceptions of indie in the UK at the moment, because you guys maybe have some early British indie influences but how do you think that compares to current the scene in UK.

Chris: I don’t really know what the indie scene in the UK is, to be honest actually. I don’t know if there even is an indie scene here.

See now I would say that East Coast American indie is producing some amazing stuff right now.

Are we East Coast American Indie?

Yes. For the purposes of this conversation, yes.

Hahaha, okay. We can play that game!

Good, yeah. So I think that if you’re an indie band in the United States you know that you’re never going to be like huge mainsream, billboard…. Mainstream in the UK is like pure manufactured pop and watered down indie.

Chris: We do see like a weird… we saw a weird thing last summer I don’t really know like there’s all these bands in the UK that are huge over here that I don’t even know.

Ira: Yeah huge, like stadium huge.

Chris: Like Kaiser Chiefs etc etc

Kinda like Kings of Leon?

Chris: No, I mean well they’re huge the play stadiums in the US. I mean they’re a big fuckin band, but they broke here first. I mean… they’re terrible, but I think that through virtue of the fact that they are American they could get big over here and then keep working on it in the States.

Yeah a lot of bands seem to do that.

It takes a little longer to break over there because it’s huge, y’know…

Ira: It’s huge and also radio is totally different here, I mean you have no real options for radio in the States. I mean there’s college and shit-

Chris: Radio in the states is so corrupt but I think you have a system that allows small bands to like, you know jump up.

Ah now, see I think this is true.

Chris: Well we don’t have [that kind of radio] any more so I think people have given up on it. And so bands like… it’s not like Dirty Projectors or Animal Collective never actually think that they’re going to get into nationwide big radio and sell tons of records. That’s not going to happen.

Ira: They can get on small radio and small markets around the country. And they can just be making a name because they’re original and so they know that blog kids and… it seems like you [in the UK] have a lot of music fans that don’t really know – I’m talking middle of the road music fans that might be attracted to Grizzly Bear – but they don’t really know where to go, they’re not Nickleback fans and they don’t like Creed and they don’t really like 50 cent, because you know the whole hip-hop thing really swallowed up the mainstream but then kind of killed itself.

Yeah yeah, this is what I think has happened to British indie, though. I think it’s an advantage to come from an environment like that. I mean, if you were Grizzly Bear and you were releasing Veckatimest and you know that was going to be a major release and you were a mainstream band and this was supposed to be played on major radio – would that have been the same album?

No

And I think it must be a similar thing for you guys…

It was weird for us to even think about that, I mean we had to come and do a radio edit for one of our songs, like come and shorten it, you know cut it down so it could be played on the radio because it’s sorta a longer song and we’re like “Really?”. It’s like the video we had with naked people in it. In the States, it’s not going to be on MTV, so who cares? But over here they’re like “Well we’ve got to do an edit so it can be on MTV” and it’s like “…they still do that?”. So it’s weird to us, I don’t know I mean we might be down with some pop stuff on the radio, y’know I’m psyched on the new Rhianna thing or new Jay Z thing, I like some mainstream hip hop, some Kanye stuff but in general you know, that’s it for the kind of stuff on the radio that I’m going to like. So we just don’t have any expectations, I mean nobody I know… even a band like Vampire Weekend or MGMT or something who to us are the only friends we have who seem like really huge bands who are really rich or something, even they don’t get played on mainstream that much…

Ira: They get on like alternative radio. It’s like alternative mainstream. They’re still very much in some markets, it’s very coastal. They’re not played all of the country like Leona Lewis would be..

That can happen in this country for indie bands, but maybe, all in all, mainstream recognition is not that much of a good thing for a scene. In fact I think on the whole, ‘indie’ music from America is generally of a better quality that British stuff right now.

Chris: I don’t even know what… I mean what bands are here?

Well, exactly(!)

Ira: The X X they’re kinda rad, doing something pretty cool, different.

Yeah, there are some, but-

I think as a result [of mainstream indie success in the UK] you have a lot of guys who are trying to fit a mould. We play these festivals and there these 19 year-old kids in bands I’ve never heard of who I think just got signed to some major label and they’re coming out, smoking onstage and playing their sassy kinda things and trying to sell, trying to whore themselves to be that thing.

But they’re basically just psyched that someone came at them and said ‘Here’s £30,000” and they’re like ‘OH MY GOD’!

Yeah like ‘Holy shit! What do you want us to do!?”

We’ll do whatever! And you wanna say ‘That’s peanuts and don’t go blow it one place because you’ll be fucked”. I mean actually I think some of those bands to end up being big bands in the States but it’s just … I mean we just played with some, we had this band open up for us and we asked you know, ‘What label are you guys on?”

‘We’re on uh, Capitol’

‘Who?’

Haha, Like does, Capitol exist? It was weird they were young guys and they’re like, ‘So! When you’re touring does your label pick your openers?’

‘Err… no? What’re you-“

‘Does your label make you do this or this?”

‘No! What do you mean?”

“Does your label come into the studio and delete the album and tell you start over again?”

Hahaha, yeah! Or “So uh, what producer did they tell you to work with?”

Err, we produced ourselves…

Ira: I also feel like uh, you see all the kids and the bands are real young. But a lot of the bands you talk about that are coming from America – they’re a little older. Those guys are older, you know TV on the Radio – older. Those guys put in years.

Ira: So they’re coming to it from a very different perspective. Very different assumptions.

I mean we’re not cute.

Ira: And we have different assumptions on.. what we think longevity is. What we want as longevity, even just through the fact that we’re looking at things that way.

Sure and nobody actually told you to go away and write that first album, nobody gave you any promises over it and you just did it.

And also, each step of the way we think ‘Oh great, we get [this much] for our advance, or we get this or this festival and so on’ but I know that next year that might not be the case!

Right, but you’ll still be band even if that stuff isn’t happening in much the same way that you are now.

Ira: We’re still going to be making weird music.

Chris: Or just not sitting on our laurels about it, you know? Not treating it a way where we think ‘Oh we got that advance, we made it, we can chill out!’

People often ask, is there a lot of pressure on your second album because you made it and we ‘re we still haven’t ‘made it’! We’re not even trying to ‘make’ it we’re just trying to do it! It’s not about making it, I mean no-ones buying a boat. I don’t think we’ll ever buy a house.

Ira: You’re invited on my boat when I get it though.

Thanks man.

Ira: It is true about that age thing though, it is weird because… There’s no band that busts on of New York that’s like twenty.

Chris: No. Animal Collective, I know most people think that Sung Tongs was their first record. That was like their fifth record. Those dudes are in their thirties. TV on the Radio are slightly older like thirties to late thirties, they were busting their asses all throughout the Nineties.

Ira: Blonde Redhead, Yeah Yeah Yeah’s.

Totally but that’s completely because… I mean at nineteen you could’ve been one of those bands but nobody came along and thought ‘This is marketable and profitable in the current climate’, I’m gonna put you guys on stage here, here, here and here, make an album…

Right

Whereas, say you were nineteen and on the trajectory to where you are now and someone had come along at that age…

Chris: It would’ve been awesome! I would’ve done it, I know I would’ve done it!

Ira: Totally! That’s what I was trying to do when I was nineteen!

Chris: That’s how I thought it worked, like ‘Well if we keep writing these little tunes then eventually we’ll get picked up!’ – but I think in England that really does happen.

It does happen. And it’s… a good thing but also a bad thing because we don’t produce much of those more mature…

Chris: It’s a good thing for those kids but yeah its bad ultimately for the scene…

Ira: I think it’s bad for the progression of any art form.

Chris: Yeah I mean, The Smiths. They had to really like work at it to catch on, no major label wanted to touch them. That’s why they were on Rough Trade and so that’s how the indie movement got started in the first place.

The other thing about the UK though I think there’s a cool uh, I like all the electronic music culture, the dubstep scene and the grime scene I don’t know how much of that is embraced by the mainstream. I know Dizee Rascal and that kinda thing crossed over into that world but in general I think that’s pretty cool, that’s pretty different, pretty fucked up. You put it on and it’s like say Roots Manuva or something, it’s not derivative, while it is a similar trajectory to American hip-hop but it’s not like Belgian hip-hop which is like “Da Beats In Da Bop Doo Da Da Da”

Hahaha!

But you know the UK stuff is really different, all these off-beats and you know, the kick will be like on the two.

Ira: I feel like that gets into American pop actually I mean Tricky co-wrote Umbrella, right?

Uh-huh. I feel like those scenes over here are healthier and more productive because they are allowed to exist outside of the mainstream and can please themselves and develop.

Chris: It just seems like the sound system, Caribbean influenced culture that would be thriving in a more independent hip-hop scene , it just seems a little more real. So that why the word Indie is always like… Indie?

It’s a weird thing isn’t it?

Stupid, like… UK Indie, I don’t know what it means and…

It’s a genre here, in the States it’s more descriptive I think.

It’s kinda become a genre in the States, but I take a little bit of, it’s like I look at like um I still believe in the idea of independent record labels, or even independent bands. If you’re Radiohead and you’re still on a major but you still dictate everything that you do.

Yeah yeah yeah I get that.

So I believe in that ethic, you know?

Well consistently they’re the guys who come up the best albums, really. Obviously I guess.

Ira: Yeah

Another thing I wanted to ask you about was. The fact that Yeasayer has quite a distinct visual aesthetic. Is that something that you’re deliberately controlling?

Chris: Yeah. I went to design school. So I went to school for Fine Art, decided to be a film major I was going to be a graphic designer but just got burnt out on it after a year. When I first graduated school I did some graphic design for like hip-hop reecord labels, that was one of those early jobs that really suck. It sucks to have some saying to you “Can it be more urban? Can you do a little more funky?”

So doing the design for our stuff and just as a result I know to have a pretty grounded aestetic and I think we all know what we like and uh, if I’m not doing it then we have a pretty close family of people, good friends that’ll do it, like the guy who does our lights for our live show, he builds these customized scultpures, he’s a guy I went to school with and has been a friend of mine for around ten years and he did the artwork, he and I came up with the concept for the artwork with the new record and he like did it. And as a result it’s very weird, I mean, he’s a weird dude and he came up with some weird shit that was like, we’re really trying to push this borderline between what’s well-designed but also ugly, unsettling and sort of interesting.

Like really avante garde?

Yeah, I mean I think it’s a nice… you have a nice platform for doing that when you’re in a band. The t-shirts, the things, the website stuff, the videos all the things that you can do and basically become an artist or at least a director of it all, a production designer of it all but you have this band and you have funding for it.

Yeah yeah totally, and you have a ready made audience, too. I mean, how hand-in-hand with the music is the art and the moment? Are you working more on things after you’ve finished the music or…?

Chris: Personally, when I write songs I think about little movies. Little visual cues within it, lyrically that’s where it comes from and it helps me. I don’t have any formal training in music, maybe somewhat in the production side but in terms of visuals I spend a lot of time studying that so…

I think that the art and the video for Ambling Alp is quite abstract, are the lyrics abstract? They don’t sound very abstract.

Chris: They’re actually pretty literal. Out of any of the songs I think they’re the most literal. Yeah I was more into like kids who made that, these guys are called Radical Friend and them just feeling out the flow of the song as opposed to just trying to tell the story. I mean you can listen to the album and hear the story, you don’t need to see the visuals of the story, you can make them up in your head when you listen to it, I like to see visuals that are totally different.

Also, I think Odd Blood on the whole, it sounds like a freer, happier album. Is it coming from a freer, happier place?

Ira: I think it’s clearer. I think a lot of the first album, we kinda figuring out what we were doing and layering upon layer and really creating this mood. And I feel like with this we’re … I don’t know if emotionally we were in a clearer state. In some ways we probably were. I feel like it’s much more of a physical, immediate album. I think it felt like that when we were making it.

Chris: I think there’s some dark uh, dark stuff on the record. But yeah in general I feel like there’s more love songs. Yeah, it’s a happier record I guess. It’s… a different record.

Well that’s good(!)

I don’t know if I’ve figured out the overall sentiment on the album yet.

So you didn’t have an overall idea of any of the moods you wanted to project really?

Chris: I don’t think we had an overall idea necessarily about lyrically what it was going to be about, but sonically we had an idea and we sort of started from that idea which is like making a poppier record with like more electronic dance and production inspired beats and production techniques that we liked and wanted to mess with.

And as a result, maybe write some love songs on top of that. More personal stuff and then some stories, Ambling Alp is kinda a story song, Stranger Union is a story…

It’s pretty un-self-conscious.

Is it? I don’t know.

Yeah I think to write love songs and admit that they’re love songs and lyrics like those from Ambling Alp, it’s pretty head on and unashamed.

I don’t like ironic music but I dunno ‘unashamed’, it’s not like.. you hear all of this music and that’s like the Pop Sentiment, that you have to walk to the fine line of being cheesy before you like eeegggh.

Ira: before you fall over into the pile of Snow Patrol.

Hahaha, yeah. Yes. Totally.

Chris: You don’t wanna trip into the Snow Patrol.

Ira: You do that and then it’s like, every album has to be a really goodgey love song.

Chris: Nononono, no wait! We’re doing DISCO ROCK now!

Ira: No, dudes! Sorry!

Haha, you guys can get away with it though, because you own more instruments.

Ira: Hahaha!

When you have one dude playing acoustic guitar and then… power solo! I’ll tell you you’re in trouble.

Chris: People love that shit! That shit gets huge! People love that crap!

Ira: I, I think it’s also performance.

Chris: If we wanted to be huge we should just have an acoustic guitar…

Yeah! So maybe you could do that?

Chris: … I don’t wanna be huge(!)

Ira: I don’t wanna be huge in that way. Then you’re just huge for a song.

Chris: That doesn’t even sound like fun, I just don’t want that. It sounds awful!

Yeah. Even Kings of Leon said recently that they don’t even like their own music anymore.

Chris: (Impeccable Caleb Folowil impression) SOMEONE LIAK YOOOO!

Should’ve seen that coming dude when you wrote that song.

Ira: Heheh, I know! What were you thinkin?

Chris: (still in mid-flow.) IMMA NEED SOMBODAAI

Ira: What did you think that you weren’t going to have to sing that song every day for the rest of your life?

Chris: They’re laughing all the way to the bank I guess.

Maybe if after they had written that someone had said ‘Guys, you really want to record this? Because that’s it for the rest of your lives if so.’

Chris: Yeah… if someone presented me with that option I’d be like ‘Okay!’

You reckon?

Yeah cause then I could still do that and then I could still do like weird… I could still play, I could still do Upset the Rhythm nights with some weird noise band. Someone might say ‘You’re that guy who wrote that terrible song!’ and I could say ‘Yeah… I’ll buy you a beer.”

Hahaha, I’m really sorry about that, hey!

In fact, I’ll buy you a car!

HA!

It would have to be guaranteed though.

Someone comes to you. Some weird guy shows up. And he’s like, got a suit made of gold. He says ‘Heeloo… tomorrow you’ll wake up with this song in your head and you’ll write it and the next week you’ll be partying in a Jacuzzi with Beyonce’

Chris: Yes…. YES!

Ira: I think the best of both worlds would be to able to excorsize those demons and then sell it someone else to someone else to sing.

Like Prince.

Ira: Yeah, like Prince, the guy form One Republic. Not that he’s really -

Chris: Haaha, the guy from One Republic!

Ira: Yeah not that he’s all like “Yeaahh, sticking to MY roots on MY thing!” but I guess that’s how he makes a lot of his money. But yeah getting that shit out of the way. I would LOVE to write some songs for Creed.

Chris: Being indie is definitely over-rated!

Ira: And Nickleback. I could write the fuck out of those songs.

You should do it. Call someone up.

We’re trying, man, we’re just getting our foot in the door right now!

Oh yeah I guess you gotta do the whole Yeasayer thing and then…

Chris: Politics, politics.

Ira: Playing in smelly bars that don’t have bottles of water for hundreds of people is overrated.

Yeah? I think it’s a beautiful thing.

Both: It can be. It can be!

Chris: I don’t wanna do it for the rest of my fuckin life, man! Jesus!

(giggling)

Ira: I don’t wanna be forty and doing it.

Chris: It’s not my end goal. And I don’t find anything romantic in it. Like ‘It’s just so real’ and that ideal.

And you guys write your own stuff in demo form and then you come together and work it out?

Ira: Yeah there’s ideas, sometimes someone has a more complete piece but yeah we always get together and produce it.

You get a lot of stuff that way? More than you’ll ever use?

Ira: I think that’s the goal. Yeah we did on this one.

Chris: We do a lot of revisions though!

You have b-sides? Enough for an EP or something?

Ira: Yeah I like the idea of having something but an EP is sometimes just like ‘Heeeere’s the CRAP!’. I like that there are deleted scenes on movies and everything but sometimes I think, ‘Oh… this really changes how I think about this movie now..’

Chris: We’ll have some B-sides, but an EP… I feel like if we’re doing to do that it should allude to what we’re going to do in the future in a way. And not just be “Leftovers!”. I mean we had some trouble almost at the end, we swapped out some songs and replaced with some ones that were B-sides to have the ‘flow’ and energy the same.

So those other tracks are still waiting to be…

Yeah they’ll show up in a BMW commercial at some point.

Hey that’d be awesome.

Also, remember the new mug that wasn’t mine? Look at this bastard. What a cup.

Look at these carefully arranged objects:

I really like this mug. It belongs to my girlfriend but I want one.

Also, check out my camera.

It’s an OLYPUS TRIP 35 as you can see. This is what the first page of the manual looks like.

Wikipedia says this:

“The Trip 35 is a 35mm compact camera, manufactured by Olympus. It was introduced in 1967 and discontinued, after a lengthy production run, in 1984. During the 1970s it was the subject of an advertising campaign that featured popular British photographer David Bailey. Coupled with the high quality lens, which is still impressive today, gave the camera the ability to take very high quality shots.

In fact, if coupled with modern film emulsions, the results can be very good indeed.”

I’m going to take photographs with it and upload them to this blog.

You should go an vote up this T-shirt design by Sophie Kern. It’s really good and she can win money for it and then we can buy one. Here’s an interview I did with her and one I just did today with her housemate Bryony on Art and Things.

My write up of Crossing Border festival is up on The Line of Best Fit.

This is the selection of some of the words I arranged in a specific order on the subject:

“Here in the UK, the words and music trick isn’t particularly a new one. People like good books and good albums. Or they are at least prepared to feign an equal interest in 1920’s era blues and Dadaist surrealism for the sake of their own sense of cultural identity, which mindless cynicism aside, still has the pretty pleasing effect of bringing together the two art forms to enjoy a very encouraging and useful mutual appreciation. All Tomorrow’s Parties, Latitude, Green Man, Bestival – there’s probably no need to detail them all, there is no shortage of festivals that are now combining music and literature successfully to introduce another dimension to their own cultural displays. The difference with Crossing Border, however, is that rather than giving the distinct impression of a music festival momentarily tipping it’s hat to the traditions of literature (as most British festivals, for all of their intentions, invariably do) Crossing Border feels like a literature festival with a lucrative sideline in gigs. Yes, in case you’re wondering, this is actually a rather good thing. Behind Crossing Border is the definite thrum of a sincere passion for language and melody and this clearly fuels the diverse and consistent quality that the festival provides in both fields. If it wasn’t squashed hopelessly into two nights, like a symphony into a ringtone it would probably be perfect. But touring schedules are touring schedules at the end of the day, apparently.”

And this is a picture of Annie Clark aka St Vincent playing at Crossing Border. Leah Perr took this. St Vincent was really good that night.

That’s it for now. I’m going over to my friends house to play Fallout 3 for a bit. Have a good weekend!

This is a doodle I did while watching a really rubbish film called The Transformers (I think) on television one evening. It was full of flashy computer-generated robots. One of them was called Megan Fox.

I’ve recently got back from The Hague where Crossing Border festival was happening. Crossing Border festival is an event with lots of good bands and writers doing readings and performances in some really nice venues in The Hague (and Antwerp this year). I’m writing up the thing for The Line of Best Fit so there’s no need for me to go on about it in too much detail yet. I did see some really good bands and meet some really awesome people (artists, writers, musicians, miscellaneous) while I was there and have a really good time, though. The Hague took us out for meals and tours and things and the festival itself was really good. The welcome pack they left in my hotel room had a kite in it. I’m happy. Extra happy because nobody made me pay for anything (har har har).

This is what I could see from my room.

Anyway more on that later.

What else? I’m interviewing Yeasayer tomorrow. (Maybe I could’ve stretched all this out over a number of updates…)

I’m also finishing of a review on this Lake Heartbeat album. I really like it. (is posting my album reviews on here boring?) anyway, here’s an line that I may or may not remove later.

“at Trust in Number’s core is a featherlike melancholy that flutters down to earth like snow on a deserted beach resort.” Gee, whiz. I tried to write most of this in Starbucks the other day but it didn’t work because a) I hate Starbucks b) I kept buying coffees because I felt awkward and ended up too jittery to focus c) I swear people were staring at me.

Okay that’ll do for today.  Thanks for reading my blog today x

My artist collective, Diy Womp did an event at the Tate Modern on Halloween night. We did a special issue of the zine and got loads of art and I ran an acoustic stage. It was fun and I’m glad people came.

Here are some photographs that Sonny Malhotra took.

Political activism zine ctrl.alt.shift have collaborated with a exciting assortment of writers, artists and other prominent British creatives to create a really amazing comic book, featuring a true stories about the horrors of corruption wordwide. I’ve read it. It’s wicked.

I spoke to British writer and comic artist Woodrow Phoenix about his involvement in the project.

Is confronting serious issues in your work something you personally feel passionate about?

I treat everything I do seriously, in the sense that I am passionate about doing good work that speaks for itself and doesn’t waste the readers’ time; work that has something to say and says it elegantly, energetically, in an interesting way. I don’t feel everything I do has to be “issue” based – I like lots of goofy things and a lot of my work is cartoony, silly, unreal jokey material. But I don’t feel I have to choose between being funny and being serious. I think you can be entertaining and also ask questions that mean something to you. You can use humour as effectively as drama to examine the world we live in. I like both kinds of material equally. What the message is decides how I’m going to work with it.

My most recent book, Rumble Strip, tackles an issue that I had been thinking about for a while. I drive a car. I enjoy it. I don’t change personality when I get into my car, but many drivers I know do. People feel entitled to act in the most monstrous and inhuman ways when they have a metal shell around them. Why is that? Some of it is human nature. We behave terribly when we think nobody can see us. But it’s not helped by the car industry encouraging everyone who gets behind a wheel to drive as if they are the only ones on the road. Whether you own one or not, cars define your landscape. They dominate your life because they determine the layout of the city you live in, how the streets you have to use are designed and lit, where you go and how you get there… and in some cases IF you get there at all. People need to wake up and start being conscious parts of a wider community rather than selfish, impatient me-junkies. We can’t carry on making excuses for the crazy numbers of people who die every day on streets around the world for no good reason because some driver was in a hurry or not paying attention.

Could you tell us a little about the story that you worked on?

I was given a piece of prose by Adèle Austin based on her experiences growing up in Haiti. It was about a kidnapping, from the point of view of a boy who had joined a gang that specialised in such things. Most of her piece focused on the internal struggles of this boy as he tried to justify what he was doing, so I had to find visual ways to represent what he was going through, make it interesting to look at while moving the story along. I started by breaking Adèle’s story down into pure structure: who are the characters, where are they, what needs to happen and how do they relate to each other? Once the background was worked out, I could concentrate on making the best choices for each panel of the story.

What made you want to tackle these issues in-particular?

It’s a good idea to remind ourselves that everyone’s actions have consequences for someone else. Sometimes you can see the results of what you do and sometimes you can’t, but everyone is connected. People get away with doing terrible things because nobody is watching. We need to shine some light into those dark corners!

Most of our readers will probably have encountered very well-respected works like Persepolis or Waltz with Bashir that successfully use heavily stylized animation and illustration to convey important, difficult messages. What is it that makes a medium traditionally associated with fantasy and escapism by the mainstream so useful and effective when confronting serious and sometimes uncomfortable issues?

Comics are tremendously effective communication because they are so direct. The unfiltered product of one person can reach into your brain without anybody else getting between you. It’s not a group activity like watching a film. You read a comic by yourself and that intimacy is hard to achieve in other visual media.

Think how many layers even the smallest film or television production has to go through. Every line of script has to be examined, debated, edited and agreed on by a great many people before you will get to see it. On a typical TV show it’s easily fifty to sixty people. For a film, that becomes hundreds. Invariably things get watered down. Compromises are made. Strong messages become diluted. Plus, all that decision making takes time. It can take months for the simplest TV programme to be made. But with comics one person can do absolutely everything. You write it, you draw it, there’s nothing in there that you didn’t put there and it gets printed exactly as you made it. If you have something intimate or controversial to say, that’s a pretty much ideal situation, creatively. Your message stands or falls on its own. If it doesn’t get through, it won’t be because someone else stepped all over it.

Works like this often prompt talk of comics and graphic novels ‘growing up’. Would you say that we are in the midst of a shift in attitudes about what the medium and achieve and the subject matter it can tackle effectively?

There have always been ‘grown up’ works out there, but there haven’t been the audiences ready to connect with them. Perhaps it’s just that a generation who read comics as children are now in media positions, so they are more receptive to articles in newspapers and magazines, or films and tv programmes about them. If mainstream media interest in comics continues past the moneymaking fixation with superhero adaptations It will help comics creators because if you get serious responses to what you do, you’re more likely to persevere. Of course, it takes about fifty times as long to make a comics page as it does to read it, so the first thing publishers and readers need to know is it’s not as quick and easy as it looks for comics creators to make their books. It can take years!

Do you think works like this are an important part of the future of the medium?

I hope so. I believe the comics medium can tackle any kind of material. It doesn’t have to be limited to throwaway subjects. Of course that also means people will have to be prepared to engage with a strip as attentively as they would with a film or a prose book. Most people don’t expect to be challenged by a comic so they don’t read them very carefully. But if readers and creators can continue to expect more of each other and grow together there’s a lot to look forward to.

The website for the exhibition that accompanied the release of the comic, with information about the book itself and where to buy it is here.

Memory Tapes is the latest project from Dayve Hawk, combining his work on previous projects, Memory Cassettes and Weird Tapes. A full length Memory Tapes LP called Seek Magic is out via Something In Construction this week. I asked Dayve a little bit about Memory Tapes and if we can expect a visit from him and his own brand of intelligent, super-smooth dance any time soon.

So Memory Tapes is a combination of previous projects to make one new, shiny one. When did you decide that marrying the two together would work for a whole new project?

Well I was bored of using samples (Weird Tapes) and pitch-shifting my voice (Memory Cassette) so was ready to change what I was doing anyhow, especially when I started getting approached by labels. Dealing with peoples’ confusion about the different projects was getting a bit much so I just dropped both and combined the names. I thought that would make it simple but now people just say I have 3 projects. It never ends!

How much of the music on Seek Magic is about your own expression as opposed to putting together really cool tracks?

Ummm… all of it? I don’t ever set out just to make production exercises, it’s all self-expression of some sort.

After Hail Social how does it feel to be going it alone? Could you ever see yourself doing what you’re doing now but in a band with a load of other guys?

No. That is why Hail Social never worked. I can’t work that way… things are much better now.

I read somewhere that you didn’t have a phone. Have you sorted that?

Not yet…. I may need to soon though. It’s becoming a bit of a hassle.

I like to imagine that you have a room full of computers and instruments and gear that you toil away in on your own for hours before your emerge, wide eyed and sweat drenched, with these awesome tracks. How far off the mark am I? How do you normally work?

That’s pretty much it: I have a room with computers, instruments and other gear… but it’s also my daughters bedroom and the laundry room!

Do you have any contemporary musical influences at all?

Not really, I tend to listen to mixtapes more than anything else current. There was recently one by Kingdom that I loved and i’ve grabbed a few from Allez Allez.

Can you pinpoint any artist or influence that helped you to take your music in this direction? Did anything in particular have a hold on your imagination while you were making some of these tracks?

Mostly I was thinking of summers here in South Jersey from when I was a teenager. There was a strech of a couple years where it rained all the time but was still hot and we ended up with this real hazy atmosphere. At the time I was into bands like Cocteau Twins and Rollerskate Skinny. So there’s some nostalgia for then I guess.

Do you have a second creative love behind music?

Well my daughter… so creating humans?

So what are your plans for us over here in the UK now that Seek Magic is out?

I’m working on alot of new music for different projects so it could be another release before too long. I’m alos considering doing some shows.

mp3:> Memory Tapes: ‘Plain Material’

Originally published at thelineofbestfit.com

Art and Things. Hello to you Chris. Tell us what started you as an artist.

What influenced you in your early development?

What’s your poison?

Theres’ a bunch of people I think are awesome. Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of them, so is Boris Vallejo. Theres also some amazing illustrators everyone should check out, Sophie Alda, Jon Macnair. Check out my links sections for a nice big list of them all.

Any other creative things you like doing?

What kind of environment do you like to work in?

You’re curating a music festival. Pick four headliners and a venue.

What’re your plans for the rest of this next period of time?

Move into my house, work my arse off drawing and i’ll see from there I think!

In a classroom, in Ontario, in 1995, a Canadian instrumental band practiced in a classroom with the words Do Make Say Think pinned to the walls. Presumably intended as some sort of vague philosophical inspiration for a class of Canadian eight-year-olds, this loosely related configuration of four verbs inadvertently became a piece of Canadian post-rock history when in 1999 the band (now called Do Make Say Think, obviously) released an instrumental album entitled Do Make Say Think that was bursting with intelligence and personality.

Fourteen years later, Do Make Say Think are also the names of the four tracks on their sixth studio album Other Truths, which, perhaps rather spookily, contains some of the most likable work the band has produced to date. It would appear that these four words posses some sort of mysterious power. A bit like The Numbers from Lost, but with actual meanings, not just made up ones to keep you watching a-secretly-really-rubbish television show.

Opener ‘Do’ immediately sets the tone, re-introducing the sound of Do Make Say Think in slightly itchier pants initially, a fun, impetuous little guitar riff lays the groundwork for one of Do Make Say Think’s new classics, a memorable epic with features that could easily become a very pleasing set of leitmotifs for the live show.

The Spearin, Payment and Benchetrit guitar work keeps on producing those familiar phrases out of their lateral, sometimes tangential approach to the fretboard, while the slightly more rounded edges and pointed almost-hooks nudge the shoulders, reminder that the concept still, somehow, has plenty of leg-room. The way wind instruments lovingly intertwine with these self-assured compositions this time around also lends a certain luxurious feel to the sound. This is an album very comfortable in it’s own skin.

Other Truths is probably the most instantly likable example of the kind of thinky instrumental head-nodders and eye-glazers that Do Make Say Think have been churning out for a decade, but that’s not to say that it’s the lacks the intensity of it’s predecessors. Far from it in fact, there are tense, off-kilter meanders and goose-bump inflicting plunges a plenty, all sitting on the familiar layers of weird, tilting atmospherics. At times the attitude of this record goes beyond confident and into magnanimously triumphant. Brass soars as second track ‘Make’ gallops, kinglike, through it’s middle three minutes. ‘Say’ achieves similar blood-stirring results, repeatedly threatening to lose it’s composure as wind instruments reach for the sky in unison before being reigned back in and gently put to bed in an engrossing cycle.

From gleaming and celebratory to forehead-clenchingly anxious and out via sparse and blissful, by the time we get through to ‘Think’ we’re back in weightless territory, a welcome little nip of nostalgia at the finale.

Managing to place itself as a pleasing progression for established fans and an interesting introduction for new listeners Other Truths isn’t quite a tour de fource, but almost good enough to warrant a touch of hyperbole if it means more people will take an interest in this woefully underappreciated band who now have a incredibly strong back-catalogue behind them. Another fantastic forty-three minutes to shut yourself away with. Buy the CD and don’t play it through laptop speakers.

Originally published at thelineofbestfit.com

There’s a lot of D. H. Lawrence I like and a fair bit I’m not keen on. I’m into the whole modern framing of archaic aesthetics, romanticism, reverence of nature and stuff in art and music at this very moment. The sight, smell and print of this artifact are nice inspiration.

For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.

Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

Go on, read a poem today.

]]> http://www.lesspermanent.com/?feed=rss2&p=735 0 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=732 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=732#comments Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:27:47 +0000 Albert Rose http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=732

Smashing Pumpkins and this 90′s aesthetic were a ‘major formative influence ‘  and continue to influence me. The grainy, hissy VHS this was ripped from only adds to the romance and makes me want to downtune half a step and play guitar for a few hours.

The resurgence in the file sharing ‘debate’ since Lily Allen said something or other is interesting and amusing because everyone is wrong.

Although ‘heyyy you big meanies! downloading hurts small artists’ might be a point, to a cynic like me it just seems a more convenient heartstring puller than ‘file sharing hurts overpaid exploitation experts who have never played a note of music in their life and cynically exploit a creative discipline for profit and listen to U2 in their Mercedes SLK’s.’.

People who want free music without admitting to stealing v greedy major labels.

They can both fuck off.

But of course, major labels and pop stars have always given oh-so-much-of-a-fuck about the plight of struggling young bands up until now. Fuck that.

And of course if you download it and like it you’re definitely going to go to a gig and buy a t-shirt and three copies of the self-released EP the artist has had to release after the album sold 1,000 copies and they got dropped. Yeah, cause you’re a real fan with 800gb of music on your external HD that you never listen to. Well done, you prick, enjoy standing at the back and talking.

Oh and we all know that each pirated download doesn’t equal one lost sale. And anyone that thinks someone should be permanently cut off from the internet for file sharing is living on cloud-fucking-dickhead.

And with the sheer volume of music out there, who can afford to take an £8 punt on every 20 potentially interesting albums that come out each week?

I remember being in a rubbish little grungey post-rock band when I was 16 and trying desperately to get people to download our demo off of Kazaa by mis-labeling it.

Anyway, what are we going to do when amazing indie labels and record shops can’t afford to exist any more because everyone is downloading what they want and buying a pin-badge as a token gesture to absolve their conscience?

You want answers? I haven’t go any. Who knows? The only thing I know is that the two entrenched camps in this debate that shout the loudest are by far the most annoying and transparently self-interested.

The rest of us should probably resolve to download Spotify, click the ads and buy a CD (and while you’re at it a book) as a treat every week or so. It’s nice to treat yourself. Get a proper CD player and put your new CD in it and settle in with your crisp new paperback. Trust me, it’s really, really nice. Much nicer than laptop speakers and 64kbs sound and reading something like a shitty blog about file sharing.

Anyway, you’ll piss £25 quid away on fags and booze in one of your regular efforts to fit in with your peers this week regardless.What’s another £14.99?

When I finish the EP I’m working on you can all have it for free. You’d just better fucking donate £10 afterwards. That’s all I’m saying.

Anyway, I’m going down the road to buy some cheese, bread, salad and juice (£7ish) and a Beirut album (£6). I love cheese and I love Beirut. If I could download cheese or eat it for free on Spotify I don’t think it’d buy it from Marks and Spencers, though.

DIY doesn’t have to mean clawing your own way out of the cesspit of the Monday night pub circuit and into the cleansing light of popular recognition using solely your own guile and determination. It might be admirable, but it sounds horrible and nine times out of ten it probably won’t work.

DIY is about collaboration, a collective attitude. You and your talented friends coming together to actually make stuff happen. It’s setting up your own label to record all the amazing bands you know that don’t have deals, making a makeshift rehearsal space because they turned the old one into a car park, or putting on a better folk night because the one down the road is rubbish and the promoter is a bastard.

The philosophy is co-operation over exploitation, it might sound all warm and fuzzy, but it actually works too. Martyring yourself while you wait for someone to notice your material as a business prospect is for the unimaginative. Use what you have and push forward.

Alex Mattison plays in Thee Single Spy with Euan Hinshlewood (also from YoungHusband and Emmy The Great). The production of their vinyl single was collaborative, “Do It Ourselves Because We Want To” process, enlisting the help of friendly musicians, other bands and artists like Rosie Roberts:

“My friend Jim had been running club nights at the Gardening Club in Covent Garden, and we used to play there a lot.” Alex explains.

“It’s where a group of bands who are now pretty tight friends got to know each other – Goldheart Assembly, Oldwick, us – and we would just hang out there every Sunday. Jim called me and said they’d like to put out a 7″, would we be interested? At the time, the idea that anyone would be willing to put money into our band was like finding milk on the moon, so the very first reaction was to feel flattered. Then question his sanity. But because I know him well and trust him totally, we said yes. The whole insane, time consuming soul-fracturing money sucking and yet ultimately rewarding process began.“

“A lot of our friends lent a hand. For the songs themselves we recorded at my house and mixed them there as well. We asked our friends Emma and Nick to play viola and trumpet, and then it was just mixing, mastering and getting the records pressed.”

And it’s not just about musicians pooling resources to make a demo. Vibrant, inspiring DIY projects that make good use their close relationship with the arts scene are rewarding for everyone involved and make the whole thing look really, really good.

“We decided to continue our tradition of making the record case out of untreated canvas, so I made a few trips to an art wholesalers which sold us massive 25 metre rolls of canvas taller than me, enlisted the help of our friend Celia as a screenprinter, got Rosie involved to create the cover, and then we all set about cutting squares of canvas, screenprinting and stitching.”

Musicians and artists that are drawn together through mutual admiration can benefit by inspiring each other to create better work too.

“I met Rosie through Celia.” says Alex. “We went to see her final degree show down in Brighton, and I was immediately taken with her work. It was like a little insect that burrowed into my brain, slept there for a while, then exploded. I thought that the image would work well with the type of songs that were on the single, so I asked her to make something. Rosie seemed to understand what we were about and I love the final collaged image.”

Rosie feels a similar way, of course.

“I enjoy working with friends on projects, it allows real freedom to create whatever you want. It helps working with people you know I think as they can be truly honest and hopefully end up with a piece you both really like without having to compromise on anything.”

A “scene” only becomes a true community when it produces worthwhile and productive relationships between people. Such environments start from a simple, honest place – like-minded people getting together to create. For someone working with a group like DIY Womp, who promote collaborations and platform sharing between artists of all disciplines, it becomes blindingly obvious what artistically successful people feed off. It isn’t the monetized carrot-dangling that so many become fixated on, but the creativity and desire of the people around you. It’s the impulse to create something special .

“Almost everything [Thee Single Spy] does is in collaboration with our friends. We rely on them so much to come to our shows, we play in each other’s bands and on each other’s records.” It begs the question – without mutual support from people on the same level, where would most of UK artists be?

DIY is the spark that creates exciting things before the majors and the MySpacers and the bookers for T4 catch on. Anyone looking for success should know that from the moment they start out things are completely in their own hands. Waiting for things to happen is boring and frustrating. DIYers use their networks, scrape together their resources and make successes out of their projects without waiting for approval.

So yeah, Do It Yourself, of course. But for god’s sake don’t try to Do It Alone.

Thee Single Spy Official Site

Rosie Roberts Official Site

DIY Womp Official Site

Chris pell on Vimeo.

Chris’s website.

I finally finished tinkering about with diy-womp.com and aatmagazine.co.uk this weekend.

]]> http://www.lesspermanent.com/?feed=rss2&p=690 0 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=681 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=681#comments Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:41:56 +0000 Albert Rose http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=681 Other bloggers sometimes say nice things about this blog and link to me. I usually respond by simply soaking up the goodwill like some kind of ungrateful, passive sponge with a blog. So here starts a TLP series about blogs out there that deserve a bit of a nod from me, maybe I can be redeemed for how selfish and malevolent I’ve been in the past.

Code For Something

I aspire to be a better blogger. More updates, better content, more commitment. Amber is a real blogger. She’s probably the best blogger from New Zealand (I’m 70% sure she isn’t the only blogger in New Zealand) She carries this netbook around in her handbag and just blogs and blogs. As a direct result her blog, Code For Something is significantly better than this blog.

Amber has bothered to properly design her blog, she’s got a real mind for the details. She even puts these neat little things inbetween paragraphs. It’s full of ideas to steal for this site, which is something I would’ve started doing ages ago if I wasn’t so fucking lazy.

So yeah, she stacks her blog with photographs she takes of cool stuff and somehow knows about things like when Murakami’s latest novel is coming out before I do (for shame).

It’s all well worth a look.

Can you draw good? Do you like whisky and money? Enter this then, there’s loads of both on offer plus they’re actually threatening to slap the scribblings that fall out of your brain in Time Out magazine which is a magazine that literally loads of people read. Click here, you pencil-weilding booze-hound.

Hey, you. You like Iceland? You like things like spending a summer evening listening to the vinyl re-issue of Start Breaking My Heart and drinking Asahi from the bottle? Sure you do, you’re cool, you listen to music on blogs and stuff.

You know what else you like? This track called Yfirskin from the  new Kippi Kaninus album called Happens Secretly.

Kippi Kaninus Myspace.

]]> http://www.lesspermanent.com/?feed=rss2&p=652 0 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=637 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=637#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:08:49 +0000 Albert Rose http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=637 I AM HAVING A NICE TIME

I rate this very highly.

Wildbirds and Peacedrums are a Swedish husband and wife duo. Andreas and Mariam make intense, bluesy, stompy indie music. I first met/saw Wildbirds and Peacedrums live last year on the Bella Union Stage at Wireless Festival. They made an incredibly impressive and spectacular noise without loud guitars, bass, violins, brass, harps, synths or any of that guff. They’ve been a favorite of mine since. Here’s an interview with them I did the other week.

Hi, Andreas. You’ve got a compelling energy onstage. Do you try to distill that into the records? Is that a challenge?

To perform live and in the studio is two completely different things. We have tried to have the same input in the studio as we do live but it’s just not possible – try to talk to an microphone the same as you do to a human and you’ll see.

You’ve been doing a lot of travelling recently. Do you do a lot of writing when you’re out on the road?

Actually nothing, it takes to much effort to perform and travel that there’s almost no energy left to be creative. So we can brag with not a single new song in over a year!

Indie fans in the UK have been really enjoying a lot of bands from Denmark, Sweden and other areas of Scandinavia for a while now. There’s a lot of good music coming from your part of the world at the moment, do you feel like you’re part of something special in this respect?

Sweden has a great history of artists that are doing creative music and finding ways to go international with it. We have had great opera singers, an amazing prog-scene (Träd, Gräs och Stenar) and then bands like The Knife who’re doing great because of their originality and independence. I think the creativity comes from a deep urge to get away from our small towns…

There’s a really nice friendship community of Swedish bands that you guys are part of, which must be enriching in a lot of ways. Do you find there are specific ways in which having a diverse group of talented friends really helps you when it comes to being creative yourself?

We are very fortunate to have such an inspiring and supportive friends (not just musicians), but it is not at all like a collective or any like that, everyone is more into experimenting in their chambers hiding secrets from each other. I love it.

You’re playing the Union Chapel with Loney Dear in September, can we expect any collaborations with your old friend Emil?

If that happens it should be a surprise for all of us!

What have you been listening to recently? Anything new and exciting? Or some old classics?

Since our collaboration with Micachu we’re having a musical crush on her, besides that I can mention El Perro Del Mar and Durruti Column.

You play a lot of interesting instruments. Are you often on the look out for new instruments to experiment with? Have you picked up anything interesting to play recently?

Our collection of instruments are a steady growing backyard of junk and jewellery just waiting for their turn to find their place…

If you could go somewhere far away an exotic in the world and be trained the local music culture on the local instruments, where would you like to go?

I would choose Korean drumming.

What’s been the most satisfying gig you’ve played recently?

Last summer it was a stunning festival outside of Berlin called Goldmund, this summer there was another fantastic festival outside of Berlin. They sure know how to take care of their spare time. Oh, and the drum circle we did in at The Coronet was amazing.

And the worst?

Those shows are meant to be forgotten and buried – but I want to mention Cambridge May Ball as one of the most humiliating show this summer, though I don’t think anyone can agree with us because no-one was there to watch it!

You recently chose to collaborate with Micachu for a BBC Radio 3 Late Junction session. What made you choose Micachu? What was it like re-working some of your material with new musicians?

As mentioned before Micachu and She Shapes is a favorite band, and we’re honoured that they joined us at the session. It was extremely rewarding to play with people other than just the two of us!

What’s the most complimentary thing that someone could say about Wildbirds and Peacedrums music?

That would bring really bad luck for us to tell!

Mariam, your lyrics are a very prominent element of the music. Do you have any main literary influences for them?

I’m inspired by movement, attraction, destiny and faith, all the things I feel, analysing that. Remembering my childhood, all the sadness that can fill a body and how to make it come out, trying to transform it to comfort and strength, maybe just trying to comfort myself.

Me and Andreas sometimes discuss lyrics that we feel different things about, to unite so we aim towards the same core in the song, but there is really no need to try and explain your lyrics to another person; people should feel them. You shouldn’t force explanations onto people, lyrics should be free just like music. Otherwise I would write a book instead.

And finally, is there anything more annoying for you than being compared to The White Stripes?

If we could get one of our songs to be sung by millions of football fans I won’t complain! Imagine drunken men trying to find the pitch on complex melodies with lyrics about lost childhood. That’s beauty!

Congratulations on the new album.  From your own perspective, how would you say it’s different from your previous works?

Well, it’s lucid and straightforward…. not that our other albums haven’t been that, but maybe this one is spoken in a simpler language. Go go smear the poison ivy and Summer make good were quite complicated affairs. Even though it might not seem like it. Hmmmm… to tell you the truth, I don’t know the answer to this question and I’m just pretending. It’s calm, that much I know, but it’s still on different level and layers and dimensions.

How have things changed creatively as people have come in and out of the Múm collective?

We thrive on that, we come from a big group of friends of musicians in Reykjavík where the biggest influence on everyone is each other. This might sound incestuous, but it is a great situation. Everyone is always trying to entertain and surprise each other and this is mostly the base for what happens in our múm musician collective, we all feed of each other and it’s a creatively dynamic relationship.

Múm  always seem to have interesting ideas and projects on the go, what kinds of things have you been up to between Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy and Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know?

We did some radio theater, which we enjoy very much. It’s a dying form of art and we enjoy working in it, because it fits very well to the way we do things. We also recorded some old múm songs with a mixed choir called Balsis in Riga, Latvia. We recorded at the National Radio and it was a magnificent project and now we are pretty much waiting to see what we do with the recordings. We would also like to do this live with a big choir at some point, so we are waiting for the perfect opportunity to do it.

How do you feel the new material is shaping the live experience for fans?

We’ve only played it a couple of times, but it was very heartwarming to feel the songs manifest in front of us. Chills, shakes, delirium tremens and watery eyes.

Are you excited about the way the band’s sound is developing from album to album? Do you find the changes to be an organic process?

It’s like being on a boat on a river, we do a bit of paddling now and then, but mostly we are just excited about where it’s taking us. We try not meddle to much with where the music is going, but it’s definitely going somewhere.

How do you feel about the way things have changed up until now, are any of the changes deliberate?

Like I said before, we don’t struggle to much. All the changes in this group, the changes in the music and the changes in life have all happened without much help from us. Life has a life of it’s own, it seems and there is no point in struggling.

Where do you find inspiration in other mediums? Art, literature? Are there any particular works that influenced the concepts on Sing Along..?

Literature, films, nicely arranged fruit, a grammatically wrong sentence or an old wheelbarrow or just about anything will inspire us, we are very open to most things. Hmmm…. specific things that influence Sing Along? Well, there’s a bit from Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars, there is an estonian sauna, the themes from the life of fish, Childhood by Leo Tolstoy and obviously some confused singalongs.

What experiences have inspired you with your writing recently?

Traveling and meeting new people. Having a baby was a big thing for me personally, it obviously changes everything in a way you cannot explain.

There have been some quite notable musical successes out of Iceland in the UK recently. Do you feel that these are particularly exciting times for Icelandic music?

Yes, the last ….. let’s say 15-20 years have been very exciting in Icelandic music and it just keeps getting better and new bands start up every day. And why not? There is not much else to do.

Who are your favourite Icelandic artists at the moment?

Sin Fang Bous, Hjaltalín, Retro Stefson, Ólöf Arnalds, FM Belfast, Reykjavik!, Gylfi Ægisson & Horse Marley just to name a few. Iceland is full of hot fresh shitake mushrooms.

Where in the world have you had your most memorable moments playing live?

It’s always great to go play somewhere far from your home, seeing something new and I particularly like playing in Asia. We played in Singapore last year and Taiwan before that and it was really an adventure. Playing in unusual settings is always a hoot, we have played a few castles in Italy and Switzerland and we really like those kind of experiences. Last year we played a synagogue in Washington DC and the Brooklyn Masonic temple, which were both very great places, because they were not the usual places to play.

Can you give us five Icelandic words that you associate with beautiful music?

- Vatn, trall, söngl, bergmál and ómur.

Can you tell us what the most beautiful lyric you’ve ever heard is?

“Blue moon, you saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for, you heard me sayin’ a prayer for, someone I really could care for.”

What are the things that you’re most looking forward to for the end of the year?

We will be playing quite a lot concerts, so obviously I am looking forward to that. But most of all I look forward to not knowing what happens next.

Originally published on TheLineofBestFit.com

After taking a lengthy break, Engineers have finally released their new album Three Fact Fader. I met Mark from the band one warm summer afternoon as they were gearing up to support the release by playing their first concerts in two years. Oh btw, the album will blow your useless brain to bits, so go find it.

It’s been a fair old while since you last had a record out. What’ve you been up to?

Well we finished this album or kind of nearly finished it at the end of 2006 early 2007 but then the record company we were with – Echo, stopped being a record company and became just a publishing house. So rather than wait around for another label to come on board we decided just to have a break.

A few labels approached us in the meantime but we just decided to wait until the right one came along, which happened last year, Kscope approached us and it seemed right, the right ethos, the right attitude.

The conversations that we had were more about us as a band as opposed the album as a product. They didn’t even know that there was another album when they approached us, they’d just heard the first album and thought that we would be a good act to have on the label.

So you’ve avoided that feeling that perhaps you could sign to a label, release the album and then find yourselves out in the cold a bit?

Ha, well there’s always a potential for that, I mean the business is what it is these days, so I’m not living under any illusions of being babied for the rest of my life, but…

Sure, but at least Kscope seemed to be interested in the act itself on the whole.

Yeah and also I think what the act means from an artistic perspective instead of just… y’know number crunching.

Sure, sure. So what’s happening on the gigging front?

Well we’ve been rehearsing but we haven’t actually played a gig yet. We’re playing on the 10th of July to follow the release on the 6th.

So that’s the first in how long?

Uh, two years.

Wow. Nervous?

Nah, actually! I play in a few little things here and there so I still play gigs quite often. I think we’re all really, really excited about it. The last few gigs we played were really amazing I think they were the best few gigs we ever played really so I think we’ve all missed that really really terribly so I think getting back to that place is going to be really good fun.

Did you get to play the material on the album?

Yeah that’s what the last few gigs were we just played- I think, we never said but we always felt that this album we’d written with more of a view to it being a much more exciting set of material for us to play live. And when we did play it live that was definitely the case

So what’s the plan after the release? Tour?

Er, well things are starting to come in now so we’re going to decide what we want to do. I mean, I don’t really enjoy just playing the kind of night-on-night tour, it’s good that people want to see you but we prefer to hand-pick the right events as opposed to just being another band on circuit.

You’re not into just hitting venue after venue every night, student unions etc?

Yeah well I mean… it’s not for being snobby or against that or anything, I mean student places are great! They’re always there for the right reasons. It’s just when you’re playing some crappy bar on a Thursday night someplace where nobody’s really that bothered and it’s just another gig on the promoters list…

…Back in the van, down the motorway a bit further. Burger King, next venue.

Yeah. It’s not like we’re saying ‘Oh we want a big tour bus’ or anything like that. It’s just that all of that takes away from… well you might as well be in a shit covers band doing that.

Ha. So, hand pick the events. Make sure you’ve got a crowd that want to be there…

Yeah, make it into an event. Not just like ‘Uhh, here’s another gig…’ y’know?

Yeah I get that, makes each gig more special. Grinding away, playing the same setlist for two weeks to lukewarm crowds can really sap the energy of a band’s performance.

Yeah and then every last thing that you do…I mean all of us in the band, the instrumentalists we’ve have an element of not necessarily improvisation but something different. And when you’re going it every night you just start to fall into a routine of like, I play this here, this is where I go loud…

…let’s not muck about lads, let’s just get it done for another night.

Yeah totally, like jobbing… kind of. Which I suppose musicians have done from time immemorial.. but y’know there has to be a spark.

So you wrote this album Three Fact Fader, in 2005?

Yeah starting writing 2005, started recording early 2006.

So between then and now, you’ve written more stuff.

Yeah there’s lots of new stuff I mean it sounds like a bit of a cliché but there wont be anywhere near the amount of time between albums for the next one. We were kind of a victim of circumstance rather than wanting to be in that situation.

So you’re looking forward to getting that out, too? Doing the gigs and hitting the ground running for the next album too?

Yeah definitely and I think now we have a label that understands what we want to do and they wont give us any pressure to be anything that we’re not then we can just be what we want to be.

So all this would mean that as well as hearing stuff from the new album, audiences are going to get to hear stuff from the next one too?

They certainly will yeah, there’s one that we’re going to play that’s never been heard before.

Suddenly you’re becoming quite prolific!

Yeah…. the last gig we did we did we wrote something specifically for as we always like to add things and make it kind of new and exciting for ourselves. Never get into the habit of just playing the album..

So how long has Engineers been a band?

Erm, we started in 2003, late 2003 and signed to Echo in 2004.

So over this decade have you found the changes in the musical environment in the UK have changed anything with how you write music?

To be honest I’ve never really been all that mindful of UK music when writing. Recently I’ve got into a lot of the interesting US stuff. Such as Beach House and Panda Bear and I don’t think they’ve made their definitive album just yet but Deerhunter.

Ahhh, fantastic band.

Yeah I love that guy, the Atlas Sound album that’s kind’ve a big ‘un for me.

So over the years has the way you write these albums changed?

Yeah I think the first album the mini-album was very… it was quite stylized we had a very firm idea that the music had to relate to visual ideas, we watched a lot of films while making that album it was almost film music for a film that didn’t exist. We wanted to create it in a way that almost architectural and that tied in with the album covers. This album was a lot more sort of throwing paint at a canvass. Every song came through a different way of working, some we’d improvise on different scales, listen back, cut stuff out and work out the track around it we’d take little samples from records and build on that just really having fun basically with the aim of having something that work really well in a full-on live situation, something was just a map of really brilliant experience.

So less calculated, more feel driven.

Yeah and that’s part of the reason we got Ken Thomas to work with us because the first one we’d been quite sort of wrapped up in the details of music making, so in a lot of ways with the early stuff we were more the creators, more taking the overview than being ‘in there’ so there was a little bit of a detachment but we wanted more of ourselves to come out and for it to be more performance based.

So that must be a really helpful thing then because if you’re a band initially when you start out and you have to be the self-critic it can stifle the creativity a bit but if you allow yourself just to go right in and let someone else from the outside hold the compass….

Yeah and you have to trust that person completely and we met John Leckie who got on famously with but we found that there was a little bit too much… we had a little too much in common with our Manchester, Northern music experiences. So working with Ken we found him to really be a kind of neutral presence at the studio and we felt that we would slot in there and just help us.

Fresh ears.

Yeah and a fresh personality too. And someone who understood the different levels on which we wanted to present the album.

What kind of influences do you have? Jazz?

Yeah I think Jazz is what took me away from a really classic approach to songwriting of just four chords, to the chorus and I think that’s where the Engineers became more about a subtle progression as opposed to a A, B, A B kind of songwriting. I mean Jazz for me is a continuation of that.

I mean anything goes as long as it’s got the right feeling.

Engineers on MySpace

Orignally published on thelineofbestfit.com

Hey guys, did you enjoy last night?

Yeah!

So you were playing like a telephone theramin thing how did you come up with that?

Ben: I was walking down the street talking do to a friend on the phone and it was one of those weird moments were talking without realizing that were were walkig on the same street. So I run into the guy, we’re still on the phone and he says ‘Oh hey, look at this’, takes the phones and puts them against each other and they make this sound. It actually sounds different over here because of the mobile phone networks.

I also heard that you guys had an organ duel at one point…

Jeff: Hahaha, that’s like the only time that’s going to happen! What happened was… it was our first trip over to Europe, we needed to get an organ to play so we ordered a second hand, but then we also decided to get a new one just in case the second one didn’t work. But it turns out that they both worked so we thought, hey we’ve got two…

Why not use them?

Jeff: One was ordered from a historical organ store and another was from ebay for £26! The cheap one was completely out of tune and Ben went in the night before the gig and tuned it up.

Uh-huh, how long did that take you?

Jeff: Ben got sick afterwards, he came down with like the Black Lung… because this organ was like 100 years old.
Ben: There was dust in the bellows. Right? And I opened up and there was just all this…

Dust inside! Of course!

Man, I was sick for weeks after that.

Ohh, man! So you caught a disease from an Organ.

I love doing it though, I mean it’s just so beautiful, the workings and inside, the craftsmanship.

Breakfast arrives, including sausages.

Ben: Do people say sausages for mike checks over here?

Uh, I think they say ‘Check Check – One, Two..’

Sausages is good. Can you think of a word you could say that would test all aspects of the sound?

Erm.. solipsist? Does that work?

Ben: … Yes!

Jeff: Solipsist?

Ben: Solipsist, Solipsist. You know why that’s good, it’s because it has all of esses. And it has the aar, Saarlipsist.

Jeff: Solipsist…

Ben: And it ends with a t so you can hear the decay of the reverb. And that was just right off the top of your head!

Yep. There ya go. Can I patent that?

Jocie: Haha!

Let’s talk about your music, like the lyrics to Charlie Darwin.

Okay.

To me it sounds… well quite horribly depressing, lyrically, really. Was that the intention? Ben: Well I guess it depends on your perspective.

Well, it was a quite a literal interpretation.

Ben: There’s just not a lot of… anchors out there you know, you’re brought up and you’re taught certain very specific things or probably most people are and when you’re given some of education you’re taught to relate to your community in a certain way… Essentially our knowledge is ideas that continue to get passed down, the strong survive, it kinda makes it impossible to believe in a framework like that.

You think if you fully accept that scientific and logical outlook on the world then everything else just becomes theory and essentially meaningless?

Ben: Well it’s like our morality is a product of the same survival of the fittest of ideas and passed down and whatever institution propagate whatever ideas, the strong survive. Like the Church of England has some brilliant missionary wing and the ethic is to spread their religion into different parts of the empire that they are expanding into, that’s a lot like a natural reproductive instinct.

Yeah, I think that the urge to spread your ideas is many ways probably a part of that instinct to make copies of yourself.

Ben: So its uh, I mean that’s all well and good but I think it puts in perspective things like relationships that you were taught to have.

So would you say that there’s this tide, like the with lyrics about ‘the formless waters’ that are fighting to come in, that they represent this almost irresistible retreat to nihilism?

Ben: I think that what’s most beautiful is people’s efforts to hold onto something despite that nihilism, you know we live in the face of that every day and decide to do things. Maybe it’s a beautiful and pervasive failure at all moments but it’s so beautiful to see humans struggling against that.

Despite that fact that it’s hopeless.

Yes! You get it!

Wow…

No, I think that’s the great stuff of life, you know the struggle despite that.

So I was kinda right, it was kinda depressing, but there’s an uplifting message in there also.

I don’t know!

Haha, okay! So where else in Europe have you been?

Uhhh, Paris, Amsterdam, we’re about to play four shows in Germany a show in Italy, Vienna.

So what’s a Paris crowd been like?

Knowing laughter from Jocie
Ben: Uh, I didn’t really like playing in Paris, I found it a little bit silly playing music that’s very heavy on the lyrics to a crowd that largely didn’t understand them.

Oh right, okay.

I mean I think that something comes across anyway., the thrust of it. But it still it felt a bit silly, it was the first time that we had played to an audience that really didn’t have much English or at least not ‘singer English’ maybe.

I see what you mean so you think that some of might have been going over a lot of heads maybe?

Perhaps, I don’t know.

The French like you to speak French too, but fair enough. In Holland I suppose they were different because of the level of English.

Jeff: It’s wonderful!

So you feel maybe there people were slightly more engaged.

Jeff: Oh yeah absolutely. Amsterdam is pretty chill. And the people they were right there, they knew what was going on.

Ben: Paris was also the only the support show we did, we supported My Latest Novel.

So how do you feel the live show differs from the experience on record?

Ben: you mean to see us dancing around like monkeys? You get to see us running around trying to figure out which song we’re supposed to be playing. Last night we abandoned our setlist and we also changed our stage plan so we were scrambling around…
I like that. Organized chaos. I think people like to see a band slightly flustered sometimes, you get something unique.

Jeff: We’re definitely not uh.. polished live.

I’m good with that. Sometimes you see these amazing, polished sets played by a band bored out of their trees. They do an encore. Leave. I like… I like to see the FEAR in a band’s eyes sometimes. Like they’re thinking “I really don’t know how this is going to go.”

Jeff: Someone came up to us before the show and instead of saying something like “I can’t wait for your performance” she said “Well… I hope it goes well!” y’know, like “It’d be really great if it did!” and I’m thinking “I do too!”. I loved that uncertainly in her voice! 
Ben: I think that’s really insightful, like that idea that you want to see the fear in a bands eyes, that’s such a magnetic thing to be aware of, that the performer’s a little scared onstage. It’s like “Oh god, what’s going to happen”. And that tension creates such a great platform for the show.

You don’t want to just hear the album-LIVE! Do you?
Yeah but I think that goes both ways, I mean sometimes people say “Yeah it was a great gig sounded just like the record!” It’s just a matter of taste.

Well that’s true, but personally, it’s great if songs sounds lovely when they’re being played but I’m also interested in performance. Someone running around like crazy…
I think a lot of the time people don’t know why they like a live show, I guess, I dunno. But good theories!

So let’s talk about the recording of the album, how did you go about getting the songs down from the live environment onto a record?

Yeah, we took a ten day, twenty-four-seven sort of approach. The previous record we had done over the period of about a year and a half just gradually in our apartment where Jeff and I lived. We didn’t want to get into that situation again and stretch something out and pick everything apart. We wanted to have something more live and also something we could do, let it be in that little window and then move on with.
So we got a producer, he was a student in this great music production program, all of his classmates had like one really nice mike as the start of their home studio and they were all on winter break so all of them fly home to L.A. or wherever music producers come from.
So he gathers everyone’s best piece of equipment and so we had this incredible amount of stuff and we set up this home-style studio and just killed ourselves for ten days and then kinda put it away.
So it was intense.

There was no sort of fiddling around, it was just “Let’s get these done and get it recorded”.

Jeff: Yeah
Ben: And we had been working on those songs for a very long time working out the arrangements but in those ten days we learned so much about the songs by not having them not go well. Y’know we would do like twenty takes of different songs, just grind through them until an idea came and we were like “this isn’t working, so what if we do this?” and then get up and switch and do another twenty takes. Charlie Darwin was the one-hundred take wonder, we call it.
We did about a hundred takes of Charlie Darwin with different arrangements, from twee kinda sounding with a full on, kinda poppy drumbeat to the eventual chamber-style choral that it ended up being…
So all of the songs completely surprised us and that might not have happened if we had done it in the other way because we would just be trying to own them all in overdubbing but it had this almost athletic quality, like it was an athletic triumph to be able to get through these takes and do the record in ten days, it was like a pressure cooker, y’know?
And we travelled away from our homes there was quite a bit of focus because we just had out recording gear and our instruments and we knew we had to make an album. So verses the first way made our album, which was slowly, every day among the regular chaos of every day life. But we said we were going to separate ourselves, sleep if we can and play take after take after take and at as we said before there’s a … on the record there’s the intensity of the experience.

So once you’d re-arranged these songs for the album did that then inform the live performance?

Ben: We even added a fourth member for some of the release shows in the US, (the self-release shows) we added a drummer to be able to realize some of the studio sounds during the kick-off and uh, for personal reasons that didn’t last too long. So then we were left with three of us trying to play these songs and a lot of other songs that we’ve added too. So now you get to see three people really trying to do the work of four, so there’s always holes, there’s always a certain sparseness. It’s almost a unnerving at first because you’re wondering ‘Why is there no bass on this song?’

Jeff: Yeah there’s space. Big space.

Ben: Of course, but there’s only three of us so there’s no bass! So you get to hear the three of us doing as much as we can but not more than that.

‘Oh My God, Charlie Darwin’ by The Low Anthem is out now on Bella Union Records.

This year, Bella Union showcase an incredible lineup of Bella and non-Bella bands on a comparatively tiny bandstand, bobbing gently on the ocean of corporate sponsor tents and within earshot of the intermittent ‘performances’ from the nearby UGG boots fashion show installation. (Yes, really. There’s ripe for parody and then there’s just rotten.)

Jesca Hoope

Saturday 4th July

Jesca Hoop opens proceedings on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. With her gently sculpted soft-as-steam voice she floats out a series of beautiful, slightly baroque ballads, battling bravely against the thunderous, pounding bullshit that’s now thumping out of the dance tent at an unusually high volume. She strikes up a rapport with the crowd and initiates cute banter with groups sat on the grass nearby. “This is nothing!” she says, in reference to thudding beat that threatens to interrupt her set. “I’ve played in much crazier environments than this!”. She knows Tom Waits too. What’s not to like?

Chimes & Bells

Next comes a real treat. The sun is still beating down when Chimes and Bells take the stage. Soon they’ll be packing out London venues but this afternoon they’re turning faces in Hyde park from bemused to enraptured with their masterfully melodramatic, dreamy chamber-indie. They’re utterly fantastic; churning out a rich, sultry performance – deep and involved. The irresistible rhythmic climax of ‘Into Pieces of Wood’ has to be one of the highlights of the entire festival. Exciting is barely the word for this Danish quartet. Utterly brilliant.

Beth Jeans Houghton

The essex boys and indie-cindys have been downing overpriced cider for a few hours by the time Beth Jeans Houghton’s set gets underway but she makes short work of winning over elements of the beery crowd. On good form and in sufficiently eccentric attire she works through her set of quirky folk until tragedy strikes and a hole is punctured in the drummers kick drum (which is actually a suitcase). “It’s me mum’s, she’ll murder uz!” exclaims the drummer. It’s okay, he turns it around to use the unpunctured side and the set is able to finish undisrupted.

Banjo Or Freakout

Time for TLOBF favorite Banjo or Freakout. Allessio has been hanging out for most of the day looking all Italian and cool and the time has come for him to take to the stage and build some epic walls of post-post-something-or-other. He crafts lush folds of gorgeous sound out into hazy afternoon. It’s definitely a dynamic better suited to a sweaty club, but it still works wonderfully.

Fanfarlo

Fanfarlo are truly incredible. A few shirtless, lagered up idiots take up position in front of the stage with every intention of taking the piss, but after waving their arms sarcastically for a few seconds even they are taken in, despite themselves. Then they start fucking around and accidentally kick a girl in the head. Never mind, lads, it was good while it lasted, eh? Meanwhile, Fanfarlo produce a fulsome, romantic cascade of beautiful melodies, providing a perfect end to a day of fantastic music.

The Low Anthem

Sunday 5th July

Another gorgeous day in Hyde park opens with The Low Anthem softly etching their existential lullaby Oh My God, Charlie Darwin into the warm summer air, as sweet and delicate as a crystal of sugar. It’s a perfect start until the power goes out. Eventually, things are put right but only in time for trio to play a short two songs, Ben Knox Miller simultaneously showing of his drumming ability and bluesman’s voice while Jeff Prystowsky jams on the double bass.

My Latest Novel

My Latest Novel are mercifully relatively untroubled by technical problems and kick out a triumphant volley of soft-edged post rock, dramatically melodic and wonderfully crafted. Audience reaction ranges from highly enthusiastic to vaguely bemused. You can’t please everyone.

In the interests of fairness (and to avoid blind snobbishness) it’s worth pointing out that a decent number of Wireless attendees had the open mindedness to sit and explore acts such as My Latest Novel, listening and clapping politely even if they didn’t find them to be their particular cup of tea. However, the Wireless festival at large continues to exist as an embodiment of this country’s landfill culture, precipitated by artificial landfill cultural movements, themselves generated and driven by cynical corporate marketeering rather than any true appreciation for artistry. Less a festival, more a circus.

Peter Broderick

Danish composer/soloist Peter Broderick takes to the Bella stage next with his piano, guitar, violin and looper pedal and makes instant fans layering up melodies and vocals, hopping down into the crowd and playing violin on his knees, stacking up heaps of noise, swirling sharp-edged refrains and bittersweet vocal hooks. His set is sadly ended for him a song early when …the power dies again.

St Vincent

Power restored and the with the day drawing to a close St Vincent plays out this festival of the most exciting prospects in indie music for the next six months with a suitably electric set of intelligent and progressive indie rock songs. Highlights include ‘Marry Me’ and ‘Marrow’, augmented by the full band set-up they sparkle and inspire, Annie Clark’s performance is passionate and effortlessly cool. St Vincent is hyped a lot at the moment, but this is why.

Another year at Wireless draws to a close for Bella Union. A dream line-up in the midst of a of a corporate landfill nightmare. A who’s who of people to see live when you get the chance.

Apparently Kanye West played too.

All photographs by Anika Mottershaw

Originally published on TheLineofBestFit.com

Yo La Tengo have an album called Popular Songs out in September.  I’ve listened to it and it sounds bloody fantastic. The veteran trio were recently in town to play at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and I caught them before they flew home, to talk about playing in the UK, keeping it fresh and popular songs.

Hey guys! Did you enjoy last night?

Georgia: Yeah it was kinda strange but that’s part of the deal I guess, you never know what it’s going to be like…

I heard the acoustics were pretty strange…

Ira: Yeah it was fine while we were playing, it was just the interactive portion of the program that was an unexpected challenge.

You just couldn’t hear the questions?

Ira: Yeah

Georgia: I don’t know if you were there but we had a lot of people ask us questions so and sometimes when we do this people will be raise their hand and it’s much easier but like all corners of the room were yelling stuff back! And there were so many accents!

Ha… so a Mancunian stands up and it’s like ‘…. One more time?’

James: We’ve been doing this sort of show all around Europe and I love that once we finally get to the English speaking cities, still nobody understands a word that anybody says.

Don’t worry, I’m the same. Anybody North of London and it’s “HELLO!? Would you like some shortbread?”

Hahaha…

Okay, so let’s talk about the new album, shall we?

Yes

When I heard that it was called Popular Songs I had a few of my own thoughts, but I’d like to hear a bit about why you chose that title.

Ira: I think we’re all more interested in your thoughts!

Haha, okay.

I think that seriously, the idea is to… give it a title that has at least one meaning for us but is open to other meanings..

Well I thought that at first it was a nod to the fact that you felt you’d written an album that was more accessible or more ‘poppy’. But then when I heard it I changed my mind, I thought maybe you were making a point about how you’ve always been a popular band, critically and with a dedicated fanbase, but never really in a mainstream sense and it was an ironic comment in that way…

James: See? It worked! That’s a very nice interpretation.

Ira: But I don’t think that it’s at all what we were thinking! But I think that’s the mark of a good title, that there are a lot of things that you can read into it. You know, certain songs, certain groups, you hear certain songs, you hear them once and you think  “Everything  I will ever know about that song or that group I know instantly” whereas other things kinda change over time and those are the things that you hear differently and I think we’re drawn more towards.. that.

It’s important to have different dimensions to your work.

Georgia: Plus there also that it’s a y’know a array of different kinds of songs- short poppy songs and the very long pieces, y’know they’re all music to us I guess.

So are you guys coming back to the UK later in the year then?

Ira: Yeah we have three shows, we have shows in Manchester, Glasgow, London in November.

No UK festivals this year then?
No, no…

So what does it feel like to still be writing albums and doing all of this touring and stuff, exactly the same as when you started, or have things changed creatively or in any other ways?
Georgia: I think as you’d expect, y’know we’ve been doing this for quite a long time now this would be our twenty-fifth year, apparently or so we keep getting told!

Wow. I’m twenty-three years old.

Gerogia: Hahaha really? I think it’s just kind of a natural progression, things have changed somewhat, James joined the band, I don’t know fifteen years ago!

Ira: I think that things… things are not exactly the same but I think the appeal of things like last night’s show is to keep pushing yourself into scenarios where you’re not necessarily at your most comfortable. I think that the fact that we’re not terrified to get onstage the way we were when we started is mostly a good thing, but on the other hand that is mostly a pleasant memory, that feeling of like “what’s going to happen?” and so to possibly be receptive to settings in which you remain in touch with that part of you I think is definitely something that is very attractive to all of us.

Stay outside of that comfort zone so that you can keep it a little bit scary sometimes?

Ira: At least not to be afraid of that.

James: I mean like, the show we did last night is it’s, mostly public speaking which is most people’s fears when you’re growing up, being afraid to be up there standing in front of a crowd and y’know for all the times we’d played for years and years before we did that kind of show y’know you would think to yourself “Oh I get up in front of people all the time!” but it’s not like you would talk and interact with them and now all of a sudden just going face to face with them, with people and talking to them it’s… it’s still a little scary, its amazing to think “oh am I getting used to this” and you are, it’s a whole new exciting way to play.

Ira: Well as we discovered last night, sorry to interrupt you there James, but something that supposedly puts you at ease when you’re public speaking is to imagine the audience naked and then came one of the questions in which he basically told us about his wife or girlfriend being naked… it turned out not to help…

Ha!

James: She really didn’t seem that pleased.

I can understand how the transformation from the ‘crowd’ as an entity to y’know upwards of five hundred individuals is scary.
Ira: We’ve never been really much of a “Hello, Cleveland!” kinda group. More like “Hello, G-107!”

Hahaha… so how in general are British crowds for you guys?

Georgia: I don’t know if we can generalize… It depends on what kind of venue we’re playing, sometimes like last night it can be very civilized-well… they weren’t all so civilized! When it’s a seated event like that I sort of feel like things are going to be a little more reserved rather than if you’re in a club with everyone getting drunk but I don’t think we get a general reaction from British crowds.

There are stereotypes from town to town on what crowds are supposed to be like I guess, but not something you’ve found?

Ira: No well y’know we don’t really ever do the extensive UK touring, like I said we’ve got the three shows in November, Glasgow,  Manchester, London. I mean we’ve had middling shows in Cardiff and great shows in Brighton, it all just depends.

Are there any bands that you guys are excited about at the moment? Anyone British while you’ve been here?

Ira: No. I haven’t heard anything, y’know especially on a trip like this where you live in your own little bubble I will say that … I was going to say less and less but it’s been this way for a long time- … current bands, they occasionally make their way past the fences that I’ve set up, I focus almost entirely on old music. I’ll never hear everything and I find as the years go by I’m a much more casual listener than I was when I was younger. I was obsessive enough when I was younger but being more casual than that can still be listening to a lot of music but it’s not such a voracious way as when I was younger.

As time goes by you realize that you’re not actually going to get to listen to everything ever and that maybe you should be more selective, right?

Georgia: And never listen to anything!

James: What’s the point?
Heheh, I wasn’t at the gig last night, did you play anything from the new album?

Georgia: We played – well since we’ve been over here we’ve been playing these things we call the ‘freewheeling shows’ and it’s sort of semi-acoustic, Ira plays bass and guitar, James plays bass and I have like a snare and a floor-tom so it’s very sort of informal almost like if you were in a record store or something. But we don’t have a setlist and we just er, we just come out and play a couple of songs and then we ask the audience to just ask us questions and then a topic we get to might remind us of a song or an artist that we’ve covered, so it’s just very loose and casual.

That sounds really nice.

Georgia: Yeah it can be really fun and y’know sometimes it’s a little crazy or there’s a lull when people are tired of asking questions! Sometimes people ask “Can you play this?” and that’s not quite the idea!

Ira: We do at some points have two people speaking, in a rare moment when we could hear clearly last night, simultaneously someone on one side of the room said “what’s your favourite velvet underground song to play” and someone on the other side of the room said “what’s your favourite Bob Dylan song?” so we ended up just combining that into a Velvet Underground song that they did in the style of Bob Dylan and it was like “Oh okay we’ll play that one.” Because we happened to know it. So y’know the set has no pre planned shape to it, we just allow the evening to develop.

That’s great, it’s like taking the idea of live performance to the nth degree…

James: We’re tryin’!

Georgia: Yeah, haha!

Well obviously people don’t want to just see a band go through the motions or just do a showcase for whatever album is coming out next, so to interact in that way is great. When you come back and do these gigs in Glasgow etcetera  people will be able to compare the different experiences they’ve had…

Ira: Well you know that has actually become a frustrating aspect to playing live in the internet age, you might do a cool cover song or rearrange one of your songs in an interesting way and after the first show it’s like…

Youtube!

Yeah, you really have to keep coming back with something each time! And even now you kind of have a feel for, I mean it’s not like we know exactly how these shows are being discussed but sometimes you just get this feel like “Really? This song’s been requested like, three nights out of four? That’s weird.”

Georgia: Yeah

Ira: And maybe it’s because they saw it or heard about it two nights ago and they think “Oh yeah I’d like to hear that too!” – Well… Thaaat’s not the idea! Heheh, we’re supposed to be doing different shows!

There is a huge community of gig –goers who like to share their experiences online, in the UK this thing just launched called Songkick and it’s solely for people to track and discuss shows they’ve been to, upload photographs, so it’s not surprising you get that.

Ira: Yeah I mean what we did last night was us at our absolute loosest. Under normal circumstances, anywhere shy a festival- well actually I take that back we’ve done festivals that way too. Well we will I think try to keep the illusion that there’s not eight people out there with microphones or things that are going to go on youtube, just try to allow things to y’know happen.

I mean it’s one of the things I’ve always loved, you make a record and try to make it sound one way and then live it’s like well if that didn’t work we’ll try something different tomorrow. And it is a little harder to maintain that with today’s attitude where everything is documented and archived.

Yeah sure, but I think audiences do appreciate it so much more, especially at festivals where you’re seeing maybe five or six bands, people remember the moments of… spontaneity.

Georgia: Well you would think! Heheheh, you would hope!

But we did two songs from the record I think, got those two out.

Ira: We had about half of the record ready to play in that format. Didn’t sound at all like the record, but if we did choose to we had a couple of things.

Were there things you were trying to get across on the recording of Popular Songs?

Ira: Not consciously. I mean the way we work is to just start playing and try to listen to what we’re doing, see if we like it and if we do we try to react to it. But we don’t ever go in with a concept.

I mean, the record we made earlier this year under the name Condo Fucks – That record was pretty conceptual, y’know it’s a bunch of covers in the crappy, garage-rock style but even that wasn’t a really concept either, we did plan it to do for a show but the fact that it came out as a record was almost accidental. There were like four different things that happened and before we knew it we were putting it out. So even something as clearly conceptual as that, it wasn’t like “Hey lets back to that trashy rock, we love that music let’s make a record that way” even that wasn’t how that record came about.

So it’s almost in the same way that you approach live performance, and I hate to use this word, but it’s an organic way of making things happen.

Ira: I don’t think we mind the word organic as much as you do.

Hahaha, okay then. The word organic is a pretty overused word in the British vocabulary.

James: Alright, we just think more of food.

Delicious vegetables.

James: Right.

Ira: And we spell it without the ‘u’.

Ourganic?

Georgia: heh heh heh!

James: I think that the Popular Songs record has um, I think that once you see all of the artwork that’s in the package and with the title with all of these that happened after the fact, you know we wrote the music, came up with the title, found this artwork and it all connected together, yet it was never intentional but I think certainly you could come up with several concepts but we didn’t have that when we started.
I think that’s almost always the way when creating things though – who can really plan and create a perfect web of interconnecting concepts like that, really?
Ira: Yeah I’m always a little dubious when I read about things like that in interviews and things. Also, I started listening to music … well before your birth.. and the British bands of the 1960’s, their American records  were different to their British records. So those records that were just this talisman on my youth they were created by some guy in an office.

I did not know that. They they re-recorded them?

They’re not re-recorded, but what happens is like… The Beatles – there’s an English album called The Beatles For Sale there’s another one, With The Beatles, those are fourteen song records. For all I know the Beatles didn’t put those together either, but those records don’t exist in the US, they come out with songs in different orders, different titles and even with records like Rubber Soul and Revolver that The Beatles did put together, clearly, those records came out in a different form in the US.

So you know, one hand that feels sort of frustrating, wanting to hear it they way it was meant to be heard, but on the other hand it’s interesting that these connections that you’re drawing are completely accidental like “I wonder why John Lennon had so few songs on Revolver!” Well the answer is because some bonehead at Capital Records dropped three of his songs from the real record!

Hahaha! And yet at the same time you listened to those songs and they connected with you..

Georgia: Right yeah, yeah, yeah and in your own imagination you come up with these elaborate schemes about why this happened and…

James: It’s like one of those cliché dreams where you find new rooms in your house, it’s “what!? There’s these Beatles songs that I haven’t heard?”

But yeah, it’s a good way to go about things, let the music run the show both live and on the record without too much laborious intellectual intervention..

Ira: Well you know it’s what works for us anyway … not to try to steer it too much just try to recognise what’s working.

You know someone came up to us in Amsterdam this guy who makes these instruments based on non-western scales and he was asking like ‘is there something,  a sound you’ve been going for that you haven’t been able to get’ and I just have to answer ‘no’ because I just don’t think of it that way. You make a sound and then think ‘Oh well that was interesting, I could use that’ – it’s like listening to what’s happening rather than conceptualizing what you want before.

Originally published on TheLineofBestFit.com

My friend teaches in Korea. He’s a writer too. I lived with him. He beat me at Uni but I don’t mind because he’s pretty good at writing. Here’s a story of his.

My top searches are showing that while an encouraging amount of people are actually out there searching google for my blog, there are still a number of people who are mostly interested in pictures of tits.

To log on to the internet in search of boobs and somehow end up at my blog must be the online equivalent of walking into in an ice-cream parlour and somehow leaving with a bowl of human shit. I’m not sure how these people are even doing it.

“the less permanent,  tlp marketing,  less permanent blog,  thelesspermanent,  nipples photographs, big juicy knockers”

I swear, one day I’m going to draw something without totally fucking it up. I sketched this out quickly because I wanted to draw a collection of my favorite animals together with my favorite sections of poetry. I did this and then destroyed it with ink. Liz coloured it. I’ll try again later.

Seriously. Fucking hell.

Want one?

Cover by Darren

I’m doing a reading next week and since I’ve slipped this into the latest issue of Art and Things I think I might read this. Illustration by Shiv.

Ten months ago, as spring broke, the four of us went away to the seaside. Siofra’s eyes had been glassed over by grief for weeks, an uncharacteristic silence descended upon her like a blanket of snow. She spent the compassionate leave granted to her by her job sat on the worn living room sofa, thumbing through paperback novels (sticking exclusively to ones she’d already read) and filling the ashtray with half-smoked, laboriously hand-rolled cigarettes.

Bryan and I would return home from work to find her in her usual spot, day after day. Her father had finally succumbed to his cancer, her mother had refused the short flight from Geneva, where she lived happily with her new family, to attend the funeral. Siofra’s mother did not like to acknowledge the shards of her past-life, her now-dead ex-husband and grown-up, lesbian daughter were a mess she had tidied behind four hundred and sixty-five miles of land and sea. Days after Siofra learned via a phone call from the hospital that she had missed those crucial moments of passing, as one life that had created hers evaporated, a letter arrived in a familiar crisp, elegant hand. Full of graceful, formal condolences, at it’s crux was a firm and curt message- ‘I’m sure you’ll understand my unwillingness to attend the service, after all that’s happened.’ she wrote. She enclosed a cheque for two-thousand pounds “to help with any funeral expenses that might arise”. Siofra understood, all too well. After her father was safely tucked into the earth she vowed (tearlessly) never to think lovingly of her mother again, and in the space of a month, at the age of twenty-four, she had lost both parents for good.

None of us had seen her cry yet. I began to feel as distant from her life as I did my own. Siofra was frozen in ice. All of the elements over which I had no control were wrapping around me. Soon I would be trapped. I could feel things beginning to turn dark.

Someone else, to my own good fortune, also felt shadows lengthening as Siofra shrank away. To Laura, Siofra had always been the older, bolder, wiser sister that she had badly missed growing up. Until the light inside her began to flicker, this was a role that Siofra had accepted gladly. It was Laura that suggested that she, Siofra, Bryan and I leave the city for a few days to “Take a break. Together.” I was relieved.

And so we took Laura’s decrepit, rusting Citroën to the road, it carried us reluctantly to the blustery coast, we stopped in a depressed and lonely town, wet and salty with rows of severe, mournful looking buildings that looked like they were waiting for the sea to come and claim them once and for all. A strong, cold wind blew and Christmas lights still hung limply from the lampposts, shimmering half-heartedly in the wintery spray. We rented rooms in cramped bed and breakfast with dark carpets and musty pillows.

It was impossible to say that Siofra wasn’t beautiful. She was in perfect balance. Her handsome father’s dark hair and light eyes, her mother’s elegant bones and olive skin. Beauty like hers seemed to be the perfect excuse for anything, That’s more or less why imagination creates such contrasts in the world and why the mind allows it. Beauty was invented so that we’d have a light to crawl towards. Within my own thoughts I couldn’t look away from it. Without Siofra there was darkness. It’s true to say that I loved her. Against all reason, I found it impossible not to. As pointless as it seemed, my love for Siofra could at times allow her to eclipse the universe.

Indeed, for a variety of reasons, each of us needed Siofra back, lest we be plunged into eternal blackness.

We swam in the icy sea at a point where it crashed playfully onto a shingle beach. We whooped and cheered as wave after freezing wave crashed over us. We bobbed up and down in the surf telling jokes and laughing loudly. Laura sat on my shoulders, Siofra on Bryans and the two contested to push each other into the water. Her soaked t-shirt clung to Siofra’s belly and her chest, the wet fabric revealed her belly button, her nipples. She laughed and screamed as she fought to keep her balance. I couldn’t look away.

The bed and breakfast had a general-purpose living room. We were the only guests and that night we played cards and worked through a bottle of whisky. Eventually Laura fell asleep in Siofra’s arms. I noted with shame a pang of jealously shoot through me. I blamed the alcohol. After Siofra dosed off, I lost repeatedly to Bryan at Palace and had to pay him ten pounds.

The next day we climbed a steep hill in the heart of the town and stopped for breakfast in a café with a large, grubby window and a view of the whole area, of the cobbled streets and clusters of huddled houses and shops, the outlying scrublands and out to sea. We drank tea from stained mugs and ate omelettes and toast. Laura shared stories about various misadventures Siofra and Laura had shared, including one in which Siofra’s father made a brief appearance. The mention of his name hung in the air, dampening the conversation. Eventually Bryan proposed a toast with a chipped purple mug.

“To Siofra’s Father.” He said.

We all took a hearty gulp of lukewarm tea, while Siofra merely wet her lips. A half-smile froze on her face and she gazed out of the window for a long time.

That evening, the others went for a walk along the beach while I, by now tired of the damp air and cold wind opted to stay in the room and read. I lay on my back on one of the too-soft mattresses and sipped from a bottle of lucozade for an hour, not really concentrating and vaguely considering a nap. A pack of the squawking gulls that harassed the town had amassed outside of the window. From the bed I could watch them flapping back and forth. Someone knocked on the door. I got up to answer. It was Siofra.

“Hi, where are the others?” was the first thing I thought to say.

“I left them at the beach.” She said. “Just fancied the walk back alone.”

“Okay.”

“I was going to walk into town, see if I can find a pub. Want to come?” She asked.

We headed out into the twilight. The weather had finally started to lighten up, the air smelled fresh. We found a pub atop the central hill, near the café we had eaten in the day before, a concrete pub garden with potted plants and benches benefited from the same view we’d enjoyed earlier. We sat alone outside and nursed a pint of ale each. She’d allowed her hair to form natural curls, the wind tossed and played with it as she stared out towards the sea.

From somewhere I found the courage to ask what everyone had wanted to for weeks.

“How are you feeling about your dad?” I said. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t look at me.

“Okay.” She said.

There was a minute or more of silence.

“My mum doesn’t give a shit. She hated him. I think she might hate me, too. Or at least she would, if she was allowed…”

I said nothing.

“I mean, forty minutes in a plane. Just to hold her daughter’s hand while she buries her dad… that’s… what’s so impossible…”

Her voice cracked. She continued. Hot tears started to tumble down her cheeks. Her beautiful cheeks.

“Everything’s about her. I swear she thinks I’m gay to hurt her or something, like everything I do is just supposed to be revenge. She blames the break-up of the family. She blamed Dad. She’s just…”

“I know…” I said. I didn’t know.

“And Dad. Dad was… an idiot!” she laughed and sobbed at the same time.

“He didn’t want a wife and kid. He just sort of ended up with us… My being here. It was all a fuck up in the end. And now he’s gone and I’m left. I’m fucking left here.” The last words seem to take her strength. Her face crumpled, her shoulders shuddered as she wept.

I moved to the other side of the table and put an arm around her. She broke away and looked at me, straight into my face with questioning eyes.

“Do you ever get the feeling that nobody ever, ever really loved you?” She said. My heart broke. I put an arm around her again and pulled her in, towards me.

“I love you.” I said. The words dropped out of my mouth as if they were made from cement.

“Laura loves you.” I added.

“We need you. Your friends. You’re the light of lives.”

She buried her face deeper into my chest and wrapped her arms around my waist. She heaved, wet, heavy breaths through the fabric of my t-shirt. She cried heartily. I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me.

She left a wet patch on my t-shirt that looked like a bear.

* * *

The next morning we left. I woke up later than everyone else and by the time I had showered they had all gone to collect the car. I checked the room and headed downstairs to check us out.

I handed the room key back to the old woman behind the desk, hoisted my bag over my shoulder and headed into the street. Bryan had the car running, Siofra stood on the pavement smoking a cigarette. She smiled at me, a broad, deep smile that forced breath into my lungs. She held her arms out for a hug. As I embraced her she turned her mouth to my ear.

“I love you too” She said.

I let her go. She smiled again, brushed her knuckles against my chest and put her hand on my arm. “Thanks for last night.” She said. Then she turned away and got in the car.

I drove all the way home. Siofra slept soundly on the passenger seat among her new family.

Me v Joe from Black Lips:

Alright, what brings you to England?
Obligation

Hahaha!
Contractual Obligation. No no no! Ha, we’ve been trying to focus on the UK. Because a long time ago we, uh, the very first time we came over to Europe was like 2003 or 04… it was like an underground tour and everything was going decently enough over there but as soon as we came to the UK for a week it bankrupt our tour, we were getting like £15 a show and like no food, no accommodation, no anything and we got really discouraged by that and gave up on the UK for a very long time. Until recently, the past two years, I guess about two years ago we started coming back, giving it another chance and ATC [management] are helping out with co-ordinating everything so now yeah we’re back.

Things are different now that you have a label and management to pay for shit now?
They are.  I mean we’re still broke! But at least people come to the shows.

And you have guitars that work and stuff now…
Yeah yeah, that always helps too!

So do you have things you like to do when you’re here?
Erm, we don’t always have a huge amount of free time when we come here but it’s always fun to hang out in East London, Shoreditch and Old Street over there, that’s always a lot of fun. Lots of pretty girls to look at and talk to, always a party going. It’s always a pleasure to go to Glasgow, great people, always a rager, heavy night when we’re there. I usually leave hungover! I wish I had more time to stick around and check out museums and things but y’know we’re usually pretty busy while we here, it’s always pretty intense.

So you’re doing gigs at the moment…
Oh we have about four weeks coming up, two weeks are in the UK plus one show in Ireland and then to the continent. We used to hit areas around the Mediterranean a lot more which I guess we all enjoyed because y’know, great food, awesome people who love to party and the weather is beautiful most of the time but we haven’t had much of a chance to do that as of recently although we are going to play Primevera in Spain which is going to be fun we did that about two years ago and we did Benicassim, we had to fly to Spain do Benicassim and then fly straight to Russia, which was awesome because it was kind of a dream for me and I guess we got in there at just the right time before the economic collapse because I wouldn’t recommend anyone go there right now, it’s a little bit dodgy.
Was it a bit crazy?
As usual, yeah. I mean we were in the centre which is kept clean and free from homeless people and freaks and things, so we didn’t get to see too much of that but. There are people out there who just don’t seem to have much to lose or just don’t give a fuck.

Jesus, so where in Europe do you really like playing? The live shows are notoriously crazy so who really ‘gets’ it?
Erm, everyone mostly. Scandinavia is really good for us, the people are really nice and they get into it. And Spain, people really go crazy. London as well, occasionally. I’ve noticed that a lot of the kids are kinda snot-nosed around here when they come to our shows, whenever the bouncers or any kinda of authority pushes, they just push back and things can get pretty chaotic and fun.

Yeah, some of our kids are pretty badly behaved.
Heheheh, snot nosed. I think we might encourage such behaviour is some form or fashion. Maybe indirectly.

Haha, do you guys get banned form many venues these days or have you calmed down?
No, not recently. I think we used to get banned from venues for the same reason, these kids go crazy and they’re kinda snot nosed, really disrespectful and young and people weren’t having that. But money talks and every place we’ve ever been banned from, we’ve been invited to come back.

That’s the way to do it. Get banned on the first tour, come back for the second because you can bring the cash.
Mmm-hmm.

What about India though? Gonna go back there any time soon?
I don’t think so. If we were a metal band or if I knew other metal friends or kids who were into 90’s alternative rock – like Nirvana is just getting big over there- I’d say “go over to India, they’ll love you”. But  if you just play sloppy rock n roll they’ll probably just think you’re bad a playing.

Yeah, maybe they’re not quite ready…
I would like to think that there is actually punk and punk rock going on in India but we just weren’t working with the right people but erm, it’s gotta be there, in a country of over 1 billon people, there has to be.

I think places that have quite conservative values can breed a blacklash cultural movement
A hardcore band might do quite well in India.

Really?
If they were a really tight hardcore band.

You think.?I would’ve thought they’d just think ‘Woah, woah, what the hell is going on here?’.
They like the heavy stuff. They like the trash.

Oh do they?
Yeah, most the shows are just dudes. All of that pent up testosterone, y’know not being able to get too close to girls and things. Aside from the cities, there are vast areas that are really conservative.

Met any cool British bands recently?
We were at this bowling alley in central London, it’s got like Karaoke and a hot tub…

Bloomsbury bowling lanes?
Yeah! And we saw a band called The Vicars play and they were cool. I didn’t think that there was all that much Rock n Roll happening in the UK but apparently they’re keeping things alive. They’re sloppy, seem like they’re having a good time.

It’s hard to keep track of what the buzz is around the UK.

Yeah?
Yeah I heard about this thing called Post.. Nu.. Rave? I.. I just think that maybe it’s a little too soon.

Holy shit, what does that sound like? Is it like a MicroKorg played really slowly for half an hour?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s even more pretentious than Nu-Rave.

Ha! So how long have Black Lips been together?
It’ll be ten years this fall.

Wow, that’s a long time.
Yeah since we were fifteen.

How to you think the creative process has changed since then?
It’s constantly changing, we’re always trying to do things in different ways so we don’t get bored – I feel like if we always produce the same sounding songs in the same way we probably wouldn’t be doing this any more because all the joy would’ve been sucked out it. I don’t understand how so many bands will create the same album over and over again. Also, I’ve noticed in a lot of pop music in America and the UK that you get the same producers producing all of these different bands that end up sounding exactly the same and usually it’s like, over compressed, there’s no dynamic whatsoever and it sounds like it was recorded over a click track and…. Music’s supposed to be about expression, whether it be emotional expression or artistic or conceptual expression or some sort of expression and most of that, when you get a producer involved it just gets sucked out. Often they wont like a take and you’re doing it over and over again and once you’ve played something a certain amount of times, it loses whatever charm or sparkle that was originally in it.

I think that’s all true. And throughout your times you’ve tried to keep the energy?
Keep the energy, the one thing that hasn’t changed that we may change on our next recording is that everyone has songs that they’ve written on their own, they write all the parts and when we’re in the studio we’ll show each other the songs and play it five or six times and actually get the song structure tight. Once it’s tight, five or six takes and then we just record it. It’s pretty fresh but it’s come back to bite us the ass occasionally when we play live and we work out whatever kinks might’ve been there before. But for the most part it keeps things fresh and a little mistake here or there adds to the charm I feel.

So once you’ve recorded it sometimes you’re thinking ‘Oh but this bit would work better like this’?
Mmmhmm.

Right, but that’s a lot of the point of live performance isn’t it? You don’t hear the same thing over an over again, it’s unique.
Yeah, we never want our live performances to sound like the CD. You’re going to a show to be entertained, you’re not going there to see a bunch of schmucks standing there what they’re playing sounds exactly like what you’ve already heard… why would you even be there? Just listen to the CD. We want people to have fun we want them to feel energy and obviously it’s not going to sound the way it did in the studio unless you’re very obsessed with those types of things. We’re just not. We prefer to just let it happen.

A gig is a gig.
Exactly.

So what’s planned for the next couple of months?
Uh we have this tour here in Europe, June and July we have a couple of one-offs here and there a show in Seattle called the Capitol Hill Bloc Party, it’s got like Sonic Youth and Deerhunter and we’re also doing a show in Vancouver with Deerhunter which’ll be our second show back in Canada since Jared’s got all his… problems cleared up. And then September, October hopefully we’ll be recording. August back in Europe for some festivals so we’ll be back here. I think tentatively slated for beginning of next year I think is Australia and New Zealand. We had an offer for some other shows, hopefully we could do it in February it’d be Hong Kong, Jakarta, Tai Pei – we’ll see if that actually comes to fruition. I think it’ll fair a little bit better than India, maybe not Singapore may not because its such a conservative kinda place.

And Indonesia could be that way I guess but it’d be awesome.
Yeah if anything it’ll be an amazing experience an adventure. And also there’s a possible China tour, we were going to it as part of the India thing but didn’t get it together, but China’s such an emerging music market. Google in China just did something really interesting they made all songs available for download on low quality MP3 for free and if you want to pay a certain amount you can for the higher quality ones, just to combat piracy. Google split the ad profits from the download sites with the record label. It’s an interesting model, I don’t know if the Western world is necessarily ready for that or if it’s completely necessary but over there piracy was so rampant that they were like “okay this is the best thing we can do”.

I’ve heard the punk scene in China is pretty vibrant. Again, maybe somewhere with an element of oppression and a cultural backlash…
Friends who’ve gone over there and toured have said that it’s pretty awesome, they have a huge underground scene for a huge amount of stuff. A lot of media is mass produced over there so I think a lot of it bleeds over.

Australia, New Zealand, what are they like?
People are real cool, they’ve got their own thing down there, Melbourne is definitely an epicentre for music culture in Australia, you see bands playing on the streets there all the time. They’ve got a real interesting way of doing things, not as generic as some places. They have their own style.

New Zealand is cool too, I like going there. No offense to the people but they’re kinda whacky.

There’s a great indie pop scene out of the South Island, I can’t remember which city in particular. But there was a record label based out of Wellington called Flying Nun and they did a bunch of early indie pop. A lot of great very simple indie pop, non pretentious. Good!

Most indie music or at least what indie has become is pretty, I dunno, self fulfilling.

Yeah, I think maybe sometimes people try a bit hard to hit ahead of the curve.
The problem is too many people are aware of the curve. If they weren’t concerned with the curve they’d probably be making some cooler music.

Think outside the curve.
Yeah.

Black Lips on MySpace

First published at The Line Of Best Fit

All tomorrow’s parties this weekend. That’s a cultural experience in England, going to a Butlins in Minehead, really.
Haha, yeah?

Do you guys have anything like that in the US?
There’s nothing where you stay there… I mean 6 flags America has hotels nearby….

Chris Bear: Yeah but nothing out in the country like that.

I’m going to the Breeders one, I’m gonna miss you guys.
It seems that they do so many of those now there’s like every week or something! There’s a Halloween one? The Christmas one. The programming with the bands is crazy awesome.

I’ve been following Ed on twitter.
Oh, okay…

What’s this Snoop Dogg thing?
We… we really just wanna hang.

Yeah?
Chris Bear: We just really think he’d be cool to hang out with.

Is it because maybe he could do a rap with your band name? Like Grizzle Bizzle something…
Yeah that would work really well…  hanging with the bizzle.  And all that business.

Chris Bear. Yeah that could work really well.

I just like his phrasing! it’s just like… soothing… in a way.

Edward Droste

He got banned from the UK for a while.
Oh really?

Yeah I think there was some shit about drugs or something…
Oh that’s horrible, I just think it’d be cool to hang with him… He seems like a cool… I mean in terms of huge cultural icons, I think that he’s got a good vibe and I think it’s pretty admirable that he just remains like really mellow and stoned, like all the time. Like on the television.

Did he get in contact?
No, that’s the funny thing. Ed’s just kinda endlessly pestering him on twitter every day… just to see.

No reply?
No reply… I don’t really expect it. He might not even be the one twittering…

Yeah and I mean if Ed is doing it then maybe there are loads of people like… I don’t know actually. I don’t really know how it works, I don’t have twitter!

You need to get his mobile number or something.
Yeah.

So shall we talk a bit about Veckatimest now we’re here?
Sure.

It’s said that this album was more of a collaborative effort with the band with all you guys throwing in more – would you say maybe as far as Grizzly Bear as a band is, that makes it more of  Grizzly Bear record than the last.
I think we were all throwing in but in different ways on Yellow House. It wasn’t by any means a singular effort. We had the same sort of thing with everyone just throwing in just coming up with much more songs y’know, from the ground up. But like… there are about five songs on Yellow House that are the same thing, like a two bar guitar loop, some lyrics (of which there aren’t that many) the band did the same thing but the process wasn’t quite as.. ‘trusting’ you know, with ideas and how we go about it and trusting each other to just do it.

So yeah, Ed was twittering about Paulo Nutini last night.
Oh he did?

Yeah he said something like ‘Known in the UK, new to us.’
Yeah, true.

So what do you reckon?
Great, actually yeah his stuff was really good! I’d never heard it before and I thought it was awesome and the band was good yeah cool.

Are there any other British bands that you’ve recently become aware of that you like?
Micachu and the shapes.

Chris Bear: Oh yeah, Micachu!

Oh cool yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing them at the Bella Union stage at O2 this year. They have this small stage on the grass with a double decker bus and tables and chairs and things…
Oh that sounds really cool. That sounds really nice.

Chris Bear: I didn’t get to see Micachu play at SXSW but apparently… yeah awesome.

Have you heard the new Noisettes record?

Yeah they’re like huge now. They had this pop breakthrough and they’re all over the side of buses and stuff.
That’s awesome for them, she’s awesome, too. So pretty.

So compared to Yellow House do you think that Veckatimest is going to be more of an accessible pop record? With songs like ‘Two Weeks’ that are more solid chunks of melody…
Yeah I think that it’s kinda clearer, clearer equals more accessible I feel like clearer equals more accessible in general as a rule.

I don’t think it’s bad to say that Yellow House was a grower album..
Oh yeah totally, I’m fine with that. I love that about albums, you know my favourite records are like hear it and you’re like ‘okay… this is cool’ and then there’s one day when the song comes along and you’re like …

…’I love this!’
Right! ‘I fucking love this song!’ There’s like this moment when the music really hits you, when something is just right and you can really deeply into it.

Oh god, so Johnny Greenwood said that you were his favourite band! That must’ve been awesome.
Yeah I mean Ok Computer definitely changed my life. And uh, I mean, I was mostly playing Jazz and it was the first Rock band that I could hear real depth in and that I could really fall in love with. So I mean,  yeah there’s really no words, I mean gratitude. Really grateful that we got to play music you know alongside those guys.

What was it like touring with them, what were Radiohead crowds like?

Really good, really good. Very positive. Responsive. Before we got out on tour the it was like ‘Okay, this could just be like y’know…. Nobody cares about us, we should really prepare for a crowd that just doesn’t get us at all.’ and I was like yeah I guess you’re right because I was just so excited about playing shows with them and then I thought ‘Oh shit, maybe everyone will hate it’. We went out on the first show and the last thing Ed said to me before we went on stage was like ‘people might not clap, okay just remember that.’

Hahaha! What kind of thing is that to say?
No, it made me feel good! Cause I was thinking fine. That’s fine. I’m cool with that, I just had to be reminded not to expect rapturous applause and… yeah all that. But people were really were responsive so it was like ‘woah… cool!’

L-R: Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear

It’s a good match actually because you put the two bands together and they’re quite different but I think there’s a definite crossover with fans.
Chris Bear: I feel like they out of any other band have the most open-minded diverse audience. I’m sure there’s probably some people who have like one of their albums but I feel like people who are fans of Radiohead have seen them go through albums like The Bends and all the way through to the new albums and have crossed over so many different styles…

I think they introduced so many people to electronic sounds and electronica.
Yeah in a way that was sort of when I first started even imagining that was one of the first ways or times I’d head electronic music intergrated into rock music in a really seamless way. It felt like a completely new fresh thing and you know it wasn’t forced.

Chris Taylor: It’s crazy to think about people who’ve just like for example heard Radiohead in their dorms… just the single from the album and are like ‘oh I never really checked them out before’ that’s so wild to me because they’ve been such a mainstay for me for so long.

Yeah it’s almost weird to hear things like ‘Pyramid Song’ on the radio.
Oh wow. That’s an awesome song.

Yeahh.. I know. It’s crazy that they’ve been around for song and managed to stay current so well too.
Yeah yeah, totally.

What other UK bands, like mainstay UK bands are there as influences for you?
Well y’know there’s The Beatles. Actually recently there’s apparently this divide, like, you like the Rolling Stones or you like The Beatles… You’ve heard this?

Well yeah..
And I was like definitely like Beatles very much and for a long time but I’ve kinda come around and I really dig the stones stuff a lot now. I am a very late bloomer.

Yeah I haven’t got on board with them yet…
Chris Bear: It’s just a different thing. [to the Beatles]

Yeah, I think I wrote off them initially because they sounded like they were trying to do something bluesy and y’know they’re from a totally different culture but it was really just them paying tribute to what they loved and y’know they really did love it. There’s this early photobook that my roommate has he’s a big stones fan and (…uh not really into the Beatles.)

Anyway it’s of their tour with Bo Diddly, they brought him over here to England. And there’s all these incredible photographs. They really did have a genuine respect and appreciation they weren’t posing. Unfairly I wrote them off as that at first.

Finally, any bands from your neck of the woods that we should know about?
Beach House!

Oh, we already love Beach House!
Dirty Projectors! The new album is really good.

Chris Taylor: The band I’m working on now might get love here if it goes alright, I’ve just finished mixing and producing the record they’re called the Morning Benders. They could do okay on this island.

What kind of stuff is it?
Uhhhh.. It’s just good!

Good stuff.
I mean it’s like rock but it’s got lots of awesome sort of arrangements and it’s pretty deep, pulling from a lot of classic rock sources.

You heard it here first!
Haha, yeah… Who else?

Oh Arthur Russell? His catalogue is incredible. You should really check out Arthur Russell.

Originally published at The Line Of Best Fit

theesinglespy,  “my bra aside”,  stephanie dosen,  stephanie dosen snowbird,  kaki chess

This is the first result you get from googling “my bra aside”.

I quote. “Lifting the black bra to my face I can feel the material that was earlier against her skin. I can picture her nipples inside hard and erect, perhaps for me one day. I begin to smell her deodorant and the special kind of smell of her boobs. I get it myself. The heat of the day can make your boobs kind of sweaty. Nice sweat. Horny sweat. The magical smell spurns me on. I begin to play with my own tits right now. Pulling my bra aside I moisten my fingers and transfer some of my saliva onto my tits. I love the feeling of my moist nipples being tweaked and played with.”

This blog is hovering over the cesspit.

Anyway, here’s how I wasted £8 worth of throw away camera on deliberately shit photographs in a vain attempt to be ‘arty’.

Do you often say the wrong thing in social situations? Do you offer your opinion on things that you know nothing about? Do people often seem irritated by your presence? Here’s a simple, effective and trendy idea to help you through!

Be fucking quiet!

Being quiet is a craze soon to sweep the hip urbanite youth population. It makes you look calm and mysterious and often helps you avoid making yourself look like a total dick!

Try being quiet in these ideal situations and watch your social standing sky-rocket:

• In a lecture when people are trying to listen.
• On the tube/bus.
• At a gig when everyone is trying to listen to the performer and not you chatting to your stupid mates.
• In the pub when discussion turns to something that you have no valid opinion on.
• In art galleries.
• In the cinema.
• When your housemates are trying to sleep at 2am.
• When you don’t have anything to say.

Being fucking quiet really is the new way to impress all of your peers. Try it out today!

This weekend I was at the Camden Crawl with Anika.

We saw some bands, some good, some bad. Banjo or Freakout were bloody awesome. We went to the pub with Alessi, The Ark and friends and family on both evenings which was nice, and really helped the weekend along. Alessi’s Ark were fantastic. Above is a picture I took of Alessi onstage with a disposable camera without looking through the viewfinder. Originally it looked bad, but then I ran it through Photoshop to make it look even worse.

Anyway The Horse is an really nice song. Watch the video.

We popped up to Sonny’s roof for a beer and had a good look at the sweaty throng.

(Anika took the photograph below and about the day drew a comic for TLOBF)

Oh yeah, I forgot to say but last week I went to Ill Fit at Scala and watched Snowbird (which is an awesome combination of Simon Raymonde on piano and Stephanie Dosen singing) and Loney Dear. Loney Dear was really, really, really, really fucking good. I wrote about it here (Secret: I didn’t actually write the bit about the Leisure Society because I hadn’t planned to write about the night and wasn’t there for their set, but since they’ve been nominated for an Ivor Novello, I doubt they’ll care.)

Tomorrow I will be getting boxes of magazines delivered. Then the work starts on posting/delivering/burning evidence of unshifted copies. The new issue looks like this:

The most important thing, though is that I have a cough. People forget how unpleasant painful coughs are.

Today I sat outside and read Arcadia by Jim Crace and looked at the blossom on all of the trees. Blossom is brilliant. I did this quick drawing of some flowers because I was inspired by the spring. I fucked it up a bit but nevermind . Then I went for a run and did some press-ups.

I’ll be twittering for TLOBF (www.thelineofbestfit.com) from the Camden Crawl all day tomorrow and on Saturday. I’ve got a ‘guest pass’ which means I don’t have to queue (which makes me feel special). Because of this I’m going to try to actually go to every venue and have a drink and see a band and make it a proper crawl. I’m a bit worried though because the safety information on the Camden Crawl website says to ‘go with at least one mate’ and not to get too drunk. I’m living dangerously.

I stopped putting those creative shorts up on my blogs for a reason, but I’ve forgotten what that reason was. I might do more and put them up. Or maybe I’ll do a proper short story and get it published and show you all how clever I am by linking to it here.

I’ve also masterminded my next viral campaign and I’ll be drawing up the slogan as soon as I get a minute. This one is sure to become a ‘cult phenomenon’.

I’ll be talking to Camera Obscura on the phone this week too. I like Camera Obscura and I’m looking forward to asking them questions. I’ll be sure to tell you what we talk about.

I’ve booked a ‘solo’ gig for June. I’m going to write some new songs for it. Maybe if I can get a few people together to collaborate the gig might not be so solo, I’m not sure.

This is by far the worst update I’ve ever done.

Hello. I hope you had a nice easter. I thought I’d share my ‘Top Searches’ with you. These are the things that people have put into websites like google in order to end up here.

‘Less Permanent’

‘thelesspermanent’

‘dan brantigan kaki king evi’

‘i think she knows’

‘kaki king sendspace’

‘hard nipples poking through top’

‘poked through’

Looking through these has given me a good idea.

BIG SOAPY TITS, KNOCKERS, NIPPLES R US, WOBBLING MAMMARIES.COM, WANKTASTIC CHEST GLANDS.

Hit spike, here I come.

UPDATE: These have cropped up recently.

thee single spy,  bad habits of facebook,  slogans on books,  marketing and exercise,  shit slogan

Might as well use it as promotion for the new issue of Art and Things. If you want a copy, send me a postal address.

Shiv drew the actual bits, not me.

The other day I went with friends to see Kaki King at the Jazz Cafe.

She has a new EP floating around called The Mexican Teenagers EP. If you don’t know Kaki King, you really should. I’d stream a song of hers but a) It would take forever b) It would eat up bandwidth c) I’d probably end up getting sued.

It was the best gig of the year so far for me, better than Animal Collective last week. She played with a drummer and Dan Brantigan on EVI. When they played ‘These Are The Armies of the Tyrannized’ I nearly exploded.

Here is a terrible photograph I took from the crowd with my phone.

There is no decent video of this performance, so here is her music video for a song called Air and Kilometers from her latest album Dreaming of Revenge, instead.

I’m meeting up with Rich from The Line of Best Fit.com Anika from Anika in London tomorrow and we’re going to see Wildbirds and Peacedrums. This is going to be brilliant.

This weekend I went to stay with my girlfriend and we made tofu hotdogs and french fries. We dusted the french fries with spices and flour so they were extra crispy/nice and made garlic mayonnaise and had a giant beer each. Tofu franks are amazing. They’re made from smoked tofu. We had an array of condiments.

Later on I sat by the river and read while the sun went down. Then I fed some swans. Spring is the best time of year, even with hayfever.

Then I played my girlfriend at chess. She beat me.

2. Exercise.

A lot of people think is exercise really boring and tiring. This is true. Also, the exercise scene is full of twats. However, carrying around 20 stone of fat until you die of a heart attack at 53 is also not very good. A lot of young fashionable people are terrified of waking up one morning as a fat, dead 53-year-old. These people are the market ‘niche’ demographic.

Fat? Uncomfortable? Self-conscious? Lazy?

Do some exercise!

• Exercise is free and available all over the UK.
• Running everywhere can cut your carbon footprint by 7%!
• Doing exercise makes you more physically attractive which will make people instinctively treat you better!
• Some popular exercise activities – fighting, running, lifting heavy things, trying really hard at football when girls are watching even though you’re 26, going to the ‘gym’ and running on the spot while people judge you, running full-pelt along the south bank of the river Thames with your fucking iPod on full-blast when it’s busy and other people are out for a stroll and expecting everyone to dive out of the way of you in your stupid sweaty clothes.
• Famous people that do exercise – Lilly Allen, Christian Bale, Gordon Ramsay, Pheidippides, The Army.
• Sexual intercourse can also count as exercise, which is something you can do lots of when you’re not so fat!
• Exercise is a happening pastime. Press-ups for boys, pilates for girls!

Externalize your self-hate into sweat and pain. Exercise!

For another shrewd marketing campaign see Books.

A couple of posts back I mentioned that Tess had sent me some post complete with a little project to do. I did it the other morning. It was fun and a great example of why people should sent each other more parcels.

Here are some pictures.

As per Tessa’s guide, I had to make the sea. I filled up the sink with warm water.

Then I put the blue tissue in the water. I thought it was going to make the water blue by bleeding into it, but it actually just dissolved. I got blue all over the place. The sink was now full of this awesome blue slosh, I should’ve filmed the way it washed around, it looked really cool. My sea was complete.

At this point, my hands turned blue. Tessa said that when this happened I should take photo of my hand holding and orange. My hand didn’t come out that blue on camera though. I think it would’ve worked better with Tessa’s hand. Her skin colouring is lighter than mine.

I made the paper that the package was wrapped in into boat. (this took me several attempts, I’m really bad at folding things like boats)

The following pictures document the the tragic events that followed:

So there you go. As someone who likes post, I just want to point out that this is how a master does it. Not only did she choose to answer the questions in Polaroid form (yeah, see Art and Things again/plug) but the package that she sent the whole thing in turned out to be a toy. One that I could make loads of mess with. Brilliant.

More post chronicles later. In the meantime – take another look at Little Yellow Drum.co.uk

While we’re on the subject of receiving post – Charlot Webster sent me something a while back. She’s a musician, one of those people that plays everything, sings and writes songs,  the girl everyone wants to be in a band with. Her material is really good, it’s ‘melodic’ and ‘elegant’ and ‘steeped in her fluency in the language of beauty’ she’s like Brighton’s answer to Feist/Cat Power or something. Have a look at her myspace. After the ordeal of uploading that Single Spy track earlier I didn’t bother to ask Charlot for a track, just click the link instead.

Anyway, as you might’ve worked out from that photograph up there, Charlot does a mixtape exchange which is a brilliant idea. I spent a whole evening sitting in my room recording my favorite tracks off of CD onto cassette tape, getting them in the right order. Then I packaged it off and sent it down to Charlot. I got a tape back from her a few days later. It was probably amazing, but a couple of days later my amp broke so I can’t listen to tapes any more (or my records or my laptop on the big speakers). Anyway, never mind. The point is you should look at her and maybe send her a tape. (Charlot, if you’re reading this and you get a load of tapes dumped on you that you didn’t want, sorry.(I’m sure she does want your tapes really))

POINT ABOUT POST NUMBER TWO.

Amber got the spoons I sent her.

I like sending post. It’s good to paint the envelope and put little extras in there too. Post is fun. Incidentally, the word Amber on that jiffy bag was exactly how I pictured it in my head. I fucked up the SPOONS bit though.

Never mind.

Oh yeah, I forgot to say I went to see Animal Collective last night and it turned out to be pretty good. That felt important enough to add.

So here’s some more, the art that she did for the Thee Single Spy album cover ( I took a couple of shots of it to fill space):

(In hindsight I realize I should’ve taken a picture of the back, not just two of the front. I’ll update this tomorrow)

I met their frontman Alex and interviewed him for Art and Things a couple of weeks ago. You can learn more about them and how to get hold of one of these wicked little vinyls (for free, I think) on their myspace – (if that turns out to be lie just e-mail him- what do you want from me?)

You can listen to an awesome track called Smoke That Tea by Thee Single Spy by clicking the play button below this paragraph. Make sure you listen to the whole thing because a) it comes together beautifully about halfway through and b) Alex sent it me in .wma (fair enough) but it ended up taking me ages to get this uploaded and to work properly. Like hours. So listen to it and make it worth my while. Please.

She sent me a little art project to do, with all the materials and instructions. I’ll be posting the results later.

Also, I’ll be posting the whole thing plus an interview (she chose to send me her answers in picture form as you can see below) on Art and Things and then I’m going to get the whole thing put into an upcoming printed edition with pretty hand-drawn design by Liz or Shiv or Darren or someone.

Tessa and I and a few other friends are going to do a free night of art, music and v-jaying soon. It’s been ages since me or WOMP have done something like that, so I might go semi-rouge depending on how busy the rest of the collective are. Setting up an installation wherever we can find somewhere in the DIY WOMP spirit. (on that subject, we’ve got a night at 93 Feet East coming up, but I’ll save that for a proper post of it’s own)

Here is my attempt at something similar, but without pictures because a) It wouldn’t look very good next to Anika’s cute drawings and b) I’m feeling really lazy tonight.

Last night I went to Brainlove‘s room at Koko because Rich Thane from The Line of Best Fit.com was DJing there and he’s my bff. I metLucy Johnston there who is a brilliant photographer. Andy from Fuck Buttons DJ’d too and then we all danced. Rich told Andy that his twitter feed made him feel nervous about meeting him. I hope someone tells me this one day.

We all danced some more. I feel like my dancing was more embarrasing than everyone elses, but truth be told it was all pretty ropey. Then this man started swearing at Rich Thane while he was djing and called me a “fucking idiot”.  Lucy took photos of Napoleon IIIrd while he was playing (really well) who was kind enough to give me a 5am beer when we got back to John Brainlove’s flat because we’d missed the last train.

Rich ate three bagels from a local takeaway and felt sick. Everyone teased the cat, who nearly went mad. My alcohol induced second wind got me home (although my friend Liz nearly died on the bus) and when I got home I stayed up and ate toast and watched The Wire until I fell asleep at about midday.

… Mine isn’t as good because it’s mainly just a whole paragraph of name dropping. Which isn’t cool.

1. Books.

Apparently the publishing industry are worried about the new Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. I don’t think they should make a such a fuss, because both of those things are currently really shit. But I have come up with a clever strategy complete with slogan and logo to help push books to the 18-29′s. See below.

Bored? Under-stimulated? Over-stimulated? Stupid? Unattractive? Insecure?

Read a fucking book!

• Books can run for decades on a single charge.
• Books are made from paper, not plastic which is harmful to the environment.
• Reading a book makes you look ‘clever’. Watching Scrubs on your iPod probably makes you look like a tosser and not at all ‘clever’.
• Holding a book makes it look like you’re on your way somewhere to read. Interesting people are often going to places to sit and read. Try these exciting free reading hot-spots; Under a tree, On a Bench, In  a Cafe, leaning against a wall.
• Famous contributers to books include Salman Rushdie, Jean-Paul Satre, Franz Kafka, George Orwell and God.
• They are a fantastic fashion accessory. Jack Kerouac for boys, Sylvia Plath for girls! They come in hundreds of colours.

Boost your look with a book!

I have to stop high-fiving people. High-fiving can make anyone look like a complete shit head.

Normally a high-five involves you and a friend saying something ‘funny’ or maybe finding that you are both pretending to like/remember the same obscure early 90′s studio sit-com. It’s easy to get carried away in these kinds of situations, but it’s never an excuse for a high-five. This is something I have to learn. I’d advise you to do the same. High-fiving needs to die.

Problems that can be experienced with high-fiving:

Maybe you and your friend have just quoted the same ‘hilarious’ quote from Family Guy or Bill and Ted or something in sync. You might as well do a shit, right there, on the floor. And then play with it and put bits of it in your mouth. Or you can go one worse and go for the high-five.

Sooner or later, you’ll get your just desserts.

Maybe the person you’re high-fiving one day doesn’t get high-fives. Maybe they don’t see your hand in the air, or maybe they’re pretending not to see it because they don’t want to be part of your embarrassing hand-slap ritual of dickery. What will happen next is that the moment of high-five excitement will pass (often too quickly for you to react) and you’ll suddenly just be this total dick standing there with a hand raised in the air like a giant penis with a hand.
All that’s left for you to do in this situation is to plead for mercy with a stock phrase such as “Hey, don’t leave me hangin’!” (try to keep it light, you’re on thin ice). After saying this, you’ll usually get a confused, half hearted clap on the hand. If, however, you are still ignored or unable to make yourself heard, there’s nothing left to do but put your hand back down, in which case you might as well actually go home and hang yourself.

The best thing to do is to keep your fucking hands down in the first place.

Action plan

If you have difficulty training your reflexes, try taking up smoking or writing ‘I AM A RAPIST’ on your palms in thick marker. This will stop you from instinctively taking the high-five pose at every opportunity.

When someone raises a hand to high-five you, stare into their eyes with a cold, dead look. When they say ‘Don’t Leave Me Hanging’ grab the nearest electrical cable and actually try to hang them. People will always step in to stop you, so don’t worry about actually having to kill someone. (N.B. if nobody else is around whisper into the high-fivers ear ‘I’m coming back for you’ and then leave)

Alternatively, when next offered a high-five just say “I don’t do that, mate.” and then wink at them.

Next time on My Bad Habits: Winking.

Disclaimer: I accept no responsibility for you following my awful advice. So if you accidentally hang someone or get into a massive fight while trying these out, don’t come crying to me.

Every single time the Facebook layout changes people lose their fucking shit. It’s incredible.

There is an ‘anti new layout’ group currently running at 195,140 members (just to be a dick I’d like to point out that the Amnesty International group currently has 45,443 members)

1.  Setting up a Facebook group may have got Boris Johnson elected and Screech from Saved By The Bell to play at your student union, but that doesn’t mean they can solve every meaningless gripe you ever have. Facebook not will ‘roll back’ the interface because of your terrible attempt at a logo that you did on photoshop. This because the new interface cost them time and money to develop and your group is full of idiots.

2. It doesn’t fucking matter if Facebook roll back the interface or not.

3. Facebook doesn’t need saving. Even if it needed saving, it wouldn’t need saving.

Disturbingly it seems that nothing infuriates the masses, nothing motivates them into passionate, unified action more than adding functionality and/or making minor cosmetic changes to the interface of their favorite social networking utility.

So yeah, we’re all fucked.

n.b. I’ve restrained myself from launching into a rant about facebook groups in general. Maybe another time, I can’t be bothered. ]]> http://www.lesspermanent.com/?feed=rss2&p=184 7 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=170 http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=170#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:15:26 +0000 Albert Rose http://www.lesspermanent.com/?p=170 Welcome to My New Website.  Thanks to Amber from Code For Something for hosting me. Amber is awesome. This site is new, but it’s got my old blog on it too. I wont be blogging in the same way that I did on the cat blog, I don’t think. I’ll probably fuck around with the design for ages too.

I never thought that ‘life blogging’ was a good idea because I’d feel like a twat telling the internet what I had for breakfast and didn’t really expect anyone to give a shit and I didn’t think it was very ‘professional’. Apparently, though,’ life blogging’ is popular with ‘hits’. I don’t know if I care about hits, but then I don’t know what the fuck I’m trying to be ‘professional’ about either.

This morning for breakfast I had mushrooms on toast with a poached egg. I made it myself and cooked the mushrooms in beer and nutmeg. I made two portions, one for me and one for my girlfriend. It was nice. I had it with coffee. I didn’t take any photographs. I’m not a cunt.

Spring is coming. I know this because of four things.

1 . There are daffodils and tree blossoms everywhere.

2 . The weather is nice.

3 . my hayfever is killing me.

4. it’s March.

Spring is my favorite time of year.  It’s nice outside, it’s pretty and after it’s over you get Summer. I went for a walk along the Thames and fed swans today. I didn’t take any photographs of this either, but I think I should do a post with some pretty spring imagery so maybe I’ll take some photographs and try to paint something this week.

Any-way.

I did an interview with Rosie Roberts. People really seem to like Rosie Roberts. I like her too.

The more I do these interviews, the more I think I might fuck off to art school for a bit.

I need to buy more scratch cards.

She told me that her name was Raphael, which immediately struck me as a completely unsuitable name for her.I asked her if it was the name that her parents gave her. She said that she assumed so. I wasn’t sure what she meant but I let it drop. Maybe she was an orphan. My mind automatically flicked through a few scenarios to make sure that I didn’t find the fact that she might be an orphan sexy. I didn’t.

She had freckles and brown hair. There was loud music playing, which made it difficult to hear her. She was particularly attractive. She had to lean in and shout in my ear .

I couldn’t think of anything to say to her, even though I don’t normally find it difficult to talk to people. The music playing was by a band that she claimed to ‘love’. I ‘loved’ the band too, but I didn’t tell her this. It seemed like a really boring thing to say.

I was at a party, talking to a girl.

I had a can of cheap lager in my hand.

I was trying not to look at her tits.

I felt like a twat.

She said she was from New York. I asked her where in New York because that seemed like a suitable follow-up question. I didn’t absorb the answer. I don’t know anything interesting or worthwhile about New York.

I asked her why she was in London. She said something long that ended with a word that sounded like ‘drinking’ so I laughed. She didn’t really laugh along so I probably misunderstood what she was trying to say.

Somebody turned up the music. I lit a cigarette and gave her one.

We kept pumping anecdotes into each other. Nothing worked. Nothing took root.

She didn’t walk away, regardless of how awkward it got.

She had long, thin fingers. I had to lean in to shout in her ear a lot. I hoped my breath didn’t stink. The conversation continued to stall. Still she refused to fuck off.

She talked about her sister. She talked about her favorite ‘bar’ in New York. She talked about what she liked about London.

I copied everything she said. She didn’t notice.

My beard was itchy. I thought about shaving it off in the morning. Although… Maybe she liked my beard.

After a while she put her hand on my knee.

“Anyway, I love your band!” she said

I said thank you.

We had sex back at her expensive hotel. We moved vigorously, although neither of us broke sweat or reached climax. We were, from position to position, two rubbery lumps of flesh, bumping dryly against each other. Eventually the condom broke.

I drank a Red Bull from the mini-bar, filled the used can up with water from the tap and put it back.

We lay near to each other for a while and watched BBC News 24.

Neither of us were worried about the condom breaking.

When I got home the sun was coming up.

That day I decided to start a band.

You’re out having a good time with some friends but it’s getting late and you’re about to miss the last bus home.

a) There’s no point in making a choice, resisting fate is futile. Things will just happen the way they are supposed to. I’m just going to keep drinking until something happens to intervene. 6 points
b) So what if I don’t go to work tomorrow? The choice is essentially meaningless, I might as well have another drink and have fun before I die and rot away. 7 points
c) I have to go to work tomorrow. If everyone else bunked off of work it would be a nightmare. 10 points
d) Fuck it. I’ll DRIVE. WHERE’S MY CAR? 2 points

You find a wallet stuffed with cash.

a) I’ll look up this ID. If I can’t find this person it’s obviously fated for me to spend it on shoes. 5 points
b) MINE! 2 points
c) I should hand this in the to a police station immediately 10 points

You’ve just spent two hours making yourself a really nice meal because you’ve had a bad day and you drop the plate face down on the floor.

a) Interesting, Well, looks like that tin of beans in the cupboard is about to fulfil it’s ultimate destiny. 7 points
b) For FUCK’S SAKE. I’m going to get drunk and smash up my ex’s car. 3 points
c) Goodness, what a mess! I should clean this up at once! 10 points

You’re on your laptop when the cat jumps up onto the table and spills your tea on it. The repair bill is £500. The cat has done this twice before.

a) This was bound to happen, I guess I’m just supposed to use pen and paper. 8 points
b) Well, it’s now obvious that I can’t keep this cat around. I’ll just have to kill it. I’ll tell my housemates that it got run over. 4 points
c) It’s time for me to stop drinking tea near the computer. 10 points

You’ve just been discharged from hospital after an accident and you’re struck by a fast moving car. What are you final thoughts as you pass?

a) So this is how I was supposed to die. How shit! 7 points
b) Well, this ‘life’ business has ultimately all been rather pointless. 5 points
c) Christ, I hope the driver is okay! 10 points

Less than 7 points – You’re a total bastard and you need to grow up.

33 points – You don’t like grapefruit juice.

40 points – You’re a complete pussy. Grow some balls/ovaries.

15 points – People talk about your lack of fashion sense behind your back.

10 points – Sudden noises really irritate you.

Yeah, I’ve been to Loch Lomond, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester. Back to London tomorrow.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGhyW8hpOn0&eurl]

When I first saw him throw his head back at 1:09 I had a fantasy about what it would be like to walk into a room and find your own dead body. Maybe I should’ve written about that instead.

I forgot to mention that I saw this on this blog.

I AM HENRY KISSENGER ORDERING A COCKTAIL AT AN EXPENSIVE BEACH RESORT IN SHIANOUKVILLE .

Brain like foie gras. Piss like golden syrup. 

I am going to bed.

Her forehead was warm. Her nipples poked through her top. I cupped her left breast, the one furthest from me. It was warm too.

I looked into her face. She was wearing an expression that I had never seen before. She looked as though she might be slightly drunk. She had a perfect nose and beautiful thin lips. I wanted to kiss her, but somehow I knew I shouldn’t. I was scared of what her breath might smell like.

I wrapped my hand around her thin wrist and then traced my fingers up her arm. I put my palm on her right breast and squeezed. I squeezed my own breast with my free hand. I squeezed harder, on both hers and mine. Harder, harder. I shoved my hand under my own t-shirt, pushed my bra aside and squeezed my breast until it hurt. I could feel my heart beating against the hard edge of my palm. I held my breath and squeezed as hard as I could. It had begun to hurt quite a lot. I still wasn’t crying.

I stepped away from the bed and sat in a little brown plastic chair. I could hear a phone ringing. I apologised, then immediately regretted breaking our silence. I needed to piss quite badly.

Someone answered the phone. I felt very stupid. She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me through those slits in her eyelids.

Her parents arrived after I’d been sitting in the chair for a while. They didn’t ask me any questions. I put my shoes back on and left.

The flat was in one of the worst areas of London. The estate agent drove me along the depressed high street, all of the buildings were grubby and tired-looking, newsagents advertised long-distance phone cards, run-down shops offered fruit and vegetables in untidy stalls opening out on to the street. The people, descendants of numerous exotic cultures, all hunched and shuffled along the pavement in shades of grey and brown. This was Greater London, the bowels, hung between the glamour of the city and the sterility of the suburbs.

The estate agent was called James Coles. We went back a bit- I’d known him since secondary school. We’d never got along much. After half an hour of forced conversation, James suddenly wrenched his small hatchback down an almost impassable side alley and stopped in a seemingly disused car park.

The place was a dump. Poverty oozed from every dilapidated inch of the block, I couldn’t see any signs of the other tenants. Along one side of the building, partially obscured by some unhealthy looking trees, ran a disused, stinking canal. Inside of the flat was even worse. There was a depressing atmosphere, heavy and dark. James the estate agent made very little effort to pitch the virtues of the cramped and murky little hovel to me. He stood on the edge of the tiny living area, beside a large, dirty window – the only discernable source of natural light in the entire place – sending text messages on his mobile phone.

“Just take a look around and tell me what you think, yeah?” He didn’t even look up from the little plastic device in his hand.

I didn’t need to look around. Being a writer, not being able to hold down a series of mind-numbing jobs, my propensity to desire money a lot less than others desired to take it from me – these things had left me with no choice. I needed a cheap place to live. I took it.

I had very little moving to do- some clothes and my laptop, a can of deodorant, my notepads and a radio and I was set up in my new home. One bedroom, one bathroom, one kitchen and a living area just large enough to fit an armchair into. £30 a week, a cheque made out to landlord that I would probably never meet, who had no interest in me or the place I was living in. Suited me.

The first night was chilly inside the flat so I wrapped up in a jumper and a hooded top. I placed my laptop on the bed, lifted it open and flopped down alongside it, as I booted it up I lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of grey smoke upwards into the cold air. With the bedside lamp on I felt I could while away a few hours committing some ideas to screen. I looked at my watch. It said 8:17.

For a while I did nothing but stare at the empty page on the word processor. Eventually I managed to get a few abstract lines down, but for some reason I was having difficulty concentrating. The cold was starting to creep through my layers of clothing so I slid underneath the duvet. Not allowing myself to become frustrated, I lit another cigarette and allowed my thoughts to wander. I studied the ceiling and the stained walls. Tomorrow I would buy some food for the bare cupboards. I finished my cigarette and allowed myself to put my head down for a minute. I could faintly hear the sounds of the city, the passing growl of buses, the occasional siren or excessive thumping bass from a car stereo. Without fully intending to, I fell asleep.

Something woke me. I wasn’t sure of what it was. I might have heard a thud or bump, possibly someone in the flat above me slamming a door. Whatever it was, it had been loud enough to unsettle me slightly and I waited in the silence of the room for it to come again. It didn’t. I looked at my watch, 11:08. I plodded from the bedroom into the kitchen, rubbing life back into my face as I went, and poured myself a glass of water from the tap. I turned and lifted myself up onto the work surface and sat there it in the dim light sipping at my glass for a few minutes. I supposed that I should shower and go to bed properly, but the cold in the flat made me reluctant to get undressed. I briefly contemplated trying to determine how to control the heating, but after catching sight of the ancient, over-complicated looking panel set into the kitchen tiling, decided against it.

I drained my glass and headed for the bathroom, finally making my mind up – a warm bath was the best course of action. Pulling the cord to click the light on, I was forced to squint and shield my face with one hand – the strip light in the bathroom was by far the most powerful in the flat and situated in by far the smallest of the small rooms, every inch of the off-white tiles and grubby sink was illuminated fiercely. I couldn’t decide if I was more uncomfortable with the gloom of the rest of the flat. It was then, leaning over the bath to pull at one of the taps that I caught sight of it.

It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. In the bath there was a large, sodden bed-sheet. I had no idea how it had gotten there. I was almost certain that it hadn’t been there earlier in the day. As I lifted it out of the bath, dirty water drained out of it. I held it at arms length, allowing it to drip into the tub. It was filthy. For some reason it took me until then to notice the smell. It was sewage.

“Jesus…” I murmured. I let the sheet flop back into the bath and hurried into the kitchen. Returning with a carrier bag, I tied the sheet up in it carefully and placed it outside of the front door. Closing the door, I heard the soft padding of footsteps. I spun around. I replayed the sound in my head. They were definitely behind me, definitely in this hallway. I thought. Heating, pipes? No. I felt the vibrations in the floor through my own feet. Thud-thud-thud-thud. Someone had just walked towards me down this hallway. They were small footsteps, a reasonably quick pace. Almost like a child’s.

It took a lot of my courage to walk back down that hallway towards where the sound had come from. Confused and slightly nervous, I showered briefly under a lukewarm dribble and went to bed, where I endured a night of broken sleep.

The next day was primarily spent trying to formulate a reasonable explanation for the events of the night before. I was preoccupied as I wandered the busy high street. I purchased three carrier bags of unnecessary items from the supermarket – most unlike me- and browsed a bookshop for around and hour. Something inside of me made me reluctant to return home, I’d begun to sense that something wasn’t quite right about that flat. As the light began to fail at about 4:00pm I was in the bedroom and I had my radio on. I told myself that the background noise would help me to work. This wasn’t true. Honestly, I was slightly uncomfortable and I wasn’t quite ready to face the silent flat alone for the night. It might sound stupid, but the sound of those footsteps still replayed in my ears. They were so… real.

I sat and wrote solidly for a few hours, expanding on some ideas that I’d had the previous night. Pleasingly, my laptop had discovered an unsecured wireless network in the area and automatically connected me to the Internet. By the time the thought of leaving my seat had even crossed my mind, my watch told me that it was 09:15. I could feel my mood starting to lift as I decided to make myself a cup of tea.

As I approached the kitchen I could hear the flat sound of drips landing on linoleum floor. My first thought was that something in the kitchen was leaking, but when I reached the end of the hall and turned towards the kitchen I saw a sodden bed-sheet hanging out of the sink, dripping filthy water onto the floor.

“Fuck!” I shouted, pure reflex, pure shock.

I stood utterly motionless, it took me about thirty seconds to realize I was holding my breath. I let the air out of my lungs slowly and took another gentle breath inwards. I could hear that the sound from my radio was now just static. I dreaded the sound of footsteps, my ears tingled waiting for them, I wanted to put my fingers in my ears in case they came.

“Keep it together…” I whispered to myself. I tried humming to relieve the tension. It didn’t work.

Someone was fucking with me. They had to be. Who? I didn’t know anyone in this town anymore. James Coles? No. Someone was fucking with me, though. They had to be.

In the bedroom the radio was still hissing. I decided to deal with that first. I went back to the bedroom and tried to tune it back in.  Nothing but crackling and static. I turned it off. The silence flooded back in. Involuntarily, my ears again began to search for the sound of footsteps again. I turned the radio back on. Even the unnerving static was preferable to the tension of the mind-cracking silence. The radio came back to life with a pop and resumed it’s hissing.

Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud-thud.

The radio signal cut back in at exactly the same instant that I realized what I’d heard and music began playing at an ear splitting volume. I mashed a hand on the dial and turned it down.

This time I knew they were footsteps. Someone had started in the kitchen/living area and ran clumsily past the door and towards the front door. It was unmistakable.

I gripped the edges of the desk and took a few deep, slow breaths. Before I’d been unnerved. Now I was genuinely scared. I hadn’t heard the front door close. Someone was still in the flat. Once again I gathered my courage. I had to practically throw myself into the hallway. Nothing. My mouth had become dry and sticky, I was wired on adrenaline, I kicked the bathroom door open. Nothing. The thought that an ordinary burglar might possibly be hiding in my kitchen emboldened me. I strode in and swung my eyes around the room. Nothing. The bed-sheet was unmoved, still dripping into an expanding puddle on the kitchen floor. I acted before I had time to stop myself, grabbing the stinking thing with both hands; I hoisted it out of the sink. I strode over to the window, threw it open and dropped the sodden, filthy rag into the car park below. I heard it slap the tarmac.

I wiped my hands on my jeans and dived into my pockets to retrieve a cigarette. Lighting it and inhaling deeply, I began to feel a slight wisp of calm rising inside of me. I smoked eleven more cigarettes that night and listened intently to the radio until half past four in the morning. I couldn’t relax. I’d come to a certain realization fairly soon after I’d started to replay what had happened in my head: Those were definitely a child’s footsteps. I slept with the light on.

The next day I received a text message. A friend from university, Amanda was visiting London for the day. I took the tube to meet her in a coffee shop in a bustling part of town. She did most of the talking; told me that I looked tired, asked if I was doing ok and why she hadn’t seen me in a while. She was living in Brighton with another friend from Uni, they both seemed to be doing well.  I told her that the new flat was pokey but fine and made no mention of rotten bed-sheets and mysterious footsteps.  In the light of day, it felt ridiculous. We made small talk and she insisted upon paying for my espresso. As we rose to leave she suddenly clapped her hands and swung her backpack from her shoulder.

“I almost forgot!” she unzipped a side-pocket and removed a small box, handing it to me.

“It’s a gift.” She smiled. “My old digital camera. I just got a new one. It’s a webcam too, actually. Can you get online in your new flat?”

I’d never really been one for gadgets, but I thanked Amanda graciously as we parted ways and promised to use it.

“Can you see me?” I typed into the chat client.

“Yeah, but the feed isn’t so good.”

It was the following day. The night before had passed without mentionable incident and I used my new camera, as promised, in webcam mode to chat to Amanda.

 
”Can you see me?” Came her message.

“Yeah”

I could see Amanda in a small box on my laptop screen. She looked from her monitor to her keyboard to type me messages. I closed the window, it was slowing my old laptop down.

“You like the new place?” There was a hint of irony in my enquiry.

“It’s… interesting lol”

“What do you mean?”

“Haha, I can’t see much of it.”

I was enjoying this. I could do it more often. It was nice to feel like I had company in this place.

“Ok, shall I give you a tour?”

No reply. I opened the viewing window. No feed. I rewound it. I saw Amanda staring at her monitor, transfixed, screaming, scrambling backwards, trying to put distance between herself and whatever she saw on her screen.

I never make outgoing calls on my mobile phone, but now I frantically dialled ‘Amanda’ from my phone memory. Busy tone.

“Fuck!”

I clicked on the viewing window again and clicked through the menus. One option was labelled ‘View outgoing feed’. I selected it and a second window popped up. I could see myself sitting, looking at my laptop. I debated with myself briefly whether or not I wanted to see. Then I rewound the feed.

Now I could see myself in the same position, typing and looking the screen but with a small figure stood beside me, only matching my height as I sat. The figure was swaddled in a stained, wet-looking bed sheet, the lower part of the head was covered with material. The figure stood utterly motionless for a few seconds before it managed to wriggle an arm free from the wrapping. It’s small hand felt helplessly at the sheet covering its mouth. The skin on the arm was a blueish grey, soaked and swollen. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. This time the footsteps stopped outside of the bedroom. I could hear a very soft sound from beyond the door. Long, shallow gasps. Only ever inward. The smell of sewage again. The smell of decay. I screamed and threw myself backwards, away from the door. Away from the spot upon which the child had stood.

Three and a half hours later and I was wandering the streets. That was it. I could not stay in that flat. I called James Coles. No answer. I called Amanda again. No answer. I wandered the streets for several more hours, too terrified to set foot back in there. I thought furiously. I would have to go back and collect my stuff at some point. No way. Not tonight. I’d only left the house wearing my jeans and t-shirt. It was a miracle that I’d had the presence of mind to take my keys with me. I was freezing. I was getting out of here. There were a few people I could call to stay with. It would mean leaving London in a taxi, but at this point, I didn’t care.  I needed two things; My wallet and my jacket. I lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. Ok, maybe I could rush back in and grab the essentials. I’d leave what I couldn’t carry, things like food. They were expendable.

 I looked at my watch. Half past four in the morning. Another forty-five minutes and I’d gathered the courage to go back inside the flat.

It was still dark. The rank smell still hung faintly in the air. I marched straight into the bedroom and heaved my large holdall from underneath the bed. I emptied my drawer of clothes into it. My laptop was next, notepads, radio, wallet. I left the camera sitting on the desk. I’d get my deodorant from the bathroom and leave.

I opened the door to the hallway. The child stood there in the doorway, I nearly walked into it. Inches from my waist as it was now, I could see a gaping open mouth behind the material, gasping for air. The smell was awful. The pudgy, grey hand reached at me and a gurgling sound came from somewhere behind the swathed face. I staggered backwards and tripped. Still too shocked to react properly, I sat on the floor staring up at the figure in the doorway. It stood motionless, wheezing. I could see the material drawn in towards the middle of the face where I imagined underneath the sheath a nose might be. It turned away, slowly, painfully, rotating somehow towards the front door. It moved as if on rails, I would have been able to say it levitated were it less rigid, more graceful. It vanished behind the doorframe and again came the sound of footsteps, thud-thud-thud-thud. For some reason I immediately staggered to my feet and lurched into the hallway. The figure was gone. I vomited in the hallway and still retching, seized the holdall from the bedroom. Heavy as it was, I dragged it frantically behind me, out of the front door. I twisted my angle on the stairs but did not stop to nurse it. I was running on pure adrenaline, pure panic. I remember erupting into tears at some point before I burst out of the block and into the car park. I fumbled with my phone. I didn’t have money for a taxi, but it didn’t matter. I could make the driver understand when he arrived. How glorious it would be to be able to confess everything to the friendly driver when he got here. I dialled.

“You could not be connected to-“

I dialled again.

“You could not be connected to the nu-“

“God fucking damn! Shit! Fuck!”

I hurled my phone in frustration, wildly, randomly. It sailed towards the stinking old canal.

There I saw the figure standing again. It stood on the bank to the canal, underneath the leafless, diseased trees, facing me. The wind blew. Freezing air swept my skin. I watched. The filthy sheet that swaddled the stinking, grey swollen child flapped in the icy breeze. It suddenly dropped to the floor, as if struck dead, and began to roll away, down the bank of the canal. I heard the splash.

The pain in my ankle began to make itself known. Utterly mesmerized, I limped, dragging my rapidly swelling foot behind me. When I reached the bank of the canal I dropped to my knees. I could see down into the water. I could see a small body wrapped in a white sheet, floating just within reach, amongst some reeds. A stench filled the air so thickly that I could actually taste it. I vomited again and I crawled down the bank. I reached out for the body and dragged it towards the bank. The wrapping began to disintegrate. The face of a young boy, no older than seven or eight was revealed, bloated, pale, eyes sunken. After I had dragged the corpse ashore, up the steep bank and into the car park, I knelt beside it and wept. Before I had time to consider what I had just done, the body turned and lurched, its arms outstretched. I couldn’t move away quickly enough, it gripped me with ice cold limbs. I felt the sodden flesh give unnaturally as the body attached itself to me. Suddenly from the corpse came a crying sound. It sounded like the crying of a newborn baby, flat yet shrill. It was hideous a sound. Finding my senses and standing quickly, I allowed the body to fall from my lap and onto the ground. I screamed from the pit of my stomach. It was long overdue.

The car-park was then lit up from behind me, the sound of an engine came from nowhere. I turned to see headlights. I dropped to my knees once more; I managed two last words before I passed out into the arms of the man who emerged from the passenger side.

“Help me.”

The police tell me that I had the body of seven-year-old Aaron Barker, missing for three weeks, in my holdall. I can’t explain that. I can only tell you what happened. That was what happened. I can’t tell them how I knew the boy’s name either. I know someone wrapped that poor kid up in a bed-sheet -a bed-sheet from my flat, yes- and dumped him in that canal, I know that because I found him. But I can’t tell them how, or who did it. Apart from that it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.

 NB: I’m a little embarrassed to be publishing this again, since I’ve already put it on one of my other now deleted blogs. I wrote it a few years ago when I was at University. While I’m not particularly proud of the writing, I have enjoyed the reactions it has got in the past. Oh yeah and hello to anybody that notices that this is actually a pastiche of a Hideo Nakata film called Honogurai mizu no soko kara that was subsequently subjected to one of those abominable J-horror American re-makes. It means we have a similar taste in films.

The reason Martin England was so feared by his peers, the reason that he so richly deserved his undisputed title as The Hardest Kid in the School is because he was not (unlike his contemporaries in the scene) careless with his threats.

Other angry, rough-looking boys liked to spray empty promises of the violence they planned to unleash upon their rivals into the chatter of the playground without giving much thought to the limits of their emotional and physical capabilities. Few fifteen-year-old boys actually possess the raw strength required to physically rip the head from someone’s shoulders, and the logistical implications of actually shitting down the neck of a recently decapitated body (while the idea itself is an admirable symbol of contempt for the recently extinguished human life) have never been seriously considered. It’s reasonable to assume that an act such as this has never, and probably will never take place.

Martin England’s prophecies of the misery soon to be dispensed on his foes, however, were always right on the mark. He premeditated his speeches carefully, with the utmost in professional planning.  His own style of thuggery was admired for perfectly balancing creative flourishes with stalwart practicality. England was a genius in his field. Legends of his atrocities reached every school in the district, his physical strength paled when compared to the raw fear he was able to strike into schoolchildren everywhere.

If Martin England had parents, nobody knew what they did, or where they were. His known family consisted of himself and three grown-up brothers, themselves rumoured to be hardened career criminals; apparently responsible for a near-fatal mugging at the bus-stop, the pub-brawl that saw the Hen and Hammer closed for six weeks one autumn and the infamous robbery at the local Costcutters (apparently one of the perpetrators had flashed and later discarded what turned out to be an ultra realistic looking 9mm semi-automatic bb gun.)

Martin England answered to no-one. The reason, it was popularly thought, that Martin had not been permanently excluded from school (not that it would have done much to end his reign of terror) was a combination of the fact that he was actually a well-behaved and competent student when in lessons and that the entire teaching staff were frightened of him.

Few challenged the England throne. It was on rare occasions that the lunch-hour Chinese-whispers resulted in bloodshed.

“Oi, Martin. John Cantely called you a prick in Science.”

Martin England had perfected his middle-distance gaze. He would jut his lower jaw and take a long drag on a cigarette before delivering his verdict.

“Tell him I’m going to break his nose and stamp on his head. Tell him to meet me in the fucking park or everyone will know he’s a pussy and I’ll come to his house.”

The punishment was carefully selected to fit the crime.

For some reason, Martin England liked me. He knew that my parents were both musicians, he once spoke to me at length about his love for a band called Os Mutantes of whom my father was also a fan. I listened to that album a lot after that conversation, trying to figure something out, although I’m not quite sure what it was now that I think back.

I’m not sure what he’s doing now. Someone once told me he works in sales & marketing, I can’t vouch for the source, but I’ll admit that I harbour a vague hope of one day seeing him as a contestant on The Apprentice.

Hi it’s me.

At the moment I am looking at my options for a masters degree. (oh by the way can you please give me six and a half thousand pounds?)

I’m also writing lots (oh yeah I’m doing a novel) and I’ve been playing the guitar (I have a new ebow).

More posts to come

Love

P

Oh yeah and thanks for reading and sometimes commenting on my really really stupid blog