24°C, deep blue,
Heatwave day 2: Saturday, added the crown to my Hifi in the living room.
A co-incidence that the second lodger moved out today; the same day that I finished organising the room changes in this house. The last step was to crown my Hifi with the record player. I now have magic in my living room, CD is nice but doesn’t do the shivers down my neck that LP does with ease.
A very fine day.
10~7°C, thin above, the sun shone a bit too.
Gifts come my way, I have foods, drinks, and CDs. The Music I bought myself, it’s been a long time since last. Before, I would impatiently open the CD cases, sometimes struggle with the packaging and use the computer to put them on my iPod hurriedly. Today I looked over every cover, the inserts and bonus postcards. I have read some of the lyrics and tried to imagine the tracks within. I shalln’t hear these for a few days. There is a something inside that wants to make pictures, polish up the hand-eye co-ordination and hold a brush lightly. The best pictures have marks and the odd repair from dropping the brush. It’s best to hold them lightly you know.
November is warm and dry this year, but I want to go away. It’s going to take all of my skill to manage my sanity this coming year.
10ºC, dry, getting windy
Gig in Stan’s Cafe Birmingham, – both ambient music, in an interesting venue- a metal pressing factory conversion in the Jewelery Quater, Birmingham. There wasn’t a great deal of conversion made to the buliding, it was clean but no effort had been put into decorating the place. We waited in the entry shed with a feeling of anticipation that was different to other performances. The audience was mostly middle-aged men, all wrapped up in thick winter clothes and many beards.
Harold Budd came on first and did a single piece 45 minute set. He began softly playing curious little phrases on the grand piano while the only other musician played a box of tricks that manipulated piano and ambient sounds. The presentation was very soft, distant and unspectacular. There was I, full of head-cold tired from work listening while drifting near to sleep but not loosing contact with the music at any point. Near the end as the sound tailed off, someone coughed and the sound reverberated inside the black box and I wondered how the audience-performer relationship would have changed if they had built on this intruded sound in their own playing.
The Necks had much in common with the first set, though three musicians who didn’t appear to use any electronic manipulation this time. The sound grew to a massive wall of sound just from percussion, double-bass and grand piano. The overlapping patterns each produced created other rhythms within. There was less space in the sound, but the overall structure was clearer. As before, beginning quietly, the crescendo was huge and tailed off at the end. Each instrument sounded anxious and distant which created tension with the others. This is music, like Budd, that had no melody, not broken into separate pieces but was bound by soft overlapping rhythms that bound it all together. There was none of the harshness that characterised amplified wall-of-sound pieces heard in other venues. You can’t beat live “unplugged” performances.
The show was somehow part of the London Jazz festival. I can’t help feeling that I don’t really have a working definition of “Jazz” though. What makes something “Jazz”?
15°C, breezy with empty threats of showers
Turntables: Wow! here are some long lost names still alive & kicking:
turntableworld. Grado, Goldring, Ortofon, Sumiko, and so on.
Some astronomical prices but at least it’s somewhere I can get replacement stylii. The tip for mine costs £140, the memory of times when it sold for £45 are still vivid. Either my memory is good, or inflation is higher than I thought.
-1°C, snow.
Don Van Vliet Died this week. It sounds like a cliché, but I harbour the feeling that I grew up with his music. Though he gave up the music business a long time ago to concentrate on painting, he’s still there in my mind, and my iPod.
He followed the other great creative genius of American culture- Frank Zappa. Two characters that redeem the notion of intelligent creativity in that most capitalist of nations.
-7 to -3°C, thick freezing fog, no wind.
New CDs: Beirut- the Flying Club Cup
Olafur Arnalds: Dyad 1909
Olafur Arnalds:Variations Of Static
The frosticles haven’t dropped all day. They usually do in this kind of freezing fog, a bit of sun releases their grip on trees’ twigs, but today, the light was too weak. So there they are, all coated in thick furry crystals of ice, white , stark and ragged. Sometimes they look as if covered in broken glass, or some crusty crystalline industrial chemical.
Sorry to go on, but this is really penetrating cold- worse when it’s damp & we’re due a minus ten tonight. Should I leave the heating on low all night?
-10 tonight, thick fog
Deaf Institute concert: The Books in a very groovy venue. Maybe tell you later if you are good, I now have some serious drawing to do.
We had travelled back in time to the 1970s. That decade looked better then I remembered; all earthy colours, apart from the purple nylon-flock wallpaper. Most of the blokes wore beards; the girls were under thinner layers of make-up than most of the impasto-caricatures that walk these streets. The Deaf Institute had a cafe on the first floor with the dance-hall upstairs. The only problem was the impressive looking domed roof with skylights- that meant the band couldn’t start until 21.45 when the light had faded enough for us to see their light-show.
I enjoyed the show thoroughly, despite the sound which was poorer than at Warwick a few years ago- it sounded a bit muffled and some speech was hard to follow. We struggled to think of a venue as stylish as this in the Midlands- maybe the Glee Club. I don’t know.
New music arrived this week.
The Zappa ones are American imports bought solely for iPodding.
Back to work, grumph
PJ Harvey: A woman A Man Walked by: initial impression is a return to previous form. I love the melancholy of the previous album, but here in the spring sunshine I can hear the old vigour back. An interesting development is that inside the LP’s cover is a card with a serial number that let me download the album on mp3. This is excellent- I have the sound quality of LP and yet still can load it onto my iPod for the car.I hope this marks a future trend
A proper review.
The Eels; are getting a lot of plays here. Perhaps a subconscious move because I have overplayed Kristin Hersh. The songs don’t paint such vivid images, but there is still a stark introspection that does it for me. Melancholy pervades and depression is a common theme, some passages are quite heart-rending to read even though I am not living in this myself. I have more albums ordered. They had better arrive before the half-term break.
Somebody Loves You
Woke up with a bang
And a bug on your face
It crawled in your mouth
And
gave you a taste of
The good life you left behind
But I think you’re
gonna be fine
Somebody loves you
And you’re gonna make it
through
This nagging malaise
Is more than a phase
It feels like a
job
But no boss ever pays you to lay there
And think how you’ll
die
While the tears start to well in your eyes
Somebody loves you
And you’re gonna make it through
One more Saturday
All alone
through the night
You’ve got to be sure
When you turn out that light
That it’s going to turn on again
You’ve got to be your good
friend
Somebody loves you
And you’re gonna make it through
More snow is marching this way. We’ll be hanging on for the phone-call in the morning. I have doubts though, after the fuss in the press, maybe the Heads will be less willing to shut schools.
Micycle 