Different ways of getting, having, and holding. Sometimes, in the past, it was simply there, from one moment to the other, on air, on Europawelle Saar, in the room of your teenager buddy – your life‘s musical history is accompanied by regularly falling in love at first sound. It was more complex when you know the music of your desire would arrive, someday soon, you may have read about it – oh, this rough mix of joy, impatience, daydreaming! At this point in time, and after several disappointments in 2018 (Laurie Anderson, David Byrne a.o. old company) there is no record to be seen in the near future that makes me bite in my teeth, shiver with pre-excitement, wanting to share my untamable enthusiasm for an album that is not yet there. Is this the final arrival of the all-encompassing age of recycling and rewinding so that (in the end) only those records make you hum that are full of distant echoes, and close to falling apart in the most beautiful ways. They have a hidden f o r t e, no doubt, but great records like the ones from Yo La Tengo, Jakob Bro, John Surman or Andy Sheppard send you into dreamspace, for all the good reasons.
I go to the rock arena, and what do I get: a ridiculously bad Jack White album, an agitated post-punk horseshit that real critics applaud to like something that would not be forgotten by the end of the year. I remember the days I waited for a Robert Wyatt or Brian Eno song album many, many moons, and when it was clear, they would land in my small place on the planet, a kind of Christmas vibe was all around. Days ago, I got an email from the son of the late „fifth man“ of The Beatles, no kidding, and he wrote though things are in preparation, it would definitely not yet be clear that the Fab Four‘‘s „White Album“ would be reissued, sensurround and all, in the autum of 2018. My most anticipated album from 2018 stems from somewhere deep in the last century.
I contacted Green Garthside, because I know Scritti Politti is working on the next album, but it is all delayed and questionable. At least Robert Forster said, a new song cycle might appear. A man and his guitar will rock you. You like the woman at his side on violin. She makes you think of Regensburg. You had another love there, slim, brown, sexy. You made love to her, near the big river, no, she made love to you, you both went to a gig of a band that was writing German Rock History, „Fehlfarben“, they toured their „Monarchie und Alltag“-album. Did it rock you? No, a bit only. She did rock you. Memory mode in pastel. Memory fade mode. All quiet. Dark night. Coming. A sound out of nowhere. Like, like…, yes: The The did rock you, „Soul Mining“ was a killer.