„Dirty old river, must you keep rolling / Flowing into the night“. I enjoyed walking through the night of Kristiansand. The work was done, the music of Cyclobe a real surprise for me on that early September day. Ossian Brown, one of the bandleaders, had published a book of photographs years ago on „Halloween in England“, with lots of ancient pictures – children in the old days playing tricks on the horror.
I walk (a real „killer walk„) over well-kept, wooden harbour bridges, past huge fish warehouses, leave the tiny coastal park on the left, now I come to the edge of town, the road rises, from a student dormitory comes music by the Rolling Stones, an old record, I think it’s „Let It Bleed„, a good hour goes by, I pass a shop with an eternal ooomp-ooomp-goove of the crazy kind and the big kebab pizza (open till 4. 30 in the morning).
I sink into bed, my thoughts rotating, live-remixing my day, then falling out of these loops, just two or three still circling inside my brain, I get up once more, take a soft drink from the mini-bar, and put on a song on my virtual jukebox that, for reasons I know only too well, „Waterloo Sunset„, by the Kinks.
The „doom-folk“ and „drone specialists“ of Cyclobe come to mind again, with their synthesizers, hurdy-gurdy sounds and other historical sound equipment, like the Kinks, treasure hunters, collecting traces from old and green England finally vanishing – the steam engines, the working class, and some day, all the red busses of London will be gone in that city that once will be called „City of Red Dust“.