Manafonistas

Robert Plant: „This is a thing called ‚Bron-Yr-Aur‘. This is a name of the little cottage in the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales, and ‚Bron-Yr-Aur‘ is the Welsh equivalent of the phrase ‚Golden Breast‘. This is so because of its position every morning as the sun rises and it’s a really remarkable place. And so after staying there for a while and deciding it was time to leave for various reasons, we couldn’t really just leave it and forget about it. You’ve probably all been to a place like that, only we can tell you about it and you can’t tell us.“

I guess I have, Robert. Summer Solstice 15 years ago. Here. It was magical. But I spilt cider on my mobile phone and knackered it.

 
 
 
It was probably a bit presumptuous to attempt a review of Codex prior to receiving a copy of it, but I think it was a worthwhile exercise. My idea of what it might be like based on verbal descriptions wasn’t all that far off, really. D’you remember The Overload by Talking Heads and how it was reportedly an exercise in the emulation of the sound of Joy Division (who they’d never heard)? Well it was a bit like that for me, in a way. Talking Heads got uncannily close in some respects, but the original JD and the Heads‘ inventive pseudosimulacrum have different axial tilts – so they throw out different thought-particles into the cosmos. I say „pseudosimulacrum“ because, well, it could hardly be a straight simulacrum if the Heads hadn’t heard the source material.

So Codex isn’t unlike what I’d imagined, but there’s more there than I’d expected. First plays were through in-ear JVC phones. Maybe it’s cos of bone conduction with in-ear phones (i.e. sound travelling through your actual skull) but it lacked nuance, and was oddly 2-D. Later plays through a mono Bose loudspeaker did the trick though – there are all kinds of subtle layers and dynamic shifts going on that I’d missed before. You do really have to pay attention to this one though – to the untrained ear this could sound lobotomised like lift music or a Hamlet cigar commercial at 16RPM. To a more tuned-in ear, though, Codex is the kind of journey into sound that you don’t get to buy a ticket for that often.

Music listening during the past week. The following are the week’s repeated plays and fascinations rather than the constant background of stuff that always gets played (stuff like Harold Budd’s Bordeaux and Jan Garbarek’s Officium).

Crass – The Feeding of the 5000 (album, 2012 reissue). Notes – this is performance poetry/jazz/standup comedy and it sounds just as good as it did when I was 12. A towering work of pure art.

The Police – Wrapped Around Your Finger (track). Notes – The Police never made a cohesive album and all serious music fans hate their guts. I think each of their albums has two or three genius tracks on it. This is one of them.

David Sylvian – Gone to Earth (disc 2). Notes also been listening to Secrets of the Beehive in full, as well as Darkest Dreaming from Dead Bees on a Cake. Disc 2 of Gone to Earth is pure psychoacoustics, unemburdened by words, save for Joseph Beuys‘ mysterious meditation on „the age of overcome“.

Benjamin Britten – Cello Suites (suites). Notes – a bit depressing.

The Streets – Original Pirate Material (album). Notes – one of few records that unfolds like a novel. The central character isn’t a Holden Caulfield, a Meursualt or a Raskolnikov. No-one notices the darkness around, but it bleeds into every beat, every syllable.

The Future Sound of London – Max (track). No notes.

Mark Hollis – The Colour of Spring (track). Notes – great song for practising your singing.

David Bowie – Low (album). Notes – all serious music fans love Low. I also love Tonight and Never Let Me Down, so I guess I’m an unserious music fan. Low is great for many reasons – but the main reason it’s great is that it’s got Art Decade on it.

I also listened to Clouds Across The Moon by the Rah Band a few times because the singer’s accent is really great, fixed in time and (Thames estuary) space.

It occurred to me today that 2015 is the 20th anniversary of Michael Landy’s Scrapheap Services. I wonder if there will be any events held to celebrate it?

You walk into the exhibition space, you’re kind of struck by the vibe of sterility in there. The walls and flooring are of a shade of white that place you in a nowhere, endless. Lots of little paper cut-out figures all over the floor. Your first instinct is to pocket one of the fuckers – the artist must have known this would be the case – and the gallery staff are watching you very closely. It’s almost like theatre. The video installation starts up, its audio a kind of measured, processed, cleansed language of corporate euphemism. The mannequins are unsettling: humanlike enough to be humanlike, but with limbs at slightly odd angles, like almost-there cyborgs, not space chimps.

„With this work Landy suggests our complicity in sustaining society’s potentially dehumanising processes through hierarchies of valuation: ‚everyone is complicit in the whole thing'“.

It’s a long time since I saw this installation – probably a decade or more. But it’s stuck with me – the humour of it, as well as the sheer fucking beauty of it.

Never had any interest (at all!) in art as a kid. Was only interested in sound. The sound of electric light, TV static, shortwave radio scans, people’s accents, the cadences in the lines of Dr Seuss books, theme tunes, advertising jingles, ice cream van chimes, rain on pavements and windscreens and Dutch elm leaves, diesel car engines, the railway, disembodied tannoy voices, silence’s unsilence (mild tinnitus or a faded imprint of the creation of the universe?), TDK D90 experiments, echoes, etc.

Having zero art knowledge/interest of art until about the age of 24 was a good art education. These days I’m fascinated by art. It doesn’t need to be any good: it just needs to be honest. There is commercial artwork on breakfast cereal packets that will travel through centuries, while there are things hanging in your local city’s Kunst-cathedral that are basically just fucking tat and that will be forgotten about.

Today, I spent about 20 minutes staring at Sepolcro di Cecilia Metella, the Piranesi etching. One of the most interesting things about Piranesi is that you sometimes recognise things in the work that you have already seen in a dream. The same thing happens with de Chirico (and sometimes even Frits Thaulow). This isn’t oneiro-semiotics though, or science or criticism. We are just chimps after all, space chimps with access to a shared/shareable (collective) dream brain/consciousness. Piranesi may well have been a time traveller – the Sepolcro is full of broken circles, portals. The sepulchre looks like it’s about to revolve. In typical piranesi style, there is weird shit in the sky – a Rorschach-blot clown-phantom wearing the devil’s trilby. Fucking hell, did Piranesi watch Tarkovski’s Sacrifice? Or read Dr Seuss? No semiotics please – this is better than that. Even for them what knows fuck-all about art. Piranesi = fucking genius.

 
and, and … E is for Eno. I greatly enjoyed this documentary-of-sorts. Maybe you will too.
 
Slowdive – Souvlaki
 

 
I greatly enjoyed reading this. You may too. The Ginger Line.
 

Newly-demolished buildings are full of ghosts. The sense of dispersal of mental static is palpable. Imposed geometries disimposed. From the draftsman’s table to the wrecking ball, time telescoped. Energy untrapped. No cathedral, just you or me or anyone’s days and days – folded into time now past. Under a calm, wide, blue cold summer sky.

Images playlist:

Cabaret Voltaire – Ghost Talk
Jerry Burns – Pale Red
The Blue Niile – Stay Close
John Foxx – Europe After The Rain

Well, what can I say? Around 1/2 way through 2015 I think I’ve found my #1 record of the year. (I still very much stand by my 2014 top choice, SYRO: I listen to it every day. Yep, every single fucking day – no exaggeration. SYRO is brain food for me. And I still LOVE the Charcoal Owls record. Big style!)

Ghost Harmonic’s Codex dropped thru the letterbox this morning with uncanny, almost mystical coincidence. I was piecing some thoughts together on a theme I’ve discussed at length in my book Der Papierkorb ist beschädigt (Chapter: „Vibes“). The theme about how recorded sound collects and inscripts more than just sound waves. For some reason London was in my thoughts, partly because I had been listening to Pink Floyd’s Animals and partly because I’ve recently been reading an interesting blog entitled Growing up on the Isle of Dogs, and also because I’ve been planning a London trip itinerary which involves my favourite coffee shop, which is on Kingsland Road (E2) and various other places, so I’ve been on Google Street view a lot, working out walking distances (and getting lost a lot too, which I value greatly).

It turns out that Codex was recorded at a studio 350 metres away from my coffee place. It also turns out that Codex is very much an embodiment – maybe even an apotheosis – of what I was on about in that chapter of Der Papierkorb ist beschädigt. (From the blurb for Codex: „The spaces in between the musical notes are often overlooked in modern recording,’ says Benge [one of Ghost Harmonic along with Diana Yukawa and John Foxx]. ‘It was these ideas that we wanted to capture on this record. The ‘ghosts’ in the studio that we were listening to for inspiration. The name came out of that.’ John Foxx: ‘I noticed an interesting effect when multi-tracking into long or complex reverbs – certain harmonics would be suppressed or enhanced and previously unheard ones would emerge from the miasma. This can be really beautiful and it’s now what I most listen for – I know a piece is going somewhere new when this sort of thing begins to occur.)
 
 
1. A Green Thought in a Green Shade
2. The Pleasure of Ruins
3. Dispersed Memory
4. When We Came to This Shore
5. Codex
 
 
This is music you need to get right inside of, like Through The Hill or The Pearl. Is this what music will sound like after the so-called Technological Singularity? Delays, echoes, pscyhoacoustics and the space between notes are things that a lot of my favourite artists explore – people like Edgard Varèse, Vini Reilly, King Tubby. Ghost Harmonic do it in their own magical way. It’s not mega-easy to explain, but I’ll try. You know how there are arbitrarily distributed zones in a city you know well, where a weird kind of magic resides, and viscerally affects you?

It can be a bus stop, a railway bridge, a weird two foot wide demilitarised zone between warehouses where only birds walk. It can be a kebab shop. It can be anywhere. When your psychogeographical filters are applied, these places are easy to spot. The effect can be so strong that you sometimes have to turn round (like a fucking idiot) and go back to where you’ve just been, to get another charge of the mental energy there. If you know that feeling, or the electrically transcendent vibe you can get from looking at an art print of a dog standing outside a beach hut on sale in a department store (an art print no connoisseur would love, hopefully), then you may just get from Codex what I get from it. It’s not ambient but its place is very much imprinted on it. Few releases excite me as much as this one: it’s like a dream where you find a book full of new ideas, but when you turn the pages there is something more than ideas, there’s a primordial mist of ideation/iration itself, leaving you to go ideate.

The tracks here form one continuous track. Some of it has the kind of gloaming time dopamine glow you get from Torn Sunset, one element of the music being devised to be projected onto by another element – holograhic harmonics. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Moments lost in time. Tears in rain. I’ve been listening to the Harold Budd and John Foxx record Nighthawks for about 4 years now and I feel I am beginning to understand it. Codex already feels like I am at the very beginning of another long and absorbing journey in sound/beyond sound.
 
 
 

 
 
 
Important note:
 
This is an experimental review. In fact, I haven’t heard the record yet. Not a fucking note of it! It didn’t drop thru my letterbox this morning. Hopefully it will next week sometime. (There are soundclips of three tracks online but I haven’t played them yet.)

Title: I’ve Seen Everything
 
Artist: The Trash Can Sinatras
 
Release date: Sometime last century. The 1990s, maybe. Who cares?
 
Recording details: Produced by Ray Shulman, recorded at Shabby Road Studios, Kilmarnock, Scotland
 
Genre: seriously, fuck knows.
 
Tell for why this is a classic: there is no canon. Otherwise it wouldn’t lose things like this. A collection of songs that might make your heart explode. Vivid lyrics, good tunes.
 
Standout tracks: Hayfever, Orange Fell, I’m Immortal, Send For Henny, I’ve Seen Everything, Earlies.
 
Sample lyric 1: all our plans were made on streets the winter paved, as streetlamp lucozade orange fell – I love this lyric. It’s like a moment out of James Joyce’s Dubliners. Non UK readers may appreciate a little background here. Lucozade is a fizzy drink, and it has an orange colour. Not opaque Fanta orange colour, more like translucent rust. The drink was originally sold at your local Apotheke and marketed to people convalescing from illness. A UK streetlamp does indeed look like luminous Lucozade. So you get this sad, reflective, post- love affair song, with the streetlamp kind of radiating this comforting energy. The wording ‚orange fell‘ has two meanings – the first is literal – the orange light fell on the snowy Scottish winter street. The second is a reference to Isaac Newton’s (probably apocryphal) epiphany when an apple fell on his head and he invented gravity. (I say ‚invented‘ but it may already have been there, dragging stuff down.) By switching it to orange rather than apple, and having photons ‚fall‘, the lyric opens up questions about how the physicality of the universe and the unity of the universe are stretched and reshaped when the psyche is affected by ‚falls‘ in or out of love.
 
Sample lyric 2: come into my house, throw open the windows wide, then back to your house to do likewise Another cracking line. It’s about breathing, the etymology of the inspiration, and also defences.
 
Sample lyric 3: three feet of snow fell on the Walnut Road, two feet trudged. Round the corner came the sound of bad dreams. The flame is old, the Thames is cold I have no idea what this song is about. It appears to tell the story of two friends in their early 20s moving to London to work in the early 1980s. They work ‚earlies‘ (i.e. from around 4am until noon) which suggests they have crap jobs. There’s a reference to terrorism – did one of them die? You’re left to guess.
 
Anything else? I saw the band play live around the time this was released. The Velvet Underground (THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, BABY!) were playing at a venue that same night, about two streets away. The Trash Cans‘ singer walked on stage and his first words were something along the lines of „commiserations, everyone – I guess you couldn’t get Velvet Underground tickets and came to see us instead“. Not me, I was there for these songs. I wasn’t disappointed either.