Manafonistas

The first thing to say about The Palace of Elysium is that it never existed.
 
 
The road to Elysium
 
Google Maps wasn’t much use. The name of the approach road is marked as „unnamed road“ which is kind of amusing. You follow Unnamed Road for maybe 20 minutes. Then you find a piece of raised earth, like a neolithic burial ground. In front of it, a discarded extraction fan and some sections of plastic industrial piping.
 
 
 

 
 
 
First sight of Elysium
 
Eventually you get to the building. On first sight it’s unimpressive. It’s completely sealed off by aluminium perimeter fencing topped with razor wire. I had to photograph the building from between narrow gaps in the fence. From this angle it could be a car park, or 1960s public housing in North London. There are – inexplicably – four redbrick cooling towers outside, and someone has painted a mystical four-syllable poem on the front of the building: EXPENSIVE SHIT.
 
 
 

 
 
 
Inside the Palace of Elysium
 
Like I said, you can’t go inside. These photographs were also taken by putting my phone through gaps in the fence, hence the awkward angles and inelegant framing.
 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
At this point, and for no reason, RD Laing pops into my mind. Then pops back out again, saying nothing.
 
 
The TV room & a bedroom window
 
The TV room, where people once presumably sat watching Kojak, Hawaii 5-0 and Star Trek:
 
 
 

 
 
 
And it’s odd how the blocky, concrete car park shape of the building suddenly gives way to other forms. The TV room is round. What this means in terms of architectural semiotics I have no idea. This cell block also has curved walls. Its window is now glassless and forlorn.
 
 
 

 
 
 
The Zone
 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
It wasn’t possible to get a good shot of The Zone. It’s actually right on the edge of a precipice so you have razor wire in front of you and a 100 foot drop on the other. And so you can’t step back and get the whole of this structure in the shot. It’s like a flattened amphibious landing craft set on a massive plinth, with an observation window at the front, again now glassless.
 
 
My phone rings. It’s Ivan Chtcheglov. He says this:
 

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors. These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning.

 
The Palace of Elysium must be built.

 

 
 
 
Time moves in numbers / I count the summers
 

North London, December 2002. Having no idea that 15 years later I’d time travel back to this moment via memory, I didn’t bother taking notes. What mobile phone did I have? Probably a Sagem, probably dual-band model with WAP, the shitty mobile internet precursor. What was I wearing? No idea, but I do know that (for reasons now long forgotten on account of being too silly to remember) I didn’t wear denims for a full five years between 1998 and 2003, when in 2003 bought a pair of £50 Zoo York jobs out of a skateboard shop. But this was still 2002 and that was the following summer, so I was probably wearing £12 black cargo pants from either Millets or the army surplus store. I was rocking a utilitarian look and style was not my middle name. (During those 5 years there was also a 2 year period where I didn’t have a CD player (or a record player) or a television. It was a good experiment, and you’d end up reading broadsheet newspapers and books and whatnot out of complete boredom. I especially enjoyed The Karamazov Brothers but felt that Russian doesn’t translate well into English and that what I was reading was not Dostoevski but a series of approximations that missed the poetry of the original. Same with Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin – you can get the metre but you can’t get the spirit.)

Finchley isn’t a name that means an awful lot to me. It was Margaret Thatcher’s constituency during the 1980s. I believe McDonald’s also had a „Hamburger University“ there. I think I may even have gone to gawp at the outside of it in hopes that some hamburger knowledge might seep by osmosis into my brain. And apart from occasional trips to Finsbury Park and Stoke Newington, I don’t think I’ve really ever been back to North London, good though it is, since last week. Anyway, the other Finchley sightseeing I did was to go to the Clissold Arms pub, where The Kinks had played their very first gig 39 years before – in 1963. I always liked The Kinks – and part of the reason why is their balance and subtlety. They never overdid the cheeky chappy wacky 60s bit, they never overstated anything much, never went headlong into rock with a capital R, and recorded a body of work that is always worth revisiting. The other thing they never overstated was production values. And yet, there they are. Listen to Big Sky off the Village Green album. The recording levels are turned up way too high on the drums and the guitar, but the vocals are as clear as polished glass. The drums on old Kinks records always have that elemental feel. But I wasn’t thinking about this stuff then. The record on the radio that week was „Don’t Mug Yourself“ by The Streets. One England had faded into the sepia-coloured folds of memory and another had appeared. Not on top of it, but in place of it. And it’s appropriate that „Don’t Mug Yourself“ reminds me of being at The Clissold Arms, because The Streets, remind me a bit of The Kinks – real without descending into social realism, ambient without even trying, and about as English as it gets.

North London, April 2017. Times and perspectives change. (And I’m wearing Levi 511s.) Battersea doesn’t feel like Battersea anymore – not in a good or a bad way, just different. Nine Elms is something else, it’s a physical space, yes, but, but psychogeographically it’s almost locationless, like an airport – a swirl of hope and anticipation and a question: how will it age? Battersea and Nine Elms are of course south of the Thames, but bear with me. Walk north for an hour (over Vauxhall Bridge and far away) and a half, in a straight line, and – boom – you’re in Maida Vale. And it’s preserved. Even the tube stations at Maida Vale and St Johns Wood still have the indefinable northness about them. What’s on the radio, who knows, fuck knows. Pasta at Allora on Boundary Road, maybe a limoncello or two, then home to sleep.
 
 
 

 
 
 
Nine Elms. The Jago it ain’t.

He: Wake up, I need you.

She: In your dreams!

The album Warszawa by Superfamily must be a decade old by now, and it’s not a record I’ve ever read a review of or heard anyone talk about, maybe I talked about it in the posts that went into to Papierkorb. Who knows? Fuck knows. One of the specific things I love about this record is its time travel theme. The first track is even called ‚Time Travelling‘. But you can’t make out the lyrics to that one too well as the vox are vocodered, presumably garbled during their journey through space-time.

A quick digression: if you listen to Kraftwerk’s Computer World (the title track from that LP) very closely, the lyric goes:
 

Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Crime, travel, communication, entertainment
Crime, travel, communication, entertainment

 
Then it goes like this:
 

Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Time travel, communication, entertainment
Time travel, communication, entertainment

 
And music is the perfect medium for time travellers. Kraftwerk knew this. Superfamily must have too. Anyway the other thing I love about Warszawa is that it doesn’t obscure its influences. You can hear the influence of The Killers in particular. But rather than this producing a simulacral effect, the opposite happens: the artist is free. A simulacrum is only a simulacrum if it’s unknowing or cynical. Originality is what it is, but the guarding of originality is unoriginal, as is is its curation. Warszawa is a record of its time, despite the time travel. (Tourbillon and on and on, Mireia, wherever u are.)

And then there’s a twist. A perfect denouement. The Suffering (the closing track) shifts from The Killers suddenly, gloriously, to a Daniel Lanois influence worn on its sleeve so vividly that it could be a sleeve tattoo. It’s there in the vocal presentation, the metre and the whatever the word is I’m looking for here – saudade? Eraritjaritjaka? Ghostiness? The song breaks down like this – central character heads to the city centre on a Saturday night but leaves at 8pm cos there’s „nothing new“, heads along a „sandy street“ (James Joyce reference?) to home. „First I froze and then I turned the key“. Vocoder kicks in again. For like 6 minutes. Night turns to day. The protagonist then gives us a precis of what just happened: he went home but she was gone, the lights still on in the house. And now it’s morning in a day that’s „young, grey and gold“. A big ending. No time travel though, as the closing words of the song and the LP go like this:
 
 

It’s a sin to go back in time. Move it on move it on, move it on, move it on

 
 
Then you realise this is an urge to time travel to the future, and it is why the song is fucking genius. Because living day to day is that forward movement. There is no exit. The future is that mountain.
 
 
 

 

It’s been a good week in music. Enjoying Fiction/Non-Fiction, then the new Drake mixtape appeared, with some ace tracks like Madiba Riddim (potential lifer) lovely stuff. Then 4 Gorillaz tracks appear on YouTube, complete with animated clips.

The Gorillaz tracks are affecting, especially „Andromeda“ with its joyful but fucked-up feel and repeated phrase „take it in your heart“. An intriguing mix.

So you go find an interview, and you find this: Simply put, we’re in transition, we’re turning into something else,” Albarn said of the album’s narrative. “The album kind of came from this dark fantasy. Just imagine, the weirdest, most unpredictable thing that changes everything in the world. How would you feel on that night? Would you go and get drunk? Would you stay at home? Just watch TV? Would you talk to people?

Wow.

Here is a photo picked at random to go with this post:
 
 
 

 

Fiction
 
Today I was hanging out with ghosts watching ghost football in a stadium overgrown, whose greenkeeper has probably not been seen since ’67. Ghost pies, ghost Bovril, ghost match. Back of the spectre net.
 
Non-fiction
 
Today (after I was done with the ghosts) I heard Olivier Alary’s wonderful Fiction / Non-Fiction. I have no idea how I found it, or indeed who Olivier Alary is, but this was the record my ears needed. Lately I’ve been listening to bits of Trance Frendz by Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm as well as Brian Eno’s otherworldly Reflection, maybe they primed the brain for this. Listening to it is like stepping into a dream. No point in looking for meaning here or using adjectives or finding comparisons. This will be on the 2017 list for real. Lifer? Too soon to tell.
 
 
 

 
 
 

More here: 130701.com/release/fiction-non-fiction/
 

Celtic Frost – Morbid Tales. Just stunning. The recording / production have never dated. Like a lot of the best metal, there’s a strong sense of humour here. A towering work of art.

Venom – Black Metal. Arguably (probably) instigated an entire genre. I’ve never read up on the history of Venom, but there has to be a punk rock influence in here – the whole enterprise is gloriously free of the past.

Motorhead – Motorhead. Apologies for the lack of Umlauts. But yeah. From start to finish, just a great record. Love the subtle use of distortion: not overstated, saying „this band is too loud for the recording apparatus“.

Slayer – Reign In Blood. It kind of didn’t get any better than this. The LP is about 24 minutes long – and it’s difficult not to love an LP that does so much in such a short space of time. It’s an exhausting listen, in much the same way as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is an exhausting read, despite being only covering about 100 pages. I’m pretty sure Seb Rochford has mentioned Slayer in interviews more than once. Maybe that’s why Acoustic Ladyland clicked first time I heard them? Who knows. Fuck knows. But that’s given me an idea. I will do a Jazz Lifers at some point.

Iron Maiden – Iron Maiden. Great tune after great tune. Not sure how metal this is though. I hear elements of prog in it, elements of the genre known as „pub rock“ (which despite the slightly pejorative connotation, was not a bad genre). The intro to Phantom of the Opera – amazing.

Iron Maiden – Somewhere In Time. Tempus fugit. By now there was a different singer, and the band were very much in the metal sphere. Brilliant use of operatic vocal style in the line „tiiime is aaalways on myyy siiiide“. I think this LP is themed around time travel, but I haven’t ever read the lyric sheet so I don’t know for sure. A time travel themed metal record with a track named for an Alan Sillitoe short story. What’s not to like?

There are other records that could conceivably also fit here – 1984 (Van Halen). Surfing With The Alien (Joe Satriani), 1989 (Ryan Adams), Streetcleaner (Godflesh), Diadem of 12 Stars (Wolves In The Throne Room) and others. But where does rock end and metal begin?

q) What’s a „Lifer“?
 
a) Something that goes into your playlist and never leaves it. Even if it’s years between listens, it’s something that never leaves you.
 
q) what is this new Lifer you found, and how did you find it?
 
a) the song is „Swap Places“, the final track from The Apartments LP No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal. I was on Amazon looking for an old Bathers CD second hand, and No Song, No Spell, No Madrigal popped up in the recommendations. It has fantastic cover art. It would have been foolish not to check out the music.
 
q) What got you about the music?
 
a) I mislike the word „authenticity“ but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Something about the vocal reminded me of The Go Betweens (whose Streets of Your Town is another Lifer of mine). After a couple of listens I looked up the band on Wikipedia and whaddya know – the guy used to be in The Go Betweens. Must be the accent made me think of it. What really got me, as well as the authenticity, was the lyrics. The situation they describe is unbearably sad and obviously not fictitious. Which dispenses with the need for metaphor or figurative language.
 

If I could do your dying for you
If I could do your dying for you
You know I’d swap places in a New York minute
The wooden box would have me in it