Manafonistas

The rain had poured since dawn upon the craggy Northumberland countryside, over tin shed roofs, farmsteads, hill clefts and footpaths, trickling in rivulets down windscreens and foreheads, soaking gardens, small pub car parks and fence posts, glistening the yellow-brown leaves of early autumn and the sills of windows everywhere.
 
 
 

 
 
 
Rain. So much rain. An unending wetness threatens to drown dreams of dry weekend weddings, country walks and youthful skylarking in twilit harvest fields, a pouring not so much of water as of gloomy indoors listlessness, driving people to the kitchen kettle, the wireless, the unfinished jigsaw puzzle and other workaday pursuits, while the incessant tapping of rain on pane and sill played out its subtle insistent rhythm of quiet enervation.
 
 
 

 
 
 
Zigzagging away thru the boredom and the pain stunning communist architecture now and then glancing up thru the rain to beyond it: the fuck-all that is nowhere and endless.
 
 
 

 
 
 
SYRO. September 2014 songs. Spring 2016 relistening:
 
 
1 [67] cubist xylophone. chrono holz! lols
2 [120] n,n-dimethyltryptamine/stocktaking. get off the ind. est. shapes/no shadows
3 [101] 9Roy Orbison0
4 [126.26] made my heart burst
5 [130] roland tr-808 i swarm of bees
6 [141.98] sea v. sea (see) view. „I want to play my Space Invaders!“
7. [138.85]
8. [152.97] insect olympics
9. [141.98] nonchalant bermonndsey superiotituty thames floatwr
10. [155] no copyright case. the innocemce of *becoming*. your bravery of space travel
11. [163.97] dogs barking. birds singing. elephant elephant
12. [102] love sky constellation warzone. bright clothes for winter
 
 
 

 
 
 
Bright clothes for winter.
 

I’ve got pockets full of solutions to the problems of the world
I’ve got barbecues like footballs perched on green glass balconies
Where dereliction used to fester
Where the coffee bars spread like weeds
And streetlights flicker eternal*

*The Karl Hyde lyric is weak lights flicker in tunnels but hey, my ears hear what they hear. Edgeland is still on heavy rotation in my personal playlist. I fucking love this record. Fucking genius, fucking all. Fucking everything: fucking motorways, fucking supermarkets, fucking clouds in my coffee.

Notes on the photo: this was taken in Staten Island in late April 2012. I have no memory of why I took it, or what happened that day. If there was a moment under the moment, then this was it. The cosmos was broken. The cosmos was repairable. She kissed me: it felt like a hit.

And dreams should stay in dreamspace, for that’s where they belong. Mainly cos a dream remembered is a dream that has only half done its work. And the cosmos is made up of stuff the scientists can’t find. Most of it is dream matter – a product that fuses language and music, iration and realisation, past and present, up and down, war and non-war, everything and everything else, and more, into one synaesthesic ball of luminous gloop. Everything* participates. Why does your heart as well as your gut feel music when music is only auditory – just chimp 1.2 banging skins and strumming wires? Because there’s no such thing as playing music: the music plays you. All the successful musician does – in the final analysis – is mediate smudged echoes of the moment of creation and maybe the moment under the moment too. They are listening for the ghost of a chance. They may help us make sense of who we are and where we came from; and as a compassionate side effect, teach us that nothing is lost. So I rake the sky, I listen hard. I trawl the megahertz.

And one night in 2013 a dream half did its work, remembered it on awakening in the middle of the night. The visuals have longsince turned to cosmotic/dreamcosmotic dust but the main theme of it was entirely word based. A repeated phrase that meant nothing to me. It went „Zeta Reticuli knows“, I don’t know how many times. I Say ‚remembered it‘ but the riff was still bouncing around my cerebral cortex – I could still feel it. I picked up my phone and sent myself an SMS so I could remember this meaningless phrase in the morning: „zetaretikuly knows“. Went back to sleep. Typed the nonsense phrase into Google the next day. And it turns out, with the help of search engine semantic/syntax correction, that Zeta Reticuli is real. Why it had got buried under a bush in the boondocks of the subconscious is not for me to conjecture. But hey, Zeta Reticuli knows – for it is written in light on a speck of lighter lighter light in the synaesthesic oblate globe of luminous silly putty that 90% of the cosmos comprises of. Somewhere.

And last week I dreamt I saw the cover of Marillion’s record Misplaced Childhood on a post written in pixels within the everchanging wider set of pixels on Manafonistas. And I dreamt I listened to the whole thing over again.  Ich brauche eine bestimmte Energie, um diese Schallplatte zu hören. & this was all I needed. &:
 

And I looked out the window
And I saw a magpie in the rainbow, the rain had gone

 

 
 
 
What the record offers is a nexus: the place where the dreamers of the dream meet the morning at the window, where The Incredible String Band, Boards of Canada and your own warblings make sense. The cup is broken. And everything is broken. And everything is repairable.

 
*Even stone.
 
[Note: 12.35% of this text is copyright Paddy McAloon, 2003. The rest is copyright: the universe]

MANAFONISTAS.
 
 
M:
____ F
_A
__N
_________S
 
 
„33 years since its original arrival, January 22 saw the release of the re-mastered version of one of John Cale’s most unique and lauded solo records, Music For A New Society, alongside a visceral new reworking of the album under the title M:FANS – a record that explores the relationship between old and new, in terms of the sound and vision, and Cale’s memories of the experience, in terms of his life, and the recording.“ (john-cale.com)
 

I listened. I laughed (cried?) What now?

The word ’steps‘ (or its approximate translation) appears frequently in the works of André Breton and Raoul Vaneigem. Words that build or destroy, dirt dry bone sand and stone. Where’s north from here?
 
 
 

 

David Bowie’s ‚David Bowie‘ contains 14 Schneekugeln. I had high hopes for doing them all here, but no. It’s time to call time. Not because the remaining 7 aren’t any good: of course they are

It’s just that it’s a listening thing. David Bowie’s ‚David Bowie‘. Doing the first 7 you realise this shit is like William Blake’s ‚Songs of Innocence and Experience‘: the simple ain’t simple, time ain’t time, gravity ain’t gravity. Nothing to throw adjectives or musicological pseudo-theory at

Or: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen

And iiii am at Plac Zamkowy and it’s raining

My friends, goodbye. I left you there on the street. I had an idea for a time machine

| Влади́мир Ильи́ч Улья́нов | dohánybolt| vážně | грязный | & twoim otoczeniu | & there was no curfew

But I am not at Plac Zamkowy, it’s not raining

And when I live my dream I’ll forget the things you told me And the empty man you left behind It’s a broken heart that dreams, it’s a broken heart you left me Only love can live in my dream I’ll wish, and the thunder clouds will vanish

And I am in a coffee shop in Łódź, on the corner of Nawrot and Sienkiewicza. I am sitting down with my coffee when this group of absolute nutters invades the place. One has on a Guy Fawkes mask, one has a guitar, one has a tinsel wig, and one appears to be carrying a tray with the nativity scene on it. One of them is doing a morris dance. I just ignore it but it’s pretty funny.

I can’t hear the song they play anyway, as I have my red and white urBeats in-ear phones on, and My Truth by Cocteau Twins is playing at full volume into my head (from my Android phone) which alongside the weird side effects of the decongestants I’m taking has the effect of partial environmental block-out. Valuably subtracting any element of sincerity from this exercise in psychogeography. What’s meaning, and what’s meant? And today, Łódź is Las Vegas and everything is repairable: everything is broken

But I am not in a coffee shop in Łódź on the corner of Nawrot and Sienkiewicza. I am in beautiful Bucharest, huddled in a doorway on the Strada Maria Rosetti, which with decongestant side-effects and half-closed eyes, could almost be Palermo. And my urBeats are playing Damage

And when I live my dream, please be there to meet me

„From light we come, and to light we go.

From the light of this understanding I moved against the human aberration of War
and followed its tribal roots down into the dark bowels of recorded history and beyond.

Never did I imagine such an incredible journey.“

Stan Hall (1936 -2008)
 

We Are Hungry Men, the 6th track on the first David Bowie album, starts off, typically, with firing sparks of genius. „Here is the news …“ it goes, in an a voice that takes its caricature of RP beyond caricature or even satire and into a place that its target deserves: nowhere.

RP was the accent adopted by English broadcasters in the middle of the 20th century. RP – received pronunciation. It’s an infinitely stupid term, as is enacted by the artist in those 4 words. RP is meant to be the speaking voice of reasoned thought, but was in practice a vessel for the 20th century’s colonial (soon to be very postcolonial) insecurities. Here is the news. Fuck the news, and its bombast. Tomorrow is yesterday. Phonemic subversion becomes diphthongal intifada.

The lyrics that follow examine catastrophism, ecologocentrism, Victorian patricianism and globalisation with humour and a lightness of touch. This is the news: the news is not news but history. And history is just facts but not the vibration/iration of everyday life.

The far future tells us so – a look to the relatively near past for intimations of the eschaton throws up just as much as a look to yesterday, tomorrow or anytime else in any epoch of any lithosphere.

There Is A Happy Land is the title of the fifth track on Schneekugeln. And what fucking depression.

Keen readers will know the title from two places: first from the awful, depressing 19th century hymn that’s about as spiritual as drinking paint. Second, from the infinitely depressing (but great) 1957 Keith Waterhouse novel by the same name. The hymn is what it is. The novel is pure unadulterated cosmos. A genius book, whose acuity of perception is so sharp that to re-read it would be vandalism.

It’s impossible to imagine this song’s iration without the influence of the novel. Part of Bowie’s genius was the ability to throw references forward without the need to poststructualise. In this case, throwing forward from the primordial paint of the life-reducing hymn and the mega fucked-up Sistine of Waterhouse’s novel. To the last song on the record.

The first four songs are an acceleration. This is a brake.

Love You Till Tuesday’s backing track is a weird jaunty department store jingle. An unlikely basis for the linguistic play it supports. The lyrics address a paradox: „my passion’s never ending and I’ll love you ‚til Tuesday“. Except it’s only a paradox for the object of love. The subject here is mercurial/comedic- you can hear it in the comedy aspect of the vocal – especially the second vowel in the word ‚romance‘ which opens up a whole book of English phonology that there’s no space to go into here. Let’s just put it like this: nobody in England (or Scotland/Ireland/Wales/USA) pronounces the word like that. Phonemic subversion! Perfect. You can also hear comedy in the (presumably scripted, non-corpsing) burst of laughter that follows for a brief second. Amid the silliness, something serious is said. The parting shot: „well, I might stretch it ‚til Wednesday“ is superfluous, and deliberately misplaced. Go on, it’s saying. Throw in a pseudo-denouement where none’s required. Keep listening, it’s saying. There’s so much more to come. A an interlude within a music hall interlude within a music hall interlude: a weird jolt, a narratological impetus.