Righteous Riot

Another live review, this one from the night after the last post. Friday 18th July, Yvonne Ruve, Surry Hills. A delightful night of mostly quiet, almost sleepy sounding acts, the audience lounging, sitting, standing (except for a few louder moments, provided almost exclusively by the Castings lads) all enjoying a rather odd and out of place way to begin a weekend. I say out of place from my own point of view: I had been working all week and was in a mood to get a little wild and while the bands didn't have the same idea as those in my mind (you'd be surprised how often they actually do) I still managed to fend off the sleep they seemed intent on inducing and fall madly in love with the soft, quiet, awkward wonder of the music.

Recordings of all the performances can be found here: http://skyhut.blogspot.com/2008/07/ruve.html

After wandering lost through the messy bowels of Hibernian House - all graffiti and concrete and pipes and syringes - my brother Leigh and I finally located the space and, after some brief greetings, paid our entry, found a spot on the floor and tucked into our tasty bottle of vodka. We had arrived just in time to catch Polyfox And The Union Of Most Ghosts, who is a dude from Newcastle called Nick who plays lovely sad little instrumental pop songs. The pieces themsleves were tiny; short little licks of sublime melody that started off with a single chord sequence that then got looped and had colour added. My only complaint would be that the songs were to short, stopped abruptly without taking off into other spheres like they could have. But the tunes were delightful, reminiscent of all the lo-fi Kiwi pop that so many kids with guitars in their bedrooms produce so wonderfully, simply well.

The aforementioned Castings crew were up next, playing a monster set, probably one of the longest I've ever seen, maybe more than double the usual twenty minutes. Another set that solidified them as the giants of the current improv/noise scene. Six guys, guitars, mixers, mics and whole lot of huge swirling sound, waves that battered and burst forth from their tortured tangents. After the pyched-out onslaught of the first half of the set, they seemed loathe to quit and unleashed a pulverising industrial-punch that confounded any prettiness that may have appeared earlier. Quite simply the best performance of theirs I've ever witnessed.

From there it was back to the quiet, dreamy pop that seemed the proper flavour of the evening. The Bowles are a group that have only been together a matter of weeks, made up of Mathew from Naked On The Vague and couple of friends of his. They played in sort of circle, facing each other and only rarely the audience, drums, guitars, keys, all swapped around after just about every song. I grew a little sleepy part-way through the set; it was so slow and dreamy but tinged with a soft gorgeousness that seemed trapped in solitude and sadness.

Alps jumped up between the next act. Unbilled and impromptu, he wailed low to his organ drone and conjured the spirits of lo-fi loneliness.

The last act that we saw was a couple of kids from Brisbane who played damaged acoustic pop under the moniker Kitchens Floor. The name comes from a song by Look!Pond another Bris-band of which the 'Floor front-dude was a key member. With this new group he's roped in tiny girl-drummer dressed decades too late who provided tapping beats and soft harmonies to Matt's griping ballads. Something about the softness and touching tales in the songs somehow managed to enrage a couple of drunken Castings boys who took it upon themselves to begin ripping up a cooling-fan and kicking around bags of bottles. I think I remember one of them pulling a paint-stained door from the outside hall and put it on the floor/stage as a backdrop. So rarely do you see such raucus reaction to music that is so quiet and damaged. It suited the performance perfectly though, the kids going even wilder when an old Look!Pond song was pulled out.

I didn't stay for the last band. Haven't listened to the recording yet either. Maybe you can grab it for yourselves and tell me what its like. For my part, the sleepy songs and wasted nature of the night carried me home through the cold at once both sad and elated.

With Thorns Attached

Another late late late live review. This is from last week, Thursday 17th July a show at the Annandale Hotel. Three bands: Naked On The Vague from Sydney, Baseball from Melbourne and Snowman from Perth.

This is not - though you might be forgiven for thinking so - a Naked On The Vague fan site. I do love the band, they're a staple of a lot of my Sydney live show experience, couldn't count the amount of times I've seen them. But their wonderfully woozy, choatic noise thrills me still as they keep growing and getting better and better. Tonight I guess they kind of played a pop set: more songs than warped improv. They played "God Nor Devil" and dedicated to the Catholic pilgrims who had invaded the city that week. I always love seeing them at the Annandale too. Just cos they get huge red and yellow glowing lights and smoke and really awesome sound.

Baseball were next with their frantic Middle Eastern-inflected punk thrash. Frontman Thick Passage sawed at his violin, screaming manic with this wild stare he shot deep into the audience. The rest of the band riffed and plucked and smashed around it all. For some strange, pathetic reason I had never caught this band live after having first heard of them a good five or six years ago. I had always wanted to but unnatural forces seemed to prevent me from doing so. So, I finally did get to catch them. It was the highlight of my night. We started off quite shy in the audience but then the wine warmed us and the songs pulled us closer and closer to the stage and eventually into silly, flailing dancing mode. Sublime.

Snowman are a band from Perth who apparently have gone dark and dreary with their current album. My only experience with them up to this night had been glancing briefly at an article in a local music rag, half-hearing a recent song of theirs on the radio and rather liking it and being recommended this night's show by a friend of mine. What to say, though, about a band that seem to act so independently from the other group members, a band that make massive, energy draining epics without a core to any of the songs? The set was huge, like I said: huge songs, long and heavy and arranged, apparently, around a sense of apocalyptic dread. But their was something terribly affected, massively put-on by the band themselves. Everything from the gorgeous bassist who could barely move she looked so bored to the tiny Indonesian keyboardist who kept throwing himself into spasms, running around, hitting random instruments - none it seemed to fit. I'm all for cartharsis, going all out in pure expression. But only when it can be channeled, harnessed and used properly with the performers around you. Unfortunately these guys just could not bring those elements together. That coupled with one of the most awkward encores I've ever seen a band award themselves made for a curiously disappointing performance.

Last Week's Marauding Noise

Ah, noise. Coming at me like masses of rolling, thundering swathes of thickening grey and black. Oh fuck, this is no place for poetry. Any poesy that could be rhapsodied out whilst being slammed back against a wall by some other sickening aural wall could only be filled with bile and roaches and stinking, horrible clouds of suffocating gasses.

This is a week late review of a small show in the Hellen Rose Schauersberger Labratorium, a concrete room above a concrete car-park tucked away inside a tiny street on the side of a rise in Surry Hills. Last Saturday four acts, namely Naked On The Vague, Absoluten Calfeutrail, Defektro and Onani, all rocked up to this above-ground bunker (don't question it, you know it makes sense) to run through a series of massive, marauding sets centred around as much harsh texture as their speakers would allow.

Onani began a while after nine with their set of swirling, spooky processed keys and effects. I don't get to see these guys nearly as much as I'd like considering they're one of my fave local noise acts but tonight proved why they haven't become the monster act they had been moving towards. The set itself - improvised, droning, doom-laden - hasn't gone through that many changes in the last couple of years. Occaisional instruments will be picked up, processed and abondoned from show to show (tonight's choice was a banjo, that should have looked out of place but kinda wasn't in the psych-y context of the show, that tore mid-range holes in the air as it was plucked and rung out) with out much over-reaching thought given to expansion, retraction or release during their sets. Still, its always great to catch 'em.

Next up was Defektro, who I only knew before as the guy who makes and sells effects pedals in the foyer of the weekly Spanish Club shows in the city. The dude is a constructivist of the highes degree. Tonight he played a guitar that looked to be made of metal rods, an old film cannister that he spun as he plucked and thwacked a long steel spring strung along the length of his instrument. The set shifted between sharp attacks of blasted noise, cold rumblings of thunder and quiet breaks in between made up of ringing coils and what could have been the inside of an industrial warehouse as all the lights are going out. At the end he turned the knob on a gas bottle he had sitting on his table of effects and smacked at another metal spring he had stretched across a huge metal tube, the end of which shot bright blue and orange flame at each random hit. Fucken superb.

I know nothing and know still less about the next act, Absoluten Calfeutrail. One guy; tall, late-twenties, bearded and facing side on to the crowd with simply a table of effects and a microphone. He screamed and shook his way through some insane, maddening curse-ritual while waves of sordid tones swarmed around him. Inside the stage area, under some stairs, lit up by a single bulb the man called upon an evil I only thought existed in the nightmares of some haunted murderer. He shook a tiny wooden box that could have only housed trapped spirits, maddening them further, the force actually going towards making flakes of paint drop from the ceiling above.

Naked On The Vague, in perfect connection with the mood of the night and its previous acts, eschewed any of their actual 'songs' in favour of an extended, improvised spooky-psyche session. All the pent-up, moody zombie rage was still there as well as what felt like a freer, possibly even lighter, feel to the entire set or maybe thats just from setting against the harsh arena the other acts wallowed in. Woozy keys, wounded guitar all swirling above the surface of swampy shades of yellow-muddied mood. First time I'd seen them since they arrived back from their US sojourn and a most welcome return.

Bonniwell's Musical Mess

I got this album the other day for my birthday and gave it my first listen last night. Its a collection of the Bonniwell Music Machine's songs that have fallen far from anyone's attention. And for quite obvious reasons. The music is a fucken mess. Its garage rock from the late 60's, all those sounds are in there - fuzz guitar, farfisa organs, thudding drums - the ideas are in there, the voice is there but not a single one of these elements seem to fit together in any way, shape or form.

The Music Machine had a hit in September 1966 with the song "Talk Talk", breaking into the top twenty and making a television appearance that showed them wearing - according to Sean Bonniwell, the band's lead singer/songwriter, to avoid all gimmicks and to embrace their originality - matching black suits, mop-tops and, to really stand out, a single black glove on either their right or left hand. Fucken wild, hey. Their next single flopped, Bonniwell blaming industry clashes and the band put themselves through years of hard touring, presumably on the back of the one song. They refused to play covers or, apparently even listen to any form of advice. The band would play hour-long sets without breaks, rather than stop to have requests shouted at them which smacks of some weird and confused egomania rather than some highly original or progressive musical tract.

After a while, the original Music Machine parted and Bonniwell put together The Bonniwell Music Machine, recorded some songs for Warner Bros that probably didn't see the light of day until this CD release.

The disc is basically the musical equivalent of one guy's strange, deluded insistence that he force his overwhelming originality onto an audience that existence nowhere but in his mind. An odd, maniacal journey into a pop-garage sound with not a single clue about hooks, harmonies or cohesive musical arrangement. Its astounding that this man was even allowed near a recording studio. No one could have been that hard up for bands in the late 60's that they needed to spend time on this confused mess of ideas. From the liner notes (credited to Bonniwell and written in the third person) to the untracable sounds that pop up clueless and erratic this music isn't, as is claimed, a forerunner to punk or progressive rock, its some insane, gloriously confused mess of mashed ideas made inside the supposed shape of 1960's garage rock.

And its not Beefheart messy either. Beefheart at least had something you could tap into, had enough of a flow and awareness of its own insanity that it was something you could tap into. But this . . . this is simply . . . impenetrable.

To quote Bonniwell in his description of the song "Absolutely Positively", which is about: 'Demanding that you get what you don't have without knowing what you want, is the same as wanting what you haven't got - then not wanting it after you get it." Right . . .

Now, I've met people like this - I know that they're real and that they're out there. People that are so enthusiastic and so brimming with ideas; people that are so convinced of their own originality that they loudly proclaim it attempt to draw others into audience. Unfortunately, though, these are ideas are often so confused, so lost, so misdirected that they are lost on anyone who happens to come into contact with them.

Which is why Bonniwell's music is so fascinatingly, fantastically broken and messed up. In a way, he does fit in with the idea of punk and, indeed, with anybody's ideas about freedom of thought and expression; the idea of creating your own world, of making evrything around you your own and yours to own. Its just that its such a terrifically garbled and inarticulate mess that no one can get properly inside of it to take away something for themselves. As Bonniwell sings in the opening line to "Talk Talk": "I got a complication/And its an only child." Thanks Sean, couldn't have put it better myself.

Pat, You Are A Pillar!

"A lot of women singers today seem to be saying, ‘If you love me and then hurt me, I’ll die.’ I say, ‘If you love me then hurt me, I’ll kick your ass.’"
-Pat Benatar (June 1979)

This is a little of the fallout from a mild brain lapse that occured last year. I got this job where myself and my fellow employees would come to blows over what radio station should be playing. One guy refused to listen to my choice of "yoof" music and I threatened to blow up when a song was played for THE TWENTIETH FUCKING TIME THAT DAY on his commercial puke-choice. So, for the sake of everyone's sanity we made a comprimise.

We eventually settled on an oldies station playing mostly rockin' tracks that re-packaged nostalgia and dreams of past youth specifically for the daily grind. But the station had a love for music which is uncommon for most Australian commercial arse-waves and was pretty endearing.

Oh, and the songs!

I would come home after a large day of nothing and fill my housemate's computer with the massively fake, over-emotive 80's tracks, get drunk and wail along with Flock of Seagulls, Foreigner and - most emotive of all - Pat Benatar.

Pat was born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski in Janurary 1953 to a Polish family in Brooklyn, NY. She was discovered at an open mic nightin the late seventies, playing run-of-the-mill songs dressed in Catwoman costume, showered with praise, shown a record deal, won best female vocal grammys for twenty consecutive years in the early eighties and was generally loved by everyone.

Her obvious massive songs aren't the ones that get me, though. Yeah, "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" is fun and brash and does deal with the main idea that runs through pretty much all of Benatar's songs: that of, "Try it on if you want guy, but I've been through enough shit to know what you're about, if you fuck with me I'll find something else like you never happened," etc.

The songs that get me are the ones with ridiculously over the top chorus, huge arena rock guitars and straining layered harmonies. "Shadows Of The Night", "We Belong", "Heartbreaker".
All of them paint Pat as this immovable pillar, this tough and world-weary chick that has been fucked over, shat on, spat up but doesn't want anything similar to happen to any dude she meets. She warns us about it but is never out for scalps. She still seeks and strives for love regardless of previous histories.

It seemed a common theme for popular women singers in the 80's. Women no longer striving for liberation; women realising they've found it, have been living that way for years and reveling in it, falling in love with it.

"Love Is A Battlefield" was the soundtrack to last year - the song that best describes all the idiocy of bringing previous history and ill communication into relationships, which of course is impossible not to do but fucks things up nevertheless. Its one of Pat's more relaxed and restrained songs but could be - maybe because its what I want to believe and take from the plasticity of the eighties - her most sincere and heartfelt that I've come across.

I think Pat's doing a bit of TV work these days. "I Was A Celebrity, Now Pieces Of Me Are Being Fed To The Wolves" reality-type swill and selling songs for toothpaste and travelcase commercials. Nevermind. For a good chunk of last year she was a rock when I was a flabby piece of fetid fat being drunkenly blown around. Pat, you are a pillar!

Ineptitude Abounds

The other day I came across two articles both giving a brief rundown of the history of Beat Happening. One was a wonderful, and at the same time critical, analysis of the band, its songs, albums, influence and infamy, the other was an odd and rather deluded rundown of the band's recorded output. One was published in a webzine focussing, generally, on the wierder sides of musics out there, the other was in the corner of the back pages of Sydney's main club and DJ streetpress. The link to the Perfect Sound Forever article is here:http://www.furious.com/Perfect/beathappening.html. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the latter article. A damn shame considering how strange its appearnce in such a publication is and was.

You can read the wonderful history of the gloriously inept and underconfident band wherever and however you wish but I don't think you'd ever be able to say that they were talented musicians or fine singers. They did craft wonderfully basic, naive pop songs holding true to themes of teenage love and all things romantic and bookish. But you'd never be able to accuse them spending too much practising together or (gasp!) learning their instruments.

Which is what the writer in 3d World was attempting to convey: that Beat Happening were a band of incredibly talented individuals who played and sang with wonderful voices and an inbuilt sense of musicianship. The best thing about the article was that I think the dude had actually listened to the albums he was describing. And yet he went on to describe what he had heard as collection of finely wrought and deftly performed indie tunes that everyone needs to seek and fall in love with.

Now, don't let me disuade you. I fucken love Beat Happening. Memories of lying in bed wailing out of tune with Calvin with my girlfriend of the time, dancing and singing around her bedroom during a Melbourne summer was wonderful. My favourite songs of theirs will always remind me of that. The band and their music should be sought and savoured but to deny them their wonderful and insatiable INABILITY would be to miss most of what their doing.

The PSF article says most of what needs to be said about the challenging nature of such a band but I thought it so strange to - in the same day - stumble across two mostly opposing articles. Apparently the article in 3d World was an attempt by someone in the magazine to sell something that the readers might not seek out intially - a grouping of underground guitar bands that the kids are getting into but have missed the dance world slightly. I'm gonna make sure I keep up with his articles and whinge about them to you here later.

Rainy Day Mix-Tapin'

Its been raining pretty hugely the last couple of weeks in Sydney so I thought it only right that a similarly wet and soppy cassette be made to accompany it. Plenty of Scottish, English and New Zealand pop tunes on there which makes sense since everyone living in those lands pretty much invented rain. Its also quite possibly the whitest tape anyone has ever made.

Side 1:

The Jesus & Mary Chain - Nine Million Rainy Days
The Go-Betweens - Right Here
Look Blue Go Purple - Winged Rumour
Teenage Fanclub - Everything Flows
The Kinks - Victoria
The Puddle - A440
Suicide - Cheree
The Smiths - William, It Was Really Nothing
The Pastels - Surprise Me
Beat Happening - Foggy Eyes
Nico - Elegy To Lenny Bruce
The Magnetic Fields - I Don't Believe In The Sun

Side 2:

The Carpenters - Rainy Days & Mondays
The Concretes - Say Something New
Cat Power - Satisfaction
Bat For Lashes - Trophy
Codiene - Pickup Song
Slowdive - Catch The Breeze
Boo Radleys - How I Feel
Belle & Sebastian - If She Wants Me
Vaselines - The Day I Was A Horse
Faust - Its A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl
Public Image Ltd. - Careering
The Bats - Other Side Of You


Heaps of the songs (Go-Betweens and JAMC in particular) remind me of the time in a previous house when it rained and rained and rained all night and the drain in our concrete backyard got clogged so that the whole thing got flooded. There was nearly a foot of water in some spots and it kept raining and raining and raining. This was the day the house had decided to have a picnic in some park or wherever. But obviously we couldn't go anywhere outside so we stayed in and drank gin and ate tasty food on the floor of our living room.

Songs of the Mo'

five songs getting my goat of late. that's right i'm changing the phrase, i'm spinnin' it flip-mode on ya. from here on the term "getting your goat" will refer to shit that knocks you sideways, as opposed something that pisses you off.


New Order - Elegia

Dark dawning of the second side of the Low-life album. Synths rising over massive drums, making heavy and more real the seriousness of Joy Division, making their story with a scary, quietly violent instrumental.


Pat Benatar - We Belong

Found the 7" single the other week for $1 and nearly died. Played the song non-stop for a couple of days, singing along with Pat's pain. The slow and completely over-the-fucking-top chorus carried me away away away. Will always be remembered for the time me and friend copied the lyrics from this song onto a drawing of a lady blowing a chimp. 'Many times I tried to tell you/many times I cried alone . . .'
Hang out for a full critical analysis of Pat Benatar songs in a future post. Yes, I'm serious.


The Eastern Dark - Julie Is A Junkie

Glorious Australian pop shouter, its a wicked Ramones rip-off about confusion and love for a girl who's only gonna break you in two. Choruses that kick off with a keening minor-chord wail get me every time.


Ween - Baby Bitch

Half-serious song from notorious genre-plasting idiots. The story goes like this: dude is hanging at a party with his chick, sees an ex who's surprised that he would be with anyone. He tells her in the chorus, eschewing all politeness: "Baby, baby, baby bitch/I'm better now please fuck off." Sounds wonderfully barbed when sung. We soon learn that the narrator was at one time fat and ugly but has been a whole fuck-load better since he stopped seeing this chick. Pretty freaking bitter, but the dude is moving on. Not unlike a situation that I found myself in not that long ago. I'm not as bitter as the Ween boys maybe, but next time I see that bitch and her boyfriend I will most likely stab them both.


The Magnetic Fields - Epitaph For My Heart

Re-found the 'Feilds recently and took myself back to a time of rainy day bus-rides to and from the town my girlfriend of the time was living. From the beginning, the harmonised reading of an electrical device's warning tag to the image of hurling the love's ashes off the Brill Building on a perfect evocation of the pain of love that is necesarry for pop.


I'm not posting any mp3's for these songs because I don't know how. And even if I did I probably wouldn't anyway. Find 'em for yourself and see what else you stumble across.

The Battle Forever!

Was deeply affected by this video when I first saw it a couple of months ago and only realised what it meant this morning . . .

http://youtube.com/watch?v=sqHz7cUw4Ls

Glenn Branca, the supreme guitar abstractor, shifting abstract destruction and letting the machine by which he is so consumed personally overtake him.

Every idea about the amplified guitar and its part in the subversion of culture--rock'n'roll guitar to sixties guitar to punk guitar--is given over in this brief performance as the machine itself doubles back and attacks a single human being. This is Branca's own personal battle, he wants to search the machine, to see who comes out on top after hand-to-hand combat. A single soul performing in a New York loft or the physical embodiment of the history of the best and most impassioned music since World War II. Branca was up for the fight: had given himself up to years deep education for years before facing his foe.

But he never stood a chance.

The weight of the six-string phallus eventually overcomes his taunts and attacks by snarling back at him, ripping and tearing at the hands and fingers he uses as (his only) weapons and eventually throwing him off-stage in a tired, worn heap.

The ferocity of the battle does not leave Branca scarred enough to give up, however. In the years that pass he will pit himself against more and more of these chiming, ringing, droning, coarse and heavy machines. And for the rest of us, we must resign ourselves to the fact that the amplified guitar is as wild and unpredictable as always and is still--after all this time--yet to unleash its fullest and most absolute fury.

Words And Guitars

apologies for the rather trite title. it is, however, one of my favourite Sleater-Kinney songs and relates better to this post than any other phrase i could think up. i haven't had a cup of tea yet this evening. can't start without a cuppa . . . ah, much better.


Now, this post will be concerned entirely with a few all-girl groups and their inate ability to create, inside of their songs, various instrumental and vocal conversations to go along with the main idea of the song. Ripping in, pulling out, delving deep and making up bullshit for you to run over the next time you listen to the songs.

First up: the Shaggs.

The Shaggs were three sisters from New Hampshire whose father bought the girls instruments and drove them to a studio to record them at their peak in the late 60's. Of course, "Philosophy of the World" ended up being one of the most gloriously inept, naive and dreadful albums ever put to tape. The songs have no meter, no rhyme, are held together only by eldest sister Dot's tenuous grasp on completing a story or idea. One of the best lyrics I've ever had pass by my ear, though, surely has to be "all the fat people want what the skinny peoples got/and the skinny peoples want what the fat peoples got" sung completey out of tune with any worldly chord.

Inside of the songs though, inside all the terrible playing the girls were talking. Every awkward twang, every hacked at drum beat was part of a larger conversation the girls were having with each other, with themselves and with whoever might chance upon their recording. Shit, I'm finding it really hard to give sense of how they did this. They weren't conscious of any of these ideas of course--they could barely speak properly--they just run over their guitars, ran over their drums, touching every note, every piece of skin they knew how. Talking with them, listening to them; asking them questions, responding with the only answers they knew.

Moving through the years, this converstation between a tight-knit group of friends and their instruments became for so many listeners a perfect contact, like sparks and shards electricity shooting from guitars, spinning out and rolling from throats. Whereas a group of men in a band is trying to show off who's the biggest, who's the loudest, who's wearing their cock right, their instruments pushing and pushing to explode a group of girls are going to let their harmonies and guitars make every scream, coo and call allowed. And not allowed.

Take a boat to London, late 70's, outside the Rough Trade shop. Amassing records by punk lovelies the Slits and the Raincoats. Acting out their lives, reproducing their telephone stories and love moods for songs running through dub to pop to waylaid sprite-punk.

Ari Up of the Slits hollering, ranting, discombobulating around the microphone with her best friends telling story-songs about what they did that day, who they spoke to and what they said. Every sentence, every paragraph of song on "Cut" is filled with lovely tappings, scrapings, active musical conversation.

Likewise for the Raincoats. Though they might sing in shriller tones and barely hit their notes on anything they sing or play they speak gloriously through song, and FOR EACH OTHER more than for us.

(Favourite 7" in my stack - 'Our Lips Are Sealed' by the Go-Go's. Perfect pop song from former LA punkers; singing about who's talkin' about 'em: "Can you hear them?/they talk about us/Telling lies/Well, that's no surprise.)

Sleater-Kinney, named after a freeway off-ramp near Portland, carried on wonderfully the tradition of soft to screaming holler over specks of guitar and drum carrying open ideas rather than firing male stoppages all over you. But they get over all of you: over and under and through to every inch of you. Its the wailing that gets me most of the time. That heavy holler, pained and free and aching for ears.

I type ambiguous because I am tired. Basically I love all girl bands. They speak to each other that extra bit easier than any other kind of band. They don't have to show off, they don't care if no one is listening; they'll speak forever in their glistening tones for themselves, for their friends, but mostly for me.

Hard Time Killing Floor

Over the last few months I've really struggled to be able to listen to the small amount of Delta Blues recordings I've collected over the past couple of years. I guess the listening kind of stalled after I had attempted to read one too many white, middle-aged blues 'thinkers' books. You know, the kind who are enamoured by the myth and romance of discovering a group of dirt-fucking-poor, beaten down musicians in your own country, just a couple of days drive from their cosy Atlantic coast cities. This book in particular was one by a Jewish blues guitarist from New York who travelled down to Clarkesdale in the seventies with a mind to help the townsfolk remember their blues tradition. Almost every person he encountered had never heard of Robert Johnson and the image of this pale gangling performer and his band trying to organise a concert of traditional blues songs in a Mississippi church hall was hard not to get a little squirmy with its complete lack of cultural understanding and sympathy. Colonialism will probably exist as long as people around, it'll just continue to take on stranger and more absurd forms.

I probably first heard the blues when I was about seventeen late late late one night at a friend's basement room in Hobart. My other friend was their goading our host to play his Charley Patton songs. He had a discman plugged into a tiny one speaker transistor radio type thing. We sat on the floor and drank and smoked and listened to Patton's aching low moan and along with other blues. One was particularly memorable: a holler blues by a ragged lady singer that was titled 'Pig Meat Mama.' They had some of the most sexually charged purely animal lyrics I've ever heard: "I'm a pig meat mama/pig meat is all I crave."

Since then I guess you could say I skirted the edges of early country and delta blues. Finding songs through reading and seeking out the artists that were mentioned most and held in high regard by other (predominately white) blues appreciators and seeing it as integral part of--vomit--'the History of Rock.' It also helped having Jack White and the Rolling Stones talking in such reverential tones about the blues players they had encountered and reinterpreted.

Now, this is probably the only black american music I have sought out in my few brief years as a music, er, seeker. And I've had to come to terms with why I'm more likely to respond a group of sexually and emotionally retarded white kids clutching guitars with their stick-thin arms than I am to, say, a brash, bouncing Hip-hop jam. Its was pretty easy to understand really: I'm a skinny white kid who gets fucked up about girls and not a streetwise black American dude intent on owning everything 'real big.' I can understand and appreciate the Hip-hop but there isn't much in it that speaks even in the slightest way about my own or my friend's lives.

Not so with the blues.

Part of the reason why so many white folks have fallen for the blues, and delta blues in particular, is because the artists are all dead. Anyone scared of exploiting the music or artists or of re-doing their songs have less worries than if they were alive and wanting a stake of the prize. Not that this would that much of a concern. It wasn't one of Alan Lomax's. The image of this white dude dragging his tape recorder around the cotton fields and juke-joints and churches of the deep South to collect hours and hours of black music and artist interviews is still a hard one to swallow. The mindlessness of walking into a Negro bar in the middle of a southern summer to copy down the list of songs on the jukebox and take notes on how people were dancing has an odd insensitivity to it. Or getting an interview and recording from a blind, homeless guitarist busking on a street corner for nothing more than survival or just his malted milk. Of course Lomax exploited these people out of love, I guess, and with a mind for posterity: an intellectial vision for wanting to keep a culture that was always going to disappear alive somehow in the annals of American history.

The same sort of cultural preservation exists here in Australia, too, with plenty of art graduates and art dealers travelling to remote Indeginous communities to help set up galleries and artist spaces with an idea to inject the funds from sales of works back into the same community. This is done with a lot more reverence and respect than whatever a Lomax or a Scorcese was attempting to record. Its the same white colonist vision, yes, but it is becoming--thank christ--a more measured and sympathetic one.

I made sure I pulled out all my blues music before writing this to help remind myself of why I listened to and sought it out to begin with. And it was all still there. All the songs were still filled with those sad, hopeless stories of travelling and friends and hilariously masked sexual exploits. The African-Americans being forced to create their own coded languages so that they could get by in the white man's world whilst still being able to relate to each other their own tales and senses of humour is surely one of the world's saddest and most troubling linguistic lineages. But after listening long enough to the dusty, scratchy 78 records repackaged and resold and finally being able to decipher the code and actually understand what the artists are singing about is definitely one of the most satisfying thing about the songs.

Robert Johnson mashing down on his little vehicle's starter motor, Charley Patton not being able to make it up to the hill country during a flood because he's been barred by the authorities, Son House watching his girlfriend being lowered into her grave. All these images are intensely personal, expressions made out of desperate, broken necessity as opposed to poses made for the artist's own ego boost--the source of pretty much any white musician's catalogue of performances.

It would be inhumane not to have sympathy for the stories blues made, the beatings the performers endured. But there is something perverse in making what these people sang about, lived through and sometimes died for into a mysteroius, romantic time and place that is only worthy of white theories and confused attempts to return a music to a people that had a relationship with it that they themselves were trying to get away from. The myths and legendary figures that rock'n'roll has attempted to create with the blues over the last few decades has given audiences much much less of an understanding of the troubles that existed in the Pre-war southern United States. And listening to it myself I can't help but feel guilty for helping to exploit whoever might have been trying to survive by this music back then. Its not my music, has never and will never come close to my own personal experiences and as a result I have trouble with my desire to use it to shape my own further experience, as I do with all music I listen to.

But the music is still made by humans. They're human troubles, human lives, human deaths. And you can't help but feel for it.

beginnings . . .

the blog started this morning when i woke up early on a saturday and couldn't get back to sleep. i lay under the covers for a while, listening to Adam Green's 'Friends of Mine' and sang along intermittently with my sleep-sore voice, got up for a second to whack off to some cartoon lesbians making sexy in their school-girl outfits.

then downstairs to the computer listening to some of the whitest pop music around: Magnetic Fields, Arcade Fire, the Concretes . . . and reading about musicians in England making music that mirrors their slow and inevitable demise . . .

Burial, Kode 9 and the Dubstep activators in South London there have been watching their culture disappear and rearrange and eventually exhume itself as this spectral echo of former, well, not happinesses . . . this isn't music of nostalgia. Its not recreating dub and soul and rave with a look back on brighter times, its putting those floating pieces together and making a ghostly collage of distant echos and slow, affected electronic trails. They're the smoky sinews of a city in a gloriously weighty decline.

Labels like Ghost Box and Mordant Music are also progenitors of this death. Odd samples from children's television programs, a reversion to the pantheistic through acid-folk, and the ghostly dawn-time echoes of a grey grey city all make for a spooky re-editing. Its all a bit wierd and disjointed. Perfectly English. Boards of Canada-style melody, loop and rumble. Intriguing, deathly-pale ambient wonder.

But by far the largest, in terms of ears hearing it, and, I suppose the most accessible of these aural manifestations is Radiohead's In Rainbows disc. Yes, obviously it has been months since this thing came out and made the internest make the news again and again and again but I never seem to hear or read any proper critical words on Radiohead apparent significance. I only just started this blog half an hour ago but these questions have concerned me for some months.

Now let it be known that I was enamoured with Radiohead when I was young and rather impressionable. What is it about guitar wankery and high-flown ideas that makes schools full of fourteen, fifteen year old kids lose their shit and want to get lost in concepts their never likely to understand or properly engage in? Too much time to themselves, maybe? Will someone please befriend these kids! Give them Sonic Youth and Beat Happening and Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine. The ideas in those bands (girls, music, drugs, blood, sex, feedback) are a lot simpler and easier to grasp. But I'm straying from the topic by foisting my own favourites upon you.

I used to like Radiohead is what I was trying to say. I used to like them until I discovered the ideas surrounding punk and noise and the timeless DIY aesthetic and realised that 'OK Computer' was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. A cultural end-point if you will. Kids whacking off guitars for years in their bedrooms trying to re-create what they thought was the hieght of musical excellence and ambition isn't going to move us forward in any way, shape or form.

The band themselves are not - have never been - interested in making music for music to be made in its wake anyway. They've been influential, yes, but never by their own admission. They have, for at least fifteen years, considered themselves, as I said, the hieght of musical excellence and ambition and care little for what comes in its wake. And 'In Rainbows' is no exception.

But I've moved far from my original point with this band bashing. 'In Rainbows', whilst being greedy and posh and just plain English. But its also another musical map that is part of this nation's long, protracted death.

The guitars this time are ghosts of themselves, played by sure hands but dead hands nonetheless. The songs are caverns of the same distress and tiredness that Yorke and Co. have been at us about for years. But here they are calling home the spectres and spirits that haunt their long-familiar cities. They pull these spirits from the their homes haunting the cobblestone corners of a Shoreditch tenement in the quiet hour before dawn.

London is dying. Has been for the last sixty years. But at least there are a few out there who are keen to represent and to wallow in its final, wonderfully protracted demise.