Goodnight London

2012-01-27T00:00:00.007Z

Here's a review of mine about the current Barbican OMA/Progress exhibition.
After attending it, I've been interested to read this report about the Saudi Arabian government's plans to build a new skyscraper that will dwarf even the world's current tallest. Yes, that'll be the Burj Khalifa (picture above) in Dubai, UAE, which seems to point a finger into the sky, asking the question: what will happen to these Towers of Babel, unthinkably tall in medieval times, when the oil begins to run out and the swirling sands threaten to blot them out? By some estimations, there are some countries in the middle East (Oman, for one), where it's calculated that the oil reserves will dry in as soon as thirty years. It's this unthinkable possibility, combined with global warming, which suggests a deeply bleak future a hundred years hence. Think about everything in your life that runs on oil, and now imagine a life without it...looks like that research into into alternative sources of energy isn't such a bad idea after all.

2012-01-02T11:37:00.005Z

Happy New Year’s all. Apologies for the lack of posts, due alternatively to a busy Christmas period and having to move and assemble furniture around. The anti-capitalist protestors are still camped out near me in Moorgate, somehow encapsulating a tumultuous 12 months of protests and direct action, while we’ve seen crisis after crisis hit the European economy, at the same time as London rents go through the roof and jobs are cut by the thousands. But I’ve been through that already.
Sometimes it makes you want to burrow into a hole and revisit your childhood and adolescence, with for me includes a commodity fast becoming something of a cult collector’s item: the cassette tape. As the format has slowly became obsolete over the last ten years, the medium has contrarily found a resurgence in the noise and black metal scenes, while underground record shops such as Second Layer in London have seen a roaring trade in the format.
I’m old enough to remember cherishing the art of the mix-tape, with the creation of unique, warped artwork part of the fun (of course, iTunes pretty much does it for you now with CD playlists). A younger generation growing up now are unlikely to feel such nostalgia for the format, of course. OurPrice and HMV in those days would stock a large section of cassette tape releases (along with blank tapes, naturally), while Rough Trade in Covent Garden had racks and racks of obscure underground releases in the format.
I was reminded of the era of cassette tapes recently when I found this link online to Pussy Galore’s legendary track-for-track postmodern deconstruction of The Rolling Stone’s Exile On Main Street. This bizarre concept was only released on cassette tape in 1986, and has quickly become a collector’s item. This being Pussy Galore, the album isn’t a strict, note-for-note cover. Instead, it feels like what would happen if the Stones had crossed paths with Faust, with weird industrial noises, sped-up tape, distorted interludes, and radio static (not to mention obligatory profanity by band members between songs) among the shambolically-played guitar riffs. It feels kind of exciting to hear something that’s been such a ‘forbidden’ collector’s item for so long (even if some of it veers on the unlistenable), and reminds me of the mystique of that pre-internet era where part of the thrill was tracking down ultra-limited releases.
Which leads to the next impossible-to-get-hold-of release that should be put on the internet: the first album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (or Godspeed You Black Emperor! as they were known then), released in 1994 and entitled All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling – limited to only 33 copies on cassette tape, and damn near impossible to get hold of. Copies nowadays, naturally, must be like gold dust. In contrast to the subsequent Godspeed albums (which generally contain three to four tracks, each clocking in at 15-30 minutes), this one has forty-two ‘songs’ (who knows what they sound like), including a charming tribute to Quebec’s finest chanteuse entitled ‘Perfumed Pink Corpses From The Lips of Ms. Celine Dion’. Now this is something I would genuinely love to hear – though, given that so few people have heard it, theoretically anyone could upload music to the Net claiming that it’s the album.

2011-11-09T21:50:00.004Z

Among all the recriminations over the plight of the European Union and Eurozone at the moment, it’s easy to forget that just over fifty years ago, the continent was at war with itself. It’s testament to the power of the European Union since then that there has been relative harmony on the continent as a whole ever since (bar war in the former Yugoslavia and a nasty dictatorship remaining in Belarus). For this writer, it would be an enormous shame if the UK left the EU, and not just because of the inconvenience that could result when visiting the continent. Despite claims to the contrary, the United Kingdom is tied irrevocably to Europe, both geographically and culturally. The European Union exists whether the likes of UKIP like it or not, and comparisons with prosperous Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada ignore the fact that those countries are far away in other continents and have never been linked to the EU in the way that the UK has.
Furthermore, claims that the UK would be better off outside the EU often site the examples of small, wealthy countries within Europe but not in the EU, such as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. Yet, as part of EFTA (along with tiny Liechtenstein), those countries are still, in a sense, linked to the EU, and still have to comply with laws from Brussels when they want to trade with the EU. At the same time, while they also have to pay into the European Social Fund, as non-EU members they have little say on where that money stumped up is spent – a situation that is arguably less democratic than being in the EU and having a say on policy and where funds are spent (no matter how torturous those negotiations might be).
Indeed, comparisons with Norway also forget that the Scandinavian country is extremely oil-rich; in comparison, it’s a moot point how the threat of Scottish separatism could affect the access to oil of a post-Union UK breakup. If the unthinkable happened and Scotland hypothetically did separate, the remaining UK, whatever it would be called (“Kingdoms of England, Wales & Northern Ireland” doesn’t quite flow somehow), might still have access to some oil, but dramatically less than before (though it would probably continue to do trade with a sovereign Scotland). In such a situation, the remaining UK would look isolated if outside the EU – even if an independent Scotland decided not to join the EU and/or Euro currency (which is not an impossibility, given Alex Salmond’s frequent references to joining an “arc of prosperity” that would include Norway and Iceland).
The EU may not be perfect, and there's no doubt that the popular discontent looming throughout the Eurozone has certainly put a strain on the whole idea of a united Europe. The argument that the single currency was always in some senses a flawed project without all EU countries signing up and agreeing to full fiscal union back when the Euro was implemented - which would, of course, consistently have led to questions of national sovereignty - has some merit, though many countries (Austria, Finland, The Netherlands, etc.) within the Eurozone seem to be doing fine at the moment. But that’s a digression to another topic entirely, as is the hypothetical question of where Britain would be if it had elected to join the Euro rather than stay with sterling. The point is, at a time of recession in the West and the looming dominance of China and India, the UK’s best option – whatever its future shape – is still, in my view, to be part of an EU of half a million people rather than alone, especially if Scotland elects to go its own way. Furthermore, it’s easy to forget that while the EU isn’t, admittedly, a country as such, it still remains – just - the biggest economic bloc in the world.

2011-10-27T13:46:00.003Z

Here's a quick reminder that this is taking place on Saturday 29th October.

Full details in my previous post about the night.

2011-10-27T13:36:00.002Z

Image taken from Disclose.TV

Really enjoyed this article on Wired magazine's website about the mysterious Russian radio station UVB-76. It almost brings to mind Tarkovsky’s Stalker, in which two men, accompanied by a guide called the ‘Stalker’, visit a strange, haunted place called the Zone, where the visitor’s deepest metaphysical desires are said to be granted. You can imagine the UVB-76, which is based somewhere near the border with Estonia, most likely deep within a pine forest, existing in a forbidden zone, where no-one fears to tread. The reality, of course, is probably a bit more prosaic, and the reality of its military function most likely dissapointly mundane, despite the fact that notions of Soviet/Russian espionage have always exerted a wild hold on the Western imagination. Nonetheless, when you listen to the beeps and static of the ‘Buzzer’, as it’s been nicknamed, via this website, with the lights off and headphones on, you can understand the attraction of this mysterious station, which according to the Wired article has gained up to 41,000 listeners (and if you don’t believe me that people are obsessed, check out this forum. It’s especially spooky when you can hear audible voices in the background. Either the chatter is interference from other stations, or – more excitingly – it is coming from UVB-76 itself and is people talking near the microphone, which seems to be placed near the buzzer. Who knows what they are talking about?

2011-10-10T17:01:00.001Z

After covering the National Union of Journalists’ Delegate Meeting 2011 earlier this year, I thought it would be interesting to attend the Rebellious Media Conference this weekend, of which the NUJ had a stall. Despite that terrible name – it was originally meant to be called the Radical Media Conference until a media company with the same name stepped in with a lawsuit – the two-day split-venue event turned out to be a good distillation of left-wing media. Organised by an umbrella group containing a number of publications and organisations – New Internationalist magazine, Peace News, visionOntv and others – the conference saw the likes of Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and ZNet’s Michael Albert, as well as speakers from UK Uncut. While the seminar involving Pilger was illuminating with its discussion on how mainstream media reporting is still subject to pressure from Governments, he remained in bullish mood, at one point insisting slightly disingenuously on the subject of Libya that the massacre in Benghazi “never happened” (surely that’s because NATO stopped it from happening?). Albert, meanwhile, had some good points to make on the left-wing movements’ crisis of identity, and how in America the 60s protest movement failed to capitalise on their successes and possibility for change in the following decades – leading, of course, to the nadir of much of the materialist 80s (embodied, to use a striking image, by Jefferson Airplane morphing over twenty years into the turgid Starship:

But, despite his soporific voice, which nearly sent me to sleep at one point, the highlight was Chomsky, with his profound insistence that the UK is following the US in its dismantling of the traditional NHS with the Health and Social Care Bill (Obama's attempted changes to the US Healthcare service notwithstanding). The NHS is one service that the Britain can justly be proud of, an egalitarian, accessible, efficient service which all of society is entitled to use. Yet, to use an example, while British Rail was not perfect, it’s unlikely that it suffered from many of the Byzantium problems which have resulted from contracting out the railways to different companies in the post-privatization age. Could the same fate now befall the NHS?

2011-10-06T22:34:00.001Z

RIP Bert Jansch

2011-10-03T22:06:00.005Z

So yet another installment in the GoodnightLondon/Pennyblackmusic series of concerts is on the cards at the end of this month, taking place at the usual manor south of the river...

Live:
Morton Valence
Madam
The Doomed Bird of Providence
Rome Pays Off

Saturday 29th October 2011
The Half Moon, Herne Hill, South London (directions here)
8pm
£5 in advance from here
£6 on door
A description of the acts can be found on the Last FM page

www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk
www.halfmoonpub.co.uk

2011-09-21T00:35:00.010Z

Spot the difference...

The first three pictures are of the Montreal Biosphère in Canada; the latter two are of The Eden Project in Cornwall, south-west England. Both are geodesic domes. The first was designed by the great Buckminster Fuller while the latter was inspired by him.
Walking around the Biosphere while in Montreal this summer was a true highlight of this year, with the dome's Utopian feel balanced by the alarming exhibitions on global warming and rises in sea temperatures. It's fascinating to think of the contrast between Fuller exploring the geodesics structural synthesis with nature and Le Corbusier's concrete urbanism, both of which were occurring at roughly the same time-span. In John Brunner's dystopian novel Stand on Zanzibar, Manhattan is imagined - like in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We - as surrounded by an enormous geodesic dome. In hundreds of years time, when global warming accelerates and the seas rise, such domes may be the only method of survival for the world's cities.

2011-09-15T00:32:00.002Z

Walking around Paris’ rue Oberkampf (“one of the city’s premier after-dark hangouts”, apparently*) while on a trip to the City of Lights recently, my first impressions were just how ostensibly quiet things were. A few people milled outside bars, but for the most part the area seemed muted and languid rather than the boisterousness of the Bastille area. Then it hit me: people don’t go out drinking until midnight here, as with many other parts of Continental Europe. I was there at 10:15pm - too early.
I’ve touched on the contrast between opening hours in Britain and Continental Europe once before, but it still seemed to apply more than ever in my mind after this trip across the Channel. The ritual culture of drinking heavily before the 11 o’clock curfew and then all converging on the street at the same time (leading to the inevitable punch-up or some such activity) has become so embedded in the British psych that many people find it nigh on impossible to imagine an alternative. The Government’s slight attempt to relax opening hours hasn’t been adopted by many drinking establishments (there have been exceptions), and the result is an infantile drinking culture that sees no prospect of changing. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This is not an encouragement for people to get even more legless than before (and consequently put a strain on hospitals). While there would certainly be an increased amount of idiots in the short-run being admitted to Casualty wards, hypothetically if drinking culture were introduced there is no reason why British drinking culture wouldn’t adapt to Continental hours in the long-run, leading to a more relaxed drinking culture.
Exmouth Market, a busy pedestrian area near Farringdon full of independent shops and a great atmosphere by evening, is an example: it could be the equivalent of some of the side streets I saw in the Bastille area; yet by 12:30am everything remained shut and the area was completely deserted, with only one pub nearby open until 2am. Much of the area around Jaguar Shoes, Catch, The Spread Eagle et al, where Kingsland Road meets Old Street, is the same, leading to puzzled looks from many tourists after midnight. Late night clubs – the vast majority of which you have to pay to get in, of course – which genuinely do open late are not included here, of course, but rather simple opportunities for drinking after 12:30 or so.
We can hardly lay claim to London being a ’24 hour city’ in comparison to rivals such as Paris or New York when an irrelevant law left over from World War I continues to stymie the city’s nightlife.

* According to the Rough Guide Pocket Guide to Paris 2011. And when are the Rough Guides ever wrong?

2011-08-16T22:56:00.004Z

(Image taken from MailOnline.co.uk)

2011 has been a year where I’ve vowed to take up that which I’ve put off for ages. And one of those things is cycling around London.
First, though, a gripe. I’ve only been using the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme for a few months, but already the limitations of the scheme are obvious. Go into Hackney and Stoke Newington and there’s not a single docking station, given that the scheme only stretches as far as the south tip of Kingsland Road. Likewise no coverage in Mile End and the whole Docklands area in east London; Brixton and East Dulwich in South London; and none in Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith in west London. The scheme, by and large, seems designed for those who work in the Square Mile, King’s Cross/Islington, and the West End, with some docking stations thrown in the important parts of South London for good measure (for those from outside London unacquainted with the service, and/or who haven't perused TfL's Barclays Cycle Hire mini-site, each of the 'pin marks' in the image above represents a docking station, where you pick up or 'dock' - i.e. leave behind - a bike).
There’s certainly a high density of docking stations in those areas which are included in the cycle hire scheme, but surely it would be wiser for them to be less concentrated and instead spread out over the city. All the areas mentioned above are relatively near to central or inner-city London, but also have a huge number of residents who would benefit from the scheme.
It’s true that there is a huge demand within central London, to the extent that I’ve passed docking stations entirely empty (though I may have simply passed at the moment when all the bikes have been took away in those Cycle Hire vans to be repaired). But in general the scheme still seems biased to a relatively small area.
Despite that, cycling through the back streets of London opens you up to a whole new vista of the city, with areas that you never thought existed. London has a capacity to surprise just when you thought you knew it well, and the endless stream of previously unseen squares, winding canals and obscure back street areas has opened up in a new, dynamic way compared to taking public transport. I’m beginning to realise now what I’ve been missing all this time. Taking up cycling has opened up a new dramatic perspective on the city. And you’re not forced to listen to people’s tedious conversations on their mobile.

2011-08-09T22:32:00.006Z

Walking around London today was a weird experience, with a subdued, intangibly jittery and apprehensive atmosphere. On the surface, everything felt normal, but underneath, you felt that tension could rear its head at any moment. It brought to mind the days straight after the 7/7 bombings. It seems incredible that Hackney, the borough I grew up in, and the other areas of East London in which I’ve lived (including Tottenham), are in the news around the world.
Two articles in particular on the rioting have been especially illuminating. This one in Time highlights just how different the London 2011 riots are to those which took place in Paris in 2005. The riots in Paris took place in the banlieues, away from the mostly affluent inner city residents. The areas hit in London, by contrast, are not only ethnically heterogeneous but also contain poor and wealthy living virtually cheek-by-jowl, which has meant that the riots have, in the words of the article, been “surging right up to the doors of the comfortable, middle and upper-middle class homes” (such as happened in Notting Hill). This is contrasted to Paris, where many of the banlieues where the riots took place are geographically remote from the rest of the city, both physically (exacerbated by the Boulevard Périphérique motorway) and mentally, with many residents complaining of their disenfranchised alienation from wider French society.
What’s also disturbing too in that article is the mention of how the new Sarkozy government brought in money, social programs and better transport links to the blighted areas in Paris subsequently. In recession-hit Britain in 2011, by contrast, the focus on the Government has been on cuts to benefits and services. While many of the rioters have undoubtedly been mindless idiots keen to join in with the carnage, there is nonetheless an acknowledgement here in this revealing article in The Guardian that cuts in services may also have played a part, particularly in this interview with a local on the Pembury estate in Hackney:

"They just want to be heard," said a young black woman. "This is the only way some people have to communicate. "Were cuts in services a factor? "Course they are. They cut our youth project by 75%. We used to work with gangs, run a workshop that brought police and young people together. Gone.”

Of course, that still doesn’t excuse the mindless nature of the rioters, particularly when they have targeted local businesses, people, cars and buildings. These are the same kind of people who make taking buses in London such a misery much of the time. I never felt the urge to join in looting when I was the age of many of the rioters, and neither do many ordinary working people. It’s quite obvious that many of the opportunists who have joined in with the riots have brazenly took their chance to loot and arson local stores full of DVDs/TVs/trainers rather than display any interest in serious objection to Government policy or human rights (hence the absence of the anarchist/anti-globalisation brigade in these riots, many of whom are in any case from an educated, white, middle-class milieu rather than working-class teenagers from the estates). It’s true, too, that there are many different factors in play – background, culture - that have led to the mindset of those that have took part as opposed to those who haven’t, and which would lead to another article entirely.

In the wider context, though, at the same time as the cuts, we are seeing footballers and bankers in the UK paid obscene amounts of wealth, while corporations such as Barclays have been singled out by UK Uncut – quite rightly - for their tax avoidance. Meanwhile, rents have gone up at the same time as wages have stagnated, jobs have been lost and benefits have been cut, leading to serious financial difficulty and desperation for many. So while the rioters are mindless thugs, the events haven’t taken place in a sociological vacuum, even if another article in The Guardian points out that the rioters are from a diverse range of ethnicities.
If Cameron and Osbourne are serious about tackling the stagnating economy and putting some money back into the community, there is no choice but to raise taxes on the wealthy and on companies, while imposing financial regulation on the Square Mile and imposing limits on ridiculous bonus culture in the City by law. On top of that, rent controls - coupled with a genuine desire to protect individual businesses (as Paris has done to some extent) in the face of greedy landlords and the onslaught of homogenous chain stores which seem to blight many UK high streets so much - would actually endear me to the current Government. But I would be surprised if it ever happens. These changes might not fully avert another riot in the future, and whatever happens the Government’s future policy certainly doesn’t justify the looting, arson and terrorising of local communities, now or in the future. But the changes could lead to a more egalitarian society, in which people feel less disenfranchised and less prone to mindlessly smash up everything in their sight.

2011-07-21T22:53:00.004Z

My recent trip to Canada feels almost like a dream now. Montreal and Toronto were hazy and hot, with the Biosphere pavilion, in Parc Jean-Drapeau, a strange utopian vision in the distance. But what interested me particularly was trying out the Underground – or Metros, as they call them - in the two cities, and comparing the result with London. Both had large, wide tunnels with trains running both ways, leading to air being able to flow. The London network was nicknamed ‘The Tube’ for a reason – namely that the narrow tunnels are literally like a tube, with heat unable to escape anywhere. Consequently, even if the grills on a London Underground train are opened in the summer in order to let in air, they are essentially just blowing hot air into the train. On top of this, the ancient, creaking, Byzantine nature of the LU infrastructure of signals exacerbates many of the problems which any frequent user will attest to.
Having viewed underground metros in other cities, it seems to me that the only way that the LU’s conundrums can be really solved is by building entirely new tunnels, this time suitably large in length, right near the existing ones. This would mean that an entirely new track and infrastructure could be built. These new tunnels could then eventually link up with the existing stations. There could then also be exits in the stations to the old tunnels, which could be used as underground cycling tunnels. In the cycling tunnels you could have bright lighting and places to drink water.
Admittedly the idea sounds far-fetched – try convincing any member of TfL, as I have - but it would certainly iron out the Underground’s endless cycle of problems. It would also cost billions upon billions of pounds, of course – but then, in all likelihood, so is Crossrail.

2011-06-25T23:44:00.002Z

Fantastic evening last Thursday going to a hearing of Eliane Radigue's work at a church near Bank - an 84-minute piece of deep minimalism in which everyone sat in a circle, eyes closed, concentrating on the music.
Going to the ‘concert’ (in reality a public broadcasting of her work) made me realise that many live gigs are actually the worst places imaginable to concentrate on music: there’s the mobile phones aloft, the toilet queues, the uninterested half-drunk audience at the back drinking Carling beer (the only on offer if it’s the ‘Carling Academy’), the unavoidable sound of someone’s mundane conversation near you…Thursday’s experience offered completely a different experience, where all you could do is concentrate on the oscillation vibrations of the music. Sometimes I think The Luminaire (RIP) were right with those signs telling people who liked to talk in the middle of gigs to go downstairs, as puritanical as it sounded. Thursday achieved a kind of beauty and purity with its hypnotic hour and a half, leaving everyone spellbound and drowsy at the same time by the end. ‘Somnambulant’ I think is the word I’m looking for – but in the right way rather than in the pejorative sense. Now I know what they mean by the phrase 'Deep Listening'.

2011-06-25T22:45:00.002Z

Me interviewing current indie-pop heavyweights The Pains of Being Pure At Heart on Pennyblackmusic's updated edition this week...fascinating to find that they've played two venues in London that yours truly has also played at (The Betsy Trotwood - officially London's smallest venue - and the Brixton Windmill). When I was (very) young I thought in my naivete that playing these venues meant that you were a guaranteed rock star. How things pan out as you get older...

2011-06-21T23:31:00.009Z

It may have escaped your notice, but World Oceans Day happened recently, which celebrated...well, I think you can guess what it celebrated, given the title. You only have to go on the Events page to see just how extensive the festivities celebrating awareness of this day were. The oceans of the world are in as much trouble as some of the problems plaguing land, with overfishing and climate warming leading to alarming conclusions from scientists. So I thought I’d play my part by including a song (which you can stream below) on a local compilation which was released celebrating WOD. It’s a cover of The Dirty Three’s Sirena, which featured on their Ocean Songs album (you can hear the original version here). Sirena was a mermaid-like creature in mythology who lured men to the bottom of the sea, never to return. Perhaps less glamorously, the above pictures were taken by me at Brighton Sea Life Centre, in which you can go into a tunnel underwater while various sea creatures float around you.

Sirena by DominicSimpson

2011-05-31T22:26:00.008Z

Sad to hear the news this week upon returning from the Animal Collective-curated All Tomorrow's Parties of the passing of both Gil-Scott Heron and Ira Cohen. Both men operated in sub-cultures, with Scott-Heron touching on African-American militancy (as opposed to the afro-futurism of Sun Ra, who was operating at the same time). Cohen, meanwhile, a Beat poet whose truly hallucinogenic, lysergic-soaked photography and imagery culminated in the kaleidoscopic film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (which I once saw freak-out band Sunburned Hand of the Man perform a live soundtrack to), embodied a time when counterculture was genuinely something underground, with no Internet and little coverage in magazines. The plotless Thunderbolt Pagoda feels like watching a dream or something from the unconscious, which links it to the work of similar psychedelic countercultural directors of the 60s and 70s such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger (something that I touch on partially here).

There's something trance-like and beautiful about his images and films, as if the people in them have found peace with themselves. In a weird way, they remind me of one of the documentaries, filmed by the Sublime Frequencies crew, which was broadcast at ATP in the cinema, which showed the ecstatic faces of the Moroccan drummers and guitarists as they played their trance-like music (Cohen, in fact, lived in Morocco for a few years).
With the Foundry and the Spitz having closed down, and the Duke of Uke possibly in trouble, I sometimes wonder if there will be any space here in east London left in the end for the kind of counterculture that Cohen explored. On Old Street the homogeneity and feeling of encroachment from the Square Mile is becoming worse, with yuppie/city trader-type bars such as 'B@1' the tip of the iceberg. Still, certain venues - Cafe Oto, The Others, The Horse Hospital, Ryan's Bar, certain crossover art/music galleries, as well as others dotted around the city - have kept open and still attest to a kind of underground spirit. Yet the nagging feeling persists that while recessions in the past have led to a surge in creativity and inspiration (1978-84, as covered in Simon Reynold's book Rip It Up And Start Again, is a good example), the current one is simply leading to even higher rent than before and less alternative spaces. Oh well, there's always Berlin...

2011-05-02T22:53:00.003Z

It’s always interesting to see how areas of London can in the space of a few years be suddenly be deemed as ‘trendy’ or ‘vibrant’ places to live where previously they weren’t. At one point in the late 70s, pre-absurdly expensive Notting Hill was at the centre of much of the counterculture in London. In the mid-90s it may well have been Camden Town; nowadays, I guess it’s a mixture of Brick Lane and my hometown of Hackney. I was at the Land of Kings festival (a kind of transferred cutting-edge take on the Camden Crawl) on Friday night at my old school area of Dalston, and the area has certainly moved on – Bardens carpet shop, for example, from which the sadly departed venue Barden’s Boudoir (now a dance club called The Nest) took its name, has turned into a boutique shop, while my old school has been turned into a pristine looking Academy. A couple of hip venues have sprung up, with some, such as Dalston Superstore (a few doors down from the Rio Cinema, where I used to go as a kid), seemingly entirely populated by fashion students/artists (others are barely more than hired Turkish pool halls). Meanwhile, leftfield theatre groups such as Stoke Newington International Airport (inspired by the genre-defying Punchdrunk) have blurred music, theatre and art in the area (as they did at LoKs in the Old Boys Club, a decaying mansion at the back of the Vortex Jazz Club, on Friday). Meanwhile, Stoke Newington Church Street – while containing some fine places (Ryan’s bar, Lucky 7 Records, The Drop, etc.) – resembles Crouch End/Muswell Hill more than ever. If the gentrification of Hackney continues, we may even see a situation where Tottenham – the final frontier – becomes a desirable place to live. The situation is no doubt analogous to developments in formerly working-class areas in New York such as Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which begs the question: where will the artists go next once the rent is unaffordable? At the moment, the answer is Hackney Wick, which offers cheaper warehouse space and living, and which has consequently seen a number of galleries (the Elevator and Schwartz Galleries, for one) and festivals such as Hackney Wicked spring up there. Yet one day, too, the cost of living there could go up. Then the cutting-edge artist set will end up moving into the Leyton and Walthamstow area, and maybe the cheaper parts of the Docklands. And if the rent goes up there too, could we see a situation where North London runs out of affordable places to live at all? If that happens, the exodus will be surely to Berlin or Detroit. Or maybe South London. Meanwhile, the encroachment of the City and its anodyne bars and suits on surrounding areas (such as what has already happened on Old Street, with the closure of the Foundry, The Legion, Smallfish Records, etc.) will continue unabated. Wonderful if you’re a banker, not so good for everyone else.

2011-04-23T16:57:00.003Z

Looking forward to the exhibition at the Barbican on Pioneers of the Downtown NYC Scene in the 70s, involving Laurie Anderson and others. It makes me think that the 70s was where the real creativity in music and arts lay, rather than the 60s. Along with the Krautrock documentary below and the Sun Ra film further down in my posts, what it also suggests is that some of the best music can come out of serious recession, with disco, punk and Krautrock all emerging during economic strife. Watch the rest of the documentary on Krautrock on YouTube - one of the most amusing bits is Faust recalling their time with Richard Branson, and how Virgin tried in vain to market the band as a 'German Beatles'.
One of my favourite gig recollections was Faust at Corsica Studios, a venue in the back streets of Elephant & Castle, a few years ago. During the set, Jean-Hervé Péron paraded around the room with real chainsaws, before wearing what looked like a gas mask. During the end of the set, he then proceeded to let off a number of smoke bombs, which filled the venue completely with blue and red smoke. Unable to see anything, I wandered around dazed, noticing at one point what looked like a ring of fire burning on the floor. Péron then grabbed me, still holding a chainsaw, and told me "you must leave the venue as soon as possible!"
Everyone was huddled outside, with the smoke billowing out of the venue. The sound of a police siren was heard in the distance. Meanwhile, the entire time this was happening, the guitarist had left on a loop a guitar riff that he had played earlier at excruciating volume.
Finally, and unbelievable, the unmistakable sound of the band getting back onstage and jamming to an empty audience was heard, the smoke still swirling around.
Now that, I remember thinking to myself, is what I call a gig to remember.

2011-04-23T16:11:00.002Z

Greetings, and apologies for the delay while I sort out work. Some posts will be up next week...stay tuned.

2011-04-08T14:25:00.002Z

As mentioned, I'm covering the National Union of Journalist's Delegate Meeting 2011 this weekend, in sunny Southport, near Liverpool. Here is my coverage of the festival (the NUJ's official microsite for it is here), and there's some much more up-to-date accounts by me of proceedings on Twitter here too. Internet is monstrously slow, so bare with me...

Ah, the joys of YouTube (Part 3)...

2011-04-06T15:13:00.003Z

Fantastic spoof of the nation's favourite supermarket and it's Orwellian expansion...

2011-03-27T18:43:00.003Z

Was busy on the march in London yesterday (I missed the various vandalism of buildings, in case you're wondering) and will be covering the forthcoming National Union of Journalists meeting in Southport. Watch this space!

2011-03-15T20:53:00.001Z

Here's an article I wrote on housing in East Germany for my course, plus some decidedly unconventional places to visit. Click on the jpgs to enlarge them...

Ah, the joys of YouTube (Part 2)...

2011-03-09T23:44:00.003Z

One of the wonders of the Internet is that you can dig out hard-to-find material which, pre-Internet, which would have been virtually impossible to find otherwise (except perhaps on expensive import). So it is with underground cult films such as Sun Ra’s Space Is The Place, a truly bizarre blackspoitation classic from the 70s which you can view parts of below (the whole film was up on the wonderful UBUWeb site here, but didn’t seem to be working the last time I looked – could be either the new servers UBUWeb are using, or copyright issues).
SITP looks as if it was done on a budget of around $100. Sun Ra’s spaceship in particular looks like it was assembled out of sticky black plastic and makes pre-high budget Doctor Who (the 70s/80s version for those of us old enough to remember) look like Independence Day in comparison.
The plot – such as it is – seems to be a weird, lysergic-flavoured proto-The Blues Brothers (which would come a few years later), reshaped in Ra’s inimitable style, in which he tries to get people to his gig, is kidnapped along the way, dodges various mishaps, and only makes it to his concert at the last minute. He also sets up something called the Outer Space Employment Agency, which the DHSS probably wouldn’t approve of if it were attempted over here. The OSEA as Ra promotes it represents a utopia of sorts for the black race, unshackled by white oppression, and which will eventually ascend to the heavens. It’s at this point that the difference with The Blues Brothers becomes apparent, and in any case, the film is far more mystical, echoing at times Jodorowsky’s El Topo (which came out two years before) with its dream-like sequences in the desert, where Ra plays tarot cards with his opponent at a table.

Indeed, the presence of SITP, Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and the afore-mentioned El Topo, and even never-to-be-repeated grand follies such as Caligula (yes, that one), suggest that the 70s produced some extraordinary one-off films, which would be difficult to repeat today. It’s doubtful that even many independent film companies would go near a Jodorowsky today, for example, such was the extremity of his vision. The Holy Mountain in particular is so out-there even today that it’s perhaps no surprise that Jodorowsky eventually wasn’t entrusted with in favour of David Lynch, with the unhinged Chilean director originally planned in the directors seat (and with a soundtrack by Pink Floyd and Magma, no less). Now that would have been incredible, but unlikely to be looked on benevolently by major film company reps (not that Lynch’s version made much sense either, mind you)
While it’s always interesting to see how far Ra was ahead of his time - with his hithero unheard of seaming together of jazz, rock, and unconventional synthesisers allied to an unbelievable work ethic - it’s also interesting seeing how much the mixture of unconventional, frequently avant-garde music, headdress and flamboyant gear that Sun Ra took to the max in both this film and in his stage performances have been used by the likes of latter-day freak-out rock bands such as Sun City Girls and the Sunburned Hand of the Man today. I once saw the latter perform a live soundtrack to an even more out-there film than Space Is The Place – Ira Cohen’s 1968 hippy mind-f**k The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. It’s somewhat strange when you think about it that such a huge corporation behemoth as YouTube should be hosting such genuinely counter-cultural material, but then, alternative culture has always been co-opted by the mainstream, from grunge through to rave culture and beyond (with the style mags waiting at the door).
It’s difficult to work out what’s really going on in Thunderbolt Pagoda - I guess you kinda had to be there. All I know is, that’s one party I wish I were at…

2011-02-20T19:44:00.006Z

So here's to the next installment in the occassional Pennyblackmusic/GoodnightLondon nights...would be nice to see anyone down.

Live:
Anthony Reynolds (ex-Jack and Jacques)
Nick Garrie
The Hall of Mirrors
Alex Monk

Saturday 26th March 2011
The Half Moon, Herne Hill, South London (directions here)
8pm
£6 in advance from here
£7 on door
A description of the acts can be found on the Last FM page.
Plus DJs
and stuff
www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk

2011-02-20T19:20:00.005Z

There's a great article by Hugo Rifkind at the moment in The Times (which sadly I can't link to due the paywall at that site) about internship culture, in which he cites the case where said internships at a number of particularly prestigious institutions have recently been sold for up to £3,500 at a fundraising Conservative Party Black and White Ball, as if they were antiques in an auction. Rifkind's point is that internship culture has become so ingrained and specifically designed for the wealthy, that the Conservatives think this is completely normal despite employing Alan Miburn as something called a "social mobility czar".
I'm pretty sure at one point internships generally involved a few weeks work, but not much more, and certainly to be fair "work experience" - which seems to be becoming increasingly distinct from "internships" - still are often not usually a lot longer than three weeks or so. On the other hand, it's now the norm for "internships" to last three months or even longer. Even worse, a lot of companies as far as I can tell simply won't even consider you if you haven't did an internship there. The desired effect, as Rifkind rightly points out, seems to be a shunning of any bright students who don't happen to have the financial clout and/or wealthy parents who also happen to have essential contacts in the right place. "Internships" seem to have gone from a valuable way of getting on-hand experience to being compulsory in order to get any decent job, leading those without the financial wherewithal or contacts isolated in a hopeless Catch-22 situation, regardless of any innate talent or how bright they were as a student. It's not what you know; it's who you know and whether you can afford it. While I would never pretend that the political culture is the same, in some ways this kind of cronyism isn't that different from the political culture which many disenchanted Arabs are protesting against in North Africa and the Middle East. British work culture may not be that extreme, but it's still no meritocracy.

2011-02-09T01:29:00.012Z

SPOILERS ALERT!

What with all the timely discussion of haunt ology (which I'll admit I only half understand) at the moment, it's worth going down memory lane and recalling the dystopian books of John Wyndham that I read as a kid...such as this:

And this:

And, of course, one of his most well-known books:

Though this also became famous for the adapted TV series:

Leaving aside Triffids (which actually genuinely terrified me as a kid, with its indelible image of psychotic man-eating giant plants) and Chocky (which I can't remember much about and of which the TV series kind of passed me by - anyone else remember it?), the first two came to mind tonight when watching Never Let Me Go at the cinema.
(In case you've not read much about the film, and plan to see it, a spoiler is coming - you've been warned...most of the other reviews by now would have given away the story anyway...and there are spoilers over the two Wyndham books mentioned below too).
Indeed, while there are huge differences between The Chrysalids and NLMG - the three characters in the former can communicate by telepathy, and the the novel is set in some unspecified far future - I couldn't help but hear echoes of that novel and The Midwich Cuckoos while watching the film, with the relationship between the three in the former novel and the description of the sixty children in the latter echoing that of Ruth, Tommy and Kathy and Hailsham boarding school in the film respectively. Just as with the cloned children at the school, we know that there is something strange about the children in TMC, with their silvery-like skin and alien-like golden eyes; we then find out about their mind control and telepathic capabilities. Both sets of children, as becomes obvious, are not fully 'normal' humans as such (hence the children at Hailsham are never given surnames and are told they are "special"), with the consequent idea of lack of 'soul' - the very reason why the teachers at the college encourage the pupils to participate in art, so as to show society that 'clones' can have souls and display the emotions of their 'originals' (which ultimately fails, of course). The issue of genetics, 'cloning' and the accompanying ethical questions, then, is ultimately what unites the three. Furthermore, the deterioration of the character's healths in NLMG after their 'donations' are also reminiscent of the characters in other films such as Primer and Moon: the former self-imposed after the two protagonists make repeated 'copy' clones of themselves as they go back in time, each 'copy' unwittingly a lesser quality than the one before; the latter imposed by the state (as with NLMG) without Sam Bell's knowledge until it's too late.
But whereas Wyndham suggests happy endings of a sort - in The Chrysalids David, Rosalind and Petra ultimately escape to a far-off future society (imagined in the book's front cover pictured above) once their mutations have been discovered and exposed, while in TMC Zellaby destroys himself with a bomb to ultimately destroy the zombie-like children too - in NLMG there's no way out, and ultimately a kind of numbed acceptance pervades despite the primal scream near the end of the film: what do you do when your entire life in planned out in front of you, from birth to death? Where to go but ultimately disappear? I'd be interested to know if Kazuo Ishiguro has ever read any of Wyndham, but in any case, it's good to see a British film which credits the audience with some real intelligence for once.

2011-01-30T23:20:00.002Z

Apologies for lack of posts while I've went through exam stress. I have, however, produced a three minute video for one of the modules on my course, which you can view below for your delectation. Reading J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World will always remind me of shooting the documentary now...

It's become so ubiquitous that it's actually incredible to think the Thames Barrier is only 30 years old, and that one day it'll have to be replaced. Doing that documentary also reminded me of these chilling images currently on display at the Museum of London, imagining a future London beset by climate change. Sadly the authors of those montages never got back to me to give permission for the images to be used in the documentary...

RIP Broadcast's Trish Keenan

2011-01-14T20:25:00.004Z

Awful news.

2011-01-03T00:28:00.019Z

So, ATP was fun. Godspeed You! Black Emperor played three times for a combined total of seven and a half hours, and Neurosis about six, but even this was eclipsed by Oneida's ten hour set in the Crazy Horse stage, replete with all kinds of bizarre white sheets dangling from the roof (see picture below). Borbetomagus did their hour-long sonic holocaust of atonal guitar and free jazz; Tim Hecker's ambient drone was in full, blissfully loud volume in the centre stage; and "Weird Al" Yankovic was, well, "Weird Al" Yankovic. As with every ATP, the devil was in the details: the Butlins cinema showing bizarre French-Canadian avant-garde films all weekend to no doubt perplexed audience (one seemed to have clips from a Middle Eastern film involving excruciating footage of a cow being slaughtered); Jodorowsky's famously demented psychedelic masterpiece The Holy Mountain being perfectly timed for 3am Saturday, on the Godspeed channel on the TV in the chalet (just as everyone came back pissed from the Butlins clubs); decidedly mean-looking members of Neurosis in the toy shop...anyway, a Spotify playlist of the event can be heard here.

Speaking of Spotify, I have noticed this truly brilliant website, in which the detritus of the application's vast music library (which you can download here provided you live in, well, Europe) can be seen in all it's ragged glory, from Russ Abbot's 3rd album to 2 Live Jews (authors of As Kosher As They Wanna Be), Derek Bailey's Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (actually pretty good stuff - it's in one of the older posts), "Various Artists - Music For Bondage Clubs" (the mind boggles), "The Siberian Chipmunks Sing The Charts", "The Flatulent Phantoms sing 'Halloween Monster Farts'", and at least one Merzbow album (possibly not the album that was only available in a car)...there is page after page of this stuff, and it's utterly fascinating.

So, purely on the strength of their names/album covers, I nominate my own list:

Snoop Doggy Dogg - My Dirty Ho's - features "Bitches Ain't Shit" (Snoop's radical complex deconstructive post-modern critique of gender relations).

James Taylor - Covers - no idea about the music, but the man looks like an axe murderer on that front cover.

Carcass - Reek of Putrefaction - interesting...I'm still trying to decide whether I like "Pungent Excruciation", "Microwaved Uterogestion", or "Vomited Anal Tract" the best.

Jason Mraz - We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things - the album title is bad enough, but just look at that album cover. Just look at it. Did a five year old do it?

Cannibal Corpse - Gallery of Suicide - contains such singalong classics "Disposal of the Body", "Blood Drenched Execution", "Dismembered And Molested", and the charmingly reassuring "I Will Kill You". Gee, thanks for the kind words, guys....

The Handsome Beasts - Beastiality - actually I don't think this is on Spotify. But who cares, just look at that front cover (or rather, don't). As nominated by Pavement's Stephen Malkmus in 'The Inner Sleeve' section of a past issue of The Wire, in which artists nominate their favourite album covers.

This list will be updated regularly...and any contributions are welcome!

2010-12-24T17:29:00.001Z

Brilliant. They didn't have that when I was a kid. Merry XMas everyone.

RIP Captain Beefheart

2010-12-17T23:15:00.002Z

Respect.

2010-12-17T00:21:00.003Z

Some footage (quite a lot of it, in fact) of the last Pennyblackmusic night in conjunction with GoodnightLondon, at the cosy environs of the Half Moon Herne Hill...amusing to see how stressed we were at the soundcheck in the first clip.

2010-12-01T00:56:00.003Z

Sad to hear that another London gig venue bites the dust...and RIP Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson. So definitely no Throbbing Gristle or X-TG at ATP this weekend, sadly.

2010-11-22T23:49:00.005Z

So looking forward to another ATP – my sixth one, I believe - this time curated by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, whom I saw live roughly ten years ago at the Scala and voted one of their albums on Pennyblackmusic.co.uk as the last decade’s best ever.
This ATP looks especially interesting, given the curators and some truly unconventional selections. The presence of Throbbing Gristle should be interesting, except that the pandrogynous Genesis P-Orridge (or Genesis P-Breyer Orridge, or Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, or whatever he/she/it is calling themselves these days) has decided not to continue with the latter. Therefore the remaining Throbbing Gristle members will be playing under the name X-TG, which remains a baffling prospect.
It’s easy to take ATP as a regular occurrence these days, conveniently forgetting that there was not a huge amount of alternative festivals beforehand (except in the back pages of The Wire). The idea of getting a curator – usually a band or bands, but they’ve had some eclectic choices before (Vincent Gallo, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Matt Groening) – who chooses the whole line-up has become commonplace now, but was less so before ATP began. Much less still was the idea of a festival at Butlins (or Pontins, where it was when it started, and which has not gone into administration) that featured experimental line-ups that melded avant rock, jazz and electronics, not to mention bands with names such as Berg Sans Nipple, Pissed Jeans, Jackie O-Motherfucker, Fuck Buttons and 16 Bitch Pile-Up. Looking at the Godspeed ATP line-up, there’s only a handful of other festivals in an intimate setting – Supersonic is one – which can mix such an eclectic line-up that includes ambient drone (Tim Hecker), full-on free jazz (Borbetomagus), Eastern European idioms (Boban I Markovic Orchestra), metal (Wolves In The Throne Room), modern composition (Charlemagne Palestine), and, well, “Weird Al” Yankovic to name just a few, as well as all manner of strange sounding movies hosted by various Montreal film collectives in the Butlins cinema programme.

But anyway, in honour of ten years of ATP, my favourite moments of the festival from memory:

buying food at the stall next to the Reds stage while Prurient was unleashing his maelstrom of noise, and seeing the tortured face of the person behind the counter
passing people playing crazy golf and go-carting while the sound of 16 Bitch Pile-Up raged in the distance (admittedly you had to be there for this one)
David Yow of The Jesus Lizard crowdsurfing through practically their entire set
the procession of people playing pots and pans, dressed in white sheets, at 5am in the morning
hearing about the member of bar staff who was in tears and had to be comforted after a whole day of Boris, Earth, Sun O))), and other assorted heavy noise
the look of pain on the security guard’s face as Sunburned Hand of the Man played a three hour jazz-freakout rock set, filling the stage with assorted weirdos including one member dressed in a pink wig, sunglasses and a Victorian suit, who proceeded to blow bubbles at the audience
Glenn Branca’s mini guitar-orchestra and the look, once again, on the security guard’s face
Julian Cope’s rant about stage times, ‘the X in Exmoor’, and ‘rodgering’ his wife
the look of bafflement by security guards during the performance of Stockhausen’s Kontakte, with various space noises bubbling for half an hour
stoned, throwing chairs around the room, while My Cat Is An Alien performed a two-hour austere drone in the background
Lydia Lunch’s profanity-strewn reading from her book ‘Will Work For Drugs’ and the looks on the bar staff’s face
Electric Wizard’s audience smelling to high hell
Jah Shaka Sound System’s bass system, which practically took off the roof
getting freaked out by the creepy accappella grunts of Blood Stereo
the combined masses of The New Blockaders and The Haters (or was it the Skaters?) dressed in radiation outfits revving up power drills. At 2pm in the afternoon
watching terrifying footage of Hair Police live on ATP TV…who were due to play live that day
watching a double-bill of Ichi The Killer and Tarkovsky's Solaris on the ATP TV channel, then watching equally weird bands
drinking vodka in our chalet and then watching Einsturzende Neubauten at 2am, with Blixa Bargelt onstage even more drunk than we were
the party in our next-door chalet, which apparently was The Damned playing (Captain Sensible of said band took down his pants onstage, but I wouldn't call that a highlight)
the contrast between watching a band called Porn (you can probably guess their sound from that moniker) one minute and Os Mutantes the next
and finally...this person. Need I say more?

2010-11-05T00:30:00.002Z

Truly surreal and possibly piss-taking interview posted on Brian Eno's website here, hosted by the implausibly-named Dick Flash from Pork magazine (whatever that is), who looks, frankly, creepy as hell.

Eno must be one of the few people to have gone from the dissonance of No New York - still a brilliant distillation of NY No Wave - to minimalism, to Bowie's Berlin Trilogy, to Nico and Devo, and on to incredibly moving ambient works such as An Ending (Ascent). Indeed, his work with Talking Heads and David Byrne (particularly My Life In The Bush of Ghosts) even prefigures Western obsessions with 'world music' - a terrible term in itself - and what Vampire Weekend are doing today. At the same time, on the other hand he's also worked with U2 and Coldplay (whether you enjoyed the fruits of such labour depends on your point of view). Despite that fact, I would argue that his influence on modern music is equal to The Beatles. No other musician/producer has manage to transcend low and high culture with such ease.

Yet who does the British establishment choose to knight? Alan Fucking Sugar, that's who.

"Service Updates" from TfL's website today...

2010-11-03T23:56:00.003Z

Says more than a thousand words ever could.

2010-10-29T12:04:00.002Z

A reminder that tonight GoodnightLondon will be hosting together with Pennyblackmusic a night at the Half Moon Herne Hill...details here. Should be a corker!

2010-10-16T00:42:00.004Z

There have been some great Private Eye covers over the years, but this has got to count as among the best...

2010-10-10T00:05:00.003Z

Checking out Berlin’s bar scene again last weekend, as I’ve done a few times, I couldn’t help but think of the contrasts with London as the hour gets late. This has been especially confirmed when walking around the West End (of London I mean, not Berlin), a truly bereft place beyond midnight, whose peculiar licensing laws (imposed by Westminster Council) ensure that every pub is shut by 11-12pm flat. The net result, of course, is that the only places to go for a drink subsequently are in expensive clubs (with the exception of indie disco After-Skool Club at the Quad in Holborn, and metaller hangout The Crowbar), where you are more often than not packed like cattle into a club playing bland crap far exceeding conversational level, and subjected to a grilling from bouncers.
Of course, the area in London that corresponds most to where we were in Berlin – Prenzlauer Berg – is not the West End, but possibly Shoreditch. But even in the East End of London, the licensing laws still seem somewhat ridiculous considering that London brands itself as a 24-hour city (well, Time Out does at least). Just walk down Kingsland Road where it meets Old Street, and where the inevitable stragglers congregate outside Catch/Jaguar Shoes/Prague Bar, etc. Half of bars are closed by twelve o’clock, with only a handful still operating and inevitably policed by a group of bouncers (leading to bafflement by Spanish tourists, many of whom are probably used to a culture of siesta followed hitting bars much later in the evening).
It is incredible that in 2010 there is still only a handful of pubs or bars in such an area still open after midnight. It seems to me that this is still part of a culture in Britain that emphases drinking straight after work, so as to compete with the absurd 11 o’clock curfew – an archaic law put in place in the first World War. The Sun and The Daily Mail’s instant opposition to the last Government’s admiral stab at liberalising the country’s drinking laws were always going to influence the course of events; the reading figures for The Sun and The Mail are astronomical compared to The Guardian, so the Gruniad’s broad support for liberalised drinking laws meant little. The Government is influenced by what the tabloids say, not by any of the leftie broadsheets, and has always been thus.
As a result, the traditional British ritual of being told by a miserable-looking bouncer/pub owner to drink up at 11 o’clock look set to continue unabated, leading to another ritual, that of fights outside the pub as everyone congregates. This kind of culture has become ingrained, exacerbated by tabloid scare stories about the ‘dangers’ of longer drinking hours, how British society may collapse as we know it in an instant, and how it might affect the impressionable public, accompanied by stories of halfwits – you know the ones, you’ll usually see them in Wetherspoons pubs (or The Elbow Rooms), louder than anyone else - in a coma from excessive drinking. Of course there is club scene in London open all hours – Fabric and the 333 are just two that come to mind - but trying in vain to find a decent number of bars beyond the 1am point has become a surprisingly regular, and frequently frustrating, experience.

It doesn’t have to be this way. London could be like many countries in Europe, where bars open late to the point that people leave at different times, and conversation is invariably more relaxed rather than dominated by having to drink quickly so as to meet looming closing hours. The bar scene in Prenzlauer Berg was a case in point. There were no fights on the street and little need to engage in binge drinking because of doors shutting early. Hypothetically, if the Government was ever to truly liberalise the pub/bar laws – which seems distinctly unlikely under the Tories – what would happen would probably be an initial surge of idiots having to attend hospital after being carried away, but then a subsequent period where the novelty of liberalised bar laws would wear off. What would follow could make London’s pub/bar scene among the best in Europe. Sadly, the tabloids simply don’t want anything of the sort, which leads to us all treated as children, expected to tuck into bed at midnight, duffing our cap to the Queen along the way.

2010-09-17T18:08:00.003Z

Apologies for the lack of many posts, but have been sorting out this out...the next edition of GoodnightLondon Presents on behalf of Pennyblackmusic. Click on the flyer above for a bigger picture.

Live:
The Willard Grant Conspiracy
The Monroe Transfer
Altai Rockets
Adam Donen

Preview of bands here
Plus DJs till late

Friday October 29th 2010
Doors 8pm
First act on 8:15
£7 in advance from here
£8 on door
The Half Moon Herne Hill
10 Herne Hill Lane, London, SE24
Nearest Overground: Herne Hill (and 15 minutes walk from Brixton Underground)
Bus services and map are here

http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk
http://www.halfmoonpub.co.uk

This is gonna be one heck of a night, suckas!

2010-09-09T21:07:00.014Z

Been wanting to check out the recent screenings at The Cineroleum, a converted petrol station in Clerkenwell, yet they’ve all sold out straight away, unfortunately. Metropolis is one film that deserves to be shown on the big screen, with its dystopian vision of future Berlin still incredible looking today; ironically, of course, the huge 'ivory towers' of upper-class city financiers that the film satirises are not too far from the petrol station's location when transposed to London.
In the same spirit of DIY, Upset The Rhythm’s recent second Yes Way event in a warehouse in deepest Peckham, along with Boat Ting’s experimental nights on Bar & Co boat moored at the Thames, were events well worth the time and effort to check out. At a time when there are arts funding cuts left, right and centre, it’s still vital to have some kind of left-field music worth celebrating. The quality of some of the acts at Yes Way may have been variable - Hype Williams sounding like bad 80s porn film soundtrack music (though maybe that’s the point) and Pheromoans’ wackiness beginning to grate – but there was also some interesting explorations into drone (The Haxan Cloak, Time, Gentle Friendly), brilliantly executed thrash (Ultimate Thrush), noise (Temperatures, Blood Stereo) and dub/electronica. Along with Café Oto, The Hackney Pearl/Elevator Gallery Hackney Wick scene, and The Others, it makes a change for once too to go to a venue that has a different approach to food and drink than any homogeneous Carling-owned franchise of music venues. It’s vital that this kind of DIY spirit still exists now more than ever, with the Foundry and Barden’s Boudoir now closed.

2010-08-09T22:28:00.012Z

So, RIP The Foundry (and Bardens Boudior and The Cross Kings while I'm at it). The last real bastion of anything truly left-field on Old Street has been replaced. Goodbye to the sense of individualism, of a semi-unregulated place full of strange and weird things going on, where there’s multiple TVs bunched together showing weird stuff, where people snog under banners saying ‘I SH*T’ and where bands prance around with people dressed in Roman toga gear dancing to the sound of saws being bowed and transvestites singing about No:ID cards (see picture below), backed up by women mummified with tin foil covering their heads stumbling blindly around the stage.

Goodbye to a place that serves lots of local ale (*) as opposed to only cans of Carling at £3:75, and that has a sense of anti-corporatism. Goodbye to a place that shows local artwork, weird improvised theatre/music hybrids, drawing classes and ranting poetry. Goodbye to the notion of being able to go to an interesting place that doesn’t have a half-witted security guard instructing you what to do (see also: the demise of the Spitz). Goodbye to that big sign that said “Awesome: I Could Fuckin’ Do That”, or some-such. Goodbye to memories of playing in an analogue synth orchestra for three hours and watching people bash huge metallic pipes that stretch to the ceiling in the name of art. Hello to mediocrity and another hotel, most likely anodyne and exactly the same as the one around the corner, sponsored by Hackney Council (authors of the Hackney Ocean and Stoke Newington Sports Centre - remember that? - no less).

Hello to no atmosphere and zero character – or a PA playing Zero 7, if you like.

(*) admittedly you can buy the locally-brewed beer at the Flea Pit, Café Oto etc. too, but still...

'In C' (live at the lexington: 11/7/2010) by monster bobby

2010-07-16T21:06:00.003Z

For those who were too hungover/already had plans last Sunday, here is our performance of Terry Riley's In C (see below) in all it's ragged glory. Bear in mind that this was the first time some of us had ever played it (me included). I'm on keyboards - well, one of the keyboards. One of the many keyboards, in fact...

'In C' (live at the lexington: 11/7/2010) by monster bobby

This Sunday at 'The Hangover Lounge'...

2010-07-09T23:11:00.003Z

Now that I'm safely ensconced back in London, and if anyone fancies coming down, I will be playing part in 'A Little Orchestra' this Sunday (11th July) at The Lexington, near Angel tube, north London, performing In C by Terry Riley along with other musicians. The event is from 2-9pm and we will be playing early (so you can get to the World Cup final with plenty of time to spare - what musician would play at the same time as that??). Guest DJ is none other than Bob Stanley from Saint Etienne. Deduct ten points if you thought I meant the French city there rather than the band.
Details (including directions) are here.

2010-07-05T23:05:00.008Z

One of the weirdest things I saw while in Los Angeles was a version of the Eiffel Tower (above) in the Americana shopping area that brought to mind Baudrillard’s obsession with both simulacrum and his quote that “Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation”. While that may be a pretentious way of putting it, LA most definitely does feel hyperreal, especially when suffering from jetlag: there is something strange in the city’s postmodern random juxtaposition of architecture, including one of the main Scientology buildings – or rather, castles - which looks like something out of a magical Disney film (only in LA would you also have a street called L. Ron Hubbard Way, devoted entirely to Scientology buildings).

The endless neon signs informing you of Jesus’ presence seem designed paradoxically to inspire epilepsy in their drivers. Driving down its endless freeways towards Downtown feels like something from Blade Runner (which ostensibly depicted the Little Tokyo district of Downtown LA in the future) or the Terminator films, with its endless spaghetti junctions branching off in all directions and corporations on all sides (you could almost imagine Skynet Cyberdime Systems being the next building up). Yet despite its skyscrapers, Downtown doesn’t really feel like the centre of the city: LA doesn’t really feel like it has a corporeal centre as such, just endless cities existing almost autonomously, encircled by the mountains at the edge of the desert, the whole place only really navigatable by car (despite the presence of a public transport system). London’s ordered rows of semidetached houses seem boring and quaint in comparison.

"There's nobody here"...

2010-05-30T00:55:00.005Z

In honour of the discussion at Cafe Oto a few months ago on 'Hauntology' in music, the above clip - mentioned during the talk - is Oneohtrix Point Never's strangely hypnotic rendering of Chris de Burgh's 'Lady In Red', the 80s schmooch classic remixed to haunting, ghostly effect.

One of the interesting points made in that talk was the fact that photography is changing from the format of photographic film to digital photography, thus losing in some respects the ghostly feel of old photographs which are tied down to a pre-digital photography area. Indeed, it can't be long before traditional photographic film, much like obsolete formats such as the floppy disk and DAT tapes, will become phased out. The unmistakably dated sepia feel of old photos will be an experience forgotten, as digital photography essentially renders all pictures pretty much the same quality, whether now or in ten years' time. It will therefore become increasingly difficult in the future to pinpoint when pictures were taken.

Indeed, a similar point could be bought up regarding analogue vs digital recording equipment. With the preference for digital tape over analogue tape (except for die-hard analogue purists such as Steve Albini and Toerag Studios in east London), even cheaply-recorded material will increasingly have a digital mid-range sheen to them, which could lead to a difficulty in twenty years time of placing songs from the previous two decades. This is in marked contrast to even records from the late 80s, which sound - twenty years on - dinsinctive of their time (the JAMC's "Psychocandy" and New Order's output, to give examples). It's interesting to note that artists such as Ariel Pink (at least in his older material) have embraced the hiss and low-fi noise of 4-track tapes as essentially an intentional, aesthetic choice in this day and age (given that digital music equipment is practically as cheap, and in the case of - now expensive - old analogue tape machines, cheaper). Much of Lee 'Scratch' Perry's dub recordings from the Black Ark days now sound utterly fixed to their time and space, analogue recordings filled with ghostly wooshing sounds, echo, and reverb; indeed, during the talk the point was made that dub was the first genre to remix songs into haunted instrumental versions where the vocals, if they did still remain, became essentially a ghost-like sound, one more instrumental in the mix alongside primitive samples of birds singing and water flowing.

Free music - Fisher Man Dub

Not only does the analogue nature of these recordings bind them to a certain time and place (the late 60's/early 70's, Jamaica), but dub can also be considered a huge influence on hauntology and the first wave of post-rock (Seefel's Quique, Tortoise etc.), along with the whole methodology of 'remix' culture, which has become increasingly superficial (I loved the story of the Aphex Twin being offered to remix a Lemonheads song, and him giving a CD of his own gabba music that happened to be lying around to the biker person who came to pick up the remix at his house). In it's own way, dub remains just an important an influence on 'hauntology' in music as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop/Delia Derbyshire does.

2010-05-29T23:39:00.002Z

If George Orwell was alive today, I'm not sure what he would have made of the new London Olympic mascots, who go by the frankly creepy names of Wenlock and Madeville. The fact that Britain has more surveillance cameras than anywhere else in Europe is reflected in the CCTV cameras embedded in the eyes, ready to observe any nasty comments about the Olympics in 2012 going way over budget. Big Brother is watching us now from behind the facade of two pseudo-friendly distinctly phallic giant eight-foot walking penises (one of whom appears to have pissed himself). More than that, though, they look genuinely terrifying rather than cuddly: a cross between Cyclops; something from Akira or Tetsuo: The Iron Man or the endless slew of manga cartoons that Japan produces; a London parking meter; and a vision of aliens from another planet distorted by bad acid; while underneath possibly lies two out-of-work actors wondering how their lives ended up this way. Perhaps it's possible that they are a clever, undetected dig at Cameron & Clegg (one representing each) and Britain's morphing into 1984-style Surveillance Society? I think we should be told.

2010-05-24T22:44:00.003Z

Hello all, and sorry for the delays in posting...without further ado, you may wish to enjoy The European's session on BBC6 Music from last week. Keep listening and you will also be rewarded with a wonderful version of Joy Division's "Insight" from their Peel Sessions (remember Peel sessions? Ahh, it all seems so long ago...then again, it was quite a while ago now).

GoodnightLondon MixCasts Volumes II & III

2010-04-03T18:46:00.003Z

Goodnight London Mixcast Iii by Goodnightlondon on Mixcloud

SONG TIMES
00:00 - Esmerine - Quelques Mots Pleins D'Ombre
07:15 - Liquid Liquid - Optimo
9:54 - This Heat - Paper Hats
15:31 - Silver Apples - Seagreen Serenades
18:18 - Land Of Kush - Iceland Spar
32:23 - Lau Nau - Kuljen Halki Kuutarhan
36:00 - Sheila Chandra - Shehnai Song
37:52 - Fairport Convention - A Sailor’s Life
48:58 - Do Make Say Think - Dr. Hooch
56:45 - Nico - Nibelungen
1:00:00 - End

Goodnight London Mixcast Ii by Goodnightlondon on Mixcloud

SONG TIMES
00:00 - Hildur Gudnadóttir - Elevation
05:17- Tower Recordings - Harvester
13:50 - Vetiver - No One Word
20:00 - Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)
23:00 - Windy & Carl - Through The Portal
28:52 - The European - The Settler
31:40 - Yo La Tengo - Spec Bebop
41:40 - Broadcast - Hammer Without A Master
45:50- Spiritualized - Shine A Light
52:00 - Nels Cline, Wally Shoup, Chris Corsano- Lake of Fire Memories
54:00 - Stars Of The Lid - Requiem For Dying Mothers
1:00:00 - End

April is the cruellest month, as someone once said. In the spirit of mix cassettes treasured long ago, here's some music for those long Easter nights, or what's remaining of them...

2010-03-28T22:32:00.008Z

The new play Shunt Money from the folks at Shunt - taking place in a huge tobacco warehouse (apparently once owned by Fidel Castro) down the road from their normal premises in the cavernous, catacomb-like railway arches underneath London Bridge station – is certainly visually spectacular in a way that can rival even interactive performance collective Punchdrunk’s mindblowing theatre productions (which GoodnightLondon has covered elsewhere on this blog).
Without wanting to give too much away, let’s just say that inside the panopticon-like warehouse, you feel like you are on the set of Brazil or an updated version of 1984, with dry ice in the darkness and ludicrously dressed riot police (unsurprisingly played by actors/volunteers rather than real police – or at least I’m assuming so) guarding a bronze, huge three-storey Victorian-looking metallic engine structure, replete with steam pulleys, pistons, levers, engines, and dials, resembling something that you might find in an underwater submarine in World War II, or from the set of Metropolis. Towering in the centre of the warehouse and belching out smoke like some being that’s alive, it’s certainly a site to behold, and is even more spectacular when you are trapped in it’s belly inside, with it’s transparent flooring revealing chambers, rooms and saunas below and above, while a bald figure all in white resembling Caliban in Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books descends from ceilings, scurries spider-like through the rooms below and around the opaque roof, and does somersaults around the audience at intervals. Who is the voyeur, the audience or the actors? It’s difficult to tell who is really spying on who, just as the seamless visuals can’t quite hide the handling of the story, which bases itself around Émile Zola’s L’Argent – a novel in the late 1800s prophetically inspired by the collapse of the French bank Union Generale, who went under as a consequence of dire financial management, greed, speculation and over-investment. The relevance is obvious when placed within the context of the current financial crisis (particularly the collapse of Lehman Brothers) and the mismanagement that has took place on Wall Street and the Square Mile, yet the dialogue was so cryptic and obfuscated and the script so impenetrable that it became difficult to really know what was going on half of the time when observing the interaction of the characters as they span their baseless pyramid schemes to each other. Perhaps this impenetrability was deliberate, intended to approximate or signify the Byzantine nature of the doomed dealings and wheelings – grounded, as it turned out, on nothing - that was being depicted, just as we now know that much of the financial dealings of business moguls in the real world was based on an illusion.
Regardless, Punchdrunk’s performance of Faust as a contrast somehow made complete sense even if you weren’t following the story closely, simply because the set design and themes explored in each room captured the story so perfectly and expertly. Still, like watching cities being engulfed by tidal waves and storms in The Day After Tomorrow while ignoring the schmaltzy Hollywood character plotting, the visuals alone made it worthwhile. After attending this and the Punchdrunk performances of Faust and The Masque of the Red Death, it seems obvious where the next location for an interactive theatre performance of this kind should be: Battersea Power Station, a venue that would truly make for an incredible backdrop (which is did, tantalisingly, in Children of Men, and which has at least hosted a couple of exhibitions). Yet, with depressing inevitability, the status of that stunning monument, just as with the handling of the banking system by those responsible that led to the current financial meltdown, remains mired in staggering mismanagement and negligence. Even if Shunt Money’s script was flawed at times, its central message has never been at a more prescient time.

Shunt Money image: © Shunt Money website/Christopher Sims.
Battersea Power Station photo: © Saatchi Gallery website/2006 Parkview International

2010-03-23T22:44:00.002Z

Slightly late to post this, but...RIP Mark Linkous and Alex Chilton. 3rd/Sister Lovers will never quite sound the same.

2010-03-06T23:04:00.002Z

I will be taking part in a photo exhibition on the theme of water, accompanied by live music, on a boat on the Thames. It'll take place on Thursday 18th March at Bar & Co, Temple Pier, Victoria Embankment, WCR2. Nearest tube: Temple.

Kaparte Promotions presents:
The Sound of Water
A visual & sonic event
The symbolism of water has a universal undertone of purity and fertility. Symbolically, it is often viewed as the source of life itself as we see evidence in countless creation myths in which life emerges from primordial waters. 11 artists photographers and four music acts celebrate the relationship between the element and the surroundings, showing with their images and sound their personal vision of water, simply on a boat, on the Thames.
Thursday 18 March
Bar & Co, Temple Pier
Victoria Embankment
PHOTOGRAPHERS SLIDESHOW:
Robert Allwood, George Bush, Sophia Dawson, Kelvin Hayes, Ben McDonnell, Angela Last, George Koutsoudopoulous, Poison Creeper & Andrea, Karoliina Hujanen, Grahame Rockhill, Dominic Simpson
LIVE MUSIC
Gagarin, Platform Five (5), Adam Donen, Will Connor (Vultures)
Plus a selection of tunes from opera to post-industrial and special visual effects...
Curated by Klarita Pandolfi
Doors 7.00pm
Entry £5 on the door

2010-03-03T01:07:00.003Z

Recluse will be returning to The Flea Pit on Columbia Road E2 Thursday 4rd March 2010.

Live acts:
Tom White - Floating surround-sound textures from the smallfish/Hibernate artist.
VLK - Textural noise using max msp processed cello,
found objects and electronics.
Burning Zoo - Guitar noise loops and primordial electronics.

£3, 8pm. DJ sets from Hybernation, visuals from
FBox Records > www.myspace.com/reclusenight

EDIT: This was cancelled due to venue issues

2010-03-01T20:36:00.005Z

Me on the latest Sunburned Hand of the Man album - though given that they did twelve albums alone in 2009, it may not be their latest any longer...perhaps with the increasingly cheap access of music technology and production these days, there's just too much music? Then again, Sunburned are simply following in the DIY ethic espoused by Merzbow, Sun City Girls, The New Blockaders, etc. and other underground artists in the 80s, in which their standard practice would be to release an enormous amount of mostly improvised music, no matter how lo-fi the sound; the only difference now is the format - a cornucopia of CD-Rs rather than tapes.
What's interesting with that Sunburned album is the way they approximate something similar to the early 80s focus on drums and funk in (mostly) white guitar music, with heavily rhythmic bands such as Liquid Liquid (whose 'Optimo' track - or at least what sounds like it - I'm pretty sure Sunburned sample at the start of A), 23 Skidoo, A Certain Ratio, and even This Heat, as well as very early 80s Eno - which may, of course, be down to the presence of Keiran 'Four Tet' Hebden in the producer's chair. For a band often derided (with some justification) as a shambling jam band, Sunburned can actually venture into some pretty original and innovative places.

2010-02-25T21:29:00.003Z

And speaking of last November's gig, the next installment of the GoodnightLondon in association with Pennyblackmusic will be at the Half Moon Herne Hill in south London.

Live:
Television Personalities (album launch)
The Pony Collaboration
Of Arrowe Hill (album launch)
The Rebel
and compère Spencer Robertshaw
Preview of bands here

Plus DJs till late and record stalls

Saturday March 20th 2010
Doors 8pm
First act on 8:15
£5 in advance from http://www.wegottickets.com/event/71527
£7 on door
The Half Moon Herne Hill
10 Herne Hill Lane, London, SE24
Nearest Overground: Herne Hill (and 10 minutes walk from Brixton Underground)
Bus services and map are here
http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk

Be there or be square

2010-02-22T21:17:00.002Z

After his performance at the Pennyblackmusic (in conjunction with Goodnight London) gig night last November at the Brixton Windmill, The European returns...

2010-02-22T00:24:00.010Z

According to TFL's website, on the Underground this weekend no less than eight lines were either at least partially suspended or completely closed, leaving only three lines with a fully running, non-interrupted service. Those tourists eager to visit Camden Town and those dreadful, never-ending shops selling “I Went to London and Got Ripped Off for this Crap T-Shirt” or somesuch would have been perturbed to find that the Camden Town station wasn’t in action at all this weekend. The result must have led to Mornington Crescent station nearby resembling the gates of Hades. Likewise Brick Lane, now a tourist mecca and affected by the Circle Line (even if other lines serve Liverpool Street, and Aldgate East and Bethnal Green stations are relatively nearby).
There’s no doubt that modernising needs to take place on the oldest system in the world, given that the Underground infrastructure appears to be as riddled with holes as French Gruyère cheese. But when it does so, it means that people are forking out money to use a non-existent service. The Bus Replacement Services may be fine for travelling short distances; but long ones can be excruciating experiences, involving much gnashing of teeth and mounting feelings of dread as said bus trundles through never-ending weekend traffic, your eventual destination ever further off.
Yet at the same time, we endure tube fairs rising, which makes a mockery of the idea that the most expensive transport system in the world* should only charge what it does if it’s able to provide an equitable and appropriate service. And with only two years to go towards the Olympics, the prolonged closure of the Victoria line every other weekend means that visitors will find it difficult to see other parts of the city when 2012 rolls on - this on top of all the other line's closures.

*yes I know that link is three years out of date, but it still stands as far as I know...

2010-02-14T00:59:00.002Z

A short message to say that if anyone fancies coming down tomorrow night (Sunday 14th), I'll be playing analogue synth in 'The Synth-Off' at the Foundry, 86 Great Eastern Street, EC2, alongside members of NOW, The Stella Marris Drone Orchestra, The Rude Mechanicals, and others. Free, 8pm.

Goodnight London MixCast Vol I

2010-01-31T16:01:00.003Z

More posts will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, here's the first of a number of MixCasts that will appear on Goodnight London via those folk at Mixcloud.com...enjoy.

Goodnight London Mixcast I by Goodnightlondon on Mixcloud

SONG TIMES
00:00 - Alejandro Jodorowsky - Trance Mutation
03:30 - Hangedup - Go Let's Go
08:05 - Out Hud - This Bum's Paid
13:00 - Fursaxa - Alone In The Dark Wood
17:20 - Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. - Pussy Head Man from Outer Space
24:50 - Black Ox Orkestar - Toyte Goyes in Shineln
28:24 - Piano Magic - Theory of Ghosts
32:00 - Wooden Shjips - Clouds Over Earthquake
36:40 - Clear Horizon - Distortion Song
40:20 - Tim Hecker - Blood Rainbow
43:40 - Keith Fullerton Whitman - 2nd Early Monolith
46:08 - Sunburned Hand of the Man - Too High To Fly No More
1:00:00 - End

RIP Tim Hart

2010-01-10T18:05:00.002Z

In honour of the Steeleye Span guitarist who passed away recently, here's the band in their prime - a favourite of mine as a kid. Reminds me of those long car journeys on holiday...

Watching that video, it's funny to think that for a long time folk-rock was considered by the indie cognoscenti as deeply uncool, with it's obsession with beards, flutes, Morris dancing, ridiculous clothes, et al. Yet somehow in the last decade, the presence of Devandra Barnhart, Espers, Tunng and tons of others have brought focus to the genre again and made it passably trendy - something that's obliquely addressed in this article by Simon Reynolds on the return of the beard in guitar music. Many of these artists (even if some haven't explicitly said it) have seen their music as essentially a reaction to the blandness of MTV pop music, which is somewhat ironic given that folk rock was essentially the pop - as in popular - music of it's time; the music of the people rather than the ruling classes or the monarchy. As such, it had the potential to be a truly revolutionary medium in feudal Britain and elsewhere, which is easily forgotten when viewing with cosy, rose-tinted ironic amusement videos such as above or other 70s footage of bearded folkies (and let's not even mention The Levellers...oh damn, I have).

2010-01-03T20:42:00.004Z

Christmas may be over and dusted, but the winter chill and darkness still bites in Europe...so I invite you to enjoy a seasonal cover from The European, one of the performers at the Pennyblackmusic (in conjunction with Goodnight London) bands' night at the Brixton Windmill last November. Eat your heart out, Aled Jones.

WALKING IN THE AIR by THE EUROPEAN

2009-12-31T00:54:00.004Z

Despite my cynicism here towards the endless reviews of the 'noughties' that have abounded this month, as the decade draws close I've contributed my own nomination in Pennyblackmusic's albums of the decade list by writers (scroll down to see my nomination, Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven, album cover above).
That album for me has remained the real soundtrack to a decade undoubtedly defined by 9/11 and everything that followed as a result, far more than the empty posturings of many of the skinny jeans brigade and their fashion spreads. Listening to that incredible album now, nearly ten years after its release, it's as if GB!YE somehow knew in advance just what a turbulent and tense decade the noughties would be, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the anti-capitalist/IMF demonstrations, impending fear of global warming, Al-Qaeda, etc. But with it's dystopian ghostly urban noises and dread-filled samples of preachers/disaffected down-and-outs filling up the spaces inbetween the band at full throttle, what's also interesting is how, in places, the album can even sound like much inspiring electronica, from Burial (something I expanded briefly on in this thread) to Amon Tobin to Fennesz.
Indeed, this is what have always made Godspeed stand out among the likes of Explosions In The Sky and - a horrible label - many other 'post-rock' acts, who started off sounding exciting (listen to EITS' first album) but who, with their latest material, have sounded like they are beginning to regurgitate what is essentially the same predictable dynamics (this doesn't include the likes of Cul de Sac, I might add, who never followed the quiet-LOUD-quiet pattern as many of these bands have). GB!YE - along with other related luminaries of the Montreal post-rock scene such as Set Fire To Flames, Hrsta, Esmerine etc. - have been constantly innovative and unique.

I'll skip books, films, etc. and present just one other nomination - for the category of Musical Villain Of The Decade award...and there can only be one man. And no, it's not Simon Cowell.

Happy NYE, and here's to a new decade.

2009-12-31T00:22:00.002Z

So sad about Jack Rose, and now Vic Chesnutt and Rowland S.Howard of The Birthday Party too...

2009-12-10T00:04:00.002Z

In case you're feeling the winter chill combined with the stress of work deadlines a bit too much...I recommend you read the reply comments to this Sarah Palin 'article' on the Copenhagen summit in The Guardian. You will not be dissapointed.

2009-12-06T19:28:00.003Z

RIP Jack Rose

a truly great guitarist who I had the fortune to see live

Recluse Christmas special

2009-12-03T23:42:00.004Z

This Saturday, 5th December, from 5pm, £5 entry (that's a lot of fives). At it's usual home of The Flea Pit on Columbia Road in east London...live acts include Hybernation, Plus Plus, Skarabee, Same Actor & Isnaj Dui, Viv, visuals and DJs, and more...
www.recluse01.com I myspace.com/recluseclubnight

2009-12-02T23:53:00.003Z

I got to meet an ex-member of The Fall recently for the first time, which makes me want to read this book even more than before now (said person - who will remain unnamed - was in the 'halcyon' period of the early 80s line-up). There are apparently a grand total of 43 former members of The Fall (though that figure could now be higher, of course), which means that the band just pips The Brian Jonestown Massacre (40 former members, if my memory serves me). Napalm Death may have come close, but are disqualified anyway by dint of the fact that they now have no members left at all from their original line-up.
Doubtless there are some brilliant stories told in that book about life on the road with Mark E. Smith. My favourite anecdote that I've heard is that when The Fall appeared on Later on Jools Holland, they made Holland sign a contract stipulating that he couldn't play boogie-woogie piano with them (for those reading this from outside the U.K., it's a late-night music programme where the presenter annoyingly feels the need to play keyboards with every band at the start of the programme). Amazingly enough, he complied. Now that is a band with class.

2009-11-23T22:52:00.004Z

An inevitable by-product of reaching the end of any decade is that there will be the endless obsessive lists and highlights of that decade reprinted in all the magazines and newspapers (and on Christmas TV too, no doubt). In the middle of the deluge, Pitchfork have been a real highlight, managing to at least have a decent view of music trends and a fairly decent top 20 (among a choice of 200 - count 'em!) albums of the decade list. By contrast, the NME's top 20 seems pedestrian in contrast, even with some surprise choices in there (Primal Scream's XTRMNTR - for what it's worth, their last good moment and symbolically that of Creation Records too; PJ Harvey at six; elsewhere The Delgados at 46; erm, that's about it in the top 50).
I'll admit that Is This It is a fairly decent indie-pop record which you could appreciate - can appreciate - for it's raw instinct, and particularly if you're at a certain age. And this list certainly isn't as irritating as that deeply irritating NME 'cool list'. However, listening to one track from each of those albums on this WE7 link, one thing that strikes me is how cynically produced some of those records - particularly that Strokes track, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs track at 6, that rubbish Libertines song, etc. - really are. The deliberately distorted vocals and production on those songs give the impression that they are desperately aiming for 'authenticity', when it's pretty obvious that huge amounts of money have been spent on these albums. It's as if they don't want you to think that these albums have been produced in expensive 36-track studios, which they almost certainly were. I guess the converse is that you could argue that it's just as well these records weren't overproduced, which is probably true. But, listening to a lot of these bands that were at their peak in the early to mid 00s, I can't help but think how horribly contrived some of this stuff is: the skinny jeans, the deliberately 'raw' production, and (in the Stroke's case) studied air of cool (you know, the 'authentic NYC gang' image - ignoring the fact that they probably weren't exactly paupers) masking an ephemeral talent.
When you contrast it from their NYC contemporaries (not applicable to The Libertines, obviously), it's obvious that acts such as Liars and Oneida have turned out to be vastly more interesting, with the former actually becoming more sonically inventive with each album (culminating in the incredible 'Drum's Not Dead'). GoodnightLondon could blather on about a whole heap of great bands at this point from the other side of the pond that aren't on that list - from Atlas Sound to Wooden Shjips, and a cast of many others, not to mention some acts on this side of the Atlantic - but, in relation to above, what's clear is that time has become the great leveller in deciding what bands have longevity and originality and what don't.
I guess there are a small amount of fairly good choices further down the NME's 100 list, including Godspeed You! Black Emperor and others. And that includes the Liars, in at 58 - but rated lower down the list than Hard-Fi. Need I say more?

2009-11-22T01:52:00.006Z

Am reading JG Ballard's The Drowned World at the moment, which has turned out to be a deeply prophetic read, particularly after the floods in Cumbria that have happened in the last few days, the latest in what feels like an annual event in England, as well as the omniprescent advertising for disaster movies like 2012 (something that I touched on with a previous post about Ballard here). You could argue that the flooding has nothing to do with global warming, but somehow it feels like their continued existence cannot be attributed simply to normal weather. But it's also eerily accurate in matching the description of what James Lovelock has predicted will happen to the Earth in The Revenge of Gaia, as well as other predictions of future global warming, particularly with this excerpt that mentions a future migration to the North and South poles - exactly what scientists, in fact, have predicted:

"All over the world, mean temperatures rose by a few degrees each year. The majority of tropical areas rapidly became uninhabitable, entire populations migrating north or south from temperatures of a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty degrees...during the next thirty years the pole-ward migration of populations continued...only within the former Arctic and Antarctic Circles was life tolerable."

Ballard wrote the book in 1962, which shows just how prescient he could be. Did he know something that we didn't?

2009-11-13T00:29:00.003Z

Goodnight London in association with Pennyblackmusic presents the above this Saturday...

2009-11-04T22:23:00.002Z

More posts coming soon, but for now...Recluse night at The Flea Pit, £3, Thursday 5th November 2009, Columbia Road, east London. Andy Nice, Isnaj Dui and Rocketnumbernine live for your pleasure.

2009-10-21T22:33:00.000Z

My thoughts here on the forthcoming Espers album.

Things in London that annoy/baffle me - an occasional series

2009-10-12T21:35:00.005Z

I timed how long the traffic lights stayed red near my home the other day out of interest. I happened to notice that the light has been staying red for an inordinate amount of time recently when I've crossed the road at this set of lights. I mention this because of Diamond Geezer's post here about the 'experiments' that are taking place with various sets of traffic lights around London. I too have noticed the Orwellian sight of sinister looking men (and women) in uniform, holding weird thermometer-type instruments and phalanxed by tough looking blokes, looking serious while standing at pedestrian crossings. I was tempted to point out to them that the traffic lights near my place have stayed red for precisely ONE MINUTE AND FIFTEEN MUTHAFU***N' SECONDS. I timed it. Seventy-five seconds by my watch. Seventy-five seconds of my life that I'll never get back.
Does that not strike you as frankly ludicrous, or am I the only one? What followed when the lights went green was that it stayed green for approximately...I don't know, twenty seconds, maybe. Perhaps even less (I didn't time exactly how long it stayed green). The net result, unsurprisingly, was that people simply walk across anyway after, let's say, thirty seconds of waiting while the light is red - and continue to do so. By the time said pedestrians cross the road, the light is still red, of course. Which completely negates the reason for having a traffic lights system in the first place. And anyway, what kind of nutter would stand at a traffic light for the whole seventy-five seconds of it being red? (Well, admittedly I did, but that was because I was timing it).
I seem to remember that when I was living in Bethnal Green, there was one specific set of traffic lights that took even longer than seventy-five seconds to stay in 'standing position'. Which begs the question - am I the only one, or have other people noticed that different traffic lights tend to take different amounts of time to change from red to green compared to other lights? We should be told.
Which is why I find the notion in DG's article that pedestrians are getting too much time to cross frankly incomprehensible. So bollocks to Boris if I'm officially supposed to wait even more while the light is red.

Recluse music night

2009-09-17T20:42:00.003Z

Tomorrow night (Friday 18th September) at The Flea Pit, with Alex Monk, Konntinent, Isnaj Dui and Met playing live.

2009-09-15T20:45:00.004Z

Brilliant 'tribute' to the end of Oasis here in The Quietus. I'm not exactly sure what they mean in labelling Liam "genetically curious"; in any case, considering that I've not listened to an Oasis record in about twelve years, much less took any interest in them, I've found myself strangely fascinated by the announcement that Noel Gallagher has left the band. The idea that the rest of Oasis might carry on without him (at least according to this article) is hilarious enough in itself - who exactly in their right mind would pay to go and see a Noel-less Oasis, never mind buy a whole new album?

I never did understand why (What's The Story) Morning Glory? was always in the top rankings of those 'Top 50 Best British Albums Ever Polls' that Q magazine seems to do. For what it's worth, Definitely Maybe and the Some Might Say EP at least had a punk spirit and energy that made them kind of look vital for a while. Yet Morning Glory must rate as one of the most overrated albums ever (as some people are now finally recognising). It's as if the fact that it sold huge amounts of copies somehow automatically transcends it from it's blatant mediocrity and bestows it in people's minds as a piece of great art, when the likes of "Don't Look Back In Anger", "Wonderwall" and "Champagne Supernova" are just bland from start to finish, with smug, half-arsed lyrics and equally half-arsed chord arrangements, not even bothering to hide their plagiarism. Not that Oasis ever sounded like The Beatles, in my view: they could never have done albums as sonically inventive as Revolver or Sgt. Pepper because, at heart, Noel Gallagher just wasn't remotely inventive, dynamic or imaginative as a songwriter beyond his normal frame of reference. Instead, they just sound like a kind of karaoke version of The Rutles, minus the things that made The Beatles interesting and unique in the first place.
I always found it incredibly irritating the way that they would constantly repeat the maxim "we're the best/biggest band in the world", which they always seemed to do in the mid 90s in interviews, as if being the biggest band in the world equates with releasing the 'best' albums in the world (whatever that means) too. By that logic, the last couple of releases by The Rolling Stones are the best albums ever released (given that they often seemed to be labelled with the sobriquet "Biggest Rock Band In The World"), which clearly isn't true. What always irritated me too at that time was the endless articles claiming that there was 'nothing interesting' in music before Oasis - and, by extension, most of Britpop - came along; or that they 'saved' British guitar music, as if the only guitar music of the 90s that was valid was that which directly referenced the 60s (not that Oasis even did it well anyway). Even as a teenager then, I already thought that the implied notion that that there was a huge gaping hole in the early 90s before Oasis' arrival was patently bullshit.

Anyway, now that Andy Bell is (hopefully) freed from his bass duties with the Gallaghers, perhaps the silver lining is that Ride now could reform, whose first two albums were miles better than Oasis in the first place. We'll see.

2009-08-25T22:08:00.005Z

The travails of moving house...I have left the wastelands of Waltham Forest, interesting as it was to see the evolution of the Olympics site at Stratford. I am no more Blazin' Squad's neighbours. Still, expect more regular posts now that I'm settled at a new abode in the capital, nested in the shadows of gleaming spires.

Since my last post, it's been weird to think how quickly technology advances, and specifically to do with music. Following on from previous posts to do with the future of music consumption, I'm thinking of Spotify, naturally, which - at least in the U.K., and Sweden, and certain other Western European countries where it exists - has took off hugely since, well, my last post (the service isn't available - at least yet - in the U.S. and Canada). Hot on it's heels, we now have a 'rival' site of sorts with the Peter Gabriel-funded WE7, which also relies on advertising in-between tracks for its revenue (most of which isn't half as hilarious as the taped messages that Spotify broadcasts of the site's fans - that includes you, Dave from Cardiff, with your intense Oasis/The Jam obsession). It is weird to think that only sixteen years ago - when I first starting going to 'serious' record shops like Rough Trade in Covent Garden (as it then was) and others - your only source for music was the weeklies (remember Melody Maker?); humble indie record shops vs corporate HMV/Virgin high street chains (depending on your preference); or the radio. Spotify has now decentered music to the point where, in those countries where it fully operates, you practically are the record shop. Like many of a certain age, my first encounter with record shops (years before going to the Rough Trade shop mentioned above) was with the long-extinct Our Price. I used to gaze at the sections on Joy Division and New Order, and look with wonderment at their distinctive and mysterious Peter Saville/Factory Records-designed covers. Ditto Depeche Mode, early Sonic Youth, etc. The idea then that they could all be sitting there on my PC was unthinkable. Back then, it would have seemed impossibly naive to believe too in the idea that these albums would essentially be there for free (if you don't count the amount that you're paying for broadband, of course (which obviously didn't exist then)), along with thousands of others - despite home taping having been a common fashion for a while already back then. This isn't even mentioning the mindboggling array of material by jazz artists - I've lost count of the amount of Miles Davis LPs on there. You could, quite possibly, never go to a record shop again and yet play a new album every day with Spotify (though there is no Beatles, Led Zeppelin and a number of others due to copyright issues).
The ramifications of Spotify are obvious: if it stays afloat (and, judging from the backing by the music industry - whatever that is these days - there's no reason why it shouldn't, despite much scepticism), future generations will become used to the idea that music is, mostly, 'free'; the idea, as in my youth, that you had to save for weeks before excitingly trudging to your independent record shop to buy the product, and then taking it home with baited breath, will slowly become defunct. Music is becoming omniprescent, fulfilling David Bowie's prediction that it'll become like running water one day. Of course, in the face of this, some record shops are still thriving, particularly those with attractions such as in-store gigs (which is precisely what Rough Trade and Pure Groove are doing, with the latter becoming less of a generic indie record shop altogether). And Spotify's lack of content from the more interesting and left-field labels (Constellation and Touch & Go, for example, or the Kranky artists) can be frustrating. Indie record shops will still thrive with obscure vinyl and obscure labels, and other examples that Spotify inevitably can't provide.
That said, one search on Spotify brought up material by the likes of Richard Youngs, Phil Niblock, and Keiji Haino, none of which can be accused of being exactly easy-listening (particularly dear Phil's numerous 25-minute long drone tracks in one chord). I guess I'm just nostalgic about the fact that the thrill of one-upmanship that I felt in 1993 when going to Rough Trade, knowing that I was the only person in my school who knew about the shop, those bands and those records, is somewhat gone. In the age of Spotify, everyone is a deeply knowledgeable music fan now, for better or worse.

Hugh Hopper RIP

2009-06-13T23:55:00.003Z

Sad to hear of the news...I once saw him play, at the Camberwell College of Arts - it was in the middle of the 2006 World Cup. Germany had just beaten Argentina earlier in the evening. Charles Hawyard was on drums, grinning manically; Tymon Dogg was coaxing weird sounds out of weird home-made instruments that looked like huge metronomes zigzagged with strings, creating a sort of weird harp; while a performance artist, face painted in white, walked around the room doing odd movements and smiling demonically to the audience. There were other strange performers too.
In the middle of all this, Hopper quietly played bass, his face inscrutable. I kept thinking that I might have seen a wry smile occasionally play on his lips when viewing the surreal nature of events around him, but I couldn't quite be sure.

2009-05-25T00:21:00.005Z

P.S. The below was inspired partly by my own experiences and partly by Diamond Geezer's various posts on TfL and the Underground in general.
P.P.S. Please don't sue me for this article, TfL. I don't have much money, and can't claim expenses unlike most British MPs'. If you're really aggrieved, I'll buy you a pint or something.
P.P.P.S. The image below was spotted on a wall near the Barbican Centre. No artists name was provided next to the work.

2009-05-17T01:42:00.004Z

"Dear Passengers, this is an announcement from your Station Controller, on the weekend of [insert any here]. The following is a travel update.

The Bakerloo line will not be running in either direction due to the fact that the trains feel like rickety wooden sheds which will implode any minute, setting fire and incinerating all passengers within half a minute. In addition, there will be no Central line due to various engineering works which have outrun their allotted time. Meanwhile, ongoing upgrading work on the Victoria line will ensure that the line will be closed every other weekend until two-thousand-and-muthaf****n’ twelve, that’s 2012. Customers living in the Waltham Forest area should also note that, in the absence of the Victoria line running at Blackhorse Road station, they also won’t be able to get the Overground from Barking to Gospel Oak, which stops at that station, due to repair work on the track. But then who cares about the inhabitants of Blackhorse Road anyway? Frankly, it’s full of weirdoes. Who else would live on a street that’s had roadworks for at last seven years? Krypton Komics looks cool from the top deck of the bus, though. Maybe I’ll see a Deep Purple tribute band at the Standard one day. Residents of this area should note that there are replacement bus routes which go to nearby Tottenham Hale; said residents should also note that this bus route will be completely useless due to the fact that Tottenham Hale is on the Victoria line, which also won’t be running. For passengers in this predicament, we would advise taking another bus route to your destination, which will take approximately three days.
Moving on, passengers are advised not to use the Northern line in the middle of the summer, as (a) it will only confuse the hell out of you if you’re a tourist, what with it’s Byzantine complex of stops and different directions which will no doubt bypass wherever station you want to get to; and (b) the experience of being in a packed carriage in the heat will be roughly analogous to dying a prolonged, agonising death in a vat of one’s own faeces. Passengers are assured that when the new Crossrail line links up with Tottenham Court Road station in 2017, we will ensure that there will be still be an irritating trustifarian busker in the pedestrian tunnels regaling you with mediocre covers of Bob Marley ‘classics’.
Customers should also note that the Waterloo & City will be closed on Sunday, just because it’s always been closed on Sunday, as no-one in control can be arsed to run it. Jubilee Line will be closed in its entirety, which we can assure has been done entirely to spite those poshos who (a) can afford to live in West Hampstead, and/or (b) work in Canary Wharf. The District line will also be closed, because, well, who do you know ever gets the District line anyway?
Meanwhile, the Docklands Light Railway, a genuinely enjoyable jewel in our 'crown', is closed completely due to the fact that the O2 venue has turned out to be a giant spacecraft that’s lifted off and burnt the tracks.
All other lines will meanwhile be closed due to various engineering work that’s clearly taking twice as long as we initially forecasted, mainly due to workers striking / eating peanut butter sandwiches for too long / going down the pub / spontaneously combusting. There will also be no National Rail, due to leaves on the track, everywhere, all at once. Customers should note that the exception is Southern rail, who will conveniently fleece you even if you do have an Oyster card.
Please have a pleasant journey. Eat more vegetables. Watch X-Factor. Shut up and be happy, and carry on buying Oyster cards at ludicrous prices, even though your card will be rendered obsolete half the time due to the fact that the line that you actually need to use won’t be running.

On behalf of TfL staff, thank you for listening. We are transforming your tube. Message ends."

Ballardian

2009-04-28T23:25:00.009Z

Sad to hear of the death of J.G. Ballard recently. The Guardian’s exploration of his influence (as well as Simon Reynolds’ great article on the man here in Salon) includes his obvious influence on music (The Normal’s classic 'Warm Leatherette' (later covered by Grace Jones), with its cyberpunk adaptation of Crash’s central theme of the psycho-eroticism of car crashes, and Joy Division’s 'The Atrocity Exhibition', named after Ballard’s book of short stories, on Closer).

There’s no mention in the film section of the fact that A Clockwork Orange feels very Ballardian, with its scenes in city underpasses and stylised, neurotic imagery of a psychedelic urban dystopia. Ballard’s “psycho-geography”, his vision of the future, is one where, like Philip K. Dick, technology has often gone wrong and we are surrounded by consumerism, designer drugs, and endless concrete highways. And his writings have often featured subconsciously in the collective imagination: his vision of London immersed in the water, an idea that he explored in The Drowned World and which has taken on a disturbing relevance with increasing worries about global warming and rising sea levels, has found expression in this imagery. And it’s even echoed in the scene in The Day After Tomorrow where a city – this time New York rather than London – is engulfed by water.
But it’s the section on his influence in architecture that’s also interesting, particularly after visiting the exhibition on Le Corbusier at the Barbican. With the surroundings echoing a lot of the ‘Modern Architecture’ and utopian urban planning ideals that Le Corbusier clung to, what was really interesting was to see his vision of housing estates back in the 60s, and what inspired him to erect them. Anyone who has lived in the majority of London – or any other big city in Britain, I guess – will know just how grim and colourless council estates can sometimes look when set against a rainy grey day, which seems to be the U.K.’s speciality in weather so much of the year. They’ve become a ubiquitous part of the landscape even for those who don’t live in one.
Yet there’s something about the images of some of them from the 60s, standing brand new, shorn of much of the decay, grime and weather erosion that they’ve suffered over the years. There’s an almost utopian longing in those old pictures, with the Le Corbusier’s view of the estates being a giant self-contained community that would simultaneously solve housing problems and raise the general quality of life – an ideal that seems impossibly idealistic now.
Yet there are occasions when his architecture does still stand up today, particularly with the housing that surrounds the Barbican itself, which perfectly embodies the original ideals that Le Corbusier strived to – modernist and exciting, with all kinds of new ideas about living and functionality at home, with the images of his examples of work displaying all kinds of unique ideas about furniture and art at home. Then again, after having visited the exhibition, it’s amazing in retrospect to think about his projected ideas – with accompanying diagrams - in 1925 to bulldoze much of Paris north of the Seine, and replace what was there with “sixty-story cruciform towers from the Contemporary City, placed in an orthogonal street grid and park-like green space” (according to Wikipedia). His plans were rejected by those in charge, but the mind boggles as to what would have happened had these developments took place. It’s echoed in these plans in London in the 70s that would have led to Brixton being completely unrecognisable, and which were likewise unimplemented.
Ballard’s landscape is often dominated by these Le Corbusier-like huge housing projects (he even did a book called High-Rise), with their concrete walkways. A few took a dysfunctional turn as the 70s and 80s grinded on, wracked with all kinds of problems, reflecting the kind of dystopias that Ballard explored in his works.

(Ballard image from the BBC website)

2009-02-01T02:02:00.003Z

There's some great posts here (scroll down to Wednesday 28th and Tuesday 27th) from Diamond Geezer about the new tube maps that Transport for London seem to be prolifically churning out at the moment, including in this case ones focusing on disabled facilities and the presence of public toilets at Underground stations.
I had to laugh at this quote that DG provides from the map on disabled facilities, involving a journey from Sudbury Town (wherever that is) to Borough station, which sounds like something only Beezlebub could envisage:

» Enter Sudbury Town (via the Station Approach entrance, not Orchard Gate)
» Take the Piccadilly line (big step up, medium gap) to Green Park (big step down)
» Via lifts and along a 220m passage to get on Jubilee line (big step up) to London Bridge (small step down)
» Via lifts and via street (410m in total) to get on Northern line (level access)
» Ride southbound through Borough station to Clapham North (big step down) and cross the platform (big step up)
» Return northbound to Borough (big step down) and exit via lift to street

I feel tired just reading that. What I’d like to add to DG’s post, other than agreeing that this seems mindbogglingly complicated, is that this involves taking four trains on three different Underground lines - and hoping that they all work. Given the chaotic nature of the London Underground, would it be cynical of me to comment that this is slightly wishful thinking on TfL’s part? Not judging from the daily update on Underground lines that’s blasted at us commuters over the tannoy at the station near my work when we ascend the escalators, in which there is almost always at least one direction on at least one line a day which is at least partially closed for repairs – and don't even think about what it's like at weekends. Taking the Underground can so often be a game of roulette.
In a fantasy world, where TfL was theoretically awarded with unlimited amounts of money, the only answer to truly making the London Underground blemish-free would be to build new tunnels for each line – admittedly, a colossal task – with 21st century signals and new trains. The old tunnels could then be used for cyclists only, which would theoretically be a benefit to transport on the surface.
Sadly, this suggestion isn’t actually uniquely thought up by Goodnight London, but rather by some bloke in a letter to The Independent that I read a while ago. But what a great idea it is. Of course, the idea contains logistical nightmares, and runs into a fair few problems when we consider that some of these lines actually do go Overground for part of their journey, as in the case of the Jubilee line heading westward. Maybe in these cases the new tunnel could join up with the remnants of the track from the old tunnel just before surfacing. The old track would have been kept only in those cases where it goes Overground, with cyclists in the tunnel being blocked by a wall at this point. Then, if the track eventually goes Underground again, the old track could then feed into the new tunnel, after which the old tunnel could then once again be used only for cyclists. Still following?
Obviously, the idea runs into the other problem, which is that it would cost trillions of pounds, and would be laughed down straight away. So instead, despite TfL’s best efforts with continual repairs, we’re stuck with a chronically exhausted network that’s constantly weakened by signal failures and the such-like – and which, of course, is the most expensive in the world to use.
Oh well, I can but dream...

Ron Asheton RIP

2009-01-07T23:21:00.009Z

Nice article here on the great man's (second left in the picture above) legacy.
All those memories of The Stooges live...Hammersmith Apollo three years ago or whenever still must rank as one of the most exciting performances Goodnight London was priviledged to witness, despite Iggy's eagerness that night to display his todger to 5,000 people. I've actually still got a Superfuzz Bigmuff pedal at home called ROCK ACTION - the nickname that was given to Asheton, won in a competition that Time Out were hosting in the music section. It was a promotional gimmick that came with Mogwai's album at the time - Rock Action, named in honour of Asheton. And it's still goes up to volume 11 - well, OK, not physically, but at least eched on the pedal by me.

RIP Walthamstow Dog Tracks

2008-12-31T01:22:00.005Z

The building's demise is another example of great individual modernist art set to perish forever, even though (a) dog racing is arguably an inherently ethically dodgy sport due to the treatment of the animals, and (b) it was largely as a result of indifference rather than deliberate attempts to knock it down.
However, it could be used for a myriad of other purposes besides dog racing, ranging from art to music. Instead, it's likely that it'll be replaced by identikit flats with nothing but the desire to fit in as many people as possible. Perhaps this is the future: truly unique architecture for the working people, as grand as the Volksbühne in Berlin, set to rot without a moment's thought. Perish the thought that it could ever be grade A listed (though admittedly the food was awful).
Maybe architectural monuments such as the Hoover Building and Battersea Power Station are next...and soon we will have no trace of a city past.

2008-12-31T00:29:00.002Z

This site's celebration of the aesthetic joy of sleeve art brings back so many memories - being eternally transfixed by Peter Saville's endless run of mysterious Factory Records' covers in Our Price, including the unforgettable austerity and minimal reductionism of Unknown Pleasures (which it covers here); the strong palette of colours in the 'tree of life' that features in both Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock; the forbidding secrets of Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising, with it's towering Gothic pumpkin image framed by a blood-red sky with the New York skyline menacing in the distance; and the blur of guitar haze on MBV's Loveless - a sleeve that actually captures the contents of the music...not to mention the beautiful packaging of the Constellation Records releases, and so on, with endless examples. Record sleeves have become so woven into the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, that it's easy to forget just how strong a statement - both politically and aesthetically - they can be. I've always thought that the best album sleeves are those which have a certain amount of intangible mystery and individuality to them, and yet paradoxically are strongly evocative of something about the contents within - despite however abstract the cover art may be. Which leads on to my posts below about downloading culture - could the album sleeve be another casualty after record shops, what with the rise of the mp3?
What's disappointing about that site is how banal some of the sleeve art that's on display is (and let's not even mention the presence of Lenny Kravitz on the list). Christ, even Screamadelica would look great on there compared to Regurgitator. From the top of my head, here's my list of what else should be on there other than the one's even mentioned.
Daydream Nation (Sonic Youth)
Spiderland (Slint)
Things We Lost In The Fire (Low)
Yanqui UXO (Godspeed You! Black Emperor)
Forever Changes (Love)
Liar (The Jesus Lizard)
Quiqe (Seefel)
Mouths Trapped In Static / Telegraphs In Negative (Set Fire to Flames)
The Doctor Came At Dawn (Smog)
Do Make Say Think (Do Make Say Think)
Lazer Guided Melodies (Spiritualized)
Palaa Aurinkoon (Islaja - there's just something about that image of her...)
Deceit (This Heat)
Admittedly I could be here for a while (not to mention the fact that this list contains no real dance music or jazz). Any suggestions?

2008-12-12T00:22:00.002Z

Back at the Flea Pit for the Christmas Recluse next week, performing with Fractured Waves...should be a corker.

2008-12-03T00:13:00.010Z

That post below about music in the internet age has really made me think about how technology has progressed and times have moved on when it comes to playing music. Twenty years ago, CDs had been only just been released on the market, and the idea of having your entire CD collection (and record collection too, with new technology, such as this Vinyl Adaptor) on an iPod only marginally bigger than a mobile phone must have seemed unthinkable. My iPod has up to 120GB of space - an unbelievably large amount, and enough to store an entire record shop's worth. Exactly what format music will be consumed in in twenty years time can only be imagined.
As mentioned below, the downside of the current download culture is the ubiquity of music everywhere and the slow eradication of the idea of the album as a coherent, whole entity rather than a collection of disposable, individually downloadable tracks, thus chipping away at the traditional pre-internet era thrill of buying an album from a record shop. Of course, you can still physically go into a record shop and buy an album, but there's no doubt that download culture has seeped thoroughly into the music retail market. The other issue of downloading culture is sound quality, of course, including the omniscience of compression more and more, as Simon Reynolds points out in this article.
The same thoughts above about iPods containing entire record collections also applies to the making of music, and particularly relates to a band that I'm looking forward to seeing at this weekend's ATP at Butlins curated by Mike Patton and the Melvins. Along with Silver Apples and United States of America, The White Noise are one of the original primitive experimental electronic 'rock' outfits, the difference with those two acts being that White Noise were based in Britain (albeit with David Vorhaus being American in origin), and congregated around the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, enlisting Delia Derbyshire along the way. An Electric Storm, with its panned drumming, tape loops and jarring samples juxtaposed with sweet pop melodies, must have sounded completely alien when it first came out.
The idea that the painfully-constructed sounds emanating from these mysterious rooms full of enormous primitive electronics, tape and synthesiser machines in the BBC headquarters could one day be distilled down to that coming from a laptop must have seemed incredible in the 1960s, just as with the idea of entire record collections existing on a piece of software barely the size of a phone. Consumer technology has become smaller - nanoized, you could call it - and more powerful rather than simply becoming bigger, as predicted in much old sci-fi. The downside of easy-to-use software such as Garageband that can be used in laptops now, as opposed to the painstaking work that must have took place splicing tapes in the huge laboratory-like rooms during White Noise's time, makes me think that perhaps punk's mantra of 'anyone can do it' has finally come true, liberated by the progression of technology.

2008-11-19T00:02:00.009Z

Went to the closing-down party for Sound 323’s shop in Highgate recently, which has joined the list - along with Disque on Chapel Market, Mr CD, Reckless Records, Beano’s in Croydon (not that I ever went) and that one in the corner of Greenwich Market whose name always escapes me - of record shops closing down in London (though Sound 323 will carry on online just as Smallfish have done). Sound 323’s focus on modern composition, field recordings, experimental, free jazz, improv etc. was always going to be a niche market, and while it’s sad to see another independent shop closing its doors in an increasingly homogenised market, there’s always Second Layer Records in the basement – with its focus on noise, psych-folk, drone, out-there, etc – taking over both floors. Sister Ray, too, has managed to stay up despite its much-publicised recent problems, while Rough Trade and Pure Groove in the East End have done well.
Perhaps you could blame downloading culture and the iPod (though admittedly I have one myself, so am not immune to its charms) for the problems that some of these shops appear to be having. The question of where the album format is going next is a moot point, and something that this article addresses. The god-awful Shuffle function – which Goodnight London never uses – decontextualises the album format, so that songs are just that: a collection of songs played in completely random format, rather than sequenced in a carefully thought-out order, designed to ‘complement’ each other and introduce texture and progression into the listening experience. The Shuffle function negates any sense of the album as a linear, conscious progression of songs whose dynamics when set against each other bring focus to the whole recording. To give you an example: the juxtaposition between loud, crashing noise on ‘Ascension Day’ suddenly giving way to the serene, beautiful calm piano of ‘After The Flood’ on Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock. It’s not inconceivable that future generations of iPod users will hardly bother with the album format at all, and will instead randomly rotate individual tunes – which they’ve downloaded from iTunes or wherever rather than buying the whole album - using the Shuffle function. It may be for a long time just yet, but it could happen. Then again, it’d be unfair to demonise all download sites – Bleep cover some brilliant left-field music, for example, and there’s an argument that magazine cover mount CDs are equally to blame.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that music, like everything else (including maybe even books one day, what with Google’s new service), is becoming digitalised.
And perhaps too I’m sounding like an old fart here who’s too stuck in the nostalgia of being thrilled when going to Our Price (remember them??) all those years ago and seeing New Order’s back catalogue of albums on display, as well as purchasing Daydream Nation on tape (does anywhere apart from Second Layer and online enthusiasts still sell tape these days?). You can, of course, still go to HMV and see those albums in pristine condition on CD. Perhaps, too, as that article notes, the popularity of downloading individual tracks off iTunes or wherever has meant that there’s a weird return to the idea of singles as a dominant format – stretching way back to 7-inches and 45s - so that we’ve gone full circle in a strange way, albeit updated for the digital age. In it’s own way, this is no bad thing.
Furthermore, just as there still exist those second-hand bookshops whose musty smell and cobwebs remain part of the charm, there will be always be those ‘niche’/second hand/collector record shops around for the purists – I don’t just mean Second Layer, which covers genuinely challenging left-field music, but places like Haggle Vinyl on Essex Road, Intoxica in Notting Hill, and even the tiny store next to Chingford Station who don’t even seem to have a name, but who has some cheerful old bloke running it. The last time Goodnight London went through its hallowed racks (including some serious Joy Divison/New Order/MBV etc back-catalogue stuff on vinyl), even he admitted that business isn’t easy, and he would know, having ran the store for 25 years. Check it out if you, erm, ever fancy going to Chingford Station.
There’s also The Dream Machine in East Dulwich, which continues the fine tradition (took up also by Second Layer) of being in the basement of a building. There’s just something about hermetically-sealed basement record shops, the thrill of descending a flight of stairs to another world completely, one that’s different to your own, which is the feeling indie record shops should elicit. It’s a feeling I always got with the Covent Garden branch of Rough Trade (since moved to Brick Lane, of course).
Anyway, I will be playing with Fractured Waves at an in-store on Friday 28th November at The Dream Machine, on around 7:30 or so, if anyone fancies coming down. Map here; nearest train is East Dulwich. It promises to be a pretty interesting evening.

2008-10-15T23:24:00.005Z

[images from Kinetica's website]

The recent Concrete & Glass event in Shoreditch certainly felt to me like the last bastion of something creative in the area before it becomes simply too expensive and upmarket to nurture any kind of alternative arts scene. With the Hackney–Chelsea link building work gaining steam, the ossification of the area into an extension of the City and its homogenous wine bars is inevitable, despite the credit crunch. The link between the arts scene and the music scene is something that’s been well overdue, and one of the most interesting things was finding that I often preferred trawling the galleries in the area than checking out some of the bands. The Byzantine labyrinth of tunnels in the basement of Shoreditch Church set the tone for Thursday evening, while Kinetica’s gallery of hybrid technological monstrosities produced some incredible results (such as those in the pictures above). I still can’t get out of my head too the different coloured lamps that populated the room at the top floor of Cordy House, with each one revealing all kinds of weird secrets when you viewed them through a binocular.
One impression to be gained from the festival was that it hadn’t completely demolished the barriers between the arts and music crowd, as evidenced by the characters trawling through the galleries of Redchurch Street; for some reason the impression I got was that they remained entirely separate from the music goings-on.
Anyway, some highlights music-wise on Thursday: Matthew Sawyer & the Ghosts’ lo-fi, low-key set on Tuesday night at the Strongrooms; Errors playing to a packed set at the Old Blue Last; and the ridiculous 80s synth-metal band (Grosvenor, perhaps?) at Favella Chic. Sadly, Friday summed up the problem with these events: all the venues were just too packed, with no luck queuing up for The Macbeth, Catch (where the ubiquitous Selfish C**t were playing), and elsewhere, while the queue for TV On The Radio at Cargo – the festival’s big draw - went beyond the realms of the ridiculous. The only place that had any space was Pictish Trail upstairs at the Vibe Bar. Still, it led to the music venue find of the festival for me: The Brady Centre, on Hanbury Street off Brick Lane, where The Real Tuesday Weld delivered a charismatic set in plush theatre surroundings, backed up by a great film show. Just goes to show that sometimes the most interesting places are off the beaten track in that area.
Judging by the success of Barden’s Boudoir (particularly the Club Motherfuc*er), I’m guessing that Dalston, where I went school and consequently have mixed feelings about, is set to be the Shoreditch of the future. If so, Café Oto is its Spitz, before the Spitz itself sadly got shut down, replete with candlelight and a relaxed, slightly arty and intelligent atmosphere; a place that feels very much independent and untouched by the Carling-sponsored mainstream. Playing there on Saturday on Recluse’s first birthday was a blast. Thank God these places still exist before the area gets swallowed up in a tidal wave of yuppie bars.

2008-08-25T20:06:00.008Z

Me here with an interview and live review of Comets on Fire. Listening to their music makes me think that if the 90's was a repeat of the 60's (as Select magazine many aeon's ago spuriously once wanted us to believe), then the "noughties" (what an awful phrase that is to describe the 00's) is a repeat of the 70's, what with the likes of COF, Espers, Sunburned Hand of the Man, MV & EE with The Bummer Road / Golden Road etc., Wooden Wand, Smegma, Wooden Shjips etc. Despite these bands' ostensibly owing huge debts to the 60s, I would argue that they actually reference the 70s far more - specifically the pre-punk period from 1970 up to around '76 (punk's 'year zero' approach wiped the slate clean in most people's minds to the point that even if the likes of Hawkwind continued beyond the 70s, they still remind inexorably bound to that certain period).
True, you could find tenuous links between those bands and out-there early 'primitive electronics' outfits such as Silver Apples and the United States of America, both of whom are firmly rooted in the late 60s, as well as other examples. But really, these bands' antecedents lie much more in that aforementioned 70-76 period that saw coming to the fore Hawkwind, disparate Krautrock acts (Can, Faust, Neu!, Amon Dull II, Ash Ra Temple), Träd Gräs och Stenar, Gong, Henry Cow and Led Zeppelin's 'Battle of Evermore' (still an incredible track despite what ever prog-rock horrors the band may have committed post-Physical Graffiti). Equally, too, the DIY approach of Sunburned and other acts of a similar ilk, and festivals such as Terrascope in America, reflect the children-friendly free festival ethos that dominated during that period (even though Terrascope itself isn't actually free). Admittedly it's easy to laugh at the worst excesses of that period, with it's preponderance of beards (something I couldn't help but notice was replicated at the Comets on Fire gig, where they were in abundance), flute solos, and Tolkien-referencing lyrics. But these bands also reference the fact that much of this music reflects the dark side of the original hippy dream as it slowly extinguished in the late 60s: Amon Duul II's Yeti in particular sounds like the acid trip gone bad, the music overloaded and dangerously out-of-control; the same could be said for Ash Ra Temple's howling ghost epic 'Traummaschine'. The drugs went sour and recession loomed (at least in Britain), giving birth to the equally bad trip vibe of Throbbing Gristle - who, ironically, appropriated much of the synaptic live spectacles that Pink Floyd (in their 60's era) and other innocent psychedelic acts employed to enhance their music five or six years before. In terms of the present, too, Selfish C*nt - forever associated with Shoreditch - and the other similar wannabe confrontational electroclash outfits that seem to congregate weekly in that area are, when it comes down to it, really just a throwback to Suicide's audience bating in late 70s in pre-gentrification Lower East Side NYC.
Incidentally, the Green Man festival that I just went to had echoes of the early 70s era, with Pentangle on the main stage on the Sunday night and much of the acts on the (cringeworthily titled) Folky-Dolkey stage in a similar vein, not to mention children running around everywhere. A shame, then, that any hopes of shamanic dancing in fields was obliterated by three days of torrential downpour, to the point where I missed Comets on Fire offshoot Howlin' Rain's set due to, well, howling rain. The only thing to do was play cards in the tent instead. Such is the pitfalls of British outdoor festivals. The first picture below was took on Friday near the main stage, when a faint belief in a beautiful, sun-kissed weekend persisted; the latter was took on Sunday at the top of a hill at the festival.

2008-08-13T22:56:00.001Z

Off to The Green Man festival tomorrow and expecting to see some serious beards...check out that line-up for tasteful quality!

2008-08-06T22:43:00.003Z

Interesting...and given the rumoured troubles the Foundry has been in, things could get worse. Then again, if you can afford to live around there nowadays, you're probably working in a demented finance department in the City anyway. Doubtless many who were in the queue for Trailer Trash last Friday do - no sane person in their right mind would wear moustaches (the new fashion) combined with 80's white Reebok trainers.
Nonetheless, the area still exerts a great fascination for me, with the contours of the area often springing deep surprises. Forget the garish technicolour excess of Shoreditch High Street / Old Street for a while and the area can produce all kinds of revelations while wondering drunk through its streets. For all it's faults, it reminds me repeatedly of the kind of scene that Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, Swans etc. spawned from in late 70's/early 80's NYC, where experimental art rubbed shoulders with nearby financial districts in a startling juxtaposition. Sad that I had to move, exacerbated with these kind of rents in Bethnal Green alone...

2008-06-30T22:06:00.011Z

Great review of My Bloody Valentine live here on 3AM Magazine, which has a lot of similarities to my experience at the Roundhouse. I managed to sit through the entire white noise middle-eight of You Made Me Realise without the assistance of ear-plugs, which surely entitles me to some kind of award. I'm guessing that it was around half an hour in a two-hour set, but I could be wrong. Like the scene near the end of 2001 when Dave Bowman goes into the monolith 'Star Gate', time became twisted and compressed - it could have been anything up to 30 minutes, during which time the eyes were bombarded by advancing patterns of light on the screen and the ears by a sound equal to a Boeing Jet 747 taking off. I distinctly remember my heart skipping a beat from the sheer noise when, finally, they slammed back into the main riff of the song, just after that pause when Belinda and Kevin breathily pronounce the song title. What it reminded me of the most is the maelstroms of noise that Merzbow and Whitehouse delivered with their sets in London recently, which makes me think that MBV never did settle for just being an indie guitar band of the kind that they influenced (a point dwelled upon with this post by Blissblog). Whether the lineage of MBV's sound can be traced all the way to the nadir of Oasis is a moot thought - the Gallagher brothers, after all, initially modelled themselves on Ride as well as The Beatles, while Ride's early EPs and first album (still their best releases) were influenced hugely by MBV (specifically Isn't Anything). However, it's easy to forget just how daring and avant-garde MBV could be, from the Steve Reich-like flute loop that precedes Soon to the grinding industrial barrage on the Glider EP - again bridging the link between MBV and the Noise movement, as well as the likes of Glenn Branca, Swans, etc.

Anyway, what struck me particularly with the tracks from Loveless - always much more of a studio creation than Isn't Anything - was how exact it sounded to the record, with some kind of foot pedals being used by Debbie Goodge that triggered samples from the album. Elsewhere, Soon illustrated just how much MBV could have grooved if they'd chosen to follow that path on a new album which will probably never materialise; in it's own weird way, it's just as funky as Fool's Gold or anything by the Happy Mondays. It's impact live was to finally inject some kind of visceral rhythm into proceedings. But the real highlight for this reviewer was To Here Knows When - still incredible sounding, with it's lava of guitar noise, the track was stunning in a live setting, the film backdrop exploring what looked like a hidden palace of some kind, while Belinda Butcher's vocals trailed away in a whisper, surrounded by jets of molten guitar lighting up the sunset. That track alone made up for missing Glenn Branca's 100 guitar orchestra at the same venue nearly a year ago.

Finally...

2008-06-17T22:33:00.009Z

So six months (or even longer) after the announcement that My Bloody Valentine have returned and will be playing live, Goodnight London will be attending the Roundhouse on the Sunday. A full fifteen years ago (or whatever it is) after playing live, it should be interesting to see exactly how those studio creations are replicated in a live setting. Indeed, having never seen them live back in their heyday, it's almost impossible for me to imagine almost anything from Loveless played live (particularly To Here Knows When, with it's aural Universe of guitar haze and submerged, barely discernible drum loop). Given that there probably wasn't a huge amount of people who saw them live directly post the release of Loveless, the album has become almost a museum piece, immutable and non-changing in people's minds, so much a product of the studio that the thought of it actually being played live is still difficult to comprehend in some ways.
Both Isn't Anything and subsequently Loveless are so of their time - pre-Internet, pre-Britpop indie, pre-grunge even, when indie really was indie (despite the cross-over appeal of The Stone Roses) - that the prospect of MBV in 2008 is something of an anachronism. It can't even be compared to another performance that Goodnight London recently witnessed at the Roundhouse which harked back to a similar era, Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation played in it's chronological order, because of that band's constant output and activity. In contrast, MBV's disappearance from view has led to a cult mystique that's exacerbated in this comeback by the lack of any new pictures of the band (the one in the flyer above is from 1988 at least).
Just as with that concert, though, this MBV show will doubtless be a bizarre nostalgia trip for much of the audience (including me).
It'll also feature in the Metro and some other papers, no doubt - itself a strange thought. MBV have always represented a kind of outsider music that combined with their two guy-two girls androgynous appeal, along with the deliberate blurring of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher's voices on their records, so that often you didn't know which is which. MBV's image is, in it's own way, another factor that remains so rooted in that period, first with the shoegazing fringes and then with the effeminate posing of Suede. They never were the kind of band that featured in anything other than the indie publications despite their huge cult following. But then the same could be said about Spiritualized. How times move on...

Bo Diddly RIP

2008-06-02T22:36:00.005Z

The business of moving rooms has conspired against me when it comes up to blog updates but will be back pretty soon...in the meantime, another legend bites the dust.

You've been taking
Taking all my money and my clothes
You don't love me baby
You don't love me
Now I know
...

A masked ball of the most unusual magnificence...

2008-05-07T22:49:00.004Z

After Faust last year, which took place in a warehouse in Wapping, the recent immersive theatre performance of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre, which has just finished it’s run, is another amazing Punchdrunk production. Just as with their treatment of Faust’s multi-linear storyline, the site-specific play is certainly breathtaking to behold in visual terms: some sixty rooms take you through the story of Prince Prospero’s fight in his abbey against the advancing plague of the Red Death, wherein the protagonist eventually falls dead at the feet of the disease, personified in human form by a mysterious guest shrouded in black during the masquerade ball. With the winter chill outside at that time, it seemed a perfect time to experience Allen Poe’s allegory supposedly about the inescapability of death.
The opulent surroundings of Battersea Arts Centre, with its grandiose chapel designs and balconies, certainly fit the gothic mis-en-scene. As with Faust, the mask wearing was compulsory, as you flitted between actors reciting lines and simply exploring the huge, cavernous maze of differently coloured rooms inside the BAC. On some four floors or so, the vast space took in different floors and rooms, including a huge bar on the top floor with cabaret, a live band, and belly dancing. Meanwhile, the main auditorium was done up brilliantly like a castle at the edge of a dark forest, bathed in blue light, with the actors wandering around you. It’s the attention to detail that’s so amazing: rooms done up intricately with nineteenth-century pianos, furniture, clocks, and pages of Poe’s writings stuck on the floor and walls; gangway corridors through white sheets; bedrooms with four-poster beds…Perhaps inevitably, the result of this overwhelming experience is that the visitor loses their way in following the story in a normal, linear manner; but the point is that Punchdrunk performances are designed as an immersive embracing of both location and story. During Faust I only half followed the story, being so enthralled with the different rooms and huge auditoriums in the Wapping warehouse; a similar principle operated at the BAC. The finale - where you ran through an incredible huge church-like area with high domes and ceilings from some bygone age – remained out of this world, topped off the ball and red confetti - the colour of blood. Beforehand, while walking the streets of east and south London in the winter dark, the title track from Burial’s Untrue played in my headphones. It’s disembodied voices and eerie industrial noises, where everything sounds submerged and muffled, fitted the scenery of late-night London perfectly, with its barely-lit alleys, Victorian houses and ghosts of centuries past - of the great plague, Shelley and Jack the Ripper. The creaking, deserted overtones and alienated voices that emerge in Burial’s music wouldn’t have been out of place as the soundtrack for the performance, in fact, with The Masque’s gothic, candlelit vibe and feeling of impending doom. There’s even a weird parallel wherein parts of Untrue remind me of the more subdued, bleak industrial noise soundscapes that Godspeed You! Black Emperor came out with on their first two albums, in-between the crashing guitar riffs and violins. Listen to the first album and the last five minutes of CD1 of Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven and you’ll see what I mean.

2008-04-20T22:09:00.003Z

Just when I've lamented the death of interesting art/live music venues in London, another one comes along: Cafe Oto in Dalston, where I'll be playing with Archslider on Tuesday 22nd April. £3 and the doors open at 8pm, I believe...

2008-04-13T22:24:00.003Z

So there's the resident weirdo/lunatic on my long nightbus home, the only one that goes to my door (I won't tell you what number it is in case s/he is reading this, and decides to lynch me on said bus route). London nightbuses are the true microcosm of the city's shifting population post-club or pub: all human life is here, either engaging with their friends in drug or alcohol-addled narratives that quickly degenerate into nonsensical bravado, or about to get off and throw up in the gutter while the stars shine above.
For a start, I can't really work out whether this person is male or female. I think it's a she, but she has a very deep bloke's voice, and I can't be quite sure. She's always wearing sunglasses - on a bus at night - and always appears to be on the same specific bus as me, right from when it starts at Trafalgar Square. Fate appears to have brought us together. It's a long route to my place, and she's there all the way, always on her mobile. That's an hour on the phone, at 3am or 4am in the morning. How many people do you know have hour long discussions on the phone at that time? Then there's the bizarre snippets of conversation that I can hear, which range from imploring quiet, to rage: "Get out of my life!" She once mounted a tirade because the unnamed people weren't British, then appeared to brag about her Caribbean descent for an innumerable amount of time. A whole hour of conversation.
Who are these people? It never ceases to amaze me how 'they' are oblivious to those around them while carrying out deeply personal conversations. The advent of mobile phones has led to a scenario where people's private lives are paraded for all to hear; the usual response is to turn up your iPod (I once blocked this woman out by playing a fourty-minute Merzbow track, which left me feeling strangely relaxed and clear-thinking). But for want of a better thing to do on the bus now that my iPod has broke, I am becoming bizarrely obsessed with the minutiae of people's lives.

Klaus Dinger RIP

2008-04-03T23:05:00.002Z

The man behind those motorik Neu! beats. Danke fur die wunderbare Krautrock Music.