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.

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.

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

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)...

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

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!

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)...

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…

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

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.

SPOILERS ALERT!

What with all the timely discussion of hauntology (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.

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

Awful news.

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!

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

RIP Captain Beefheart

Respect.

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.

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.

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?

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...

Says more than a thousand words ever could.

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!

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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'...

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.

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"...

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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