My housemate Gareth and myself are now experts in the genre of the ‘modern rap video’. Matt Gringo keeps suggesting to Gringo recording artistes that we venture into the world of the music video for the sake of market share and sales forecasts but until someone can do one of those videos where the camera is on the floor going backwards down a hallway with loads of diamonds on the walls and ceiling and it’s kind of looking up at members of Bilge Pump/Lords/Souvaris/Sailors surrounded by professional dancers and then Emlyn from Bilge throws a massive wad of ‘fiddies’ at the camera, then it’s just not going to happen.
Strangely, Kanye West has made a video that looks nothing like this and is funny as fuck.

Currently…

Listening:

Loads of stuff. Getting back into music at the moment as well as rediscovering lots of old things.
Mulatu Astatke is the big one for me at the moment. The Ethiopean King Of The Fender Rhodes. The Ethiopiques Instrumentals and Ethio-Jazz compilation LPs are phenomenal. The Ethiopean scale of music means nothing ever sounds resolved so you end up with this beautiful haunting music that teeters between heartbreaking sadness and true ecstacy.
Qui are awesome. Got chance to see them in Texas in March and then again at Supersonic at the weekend. Search You Tube for their Supersonic set to see how much of this awesomeness comes from the powerhouse drums and guitar action meaning comparing them to The Jesus Lizard is nothing short of missing the point.
I never much liked Soundgarden back when I had long hair and a checked shirt. Whereas Nirvana spat out their music and it all felt natural, Soundgarden sounded too composed and thought out. I must have been mental. Superunknown is a masterpiece. There, I said it. I’m even going to see Chris Cornell in a few weeks.
The new Earthless album Rhythms From A Cosmic Sky is 2 extremely long and heavy jams where the guitar solos become so long and deep that they go through the barrier of being ‘long’ or ‘wanky’ and out the other side into some weird reality where time is all strrrretched.
And finally and most importantly the new Moondog compilation on Honest Jon’s is one of the strangest and most affecting records I have ever heard. Get on to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moondog
Not to mention The MC5, Bo Diddley, The Monks and the new Bilge Pump album.
And the gentle purr of my new car.

Reading:
Louis Theroux – The Call Of The Weird. I always find the documentaries excruciating but the book is great.
I have also been reading about having my cruciate ligament replaced with part of my hamstring as it all sounds a bit fucking heavy.

Watching:
TV? Oh no, I don’t do that. I have been immersed in Family Guy boxsets for a while now though. And will no doubt go see The Simpsons Movie.
Lots of You Tube action as well. There’s some incredible footage of The MC5 from Detroit Tubeworks that is possibly the finest rock n roll footage I have ever seen.
I’ve been watching my weight also. This knee thing has lessened my already small exercise regime and I am entering my Vegas period.

Anticipating:
New Lords album. We’ve been working hard on this since April and now I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel and that light is the light of rock’s majesty, in light form. It’s been surprisingly good fun. I like being in a band sometimes.
First proper release by Felix is out now as well on www.low-point.com – somewhere between Regina Spektor and Earth. I do the Regina Spektor part obviously.
I’m also hopefully playing guitar in October for a very reknowned New York composer, I’m not jinxing it by saying when and where and who but I’m very much anticipating it.
Lots of weddings coming up too, and births.

Working on:
Work. This self-employed thing isn’t quite the piece-of-piss I thought it might be. Been doing lots of ‘proper’ illustration jobs and really enjoying it too. I’m going for a big fat steak tonight and when I’m stuffing my face I can think “drawing pictures paid for this”. It’s a nice thought.
I’m also learning to read music fast.

 

Thank the heavens right now for You Tube and don’t turn it off before these loonies hit the guitar solo.
MONK TIME.

Still the funniest thing on You Tube. Take a moment to listen to the real Yngwie on an airplane explaining how a ‘bitch’ who poured water on him has unwittingly “unleashed the fucking fury”:http://www.roadrun.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=8100

Can’t get enough of this, for all the hipster comparisons I read for Barr it reminds me of The Lapse or Pavement. Liking the video too which gives me chance to make my first contribution to the films blog.

Deep space gloomp and wind-tortured drone-silence. A total purging of the nervous system in four iron-clad movements populated by machine gun phase, rib-throbbing microphone feedback, whole orchestras of alarm codes and the kind of sensory blitzkreig that brings to mind Lester Bangs on LSD and Metal Machine Music dominated by ludicrously monolithic psychedelic guitar gravities and blow after blow of tone-fractured bass groan reigning down through a maze of fuzz and contemporary noise muscle that comes in splattered sprayed case with insert artwork by French… totally sick. Hand numbered edition of 35 induces foul heart exploding spasms dominated by ludicrously monolithic psychedelic guitar gravities.
First side is a wheezing grunt through spliced and glued shards of rock noise, B-side is a beautiful dart shot straight through the heart of Aerosmith. They fucking deserve searchlights probing deep beneath walls of flesh while expressway trains hum and sing in your veins and huge steel jaws draw protesting blood straight from the air threaten to dissolve into luminous feathers of breath and flatten themselves against the sky. Very beautiful. On shrimp coloured vinyl.
Oppressive levels of amplifier torture given the shape of massive raptor blades via the psychedelic application of ribbons of reverb and fuzz “recorded through a refrigerator and toaster oven”. Combines monstrously degraded post-NWW chance electronics with an extreme Godz/Hijokaidan approach to free clatter and an almost autistic relationship to smeared noise detail.
Honey comb like fly visions slow motion ascent flying into a candle moving into thin beams of flickering steel-filed brain-drilling that matches tiny ECG eruptions with the chatter of instant mechanical sculptures with individual pockets of time that are so mutually incompatible that you feel your mind peeling apart in an octopus of directions.
Growing out of the motorik clank of knuckles rapping on a giant disintegrating metal structure, contact mics are thrust head first into the gut of a gurgling furnace, reporting back whole macro-systems of unknown tonal potential. Waves of amplified insect tongue swarm around bass frequencies bloodier than an exhibition of glistening abattoir victims, while disembodied palms hover over hot-wired theremins like phantom faith healers. The side unravels into a slow motion wheeze of bronchial electronics offset against lightening flashes of degraded walkman rewind that sounds like ticker-tape electronic SOS voices broadcasting from fleets of submarines lost somewhere beneath the ice and elbows of pure aural threat. This is ambitious, florid psych that should please anyone who digs the more dramatic UK sugarcube moments as much as the more enjoyably complex Euro prog shit. And if that ain’t you, who the fuck is it? All sounds generated using an epilator designed for removing leg hair, albeit with the source sonics manipulated to new depths of infernal dreamtone. Sounds great.
High-energy acrobatics with guttural, devolved beast talk that has as much to do with Link Wray, Hasil Adkins and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy as it does Marion Brown, Han Bennink and Alan Silva. Features “The Physical Brain As The Tomb Of The Ancient Clairvoyance” and peaks at a whole new level of barbarous sludge with what sounds like a fleet of electric razors burying steel raptors in six feet of concrete while the Angus MacLise Orkestra play pre-Lapsarian Morse codes on a handbuilt steel drum containers and whole choirs of ghosts sing madrigals somewhere just over the horizon where hypnotic vapour trails of solo synth dissolve like tiny coronas of smoke in a way that feels as ancient and otherwordly as the earliest of scientific Americans, with a sci-fi dance-of-the-Pleiades feel and the kind of soft, mushroomy, organic logic that makes you wanna wrap it around your ears and sink straight to the bottom. Highest recommendation: strap this fucker on and get gone.
Huge lungs of void cut up with diamonds of percussion and lone metal tone in classic globe-gobbling style weed-damaged monolithic free rock blare, post-Blue Humans strings/drum-think in studded leather mittens and stained Bob Marley shirts. Who the fuck would’ve believed it? Another killing side from this devastating free rock monster. Very limited.
Head harvesting.
Unrelentingly heavy on the high end; electrified dog whistle shocks are intersected by explosions of enraptured primal balling and drum machines collapsing due to their own sheer animal urgency. Locomotive bolts of damaged FX discharge from makeshift mixing desks birth slow drugged processionals that sound like huge butterfly wraiths coiling slowly around your spine, phased drone-spikes that mirror the sun coming up on a field-full of stop-motion poppies and some beautifully wasted testimony-to-oblivion arcs of rotor drone, shadowy bursts of non-specific machine friction and what sounds like a fleet of iron lungs sailing lonesome through an infinity of NWW-styled cold dark space: the first in a projected series and features a side of distressed solo vocal murk that crosses distraught wordless codes with loops of desiccated tongue and a side of solo guitar that sounds like a sky-full of cathedral organs.
Limbs forced deep into the kinda bastions of freedom associated with a buncha exclusive outside music streams like psych rock, hardcore grunt, primitive field blather and – of course – fire music and beyond looped metal teeth tearing tiny holes in saturated analogue tape to the sound of raw circuitry invaded by light and flesh.
Packaged in a hand-sewn and hand-stamped onionskin sack with insert.

American author Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday aged 84.
I don’t read that many books because I have the same problem with them as I do with a lot of films: by their nature and the length of time it takes to ‘consume’ one, there is inevitably a certain amount of flab, or filler to wade through. I don’t like being reminded that I need to be more busy and books and films usually have this unfortunate effect on me. I suppose it’s hard to make everything count in something that takes so long to experience.
This is why Kurt Vonnegut is my favourite author. I always feel I’m wasting my time when I stop reading his books (or looking at his drawings). He had a way with the most minimal amount of words of conveying something staggeringly huge. Indescribable even. So it works better to approach the subject from a different angle, to suggest the reader thinks of it exactly how they want to, safe in the knowledge that if the reader engages with it then their own interpretation cannot be anything less than perfect.
Someone once said that there is no humour without cruelty, or that there is no such thing as victim-less humour. It’s true. Vonnegut is the only author who can make me laugh out loud reading a book about the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Alongside James Baldwin, he is also the only author that has made me re-read pages of a book as I go along because I thought they were so good.
His style of writing, with it’s cross referencing of characters, self awareness and the brilliant touch of adding his own drawings into the text, sounds uninviting perhaps if you’ve never read him before. Like some knowing, post-modern nightmare. Nothing could be further from the truth, Vonnegut was a supreme humanist. The inevitable tradegy of human life and the absurdity of it all versus the ways of dealing with it and dealing with your fellow humans.
He would have made a good president.
Like John Fahey I can now begin the period of regretting that I never met him and didn’t buy one of his paintings when they were cheap.
So it goes.

I went to Berlin, it snowed. It was beautiful. And a bit scary in a Gothic, Eastern-Block kind of way.
I took hundreds of pictures. Waste time by viweing them here:
www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin

I couldn’t work out how to do that thing that Mar-C did where she made them all little neat thumbnails so you get bigger photos. Here’s 2006 in visuals…

I am addicted to You Tube. And specifically one micro-genre of films contained within – people trashing their musical gear at gigs (or, bizarrely, at home or in the yard). Seems like a mainly Americanised genre and most of the films are made by bands that are beyond awful or by surburbanite monosyllabic windowlickers. Lame as it is, I sort of get why you might do it at a gig – but in your back yard?
This has somehow made it appeal to me even more. It is addictive and often hilarious. It is occasionally excruciating.

Here are some of my favourites for you to enjoy – famous or otherwise, all totally pointless:

“I don’t come to the bus station and slap the dicks out of your mouth when you’re working do I?”.
My personal favourite.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4NXlkt_o_Q

I don’t know what the fuck is going on here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op_WDUaWZW8

Here’s about 7 minutes of Richie Blackmore acting like a nobber from 1974.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aQ9P4qi8uo

Kiddy toucher takes an age to break his guitar. His roadie loosens the screws for him too y’know. To make it easier. It’s true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUY5oRd1lBk

And here’s the middle class big nosed art student doing it again. Ouch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URfzAemzG2s

This dude trashes his guitar to stick it to the hippies man and then his band launch into the most fucking amazing full-on rock you’ve ever heard. It stirs me, emotionally.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLwrW77zTaU

The classic “switch to the shit guitar” trick. Genius. Great band too obviously.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7_9X0AN3Hg

Yngwie Malmsteen having a wank onstage. Check the drumming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMVbDtNBX0U

Journey? What fascinates me about this one is the way he keeps strictly to his side of the stage, as per the stageplan. He collects the guitar each time and then retreats to his position.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT_6C9mF-Ow

This is priceless. A fat dude in his garage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzfzgGBctyw

A digger truck? Isn’t that cheating? And pointless?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG8-nYHNF9k

Man in bike helmet with strange moustache miming in garage and filming himself. On his own.I have to admit this one pains me a little as it’s a nice guitar. Or was. He looks like Bob Log III too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zrMb7HsRLI

OK, not strictly a guitar but this surely can’t be for real? It’s like watching myself deal with a mobile phone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2krt04eO6s0

My housemate Gareth’s favourite and one of mine too. Practise in the school hall style. Note the kiddy’s plastic red n yellow car onstage and the recoil in fear as the guitar goes mid-air.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDkAZFrOF6Q

And, finally, the real way to smash something in two. With your stomach.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQTZEIDVVYc

A sub genre: the world’s need for those little red Grolsch bottle tops to put on their guitar straps…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKRJLz90NJI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l67oTM6FtIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avSYPyQ2GWU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx4K4A8r_-M