There are things I want to do but I don’t know
If they will be with you, if they will be with you
There are things I want to say but I don’t know
If they will be to you, if they will be to you
The ninth song and already the third one from 1991. It definitely has to do with the fact that during that year I seriously got into listening to indie rock but I also think that 1991 objectively was one of the most exciting years in rock music history.
It took me some time to appreciate the music of the band in question. In the beginning I found it boring and too soft. In comparison to the other music at the time I might have had a point. But after a while I got into their extremely tuneful version of noisy pop (that’s how the French DJ from France Inter, Bernard Lenoir called this kind of music, others called it power pop). They are from Scotland and there is something about the knack of Scottish bands for melody. Could it have to do with their rough, hard, germanic accent which they can hide when singing? What always amazes me is that I can’t hear their accent when they sing but when they talk it kills me.
The name of this song which I only found out about a while ago still makes me smile. It basically condenses how I spent my vacations when I was twentysomething. The word is invented. Like many German words it concatenates two other words. It makes me think of the image for a hangover a Scottish bloke told me on my travels. It’s when your head feels like a box of frogs.
That verse above always breaks my heart when I hear them sing it. It is so bloody cruel. Because somehow I imagine she is in love with him which is probably totally off the mark. Anyways this is a song I can bath in and bathing (together with walking) is my favourite pastime. One last advice: I think on headphones this sounds better than on loudspeakers. But what good song doesn’t?
Look at me, I always get the blame
But I can’t even learn to spell my name
I like to read, I like to write
But where I live I learn to fight
Another light-weight song I also chose for nostalgic reasons. When this album came out everybody within our clique in Luxembourg purchased it within a couple of weeks. It was the soundtrack to the early summer of 1991. A very consistent album of easy-going europop numbers by a supergroup which for once delivered the goods. The lyrics were not exactly poetry but that has always been part of the charm of the songs the singer wrote in this or his more famous other band. It is weird that this beat driven music which uses a drum machine, a synthesizer and many electronic sounds from the can did actually find the way into my ear. One reason might be that I was younger at the time and more open, other and more important reasons are probably that the melodies despite all the elaborate production are breezy and that there is this sunny, good vibrations side attached to the tracks. There might be better songs on this album than the one I selected here but this one has the advantage that it lasts 5 minutes and 27 seconds. That’s what iTunes says at least.
Concerning the exact lengths of the songs Tom already mentioned that he uses the WMP time information, I use the iTunes info. Apparently they are not identical, guess which one is correct? Apple or Microsoft? Jobs or Gates? Whom would you trust more? Unfortunately I use the incorrect song length data. Apple rounds the seconds. So the song I chose today (see graph above) in reality is not 5 minutes and 28 seconds long but only 5 minutes 27,915 seconds. That is a serious blow 😉 for my project, the lengths of the 5:31 song on Thursday and the 5:33 track on Tuesday were exaggerated too. I hope my dear readership can live with this, I won’t change anymore now, that would be too much of a hassle.
At sunrise the monkeys will fly
and leave me with pennies in my eyes
Here we have a piano ballad as tender and restrained as few others. The slow, measured, grave, melancholic melody drills itself straight into my heart. Another example of the immediacy and urgency of beauty in music. And then this turns into a duet. With another one of my favourite female singer-songwriters. The theme of the song seems to be the crossing of a divide. Either from life to death or from childhood to adulthood. Money could play a role in both scenarios. Either for Charon to row the deceased over to the other side of the Styx or as a symbol for adult life. In any case the lyrics are pretty simple but their meaning is rather mysterious. After the small pause in the last minute comes the weird coda which consists of a rumbling noise with occasional squeaks as if a revolving machine was not oiled.
I mentioned this means to amplify the impact of a melody on the listener in my last post. It suddenly occurs to me that there are at least two kinds of repetition and that their effects on me are almost opposite. When someone playing an instrument repeats a chord progression or a certain beat on the drums he only approaches repetition, he never perfectly repeats the figure he plays twice. This kind of weak repetition is something I like, it enters a tune or beat in my brain slowly. It gives my mind a degree of freedom. The other kind of repetition is the perfect digital copy of a line or a sample which recurrs over and over in a track. That is something I cannot stand at all. It feels like blows from a hammer on my forehead and makes me aggressive. I guess my brain needs that little work to assemble the puzzle pieces of weak analog repetition so that it has a good blood circulation. Or something.
What genre is this? Kosmische Musik? New Age? Some sort of guitar synth pop? Let’s just note that this is one hell of an earworm, leaning slightly towards kitsch but still on the good side. The man behind this instrumental who has been on the cutting edge of krautrock around 1970 was breaking the chains of band memberships and was doing his own thing at the time this came out. Like always with beautiful melodies it is hard to describe what exactly is so lovely about them. There is the instant gratification aspect; as soon as this tune enters your ear you know it has got the little something to stay there for a while and you won’t be unhappy if it doesn’t go away. Irresistibility is another quality which comes to mind here. Even if I wanted I could not not listen to this and not be charmed by it. A characteristic which seems to describe the melody quite well is warmth, there is a pleasant cosiness from the inside mounting up in my body towards my head when I hear it. A propos „moving up“, a metaphysical dimension, an aspiration towards the immaterial, the out of this world, the inexplicable – the only one word nailing it I can come up with and it is with great hesitation I use that word (in German we would say Bauchschmerzen [bellyache]) is God – is absolutely indismissable in a piece of music to really make me fall in love with it. Last not least the perpetual repetition amplifies the effect of the enchanting tune and it was reflected in the title. Going round and round and round…
Mama never taught me how to cook
That’s why I am so skinny
One of my favourite female singers. She has got the punch, she has got the power, she is so cool. And she is smart and she has humour too. What else could a man want from a woman? Children?
And I have heard men saying
Hey baby, your love is the greatest show on earth
And hey baby, I’m your man with the perfect plan
And I’ll give you everything your heart desires
I want you and I give you everything you dream
Everything you need,
Just let me get close to you
I want you, hey baby
I wanna suck your honey
I wanna cop your conception
Take your energy, absorb your vibe and preach you philosophy
I wanna become you
I want you and I want you to die
So I can be you
Hey, come over here
And give your sweet vampire some blood
And I’m your man
Come over here and pay your landlord some dues
Hey baby, that’s what I call love
And that’s what I call a relationship
Now do you want to get it on?
And I say, hey man
My destiny is not to serve
I am a woman
My destiny is to create
This is not a fun song. It may well be a love song though. It captures a band in metamorphosis, a band which had to reinvent itself as its leader had abandoned the ship, a band in between post punk and electro pop. The song is build on an intricate bed of rhythm which is provided by the drums coming from all directions. After a while they accelerate and the song gets more and more menacing and moves up to a higher level. It is like a lift to heaven. After the earthly toms, the ringing guitar dominates now. In the middle the song suddenly fades out in a synth tone for a while. There is a pause where everything literally hangs in the air. The tension is mounting and is then relieved by the bass playing that little riff dominating the song. The drums, guitars and synthesizer join in as well and end the song on a firm base. This is from my favourite album of the reborn band. Later on they changed the heaviness for the lightness and became the electro dance band it was okay to like.
Not the kind of music I listen to every day but from time to time I like it groovy and chilled-out. I think after thirty seconds it is about clear who the people behind this track are. They have a signature sound, the big dubby bass beats, the elaborate naturalistic drum programming. Plus an ear for melody and the gift to put existing music into a new context by remixing it. Take the samples of the woman chanting here. They add a new dimension to this piece, give it a warm, human touch. Of course a little saxophone line has to feature as well. I may be wrong but I have the feeling that there is something sleazy about this kind of late 90s club music but sometimes cheap & cheesy is irresistible & sexy. Felix Austria. File under guilty pleasures.
There were four versions of this song on my iPod. Two of them were five minutes and thirty-three seconds long and both were live recordings. I chose the more conventional, the more polished version, the other one gives the impression that it has been recorded in a staircase with the drums sounding like a dozen of trash bins falling down the steps from the 5th floor down to the ground floor. Cherchez la femme!
Cut.
I’d like to dedicate this post to my friend T. who is beginning to see something he hasn’t realised before. Everyone around him in the last ten years has seen it except him. Or maybe it is more realistic to say he probably saw it himself but he didn’t want to admit it to other people. Now he has made the most important step to get out of the circulus vitiosus, it is only a question of time that he will see the light again.
Another cut.
Something about this song is really amazing. It does not date, it is undestroyable (unkaputtbar), the groove and the tune still sound fresh & young in my ears. Why is that? One reason must be the compact, dirty guitar sound, especially the strummed rhythm guitar, another one the forward movement, the perfect flow, the song pulls the listener toward the future. We cannot escape the promised illumination. That is another important aspect of the song and the album it is from: the spiritual vibe. Somehow it is so totally unexpected and on the other hand it feels so right. And then there is another little line which makes me hold on for a second:
I met myself in a dream, and I just want to tell you,
Everything was alright.
I never had that experience but fortunately I never received electroshock therapy neither. Unlike the singer of this song.
Tom Ewing, the person who started the wonderful music forum I Love Music about ten years ago has kicked off another project on 1st of January called It Took Seconds where he posts a song a day and writes about it. Nothing special really but there is a twist to it. He started with a track which was 6 minutes and five seconds long and he intends to finish on December, 31st with a one second piece. Each day he is going to lose a second. A lovely idea which I would like to take up. I am a month late so I start with 5 minutes and thirty-four seconds. I will neither name the artist nor the name of the song, of course you are all invited to guess or discuss about what I have posted if you like.
The band behind this song found a magic recipe. But unlike the alchemists formula of how to turn shit into gold theirs actually worked. They managed to create blissful melodies out of guitar noise. Who could have thought before that there is so much beauty hidden in distorted guitar feedback? Behind all those layers of mist there is a fuzzy ray of sunlight warming the heart. I was listening to the album this is on at carnival 1992 on my car hifi when a love was lost and I was driving by night through an impermeable fog with my VW Golf from Trier to Luxembourg. I was doing an average of 30 km/h, instead of half an hour it took me two hours. The slowdown, the poor view and the blurred music fused to something strange, something out of this world. I stopped and only listened to the music inside the car. I gave up all hope to ever arrive at home again. Somehow I got there in the early morning just before dawn but I don’t think I would have made it without this tape on repeat.
I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.
[Holden Caulfield in Chapter 1 of The Catcher in the Rye]
I participated in the I Love Musicalternate 1970s albums poll and my ballot actually made a difference. Three albums entered the top 100 only because of my votes. Here is a small taster of those albums with one track each.
Chic’s second album C’est Chic from 1978 just about made the top 100 on position 99. The first song from it, Chic Cheer is one of my favourites due to the groovy bass line. It is so perfectly tight and self-sufficient. If this does not fill the dancefloor, you have invited the wrong people to your party.
On position 97 we had Patti Smith’s debut Horses of 1975. The opener has some of the most famous and strongest opening lines of any song in pop history.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins. But not mine.
And soon after that the band starts rocking out and she starts screaming and howling. It has to be taken into account that this was before punk had had its breakthrough, the music stations in the US were playing streamlined stuff like The Eagles and Steely Dan at the time. Patti Smith proved that poetry and rawk did not exclude each other.
Neu!’s 2 from 1973 arrived at position 90. Krautrock from Düsseldorf with Klaus Dinger’s motorik drum beat. Maybe only their third best album after the debut and Neu! 75 but still as good as it gets. Especially this almost bukolic instrumental called Neuschnee (fresh-fallen snow) which fits quite well with the weather situation in Germany right now.
The new Massive Attack album Heligoland which is scheduled for February, has leaked. I listened to it twice, once on loudspeakers and once on earphones. The expectations were low but what I heard was more than disappointing. There was no way I could listen to the first three tracks until the end. They were very repetitive and unimaginative. I had to skip each of them after half the time. The only song on the whole album which I really dug was Girl I Love You featuring Horace Andy. Besides having a menacing bass line like many tracks on the great 100th Window it has also this hypnotic quality I love so much. In the second half there is some experimentalish dissonant brass action going on followed by some arabic undertones. A phantastic track. The other song I like is Paradise Circus but that is more because of Hope Sandoval’s sleepy, sexy voice than anything else. Damon Albarn sings on another song but he sounds so tired and down that I got depressed too when listening to it on earphones while walking through the snow covered meadows. Maybe the whole album will grow on me but somehow I doubt it.
This made my day. I had never heard of Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band before the alternate 70s poll. That combination of swing and disco is so much fun. Kid Creole plays bass here. In other news there was some snow shovelling to do today. The whole of Germany is covered with a layer of white, frozen crystals. Nice to look at, I hope it will stay for a while. It slows everything down which is a very good thing.
David Thomas live. If there is an extraterrestrian on earth it is him. The way he moves his hands, the way he shows his index finger, the way he pats himself on his heart. This guy is totally nuts. What a genius (lifted from here).
This is from the same year as the Gun Club song before. Besides that there aren’t too many connections I can think of. Not quite true, they sing in English too. Whenever I hear something by this band I immediately get the feeling that the music comes from a different planet which is actually not totally wrong: They are from the other side of the earth. It sounds so fresh, so naive, so innocent, so light-hearted, so breezy. The place this music comes from must be a sunny place near the sea without too much rain and without dark, long winters. And it is. The name of the group is the name of a small, cute mammal with relatively big eyes native to the region where the band comes from. The internet does not know a lot about them. They have a myspace site though. Why they never broke through is one of the huge mysteries of popular music for me. All they ever released were a couple of singles and a compilation made from them where I got the track from.
He was from LA, CA but the music he and his band made always had more of a dark aspect to it which contrasted with the bright Californian sun. There was something obsessed about him and his music. As if he was trying to exorcise the devil from his own body with his shouting. The name of his band described something very American and it fit quite well with the music. With their first album they immediately broke through. They did not become famous or rich but they had established a new name on the map of rock’n’roll. They fused punk and blues to a style some people called psychobilly. Their songs were blasting of energy, he seemed to be delivering his soul while singing. He spent ten years in London before he returned to the US. Like many other rock musicians he fought with drugs and in the end he lost the battle. He died 37 old years old, the alcohol had taken its toll on his body. The song from above is from his last album. Which has a completely different vibe than the others, it is very calm and relaxed, as if he had already made peace with the world.
The countdown of the ILM 1980s album poll is going on and I discovered this devastating live performance by Big Black of a song from Atomizer which placed at #97. And I immediately wanted to be back in 1986 again. What an incredible burst of energy!
When I saw David Freel last year in Weinheim in front of about twenty people he told me that there will be a new record out soon under the awkward moniker Be My Weapon and I thought, oh well, really? Swell was the band which defined my seven year stay in Luxembourg best. The smell of sweet grass in the kitchen in my flat in Limpertsberg with the phone on Don’t Give from 41 ringing into the void on a hot summer afternoon when I was having a Weißbier on the balcony and A. was about to join me there. There was a very relaxed atmosphere of light heartedness in the air. We were at the right place at the right time. I have not had that feeling so often in my life. Hardly ever for such a long time, almost a year. And Swell’s music was part of it, the slightly distorted guitar playing bittersweet tunes which carved themselves in my brain, the forceful drums & bass, the long pauses mounting the tension, David Freel’s calming baritone. I hardly ever listened to the words, they were more or less banal I think but it was not important. Swell released a lot of hit and miss records in the past ten to twelve years, David Freel on his own or with always changing band members, I bought them all, my love is hard to kill. I did not expect a lot of the new release which I bought from his site, so I was in for a nice surprise. It sounds almost like a Swell album from the old times. I Miss Your Mischief, the song from above, has got this melancholic touch combined with this sluggishness I adore. It is not yet grand cru again but it is at least premier cru. Thank you, David.
In antique times, Greeks didn’t describe dreams as something that happened in their heads while they slept, but as something that descended from heaven, you saw your dream approach like a window opening into the world of the Gods, and once the message was delivered, this window went away, it vanished into the distance. (q)
Cleverbot: I didn’t say she didn’t like you, she just doesn’t like the colour of your text.
User: I don’t mind as long as she likes my words.
Cleverbot: Your talk is eluding me.
User: All right, an easy question then. Are you male or female?
Cleverbot: Male.
After some talk with him I ask myself if I would pass the Turing test from his point of view. Somehow I doubt it. He is not very smart, his maths are abominable, but that does not say anything about his intelligence.
Why must happy hearts break so hard? I am pretty sure I posted this song already. But I am too lazy to search. This time Daniel Johnston is accompanied by Okkervil River. The country treatment with a banjo and a pedal steel does this song quite well. It has this cocooning effect. This song needs friends, the more friends the better.
Anton Fier was the drummer on the Feelies debut Crazy Rhythms. Later on he founded the Golden Palominos. I first heard of Mark Robinson when he played in a band called Air Miami whose only album Me. Me. Me. I bought in Luxembourg in 1995. What a refreshing guitar powerpop album. Full of hooks, full of bubbles, full of goodness. Later – when I had already started blogging the Absintheur who at the time also blogged about music and other stuff sent me Perfect Teeth, the second album of Unrest, the previous band of Mark Robinson. Another tuneful indie guitar gem. Today an old ILM thread was revived and I started listening to the first Unrest album Imperial f.f.r.r. for the first time. And got stuck at the third track, Imperial. It is seven minutes of one simple rhythm guitar figure accompanied by a wee bit of singing. And there is not one second of boredom in all that repetition. I think the fascination has to do with the fact that the guitar is actually played in real and not just sampled and looped. It breathes and lives. I love dancing to it in our cellar where I type right now on the keyboard. It is the dance where I just move the body, swirl the arms around and stare at my feet. With a smile on my face.
– Anton Fier, Bill Laswell, Nicky Skopelitis, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Fred Frith, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, David Moss, Bob Kidney, M.E. Miller, John Lydon, Syd Straw, Jack Bruce, Richard Thompson, Jody Harris, Michael Stipe, Matthew Sweet, Don Dixon, Peter Holsapple, T-Bone Burnett, Amanda Kramer, Bob Mould, Lori Carson, Knox Chandler, Nicole Blackman (some people who have been in the Golden Palominos)
– Nicole Blackman has got that voice which is crystal clear, razor sharp and attractive at the same time, I have to listen to what she says, I cannot not listen to the words coming out of her mouth. Her whispering sprechgesang is quite similar to Laurie Anderson’s actually but more feminine and seductive. The song has got this road movie feeling, just a simple beat and her voice luring us into the darkness. The atmosphere reminds me a little bit of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. The song is going where it has to go, nobody is going to stop it.
Things only feel true
when someone’s abusing you
You are sometimes startled you are never surprised
There are only two speeds: fast and faster,
now you’re lashed to mast and lashed to master
Whether you’re in bed or in court, everybody gets off
So she smokes to keep from eating
and you fuck her to keep from feeling
and this is a taste, and this is a waste
and these are all of your days sacrificed
– Why do I have to listen to so much bullshit to find a good tune? Out of 20 songs I play, one is worth it. How can I decrease that ratio? I don’t think last.fm is the answer. I don’t believe in masses.
– These days I have a problem to listen to tracks from beginning to end. As I said in my last post I am checking everything on the ipod and rating stuff. That means that after 20 or 30 seconds I have made up my mind and have to move on. I am bored by any title after the 30 seconds mark.
– I have rated more than 5,000 songs by now, there are another 15,000 to come. I fear that my already dwindling love for music is about to disappear completely after the rating exercise. I should never have downloaded all that free stuff in the first place. The greed is firing back. It is a killer like in real life.
– When I started this blog at WordPress I reserved another name which didn’t appeal to me enough to use it. A word which mixes German and English. And ear and sex. Right now I prefer it tons to the name and address I have chosen. What do you think? Should I change again?
– I love that soul number by Scott-Heron. It’s cooler than a glacier in the Swiss alps. And hotter than the music in any techno club in Berlin. And smoother than a Pomerol.
One of my standard after hours settings. I lie on our mauve leather couch in the living room and listen to my ipod on shuffle. My job is to rate songs as quickly as possible. 100 songs usually take less than an hour. The main question is: Will it stay or will it go? Suddenly this little blues from the old times comes on. Judging from the sound quality and the hissing it must be from the 1920s or something. Three stars, a keeper, I’d say, just about. After ten seconds I consider moving on to the next title. But what does this woman sing there? Something about making a dead man come without omitting the physical details. Apparently in 1935 – the year this was recorded – the U.S. weren’t quite as Victorian as these days.
I am totally addicted to this rock song right now. It is from 1975 by a band from Detroit who has been rediscovered this year. Three black guys riffing hard. What a phantastic dirty guitar sound. Imagine Jimi Hendrix with a better more varied voice switching between rap, soul and shout.
I don’t think I will make it through 7 bloody years. Today was another climax of craving. I got up at 5, cycled on the ergometer (the fag after the exercise is the best in my memory), worked from 7 to half 7, those bloody deadlines, that bloody fair. Additionally it was Indian summer weather, 25 degrees Celsius and more. I don’t remember anymore how I could resist the nicotine. The craving is fading away slowly and it pisses me off. I let the occasion pass to smoke a roll-up while I was craving it. There will be more.
Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
I have never been a big fan of Prefab Sprout – too melodramatic or something for my likes – but this song from their upcoming new album is a keeper. There is a lovely tenderness in Paddy Mc Aloon’s voice and the track bursts with positive vibes.
The first thirty seconds of this beam us back into the glorious post-punk days of the early 1980s. A marriage of the powerful, gloomy atmosphere of The Cure around Seventeen Seconds with the minimalistic low-key indie pop tunes of the Young Marble Giants. Sometimes retro can be really cool.
Current Weather Conditions:
Frankfurt / M-Flughafen, Germany
(EDDF) 50-03N 008-36E 113M
Conditions at
2009.08.20 1350 UTC
Wind from the S (190 degrees) at 14 MPH (12 KT)
Visibility greater than 7 mile(s)
Temperature 96 F (36 C)
Heat index 94.1 F (34.5 C)
Dew Point 55 F (13 C)
Relative Humidity 25%
Pressure (altimeter) 30.00 in. Hg (1016 hPa)
I know you have all been waiting for this desperately. Just plain text. Without links to youtube or whatnot. Additionally the choices are extremely predictable. I am such a sucker for simple tunes. By the way Lovesong would have been #11. The order is more or less chronological.
There are things I want to do but I don’t know
If they will be with you, if they will be with you
There are things I want to say but I don’t know
If they will be to you, if they will be to you
(Teenage Fanclub, Alcoholiday from Bandwagonesque, 1991)
Recently I was in New York and I finally bought an ipod. The classic version which has 120 gb (111 gb to be correct). Now I have a problem which I wouldn’t have had immediately if the ipod still had a capacity of 180 gb as in the past. I have more music on the hard disk of my pc than fits on the ipod. So what I did was putting all artists from a to q in a playlist and synchronise it with the ipod. Whenever I listen to songs on the ipod now I rate them. One star means I really dislike the song, it will be deleted from the hard disk. Two stars means I don’t want to have it on the ipod but it can stay on the hd. Everything from 3 stars onwards stays on the ipod. In the past weeks I have rated well over 2,000 tracks. More than 600 got two stars. The last band I have added is Silver Jews. So I am slowly managing my way through my mp3 collection. At Christmas the latest I should arrive at Z and the ipod should include only music I like if everything works well. Right now I have 20,435 songs on it. Somehow I don’t believe that there are more than 20,000 good songs out there. And you? (first posted here)
blogge momentan eigentlich nur noch wörter im kompetenzteam.
***
gestern kommt mir nach fast einem jahr die idee, jean eine e-mail zu schreiben. jean hatten wir vor einem jahr auf dem jakobsweg getroffen und seine füße waren schon nach wenigen tagen voller schwären. abends nach dem tagesmarsch torkelte er wie ein betrunkener. war in neuen schuhen unterwegs. natürlich ohne einlagen obwohl er mindestens so schlimme knick-, senk- und spreizfüße hatte wie ich. sein glückseliges lächeln machte ihn zu einem, der die erleuchtung auf dem weg gefunden zu haben schien. wir trafen ihn kurz hinter logroño am ersten tag und verabschiedeten uns in villafranca del bierzo drei wochen später. wir waren mehr oder weniger synchron gelaufen. anschließend war er mit zwei anderen pilgern bis santiago gegangen und wir waren wieder zurück gefahren. ich schicke ihm also eine e-mail mit zwei bildern und der frage wie es ihm so geht und eine knappe stunde später kommt die antwort. er ist 12 km hinter logroño und geht den jakobsweg ein zweites mal, dieses mal mit seiner frau, die im dritten monat schwanger ist. sie fliegen am 23. juli wieder zurück nach québec. können also nicht alle etappen machen, müssen etwas bus fahren. der witz ist, dass wir nach unserer planung am 22. in santiago ankommen werden, d.h. also wir gehen wieder synchron, was für eine koinzidenz. wir werden sie höchstwahrscheinlich treffen.
***
bandwagonesque vs. loveless vs. nevermind. bandwagonesque for me. as in the beginning it just sounded bland and dull. then i heard the melodies. and at the end the noise. loveless was from the beginning on the perfect marriage of noise and melodies. melodies in the mud of looped noise.
I don’t think it is necessary to write one sentence about this track. It’s music you feel or you don’t. The perfect music for a summer party with lots of people who like to move their bodies. Rave on. How come that I don’t remember ever having heard this song at a party? Maybe I was always at the wrong parties? There are other great tracks on Primal Scream’s chef d’œuvre Screamadelica but this is the one I’d like to save from the record if I could save just one. There are some positives vibes emanating from it. And it feels like a hymn for freedom.
Though the various components repeat themselves incessantly, it’s how they interact and build that determines the sound — and that’s the essence of most electronic dance music, that complex interplay between several repetitive elements.
(The AMG on Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 which was recorded in 1981)
Formulated like this it seems to make sense. The repetition of the elements drum machine loop, guitar line and synth figure is not 100% linear. There is a dynamic operator fusing those three in the equation. But as can be heard in this small extract the variational element is too small to not bore the listener even after less than five minutes. This piece actually goes on for almost one hour. A torture for anybody who hasn’t taken the adequate drugs. The funny thing about this track is that it is actually by Manuel Göttsching who was in Ash Ra Tempel from Berlin, one of the early krautrock bands. They were electronic pioneers playing similar spherical music as Tangerine Dream. Klaus Schulze was even a member of Ash Ra Tempel. So in the end techno was just one little twig from a particular branch of the huge krautrock tree. And it became a German speciality again.
This hypnotic live song is originally from 1983’s The Crackdown. Totally different from the two tracks I posted before which were machine music whereas this has a very human touch. Especially the phantastic tribal drumming together with the deeply resonating bass gives it a funky down to earth groove. This sounds very much like something from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Eno & Byrne. It has a world music vibe which is married with some out of this world synthesizer sounds and Stephen Mallinder’s singing which in places sounds like scat, i.e. random syllables. It’s great that there are still amazing bands like that out there for me to discover.
If you want to get an idea of what this is like, imagine this:
The Emergency Broadcasting Channel tonal noises, raised about 10000 octaves, to produce the most ear-splitting continous beeping, just shy of a dog-whistle. Add to that, the sounds of bus-boys who, while carrying a full load of dirty dishes, drops it all. Glasses, silverware, dishes, sauces, etc., all come crashing down. Cut and paste a few chirping bird noises and the sound of a man having his throat slit (i.e., Mike Patton) while trying to speak and gargle mouthwash at the same time. Next, imagine 500 diesel engines all trying to start at the same time, but can’t. Then, for good measure, imagine 1500 grindstones all being used at the same time to sharpen axe blades. Lastly, throughout the entirety of the above, imagine 400 jet engines running constantly, while 6000 short-wave radios are all trying to tune in different channels at the same time (constantly).
There is 70 billion people over there. Where are they hiding?
This is from 1982. And I like it. It sounds like techno. But techno didn’t exist (under that name) at the time. Why in the world do I find techno so brainless? And this inspired in comparison? One reason might be that I don’t really know techno, another that techno arrived too late in my life. In 1990 I was 27, my music taste was more or less forged already. Which is actually not true. I discovered indie in form of the Pixies, the Blue Aeroplanes, My Bloody Valentine, PJ Harvey etc. And I loved all of them. I always found that techno was a stupid name. Which was actually fitting the music very well. I think namewise I would prefer a genre called no tech. Another reason why I like this song is that sentence with the 70 billion people. Either there are billions of people on other planets or the song was recorded in the future. And the future is bright as mankind will not only survive but propagate.
they sound like music played by really shitty robots, like if you’d buried an early prototype of Kraftwerk in toxic sludge, then accidentally uncovered them two hundred years later and OH SHIT THEY’RE STILL ALIVE WHAT AN UNSPEAKABLY HORRIBLE EXISTENCE (q)
.
I never really got into them before tonight. But right now they seem to be the greatest band of all-time. Or at least of post-punk. After having listened to them I understand even less what all the fuss about techno was about. They made techno in the early eighties. And it sounded so much better than any techno I have ever listened to. It was inventive, varied, obsessed. Besides that they were into synths, dance, dub, funk, punk, tribal rhythms, industrial, noise, goth, trash, medieval choirs almost anything that gave music a distinctive flavour in the past 30 years. Put Suicide, New Order, The Pop Group, Einstürzende Neubauten, Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, the Talking Heads and PIL into a mixer and the result will be something like the Cabs.
Talking of coincidence. A colleague introduced me to two bands today which I had hardly heard of. At the same time somebody revives an old I Love Music thread: Taking Sides: Moloko vs Morcheeba. It’s got to be Moloko, I suppose. Just have a look at them live, what a groove, what a performance.
I had forgotten about this great song (yootoob). What a nasty and energetic riff. Exactly the right kind of music to start a day. It would kick a dead out of bed. But I tell you in advance: you won’t get the melody out of your head for the whole day long.
Die Stadt Frankfurt greift im Kampf gegen die stetig wachsenden Populationen von Kaninchen und Tauben im Stadtgebiet nun zu drastischen Mitteln: Nach Informationen der Rhein-Main-Zeitung hat der Magistrat eine „Abwrackprämie“ zur Bekämpfung der Plagen beschlossen. (mehr)
In the last few months I have read several reports about internet providers working with record labels and the RIAA to cut off the service of anyone who downloads music from sites like this one. Now, there’s finally a plan that makes sense. (more)
leaked.
sounds pretty great.
like Rather Ripped, but with thicker sound – which is better! (more)
Says Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, “The first time I heard it, I hated it; but the second time, my brain turned around backwards in my skull. It changed me forever; I think it changed all of us.” (more)
I’ve just heard that FIDE are considering reinstating an old rule that pawns don’t need to promote when they reach the 8th rank, but can simply remain as pawns. (more)
I only came across Juana Molina recently but I loved her slightly detached, dreamy voice immediately. She is from Buenos Aires and sings in a soft Spanish accent which sounds almost as melodic as Italian. E.g. the way she slowly pronounces profundamente. Apparently it is Rioplatense Spanish. Río Seco is a sad song which doesn’t surprise considering the title. A dry river is unnatural, even frightening. And the electronics in this song create a spooky atmosphere. There is this sustained noise in the beginning which is repeated all the time. For me it sounds like a coyote howling in the middle of the pampa. The acoustic guitar is mainly a rhythm instrument here. Juana sings the tune herself. Río Seco is the starter on her fourth album Son from 2006. Her new album Un Día seems to be more electronic and less folky.
Personally, I am hoping for one of those massive heart attacks (not the little sort that merely leave you an invalid). So too are most of the doctors that I know. Going out with a bang on the golf course is the physicians‘ preferred exit route. Though quite why they persist in prescribing for the rest of us pills that will make such an event less likely and consign us to far less desirable forms of death, is a bit of a mystery. I’m still waiting to meet a medic who greets my high blood pressure and raised cholesterol with a smile and a warm prediction of a premature but speedy end. (source)
What a naive question about the fact that doctors prescribe medicine which does prolong the life of a person who has turned into a zombie. They and the whole „health“ industry want to make money, what else. A quick, painless death of the patient is not in their interest. Their favourite scenario would be a long, painless death where lots of pills and other medicine will be consumed by the patient. Maybe I should restart smoking just for maximizing my chance for a massive heart attack. But of course tonight I have no urge whatever to smoke. Tomorrow then.
One of the first songs by The Smiths, the b-side or actually c-side of the 12“ of their second single This Charming Man from October 1983 is a grave and slow ballad in minor. Besides the wonderful line
But when she calls me, I do not walk, I run
I absolutely adore how Morrissey bathes in sentiment in this song. He sing-sighs for most of the second half, a vocal style which will become one of his trademarks later on. He literally sighs the tune and it sounds more melodic and of course more melancholic and more emotional than if he had sung just the words. He surrenders himself completely. Something especially young men love(d) so much about Morrissey. Apparently the lyrics are about Linder Sterling, one of his best friends who sang in the post-punk group Ludus. Could it be that he sighs as he realises that they will never be a couple as he is not able to live with another person? Whatever this is definitely a love song from a man to a woman.
There is a basic principle in environmental economics called „the polluter pays“: polluters must pay for the cost of cleaning up their pollution. American banks have polluted the global economy with toxic waste; it is a matter of equity and efficiency that they must be forced, now or later, to pay the price of cleaning it up. As long as the banking sector feels that it will be bailed out of disasters–even ones it created–we will continue to have a moral hazard. Only by making sure that the sector pays the costs of its actions will efficiency be restored.
The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking.
That’s not totally absurd but I don’t get the relation between Hardy’s paradox and the new findings. His thought experiment states that the encounter of matter and antimatter does not have to result in the annihilation of the two but can result in an interaction where they both survive. But this can only work if there is no observer. The new experiments show that there can be a negative number of polarized photons in some places. How can this be explained with the thought experiment if antiphotons do not exist?
there is a new blog around i’d like to draw your attention to. the mix blog musicophilia has got a baby. it’s called musicophiliadaily and it presents a lot of music i’d have liked to talk about here if i had known it beforehand.
Not the most brilliant Smiths song ever but still pretty great and additionally it is about smoking. A colleague relapsed after 1 3/4 years. Yesterday I told him that I was thinking of restarting as the craving for a fag didn’t seem to get better. And he said that he did not have that conversation with himself. The truth was he had already finished it.
I smoke ’cos I’m hoping for an early death
And I need to cling to something.
This song totally rules my world right now. I must have listened to it at least twenty times in the past week. It goes well with my current minimalistic obsession which I already tried to express in the haiku about hiking with my father on El Hierro. There is only Chan Marshall’s raspy & at the same time fragile voice and her piano play on her version of this classic, simple song (from George Cukor’s 1957 movie with the same name starring Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani which tells the story of a rancher who marries his Italian sister-in-law after the passing of his wife, but she falls in love with his son). Cat Power drops some lines of the original lyrics and makes them even more concise. She inhales life in this song and makes it totally her own. Forget Johnny Mathis, Nina Simone or David Bowie, instead at getting at the heart of this song they made it an unbearable Schnulze (tearjerker). But Chan Marshall manages to marry the deep sadness inherent in this tune to an irresistible groove when she evokes the „you“ seven times in a row and clicks her fingers. This playfulness, this joy when she just utters „you“ is a miracle. As if she had just discovered that there is a „you“, that she is not alone in the world. I had four live versions and the album version from the Covers Record which is even more stripped down to the bone to choose from but the performance from La Route du Rock 2006 was the one I preferred, one reason being the length, the other the easiness of the cascades of „you’s“. A while ago Jordan from one of my favourite mp3 blogs Said the Gramophone already analysed this song and came to similar conclusions. Concerning the lines about the leaf and the tree I find the lyrics rather revealing as the singer is the tree and the other beloved person the leaf. It is the leaf which will one day be blown away by the wild wind, the tree will stay.
Here are the lyrics she uses:
Love me, love me, say you do
Let me fly away with you
Give me one more caress
Satisfy this hungriness
We are creatures of the wind
Wild is the wind
You, you, you, you, you, you, you
You touch me
When you touch I hear the sound of mandolines
You, you, you, you, you, you, you
You kiss me
With your kiss my life begins
Like a leaf clings to a tree
Please cling to me
We are creatures of the wind
Wild is the wind
Revolution take 20. An 11 minute version of this Beatles track has surfaced. I haven’t listened to it yet but it seems to be a precursor to Revolution #9 from The White Album.
There will be a new Sonic Youth album out on June, 9th. The 16th. I would really like to forget about Joy Division for a while but you are doing a great memorial job out there.
My first thought when I heard the title was that it is atheist or at least non-Christian. The soul cannot die according to the Christian belief. And even if it was mortal it would not be the soul as we imagine it. A dead soul is a contradictio in adiecto. Later I realized that Dead Souls is a book by Gogol which Ian Curtis has read. Apparently it is about some sort of macabre financial scheme. The main person travels around in rural Russia to buy the registration papers of dead serfs from the landowners. A classic win-win situation, the landowners would save the taxes they have to pay on the „dead souls“ and the main character would get loans from big farms on behalf of them. Earning money from nothing. Somehow all that sounds like a precursor of the financial crisis to me.
Anyways let’s get back to the song. It was first released as the second track of the Licht und Blindheit double single on the French label Sordide Sentimentale in March 1980. Together with an essay on romanticism by Jean-Pierre Tumel. The other a-side Atmosphere is probably the Joy Divison song I am most allergic to. I absolutely can’t stand Ian Curtis grave disguised voice on it and the synthesizer which sounds like an angel suffused with light landing in a heavy procession doesn’t do anything for me. Pretentious bullshit artistry, if you ask me. Later on Corbijn made a video of it with men in black hooded cloaks walking along. CRAP.
I have deviated again. Dead Souls is a song which has no introduction. On record it starts immediately as if the record button had been switched on in the middle of rehearsing. First we hear Sumner’s guitar looking for a fierce riff and finding it after a while and some fine tom drumming by Morris. Hook’s bass joins in and rumbles and mumbles more or less in the background. Occasionally when it gets melodic it comes to the fore. Suddenly there is more distortion in the guitar, there is raw power, punk. And after a minute or so a groove has set in, it is all hanging there beautifully, moving up and down for another minute, do we really need a singer here?
Someone take these dreams away
That point me to another day
A duel of personalities
That stretch all true realities
Yes we do. The song suddenly gains in stature, it has a soul in form of a voice now. And somehow I don’t care that Curtis sings with that solemn habitus again as his voice sounds haunted now. He really is captured by something. In hindsight the first two lines could be interpreted as an announcement of suicide. Curtis does not want to think about another day, he has made his decision and everything which acts against is a bad dream. But there are still two personalities fighting in his breast. And then he shouts in a terrified way
They keep calling me
Keep on calling me
They keep calling me
He heard voices which he didn’t get out of his head. They always came back. They didn’t stop until May, 18th 1980.
P.S. The version from 18 January 1980 in Eindhoven which is on Les Bains Douches is awesome. The bass is much more prominent in the beginning. The whole song is amazingly rough and powerful. Another proof that they were the best live band ever.
Sometimes I write in English, sometimes in German. If you only want to follow the English posts, there is an rss feed here. Für Deutschsprachler, die keine Lust auf die englischen Beiträge haben, ist dieser RSS-Feed gedacht. Alles klar?
You can imagine what happened. Today was another day where I burnt 1919 kilojoule on the stationary bicycle. It is a 27 minute program starting with two minute intervals of 250, 275 and 300 watt. Then I reach the 325 watt plateau which lasts 15 minutes and the last six minutes are descending down to 250 watt in two minute intervals again. By the way 1919 was the last year where swapping of the first two digits with the last two did not change the number. The next one will be 2020. And 1919 is no prime number. As all four digit figures which are permutable in this way it is a multiple of 101. Enough playing around with digits now.
Let’s come back to Paris 1919. This song is actually my favourite of the album. Another declaration of love. This time to a geographical place, the South of Spain. It starts with this great line where syllables seem to be permutated in a magic way that it sounds like a nursery rhyme:
Andalucia when can I see you
When it is snowing out again
Farmer John wants you
Louder and softer closer and nearer
Farmer John who is probably John Cale himself will have to wait for a long time to see Andalucia again as it rarely snows there. Except in the Sierra Nevada but there is no mention of a mountain range in the lyrics. Again Cale sings in a sweet and tender way, there is a lot of yearning and longing for the object of desire in his voice. And in the music as well: the sublime acoustic guitar, the keyboards which stay nicely in the background and finally the pedal steel guitar adding the typical country sentiment to this outspoken ballad.
Needing you taking you keeping you leaving you
In a year and a day to be sure
That your face doesn’t alter
Your words never falter — I love you
After a one year stay the face of Andalucia will be almost the same as on the first day. The seasons will have gone full circle. Spanish people – especially those from the South – don’t hesitate with words, they love talking and apparently Cale loves that too.
Beggar’s Banquet has always been my favourite album by the Stones. To be honest I have never been a huge fan of the band, maybe it is because they were always there. And they still are. Or at least they think so. No Expectations is dominated by Brian Jones slide guitar on the right channel. Jagger said it was one of the last times Brian Jones was involved in something he cared for. About a year after the recording he was dead. I love that the guitar sounds like a drunk staggering along. The song was recorded with open mikes in a live setting and it has this intimate home feel. It is a slow blues ballad which adds to the cosy atmosphere. Jagger seems to be lamenting. I always expect him to burst into tears in a second. Not a typical Stones song.
Not to have any expectations is an attitude I aspire but hardly ever attain. You cannot be disappointed if you don’t expect anything. But you can very well be surprised in a good way. With music this happened many times to me. Let’s take Astral Weeks Van Morrison’s milestone album from 40 years ago. I had read so much about its ingenuity: a white man singing the blues like no other etc. that I was totally underwhelmed when I heard it for the first time. It was so not there, so ephemeral, passing me by completely. Other artists like Joni Mitchell or The Smiths I discovered by pure chance without knowing anything about them not even their name. And their music immediately became a part of me.
There is also a meta aspect of this idea. I had planned to write about a song per day or maybe five per week but I would like you not to expect this posting frequency by me as you will surely be disappointed soon. Fortunately there are only about two and a half people following this blog so the letdown will be limited. And I beg you not to expect anything from the music. Only then your mind will be open to enjoy it. To be maybe hit or penetrated by it. But if you want me to write about a song you would like to discuss about please feel free to do so. As the main purpose of blogging for me besides concentrating myself on something is to communicate with others and to exchange views and thoughts.
Lloyd Cole & the Commotions: You Will Never Be No Good from the 2nd disc of the 20th anniversary edition of Rattlesnakes (originally from the Perfect Skin single)
Isn’t that what we all need these days? Some nice, happy tune caressing our eardrum? For some reason Lloyd Cole keeps popping up on my jukebox when it is in shuffle mode. And I have only about 30 songs by him on the player which should be just about 1 per cent of all tracks. It must have to do with the fact that micro processors are still not able to produce real random numbers. There will always be a recurring pattern in series of numbers generated by a computer algorithm. In any case due to this systematic, non-random behaviour of my mp3 player tonight I put a song by Lloyd Cole online which is already 25 years old – the Orwell year was a quarter of a century ago, there is something unbelievable – but which still sounds fresh and yummy. It is one of the songs I have to whistle to which is always a good sign. The melody is simple and straightforward, light and peppy. And the lyrics seem rather fitting these days if one imagines Lloyd is singing about the people who have led us into the crisis:
D’you know what I’d do if I could
Chop you up into firewood
That’s what I’d call positive thinking. How to turn them into something useful. It’s a cold winter in Germany, it’d make a lot of sense you know. I hope my humour has been more subtle in the past but in rough times jokes tend to be coarse too.
Cut. Lloyd Cole turned 48 on Saturday and he just released a four cd compilation called Cleaning out the Ashtrays comprising 59 b-sides & rarities. I guess you will hear some more of them here in the near future if you don’t mind.
A couple of years ago I would have supposed that most readers of my blog know Loveless, the album by My Bloody Valentine. But by now I am not so sure anymore as I am uncertain if the plural readers still applies. Whatever Loveless is one of the last innovative rock albums which was great at the same time. It came out in 1991. One groundbreaking album in 18 years? Yes, I think that very well describes the state of rock music. Whatever. Let’s get back to today’s song. Japancakes covered it and the whole Loveless album a while ago. And they covered it well. Stayed close to the original and changed it at the same time. Whereas in the original What You Want like the whole album sounds misty, muddy, nebulous, you name it, Japancakes‘ version is stripped down to the sweet tune. You could call it muzak if you were malicious. Japancakes are from Athens, Georgia. Like R.E.M. And their version is not only purely instrumental but it also uses a lot of pedal steel and therefore sounds a little like country. Not exactly what anybody would associate with MBV. It is like moving the album from foggy, unfriendly London to sunny, easygoing Athens in the South of the USA. And somehow it works. Like classical theatre classical music can be transposed in time and space.
I switched them off. The thing is I like them in blog posts as in many cases they are extremely useful. For example when I link to a Wikipedia article you can read the beginning without having to open the page. That’s very neat. One disadvantage is of course that there are word ads in Snap now but they are not the reason why I turned the service off. I would have liked to just switch it off for the blogroll and other links on the right side as the pop-up windows are really annoying there. But I didn’t find any information about how to do it. Musicophilia implemented exactly what I’d like to do. Snap works in the posts of the main blog but there are no previews for the links on the right side. I have no clue how that works but I am a beginner here so please excuse me.
I found the song I had been looking for. A live version is on the second CD of the digibook limited edition of Gee Whiz but this Is a Lonesome Town. As I said before it is slow and sad. And majestic. Especially Arthur’s small dobro solo is phantastic. Here is what I think the lyrics are:
The first time we met in a poolroom bar
We were dressed both the same
We looked like twins
You knelt down and invited me to dance
We started to walk in the dark
And we danced in the night
We danced on the beach
We danced on the sand
We danced in the moonlight
Up to the North I was walking in the street
When a queer feeling started grabbing me
When I saw you coming up to me
Like a serendipity
And we danced on the street
We danced by the river
We danced on the bridge
We danced on the harbour
The last time I saw you
You were sitting on your suitcase
Waiting for the train
I was about to take
When we realized
We had the closest seats
We decided to dance on the train
Moriarty: Cottonflower from Gee Whiz But This Is a Lonesome Town
The first time I heard the name of this band I thought of Dean Moriarty, the hero of On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s travelling buddy who was called Neal Cassady in real life. At the same time I was pretty sure that it wasn’t him who inspired the band name. Apparently I was wrong.
I like the song almost as much as the other one about a man with a suitcase and a woman dancing with him in the train which they also played but which is not on the album. Cottonflower is a slow affair. I can see the American prairie or is it the Mississippi delta? It’s a view of the plains which bend down at the horizon. There is a lot of dust on the fields, there are people working in the evening sun there. And there is a sad voice of a woman singing about someone she is in love with who doesn’t turn off the tv, or something like that. It’s a song which feels like home, in a way. That’s how I felt at the concert on Thursday. In a familiar place, cosy. The Moriartys emanate a warmth and devotion like few other bands. When they all – they are five without the drummer – stood close to each other in front of the one and only microphone on Thursday I had the impression of seeing a family who had found itself.
The title-page up there is a photo of the rising sun as seen from an airplane on December, 21st. We were flying to Girona. It was the flight which took off 6h40 in Hahn in the Hunsrück. We had gotten up just before four o’clock and I got flashed at 4h26 on the motorway bridge over the Rhein in Wiesbaden with an excess speed of 20 km per hour. I was lucky, only 30 euros and no „points“. Just thinking of all that, isn’t December, 21st the shortest day of the year? The photo of the sunrise was taken just after we arrived at the Mediterranean. We were sitting on the left side. I remember that there was a city at the coast. Maybe Nice? Or San Remo? It was not too far away from the Alps. I didn’t ask, I should have. When the plane arrived above the Mediterranean it turned right. I was totally mesmerised by the different shades of red and orange. I don’t remember seeing the sun rise. When we arrived in Girona it was bright day. And pretty cold too, just above zero degrees.
The thread which made me relisten to this song. It’s a pretty great song with the hazy guitar and stuff. I never paid a lot attention to it as one of my all-time favourites is the song before. I wrote a little bit on the thread about all that. The discussion will continue there, hopefully.
Silver Jews: Punks in the Beerlight from Tanglewood Numbers
There is one thing I do not understand. Why do grown-up people prefer to talk badly about a third person when that person is not there to saying it to that person directly? And why the hell do I have to be in between those two persons? Which means of course that I also have to listen to the other person’s criticism of the first. Je n’y suis pour rien. Additionally I got into a rather fruitless discussion (unfortunately it is in German) about the question if Obama is black, white or something else. I opted for something else. I’d rather forget all this crap and listen to David Berman’s wonderful song about punks in the beerlight. I guess to produce a rhyme like
Ain’tcha heard the news?
Adam and Eve were Jews.
you have to be a) a Jew and b) David Berman
But the unforgettable line in this song is of course the chorus. „I loved you to the max“. It resonates in the ear. There is a happiness hormone hidden in this simple sentence which has an effect only when you sing it and repeat it again and again. The complete lyrics are here. And there is another part which makes this post kind of come full circle:
If it ever gets really really bad,
Let’s not kid ourselves.
It gets really really bad.
How can someone not love David Berman? There’s another great mystery of life.
A succinct and apt description of Joy Divison’s music from the surprisingly active thread with the seemingly arbitrary juxtaposition of Pink Floyd vs. Joy Division (I agree that it would be more correct to confront PF against JD+NO as PF was two bands as well, with and without Syd Barrett):
… Joy Division eschew decoration. Their music is stripped down, clean, reduced to mechanical functionality, never more than it needs to be. They emphasize the materiality and physicality of their instruments, rarely pushing them outside a narrow range of effects. As a result, their music is raw yet restrained, coldly monochromatic, even sterile. More than anything else, it is coherent. It is of a piece. In this, it is, perhaps, the purest pop embodiment of modernist ideals, and it rigidly obeys the dictates of its own, spartan aesthetic. The fact that they existed for such a short time only makes their artistic thumbprint that much sharper. …
― Calling All Creeps! (contenderizer), Monday, 19 January 2009 16:35 (Yesterday)
Joy Division: Heart and Soul from Preston 28 February 1980
1. The temperatures have risen in Germany in the last couple of days. Last week we had around -10° Celsius when I left work today it was something like 7°. This weather change caused havoc in the water container for the wipers. For some reason – probably I did not put enough anti-freeze liquid inside – the water froze when there was permafrost. And the ice melted again when it got warmer. So far, so good. But unfortunately the alarm display for the wipers went on again today. There was no water left. And whenever I pour some water into the container, it never gets filled. After some deep analysis – Edgar Allen, you are still my hero – I came to the conclusion that there is a hole in the container. When I will go to the garage to change the container I am pretty sure that it will cost a fortune. Probably they have to remove the motor or something to change that bloody thing.
2. I have got an electronic body-fat balance which I use after my ergometer training to check my weight and body-fat index. Whenever I try to weigh me these days it produces error 0 which means wrong initialisation. First I thought it was the battery but it wasn’t. The balance is just a pile of high-tech junk. A totally useless gadget. Actually I never understood the value-added of the body-fat index. All that interests me is my weight in kilograms. I descended the mechanic balance from the bathroom again which may be less flashy and maybe less accurate but at least it works.
3. Finally the pulse monitor watch has packed up. It used to have difficulties to pick up my pulse in the past, I imagined it was because my pulse was too weak and/or too slow. But now the display has totally faded away. I hope it is only the battery.
Ohrenschmaus 