Now I'm fucked

Somebody put a mountain range inside my head. I should have fallen over when the geography moved underneath me but as usual I sat on the edge of the bed and pondered.

SOOFyahn

You might think Sufjan Stevens is getting his Radiohead and Bjork on in The Age of Adz but you’d be wrong about that. The Age of Adz sounds precisely like Stevens is standing on a tall pile of everything he has already recorded. The strong melody and phrasing, struck through with symphonic arrangements and joyful cacophony of horns, from albums like Sufjan Stevens Invites You To: Come On Feel the Illinoise and Michigan are still here, they are just wrapped in a layer of beats, bleeps and squelches.


Continue reading on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - What Jack? Quaoub Part One

The song sounded like a lilting heart, a real one disgusting with blood and necessary rhythm but there was an unidentifiable lightness to it as well. The melody came in slow and agonisingly low. I couldn’t follow the rhythms, they were organic and structured like the invisible inside of yourself no one else can see.

I don't know what he was singing but everything stopped, the bells, the chatter, wind in the grass. Everything except the backlit clouds stopped a moment to hear his song. It was dark and I couldn’t even make out his silhouette. I know it sounds like I’m always sitting out in a park or a graveyard at night but if you’re a Newtown local you’ll know it’s one of the best places to be.

It was six months before I figured out who was singing in the dark that night. His name is Jack Elias but he performs under the name Quaoub. I’ve got more than one problem with this man but we’ll talk about that later. He conducts himself with a disturbing kind of grace but I don’t think that’s one of the problems. There is grace in his words, movements and most prominently in his songs.

It’s rare that I’m struck so profoundly by a song the first time I hear it. I like to listen to things on repeat until the slow soak of sound unravels inside my head and begins to make sense. This song didn’t need making sense of. This song, for all its lilt and rhythm, had the force of a hammer.

He came and lay down in the grass near where I was sitting. We talked about ritual and meaning and ancestral sorrow. This is where my first problem began. I dislike meeting people that I wish to talk with again, it leaves me feeling hollow, meaningless and dead as the buried we were resting six feet above.

Now that I know who Jack is I am shameless in my quest to hear him play as often as possible. On another night, in another park, I was planning to drunkenly demand to hear him play. Spencer, my good and sage friend, advised me against this. To my delight Jack graciously confiscated a guitar from a nearby man and played songs he hoped I might like. No demanding was necessary.

A girl, some admirer of Spencer’s, rattled a tambourine to accompany Jack and his guitar. Her failure to make any sense of his rhythm whatsoever was more endearing than annoying but it was testament to the complexities of the music. At the conclusion of his small performance Jack smiled at the tambourine girl and told her she done well. He was laughing but we all melted a little because he meant it. Jack’s easy warmth makes it easy for all of us, even me, to feel at home with our own awkwardness and inadequacies.

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - Girl Singers are no good

My friend Spencer is not so keen on what he calls 'girl singers'. I’ve been wondering about this for a while now, been wondering just what exactly is his problem? Now here's a little warning, this is all wild speculation.

I’ve got a theory that Spencer is less keen on 'girl singers' than 'boy singers' because he likes music to be yelling versions of his life back at him. He wants to be inside the song instead of just listening to it from the outside. But first here's a small amount of boring information.

Don't forget to read the rest of this by clicking on the link to RHUM!
Continue reading on RHUM...

Better to befriend a Lemon than get bitter about his talent

Go read this post by Geoff Lemon because its so much better than what was in my head this evening. For those that are interested, this evening the contents of my head included wondering how to make a cake in the shape of myself, the amount of apples that Paul Simon might buy in one go and what is the most polite way to firmly refuse a man who has expressed a desire to wee either onto or inside of you.

Storage solutions will solve only the problem of storage

I have become confused by furniture. All of these years I have simply pushed around cupboards and drawers with all-day Tetris intent. It has never failed, not until three days after my most recent attempt. This time I have bruised all of my fingers and quite a high proportion of my toes, my record player described a perfect arc before landing upside down and in pieces. The very end of my bed has demonstrated why knots in wood become vulnerable points for anything and my typewriter will not come out of its case. There is one thing I have not moved but only because other people wear pajamas, this will make more sense in less than a minute.

It is quite difficult, I think, to enter into a whiskey-fueled state of rage and typing when I live somewhere called The Peach and when The Peach is populated by people who come home from working, cook food in the kitchen and wear pajamas in the most normal of ways. This is why the bottle of whiskey has not moved from where I placed it three weeks ago. I suspect most people would not like to enter into a whiskey-fueled state of rage and typing but by my calculations I make up only one 6,830,586,985th of most people, this is a startling figure, I should commence cloning operations at once. Statistics have never been my strong point but I feel certain if there was more than one of me it would be easier to throw pajamas to the wind and rage with whiskey and typewriters all through the night.