Man's best friend

First up, anyone who has not yet caught Episode 1 of Analogue TV really oughta! You can watch it on the embedded vimeo below. I declare a multiple win for the gang behind it. The production values, the sense it gives of a developed (rather than grab-bag) editorial taste, not to mention the quality of the show's interviews, make a screaming case for this to be watched by ANYONE who gives a hoot about that endangered televisual subspecies - proper Irish music television. Take a bow dudes.


Analogue Episode 1 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Second up: people who walk dogs in Kells, take note. I have one eye on some of ye now and I'm wise to your greasy little tricks. I had to catch a 5.40am to work in Dublin earlier - the eerie ol' 109 red-eye, a bus where the soft gloom of snoring Poles is sometimes punctured by the sad hiss of surreptitiously opened cans from behind the seat hiding the ubiquitous old fella of the eternal maudlin morning. On my way over the town to catch this bus I spotted two suspect characters in the dark, both pausing along the street with their hairy best friends. Bold as brass, they were, and definitely taking the dogs for a sneaky stroll with benefits - AKA the Farrell Street poop n'run.

Before six is the turd hour, it would seem. The hour when nobody can see your rat on a string void some reprocessed animal offal out of its trembling little hole (they alway shit on streets like they are getting off on it) onto Kells' main thoroughfare. Nobody, that is, bar the odd magpie taking a break from fighting a rook over a discarded three in one, and me. So what did I do? Nothing of course. I just stewed all day until I could write this spineless diatribe. But I might. I might *ahem* write a strongly worded letter.

gis a fuckin chip will ya?

Did I say dogs? I used the term loosely. These rambling little micro-mutts are the sort of canine which is more weight-watcher accessory than animal; a nondescript little shit factory on paws dragged over the town under darkness by some sweating, demented wagon in all-over-gortex as she trys to pound out the last bit of whatever bowl of uncle Ben's slop buckled the weightwatcher chart the night before.

The current dog craze hit Kells around Christmas 2006 I think. Almost overnight there were a million of them. My Dad has a good Dad-like theory on all this. "It was them Dubs who moved into the new estate houses" he says. "They can't do anything without a stupid dog, them Dubs. And now the Kells crowd are all at it too. Copying them." It's most probably not true. But it's funny, and it makes me think of dogs barking in either Kells accents or Dublin accents, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Atlas Sound and Tickley Feather giveaway

Update: Tickets have been randomly selected. Congratulations to Morgan and Eoin who have been notified. I'm also aware that I had the wrong email address written at some point in the text. Woops and sorry.

Thanks to the nice people at Foggy Notions I have two sets of double passes to give away for upcoming gigs.

The first are for Atlas Sound (Bradford Cox of Deerhunter) and Hulk (Bruce Banner when he's angry - kidding. Hulk makes the sort of dome-ceilinged, instrumental electronica this blog loves. His album 'the silver thread of ghosts' is beautiful in all sorts of ways). The gig is in Whelans Saturday 21st at 8pm. For the chance of a pair of passes email asleepontheheap@gmail.com with your name and the name of Atlas Sound's new album and I will select your name using a random number generator tomorrow night 8pm.

hulk play whelans, hulk support atlas sound, hullk want to know who spilled hulk's pint

The second set are for Tickley Feather. Tickley Feather is the work Annie Sachs who makes woodsy, distorted music that is LOW-fi. Think of a creaky, smudged take on Animal Collective's campfire phase. Indeed, she is signed to their Paw Tracks label. Tickley Feather is supported by local boy wonder Patrick Kelleher and his full band upstairs in Whelans on November 18th. This promises to be an intriguing night. For the chance of a double pass to this email asleepontheheap@gmail.com with your name and the name of Tickley Feather's errr, actually screw that just email your name and mark it tickley feather. I will use a random number generator to pick a winner by 8pm tomorrow.

Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

Ah, wanderly wagon. A children's show from those days where a vignette about snakes and ladders could prove as terrifyingly existential as a one-act Samuel Beckett play. And, as we all know, life sometimes still feels like a fucked up game of snakes and ladders with a know-it-all prick of a crow cackling 'I told you so' over your shoulder.

(Aside - If there was an Irish 'Neon Indian', he'd swipe the theme tune to wanderly wagon and fucking run with it for ever, the chillwave cunt. Hey, wait...I'm just kidding Neon. Come back please, I need you. Hang out with me and the possie like we did in the 'Shaw last week. Remember how we ironically ate roast potatoes cos it was Sunday, then non-ironically gobbled a load of cattle wormer pills from New Zealand and jiggled around the barr to your tune and it was only lunch and it was mad? Then we capered through Rathmines in the daylight until the worming tablets wore off. Remember how we got home to play guitar hero and luxuriously felt that every time we busted major fret during Dragonforce's 'fire and flames' a discrete unit of the human soul did not have to die? Y'know, not like it felt that time before? The time you cried at the TG4 euroweather?)

When this show used to come on, my brother and I went quare. Bloodless faces, tiny bodies collapsed in stiff sobbing angles behind a couch. Indeed'n I still feel the visceral panic which used to overcome me at the start, when the wagon moved in semi-animate slow motion through the air, piloted through waning time-lapse light by a peculiar sort of overjoyed pig lady pilot. My mother describes the scene well: two screaming twins, faces pumped beetroot, scrunched together in mutual telepathic horror behind a couch, yet still very much drawn to the source of that which demented their wee minds.

And as for fortycoats? I remember clearly a demonic shade to his persona. He was like an archetypical travelling salesman form hell - a comically devilish character out of Bulgakov. He also flew some sort of contraption, and confidently spoke in rhyming verse ("I'll take look at me breakfast bowl, it's empty crow, now where'd it go? And that shoal of herring which flew beyond the wagon, which caught me eye before that dragon?"*) He was a spooky fucker. And with the exception, perhaps, of rimini riddle, the single most spooky entity on RTE kid's TV.

*made up in the fortycoats style

Music things to see and do this month

"Nothing lasts for ever in the cold November rain" is a lyric Axel Rose wrote after he was kicked out of Whelans and left holding a bag of half-cooked chips from Roma II one pissing November night. Sure enough, those chips never saw the watery dawn, and Axel suffered inside himself. However, suffering begets inspiration, and earth is now one hair-ballad the richer.

Like Axel, many of us find the month of November as grim as a greying carpet of tripe of left out in a butcher's window in Phibsborough. Yet, we needn't turn to smack to help us through the gathering gloom. Why? Because there are a bunch of fun things to keep us otherwise occupied (in Dublin at least - if you live in Offaly heroin might be a reasonable seasonal crutch). Here are a few of them in order of their occurance.

Tripe: its repeating honeycombed surface makes it a foodstuff much feared by magic mushroom gobblers and neurosurgeons alike

Analogue Episode 1 Launch Party: Joy Gallery (Thursday November 5th, 7.30pm)

Analogue, the online Irish music magazine, is launching its excellent new Web-TV show in the Joy gallery this Thursday.  For the price of a pint you can catch a screening of the first episode of the show - followed by music from Hunter Gatherer (sepulchral grooves from a wandering boy poet's mind), Angkorwat (smudged expressionist electronica that walks a tightrope between euphoria and worry), and The Great Lakes Mystery (gliding half-way house between post-rock and techno). Like Analogue's excellent Peeek! CD, this night promises to be a signpost toward the innovative, the fresh, and the left-field in Ireland.

Check out Angkorwat here

Check out Hunter-Gatherer here

Yours Truly: Crawdaddy (Friday November 13th, 11pm)

Yours Truly is a night starting soon in Crawdaddy (Tripod). I know the lads behind this and they have great musical taste. They will be casting their net broad and wide to pull in a bunch of quality bands from home and abroad for some proper alterno-weekend fun. As the night is in Crawdaddy and on a Friday, it will go on late. It will feature regular DJs (including Aero - my old bud from Kells), and should prove a proper tub of happy craicers. We Have Band are headlining the first night with support from Feed the Bears. A lot of brilliant acts are on the agenda for this night (from Ireland and abroad): more details will follow.

Homelights: Whelans (Friday November 27th - Monday November 30th)

Foggy Notions and Adrian Crowley are behind this one. It is a sort of micro-festival taking place in Whelans at the end of November, which appears to reflect the musical sensibilities of Adrian Crowley as it is quite a folky weekend. It is also a potentially awesome weekend. In addition to Adrian Crowley, you can catch the likes of Vashti Bunyan, Minotaur Shock and Hulk. You can also see AN-ALL-TIME-COMPOST-HEAP-FAVE in the shape of Adem Ilhan, who is playing on the Saturday. The tickets for this are priced between €12/€15/€20 for single nights or €45 for the weekend. If you have 45 quid to spare it might be a nice weekend. Whelans smells of pine and Christmas as winter draws in.

MP3: Adem-Statued

The rubbery white face of an old man

This year's obligatory Hallowe'en post comes from Storkboy, my identical twin. I robbed it from an abortive blog he kept years ago that crafts something mystic out of 'we-wuz-in-an-estate-but-wuz-aware-of-the-country' in a way which I try, but never can. He is a brilliant writer. He is also identifiable as the twin on the right in the photo below. I ate more carrots to make me handsome. Happy Hallowe'en (Or Oíche Samhna as us non-Americans six miles from the place where it was invented sometimes call it)!.

they were dotes growing up

It happens every year, and it was walking home from work today that it chose to happen this year. First it was the dramatic surrounds of the national park that set it off, but later even stronger feelings with a darker edge stirred in my breast as I reached the non-descript housing estates. These are the housing estates that echo with childhood memories under ragged October skies, memories and feelings summoned by the power of damp walled terraced houses; a hypnotic power which is rooted not in any of their specific details, but is instead paradoxically rooted in their very universal non-descriptiveness. This is why they also seem universally familiar, those never-ending conurbations that spider out from our county towns.

I work in the Waste Water Treatment Plant which is located in a copse of woodland on the grounds of Ross Castle. I had quite a workload to get through this week and it spilled over into Sunday. Working on a Sunday is not something I mind too much, as the place is empty, allowing me the full use of the lab without my erratic working methods getting in anyone else’s way. I also like to take the time to enjoy a leisurely breakfast roll, read the papers and watch TV. It’s great. There’s nobody else to bother me.

I worked late today and I had to switch on the lab’s lights an hour before I left, a full two hours before what the newspapers recommend as the official ‘lights on’ time. It was while cleaning up my stuff that I had the first sense of the October pangs, which would later develop into an acute attack of the jib-jibs. I think it was the 5pm lights on that did it.

Walking home, I pass the gothic ruin of a Georgian gatehouse with several chimneys and boarded up windows. It is located on a little patch of grass which seamlessly blends into fine woodland at the rear. On summer mornings this place is attractive in an opaque postcard way. However, it was only this evening, with the jackdaws cawing from its mossy roof that it came into its own for the first time and fully announced itself to me; imposing, gothic, and forlorn. All over the park, ruins and stately homes, oak trees and ravens were uncloaking their true nature. Ross castle, no longer teeming with new-world coffin-dodgers, now majestically soared into a tumultuous sky casting no reflection on the surface of the black lake. The centuries overlapped. I took it all in as I walked; the way the mushroom wind sent hundreds of yellow beech leaves swirling chaotically in the funny half-light and the sad way in which car headlamps shone on the glistening road. It’s not often that it happens to me, tuning into my surrounds in such a manner, but when the world gives up its secrets I make sure to try and take note.

I approached the town wondering whether if each season had such a day, just the one, in which things take on a hallucinogenic significance, and now, as I write this, I wonder if I am using the term ‘hallucinogenic’ to try and describe the act of simply perceiving the world as it is. Further proof of the poverty of our conditioned senses is found in the thrill seekers who methodically comb hillsides for little fungi at this time of year, trying to open doors of perception that have been closed since childhood. 

As I mentioned at the start of this blog, these feelings deepened as I walked through the housing estates at the edge of town. I grew up in one such estate, and I first experienced the world through its alleyways, playing fields and forbidden building sites. This evening, like some half-stoned gombeen, I slowed down to people-watch in a similar Killarney housing estate. Nothing changes; a group of ten year olds kicked a football around a muddy playing field with wet echoing slaps. Their mothers cooked mashed potatoes and sausages behind steamy orange windows. I remembered the myriad alliances forged in the complicated politics of childhood, the secret world of ten-year olds, every bit as convoluted as the UN.

The corner boys were there too. Those specimens who crowd round cement walls, hooded and wraith-like. They were playing with fireworks. Not the bulbs that explode into flowers in July skies but a different breed of firework; the Halloween firework. Sneaky whistling things that shoot from Waven pipe and explode with empty cracks. Halloween fireworks are not designed for the crowd-pleasing spectacle. Instead they are designed to blow cat’s arses apart, give oul one’s massive coronaries, and every now and then to blow the fingers off one of the teenage paramilitaries that wield them.

One of the hoods was performing the archetypical banger throw. It went like this, he lit the banger in his hand and the dim sodden air around him filled with acrid blue smoke and fizzing sparks. In a show of machismo he allowed the fuse to burn down almost to the very last before his friends began to scarper. He then fucked it into the air as hard as he could. The aim is to get it to explode in mid-air, which it did satisfactorily, eliciting a barking cacophony from terrified pet dogs. The dogs, along with the elderly, suffer the most at this time of year.

Another banger move is the house attack. In this move a hoody and his cronies will pimp-roll over to the house of say, a retired teacher who’s on a kidney dialysis machine. This move is more subtle than the previous one. The banger is placed in the confined space between a concrete wall and the house gable. This will produce a bowel shattering echo. Once the banger is lit, the hoodies don’t scarper, but instead, with hands in pockets, radiate outwards in a nonchalant circle, only betraying themselves with a flinch as the banger explodes, its sound magnified by the reverberating effects of the surrounding walls.

In the next few weeks anything carbon-based that is not nailed down will disappear and then reappear in one of the fiercely guarded bonfires that mark each estate’s perceived superiority over the others. Bonfire building is a competitive sport. The excitement is not merely in the building of a bonfire but in the daring raids in which material is acquisitioned. With the aid of several gallons of petrol these rain-soaked bonfires somehow always manage to defy the laws of physics by spluttering into life on October 31st. Dangerous things they are and all, what with the winds that can blow at this time of year, and they do sometimes set trees, buildings and perhaps even the odd hoody on fire.

Finally I came to the town. October had struck deep here too. I’ve never believed in that shite that one needs to grow up in a rural setting to fully appreciate the turning year. The light was really dimming now, and a bit of a breeze was blowing. The breeze smelt of leaf-mulch and coal-smoke, with an underlying earthiness betraying the cold and hibernating pasture lands that lie just beyond the town. I passed shop-fronts which were festooned with spooky Halloween decorations. Halloween is the festival which has done the least to shake off its pre-christian identity, as Halloween knows that Jesus can’t compete with it. Its decorations are probably the only festive decorations which empathise with the natural manifestation of the season. Compared to the gaudy incongruity of Christmas tack, the orange and black crepe paper and rubber goblin faces of Samhain perfectly compliment the falling leaves and darkening skies. Like the bonfires, they are there to answer a hidden need within us, a need to somehow reach out and grasp momentarily through the shadows and cracked mirrors of this hollow age towards another time, an age in which it was not a matter of suspending disbelief, but simply believing.

My grandmother used to refer to Halloween masks as false faces. This was a term which always unsettled me. And every year after all the little people have finished calling to the door trick or treating and the porch lights have been switched off, when the bonfire has burned back to a few glowing tyres and the fireworks have become sporadic and distant, there’s always a straggler, a trickortreater who calls alone after all the others; a wee hunchback whose alert eyes ramble gleefully behind the rubbery white face of an old man. It is he who wears a false face and not a mask. In wordless silence he stands on the doorstep looking back at me, his torn binliner-cloak streaked with rain, its black tatters fluttering in the howling wind. I give him some sweets, hoping he will go away quickly; for I cannot know for sure if he is ten, or four thousand and ten years old.