Durpee-durpee-durpee-klangaklangaklangalang

Tweet May continues. The gigs continue. I'm sure many of you at this stage, like me, probably want to read a blow-by-blow account of how Spencer Krug/Bradford Cox/Matt Berringer behaved themselves in some small Dublin venue as much as you want the rough end of a Black and Decker drill ground into your right eyeball. If so, stick around on the compost heap for a minute or two. You can enjoy a bit of respite from the gig grind as I turn my eye to the frankly shit-your-pants-terrifying camp-ocalypse that is this year's Eurovision song contest. Its on telly right now. I almost missed it, but was reminded that something strange was on TV by the tottering 6 foot Bet Gilroy-style male creatures in shimmering wigs that walked past my window earlier this evening clutching bottles of wine and knocking into number 3. A gay hair-stylist lives at number 3. He crashed our last Christmas party looking more festively bronzed than a well-done turkey and stole a bottle of Absolut Vodka. Anyway, as increasingly more exotic and gay looking dudes walked past the front window, it quickly clicked that the Eurovision was afoot, and there was a special cross-dressing party to mark the event underway a few doors down. We switched over, hoping the spectacle on screen would live up to the spectacle outside. As always, it was good for a few laughs, was a timely reminder that for one evening a year an entire continent can be a little bit gay, and was a curate's egg mixture of the monotonous, the diverting, the terrifying and Terry Wogan's (somewhat sparse) one-liners which included this one gem "she's surrounded by the three statutory prancing eejits". I noticed a few things this year. 1: At least 40% of the songs are basically a melody-free version of the Muslim call to prayer on gak chanted by a transexual over an unhinged middle-eatern drumbeat with a gratuitous key change near the end. Something along the lines of Durpee-durpee-durpee-klangaklangaklangalang. This is somewhat acceptable from the likes of Turkey, but from Ukraine? 2: Sebastian Tellier sang a surprisingly sophisticated pop-song in the French tradition. But he looked so freakishly like John Waters I half expected a pained middle eight relating to the soulless twilight of the Celtic Tiger, Katy French and father's rights. 3: The demented Spanish dude was really, really a lot like Dublin indie merchant Robotnik. Chris Morrin oughta sue.
Robotnik..........................Scary Spanish Dude 4: Finland is fucking scary. Its full of leathery mountain dwelling monsters and bouffant 7 foot men with pointy guitars. 5: Ireland loves Latvia and Lithuania. I'll put it out there and say its because they are the most musically talented countries in Europe. I mean why else would we give them 10 and 12 points? 6: Russia won. Because everyone is scared shitless of Vladimir Putin. In fact the Eurovision is a 1984 style, thinly veiled, horrific harbinger of a soulless, autocratic Europe controlled by its most oil-rich country. 7: Bosnia Herzogovina deserved to win. Their effort was spectacular. Women knitting. A Helena Bonham Carter character hanging clothes on a rope. A dizzying, hypnotic trip of a tune sung in the style of Of Montreal by a strange elfin man who stalked the stage like the malfunctioning love child of Kevin Barnes and the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. They may not have won, but surely, they'll be booked for ATP next year? My token MP3 unfortunately has nowt to do with the Eurovision. Its more Built to Spill. Why? Cos Im still creaming meself that they are playing Dublin. This song is called Else. Its plays like a soft, extended hug. Play it on repeat. Its a never ending charm. MP3: Built to Spill-Else

Stop Making That Sound!!!

Tweet This is probably the most excitable post I've ever written on this blog. Why? Because I just found out Built to Spill are playing here, in Dublin, in November. My shit-eating grin is currently so wide open at this news that I look like 80s video game pixel gobbler, Pac-Man. I started Asleep on the Compost Heap last September, and I think I've digitally expressed my ragged tiny-tim style yearning for Built to Spill to play a live gig in Ireland on at least 3 separate occasions. Well somehow a Dublin promoter got 'em, and its going to be magical. 'Perfect from now' on is one of the most formidable guitar albums ever recorded. I think a lot of shite gets spouted about Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Dinosuar Jr etc, but in my opinion 'perfect from now on' is the definitive psychedelic left-field yank album of the 90s. If I've heard it once I've heard it a million times, and yet despite repetition, the transition from slowcore introspection to visionary finger picked psychedelic madness in 'stop the show' is one of the most tingling moments in any song I've heard. Also, unlike other rarefied alterno-gods (in my head anyway) like Pavement and Guided by Voices, Built to Spill still give it socks!!!! Just listen to 'goin' against your mind' off their most recent album 'you in reverse'; it's an affirming reminder that Doug Marsch can still knock out a blinding tune if not a full album. I won't go on any more 'cos its sad. My girlfriend Loreana loves them as much as me, bet she's blabbing on her blog. Anyway, two fine musical reasons to see Built to Spill are...

1: MP3: Built to Spill:-kicked it in the sun
2:MP3 Built to Spill:-distopian dream girl

When I'm feeling a wee bit down in the dumps, I actually listen to kicked it in the sun to make me smile. Its the sonic equivalent of prozac. As for t'udder stuff, its all so, so good. Built to Spill RAWK!

GIG-O-RAMA!!

Tweet Right where do ya begin with this month of May shit? Normally at this time of year I go to ATP in Camber Sands with a load of mates. And normally at the end of it I hibernate for four or five days while the entire experience leaks out of my system as I suffer hideous, crawling hyper-real William Blake style flashbacks. These normally consist of me looking at myself objectively from the corner of the room (like those people who nearly die in hospital) jumping up and down for four hours on a printed camber sands mattress to Float On by modest mouse played on repeat, or tribally banging wheelie bins at 6 in the morning with gap-year students from england and chanting sonic youth songs to the breaking dawn. And on Sunday we all end up battling the fact that we have an encroaching and sick realisation that monday morning will replace hedonistic ATP madness with a nauseating flight home where you try to read as much of the in-flight paper as humanly possible in order to crowd the insistent chalet related horror stories out of your sweat drenched head. Not to mention the bugs and spiders. On Tuesday, you'll think you had the most fucked up time of your life, but by Friday you'll be telling everyone that ATP is fucking mega and you can't wait to do it all again. Its a conflictual conundrum. This year Thrillpier did it for us all (minus much of the the mad shit, cos his head is screwed on right and he loves music more than making a spa of himself). You can read his in depth analysis of the whole affair on his blog. Just click back on the link. Aside from all that, I really wanted to talk about a gig. Animal Collective in Whelans last night. I am a 27 year old man. I've seen a LOT of gigs. They put on one of the best gigs I ever saw. I bet most other people who were there think the same. This was a gig to write home about. It was adventurous, mindblowing, colourful, and thrilling. I felt brand new synapses unravel in my brain as it progressed. The blinding multi-coloured striplights behind them caused a friend of mine (David) to comment that the whole affair reminded him of the sci-fi movie close encounters of the third kind, like some kinda extra terrestial force was communicating with us. I loved it. I could go on here but I won't. Animal collective live are savagery. They are pure unadulterated savagery. :) Hipsters at the animal collective gig MP3: Animal Collective Who could win a rabbit

Deerhunter interview

Tweet My interview with those loopy noise merchants deerhunter is now oop on analogue magazine. Read it here! In other news I saw a couple who must have been in their 70s buy callipo ice pops in Super Valu Kells today. This should be the quintessential cute romantic moment. It wasn't. They sat in the front seats of their Nissan and stared stonily out of the opposite windows as they licked their pops, trapped in some sort of sour loveless hell. Judging by the deep lines of mutual resentment etched into their elderly noggins they might as well have been sucking frozen badger piss out of their colourful ice-cream sheaths. Ah well. Animal Collective later! Woop! Or maybe not.

Rancho Relaxo

Tweet I know, I know, the compost heap is starting to live up to its name. Its fast becoming a neglected and dank corner of the 'net where sweet fuck all happens and things putrefy. A badly tended blog. Its not meant to be this way!!! But college and my inability to manage time and anything in my life that isn't an ipod wheel or the ringpull on a can of beer have conspired to make me a strung out and exhausted gardenhead. Truly asleep on the compost heap, snoozing in the thick fug of fruitflies and decomposing banana peels, dreaming of escape to somewhere where crickets whirr as the sun sets deep and red. For the moment, I've made do with a mini break to Kells for a bit of rest and relaxation. Now, its a mark of how viciously I needed to get out of Dublin when 2 days in Kells midweek feels like a 2 month visit to Rancho Relaxo. But it really does. I'd like to take this opportunity to shamelessly plug the chicken balls available at the rose garden Chinese take away in Kells. They are wonderful things. Hefty, golden and delightfully irregular looking with a light batter that cloaks huge steaming pieces of meat. And thats just the guys that serve them, parp! I eat a disturbing amount of chicken balls and these are the best. Most in Dublin come coated in a sort of worrying lagging jacket of spongey batter thats burnt brown on the outside and a sort of cottage cheesey slime on the inside. For some reason, I never learn and repeatedly put myself through the endurance test of eating them. The Kells chicken ball on the other hand is the Platonic ideal of a chicken ball, the perfect standard by which all others should be measured. I advise all chicken ball fanatics to go on a little gastro-tourism trip to Kells. Sqwaaawkk!! Okay MP3 time. I'll endeavour to keep the blog fed with tidbits even if they are sometimes smaller than the usual meandering missives. Today's tidbit is from the Fuck Buttons album Street Horsssing. I find it hard to keep up on all the new music and can normally only properly assimilate about 10 albums or so a year. So I typically play catch up on stuff that was buzzed about months ago. True to form, Fuck Buttons wormed its way into my brain bosca only recently. I really love this record and at the moment its proving a very calming and cathartic listen. Its funny how noise can do that no? I mean, elevator music like Katie Melua would send me screaming through a plate glass window, but this textured exercise in the interplay between raw noise and melody chills me out and soothes me to sleep. MP3: Fuck Buttons-Sweet love for planet earth Finally keep an eye on Analogue Magazine for my interview with Deerhunter's Bradford Cox and some of the rest of the gang including their new guitarist Whitney. Bradford talked about shitloads of stuff, the new album, why noisey music is better than sex, getting drunk to interview Stephen Malkmus and much, much more!!!

Beautiful little oddity

Tweet Gagh the flat I live in is falling apart. On the surface, it looks great. A modern 3 bedroom duplex with a big open plan kitchen and loads of cool stuff. But peel back the veneer and its falling to bits. I'd swear the walls are made of weetabix. The curtain rail in my room has fallen out of its crumbling cradle three times now. The last time this happened I resorted to sticking black binliners over the window with elastoplasts because there was no sellotape in the house. Also, none of the doors sit well on their hinges and our spotlights keep randomly exploding. Its enough to tear my already flayed nerves to utter shreds. Anyway, I digress. This is supposed to be a blog about my favourite Welsh folkster Adem Ilan. After a long break since the-not-as-good-as-homesongs-but-still-fine 'love and other planets', Adem is returning to the fray with a big bag of cover versions of some of his favourite songs called 'takes'. Now to be honest, this news doesn't exactly thrill the fuck out of me, cover version albums stink of song-writer's block. However, the tracklisting looks unusual in a good way, and there is one beautiful little oddity on it. A cover version of two Aphex Twin tracks from the Richard D. James album melded together to form something that should be a throwaway ditty but somehow isn't. Its utterly Ademesque, plinking, rattling, creaking and whirring away like an old children's playroom come to life at twilight. MP3: Adem-girl/boy song-to cure a weakling chile UPDATED!! Here is a working MP3 of the song on Rapidsare MP3: Adem-girl boy song-to cure a weakling chile I've been to a few live things recently. Deerhunter in Whelans, M83 in ALT, and Ricardo Vilallobos in the Tivoli. Funnily enough, the best moment out of all of them was during a DJ set. During one of the many giddy highs of Villalobos' set he played this colossal strung out techno remix of 'I feel love' by Donna Summer. He destroyed the place. The sense of communal abandon and release was magic. Top stuff.

Lolomix 9: Sleep

Tweet Sorry 'bout being away from the screen for a long time, but with the weather this nice I'd say people have better things to be doing than browsing blogs. Like dropping melted tangle twisters on themselves and getting nuclear sunburn. After a long break, Lolomix returns with number 9 in the series, songs about sleep. This is a very appropriate Lolomix because anybody that knows her will know that she is a sleepy sort of creature and loves to be in bed. I'd say my favourite track on this particular mix is swingboat yawning by Rollerskate Skinny. In my opinion we had in them, a modern Irish Psychedelic band that were every bit the equal of your Mercury Revs and your Flaming Lips. Its a class mix. Enjoy. Download Lolomix 9: Sleep The Microphones- Don't Wake Me Up The Antlers- When You Sleep (My Bloody Valentine cover) DeVotchKa- Too Tired Belle & Sebastian- Sleep the Clock Around Rollerskate Skinny- Swingboat Yawning Bonnie 'Prince' Billy- Cursed Sleep Nat Baldwin- Only in My Dreams Sonic Youth- Unmade Bed Uzi & Ari- Asleep in Armor Les Savy Fav- Yawn Yawn Yawn Stars- Sleep Tonight (Junior Boys Remix) Chemical Brothers- Asleep from Day Now put it on your ipod and run out to get the last bit of sun and an icepop! That's an order.