Merriweather Gig Pavillion

Animal Collective are the musical embodiment of the beardy proto-Plato philosopher Heraclitus's doctrine that constant change is the central force in the universe. As he put it, you can never step in the same river twice because other waters will always run over your toes. Keep this in in ancient adage mind when you go to an Animal Collective gig. You're less likely to be disappointed than the vexed sod standing beside me in Tripod last night who spent the encore roaring and spluttering about the lack of material from their 2005 album, Feels.


Photo by Lolo

In fairness, anyone looking for a substantial live manifestation of any of the band's previous incarnations last night would have come away unhappy. Especially considering that one of the only recognizable - in my case - nods to pre-Strawberry Jam material was an overegged rendition of Leaf House which collapsed under the weight of the gratuitous reverb added to Panda Bear's yodelling vocals and the dubby, slow motion re-reading of the song's original sprightly guitars. It was hard to reconcile it with the bewitching avant-folk original on Sung Tongs. Indeed, it was hard to reconcile last night's band with the group that wrote Sung Tongs. Animal Collective are resolutely about change, and, increasingly, resolutely about dance music.

The band's - and particularly Noah Lennox's - well documented infatuation with dance music was in full demonstration in Tripod. In a set that bulged with cuts from Merriweather Post Pavillion, the bass sounds often hit a poop-loosening, sub-woofer throb that wouldn't sound out of place at a Modeselektor gig. All the dancey aspects of Merriweather were exaggerated. The distended housey pianos towards the end of Daily Routine became more overtly rhythmic and seemed to go on for ever as Lennox's cathartic hollers cut in over them. The new light show pulsed and flashed like the band were playing inside a massive graphic equalizer, while coruscating computer visuals intermittently crawled over the new psychedelic beach ball prop that hung over them. Watching all this from where I stood near the mixing desk was exhilarating, and the outbreaks of frenzied dancing toward the front of the crowd - particularly during an awesome Brothersport - ensured the gig felt nothing short of a rave by times. Needless to say, I loved it. But I'm a fair weather raver and that sort of shit is catnip to me. I can see how others like Ian might have come away disappointed.

As a seasoned follower of this forward-thinking band, I came with high expectations for new material. One song delivered the goods. It is called "what would I want sky" and it is built from trip hop percussion, a deeply psychedelic Avey Tare melody and finally, gliding female vocal samples reminiscent of the Field. Guess what? There's already a session recording of it. Check it out!

MP3: Animal Collective-What would I want Sky

If this is an indication of Animal Collective's future direction it looks like they are drifting off into a pastoral electronic wonderland. Alhough knowing them, the next album will be doom metal.

Update: If the MP3 wasn't working earlier, it should now. I've changed the link to mediafire.

Their hearts are not hearts they're clockwork springs

How come so many of the things that spook the fuck out of us hold us utterly rapt in our dread? It's the curious little mystery that ensures horror films succeed. Fear seems to go hand in hand with a peculiar enjoyment. I might stain my chinos when I see a sodden Japanese devil girl strobing her way out of a telly, yet, at the same time, there is a giddy wrinkle in my amygdala going "awww class I'm actually pissing my pants here".


When's the *rattle Amon Duul II concert on? *rattle *rattle *clack SATAN!! *clack

I've broached the subject of my fear of puppets before. I don't quite know what it is about them exactly, but I have a theory or two. It could be the brief illusion of life being breathed into a lifeless entity. It's an alchemical sight that might easily put a deeply-held, minuscule ember of leftover Catholicism on irrational Satan-alert. Possession. Is this what the act of puppetry whispers to me? Yet, by the same logic, I don't find robots nearly as diabolical.

Maybe it's their woodenness? Or something about their quickness too? Hmmm. I'd also be a bit wary about how they jerk, chatter, and seem to both walk and float at once. It doesn't take much of a leap for me to imagine little medieval death squads of the wooden fucks flitting through ruins and woods, cackling wildly as they're chased by stinking winds through the waning light. Nobody is pulling their strings of course. The strings disappear upwards into low lying fog as they sometimes do in Jan Svanjemaker films. Off and away they skitter, as only wooden goblins with limited joints can. Off toward the dull red flicker of their home, the puppet pit, with their squirming knapsacks full of panicked thoughts sliced from the minds of those caught slumbering.

Scarier still, are Automatons. Automatons or Automata are mechanical toys of varying complexity that use mechanics to create the illusion of self-determined movement. They are often human-like. Think of the creepy funfair wizard in Tom Hanks' Big and you've got the picture. Automata have a long and rich history in human technology. Around the time of enlightenment when philosophers such as Descartes were drawing tentative comparisons between human actions and the mechanics of machinery, automatons whirred and creaked into the human imagination in a big way. As the following informative but unsettling video demonstrates, they reached their peak in terms of size and mechanical complexity in 18th and 19th century France. Watch, but be warned that there is a mechanical monkey who smokes a real fag with what the archaic voiceover describes as his "leather bellows". That's some spooky foetal position shit. Oh and just hear the music in this. It's classic TV workshop-style tape loops of synths. Wibble warble wibble warble splunk. Sweet.



Some people find automatons beautiful. I find them fascinatingly sinister, a reason I think I am so taken with the films of Guillermo Del Toro, who has motifs of clockwork powered people or contraptions in many of his storylines.

When I think of Automatons, I remember the remarkable astronomical clock in Prague. This unholy looking clockwork extravaganza of a building is full of strange little machinations that come to a head every evening at six. As the chimes ring out over the old city, death springs mechanically out of a door and ushers a procession of deceased saints into the afterlife. The deliciously evil little wizard who pops out of the contraption below (designed by Thomas Kuntz) fills us in a little more about what next happened to the celebrated artist who designed the clock in Prague. Yes, the macabre story told by the 7 inch puppet is apparently historically on the money, whether it is true or not.



By appropriating life yet being simultaneously inanimate, these things feed into the darker crevices of the mind. This alive-but-not quality is shared with puppets, dolls, and ventriloquists' dummies. They are the closest things we have to the living dead.

Here are MP3s from two very clockwork-sounding tracks with videos that are packed full of eerie imagery.

This Dead Can Dance track scared me frigid when it used to appear on No Disco, and, err, it still does and all. Fuck. No cheese for me tonight.

MP3: Dead Can Dance-The Carnival is Over



MP3: Aphex Twin-Nannou



There will be a few album reviews coming next. And I don't know where my last post, on Annie, went. It's just gone!? Edit: It came back. Hoorah.

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone yadda yadda yadda...

For the first time in a few years Saint Patrick's day saw some fine weather and it was in a sprightly mood I headed over the town to catch the Kells parade.

I shouldn't have bothered. It was a fuckin disgrace.

In retrospect, I might have heeded the omens. As I neared the town, Mundy's execrable 'Galway Girl' drifted over the air from some far off hell. It was about then that I began to realise that the ginormous traffic jam of white vans full of sweaty gombeens I was walking alongside wasn't waiting for the parade to pass by. It was the parade.

Now, normally the Kells parade is nothing spectacular. We are not exactly the most cultured town, but we always manage to rustle a couple of marching bands (trucked down from the north in cramped containers) and get some weird 'oul local fella dressed up as St Patrick to throw a few green chupa chups to the kids. Because, really, what is a parade if not for the children? Sure, there might be a few local businesses advertising their wares, normally through handmade signs on the back of floats otherwise decorated. And you wouldn't begrudge them, because there would be enough colour and pageantry to amuse the youngsters elsewhere.

Not this year though. Nuh huh. This year the kids were treated to a grim, crawling procession of local small business fuckwits desperately advertising their soon to be defunct Celtic Tiger effluent. Van after van, truck after truck, all carting gigantic digitally printed signs offering us (and repeat after me in a North Meath monotone) Cavihhhy Wall Solushions, Timber management, Seweherage Disposaahl, Vehicaal Recoverrrrrreeeeee.... Most of the shameless cretins didn't even run to a green balloon or ribbon hanging off the aerial - the budget was obviously blown on the 20 foot hoarding behind the van. It was naked, cynical opportunism and a sickening reminder of aspects of Ireland of which none of us should be proud. St Patrick's day is our national holiday for fuck's sake, not a five minute commercial break on City channel.

Imagine, for a minute, that you are on holidays in some small European town. You find out that it is their national day and you'll be lucky enough to catch their parade. What do you expect? A bit of colour? Music? National dress? Or a never-ending cavalcade of dumpy little men offering the best value in septic tank management/solutions/recovery/delete as appropriate.


local businesses had been working on their colourful floats for months


this bright creation from Oristown Vehicle recovery was a particular hit with the kids.

The little fella next to me asked his mother if that was all there was this year? I wanted to grab him and say "No my son. No, that is not all there is. Because later, you can follow your dad down to the local pub and watch these scaldy buffoons take part in another age old Irish tradition. The one where they drink 8 pints of lager and bellow along to Journey's 'Don't stop believing' with the spit hanging from their chins."

Happiness is a Low Hum: The Inaugural Compost Mix.

Don't worry, Lolomix hasn't gone into hibernation (Lolo is working on one at the moment, in fact), but I've decided to try my hand at posting the odd mixtape.

I've zipped this first one nice and tight and it should open into 11 separate files grouped as one album. It's a sort of ambient electronic bunch of tunes with the more dancey stuff loaded at the front end. I wanted it to sound like the kind of mix to which you might flake out on the last night bus down the country, or dive deep into during the small hours when your body is wrecked but your brain can't sleep. Anyone who knows me knows that I listen to lots of music that sounds like broken fridges or dying wasps, so I'd like to reassure them that I've gone light on that type of thing for the sake of everyone's ears. The next mix will be something completely different. The Guardian's guide to 1,000 songs has me dipping in and out of classic rock recently and I'm listening to lots of post punk too.

Hope you like 'Happiness is a Low Hum', and please let me know what you think. I'll be reviewing Kells St Patrick's Day parade on Wednesday. See you then!



Tracklisting:

1: The Prelude (Final Fantasy III): Nobuo Uematsu
2: America: Efdemin
3: So Weit Wie Noch Nie: Jurgen Paape
4: Rigning Niu: Yagya
5: Shisheido: Fennesz
6: Made a Tree on the Wold: Telefon Tel Aviv
7: I am Speaking through Barbara: The Fun Years
8: True Enemies and False Friends (Yesteryears Suite): Klimek
9: Chair and Acoustic Guitar: Chihei Hatakeyama
10: Chimeras: Tim Hecker
11: An Ending (Ascent): Brian Eno

Download: Compost Mix 1: Happiness is a Low Hum

The scourge of suburbia

I got thinking about our leylandii trees today. My Dad, displaying a disturbing level of childish excitement, bought a new chainsaw in Lidl with the specific purpose of chopping them down. The leylandii tree sometimes gets described as the scourge of suburbia. It's easy to see why. It grows like fuck and has an extremely wide (if shallow) root system that spreads into neighbouring gardens and often blocks drains. People moving into new houses often plant leylandii as a low maintenance, quick growing hedge, a green buffer to fall between pervy old neighbours' eyes and spouses' bronzing baps. Additionally, they are extremely dense, giving them the ability to block out noise (perfect for when uncle Cormac brings a couple of badgers up from Laois so the pet pitbull can have a bit of craic without worrying the neighbours).

Yet woe betide the inexperienced gardener who plants these aggressive shrubs without foresight. Because of their shallow roots they often grow lanky and topple over, smashing sheds, roofs, dreams and in the sad case of Llandon Burdon - shot dead in a leylandii dispute - even life itself. Ours are about 30 foot now and apparently constitute such a risk to society that an enigmatic man turned up at the door one day offering to chop them down for what he pitched as the bargain price of two thousand quid. By buying a chainsaw for €74.99 in Lidl, my Dad reckons he is going to shove it to the mystery man and make a saving of €1,925.01. He obviously hasn't worked the value of a human limb into this equation.


come on and prune me if ye think yer 'ard enough

I'll miss 'em when they are gone though. During summer nights, when I open my bedroom window to let in the night, I can sense them easily, looming and swaying in the dark. They are scented too and add a sort of woody ambiance to the garden air. Behind them lies a noisy football pitch that gets taken over by nocturnal hordes of bebo spawn. They are out there right now as it happens, gobbling yips (Kells street term for pills y'all) and messing around with some sort of motor bike which probably has a live cat tied to the back of it. The trees soften the chatter of noise from the pitch.

But they have to go. We looked into a drain near the back of the house today and hairy tangles of roots were busting through the soil and crawling thirstily toward the water pipe. This was creepy considering the trees themselves are about 11 meters from the house. The sight of the roots that close to the house gave the upcoming chainsaw massacre a personal edge for my father. After considering them for a few seconds he started pretending to choke himself, looked at me with a wild glint in his eye and said "did you ever see that film with the trees?"
"Which one?"
"the one where the trees start coming through walls and strangling people."
Yikes. The chainsaw comes out for its maiden run next week.



I wonder will Doves pull an Elbow this year and go nuclear with their forthcoming album Kingdom of Rust? I like their new single a lot. Because the web sheriff is after it, I can only post the video (below). Anyways the song has a rousing mariachi style clip to it, slightly tempered by some politely psychedelic xylophone sounds during its later moments. The vocal melody - funnily enough - is a big, sweeping, mournful north of England affair with lyrics about rusting factories, love and birds in flight over the moors. Here is a bonus MP3, Sea Song, from the stunning Lost Souls record. I only came back to Lost Souls recently and it floored me. Such a haunted album. It has more spooks in it than the big containment unit in Ghostbusters. Sea song sees the Goodwin brothers playing harmonica and keening from the deck of a spectral galleon in the fog.

MP3: Doves-Sea Song

Kingdom of Rust


Finally, I am seeking a ticket for Animal Collective in Dublin on the 27th. If you have one spare I'd be more than happy to purchase it :) email asleepontheheap@gmail.com

Lip my stockings. Yes! Please lip them (Soundtracks part 6)

What the fuck is happening to Ireland? Just as we are trying to adjust to the stinking death rattle of our poisoned economy, some utter loons start spraying bullets around the North like it's 1992. Are we in a space/time vortex? If I open my wardrobe will it be full of black Nirvana T Shirts artfully splattered with domestos? Is the statue of Mary outside the Credit Union about to up sticks and march around the town handing out butter vouchers? The mind boggles.


Helloo Helloo. It's good to be back.

Here are two distractions for you if the internet hasn't stopped working due to a Bórd na Móna strike in Crossmolina.

Éoin Butler of the Irish Times and formerly of Mongrel has got a shiny new blog right here. I think he's a mega writer who perhaps had a few fetters put on him by the Times. I predict that the new writing on his blog will be closer to his Mongrel style which always mixed seriousness with utter absurdity.

Ciarán and Gavin from Goldmine Trash have a new project going called Stuck Records. It's in its infancy, but it looks great. In good old Smash Hits style, they seem to be dipping into a very mixed bag of music and rating it. This is a welcome addition in a world of Pavement equals year zero blogs. Yeah and I include mine in that, although I did write a post or two about Glenn Campbell.

Today's soundtrack is one of my very favourites, the Lost in Translation soundtrack. This is not just because the movie contains the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in the cinema, all wrapped up in gauzy pink, like a peach in an expensive stocking.....drooool. Nope. It is because Sophia Coppolla pulled off the tricky feat of entwining the soundtrack and visuals of the film so tightly together that the resulting atmosphere is a model of how to correctly use this type of soundtrack, let's call it the cobbled together variety (i.e. not all the music was written purposefully for the film).

Coppolla is never one to tack a chundering ballad on the closing credits of her movie while key scenes appear projected across a director's chair as Mr Nickleback emotes. Instead, as Lost in Translation elegantly demonstrates, the music enhances the overall feeling of the movie. In this case, a sort of dreamy, jet-lagged disorientation compounded by being in an alien place. Coppolla is so good at this that I often wonder what came first, the scene or the tune. See also The Virgin Suicides, and to odder, less successful, effect, Marie Antoinette.

Here are two cuts from Lost in Translation. The first, by French pop group Phoenix is heard by the central characters during a psychedelically lit night of chaos and fun in Tokyo. Because it is playing inside the film (in a club) I think it is technically called diagetic music. The second, a delicate instrumental piece by Squarepusher, plays out as Scarlett Johannson sits lonely in a window and watches tiny lights flash on in the Tokyo evening with the city spread below her. I think it is non-diagetic 'cos only the viewer hears it. Anyway, that scene in particular is goosebump beautiful and an A1 example of the wonders of music and image combined.

MP3: Phoenix-too young

MP3: Squarepusher-Tommib

Best of Luck

So it is Choice music award night tonight...

Here's who I think should win



or



Best of luck doods. Watch this space for a longer blog before bedtime. Ciao