Word[s] of the Day - Goon Gumpa

Tweet "I suppose you get to see giraffes and all where you come from?", was the comedic utterance that startled me from my snooze between Kells and Navan on the bus yesterday. Thank god for that thin-haired old lady and her well-intentioned - yet bizzare - conversation with the African dude in the seat in front of me. If it wasn't for her I would have slept on as far as Dublin. Ya see, they have these new double deckers on the 109 route now which have loads of legroom - most likely in response to a litany of complaints about the previous generation of human crumpling 'commuter' buses (Bus Eireann 1.0) - so it is easy to buy a ticket to Navan, snooze luxuriously, and wake up in Bus Áras. Or even worse, on the flipside, to buy a ticket to Kells and wake up in an exotic corner of southern Ulster called Tierworker or Ballyjamesduff.

how many towns have this shit in the middle of them? hah?

Kells/Dublin is my usual vector, but some terribly important business brought me to Navan Shopping Centre yesterday. Navan. The void. The place where you go shopping, or where you go to take the odd terribly unavoidable/important trip, and yesterday was mad important. I had to exchange a couple of old Nintendo DS games for the latest Zelda game, and Xtravision in Kells didn't meet my needs. That's the sort of serious stuff that brings a man to Navan (Ireland's leading palindromatic town).

While I was there, I had a wander around the shopping centre to see how things are ticking over in Nyaahvaahn since the hard times kicked in. It seems they're doing alright over there, or at least a lot better than Kells or Drogheda are faring right now. The place was abuzz with the usual mixture of jerky-headed bad teens milling around the automatic doors and slopey farmers from the sticks homing towards the calvita/valu/jam shelves in Tesco. The car park was full too, and a family with five or six real kids (but with the collective weight of 13 kids) argued over Tango flavours on a five-tango-can offer in the Euro-squared shop. Maybe it was the good weather, but Navan seemed to be, by all empirical evidence, in rude health yesterday. Which left me feeling a little bit broken when I walked through Kells later.

The town is (for want of a better term) a ruinous fuckheap this weather. It's a boulevard of broken lives and dreams. A euthanasia clinic for Indian restaurants which open about twice a year, and close about three times a year if that's possible? An over-housed corner of the commuter belt, full of Dublin families who work in Dublin, shop in Dublin, and probably wish they were out in Dublin every waking minute.

David McWilliams [our premier cliché mongering spanner] calls commuters in Kells the 'Kells' angels' and reckons they are representative of Dublin commuters as a whole. Yep, a town used in kid's history books to illustrate the perfect plan of an modern Irish town built around a monastery, has, not only in the last eight years been absorbed into a fungal splodge of white semi-detached houses but, worse still, reduced to a David McWilliams cliché. That shit is okay in characterless mainstreets pretending to be towns in Westmeath (that's right Delvin, I'm talking about you bitch!), but in Kells, it's just a travesty. I stood on the hill of Lloyd last week and looked at Kells from an elevated vantage point familiar to me from my childhood. In my memories the town was compact and grey when viewed from there, the familiar oval shape of a monastic town (like Swords or Armagh), with the round tower, the old church, and St Columcille's house providing a familiar skyline. Now, nothing dominates. The old town is a greyish yolk in a sprawl of identikit white housing estates. It's a truly beautiful town fucked rotten by the 'commuter belt' - soon to be renamed the 'empty semi-d belt'.

We have about seven of these; the primary school kids can knock a new one out before lunch.

Sure now that we are all here, I might as well throw in an MP3 for yucks. The confusingly medievally titled 'Candy Shoppe' is the opening track from Ohio drone enthusiasts Emeralds' latest album 'Does it look like I'm here?'. It's not very representative of their work because it sounds like the opening credits of a final fantasy game, whereas most of their discography sounds like all the original Krautrock drone bands working together on a project where they have to imagine what the internet will sound like. It's ace. And so is everything else they have ever done. Go buy some stuff by Emeralds. And shop in Kells.

MP3: Emeralds-Candy Shoppe

Mystic Meg sez: Gardenhead's next blogs will be about Irish bands, and, also, photos he took in Kells.
Mystic Meg also sez: No. Don't go away. The photos will be interesting. Honest.

Day 30: your favourite song at this time last year

Tweet Last fm is great, but it doesn't seem to get used that much anymore. I'm worried that it's slowly getting slurped into the chute that leads to the shitheap where bebo and other banjaxed sites rot. For the purpose of this post, I used last fm to check out what I was listening to during the later stages of May 2009. It appears that, album-wise, John Cale's 'Paris 1919' was squaring up to the Thermals' 'Now we can see' in a fight for my affections.

This is no surprise, because John Cale's 'Paris 1919' tends to square up against every other fleck of music on my iPod in a fight for my affections. It always wins out in the long run. It's a bruiser, albeit a melancholy one. I'm glad that last fm threw it up during the meme's last gasp. It makes a fitting end to this thing.

Day 29: A song from your childhood

Tweet

Back in '84 everything was this colour. We lived in the glow of a nuclear sunset from Chernobyl

I have a very deep, primal memory of a trapezoid of evening sunlight moving slowly across the kitchen wall of my house, the smell of rashers, and this song playing on a radio somewhere.



"That great Cathedral space which was childhood" ~ Virginia Woolf

PLUG-A-SAURUS REX!

Tweet Is it Thursday? Are you bored? Do you dream of dancing like a loaded panda on funny pills? Are you a bit broke? HEY...the last bit really doesn't matter, 'cos PANDAmonium is free in. It's in Pravda (Liffey Street), and the main DJ is Loreana who used to make Lolomixes for this very blog - and who plays garage, indie, twee, psychedelia, dance, northern soul, and plain oul' pop-from-whenever all night long! Thursdays @ 8.30pm. Be there and be a bear.

Flaming Lipsos y chemical hermanos? - Subtitulado? - Español? Fuckin' Bueno!

Day 28: A song that makes you feel guilty

Tweet Being a guilty kinda chap (the nebulous sort. I haven't killed a man) I can imagine how I might listen to a song for solace if I felt that way inclined, but I cannot for the life of me imagine how a song could make me feel guilty in and of itself.

So no dice on the song 28 concept. But hey, what the heck: out of pervosity, here's a fucking class, ultra lo-guilt, humdinger of party song that my American uncle Bob and I managed to rustle up for the 'heap.

Day 27: A song that you wish you could play

Tweet Considering that I can't play anything - I sort of wish I could play, well, anything. Indeed, down the years I've considered the skills, or smaller body parts, such as baby toes, that I'd swap to just have the ability to hold a note, tune a guitar, beat a paint-can to a rhythm, or even manage to synchronise my wibbly fruit-picking dance to the beat at a techno set.

Way back when, like most introverted teens into music, I used to fantasize about being great on guitar. I had a lucid dream about actually being Johnny Marr once, and I can remember it as clearly as other events from the year of 17. As an adult, I still wonder about what it must be like to be able to play music; still in the same jealous way - as if that particular skill is the key an entire world of human experience closed off to me. It's orchestras I think of now, not bands. I wonder how it must feel to be part of a complex mechanism made from extremely talented people working in harmony, like a single organic entity (ideally), all spinning individual strands of one composer's brilliant vision? Exciting? Meditative? Fulfilling? Gah, the world of musical ability is a foreign country.

I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be the solo violinist who swoops into Philip Glass's 'Einstein on the Beach' during some of that opera's most emotive moments, the Knee Play bits. Just like 3 mins 56 seconds below. I'd trade a nipple. Seriously, a nipple.

Day 26: A song you can play on an instrument.

Tweet I have rudimentary guitar skills. My voice is half Kells town councillor/ half magpie. I'm just not that dude. The dude with the instrument and sex appeal. Although, I can just about manage one thing. Thank you ringo starr and your shitty singing ability. You gifted me this magical Paul McCartney nursery rhyme that I can just about pull off - even the chords.

ALTOGETHER NOW: "In the town/ where I was born/ lived a man/ who sailed to sea."

When I get carried away at Karaoke, I sometimes spout out "full steam ahead Mr Harrison" in my feeble appropriation of a Liverpudlian accent.

Day 25: A song that makes you laugh.

Tweet Ween are a band for chronic stoners right? I think that's why most of their wacked out jokes go over my head. A few years ago, I missed a Kings of Leon gig (yah, yah, I know, I liked them ok?) to check out Ween in the Ambassador. I came to the gig after an epic struggle with their back catalogue. I mean, months of marijuana-free days and nights had been spent trying to parse what the deal was with these dudes. I finally resolved myself to the fact that I would never 'get' Ween unless I smoked prodigious quantities of dope. They are the druggies' druggies.

To paraphrase Jason Pierce, Ween's albums are music written by people on drugs for other people on drugs to enjoy. Their fans call themselves 'Weenies'. A full fledged 'Weenie' was stuck in front of us in the Ambassador. She took her top off and whupped the bra out after the second song. By the time they were three songs in, she was rolling around like a snake on the Ambassador carpet and screaming that she wanted Ween 'in' her. It was a dismal gig. Gene Ween was not well. It transpired that he was in cold turkey from all sorts of class A drugs. They wanted to get off stage fast. Meanwhile, their odd hippie fanbase from the states were pulling demented Woodstock shapes in front of us few perplexed punters. I hated that gig so bad.

Until they played this.

'The Mollusc' makes me laugh out loud.

Day 24: A song that you want to play at your funeral.

Tweet I watched this yoke on Sky 1 once, about how many English people who popped their clogs are getting 'Candle in the Wind' or Robbie William's 'Angels' played at their funerals. Cringe dot com.

I am not sure if I would like music to be played at my funeral at all. I am an atheist, but I would still like to imagine a priest saying a few words and it all going down in the traditional Irish way. Although....................if I was really pushed, I would have to be an afterlife smart-arse. And probably request that something by generational cretin Timmy Mallett be played.


Aww Yeah

Day 23: A song that you want played at your wedding

Tweet My sister, who is getting married in October, decided she wants Bruce Springsteen's 'Jersey Girl' as the first dance at her wedding. She picked it out of an A4 sheet of paper that had about ten options and has since learned to love the song on her iPod. Hmmm. I dunno.

If I got married it would not be in a church. There probably would not be a lot of people there. Indeed, it would be under a tree, so people would not fit. A tree that sheds blossoms or brightly coloured leaves. And the music played would naturally have to be under-tree music. Something terribly weird and pagan, I think - like this perhaps...



What is this enigmatic song about? The postman? The beginning of the universe? Drug baloney? Would it work at a wedding under a tree?

Regardless, they'd be a great wedding band, probably able to switch up from a waltz to jig in a jif! <3 you Incredible String Band.

Day 22: A song that you listen to when you're sad

Tweet Good - now we are in familiar territory. I am a weepy man, and when I am sad I listen to sad music to remind me that I am not the only sad person in the world. There are two pieces of music that I would turn to for solace if I was in absolute ribbons. Both are from movie soundtracks. One is Danny Elfman's theme to 'Edward Scissorhands' the other is John Barry's theme to 'Midnight Cowboy'.


He looks so much like troubled nearly-man snooker player jimmy white. Both broke my heart


I watched midnight cowboy when i was in a weird humour in Canada once. As a result, it is BURNED into my pre-frontal cortex. It is such a sad film, but the saddest part is the shitty wallpaper in the New York flats where Joe Buck hustles. That Wallpaper is decrepit, snot green, and tragic.

Day 21: A song you listen to when you are happy

Tweet I'm terrified. Terrified to acknowledge when this song came out 'cos it will show my age. When it did, I was in first year in Trinity College and living in a moisture afflicted flat at the corner of Parnell Street with two good pals. One of these pals used to drink buckfast in the shower and put his cigarettes out on any piece of foodstuff within arm distance of him. Gross, I know. But nostalgia is winning now and I would love to live there again. We watched Toy Story a lot. One night I came home and had to talk calmly to one of the dudes for a couple of hours because he had taken a ridiculous amount of LSD and had spent half the night worrying about college and the other half building small, colour-coded piles of Maynards wine gums. He bought two large bags of them in the shop and explained to me that he thought the green ones would be happier if they were all together. After the crisis was resolved, we watched Toy Story.

I was so happy living in that flat. This song was on repeat while we were there. And we always goofed and danced around to it. Happiness. [it's actually Daft Punk right?]

Day 20: A song you listen to when you're angry

Tweet Anger music: this is an entire genre of music I don't understand. I don't think I've ever consciously listened to a song while angry, and I would never turn to my iPod if I felt peed off.

I was at Oxegen last year with a bunch of friends who managed to whip themselves into a frenzy of uncontained anger when Rage Against the Machine were playing. "It's RAGE Darragh" they told me, with froth bubbling out of the side of their mouths. "RAGE. THE FUCKING RAGE". I was very far back in the crowd, tired, and all I could see was an ageing dude with dreads doing a Karaoke rundown of songs that I used to dance to at juniour Flix, in between the ravey bits which I preferred.

If I was very angry and needed to placate myself with something musical, I would probably listen to something quiet and  contemplative to become calm; perhaps something off 'The Pearl'. 'The Pearl' is - in my humble opinion - Brian Eno's most astonishing collaborative album. He spins an ocean of calm out of Harold Budd's lonely piano chords.

Day 19: a song from your favourite album

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lay down all thoughts and surrender to the void

Wow. This is a hard one. My favourite album, hah? Technically, and objectively, it is probably 'Revolver'. That's the album to which I have had more goose-pimply private revelatory moments than any other. Once, at Christmas, when I was around 16, I was at home on my own, and tried to think of something cool I could do due to the fact I was alone. I ended up turning off all the lights in the house except for the ones on the Christmas tree and proceeded to lie on the floor under said tree, staring at the lights, hollering along to 'Revolver' which was turned up so loud that people in Navan could probably hear it.

Yet over the last decade, I've returned to two albums time and time again. These albums are Neutral Milk Hotel's 'In the Airplane over the Sea' and Guided By Voices' 'Bee Thousand'. Yah, yah, indie clichés I know; but both albums are blessed with beautifully complete aesthetics. All of the songs on 'In the Airplane over the Sea' feed into an unresolved, discombobulated love story between a two headed projection of Jeff Mangum's inner child and Anne Frank, and Bee Thousand is all tied together by....ummm....booze? Whatever - 'Bee Thousand' feels really consistent, and this is in spite of Elves getting kicked, people getting smothered by hugs, UFOs appearing over the Ohio suburbs, and spectral women walking through the grounds of mental hospitals.

Yah, to cut this short, I'm cheating again. I should really be posting a song off revolver, but instead I'm posting two songs - one off 'In the Airplane over the Sea' and one off 'Bee Thousand'. Jeff .... Bob? Are ye looking to adopt a 29 year old man as your new son? Look no further. I am a neat non-smoker with a compulsive drive to wash dirty dishes as soon as I see them.

MP3: Neutral Milk Hotel-ghost
MP3: Guided by Voices-The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory

Post Script: I once promised my good friend that I would write some sort of quasi-academic polemic about Guided By Voices. That was a long time ago, but the Guided by Voices screed is still gestating.

Day 18: A song that you wished you heard on the radio

Tweet It's all feckin' and Mumford and Sons these days. The radio sucks. If I was in control, this would get an airing on all stations at least once a day. People would be happier about life in general as a result, I think :)



MP3: Dinosaur Jr-Freak Scene

Day 17: A song that you hear often on the radio

Tweet I'm not a big radio dude, but I like to tune into oldies from time to time. Stuff like Larry Gogan's golden hour. This is a song that always tickles me when I hear it on an oldie show or whatever - and it's on the radio a lot.



Wow! Who is it about, Mick Jagger or Warren Beatty? In fairness, why give a fuck now? It's just a class song about a preening man who thought he was to cool for Carly Simon's love, and it has gloriously transcended it's subject matter.

Day 16: a song that you used to love but now hate

Tweet Are the Offspring the Tory Party of American west coast punks? After the song below, they had a hit with a song called 'why don't you go out and get a job?'. That could possibly be the most hectoring, stuffy slogan to ever be barked over a three chord punk thrasher. What disenfranchised American teen is going to whap out his skateboard and cut a few halfpipes while listening to a fortysomething millionaire asking him "why don't you go out and get a job?" on the headphones?

When I went to the Gaeltacht in Gaoith Dobhair back in '95, I packed a few Offspring and Greenday tees in my bag. I thought that I was the shit. Any alt fourteen year old worth his salt loved the Offspring and Greenday during the heady days of '95. With the power of those tee shirts, I was certain I was going to score. Maybe even feel up a boob. I didn't. It was a dry three weeks. A humiliating three weeks. I got upstaged by an uncharismatic twig from Longford who looked like Nosferatu, yet was able to play Greenday on the electric guitar. He was the sort of fifteen year old dude who came out with humdingers like "is aoibhinn liom Marylin Manson agus i mo thuairimse, tá an t-amhrán 'the beautiful people' an t-amhrám is fearr riamh". He also came back one night, after scoring a girl I fancied and asked us all to smell his fingers. The lesser sexually experienced guys in the house at the time were all so in thrall to him that they stayed up for an extra hour as I tried to sleep while listening to him explain in great detail 'as Gaeilge' how he lost his virginity to a girl two years older than him during the entire song of 'Nothing Else Matters' by Metallica.


terrible song. rips off lovebuzz by nirvana. reminds me of shitty teenage times. how did i ever like it?

Day 15: A song that describes you...

Tweet 'Where you'll find me now', by Neutral Milk Hotel

"But I've let you down/ and swollen and small is where you'll find me now"

This one comes so, so close: 'Gold Soundz' by Pavement

"so drunk in the Autumn sun/ and you're the kind of girl I like/ because you're empty and I'm empty too"

And to prove I'm not a self-loathing trainwreck, hot on Gold Soundz's heels is Love and their song 'Alone again or'

"Yeah, I heard a funny thing/ Somebody said to me/ You know that I could be in love with almost everyone/ I think that people are/ The greatest fun"

I really do think that, and it's a bit revelatory when you think about it, isn't it?



Addenum: for people who've asked me in the past, this blog's url is named after Neutral Milk Hotel's debut album 'On Avery Island'. Also, even though ye all know I'm Darragh by now (apart from Hotpress who imply that I am a cowardly anonymous blogger), the Gardenhead name is cribbed from a song on that album. It is about an nightmarish organic entity that Jeff Mangum imagined had something to do with death and was out to spook him. It was my sorta lyric. And I am not good with song lyrics. Or at least, with the non-abstract ones. [I still can't understand or appreciate 'visions of Johanna' or, indeed, anything by Tom Waits but I FUCKING love Animal Collective's 'who could win a rabbit']

MP3: Neutral Milk Hotel -where you'll find me now
MP3: Love - alone again or

Day 14: A song that nobody would expect you to love

Tweet This is tricky cos I have a reputation with friends as a fella who will listen to absolutely anything. Nevertheless, I have about two curveballs in my repertoire. This is one of them.

Day 13: a song you think is a guilty pleasure

Tweet This is the point where I say "boo/hiss" to the plonker who invented the meme. There is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. Just pleasures. If you like Girls Aloud, you like them because their music is fantastic. The same goes for ABBA, Erasure, Backstreet Boys, Duran Duran, etc etc etc etc. 'Guilty Pleasure' is such an assumptive concept.

Anyway, seeing as I am sticking to this brief, I will post a song. It's not a pop or indie song. It is a song I hear day in and day out in my current professional role, working with children with Autism. One of them loves 'The Bear in the Big Blue House'. So much so, that he earns a chance to watch it on youtube a few times a day if he self-manages his difficult behaviours. The days I teach him, I try my very best to help him achieve his treat of watching the bear on youtube. Partly because I want him to do well, and partly because I think this is one of the most heartbreaking 'goodbye' songs of all time. I've dabbed a sly tear away from my eye during some of the times we watched this.


Saying goodbye to the moon. Oh, bear in your big blue house, you emotionally cripple me.

Day 12: A song from a band you hate

Tweet The overriding soundtrack to the strange alternate reality-bubble we find ourselves in at music festivals tends to be a dull, thunderous thud about a half a mile off. If you mix this noise with ridonculous amounts of alcohol, the smell of hotdog onions on your fingers, the sound of zany campsite chatter, and the hyper-clear/ hyper-profound patter of rain against the sheeting of your tent (made interesting by drug spidey sense), then you are coming close to mapping the strange alchemy that causes music festivals to live on in your memory in the same way that past Christmases do.

Now listen again to that thud in the distance. Go on, try to make it out. It could be something incredibly cool, perhaps life-changing. Like New Order emoting their way through 'Ceremony' at the Electric Picnic a few years back.

Or it could be Faithless.

Yeah, Faithless. Faithless playing their penile-wart of a stadium house song 'God is a DJ'. Every single time you blow out a candle, a sailor dies. Every single time Faithless play 'God is a DJ' at a music festival, the clouds part to reveal a ginormous anus in the sky. Without fail, said cosmic anus opens its sphincter during the song's hammy, manipulative, faux-house crescendo (der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-doop-de-doop-doop-de-doop-doop-de-doop-doop) and spatters ton upon ton of liquid shit into the upturned, eager faces of 60,000 sunburned coprophiliac gobdaws in novelty cowboy hats. They'll all be doing it at Oxegen again this year. Make sure you bring your fecal proof umbrella.

Day 11: A song from your favourite band

Tweet Ya know the type of visual demonstration that's sometimes given by trendy TV lecturers such as Prof. Brian Cox? The sort where they try to demonstrate vast distances in outer space by scaling them down using everyday objects - like when Cox shows the distance between planet pluto and the sun by placing an orange representing the sun in the middle of a football pitch before driving five miles out the road with a raisin or currant that's supposed to be pluto? To shamelessly borrow the analogy, if Guided by Voices, Pavement and Neutral Milk Hotel are mere raisins lying in a field somewhere between my house and Navan, then the Beatles are a big juicy orange sitting on my living room floor.

As far as I am concerned, the Beatles are the beginning, the middle, and the end of most of what is wonderful about music (with Kraftwerk filling in a lot of the gaps). I know in my heart that the day I tire of the Beatles will simply be the day that I tire of all music, or, more realistically, the day my heart gives up.

I'm going to break the rules and post three songs here - one favourite from John, one from Paul, and my favourite collaboration from that tiny venn diagram of the few songs where you can clearly see the joins between their two songwriting styles, with 'A Day in the Life' being an obvious other example from that select pool.

Listen.

Then wonder about what crazy fluke of fortune led to two of the greatest songwriting geniuses of the last century living over the road from one another? Unreal.


This song is always nipping at Wichita lineman's heels to be my favourite song of all time


No wonder Brian Wilson shat himself. Paul McCartney was writing terrifyingly perfect music in '66


*Swoons*

Day 10: A song you can fall asleep to

Tweet This is a powerfully hypnosedative song. I should know, because I listen to a lot of this sort of shit, you see, *snorkle* ugh yeah I am very well placed to write about songs you can fall asl....*snurp* asleep to....*snerpederp* to because i love ambient musi................zzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZ [Fuck off crows - fuck off!!! Why is it always crows? Why can't I have the Joan from Mad Men/paddling pool dream again? No not the beaks, please, please not the beaks. Leave me alone!]



MP3: Taylor Deupree-Northerm

It sounds just like a window frosting over on Christmas eve.

Estates just got REAL!!

Tweet

I live in estate. Its called rockfield. It's not too shabby, apart from the teens in the pitch, the dogshit, and the empty sachets of a mysterious substance called "ice blow" lying around everywhere. It's not as good as Real Estate though. Real estate are a band on the Woodsist label who brought out a marvelous album of sublime and gently addled acousto-delica early this year. This is its cover...

If you smoke enough DMT you too can [imagine you] live in this prime piece of real estate

I would attempt to describe their sound in further detail, but Real Estate sum it up fairly succinctly themselves. According to their myspace page, their music sounds like this....

And who could argue with that?

Thanks to the Yours Truly dudes, Real Estate will be playing Crawdaddy, Tripod (Dublin) tomorrow night, Monday 10th of May. Doors are at 8pm and tickets cost 15 squids. They play the Róisín Dubh, Galway on Tuesday. Alternate these feckers with Built to Spill and Dino Jr in both cities and you are looking at quite the start to the week eh?

Here's an MP3 of one of my favourite songs of the year FTW

MP3: Real Estate-Beach Comber

Day 9: A song that you can dance to

Tweet What can you say about this track which hasn't been said before? A key influence on techno, synth music, NRG pop, and gay club culture. A track that sprouted a spindling, dendretic web that ran, and still runs, through the living history of dance music. Most importantly, it's a song that could eke involuntary arse wriggles from the most knock-kneed, beat-phobic, Whelans based indie dryballs you know, were you to dump them into an appropriate mephedrone riddled sweatbox and pump it over the P.A.

Upon hearing this track, Brian Eno once rang up David Bowie to breathlessly tell him he had heard 'the future'. When I heard Ricardo Villalobos play this in its pure extended (8 minute) state during the peak funtimes of an epic set in the Tivoli a few years back, that was exactly how it still sounded - like the future.

Ever the futurist, Donna paves the way for English World Cup footballing stick insect Peter Crouch

P.S guess what you guys? After the imro shitstorm I've realised I don't post enough Irish interest stuff here. So expect some in the near future. Also, the remaining 'songs of the decade' [judder] are lying around in a bin in my brain somewhere. As soon as I rinse the bin juice off of 'em with a squirt of 'Of Montreal', I'll start posting again. 

My back pages

Tweet As proof that I actually listened to some new music over the last couple of months, here are a few annotated reviews I wrote for the wonderful people at AU Magazine.

Motherfuckin' book of Kells y'all. Listen up and give it back you fusty Trinity boffins.

Future Islands: In evening Air
Thrill Jockey

[on hold 'til the latest AU comes out. I realised today that this hasn't been published yet. Sorry AU. BTW it's a great album ;) ]

Seth Troxler: Boogy Bytes Vol.05
Bpitch Control

The fifth instalment of Bpitch Control’s Boogy Bytes mixtapes sees label head Ellen Alien hand the reins over the stable gates for the first time, inviting DJ du jour Seth Troxler to take the series somewhere new. In spite of a small hiccup, Troxler emerges as an inspired choice – taking the listener on a spiralling liquid journey through the night that exists in his head, confidently progressing from the oceanic house depths of Craig Smith & The Revenge’s ‘The Soul Part II’ into increasingly remote realms of techy strangeness via Alexi Delano’s ‘Molar One’ and Troxler’s own remix of Fever Ray’s ‘Seven’.

The underlying moods of the mix are deliciously discombobulating, slightly spooked and even a bit melancholic. Ably demonstrating the skills behind his current beloved reputation as a DJ, Troxler creates his hall of mirrors out of materials cribbed from a variety of scenes – deep house, minimal, and tinges of dubstep – proving a gifted understanding of the ever-shifting contexts of the European club scene.

As for the hiccup mentioned earlier? It’s the pesky intro, a juddering irony-free monologue about the life of the Berlin clubber that embodies the more, ahem, self-important side of that great city’s scene. Minus this gratuitous lapse into explication, the music on Boogy Bytes Vol.05 is advertisement enough for the Berlin clubbing experience. Indeed, the mix could be the best in the series. It’s hard to listen to the skyscrapingly huge ‘Birds and Souls’ break over Troxler’s remix of Heartthrob’s ‘Signs’ and think otherwise. Almost perfect.

P.S At 5mins 37 this turns into a complete runaway jumbo jet. Michael Mayer dropped it mid-set in Kennedy's last week and boy did that 5 mins 37 bit make my brain goolies throb.

Day 8: A song you know all the words to

Tweet There are so few of these. So very, very few. I'm just not a lyrics retainer. In all honesty I'd struggle with getting the lyrics to 2 Unlimited's 'No Limits' out there at a push. However, for some reason, something to do with the relationship between long term memory skills and teenage emotional torment, I can ream off Biblical chunks of Smiths' songs. Not something that's ever served me well in a practical situation to date, but who knows, maybe someday I will escape from the ultimate scrape based on my ability to recite 'William it was really nothing' from start to finish.



Weirdly, it's just struck me that I could manage Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan's nightmarishly slurpy Eurovision entry 'Rock n' Roll years' too - on account of being exposed to it repeatedly in a palliative care home I used to work in. Bleak times all round then.

IMRO: Part 2

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Myself, Niall and Shane and our legal advisor met with some of the guys in imro today. The general feeling was that a lot of concerns were heard and a lot of things were clarified to a point. The most important aspect of it was that the communication between us and them now seems to be on the level. We will be meeting them again in time. I am sure the others will post soon, and go into as much detail as they can. When they do, I will link to the specific posts here.

Niall's update