coimetromania

Tweet Coimetromania, hah? When it's at home, it's defined as a compulsion to lurk around graveyards. Last week, a touch (only a touch mind you) of coimetronmania compelled me to go poking around the graveyard in Kells monastery like a bit of a weirdo.

The monastery church was burnt down at one point, rebuilt, used as a horse barracks by Cromwell, then extended to make our current church of Ireland. The round tower and a few high crosses are on the grounds, but there are also a bunch of graves dating back as far as the sixteenth century. Some are in really good nick, others are cracked, shattered, overgrown with creepers, and burst by searching roots.

At the front of the graveyard the headstones are in the best condition, lined up neatly and staring inscrutably out from the hill of Kells and south towards Navan and beyond. But they are the least interesting ones. At the back of the graveyard, where cedars stand stiff and dark, there are shattered stones with inscriptions in archaic English, weird little verses, curling words that run to the very edges of huge slabs, and, in some cases, frightening black gaps under monuments. How deep do they go? I saw a fleshy white tail disappear into one and was reminded of the time our art class visited another cemetry in the town, near the school, which is even older, and someone found a skull. That's right, a skull.

MP3: Demdike Stare-Caged in Stammheim

You know how Boards of Canada showed touches of evil on their second LP Geogaddi? Well, Demdike stare have taken that whiff of the occult and run a hundred dark miles with it, leaving cloven footprints and slaughtered babies in their wake. Named after the mad staring eyeballs of a witch from the notorious Pendle Coven called Granny Demdike, the Manchester duo create music that is hard to define - a gibbering and squeaking monster that squats in a rank darkness cannibilising shreds of dub techno and ethnic music. Like their pal Shackleton, they acquaint themselves with ideas of death as a state of being - one of their albums is an exploration of the trance-like voyage from life described in the Tibetan Book of the Death. Check them out if you dare.

NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW NSFW

#teamnathan - my top tracks of 2010 (7-6)

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Oh, how many lives there are. Did you ever think about it, how many lives, like yours, a night contains? I really thought about it once one night when I was a teenager in Canada. I sat on the bonnet of a car on a hot summer night and I saw all of Montreal spread out in front of me, racing down the mountain from my feet, towards sky scraper rectangles and the scattered cinders of outlying towns. All that life. All those humans. Each one alive like me. And above it all the moon arcing high, shining on how many other cities? Shining halfway across the world on Galway, shining on my brother, shining on millions of lives like yours and mine.

'Scavenging' (second from bottom left) just downloaded the 320kbps version of the new James Blake album, the beaky fuck.

#7 Gorrilaz - On Melancholy Hill


Ah who needs Blur? It's all here as good as it ever was. The concentrated melancholy nucleus of Damon Albarn's formidable craft. The soft slightly smudged voice (when Damon sings sad, the world swoons sadly with him), the dancing down a never-ending-staircase-of-sad song structure, the double-tracked Damons drafted in to sing sad harmonies, and the spell the entire thing casts over four dejected minutes, a broken heart afloat on a beautiful sea. 

See also: Badhead/ Resigned/ Out of Time/ The last song on any mix I made for a girl between the years 1996 and 2003.

#6 Birds and Souls - Birds and Souls
A quick digression on dance music culture - what's the story with mugshots of DJs and producers? Why is dance culture chocka with mugshots of DJs and producers shot in high res and often with stupid arty/artless things happening to their faces? Like, if you go onto any techno/dance message board and look at the millions of tryhard avatars of hi-resolution nobodies you will see this. You'll see how they all mug at an imaginary [insert trendy magazine here] photographer, and you'll see them all with their best sunglasses-askew-and-headphones-balancing-on-buff-shoulders faces on. Such an earnest culture of the face.

I digressed because both the Fabric and Boogybytes series of mixes have cover art that consists of DJs and producers with weird shit happening to their faces. In high resolution. On the Fabric mixes, they get covered in paint. On the Boogybytes mixes they get snapped, high resolution, after getting hit in the face by something invisible and malignant (most likely air from a hairdryer but possibly the riff out of a guitar). And, umm, this next song is on my favourite mix of the year, which is Seth Troxler's Boogybytes volume 5.



Towards the end of Troxler's mix, there is an inspired moment when it sounds like the storm clouds open and the mix begins to precipitate raw emotion - a break in the prevailing weather systems. The tune that burbles up into the clean air is a track called 'Birds and Souls' by 'Birds and Souls', who I had never heard before.

'Birds and Souls' is made up of two parts. Part one slithers along on a burbling mantra of druggo vocals and liquid instrumentation from the Rolling Stones/ Primal Scream school of bluster. Part two drops like the universe's balls, swinging majestically into the kind of 4/4 groove the Rapture once nearly owned - the sort that pumps out giddy phermones irresistible to indie kids and ravers alike. It destroys.

And yet, there is that troubled lyric. "My soul weighs a thousand pounds/ and four ounces/ my soul weighs a thousand pounds/ touch the mountain/ touch the ground".

For such a killer and heady production, the lyric is a repeated exhortation of world-weariness.  In spite of the groove's antecedents, it doesn't wanna be adored, or fly higher than the sun, or move on up now. It is a pregnant heaviness hanging in the hedonism. A reminder that the party goes on, but it doesn't go on unchecked.

Get on it.

Maxithermal's Golden Greats #5 (Storkboy does not like Killarney part one of about four)

Tweet The brother once lived in Killarney y'know?

I didn't. But I have no doubt you will fill in the gaps in my knowledge of your sibling and his erstwhile place of abode. 

He's a man of the world, is the brother. A cosmopolitan you might say. He's been all over - Australia, Galway, Ringsend, Yorkshire, and Killarney. And I'll tell you a good wan. It's on account of the sewerage. The shite. That's right, the brother travels the world and makes his fortune out of shite. 

A rare profession.

I'll tell ye a funny wan, will I? This'll give you a real good laugh. 

I'll let my ribs know that there is no doubt they are about to be tickled.

The brother has a PhD from the National Universities of Ireland. He is a qualified docther in the sciences, no less. He brings home the piece of paper with the proof in it - written in Latin, the ould language.

"There's no flies on you" says I, when he comes in the door. And do you know what he says?

I do not.

"There's plenty of flies on me at the best of times...", isn't that something now, to come from an educated man with the qualification? 

It is a strange admission I will admit. 
Begob I had to ponder that one. But you know what he says next, the joker? "Sure anyone who works around shite would be crawling with flies". Crawling with flies. On account of the shite. Isn't that a great one? Didn't I tell you the brother is a funny man? And do you know what else?

No. I cannot for the life of me divine what you are about to say, I'm afraid.

When he was hikin' around the world he kept one of those websites. "A blog" says he. Oh the brother was well ahead of the times back then. He still is a forward looking man.
A veritable Mystic Meg

Well, the brother doesn't do the 'blogging' anymore. He declared it dead, no less, in 2006. He's a man for the twitter now. "Brevity is the soul of twit", says he, quoting the bard. But begob he penned some funny words when he was living in Killarney.

The brother is a modest man, and wouldn't share them himself. So I will share them for him...

Contrived Killarney, oh how dull you seem to me, with your cute-hoor jarveys, porcelain leprechauns, tired rebel ballads, uninspired seafood restaurants, and endless throughput of grey-haired geriatric globe-hoppers. It can be overwhelmingly awful living in a tourist destination that lacks a soul; a place which seems moulded by the tourists' wants rather than being an independent entity of its own. This is opposed to, say, a place like Galway. Galway demands respect; it's a place that is more than able to assimilate tourists into its laughing silly-hatted essence. Galway basically doesn’t give a fuck about how it should appear. It just 'is' and the 'is' happily appeals to tourists.

Unfortunately, tourists are Killarney. That’s what makes it such a sad, shallow, transient place. Worse, it’s mostly shotgun tourism. Hop on a bus - bang  - the lakes of Killarney - bang -  Muckross house - bang - the ring of Kerry - bang - back to town for a seafood platter and the old crook-neck round the door of several pubs - bang - glass of Guinness in a pub that’s suitably suffused with ‘blarney’ and ‘the craic’ - bang - watch indigenous musicians with a knotted, fawning expression of cultural appreciation - bang - move on to the next pub which hopefully isn’t ruined by too many tourists - bang - click, click, shit, errr, reload - bang, make way and let a fresh batch keep the turnstiles turning - bang, bang, bang.

I sleep with the window open. The rebel ballads drift across town from The Scott’s Garden Hotel. The session ends each night on the same three songs. Green Fields of France. A Nation Once Again. Amhrain na bhFiann. All are sung in a rousing battle-cry by the band in their trademark Derek Warfield style (and are mumbled along to in a wordless nasal whine by the tourists). Little known fact - the nasal whine of Maureen-Slizlky-Corbett from Milwaukee (2.78% Irish and proud) comes in at a whopping decibel level just under that of a jumbo-jet engine taking off, but over that of a donkey bray mid-castration (Lapara and Alleman, Acoustic Physics; 1999).

Now, back to the ballad session. Killarney is once again preparing to take on the feared black and tans at three in the morning. Pub Patriotism I like to call it. The drunken Killarney twentysomething captivates a clucking brood of Americans with the tale of how his uncles (Wolfe Tone and Michael Collins) planned to blow up Oliver Cromwell and his friend Edward Carson the night they stayed in The Great Southern hotel. However, said conspiring uncles got drunk on a bottle of TCP up in t'Reeks and danced their mortal toes off with the miniature folk ‘til the following morning. Still drunk, they remembered their plan and they hurriedly exploded the bomb under what they thought was Cromwell’s automobile - it later turned out to be an old tree shaped like a 1992 Vauxhall Cavalier. “Yer drunk yer drunk ya silly old fool/ still you cannot see/ that is the oul tinwhistle that your mother gave to me”.  It’s a little known fact that we Irish were always better at singing about rebellion than taking part in it (O’ Connor; Cowardly Drunken Bragging: An Irish Case Study, 1978). Anyway, I hear and think about all this seven nights a week. 

I have one scientific conclusion. The same guys sing the same songs in the same order because there’s a new audience for them every night. 

That’s a lonely buzz.

It was with some relief I retired to Ceathra Rua for the weekend, where, among other things, I attended the Doilin boat races. Afterwards, I drank Guinness from a warm keg on the pier in front of a soul-stirring backdrop comprising the Twelve Bens and the Atlantic Ocean. All around me people spoke and laughed casually in Irish, and nobody was in a rush to get anywhere. Later, in a bursting-full pub, some crazy musicians launched into a rousing version of John Denver's 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' - sung as gaeilge. We danced like lunatics to The Joyce Country Ceilidh Band. And you know, there were satisfied tourists here too. They did not seem to mind that there was an absence of the bang - bang - bang - instant hits of twee pot-of-gold wank, or handlebar-moustache wielding balladeers. Those things are just for the Disneyworld OAP-brigades. May they stick to Killarney.

But enough of happy weekends, let’s get back to what I really enjoy writing about -  things that annoy me. A year ago, I wrote of Spud-boy the wunderkind of the west, a man whose foggy-bottle mountains still loom in my nightmares. Every now and then, I am forced by circumstance to live with characters like Spud; people who (to me at least) are the sum of several unpalatable personality traits. Naturally, I then foist yet more repugnant idiosyncrasies upon them; until eventually the bespoke party transcends their status as a mere individual to become something larger and more frightening - a bit like the pink goo in Ghostbusters II. After a few months of co-habitation, a person like this eventually develops into a typecast symbol, representing vast swathes of (as I stereotype it) stereotyped society.

Subsequently, my relationship with the person is doomed to petty hatred. They become the epicentre of all my disgust; my disgust at their housekeeping habits, or even, my disgust at their cultural tastes. It is not unlike Yeats’ Connemara fisherman in reverse, I know. It is the simplification of the complicated on my part, for the sake of lazy compartmentalisation of the people.

Any-wayzzzzz......my return to Spudville in the preceding ramble serves as an introduction to another anthropomorphic vegetable I’ve recently become acquainted with; The Cabbage. She is rarely seen in daylight without her close-associate, The Carrot. In the company of the empty-headed Cabbage, my days spent shooting the shit with Spud on such varied subjects as THE NIGERIAN INVASION and the authentic Spudley guide to environmental conservation (summed up as 'fuck it') now seem like noble and questing philosophical arguments carried out on the marble steps of a long-forgotten age of enlightenment. You can’t converse with a vacuum.

If Spud and Cabbage serve as two random samples taken from the pool of the ornery folk of Ireland, then things have deteriorated in the past twelve months. A TV3 news poll suggests a ten percent decline in peoples' reasoning ability in news polls (due of course, to watching too much TV3), but the question we must ask is this; are these results skewed by the very decline they are trying to describe? It’s a nice circular argument, if ever I heard one.

So to get on with it, here (at a later date, I’m all typed out now) will follow a horror story in which I will attempt to describe a bizarre ménage a trois, involving TV3, The Cabbage, and The Carrot. I hope with this tale to finally exorcise some of the tired themes which are recurring too often on the Blog and move on to fresh pastures. It’s an uneasy task, and one I hope does not serve to make me look condescending or snobbish, as it is never my intention to criticise the intellect, or ability of people, but rather the insidious vices of sloth, greed, apathy, and wilful ignorance. These provide the fertiliser from which cabbages sprout and thrive.

…..to be continued…..the following MP3s are songs the brother and I both like...

MP3: The Stone Roses - Bye Bye Badman

MP3: Rollerskate Skinny - Speed to my Side

#teambethany - my top tracks of 2010 (8)

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I returned to work today. It was painful. One of my new year resolutions was to save money. Because returning to work was so painful, I broke this resolution at 5.14pm (according to my Tower Records receipt) when I bought a fuck-off pair of Sennheiser headphones. 

Were they worth the cash? Yup. My ears feel like were rinsed out with DMT. I am listening to the new James Blake album and I am falling in love with tiny pattering noises in the upper register which were probably accidentally recorded when a fly walked over the microphone. 

Stay tuned for an upcoming sob story - 'When Darragh left his headphones on the bus'.

HEYYY HONEEE, Make sure you bring that big thing of diet coke with lime

#8 Grimes - Weregild

I have a lot of time for the website cokemachineglow. It is like a subversive, second-tier Pitchfork. No matter how we feel, we all have to suck it up and accept that pitchfork now wields an influence powerful enough to not only break huge albums (Arcade Fire's debut), but to revise the history of independent music (Pavement = Pitchfork Year Zero). When Pitchfork swings behind an album, people notice. When cokemachineglow swings behind an album, people do not notice. Which sucks, because they like better albums than pitchfork.

In saying that, I wasn't too sure about last year's cokemachineglow superstars 'A Sunny Day in Glasgow'. I wanted to ride the anti-pitchforkwave, but I just couldn't. But this year, they introduced me to a Montreal-based musician called Grimes. She released two albums in 2010, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, and has a voice that can slide from Cocteau dreampop to Siberian throat singer in two seconds. She doesn't do publicity. 'Weregild' is mesmeric and overlooked. It sounds like a satanic possession. Her voice changes in an inhuman way. She is worth your notice.

MP3: Grimes-Weregild

Run outta things to call this for now - my top tracks of 2010 (10 and 9)

Tweet Do you live on an existential knife edge? Do things in your environment send you spinning into uncontrollably black moods that are difficult to manage? Then you probably feel the same way I do about the Northern Ireland football results on UTV. Enunciated monotonously into every wobbly weekend afternoon of the soul... "Glentoran..........one, Glenavady......null". You want to turn them off, but the remote is nowhere to be found and, like kryptonite, they have already sapped away too much of your life-force to turn the telly off anyway. "Ballymena ...............six,...........Cliftonville............null", every grim, drizzly syllable falls a little heavier on your heart. You wait and hope for reprieve, but it fails to come.

Instead, the UTV weather jingle descends. Down it comes from the Mourne mountains, like a black wave of tormenting angels led by Brian Kennedy, a man whose pipey little voice was designed by Satan himself to inflict random pangs of anguish into th'soul well into th'weeks 'pon hearing its troublesome warblings.

once, when i was bored in 2009, I made this on MS Paint

Yesterday my delicate temperament took a double goolie punch. I was already trying to cope with it being New Year's Day which is my least favourite day of the year. My coping strategy for this was to eat lots of Aldi crisps. It wasn't working. Each crisp whispered shitty things to me as I packed it into my despondent mouth. To make matters worse, I was alone.

Then the fucking Northern Ireland football results came on. In the next room.

Way too far away to turn them off.

I looked outside.

Rain.

Yip yip hurrah.....happy 2011.

#10 How to Dress Well - Ready for the World
A lotta sorta kinda dark and spooky music came out of the US this year - am I right in saying this? I found it hard to keep up with the developing trend; I thought the spirit of the times was still grappling with 'chillwave' until I heard someone mention the (surely parodic? 'cos if it's not, consider me unsettled) compound word 'rapegaze'. Then the guardian started going on all about stuff being slowed down and called 'drag', and pitchfork was all, like, music's a bit Blair Witch Project in 2k10, and I was, like, shite on a bike, I haven't a fucking clue what the kids are listening to these days. And then I cried a bit. Mostly because I was slicing a shallot on my new Ikea chopping board; but still, they were real wet tears.

So, kids in the know, are 'How to Dress Well' included in this hastily flung together microgenre? It kind of feels like they should be, on account of a) their album being released in 2010; b) their having some very unsettling artwork associated with their musical output; c) said musical output sounding like something gaseous emitted from a flooded wine cellar near which I used to lurk as a teenager - yah, it was unaccountably just there on its own, a hole in the ground, in a small forest near my house in Kells; and d) the lead guy's surname being 'Krell'. And Krell sounds like the final demonic mage you might face down in World of Warcraft or some shit.

I'm interested in this whole 'witch-house' thing. I don't know enough about it to go on, but I surely will once I get to my albums list (How to Dress Well will be up there). For now, I'll consider the merits of 'Ready for the World' independent of context.

You know the bit in games like Mario and Zelda where you go into a level which is the reverse of the one you are playing, and everything is inside out and dark? 'Ready for the World' sounds like a radio R&B song might sound in that world. It exists in a ball of hissing vapour, a ball of hissing vapour that emits exactly one bloodcurdling whistle per listen. I had no clue what the lyrics were about, until I looked up the song online and found out that it is, in fact, an inside out version of a radio R&B song...

Like the rest of Krell's (oh man forgive the digression but Krell should release a solo album with a decapitated goblin head on the cover with the word "KRELL" floating over it in big medieval font) oblique album, it's an extraordinary piece of music which has gotten under my skin and had me itching like fuck for weeks now.

MP3: How to Dress Well-Ready for the World

#9 Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round
Before Ariel Pink's new album came out I interviewed him for AU magazine. I called him from home on a Friday, figuring the interview wouldn't take long because in my imagination he was going to be one of those monosyllabic sphinx types who resent being interviewed. I was dreading two word answers delivered in an L.A. drawl. As it turned out, I was wrong. He loved to talk. He talked, and he talked like fuck. And it got to the surreal, but admittedly rock n' roll, point where I had to put my hand over the receiver and shout to my mate Frank, who was waiting impatiently for me downstairs, to "hold on a minute, I'm just on the phone to Ariel Pink here". Which was nearly as good as the time I got my Built to Spill loving friend over for a pizza party when I interviewed Doug Martsch on said speaker phone. He sadly wasn't as up for the pizza party as we were. He sounded glum and harassed, and I could hear Spanish airport announcements in the background.

The point of all this, apart from me spinning a boasty music bore anecdote, is that Ariel Pink didn't have a clue who I was, or how widely read AU was, but in spite of this he really seemed to want to prove or validate himself. Half of the interview consisted of him explaining how he had changed from being an arse to his fans to being sound to his fans. The other half consisted of him complaining that his previous albums were released in the wrong order and proclaiming that his new album was finally going to demonstrate his talent to a world outside the hermetic and financially unrewarding bubble where he was considered a sort of lo-fi demi-god. In short, he wanted to make it big, and he clearly always did. His (then) outsider status was not an affected thing, it was just a fact.

Later in the year I saw that he was touring with The Flaming Lips. I thought there couldn't really be a better pairing. Like him, they always struck me as being weirdos not by choice, but by design (one look at documentary The Fearless Freaks confirms the odd gene in the Coyne pedigree). And, like him, they always wanted to share their music with the widest amount of people possible.

It's good then that 'Round and Round' is an anthemic song that would happily rock out a stadium of Flaming Lips fans, an indie disco, or no doubt even a 'proper' disco. And the thing is, the song is every bit as elusively weird as his earlier more scuzzy stuff. It's pervert pop. It has camp flourishes, such as a phone physically ringing and Ariel intoning 'Hello? Oh hi' before the big chorus goes into overdrive. It's meta pop too; the breakdown consists of Ariel repeating the word 'breakdown' over and over. And of course the lyrics "round and round" are literally describing a song structure that is moving round and round.

As for his lyrical preoccupations, things haven't changed in the midst of the Pokemon style evolution between old and new Ariel; he might be cleverly commenting on the structure of a song he knows is an anthem in waiting on 'Round and Round', but the ultimate lyrical struggle is a vicious dichotomy between bright hope ("we'll dazzle them all") and sickening self-loathing ("it's all my fault"). Ariel's personality dial is still automatically set to 'troubled'.

MP3: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti-Round and Round

Maxithermal's Golden Greats #4

Tweet Here's another poop obsessed postcard from the past - AKA my sewage pumping twin brother's brown back pages. I think he wrote this in 2005. I'm reblogging it mostly for the poem at the end, which, as you will see, befits the time of year that's in it.

The plague, pneumonia, pleurisy, tuberculosis, smallpox, scurvy, the black lung, the yeasty oesophagus, the mildewed mouth; call it what you want, just don’t call it the common cold. Its time has come. Beckoned by the semi-solid September mists, it crawls forth from the bogholes of the west, sneakily seeking its bronchial bedsit. Soon it will be airborne on the phleghmy coughs of the masses, sporulating and dividing. Insidious and invisible it will strike you down. With the rattly lungs, the weeping nose, and the stinging eyes you’ll be lucky to feel right this side of May 2005. The country has become a festering agar plate. 

In the Universities we witness the phenomenon of the sunkissed students returning from the Americas. Buoyed up by the sexual confidence of a summer talking like dis begorrah! to geh a bih o’ dat (;) or a bih o’ dis o//o if ya know whah I mean ;), they hit the nightclubs of Galway, Nobber, Dublin and Bohola, working industriously to make the most of the short-lived transatlantic sex magic. In a week they’re red-nosed and bed-bound, victims of the soft septic air, suddenly exuding a new and special sort of sexiness, irresistible to necrophiliacs and vultures. I have one treasured memory of two flatmates of mine who spent a fruitful day skipping classes while trying to see who could first fill a pint-glass with mucous. In those days if we came down with a bacterial infection we’d grab a knife and harvest penicillin from the green Galway walls. In the cold clammy caves of the Claddagh the mould of the sea happily coexisted with the mould of the river; and to survive you quickly grew gills.

I myself have contracted a little rhinovirus. I’m codding myself that I’ll shake it off in a few days. You know, drink some lempsip, wear warm clothes, shut those draughty doors, but it’s not going to happen is it? Instead my lifeforce will slowly ebb away from me, reaching a nadir just after Christmas. When the jolly festive hangover wears off, the underlying cold will reassert itself with nasty vigour. It’s amazing the shattering effect falling asleep on a frosty lawn (after a feed of whiskey) can have on the immune-sytem. And to make matters worse the revitalisted post-Christmas virus is often compounded by the horrendous new woe of colonic turkey-sandwich congestion. I’ve written a poem about that ye know. It’s called "Good King Wenceles last ate prunes on the feast of Stephen"

No I’m messin’ it’s called something far more dignified than that - "The Log".

The Log (of the Magi)

In the dying embers of December someone is crouching
And a fat bolus of Santy-shit is per-istal-tical-ly slouching
Towards a foul Winter's birth.

Midwifed by paraffin
Are the first signs of the turtle grin.
And the color is tainted
Like original sin

Peekaboo!
I see you
It teases so mockingly
Before
hanging um-bili-cally it’s vacating so softly
Dropping with dignity
Into its cold ceramic cot.

Phut it goes
Phut it goes
Plop

Phoot it goes
Phoot it goes
Plop

The Creator rejoices to see what he’s done
A monster is born into weak January sun