Compost Mix 3 - A Dreamy Divigation

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Check it out yall, I stayed up late making you a brand new mixtape for a psychedelic bank holiday weekend. To activate compost mix 3 (a dreamy divigation), click the link below, download the zipped file, then unzip, et voila! The mix should open up in any media player as an album and the songs are all tagged to play in the correct order (important because I think this mix has a nice flow to it).

I've tried to avoid stuff that might be doing the rounds on other blogs to keep it relatively fresh and unusual. Please do let me know what you think of it and if you'd like me to do any more of these. I feel feedback deprived these days. Us bloggers are feeble and vain creatures, and we are best nourished by comments.

artwork by me: words by elizabeth bishop

Download - Compost Mix 3

Tracklist

Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise - The Nightingale

(from the jukebox in David Lynch's head - this is a song made out of American dream juice)

Susumu Yokota - Kodomotachi

(seminal ambient techno - this is a piece of music made out of Japanese dream juice)

Harold Grosskopf - Synthesist

(close your eyes and imagine you are inside the cover of a 1970s science fiction paperback - this is a piece of music made out of German dream juice)

Haroumi Hosono - Sports Men

(the coolest member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra pulls Bowie shapes - but still sounds mad Japanese)

Peaking Lights - All the Sun that Shines

(stoned Slowdive referencing dub music from the States)

Mikron 64 - Sonnenuntergang

(a tiny little 8-bit man is singing endearingly to you in German because he is in love with you. Be kind to him)

Fennesz - Liminal

(this new Fennesz track is cut from the exact same cloth as Endless Summer. He might be repeating himself, but that's okay, it is beautiful beyond words)

The Incredible String Band - Chinese White

(seriously hypnotic folk from compost heap faves)

Linda Perhacs - Dolphin

(it's a dreamy sixties folk song about everybody's favourite aquatic mammal)

The Fun Years - Breech on the Bowstring

(meditative multi-instrumental drone piece with that 'duvet' quality beloved of the compost heap)

Julianna Barwick - Prizewinning

(her voice can split into ghostly replicas of itself and follow itself around in circles like the karts in super mario kart)

Robag Wruhme - Ende

(a techno sigh, a soft hand in your hair at the end of the weekend)

There was this fella in Navan who ate 30 stingers

Tweet Every generation gets the carcinogenic sweet it deserves. Back in my day, we faced the great stinger plague. A wave of cancer that culled hundreds, nay thousands, of unwary nine-year-olds who dared eat more than seven stingers in one sitting. Though nobody ever died in Kells schools, news of the stinger plague reached us through the little-break grapevine. There was the friend of someone's third cousin in Mullingar who not only developed stinger cancer but whose stomach fell out of his arse from eating orange peels; the gimpy-legged boy from Ardee whose stinger cancer spread to his mickey; and finally the girl in Trim who ate a stinger bar and a Desperate Dan bar at the same time (the primary school equivalent of a speed-ball) and immediately melted into a tumourous puddle. So many fallen comrades - they deserve to be remembered. A tomb to the unknown stinger enthusiast.

This generation's stinger bar is a worrying sour sweet called 'Toxic Waste'. In the podcast I recently guested on with Karl and Sean, we tried out a bunch of sweets we purchased in Dublin city center to ascertain which was most sour. An overpriced but tasty American effort called Wonka Shockers came out trumps, whipping stuff like Maynards Sours and halal jelly worms right back into the mediocrity bucket.

This experiment was all well and good, but our sample wasn't exhaustive; we had failed to locate a notorious sweet that had been mentioned to us in cagey whispers on Twitter - the Toxic Waste. A mum we know bans her children from the stuff. A primary school teacher reported weeping chemical sores inside the mouths of those who dared suck more than one at once. Rough stuff, you'll agree.

Toxic Wastes: As used by Saddam Hussein on the Kurds in the 1980s

I had to buy the things, of course. A week later I spied them on display in a Kells newsagent, packaged in a little yellow barrel with fake nuclear mud spilling over the edges, and an ominous warning on the sleeve about not trying more than one at a time for fear of mouth irritation. Of course, I decided to suck more than one at a time (show me a big red button with the words DON'T PRESS under it, I dare ya). I quadruple dropped. Bad move. The peeling began instantly and lasted into the next day, where I watched with abhorrent fascination as a translucent shell of shed tongue material fell from my mouth into the washbasin as I brushed my teeth. Three days later, I felt like a ghoul from Fallout 3 as chunks of collaterally damaged cheek meat were still coming unstuck between my teeth, and, even now, when I think of how those sweets tasted, my mouth pulls this reflexive Pavlovian pucker. I thought I was hardcore when it came to sweets. Not any more. Toxic Wastes just handed my hole to me.

Album Stream: Patrick Kelleher and his Cold Dead Hands-Golden Syrup
Patrick Kelleher & His Cold Dead Hands - Golden Syrup by osakaRecords

With Golden Syrup Patick Kelleher takes a sure-footed step sideways from the eclecticism of his debut album. On it, he mostly mines deep into the type of sound that I think suits him, his voice, and his lyrical content best, a darkwave take on synth-pop that speaks of a mind well-versed in an alternative history of 80s music, populated by post Joy Division bands recording spectral mixtapes in the depths of communist Europe. This core aesthetic is fleshed out with show-stopping moments of psychedelic intensity, enhanced by the expression in Kelleher's voice - he can turn on a sixpence from benevolent troubadour to mellifluously spooky cave wizard.

While the album has its moments of lightness, the overall impression Kelleher communicates here is one of sadness and anxiety. The impression coalesces most palpably on 'Golden Syrup' which is surely going to be the Irish song of the year, a slow trip down a frozen tunnel where Kelleher, in full magician mode, conjures a lysergic slide show of heartbreak that spirals and drips across the twinkling walls.

Patrick Kelleher's back garden

Kelleher doesn't work alone. His 'Cold Dead Hands' all work individually as Cat Scars, School Tour, and Hunter Gatherer respectively, and collectively as Children Under Hoof. They are, to me, the most fascinating bunch of musicians in Dublin city, united by friendship and a ferocious commitment to experimentation and exploration. All possess an unaffected affinity towards strangeness, and all possess an understanding and appreciation of pop. This combination makes for a very fertile musical hot house, where Patrick Kelleher's new album is the current prize bloom, but where plenty more unusual things are surely germinating and sprouting.

melancholy and mystery of a street

Tweet I was about to do something bad to someone. Had I always intended to do it or was it an impulse? I wasn't sure. I wasn't even sure about what motivated me. If I felt anything, it was that it all had something to do with my dying brother. But that was only a vague impression; a groping.

I watched the woman from the top of a long concrete slope. It was a road, perhaps, but not one presently used. Maybe it was an empty motorway, unfinished? She was elderly, this woman, heavyset and muttering to herself, muttering and fuming, walking purposefully as she pushed a bet down trolley of some sort, one of those two wheeled tartan-baskets. She couldn't see me as I peeped at her from shadows, well hidden behind a large metal skip on wheels - the sort found behind fruit markets and filled at the end of the day with the overripe and the crawling. The purple shadow cast from the bin that hid me stretched toward the elderly lady, downwards across the expanse of empty concrete until it almost touched her feet. She paused - a silhouette in a painting now, a frozen potential in an empty plaza of thick silence and shades. Once again the hate rose through me, unstoppable now. This crone, she had done something, something vile beyond belief, and if she hadn't, then her shadow had, that snaking negative form, running away from her feet at a queer slant that defied perspective and nature.

I pushed the bin and watched it roll.

It rolled, dwindling, over the sloping concrete for what could have been a mile if my timing and sense of distance were correct. She never moved as it approached, just turned her head slowly towards me, locking eye contact as it finally, violently, hit her, rolling her flat. A second or two passed before I heard the impact, carried along to me after the sight, detached now by physics from the act that generated it, moving through a space of its own. A curse-yelp, a crack, and the soft double-thump of wheels passing over frail flesh, leaving a diminished figure leaking dark blood that would curdle and clot in the next day's sterile sun.

MP3: bvdub-No One Will Ever Find You Here

Later, I found myself among the others as I usually did, wondering what they knew about the crone and the bin. More than once I got the funny eye from a couple of them. They considered me as we worked on our bonfire for the final night. We had been at it for three months and it had grown to its full size, an imposing pyramid of wooden steps that rose three or four times higher than the distant estate houses we saw as we worked. Those houses squatted behind tall hedges which muffled the sounds of lawnmowers, child-like screams, and faltering piano recitals played through opened windows on August nights.

Yeah, the others were definitely eyeing me as they built and sang. To avoid them, I brought some work close to the top. I entered the bonfire at the bottom so I could climb towards its summit using a spiraling inner network of pallets and planks that wound around its heart, the trunk of a solitary ancient oak that stood in the wasteland beyond the town. The outside of the bonfire was all wood, but its inside was lined with all sorts of bric-a-brac and belongings, old toys and dolls, velveteen pictures, damp-stained encyclopedias, faded photos of families on holiday, pin cushions, saints, a prayer book for the sick. I had a toy with me, a tin spinning top I would nail to the top of the oak where it might turn and whistle in the sucking gusts of the forthcoming conflagration.

As I hammered it to the tree I noticed two things. First, there were heads watching me over the tops of the hedges beyond the wasteland. I could make out my brother's doctor, a policeman, and my brother himself. His face was papery and yellow and he was weeping. They all knew what I had done, they knew that I was lost to the peculiar vista I inhabited, as far from them as they were from me, separated by the no mans land beyond the hedges and the town.

The next thing I noticed was a faint smell of smoke curling lightly through the structure from far below. Voices carried up to me, curling lightly too, singing in tongues. Below and away, the thistles in the stony fields glowed a ragged orange while pallets began to hiss and crack, and beside me, a faint hum - the spinning top. It had begun to breathe the wind.

This fairly indulgent post is the fruit of stream of consciousness exercise I did this morning on the excellent 750words website - which encourages you to write 750 words from the top of your head once a day. This effort was based on the receding shape of a dream, mixed with images and ideas that occur to me from time to time. I don't know what it means, so there is probably not much sense for anyone else to find. I like the imagery though. 750 words is a blast.


I'm aware there hasn't been much in the way of music on the 'heap of late, but that will change all this week with a new list, some Irish indie, and a couple of reviews.

Storkboy's Flatmates #4 Scobe Pt 1

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A further dispatch from Storkboy 2003.

I've written much about the people I've lived with in Killarney, and how the Shitbox's landlady (Clammy Norah) operates a revolving door policy which has permitted entry to a steady stream of increasingly grotesque transients and lost souls. I've often mused about which of these people have been the most representative of this gone-off slice of the human pie, these child-brained twenty-somethings who float around flat-land with their little tins of tuna, koka noodles, desktop ghetto-blasters and aging collections of copied CDs. Was Pig-face the worst of them? Or was it the Cabbage? They were both bad enough alright. But then again it could just as easily have been Turnip or Kola or Tweenie. And that's not to mention Spudato with his itchy scalp and Lizard boy with his once a day Goodfellas deep-pan pepperoni and wank. They've all had their own charmless characteristics, chief among them (and applicable to all) being the inability to carry out the most basic of domestic tasks such as heating a bowl of soup or beans without burning the saucepan, or managing to successfully put recyclables into the big blue bin marked recyclables.

There has been one figure though who has stood above them all. His hulking relief throws a long shadow over the puny Pig-faces and Cabbages of the world. It's like trying to beat the Beatles in the pop-band Olympics or usurping Hitler for the status of genocidal monster...there really is no other competitors when it comes to an appraisal the past inhabitants of the Shitbox. The undisputed king of the Shitbox was a guy called Scobe.

Scobe moved in during the early months of my Shitbox adventures, but even at that stage the initial relief at having some obnoxious slob move out was tinged with a sense of foreboding as to what would next darken the doorstep. ‘Better the devil you know’ had quickly become my mantra while living in Killarney. I don't say that lightly. At least 9 out of 10 of the random people that fate has deigned for me to cohabit with have been idiosyncratic weirdos and slobs, proud owners of the kind of blunted sponge-brains that think only intellectuals read newspapers. We're talking the intellect and cultural awareness of Ibiza holiday reps. The weirdness (and creepiness) of flat-land people goes exponential with advancing years after the age of 21 or 22. People floating about in flatland go a bit touched and sinister like all other wandering tribes such as carnies and circus-folk. Think of the sort of people who don't believe it's rude to mark their ownership of a meagre hoard of repellent value-label food with little paper labels, and you're thinking Killarney. For me Killarney has been a long slow journey of increasing misanthropy and deep bewilderment at how I could have lived in this place for so long and not have met anyone I wanted to even become the loosest of acquaintances of, never mind friends with. Perhaps I've become unapproachable or even worse, some sort of a snob, but I don't honestly think that's the case. I've just been placed in one of the slow-moving tributaries feeding into the river of dunderheaded zombies that washes across the plains of 21st century Ireland. One look at that Big Brother TV show tells me we're not alone, these people are the majority. Swimming against a sea of stupidity.

And now to Scobe. I don't een know where to start with that fucker. Let’s start at the beginning and blue lightning spiking through tumultuous clouds over the lakes of Killarney. I was out and about looking for kingfishers in the reeds and wondering what my new flatmate would be like. The storm didn't bode well, the sky was surreal like painted canvas, special effects boards wobbled behind it, and a wicked jarvey bobbed by, leering at me from his horse and trap. I was suddenly unnerved. Damn the kingfisher anyway, it had eluded me again, but at least I got to tick off treecreeper and dipper. I arrived home somewhat tired but clear-headed after being away from the Shitbox for a while. The door to the vacant room was open and there was stuff strewn about the hallway. Ghetto-blaster, check. Dismantled exercise utility (either weights bench or an ass-master) check. Rolled up posters, check..my heart was sinking, another child-brain intent on stamping their own inimitable style on their bedroom with posters...that's one of the true indicators of what I've been talking about, I mean come on, people in their mid-twenties who believe that posters of their favourite bands, football team or even worse, posters of pop-cultural icons (Einstein, Mona Lisa, Area 51 alien) smoking a doobie, are among the essential items you'd move into a new room? The posters were the red flag alright. I already knew the cloth this new flatmate would be cut from. Later the posters unfurled to reveal a girl draped across a yellow Lamborghini, an assortment of smiley faces having various types of day (ranging from a happy day to a stoned day), a marijuana leaf (that most odious of all images) spinning away forever into some sort of psychedelic spiral, and finally a picture of Celtic captain Neil Lennon striking home a tribal goal at Parkhead. To me, all of these were simply semaphore for ‘cunt’.

Scobe was sitting in the kitchen, in shadow. Lean, strong, wild. I only had to look at him and all sorts of deep-rooted fight or flight alarm bells started ringing. He had the leathered face of a habitual drug user, his dead heavy-lidded eyes, black as coal, were sunk deep in tea-coloured sockets. His head was shaven and he had an angry crescent-shaped scar above his left ear. He wore a Lakers basketball shirt, hot rock marks speckled it. A nationalist sort too, an Ireland flag tattooed on his left shoulder, while Maori patterns extended down his right arm, like many young Irish men he had a spiritual affinity to that race. Gold links hung around his neck, status perhaps. When he talked his upper lip extended rigidly over his teeth in that strange scobie fashion, the way you purse your lips to say ‘alreegh’ instead of ‘alright’ and his head bobbed back and forward as he uttered pearls like "well man, I'm Damo, mind if I skin up? Just have to see are ye cool with me havin' a bit of smoke?". The answer of course was ‘I’m cool, skin up’. He walked with the extreme pimp roll, the scary one, the one that denoted ‘standing’ amongst his own kind.

He made himself at home quickly. His ghetto-blaster packed quite a punch, the Shitbox quaked to the hard house stylings of Bonkers! I, Bonkers! II and Bonkers! III, hardhouse compendiums popular with mad young fellas. A good few years on the yokes and smoke before you can listen to this kind of stuff as background ambience in your bedroom. There is a nightmare dimension that a lot of young Irish people live in. I like to call it the realm of the Crazy Frog, a place where chipmunk voices sing the Fields Of Athenry over 200bpm riddums and everything buzzes with electric badness, jacked up, vrrooom vroom hallucinatory intensity. It's Scobe's world; souped up cars, coke, yokes, hash, scarface, mobile-phone ringtones, breakfast rolls, lucozade, slaps, Glasgow Celtic and the sloppy undercoat of booze, every single day of the week. In the realm of the Crazy Frog things can turn on a €2 coin. Some friends of mine once lived with a frazzled Manc called Maffew Duckworf, who, while being with us in body, was most definitely somewhere else in spirit, I like to think of him residing at a mad tea-party tooting snowballs, and sharing cups of buckfast tonic wine with his generous hosts, the Crazy Frog and Tweety the Chick. Everyone was his best mate when they first met him, and he was a funny fucker I'll hand him that (fookin had a horn ah cood pick nose wiv), but he also had the gee-eyed scobe madness erupting out of his every pore, and my most abiding memory is of him kicking in the windows of a restaurant in Dominick St. in Galway, to the horror of the diners within, and quickly following through with a traffic cone. His girlfriend (who he used to bate seven shades of shite out of) subsequently stole the contents of the rent jar to get him a ferry fare. I remember him pleading with everyone that he hadn't done it, that despite being a bad person he'd never ever lie, and then the fact emerging that the entire incident was caught on CCTV. Ah, good times with Maffew. And you will have to wait for the concluding tale of good times with Scobe.

Buffy Honkerberg's Answer Machine

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I've listened to a lot of weird shit in my day. There are bands in my iTunes library with names like Dolphins into the Future. I have an electronic EP which was made by a Japanese lad sampling the inner workings of an old alarm clock and nothing else. I have a 1960s children's album by a mescaline addled Canadian bloke called Bruce Haack who talk-sings the story of Mother Goose over a primitive synthesiser. I even have a synthesiser album of deranged oompahing burlesque music about the second world war that was recorded in Japan in the 80s. None of this music is as weird as James Ferarro's.

MP3: James Ferarro-Leather High School

MP3: James Ferraro-Pleiadian Channel Surfer 2

I checked out the experimental New York musician Ferarro after reading an interesting Pitchfork review last week and then vaguely remembering his name cropping up in a phone interview I did with Ariel Pink (whose current sound is very indebted to him). I was looking forward to some oddball lo-fi pop. What I found instead was a self-contained planetary system of exhilarating and, I'll say it, mystical psychedelic music. All held together by this bonkers conceptual framework of what I can only describe as a molten alternate version of early 90s teen culture. Not grunge music or anything like that, but shit like the TV show Saved by the Bell, hair metal, cheap neon colours, dot matrix printers, Max Headroom, and lots of shiny pink plastic.

The above description might make Ferraro sound like another empty nostalgia trip along the lines of Neon Indian. Indeed, he was the key figure behind The Wire magazine's loosely defined 'hypogogic pop' scene - which lasted until the Hipsterrunoff blog coined the more familiar term 'chillwave'. However, Ariel Pink aside, I find it hard to draw a vector between Ferarro and any of that music. What he does is different in some very fundamental ways. In fact, in spite of not sounding at all like them, in a weird way I'd consider him a kindred spirit of The Butthole Surfers or Yerself is Steam era Mercury Rev; a gaudy hyper-real splurge of teenage tat that is a psychedelic response to contemporary pop culture.

In fact, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to call Ferraro's music pop art. He invites the comparison himself in interviews I've read. Like Andy Warhol, Ferarro seems to want to tell us something serious about everyday things, communicating high profundity through so much cultural flotsam. He succeeds at this. It's hard to imagine that such rubbishy stuff can be used to create music that sounds this ecstatic, but it does. In this act of creation, he elevates and ennobles his source materials, just like the pop artists did.

There are two albums of Ferarro's that are well worth starting with and they are the two recent reissues On Air and Night Dolls with Hairspray. On Air is the more experimental of the two. It plays like a mangled radio station full of dopplering waveforms, static, snippets of familiar music such as the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and heavily filtered synthesiser melodies which whip through the white-noise and towards space.

Night Dolls with Hairspray is a different album entirely. It is conceptual too, but whereas On Air's concept is a weird radio station this album instead plays out like a lurid and familiarly creepy dream that transforms American high school into a surreal wonderland. To a soundtrack of embarrassingly brilliant weirdo-pop, which is entirely free of samples believe it or not, Ferraro appears to sing out his suppressed teenage dream life replete with masturbatory fantasies (in one song he appears to sing of fucking his teacher in front of the class, and thinks of the dinner lady rubbing gravy all over herself). The whole thing is, well, for want of a less clichéd descriptor, it's a trip.

Washed Out it ain't.

Post Script: I have contributed to the excellent Them's the Vagaries podcast, which is made by Sean McTiernan of No Chorus and Karl McDonald of Those Geese Were Stupefied. In it, we talk about sour sweets, come dine with me, confirmation names, dead puffins, Werner Herzog, Robag Wruhme, Destroyer, and Totoro. Find it here.

Storkboy's flatmates #3

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Well lads, it's Ciarán again. Between the years of 2002 and 2007 I maintained a few 'blogs'. Upwards of 200,000 words I believe. Amongst other things I wished to use them as a sort of permanent record of the psychological effects of braving out the Celtic Tiger years without money, girlfriend, car or dignity. I also felt that they may provide suitable starting material for conversations with a therapist in later years.

They show a very different Ireland. A large number describe a nation where, to my mind at least, everyone was indeed 'partying' (as Lenihen said). The blogs are packed with tales of coke, packed pubs, property speculation, young lads buying speed-boats, and then my self-pitying self, feeling isolated in this whirlwind. This was rural Ireland, and it was fucking crazy, drenched in credit and money, and houses were appearing out of the bog overnight. Quite a few of these 'blog posts' found me describing invariably grotesque characters I had to share living space with in the far-flung corners of provincial Ireland.

About 6 or 7 years ago I hit rock bottom in Killarney. I was depressed, quite badly so, and I was struggling to progress a PhD with field-work that was going nowhere. I shared a 5 bedroom house with a sort of revolving door policy, in which I had no say in what strange tenant the landlady would move in next. By my reckoning I had 20 housemates in the period of a year. Killarney is a seasonal place. Below is a blog in which I describe English Dom, a middle aged divorcee who may have been on the run from something in the UK. He worked as a 'picker' in Argos, one of those people who bring your purchase to the counter when your number is called.

So I am faced with two options of an evening; to sit and watch TV with English Dom or go for a very long walk in the countryside. I choose the walk. I do like my TV, but recently I've had to share my beloved remote with Dom. Before I describe the walk I'll give a rundown of what it's like watching a typical evenings TV in the company of Dom.

First, a defining fact regarding Dom - he is one of the few (non eight year old) people I know who can unselfconsciously eat a bowl of Campbell's meatballs in the company of strangers. Dom is a forty four year old man. Well, he just loves his soaps does our Dom, and is one of those tragics who will contentedly sit out the entire ass-numbing marathon from Emmerdale through to Fair City, with Corrie and Eastenders in between. And when he's off work he will make time for Home and Away too. Dom, if you need reminding, is forty four, and this is this is his life. Following the early evening soapathon, Dom moves with considerable ease into the RTE 2 documentary zone. He usually prefaces this stage of the evening with a banality such as "I believe theres a really fascinating documentary on channel 2, mind if I change over?" then like clockwork, he will produce cups of tea, at least four cups between seven and ten "I'm sticking on a brew, do you fancy one?".

He settled down to a documentary on the Titanic one particular evening "Marvellous the ships they built in Island werent they? the Titanic, she was the pride of the merchant navy she was, unbreakable they said" Dom finds everything fascinating, marvellous, incredible; from the fishing tackle on sale at Lidl to the fusion of hydrogen atoms in the depths of the sun, its all equally intriguing to Dom, and boy will he tell you all about it.

When he has fully relaxed into an evening's programming, Dom begins to work his jaw in a very odd manner. The sound of this reminds me of a noise my pet guinea pig (the only pet I ever owned) made on the very rare occasions when it too found itself at ease. It's like the grinding of teeth, only it's deeper, funkier, freakier. I think he somehow locks and unlocks the lower jaw, producing a sound akin to that of central locking being activated in a car. The action seems to quicken when something of interest appears on TV; for instance, it accelerates in appreciation of the evening's premier appearance of young Sarah Platt on Coronation Street. It was even accompanied by some lip-licking once, when Stacey Slater picked a pint of milk from a doorstep in Albert Square. On another occasion, when Corrie's Charlie was fondling Maria in the Salon, I had to walk out of the room to refrain from throwing my 'brew' in Dom's face, a face which was now shifting patterns of fluid jaw and tonge and lips offset by his rigid intent eyes. Deep breaths were required to drown out the noise of those swivelling mandibles, a noise which had slowly built into a tidal roar that drowned out every other sound, every other thought. He must have noticed how my twitching eyelids had synchronised with his jaw-clacks. Ah, Dom and I, the original odd couple, with more in common than we'd care to admit, ho ho!

Here are some of Doms pronunciations on stuff:

Dom on the atom bomb "It's fascinating really how such power comes out of something so small, fancy a brew?"

Dom on Eastenders "I love Eastenders me, when I think of it, I've watched it from the very first episode, and for me that's its advantage over Corrie, I've followed it from the start really, but Corrie had been on for several years before I was watching it, fancy a brew?"

Dom on Brian Kennedy "He released some incredible tracks a few years ago, my sister gave his album to me as a Christmas gift, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, in particular his singing, on some of the tracks the singing was superb and there were some outstanding session musicians playing with him too mind you, credit where credit's due, but lately I havent been so keen really, fancy a brew?"

Dom on tea "It's the little things you notice when you are away, for instance I find that Tetley tea tastes different in island, and Im not knocking Irish tea, but I always stock up on the English Tetley when I go back to Manchester, fancy a brew?"

Dom on trains "You can't beat a real steam engine, they are incredible really, the sound of the engine, chugga chugga choo, and they were always on time too (chuckles), by god they made things to last in them days, fancy a brew?"

Dom on his maiden aunt "Firstly I had to hang her naked body over a barrel to bleed it properly, fascinating really how the blood congeals so fast. Her eyes were still open you know, funny really, it was like she was watching the whole thing, and after I had bled her, butchered her, and wrapped all of her limbs in cling-film, I placed, in full view of me, her head, which still seemed incredibly aware of the whole situation, and then I slowly took down my trousers and forced a bowel movement, right there on the carpet, as if to say, -look who's potty trained now you fucking nasty old cow, do you fancy a brew?"

It seems I never got around to the walk, which was a pity, as what I saw on it was far more interesting than Dom. The walk is for the next blog so.

Maxithermal's Golden Greats #6 (Rugby ball headed munchkins sitting on a cactus on a broken windowsill refracting sunlight)

Tweet Hullo, here is some more stuff written by my brother circa 2003.

Spudface O’Houlihan is a first year student from the west. Normally I ignore his spit drenched Ballina brogue (exarcabated by a terrible lisp), and the illuminating thoughts he relays through it. These topics range from the Revs, to Dublin, and to life in general, and I will expand upon them later. Yesterday, however, I had to share the living room with him for an entire day. I was trapped due to low pressure systems swinging in off the Atlantic, creating an unwelcoming atmosphere outside. 

First, a physical description of Spud. I do not normally judge people on their looks, but in some cases (Spuddy’s) a horrific visage coupled with a repellent personality is an entire package. It is almost as if his child-scaring, elephant-man face is a manifestation of his inner ugliness. His head is shaved (lice problem back home, methinks), and his eyes protrude like painted golf balls, giving him an all round reptilian, or insect-like appearance. I think he has stereoscopic vision, and half the time I am waiting for his tongue to dart out and catch one of his six legged brethren in midair. To attain a complexion like Spud's, I think continual scrubbing of the face with a brillo pad and caustic soda for a prolonged period before bed each night is in order. This bad complexion is despite his habit of drinking bottled water continually. He drinks in excess of thirty bottles a week. He doesn’t actually finish any of the bottles and they accumulate into horrible blue plastic mountains, foggy with condensation. Notoriously tight, Spuddy doesn’t buy the bottled water, his sister works in the factory that produces it.

Spud's philosophy on life, recounted in his dribbling cowdung inflected lishpy voice, really pisses me off. He is the spawn of the CAP system. He was brought up to believe that screwing money from every source, is the best way through life. He is an ugly conglomeration of medical cards, grants, cash in hand jobs (three) and corner cutting. Two recent examples of this philosophy in action produced a the same effect on my general countenance as nails might do when scraped down a blackboard - all I could do was dig my own nails into my palms and grimace.

The first example typifies Spuddy’s attitude to the system. It costs quite a lot to have your garbage removed in Sligo (10 euros per bag) Hence Spud will usually let it accumulate for a number of weeks and try and compress three weeks worth of thrash into one load. This often gets funny looks from the neigbours who might find the smell disconcerting. Of course, a very large proportion of this rubbish consists of Spuddy’s cloudy blue bottles, giving it an unnecessary bulk. One week, however, Spud refused to pay for the collection when I asked for the money off him. He said he had no money. This was a lie he is already saving thousands for the house he is going to share with his maiden aunt/sister/brother. Not being able to afford the full ten euro myself, I was resigned to leaving the rubbish there for another week.

Imagine my surprise when I returned on Sunday night, to find all the rubbish cleared away. Spuddo’s friend Turnip was up and had brought his car. Spud could hardly conceal his delight as he explained to me, with a shit eating grin rupturing his mealy face, how he had done one over on the binmen. He and Turnip had dumped the rubbish on some “shitty old beach” in the middle of the night.

In my second example of Spudso’s behavioural tendencies, the Spud philosophy was not as evidently at play, but nonetheless the irritation factor was high. Three nights a week, he works in a nightclub in town. Before going into town, he washes one shirt, then tumble dries that one shirt. Like many of his ilk, Spud's tightfisted nature does not extend to electricity bills, which he has trouble relating to actual elecricity usage. On Sunday he texted my phone and told me to take his shirt from the washing machine and throw it into the tumble dryer. This I did, ignoring his moth bitten y-fronts which lay crumpled with alongside the shirt.

Annoyed slightly as I was by this wasteful behaviour, I was more irritated at the prospect of having to spend the following day in his presence. When he arrived later he asked if he could use my phone to ring a taxi for work. I complied, he then returned my phone (creditless) and jumped in a taxi five minutes later. Three more taxis subsequently arrived outside the door. It turned out that Spud was in such a rush for work that he ordered four taxis from my phone and caught the quickest one. I had to deal with irate and abusive taxi drivers who vowed never to come to our address again. The following day, Spudnik just laughed it off, “Shure they’ll jusht forget about it, shpit shpit dribble”

Spudley’s Ireland is a cultureless shithole, defined by nondescript county towns, welly boots, drinking, bookies, chippers, English soccer clubs, winning streak cards, silage plastic flapping in hedgerows and kids driving tractors since age seven. Strangely Spud would consider himself more Irish than people from Dublin just by virtue of living west of the Shannon. This is in spite of all the factors I’ve listed above, which reveal him to be bereft of any true love of his country, most notably the incident in which he dumped the rubbish on the beach.

MP3: James Ferraro-Runaway

Salt and Winnegarrr

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I was going to write a long-winded state of the nation blog today. However, my plans were scuppered by my father who had me out with a digital camera taking surreptitious photographs of neighbours' driveways all morning. It seems that while all the neighbours got lovely new driveways when the council fixed the road, ours was made out of sherbet and powdered twig, causing it to crumble away to shite in a couple of months. So instead my state of the nation mega post, I'll share some bite-sized chunks of words and music. Which is all I ever really do, come to think of it.

Ah 'tis yourself. Would you like to buy a plate?

MP3: Biosphere-Ikata-1

Biosphere's latest album N-Plants has an unusual back story. It was written early this year, prior to Japan's nuclear disaster and apparently the underlying concept was about the structural instability of the country's nuclear power plants (BTW have you noticed how so many ambient albums have grandiose underlying concepts? You'd almost think the artists don't trust their bleeps or drones to be interesting enough on their own. Loscil is the WORST for this. Mind you the nuclear concept is pretty obvious and integral to the sound of this particular album). This back story either reflects spooky prescience or Biosphere playing a bit fast and loose with the facts. Like it's obvious the dude made an album about nuclear power plants, but listening to one of these tracks is hardly going to cause a listener who hasn't read the press release to gasp and exclaim "oh shit the bassline makes it so obvious, Japan is doomed if it doesn't switch to airtricity before the next tsunami".

Forgetting the back story, the album is fine piece of work. For the most part, the music is founded on ticktock Geiger counter rhythms and molecular synth sounds that drift smoothly and sometimes bounce off each other like notes in a Terry Riley composition. Unlike its obvious precedent, Kraftwerk's stark and ominous Radioactivity, the music here is ambiguous, often soft and elegaic, and if it weren't for the back story I'd believe it was in its funny way a love-letter to the split atom.

Album Stream: Lorem Ipsum-Lorem Ipsum is Between Hospitals

Speaking of back stories, I wonder what is the back story to mysterious Irish DIY dance producer Lorem Ipsum's 'Lorem Ipsum is Between Hospitals'? The last track on this frankly cracked - yet always fascinating and often brilliant - album is named after Dublin's St Vincent's. Was Lorem Ipsum admitted to their A&E after electrocuting himself on some of the destroyed and ropey equipment he uses to create his mangled aesthetic - a distillation of every obscure synth album made by a lone weirdo with an irrepressible pop fetish that I ever downloaded from Mutant Sounds (there are more of these albums than you might imagine. Waaay more)?

You can listen to the entire thing on bandcamp, just click the player above. Or even better, check him out in the Twisted Pepper tomorrow night, supported by the equally out-there lone weirdo Angkorwat. What with this, Tierranniesaur, and Paddy Kelleher's latest, it seems Irish DIY music is going through a very exciting purple patch right now.

Sadly the future no longer is no longer what it was...

Tweet If I've learned one valuable lesson through my work with children who have autism, it's this - patience is a wonderful thing. While it was necessary for sanity in that line of work, it sure isn't necessary in contemporary life. Indeed, impatience has become an acceptable standby mode for most of us, and I'm sure there are many who take pride in their impatience, seeing it as an essential tool in developing certain careers, or as an aide to better services and greater quality of leisure time. So life speeds up into a silly race and everyone seems to be hoisting themselves up one dumb imaginary ladder or another, helped by always on broadband, entire season DVD box-sets, convenience foods, instant this, no more waiting that, and same day guarantee or your money back.

As we flap about impatiently on our shitty ladders, chirping for the next speedy administration of easy-digest cultural pap, we lose the ability to devote ourselves to the slower things, things that can't be done passively or in an instant. Such things require not only time, but engagement, a bit of puzzling and interpretation. They include precious things; poems, long novels, slow paced films, challenging meals cooked from scratch, 'difficult' music, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to sit contentedly in one's own company.

How often do we ever do that; just taking the time to sit alone and reflect (and I don't include fapping one off on the toilet here). To be detached from all electronic devices, using our five senses to pay close attention to our immediate environment and little else. To do this is a great reality check. It allows a person to notice and the ability to notice is fast becoming a rare skill. A lot of people will say they don't read poetry because they don't get it. They find it difficult. What they really mean is that they are going too fast to notice. They can't put the handbrake on long enough to notice each word or image and appreciate its various meanings. So they zip along, skim past, allowing these beautiful things to be forgotten about - and that is so very sad. As a result, we find ourselves in a culture of exposure where we have 24hr have access to multitudes, but we lack understanding of the simplest things.

I'll share a little parable by late writer David Foster Wallace which goes as follows

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?""

The fish, of course, were too busy swimming to notice or figure out the most essential part of their little lives. 

The older I get, the more appreciative I become of my ability to be patient. It is a skill that I wasn't born with; I have learned it. Indeed, as I mentioned, it is only through my recent employment that it really developed. Now, aged thirty, I'll happily sit outside for an hour and watch a crow fiddle with a twig on the patio. I'll listen to laundry flapping on a clothes line, smell lawnmower fumes and drying woodstain, taste a strawberry sweet, and marvel that I am not the centre of all this but just another small part of it, your average thirty year old collection of human molecules in its environment. And that realisation, to me, is more valuable and sustaining than any amount of career or status shite. 

MP3: Leyland Kirby-Sadly the Future no Longer is What it Was

OK fish, it's time to slow right down and take in this desolately affecting ambient piece from Leyland Kirby's huge album of the same name. The album is a close relative of William Basinki's Disintegration Loops and preoccupied with similar themes of entropy and erosion. When I listen to it I think of electric lights against a dimming sky during the 'magic hour', like in TS Eliot poems, and fog, and crumbling things glowing one last beautiful time in the dimming light.

Eddie Murphy: Reprieve

Tweet Someone brought this old post to my attention recently and told me I should recycle it. It's probably one of the funnier things I've written here. Revulsion brings out my funny side it seems.

Me, wearing a rubber Eddie Murphy mask

I went to see Kung Fu Panda today with my girlfriend who is obsessed with pandas (we once visited Berlin Zoo. It was all I could do to stop her scaling the glass of the panda enclosure spiderman-style so she could get in to hug the panda. I don't know what full grown pandas do to mad humans who try to hug them, but I doubt it's hug them back). Anyway, unlike Adam who unequivocally advises against Kung Fu Panda, I liked it a lot. It is a Dreamworks animation and I half-expected their usual exhausting barrage of double entendres and gags that reference adult movies to keep older viewers happy (oh look, the panda is doing the bit out of the matrix, oh look the panda is doing the bit out of the sixth sense, oh look the panda just made an implicit joke about masturbation etc...). Instead, the film was closer in spirit to classic Pixar (Toy Story is one of my favourite films of all time), in that the gags were purely slapstick, often very imaginative, and worked on a level that both parents and kids could laugh at mutually. Shouldn't that be the hallmark of a good kid's film? I bet most twentysomething adults still cough back a tear at the exact moment in ET that they blubbed at when they were five years old. I'm delighted Dreamworks apparently copped on to this, but it was still not a patch on Toy Story though.

I used to joke that a nice measure of a film's awfulness is how many of its characters are played by Eddie Murphy. If there are three Eddie Murphys in a film, and one of them is a grotesque stereotype of an obese black woman you know that you have not just busted right through the bottom of the barrel, but are now deep-sea drilling for civilisation's very last reserve of pure shite, embedded in the earth's crust, some 600 miles below the barrel. A trailer containing the words "starring Eddie Murphy AND Eddie Murphy" used to make my blood run cold. Tonight, I saw a trailer which incredibly went one step further. It was about a film called Dave. "Starring Eddie Murphy IN Eddie Murphy", it proudly proclaimed. Yes, I know. As if that was a selling point. Expecting a horrific comic porn flick where Eddie Murphy penetrates himself, I managed to make out through my tensely knotted fingers that this film contains a robotic Eddie Murphy controlled from the inside by a tiny Eddie Murphy (a bit like the real Eddie Murphy then). Vomit. I didn't ask for this eyeball shit-rinse when I paid for my Kung Fu Panda ticket. Also, has anybody else noticed that Eddie Murphy's face is becoming disturbingly more smooth, airbrushed and oval as he gets older? He now looks like someone pulled a rubber mask of 1980s Eddie Murphy over a rugby ball and polished the fuck out of it.

Oh man, I hope that movie tanks. Eddie Murphy belongs in whatever sort of painful purgatory Rob Schneider is currently languishing in. Actually there's a movie idea..."starring Eddie Murphy AND Eddie Murphy IN Rob Schneider who IS Eddie Murphy playing an obese black woman". A guaranteed 18 certificate if ever there was one. It would never get past the censors though, would it? If it did, there would be plenty of gibbering post-traumatic wrecks clogging the waiting rooms of our mental asylums.

After Kung Fu Panda, we thought our Eddie Murphy woes were over. Were they fuck. In Cineworld there is only one escalator running down from the third to the second floor. Unfortunately, to go down that escalator you now have to travel through a gigantic 3D Eddie Murphy head promoting his new stinking stool of a movie. With their heads bowed like docile cattle, all the other cinema-goers smoothly passed through his 7 foot cardboard cranium like vitalinea through your digestive transit. I bridled. I panicked. I turned to Loreana. I said "there is no fuckin way I am going through Eddie Murphy's head to get out of here". In fact the Gardai would have had to airlift us out of the place, before I'd walk through a giant Eddie Murphy noggin. I'd rather eat dry white catshit.

Thank God for the Cineworld fire escape.

MP3s comin' atcha tomorrow folks.

KRRRCCHHHHZZZZZZ sorry for the delay and welcome back to Compost Heap FM

Tweet ...and we're back.

Ah, great to settle back into the old groove. That good ole sweaty dent on the sofa that smells faintly of poo and onion. Mmm Hmm. Let me just lift my hole and unhook th'knickers - they're riding up a bit. That's it. Lovely hurling. Feels like I've never been away.

Laptop computer wobbling on paunch. Check.
Oversize bag of jellies within arm's reach. Check.
Two litre bottle of cheap fizzy drink. Check.
Overheated, chattering thought loop. Check.
Arbitrary picture from google image search. Check - see below.

remarkable drawing by a twelve year old boy with autism, David Barth

What's left? MP3s and unrelated text about Kells drawn from the overheated chattering thought loop of course.

MP3: Master Musicians of Bukakke-Elogia De La Sombra

This is an expansive dark krautrock song inspired by a Luis Borges poem and performed by a band named after a degrading Japanese pornographic practice that involves one face and a lorra lorra dicks - eeek. What's not to like? Their other music, while similarly cavernous, tends to be more drone based and draws on metal and ethnic folk. Perfect for that tiresome rush hour DART trip when you just want to close your eyes and teleport to a blackened ziggaraut in the bowels of the earth (which is hollow if you believe Malefic and the lads in SunnO)))). Wow, putting SunnO))) at the end of a clause in parentheses is a total headfuck maan.

MP3: Last Days of 1984-Rivers Edge

I am a bit late to this particular party and I know these lads have had plenty of love on the other blogs. But this is a cracker of a track. They are a duo based in Dublin and according to their bandcamp page, here, they are influenced by 'chill-wave'. Don't let that put you off. River's Edge sounds nothing like chill-wave to these ears. To me, it is genetically close to the all that delicious dance-pop that comes out on the Swedish record label Sincerely Yours. Stuff like jj and The Tough Alliance. It is the sort of song that could only be North European, one that seems to anticipate a comedown even as it soars, and it belongs to a fine tradition that began with New Order and The Smiths.

MP3: Unknown Mortal Orchestra-How Can You Luv Me

If someone repackaged Unknown Mortal Orchestra's eponymous album as a great forgotten classic jam album by the cream of Elephant Six, I'd happily fall for the trick. The album is chock full of crayon-brite psychedelic music and luxurious funky grooves that would make a young Kevin Barnes proud. Perfect music for those situations when you find yourself sitting on a big plastic mushroom in a children's adventure playground at night. Or failing that, a regular chair or couch.

In the few weeks I was away I became an uncle to this little dude...

I also took part in the Irish version of Come Dine with Me. This was a funny experience, and something that became a much bigger deal than I thought it would when it came on telly. In fact, I can now say with some authority that I know exactly what it must feel like to be a famous person in public. For a short and intense period of time (when the show was running) I could not walk down O'Connell street, for example, without people pointing, shouting, and approaching me. What did it feel like? It was unsettling. I felt a bit paranoid and sketchy, and vaguely vainly ashamed because I didn't cook as well as I normally do. I don't know how those people who go on Big Brother or, indeed, one or two of the others who took part in the show with me, enjoy that sort of attention from complete strangers.

I'll be talking about it in the next Them's The Vagaries podcast and I'll write about it in detail here some time soon.

And look Ma, I got through a full post without mentioning the Meath town that begins with K.

Finally, a tasteful word from my sponsor...