everything is on the point of decline

Tweet See ya January. Off to fuck with you now.

February sees me taking on some work in Dublin and facing into a daily commute totalling 5 hours to and from my job. I'm trying to be as zen as possible about this and want to maximise my use of the down time afforded by the bus trip. If I turn off my phone, I can completely tune in and turn on to a good book, a podcast, or an album. I can give my attention fully over to these things without feeling the nebulous guilt that can cling to such activities at home. Nebulous guilt and/or the lure of the 7 or 8 shitty social network sites (with slightly different USPs) that take up real estate in the part of me that should probably contain a soul or something.

woohoo 

Stuff I enjoy on the bus:

1: The 1UP Games, Dammit! podcast

This is an excellent podcast for many reasons: chief among them is the sharp wit and intelligence of the Games, Dammit! guys who wear a lot of learning lightly and effortlessly frame games within the wider culture. For example, if a game references ancient Greek mythology, the chances are that these lads know their classics and can riff off of that sort of stuff. Their intelligent approach is a pleasant reminder of the significance of computer games in our recent cultural and social history, and the validity of taking them seriously.

2: The new Caretaker album

Leyland Kirby, everybody's favourite navigator of the softening grey landscape of the dying brain, returns with Patience (after Sebald), a new album of atrophied music. This time, he gives the music of Franz Schubert his treatment and the results are as uncannily moving as anything he has done previously. I find that watching the lights of Dunshaughlin creep past the bus window at 7am with this on my iPod makes me feel all existentially reflective and shit.

MP3: The Caretaker-When the Dog Days were Drawing to an End

3: Elizabeth Bishop's prose.

I found a book of the famous poet's lesser known prose in Chapters. It has a neat short story called 'the sea and its shore' about an alcoholic man who cleans up a beach for a living and constructs a mental world out of all the written material he finds during his surreal and lonely job. It's a bit like Beckett in how it explores the disconnect between the intended meaning of written words and how they are interpreted.

4: Oval DNA

There is a bumper compilation of Oval's music newly released. Bisto gravy granule music. DNA music. Cell music. It's for fans of lots of tiny things unfurling leisurely like a scene under a microscope. Stoners, in other words.

MP3: Oval-Australasia

Feel good post of the winter

Tweet A couple of weekends ago when I wrote my little photo essay on Kells, I had a childish fight with my twin brother (a regressive and embarrassing spectacle that happens all too often when we spend time in the family home. We are 31). He stalked me around the house, pleading with me to delete the blog post as I banged a couple of doors and muttered at him to fuck off (reminder: we are 31). He believed that the post would go viral and I'd become a pariah in Kells. Not only that, my near-certain status as town reject might rub off on him on account of our being identical, which is exactly what happened the time I finished in last place on Come Dine With Me and he had to suffer such slings and arrows as a row of Dublin teens singing "come dine with me..." to the melody of Frank Sinatra's "come fly with me" in the Savoy cinema once.

He was half right. The post went semi viral. According to my blogger statistics it accumulated about 2,500 hits a day over the course of last week. A number of websites also linked to the post, including Kells online which featured a piece about it here.

To be honest, I shat my pants (figuratively!) before reading the Kells online piece, as Storkboy's rabid warnings had me braced for the worst. However, the piece is measured and it acknowledges that the town looks a bit shit at the moment. Indeed, it appears that my little photo essay might even provide incentive for a town clean-up.

I felt a bit bad, however, when I read the line "while it could be argued that there is a certain mean spirited tone to the article and that you could find similar sights in any town in Ireland is went set out to look for them". I would hate people to come away from my blog with the impression that I am mean-spirited about my home town and I'd hope that regular readers recognise that I have a fairly complex relationship with the place.

if your Viking longship runs into trouble approaching Kells, look out for our lighthouse

There are times when Kells feels like a dispiriting kip to me, a heritage town of enormous historical significance that perpetually fails to respect itself. But there are times too, when I come over all gooey for the town; for the motley crew of unpretentious yet arty kids I befriended in secondary school and who continue to be my closest friends in adulthood; for the dreaming monastery feel of the town on a fine Summer afternoon walk; for the weird pagan lore that seems to co-exist with the monastic past; for Ireland's only inland lighthouse; for the flat, aesthetically challenged accent that is perversely sported as a badge of honour by many; and for a stubborn character that continues to resist the severe damage Ireland's failed economy has wrought on the place.

Ah Kells, I love ta hate ya.

Asleep on the podcast heap #3

Tweet Woo hoo I finally got on top of the sound issues. My voice is dulcet on this one. Golden. *edit: it overlaps itself for about 4 seconds at the 2 minute mark*.

I have pipes like this dude...

On this week's podcast, I discuss some music social networking sites such as this is my jam, James Ferraro's creepy google muzak masterpiece (or is it?) Far Side Virtual, and the Quarter Inch Collective's new Quompilation cassette.

As usual, I'll devour any feedback like a starved dog. I'd also think it very sound of you if you enjoyed the podcast and recommended it to friends and stuff.

Episode 3 on podomatic

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Episode 3 in dropbox

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Next week, I'll hot my first guest. Sean McTiernan of the excellent Them's the Vagaries.

My favourite albums of 2011 and a mini essay on techno (#23 Roman Flugel - Fatty Folders)

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Music journalism cliché #29545: the phrase "dancing about architecture". 

Music journalism cliché #29546: the adjectives "hazy", "ethereal", "gauzy", "widescreen". 

Music journalism cliché #29547: clunky gender specific synonyms for the word songwriter when said songwriter is female, such as "songbird", "chantreause", or *retch* "songstress".

Music journalism cliché #29548: synth music only ever occurs in "stabs" (I think Karl alerted me to this one).

Music journalism cliché #29549: "X sounds like Y on acid".

For more of these, check out a funny old post by Dave Donnelly, who has a good eye for such things.

#23 Roman Flügel -Fatty Folders

oooh luxurious colouredy folds. luxurious colouredy folds of tactile techno

What is techno music about? It's a weird question isn't it? But it's one that is brought to bear on dance music by people well versed in other types of music. It is hard to write about techno using the critical tools we apply to conventional rock and pop, where the songs tend to have internal narratives full of symbols and meanings to disseminate. The language of techno is just different. And that's why it can be so cringe-worthy when a journalist approaches techno with a confident spouty approach informed by the form and function of pop and rock; something I've read Karl write similarly about rap.

I did an interview with Apparat for AU magazine earlier last year, where he provided the following wonderful quote:

"But I realised that night that techno works not because of emotion or anything like that. Techno has a function. It is functional music that helps people escape. I mean if you think about it, it is a dark room full of people dancing and fucking strobe lights and repeating music. That is what it is for."

Apparat is halfway there. Techno is functional; that's the 4/4 beat. It is also sensory; that's everything on top of the 4/4 beat. Sure it can be emotional too (look at Kompakt's love of heart-tugging pop), but anything on top of the beat and the sensory experience is extraneous. Good techno does not need to have a message.  And even when it has a vocal, the vocal is not necessarily communicating a message. It does not need to tell us anything about love, life, ageing or the human condition. It just needs to provide a stimulatory present moment. A place where words and language are replaced by feelings and sensations, forms and shapes. A portal for escape. A never ending present. A feeling.

Everything about Roman Flügel's Fatty Folders is about 'feeling'. This album is tactile. From the luxuriant floaty cover art, to the odd quivering connotations of the title, to the rich gluey tech house it contains, this is a record that murmurs 'touch', 'feel', like a moon-eyed ecstasy virgin tickling their own cheek in the corner of a nightclub.

Each track on 'Fatty Folders' has a distinct identity of its own, so clearly delineated from those either side of it that in listening I am reminded of a child's activity cube with different textured surfaces (this one is rough, this one is furry, etc). So different are the productions in style that you might expect the album to play disjointedly. For example, 'How to Spread Lies' is supremely smooth glassy house in the vein of John Roberts whereas 'Bahai Blues Bootcamp' flirts with British bass music overlaid with classic AFX acid. Yet, the record hangs together quite cohesively and this is probably because of an overarching sense of Flügel's sheer love of form. What each track has in common is precision crafting down to the microscopic, fabergé-egg level.

'Fatty Folders' isn't some sort of crazy masterpiece. It's just a beautifully rendered, sonically rich album that offers us nothing more or less than pure aural sensation. Take it on those terms, and you have one of the finest techno/house albums of 2011.

MP3: Roman Flügel-Deo

My favourite albums of 2011 (#24 Pure X - Pleasure)

Tweet The asleep on the compost heap podcast is now set up with iTunes. You can subscribe to it right here. In other podcast news, I am going to record some episodes where guests chat about their favourite things. Yes, it will be a 100% rip-off of pitchfork's guest list feature. To complete this lousy act of blatant intellectual theft, I need a good name for the feature; something that is not 'guest list'. If you have any ideas please leave them in the comment box below.

Many people pointed out to me that my voice came burbling out all up close and demented (not good) towards the end of the last podcast, and also that there was a significant discrepancy between the music and voice volume. Well I'm on it like a sonnet, and the next podcast will be gleamingly produced. I'm even making a screen thing with an old pair of tights to filter out the popping sounds. Check out how good it sounds on Friday.

#24 Pure X - Pleasure

and the WTF album cover of 2011 award goes to...

I'd wager that almost every critic who has a go at certain artists for being generic or copyists makes exceptions for bands that peddle whatever particular formula is that critic's kryptonite (it makes hypocrites of us, of course, but hey, spineless double standards are part and parcel of music journalism amirite?). The Galaxie 500 sound is my purest kryptonite, and young Texan band Pure X lay on the Galaxie 500 shtick so thickly that I hope they never ever change. I want them to continue forever making records with keening guitars that move like a slow motion tsunami of molasses and double-tracked vocals that echo their news from a huge cavern containing all the lonely teens.

I know that my blog is probably full of instances where I call out bands that I don't like for being formulaic. And I know I will do it again. All I can do is hold up my hands and admit I'm a big fat hypocrite. Now excuse me while I play 'twisted mirror' again and wallow in a big luxurious vat of liquefied misery.  

MP3: Pure X-Twisted Mirror

My favourite albums of 2011 (#25 Sun Araw - Ancient Romans)

Tweet Hmm, I'll have to admit, this feels a bit awkward and wayward of me, my starting this list now, six weeks later than I really ought to have done. Even that notorious tortoise Karl appears to be putting his list to bed over on those geese (it's an excellent list by the way; you all should read it, but come back here won't yis). The path ahead looks lonely and punishing as fuck...and to think I started blogging because I thought it would be fun.

THIS YEAR...IN A WORLD...ONE BRAVE MUSIC BLOGGER'S JOURNEY AGAINST THE ODDS...HE SET OUT TO WRITE A LIST...BUT ENDED UP WRITING THE STORY OF HIS HEART...YOU'LL LAUGH...YOU'LL CRY...YOU'LL EVACUATE PSYCHEDELIC SUBSTANCES ALL OVER YOURSELF AND HOWL WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM LYRICS AT THE MOON IN A VOICE THAT IS NOT YOUR OWN WHILE YOUR EYEBALLS TREMBLE AND SQUEAK IN THEIR SOCKETS AND YOUR EARDRUMS IMPLODE AS LANA DEL REY SKITTERS BACKWARDS DOWN YOUR STAIRS ON ALL FOURS LIKE THAT BIT IN THE EXORCIST...[Huge subwoofer sound effect. Screen dims to black. The flaming words 'Asleep on the Compost Heap' fade slowly into view]...ASLEEP ON THE COMPOST HEAP...[Words dim to black followed by scratching record needle sound and goofy surprise gag, precisely 1.5 seconds long, featuring Rob Schneider].

#25 Sun Araw - Ancient Romans

There's a long tradition of psychogeographical holiday making in freak-out music, and such excursions through both time and physical geography are particularly evident in krautrock. Popol Vuh, for example, explore ancient Egypt on In den Garten Pharaos; on Alpha Centauri, Tangerine Dream aim their spaceship for that particular star; and so on. There's an earnest desire to seek on such albums, a desire that is irony free and feels a bit quaint or even innocent in this era of inverted commas around everything.

Sun Araw's Ancient Romans is spiritual kin to those records that bring to mind the illustrated covers of old science fiction books at jumble sales and afternoon escapes to inward panoramas. It's a serious minded album of expansively rolling jam music which has a single, pure, function: to free the imagination from stifling real world associations so it can travel to places vast and strange.

The album's conceptual 'thing' is that it is loosely based on the mystic bacchanalia rites of ancient Rome. As classics students find out in University (according to Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' anyway), the world of the ancients is separated from us not only by time and space but by systems of thought. One reason the average Ancient Roman lives in a different world to us, is that he perceives the world differently. Teleport him into the present and he will still exist in a reality that is profoundly altered in relation to ours.

Stallones clearly wants us to get inside that lad's mind, and he fiddles with the hinges of this conceptual window using colossal dubby soundscapes and submerged rhythms that speak of ritual and trance. The tunes unfurl slowly and luxuriously, more often than not breaking the ten minute barrier, with giant parts shifting slowly in relation to each other like scenery in parallax. Vocals, meanwhile, are used sparingly. They are dreamlike and dissociated in a reverb-heavy fog, ecstatic yelps and exhortations that serve to draw the listener ever further into this mysterious and fine album in the krautrock tradition.

MP3: Sun Araw-Crown Shell

My Home Town: a photo essay (NSFW or NSFCL Not Safe For Cat Lovers)

Tweet Visitors to the Kells online website will note the town's quixotic quest to have a volume of a famous manuscript removed from Trinity College and permanently 'returned' to us (because, erm, a treasure of national significance belongs to the town near where it was found). Understanding the magnitude of the endeavour, I've decided to help the town's chamber of commerce with some photojournalism to bolster their PR effort. It's a series of images that give a flavour of the picturesque and historical town on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

I call it My Home Town: A Photo Essay in eight parts. Enjoy.

When in my home town, why not engage in some retail therapy?

The 'some things he can't pick up' campaign targets town dogowners...

...yet fails to take off

hungry? try our Meath-renowned curry chips

Who needs Paris's Left Bank when you can people watch on the town's great thoroughfare, Farrell Street?

a wise man said that Ireland experiences cultural renaissance in times of recession

we welcome the smoker...

...and the outdoor drinker...

do not click 'read more' below if you are a cat lover or squeamish...

Asleep on the podcast heap #2

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This week's episode finds me considering... 

- gloomy witchy techno from England

- Guided by Voices' heartbreakingly ordinary new album

- and Nim, the tragic chimp whose life was ruined by a pompous turtlenecked professor with a hard-on for his female postgrad students and a disregard for the simple simian's heart.

the hipster chimp with the heart of gold

I feel much happier with episode 2 than I was with episode 1. I've managed to iron out a few technical kinks and improved my diction. This episode also includes music clips to add context to my discussion, and I feel like I was more focused and engaged in my chattering. Once again, I had great fun putting it together.

I'd greatly appreciate your taking a listen to this and giving any feedback at all. If you weren't so sure about episode 1, I'd still encourage you give this one a go as it's much further along the learning curve.

Podcast MP3 in Dropbox

MP3: Asleep on the Compost Heap-Episode 2

Podcast hosted on Podomatic

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Give us a shout in the comments if you have any ideas for future episodes.

Day 17 - something that grows

Tweet Some of these are just plain tricky to make interesting. Something that grows? Not my bank balance anyway (boom boom). How about Skrillex's hair? Skrillex's hair gone sentient, growing out of your toilet at a hundred miles an hour, wrapping around your ankles as you run screaming for the door.

SKRILLLLLLLLLLLEXXXXXXXXXXXX (click to make big)

MP3: Harold Budd-Flowered Knife Shadows

Over the Christmas period I vibed hard to a lot of music that probably gets stocked in the HMV rack marked 'New Age'. I'm not sure if this means I'm on some kinda slippery slope that will end with me buying limited edition porcelain unicorns out of Sunday tabloid supplements; all I know for sure is that I've developed a taste for a type of music which my younger self would have recoiled, nay cringed, at. Am I slipping over the Enya event horizon? If I am, let's blame Animal Collective. Fucking Animal Collective. The rot started with Animal Collective.

Quick podcast update - podcast episode 2 will be online tomorrow after Coronation Street.

darkling

Tweet There are few sights as dispiriting as Christmas decorations at this time of year. At any given moment on the fifth of January, a piece of tinsel detaches from a hard piece of blue tack and see-saws slowly towards a floor, somewhere in Ireland, while a drunk man cries. In a thousand playrooms, a thousand interactive toys dimly light up for the final time, playing horribly distorted electronic lullabies as batteries (which will never be replaced) die. Meanwhile, blocks of barely touched stilton squat in fridges, unpopular quality streets make their inevitable greasy descent down the gullets of the self-loathing, and oddly coloured stains streak the nation's porcelain.

That first snowdrop or crocus needs to hurry the fuck up.

In the meantime, the Compost Heap will illuminate the blustery gloom with a countdown of my 25 favourite albums of 2011. This year, I am going to devote a full post to every album in order to apply a modicum of critical depth to the process. I'll try my best to post very regularly (ideally three times a week) and in between the albums I'll post up the remains of my series of doodles from last year.

The podcast will return tomorrow or Saturday. I was delighted to get some IRL feedback on it, and further to suggestions (ooh see how I just lapsed into shitty business speak, might as well run with it) I'm going to address technical issues moving forward - after all we are all climbing this strategic staircase together, and we will hopefully hit the ground running in the next quarter.

In other words, I'm going to cut down on the 'ems' and 'aws' when I speak, and integrate small clips of the music I discuss into the podcast. 

Before I go, here is Grimes's ace new song. She's going to take off this year, mark my words.

MP3: Grimes-Genesis

the garden of forking paths and/or frozen puke

Tweet I saw in the end of 2011 watching TV with my mother in our front room. A tin of chocolate sweets sat open in a no man's zone on the floor between us (a slightly out of reach spot that allowed us to maintain a feeble delusion about not being chocolate crazed Christmas pigs). Before midnight, my mother, engaging in one of her weirder habits, went into the kitchen to microwave her cold mug of tea. I gulped a mouthful of Tesco diet cola, farted softly while there was a sly getting away with it, and un-muted The Vaccines who were gurning silently on Jools Holland's Hootenany.

My mother returned, squinted at the indie-landfill tableaux of forced jolliness on telly, and remarked "it's the same fella again. Does he come on every year?"; a comment which sent me tunnelling down a churning vortex of slowly rotating Quality Street wrappers into a clammy state of seasonal deja vu. She said the exact same thing to me the year before, right down to the word. I was sure of it. Which implied that we shared a similar experience the year before that too. I was reminded of an American novel I once read where a character pukes in the precise same spot in the same garden every New Year's Eve for the guts of a decade.

There's a grim repetitiveness about New Year's Eve (for me anyway), and when the scene repeats, only with you a little older, it can begin to feel like a cruel cosmic joke. In early 2011 I envisaged I'd be in Canada on New Year's Eve, standing out on my pinewood deck, watching fireworks pop brightly in the chill Vancouver night, one gloved hand holding a hot drink, the other thrown chummily around the furry shoulder of my pet bear, Ben. Oh, such dreams...

the glimmering dream

the shitty reality

Yet something has changed. Something important for me. I gave up alcohol. Even though I've only been off it for three months, I've already gained enough insight to know that Canada would have been what the old dudes in AA call a geographical escape. I'd more than likely make the usual tit of myself and do the usual damage to me and to others, except in a different country; a freezing cold country, for that matter, where the consequences of falling asleep on your doorstep (or indeed a compost heap!) might make for a slightly less funny story than here in Ireland.

I have no idea what the coming year will bring. But I know one thing - I am not going to let that fact bother me. Earlier this year, someone gave me a little keyring with 'live in the now' written on it, which is a fitting new year's resolution for me, with my tendency to live either in grossly exaggerated replays of shitty events from my past or in pipe-dream futures. And, ignoring the giant recession shaped boat we are all sitting in, 'now' isn't that bad for me. I have my family, my friends, a warm place to live, some good books to read, a bunch of hobbies to occupy myself, and my health.

Happy new year everyone!

MP3: Ray Lynch-The Oh of Pleasure
(pleasant new age burblings recommended by Astonishing Sod, aka music for contemplating the universe as a dribble of wheat enema snakes across your yoga mat.)