The lick of paint...

Tweet I've lived in Dublin for the past few weeks and missed out on a huge clean-up effort that got underway in Kells. Gallons of paint were made available from some paint factory in Cavan (the Cavan paint people must have forgotten that dark day in Kells/Cavan relations when Kells people threw eggs and stones at their cars on their return from a game in Croke Park), and businesses were offered €100 grants to clean up their premises. A key incentive was that ageing Hollywood icon Maureen O'Hara was to pay us a visit and unveil a bronze bust of herself (which I checked out today and found out that her father, a Kells man, was called Charles Stewart Parnell Fitzimons no less - Parnell has some vague Kells link too!).

But now Maureen has come and gone, and look what we have, a town that shines and gleams like a postcard come to life. I swear it's amazing what a lick of paint does for the soul of a small town. Kells made new. Even the empty premises, shining like instagram photos waiting to happen (and in the age of instagram reproduction, that's the way some of us will ever know they really exist).

photo from Kells Heritage site: taken in Autumn

I was feeling under the weather yesterday, so I trekked down to the chipper to cheer myself up. It was national fish and chip day. Because of this, I had an idea that the chipper would be busy due to the half price fish and chip offer. I had an idea, but the reality was beyond belief. Two queues of people, coiling out the doors and down the street in two directions. One queue was for those who had made phone orders for collection, and the other was for those who wanted to avail of the walk-in offer (so to speak).

I took my place in the walk-in queue but couldn't help throwing the odd jealous eyeball over the other line which seemed to be moving much faster. Then I noticed that other people were aware of this too and were placing sly orders from their mobiles, while in the walk-in queue, before quietly switching sides. This strategy backfired, however (thankfully before I got sly and pulled the same stunt). You see, the collection queue immediately clogged up with people pulling the switcheroo. After that, some grumbling began. I heard the following hilarious lines: "there are scabs and strings of shite coming in here who never bought a bit of food out in their lives." "In twenty years you wouldn't see them cross a door for anything but teabags." "There'll be flies zapped dead on that thing from all the wallets they're flying out of".

Ah, Kells.

Also spotted in the chipper: an oul fella repeatedly wiping prodigious globes of sweat from his head with a fifty euro note later used in his transaction for chips. Well, it was hot in there, I suppose.

The fish and chips tasted great by the way. They really cheered me up. And I ate them walking home through a sparkling town.

MP3: Mt Eerie-The Place I live

Sally Cinnamon

Tweet Another post about a song I love. A friend of mine, who I love dearly, expressed his hatred of the stone roses on twitter in such a visceral fashion that it fascinated me.  "I don't think I hate a band more.My soul winces whenever I hear their music." - these were his exact words. Why? What is it about the Stone Roses that feeds into this sort of hatred?

For what it is worth, I love the Stone Roses. They speak out to an embryonic part of my brain. When I was 17 I used to think the Stone Roses were the sound of my teenage soul achieving some sort of actualized grace. That light drumming, that effortless pop way, the fact that your man can barely sing but he keeps it up because he is the mouthpiece for some sort of massive vibe coming out of the north of an artistically important country in pop.

My favourite Stone Roses songs switch all the time, but at the moment Sally Cinnamon is the cream of their crop. It is the sound of the band discovering themselves, tentatively trying out this sound that is entirely novel. It is amazing to listen to, a band truly discovering itself. I would happily argue till the cows come home about why people don't like the Stone Roses?

If you get it, and if you feel it, then this summer you are probably in for an extreme treat. Shane Meadows is filming the entire thing for a documentary. Magic.

The Stone Roses - Sally Cinnamon

If you only go to one thing this week/ month...

Tweet ...then I advise you to go to see Tim Hecker in Dublin's Unitarian Church this Friday (time: 8pm cost: €15). Thanks, Quarter Inch Collective! Like the snooker player Jimmy White, the techno producer Moritz VonOswald, the poet Elizabeth Bishop, my baby nephew Karl, and this dog, Tim Hecker is a compost heap hero.

Tim in your back garden earlier today.

Below, you will find a piece of music from his astonishing recent album Ravedeath 1972. I'll stick my neck out and say that Ravedeath is an album that has actually taught me things about how to listen to music, just as reading certain great books can teach you new ways to read (but more of that at a later date).

MP3: Tim Hecker-In the Fog I

Ghostliness and after-traces, these are the themes of Hecker. The Tupac Hologram flickering brokenly on a scorched outcrop long after the last human died, while the radio wave ghosts of music flux and howl around dead, irradiated, poles. And who hasn't felt that kinda buzz, right? 

voices from the lake

Tweet Remember a few days ago when it was Tuesday and a baked potato and a period of self-reflection got in the way of my posting about a sublime techno album? No? I'll jog your memory - The Irish Times had this to say about the day that was in it...GREECE TOLD TO EXECUTE BAILOUT TERMS OR FACE BANKRUPTCY... Oh, urm, on second thoughts, that could be the Irish Times any day this year.

The album is too good to consign to the heap of projects I've abandoned due to my digressions (the compost heap's compost heap - a spongy grey place where you'll find a half-read copy of Don Quixote sandwiched between a partially dismantled Rubix Cube and a Pokemon Silver cartridge for the Nintendo DS), so I'll post a few short words about it now.

the lads would eat gelatos beside the lake as teenagers, dreaming of the day they'd get a 5/5 review on Resident Advisor

Voices from the Lake is a collaboration between two Italian techno producers I previously knew little about, Donato Dozzy and Neel. Dozzy's background is in trance-like techno that takes the scenic route, whereas Neel, as far as I can tell, is just some dude (I'm kidding: he's probably great, but I just never heard of him). 

The album is a study in refined ambience. It is a techno slow-burn that moves incrementally, steadily, through curtains of shifting texture and percussion, preparing the listener for moments when it seems to open up entirely, most strikingly on S.T. (Vftl Rework) where a few judiciously deployed synth chords (mentioned elsewhere) feel so grand and spacious, that to experience them in the context of the slow build that comes before them, is like looking out over a hopscotch pattern in the sky, illuminating itself, one box at a time, towards heaven. 

It's clichéd to talk about techno sets, albums, or mixes as being journeys, but I'm gonna put up my hands and say I can't think of a more suitable analogy to describe this album. The trajectory of the mix (and it builds seamlessly) is a succession of gentle ascents towards sweeping plateaus, where interlocking percussive elements writhe across the illusive depth created by the synthesizers. All this is tied in with a loose 'lake' concept that is first suggested on the album's opener 'Iyo' and reinforced time and again by the aforementioned sense of surface patterns moving across depths.

I listen to this album going to sleep a lot, and a friend of mine recently told me on twitter that he does too. I think that taps into its core function. It is a cool and detached thing of beauty, designed to be contemplated as such. It's an exploration of sonic depth and temporal processes for the mind to get lost in and, on the subject of temporal processes, it is unquestionably an elegant experiment in time manipulation (which is what a lot of dance music is about - the hunt for that 'everlasting moment' people sometimes experience at the peak of a DJ set, that sense of stepping outside of time). 

Over to you jury people: Voices from the Lake is in a phrase... (what is it?)... it is, quite simply, beautiful music.

MP3: Voices From the Lake (Featuring Donato Dozzy and Neel)-Vega

baked potato...

Tweet When I sometimes look back at my earliest writing on music, I cringe. I tended to talk about things in absolutes and superlatives. Albums were often 'an album of the year', even if they were discussed in February. Indeed, almost everything was the best/ the most/ the ______est of its genre or kind. I was fond of adjectives too, and many nouns died in that tragic circumstance, the multi-adjective pile-up.

"It's ugly Doc. The album review didn't stand a chance. Looks like another case of adjective asphyxiation. They say it was the word 'ethereal' that did the damage in the end."

My critical writing is still flawed. I'm an extremely slow learner and always looking for ways to improve. For example, I've become aware of just how little I know about, or can expound on, the technical side of music. It is a mystery to me. I can't read notation, identify chords or notes, and have a limited understanding of the component parts of songs, stuff like bridges, middle eights, harmonics, melodies and counter melodies. When a musician listens to a song, what they hear is surely very different to what I hear. I can't make out the joins. I was always aware of this, but it became excruciatingly apparent to me a few years ago when I read Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head, which is a song-by-song exegesis of the Beatles' entire catalogue and the single best book on music I've read (I know this observation looks funny in light of my first paragraph but, honest, it really is the best). McDonald had a background in music theory and this shows in a remarkably rounded critical style that considers the songs in terms of their cultural and historical context but also dissects their musical anatomies.

album X sounds like a Jackon Pollock painting looks

I sometimes feel sad that I'll never be able to write about music in that way. I've tried to brush up on music theory from time-to-time by reading stuff like Daniel Levitin's excellent This is your Brain on Music, but there is only so far my tuneless brain can be pushed in that direction. Here's a tragic fact: when I was in primary school (sixth class I think), I was such a bad singer that not only was I relegated to the chorus of the choir, but was ultimately told to mime along to the chorus instead of singing, because my discordant crow voice messed everything up.

So what can I write about? Not much really. I don't even consider myself a critic when it boils down to things, and sometimes feel uncomfortable when writing about music outside of this little space (for example for magazines). What I can offer are my personal responses to music, which continue to be intensely felt. I can discuss what it means to me and especially how it ties in with my memory. I guess I can look at it in terms of its cultural context, and I think I have a good idea of what is striking or important. I'd like to think I have a bit of a 'feel' for psychedelic and dance music (albeit a grasping and crude feel), though I'd make no great claims there either.

Hmm, so that's it I guess; my poorly equipped critical toolbox. I'm not sure what brought on this post. I put a potato on to bake about an hour ago and sat down to write about a sublime techno album called Voices from the Lake yet ended up writing this. In spite of how it reads, it's not an avalanche of self-doubt or anything like that. I'm not going to stop blogging about music, it occupies too prominent position in the life of my mind. But as to whether I properly understand it? That's a different story.

MP3: Built to Spill-Carry the Zero

Hanky Panky No How

Tweet This is just a short post about a favourite song of mine. I might write a few of these over the next while.

memories of planing lakes

MP3: John Cale-Hanky Panky No How

Paris 1919 is John Cale's famously lush, orchestral album. It's very dreamlike, using a combination of soft orchestration, pop melody, and backward gazing literary lyrics that imagine Europe during bits of the 20th century that John Cale wasn't born in time for (though I'm always surprised by how old he is) or in the right country for, and stuff from his own life and experience. Pretty much every song on the album is a little marvel in its own right, and I find myself moving between them in my interest, but 'Hanky Panky No How' is the one that really gets me, the one that even makes me teary sometimes. 

Paris 1919 is dreamlike in its entirety but 'Hanky Panky No How' sounds particularly so to me. I think this is because it combines the verdant orchestration typical of the album with the addition of a rising drone that reminds listeners of his earlier avant garde music with the Velvet Underground and La Monte Young. The drone gives the song a quasi-psychedelic feel and ties in beautifully with my favourite image from the entire album:

What’s needed are some memories of planing lakes
Those planing lakes will surely calm you down 

What a beautiful, peaceful and comforting image of something to give you spiritual solace or to console you. And how the music matches it, flattening out along the drone in endless calm. It's just heartstopping stuff.