the silver gap

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Finally, a smidgen of summer. I've the window of my old room in Kells thrown wide open and, apart from the usual lazy sounds of the season, I can hear a new sound, the continual low clucking of chickens. Late in their lives my parents have decided, like many people who've watched a Duncan Stewart show on RTE1, to move themselves a tiny increment along the Irish social mobility spectrum and become suburban hen owners.

The hens live in a pretty classy coop at the top of the garden which looks exactly like a miniature version of the shed (one of those standard brown lumber ones with a corrugated roof). They've a nice bit of space to move around in and they are sheltered by the garden's staggeringly massive leylandii trees. Originally they had five hens but this has since expanded to eight because one of them became broody and my mother, touched by the hen's baldy tummy and distraught behaviour, decided to put her sitting on live eggs a while back. These eggs hatched last week into three chicks I've christened Tiesto, Scooter and Moby.

Tiesto, Scooter and Moby just chillin'

It was pointed out to me on twitter that some or all of Tiesto, Scooter and Moby might in fact be female. I'm keeping the names Lisa Lashes, Lisa Lashes II and Lisa Lashes III in reserve just in case.

As with all animals (and many inanimate objects - I've heard him call a TV remote a "fucken bastard") my father has now completely antropomorphised the chickens and projected a plethora of human psychological failings onto them. He mostly thinks they are "eejits". When the broody one started clocking, she was an "eejit". When she first wouldn't sit on the live eggs and would bolt for the shed door, he'd say "look at the eejit trying to get away from eggs now". When she finally sat on the eggs, he laughed his head off and said "look at the eejit now, sitting on another hen's eggs". But if hens are "eejits", crows are "bastards".

Crows can steal hen eggs. Who knew? Certainly not me. When someone first told me about this, my initial response was an incredulous "like fuck they can". But it turns out you can never underestimate the crow - a quick google search of "crow stealing hen eggs" throws up some disturbing results including a video of a little jackdaw marching into a coop then marching out bold as brass with an egg twice the size of his head somehow held steady in his beak. That particular crow was Australian, but the behaviour is general it seems. My father called me up the garden a couple of weeks ago, where he stood contemplating what were clearly a couple of smashed chicken eggs on the ground outside the coop. "Maybe the pigeons threw them down from the trees", he said without much conviction. Notwithstanding the fact that pigeons don't have arms it was very doubtful that they could have laid eggs that big. You'd fit about ten pigeon eggs in a hen egg.

Someone suggested covering the coop area in VHS tape to scare off the crows. We did this for a couple of days but my mother couldn't cope with the unsightliness. The place looked demented, hens running around behind a tangled chaos of shiny black tape whipping about like a web of madness. So we are looking for a plan B. Putting a life sized scarecrow is my preferred method of dealing with the problem. Something real mean and creepy, perhaps created from a disused boutique mannequin? I'd have some fun with that.

The eggs are fantastic by the way, golden yolked perfection. The white is so firm that they make the most wonderfully complete poached eggs without any messing around with whisks or vinegar. If you know me in real life don't be afraid to ask for a few.

MP3: The Orb-Little Fluffy Clouds
(the sky outside is full of little fluffy clouds so I'm off to make the most of the lovely day).

My favourite albums of 2011 (#7 Danny Brown - XXX)

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Move aside, big personality coming through.

#7 Danny Brown - XXX

Walt Whitman once wrote "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)".

Danny Brown doesn't do clichés, but I just had to invoke the literary cliché above to give some idea of the sheer expanse of human personality he communicates through the crude, funny, desperate, obnoxious, vulnerable, bollocky, proud, and conflicted character at the heart of his XXX album. It's pretty much a rap spiritual successor to a 'Song of Myself'.

I don't know a whole lot about rap so I often come to it in roundabout ways. I first came to XXX through the cover art. I thought the drug on the person's tongue was xanax, which is something I've been prescribed for anxiety at points throughout my life. That sounds like a pretty weird, weak and solipsistic link into this album, I know, but then again Brown has a thing about prescription drugs, his unusual rapping voice can sound at times like anxiety personified, and as for demented solipsism... Regardless, it's now long after the image hooked me and I continue to marvel at the lyrics and music on XXX.

The second claw XXX sank into me, the one that really gripped (actually, the third. The second claw came in the shape of huge space-gothic beats), is Brown's preoccupation with the age 30. He alludes to it in the title of course, but also mentions it explicitly on the raps that begin and end the album. It hangs over the entire lot. Last year saw my 30th birthday too. I'm sure I speak for most people who pass that symbolic milestone when I say that the age literally appears to pulse wherever you encounter it in print (right, guys? Right?). Without wanting to diminish the other remarkable stuff on XXX, I must admit that for a short while I was most fascinated by Brown's hyper-awareness of being 30 and where that placed him in rap.

The 'being 30 and looking over your shoulder' thing is a major part of XXX, yet there are many other aspects of Brown's persona that chime true. In saying that, I'm hopefully acknowledging less about my own self-absorption and more about Brown's mastery at revealing stuff about the human condition through cleverly curated details (actual or exaggerated) of his fucked up life. I'm sure most of the people who listen to this album will never strip houses for scrap (although, there are some Irish people who will identify explicitly with that) or snort ADD drugs until their noses bleed. But they might surely identify with some aspect of the personality of this flawed, substance-addicted artist having one last go of it in the eye of a personal storm as big as that baleful red yoke on planet Jupiter.

I'll leave it there. If I start to waffle on like a tool about 'flow' or 'spitting' I'll get shot from a height by my friend Sean who knows a thing or two about rap, and who might be reading this while polishing a few bullets. It would also be rude of me to not point those who haven't yet read it towards Karl McDonald's excellent piece on the album. He fills in all the gaps, and then some.

MP3: Danny Brown-30

...on note-taking

Tweet Is that summer I see outside the window? Or just a temporary break in the despondency?

As the sheets of rain came down earlier this week I found it hard to write a new blog post to publish here. You might have noticed this and you might have noticed, too, that I took down the most recent posting, which was my attempt to satirize various media responses to the Swedish House Mafia malarky.

I don't think it was particularly funny, but that is not why I took it down. It just didn't feel a correct fit for this blog - it wasn't in tune with the 'heap and what it is about. I'm not good at snark here, even though I have a an unruly snark element in my nature that pops up in conversation or on twitter sometimes.

I've spoken before about change here, but I doubt what I do on asleep on the compost heap will ever truly change. I found out that that the blog has a 'feel' I can't betray. This week, when I had that satirical post up, I genuinely felt weird at odd moments of the day, struck by sudden realisations that it was out there misrepresenting my little blog and gathering the wrong sort of page impressions. As pathetic as that admission must sound to a non-blogger, I'm sure plenty of bloggers will know the type of unique neurosis I'm getting at.

I might start a different blog somewhere else. Who knows?

Today, I've been looking through all these notes. There are piles of them. I have a box of them under my bed, and I rooted it out. In the past, I've lumped stuff into the box, but I've never actually sat down with it and gone through it. This afternoon, I tipped it out and sat on my bedroom floor surrounded by years and years worth of material all written in the same clutzy scrawl that was remarked on in every single one of my school reports.

My God, what an amount of stuff. There are notes about every sort of thing physically written on every sort of thing: foolscap, torn cereal boxes, various diaries, newspaper pages - there are even more than a few supermarket receipts with scribbles on them. Seeing them all accumulated like this, it struck me what vast personal value these notes have.

I'm looking at shreds of slightly macabre stories about boys on building sites and farms, slippery and rare playground echoes that came into my mind long enough for me to catch them with a pen, things old people said in pubs, the wisdom of people who gave up alcohol, the self-absorbed righteousness of some of those people too, wisps of dreams, stuff written when I was young and drunk, stuff written sobering up, diary entries from a hitchhiking trip across Canada, drawings of people on buses, drawings of people in psychiatric hospital and (scribbled below) the things that they and their families talked about as I listened from my bed across the ward, shadow figures from my childhood fleshed out by sentences spoken in their actual voices and captured from the dark multiplying murmurings that rise around the mind as it falls asleep, weird newspaper stories, small-town rumours from Kells, stories my mother told me, ghost stories, impressions, the light on certain buildings, my uncle's wet woolen clothes hanging on a hook, the same uncle's cold as marble head that I kissed at a wake, sunset on Clew Bay, a teenager falling headfirst out of a swingboat during a torrential wet night at a fairground in Kells, an Easter rising parade marching through Falcarragh's main street on an almost painfully bright March day in the 1980s.

So much stuff. Saved in way. Caught from the rapid daily flux of thought and piled up like sediment in a box. To be honest, I never knew how valuable all this would be or indeed why I felt compelled to take notes on situations. I mean I've harboured a vague desire to write that has come and gone down the years, but the note-taking remained constant like a compulsion. I'm so happy I did it. It feels like I've given myself a heap (!) of genuine treasure.

Now I'm going to start building. I'm going to use my spare time to try to write fiction seriously.

Bits of fiction will certainly appear here as I try things out. But fear not, the compost heap will never really change. I joke from time to time about agonizing over blog posts but the truth is that I get a lot of peace of mind from writing here. It's a sanctuary.

Music lovers, don't give up on me, my next post will be about album number 7 of last year: Danny Brown's XXX

MP3: Moondog-Bells are Ringing

questions of geography

Tweet My twin brother won a gold medal for achieving the highest leaving cert geography result in Ireland in the year 1998. Six months later, in NUIG's college bar, a drunk know-it-all from Kells chipped his front tooth on the medal in a reckless attempt to verify whether it was solid gold or not. The medal's current whereabouts remain unknown.

I'd like to think the weetabix wonder world atlas contributed in some small part to the winning of that medal.

not just a healthy malty cereal: weetabix clearly trail-blazed political correctness

A starling died in the attic of our family home a couple of weeks ago, crapping all over the place and dropping so many feathers in the process that it might as well have exploded. While cleaning up the deceased bird's trail of destruction (which included live maggots on top of what I just described) I happened upon a box of books containing the weetabix wonder world atlas. The bird shit could suddenly wait. I turned on the attic's bare bulb, dropped to my hunkers, and marvelled at this little yellow canonical book from my childhood (and my geographically savvy brother's childhood too, of course) for a good half hour or more.

I had entirely forgotten about it up to that point. Yet one look and one touch of its thumbed cover and pages (thumbed, but only to the dimensions of two pairs of identical nine year old thumbs), were enough to kick a closed door wide open across a day-bright room of memory.

The weetabix wonder world atlas. We saved up tokens for it and almost lost our shit the day it arrived in the post (An atlas. We almost lost our shit over an atlas. Seriously, what the fuck, etc). This sentence is bizarre but, thinking back now, I remember the extraordinarily salient role the weetabix cereal played in my young life. For a start I ate the stuff, that malt flavoured wattle (or is it daub?), every morning. (I digress: I ate weetabix out of a bowl like normal human being. However, Ciarán insisted on eating it out of a specific brown mug that had a rustic ploughing scene depicted on it and would not, could not, eat weetabix unless it was contained in said vessel - a habit that lasted right up until the point in his teens he made the big leap to coffee, toast, and seven seas multivitamins, possibly under threat of my revealing to his second year contemporaries that he ate pulpy tepid cereal out of a special brown mug as if he were autistic.) Then each night, I'd fall asleep looking at the outlines of the weetabix luminous Hallowe'en stickers I had plastered all over my bedroom wall and ceiling. I'd watch them fade from feeble luminescence to complete black during the hour or so that followed my mother turning off the light in the bedroom, getting an early and insidiously horrifying understanding of entropy and decay - something I am sure the suits in the cereal novelty department never factored into the stickers' function.

Anyway, this atlas. It was thumbed. But the pages that had the most love, the pair that kept opening of their own accord due to a crease in the book, were the pages illustrating the flags of the world. I felt so sad looking at them. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because I don't give a fig about flags now yet I clearly obsessed over those two pages way back when. I liked those flags to the point of pouring over them almost daily for a couple of years at least (there were carbon 14 style doodles on the page from my ten-year-old period - namely, a cartoon kettle called cuppa). And, you know what? I'd probably ace a flag round in a table quiz tomorrow, as long as it didn't contain post Yugoslavia break-up material. The flags are absorbed.

The young lad is still inside me somehow. But I am literally a different human. Look at this creature, this grown man, sitting on his hunkers amid bird feces and maggots in an attic, squinting down a telescope the wrong way.

MP3: The Kinks-Picture Book

My favourite albums of 2011 (#8 John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves)

Tweet An egg a day is okay. An album a day is okay too.

#8 John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

There is an interview with John Maus on The Quietus which is pretty much a dream interview. No truculent shite about "making music for ourselves, and if the fans like it then..." from John. Instead, he is articulate, unashamedly intellectual and, best of all, spilling over with enthusiasm. The man can't stop talking a mile a minute, which kind of puts an ironic spin on his album title, something I'm sure he's aware of. I'd advise anyone with an interest in the current state of art rock to pop over and have a read.

In the interview, Maus describes this album's title as a bit of a "pretentious mouthful". He took it from material by the philosopher Alain Badiou whose work, from my limited wikipedia-derived understanding of it (it's a heck of a wikipedia page however), appears to operate around belief in eternal truths that are mostly indiscernible, yet which reveal themselves to us during brief moments of rupture in, for example, art. It is up to the artist or the philosopher to try to name these truths and make them discernible for the rest of us. I think the important point about the guy, and what sets him apart from other philosophers in the postmodern tradition, is that he believes these truths actually exist and can be crystallized and identified. I'm wary to go on any further here, because my grasp on this stuff is slippery and undergraduate. I could be wrong already. So we'll step out of philosophy 101 and look to Maus and his cool album. Hopefully in a moment you'll see why the bit of theoretical context is important in this case.

Phew. Okay. I've just wiped a giant clot of sweat from my crinkly forehead.

Pretentious mouthful or not, I like the album's title and what it implies. As for the cover image of a lighthouse beam searching the sky over a storm? I adore that shit. It's clearly a metaphor for the self and a key to what Maus is all about. From his lyrics, his music, and from his dense interviews, his art strikes me as being about vigilant self-searching and the need to address the fact that most of what comes out of our mouths, our instruments, our paintbrushes, etc, is in fact bullshit. He wants people to pause and think about what is actually true, to cut the baloney out. I'm laughing now, wondering how this blog, with all its meandering bullshit, would fare in the world of Maus? Would he find anything of merit here? Probably not. Anyway, that's one aspect of what he does.

Another aspect of what he's doing, and something that connects him to his contemporaries Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, is his highlighting a need to apply a stringent critical filter to popular culture, and by implication, to take popular culture seriously. Like it or lump it this is the art of our time, he seems to say. And in different ways all three of these lads believe there is stuff of tremendous value in popular culture. In other words, the terminator walking out of the fire in James Cameron's film could be a beautiful meaningful image analogous to renaissance art, to name one example (Maus picks up on this image in the Quietus interview).

I think I can agree with him. For example, I have felt as moved by the Super Nintendo game Super Metroid as I have by certain works of high art or high literature that have appealed to me in my life. The music of that game, the eerie stillness and fascinating physical aesthetics of the environment created in it, the lonely atmospheres, and the strikingly beautiful central image of the sprite forever running, strikes me as the real thing - genuine art.

So like James Ferraro's, Maus's lyrics pull odd images and metaphors from popular culture and ask us to reevaluate them. Ice-T's famous "Cop Killer" is a very important image to him and he wants us to appreciate the metaphorical possibilities in it. Hulk Hogan emerges as a later symbol, and Jackie Chan too. "I'm a believer" Maus sings about them, and listening to him I think about one of the only things by Roland Barthes I've ever read where he treats the entertainment spectacle of wrestling in very serious elevated terms. These things, says Maus, are art. And we need to find a critical language analogous to them. Whether you agree with all this or not is up to yourself, of course, but how fine it is that a composer is out there grappling with things like this and, moreover, trying, really trying, to make it accessible. And that's where the music comes in.

The music on We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves is pop of a sort. It's sometimes dark music made on archaic synth equipment (not a million miles from Paddy Kelleher's album at number 13. Paddy, I'm sure, considers Maus an influence). Yet it is pop all the same - pop in that it's catchy, immediate, and not afraid to paint its joy or sadness in broad strokes. These songs are loaded with spiraling earworms. Quantum Leap is so insistently melodic I find myself internally humming it during odd moments far removed from any actual listening. And as for 'Believer', the album's closing statement, well when I listen to that sparkling manifesto I feel like I want it to carry me on its bright journey outwards for a lot longer than four minutes. I think of the lighthouse on the cover as 'Believer' ends, of the possibility of the song as the beacon of light, and then of Maus's uplifting message that culture hasn't gone to shit, that there is in fact plenty all around for us to believe in, if we'd only look, and think, and respond to it in a serious way.

MP3: John Maus-Believer

My favourite albums of 2011 (#9 Pinch and Shackleton - Pinch and Shackleton)

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#9 Pinch and Shackleton - Pinch and Shackleton

Of the two lads who collaborate on this genre-proof album, I know a good deal more about Shackleton than I do about the dubstep producer Pinch. I've yet to listen to Pinch's highly regarded Underwater Dancehall LP, and the only work of his I'm well acquainted with is this phenomenal fucking musical brick of inner-city England. There is no doubt that the lack of familiarity biases my assessment of Pinch and Shackleton, so bear that in mind when I say that it sounds on a continuum with Shackleton's other work, if a little less microscopic on the rhythmic end (that's not to say it's still not microscopic as fuck. It is. Just less so than the 3 EPs, for example). 

Those more familiar with Pinch would be better at picking out what he brings to the collaboration, I'm sure. I suspect it's a kind of spacious fluidity, a bit of fresh air to Shackleton's hyper-syncopated percussion and the chopped up guru/self-help voices thing that is by now so distinctive that music blogging dorks like myself have run out of words to describe it without resorting to a clichéd bag of metaphors about airlessness, dust and bones. Although, good luck to the fool who tries to describe his newest material (the extraordinary Music for the Quiet Hour) in those reductive terms.

So is there anything new I can say about this album without talking about tap dancing skeletons and desiccation? Maybe. I've listened to the album very deeply and every listen draws me further towards a peculiar pagan vision that counterbalances the dread of death with an affirming dance of acceptance. Towards the end of 'Levitation' - as the mid range quivers like some sort of astral projection enabling throwback effect from a far out krautrock album - a treated sample of choral voices and a slowly breathing organ threaten to communicate something very, very, final and fundamental about the human condition. Who am I to say what it is, but it's definitely spiritual and, weird as it feels to type this about this album, something peaceful.

I played the album on a whopper sound system in my brother's apartment yesterday and his wee baby, who had gotten completely antsy at a maximalist Kanye West production just seconds before, relaxed into a rhythmic nod of contentment straight away and, not only that, continued to move his upper body peacefully along to this mad alien sounding techno-dubstep as he slotted bricks into a shape-sorter. The same young fellow likes Wacka Flocka Flame, James Ferraro and the Bear in the Big Blue House - maybe there will be a future blog about his eclectic baby tastes?

If all the above sounds a touch introspective for what is ostensibly a dance LP, I must point out that elements of Pinch and Shackleton certainly feel like they would work outside of the context of headphone or home listening music (I'd say that could be to do with what Pinch brings). Like, even though the album is a complete piece (wonderfully so), there are a couple of productions on it such as 'Torn and Submerged' which would add proper value to a well judged techno/ dubstep mix or set.

Finally: as I've already alluded, Shackleton has outdone himself in 2012. But more of that later.

MP3: Pinch and Shackleton-Levitation

Oh, Columbo "one more thing" post-script time. I almost forgot. Shackleton will be in the Button Factory in Dublin on Thursday night (July 5th). Doors are at 7.30 which seems mad early but there's another guy on before him, so it might be a more reasonable hour when he takes over. I saw him in Dublin a year ago or so and it was surprisingly face-shredding. People standing too close to the stacks looked like gurning old folks going down a roller coaster (or maybe that was just the disco biccies?). Intense, and a lot easier to dance to than you might think listening to the same shit on headphones. He knows what he's about when there's a crowd in front of him. Ok, now I'm really going. Bu-bye.