ensenada drive, woodland hills, 1969

The piano may not have been drinking, but I have; to a civilized degree. Purloined from the original German, here; the root and trace of it seeded from a sugarmegs microdot of a torrent sown, originally, in 2006. With supporting observations from John French.

A roll of the dime. As invited within the offices of the good doctor, Faust.

A sequence of eight annoted short pieces, recorded somewhere between the onset of winter, 1968 and the spring of 1969, none of it features on the official "Grow Fins" compilation of outakes from those Trout Mask Replica Sessions. I learned of the captain's passing, first, in a report from Casa Nada, sometime in Sacramento.

01-Untitled Piano Song (1:33)
02-Untitled Piano Instrumental #1 (1:53)
03-A Lot Of Money For You, A Lot Of Money For Me-Untitled Piano Instrumental #2 (1:19)
04-Short Whistling (0:10)
05-Untitled Piano Instrumental #3 (2:04)
06-Why Can't We Be Free? (0:50)
07-Untitled Piano Instrumental #4 (0:58)
08-Untitled Piano Instrumental #5 (0:31)


▼ DON VAN VLIET: THE BEEFHEART PIANO TAPE (OR, THE TROUTWOOD NOT TELL ME WHERE THE SUSHI'S HID / SUNDAY EVENING) Original Reel > PC Wav > FLAC > MP3 (Bootleg) 1968/9 (US)

a dose of vitamin e [reduced]

Gustave Doré, 1886. 


In a good mood, then, I leave my wife dawdling over the pram in the more sanitary side of town and duck into the supermarket.

Our sage bag of tricks has piled on one and a half lbs in the course of one spare week. Something less by metric alchemy.

I do not find what I am looking for. 

"DOYOUDOSUSHI?" I enquire. Karaoke out a Can. Barry Sheen, after a stroke.

We kick-start the pram and travel in caravan to the park at the top of the road. By the time we get there I could eat a horse. As it is, we prowl around in search of a dry bench and fall upon the sushi. Devouring every shard.

It is all right. 

I do not care for George Osbourne. I do not like him at all. An 18th century engraving of a man divested of powdered wig and rouge. Ankle breeches. Buckled shoe.

Give his coalition seven more months, and there will be a poor house back on every corner. Jacobins swinging in Tyburn.

We take a meandering route back home past vast Georgian houses hugging avenue and circus, a puzzle of lanes. This part of this city I am largely unfamiliar with. An adjunct to its commercial heart. Among the nursing homes and divided lets, an odour of squandered wealth persists, blackmail, sculduddery; under quarried flagstone and vans deploying fibre to the curb; out of rockery and reclaimed wind. 

When Gilmour's charge did dandle, Parliament Street did blush;
Should Lutyens' stone be littled, with swords brought forth be hushed.

We open the door on mail forwarded from our old place.

A solicitor's letter on behalf of the utility company demanding £154 on top of all we fed in to its niggardly prepayment meter in the course of this year past.

This, despite a credit carried over in that last quarter of some £56. Plus a £20 late payment surcharge; £30 court fees; £50 solicitors costs. Oh, and £1.14 statutory interest.

Just one more reason we are forever in debt. 


▼ THE FALL: I AM DAMO SUZUKI from "This Nation's Saving Grace" LP (Beggars Banquet) 1985 (UK)

triage

Christmas Trees
have taken over our
Pavements,
Creeping out under
cover of
Darkness,
Flood Warnings,
Dragged out out of 
bed to sober 
Up,
unwanted guests.


By morning they have
Succumbed to frostbite.
Shedding
needles like so many
Fingers. Toes.


Walking back
from the brink of
Shrivelling,
we step behind a
Dislocated limb,
allow a woman to
move past us,
Uninterrupted.


Thanks, she yawns,
Her breath a
Fog. Steaming like
Warm breakfasts.
Tea. Toast.


We nod and pretend
to examine the tree,
Stooping
like Undertakers on
The Job,
Measuring a corpse
left out in the rain.

1010011010:~$sudo su

There was a time when all was word,
from font of crackling spindle
Searing Moses ear,
to Albert James Freed on the AM dial.

Before that too, the coiled copper wire
of the fallen, whispering for Adam.
Serpents. Rose seeds.
Unplumbed wormholes in the garden.

The nature of the word is virus.
Binary. Hyperlinked. Self-replicating.
It will not rest, in cave nor cache,
what began as babble is storm, torrent.

philip kindred got it nailed, the sepsis.
Dancing round hospital in wheelchair.
Denounced as hack, hacked in turn,
Warding off infection with icthys palm.

What began with an apple
Scrolled on the Mainframe, vavvavvav,
Scripted on the backs of eyelids,
Blessed, archived, embedded in host.

The voracious appetite to overwrite, 1.1

all out to fink, inc.

..."La Fleur De Barbe" is not among those eight recordings of Dubuffet's reissued by İlhan Mimaroğlu on "Musical Experiences" (Finnadar SR 9002). Certainly, it hails from those original pieces recorded by Dubuffet - in collaboration with Danish painter and ally, Asger Jorn - between December, 1960 and March, 1961; twenty issued on six 10" LPs, with perhaps eleven additional pieces on a farther four 10" vinyls, each in a limited pressing of 50 copies individually numbered and signed by the artist. 

"The first tape produced in these circumstances is rather unusual as it is a poem, La fleur de barbe, which is declaimed, chanted and vaguely sung by several voices mixed together (which are all in fact mine) with occasional instrumental accompaniment."

OUT OF PRINT SOURCE: THUNDERPERFECTMIND

▼ JEAN DUBUFFET: LA FLEUR DE BARBE from "Experiences Musicales" 6 x 10" LP (Unknown Label) 1961 (France / Italy)

all out of ink, inc.

"Bowery Bum (May 1964) is the piece that occasioned my association with Dubuffet and opened the way to my discovery of his own extraordinary music (of which I eventually made a first commercial edition on Finnadar SR 9002). The visual impetus of the Dubuffet drawing, one of his Bowery Bums, suggested the form, the content, and even the sound source - the sound of a sole rubber band used as a counterpart to the India ink of the drawing. The outer formal character of the piece corresponds to that of the drawing - a seemingly random maze of lines through which appears a human figure, pathetic and droll."

- İlhan Mimaroğlu, sleevenotes:
"Face The Windmills, Turn Left" (Finnadar SR 9012).


The trail which led - for me - ultimately to İlhan Mimaroğlu begins with a stark one colour caricature of Mingus by Greg Condon. "Changes One" and "Two" - recorded in NYC in December, 1974, with Don Pullen on piano; George Adams on tenor sax; Jack Walruth on the horn - are variously celebrated as a high, or derided as elevator music climbing only so far as a wedding planner schmoozing in the honeymoon suite of an uptown hotel. The last position is thoroughly strange when one considers that much of the content from these two sessions was informed by the Attica Prison Riots of 1971, mitigated only marginally by allowing that both albums were produced by Turkish electronic avant-gardist, İlhan Mimaroğlu.

For some, the blame lies not with the featured composition or performance, but the veneer and polish of the final Atlantic release. In short, those essential qualities Mimaroğlu brings to bear in consenting to channel the muscular Mingus at the top of his game.

Born in Istanbul in 1926 and educated at Lycée of Galatasaray, Mimaroğlu "studied in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Center under Vladimir Ussachevsky" after his move to the US in the 60s. In 1971 he collaborated with Freddie Hubbard on the critically acclaimed "Sing Me a Song of Songmy: a Fantasy for Electromagnetic Tape". For his part, Mimaroğlu was rewarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. One assumes Mingus was himself impressed; there is no record that the decision to draft Mimaroğlu into service on "One" and "Two" was anything bar consensual.

Beginning in earnest in 1964 - with "Bowery Bum" (after an ink drawing by Jean Dubuffet, executed 12 years earlier) - Mimaroğlu's experimental compositions are simultaneously linear; collaged; perplexing. Founding the Finnadar label in 1973 as a conduit for both acoustic arrangements and his continuing experiments in stereo and quadraphonic sound, Atlantic bought over distribution of his back catalogue in 1981.

"Musique Noires", released in 1983, compiles - so far as I can gather - earlier "tape parts realized in the studios of Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center" overdubbed with traditional instrumentation and voice. In the following instance, with cello by Charles McCracken.

There. I just thought I'd hurl out a curved ball.



▼ İLHAN MIMAROĞLU: BOWERY BUM from "Face The Windmills, Turn Left" LP (Finnadar) 1976 (US)
▼ İLHAN MIMAROĞLU: STILL LIFE 1980 from "Musique Noires" LP (Finnadar) 1983 (US)

AVANT GARDE PROJECT 30

behind the nib of sleep

This post has been amended, pending investigation into possible po-facedness.

Sleep. No, not the recumbent John Giorno from Warhol's 321 minute anti-film - premiering to nine people in total in a Manhattan loft on January 17th, 1964, two of whom fled within its first hour - but the absence of it. The dessication of self as bodily fluids coagulate. And major organs fail.

Tim Sullivan got me started thinking on it in an afterthought to his piece on horses; horseshit; bridles and bits. A trail of "secret creepo rays beaming out from Disneyland". This is not an attempt to distil his original meditation. More precisely, it was not so much sleep deprivation which was mentioned, as insight. Looming up through a tangible fog on wings which beat and dazzle. I sat down to brood over it, got up to pour a cup of instant coffee, and realized one cigarette was not about to get me through the night. My wife offered to set out for the shop, but I could not allow it.

Of the two of us, she has had less sleep by far. Her breasts are tender, her nipples chafed from our child's feeding, the whites of her eyes veined like cracked porcelain. Besides, it was I who made it first to the end of the pack.

I put on my shoes and walked up the street to the shop on the corner with my older son. Really, the shoes are no use at all in this weather. The snow melted some time between Christmas and the approach of a new year, but it has been raining constantly - a freezing drizzle - and the pavements are carpeted with municipal grit. A poor man's salt of the earth. And the road we must cross rises quite steeply, steeply enough that I have seen rivers washing over it. And the green light over the shop's canopy dispelling any kind of welcome as we near it. As dismal, maybe, as the bar in Venice Beach. Its proprietor seemingly despising all who purchase tobacco products or alcohol.

Glasgow is littered with this type of convenience store. Jaundiced shopkeepers irrately dispensing forbidden fruits to the infidel. And his children. In the event that we all succumb to a sudden rash of cancer, there is an alcohol dependency unit situated conveniently nearby; just to keep the cash register chirping.

So. I bought the cigarettes, my son paid for a bottle of chocolate milk, and we trudged back home to pick up where we left off.

Back to sleep, then. Or the rationing out of it through these lean times.

It is not a taxable commodity, I don't believe. Not yet. The rising tide of the clinically depressed may yet tip the scales in favour of a referendum on it, even chronic alcoholics habitually embrace it. Junkies, of course, are perpetually on the nod. And when the urge to hit at the keys is on the wane, I even put my monitor to bed.

It is an untapped market of huge potential. Only the FTSE never sleeps, now the tiger is awake.

Well. There is no Bill's Bar to bring one's woes to.

Even the best of them will chew you up and spit you out just as soon as the eyelids flutter; the fingers grope for pennies to shield the retina from the cold soaking glare. I cannot pretend to have amassed an ounce of advice worth a button. Not that anyone is asking. There is no respite. That's the truth of it. The soft tissues brittle over like crystallized syrup; the arteries harden and the blood becomes like ice. A redundant muscle with too much heavy traffic wheezing in and out.

The biggest sleep we've all been chasing.

Leaning in to it like skittles, squandering the passing of days as we suck it in and shit it out. Contorted monkies, finally, racing to the finish.

I forgot to mention.

An advertisment dropped through my letterbox today. Four figures in washed out black, the ink laid on sparingly as a mafioso's kiss, and not - as you have every right to second guess - the four horsemen of the apocalypse. "SINGING RESERVOIR DOGS WANTED" - looking just like the Walker Brothers, what are the odds ?

"FOR 1950s DOO WOP GROUP. WILL BE EXPECTED TO BUSK IN TOWN, SO AS TO LEARN TO ENTERTAIN FROM THE GROUND UP." No specific reference to burial, or promise of resurrection, but the allusion to it nonetheless. "YOU WILL RECEIVE AN EQUAL SHARE OF THE MONEY AND I WILL PAY EACH OF YOU £10 ON TOP OF THAT."

I could be tempted.


image by Pablo, 1933.

A nod, too, to Nathan Nothin's procurement of jam and "Jerusalem" as the veneer of democracy starts to fade, and to jonderneathica for supplying an invitation to the quietus.

▼ SLEEP: EVIL GYPSY / SOLOMON'S THEME from "Sleep's Holy Mountain" CD (Earache) 1992 (US)

fingers in the pies

Antonio Prohías, 1961.



"A Ha to Doctor Johnson
Said Scipio Africanus
Lift up my Roman Petticoat
and kiss my *@!$! Anus"

- William Blake, Complete.



The following (quoted) piece first appeared the day preceding Hogmanay; under a different badge. I promptly reset it to draft, given my alarmism seemed a tad overblown.

In hindsight, I'm not so sure.

There exists a spate of reports out there documenting persons being locked out of their Google or Facebook accounts. Contact lists violated; emails circulating in the wild. The repercussions, when one pauses to reflect on it, are potentially grave enough to raise a code red. After months of plunging into the surf without a seatbelt, internet security is very much back on my agenda.

Legitimate concerns after the careless activation of a Java Applet.

Not content, then, on promoting catalepsy with my waxing lyrical on parenthood, I reinstate it now as a means of further cudgeling the casual wanderer onto the Bleachers. Or to merely propogate unwarranted dread.



"A curious thing happened on the way to the forum, today, to paraphrase Zero Mostel as Pseudolus.

Or Frankie Howerd. Chose your poison.

I was sitting in front of my portal to the world with the sound turned way down low and my browser open. My fly zippered. Out of sheer laziness, I left the tab logged into my Google account. Staring absentmindedly at the baby in my lap; daydreaming myself into a coma.

Well. An hour or two might have idled by. I did not notice whether the monitor drifted off to sleep. The grey afternoon licking at the window petered into twilight; the lamps up and down the close across the street stuttered awake like drunken fireflies. I could have leaned out to start a cigarette. I could have leaned out to start an argument, but nobody was listening.

I am still getting used to the change of water. A different sort of fishbowl entirely. If I ever move again it will be to a croft parked on the edge of a sheer cliff - a broken lighthouse - with nothing but glowering skies between me and the sea.

So. Mildly irrated at this slipping into genteel dotage without so much as a properly diagnosed seizure, I sidled my son into the crook of one arm and lunged at the keyboard for a timely interruption. I punched the volume up as far as it would go. And that's when I heard it. That's when I became aware of some kind of terrible intrusion.

At first I was tempted to dismiss it as a bad rip.

A sloppy stab at binary encoding.

I quit the file and the sound persisted. Keystrokes. F@ckin' keystrokes. Jamming away like a trio of ambidextrous Ukranian crooks. Or the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Dear lord.

Now, I am not so quick as to dismiss myself as wholly cretinous when it comes to desktop security. I have a modest grasp of the internet; those pitfalls to avoid. I laid my son in his crib and opened up my system preferences, navigated to sharing. Firewall on ? Check. No exceptions ? Check. Internet sharing off ? Check. Back to security. A cursory search to make sure passwords are enabled, then on to accounts.

The devious hacking of remote keys upped a gear and appeared to be reaching its crescendo.

I logged out of everything I could - force quit what I couldn't - restarted and ran a standard Symantec test for vulnerable ports; everything clean and stealthy. The keystroke noise, of course, had disippated. I logged into my router's firewall and closed down anything which did not seem essential. I did this, and I did that. Oh, yeah. So what.

Last, but by no means least, I logged back in to my Google account, changed the password, deleted an obsolete default email address, and made sure port forwarding was not enabled. Everything appeared to be as it should, bar the one lamentable oversight, which lay with the integrity of the original password itself, perhaps. A glaring error. Possibly.

Like Mr. Kurtz, at the atrophied epicentre of his heart of darkness, I have gotten lazy. Prone to infection and possession.

Like Marlon Brando in his precarious temple, I have gotten fat and routinely neglectful; complacent in the face of complexities. But not an inch too paranoid.

Apocalypse now ? Last tango in Partick, motherf@ckers."



postscript:

I habitually monitor downloads with Clam Xav; a freeware program. I monitor, too, inbound and outbound connections via the indispensable Little Snitch. As an added precaution, I installed Sophos Home Edition and scanned the entire volume for evidence of Trojans or Worms; in particular any DNS Changer which might have embedded itself somewhere in the directory. Nada. I also ran a subsequent fully authorised scan through a separate program to check for any Malware Sophos might have missed; specifically Keystroke Loggers. Nothing. Theories ? Spurious observations or informed conjecture ? Hit me with it. I'm all ears. Let me begin the new year with cigarette burns peppering the hood on my sweatshirt; a glass tumbler to bottle up the smoke.

the wrestler

Of all those odd jumbles of vowels
my son brings with him to the world -
the gurgles; yelps; indian war whoops -
broken consonants, riddles, squawks,
the strangest by far is that piercing
screech; a squeal of brakes on a
dodge scraping the corner, hubcap
flapping, all this accompanied by tiny
fists flung out over each shoulder,
as he comes to in his crib, half drunk
on milk, one expression after another,
mouth yawning; lips smacking in
a perfect 'o'; forehead furrowed with
all that effort required just to break
wind, squeeze out a fart: a pistol shot.

It is an undecipherable conundrum.

The letting go of past lives, the
slipping of an old soul into a new shoe.
The lacing and interlacing of self,
eyelash and fingernail, an epic struggle.

There was a free thinker named Boehme,
much admired by the engraver, Blake.

"Man must be at war with himself,"
he wrote, "fighting must be the watch
word, not with tongue and sword,
but with mind and spirit, and not to
give over."

Peaceful soldier. Wrestling with tigers.



image from the comic book,
"Fiasco Bombasco", by Ive Sorocuk.

know your conjurer

To those of you who looked no farther than the sacrificial goat, you left the feast empty bellied; to those of you who asked no more from pablo's danseurs than a festive showing, you missed a merry treat.

Squatters on the Bleachers - and there are a few - will be aware by now of my fixation on the astral unravellings of one Daevid Allen; the dark archipelago where hippie collided with punk in those eruptions from Planet Gong. The liaison was fittingly brief. It culminated with a startled Dingbat Alien fleeing passing searchlights - luminous burning spearings - to seek refuge in the bush; it ended with Mark Perry's ATV hijacking a free bus in the Here and Now.

In much the same anarchic spirit, Dave Sez of Know Your Conjurer - aided and abetted by pinkpressthreat - wassailed the house to alert me to a Megapost on some very hard to unearth gems from the band first formed in Ladbroke Grove in 1974. Never once in print jams and unreconstituted vinyl rips. Soundboard Recordings. What began as one man's labour of love seems to have escalated into something more deeply collaborative.

From who ? Where ?

Know Your Conjurer. From Pablo to Bosch. * * e d o * *.

This unforseen doffing of the - conical - cap took far longer to orchestrate than anticipated. A two fingered jab at the keys, and my dashing off to shake a knitted monkey over the crib. Lest I forget, I would like to say a brief hello to baby Cal, too, who entered the world to share his birthday with Stacia of Hawkwind just three short evenings ago. Glad tidings.

Three weeks on the heels of my own impossibly small son; Milo, the Sagittarian. Registered, at last, today.

Know your conjurer.

no reasön

Recorded in Escape Studios, Kent, 1977; produced by Speedy "Thunderclap" Keen(e).

Written by Ian Kilminster.

▼ MOTÖRHEAD: MOTÖRHEAD from "Motörhead" LP (Chiswick) 1977 (UK)

pablo dillinger, on registering a birth

A knife. A fork.

And the forceps not so small,
nothing remotely tidy,
or encircling in pentameter.

Two feet and a long syllable;
drawn out, redly yawning.

The cerci of an earwig.

This is not what immediately
occurred to me, or even after
the fact. The blood still
drying on my hams. The wailing.

And the young doctor's face:
contorted with the exertion
required to change a tire.
A 4x4. Something heavy hurtling.

I did not think to thank her until
much later, back in the corridor
between soda machine and bins.
Fearing the worst and hindsight.

A knife. A fork.

Not to spell apple, but application.
Raw, dispassionate intervening force.

I do not remember if I did - thank
her - at this late stage. Not formally.

A smile. A nod. That is properly
the size of it; wan, if not quite
hostile. The fleeting discomfit of a
husband discharged. Discarding
gown and overshoes in sanitary
fashion. Dishevelled. Irritable.

And yet. I threw my arms around
the midwife while they weighed
my son, thankfully she did not
think to escape. Imagine the
effrontery. The potential for sheer
awkwardness; "you crazy fool !"
my wife chiding, from the stirrups.

A knife. A fork.

And the forceps not so small,
but my son a rosy bundle,
scalded and petulant; mewling.



illustration from Picasso's "pichet tête"
(1953); partial glaze on white ceramic.

three minutes to three, december 6th

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The encroaching murmur of sleigh bells.

The due date came and went as the ice fastened and snow drifted. On our trip to the bus stop for what was officially our last antenatal appointment, all that was missing was the donkey. Magi. Three wise men overtaking us by taxi.

The wait was crippling. Or seemed so, as Scorpio fell under the centaur's arrow. And the great goat Pan up to his midriff in dirty slush; spotting by his elbow.

Whittled by uncertainty, all semblance of resolution gone in a puff of smoke, I found myself slyly coveting a random assortment of 70cl bottles on supermarket shelves. Impervious to cajoling, not one absconded in my basket. Fairweather friends. Down to the grain.

The scales stalled at tipping point. Worse, the scales sat empty.

A pregnant pause. A timing of contractions.

Well. Something had to give. The bump was having none of it, the hospital did not want to know.

"Keep an eye on those contractions, you'll know soon enough," the midwife on the line pronounced. She might easily have been an imposter. A mental patient stopping by the desk to pick up the phone.

A falsetto brute with pharmaceutically doctored balls.

Another Saturday came and went. Blanched under two feet of snow. And the madman downstairs, stamping his feet at one AM; belting out "The Sash my Father Wore". I wanted to burst him good, the unenlightened orange balloon.

I took to eavesdropping on Holy Warbles. I was too unnerved by then to even leave a comment. The Holly and the Ivy.

Pascal Comelade is a Frenchman by birth. A Catalonian by calling.

On Sunday afternoon, I was dipping into his Haikus. I pulled out "Put a Straw Under Baby" and cranked up the volume on the PC's wheezing internal speakers. So far as I was able. This apple is so elderly, it ought to have fermented into cider. Acid green and volatile. I have wanted to euthanize my disagreeable neighbour under King Tubby's dubby boom for some weeks now, but our living room echoes like the chilly wooden benches of a Siberian train station, and I have not had the heart to hard wire the woofers out of their box. The patience.

We are in limbo.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," my wife cried out. "My waters have broken! Get me up before I ruin the couch."

On arrival at the hospital she was five centimetres dilated. By 8PM, she was fully dilated and the midwives were convinced she would breathe our baby out by suppertime. Debbie and Lauren. I warmed to them almost immediately.

In my limited experience, midwives are a grounded lot. Where consultants - even nurses - routinely grate or inflame, midwives are the exception. Of course, we had time enough to establish a rapport.

It was not an entirely easy birth, though. Let me attest to that.

By 12:30 AM, as December 5th slipped into the 6th, it became alarmingly clear that my wife was not going to breathe our baby out without some kind of clinical intervention. I am ashamed to confess that after eight hours of attending her labour, I was beginning to tire. My wife kept pushing, and I kept pushing my wife.

Faintly tetchy. Craving the nicotine.

I wanted some of that diamorphine to myself.

By 1:30 AM, the decision was made to move her into theatre. I made my way down through the warren of deserted corridors for a cigarette and a lungful of freezing air while she was prepped, then put on the mandatory ridiculous hat, overshoes and gown. The old hospital is an eerie place at the best of times. The Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The Maternity Unit is a recent addition, but late on Sunday night through Monday morning, most of its wings are locked off and only the most persistant of housebreakers can negotiate admission.

Orderlies and porters are nowhere to be seen, if they retain earthly form at all.

I have visited aged relatives on their deathbeds in there; deep in the bowels of the old building. I have had wounds treated in its accident and emergency unit. Like many people, I have an aversion to hospitals in general. I care for this one even less.

It was a forceps delivery when it came right down to it.

Our son was heaved into an alien world full of halogen lights, scrubs and strange voices at three minutes to three on Monday, the sixth of December. As cleanly as I could muster, I cut the umbilical cord and placed him on his mother's chest.

Skin to skin.

He is a brave little thing, his cheeks a little marred from the steel of the instrument which was used to pry him from his mother's womb. I am told this will certainly fade. With time.

His eyes were quick to seize on mine when I spoke to him and cradled him in my arms. The tiniest bit unfocused at first, awake and mildly curious.

He has yet to grow into a name, my youngest son. Waiting on the whisper.



▼ PASCAL COMELADE: PUT A STRAW UNDER BABY from "Haïkus de Piano" LP & CD (Les Disques du Soleil et de L'Acier / Eva Records) 1992 (France)

neville brand ate all the flies | the five gates to hell

"I'm a Buddhist. In case of an emergency call a Lama.”
- Col. Vincent Kane


The fly had been following the end of my brush for close to two days, flitting from room to room like a ball of lint on rotor blades.

I do not care for flies. Houseflies; blowflies; bluebottles. Calliphoridae. Like something decaying off the coast.

Where I might nudge a spider gently on its way - to scuttle under the bed, or abseil behind a door - I have little patience for the fly. The karmic goodwill runs thin. The stingiest dribble of undercoat.

So. After experimenting overnight with a dose of Quick Dry Satin - the ninth configuration of synthetic finishes - I observed enough shredding around the jambs to prompt me to opt instead for an oil-based eggshell. The drying time is a killer, 18 to 24 hours over an offending battleship grey, and all of it an unsightly stippled gloss.

The antichrist of painting and decorating.

I was on the second coat, having walked on down the hall, to where the ghost of a toy tugboat floated face down in the bathtub, when the insect which had been tailing me hovered up and alighted right of frame. I did not miss a beat. Anchored in the greasy slick, the brush caught up with it easily. Swept straight over it. Airbrushed out with a bubblegum pop; a napalm kiss on celulloid.

And what became of Neville Brand ? Lee Marvin’s thuggier twin.

I would not mention the incident with the fly if it did not bother me. Just a little.

Slow witted and lazily sculpted, Brand bristled with the neanderthal menace of the faintly retarded or simply psychotic. A slack jawed insouciance melting into bulging eye and pit bull leer on the turn of a sixpence. Or the onset of a stroke.

Neville Brand wore sharp suits and Brylcreemed hair. His face hewn blunt. Liver lipped. Itching to be cut by a cornerman with trembling hands between the 6th and 7th round.

In truth, I planted both feet heavy in the schoolyard bully’s shoes when I flattened that fly. Smeared on the door with the cigarette fastened between my teeth. I was irritable. Tired. Bitten by self-pity.

In bad need of a slave.

But wait. Killer Kane. Boyd, not Arthur. And several times removed from Stacy’s Colonel.

Neville Brand was no simple bad boy bum. Weighing in for a preliminary bout in Griswold, Iowa, and cremated in Sacramento, his nine times decorated army grunt was D.O.A. from the first. Painted into a corner, I contest, as the result of Dutch and Celtic ancestry. The white heat of Illinois steel.

Typecast by villainous hacks - the revolving door of misplaced mediocrity - the former shoe salesman turned Warner Bros. stooge traded bleeding out by the Weser River for an afterlife of two bit parts.

Sometimes shiny as a quarter in the gutter. Often overlooked.

“I’m a loser! I’m a loser!” he cried, but the truth was far from that.

Scant regard is given the 30,000 books reportedly amassed between petulant acts of cruelty; teased out of acting classes paid for through the G.I. Bill. The raging thirst to distance himself from understudy. Shadow.

“Let me out! Let me out!” he sang.

And all the while the whiskey and remorse. The inability to rearrange at sub molecular level: to set the atoms dancing; to walk - as Captain Fairbanks yearned to - between and through the impenetrable. Walls and floors.

Buttresses.

I have no idea if Neville Brand ever flirted with Buddhism. Perhaps. I suspect not. Myself, I have only used the term emphatically when laid up in a hospital bed. Just to see the charge nurse stiffen.

The closer I peer into cracks and examine those hairline fissures tumbling off into chasms, the weaker my resolve becomes. An endless cycle of filling and painting. Sanding. Immersing bristle and forearm in litre upon litre of turpentine substitute.

It was emphysema which did for him in the end. And the library all up in flames.

Still. The fly is my concern alone. All this chatter of Neville Brand and Hollywood is just so much passing the buck.

Well. It could be worse. Don't ever get me started on the time I aimed a .22 at a crow on the lamb and missed.

calling cllct

Why. Those unholy Oreaganomics get better and unrulier by the minute.

Straight from the lips of lapsed ordainment:

"We had to mortgage our soul to Satan to get it done & I know you'll like it  
(That's a promise right from the "source")."

What's not to like ? 

Late last week with the rain coming down heavy - the pavements along the Crow Road laced with black puddles - I hunched out through the spray of taxi cabs for rent in search of Jim Beam or an iced Jack watered down with Pepsi. My head was pounding.

Our house felt small. In need of a lick of paint. And the varnish was burning in my nostrils.

I fell through the saloon doors and bruised the rail along the bar. The ceiling was high. Pocked with little glass lanterns glowing like whiteheads on the brow of a passed out whore (Hubert might have observed). A trio of jazzmen were two fingers in to the last number of their set. The vocalist sat it out. A glass of stout on the table in front of her and her knees together, tidily.

An empty house. And the keyboard player refusing to let it needle him too much. The drummer laying on some syncopated flourishes with delicious irony.

I finished my first just as they wound it down for the eight o' clock wave of serious spenders. The lights did not go up or down any. A smattering of dry applause. Drowned by the splash of mixer straight into a tumbler two dripping raincoats along.

And that was their cue.

Milton Ager and Jack Yellen. Chasing rainbows. "Happy Days are Here Again".

It was a sterling snook of tumultous wonder, let me tell you. All that was missing was a pint size plastic uke.

If I had a kazoo I'd have whipped it out my pocket. As it was, I turned and clapped my hands together and caught the heel of one shoe on the trailing hem of my pants.

I would like to believe Oreaganomics might have enjoyed a warmer reception. An Acapulco ovation in the last resort. They are deserving of such. "Hand Turkey", as they promise, is the unreconstituted stuff of leg-end. A refusal to be stymied; blindsided; bluffed.

God bless them.


▼ OREAGANOMICS: GHOST TOWN GENERATION from the forthcoming "Hand Turkey" LP / CD (CLLCT) 2010 (US)

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD ON AN EMPTY HOUSE RUSE

another council tenancy < slight return >

So. Here we are, then. Surrounded by a jumble of unopened boxes still, the lingering itch from a hastily amputated limb.

We packed the parachute before we leapt and slammed into the ground running.

The pregnant one rode out ahead of the marital bed, while I scuttled back and forth between floors and jettisoned all that seemed feasible. We reunited amidst a coil of soldering wire and commenced our tenancy before the school bells sprang a chime.

It took three weeks for an engineer to arrive and connect our phone. Another seven days before a replacement in overalls could be dispatched to correct the overlooked fault.

The line had shredded in its yellowed plastic jacket some time in the previous forty years. Between telegraph pole and bedroom window. And while the signal was intermittent, my ire at placing calls cloaked in crackle and drag was anything but. In these days of fibre optic cable - telecoms cabinets on every street corner - I had assumed those slowly rotting timbers were surely decorative. The second engineer resembled a hungover Glen Campbell in hard hat karaoke as I watched him emerge from the foliage by way of a steel ladder.

One clear October day before the ritual carving of the pumpkin.

Well. The DSL lamp is awake and constant now. Touch wood. The connection is made. It is altogether quieter out west here on the river. Too quiet, perhaps. Though the soundproofing is dreadful, it is as if our neighbours have adapted to this intrusion on their privacy by bedding down shortly after 10PM. If one strains one's ear - even marginally - one can follow a whispered conversation almost word for word. The floorboards squeak above our heads; below our feet.

I find myself pining at times for the dysfunctional pattern of muddling by on the 22nd floor. Insulated by concrete. The asbestos which erupted in a mushroom cloud when they brought our sibling crashing to its knees.

We snuck back on the subway to watch it coming down. They evacuated our old building, of course, but I spoke to a neighbour who barricaded himself in bed and rolled one fat one after another. Just to brace himself against the bang.

The klaxon sounded as we rode the escalator up to ground zero.

We were a street away when the detonators blew, three in quick succession. Shakin' Street. The MC5. The dust was all enveloping. It followed us as we crossed back over the river and clung to ligaments along the bridge and burrowed down into our throats.

Our noses were furred. The children's hair prematurely grey.

Overnight, I developed a hacking bronchial cough; aggravated by my digging into the floorboards at our new address with a ridiculous detail sander fit for windowsills and skirting boards at best. And the cigarettes. Always the cigarettes. Taxed to the butt from recession through depression.

The staple diet of the institutionalized and soon to be interred.

I will get used to the sudden quiet, I expect. Already I am lulled by it on early mornings when the rain falls like rustling paper where once it stuck like an angry slap. A wet towel or a razor strop.

The rest is likely errant nostalgia. A character defect.

Vic Godard: vocals;

MarkBraby (previously Sidi Bou Said): bass, acoustic guitar;

KevinYounger (Armitage Shanks): guitar, piano; organ;

GaryAinge (Felt/Gokart Mozart): drums, percussion.

Special Guest: Paul Cook on drums and percussion;

Guest Backing Vocalist: Simon Rivers.

Recordedby Jon Clayton at One Cat Studios South London,

Mastered by Dallas Masters.

Mixed and Produced by Jon Clayton and Vic Godard.

The ‘We Come as Aliens’ Tour kicks off with a couple of dates in Catalonia on 8th October,

The John Peel Festival Koln on 23rd, then Munster, Berlin, Hamburg,and Hanover 4-7 November.
Candy Apple red glass globe shade available from SeaGullLighting for $51.99,
Subway Sect's "We Come As Aliens" for considerably less.

▼ SUBWAY SECT: OUT OF OUR ZONE from "We Come As Aliens" CD / Ltd Edition Vinyl (Overground Records / GNU) 2010 (UK)

long time no jeer

Fiends; roamings; scribblings.

Let me begin, before apologising for my protracted absence, by stalling just long enough to ease a splinter from my eye. Gingerly now. A sliver of pine; an inch of sixty year old plaster.

There has been no motorcycle accident. I am not in traction. Nor have I succumbed to a bout of leather veined blackness. 

Neither have I jumped ship in the dead of night to throw in my lot with the ghost of Tubby. A bullet riddled bulwark floating just off the coast of a sinking isle.

The waters are a little choppy, but the sailing is fair. Or promises to turn so once we negiotiate the dog leg. Her majesty's cannon.

There is a smell of tar and feather in the air. The ship's cat whipped and tethered to the mast.

Nine tales untold, or merely rudely stuttered.

The inky twin tower paired with ours is resigned to demolition, hobbled and bandaged and its windows gouged out. It will be blown to its foundations the first week into October; more trouble and rust.

Enough is enough.

My wife is seven months gone already - pregnant, I mean - and the case for celebration has been tempered with anxiety. We are moving. We are in the process of moving. West of the Gorbals, north of the river. We are leaving behind a blueprint of regeneration before the dust settles. Before late autumn winds gather their breath through the fall.

I am somewhat old to be starting out as a father again. I have had some practice.

The overture to a new tenancy came quite out of the blue.

It would have been churlish to refuse. Unhinged. We are trading two up in a tenement for a 22nd storey shuttle diplomacy accessible only in a steel cage. There are few seagulls where we are going, though we are close to a still functioning shipyard or two. The tenements are too squat to easily confuse with a crumbling sheer face to nest.

Where there are rats, I have glimpsed only brazen squirrels.

Of course, there remain tiny piercing doubts; at the best of times, I can scarcely put one foot in front of the other. I have invested eleven years in this grim place. Close to a life sentence, under British law.

And. I am a Taurean. My neck bristles with territorial huff.

My son took his first steps here. I will miss the uninterrupted view, even though the windows leak.

Our soon to be home needs a lot of work.

Every sheet of paper peeled away reveals an old disaster. Twice I have nearly crashed through the floorboards. I dragged 10 litres of paint through the door only to discover I had misread the label. I live in constant fear that we will not be able to meet removal costs.

Like James Brown speeding out of blacktop, I wake up at 3 AM in a cold sweat. If you have survived the horror and suspense of awaing a decision on a DWP funded Budgeting Loan you will doubtless know the script.

Some things never change.

Still, I am reeling at our good fortune. This is as close to humble as I can bear to err. I am nothing if not not a cautious motherf@cker.

So. Finally. Apologies to all those good people whose e-mails I have conscientiously avoided if not quite ignored. Audio submissions and manual labour. The deaf log is hallucinatory. Nothing is lost, I trust; no trust has been irretrievably fractured.

Let us repair. Without a surly Van.

I may lose my connection for a period, I almost certainly shall.

In the meantime, I leave you temporarily in the capable hands of sibling, Alexis Blondel. Of Year Zero. He stubbed his toe on the bleachers quite by accident.

"Sound Iration in Dub" - the digital brainchild of Nick "Manasseh" Raphael and Scruff, aka Steve Gilder - was originally released in 1989 through WAU! Mr. Modo Records; a fledgling collaboration between Youth - of Killing Joke - and The Orb's Dr. Alex Paterson.

Little Youth, if you catch my drift.

In 2010 it was reissued on a double CD, compiling 14 previously unreleased demos. Alexis informs me it is slated to make its second appearance on (180 gram) vinyl later this month. For audio purists.

You can eavesdrop on more samples via Sound Cloud, here.

Stay tuned for further - wholly erratic - transmissions. 

An occasional table in transit.




▼ SOUND IRATION: MELODY ROOTS (PART 1) from "Sound Iration in Dub" LP / 2 x CD (WAU! Mr. Modo Records / Year Zero) 1989 / 2010 (UK)

augustus pablo swaby paints

kingston, 1976, photographer unknown.


Overtaken by a weakness to bludgeon the house senseless with a royal flush of dubs, the bleachers echo with the whisper of melodica.

From 10PM to 5AM, its disinfected concrete steps slump tiredly. A stomach emptied. Hosed down with cobalt blue. 

Tubular rails faintly thrumming. 

A late August cough nudging silver wrappers. A polystyrene cup impaled on a straw.

By 1AM, the sirens falter. Subside to a wheeze. The hammers to the south bed down in a pulse.

Pablo never sleeps. Not really. The quiet he inhabits are those spaces between sinew and joint. The dials twitch. The tape rolls. Spooling behind eyelids, the fluttering of moths. East of the Nile. A mile upstream.

The engineering is not so critical as the end result. Chin to midrift. Thickening to a river.

Tubby.

Augustus Pablo started out as an anonymous outpouring, a splash from a carafe, a water bearer.

As with Miles, the climate is tertiary. Around it. Through it. To it.

Written and produced by Horace Swaby.

Mixed by King Tubby.

 ▼ AUGUSTUS PABLO: CHAPTER 2 from "East Of The River Nile" LP (Message) 1977 (Jamaica)

a sanitary riot

On threading our rented trolley
between the aisles of a supermarket,

we acquired a bottle of bath oil.

As one does.

"Revive & Restore", the label advises.
Very calming. Very restive.
When one is prone, susceptible.

It prompts the smoke detector to howl
everytime we pour a bath.
It triggers a bout of anxious scrabbling.

The effect is less than therapeutic.

Sandalwood, surely, is quite innocuous,
a dash or two of an essential tear.

The pepper spray is an alarming twist.

the ponderosa and the ark of the weak heart

Twenty-two floors above, the green JCBs resemble not so much a rise of the machines as their last bronchial rattle. Scrabbling in the dirt for purchase. Listing drunkly like a man with motor neuron disease. Clinging to employment.

The blueprints for fuel efficient housing will be rolled out where they are needed least, I suspect.

They will not be built round here - not in my lifetime, at any rate - nor in those mountainous rural backwaters to the east, where every last penny of huminatarian aid is siphoned to stem a tide of mainiacs squatting behind RPGs.

Or to line the pockets of a few bent shopkeepers.

At present, those compact intended domiciles exist only as a byproduct of social etiquette. I am supposed to peer out my window and enthuse.

"Oh! What an excellent idea! How nice to see all those young men doing something constructive at last."

Instead, I am having none of it.

The solar panels look splendid. The clay brick and whitewashed wall. When the 4x4s eventually pour in behind the fence with offers, those same young men will hurry back to their street corners. Their leaky tenements and blistered detention zones. Brewing milky teas over toast while they huddle in pyjamas.

A scrum of newspapermen will descend on them with cameras - to take their picture as a local concilor rumbles into a microphone and hands out diplomas - and the instant will immediately be interred.

They will tear down the two little houses they have built. Harvest its parts for organ transplant.

They will lay polythene sheeting over the supparating foundations to prepare the space for a car park.

They will chisel and gouge and my contorted face will be at the window still. A little more lined, simian. A monkey. A nun. A sentinel fed by tubes.

A stain.

Gradually fading away to nothing like a sun bleached snapshot. A splash of urine drying in the crotch of a mildly befuddled hospital patient.

There will be no spontaneous protest which has not first been vetted three times over by the politically correct. The first out of the trenches will be mown down as they fumble for the switch on an antique bullhorn. The ones idling just behind will obediently fall back to their beds.

The nursey is what we know. Sand. Gravel. We fasten to its smoke and mirrors even as the generators fail.


Postscript:
The LP which came to be known among collectors as "E-E Saw Dub" - twelve original Jacob Miller riddims mixed and overdubbed by King Tubby at his Waterhouse studio - was a paper sleeve only limited release, mislabelled as Earl Zero's "City of the Weak Heart". Recorded at Randy's and Joe Gibbs, and produced by Ian and Roger Lewis of Inner Circle, these dubs are celebrated in no small part as the result of quite innovative techniques involving synth patterns overlaid by IC keyboardist, Bernard 'Touter' Harvey and enhanced by Tubby.

"Ghetto On Fyah Dub", too, specifically brings Augustus Pablo's contribution centre stage.

While the original vinyl release is much coveted and fetches exorbitant prices at market, the LP was subsequently reissued in digital format - with two bonus cuts - as "King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller in a Tenement Yard" through the independent UK label, Motion Records, active between 1996 and 2007.

Horsemouth Wallace & Santa Davis: drums and percussion;

Ian Lewis: bass guitar;

Chinna & Michael Chung & Roger Lewis: guitar;

Bernard "Touter" Harvey: keyboards and synthesizer;
Augustus Pablo: xylophone.

▼ JACOB MILLER / INNER CIRCLE (FAT MAN RIDDIM SECTION): GHETTO ON FYAH DUB from "E-E Saw Dub" 12" / LP (E-E Saw) 1975 (Jamaica)

royal dub pretender, phase ii

One more dub from Kingston 11.

"His Majesty's Dub" - produced and arranged by Jah Woosh - was variously recorded at Channel 1, Joe Gibbs and Randy's with The Revolutionaries before the reels were taxied over to Tubby's for mixing. On the back of a motorcycle.

Dillinger was far from uptight. At Black Ark, it was business as usual.

Lloyd James and Tubby steal top bill on this release, although Errol Thompson in his role as engineer at Joe Gibbs Studio and Lancelot "Maxie" McKenzie for Channel 1 deserve joint credit. A huge fat blunt. Oiled and smoking.

This particular dub, with all its off kilter eccentricities is a particular highlight, I feel. "Throne of Judgement" is often cited as the riotous jewel in the crown, garnering accolades for its thunderous drum rolls and momentous foreboding, but this one is whacked out joyful. Or just plain daft.

Lloyd James first lit up a studio at the home of his in-laws in Waterhouse, Kingston 11 some time in the mid seventies. A sound system veteran, he learned his trade operating an electrical repair shop from his mother's house in the late 1960s. When an opening was peeled back from the kerb at Tubby's place in Dromilly Avenue, just around the corner, Jammy leapt at the chance.

The district of Waterhouse was alive with cable and valve; a solid state tower built from the ground up, straight off the grid.

By 1977, the prince graduated from mixing and engineering to full scale production on Black Uhuru's "Love Crisis". A major player in the evolution of dub from analogue to those entirely digital rhythms and effects adopted in the 80s, this dub illustrates to what outlandish degree the chicken predated the egg.

"His Majesty's Dub" was eventually reissued through Original Music, a label established by Jah Woosh in 1989 as a vehicle for his own back catalogue and various related productions.

Save me from the dancehall. I don't got the stamina nor stomach for it no more.


▼ PRINCE TUBBY V KING JAMMY: JAH WORKS from "His Majesty's Dub" LP (Sky Juice) 1976 (Jamaica)

22 unM4SKed

"the hollows" by simon woolham. biro on paper, 2008.

Honest to Christ, that drill. 

A machine gun rattling in its pillbox. Stalling ocasionally, the bit overheated, encased in concrete. Starting up again in earnest before one can catch one's breath.

At 3 AM, I rolled off the futon to close the windows. Hobbled into the kitchen to slam both catches when it occurred to me the noise had merely jumped channels in a stereophonic assault.

The demolition is ongoing. Every morning, too, entire new sections of the M74 have been bolted into place. 

The shoemaker's elves spit rivets all through the night.

And speaking of drills, it would appear I have missed a dental appointment. I am forced to grovel to avoid a fixed penalty. 

As if losing one's teeth is not punishment enough.

M4SK 22 - a collision of postcodes - is an experimental project fusing input from artists Simon Woolham and David Moss. They met in Manchester in the mid 90s, but did not begin making music together until January, this year.

"We make music and videos as products which we work on furiously, then we put them out online and move on to the next idea."

There is no obvious manifesto. Working remotely on passages traded via the internet, each bends the material as the moment dictates; throwing out a curve and letting it float. Simon is a renowned visual artist, David makes music and film. Their product is tested on M4SK 22.

"The Spindle of the Dowie Dens" began as a guitar part recorded by Woolham, with additional strings - piano and more guitar - overdubbed by Moss and relayed back. Moss was keen to to evoke a sense of traditional Scots and Irish melody familiar to him from childhood, and Woolham responded with a spoken word narrative shaped by recurring themes in his drawings and installations.

Looting archived public domain film footage, Moss then developed a short animated visual sequence incorporating stock elements of George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". Musically, the end product is faintly claustrophobic. Full of echoes. Reeds. Inkeeping with the historic ballad which in part informs it, a rhyme of the Yarrow Water running through the Scottish borders. Collected in 18 variations in Francis James Child's "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads", first published in ten volumes between 1892-8.

"The Spindle of the Dowie Dens" drags one out of the past by the scruff of a cigarette burned anorak.

Into the nettles growing through the inner tubes of bicycle tyres a child might paint as snakes. Discarded bottles of Buckfast Tonic.

Of course, nothing is linear. Or quite so transparent.

M4SK 22 aim eventually to commit to a series of live performance. Until then, by far the best way to familiarize yourself with their sometimes challenging product is to visit the archive direct.

▼ M4SK 22: THE SPINDLE FROM THE DOWIE DENS from "M4SK 22: The Screen We Face is the Primitive Mask of a Global Society " MP3 / Multimedia (M4SK 22) 2010 (UK)