I’m a black bat babe bangin on your window pane…

I’ve been trying to get my act together over the last couple of days, I got distracted by some photographs, more of that to come. I’ve been wandering in a some sort of weird fugue state, then this weekend I was going to get to go the beach and shout with my friends about music, that got cancelled by health issues for a friend wife so here I am adrift.

In order to ground myself I fumbled around for an interminable time trying to decide what to do, eventually I was led like to Wooden Ships Vol 2. apparently a collection of rarities and there I was thinking it was just the second album abut its the second of two volumes of rarities the first being called imaginatively Vol1. I believe have that somewhere.

I sat down to listen and was transported via sound to a dank/damp cellar somewhere on the outskirts of town where a band of threatening individuals in leather and oil stained denim where repeatedly playing the riff they knew, drilling insistently into my back brain. Twenty something minutes later I stood staggered to the record player and flipped the disc for side 2, which again transported me to that roadhouse somewhere along the Redwood Highway. The organ swirled and the guitar wailed and the drums pounded along as the bass held it all together. Another twenty minutes or so passed and things settled down as I replaced the record in its sleeve, what I was left with was the feeling I had been involved in something slightly dangerous, a little unsavory and undoubtedly fun. This is how the best rock and roll should leave you.

burning wheels of fiery red keep on trucking till we’re dead…

It could be smell of an herb as you add it to a stew, the rustle of fabric, the light as you walk out of the front door, the sound of children laughing or the barking of a dog somewhere in the distance. Suddenly you are somewhere else remembering the joys, pains, successes and failure of the past.

Other times there’s a sense of displacement, this week we went for displacement and disorientation.

This week as an experiment I have exclusively been playing Nonagon Infinity on loop in the car for every drive if I am going to play music. Today I extended that to my workspace which has caused concern from my work colleagues. At one point in the car I had to turn everything off to get myself to some sort of equilibrium. My work mates asked me to turn it off before I got to side two which to be fair to them is the most raucous insane part of the album. If only they’d held on.

The album sounds like a cross between Hawkwind, some sort of jazz odyssey shit and The Kinks, its driving, disorienting and confusing, melodic, brutal and confrontational. Its music made for the mosh pit. It’s relentless intensity builds and builds, until the midpoint when Mr Beat hits like a cooling spa on the edge of the desert, of course then you’re into the insanity of Evil Death Roll, then we hit some strange alien jazzerdelia and the whole thing ends with the chugging space blues of Road Train which sounds like the band you imagine rocking out in the desert to Mad Max.

This is an album of excess, over stimulation and all out rock. There are synths guitars, drums and crazed harmonicas, what more do you need. It’s a science fiction express train to insanity and beyond. It’s what happens if you don’t take the drugs before hyper space and it’s brilliant.

I’m gonna burn your bongos tonight…

It’s been 40 years. How did that happen?

This passed me by at the time as I was enamored with American bands and their neo-psychadelic country sounds, forgetting that there was a much more whimsical place for English psychedelia.

“I’m gonna burn your bongos tonight.” Is however one of the greatest single lines in UK popular music. It conjures up scenes of wrestling bongos from smelly hippies at Stonehenge in an anarchic display of the future overwhelming the past. We have ahead of us the great bongo bonfire of the vanities.

still looking up…

The clouds obscured the eclipse the other night.

The moon was still there in the morning.

It was back that evening as well.

look up…

I was stood outside and saw this.

It’s that time of year things are running down and the sky gets more interesting.

I was moved to play this.

I think they have a certain atmosphere in common.

oooh I’m in heaven again…

There’s such a sense of satisfaction knowing Ritchie Blackmore played with Deep Purple again. There’s something organic about the MKII lineup and the way they all played together. I know it’s considered heavy rock/metal by some but it’s just great loud all hands to the pump fuck you head down and go for it rock and roll. Yes there’s a regret it didn’t happen when John Lord was alive but at least it happened. There a few other rock feuds would be good to see end or at least acknowledge that it can all be put aside for ten minutes.

Tonight I played this again and reminded myself what was so great about Purple in their prime. Yes the songs may last a week, there’s a certain pretentiousness around the call and response vocal guitar player thing at times. At no point in any song does it get boring and there’s always Paice holding the beat like the god of rock and roll he is.

So tonight I can sleep well knowing that some people can get over themselves and admit that that thing they had with their friends was special and should be celebrated.

I also defy anyone to find a finer song in the world than Lazy and Lords neo-classical phantom of the opera heading towards feedback intro is a thing of sheer beauty. The rest of the band also manage to take it over the top.

no ear fingers…

I’ve been really enjoying instrumental music recently, the slower and more reflective the better. Spafford Campbell fit the bill tonight. It’s allegedly folk, I guess there are fiddles and guitars and is that a banjo somewhere around all this?

Yes I know there are occasional vocals but I’m damned if I know what they’re singing about.

It’s folk music for a collapsing society, it has more in common with Godspeed You! Black Emperor than the Clancy’s. It’s drones and discord and melody and it needs to be played at volume.

There are definitely no fingers discernibly in ear here.

screaming souls in the night…

Of all the albums I have managed to acquire over the years there are a few that just demand attention from beginning to end and once you begin you’re in for the whole journey.

Hawkwind’s X In Search of Space. is one. It may even be my favorite Hawkwind album. Yes there’s no Lemmy but there is the space rock motorik beats and the electronics screech and scream and warble like lost souls in the night.

Shouldn’t Do That may be the greatest statement for the huddled masses ever written, a mesmeric space chant for the disenfranchised. A song for a society collapsing under authoritarian fear mongers a dystopian anthem for today, a timeless howl against the man, or just a great tune to get altered and sway. You chose. Or maybe it’s all real man.

What we need right now is to be saved by The Master of the Universe. It’s an incredibly coherent album from Hawkwind. Themes of collapse and decline throughout ending with what could be seen as hippy anthem but is closer to a disturbing Quatermass vision of the disenfranchised youth rebelling in the ruins.

It’s not a happy hippy album. It’s a stark meandering, disturbing stroll through the decline. Hypnotic, insistent and sounding as relevant today as in 1971. and it’s going to mess you up some days man.

“ a distorted version of the original experience…”

I’ve been writing this long post since I got back from England and visiting my mum. Maybe it covers too much ground.

I’ve also been listening to Elori Saxl’s The Blue of Distance. A truly stunning and beautiful collection of found sounds, analogue synths and chamber orchestra. A reflective piece, reflective looking back from the isolated dead of winter to a happy summer.

I think it’s one of the most beautiful rewarding listening experiences I’ve had in a long time.

I moved taking the picture, I like it.

Here’s a better shit picture.

Maybe that long post will materialize at some point or maybe it’ll just be a reflective exercise for myself.

What I do know is it’s time to make an effort to get back to this, whatever it is.

Found in the woods.

when you go down you take me down with you…

Several weeks have been in this weird shifting and morphing phase. A sense of disjointedness and dissatisfaction, restless and yet slothful, a malignant malaise.

I walked onto the beach the other weekend, walked a mile along the coastline, the view in front of me was glorious, the blue that you can only get at the coast in the sky and soft floaty clouds, as I reached the point where I could no longer walk, faced by jagged cliffs and rocks as the the tide came in I turned to return. The sky I turned to was a malevolent charcoal, roiling with movement and the threat of hail. I headed into the darkness, leaning into the rising wind as large raindrops started to fall pounding my head. I regretted the lack of rain gear as the rate of fall increased and I had a mile of this to go. Arriving eventually at the house drenched and freezing, I wrapped myself in a blanket huddled next to the fire place, feeling warmth finally.

This is indicative of how the last few weeks has been, the way ahead looks clear and behind is the storm waiting to overwhelm me, cold and impersonal.

So the light hearted stroll in the sun has been Snocaps, Katie and Alison Crutchfield’s exercise in indie pop fun. The lyric can be heavy but the sound is pure pop.

Guitars bass and drums rocking along at a sunny clip disguising the seriousness of the songs. Songs of lost love, addiction and the realities of life surrounded by jangle pop guitars and off kilter drumming.

The other side of the stroll phase been Elori Saxl, I’m not sure if it’s a avant garde classical composing, ambient synth or some form of jazz that includes analogue synth. It’s textured, intense, beautiful at times mixing ambient sounds of a lake and sax solos, hard to explain. It does however leave you drenched and exhausted and uplifted at the end, introspective music for troubling times.