Fergie sings London Bridge on TRL

happy guiltless new year. i think you'll agree the inclusion of Beefeaters and lite-krumping makes it really something special

Hauntology catalogue: Introduction.

In conjunction with European partners the Cultural Parody Centre, The iMpostume is proud to present it's new range of cutting edge Spectral solutions (developed 1922.) Spend more than five hundred pounds and have your name entered into a fantastic prize draw for a weekend's R and R soaking up the uncanny, post- industrial ambience at a disused Colliery in North Wales!*

*offer open only to non-bloggers. Terms and (un)conditions may apply.

Hauntology Reappearing-Disappearing ink. (£6:95)

Presence? Abscence? Why not have neither? Or both! Communicate less effectively with loved ones, bank managers and the local council and really make your lack of presence (un)felt. All the colours of the spectral-um!

Hauntology mirror (£254.90)

Am I pretty? Am I ugly? Am I fat? Am I thin? Overturn all binary oppositions with our totally opaque cement* Hauntology (un)mirror. Truly become a stranger to yourself with Hauntology Products !

* cement guaranteed 100% re-used detritus from abandoned brutalist power station!

Hauntological condoms: (£5.50 for 3/£7 for two (less is more!))

So fine it's almost as if they're not there! Also available in ultra-sensitive "ribbed" for an even more rapid dissemination of ideas!

Warning: Not 100% effective: phantom pregnancy may occur

Hauntological video camera. (£2,400)

Preserve the repressed aspects of all those family gatherings for posterity with the Hauntological Video camera's special non-filter. Additional wide angle lens* may be required for full capturing of the elephant in the living room.

*sold separately.

The Hauntological Undictaphone (£3.50)

Sick of the way Christmas parties are always privileging speech over writing? Then the Hauntological Undictaphone is for you, scribble tired anecdotes and smutty jokes on the pad provided, feed them in and hear all your written text transformed into uncanny electronic non-speech by this handy pocket-sized machine.

Ectoplasm place mats. ( £7.50 each or £24.70 per set of six)

Made from one hundred percent re-cycled ectoplasm these durable and stylish table mats depict a number of key Hauntological figures and scenes. Proto-Hauntological white dub-reggae band UB40, Shergar, Lord Lucan, that doll from the BBC2 testcard, a disused old building near some new buildings, and a scene from ITV's seminal "Armchair Thriller" the opening credits of which brought the Hauntological non-prescence of spectator-as-shadow in his moment of non-constitution within the kapitalist media nexus into the very heart of every terraced unhouse in the land.

Hauntological games book. (£12.90)

Bored of your friends inability to rigourously deconstruct and "problematize" the implicit assumptions and power relations that regulate such notions as "fun" and " games"? The Hauntological games book is for you. We put the UN in FUN! Includes a new Derridean version of Snap in which the winner is the first person to write the word "Snap" on a piece of paper, send it off and have it published within two years by Polity Press!

phew.. while working on my end of the new Hauntology products range i just have time to copyright* this gag....

Apparently James Brown has been given the job of cleaner up in heaven. God heard that he'd had twenty-five year's experience in hoovering up Angel Dust !

BOOM BOOM. I thangyou.

*after all I missed out on Wyatting... let's see how long it takes till someone claiming to have invented this gag themselves is telling it to me down the pub... aghhhhhh.....

Yawntology.

Give up already! It’s so 2006.


At risk once again of showing my own lack of understanding up.


The main thing that’s still bugging me about HNTLGY if my below summation is in anyway accurate is the sheer difficulty of doing such a brilliant and vital set of concerns justice sonically. This is I guess why I have a problem with the Hauntology canon that’s being touted at the moment. I don’t see why for example Hauntological works, or rather works that are being claimed as representative by those keen to push the Hauntological agenda are Hauntological. I mean, if the pitting of the artifice of the studio against the presumption of authenticity and prescence is a key point in Hauntology wouldn’t this exclude any purely electronic music at all from entering the canon, even if it might seem appropriately spooky, post-Rave and elegiac a la Burial? And why, other than the lack of said obtrusive use of studio technology aren’t, for example, the Manic Street Preachers Hauntological, especially round the time of “Everything must go” and “A design for life.” There was certainly plenty of sloganeering and a series of passing bells being rung for the working class at that point (and very pointedly so in the videos). In other words I’m wondering whether Hauntology hasn’t used a variety of currently emerging bands/styles etc as a way of defining itself up to this point and whether the actual Hauntological work is yet to come. It represents a fearsome challenge sonically I would have thought, seeming clearly much easier to express in mixed media formats, especially those which incorporated spoken word/text (“ London Under London” seems largely the right kind of vehicle.) I think it’s interesting that the debate has encouraged the rather smart Acid Nouveaux to attempt a project but again (rather as in the other examples (Owen’s Hauntological Pop) the aesthetic seems to be toward an ambient/ illbient/ elegaic feel.) Can’t there be an ecstatic, liberating element to Hauntology? It seems odd given that the repressed elements struggling to assert themselves in the face of the post-Industrial Real that’s locked down on us ( Utopionism, collectivity) should be restored to us though the enervation and drift of the Caretaker, et al. Rather than Hauntological pop I’m wondering when or if there will ever be a Hauntology we can dance to? Or even (given my own set of preferences) headbang to? Can’t there be an ecstatic, liberatory element to Hauntology? Can’t it be joyful? Must it be X old fashioned music viewed through a grey drizzle of scratchy surface sound, or vitiated, doom-heavy Dancehall? Must it be mournful, must it be “spooky”? After all, it’s not about ghosts right? It’s about opening up a breathing space within Po-mo. It’s a lunge for freedom, it's a call to arms. Shouldn’t the music quicken the pulse a little more, as much as the theory does, at least?

LIARS - Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack

LIARS - Let's Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack

Coming up....number five..."Drum's not Dead"

TITLE HERE

This is not a story in the normal sense of the word. This is a story which has replaced character with attitude. A story that almost can’t be bothered but hasn’t got anything better to do. A story that’s not prepared to play the game, that makes a principle of its lack of progress. This is not even a story about stories, or a story about stories about stories. This story is certainly interested in itself but it doesn’t want to share its interest. This is a shrug, a bored look, a sullen lip.

This story could be about a million different things, but this story just can’t be bothered. This story could end any time it wanted to, but why should it to do you any favours? This story doesn’t have anything to prove. This story is almost confrontational in a withdrawn kind of way. This story wants to know if you’re good enough to read it, but won’t define what it thinks good or bad are. This story defies you to keep on reading. This story has a jaded eye. This story has been to Waterstones and has left again without meeting any other stories worth talking too. This story has a stony face. This story is tense with fatigue from laughing up its own sleeve. This story has lockjaw from swallowing its own tail. This story lets criticism wash over it while, by its own semi satisfied circularity, it seems to criticise everything else. This story’s theme is its own themelessness. This story has aspirations it can’t articulate and ideas it can’t express This story has a heart it can’t find and a brain it won’t use.

Whose story is it?

Yours.

A Christmas message from Mr Impostume.

Number Five: Eglantine Gouzy "Boamaster"

While my P.C. gently weeps.


I was a bit cruel about Eglantine Gouzy’s contribution to Monika’s “ Four Women No Cry” compilation on the old musical bear site a while ago,(now archived here: http://www.spannered.org/music/699/) suggesting that she was over-influenced by Bjork (who I’ve never been able to bring myself to enjoy despite her obvious etc, etc) and Laurie Anderson (who I love.) She seemed a bit determinedly pigtailed and knock-kneed, a bit too intent on playing the boring Art-chick game of wilful kookiness and mildly hysterical hauteur,(laughs raucously, picks at already badly bitten fingernails, suddenly begins to dance violently then collapses pouting in a chair. See how she is driven by her strange artistic drives which we will never grasp! See how she is special and exempt from the normal rules that govern interaction, such as politeness and coherence! She is too wild and free to tolerate us. And yet we must respect her sprite-like and elfin, creaturely Otherness for the gifts of her art that it imparts to us ! Give me a break, Jesus Christ, I…………sorry where was I…. ahh, yes… Eglantine.)

So while no-one is going to suggest that Bjork Shriekersdotter and Laurie Anderson are not the spirits which preside, (nay loom!) over Eglantine’s work, my initial dismissal of her was frankly just wrong, "Boamaster" is an amazing, unimpeachable album, intensely visual, a veritable act of conjuration, the bringing into being of an enchanted space. If Joanna Noisesome’s “Ys” immediately summons up some kind of “Song of the South” cartoon rootsiness then "Boamaster’s" universe is clean, crisp and cosmic, one of those Hi-Tek chambers in which the deep space voyager wanders through crystalline, artificial gardens, a huge, mutable, ornate room, some hybrid of a planetarium, solarium and aquarium, in which the songs themselves hang suspended. A series of precise miniatures in effect, (only one track is over three minutes) as lucent and crisply colourful as a set of stained glass mobiles over the surfaces of which their ever shifting surroundings weave and warp, refracted back at the dazzled onlooker, and through which La Gouzy wanders, singing sometimes in French, sometimes in English, sometimes quietly sitting back and listening.

The record even starts, on “Eglantine Longe” with what sounds like an anouncement for all passengers to board, a sawing, cello-like tone, some skittery rhythmic tics and Eglantine's multi-tracked voice summoning us to depart. In “Cowboy” the chiming guitar serenade is slowly threaded through with bright, wisps of keyboard drone, “Strada” sounds like a hurdy-gurdy starting up in the middle of an aviary, in the rain. “Zone A” with its muted orchestral sample and gently ascending vocals is orbited by a long synth-pulse, the tail of a comet streaking past and sending waves of phosphorescent dust rippling through the track, “Come back” really is the sound of a computer crying into its beer at the bar in a Venusian zoo, and by the time we get to “ Pygmy,” a mere thirty minutes or so on from where we started out we find Eglantine swinging in a hammock and listening to two virtual birds of paradise going through an elaborate courtship ritual in the branches above her head.

The reference points are few and far between really. Laurie Anderson’s “United States” certainly, certainly the machine-melancholy of Kraftwerk circa “Radioactivity” or the urban-pastoralism of “Neon Lights,” but mostly it reminds me of certain movies, Hal’s final moments in "2001", Douglas Trumbell’s magnificent “Silent Running.” Either way it’s an amazing record, up there with (yeah, that’s right I am lumping them together for no better reason than that they’re both women) Juana Molina’s “Son.” Certainly ahead of Joanna Gruesome’s effort. Destined to sell about ten copies.

Eglantine Gouzy / BOA / dir - Sophie Gateau

yes....bit slow on writing something on how tremendously great the album is.. so in the meantime i leave you in Eglantine's petite, Gitane-stained, garlic-scented hands. (she's a frog, innit?)

Arise Sir Bono

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6206063.stm

only fair, what with him having made poverty history via "punk capitalism" presumably he 's now going to hang onto his rock and roll kudos by being "punk establishment."

For those of you who have yet to see the staggering bit of work that is Woebot TV (this will be more or less no-one) I suggest you head over there tout suite. How much work must have gone into it god only knows, true dedication.

I want one!!!! If i'm really good next year can I get an Impostume TV thing for Christmas?

A couple of things which will potentially lead on to other things.

This will all be very off the cuff and speculative so if I get anything horribly wrong feel free to tell me.

1) Offending people.

A couple of things have been praying on my mind so I’ll lay them out here. First of all a couple of exchanges with Dejan and Andy regarding “offensiveness”. I have certainly written things I wouldn’t be terribly keen on my mum reading for example and I wonder why I am attracted to writing such potentially “offensive” material/ expressing my ideas in such an aggressive or scatological way (or why they are such pressing themes for me).

Well first up, it’s pleasurable. This pleasure may depend (see Wyatting) as K-punk remarked on the notion that there is some Big Other out there who is appalled by my actions though I would actually be more inclined to think it’s a gesture that attempts, however futile it might be, to incarnate a Big Other, a desire to be told off by a tangible “them”* that we can affirm our “usness”, and if that’s too ambitious, at least for me my “ I-ness” against, in a world in which Authority has become diffuse and attenuated to the point of invisibility ( this attempt to scandalize represents largely a form of nostalgia for monolithic power structures/symbols of authority and the stubborn residue of the belief that they must be out there somewhere, come on, give me a palpable someone to hate!) and the pallid relativism that reigns in all spheres, sucking all the individual's moral force away with its endless caveats and cavils (best just to do nothing, really.)

So to some extent it’s the flailing of a man in free fall. While the “shocking” is absolutely an over-familiar post-modern trope in art I think my own use of it is an attempt to limn the boundaries, to trace the contours of public discourse for myself, to use it as a compass in effect to gauge where the lines are still drawn, where the taboo areas are, a way of orienting myself. This can’t be said, this is wrong, this will cause irritation, this constitutes an over-stepping the mark ( for whatever reason). Doing this helps to bring things into relief. Aha! This is where we are. These are the rules x and y operate by.


Also, it’s funny. Now I won’t embarrass PMPEP by going over, once again, the single most inappropriate series of observations ever made by a human being to a couple of lesbian separatists during lunch but suffice to say, I laughed my head off. It was joyful, as these moments are, possibly because it was abreactive, ( we felt threatened by these girls, probably) but mostly because it shattered the rules of discourse, in this case politically correct discourse, precisely the one in which we invested so much, yet felt so miserably smothered by. I assume that in most exchanges we’re constantly tending our discourse in more or less successful ways (and this is the release afforded in friendship, the slackening of that tension, the “I can be myself-ness” of it, that now the variously contending discourses I manage during the day can collapse back into each other and that I’m afforded the relief with the “friend” of a lowered self-consciousness.) So, those rules being broken produces dizziness, vertigo, a lightness, a sudden decoupling and a whirling out of the senses that’s intensely pleasurable even if on a moral level what’s happened is deplorable and that if it were directed at a friend the response would be anger. For a moment all discourse is suspended and there is, if you're sufficiently removed affectively from the “target,” that ecstatic moment of almost pure thoughtlessness. It’s the moment of not knowing what to say, not being able to find the next step in the discursive ladder that can be either hilarious or mortifying. Analogous I guess to the supposed divide between comedy and tragedy, that sympathy is everything, that it can be either traumatic or exultant, an experience either of the abject or the ecstatic, either a scream or an outburst of laughter. Presumably the offensive/scatological is situated at the fault-line, the boundary within jouissance itself where one shades over into the other, (isn’t there a certain kind of thin queasiness in there, some residual astringency in most pleasure? The slight depression, lowering of the spirits that follows the outburst, something that has curdled in the sudden overflow?) While there is pleasurable terror, (the way children shriek in delight and run away when you pretend to be a monster can sometimes turn into actual distress and fear if you get too good at being scary. You have to regulate your performance and maintain a certain amount of “yourself”, a certain degree to which it’s a role your playing, a performance,) maybe there is also something fearful in pleasure. I think that this controlled mingling of trauma and exultancy is what certain “offensive” texts offer you. I guess that’s why for example “The 120 Days of Sodom” is basically funny. Why Whitehouse are funny. Why Burroughs is funny, why Lautreamont is, but why Genet isn’t, why Coil aren’t, why Aurtaud isn’t, they are not “transgressing”, not playing with the boundary, they’re speaking to you from somewhere deeper inside the zone.

2) Hauntology! A call for clarification

There’s also been a lot of Hauntological talk abroad of late. Almost all of which has been making me think I don’t understand the term or its applications. My basic grasp of Hauntology (in really layman’s terms) is that its an attempt to pit the past against the present for the sake of the future, to examine the present “reality” in terms of what is absent/repressed (collectivity, Utopianism etc) and make that absence felt, an attempt to make the Po-mo “nostalgia mode” work against itself, to achieve a kind of politicised maybe even a polemical nostalgia. An attempt, in fact, to liberate the past from nostalgia and, rather than it’s being another country, marked off, clearly the environment in which things are done differently, and which becomes an arena for exotic consumption, it is infused into the present, (or rather its (the past's) presence is amplified) to add/force a historical/political depth to post-modern “flatness” and in that way undermine/overthrow it.
So…..treating old blues songs as easy signifiers of “soul” and attaching them to pedestrian house music a la Moby, would not be Hauntological whereas an attempt to do justice to the experience of slavery, for example, by foregrounding the continuation of racism/ exploitation etc in the present via a deliberate, provocative dyschronia, would be.

Anybody care to tell me if that’s roughly it before I plunge on?

First I should tell you how great that Eglantine Gouzy album is though!

*And at whom I impotently fling my filth like a coprophagic Ape** in a cage attempting to bespatter the faces of its captors.

**Originally I wrote "gorilla", but "ape," I think you'll agree is somehow funnier

Ice T - The Tower

Why does no video for "the hunted child" exist?

ICE-T - Straight Up Nigga

I just Quidditched this album and i have to say that it's as phenomenal as I remember it being. Maybe not quite as great as "The Iceberg" but still monumentally witty.
"Sit up like some fool and eat turkey?
That's the day your forethfathers jerked me!"

Jason Phereus: A final extract (or two)
1)

No time for the Tube they grab a taxi, the Koolhunter seemingly summoning a black cab up with a click of his fingers.
In the back. “We’re going south of the river, mate. Alright?” the Koolhunter says with a laugh.
The taxi driver, middle aged, Indian, Gene Pitney on the in-car CD player, nods back. “Something’s gotten hold of my heart,” playing. The Koolhunter scowls at the back of his head and turns up the volume on one of the iPods, the one attached to his left ear, the headphone that he hasn’t taken out all evening, as rooted in there as a six-inch catheter in a vein. Barney can hear a thin clanking coming from the other headphones, straggling loose from the neck of his coat now. He asked him, as they came out of the pub, why he had two I-Pods and the Koolhunter replied, old stuff and new stuff, old in the right ear, new in the left.
“ South where?”
“Peckham, mate. Head for the station. I’ll direct you from there.”
South of the river? Barney’s puzzled. He eases his blue rucksack off and sets it down at his feet, settles back in his seat. Maybe New Cross he could understand, he knows that’s getting trendy now, he went to see a couple of friends of his play there a few weeks ago, the band he might join one day when he decides to reap the full rewards of the glorious destiny that has been promised him, but Peckham? Peckham, that’s ironic given all the times Duncan’s tried to make some kind of capital out of the fact that he lives there, when really he just lives on the border of Peckham and changes the location depending on how hard he wants to appear. Peckham’s got a bad reputation, though, hasn’t it? Isn’t that where Damilo…. what was that kid’s name, but anyway he was killed there wasn’t he, or was it the other one, the other……at the bus stop. Or both. Anyway, he knows it’s a very, well… black area, isn’t it? But it’s not white guys getting stabbed there, as far as he knows, so… Maybe they’re going somewhere else after that. He coughs. Instinctively he checks in his pocket for his mobile. It’s there. He pats at the wallet in the breast pocket of his faded denim shirt. It’s there still….of course. Maybe he should put them somewhere else. Shifts his feet in so they are in contact with his rucksack. He hasn’t even got there yet.
“So what are we going to, exactly?” he asks. He has a sudden panic–flash of some downstairs basement, some back street in Peckham, and his is the only white face in there, taking photos, having to interact, trying to understand, sometimes it’s not so easy to understand people if they have heavy accents, use a lot of slang or speak patois and the minute he opens his mouth they’ll know him for what he is, if they can’t tell from just looking at him. A white, middle class, University boy. Not that he’s ashamed of that, and not that he’s a racist, but they might not like it. They might look upon him as an easy target.
“Exactly?” the Koolhunter asks and lowers his head to snort a small mound of white powder off the side of his fist. “You know Craig?” he asks, then licks the spot on the side of his fist and dries it with a swipe at his jeans. “ Stush, stush, stush, stush stush!” he says, drums his hands on his thighs.
“Craig, well, not exactly, I mean I know him through knowing Dave, really”
“ We were at Uni at the same time, ” The Koolhunter says. “ I used to fuck his missus,” he folds another stick of chewing gum into his mouth. “She was fucking everyone. Anyone and everyone, you know what a mean? A freak. Still is. He’s still in love with her. She’s going to screw him over, now. She’s got dirt on him, she’s got money and she‘s going to take his kids off him. He’s a loser, you know what I mean? A victim. A victim.”
Barney nods, unsure how to respond. Looks at the Koolhunter’s face, in profile, his jaw set hard for a moment between sudden bursts of furious chewing and snapping at the gum, pale with a yellow-ish cast. Horns blare, motors rev and idle, people shriek and yell, music wafts and thuds outside the window and for a second, sealed into in the back of the big black car Barney imagines he’s in a hearse.
The Koolhunter looks at him.
“ What you into at the moment? Music. What you listening to?”
Barney hesitates. “Oh, a bit of everything.”
The Koolhunter’s gaze is unwavering. “ Like?”
Barney demures. He’s been listening to Smashing Pumpkin’s solo stuff recently Auf de Mar, Zwan, Perry Farrel’s solo stuff, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Hole. Nothing he feels comfortable mentioning. “ Mostly guitar stuff.”
“Like, like, names man, names,” the Koolhunter waves his hands around.
“Franz Ferdinand,” Barney says, though he’s only heard that one single, everyone seems to be talking about them, he thinks back to last year’s Mercury music award. “ and Dizzee Rascal, of course” though actually he has no interest whatsoever in that kind of music. Obviously he has got a compilation of the Beastie Boys and a Run DMC compilation with “Walk This Way” on. The Koolhunter keeps staring at him, his lips slowly twisting as he chews, screw-facing him. Five seconds, ten seconds. Barney is about to break out in a nervous smile when he sniffs, nods, rolls his head round on his neck. Breathes out heavily. Starts to chew, stares straight ahead again, his hand flicking angrily at the buttons on the iPod nestled in his lap. “Got to keep ahead, ahead, ahead. Y’know. Fuck. Soldiers. Soul-Jah.”
Barney keeps looking out of the window, registers the tramp, the tramp who’s always sitting there, outside Benjy’s with his mangy dog and feels a faint twitch of irritation. Not at this guy specifically, though he can’t understand, really, why people who can’t even find a way to feed themselves would get an animal that they have to feed too, maybe it’s just like the untouchables in India who actually deform their kids in order to make them more pitiable. People give you money if you’ve got dependents. It’s a more general irritation at the tramps he feels, the winos and junkies that litter the center of town. Not that he has any problem with people who take heroin or have alcohol addictions, that’s their prerogative and also, yes, he does think unlike Duncan that they should be given help and medical care at the taxpayer’s expense if necessary but it bugs him that they do annoy other people as they try to go about their business, not just with the begging of course, and he never gives money on principle as everyone knows that the money just gets spent on more drugs, which isn’t a solution for anyone, but also, well, a couple of times when he’s come into Charring Cross in the morning after crashing the night at someone’s house there is always a big group of them, of homeless, playing football on the square outside the National Gallery, wrecked, barging into pedestrians as if they weren’t there, holding up traffic. Last week, on Friday morning after he’d spent the night on a friend’s sofa over in New Cross, having been to see a band that one of his old University friends had started up, a kind of nu-Grunge thing, and late for work already with a pretty bad hangover himself, the half-flat football they were using for a kick about came galumphing across the road, hit the kerb just in front of him and sat wobbling in the gutter. All the tramps started shouting for him to kick it back over to them and he ignored them, went past because, well, he’s never been a very confident kicker of footballs, especially publicly and besides some people have a job to get to, some people had to stop drinking at two-thirty, some people had to get a few hours sleep, and so he went past, just didn’t have the time or the inclination to be kicking a football at that time in the morning and then was showered with abuse for, you know, having responsibilities to meet. So it’s fine, enjoy yourself, he‘s not going to moralize, but don’t disrupt other people’s lives, y’know, have a bit of personal responsibility, too, have some limits.
He breathes out. He’s tense. Already this seems to have been the longest taxi journey of his life. “So where exactly are we going?” Barney asks again after a pause. He is a little bit more nervous now, though he tries to be cool about it. He’s not used to people doing coke, that’s all. He’s never done it. He’s never been around it. Not his kind of circles. More booze and dope in his crowd. He’s never taken E, he was never into Rave, went to one in a field once, didn’t dance and had to wander around on the periphery for five hours waiting for everyone else to come down so they could give him a lift back home. He doesn’t want to end up in the middle of nowhere, in South London, which is mostly uncharted territory for him, what with his tiny, super-cluttered room in St John’s Wood, a room so tiny he has to have the wardrobe on the landing outside. But it’s cool anyway because the people he lives with are all around his age and very nice, very relaxed.
As they hit London Bridge, the cab rattling, picking up speed, he feels suddenly as though he’s breached a boundary, as through there was a moment’s resistance, some integument that the cab passed through, so infinitesimally fine, so lucent and attenuated that it seemed to be a border in both time and space, the fault-line where the two collapse into each other. The quality of the light shifts, grows darker as the grain of things is brushed back the other way, as though, if he checked his watch now it would be ticking back, counter-clockwise. Barney glances behind him, out through the back windscreen, sees the dome of light set down over the centre of town ringing slightly, as though struck, bright and brittle as a bell jar, and he feels a soft and unexpected pang of loss rise in him, suddenly feels something like tears welling, something vaporous, nostalgia, thick in his nose and throat, itching at the back of his eyes. He tries to cover it, coughs, asks, “And what are you listening to at the moment?” What was that? Weird
Well, what is it Barney, what is it?
The Koolhunter is staring straight ahead and breathing heavily. His fists clenched in his lap. “Sons of Hagar, Mujahadeen Team, Shiek Terror & The Soul Salah Crew, Al Kaeda Krew, Diwali Riddim Mob, and that whole Jihad-hop, rap, crunk-bashment-break-core mash-up, shit, you know, “ Shia Warrior” by Hasan-i Sabbah, “9-11 Ain’t No Joke,” Kuffar Killer. It’s so fucking underground that shit, even getting a mix tape out of these guys, even finding out where you can get a mix tape from is like getting into Fort Knox. Most of these guys are being watched, most of them are illegal, they get in, they agitate, they stir shit up, they’re fucking radicals man. You know….. their pirate stations keep getting closed down, moved around. I‘ve got contacts, contacts, a lot of those rap guys are Five Percenters, you know what I mean, me too, me too, Wu-Tang heads, a lot of British guys are into that you know and some of them are drifting over to the more hardcore, the realer shit, realer than real, you know, and that’s where I’m at, that’s where I have to be, you know what I mean. It’s all about the Real shit, the hardcore shit, the real stuff. Hardcore Reality. I mean Public Enemy are back man. You know the biggest tune of 200X, man the biggest mix is that off the hook, fucking bugged out Diwali Riddim Crew mix of “ Party for your Right to Fight.” Everybody’s looking the wrong way man, everyone’s looking at grime and that’s played out. This is the raw stuff, the raw and the real.”

Barney hasn’t understood a word of it, really, except for the part about Public Enemy. Who he’s heard of because they did that song with Anthrax that a lot of his friends used to dance to at the Zodiac Club back in Oxford. Where are they going? What are they going to see? Jihad-hop? He coughs. “Aren’t they kind of.. anti-Western? These errmm…..” He struggles for the right word. “These… guys?”
The Koolhunter’s shaking his head from side to side. “I’ve seen one video man, of a meeting, you know. Kuffar Killer, you know, busting some hardcore, shit y’know, some real gritty stuff and the fucking beats you know with all that fucking Arabic wailing over the top, it’s heavy, heavy shit for the bredren, you know,” he laughs coldly, mechanically. “Fucking guys with machetes, you know, cutting their own fucking heads up and stuff and NO drugs, man, nothing, you know what I mean. Straight edge.” He digs both hands into the left-hand pocket of his jacket, fumbles around, pulls them back out with a small mound of the same white powder nestled in the loose flap of skin between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. He pushes it toward Barney. “ I’ve got to get rid of this shit before I get in there.”
Barney looks at the powder glistening in the streetlights that strobe slowly by, not exactly white, a kind of dull, light absorbing off white, like a pinch of pewter.
“ Is it coke, or?”
“Coke?” the Koolhunter snorts, “Do I look like a coke-head, mate? Is that what I look like to you?”
“No. I just thought…”
“ Stellarc Four. Four. Four mate, do you get me?”
Barney hesitates. Well, he wants to be cool, but… he hesitates a moment too long. “Too slow mate,” the Koolhunter huffs it up, licks the last few grains off the skin webbing thumb and finger. His irises contract, expand then settle and for a second as the car accelerates along the Old Kent Road he seems to be broken down into a million tiny points of colour, momentarily and minutely disassembled and then reconfigured.

“Ffffuckk!” he breathes out. “ foreal, foreal, foreal, froeal foreal, foreal”

2)

Those guys want in.
That’s what the Koolhunter’s telling Barney as the taxi turns down what looks to Barney like a pretty dodgy, dead end back street, heading for what also look like a pretty dodgy bunch of disused warehouses at the other end. Is it safe down there? he wants to ask, but, of course, he can't…
“What do you think? Think they wanna destroy us these guys, think they wanna KILL us, fuck no, man. They want IN, IN everybody wants IN. They want it on their terms right. It’s the same with everyone. Man, everyone. Same with you,” he jabs a bony finger in Barney’s face, “ you want the world on your terms, right? They’ve got their pride right, they don’t want to come crawling to us, they pretend to hate us, they pretend to hate what we stand for, they pretend they think they’re underground, they think they hate us,they think they want to destroy us, they think they can’t be bought, they can't be touched, but they’re kidding themselves and trying to kid us, too, They Want In. T.W.I. never forget it, never doubt it. T.W.I. They Want In. You know what heaven is mate, Allah Akbar and blow yourself up and you get your forty virgins and you can drink ambrosia up there in paradise, you know what paradise is man, it’s a Dr DRE video, I know it, YOU know it,” the finger comes up again, the tip a few inches from Barney’s face. “In the Jacuzzi sipping Cristal with the light-skinned honeys hanging off your dick. When these guys close their eyes and see the heaven they’re going to, that’s what they see, and it’s Paris Fucking Hilton giving them a blowjob while J’Lo and Britney fight to be next in the queue, right? They’re already in. What they want is what we want them to want, they way they think about what they want is the way we tell them to think about what they want, they’re in but they’re not in far enough yet, that’s the point, they know, right now, that some DRE action is just not going to happen to them right? No-one thinks Arabs are cool, that’s what they’re pissed off about man…”
Barney’s staggered by the guys ignorance.“Surely it’s more that that, Israel..”
“Whatever. These kids grew up with MTV right? Even over in Saudi they all know Tupac and The Jigger, man, in Yemen man, they’re in, but they are fighting to get further in, and part of that process is making yourself cool right. And what’s cooler than terrorism man? What’s more hardcore, what’s REALER than that, man? Fuck, they want it so bad they‘ll kill themselves to get it. Maybe they’ll kill you too. They want recognition.”
“Is this safe?” Barney tries to keep the note of fear out of his voice but it’s there, unquestionably there. The Koolhunter isn’t listening anyway, he’s too fired up. He turns to look at Barney and his eyes roll back in his head for a moment the iris almost disappearing before they flick back in to focus on him. He raises his finger to Barney’s temple and starts to tap it slowly there. The tip of his finger is cold and porous, like bone.

“I know what’s in their heads, just like I know what’s in yours, in yours. Who put it there? I did. You can’t get away from me. I’m IN you.”
Then he turns back, eyes drilling into the back of the cabdriver’s skull.
“You can try and get away, you can try and hide, you can kid yourself that you don’t want to know me, but I’m going to find you and give you what you want, even if you don’t want it.”
The taxi has idled to a standstill and the driver turns to them. “I can’t get any further on this road,” he says. There’s a pause as the Koolhunter composes himself, stretching his legs and arms out, cracking the bones in his neck with sharp twists of his head, the song on the radio that Barney hasn’t even been aware of until now fading out suddenly with the words, crooned and shivering as the song dies “..and I can never, never, never, go home again…”
“ I can’t go any further on this road,” the taxi driver says again, his face in exactly the same position, his voice inflected exactly as before.
“We’re fine here,” the Koolhunter tells him, gives the guy a fifty and waves the change away, pulls his hood up over his face and steps out of the black cab, slamming the door behind him on the driver’s repeated, “thank you, thank you…”
Barney exits more cautiously, more considerately, looking around him at the squat, red-brick buildings, the portacabins, the fencing, the barbed wire, the CCTV cameras on sticks, the broken Pils bottles, burger cartons and plastic bags as he pulls his blue rucksack on.
He gave him a fifty, just like that.
“Where are we?” he asks. He tries to keep his voice light and unconcerned but to his own ears it sounds suddenly strangled and anxious.
“Where we need to be,” the Koolhunter tells him. He kicks a plastic Pepsi bottle that’s lying at his feet and sets it spinning. It slows, stops, points at Barney. Truth or Dare? The taxi has reversed back along the narrow stretch of road to the turning now and he glances back at it as it pulls round onto the road and then accelerates off into the night
The Koolhunter checks his watch. Five minutes early. Time for a fag and another toot of Stellarc Four. He waves the Marlboro pack at Barney who hops across a thick wodge of tire–tracked mud, doesn’t want to get his nicely roughed up Converses too dirty and slides one from the pack.
“First,” the Koolhunter tells him, “we’re going to meet someone who’s going to take us somewhere to meet someone who’s going to take us to meet someone who’s going to take us somewhere else. All that shit.” Barney lowers his face to the lighter, holding those enchanting golden curls back up off his face and away from the flame with his left hand. Puts his head back, has a drag. Marlboro are strong, it hits him straight away, the blood booming in his forehead. He needs a drink, more than anything. A drink would sort him out. He takes another drag and almost immediately feels the need to shit, shifts his whole body around it, the flesh on his back ruffling, his neck extending, getting a solid grip on it, then settling into himself like a big, egg-bound hen, as the Koolhunter, sucking on the filter pinched tight between thumb and forefinger eyes the surrounding area. He can tell that Barney’s frightened. Should have had a bit of Stellarc when it was offered him, but the Koolhunter himself, well, he couldn’t give a fuck. He’s been lost in Favelas at four in the morning, broken down in Townships with gangs of hardcore, known criminals in his car, been caught in the crossfire inside and outside dances in Kingston, Port au Prince and Puerto Rico. The fact is this, somewhere in this mass of half-used factories, empty car parks and boarded up office space, the Real is waiting for him to take possession of it. He squints, he sniffs at the slight breeze that has set the remnants of a piece of plastic sheeting snagged on the barbed wire in front of them fluttering. He can smell it, taste it, see its faint glow, feel the distant spit and crackle of its pulse brushing past him in thin, almost imperceptible waves. “Just call me the great white hunter,” he announces to the air, his eyes on the gently undulating scraps of plastic sheeting, semi-translucent, smeared in dirt, ghostly, shroudlike, panicking, and then he takes the last of the Stellarc Four up off his fist, feels himself shudder and surge up to another level.

Fifty foot tall, world eating, bulletproof.

Unfortunately don't have enough time to devote to a full take on this at the moment

www.dreamingmethods.com/uploads/capped/

Suffice to say that Andy's productivity and quality rate has never been higher and is basically caning mine at the mo. Yep, it's lights -out and sound-up time folks for what has to be the most cinematic Dreaming Method's production yet, more deadzones, fragmented memories and Uncanny encounters in childhood games, this time filtered through Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and consequently on a much larger canvas than The Flat . Superb, of course, the 3D effects are sharper than ever, the text well-proportioned, the sounds deployed for maximum effect.

For those unfamilar with Andy's stuff, use the mouse to move the image around, revealing text/space... parts of the screen where the arrow becomes a hand should be clicked on to move to the next part of the tale.

He should get together with Xela, someone should give them several million quid, and the results would be spectacular.

the double: a quote.

" There is always that other strange second man in me, calm, observant, critical, unmoved, blase-odious! He is a shadow that walks within me, a sort of canker of doubt and dissection: it is very seldom that I forget his loathsome prescence."

Lord Leighton

Number seven: Killing sound: The bug versus the rootsman.

The Impostume only leaves the house for three people these days, Kevin Martin, David Thomas and Juana Molina. What can I possibly say about the man that hasn't already been said? Nowt. This link (back when Kevin was still using lots of his Techno-Animal effects in his Bug set) will doubtless express just why he is England's most exciting and worthwhile human being. Have I ever had a better experience than seeing either Techno Animal or the Bug live? No.* Do I slavishly worship the ground upon which his podgy shadow falls. Yep.

Arise Sir Kev of err.....Brixton.

ftp://ftp.burningworld.org.uk/htdocs/thebugvssoundmurderer.mp3 **


* well, except for David Thomas and two pale boys' gigs, obviously.

**buggeration! errr, that doesn't work then? try ...

http://theperfumedgarden.blogspot.com/

Education, education, education eh, Tony?

The spiritual strangulation of the country continues apace.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6184145.stm

I wonder how many members of the cabinet have "useless" degrees in History or Literature ( ahhh, but that's alright, their parent's could afford to pay for it.) I wonder how many of them (or wives/husbands) dabble in "useless" activities such as Pilates, Yoga, various forms of new-age spirituality and err..... reading books (but they can afford to have interests, can't they? interests are what you are allowed to develop once you've made your money. Let's get things the right way round!) What do you mean you want to express yourself and relate to others who share your interests, what do you mean you want to expand your understanding and develop new non-essential skills that would only contribute to your own levels of happiness... ? You selfish fuckers, don't you think about the good of the country? Get back in your fucking Council-flat and get the TV on... stick another Iceland value-meal in the microwave and think yourself lucky that you've even got that... after all, what do you "contribute"?...only those who have already validated themselves by being "wealth-creators" are allowed to indulge in "leisure" at our subsidised expense... you've been priced out, but never mind, that should sharpen you up a bit, give you a further spur to becoming properly competitive in our flexible labour market...look, we've given you a concrete box to bring your kids up in, a concrete box to die in, just enough money to keep you in frozen pizzas and Sunny Delight, you've got twenty-four hour Big Brother on E4... what more do you people want?

Depressing. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you in all seriousness, what is to be done?

Much fascinating talk on other blogs re: writing and the double have provoked me into dragging this old story out and dusting it off.

The usual apologies for the usual litany of unproofed errors!

NO QUALIFIERS.

Well it’s any old South Coast Saturday afternoon, a cheeky, seaside postcard of a day. Walking past the cash-point round by the station, Tommo’s looking one way, over at the beach and the distant lip of foam curling back from it, tasting the salt on the flayed February wind when suddenly Scotty has reached in over some fat bloke’s shoulder, plucked the freshly delivered twenty from his hand and had it away on his toes down the seafront.
Fuck’s going on?
Tommo’s face looks like a smacked arse for about half a second and then instinct tells him to run.
Off they go, belting along the front past the arcades. Weaving between the shoppers, every breath lagging their lungs with frost, coloured bulbs, loops and lariats of neon, grannies and families all blurring by. A long trough of smeared light rocking back and forth under the stable blue sky as Tommo’s feet pound the pavement and his narrowed eyes start watering in the wind. Scotty’s beige, Stone Island ski-jacket shifting in and out of view a few feet ahead of him, pony tail bouncing.
“Keep up, boy,” Scotty shouts, face half turned for an instant over his shoulder, voice carrying back to him over the beeps and whistles from the arcade and the cars crawling up to the traffic lights, a sudden bass thud and some stars of skittery rhythm flung from one of them as they pass, drum and bass, old school, Bukem by the sound of things. Glassy buffeting from the sea breeze making some cold point deep in his right ear throb, small bone at the base of his skull squeaking away. Only just realised what’s happened and Tommo starts grinning as he runs. Scotty doesn’t need the money, just doing it for a laugh. Fucking around.
It feels good to run, though the last lunch time pint’s crawling corrosively up his chest and he knows when he stops his head will start hammering. A blood-red battering ram against the back of his eyes. And stop they do, round the corner from DaMario’s arcade, sure that they’ve lost him, if he even bothered to chase them at all.
Even if he does catch up with them, so what? Nothing they can’t handle, no problem.
Some fat cunt. They stand there, hands on their hips. Too tough to double up, even though Tommo can feel a stitch poking its blunt finger into the muscles of his lung.
“Look on your fucking face,” Scotty muses between gulps of the fresh, chilled air cheeks red with two big, flushed muttonchops. “Your reactions are shit, mate.”
“Fuck off,” Tommo wheezes back, too many fags fluting his breath up into a whistle. “Looking at the fucking sea and then you fuck off down the road full tilt.”
“You’re knackered, mate. You’re out of shape.” Adjusting his pony tail, hair falling free for a moment and dancing over his face before he turns into the wind and lets it sweep the strands back into his grip, into the band. The twenty flapping between his teeth.
“You knicked that for what?” Tommo asks him, wincing, forehead booming, tentacle of bile tickling the back of his tongue.
“Keep you on your toes.”
“FUCK OFF,” Tommo snorts.
It’s not like Scotty needs a poxy twenty quid. This kid’s coming up the road, gawky and overgrown, all Adam’s apple and trailing arms. Streak of piss with a face full of zits.
“Here you are.” Scotty waves the twenty in the kid's face. “Go and buy some twat mags. Have one off the wrist on me. Or some Clearasil.” Grinning at Tommo, who’s looking at the kid in mock horror. Not so fucking mock, maybe. He’s an ugly fucker this one.
“Fuck off,” the kid says and Scotty’s grin shrivels. Eyes narrowed. Head back.
“What did you fucking say to me?” he asks the kid, the twenty clamouring for attention in his hand. Just take me, kid.
“I got me own money, mate. I don’t need yours.” His voice is hesitant, the boldness thinning. Like he’s just sussed who Scotty is.
“YOU FUCKING WHAT!” Scotty’s face bolts in on the kid’s, his big hands coming around, fists fat with anger, his mouth a hard, white oval. The kid almost collapses, folds his long limbs down to the pavement with the shock and then cowers there, one hand on the floor behind him like he’s about to start an impromptu breakdance.
Fanny parting, bumfluff tash, Peacock’s jeans with the crotch down between his knees.
Tommo can’t help it, he bursts out laughing watching the kid collapse, going from gangly pride to huddled and shit-stained in a nanosecond. Luckily for the kid Scotty starts laughing too and the kid slides forward, up and out, muttering to himself, face like a spiky balloon, pulling at his jacket and trying to strut, throwing looks back at them.
“You cheeky little cunt,” Scotty yells, still laughing, and darts forward. Even as the kid tries to jump away he gets him right up the hoop with a well placed Timberland, half his foot thumping up the kids scrawny arsehole and lifting him six feet off the floor. The kid lands and rabbit hops around the corner, hand on his stinging ringpiece, eyes bright with tears, whimpering, “Bastards.”
Tommo can’t breathe. Funniest thing he’s ever seen. “Fucking hell, mate, did you see the cunt jump. He should be in the high jump for England, that cunt.”
“Fuck that,” Scotty says re-doing his ponytail again, restoring everything to order. “He should be in the pole vault.”
What a fucking day this is going to be. Anyway, it’s not like Scotty needs the money and so he opens his hand up, lets the twenty tremble on his palm for a moment. Can’t believe it’s free at last. A gust of air punts it slowly up into the sky, spinning it like a paper boat on a gutter stream until a crosswind propels it away down the road, past the coach park and the chippy. Bye-bye money. A little purple and green flutter. An early butterfly against the ice blue sky.


What’s left to do but get up the pub? Game of pool, tenner in the fruit machine, try and get that barmaid into bed.
“If I got her into bed, mate, I just wouldn’t stop fucking FIDDLING with it, know what I mean?” Scotty tells him, juiced up, full of adrenal soup, bouncing up the hill towards the Crab. “I’d be fucking riding her all night. She’d be like this, like this….” he pulls a pained, orgasmic face full of uncomprehending, awe-struck pleasure, straight out of some nasty hardcore he’s seen. The look actually, for a second, turns Tommo on. Guts prickle and spasm, thickening ripple runs the length of his cock.
He coughs.
“Fuck off.” Panics. Scotty’s given him semi. “FUCK OFF,” he yells again more to his cock than anyone else, then hard-stares some old wanker whose attention he’s inadvertently attracted as he passes. Shudders inside his Cerruti shirt and not just because of the bucketful of cold air the day throws in their faces as they turn onto Shoreview Parade. It made him think about birds, right. About giving a bird one. That was all. He likes women.
Anyway he doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. That barmaid is right up her own arse anyway.
“She’s fucking ugly. She’s a fucking hound, mate.” She loves herself. Stuck
up, innit. Haley. What kind of names that? Tommo takes a very personal offence at the name. Lay-me! As Scotty likes to call her.
“I’ll get you a nice fucking ginger fat bird to fuck while I’m giving her one in the shower then, all right?” Scotty half-dancing across the roads ahead of him. “She’ll be going.....”
Tommo looks away quickly, doesn’t want to risk getting a lob on again, gazes at his feet in their boxfresh Reebok Classics, luminous against the grey tarmac, blurring by. Can’t avoid hearing a few pleasure racked gasps and bleats though. Gets one anyway.

He stomps into the pub behind Scotty, face flushed, shaving rash inflamed like a million hot needle points in his neck as Scotty drops the glee down a gear, moderates his skipping into a pub swagger. He is, after all, a man who inspires fear. He didn’t get where he is today by not being a hard cunt.

It’s gloomy in the Crab, or maybe it’s just the contrast to the bright day outside. At first Tommo can’t see anything but primal murk, squints into the prehistory of a Saturday afternoon session. Troglodytic forms shift and moan, damp warmth and fetor of the cave mouth, fag ends glow red and drift about like fireflies.

Whoah, fucking hell, freaks out for a minute. Timewarp! Slowly the gleam of the pumps and the light from the optics cut through the murk to reassure him.

Civilisation. His eye adapts, a slow fade in and the light is bouncing off the long, burnished bar, the usual coffin dodgers slumped against it, faces varnished with the teak glow, nodding occasionally, voices low and loving, whispering intimacies at a wake.
“Alright Aylee!” Scotty goes, standing about ten foot away from her at the other end of the bar, even though there’s plenty of space down the side. “Two Stellas,” Scotty goes. “And whatever your having, darling.” Lifts a serious wad of twenties out of his pocket, about a grand and a half’s worth all rolled up in a rubber band, proceeds to peel one off.
Haley’s busy serving some old cunt at the other end of the bar. Wearing a nice white top, nice and tight, low cut, wonderbra. The old cunt’s stare fixed on her tits, eyes busily excavating the yard long seam of coal black cleavage. She twists a fixed grin their way, and then quickly turns it back to the old cunt. Muscles in her jaw clenched, face puckered. Looking non-too-pleased to see them.
Tommo skulks sulkily onto a barstool. In a second she’s over to them, eyes throwing ice cubes.
“You’ve got a fucking nerve after last night,” she hisses. “Did you run back to her this morning then?” A glittery purple smudge under each eye, red around the rim. Testimony to sleeplessness and tears. She flicks a glance at Tommo, who gives her a flare of the nostrils and a curl of the lip in return, then moves in closer, leaning across the bar. Eyes even more livid, face more drained up close. “I can’t stop thinking about you. I know we’ve only been together for a week. Those things you said to me last night, no-one’s ever understood so much.”
She swallows and suddenly looks more hurt than angry, backs off whispering bitterly.
“You said we couldn’t go away today ‘cause you were busy. And now look. Why do you put this front on? You’re so different when you’re with your friends”

Rewind! Scotty’s gobsmacked. What the fuck was that all about? Lost for words, and that doesn’t happen too often. Mouth gawps and flaps. Hand, chest height,tugging at some invisible drawstring, trying to pull his face closed or drag up a question as she stomps back over, angry and heartbroken, head down, nestling hurt eyes against her bosom, and slops the Stellas down.
“What the fuck?” Scotty looks at Tommo. Who shrugs. A bitch is a bitch.
“She’s on the rag.”
“What’s she talking about fucking last night?. I was in the Anchor all fucking night,” he tells Tommo, who scarcely needs to be reminded, seen as he was fucking right there next to him all fucking night. For fuck’s sake. He pulls the Stella across the bar, lowers his face to it and slurps at the first frothy inch. It stops about half way down his chest trying to decide whether to come back up or not.
“What you talking about?” Scotty shouts down the bar. “I have not got a clue what you’re talking about, darling.”
Tommo drifts disinterestedly off to have a piss, stands there trying to pry a dead fly off the top of the urinal with a narrow yellow crowbar until the tension in the piss-stream begins to slacken and he expediently attempts to blast it off with a few concentrated piss-bursts, squeezing his guts down and letting the odd volley fly. All this heavy artillery work gets his bowels grumbling. Better have a shit as well. Sits gurning in a box of meaty stench for a few minutes. Puts his finger through the toilet paper. Shudders, then sniffs at the feculent bump and its little watery brown tail. Like a tiny crap-pole. Rinses his hands under the tap. Wipes them on his jeans. Drags a few pubes from his foreskin and then fiddles about with his cock. Makes a couple of ‘come on and have a go/ game on’ faces at himself in the mirror. Winks at his own reflection, which just about has time to wink back before he goes back out to the bar.

Scotty’s still in there, slumped at table near the bogs now, face like a frayed purple cushion, muscles moving en-masse below the surface, mental indigestion. Tommo pulls up a pew. Dust in mini-maelstroms swirls and circulates, motes of magnesium and mercury in the long fall of glass-bright light pouring through the window behind them and crashing in a jagged ellipse against the unused pool table.
“Get this, right.” Scotty murmurs. “She reckons I was with her last night. That I come in here about half eight, then took her for a meal somewhere and then back to her place.” He’s staring into the middle distance, mind making faces from the muddy light. Is there something out there, something sucking and slopping up out of the formless murk beyond the muted green baize of the pool table, dwindling plane of the pastoral slowly swamped by the loose banks of peat coloured darkness stacking up at the back of the pub? Night coming closer.

“I wasn’t even in here? I was with you, yeah?” Scotty’s eyes look beseechingly into Tommo’s. Tommo’s never seen a look like it. Doesn’t like it.
“Fuck off mate, course you was,” Tommo tells him. “She’s fucking stoned mate. She’s a coke-head anyway, everyone knows that.”
Scotty’s face condenses, grips certainty and disdain. “She’s fucked up. What’s she talking about?”
“Forget it, mate. Let’s have a game of pool.” Tommo jabs at the table with a Benson and Scotty follows his lead. Looks reluctantly back up at the table, not sure what he suddenly expects to see standing behind it, something muddy and leering leaning towards him maybe. A sick and slug-like shifting in his stomach, something ancient stirring, feelers uncoiling, skin sweating poison in washes of pure green fear.
“Nah. Let’s go somewhere else. Fucking sick of this fucking dump,” he announces loud enough for everyone to hear. A few faces turn his way. “Yeah?” he asks, “yeah, what?” Mouth barking, eyes bright with glaring. Tommo sees how the day's gonna pan out, pissed up and punchy. Sweet.
Haley keeps her head down as they hit the door and step out into the street.

Wind nearly takes them off their feet. A mocking blast, stinging with salt, so sudden it’s as if it’d been crouched and waiting to pounce. They look down the hill toward the coast. See the vast, cold mouth of the sea gnawing endlessly away, breaking its teeth against the land beneath their feet. Scotty tucks his face down into the neck of his ski jacket, stray hair strands whirring about over his head like helicopter blades.

Where to? The Crown. They head downhill, angled into the wall of wind that cuts out intermittently, leaves them staggering like they’re shitfaced until another long squall catches and supports them again. Weather’s getting worse. The sky still bright but loosing its sharpness beneath a thin wash of twilight. Somebody being driven up the pavement toward them. Is it? Yeah, Tommo thinks it is. Stumbling, six foot or so of breeze-free space suddenly opening up in front of them, the fat cunt’s speed stalling without a following wind. They both begin to operate on different time frames, different gravity, battle against the polar ends of inertia. Yep. There in front of them is the fat cunt they lifted the note from. Tommo’s hands fist up ready for a ruck, but the fat cunt’s face is full of surprise, pleased even. He moonwalks past them as they flail and windmill. Stops and turns as they do.
“How did you get up here so…”
Wallop. A big slab of wind hurls his words up the hill. Sends them all sashaying two steps back. Scotty gestures to a shop doorway and they wade their way towards it, Tommo watches Scotty and the fat cunt climbing in out of the way as the wind goes belting past. The fat cunt has a goatee and a froggy fold of flab cushioning his chin. He begins to babble. The goatee rides about on the ripples like a fur coat thrown on a waterbed.
“Up here so quickly. But really, let me thank you again for the money. It really wasn’t necessary, the apology itself was more than enough.”
The side of Tommo’s face has gone numb, the wind poking tiny pellets of ice into his pores. Come on, for fuck’s sake. He’s only got a shirt on and he can feel hypothermia’s deep, warm hands begin to knead him away from the surface of his own skin.
Scotty’s staring at the fat cunt, trying to get his head round it.
“What fucking apology?” his face pushing in close, more from fear and eagerness than any attempt at intimidation. The fat cunt goes suddenly bosseyed and nonplussed.
“Just five minutes ago outside the supermarket.” Splutters flecks of spit onto his neck tyre. “Insisted that I took fifty pounds as compensation for the....”
“Me?” An appalled, bawling whimper. “You’re saying you just seen me.”
The fat cunt’s startled. “Two. No, five minutes ago.”
Someone’s playing fucking games with him. Or has spiked him. Fucking acid or something. A million drops of dread pelt coldly through him, mind wobbles and goes down under the onslaught then bobs back up to the surface again. Head stuffed full of warm gauze, feels like he’s had a hit of double-cheap homegrown. Some kind of a set up, someone must be watching him. Maybe he shouldn’t have knocked Dave Lords out with that pool cue. Dave’s got friends.
The right side of Tommo’s head’s crusted over with cold now and he can feel himself begin to shiver, each little ripple through his flesh washing him further away, deeper into the rosy cove that’s slowly unfolding inside him, feels like he’s curling up in soft, cupped palms. Looks at the street. Wind cuts out with a whine like a motor dying and he almost pitches over onto his side.
“Scotty, for fuck’s sake,” he yells into the grey and yellow doorway. Florists shop, bleached flower heads crowding dustily behind the bottle-green glass.
Some movement at last. The fat cunt takes advantage of the disorientation and divided attention, slides globularly out of the doorway, seeps across the window, then goes bouncing up the hill on a fresh gust. Scotty stalks out of the doorway, scowling face down, hair strands standing bolt upright off his head and then running into each other in panic.
“Someone’s fucking winding me up today,” he tells Tommo, who pulls a ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ face and starts hotfooting it toward the boozer, leaping chest first into the windwaves to keep his momentum going, just like he was struggling through the sea in summertime. Rushing to get out of his depth.

“I’m gonna have some cunt for this.”

The Crown. What a fucking shithole. What a dive. Jukebox has got fuck all on it except for one Derek May cut on some cloth-eared compilation from about Nineteen Eighty-Six or some such shitty year. The punters in the place are a sad sack of cunts. Cunt-ers, as Scotty likes to call them.
Still, at least it’s warm. Tommo’s head starts to thaw and he begins to feel himself again, familiar thoughts and ideas coming slowly back to him, rattling around in his head like heavily processed peas rolling off the frozen mass and doing a small circuit of the bowl before they settle.
That’s right. That’s right. Shite pub. Full of wankers. Certainty. Tommo grins into the last half of his pint and then necks it. Even got his drinking head back on. He wishes Scotty’d sort himself out, just sitting there, staring at his pint. Tommo gazes at him, at his profile against the coloured glass in the Crown’s main window, hair falling glossily across his cheek. No wonder he gets so much muff.
Still. It is strange that all these people reckon they’ve seen him somewhere else. But, you know. And yeah, it is weird that someone who looks like him is getting involved in Scotty’s life, what with the fat cunt and Haley and all that. Yeah, that is pretty fucking weird. Someone must be having a laugh. Winding him up.
“Forget about it mate. We’ll find out who it is. We’ll sort them out.” Words bounce back off the pall of preoccupation Scotty’s sunk in. Suit yourself. He goes to the bar for another jar. Snarls at the Puke-box on the way past as it bursts into Britpop bollocks. Tinny thrumming, nasality, shopping-list lyrics.
Belches at the bar and who the fuck’s this? If it isn’t me old mucker Andy.
“Alright mate. What you been up to?” Tommo asks.
Andy double-takes, startled. “Fucking hell, mate, you want to get yourself up the High Street. Scotty’s up there, just had a right kicking.”
Tommo’s turn to double-take. “What you talking about, he’s over there.”
Gestures to the back of the pub. Andy does a double double-take between the two of them. Mouth falling progressively more open.
“Come on,” Tommo tells him and escorts him across the pub to Scotty.
Of course, he gets a pint in first.



Andy tells his tale, Scotty’s face slack and subdued. “Could’ve sworn it was you.” Then bows out backwards, don’t shoot the messenger, back to the bar, leaves the two of them in a cloud of incomprehension.
Scotty’s the first to speak. “You’re telling me, right, that everybody in town has just seen me get a kicking off that kid and two of his mates. Right in the middle of town?”
His voice trails off. This is fucking perplexing. Tommo sinks the last of yet another beer as Scotty drifts back down into the dark depths of the unfathomable.
Early evening, light wincing in the window like scuffed tin, a reputation in tatters.
The indignity of getting a kicking off those little fuckers. Everybody saw it. Scotty’s cheeks inflamed with shame, his chest prickling. Except of course it wasn’t actually him. How can this be happening?
“A doppelganger,” a voice says somewhere off the edge of his attention. How can this be happening?
“A doppelganger,” the voice says again, moving in closer, pulling up a seat.
Tommo eyes the guy up sullenly. Not another fucking foreigner trying to make conversation in the pub.
“We don’t speak French, mate,” Tommo tells him, slurring and surly.
“No. Well. Neither do I. I’m sorry but I couldn’t help overhearing,” the guy says and Tommo looks up at him properly for the first time. Long, pale face, big ears, black polo neck. Worse than a foreigner, it’s a student.
Tommo opens his mouth to tell the student what to do, in no uncertain terms, when Scotty stalls him with a chop of the hand.
“A what?”
“Well...” the student shakes his empty pint glass, looks at it, grins apologetically. Tommo knew it. The student eyes his cigs, hovering over them like a scrawny black fag vulture.
“Get him a pint.” Scotty orders. Tommo bridles then obeys. Going to the bar anyway. Pushes through the punters, pub filling up with the post-Footy fraternity. His head thumps dully under the pressure of the pints. Libido livening up a bit though,something sinuous snaking through him. Saturday night. Time for a chaser. Whisky, he thinks. A single or maybe...

“A double, essentially,” the student says, smirking down on them from the lofty Erie of Esoteria, fag in his left hand, pint in his right.
“Legend has it that the doppelganger is a malign facsimile of oneself, or one’s self I should say. It has been interpreted differently, perhaps it’s a symbolic projection of the Blocked Wish, or the desire for self immolation that we all essentially possess, the individual ID incarnated, begging the question as to whether the role of the doppelganger, terrifying though it seems, is destructive or essentially liberating. Still, it basically sets about undermining and destroying the other’s life and should they ever encounter each other face-to-face the doppelganger will immediately attempt to attack and kill the other.”
“Cunt!” Scotty whistles in disbelief. “This dopel-fuckers dead, when I get my hands on him.” Reckons he’s me does he?
The student ferrets yet another fag from Tommo’s pack, he could scrounge for England this cunt, and looks quizzical. “Well,” he says and pauses. “Maybe you’re the doppelganger then.”
“I ain’t no fucking doppel-fucker mate I’m me,” Scotty tells him “This cunt’s ruining my life.”
The student shrugs. “Or are you ruining his? Ruining his reputation, stealing from people and making him pay them back, getting him beaten up, causing trouble with his girlfriend or his mistress, whatever she is.” He sips theatrically at his pint.
“Rather than destruction, you should seek a protoplasmic re-assimilation of self and other,” the student says, hand blithely plucking at the fag pack.
Cheeky cunt. “Right, you can fuck off now,” Tommo tells him. “You’ve had your free fags and your pint so fucking do one mister doppel-fucking whoever you are with your protoplasmic re-absorption and your fucking polo neck full of dandruff. Alright?” The student quails, pales and discreetly disappears.
Well, that leaves them with quite a bit to think about.
A doppelganger.
You learn something new every day.
Fidgety silence.
Muted battle between the pub lights and fading February daylight in the window where they sit. Tommo looks at Scotty and gags on a sudden surge of feeling, suddenly wants to tell him that he loves him. Fucking hell. What’s that all about?
What’s wrong with me? He takes another big gulp of his pint. Scotty looks at him across the table. Sniffs, face twisted and crinkly, flat with back lighting, like a sketch that someone’s screwed up and then unfolded.
A long pause. “Am I a real person?” he asks. Voice lost.
Fucking hell.

Tommo hates to see him like this.

Number eight: Xela "The dead sea"

Maybe it was all the Zombie talk over on Bad Zero and various long forgotten early-to-late-teen afternoons spent watching Fulci, the Bavas, Jess Franco, Michael Soavi, Uli Lommell and Argento movies surfacing again, but somehow Xela’s tinny, scuzzy, bedroom power-electronics take on the themes from “Halloween” and, most amazingly, Goblin’s main theme from “Suspiria” seemed particularly timely, as did his Zombie-concept album “The Dead Sea.”

Not only that, of course. Reader, have you ever been in the position where you like a record but wish it were somehow different or that there were several similar records that took it as an aesthetic/conceptual starting point and then went in different directions? The Impostume certainly has (actually this applies to almost everything I listen to) especially when it comes to the really great but somehow finally slightly underachieved “Salt Marie Celeste" by perennial Impostume faves, “Nurse with wound.” “The Dead Sea,” looked like it could be just such wish-fulfilment business.

Which it wasn’t, but somehow it grabbed me anyway after a while, for reasons of its own. It should of course be pointed out that while “The Dead Sea” might well have aspired to being a kind of soundtrack-to-a-Fulci-movie-that-never-existed it was somewhat hamstrung by its limited production values. It doesn’t sound especially cinematic, I mean it doesn’t have any scope, there are no vast distances here, great empty miles of torn and humid seascape or towering walls of water, no descents into the Maelstrom*, no looming behemoths. It all sounds very shorebound, home made, very up-close, there’s bits of guitar, some sea shanty style jauntiness backed by clanking percussion, the squelching of jellyfish against a barnacled hull, the sound of sodden footsteps, ripe with putrefaction, the whole thing liberally swabbed down with a good bucketful of scratchy electronics. It’s not even faintly sinister really, and yet somehow over the past couple of months or so I kept sticking it on. Actually what it is frankly, is endearing and slightly inept. Something you applaud more for its ambition than its execution and that somehow slips into your affections because of what it is rather than what it does (nebulous enough for you?)

Should you get it? Yes of course. Make him rich! This man’s ambition and talent need Cinemascope, not Super-Eight!






* What’s with “The Perfect Storm”? I have vague memories of it as a brilliant film about the nightmarish, utterly alien dimensions of the sea being rather spoiled by the presence of Marky Mark. Horrible ending too as I recall, the last lone figure, a tiny speck lost in the great basalt canyons and valleys. Shudder. I must watch that again.

An Open Letter to Dejan.

Well, Dejan, you asked me why I liked your Blog, or rather what precisely it was that appealed to me about it, and here’s your answer. Now the first question I suppose is why I want to publicly tell you rather than just firing off an e-mail. I want to do it because I think that if you have something positive to say to someone you may as well do it out loud, because it makes me put myself on the line to some degree, it forces me to risk being wrong or ridiculous and also because it obliges me to think about your question more seriously.
So. As you know I like it because it “ cheers me up.” Because it’s funny, of course, because it runs at a pitch of what I can only describe as aggressive irreverence, which is largely the tenor of my own humour, because of its scorn, dismay, disgust and wilful overstepping of the mark. The designation of certain American actresses as different types of class-demarcated “Cunts” for example or the ongoing “ All the Daddies who ever fucked me” complete with hardcore cartoons. So it’s the mixture of the registers, the learned with the vulgar, a picture of Tito or (Marx) in conjunction with an All American Patriarch getting blown in a shower may not be subtle but it is good for a belly laugh. It may seem offensive to some, or seem embittered but I don’t regard this stuff as misanthropic. I see it as really, innocent and playful…a desire to bring out the underlying, unacknowledged grotesquery in the culture. After all we all know what’s going on in people’s heads don’t we? We all know each other's dirty secrets, the shame, the fear, the bluffing and sneaky sideways glances, we have a shared condition and acknowledging it, with wryness and humour rather than self-mortification (too much of that around for your tastes I suspect, Dejan) feels like a release, (as opposed to the trapdness of a "sophisticated" averting of the eyes.) The opposite of misanthropic, in fact, generous and genuine in its affection, hopeful.
That sense of play and it’s importance, that sense of a kind of natural wellspring of affection, creativity and action that is dammed up in the culture is there in your dislike of the Dutch and the whole Mammon-worshipping priggishness and dullness of not just the Netherlands but of all of Northern Europe and the States, and I really like the way you undercut its authority by contrasting it with other traditions in which the emotions aren’t so stifled or sublimated into the hoarding up of reserves of capital/commodities and kulture, how the rich Dutch are in many ways impoverished and one dimensional no matter how much they consume/know. As someone who has spent a reasonable amount of his time outside his own culture and with people of different nationalities I know how we Northern Europeans often appear (are) : bloodless, dull, tight-fisted, miserably self and status-conscious and your sallies against the Dutch remind me of how much we have to learn from and how much there is to appreciate in other traditions in terms of actively widening our own frames of reference (by which I don’t mean of course reading more books and buying more CDs, hoarding more information) but by understanding other ways to be and to be with each other. In this respect the Blog usually chimes in with my own experience and reinforces me in the general drift towards a more loosely knit, less status-hungry persona. In other words it reminds me that I’m not alone.

Unless, characteristically, I’m getting it all wrong of course,

Yours,

Mr Impostume

crikey.. this talk of the Laughing Hyenas has been unfortunately timely. A belated R.I.P Larissa Strickland...and here's some sonic tributes from other blogs*.

http://www.somethingilearned.com/sounds/larissa/Laughing%20Hyenas%20-%20Dedications%20to%20the%20One%20I%20Love.mp3

http://www.lastdaysofmanonearth.com/media/Laughing/12.mp3

and without Mr Brannon's errr.... strenuous emoting

http://chunklet.com/images/upload/6/audio_file/01%20Stain.mp3

* yes that's right, i still dont know how to do that hide-the-link-behind-a-quote thing. Like, derrrr...hello!?

The Drones - Jezebel

Number Nine! The Drones: Gala Mill.

Hauntological Blues!


Quite what made “Gala Mill” such an awesome listen, such a monumental piece of work is hard to convey. After all, a bald (hideous word, that) description of them, raw and ragged, strung-out garage punk would leave you hard placed to differentiate them from a million other post White–Stripes wanabees. But what the Drones had on their side, among other things, was that they were Australian.

It's the Australian Folk tradition, with its tales of nostalgia, loss, abduction and inhuman suffering, the foundations of Australian society, mired in merciless exploitation, rebellion and punishment and the wounded-ness of its peoples that the Drones revisit again and again*. The cover, for example, features a sepia rendering of a posse of masked men. Criminals, lawmen, concerned citizens, it’s impossible to say, but certainly ancestral fathers familiar with violence. One track “Words From The Executioner to Alexander Pearce” imagines a conversation between the hangman and one of the country's most notorious criminals and cannibals as bassist Fiona Kitschin’s voice soars, seraphic, over their heads (the clouds parting to reveal the Kingdom , the ministering Angel come to take the traveller home.) We don’t expect much from rock lyrics these days, but fortunately the Drones are up to their subject matter, horror, guilt and hope, History in effect, both personal and political, sometimes strikingly transfigured, as in the opener, the seven minute barbed wire and landmines assault “Jezebel,” (see above) or more directly addressed in the epic storytelling of the ten minute-long, “Sixteen straws” an elaboration on the traditional “Moreton Bay.”

Blooze wise The Drones are situted somewhere between the throttled, silt-heavy humidity of Oxbow, the Laughing Hyenas sky-scouring, volcanic howl and, given that the pace never gets up much above funeral, the drums largely a repetitive thwack (the sound of a hammer breaking hot stones, of a spade thudding again and again into unyielding earth, of the jawbone of an ass against a skull) they are also reminiscent of the beautifully doleful plod of Dirty Three’s “ Horse Stories.”

Not simply content with this, “Gala Mill “ plays enough subtle, disruptive games with notions of presence and authenticity to suggest they’re regular readers of K-punk! “Jezebel”, starts up, as do almost all the tracks, with a voice from the studio cueing the band in for that one–take, live-to-mike performance, followed by a moments silence in which a dog can be heard barking somewhere in the middle distance before there’s the hum of a coiled amp and the song comes crashing in. The sublime, teasingly ambiguous “Work for me," ends with a thin electronic filament threading its way into the track and a faint peal of birdcall. And what are we to make of the lovely, loping, “Are you leaving for the Country?” with its thick swathes of multi-tracked, dubbed out vocals, the dare we say, Utopian note of its chorus, “Let the spirit move you again!” and the softly quavering electronic smear of tremulous non-voice that ripples through the applause at the end of the track?**

I heartily look forward to seeing them blow “Grinderman” of stage at next year's ATP!

*There’s an evident overlap between the American and Australian experiences and the degree to which the Blues, in its compulsive re-iteration and attempted exorcising of the trauma of slavery, of chains, transport and indentured work in foreign climes chimes in with the Australian experience of deportation and hard labour, the legacy of land clearance and settling, lawlessness, genocide of the indigenous peoples, the unbearably hostile, alien territory and the almost cosmic inaccessibility of the homeland, literally on the other side of the world, (“I’m Stranded”)

** This news just in from The Drones website! “The family who owns the farm and the mill (where the album was recorded) have been there since the 1840s. It’s beautiful. There are all these orchards around it, a creek near there you can swim in... and it’s meant to be haunted. A woman apparently comes upstairs into the bedroom and cries. Although,” she laughs, “We never saw anything. It’d probably be a better story if we had.”

Update! Re the E-mails inundating me (well there's been two, which for the Impostume is a bumper crop) plus PMPEP's distaste for the Drones, the question, do I actually like them or am I fannying around in annoyingly smug way, selecting records at random and making large claims for them (first the apparently appaling Calamaro, now this) I would have to say errr... yes to both. Do I genuinely think that Drone's song is very good, yes I do and do prefer them (shock, NO!) to Oxbow, who are just a bit toooooooooo ponderous over the long haul for me, is the Album fantastic, yep. Am I suggesting that the Drones have anything in common with the Ghost-boxers of this world, not really no, never actualy having heard ANY of the ghost box and whatnot stuff i wouldn't be in a position to say and i reiterate the below "without any grafting of Large Theoretical Concerns onto the affair." Cor, just a bit of cheeky fun with a few phrases that have been bandied about of late, no need to start a witch-hunt!* And i thought people would be annoyed by my imputation that listening to "Bajofondo" meant you were an evil imperialist.

*Wyatting chickens coming home to roost? They warned me, you know.

Carlos Gardel - Por una cabeza


Por una cabeza de un noble potrillo
que justo en la raya afloja al llegar
y que al regresar parece decir:
no olvides, hermano,
vos sabes, no hay que jugar...

Por una cabeza, metejon de un dia,
de aquella coqueta y risueña mujer
que al jurar sonriendo,
el amor que esta mintiendo
quema en una hoguera todo mi querer.

Por una cabeza
todas las locuras
su boca que besa
borra la tristeza,
calma la amargura.

Por una cabeza
si ella me olvida
que importa perderme,
mil veces la vida
para que vivir...

Cuantos desengaños, por una cabeza,
yo jure mil veces no vuelvo a insistir
pero si un mirar me hiere al pasar,
su boca de fuego, otra vez, quiero besar.

Basta de carreras, se acabo la timba,
un final reñido yo no vuelvo a ver,
pero si algun pingo llega a ser fija el domingo,
yo me juego entero, que le voy a hacer.


Losing by the head, of that noble steed
That in the home straight, slackens its pace
And as it’s coming back , seems to say
You should know better, mate, give up betting!

Losing by a head, one day’s infatuation,
with that vain and brightly smiling girl
Who in happily swearing to the feelings that she’s faking
Tosses on the bonfire, all of my love

Losing by a head.
All those mad moments!
A kiss from her lips
Wipes out the sadness
lessens the misery

Losing by a head.
If she ever forgets me
I wouldn’t care
If I lost my life a thousand times over.
What else would I live for?

Losing by a head, so many disappointments,
Time and time again, I swore I’d refrain
But if a stray look, strikes me passing by,
I’ll want to kiss her fiery lips again

That’s it, I’m done with racetracks, the gambling is over!
I won’t watch another nail-biting finish again,
But if there’s some nag, that’s a sure thing come Sunday
I’ll put everything on it, what else can I do?

03 Andrés Calamaro - Por una cabeza

Number Ten! Tinta Roja: Andres Calamaro.

LAST WEEK'S MUSIC, YESTERDAY!


There may be no second acts in North American lives but in the South there certainly are, and Andres Calamaro would be as good an example of a mid-life “renacimiento” as that of the recently cleaned up, slimmed down and ultra celeb-friendly Maradona whose lachrymose chat show was the big TV hit in Argentina last year ( to the dismay of many). Calamaro never shot at journalists or quite ballooned to El Diez’s Zeplinesque proportions on an unstinting diet of meat and Bolivian nosebleed coke, nor did he quite manage to commit acts of suicidal coke-fuelled frenzy up there with the legendarily deranged granddaddy of Argentine rock (the appropriately named) Charlie Garcia’s leap from a tenth floor hotel window into a swimming pool (captured on film, and available as are all things, on youtube) but he’s certainly infamous enough back home for his drug habit, weight gain and self-exiling to Spain after he got in trouble for suggesting at a concert that it was “a lovely night to smoke a joint” and appearing smashed on TV one time too many.

This is not to say of course that Argentines don’t have a huge tolerance for fucked-up artists, indeed the tradition almost demands it of them, the Tanguero’s demi-monde of coke, whisky, impossible loves and all-night Milongas has finished off most of the greats, with the exception of Carlos Gardel of course, who was fortunate enough to go down in a plane over Colombia while still relatively young, thus preserving him as an icon of all that’s beautiful and noble in Tango.

Calamaro, like Maradona has effectively stared his own ruin in the face and come back out the other side sporting a newly found sense of propriety and engaging with his manhood via a crack at the tradition. He started this after a particularly poorly received triple album (!) “ El Salmon” written in a fortnight or so at the height/depth of his Madrid drug binges, a move which seemed to have finished off the solo career which started in the early Eighties with a series of highly successful quirky pop hits ( “Flaca” being the most widely known) and the album “Alta Suciedad.” In 2003 with “El Cantante/ The Singer” (the title taken from a Ruben Blades track he covered on the album) he began to interpret other people's works, taking on salsa, folk songs, modern classics of various traditions of Rock Nacional, (either a mature act of homage or the last recourse of a spent creativity, take your pick) and most significantly for “Tinta Roja”, the tangos “Volver,” a flamenco version of which recently appeared in Almodovar’s movie of the same name and “Malena” a slightly more obscure but inspired choice, a fabulously gothic paean to a Tango singer from the slums of Buenos Aires.

The album was a huge critical and commercial success prompting Calamaro to return to El Sur, cleaned up, slimmer, newly in love and ready to be taken back into the bosom of the family after his forty days in the wilderness. He performed a couple of sold out concerts, released another big selling disc of the gigs, “El Regresso/The Return” and set about his next recording, “Tinta Roja” in which he’s concentrated exclusively on Tango, the same combination of classics and more obscure works ( the Tango corpus is ridiculously vast) albeit a rather eclectic take, featuring lots of flamenco guitar, horns and very little Bandoneon, certain to upset the purists.

The singing of Tango is frankly, to inexperienced Anglo ears such as my own, pretty weird, it’s essentially declaimed, somewhere between spoken and sung. Quite why one Tango singer is great and another mediocre is dependent on a whole subset of micro-gestures, tone, empahasis, modulations, inflections and pauses, not to mention the grain and heft of the voice itself , along with the even more imperceptible performative “feel” for the lyrics and the tradition, which largely leaves ears such as my own, steeped neither in the form nor fully conversant with the language, at a loss.* There is a level then on which Calamaro provides a pretty good kind of intro to non-initiates into the music, it’s a prettified, more singer-songwritery take, more accessible.** The fact remains, it’s hugely enjoyable, moving and refreshingly disinterested in doing anything “new” or “radical” for the kids (actually the kids are really trad, aren’t they? Ok, then, blogging academics!) and much more concerned with doing unfashionable justice to the genius and the enduring legacy of his great grandparent’s golden years. A selection from youtube, Calamaro’s***** version of the magnificent “Por Una Cabeza" appears above, along with Gardel’s original and a humble attempt at a translation by Impostume Industries



*Roberto Goyeneche the last of the Tango greats ( a chronic alcoholic whose signature world-weary laugh provided a high point of many of his works and whose work with Piazola on “Vuelvo al Sur” and “ Solo” from Pino Solanas’ tango musical “El Exilio del Gardel” were the points at which any of it started to make any sense to me, in an affective way, I mean) observed, utterly shit-faced, in an interview that the secret of his success was that he had respect for the text. “ I say it well, I say it with full stops, I say it with commas!”



** Nothing Vanguardist whatsoever going on, just a series of fascinating songs being re-jigged by a skilled musician. Very unlikely to appeal to Euro-hipsters whose take on Tango is “Gotan Project”, “Bajofondo” and the million similar acts that their success has spawned and who can’t really be bothered engaging with another culture/form in all its tiring complexity*** and localness, but will feel good about their open-mindedness by indulging in third world traditions if they are served up to them with enough Electronica to neutralize its otherness, make it immediately appetising and reassure them that yes, their culture is the global cutting edge and model of aspiration,(and what could be more important than being cutting edge?)


*** “ El Lenguaje de Buenos Aires/ The language of Buenos Aires,” by Borges is, for example, just one attempt among many to analyse and assess the sheer quantity of slang (Lunfardo) specifically derived from Tango and one of the more formidable difficulties even for speakers of other varieties of Spanish in the “Español rioplatense” spoken in Buenos Aires , its environs and Uruguay, where many claim Tango originated.

**** Those with a Western Imperialist allergy to mullets/bouffants may wish to look away when Calamaro appears. Naturally since "Tinta Roja" came out the absurdly prolific Calamaro has released another album, of his own stuff this time, which basically sounds like the Lightning Seeds. Ahh well.