KATHY'S CHOICE

Ona sluša ona misli ona piše. Baš kako ja volim. Zašto ne bi i vi?

Kathy je web-poznanica koja ove tekstove piše za jedan zatvoreni blog koji drži moj drugi web-poznanik Yotal. Mislim da bi bila prava šteta da ova pisanja ostanu samo za nas par.

Our ISP forced us onto a 3-week Bill Drummondy “No New Music” strike and for the first week my stomach was jittery with worry at Getting Left Behind. But then for two weeks it was okay. And afterwards you’ve got to to either catch up or pretend those three weeks never existed. We decided to catch up. It was stupid. 28GB of music files piled up in Mipony on a planet where people are starving.

Adore the Violens “nine songs” thing. Adore the “Requiem” by Gregory Spears - it’s spot on. It’s a bit old-fashio ned. It’s like evolved Vaughan Williams or tangled-up Part. Maybe my favourite thing is that skuztztzy single by Crushed Beaks. Almost as brilliant is the one by New Manhattan.

There’s a thing over at MC by Jefre Cantu Ledesma which is absolutely beautiful - like Victorialand-era Cocteau Twins, my favourite era ever. Also brilliant is that thing by Nujabes. It start

s like some sleazy blissy easy-listening for a porno video. But then some bloke starts rapping on it. I’ve never had sex to rap music. I don’t believe it is humanly possible. But it’s a good album.

Adore the album by Bernacchi (?) and Budd and Guthrie. Liked that old thing by Wives too. Sometimes you get bored of calculating boys with guitars pretending they don’t know what they’re doing and you just CRAVE the sound of people who genuinely clearly haven’t got a bloody clue. Maybe my true favourite thing all week (month) is something by Koss/Henriksson/Mullaert called the Moellan Sessions. It’s

very long, quarter ambient, half stunning dub techno that actually manages to sound different, and a quarter a bit crap too. The crapness makes you love the brilliance.

For most of our time back online it was obvious that my ROTW had to be the VA Peel Sessions 1977-79 double CD thing. But the world doesn’t need another geriatric survivor of the punk war and New Wave national service blah’ing on about blah blah blah. It was the only time when gig-going was pure lusted-for joy, with no hint of duty or box-ticking. If you were there you’ll know. If you weren’t then you’re right not to give a damn. But dear god, listen to disc one - the mainly “punky” one. It is awful. Punk dated appallingly. Except the Jam. Disc 2 is more new wavey and when the Magazine track kicks in you are suddenly hearing music that is eternal. Joy Division, Simple Minds, Killing Joke, even the Psychedelic Furs - come out

unzipped and powdered for action. To say the unsayable truth, very few John Peel Sessions were brilliant. I heard decades of them. Only three people did sessions that are IMHO superbly better than anything elsewhere - Tim Buckley, This Heat, The Smiths.

John Peel died too late. He died while music was going through a doldrums era, and he was also doing embarrassing family shows on Radio 4 and writing duff columns in the Radio Times and reading out cringey random dull emails from the new internetty technology and always smacking his lips in his home studio as he ate a cake. And after he died everyone thought new music would die. But the opposite happened.

My ROTW is Richard Youngs’ “Long White Cloud”. It is maybe less sweet than anything mentioned above. But I’m biased, and love it for reasons other than just the music. 5 tracks. Just under forty minutes. It starts with an a cappella thing. This is always embarrassing for the listener. Then four lean NEUfolk bludgeoning tracks repetitive almost to the point of annoyance. Him. An instrument. Sometimes something else. Even for me, in the same area of the autistic spectrum, it’s not enough. But you need to know where he came from. In his early years he messed around with half-busted cassette recorders, doing the same as everyone else, making clacking noises and speeding them up using high-speed-dubbing on double-cassette decks, and speeding the result up too, and again and so on - making huge great 3- and 4- and 8-C90 albums of this same track going at various speeds. These things are a delight to hear if you made them yourself. They are unbearable if you didn’t. If you’re crazy and rich then go to Discogs and buy everything you can by him and hear it all in chronological order and if you don’t die of old age first you’ll hear someone turn from a dud noise musician into almost Roy Harper or Peter Hammill.

I love him for his work ethic. He really can churn them out. He makes you wonder why most musicians need a year or two to write ten little poems and slap a tune/riff on each one and sing them into a microphone. I love him for being a rubbish musician early on but that he just kept on keeping on and learning. I love him for his lack of quality control. Do something fast, chuck it out for the public, let them decide. This album wrongfooted me. In the Comments bit I said it was very immediate but not as good as his “biggie” of a few months ago - Amplifying Host. Wrong. It is immediate, but already it’s grown bigger than A.H. Bizarrely, by starting out on a carpet with a Hoover and a cassette recorder, he’s accidentally ended up sounding like Bert Jansch. But better. Listen to that second track. Isn’t it beautiful. It took me three days to realise. I’m not normally so slow. This is the joy of following people who travel so fast and never look back.

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(thanks, Kathy, thanks, Yotal)