KATHY'S CHOICE

She's like a weirdgin

0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 it goes divine like I don’t know if this is bvdub’s best or what, I adore his spewing them all out so fast, knowing no one’s got time to hear anything a second time, making it all immediate and trim, and they’re the albums you end up playing second and millionth times - I “mustn’t” drink/drug and the doctor’s stuff is like I’m wearing a crash-helmet, and I tell the docs the only time I’m really happy is when drunk, and you sound a saddo when you admit that, but it’s true for all of us. Like all those sober miserable-looking shabby people on the pavements are something to aspire to ? Fuck no - you have a day which is fantastic and drunk and simple and you want every day forever to be like it, and you hear one beautiful chord and rhythm and you want it to go on forever and that is what bvdub does - the beautiful cummy bit on and on all the time you’re together - NOTHING compares to the fortnights when time goes so fast you never bother drawing the curtains and just sit 24/7/14 blitzed and they say it’s not “real” happiness - but all their “real happiness” just feels so phoney. They say repetitive simple easy music isn’t “real” music, but it’s the ONLY music. Everything else is just showing off. Non-alkies have no idea how empty their offer of a dry world feels. Bvdub is my methadone. Put it on repeat and become unemployable and lose all yr friends and gain the bliss of being left alone-ish. I also adore the album by Steve Hogarth & Richard Barbieri - it is proggy and would love to chop/change every ten seconds and be irritating and the opposite of bvdub but they only seem to know one song, so they sing it over and over and it’s a good song and they are the fox, they know lots of little things - and maybe that’s how it works - you either know one big thing and play ecstatic mantras and devote your life to drink or god or music or love, or you tinker with lots of little things and spend evenings correcting Wikipedia and sometimes you hear musos packing their music with ideas like they’re packing their homes with stuff and it’s all crap - instead to have one beautiful thing and repeat it forever, like the music of bvdub and it takes guts to be simple and kind, soloing their erogenoughs, this isn’t making any sense, but THE POINT IS what the hell are all these OLD people doing on my computer screen every morning? - Genesis PO and Nurse With W and CQKluster and Penderecki and blokes from Sonic Youth and Japan etc etc all with fantastic albums better than the kids. I especially adored the Qluster one - the recent predecessors were a bit bushy, but this one has the surefire lush slow beautiful piano which never fails. Tip to Bob Dylan - just play the piano very slowly for 45 minutes and it’ll be hailed as a fantastic comeback. Or join Metallica.

Or Nurse With Wound !!!!!!!! I once loved them (NWW) sooo much. I really did. Or him. Nowadays EVERYONE loved NWW in the early days, like everyone saw the Sex Pistols in 1952 etc etc, well fuck the Pistols, but I had all the NWW cred clobber and their early LPs were some of the few that I sold on ebay instead of giving them to charity shops or the bonfire and I blew the paypal on booze - my favourite early/”hard” LP was Insect… and my favourite later/accessible/dance album was Rock’n’Roll Station, but suddenly it was the end of a beautiful friendship and I got sick of it all. You have to sympathise with Steve. In c1980 it really did still feel like there were easy new ways for music to go. But c1999 it didn’t and NWW just blanded out. More door-creaky noises ? Or try to go “mainstream” ? Me I just got bored of “experimental” meaning that music had to try to be as extremely boring and unpleasant as possible. Surely the bravest experimenters are the ones straining to be as extremely accessible and beautiful as possible - like bvdub.

I thought the Windmills thing was really good. And Bed Rugs and Miike Snow and Kitchener-Waterloo Thingummy and tons of stuff but WHERE’S THE TIME ????????? - weep I still haven’t heard the Genesis P O surgical soundtrack thing - what is this life if full of antabuse you have no time to sit and hear THAT beauty ? On Az’s lifeful site my favourite thing was almost a repeat of last week - it’s by Roger Doyle and I don’t have Az’s talent for describing it in a way that’ll make it appealing - but it’s the sound of ansafone chatter with music-while-you-wait timeswooners - so it reminded me of Scanner, and it is utterly beautiful - the music is odd and simple and quiet and an addiction and always lovely, the words are muffled by the phone-y-ness of it all. And it does something that NWW gave up trying to do years ago - proves that there are still new musics to be created. My favourite thing on MC was that one by Yair Yona, it is classical guitar, it’s as spacious as bvdub and Roger Doyle and you will be horrified to hear that I probably could go on and on for another ten million paragaphs but I’m not in the mood right now, when bvdub repeats all weekend it just feels that WORDS are pointless, that’s enough of the self-indulgent craptrap from me oh the relief to me even more than to you of the end.

kathy