Thursday, September 04, 2008

my feet, my arms and my ears and your feet...

to continue the early morning soundtrack theme, i thought i'd expand upon the all-important front-door-to-bus-stop journey i alluded to in my last post:

the first track i'll use as an example is "hit go" by iain archer... this track was a giveaway on his website sometime between his last two albums... actually, if memory serves me correctly it might have been an outtake from "flood the tanks" (a.k.a. oneofmyfavouritealbumsofalltime)... it's a beauty - clocking in at a trim 2:10 and with an aimless shuffle that i find quite compelling... i have probably listened to this song a couple or three hundred times over the last few years and it still intrigues me... i spent so many mornings using this to propel me to the bustop that i began to think of it being my own personal theme tune.... "hit go" seemed synonymous with "press play" and "start the day"... in case the thought of a pale, bald man puffing his way down a quiet street doesn't paint to inviting an image, i'll provide another: i made a dvd's of all our family's super8 movies to use as christmas presents for my dad and sister a couple of years back and "hit go" made i to the soundtrack... the particular reel featured my sister and i kicking footballs around the garden with a certain lack of dexterity (at last on my part)... there was a lot of that running and reaching down for the ball whilst simultaneously kicking it out of your hands that i'm now (as a father) starting to realise it a right-of-passage for most kids... we look so happy and content on those frames of film and iain's track captures that child-like energy, wonder and excitement perfectly...

bibio also featured heavily on that super8 compilation (along with a lot of john fahey) but it was his remix of chris (now just) clark's "ted" that made the early morning playlist for a huge chunk of 2007... for me, bibio's music taps into the same rich seam of nostalgia and half-memory as boards of canada and it comes as no surprise that one of the sandison brothers was instrumental in his (tragically limited) exposure... bibio's take on things leans toward the acoustic but with all of the wobble and crackle of classic B.O.C... if i say bagpuss, i know any bibio novice will quickly come to understand where i'm coming from (assuming they watched the bbc in the early 80's)... his clark remix is hypnotic: worn tape loops of fingerpicked guitars, nagging and relentless motifs that build and build and finally break... try it...

lastly, i'll leave you with my latest weapon of choice: adem's cover of the aphex twin's "to cure a weakling child" and "boy/girl song" from his recent "takes" album... i was a little unsure about posting another (two?) aphex twin cover versions so soon after my first post but if this site is to become a celebration of music and the refusal to believe in coincidences, then i think it's quite fitting... and if the journey continues it will bring us to fridge and then to four tet and then on to who knows where... adem's cover melts the two aphex tracks into one beautiful whole... adem's constant, melodic repetition of what was originally a cut-up sample of a child's voice brings to mind jim o'rourke's "women of the world" from 1999's eureka album... i was recently reminded of an interview with o'rourke while reading lester bang's passionate appraisal of van morrison's astral weeks (muchos gracias to jdd for that one)... in this article, bangs speaks of lyrical repetition:

"...those words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely..."

o'rourke puts it like this:

"I’m really into songs like "Slowride" by Foghat. What’s interesting about that song – and it only works because of its length – is that through the constant reiteration of the words "slow ride" the words go from its obvious sexual connotation to just absolutely nothing. Because it’s being reiterated so much it just becomes another instrument. But when you take it over the long haul like that, what happens is the song actually starts singing about itself. It’s actually confirming its own existence in its own time. And because it’s such a banal statement – "slow ride, take it easy" – it works that way. So I thought it would be interesting to do that with a statement that was so loaded that it would actually resist that. Saying "women of the world take over" isn’t exactly banal. So it interested me what would happen if I reiterated this perplexing statement over and over again like that. Hopefully there would be this conflict between its desire to become this kind of mantra and something you don’t hear anymore. "


adem's take on the aphex pieces is a perfect example of this mantra o'roukre and bangs speak of and it leaves me with a better understanding of the prayer-without-ceasing that salinger wrote about in franny and zooey...

ok... too much talk, not enough music...

so here we go:



...enjoy:)