Despierto Otra Vez

There are weekends, then there are Weekends. The last few days definitely constituted an excellent example of the latter. Between Friday and Monday I probably had about 6 hours sleep (which probably isn't helping the manky cold I have at the moment* but fuck it, that's what Syndol's for), but I don't care. Friday's** party was just fucking excellent, loads of brilliant people I haven't seen in an age, everyone on top form, enough alcohol to refloat the Bismarck, some damn fine music (I even managed to behave myself at the decks for once) and an extremely well-stocked pharmacy, and which ended, as per usual, with the last few standing (if that's the right word) marching off to our traditional Croydon boozer, because when you've been up for that long, and y're that twatted, the only sensible fucking course of action is to hit a pub where; a. they sell extremely good beer at exactly the right temperature, and b. will serve us lot in seemingly whatever rotten state we turn up in***, and we've turned up hanging in fucking rags on many occasions, yet never been refused service. Then again, we're good people.

And Sunday? Fucking brilliant too. But I'm far too much of a gentleman (stop laughing at the back) to tell you about that.

*No, I can't think of anything else that could have contributed to it. I have no idea what y're implying.

**And for some of us, most of Saturday.

***Although they tend to draw the line at my mate and I's occasional freely improvised duets on the (rather good) pub piano. A word to the wise: If musicians frequent yr pub, and it has a piano, when said musicians are drunk, that piano is going to get played. If you do not want this to happen, don't have a fucking piano in yr fucking pub. Easy really.

Habrá Sangre y DMT

Please forgive the complete insane/nonsensical/just plain fucked nature of anything posted over the coming weekend, as the party I'm attending tonight is going to get really fucking messy and leave a trail of carnage all the way from Croydon to Kilburn by the time everyone has finally fucked off/passed out/been arrested/carted off in a ambulance or just generally lost it in the most enjoyable and spectacular fashion possible. I'm supposed to be deejaying at around 3 in the morning, and am under strict instructions "not to play music that will fuck people up" which is a bit like locking an alcoholic in whatever distillery makes their preferred brand of liquid oblivion and telling them to "look after the stock". You'd think that people who've I've been mates with for over a decade would know better by now...

See you on the other side.

Rareza

Looking the way I do, I've grown used to instantly being spoken to in the local language whenever I go to southern Europe, and then enjoying the inevitable look of surprise when I reply in a broad south London accent, but for some bizarre reason, a similar thing has started happening regularly in my home town. The amount of people who've asked me if I'm Spanish over the previous couple of months is well into double figures, the best occurrence being when someone told me that I'd really lost my accent, which given that my accent is fairly pronounced to say the least*, threw me a little. I obviously looked quite confused at this, and so they went on to ask (and I knew it was coming after my temporary state of perplexity had passed) "oh, aren't you Spanish?", and they seemed genuinely shocked that I'm a Londoner. I mean, Spain is one of my favourite places on Earth (as you may have gathered), and one of the very few places I would choose to live in** apart from London, but I had no idea that I'd absorbed, via cultural osmosis, enough essence of Spain for it to start oozing out of my pores causing people who don't know me from Adam to assume that I come from there. Not that it's a bad thing, just slightly weird.

*The bit of London I come from has a glottal stop so hard that the CIA use recordings of certain London accents to familiarise people learning Arabic and various other languages which feature said glottal stop with the sound in a familiar language. Seriously, I'm not having you on.

**I could definitely get used to living in Palma - even though my Catalan/Mallorquin is shit compared to my Castillian - although I'd probably end up dying from a boquerone and red wine overdose. Seville wouldn't be so bad either.

Sin Igual

Listen to this. This is the greatest fucking piece of music ever recorded. And if you disagree with me you haven't fucking lived properly. Come back in twenty years and listen again. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Goin' Down Slow by Howlin' Wolf...

Anuncio De Servicio Público

Goddamn this is nice wine. Go and buy a bottle (or better still, several) of Otoñal 2009, a rather delicious, and inexpensive (about £7) Rioja from Bodegas Olarra, which wipes the fucking floor with that Faustino shit (why is it so fucking expensive?, I'd rather drink Siglo) that costs almost twice as much, and is rapidly becoming one of my favourite everyday reds*. It's a massively juicy bugger of a wine, fruity without being overpoweringly plummy, with a touch of oak, and crucially (for me anyway) it's a Rioja with no foreign varieties in the mix whatsoever (Tempranillo, Garnacha & Graciano), which means it hasn't been within sniffing range of a Cabernet Sauvingon grape (the most over fucking rated red varietal in the world, I don't care what the fucking snobs say, I can't fucking stand it), which is what lead me to me buy it in the first place.

Because when it comes to red wine, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are where it's at as far as my taste buds and nose are concerned, especially stuff from the north of those countries. I mean, it's never going to replace Barolo as my ultimate wine, but then again, Barolo is a little pricier, to say the least, and not necessarily a wine you'd want every day even if you had the fucking money (which I certainly don't) given that in the heaviness stakes, Barolo (younger examples especially) is the Skullflower of the wine world, but fuck me Otoñal's really fucking nice, outrageously drinkable, tastes like it's twice the price and it goes with bleeding meat like they were designed for each other, which is important to me, given my predilection for enormous slabs of pretty much anything on four legs** (except rabbit, which no one will ever convince me is worth eating***, even the Spanish and Maltese methods of cooking it don't do it for me).

Seriously, this is really good shit. I've been back to my utterly fantastic local off-license§ for another couple of bottles, because the first one disappeared down my throat in the time it took me to write the first paragraph and the second one's almost dead. It's that fucking good. Buy some now before the snobs notice, because when I looked it up on the web lots of wine ponces are banging on about how good 2009 Rioja is in general, and I think it may not stay so cheap for too long...

*Pireneos Mesache is also highly recommended. By me. And every other bastard who's got drunk on it with me.

**Or two. Or with fins. Or tentacles. Or mandibles. Oh fuck it, I'll eat almost anything that was running/swimming/crawling/slithering/whatever. It doesn't even have to be dead. Like krill, the spacedust of the seafood world. I also heartily recommend zebra. And antelope. Never tried camel tho, if anyone knows of a butcher who sells it...

***Never trust an animal that doesn't make a noise unless you dropkick it. They're planning something. Hare, on the other hand, is ultragamey godlike awesomeness, especially cooked in it's own blood.

§I'm not telling you which one, they get great wine off the back of a lorry and flog it far too cheap, I once got 4 bottles of Barolo for a fiver each from there. And I seem to have become their unofficial real ale taster over the past six years or so. Make of that what you will...

Ciudad De Aceite: Addendum

It is on iPlayer. Right here. Watch now.

I knew that this stupid smartphone was useful for something, i.e. posting this shit for your enjoyment and enlightentment.

Ciudad De Aceite

Before I bugger off out to pastures disgraceful, I thought I'd write about one of my formative influences, one which might surprise a few people, but also one which might make sense of a few things to some of you, namely Dr Feelgood. Yes, you read that right. I fucking adore Dr Feelgood and don't care who knows it. Whilst watching Julien Temple's brilliant Oil City Confidential yesterday night*, it was pointed out to me (through gales of drunken laughter) that I was dressed identically to Wilko Johnson in his 70s prime**, and the fact that I took this as a great compliment came as a surprise.

Because if it's balls out, straight down the fucking line Rhythm'n'Blues with a psychotic edge y're after, the Feelgoods (with Wilko) are pretty fucking unbeatable, and compared with most of the punks they influenced, conveyed a genuine aura of reined-in violence and threat, the sense that at any moment all hell could break loose. And goddamn it, Lee Brilleaux and Wilko had, for my money, the finest stage presence and unconscious rapport of any frontline I've ever fucking seen, not to mention great fucking taste in clothes.

A pair of mismatched nutcases, one a teetotal speed and hash fuelled ex-schoolteacher (see the film for the extremely amusing stories underlying his exit from education) who played guitar like breaking glass, and a beer-sweating thug with a penchant for gourmet cooking who could sing the blues like he fucking meant it, unlike most of their 60s freakbeat antecedents, who sound like their balls haven't dropped in comparison (Keith Relf, I'm thinking of you in particular). No one owned the stage like those two, Wilko high-speed scuttling round the stage like a methed-up spider with the worlds worst unblinking thousand yard stare, with seemingly no awareness of anything or anyone else, all the while cranking out those cut-glass simultaneous rhythm/lead lines must have been a genuinely unsettling experience up close, and allied to Brilleaux's Canvey Island rasp, on the fucking money harp blowing and someone's gonna get fucked tonight attitude they couldn't fucking lose.

The fact that they had a rhythm section who could turn R'n'B into motorik and back again didn't fuckin' hurt. Bollocks, I have to go, so I will leave you with a fucking awesome version of their classic, She Does It Right, from 1975 (you may have noticed I've changed the clip, this one's just a bit more motorik, and Wilko bears an amusing resemblance to the latest Doctor Who, plus that paedo deejay on the original clip was making people a little queasy). More on this soon, I'm off. Enjoy

*It should be on BBC iPlayer for a week, go watch it even if you don't like the Feelgoods, because it's one of the best, funniest, saddest, truest portraits of what it's like to be in a band composed entirely of bored lunatics and drunks. A situation I am not entirely unfamiliar with.

**I was extremely glad that it was Wilko I was compared to, as opposed to John B. Sparkes, who looks like a drunk spoiling for a fight at a 70s wedding, and memorably referred to his stage clothing as a "bastard suit" in the film, causing both of us to collapse in more gales of even drunker laughter.

Displicencia

I am so fucking bored today. The tedium of what I have to do at work today* is so overwhelming it feels like an altered state of consciousness. Which I s'pose it is, only a really shit one. Time has gone bendy, I'm so tired that my eyes have that special slightly hot and too big for their sockets feel, coffee is having no effect on me whatseoever, and the official office cretin will not fucking shut up**. I'll be in a much better mood the second I'm out of this building, but that's not for a few hours yet, so I just felt the need to vent bile so I will be my normal lovely self upon leaving this evening***.

*It involves a 276 page spreadsheet. I hate spreadsheets. Any job which involves a spreadsheet for any fucking reason is automatically annoying, a 276 page one can fuck right off. The fact that said aggravation is contained within an even larger badly written, legalese enburdened and technically incorrect document is just the shit flavoured icing on an already crap cake. Cunts.

**That 2' stilson wrench still lives next to my desk. If there's a really long break between this and the next post, well, it probably means the fuckwit's started whistling and I've finally snapped.

***Joy, I get to travel on the Hipster Express again. Maybe I'll see another bloke in jeggings and have a laughter induced coronary. I saw a bloke in Berwick St wearing jeggings and a stupid too small hat and did fear for my arteries. It was almost as good as when, sitting in my local cafe, and idly people watching, one of the Barleys from over the road, who was wearing his silly girls jeans round his arse gangsta style, ran across the road for a bus, only for his jeans to descend to his ankles as he ran, sending the silly twat flying, and making me gob my breakfast all over the window. Laugh? I nearly fucking choked. But it was a beautiful moment.

Pensar

I may be many things, but I'm not a fucking snob. I don't believe that everyone should share my tastes and predilections, and I get quite arsey* when confronted with that attitude when it's aimed toward me, or towards someone or something that means a lot to me. I don't expect everyone to enjoy music that sounds like someone projectile vomiting into a broken cement mixer, or to share my twin loves of modernism and abstraction, but if y're going to tell me something's worthless, then I expect a reasoned argument to underlie that opinion. If you just don't like something, at a visceral level, that's fine, just say so, but if y're going to contemptuously dismiss whatever the something in question is, without coming to some sort of understanding of it, that's different.

I know that my language can be a little untempered at times**, but I try to never call something shit, or dismiss it out of hand without having a damn fucking good reason to do so***, because it not only makes you look ignorant, but shows a fundamental lack of respect for others viewpoints/tastes/whatever, and therefore makes you not just ignorant, but an arsehole. And yeah, before anyone points it out, I'm fully aware that I'm capable of being the most stubborn, intransigent cunt you can imagine, but, and this is the kicker, only when I'm on home turf and the person I'm talking to knows fuck all and isn't willing to listen. If we're on yr pet subject, or artform or whatever it is that floats yr boat, then I may have opinions, but I want to hear your perspectives, to learn, because you know more about it than me, and even if we still disagree, I've learnt something, had my viewpoint expanded, gained new insight into whatever it is we're discussing (obviously the same should apply with the roles reversed).

And hell, maybe my less-informed ideas might open up new avenues in yr thought too, simply because of the infinite number of angles from which it's possible to come at a subject. But the point is, it's a conversation of, if not equals, but at least two people who share some of the same knowledge, who can rationally take on board what's being said, who's mindsets are flexible enough, who have enough empathy, to not necessarily agree, but reach a mutual area of understanding, and also to accept when they're wrong or misguided. But when you just dismiss someone out of hand, with no understanding, no empathy whatsoever, y're not just an arsehole, not just a snob, but a fair way down the fucking road to becoming a bigot.

*This may be a slight understatement.

**See the above footnote.

***Except when some fucking hippy is attempting to convince me that some loopy psuedoscientific concept is right and Physics is wrong. Not that I don't have a fucking good reason in this case, it's just that a. it's absolutely impossible to argue with these fuckwits, because they don't understand the underlying principles behind what they think they're talking about§, and b. think you represent some kind of conspiracy to keep the true knowledge of the nature of the universe out of the hands and minds of the population at large. Life's too short to waste my breath on such idiocy, you will be told to fuck off in no uncertain terms.

§Reichian/Orgone horseshit and perpetual motion machines being two typical offenders. It doesn't matter how carefully you attempt to couch yr arguments, or how you organise or manipulate the data you think you've gathered, everything you are claiming violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and yr hypothesis is, in layman's terms, completely fucked. Or as Eddington put it:

"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

And don't even get me started on homeopathy. Chemical fucking memory my arse. When you have a "discipline" where no one who practices it can actually explain in any way the mechanism underlying what they do, you have charlatanism, nothing more. It makes me almost physically sick that you can get a fucking BSc in homeopathy, which is no more a fucking science than astrology or having a fucking wank.

Cóctels 2: Si Estás En Mallorca...

As an addendum to the last post, if you really want to experience some of the finest booze known to humanity, in what is possibly the most outrageous setting of any bar in Europe, then this is where you need to go; Abaco, in Palma inhabits a parallel universe where everyone is a decadent tyrant with appalling taste and limitless resources, where rose petals rain on yr head if y're there on a Friday night*. I recommend the Especial Abaco, a goldfish bowl full of fuck knows how many different kinds of booze that tastes like nectar and is possibly the closest thing this planet has to the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. Yeah, it's a bit pricey, but look at the fucking place.

And this is just a very small glimpse of the outrage. Now just imagine what the fucking toilets are like...

*I'm actually not taking the piss here. This actually happens.

Borracho, Pero En La Mejor Manera Posible

I love dodgy after hours bars, which, aside from the fantastic record shops (Sister Ray, Phonica, Sounds Of The Universe...), and cornucopia of really fucking good and cheap eateries is one reason I actually love Soho and Fitzrovia, because they're fucking full of 'em, if you know where to go. For one thing, there's generally a much smaller wanker quotient than in the more, shall we say, visible watering holes of that area, and the cocktails are cheaper. And I do like a properly made cocktail.

Not the shit that certain types of pubs and bars call cocktails, sickly concoctions involving lurid milkshakey looking gloop* or (Lucifer fucking preserve us) Red fucking Bull**, but proper fucking cocktails made with high quality ingredients by someone who knows and cares about what they're doing. Because mixing them takes skill, and if you use cheap shit, it doesn't matter how well you combine all the bits, it's still going to taste like cheap shit, just more complex cheap shit.

I say this, because last night I had the perfect Negroni, better even than the exemplary examples served up in the bar of NY's Time Hotel***. OK, maybe the company made everything taste better, but fuck it was good. A perfect balance of sweet and bitter, cut through with the aromatic astringency of the gin§, and a burnt orange twist just sealing the fucking deal. And were we in some posh bar? Nope, some dive round the back of Oxford Street, and it was £6. Fucking brilliant.

The cocktail, in it's purest form, like a proper Martini§§ or Tom Collins, is pretty much the pinnacle of the alcoholic art, a balancing act that's harder to achieve than it looks, and I'm glad it's an artform that hasn't died out, that people care enough about this shit to really fucking practice, to learn to play the ingredients if you like, to produce such outrageously alcoholic and goddamn delicious concoctions for good people who understand that drinking is about so much more than getting pissed, and I for one salute them and their dedication to enriching our drunken conversations with their magnificent creations.

Oh, and if you want to enjoy a proper Negroni in the privacy of yr own home, there's a rather fine recipe here. For the vermouth, you can use Martini, but it's way better with Cinzano. Fuck, that might be the ponciest sentence I've ever written. Excellent.

*What are you drinking toffee flavoured gunk for? What are you, fucking 12? Go and have a White Russian, or a Brandy Alexander if you want something creamy. For fucks sake.

**The most disgusting drink ever conceived, tastes foul, but it's the smell that gets me. For some bizarre reason I can smell Red Bull a mile away, at a distance even neat poteen would be undetectable and it makes me retch. And it looks exactly like fizzy piss.

***I can't believe how much that place cost a night (well over £200) in comparison to the size of it's admittedly nice rooms, I know NY is notorious for shoeboxes, but the bed wasn't even long enough for me, and I'm not exactly lanky, then again, we didn't pay for the room, but seriously. Their website is so artfully photographed that it's impossible to judge the size of anything, except you can guarantee that it's smaller than you think.

§Didn't see what one she made it with, but I suspect it was Tanqueray judging by the kick. I love that stuff.

§§And, if y're like me, a really Dirty one. Also you may detect a slight gin-cocktail bias here. What can I say? I like gin. A lot.

Jadeante

To quote DJO's version of Jean-Luc Picard, my head feels like it's been shat through a wormhole and fucked by a balrog. In the best possible way. My brain is still in a very comfy bed and is resolutely refusing to co-operate until it's been fed with copious amounts of good fucking coffee, so this is probably going to get a bit random. Maybe James Cotton (acid house bloke as opposed to the bluesman) isn't necessarily the most sensible music to be listening to under these circumstances, but hell, it feels right so fuck it.

And things are feeling right at the moment, in a way that they haven't for a fair whack of time, because I've finally stopped thinking and started fucking doing, and in the process discovered that all my friends were right and I was wrong, that I'm not the social retard with a permanent black cloud hovering over his head I've sometimes thought I was, and I've finally broken that fucking feedback loop of shitty thinking and negative self-analysis that has defeated me in the past. In short, I am no longer a twat.

I'm also smoking less, and not just because the quality of hash in London has increased by a remarkable degree in the last few months or so, but because getting stoned is fucking great, but you can go too far, and when the only points in your day when y're not a shambling smokebeast are work and sleep, you've gone too far, and I was chainsmoking constantly the second I got through the door during the week and as soon as I was awake at the weekends, almost to the exclusion of any other, more stimulating activities, like actually getting off the fucking sofa. So now I smoke because I enjoy it, as opposed to using it as a crutch and basically self-medicating myself out of the conscious world, a place I've discovered I like a whole lot more than I thought now I'm not invariably experiencing it through fogged and distorted lenses.

And it's fucking fantastic. I've laughed more in the last month than in the 12 which preceded it, rediscovered the joy of just being with good people, rekindled friendships that were dormant from neglect and petty stuff that really didn't mean shit. I no longer have the constant, idiotic background paranoia that I'm behaving like an arsehole and people are just putting up with me, which I always knew was fucking stupid, because my friends are generally not the sort of people who would refrain from telling me I'm being a cunt when I am, which is just one of the many reasons I love 'em all to death.

I'm so grateful to the support of the people around me, their unswerving fucking brilliance in knowing what to say, and what not to say, for listening to all of my crap, for putting up with my unreliability* and my erratic behaviour and moods and having faith in me when, frankly, my well had run dry. In that respect I'm one lucky fucker, and there's no way on fucking earth I'd be writing this if it wasn't for them.

So I have a life again, and it's one I love, and it's so fucking inspiring. Music and words and ideas are just leaking out of my pores, I'm pulling new riffs, sounds and songs from the air like a demented butterfly collector. Thor's Helmet is sounding fucking immense, a much meaner, nastier proposition than ever before, a roaring fucking spacerock fuelled doom machine with a glint in it's eye and a really dirty mind, lyrics so shameless they'd make Dave Wyndorf blush and no sense of dignity whatsoever. Think Angels In Pigtails-era Terminal Cheesecake fistfucking Black Sabbath with a massive side order of (early) Hawkwind and Chrome.

There'll be new Morgen und Nite stuff coming soon too, two of the flat out weirdest pieces of music we've ever recorded, which I'm saying nothing about until they're both completely done, except that if you listen on headphones to one of the tracks it actually makes you feel dizzy and vaguely nauseous, and which, now I'm actually off my arse and doing shit, will be released by some as yet unsuspecting record label on heavy fucking vinyl because I won't sleep until it happens. And I'm almost done with two, yes two, solo recordings. One all guitar, one techno with a big slab of gooey acid house stirred in, but more on those soon. Oh, I almost forgot to mention The Electric Bacons. So now I have**.

The biggest thing for me though, is being able to go out, to actually want to go out, the fact that I'm genuinely socially confident for probably the first time in my life, that the fear, the anxiety around people has dissipated, the shocking revelation that I can actually talk to someone I've never clapped eyes on before without having to be off my face on something or other and without wanting to run and hide, let alone contemplate the idea that that person might find me interesting or even (shock, horror) attractive. I may sound like a bit of a dick here, but I couldn't give a toss, because if it wasn't for these changes in me, then I wouldn't be sitting here with a head full of amazing possibilities, and an idiot grin on my face you'd need an angle grinder to remove, and the reason for said grin would never have entered my life.

*Some of which (but not all) can be put down to a vicious autoimmune condition called Guillain–Barré Syndrome which almost killed me three years ago. And yes, I know, I haven't mentioned that before. Just too fucking raw. I never wrote about it because it was fucking terrifying, and every time I tried found that words were just inadequate to express what it was like. Still do, I'm just infinitely better at dealing with it, and the consequences of it now.

**Soon the world will bear witness to the porcine garage glory. And it won't be best pleased.

El Nuevo Modelo Quinientos

Oh yes. Pass the cleaning equipment, because I may need it quite soon. Juan Atkins, Living God King Of Detroit Techno, is putting out the first new Model 500 ep for 11 years on this coming Monday, and I'm slightly overexcited*, because the one track I've heard from it is a rather fine slice of electrocharged loveliness, because I fucking love Model 500, and almost all of my favourite Juan Atkins tunes have slid out under that particular moniker. Anyway, the reason I'm posting this, is that you should go here, and listen to the glistening marvellousness that is "Huesca".

*Yeah, like this is some new phenomenon concerning me and music.

Duende

Driving in London can be, to put it mildly, a somewhat aggravating experience, which is why I try to a: avoid it if possible, and b: tend to listen to the less, shall we say, psychotic bits of my record collection (or the radio) in an attempt to lessen the frustration levels of driving in our beautiful but wildly haphazard maze of a city. Well I had no choice in the matter, as some of the tools I needed for todays industrial lunacy are not allowed to be carried on public transport*.

So drive I did, and I do believe that there must be some sort of fuckwits convention occurring today, given the level of general ignorance and random insanity that I witnessed and occasionally dodged this afternoon. But, just for once, none of it annoyed me, and not just because of my vastly improved mood and outlook, but also because I flicked the stereo onto BBC Radio 3, and heard the first notes of what is undoubtedly one of the most wonderful pieces of music ever composed, Berg's Violin Concerto**, and I knew no matter how apallingly anyone drove, no matter how many times I was cut up by some badly-suited prick in a Mercedes, BMW or Audi***, that while the sound of that achingly beautiful piece filled the van, I was immune.

Because it's an amazing piece of music. It manages to infuse the often forbiddingly dissonant world of serialism with a breathtakingly elegiac lyricism, bridging the avant-garde and traditional tonality in a completely seamless manner which very few other pieces can match, not that dissonance is absent, or that the clashing timbres that the orchestral music of the post-Schoenberg lot were so fond of don't occasionally erupt with great power, that's all in here, but, because of the astonishingly precise way they are employed and arise in the course of the piece, the care taken over the balance of the instrumentation, the pacing, rhythmic shifts and sheer dynamics, it never becomes overly strident, the 12-tone process never overwhelms the emotional impact.

Which is what floors me about this piece of music. I'm probably fussier about orchestral/chamber music than almost anything else, I mean, no other spectrum of music contains a period of over 150 years where I hate almost every single fucking thing I've ever heard from that era§, and no other musical arena is so hidebound by rules, conventions and hierarchy as the classical world, three things which you've probably guessed get my goat a bit, but I digress. The emotional density of this track, the amount of meaning it manages to convey through it's luminous textures is massive, and moves me in a way that only Messiaen§§ can match in this sphere of music. It's a piece deeply infused with great love and compassion, a profound sadness and a huge amount of joy, and the sonic promise of transcendence in it's glorious end. It's a life in sound, stunningly realised.

*Best not to ask.

**Also, go here and have a listen.

***What is it with people who drive German luxury cars in this country? Do you get a special arsehole license with the car?

§Classical and a large proportion of the (particularly early) Romantic period. Can't fucking stand it. You can't begin to conceive of how much I loathe Beethoven. And Mozart. Everything I hate about music neatly encapsulated. At least it got good again when Debussy, Ravel et al turned up for the party.

§§OK, I'll give you Morton Feldman too.

Máquina De Plata

It's good to know Stephen Hawking can still wind morons up, particularly the sort of idiot who finds the concept of metaphor too taxing to get their tiny mind around, who make no attempt to understand what is being said in context, instead ramming it through the 2000 year old bullshit machine they wired their head to years ago because it makes things easy and comfortable and doesn't reduce you to an insignificant random speck in the great cosmic order of things. Go and read what he said again, in context, and come back to me when you've had the long words explained to you.