Off & On

This comp just materialised out of wanting to hear a few random things I didn’t really know (except the opener, which I first heard on Specialten DVD mag.) Add a few faves to keep up the momentum, rearrange for maximum journeyness and here you have it: Satellite One (thinking of Dr Who’s Satellite Five).

1. Crosses José Gonzales

   stylish Swedish Cowboy

2. City of Dust 31knots

   contemplative electronic moment from US proggers

3. Act of Being Polite / N-Err-Gee (Crisis Blues) Amy Denio & Ubzub

4. Release Afro Celt Sound System

   Sinead O’Connor goes all Transglobal

5. Fellini Overdrive / I’ll Shoot the Moon Pinkie Maclure

   looking forward to hearing her new project PuMaJaW; gonna order a CD when current financial crisis is resolved

6. Rose A Perfect Circle

   courtesy of the Zen’s former owner

7. Baby’s Arm Belly

8. 7/4 (Shoreline) Broken Social Scene

9. Indonesian Guitars Windsor For The Derby

   from their problematic Emotional Rescue LP

10. William, Clap Your Hands The Unicorns

    bedroom lofi at its scratchy, weird best ("leave their corpses in my underwear" - I mean, where else?), with the distant sound of kids playing; must investigate further

11. Here, There and Everywhere The Beatles

    I knew quite early on that this would be on somewhere, as it just fits with the rest of the playlist. Took me a while to find the right moment: the "end of Side One".

12. I Like to Dance Home

    the sparks of genius seems to be a little further apart nowadays, but this limb-flailing track from XV is way cool. Thinking about buying the new Sexteen.

13. Werewolf Cat Power

    lest we forget, a reminder of why Chan Marshall is a treasure

14. Homebled Ut

    finally I dare to include on one of my comps their finest moment bar none

15. Streetlights, Empty Wells Anatomy of a Ghost

16. John Faust October All Over

17. I Spy Dry Fear Smokers Die Younger

    with this and the preceding, there’s hope for British Punk yet

18. Gas Electric Coping Saw

    spot the connection?

19. Ebroglio At The Drive-In

20. Tubular Belgians in my Goldfield Departure Lounge

    beautiful track; a much-needed respite after all that anger

21. Knocks the Head Beekeeper

    where the hell are this band when we need them so desperately?

22. Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls Godspeed You Black Emperor!

23. June (Call Us Walking) Bedroom Heroes

24. Tomorrow Started [live] Talk Talk

It would be unseemly for me to express fully my delight at finally getting an mp3 jukebox of my very very own. I’m so late to the party that the other guests are already wiping their breakfast crumbs away. And although it has been a dream of mine since before the birth of the codec to carry all the music I love around with me in my pocket, having all that storage capacity (sixty gigabytes!) literally at one’s fingertips is not without its difficulties.

For one thing, I have been acquiring mp3s for about six years. These have been moved and copied and re-tagged and siphoned onto disk so frequently that it took me a whole weekend to find them and get them onto the player. Even then there were several artists whose stuff had somehow failed to surface, and their resurrection entailed a lot of ferreting around on Torrentspy or in my stacks of those peculiar silver disks we used to buy.

In their way even more irritating are the duplicates, of which there are I’m not sure how many. I thought I’d trashed the player through my obsessive tidiness a few days ago, when I expunged one copy of ‘Sugar Hiccup’ (which Cocteau Twins knowitalls will be aware appeared on an album and an EP), only to have it crash midway through. Happily I am surrounded by Creative Zen experts and after a bit of head-scratching, paperclip unbending and apparently random buttonpushing normality – and more importantly my music – was restored. (I haven’t dared check whether that duplicate actually got deleted, though.)

To further complicate things, my secondhand player came preinstalled – as so many do, these days – with forty gigs of Goth, Metal and, oh, Gothic Metal. If it had all been Peters And Lee I could have just dumped the lot, but I doubt they produced that many tunes. In any case, it’s unrealistic to expect a total blank. I bet every iPod in existence has at least one song on it I would like if I heard it. The difficulty is finding that haystack-needle. So I kept most of the stuff I didn’t know on the offchance. Space is limited, even with this amount of GB, so that’s where this blog begins: what goes off, and what goes on my Zen. If I’m undecided about something, it goes into purgatory, pending final judgement.

Set Fire To Flames Sings Reign Rebuilder (2001) Telegraphs In Negative / Mouths Trapped In Static (2003)

At first I thought I had imported Set Fire To Flames’ 2003 album twice, but fortunately I realised it was double CD before I deleted half of it. Very fortunate, actually, as I have no idea where I got this stuff from. How strange that one can so easily fall in love with music about which one knows zip. This may be a good thing; if people get used to disembodied sounds, tunes without a face, that’s surely the first step away from personality-trumps-talent.

“Disembodied sounds.” Did I really say that? That’s a pretty good description of Set Fire To Flames. They have the techniques of Postrock— quiet guitars overamped, repetition, skewed samples, scanned phone conversations, loud rustling noises, and… yes… heaps of full-bodied solo violin — off pat, but enough personality of their own mainly to escape cliché.

I’m drifting. One track reminds me of spending a night in a forest; I look at the title, it’s called "In Prelight Isolate". How ’bout that? Tone poetry that works. Apart from the obvious reference I alluded to in my opening sentence, and the wonderful Boxhead Ensemble, the outfit SFTF remind me of most often is The Marinernine: whose A Little Something From The Weathervane’s Perspective is a forgotten belter of sneaky understatedness, in a Mathrocky vein, with obdurate studio processes.

Sings Reign Rebuilder is clearly the sound of SFTF before they broke completely into pieces. Mainly acoustic in intent if not always in instrumentation, its crescendoes are succinct while still carrying a devaststing payload.

Telegraphs… is less obviously numerological, but with the same fidgety ambience, verging on occasion a little too close to a foley catalogue. At its best, though, as on tacks like ‘When Sorrow Shoots Her’ with its sighing strings and desolate guitar twang, we forget that not all music sounds like this. We have slipped quietly through the subtle window and the Universe has shifted sidways.

This is the music not of your nightmares, but of the fleeting half-dreams that slip away right after you wake. Something important was there but we’ll never know what. Just enjoy having been touched by its presence.