I have had a bad case of "I hate Melbourne" the past week. Lots of reasons. It was a nice feeling, when i first arrived after being away for so long. Everyone was so welcoming and i was the center of attention and i like that stuff. But then the novelty wears off and the honeymoon is over baby and its never gonna be that way... and it kind of never was. Really. So now the task of figuring out who and what i'm gonna start becoming commences. Like it ever stopped!
But i am bored. There needs to be more music, or something. More poetry. More noise! Whatever it is - more. Boredom gives way to awareness of finitude and fear and anxiety and we all know we're only dancing in the music - that we are the music... as long as the music lasts.
But thats not all. Last weekend i went to an indy pop festival - "Winter tones". There was a lot of nice music playing - but i gotta say that the "kids" who dag about at these festivals are not exactly engaged on all cylinders. The boys and girls seem to be erring about in clothes that don't fit and all fogged up and confused - all you'd have to do is say boo! and their poor posture would paroxysm and the lunchbox would hit the floor - such thankless, joyless food would scatter here and there, and then lunch would be over. Like the little fantasies that seem to stand in for the experience - has the age of virtual engagement, stimulation and transcendence brought about a de-evolution of spirit? These bodies seem so frail - so lost and... disembodied. The music... some of it was nice. But it was TOO "nice". Music serves a myriad of purposes to different ears, but it should express and emotion, create emotion, allow the imagination to transcend, go beyond, to soar with the eagles. Music should push us to the extremities of feeling, break us down, and be all that holds us together. As long as the music lasts. Perhaps apathy is hip these days - the emos, in tandem with the idiots, are winning. The scene is about being seen. Everyone wearing skinny jeans and sweaters and scarves and shit - big rim glasses all the better for not seeing you with. Occasional moments of recognition which would spark social ignition (in another world) seemed only to startle, make role and scatter, like frozen peas from the plate.
Sorry.
I don't wanna come over to play with lego and read Grug and listen to limp wristed glitch pop. Any candidates for driving out to the desert, tearing open the sky with a cardboard key and entwining ourselves in fleshy fluid ecstasy on the bonnet of the kingswood?
I thought not.
Then there was some accupuncture and i was depressed most of the week. Been dreaming like a seer suspended between worlds, my ear arched just right to let the whispering owl, the river and sunset breathe their scallop'd secrets. But now i'm thinking about going back to uni and getting qualified and then getting the hell out of Melbourne again and seeing some more of this planet but this time with cash on my ipod and money in my pocket.
The above recording! Holy shit. It is another sample from the Chotto Matte rehearsal last week. My favourite bits are when we don't know what we're doing and it sort of sounds like we're trying to stare each other down, taunting each other... i dare you to make a sound. It won't break you down and tear you to pieces like maybe oneday we will... but it is honest and in its moment.
You and I,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Two moons spinning in silence
Last week Chotto Matte got together for a first bashing of cymbals after not knowing the rehearsal chamber since last November. Things were radically different. Things were remarkably the same. Adding to the spice blend, we'd asked Cameron Toll (my sister's musical husband) to join us - adding depth to the rhythm section and some well placed backing vocals. We were all feeling excited and anxious and probably a bit insecure, but some pretty weird places were found in this session. The first recording is short and excessive - a dust unsettling rant and raging at the stars. The second piece creeps along, rolling and weaving through a percussive storm.
I wont write anymore today. Not here anyway.
You'd have to catch me in a corner,
tame the biting and the bark,
then with definite precision
force my acid tongue to wag.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
A couple of things
Last week on the same day that was stuffed with songs and sung to the sky - the day that was Thursday - i made several recordings of several events while walking about and sitting about and thinking and reading. Some very beautiful things happened and i don't think i would have even heard or seen them had i not been looking through the hard gauze that protects the tiny probes of my zoom H2. I stopped and sat on a stool at Jungle Juice and just for fun turned on the microphone and listened to everything as it was happening. I've got that bad boy set at highest gain possible, so when i monitor what its scribbling on its SD everything comes through loud and clear and its like the whole street was running through my head, between the curves of the cortex and under the hypothalamus and outward into the cold wet sky again.
Here is the recording:
While you are listening, i thought it might be fun if you could read what i was reading at the time, which is pretty weird because it was a scene set in a cafe in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers:Divine appeared in Paris to lead her public life about twenty years before her death. She was then thin and vivacious and will remain so until the end of her life, though growing angular. At about two a.m. she entered Graff's Cafe in Montmartre. The customers were a muddy, still shapeless clay. Divine was limpid water. In the big cafe with the closed windows and the curtains drawn on their hollow rods, overcrowded and foundering in smoke, she wafted the coolness of scandal, which is the coolness of a morning breeze, the astonishing sweetness of a breath of scandal on the stone of the temple, and just as the wind turns leaves, so she turned heads, heads which all at once became light (giddy heads), heads of bankers, shopkeepers, gigolos for ladies, waiters, managers, colonels, scarecrows.
She sat down alone at a table and asked for tea.
"Specially fine China tea my good man," she said to the waiter.
With a smile. For the customers she had an irritatingly jaunty smile. Hence, the "you-know-what" in the wagging of the heads. For the poet and the reader, her smile will be enigmatic...
... She drank her tea before thirty pairs of eyes which belied what the contemptuous, spiteful, sorrowful, wilting mouths were saying...
... The cafe disappeared, and Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls - chimeras or griffins - for a customer, in spite of himself, murmured a magic word as he thought of her:
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
And so that is that and now this is this. I think i will post more of these field recordings for the time being. When i listen to these files that i make available, it strikes me that the most compelling pieces are the ones made in the field. Stimulating, dangerous and deliciously uncontrollable - the environment seems to fold the many strings, depress the keys and gently hold the pipe upon her lips. When we play in these field jams we are only agents - the world takes control - we can only dance between the logs and life rafts of this accidental stream.
As for the studio sessions. There are some things that i like but there are more that i don't. It is all just experimentation and getting to know what we can do and what its gonna sound like. For the moment. But without the world to sing along we put ourselves up the front and then get to performing and it sort of seems to lose its thin seeds of honesty. And so that is the challenge i set for myself: to drop the bullshit and just let the vital force (elan vital) just happen. In the studio before the microphone. As it does when we sit back and listen, on bated breath, daring the world to make a sound.
But as a sort of special present i thought i might post for you to hear this lovely little recording of an improvised session i was fortunate enough to attend (and quietly bootleg) in Fort Cochin, Kerala, South India. Here we have two exceptional musicians playing sitar and tabla and i think you'll agree it is a very beautiful event. Later.
Friday, August 15, 2008
a head buried in the sand
Ok. This is the recording Alex and I made at the Jam Hut last night. I'm glad we got to do this as it was a healthy opportunity for us to see what came up immediately and work through some stuff and try a few different things completely on the fly. Just a quick not of personal reflection - one thing i must try to be aware of is how i sort of play it safe and keep doing the same thing and then play a strange kind of role. Like a tough rock star punk role or something. This is the recording of our first session with a PA and Alex doing some crazy instrumentation and some rock bass and just getting down with a microphone. There are some pretty wild bits and a whole bunch of stuff i will try to avoid in later sessions. Be warned - there is some explicit language. Don't listen if you think you might find this a bit hard to bare.
Ben vs Alex.mp3
Oh well... i guess i wanted to put it all out there.
See ya.
Rafael - the troubled turtle.
It has been an odd week and part of me wants to write and put it all down and then maybe the horrid gaping ulcers that sing and weep like toothless angels within my mouth would deflate, diffuse and drift away... as the tiny paper boat that a young boy puts upon a quiet lake when the sun is still watching from between the trees. It bobs and floats and melts between the bubbles bursting - as crows becoming bracken as they flap and fold, flap and fold within the tree.
When i sit to write i want it to come out like the sudden assault of perfume when a vial is shattered on a black stone floor. I thirst for it to come out and with such furious burning passion that i can feel the gushing torrents of existence and ecstasy and see the twisted face of one who leaps defiantly into the void, flickering between the flames. And rarely will it come. Instead it gets stuck in my throat and i can taste the embers and the ash as it settles on my tongue and between my teeth and there the skin sizzles and boils and opens like the mouth of some newborn mammal, blindly sucking for the tit. I find myself tucked up inside myself, like Rafael who could never reconcile the terrible gulf that separated the world as it was with the world in his heart, a world that would satisfy his heady, romantic idealism. The nausea, it would seem, does not spare even a hero in a half shell.
Yesterday i decided to ignore the pain in my mouth and go and get another lesson with my singing teacher. She pushes me because she has terrible worries of her own but somehow we keep it real and i find that line that runs taught like a guitar string from behind my top front teeth and the chakra that winks just above my head. She belts that piano and the string is quickening as i hold that line through each ascending scale and into the falls as we plunge deeper and deeper. My guts push and my collar is stiff and that chakra is winking like a vector on the screen. I was so exhausted but feeling all the life inside i knew i had to go back into the city and make those new recordings. Flinders Street Station. Degraves St. Trains and trams and coffees and car radios. It all seemed to be happening at once and i realised that it always is but we just shut it all out so we can deal with one thing at a time. We find this phenomenon in philosophy: Bergson and Huxley knew that the role of consciousness is not simply to perceive the world and enable action/thought within it. The first role of perception is to reduce, to siphon, to minimise. The brain, as an organ of sense, is a huge station for processing information as it manifests to the nervous system. In the moment, it catalogs and arranges this information according to the needs and interests of the body as it exists in temporality. That is, the utilitarian function of the brain is to sort stimuli according to the present interests of the subject. From within the whir of this stimuli, some is seized, much is discarded. I guess it just depends on whether you're listening to an announcement, walking someplace, or looking for a toilet.
So many sounds are going on and it was like i didn't really pay much attention to them until i started to listen through the headphones of my microphone - then i started to hear the voices, the rhythm of traffic, the shuffling trams and the always breathing wind. It all seemed to make one deafening symphony and my skin tingled when the seagulls sang overhead just as the ticking of a crossing slowed. It got me thinking about how our brains sort and reduce perceived information so we can manage ourselves in the world. How we spend so much of our lives thinking about something else, not here, not now. But it was suddenly all of interest when i clicked that mic "on". Is there a zen of field recording?
And so i have uploaded another recording for your ears to hear and this comes from the streets of Melbourne as i was walking from Federation Square to Missing Link Records. For the first bit i was just walking along, letting it all happen and swell around me. But after a bit i realised i could alter the content of the recording by stopping to capture a truck parking, or following the pins of high heels pricking the pavement... until the walker noticed my device pointed at her shoes. It is sort of like a divine child got this toy city for an instrument and he is just twangin away here and there like the haphazard fall of an avalanche making sound.
Later that day Alex and i met up and had some coffee and then talked about playing music and on a whim decided to go to a rehearsal space and set up the bass and the mic and just have a bit of a jam. I cant wait for the whole of Chotto Matte to be back in the studio and we'll weave our way through sunsetting stations and the call to and fro of fields and forests. It gives me a shiver and i cant help but smile. But we're still in the ideas phase and probably will be for a while even when we've got heaps of stuff on file and maybe do a show for whoever wants to come. It is a strange and stringy embrace this making and doing - a lot of the time i feel like i don't have a clue and it is all rubbish and i should just stop and let creative people do it. And then i thin k about how much fun we're having and how all the noise seems to stop hurting when we forget ourselves and just let go. And even though the ulcers burn and bite and i still struggle with this furious anger inside my chest - maybe one day i'll be able to sing it all into something i am proud of and makes me glad and not so pissed off i'm here in this strange, deafening symphony of so many objects, just wanting to be heard.
When i sit to write i want it to come out like the sudden assault of perfume when a vial is shattered on a black stone floor. I thirst for it to come out and with such furious burning passion that i can feel the gushing torrents of existence and ecstasy and see the twisted face of one who leaps defiantly into the void, flickering between the flames. And rarely will it come. Instead it gets stuck in my throat and i can taste the embers and the ash as it settles on my tongue and between my teeth and there the skin sizzles and boils and opens like the mouth of some newborn mammal, blindly sucking for the tit. I find myself tucked up inside myself, like Rafael who could never reconcile the terrible gulf that separated the world as it was with the world in his heart, a world that would satisfy his heady, romantic idealism. The nausea, it would seem, does not spare even a hero in a half shell.
Yesterday i decided to ignore the pain in my mouth and go and get another lesson with my singing teacher. She pushes me because she has terrible worries of her own but somehow we keep it real and i find that line that runs taught like a guitar string from behind my top front teeth and the chakra that winks just above my head. She belts that piano and the string is quickening as i hold that line through each ascending scale and into the falls as we plunge deeper and deeper. My guts push and my collar is stiff and that chakra is winking like a vector on the screen. I was so exhausted but feeling all the life inside i knew i had to go back into the city and make those new recordings. Flinders Street Station. Degraves St. Trains and trams and coffees and car radios. It all seemed to be happening at once and i realised that it always is but we just shut it all out so we can deal with one thing at a time. We find this phenomenon in philosophy: Bergson and Huxley knew that the role of consciousness is not simply to perceive the world and enable action/thought within it. The first role of perception is to reduce, to siphon, to minimise. The brain, as an organ of sense, is a huge station for processing information as it manifests to the nervous system. In the moment, it catalogs and arranges this information according to the needs and interests of the body as it exists in temporality. That is, the utilitarian function of the brain is to sort stimuli according to the present interests of the subject. From within the whir of this stimuli, some is seized, much is discarded. I guess it just depends on whether you're listening to an announcement, walking someplace, or looking for a toilet.
So many sounds are going on and it was like i didn't really pay much attention to them until i started to listen through the headphones of my microphone - then i started to hear the voices, the rhythm of traffic, the shuffling trams and the always breathing wind. It all seemed to make one deafening symphony and my skin tingled when the seagulls sang overhead just as the ticking of a crossing slowed. It got me thinking about how our brains sort and reduce perceived information so we can manage ourselves in the world. How we spend so much of our lives thinking about something else, not here, not now. But it was suddenly all of interest when i clicked that mic "on". Is there a zen of field recording?
And so i have uploaded another recording for your ears to hear and this comes from the streets of Melbourne as i was walking from Federation Square to Missing Link Records. For the first bit i was just walking along, letting it all happen and swell around me. But after a bit i realised i could alter the content of the recording by stopping to capture a truck parking, or following the pins of high heels pricking the pavement... until the walker noticed my device pointed at her shoes. It is sort of like a divine child got this toy city for an instrument and he is just twangin away here and there like the haphazard fall of an avalanche making sound.
Later that day Alex and i met up and had some coffee and then talked about playing music and on a whim decided to go to a rehearsal space and set up the bass and the mic and just have a bit of a jam. I cant wait for the whole of Chotto Matte to be back in the studio and we'll weave our way through sunsetting stations and the call to and fro of fields and forests. It gives me a shiver and i cant help but smile. But we're still in the ideas phase and probably will be for a while even when we've got heaps of stuff on file and maybe do a show for whoever wants to come. It is a strange and stringy embrace this making and doing - a lot of the time i feel like i don't have a clue and it is all rubbish and i should just stop and let creative people do it. And then i thin k about how much fun we're having and how all the noise seems to stop hurting when we forget ourselves and just let go. And even though the ulcers burn and bite and i still struggle with this furious anger inside my chest - maybe one day i'll be able to sing it all into something i am proud of and makes me glad and not so pissed off i'm here in this strange, deafening symphony of so many objects, just wanting to be heard.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Requiem for Rajasthan
It seemed wrong to not post a sound piece and make you read my words and not hear nice things. This recording was made in the Bhundi Palace in South Eastern Rajasthan, mid Feb, 2008. Noises are made by Jasjeet Singh and me. That palace had its own voice. Enjoy.
Bhundi palace session.mp3
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Nothing new has been recorded in the past two weeks. No entry to drains or under bridges. We did make a feeble attempt at the abandoned Melbourne brewery on Swanston Street, but razor wire and padlocks kept us out. There are ideas in the pipe and potential venues are being sought... but everything is so busy all the time it makes it difficult to get together.
Still. I go to my singing lessons and practice jazz and opera. Unless i change my mind i will buy a cello sometime in the next week or so. I think that strings will sound very nice in a drain or under a building. And so we have perhaps loosened the soil and know that something will grow but we know not what fruit it shall bear nor when shall be the time for harvest. It is interesting and exciting and as i talk more and more about the work with more and more people the more and more lines of flight seem to open up. A plant room. An emergency access tunnel. Sewers and ports. Seaside and drought stricken. I have only been back in the country for five weeks and already so much has happened. I put off making decisions about moving to a new address (my parents turn out to be very agreeable house mates), and making coffee is an ideal floor upon which to make my meditative dance. So much is new and i don't know what yet but i shall keep looking and thinking and reading and writing and making those noises when the time seems opportune.
What else? The other night i went to see a performance of Don Nigro's The Scarecrow, billed together with Imp of the Perverse, a twining to Poe's dark threads. After being disappointed by my recent attendance to the professional stage, it was a delight to discover some deliciously focused performances by young actors on a stage that was uncluttered and thoughtfully composed. Though, i must admit a twang of reluctance emanated from my forehead when i heard those put on American accents. I hate accents in the theatre. And there was the odd moment when the picture became little more than a mantle arrangement of talking heads... but never for too long. And, given the hypnotic beauty of the words, it was perhaps appropriate for those bodies to remain so still, hovering in the dark. Certain Cowells would do well to take note of the inherent power of a poised and restrained presence.
Of course. I have spoken with others who admit enjoying the latest Bell Shakespeare mockery of Hamlet. I find such admissions difficult to comprehend. The production only whithers, becoming less and less of a disappointment, as it sinks slowly from memory. Some even told me i should give the High God People another chance. But i gave them two already. It is interesting that they choose to present their work as theatre at events geared towards sound art and experimental music. A sly suggestion slips between the sentences. But the emperor is left naked on the steps. The designer cackling among the pigs and swine.
I just finished reading Sartre's Age of Reason and must say that i have no idea what to read next. He is very good and perhaps i will have more to say about it later. But for now i must slink away and prepare for my next singing lesson. That is enough words for this time. But if i may offer a recommendation, then make sure you go and get a listen to J.P Shilo's album, Happy as sad is blue. John Brooks of the former Hungry Ghosts weaves a haunting and emotive web of wonderful meditas and crescendos.
Until next time.
Still. I go to my singing lessons and practice jazz and opera. Unless i change my mind i will buy a cello sometime in the next week or so. I think that strings will sound very nice in a drain or under a building. And so we have perhaps loosened the soil and know that something will grow but we know not what fruit it shall bear nor when shall be the time for harvest. It is interesting and exciting and as i talk more and more about the work with more and more people the more and more lines of flight seem to open up. A plant room. An emergency access tunnel. Sewers and ports. Seaside and drought stricken. I have only been back in the country for five weeks and already so much has happened. I put off making decisions about moving to a new address (my parents turn out to be very agreeable house mates), and making coffee is an ideal floor upon which to make my meditative dance. So much is new and i don't know what yet but i shall keep looking and thinking and reading and writing and making those noises when the time seems opportune.
What else? The other night i went to see a performance of Don Nigro's The Scarecrow, billed together with Imp of the Perverse, a twining to Poe's dark threads. After being disappointed by my recent attendance to the professional stage, it was a delight to discover some deliciously focused performances by young actors on a stage that was uncluttered and thoughtfully composed. Though, i must admit a twang of reluctance emanated from my forehead when i heard those put on American accents. I hate accents in the theatre. And there was the odd moment when the picture became little more than a mantle arrangement of talking heads... but never for too long. And, given the hypnotic beauty of the words, it was perhaps appropriate for those bodies to remain so still, hovering in the dark. Certain Cowells would do well to take note of the inherent power of a poised and restrained presence.
Of course. I have spoken with others who admit enjoying the latest Bell Shakespeare mockery of Hamlet. I find such admissions difficult to comprehend. The production only whithers, becoming less and less of a disappointment, as it sinks slowly from memory. Some even told me i should give the High God People another chance. But i gave them two already. It is interesting that they choose to present their work as theatre at events geared towards sound art and experimental music. A sly suggestion slips between the sentences. But the emperor is left naked on the steps. The designer cackling among the pigs and swine.
I just finished reading Sartre's Age of Reason and must say that i have no idea what to read next. He is very good and perhaps i will have more to say about it later. But for now i must slink away and prepare for my next singing lesson. That is enough words for this time. But if i may offer a recommendation, then make sure you go and get a listen to J.P Shilo's album, Happy as sad is blue. John Brooks of the former Hungry Ghosts weaves a haunting and emotive web of wonderful meditas and crescendos.
Until next time.
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