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.

Fed sq - Missing Link.mp3

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.