Friday, May 07, 2004
APHEX TWIN
SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME 2
TEN YEARS AFTER
The following is an experiment in uniting thought and expression of emotional reactions to music. The words which you will read have been improvised and written spontaneously in real time while listening to the two CDs which comprise this album, an album which is one of the author’s absolute favourites, and a record which carries past associations to a degree abnormal even by the intense standards of this website. No conscious effort has been given to organising these thoughts into a formal writing pattern; any coherence is dependent upon the inner coherence of the writer. The aim is to minimise as far as possible the gap between the germination of thoughts provoked by the music and their written articulation, and therefore achieve a greater degree of real feelings and emotions as they are made manifest.
As Richard D James does not apply verbal titles to each track, but rather gives them visual titles – designs mainly in various shades of orange and yellow, with the colours acting as triggers for the pictures which the pieces are presumed to paint (this is consequent to, but not derivative of, the similar experiments of Anthony Braxton, who generally names his pieces with appropriate combinations of numbers, symbols and graphics).
The explicit association with the concept of lucid dreaming, as pioneered by Dr Celia James, is for the purposes of this piece taken as read and understood.
Needless to say, this piece will be best experienced if read in tandem with listening to the record and specific tracks in question.
CD ONE
Track 1
Baby talk. Birth. Major key. Already trying to make it minor. Rhythm like bloodflow. The quiet bits of Art of Noise’s Into Battle were always the deadliest. Again and again, I’m drawn to music which sounds like STARTING AGAIN. Afterbirth, afterlife, after apocalypse. There a marimba. Generating an echo. Wish I was six again. Marimbas in pop, feel warm and comforting, like a big gigantic hug. Just My Imagination. Vincent. And I Love You So. Music sounding like we’re learning to talk, to communicate. Original Whim by Extradition. What would it be like if we made music for the first time? That’s why the Gail Brand/Morgan Guberman record matters – listen to it in the sense that these are two people, two creatures, trying to learn the art of communication with each other, their efforts to form a language. The trombone is treated more like a drum. Rowing away rowing away. Boats in Stanley Park, 1968. That 1968. Boards of Canada of course, as if I could get away with not mentioning them. Magic, baba, papa. Voice stuck on a papa loop. You like your father, isn’t it? Careful the seesaw doesn’t collapse mid-swing. Gurgling Gail and gabbling Guberman. That marimba. Learning to distinguish what notes are in a primary school class. Walls of wood. Minds of steel. Because, look, we’re here and how is it we’re here, but while we’re here. Now nothing left except the marimba. It’s a beginning. Blurring slightly out of focus and then BACK IN again. In the back of the taxi coming back from Glasgow Royal Infirmary, December 1964, having escaped death for the first of several occasions in my life. So far it’s the first of four. Does oblivion or familiarity wait at the other end?
Track 2
I can’t grasp these chords. They’re wavering. Mummy. Like the corn. We never had corn in Bothwell, just cricket stumps. It looks so real, doesn’t it? But can you touch it? Corstorphine Road in the Wednesday morning September sun, just after a rainfall. Not quite South Kensington. Though sometimes you’d like it to be. Duffle coats. When you’re in the coach and it’s midwinter and it’s raining and blowing so hard that you momentarily move into nowhere – the subnormal lighting of the old A40 route, or the Lake District at 3 am in December. David Penhaligon. What caused that? Thinking of the drowning. Never quite got away from it. What’s that quack? There’s a duck above me. And to think I’m scared of drowning, feart because I might end up getting eaten by a duck. This music’s trying to raise its head upwards, above the water. Let’s Evolve. Sudden Sway. The glistening gills as you BREAK THE SURFACE to find Port Meadow still there. Remember to keep your eyes tightly shut at all times. Keep out the greenness. And the salt. Because you could be floating nowhere. And that strange steepness near the top of Muswell Hill. Hidden record shops in Cambuslang Main Street. Blue Circle cement factory. From the school playground it could have been the Himalayas. I didn’t forget Martin Denny. Bend those rhythms, as you can, because you’re trying not to be born, nor to founder somewhere in Kidlington. She was taking photos in Stamford the Sunday before it happened. The last good Sunday. “She looks so like her mother.” Even then we knew. So did she.
Track 3
The North Sea. St Andrews, 1981. Michael Furey. The Bog of Allen. Ghost ships. South Queensferry. Aberdour. Burntisland. Everything looks like you’re in heaven. Flying over people. Why do I keep thinking Architecture and Morality? Fennesz, of bloody course. That cracked old gargoyle of a face of a city. The most colourful city in the world, although no one who actually lives in it will ever acknowledge it. And the Oxford. And the river behind the Hall of the Lady of Margaret. The mists as I was escorted to my interview, Tuesday 9 December 1980, the morning after Lennon was shot. Cole Porter. How did he get in? Remember the shot of him, lying, grinning, in his own grave. The best thing about the White Stripes. Sealand Sealand SEALAND. Where no one can touch me and where I can never be touched. Observe passivity as your tool of trade but never mistake it for a token of affection. The doing of nothingness. The cottages at Anstruther. The 95 bus, but what if we stayed on it all the way to Leven? Would we, could we, ever find our way back? What lay behind the Ploughman’s Tower? Or was it the Plowman’s Tower? That Chaucer block of slums in Tooting, hidden safely away, protected by the ruthless bend of Garratt Lane. So grand in its emptiness. There a bassline, steadily and methodically proceeding around the wreck of a melody like an exhausted lighthouse keeper. Silhouette, the horse and the campfire. Where Gabriel ceases to exist. When he realises he has lived for nothing because he can never compete with someone who is beyond competition, because they are safely dead and DIED FOR HER OH YES BEAT THAT. The snow is general, the fog less obviously permeating the atoms which make up you. All good ghosts of heaven and hell unite on the second promontory to the left of the eighteenth hole.
Track 4
Sirens. Take the song, twist it, shift it out of focus, down several registers and it becomes a WARNING and suddenly you are SNAPPED OUT OF THE REVERIE OF GHOST SHIPS AND ARE FACED WITH THE PROSPECT OF IMMINENT GHOSTHOOD HAPPENING BEFORE YOUR EYES AS IT IS NOT THE HOOT OF A SHIP’S SIREN OR THE POLICE TRYING TO SHOOT YOU AS YOU STAND WITH YOUR MELODICA ON THE BEACH AT PORTOBELLO IN OCTOBER 1987 but is an ECG machine, or the hum of a ventilator, there QUICK there the snatch of an organ YOU’RE ALREADY HEARING THE FUNERAL the memories have not yet happened AND NO ONE SHALL BUILD A STATUE FOR ME and suddenly the sounds have become cold, steel and real, you are not in an idyllic afterlife of endless bookshelves and the reproachful rooftops of SW10 but in a ward watching life drain away systematically HOW COULD YOU HAVE THOUGHT THAT IN 1994 it is true, in 1994 I merely thought of ships, of ghost Lancasters flying over our heads, the police helicopter which always used to hover in the wastelands across the way from the train station with a tonality as uniquely dissonant as that of OMD’s “Statues” but it fitted in with Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia” but you are in REALITY and it’s all functional fuck function it’s fading she’s going.
Track 5
Great, vast industrial mechanisms. Brunel where are you operating now. The Hawaiian waving grasses having been nuked. Nothing but the sea, and there, my God there, coming in, looming in from the distance, alternating semitones and bitonal semitones at that WHAT IF THERE WERE NOTHING ELSE ON THIS EARTH BUT THIS the waves of water and the ghosts of never-existing ships? How would you feel? Would there be a you to feel? The southern tip of Goldsmith’s College, radiant in the greyness of a Camberwell afternoon. That Friday, walking back from Denmark Hill to Victoria. Kids passing by outside the curvature which shields the Oval cricket ground from humanity. Oval House there on the other side, where he had previously been many a time to witness improvisatory goings-on, before the money ran out, but is it still open for gatherings? No obvious point of entry. And down the road, just behind me, the Imperial War Museum. Can I venture there alone? Can I feel emptier there than anywhere else in the world. It’s all moving in slow motion. Steadily, without fuss. The radiation from the MI5 building. Getting a bit too Iain Sinclair. But you can work it out. The 1928 meets 1971 façade of the redbrick grocery shops which form the corner of Fentiman Road and South Lambeth Road, just as the latter turns into Portugal. There a crescent, across the road from the library, Tradescant Road. This was a soundtrack to the daily re-enactment of the final journey of Elias Ashmole which I undertook every working day. Tautology. Ha ha. Nothing ha ha about that siren which has gradually been breaking free from the music. But is it an air raid? Happening twenty galaxies away or just around the corner? Could I still hear that howl all the way down, the entire fucking length of, the Botley Road? Right the way down to Habitat? The Sunday Times. A different West Way, but if you stuck to the path and headed due south you would end up on the real Westway. Westminster Way, even. Did they think to call that Botley shopping centre Westminster? Just to kid us that it might be an obscure, obsolete extension of Westminster? Where Politico’s bookshop is shortly not to be, round the corner and into Victoria Street. Sometimes that’s like venturing out of Greenland. So alien. So un-London. I close my eyes for not too long else I might probably find myself in Botley when I open them again. Frequently I did. Did I mention sex yet? Because, in a way…where are you going?
Track 6
What’s that voice saying? Twin? Plan? It sounds a lot surer of itself. Does that mean it’s growing up? Oil refineries. Grangemouth. How could the Cocteau Twins have come from anywhere else? Do we have to mention Kraftwerk? How all of this is being dreamed and how after a while I expect not to be entirely conscious while I’m typing this? The war memorial at Ebury Bridge. At least I’ve always assumed it to be one. Keep your views to yourself. Can’t understand why I understand Maxinquaye without knowing it. Where’d that come from? The ‘90s. Extinction not a thought then. Nowhere near my mind. As if. Bright, this beat, bright and sprightly. Then it momentarily rests but I know it’s coming back. It’s just stopped to get the paper and a Yorkie and change a tenner. It dies down to almost a funereal tempo, slowing down and you imagine it’s never going to speed up again, but there the voice, battling to bring it back again, now muffled, now processed, but keep at it…no, it’s a goner.
Track 7
Angels skating in the park. On a deserted Sunday evening, no, afternoon, in November. It is dark. But they are happy. Such grace, such ineffability in foreseeing its own closure. The darkness of the surrounding trees form their own protective cradle for us. If I knew how to skate. Christ Church Meadow on the first Friday in January, when it’s bled white with frost and no one, no tourist, will venture into it. We have all of it to ourselves. That blinking light, a signal to let us know, to remind us, where we are, even though we are nowhere. A dance which will last forever as it is self-regenerating. The effortlessness of anti-gravity. The understanding – Guillem as Juliet – that to be lifted is to be transcended. She has to KNOW that she can fly, can be passionate by how her body relates to gravity, to the lover supporting her, can reach to become more than flesh and blood, even if it’s the absolute core of why she’s doing it. Why can I not listen to this music forever? A Charleston, denuded of gaucheness, for the benefit of the ghost of Dick Diver. The implied secondary rhythm throughout, like a central pulse which will beat regardless of the moves you are making in the snow, on the ice. It’s a Sunday. Everyone’s away. Alice blinks as the most abstruse of conceptions. You start to imagine higher registers – no, hang on, there it is, sure and stubborn. And the funny thing is that, although it’s winter, we feel warm. Warm, snug and cosy. That was very important to us. More important than you realise. That vague sense of yearning towards the end. The music box imperceptibly winding down. To a graceful gavotte. Alvin Lucier’s grandson tapping the radiator in the kitchen, echoed and reproduced into infinity, until the radiator in the kitchen becomes indivisible with the ice rink of your mind, your heaven, and in 1994 it does not seem like an afterlife, not like the junction of Stamford Brook Avenue where it turns into King Street and suddenly begins to become the shabby genteel end of Hammersmith, Ravenscourt Park, those familiar-looking joggers vaulting the fences at 6:28 am, impatient for their run so that work can happen. Where there is a definite gateway between an imagination of the world and its concurrent reality. Strand on the Green. Or Gunnersbury. Or life. Or death. Or ice. Slow down now. Come to an end. Shut off.
Track 8
Why am I thinking of the “Three Fingers” 16 rpm mix of “Moments In Love”? Such vastness of grieving, such elementary ghosts being coaxed out of that piano Midge Ure abandoned thirteen years previously. Where is your Vienna now? Left to the whims of the deadly electrician. The most aggressively solitary of musics in its stateliness. Abandoned mansions. The winding river of abandoned boats. Sometimes your misinterpretation of others’ words can accidentally lead you to the emotional core of what they’re trying to say. And I am thinking 4AD. Such coldness. I’m shivering. A 38th birthday spent alone, in wreckage. A 30th birthday spent in ecstasy. The sun was still shining then. Still this music cut through me then. I didn’t want to guess. The great baronial desuetudes of the nursing home halfway up Nightingale Lane. That piano trying to creep upwards. Random. Robert Wyatt’s Sea Song. Of course. It’s again. Of course, again. On course to drown. And become something else. When the light distils itself into the negotiating shades of early winter, and you are impounded within a somewhat unreal world. What do you need me to tell you? How I still see and converse with her ghost when I am dreaming at night. How lucid can this possibly get? How long can I stay alive?
Track 9
Beat a little more assertive. Edging back into the major, key-wise. Robert Wyatt, again, Matching Mole. You’re waiting for the Lear free associations and bass clarinet to make their way back in. But they do not. There, another nursery melody, on a distant organ. Sean O’Hagan caught that mood, just short of wistfulness, in the later stages of Stereolab’s Mars Audiac Quintet. Almost a light interlude. A testcard for an alternative 1969. It does feel like that. You’re trying to discern the music; you can hear it but it doesn’t quite fit with what you recognise as a tune, and at that moment you realise you are dreaming, you are in fact quite conscious that you’re dreaming, and for the briefest of lucid moments you revel in the dream-ness of your dream. You are exceeding yourself because for that moment, just for that micromoment, you are truly yourself as you cannot be touched by anyone else or made to change into someone you are not. That’s why we like dreams; because then we are in control of our lives. An anvil. Can’t quite banish the Stakhanovite reality to which you are forced to awaken. Keep it at bay for a little while. Who knows, if you can control yourself sufficiently you might never wake up! There what I recognise as the closing motif. Time gentlemen please. No good moaning about it. What if I kept on doing this in decreasing, declining states of wakefulness – I mean it is getting fairly late – and managed to finish this piece while I was actually dreaming? How would you like me then?
Track 10
That bass sonority is sounding a threatening cloud again. Because it’s back to fucking reality, isn’t it? The emptiness of the corridor at night, unlit except for the steadily diminishing contents of the confectionery vending machine? Walk out into Banbury Road (at one end) at a certain time of night and you feel that you have entered a zone of the dead. Walk out into Walton Street (at the other end) and all you’ll get are hoohahs and hurrahs edging out of the Phoenix cinema and the winebars and whatever the Jericho Tavern’s now calling itself. And now you realise you’ve been looking at one thing from ten different angles – so far – getting closer to, approaching, those ghosts, those ships which sail serenely up what should be tramlines. But that hum, in the unpopulated ground floor corridors of the Radcliffe Infirmary. I DID NOT WANT TO GO BACK TO FUCKING WORK I WANTED TO STAY THERE AND NOT HAVE TO BE OBLIGED oh what’s the use what good could that or I have done and what’s this all got to do with 1994 anyway every perspective is by necessity tainted. What if there were nothing except that one string synthesiser line, yearning, but no there’s that crocodile of a bass, munching its way back in to devour the whole bloody album if he gives it a chance. And then it’s away again. And back. And forth. Maybe it’ll swallow me up in the end and I’ll never have to think again. Who said anything about thinking? Porphyria, Philadelphia, Padlocks, peppermint, plantars downgoing. The Persian army without all the deserters coming over from the Spartan side. Because they wanted to be on the winning side. They thought they could delay their deaths. Now a Fender Rhodes trying to wander into the territory, the prohibited post-nuclear territory, and did a bomb go off why of course it did, right before this record started. The side-streets which lead off the Banbury Road. Thence begins Antarctica. You can’t get away from the thing which is with you at all times, even past what used to be the tip where there was a very decent burger van, the best burgers I’ve ever tasted in fact, and that thing is death, my friend, death which follows you the other way, past the Park End Club, whether you’re walking past there at 4:48 am or on a 100 bus, there’s no escape from it. Or past the deceptive ashen sunrise over Ladbroke Grove, as you passed it that Tuesday morning in October, looking down at it from atop the Westway, briefly looking back before the turnoff into St Mary’s to see those plumes of smoke wafting up like forgotten chimneys.
Track 11
What, there’s more to say? A blip. The marimbas again. Circularity. Like Terry Riley. But not really. Slightly blurred and bleary. Imaginary, yellow-walled chip shops in Hatcham at 2:34 in the morning. When nothing is quite palpable, least of all your own sanity. A sharp intake of footsteps. An ECG machine which drones at sopranino pitch as if you’ve somehow neglected to breathe. Balletic. What if I woke up and found myself in a yellow-walled chip shop in a part of the city I could never find it in myself to place, except I’d have to go out of it at some point and what the fuck would I do if I were confronted with the dome of St Paul’s, at eye level to me, at 200 times its normal size, and would I expire from the sheer shock, and is that why I am reluctant to exeunt from that yellow-walled chip shop, because despite the almost racing certainty that I will emerge into a non-specific, undefined southern high street with nothing and no one to populate or desecrate it, there’s just that slimmest of possibilities that the next station from Sloane Square will not be Victoria, but rather Baker Street? And what if it were Dover Street tube station? And that I will, I might, come out of it and walk straight into my own cemetery? Without a middleman? Or walk out and be gobbled up by…that damned ECG bleep, it subtly penetrates everything, doesn’t it? The ardour, the candour, the fear, the faithlessness. That melody, it’s now warping ever so slightly. Where shall I find myself when it has ended? I haven’t forgotten to acknowledge Chesterton. Thursday’s face filling, and finally constituting, the entire sky shining above Earl’s Court, which suddenly becomes Leicester Square? What horses could be so swift?
Track 12
It’s a voice! Voices! A frantic bell ringing! But they’re speeded up, I can’t make out what they’re saying. They’re laughing. But I’m disturbed. What fucking mutation of a shop have I just walked into? Or am I hearing the biased voices of the doctors trying to save me? There’s a laugh, but what theatre am I lying in? Screech of brakes, there, was it? Almost into focus there, I nearly got it, but it’s blurred back out again. Tibetan bells, if you feel that way. The strange comfort you feel when you’re immobile and semi-conscious in intensive care, the relief at never having to do anything for yourself again.
CD TWO
Track 1
Someone is hammering on my coffin. Trying to get the heart started again. But time’s running out, so I have to get everything in. That melody which swoops down to embrace me. The clock is ticking away, can you hear it? What can I tell you about names to be named? There are too many and some of them, if not all of them, wouldn’t want me to name them in this context. Double speed and half-speed. Because there was the Muiredge, and there was the Grammar, and once upon a time there might have been an Uddingston, and there was certainly an Oxford, as there is just as certainly a London, even if it doesn’t exist except when I’m there, as with all of these places. That’s why if I go back to Uddingston, people still greet me routinely as if I hadn’t been gone for 23 years. But I can see that light, just up there, and I’m not sure whether it’s the sky or whether they’ve set my bunker on fire. I’m shortly to find out one way or the other, however. Is that a vibrato I can detect in the synth line there? Pop, pop. Popping music. Unthinkable without that speed bump of a heartbeat, just to be sure. And it could be such banal matter if not seen in extreme close-up and magnified in extremis. The belching of the sugar refinery at Silvertown. Chartres Cathedral. The medieval city of Bruges, which I am fearful of gazing upon lest I find myself in a parallel universe Oxford. Lincoln Cathedral, of course, the grandest approach to any city on any rail network in Britain, with the possible exception of Waverley. The way in which you feel you are going underneath, excavating, Princes Street and the Castle. Especially when it’s a cloudless blue sky.
Track 2
Harsh, sawtooth, what is this language and what are you trying to communicate to me with it? A drill. Machinery. It could be a sterile non-world. MRSA lurking beneath every veneer of cleanliness. Yet that implacable melody constantly asserts itself – and this is another in a major key, oddly imposing, like Arthur’s Seat – as a monolith which can never be destroyed, even if gnawed away at for centuries. That intimation of the minor, though. Gradually the melody becomes predominant at the expense of the bassline drill, or at least tries to. Sometimes it sounds as if it is sobbing. For us, for you, not really for me. But certainly by me. That subterranean bassline which keeps looming back into view, like a benign whale. A drone, a continuo. It breaks slightly, the solidity. And becomes luminous, untouchable, Rothko-esque in its grievously isolationist sureness of colour. Eventually the drone fills all of your head. The thoughts you cannot expel or excuse. Il miglior fabbro. Now, see how they’ve come a semitone apart and become dissonant right under your very nose, between your very ears? The nobility of indeterminate ruination. It dies off at the fade, diving down back towards the seabed, confident of its own extinction.
Track 3
Static explodes into rhythmic life. Shall we dance? All you had to do was ask! That beat, though, crackling up as though it’s being burned for bacon. That sudden HOWL there! Joe Meek trying to claw his way back to us! A SCREAM, almost! Made me jump! The acetate of this music is burning up faster than we can register it. The semblance of what might once have been a guitar meme. Now the bass comes in. Underworld at 25 rpm. Can’t get started.
Track 4
A desolate, mighty wind. Or is the might imaginary, from my perspective only? Is that someone trying to get through, to tell us that they’re still alive? The shifting, whispering sands. A tinkle of bells (to remind us that there was once a thing called Christmas) now giving way to a burbling synth line. All comprising trapped voices, voices of long-gone people doomed to resonate in space forever, at consistently diminishing levels, but still succeeding in existing? Then back to the wind, and are those footsteps or a gong? The howling wind becomes higher in pitch, searing, and then vanishing. Now, low noises like nature being wound backwards. Trying to restart the world. I see. Does he succeed?
Track 5
I managed to avoid mentioning Kraftwerk until now. But in another life this formed the basis of a minor Top 40 hit single (“On” - #32 in November 1993). A beningly burping melody, reflecting upon itself with moderate lustre. Not too demonstrative, lest the hall of mirrors be irrevocably revealed. And so brief.
Track 6
Beaver and Krause again. It had to happen. Those undulating flutes. The ghosts of Strawberry Fields Forever as well, naturally. Tablas. The things which trigger off the process of remembrance in your life. Flutes to a three-year-old mind in 1967. Gas stations. Strawberries. Was I ever young? Was I ever young like that? Was I once a child in Glasgow? The TV was on in the dark. Destination Moon. Central Pier. Aston Martins. Norman Vaughan. Robert Kennedy. I remember it all. Somerfields when it was called Coopers. Thinking that Tommy Cooper ran it. Mary Hopkin. Cornelius Cardew. Counting rods of different colours, from one to ten. The Marble Arch record label, forever hitless. Don’t try to tell me that I dreamed it all. What else could have constituted reality? That little acknowledgement of 1983 electro there. That whistling’s steadily getting more piercing. Then it goes on its rounds.
Track 7
I don’t suppose we can escape – or at least I can’t escape, you’re free to go at any time, reader – a reading of religiosity in this music, somewhere down the line. And here it is, a church organ, as someone paces patiently up and down the aisle – it surely cannot be another clock ticking. Art of Noise – “Memento.” Those footsteps continue – wait, they’ve just stopped. They never approach the listener, us. But there is also a great deal of Sylvian’s spirituality here (I keep thinking how so much of Fennesz’s stuff is predicated by this record). The footsteps return. Not going anywhere especially. Worship. Awe. Marriage. Death. Never birth. Not yet anyway. The contented hum of a power supply which will continue to be operative for as long as anyone wants it to be. The careful ticking of the heart at the earth’s core. Deeply moving. Some people just won’t get it. But I can almost feel at peace listening to this. Hear how it is slowly rising out of the waves, Atlantis reborn, counter melodies and counterparts methodically being added to the central motif. A generator which will continue to generate after all generations have departed. Astute readers will notice how I’m not writing so much for each track now as the record progresses. Because sometimes you have to sit, pause and worship. You just have to. Is this still coherent? Was it ever? What are you to make of me, who for the last two-and-a-half years has not been talking about this record specifically, aside from continued leitmotif-style passing references – those footsteps have slowed down to a halt again – and what am I to make of what you should make of me? Does it mean I still have the right to be, to exist? Because we’re getting near the end now, reader – two more dislocated footsteps, then another little collection, falling into disrepair, into unconsciousness, into death, and here, HERE, when there’s nothing left but those three organ chords, is where it transcends everything. Into somewhere else.
Track 8
Could almost be the introduction to a David Gray record or something, couldn’t it? Good grief (and there’s no good in grief, only good as a consequence of grief), it looks like the sun might be trying to shine again – I think remotely of the chorus of Madonna’s “Take A Bow,” forgetting that the latter song’s all about saying goodbye. A clarinet is not quite forlorn in the distance. As the underscoring melody line comes in, it’s a reassertion of life, despite everything. Uplifting, it feels as though the drowning artist has finally broken the surface of the sea and can make his way safely to shore, to refuge. The distant Vienna piano returns, now sounding reassuring, re-enlivened. There has to be a happy ending somewhere. Although there is still unfinished business to clear up. Is that an alarm clock going off at the end? Do you fancy waking up? I haven’t even been to sleep yet, though am rapidly getting there.
Track 9
Now we’re flying. Untethered to the earth. We could have died of course, can’t quite rule that out. The feeling of mortality which Vaughan Williams’ music could never quite avoid. Synthesised woodwinds play as if waiting for Nick Drake to give them words in the next world. Astonishing, the light which has intruded into the latter quarter of this record – strayed would be a better word than intruded – because now we’re back on the beach, and I’m five again, and I’ve said all this before. New Age by any other nitwit’s name, but as a kind of contented coda to the disturbances which have gone before, it is immensely affecting. I think of the summer of 1994, I think of how happy we were for so long a time, of who and what existed then and who and what now exist only in my memory. The brilliant Saturday morning sunshine. We always liked to face the sunshine. God help me live.
Track 10
God help me hold on, because those howling winds won’t go away – they’re slightly further away from me now, and there are more definable voices, though still not so definable that you can hear what they’re saying, but it sounds like a female voice, and do I have to keep being dragged back to the horrid reality of the August Bank Holiday weekend of 2001 because it was so fucking hot, so horrendously hot and stultifying and suffocating that I still dread the coming of the month of August every year with an intensity that no one else will ever quite understand. WHAT ARE THEY SAYING? AM I THE ONE WHO’S DYING? Well, take me instead, she’s got a future, I’ve lived my life. But no one would listen or heed. I CANNOT KEEP ACKNOWLEDGING THIS, THE CLOUDS HAVE TO BREAK AGAIN, THE SUN HAS TO SHINE AGAIN, HOW CAN I HOPE TO LIVE IF THE SUN NEVER SHINES AGAIN, STOP THIS STOP THIS REVERSE THIS BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. Impossible. The choir holy. Cannot get away from it, it pursues me because I keep allowing it to pursue me. Where’s the way out? Forwards or back, progression or regression? Those voices persist, and everything on this track sounds as if it were generated by a human voice, and yet I know there is no humanity here; it is the most deliberately abandoned of musics, a music stripped of human beings, a desolate landscape which exists for a reason long since forgotten, and STOP STOP STOP STOP
Track 11
A drill runs through my head. A curious melody, like a desecrated brass band, tries to break through, but I’m letting the pain exclude all of it. It’s uncomfortable, fucking unbearable in fact, in its extreme closeness. The phantoms of old Shadows riffs recede sadly in the background, but then you realise that the sounds are doing their best to try and kill you. The melody, the scant remnants of beauty, cannot be reached and can only be heard with difficulty because THIS FUCKING DRILL is cancelling all of it out. Cut the thread, cut the oxygen, have done with it and buona sera you overrated fucking planet. I don’t know about dreaming; all of a sudden I’m wide awake again and this sound is unimpeachably and indisputably real and it goes ON AND ON AND ONANDONANDON so get the memories while you’re here oh shit oh no they’ve all been written down all the important ones anyway just go and read them and then do something else and I can’t bloody think because it’s HURTING it’s FUCKING TEARING MY HEAD APART and my head needs to be SOMEWHERE ELSE WHY CAN’T YOU LET ME BE A KID AGAIN IS IT SO WRONG TO WANT TO BE A KID AGAIN because it had its flaws admittedly I’m not concealing those but it was preferable to being systematically buried in concrete and that drill isn’t even going to help me drill my way out again once I’ve been entombed and DIDN’T I DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS WHERE’S THE TUNNEL THE SCREENS THE SCREENS THE SCREAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Track 12
Now I’m buried, but here I am, I’m still trying to breathe, breathe deeply, and the oscillating synth sounds return, those dessicated Hank Marvin lines, repeating and entwining themselves – there I growl – now I leave the melody line to itself, bemusedly adapting into a different focus, one which isn’t quite mine, because of the alternative perspective, that of the living dead, and now there’s a cackle there, a laugh, and it’s a palpable laugh which sounds like it’s coming from a viably real human being – not speeded up or distorted, but a loop of a laugh. Then of course it’s just a loop, like Neil Innes’ laugh at the end of “Slush” by the Bonzos – the progenitor of the laugh perhaps themselves long gone. A bassline attempts to sidle its way upwards, through and past the undergrowth, but it’s a forlorn mission. More voices on the right, then trying to cross the barrier, but no, they’re distant again, nothing really to do with me, they can’t be talking about me, can they? They cannot be mocking me when I can’t respond? The pitch of the laugh has become lower, less human, more grotesque in its unrealness. Tantalisingly close these voices come sometimes, but now closer than the ear can hear (Escalator!). Now everything’s sounding unnaturally close up, and I’m now not entirely sure that I’m dreaming this, or that I’m having a dream that is distorting my perception of this music. Strange when you think of all the times I’ve listened to it – and we DID things to it – in full consciousness. On such occasions you tend not to notice a lot of the music’s components. They only become apparent once you have loosened your conception of consciousness to a small but sufficient degree. Thus am I half asleep, but still wanting to find my way out of this now forbidding labyrinth. The bassline’s back again, slightly more to the fore. I must have imagined that laugh. FUCK THEY’RE COMING INTO THE ROOM RIGHT UP TO MY FACE AND THEY ARE TALKING TO ME AND I CAN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY’RE SAYING AND NOW THE LAUGH’S AT 200 RPM – this might be a worse hell than the drill and if I’m not typing doggerel by now which I might have been doing all along – there it slows down to let me breathe and figure out an exit.
Track 13
The release. I had to face it. It’s 1976, I am 12 again, and a tune and a bank of synthesisers straight out of side two of Vangelis’ Heaven And Hell. And it’s all in front of me, I’ve got it all to look forward to though am vaguely conscious that I might already have had the best of it. A Hollywood ending; how appropriate. Now everything, look, is coming into focus; I could scarcely be more lucid because, here, Blake’s engravings, and there, the stone in Virginia Woolf’s coat pocket, and over there, the last minute reprieve for Hart Crane, and there, resplendent and profound even to a schoolboy with Saturday morning satchel westering to his spiritual home in Kelvingrove, the sublime and holy art of Sir Stanley Spencer for the goodness and benefit of all humanity to enrich our spirituality and sexuality because it was about sex, Christ (Resurrection!) I’d worked that out at a very early age, because that’s what it’s been about all along, that’s how everything keeps coming back to the glorious and beautiful resurrection which shall await everyone who deserves it and in whom I believe and have never ceased to believe.
A cut-off point. Abrupt.
Life before it’s lived.
But not life before it’s ended.
Never.
SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME 2
TEN YEARS AFTER
The following is an experiment in uniting thought and expression of emotional reactions to music. The words which you will read have been improvised and written spontaneously in real time while listening to the two CDs which comprise this album, an album which is one of the author’s absolute favourites, and a record which carries past associations to a degree abnormal even by the intense standards of this website. No conscious effort has been given to organising these thoughts into a formal writing pattern; any coherence is dependent upon the inner coherence of the writer. The aim is to minimise as far as possible the gap between the germination of thoughts provoked by the music and their written articulation, and therefore achieve a greater degree of real feelings and emotions as they are made manifest.
As Richard D James does not apply verbal titles to each track, but rather gives them visual titles – designs mainly in various shades of orange and yellow, with the colours acting as triggers for the pictures which the pieces are presumed to paint (this is consequent to, but not derivative of, the similar experiments of Anthony Braxton, who generally names his pieces with appropriate combinations of numbers, symbols and graphics).
The explicit association with the concept of lucid dreaming, as pioneered by Dr Celia James, is for the purposes of this piece taken as read and understood.
Needless to say, this piece will be best experienced if read in tandem with listening to the record and specific tracks in question.
CD ONE
Track 1
Baby talk. Birth. Major key. Already trying to make it minor. Rhythm like bloodflow. The quiet bits of Art of Noise’s Into Battle were always the deadliest. Again and again, I’m drawn to music which sounds like STARTING AGAIN. Afterbirth, afterlife, after apocalypse. There a marimba. Generating an echo. Wish I was six again. Marimbas in pop, feel warm and comforting, like a big gigantic hug. Just My Imagination. Vincent. And I Love You So. Music sounding like we’re learning to talk, to communicate. Original Whim by Extradition. What would it be like if we made music for the first time? That’s why the Gail Brand/Morgan Guberman record matters – listen to it in the sense that these are two people, two creatures, trying to learn the art of communication with each other, their efforts to form a language. The trombone is treated more like a drum. Rowing away rowing away. Boats in Stanley Park, 1968. That 1968. Boards of Canada of course, as if I could get away with not mentioning them. Magic, baba, papa. Voice stuck on a papa loop. You like your father, isn’t it? Careful the seesaw doesn’t collapse mid-swing. Gurgling Gail and gabbling Guberman. That marimba. Learning to distinguish what notes are in a primary school class. Walls of wood. Minds of steel. Because, look, we’re here and how is it we’re here, but while we’re here. Now nothing left except the marimba. It’s a beginning. Blurring slightly out of focus and then BACK IN again. In the back of the taxi coming back from Glasgow Royal Infirmary, December 1964, having escaped death for the first of several occasions in my life. So far it’s the first of four. Does oblivion or familiarity wait at the other end?
Track 2
I can’t grasp these chords. They’re wavering. Mummy. Like the corn. We never had corn in Bothwell, just cricket stumps. It looks so real, doesn’t it? But can you touch it? Corstorphine Road in the Wednesday morning September sun, just after a rainfall. Not quite South Kensington. Though sometimes you’d like it to be. Duffle coats. When you’re in the coach and it’s midwinter and it’s raining and blowing so hard that you momentarily move into nowhere – the subnormal lighting of the old A40 route, or the Lake District at 3 am in December. David Penhaligon. What caused that? Thinking of the drowning. Never quite got away from it. What’s that quack? There’s a duck above me. And to think I’m scared of drowning, feart because I might end up getting eaten by a duck. This music’s trying to raise its head upwards, above the water. Let’s Evolve. Sudden Sway. The glistening gills as you BREAK THE SURFACE to find Port Meadow still there. Remember to keep your eyes tightly shut at all times. Keep out the greenness. And the salt. Because you could be floating nowhere. And that strange steepness near the top of Muswell Hill. Hidden record shops in Cambuslang Main Street. Blue Circle cement factory. From the school playground it could have been the Himalayas. I didn’t forget Martin Denny. Bend those rhythms, as you can, because you’re trying not to be born, nor to founder somewhere in Kidlington. She was taking photos in Stamford the Sunday before it happened. The last good Sunday. “She looks so like her mother.” Even then we knew. So did she.
Track 3
The North Sea. St Andrews, 1981. Michael Furey. The Bog of Allen. Ghost ships. South Queensferry. Aberdour. Burntisland. Everything looks like you’re in heaven. Flying over people. Why do I keep thinking Architecture and Morality? Fennesz, of bloody course. That cracked old gargoyle of a face of a city. The most colourful city in the world, although no one who actually lives in it will ever acknowledge it. And the Oxford. And the river behind the Hall of the Lady of Margaret. The mists as I was escorted to my interview, Tuesday 9 December 1980, the morning after Lennon was shot. Cole Porter. How did he get in? Remember the shot of him, lying, grinning, in his own grave. The best thing about the White Stripes. Sealand Sealand SEALAND. Where no one can touch me and where I can never be touched. Observe passivity as your tool of trade but never mistake it for a token of affection. The doing of nothingness. The cottages at Anstruther. The 95 bus, but what if we stayed on it all the way to Leven? Would we, could we, ever find our way back? What lay behind the Ploughman’s Tower? Or was it the Plowman’s Tower? That Chaucer block of slums in Tooting, hidden safely away, protected by the ruthless bend of Garratt Lane. So grand in its emptiness. There a bassline, steadily and methodically proceeding around the wreck of a melody like an exhausted lighthouse keeper. Silhouette, the horse and the campfire. Where Gabriel ceases to exist. When he realises he has lived for nothing because he can never compete with someone who is beyond competition, because they are safely dead and DIED FOR HER OH YES BEAT THAT. The snow is general, the fog less obviously permeating the atoms which make up you. All good ghosts of heaven and hell unite on the second promontory to the left of the eighteenth hole.
Track 4
Sirens. Take the song, twist it, shift it out of focus, down several registers and it becomes a WARNING and suddenly you are SNAPPED OUT OF THE REVERIE OF GHOST SHIPS AND ARE FACED WITH THE PROSPECT OF IMMINENT GHOSTHOOD HAPPENING BEFORE YOUR EYES AS IT IS NOT THE HOOT OF A SHIP’S SIREN OR THE POLICE TRYING TO SHOOT YOU AS YOU STAND WITH YOUR MELODICA ON THE BEACH AT PORTOBELLO IN OCTOBER 1987 but is an ECG machine, or the hum of a ventilator, there QUICK there the snatch of an organ YOU’RE ALREADY HEARING THE FUNERAL the memories have not yet happened AND NO ONE SHALL BUILD A STATUE FOR ME and suddenly the sounds have become cold, steel and real, you are not in an idyllic afterlife of endless bookshelves and the reproachful rooftops of SW10 but in a ward watching life drain away systematically HOW COULD YOU HAVE THOUGHT THAT IN 1994 it is true, in 1994 I merely thought of ships, of ghost Lancasters flying over our heads, the police helicopter which always used to hover in the wastelands across the way from the train station with a tonality as uniquely dissonant as that of OMD’s “Statues” but it fitted in with Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia” but you are in REALITY and it’s all functional fuck function it’s fading she’s going.
Track 5
Great, vast industrial mechanisms. Brunel where are you operating now. The Hawaiian waving grasses having been nuked. Nothing but the sea, and there, my God there, coming in, looming in from the distance, alternating semitones and bitonal semitones at that WHAT IF THERE WERE NOTHING ELSE ON THIS EARTH BUT THIS the waves of water and the ghosts of never-existing ships? How would you feel? Would there be a you to feel? The southern tip of Goldsmith’s College, radiant in the greyness of a Camberwell afternoon. That Friday, walking back from Denmark Hill to Victoria. Kids passing by outside the curvature which shields the Oval cricket ground from humanity. Oval House there on the other side, where he had previously been many a time to witness improvisatory goings-on, before the money ran out, but is it still open for gatherings? No obvious point of entry. And down the road, just behind me, the Imperial War Museum. Can I venture there alone? Can I feel emptier there than anywhere else in the world. It’s all moving in slow motion. Steadily, without fuss. The radiation from the MI5 building. Getting a bit too Iain Sinclair. But you can work it out. The 1928 meets 1971 façade of the redbrick grocery shops which form the corner of Fentiman Road and South Lambeth Road, just as the latter turns into Portugal. There a crescent, across the road from the library, Tradescant Road. This was a soundtrack to the daily re-enactment of the final journey of Elias Ashmole which I undertook every working day. Tautology. Ha ha. Nothing ha ha about that siren which has gradually been breaking free from the music. But is it an air raid? Happening twenty galaxies away or just around the corner? Could I still hear that howl all the way down, the entire fucking length of, the Botley Road? Right the way down to Habitat? The Sunday Times. A different West Way, but if you stuck to the path and headed due south you would end up on the real Westway. Westminster Way, even. Did they think to call that Botley shopping centre Westminster? Just to kid us that it might be an obscure, obsolete extension of Westminster? Where Politico’s bookshop is shortly not to be, round the corner and into Victoria Street. Sometimes that’s like venturing out of Greenland. So alien. So un-London. I close my eyes for not too long else I might probably find myself in Botley when I open them again. Frequently I did. Did I mention sex yet? Because, in a way…where are you going?
Track 6
What’s that voice saying? Twin? Plan? It sounds a lot surer of itself. Does that mean it’s growing up? Oil refineries. Grangemouth. How could the Cocteau Twins have come from anywhere else? Do we have to mention Kraftwerk? How all of this is being dreamed and how after a while I expect not to be entirely conscious while I’m typing this? The war memorial at Ebury Bridge. At least I’ve always assumed it to be one. Keep your views to yourself. Can’t understand why I understand Maxinquaye without knowing it. Where’d that come from? The ‘90s. Extinction not a thought then. Nowhere near my mind. As if. Bright, this beat, bright and sprightly. Then it momentarily rests but I know it’s coming back. It’s just stopped to get the paper and a Yorkie and change a tenner. It dies down to almost a funereal tempo, slowing down and you imagine it’s never going to speed up again, but there the voice, battling to bring it back again, now muffled, now processed, but keep at it…no, it’s a goner.
Track 7
Angels skating in the park. On a deserted Sunday evening, no, afternoon, in November. It is dark. But they are happy. Such grace, such ineffability in foreseeing its own closure. The darkness of the surrounding trees form their own protective cradle for us. If I knew how to skate. Christ Church Meadow on the first Friday in January, when it’s bled white with frost and no one, no tourist, will venture into it. We have all of it to ourselves. That blinking light, a signal to let us know, to remind us, where we are, even though we are nowhere. A dance which will last forever as it is self-regenerating. The effortlessness of anti-gravity. The understanding – Guillem as Juliet – that to be lifted is to be transcended. She has to KNOW that she can fly, can be passionate by how her body relates to gravity, to the lover supporting her, can reach to become more than flesh and blood, even if it’s the absolute core of why she’s doing it. Why can I not listen to this music forever? A Charleston, denuded of gaucheness, for the benefit of the ghost of Dick Diver. The implied secondary rhythm throughout, like a central pulse which will beat regardless of the moves you are making in the snow, on the ice. It’s a Sunday. Everyone’s away. Alice blinks as the most abstruse of conceptions. You start to imagine higher registers – no, hang on, there it is, sure and stubborn. And the funny thing is that, although it’s winter, we feel warm. Warm, snug and cosy. That was very important to us. More important than you realise. That vague sense of yearning towards the end. The music box imperceptibly winding down. To a graceful gavotte. Alvin Lucier’s grandson tapping the radiator in the kitchen, echoed and reproduced into infinity, until the radiator in the kitchen becomes indivisible with the ice rink of your mind, your heaven, and in 1994 it does not seem like an afterlife, not like the junction of Stamford Brook Avenue where it turns into King Street and suddenly begins to become the shabby genteel end of Hammersmith, Ravenscourt Park, those familiar-looking joggers vaulting the fences at 6:28 am, impatient for their run so that work can happen. Where there is a definite gateway between an imagination of the world and its concurrent reality. Strand on the Green. Or Gunnersbury. Or life. Or death. Or ice. Slow down now. Come to an end. Shut off.
Track 8
Why am I thinking of the “Three Fingers” 16 rpm mix of “Moments In Love”? Such vastness of grieving, such elementary ghosts being coaxed out of that piano Midge Ure abandoned thirteen years previously. Where is your Vienna now? Left to the whims of the deadly electrician. The most aggressively solitary of musics in its stateliness. Abandoned mansions. The winding river of abandoned boats. Sometimes your misinterpretation of others’ words can accidentally lead you to the emotional core of what they’re trying to say. And I am thinking 4AD. Such coldness. I’m shivering. A 38th birthday spent alone, in wreckage. A 30th birthday spent in ecstasy. The sun was still shining then. Still this music cut through me then. I didn’t want to guess. The great baronial desuetudes of the nursing home halfway up Nightingale Lane. That piano trying to creep upwards. Random. Robert Wyatt’s Sea Song. Of course. It’s again. Of course, again. On course to drown. And become something else. When the light distils itself into the negotiating shades of early winter, and you are impounded within a somewhat unreal world. What do you need me to tell you? How I still see and converse with her ghost when I am dreaming at night. How lucid can this possibly get? How long can I stay alive?
Track 9
Beat a little more assertive. Edging back into the major, key-wise. Robert Wyatt, again, Matching Mole. You’re waiting for the Lear free associations and bass clarinet to make their way back in. But they do not. There, another nursery melody, on a distant organ. Sean O’Hagan caught that mood, just short of wistfulness, in the later stages of Stereolab’s Mars Audiac Quintet. Almost a light interlude. A testcard for an alternative 1969. It does feel like that. You’re trying to discern the music; you can hear it but it doesn’t quite fit with what you recognise as a tune, and at that moment you realise you are dreaming, you are in fact quite conscious that you’re dreaming, and for the briefest of lucid moments you revel in the dream-ness of your dream. You are exceeding yourself because for that moment, just for that micromoment, you are truly yourself as you cannot be touched by anyone else or made to change into someone you are not. That’s why we like dreams; because then we are in control of our lives. An anvil. Can’t quite banish the Stakhanovite reality to which you are forced to awaken. Keep it at bay for a little while. Who knows, if you can control yourself sufficiently you might never wake up! There what I recognise as the closing motif. Time gentlemen please. No good moaning about it. What if I kept on doing this in decreasing, declining states of wakefulness – I mean it is getting fairly late – and managed to finish this piece while I was actually dreaming? How would you like me then?
Track 10
That bass sonority is sounding a threatening cloud again. Because it’s back to fucking reality, isn’t it? The emptiness of the corridor at night, unlit except for the steadily diminishing contents of the confectionery vending machine? Walk out into Banbury Road (at one end) at a certain time of night and you feel that you have entered a zone of the dead. Walk out into Walton Street (at the other end) and all you’ll get are hoohahs and hurrahs edging out of the Phoenix cinema and the winebars and whatever the Jericho Tavern’s now calling itself. And now you realise you’ve been looking at one thing from ten different angles – so far – getting closer to, approaching, those ghosts, those ships which sail serenely up what should be tramlines. But that hum, in the unpopulated ground floor corridors of the Radcliffe Infirmary. I DID NOT WANT TO GO BACK TO FUCKING WORK I WANTED TO STAY THERE AND NOT HAVE TO BE OBLIGED oh what’s the use what good could that or I have done and what’s this all got to do with 1994 anyway every perspective is by necessity tainted. What if there were nothing except that one string synthesiser line, yearning, but no there’s that crocodile of a bass, munching its way back in to devour the whole bloody album if he gives it a chance. And then it’s away again. And back. And forth. Maybe it’ll swallow me up in the end and I’ll never have to think again. Who said anything about thinking? Porphyria, Philadelphia, Padlocks, peppermint, plantars downgoing. The Persian army without all the deserters coming over from the Spartan side. Because they wanted to be on the winning side. They thought they could delay their deaths. Now a Fender Rhodes trying to wander into the territory, the prohibited post-nuclear territory, and did a bomb go off why of course it did, right before this record started. The side-streets which lead off the Banbury Road. Thence begins Antarctica. You can’t get away from the thing which is with you at all times, even past what used to be the tip where there was a very decent burger van, the best burgers I’ve ever tasted in fact, and that thing is death, my friend, death which follows you the other way, past the Park End Club, whether you’re walking past there at 4:48 am or on a 100 bus, there’s no escape from it. Or past the deceptive ashen sunrise over Ladbroke Grove, as you passed it that Tuesday morning in October, looking down at it from atop the Westway, briefly looking back before the turnoff into St Mary’s to see those plumes of smoke wafting up like forgotten chimneys.
Track 11
What, there’s more to say? A blip. The marimbas again. Circularity. Like Terry Riley. But not really. Slightly blurred and bleary. Imaginary, yellow-walled chip shops in Hatcham at 2:34 in the morning. When nothing is quite palpable, least of all your own sanity. A sharp intake of footsteps. An ECG machine which drones at sopranino pitch as if you’ve somehow neglected to breathe. Balletic. What if I woke up and found myself in a yellow-walled chip shop in a part of the city I could never find it in myself to place, except I’d have to go out of it at some point and what the fuck would I do if I were confronted with the dome of St Paul’s, at eye level to me, at 200 times its normal size, and would I expire from the sheer shock, and is that why I am reluctant to exeunt from that yellow-walled chip shop, because despite the almost racing certainty that I will emerge into a non-specific, undefined southern high street with nothing and no one to populate or desecrate it, there’s just that slimmest of possibilities that the next station from Sloane Square will not be Victoria, but rather Baker Street? And what if it were Dover Street tube station? And that I will, I might, come out of it and walk straight into my own cemetery? Without a middleman? Or walk out and be gobbled up by…that damned ECG bleep, it subtly penetrates everything, doesn’t it? The ardour, the candour, the fear, the faithlessness. That melody, it’s now warping ever so slightly. Where shall I find myself when it has ended? I haven’t forgotten to acknowledge Chesterton. Thursday’s face filling, and finally constituting, the entire sky shining above Earl’s Court, which suddenly becomes Leicester Square? What horses could be so swift?
Track 12
It’s a voice! Voices! A frantic bell ringing! But they’re speeded up, I can’t make out what they’re saying. They’re laughing. But I’m disturbed. What fucking mutation of a shop have I just walked into? Or am I hearing the biased voices of the doctors trying to save me? There’s a laugh, but what theatre am I lying in? Screech of brakes, there, was it? Almost into focus there, I nearly got it, but it’s blurred back out again. Tibetan bells, if you feel that way. The strange comfort you feel when you’re immobile and semi-conscious in intensive care, the relief at never having to do anything for yourself again.
CD TWO
Track 1
Someone is hammering on my coffin. Trying to get the heart started again. But time’s running out, so I have to get everything in. That melody which swoops down to embrace me. The clock is ticking away, can you hear it? What can I tell you about names to be named? There are too many and some of them, if not all of them, wouldn’t want me to name them in this context. Double speed and half-speed. Because there was the Muiredge, and there was the Grammar, and once upon a time there might have been an Uddingston, and there was certainly an Oxford, as there is just as certainly a London, even if it doesn’t exist except when I’m there, as with all of these places. That’s why if I go back to Uddingston, people still greet me routinely as if I hadn’t been gone for 23 years. But I can see that light, just up there, and I’m not sure whether it’s the sky or whether they’ve set my bunker on fire. I’m shortly to find out one way or the other, however. Is that a vibrato I can detect in the synth line there? Pop, pop. Popping music. Unthinkable without that speed bump of a heartbeat, just to be sure. And it could be such banal matter if not seen in extreme close-up and magnified in extremis. The belching of the sugar refinery at Silvertown. Chartres Cathedral. The medieval city of Bruges, which I am fearful of gazing upon lest I find myself in a parallel universe Oxford. Lincoln Cathedral, of course, the grandest approach to any city on any rail network in Britain, with the possible exception of Waverley. The way in which you feel you are going underneath, excavating, Princes Street and the Castle. Especially when it’s a cloudless blue sky.
Track 2
Harsh, sawtooth, what is this language and what are you trying to communicate to me with it? A drill. Machinery. It could be a sterile non-world. MRSA lurking beneath every veneer of cleanliness. Yet that implacable melody constantly asserts itself – and this is another in a major key, oddly imposing, like Arthur’s Seat – as a monolith which can never be destroyed, even if gnawed away at for centuries. That intimation of the minor, though. Gradually the melody becomes predominant at the expense of the bassline drill, or at least tries to. Sometimes it sounds as if it is sobbing. For us, for you, not really for me. But certainly by me. That subterranean bassline which keeps looming back into view, like a benign whale. A drone, a continuo. It breaks slightly, the solidity. And becomes luminous, untouchable, Rothko-esque in its grievously isolationist sureness of colour. Eventually the drone fills all of your head. The thoughts you cannot expel or excuse. Il miglior fabbro. Now, see how they’ve come a semitone apart and become dissonant right under your very nose, between your very ears? The nobility of indeterminate ruination. It dies off at the fade, diving down back towards the seabed, confident of its own extinction.
Track 3
Static explodes into rhythmic life. Shall we dance? All you had to do was ask! That beat, though, crackling up as though it’s being burned for bacon. That sudden HOWL there! Joe Meek trying to claw his way back to us! A SCREAM, almost! Made me jump! The acetate of this music is burning up faster than we can register it. The semblance of what might once have been a guitar meme. Now the bass comes in. Underworld at 25 rpm. Can’t get started.
Track 4
A desolate, mighty wind. Or is the might imaginary, from my perspective only? Is that someone trying to get through, to tell us that they’re still alive? The shifting, whispering sands. A tinkle of bells (to remind us that there was once a thing called Christmas) now giving way to a burbling synth line. All comprising trapped voices, voices of long-gone people doomed to resonate in space forever, at consistently diminishing levels, but still succeeding in existing? Then back to the wind, and are those footsteps or a gong? The howling wind becomes higher in pitch, searing, and then vanishing. Now, low noises like nature being wound backwards. Trying to restart the world. I see. Does he succeed?
Track 5
I managed to avoid mentioning Kraftwerk until now. But in another life this formed the basis of a minor Top 40 hit single (“On” - #32 in November 1993). A beningly burping melody, reflecting upon itself with moderate lustre. Not too demonstrative, lest the hall of mirrors be irrevocably revealed. And so brief.
Track 6
Beaver and Krause again. It had to happen. Those undulating flutes. The ghosts of Strawberry Fields Forever as well, naturally. Tablas. The things which trigger off the process of remembrance in your life. Flutes to a three-year-old mind in 1967. Gas stations. Strawberries. Was I ever young? Was I ever young like that? Was I once a child in Glasgow? The TV was on in the dark. Destination Moon. Central Pier. Aston Martins. Norman Vaughan. Robert Kennedy. I remember it all. Somerfields when it was called Coopers. Thinking that Tommy Cooper ran it. Mary Hopkin. Cornelius Cardew. Counting rods of different colours, from one to ten. The Marble Arch record label, forever hitless. Don’t try to tell me that I dreamed it all. What else could have constituted reality? That little acknowledgement of 1983 electro there. That whistling’s steadily getting more piercing. Then it goes on its rounds.
Track 7
I don’t suppose we can escape – or at least I can’t escape, you’re free to go at any time, reader – a reading of religiosity in this music, somewhere down the line. And here it is, a church organ, as someone paces patiently up and down the aisle – it surely cannot be another clock ticking. Art of Noise – “Memento.” Those footsteps continue – wait, they’ve just stopped. They never approach the listener, us. But there is also a great deal of Sylvian’s spirituality here (I keep thinking how so much of Fennesz’s stuff is predicated by this record). The footsteps return. Not going anywhere especially. Worship. Awe. Marriage. Death. Never birth. Not yet anyway. The contented hum of a power supply which will continue to be operative for as long as anyone wants it to be. The careful ticking of the heart at the earth’s core. Deeply moving. Some people just won’t get it. But I can almost feel at peace listening to this. Hear how it is slowly rising out of the waves, Atlantis reborn, counter melodies and counterparts methodically being added to the central motif. A generator which will continue to generate after all generations have departed. Astute readers will notice how I’m not writing so much for each track now as the record progresses. Because sometimes you have to sit, pause and worship. You just have to. Is this still coherent? Was it ever? What are you to make of me, who for the last two-and-a-half years has not been talking about this record specifically, aside from continued leitmotif-style passing references – those footsteps have slowed down to a halt again – and what am I to make of what you should make of me? Does it mean I still have the right to be, to exist? Because we’re getting near the end now, reader – two more dislocated footsteps, then another little collection, falling into disrepair, into unconsciousness, into death, and here, HERE, when there’s nothing left but those three organ chords, is where it transcends everything. Into somewhere else.
Track 8
Could almost be the introduction to a David Gray record or something, couldn’t it? Good grief (and there’s no good in grief, only good as a consequence of grief), it looks like the sun might be trying to shine again – I think remotely of the chorus of Madonna’s “Take A Bow,” forgetting that the latter song’s all about saying goodbye. A clarinet is not quite forlorn in the distance. As the underscoring melody line comes in, it’s a reassertion of life, despite everything. Uplifting, it feels as though the drowning artist has finally broken the surface of the sea and can make his way safely to shore, to refuge. The distant Vienna piano returns, now sounding reassuring, re-enlivened. There has to be a happy ending somewhere. Although there is still unfinished business to clear up. Is that an alarm clock going off at the end? Do you fancy waking up? I haven’t even been to sleep yet, though am rapidly getting there.
Track 9
Now we’re flying. Untethered to the earth. We could have died of course, can’t quite rule that out. The feeling of mortality which Vaughan Williams’ music could never quite avoid. Synthesised woodwinds play as if waiting for Nick Drake to give them words in the next world. Astonishing, the light which has intruded into the latter quarter of this record – strayed would be a better word than intruded – because now we’re back on the beach, and I’m five again, and I’ve said all this before. New Age by any other nitwit’s name, but as a kind of contented coda to the disturbances which have gone before, it is immensely affecting. I think of the summer of 1994, I think of how happy we were for so long a time, of who and what existed then and who and what now exist only in my memory. The brilliant Saturday morning sunshine. We always liked to face the sunshine. God help me live.
Track 10
God help me hold on, because those howling winds won’t go away – they’re slightly further away from me now, and there are more definable voices, though still not so definable that you can hear what they’re saying, but it sounds like a female voice, and do I have to keep being dragged back to the horrid reality of the August Bank Holiday weekend of 2001 because it was so fucking hot, so horrendously hot and stultifying and suffocating that I still dread the coming of the month of August every year with an intensity that no one else will ever quite understand. WHAT ARE THEY SAYING? AM I THE ONE WHO’S DYING? Well, take me instead, she’s got a future, I’ve lived my life. But no one would listen or heed. I CANNOT KEEP ACKNOWLEDGING THIS, THE CLOUDS HAVE TO BREAK AGAIN, THE SUN HAS TO SHINE AGAIN, HOW CAN I HOPE TO LIVE IF THE SUN NEVER SHINES AGAIN, STOP THIS STOP THIS REVERSE THIS BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. Impossible. The choir holy. Cannot get away from it, it pursues me because I keep allowing it to pursue me. Where’s the way out? Forwards or back, progression or regression? Those voices persist, and everything on this track sounds as if it were generated by a human voice, and yet I know there is no humanity here; it is the most deliberately abandoned of musics, a music stripped of human beings, a desolate landscape which exists for a reason long since forgotten, and STOP STOP STOP STOP
Track 11
A drill runs through my head. A curious melody, like a desecrated brass band, tries to break through, but I’m letting the pain exclude all of it. It’s uncomfortable, fucking unbearable in fact, in its extreme closeness. The phantoms of old Shadows riffs recede sadly in the background, but then you realise that the sounds are doing their best to try and kill you. The melody, the scant remnants of beauty, cannot be reached and can only be heard with difficulty because THIS FUCKING DRILL is cancelling all of it out. Cut the thread, cut the oxygen, have done with it and buona sera you overrated fucking planet. I don’t know about dreaming; all of a sudden I’m wide awake again and this sound is unimpeachably and indisputably real and it goes ON AND ON AND ONANDONANDON so get the memories while you’re here oh shit oh no they’ve all been written down all the important ones anyway just go and read them and then do something else and I can’t bloody think because it’s HURTING it’s FUCKING TEARING MY HEAD APART and my head needs to be SOMEWHERE ELSE WHY CAN’T YOU LET ME BE A KID AGAIN IS IT SO WRONG TO WANT TO BE A KID AGAIN because it had its flaws admittedly I’m not concealing those but it was preferable to being systematically buried in concrete and that drill isn’t even going to help me drill my way out again once I’ve been entombed and DIDN’T I DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS WHERE’S THE TUNNEL THE SCREENS THE SCREENS THE SCREAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Track 12
Now I’m buried, but here I am, I’m still trying to breathe, breathe deeply, and the oscillating synth sounds return, those dessicated Hank Marvin lines, repeating and entwining themselves – there I growl – now I leave the melody line to itself, bemusedly adapting into a different focus, one which isn’t quite mine, because of the alternative perspective, that of the living dead, and now there’s a cackle there, a laugh, and it’s a palpable laugh which sounds like it’s coming from a viably real human being – not speeded up or distorted, but a loop of a laugh. Then of course it’s just a loop, like Neil Innes’ laugh at the end of “Slush” by the Bonzos – the progenitor of the laugh perhaps themselves long gone. A bassline attempts to sidle its way upwards, through and past the undergrowth, but it’s a forlorn mission. More voices on the right, then trying to cross the barrier, but no, they’re distant again, nothing really to do with me, they can’t be talking about me, can they? They cannot be mocking me when I can’t respond? The pitch of the laugh has become lower, less human, more grotesque in its unrealness. Tantalisingly close these voices come sometimes, but now closer than the ear can hear (Escalator!). Now everything’s sounding unnaturally close up, and I’m now not entirely sure that I’m dreaming this, or that I’m having a dream that is distorting my perception of this music. Strange when you think of all the times I’ve listened to it – and we DID things to it – in full consciousness. On such occasions you tend not to notice a lot of the music’s components. They only become apparent once you have loosened your conception of consciousness to a small but sufficient degree. Thus am I half asleep, but still wanting to find my way out of this now forbidding labyrinth. The bassline’s back again, slightly more to the fore. I must have imagined that laugh. FUCK THEY’RE COMING INTO THE ROOM RIGHT UP TO MY FACE AND THEY ARE TALKING TO ME AND I CAN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY’RE SAYING AND NOW THE LAUGH’S AT 200 RPM – this might be a worse hell than the drill and if I’m not typing doggerel by now which I might have been doing all along – there it slows down to let me breathe and figure out an exit.
Track 13
The release. I had to face it. It’s 1976, I am 12 again, and a tune and a bank of synthesisers straight out of side two of Vangelis’ Heaven And Hell. And it’s all in front of me, I’ve got it all to look forward to though am vaguely conscious that I might already have had the best of it. A Hollywood ending; how appropriate. Now everything, look, is coming into focus; I could scarcely be more lucid because, here, Blake’s engravings, and there, the stone in Virginia Woolf’s coat pocket, and over there, the last minute reprieve for Hart Crane, and there, resplendent and profound even to a schoolboy with Saturday morning satchel westering to his spiritual home in Kelvingrove, the sublime and holy art of Sir Stanley Spencer for the goodness and benefit of all humanity to enrich our spirituality and sexuality because it was about sex, Christ (Resurrection!) I’d worked that out at a very early age, because that’s what it’s been about all along, that’s how everything keeps coming back to the glorious and beautiful resurrection which shall await everyone who deserves it and in whom I believe and have never ceased to believe.
A cut-off point. Abrupt.
Life before it’s lived.
But not life before it’s ended.
Never.
