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Paul Bowles—“Twisted Love”

3/24/2023

‘Every work suggests its own method. Each novel’s been done differently, under different circumstances and using different methods. I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue bus one day going uptown from Tenth Street, I decided just which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was omniscient. I would write it consciously up to a certain point, and after that let it take its own course. You remember there’s a little Kafka quote at the beginning of the third section: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back; that is the point that must be reached.’ This seemed important to me, and when I got to that point, beyond which there was no turning back, I decided to use a surrealist technique—simply writing without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was going to write next, or how it was going to finish. And I did that.’ Paul Bowles

Of course, it’s good to read as widely as possible—especially outside your race, class and gender—but, as a writer, I’ve found I’ve learned more by returning to the same book again and again. When you finish reading a novel for the first time, your memory of it does not stay fixed forever; it shifts and evolves. Years later, you might find yourself talking about it only to discover that your memory has retained only a few scraps—mythic representations—of the text. You realise that, in the intervening years, you have reconstructed in your mind an entirely different book—an inner book of ‘received beliefs’—from the actual one. This is when the value of re-reading becomes obvious. A book comes alive with each new reading. A book is born again every time you pick it up. When you re-read a book, it will appear to be different on a second, or third reading, but of course the book hasn’t changed, you have. Any text has the potential for several different interpretations, and no single reading can ever exhaust a text’s full potential because, on re-reading, each reader will search for connections in their own way, excluding other possibilities and so making them aware of their own role in the play of meaning. It’s not the case that subsequent readings are any ‘truer’ than the first—they are just different. The fact that readers can be differently affected by the same text shows the degree to which reading is a creative process. If you read a single book many times over, it marks the changes in your life and, whatever happens, you continue to have a conversation with it.
   Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky is a novel that I happen to have read a number of times and, each time I re-read it, it offers fresh insights into how and why I think it is such a great piece of work. Set in North Africa just after the Second World War, the novel is about husband and wife, Port and Kit, and their travels after they arrive in Tangier. When I first read the novel, I thought it was Port’s story, but after a few more reads, I realised it was in fact Kit’s story. She is the character who undergoes the most change and the person in whose company we end the story. Also, I had not noticed at first how Port and Kit’s journey starts at the coast, in a well-populated city, and goes directly inland, stopping at places that become fewer and further between and less and less well-populated until, ultimately, they arrive in the middle of nowhere. The desert and its ‘virulent sunlight’ take on an increasingly claustrophobic, emptying role, smothering love and hope until all that is left is sand and wind. This doomed journey into the desert is a subtle, sophisticated metaphor for their relationship. I also had not noticed that, although Port and Kit both have sexual encounters with native Arabs, it is how they respond to those encounters that matters, that defines the difference between their personalities. Port’s is a one-night stand and the experience ‘poisons’ him and is his ultimate undoing. Kit, on the other hand, enters into a desperate, very physical affair with a Bedouin that rejuvenates her body entirely and sets her off on another journey altogether.
   Port’s death in the desert provokes an existential panic attack in his wife, Kit. She is crushed by his death, but she is also liberated in a way. The novel continues for another 60 pages as we see the consequences of Kit’s loss play itself out in the narrative and, by the end, we realise that the story had been about Kit all along, not Port. His death has not resolved her life, just set her off on a new and different journey. Indeed, endings of stories are, in a sense, just beginnings to other stories. In the most perfectly plotted stories, resolutions give rise to a new set of problems.
   The start of The Sheltering Sky has its end seeded deep within it. Port has become so disenchanted with Kit that he has reduced their marriage to an intellectual exercise. What he comes to expect from it can never be sustained. At one point in the book while looking at the sky, Port says, ‘I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind’. Bowles peels back that protection to reveal the pain and pitilessness of a modern relationship. We, the reader, sense this and pull against the inevitable and Bowles dramatises this tension. He has said that, after getting the idea for the novel, he wrote it ‘in cold blood’ in nine months flat. The only scene that proved tricky to write was Port’s death in the fly-blown desert town of Sbâ (one of the most convincing and harrowing evocations of death since Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich). He says, ‘I got to the death scene and I didn’t feel up to tackling it, so I ate a lot of majoun and just lay back that afternoon and the next day I had it resolved.’
   Literary novels such as The Sheltering Sky act as mirrors, but the act of reading and re-reading them presents us with the paradox—the reader is forced to reveal aspects of themselves in order to experience the reality of the text, a ‘reality’ that is different from their own. The impact of that reality will depend on the extent to which the reader actively participates and provides the unwritten part of the text, and yet, by participating in that way, the reader must think in terms of experiences beyond their own. Some texts offer nothing but harmonious world-building, purified of all contradiction and excluding everything that might disturb that illusion once established, but The Sheltering Sky doesn’t lie like this—it is so fragmentary that the reader’s attention is solely occupied with the search for connections, making us aware of our own capacity for providing links. Indeed, it is only by leaving behind the familiar world of their experience that the reader can truly participate in the adventure. In this way, Paul Bowles is Mercury, a messenger, world-traveller, transporter of communications from one realm to the next, and his cold, clear eye tells us that a truthful marriage can sometimes be both loving and loveless, that a modern love can be ‘twisted’.

‘A moral message is the last thing I look for.’ Paul Bowles

‘White Noise Machine’—review

3/21/2023

‘The machine in the title of Richard Skinner’s new collection is the cherry tree of its opening poem, which “explodes in white noise every spring”. It is a “perfect” machine, conducting towards healing, loading “a sense of surety and calm”. As does, in fact, the poem itself, with its villanelle-like repetitions and rhymes. Other forms of white noise we are familiar with – an untuned radio, the residual galactic hiss of the Big Bang, the sound of the ocean in a shell – act, I think, in the same way. Packed with data, inviting the imagination. Faced with such possibilities, Skinner can seem scarcely able to contain his excitement at the white noise of the world. In his poem “The Scene”, he ponders the constituent elements of a sea- and sky-scape, engages with possible similes, eventually concludes that

‘All the world is drawn to this single point
Moved to convene by enormous forces’

And the result as he stands enclosed in this serenity? If one were to ‘tap’ him today, he would ‘ring like a bell’. The enormous forces referred to are perhaps most movingly arrayed in “Amaryllis & the Iceman (for J)”. Here, dermatological traits visible in the addressed individual reflect a ‘journey (which) began in the Holocene/in Central Siberia’. The long development of our shared genome leaps compassionately into focus.

There’s a tremendous kinetic energy in these poems, evidenced in the wide variety of linguistic stratagems he deploys to express the wonder and joy of things. These range from bright-eyed vocalic transpositions to wholesale melding of poems by different authors. Wallace Stevens would surely have approved his evocation of the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) as ‘an ecru curtain/in an epic inert arena,/each inch an ounce in nuance’; while Louis McNeice and Paul Muldoon cohabit strangely in “Snow2”; and in “The Wild Swans at Coole N + 7” a technique of lexical substitution reminiscent of one employed by Christopher Middleton in parts of Pataxanadu leaves WB Yeats amusingly, but somehow still beautifully, transmogrified.

There are many cultural references in this collection, but don’t let that put you off. If you don’t recognise all, or even many, of them (and I certainly didn’t) then I can only testify that you’ll enjoy finding out about, say, ‘hunger stones’ in northern European rivers, the Sedburgh Embroidery, or the work of Agnes Martin or Claude Cahun. It’s all part of the pleasure afforded by this truly remarkable collection.’
— Peter Didsbury, author of A Fire Shared

Alain Tanner—An Appreciation

9/19/2022

I’ve just found out that, two days before Jean-Luc Godard died on 13 September 2022, the Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner also passed away. This is especially ironic because, with Godard, Tanner’s early films shared a radical political agenda. As part of my undergraduate English Literature & Film degree, we were forced to study how form conveyed political meaning in the films ‘Pierrot le fou’, ‘Weekend’ and ‘Tout va bien’. It was pretty tortuous. However, whereas Godard’s films quickly descended into an ill-thought-through Marxism, Tanner’s agenda in his early films was far more fully expressed and could therefore connect to a much wider audience. Maybe this was partly due to the fact that a couple of those early movies of his were written in collaboration with John Berger.
   After he made ‘Messidor’ in 1977 (a controversial road movie about two young woman who kill a man after he tries to sexually assault them), Tanner had a heart attack followed by heart surgery. Afterwards, he said he was through making didactic movies and emerged a few years later with ‘Light Years Away’, his first movie in English. This was in 1981 and the film marked my entry point into Tanner’s work. As an impressionable 16-year old, I remember watching it late one night on Channel Four. I vaguely remember it being set in a dilapidated petrol station in a post-apocalyptic world. The cast - including Trevor Howard and Mick Ford - was dressed in rags and there was a big bird which seemed to hold some great significance. It bemused me but I never forgot it.
   So, when his next movie came out a few years later, I went to see it in the cinema. The film was ‘In the White City’ and it made a deep impression on me which lasts to this day. The story is simplicity itself: a mechanic on an oil tanker, capriciously decides to jump ship at Lisbon. He spends the following few months wandering around the ‘white’ city, filming himself and everything he sees - the streets, tram rides, the sea - on a Super-8 camera. He sends these home movies to a woman (his wife?) in Switzerland, who has them developed and watches them. They are postcards from a man who is frozen in time and place, a flaneur who has no aim and no agenda, an unanchored sailor on the road to nowhere.
   Nothing much happens in the movie. It is dreamy, largely without event or incident and therefore plotless. It was no surprise to learn that the film was completely improvised by Tanner and his lead actor Bruno Ganz. The film carries no screenplay credit. The pleasure of the film comes from this aimlessness. It’s a film about the moment, the here and now, without care or comment. Is the sailor having an existential crisis or has he found himself at last? We never know, but that’s not the point. On the aforementioned undergraduate degree, I wrote a paper on Tanner’s film and its use of those home movies. The movies are an exploration of space, not time, and so they ‘freeze’ us and force us jump out of the story, just as the sailor has jumped ship and is landlocked. The home movies gradually replace the film’s story-time itself as the nameless sailor’s being dissolves into the surfaces of the city - the stone, the breeze, the water, the white light and dust.
   In the same year that ‘In the White City’ was released, Andrei Tarkovsky released his movie ‘Nostalgia’, a film with which Tanner’s bears a lot of similarities. In Tarkovsky’s movie, the main character (played by the late great Oleg Jankovsky) is also existentially ‘stuck’. Tarkovsky’s movie is devoid of plot, too. Set in and around the Roman baths of a small Tuscan town, the main events are a nosebleed, a rainfall, an argument, lighting a candle. Nothing happens and then it’s all over. Wonderful.
   A couple of years later, Agnès Varda released her stunning movie ‘Vagabond’, in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays a young itinerant woman called Mona who, when asked why she drifts around so much, simply shrugs her shoulders and replies, ‘I move.’ The film is a series of gazes, of one-way exchanges from different people—dropouts, hippies, a prostitute, an itinerant worker, a maid—but each of these ‘witnesses’ is not seeing Mona, but a reflection of their own regrets, secrets, longings. Mona is the blank centre of the film and she leaves no trace of her existence.
   All three of these movies are about characters in a state of self-imposed exile and all contain highly-choreographed tracking shots. For me, they form a loose trilogy of road movies, but of a distinctively European kind rather than, say, ‘Easy Rider’. When I saw these movies in the cinema, I was too young to fully appreciate their subtlety and sophistication. They are ‘writerly’ films - films that explore contingent states of being - rather than ‘readerly’ films, which rely on the idea of causality in plot. When I started to write fiction, I remembered Tanner’s film in particular. It taught me that you can write in real time, about inconsequential things, such as corners of rooms, billowing curtains, a night in a bar, the heat of the sun, a wall. Just moments, things, nothing more. We don’t have to be a slave to plot. It was a revelation.
   I was fortunate to meet and interview Tanner once, in the early ‘90s, when his movie ‘The Diary of Lady M’ was screened at the BFI in London. He told me a story that evening which I’ve never forgotten. Some time in the ‘70s, in between film projects, he mounted a camera facing outwards on his car window and drove around his native Switzerland for days and days letting the camera run and run. He edited the footage down to around 8 hours of film of roadside views of streets, trees, houses, lakes, supermarkets, mountains, petrol stations, etc. He organised an evening with friends to show them the footage. After all 8 hours, every one of his friends was numb with boredom and they all urged him never to release any of it. He said he’d never been so disappointed with a reaction in his life. I laughed when he told me that story because I would have loved that film. A great artist, massively overlooked and severely underrated. Merci, Alain. Adieu.

Mouse on Mars

11/7/2020

Mouse on Mars—A Primer

François Truffaut believed that you could sum up an entire movie in one word—his word for Last Year in Marienbad was ‘persuasion’—and if there is one word that sums up Mouse on Mars’ career thus far, I would suggest the word ‘playfulness’. They have never been as ‘challenging’ as the concrete analog noise of Panasonic or Main, nor as predictable as the made-to-order electronica for the club generation (Chemical Brothers anyone?)—instead, they have spent the last 21 years seeking to challenge themselves and their audience at every turn by playful exploration while, at the same time, miraculously managing not to descend into pedantic exercises or pointless noodling.
   For a long time, the myth was that Jan St Werner and Andi Toma met in the early 90s at a death metal concert. The truth turns out to be a little more prosaic—they actually met in the audience of a rock contest at Cologne’s Popkomm trade fair. They quickly formed a very close working relationship and fell easily in line with each other’s thinking—they even sign themselves ‘Jandi’. ‘It’s something very intimate, you can’t do music with anyone,’ says St Werner. Their very first recording together resulted in the single “Frosch” (frog in German), released in 1994, and people immediately tagged them with the Ambient Techno label alongside acts such as Higher Intelligence Agency, Aphex Twin, Spacetime Continuum and Orbital. However, they quickly shook off that label and moved onto pastures new. Of those early ambient/electonica outfits, few remain, and their only contemporaries (as a duo) to have built an equally solid body of work and to have kept their reputation similarly intact are Autechre and Plaid.
   Looking back over their career, they do seem to have more fun than most, which must derive from the fact that Mouse on Mars have always deliberately and systematically avoided being lumped into any school of thought, trend or movement. They shun linear progression, preferring instead to sidestep any second guessing by producing each time something completely different from the time before. The one consistent element in their career is their non-consistency. In 1998, Andi Toma explained, ‘We don’t feel part of any electronic movement, or any other movement. In fact, we have just three synthesisers and two samplers, so most guitar bands are actually more electronic than we are. In the future, things will be more interesting with electronic music because there will be better computers, but if you work with computers, you have to work harder to make sure the music isn’t just code. We want to make it more organic—we see our music as a community of sounds, and we make sure the sound has a position in the music.’
   This is a pretty good summary, and manifesto, for their entire output to date. Words like ‘community’ and ‘society’ have figured prominently in their thinking and approach to their work since they began making music and this sense of openness reached its apogee in 2014 with the release of 21 Again, a set of collaborations with friends and fellow musicians to celebrate their first 21 years of making music. To coin a phrase, the Future Is Now, and so to see whether or not Andi Toma’s prediction that things will be more interesting with electronic music because there will be better computers has come true, this seems like a good time to assess their journey up to and including their latest release 21 Again.

Vulvaland
Too Pure CD 1994
Iaora Tahiti
Too Pure CD 1995
Their debut album, Vulvaland, is by far Mouse on Mars’ most focused effort. These early tracks were a digital coming together of three strains of music: the kinetic four-to-the-floor techno of “Frosch” (based on a sample from Iggy Pop’s Zombie Birdhouse album), the dub of Prince Far-I on “Future Dub” and the Krautrock of Can and Neu! on “Katang”. Aside from the abrasiveness of that 29-minute closing track, the rest of the album is a collection of blissed-out ambient 4/4 grooves, which isn’t surprising as it was released on the last waves of music produced by Generation E. 20 years later, it still sounds pretty damn good.
   Much more structured was the distressed textures and digital cut-and-paste IDM of Iaora Tahiti, which is a contender for their most accomplished piece of work to date. Opening track “Stereomission” has a stifling bassline as the undertow, hooking and pulling us through the candy-coloured pop, but the digital surface is notched, punctured and chinked, revealing the dub effects hidden deep inside, sloshing around like soup. “Schlecktron” is one of the heaviest tracks Mouse on Mars have ever produced—the sound of a spacecraft emitting distress signals from above the seething, swirling surface of a red-hot planet. And then there’s the incredible “Bib”, with its ghostly choir intoning over the shimmering percussive rush—Mouse on Mars’ first negotiation with the blind joy that is Jungle. The Rousseau-esque “Papa, Antoine” was positively tropical with its use of kiddy roto toms, oompah bass and pedal steel guitar and the whole thing signs of with the beautiful, wistful “Hallo”, a claustrophobic listening experience, like being trapped inside a large multi-coloured balloon.

Glam
Sonig CD 1998
In the mid-‘90s, Mouse on Mars were called upon for a couple of head-scratching projects. One was to produce an album for Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür (of which more later); the other was a commission from Hollywood producer George Edmunds (son of Ali McGraw) to record the soundtrack for a B-movie entitled Gangster Glam, directed by ex-boxer and actor Tony Danza. Toma and St Werner duly took up the offer: ‘We synced the video to the instruments, so the video tape was leading the computer. It has a different personality. We would never have done it that way if it had been music for music’s sake.’ The producers were completely baffled by what MoM came up with and rejected it on the grounds that it was too ‘uncommercial’. Initially, Toma and St Werner disowned the project and it looked destined never to be heard, but MoM thought better of it and, when they parted company with Too Pure after the Iaora Tahiti album, they decided to set up their own record company, Sonig, one of whose first releases was Glam. Thank goodness they did, because the album is unlike anything else in their oeuvre and, after nearly 20 years, still sounds current and relevant.
   The opening track, “Port Dusk”, begins with three minutes of warm fuzz, billowing in and out of the speakers before we get a grinding crunch of clattering beats, a power drill bursting into a lava lamp. These harsh metallic tones continue on the aptly-named “Grindscore” before evolving into the flurry of the butterfly beats of “Snap Bar”. The rumbling cinematic moodiness continues over a further 12 tracks with titles such as “Mood Leck Backlash”, “Tiplet Metal Plate” and “Heizchase Nailway”. Indeed, Glam exemplifies just as well as any MoM album the fantastic wordplay in their titles, which recall and echo recognisable nouns and syntax but are always off-kilter with their own pre-lingual inventions. Again, ‘playful’ is the word. The cold presses of clicks, whirrs and burrs of sound here is as close to Isolationist drifts and drones as MoM ever got. Track after track conjures images of blasted, crepuscular landscapes and icy climates, cold and forbidding, all filtered through a dubby fluid undercurrent. This is a seriously accomplished piece of work, which (like all great art) was met by bafflement and indifference on its release, but which sounds better and better as the years go by.

Instrumentals
Domino CD 2000
Rost Pocks
Too Pure CD 2003
Back in ‘95/‘96, MoM were producing incredible tracks that made fantastic use of dub effects, but it was many years before these early vinyl-only compilation singles and EPs were re-released as CD collections. The first of these, Instrumentals, is made up of various compilation tracks from that period and about half of them are among the finest that Mouse on Mars have recorded. “Pegel Gesetzt” begins with a slow build up of static and bass before evolving into a softly patterned children's lullaby. “Owai” is straight-ahead, no nonsense techno, driven by sten-gun bass and leviathan belches. The stray whips and cracks of sound in “Subnubus” (featured on the compilation Folds And Rhizomes For Gilles Deleuze) are the perfect embodiment of Deleuze’s rhizomes—strands of sound that grow in an organic, vegetal way, finding growth and renewal in, and through, the gaps of a song. “Chromantic” is Mouse on Mars at their softest and warmest—the gorgeous melody line is subtle and wistful, and the whole thing is earthed by its very liquid bassline. Best of all is “Rompatroullie” with its nod to the Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra. The dancehall-reggae dub effects on this track are outstandingly used to create depth and breadth in sound, and the push-pull, stop-start rhythm is absolutely beguiling.
   Rost Pocks collects together the EPs Frosch, Bib, Cache Cœur Naïf and Twift and the “Saturday Night Worldcup Fieber” 12” single on one glorious CD and, although you might think it’s for completists only, it is actually a good place to start the wonderful Mouse on Mars adventure in sound. Things kick off with “Frosch” and end with its kissing cousin, “Froschroom”, a longer, loopier version. In between sit some of the most gorgeous electronic music you’re ever likely to hear: the glorious kick-ass Krautrock of “Schnee Bud” from the Frosch EP, the sublime “Maus Mobil”, with its post-breakbeat push-pull and Jah Wobbley bassline, the wiggly Fruit mix of “Saturday Night”—a breathtaking example of mid-‘90s breakbeat mayhem being applied to the gloss of minutely-programmed and precise rhythms to produce a track with squishy depth. On a lighter note, most of the fabulous “Cache Cœur Naïf” EP is included, with Laetitia Sadier supplying her voix sans vibrato on some bright and breezy chansons. My only quibble: I would have taken out the relatively one-dimensional Konkret of “Rototon” and “7000” and put in instead the wonderful ‘Lomo’ dub version of “Bib” and the equally good ‘Drykorn’ mix of “Dark FX”. But no matter, this CD is a priceless collection of totally original productions.

Autoditacker
Too Pure CD 1997
Niun Niggung
Sonig CD 1999
For the Autoditacker and Niun Niggung albums, Mouse on Mars made a decisive move away from the long, loose 4/4 workouts, like “Froschroom” and most of Vulvaland, and started to develop their songs into short, tightly-organised squiggles and squeaks of sound. These two albums represent some kind of apogee of their working practices up to the end of the 90s and they both achieved much more attention and recognition than they had thus far, with Niun Niggung even topping The Wire magazine’s 50 Best Albums of 1999. In interview, St Werner and Toma have talked about their way of working in the studio during this period—deliberately pushing too much data through the channels, forcing the machines to improvise in order to deal with the overload. The moulded plastic surfaces of their music started to be put under stress and the music catches these disruptions and distresses. St Werner says, ‘It’s not exactly synchronised any more. This is rhythm—it’s always beside the exact point, a bit behind it or a bit before it that makes a groove. Funk…’
   On Autoditacker, “Tux & Damask” continued their flirtation with Jungle while “Juju” and “X-Flies” were whirling mobiles of sound hung in a playpen, filled with pin-sharp insect detail and flurries of digital interference. The intricacy of these arrangements continues on Niun Niggung on tracks such as “Distroia”, an apocalyptic Jungle two-step workout, and was perhaps taken to its logical conclusion on “Super Sonig Fadeout”. This heavily processed track, with its crunchy glitterbeats and vocoder, is a gloriously inventive effluence of junk-filled Garage, so stuffed with ideas that it can’t possibly stay still, spilling out all over the shop. ‘I really believe in the idea of experimental as trying; working towards new possibilities and newness,’ St Werner says. “Super Sonig Fadeout” was another high water mark for Mouse on Mars and, if ever there was an obvious example needed for the playfulness in their music, this is it.
   At the time of these two releases, Mouse on Mars were part of the so-called ‘Neue deutsche Wellen’—a group of very talented artists/musicians, including Gas, Genf, Holosud, Pluramon and Wabi Sabi, all of whom lived and worked in and around Cologne and Düsseldorf. One of the centres of the scene was A-Musik, a shop and record label founded and run by Georg Odijk. Adjoining the shop was Odijk’s flat, which he happened to share with St Werner and Markus Schmickler (Pluramon). These close social set-ups were reflected in their music and these two albums continued their long history of invitations to other sound and visual artists to contribute to their music and artwork. On Autoditacker, the magnificent Laika bassist, John Frennet, puts down a monster groove that fires and propels the motorik of “Tamagnocchi”. On that same track (as well as many others on both albums), the live drumming is performed by Dodo Nkishi. French chanteuse and close friend Laetitia Sadier provided vocals for “Schnick Schnack Meltmade”. To return Sadier’s favour, St Werner and Toma played on and produced three tracks on Stereolab’s 1997 LP Dots and Loops.

Idiology
Sonig CD 2001
Radical Connector
Sonig CD 2004
The abrasive 2-step lark of “Actionist Respoke”, which opens Idiology, is bristling with clatterbox beats and hyperprocessed vocals and takes up exactly where Niun Niggung left off, as does the stuttering apokalypse-disko of second track, “Subsequent”. Third track, “Presence”, however, marks one of the siesmic shifts in the career of Mouse on Mars. Drummer Dodo Nkishi steps out from behind the drum kit and stands at the microphone, delivering a set of philosophically head-mashing lyrics about, er, presence. “The Illking” is another stark departure, this time into a pastoral coming together of synths, French horns and violins. There is the spirit of Copland and Ives’ Americana running throughout, on “Catching Butterflies with Hands” and “Fantastic Analysis”, a spirit started with Niun Niggung’s “Download Sofist”. This all comes to a crunching halt with the 2-step oompah of “Doit” and gets a bit too much on “First : Break”, a self-indulgent cacophony of directionless noise. But, overall, Idiology is another fine example of MoM’s shapeshifting nature.
   Radical Connector continues their zigzagging from style to style on each album, each more unpredictable and convoluted than the last. After the Baroque excesses of Idiology, Radical Connector is plush with hooks and beautiful pop melodies. The album sounds more like Basement Jaxx than Aphex Twin—an attempt to secure more mainstream commercial success? ‘We thought it would be good to be more precise,’ says Toma. The album’s tracks are split down the middle, with half the lyrics being supplied again by Nkishi and the other half by close friend Niobe (aka Yvonne Cornelius), with her synthetically pristine vocals. Two of the Nkishi tracks open the album: “Mine Is in Yours”—a cacophony of chattering voices and a pileup of beats—and “Wipe that Sound”, with its stomping funk bass and delirious falsetto whoops. For this listener, however, the more satisfying and intriguing songs are those sung by Niobe. The shudder and stutter of “The End”, the sleek sheen of “Evoke an Object” are pure pop songs par excellence. Best of all is “Send Me Shivers”, a very simple combo of mellow keys and crunchy beats and an outro heralded by strings, but a scintillating listening experience.

Live 04
Sonig CD 2005
doku/fiction
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf Book 2004
When 2004 came around, MoM celebrated their first 10 years with a live album and a book made up of commissioned artwork. As a duo, Mouse on Mars became very well-known for their very long and intense DJ sets of pounding Techno—“Twift Shoeblade” from Autoditacker and “Super Sonig Fadeout” from Niun Niggung were standout tracks that became live favourites. Since 1994, however, they also began touring as a band. London-based drummer Dodo Nkishi was drafted in to supplement their live performances, with Toma on bass and St Werner on keyboards. And what performances they were, too. I had heard that they were very good live but when I went to see them at the London Electric Ballroom in 1997, nothing prepared me for their full-on, surround-sound experience. Toma and Nkishi (wearing a T shirt that said I GOT THE CRABS) locked down the motorik dub grooves that night, nice and tight like Sly & Robbie, while St Werner unleashed a swirling cosmos of sounds from his very modest set-up of keyboards. The live album sticks to this band set-up and unsurprisingly features tracks from their most recent albums, except for the closing track, a monster version of the talismanic “Frosch”.
   How many bands publish a book to celebrate their 10th anniversary? Not many, but MoM did, but doku/fiction is more of an art gallery than a book proper. Once again calling on their outstanding contemporary artist and musician friends, MoM asked them to ‘remix’ Mouse on Mars in visual terms. What they got was paintings, photographs, pencil drawings, cut-ups, collages, cartoons, installations, scans, graphs and binary print-outs. My personal favourite is Adam Butler’s “Piano score for a remix of the Mouse on Mars song “Twift” in the style of Eric [sic] Satie”. The book also contains two very long and comprehensive interviews with Jan St Werner. When challenged by the interviewer that ‘Not everyone can stomach what you dish up’, St Werner’s characteristically cryptic reply is: ‘Granted. I couldn’t say precisely who listens to it, apart from a group of musicians perhaps, but who might then probably say at some point, 7/8 would be great, but 7/8 has been done in Pop. It was prevalent in the 70s. King Crimson, Yes or Faust, Can—there are loads of them, particularly in the genre of progressive rock and jazz.’ But there is, after all, a musical element to the book. Included in the back is an exclusive CD collection of “9 Sound Models of 37 Imaginative Mappings”, which comprises short pieces of pleasant but inessential electronica/Konkret, much better examples of which are “7000” and “Rototon” on their debut EPs, Frosch and Bib.

Yamo
Time Pie
EMI Electrola CD 1996
Von Südenfed
Tromatic Reflexxions
Domino CD 2007
Mouse on Mars have built their career on keeping their friends close, but they have also put themselves outside their comfort zone and collaborated with some singular (read ‘challenging’) figures in contemporary music. Recorded immediately after the Glam album, Yamo was the name for their collaboration with Kraftwerk’s Wolfgang Flür. St Werner described their time with Flür recording Time Pie: ‘He brought us to collapse. I think we all met at a level of what we call ‘Schlager’ [crass pop hits] in Germany. Not even Easy Listening, more like Easy Thinking.’ It’s true that the album contains some truly awful lyrics, but don’t be put off--Time Pie is one of the unsung jewels in Mouse on Mars’ crown and contains some genuinely gorgeous pop moments. The track “Aurora Borealis” has a deliciously icy sheen to it and an arctic stillness at its centre, all rooted in deep bass and dub spaciness. And, for some reason, I find the track “Naked Japanese” to be an astonishingly heavy four-and-a-half minutes, cresting and cresting to a climax before ebbing away on a wave of staccato synths.
   For their collaboration with Mark E Smith, MoM renamed themselves Von Südenfed (yet another example of their jokey wordplay) and, as with Leftfield’s collaboration with John Lydon, the resultant album proves to be surprisingly robust and solid. The record is awash with Smith’s familiar barbed and droll lyrics, but the music is wildly different from the usual MoM fare. The obvious standout track is the insanely catchy, grimey, 2-steppy “Flooded”, but most of the other tracks are pitched somewhere between rock and electro-clash. “The Young The Faceless And The Codes” is just squelchy bass synths and splattery drums, as is hit single “Fledermaus Can't Get It”. “The Rhinohead” is pure Motown, “Dearest Friends” is Ladyship Black Mambazo playing Hawaii, while “Chicken Yiamas” sounds like Blind Lemon Willy, for goodness’ sake. The hilarious “Jbak Lois Lane” sees Mark E Smith arguing with a fella named Jack who is mowing his lawn. ‘You know it’s Sunday, don’t you?’ Smith asks. Singing in German for one song (“Speech Contamination / German Fear Of Österreich”), perhaps for Smith this collaboration was the nearest he could ever get to a collaboration with his beloved CAN but, in lieu of that, this will do very nicely thank you. A versatile release with a smile on its face.

Varcharz
Ipecac Recordings CD 2006
Parastrophics
Monkeytown Records CD 2012
In interview, St Werner has revealed that Varcharz was made to break a publishing deal that he and Toma were unhappy with. It certainly is one of their weaker albums, in the sense that it lacks the same sense of fun as previous efforts. It also feels very unfocused. St Werner describes the album as ‘odd and free. It’s a mix of a rock and free jazz record.’ And it shows. Most tracks are just crunchy beats and deconstructed bleepery and the worst of this tendency is evident in “Duul” and “Retphase”, not enjoyable listens by any stretch of the imagination. It does, however, contain one classic killer MoM track, opener “Chartnok”, which is another hugely inventive flirtation with Jungle rhythms.
   After a six-year hiatus, Mouse on Mars reconvened for Parastrophics, one of their most coherent efforts for years. The album is awash with Prince-era synths and superbly-programmed stuttering, faltering beats. “Wienuss” is classic MoM—a highly-infectious, beautifully-controlled slice of white funk. The kick drum recalls Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines” and the track has the same HipHop forward movement. The barrage that is “Baku Hipster” has Space Invaders synths and a battering ram of bass drum. Startling. “They Know Your Name” has Dido once again on vocal duty and carries on his contribution where Radical Connector left off, although this time round the track is far less abrasive and much more radio friendly. Closer “Seaqz” is a whiplash whiteout of mad synths, cracking snare and blips and bleeps of arcade games—pure electronic propulsion.

WOW
Monkeytown Records CD 2012
Spezmodia
Monkeytown Records CD 2014
21 Again
Monkeytown Records CD 2014
Parastrophics was an astonishing five years in the making and so, for their next release, MoM did the exact opposite—WOW was created from scratch in a matter of weeks, and released just six months after its predecessor. And you can feel this letting off of steam—WOW is a totally exuberant return to MoM’s grass roots in the club scene with each track bouncing and bubbling along merrily. The track “ACD” even makes use of the much-loved Roland 303 and it’s as if we were back in 1988. The vocal presence tying the whole mini-album together is Dao Anh Khanh, whom the band met during their tour of Asia 2011. Dao’s shouty fantasy language recalls Damon Suzuki’s similarly guttural pre-linguistic lyrics for CAN. The Spezmodia EP is an equally full-on fun fest. The club tracks here are all wonky Gabba/Happy Hardcore and tap into their days as a riotous duo live act, as evidenced on their tremendous 2014 appearance at the Boiler Room in Berlin. These excellent releases are MoM at their purest and simplest.
   To mark a 20th anniversary, most bands would have put out a ‘Best of’ but, once again rejecting the conventional approach, MoM instead take one of the defining features of their career—collaboration—and use it on their anniversary release, 21 Again. There are some very distinguished collaborators here, including friends old and new: Mark E Smith, Tortoise, Eric D Clarke, Laetitia Sadier, Schlammpeitziger, Junior Boys, FX Randomiz, Yoshimi from Boredoms, Matthew Herbert, composer Olivia Block and Oval. The release sees MoM up to their usual tricks of showing total irreverence for form and experimenting with content until it is bent completely out of shape: the ersatz disco of “Fertilised”, faux rap of “Purple Frog”, the quasi-soca of “Queen Für Erschein” (co-written with Dodo Nkishi) and the simulated Koncret with Oval on “Gitto Ski”. “Key My Brain”, “Putty Tart” and “Somiak” are the standout tracks and are already destined to become MoM classics. For the most part, this is a highly inventive addition to the MoM discography, bristling and brimming with ideas, but the quality threshold does occasionally drop. Somewhere in this double album a very good single CD is waiting to emerge.

Ana Teresa Pereira

8/27/2018

I first came across Ana Teresa Pereira on Facebook. Ana is someone who uses her Facebook page in a very interesting way. She almost exclusively posts film stills, usually of movies from the 40s and 50s (she seems to favour Robert Ryan and Rock Hudson), but also from movies by Alfred Hitchcock and Victor Erice and David Lynch, among others. I love the work of all those directors but I happen to love Erice’s movies in particular, and not many people know his films, so my interest was piqued. We began talking and exchanging ideas. Ana has a greater love and passion for film noir and detective novels than anyone I’ve ever met. We shared a very similar artistic sensibility and we started to share work. I sent her a copy of my novel, The Mirror, and she sent me a copy of her novel Karen. Unfortunately for me, the book was in Portuguese and Ana explained that none of her 20 books had yet been translated into English. Then, in the summer of 2017, Ana sent me some short stories she was working on. I couldn’t believe what I was reading—they were so good. Here was a writer who was in complete control of her material and was producing work like nothing I had ever read before. I asked her if I could publish them and, much to my delight, she agreed.
   So, here for the first time in English, translated by Ana herself, is the work of Ana Teresa Pereira. It’s difficult to describe the style and content of her stories. The language is deceptively plain, unassuming—writing that doesn’t draw attention to itself—which is, of course, an accomplishment in itself, but what is really remarkable about these stories is their content. The eight stories here are all told from a female perspective. The women are all either actors or painters. They all read detective novels and listen to jazz. They all love the smell of heather and lavender. They all dress simply, usually in faded jeans and a white T-shirt. Pullovers, raincoats. Nearly all of them have green eyes. All their husbands are either playwrights or theatre directors. All the houses they live in seem to be chilly. The houses are either previously-abandoned or are situated on the edge of town. No one else is ever around, but there is usually a cat somewhere or other. In this way, Ana’s stories recall the mood and atmosphere of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico or Edward Hopper.
   But that’s not the half of it. Despite reading the stories many times and thinking about them, I still couldn’t put my finger exactly on what I found so strange about them. In his book, The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher examines and discusses what is weird or eerie in the work of writers and filmmakers as varied as Daphne du Maurier, David Lynch, HG Wells, Jonathan Glazer and Joan Lindsey’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. Fisher’s contention is that examples of the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’ are to be found on the fringes of science-fiction and horror genres. Both share a preoccupation with the strange, a fascination for the outside, for what lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This involves a certain apprehension, dread even. Freud’s term unheimlich—which is usually translated as ‘uncanny’ but is more accurately translated as ‘unhomely’—is about the strange within the familiar. The sense of wrongness of the unheimlich is often the sign of something new.
   Eventually Fisher arrives at a distinction between what is ‘weird’ and what is ‘eerie’. He says that the ‘weird’ is ‘constituted by a presence—the presence of that which does not belong.’ The ‘eerie’, by contrast, he says is ‘constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence.’ He goes on to say that the sensation of the eerie happens when there is something present where there should be nothing, or when there is nothing present where there should be something. As an example of the eerie constituted by a failure of absence, Fisher cites the ‘eerie cry’ of a bird. A bird’s cry is eerie because there is a feeling that there is something more in, or behind, the cry than we usually associate with a bird. The ‘eerie’ necessarily involves forms of speculation and suspense that are not an essential feature of the ‘weird’. The eerie concerns the unknown and, when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears.
   This was all very revealing as I was reading Ana’s work. Fisher’s distinction between the weird and the eerie, and his definition of one kind of eerie-ness, presented me with a way of explaining what I find so intriguing about her stories. The mood and atmosphere of the stories do seem to stray as far as possible from the familiar world without venturing fully into the realms of horror or sci-fi, but there are touches of the unreal and horrific in them. All the characters are haunted, or seem to be suffering from one form of trauma or other—aphasia, amnesia, shock, dread. The empty eyes of an amnesiac. The blank expressions, rather like the ‘models’ in the films of Robert Bresson. All the characters pick up and leave, or arrive in, places without warning or surprise. There is no sense of direction, no reason for their comings and goings. They wander around like zombies. Fisher talks about the repetition and doubling that is so central to Freud’s idea of the unheimlich and this is a very strong feature in Ana’s work. All the women in the stories seem interchangeable and, indeed, many of them replace other women in relationships, or are replaced by them. They are all doubles, doppelgängers, decoys. Some of them even have the same name. The narrator of “Fugue States”, for example, is a woman named Jenny—is this the same Jenny that appears in “Die, My Love”? Who knows? In keeping with Fisher’s idea that, when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears, Ana quite rightly never discloses the answers to these questions and so the stories keep their sense of the eerie.

Henri Michaux

2/1/2018

Image: René Magritte © ADAGP, Paris & DACS, London 2017

In The Courage to Create, psychologist Rollo May insisted that ‘the first thing we notice in a creative act is that it is an encounter’. It could be, he said, with ‘a landscape, an idea, an inner vision, an experiment’, but what would mark it out would be its intensity, for ‘genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.’ Henri Michaux’s collection of prose poems, Dreams like Enigmatic Paintings, newly and exquisitely translated here by Michael Eales, could not be a more perfect example.

The poems were Michaux’s response to the paintings of Réné Magritte, which in their urbane strangeness might have been expressly made to fascinate and bemuse him. The 1950s had been taken up by an alliance between Michaux and mescaline, a response to the horrific death of his wife in 1948 when she accidentally set her nightdress on fire. For more than a decade, Michaux experimented attentively with hallucinogens, recording his experiences in both text and drawings, and these works made his artistic name. But now, in the early 1960s, he was ready to meet with something new, weird and wonderful. Michaux was interested in the farthest outreaches of his mind, and Magritte’s art provided an intriguing mode of transportation for a melancholy poet. ‘More than anything, I wanted to know where these paintings would lead me; how they would support me; how they would thwart me; what inner desires they would arouse,’ Michaux writes in his forward to the text, concluding paradoxically, ‘Having only found so few paths, I regret that there are so many.’ The result is 31 brief poetic explosions, arresting, bizarre and inexplicable. There is no need to know anything about Magritte, or about Surrealism for that matter, to read them, for the manner of their genesis is an instruction to the reader as well. Just as Michaux fell upon Magritte by chance and let the shock inspire him, so the reader needs to approach these prose poems with an open and flexible mind, ready for an imaginative workout. What matters is to encounter them on their own terms and see what mental alchemy results.

Henri Michaux is one of the more clandestine figures of twentieth-century French literature, consistently avoiding anything that looked like limelight during his lifetime. Yet he was extraordinarily prolific, publishing over 60 works across a number of genres including poetry and travel writing, books of aphorisms, art criticism and his accounts of drug use, many illustrated by his own drawings. He has been described as a French Kafka, for the world of his imagination is full of hostility, aggression and fear. Inner demons fascinated him, and he was often obsessed by the idea of our inevitable isolation. Michaux found failure a great deal more convincing as an experience than success, which led to an art characterised by attrition, dissipation, perplexity, disintegration. He took up painting in the 1930s because of his frustrations with the closed circuit of language, but as both poet and painter he spoke from the place of being overwhelmed by the infinite, unknowable world. What makes his work powerful is that there is nothing performative or sensational about this evoked emotional state. Michaux was a quiet man who shunned all extravagance and his art is unsettling because of its genuine, subtle depth. Writing in the Guardian, Octavio Paz put his finger rather brilliantly on Michaux’s essential quality: ‘Painting and poetry are languages that he has used to try to express something that is truly inexpressible [...] All his efforts have been directed at reaching that zone, by definition indescribable and incommunicable, in which meanings disappear. A centre at once completely empty and completely full, a total vacuum and a total plenitude.’ I think this sums up Michaux’s inner contradictions well - a man of great humility, grafting away at the impossibly ambitious goal of describing the devastating extent of our limitations.

So it’s no surprise that, having sought a form of meditation in Magritte’s paintings, Michaux begins his preface to the text with the confession that time spent with the images has given rise ‘to dreams ...and confusion. The baffling painting is a starting point which stops dead.’ The Surrealist critic, Renée Riese Hubert has described Magritte’s paintings as being full of elements from an imaginary world ‘in search of a storyteller.’ But when Michaux offers himself for the role he shows both how intriguing and impossible it is; there is an abrupt and truncated feel to many of the poems, which open with an arresting image whose mesmeric quality refuses explanation. The marble sculpted head, for instance, that starts to bleed:

‘On the white shadowless face, a memory makes its mark, at first secretly, now betraying itself. The blood springs from the wounded soul.’

Or the tree stump that grows around the abandoned axe:

‘In the clearing, near the tree that lies felled, the stump has taken possession of the woodcutter’s axe. One of the gnarled roots, or rather one of the low woody supports, must have moved slowly and, like a bear’s paw, placed itself on the murderer’s tool, holds it and will never give it up. Justice at last. Equality. A new assertion.’

These have the quality of twentieth-century rewritings of the Brothers Grimm, dark fairy tale with a hint of twisted morality. In many of the poems there’s a magical or mystical animation taking place, the ‘rose that becomes a person’, for instance, or the person who becomes a house, or the door in a house undermined by an earthquake: ‘Its silly, pretentious, impassive rigidity was not maintained. As if finally it actually experienced real emotion, it buckled - the geological movement of a door - submitted to the unexpected, and frightful crushing and tearing.’ The innards of the poems are never simple, never static, instead there is this constant shape-shifting at work, whose guiding force is that of dark, troubled emotion. Nothing is safe from this kind of feeling, Michaux seems to be saying, not even sticks and stones and the rest of the inanimate world. It will find a way to seep in and destroy and become, as he writes of the tree roots, ‘A new anxiety for mankind.’

What we’re really talking about here is the uncanny. André Gide described how Michaux was fascinated by ‘the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.’ In this respect, he and Magritte are speaking the same symbolic language. Aside from a few images that will remind anyone with a passing interest in Magritte of some of his more iconic paintings - a nightdress sporting a pair of breasts, clouds floating in strange places - it’s easy to forget the original source, and not really necessary to recall it. But for both Michaux and Magritte, the everyday familiar world has terrific power to unsettle. ‘Nothing but the banal can support the unusual,’ Michaux writes, stating further on in the same prose poem that ‘The extraordinary has not succeeded in overcoming the ordinary.The ordinary has not been defeated by the absurd.’ This is a reasonable judgement to pass on the entire collection; Michaux’s skill in these poems consists in creating delicate tension between the ordinary and its potential to be fantastic, unsettling and bizarre.

Michaux achieves this by crafting poems that resonates the same way dreams do. It’s in our dream life that we regularly meet the ordinary transposed into the fantastic. Every element of a dream is tinged with both significance and absurdity. Dreams beg to be interpreted, yet often resist, they are full of strange metamorphoses, and even the most humble and ordinary object within them can reveal secret energies. The poems in this collection reveal the exact same profile. There’s a clue in the title of the collection, after all, and the dream speaks to us as a special kind of encounter with our own disturbing, unsuspected creativity.

Although Michaux was never a fully paid-up Surrealist, (they were mostly performative, sensational and excessive, the opposite to Michaux) he was more than ready to acknowledge his debt to the movement: it gave him licence to focus in on the parts of psychic experience that most interested him. What Surrealists thought was useful about dreams was very different indeed to what intrigued Freud about them, as became apparent when André Breton wrote enthusiastically to the father of psychoanalysis about his work. For Freud the dream was full of meaning that could be interpreted in an entirely practical way and applied to the dreamer’s waking problems. For the Surrealists, the dream was an extension of the real world, a form of perceptive revelation identifying something in the real that normality otherwise veiled. For this reason, Breton believed the dream to be a call to revolution (this perplexed just about everyone at the time). But for the same reason, other Surrealists simply enjoyed the dream for its funky weirdness.

The poetic value of the dream for Michaux can be found in the powerful dynamic of transformation, in startling images and the trappings of the uncanny, but I think his strange habit of undercutting the complexity of his images with sudden brutality also needs to be taken into account. ‘Everything here is of equal value, that is to say no value at all,’ Michaux writes in one poem, ending another: ‘But nothing happens. Everything has already happened; has stopped for who knows how long.’ The reader is left on the wrong foot, in radical ambivalence, wondering what to make of it all. Reading the poems, I began to feel that these abrupt and frustrating closures were the equivalent of the poet bumping into the frame of one of Magritte’s paintings - or waking up disoriented from the dream. It made me think of Octavio Paz’s insight into Michaux’s desire to put us in touch at once with both total plenitude and total vacuum, on the borderline where meaning disappears. There is no more unsettling collapse of meaning than the moment of waking, where what was once so vivid now becomes ephemeral, ungraspable and haunting.

These aren’t readily accessible prose poems; Michaux never sets the reader an easy task, and at first they can seem too cerebral, too absurd. They require a certain kind of mental gymnastics, and a willingness to enter the poetic space without trying to control it. But this is also what makes them beguiling. They are radically different to the kind of art that’s being produced today and open up the imagination in surprising ways. For me, Michaux’s dream-like prose poems are an impressive example of his poetic quest to find both a total plenitude and total vacuum of meaning. We are lucky to have them in this excellent translation, which manages to retain both the ordinariness and the peculiarity of every Michaux sentence. No mean feat, and one that allows the reader fully to experience the shivery oddness of this work.

Victoria Best, author of An Introduction to Twentieth-Century French Literature (New Readings Series)

Desert Island Discs

7/2/2017

“Gymnopédie No.1” (1888) Erik Satie, played by Pascal Rogé
A piece that, for me, was revelatory in terms of its simplicity, brevity and purity. Listening to it is like looking into a pellucid lake. It is deeply meditative, yet spiritually light.

Fauré’s Requiem: “In Paradisum” (1890) John Rutter & The Cambridge Singers
I’m more French than German when it comes to classical music and am always drawn to music that strives for simplicity and spiritual clarity. This is one of the most purely beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. I especially like this recording because it’s very atmospheric – you can almost reach out and touch the choir.

“Canaxis” (1968) Holger Czukay & Rolf Dammers
This piece was recorded and released in the late 60s, years before the advent of ‘ambient’ or ‘world’ music. Using found recordings from across Asia, Holger Czukay then went into his studio and manipulated and looped them into long, trippy, deeply meditative pieces. This piece is full of cavernous clangs, monks chanting, sudden bells and gongs and the blips and bleeps of radio frequencies. Listening to it is a hallucinatory, hypnotic experience.

“Surf’s Up” (1971) The Beach Boys
I was introduced to the Beach Boys by a couple of stoners at university. Like everyone else, I thought there was nothing more to them than songs like “Fun, Fun, Fun” and so it was an absolute revelation to hear how beautiful their unknown late 60s / early 70s period was. The three-minute pop song doesn’t come any better, or more beautiful, than “Surf’s Up”. Split into three parts, it is another of Brian Wilson’s ‘pocket symphonies’. God only knows what the song is about but its emotional connection is undeniable. Although Brian had the voice of an angel, he knew he couldn’t compete with his younger brother Carl’s and so he handed vocal duties to him, and what a job Carl did.

“Once In A Lifetime” (1980) Talking Heads
I was at school when punk started, but I never really bought into it. I liked Bowie’s Berlin period and the odd Joy Division song, but punk seemed so unimaginative to me. Then, in 1980, I saw the video for “Once In A Lifetime” and it blew me away. Who is this guy who looks like Norman Bates and what is he doing with his body? What’s he singing about? I can’t tell you how weird and wonderful this song seemed to me at 15 years old. Gradually, I learned more about the song, that he took all the lyrics from TV evangelist shows, for example, and that those jerky hand and body movements were actually taken from African tribal dances. Suddenly, I saw artistry and imagination. I took the plunge and bought the album, not quite knowing what I was letting myself in for. I was captivated and confused in equal measure and it took me many years to get fully to grips with these songs. The album is a very intense listening experience. The lyrics are clever and oblique, dealing with terrorism, obsession, confusion, paranoia, the apocalypse. The most complicated of these ideas are often expressed in the backing vocals, which act as a voice of reason to the paranoia of the main vocals. The music is incredibly manic and funky. If “Speaking in Tongues” is their ‘disco’ album, then this is their ‘funk’ album. Each song is driven by a minimal, fast, pulsating rhythm and the whole thing is torn through by Adrian Belew’s screaming guitar.

“Circles” (1984) Wim Mertens
I love this piece for its purity and simplicity. Mathematical in approach, it becomes very emotional in its effect as you listen to it. After a while, your senses become unanchored and the piece lulls and moves you to its dramatic, abrupt ending. I like a lot of Wim Mertens’ music. He draws heavily from Minimalism but he’s also incredibly lush and romantic.

“The Great Lakes” (1985) Morgan Fisher
I first heard this piece when I was 19 or 20 and it was another of those revelations. It takes Terry Riley’s idea of the time-lag accumulator and applies it to oriental soundscapes. The piece is totally about process, not product. As each part of the piece is introduced and repeated endlessly, the piece becomes haunting and fragile. I think it works rather like memories do – new memories come in and layer on top of old ones, so that they continually fade without ever disappearing completely.

“Mustt Mustt” (Massive Attack’s Duck Pond Dub) (1990) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
I love dub music—not just dub reggae, but the whole idea of the bass energy and rhythmic complexity of dub, whatever kind of music it’s applied to. This version by Massive Attack was done in 1990, four or five years before the remixing scene really got underway, and it’s never been bettered. It’s the perfect fusion of Sufi spirituality of the east and western rhythms. It sounds incredibly cheesy when you put it like that but, for me, it works completely. Every time I listen to it, I pull something new out of the mix.

“Southlite” review by James Miller

6/26/2017

“Southlite” is a lost nugget of late 90s dub electronica, a collaboration between the writer Richard Skinner and musical collective Pablo’s Eye originally planned as a soundtrack for a film that was never made. The forty-minute album is a shifting mosaic consisting of twenty tracks, a series of beguiling and eclectic excursions into ambient dub structured around short extracts from a previously unpublished novel by Richard Skinner. In the story, Jeziah, an urban nomad and apparent refugee arrives in the docks on a Dutch banana boat and struggles to find a place for himself in the city, his journey ending in Brixton police station, asking to be locked up. This narrative, deconstructed and re-contextualised by the music, drifts in and out of focus, words intoned by a hypnotic female voice, a strange journey through phases of alienation and rebirth. Around this, Pablo’s Eye weave a compelling tapestry of shifting sound and mood. Like the alienated narrator whose isolated journey through the fringes of London forms a loose narrative thread for the album, musically it inhabits a similarly liminal place, shifting in style, tempo and texture, a polymorphic symphony of dub-electronica. Pablo’s Eye describe themselves as “a temporary atmosphere, like a taste or a dream” whose music has the common goal of creating a feeling of travelling in time and space and this perfectly describes the effect of the album. Dub was forged in Jamaica by the ad hoc studio genius of producers like Lee Perry and King Tubby who pioneered methods of re-working rhythms for sound systems, breaking them down and expanding the levels, finding new moments of drama in the pace and drop, the sudden introduction and removal of percussion, their experiments pushed on for ever heavier and harder dubplates to satisfy the demands of the dancehall. These early ‘remixes’ reveal an almost infinite series of rhythmic and tonal variation within a song, allowing for continual reworkings and refreshments; in this sense every dub is also a collaboration, a musical palimpsest in which producer reworks producer reworks the musicians until traditional notions of authority and originality are completely effaced. As a result of this collaborative foundation, dub is a technique well evolved to translates the cosmopolitan vibration of multi-cultural London, a city where registers intersect and reconnect, styles can jump between cultures and hybridity is the norm, an approach clearly embraced by Pablo’s Eye.
The album opens gently, as series of modulations and drones gradually intercut with other, more discordant sounds. The slow, pulsing tracks are evocative of Loscil’s work, deep tunnels of expansive vibration and percussive texture suggesting a slow awakening, the self moving through phases of dream to consciousness, a sense confirmed by the narrator. “It was early morning…” she intones, “He began to make out sounds, as if someone were turning the volume up in his head,” the snippet a bridge to a heavier, more percussive sequence. Here, Pablo’s Eye blend reverb drenched tabla drums with other exoticised instrumentation, the earlier ambient meditation morphing into a series of intensifying drum and bass sequences. Throughout, the album counterpoints between these heavier parts and more introspective pieces that break down the pace and expand the mood. Despite this eclecticism, the album works beautifully as a coherent whole, the final track linking neatly with the opening. The production values have held up very well for an album that is almost twenty years old, or it might just be my own nostalgia for music from this period but there’s a pleasing warmth and organic wholeness to the sound, a hypnotic quality that conveys a true sense of being on a journey, a polyphony of overlapping sounds. This is music for psycho-geographers of both mind and place, a mood palette linking sonic locations with literal ones: an album to be listened to late at night or early in the morning, on the night bus home, watching the flicker of the passing city. Highly recommended.

'southlite' by Pablo's Eye—review by Owen Vince

5/24/2017

“None of us is outside or beyond geography”
- Edward Said

i.
This is the sound of a landscape of ice. Recently, my friend told me how – in the northern reaches of Norway – the fjords sang. Structures sing; cities sing, give life, and take it away. Bodies come close to other bodies, enter their worlds. And for hundreds of days – thousands – these cycles are repeated. This is the sound of a history re-entering an orbit, dragging close to the thick lump of a planet's heart.

ii.
“Southlite” by Pablo's Eye is an expanding wave; if you imagine a wave, splitting – radiating outwards – from the epicentre of an opening, an initial analogue shunt. This is the dry cough of a synthesizer before it has been tooled, equipped, prepared. We're being “let in”, but let in slowly. The ice melts, creaks, and yawns open its skin to let out ships which – not even ghosts any more, or skeletons – plough.

A sound unwinds, between the uncaught stands of grey-white buildings which broadly constitute the city of London, and of those parts of London which are not yet London or were, once, a part of London. In this landscape the speaker-composer descends throughout its entire sonic texture (again, a wave, breaking) with the conscience of a field recordist, ear plucked and levelled keenly to these attuned waves which break and break over and through her. Ambience builds, sustains, accumulates – we are entering a language place in addition to a sound place, a confluence of sound and linguistic texture. Words parr and split through the fruit's skin, if you imagine a fruit.

The first part, it gives a hypnotic dub inflection, warped & echoing; against a fading incurring drumming, distressed like train wheels going over points, gaining intensity, flanging at its outer edges; becoming more conspicuous, becoming less certain of itself – a derailment of sorts, which our - “the” - voice attends to, calmly, certainly, as if all of this were known and predicted; a vase of water poured exactly into a cup that fits it, without spillage, without missing a drop.

Other notes – girded by War of the Worlds-like B-movie thrusts into (no, from) the dark, contain within them a middle-eastern vibrancy, as if applying themselves not to conventional tonality but to the semitone, to microtonality. Great housey beats crash into the mix (or do they emerge from it?) in slow time, always echoing; if it is house then it is the club, 1993, after the ravers have gone home, sunk in mist, back to bedrooms, behind doors. A drum continues, lapses, rises. This is a good thing; we're treading into accident, something heard from another room that we are not hearing, or should not be hearing, or are not welcome to hear in the first place. We are immensely lo-fi, slightly in slow motion, beckoning. A choral organ is summoned, as a violin arches across the cobalt, singing. It is a hypnotic sound, a drugged sound, constantly veering into and away from the light. The narrative picks up, is dropped, and occurs again.

Why am I watching the past? Can I pause, transform, transfix this thing? I am walking into the night, up a flight of stairs; a crane is turning, car headlights streaming red amber pulses.

“It is early morning; he begins to make out sounds, as if someone were turning the volume up in his head. He hears a constant stream of traffic.”

“Southlite” can be conceived of as collages of sound; brought together, in continuous and surprising rearrangement. But it doesn't clarify a specific sonic architecture; it remains an exquisite corpse, generating toward mystery and obscurity; unlike the deceptions of deep house melody-making (and it is not shy of its debts here), it listens you toward its centre. Dragged-out, echoing bass has the tonal thickness of Augustus Pablo, roots reggae cascading (again, out from) an ambient pull and drawl. It has the deep and echoing array of “human mesh dance”, the sound-stage decomposed away from a recording studio and into a city; unbounded by sound-insulating tiles, it allows the sound to disappear itself and to refract back onto the listener in jubilant, frightening, melancholic spears.

The “depthless contemporary” moment which Mark Fisher spoke of is engrained throughout every texture of Pablo's Eye, the ultimatum without a language to convey it; we have arrived (are arriving) within an assemblage culture of disfigured parts, which nonetheless shuttle forward or give the impression so, as if only by lazy assumption that a new day heralds forward movement. The cancelled future. The speaker-composer is lost, abridged and taken apart as they confront the myriad workings of a culture as undifferentiated material without visible structure and relationships.

There are newer, and tighter, structures which arch throughout the work; I kept pairing “Southlite”, in my listening to it, with Sister/Body, the Czech-Slovak techno experiment. I am pulled back toward early/late echoes of Massive Attack, a deep shuddering course.

iii.
Originating from Belgium, and founded in 1989, Pablo's Eye consists of six artists working across mediums and technologies, instruments and forms. Voice, guitar, violin, samples, text. Translated and edited by writer and poet Richard Skinner, the words sway earthly – and often transparently – through the myth-smoke of the long, slack chords and pulses of the record's structure. The central figure – fictive, Everyman, specific, real – is Jeziah, yet the possessive voice talks both about a person (“he”) and about another. “It is early morning”, a deliberate observation; record; archive. “All around me” is followed by “Voices”, as if the two songs, in title and imaginary, are part of the same conversation. The original soundtrack was composed in 1999 for an abandoned film, which itself was intended to be a collage; a fitting visual structure for a musical composition which is more than any OST, but rather a mirror-montage. Jeziah is a figure arriving, given a place; flat 1109, sights of the docks, with cargo and papers. Jeziah throws himself ultimately to the police, entering what the album calls his “darks”; a sense of guilt, loss, rage, abandonment, confusion. Jeziah is a migrant voice, tossed and moving, both purposeful and lost. “Southlite” was based on a text for a novel by Skinner – also called “Southlite” - and is testament to a subject living on the fringes of society; all about him is a density of living and complex lives, yet he is constrained and pulverized by them. “Southlite” is an appropriate lyrical and compositional moment at a time when migrants – dying, dead, barely alive, desperate to live – arrive on numerous shores to seek refuge in a society which blunts them, turns them away, rejects them within itself. Jeziah has been coming – and going – for centuries. He is arriving again, now. In a recent exhibition at the Triennale of Milan, the exhibition included a film; the film followed in decayed wavering shots people subjecting themselves to the sea, and being pulled down into it as the rock of Gibraltar crested on the distance. The music was of water entering the field of sound; crushing, but voices could be made out against it. The film was projected across walls, across mirrors. “Southlite” is mirror and water; it is the city after its levies have broken, the streets erupting in proximity and distance. Jeziah's story – a story in fragments, in smashed continuities – is mesmerisingly conveyed in a composition and story which teeter on the edge of comprehension, and invite us to give empathetic witness to their happening; as drums – loose, beating, dub – reflect the rhythm of traffic, they also reflect the rhythm of a mind which is passed by that traffic. To dance to it is to be pulled in, lured; yet its core constantly threads away from us, the fragment arising in the ascendant. That the film project never came to fruition is a melancholy reflection on Jeziah's own failure-to-become within his new society. Throughout, I kept returning to a line by Ocean Vuong, also reflecting on coming and going, on colonial history, on now:

“the song moving through the city like a widow”

“Southlite” is both song and widow; movement and stasis. At least – in listening – we reactive that movement, and allow it a possibility to continue there.

OMGV, May 2017

Owen Vince is a writer, digital artist and electronic musician. His recent releases include 'body without organs' (Harsh Noise Movement, 2017) and 'sometimes, frequency' (Illuminated Paths, 2016). He tweets @abrightfar.

10 Novels That Changed My Life

4/10/2017

Ruby Speechley asked me if I would write about 10 books that were somehow important to me. I was delighted to be asked and thought long and hard about my choices. I decided I would choose those books that really expanded my understanding of what fiction could do and how it could do it. These 10 books blew my mind and changed the way I thought about fiction forever.

Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky

In Bowles’ quasi ‘beat’ novel, two moneyed Americans arrive in Tangier just after the Second World War in order to rejuvenate their marriage. Port and Kit’s journey starts at the coast and goes directly into the desert, stopping at places that become fewer and further between and less and less well-populated until, ultimately, they arrive in the middle of nowhere. The desert and its ‘virulent sunlight’ take on an increasingly claustrophobic, emptying role, smothering love and hope until all that is left is sand and wind. This doomed journey into the desert is a subtle, sophisticated metaphor for this stunningly honest portrayal of a modern marriage.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

As a young man, Italo Calvino read Marco Polo’s account of his travels to the Orient and had always wanted to write about them but he never knew how. Many years later, he found himself writing numerous microtexts of imagined cities. He had the idea of framing these descriptions with Marco Polo’s fabulous voyage to the Orient. At around this time, Calvino was invited to join OULIPO and his fiction began to incorporate that movement’s obsession with building complex mathematical structures into literary texts. Calvino believed strongly in the idea of a work of art as a map of the universe and the sum of all knowledge, a vocation in Italian literature that he said had been handed down from Dante to Galileo. Invisible Cities is no exception. Its multifaceted structure allows for multiple, non-hierarchical readings. It is the single work that embraces all his previous works as well as alluding to the Bible, classical literature, medieval texts, oriental literature and utopian/dystopian literature from Thomas More and Aldous Huxley. Most of all, it displays what Calvino learned best from Borges, namely that brevity can encompass infinity.

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

The Vegetarian is about a woman who wants to become a tree. Set in Seoul, Part One, entitled “The Vegetarian”, starts in the first person from the POV of a man whose wife, Yeong-Hye, one day announces that she is now a vegetarian. Her husband finds this intolerable, as does her father and mother, and they seek to force her to eat meat. Yeong-Hye resists so strongly that she cuts her wrist in protest. Her family have her committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she stays for several months. Part Two, entitled “Mongolian Mark”, is set two years later and is told in the third person from the POV of Yeong-Hye’s brother-in-law, a visual artist who has formed a secret desire for Yeong-Hye ever since her attempted suicide. Part Three, entitled “Flaming Trees”, is in the third person and told from the sister’s POV. Yeong-Hye has been committed to a psychiatric hospital again and, as her sister travels to visit her, the sister thinks back to when she and her sister were young girls. It transpires that their father used to physically abuse Yeong-Hye, about which her sister has feelings of shame and guilt. While in hospital, Yeong-Hye tells her sister that she has completed her metamorphosis from animal to vegetal and is now a tree. The book ends with a vision of some trees on fire. As the novel progresses, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of the human relationships within the book. The sister, who was barely mentioned at the start, evolves into a main character. Her husband, also hardly noticed at the start of the book, comes forward to have his own voice before then disappearing from the narrative altogether. By the end of the novel, Yeong-Hye’s ex-husband (the entry point into the novel) has long since been forgotten. The men disappear, the women remain. The only constant is Yeong-Hye herself, although she doesn’t have a voice or her own vantage point in the narrative. She remains an enigma from start to finish.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans

I’ve read all of Ishiguro’s books but When We Were Orphans is my particular favourite. As a result of his love of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Ishiguro was keen to attempt a novel narrated from a detective’s POV but, in When We Were Orphans, we remain in the dark as ever regarding how his main character Christopher Banks actually solves any crimes. Indeed, in place of being aligned with a narrator who can never quite grasp the reasoning process of the great detective (e.g. Watson), our perspective is shifted to a detective-narrator whose subjectivity and emotion often overwhelm the rational aspects of his role as detective. Ishiguro’s narrative has all the trappings of the detective story, but none of the internal logic. Banks is another of Ishiguro’s ghostly, haunted narrators, an actor who wrongly interprets the reality around him.

David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel

This novel does what it says on the tin. Not a novel in the conventional sense—with a plot, characters and narrative drive—instead, it is a series of short, sharp quotations and observations that seek to touch upon and draw out the points of connectivity in the whole history of literature and culture. Imagine a spider’s web turned into a globe. Because of this wealth and scope of its material, this is the purest book I know and one I return to again and again and again and again.

Valerie Martin’s Property

Property is quite simply the most astonishing historical novel I’ve ever read and Martin’s narrator, Manon Gaudet, a listless southern belle from New Orleans, is one of the most fabulous creations I’ve ever come across. Set in the early 19th century, the novel revolves around Sarah, a slave girl who may have been given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, and whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon’s husband’s inclinations lie. Property is a novel written on the fault line of race and racial tension and contains one scene of the most excruciating horror and violence I’ve ever read in a novel. It is also a highly elliptical book whose central mystery remains unsolved. Are those whisperings Manon hears behind the wall? If so, who is whispering?

Herbert Read’s The Green Child

A man in a black cape named Olivero is sitting on a train in 1930s Yorkshire. He looks totally out of place. He gets off at a village and looks for the stream that flows through it. It transpires that, after a long period spent in South America, the man is returning to the village in which he grew up. From a bridge, he looks at the stream and it slowly dawns on him that it is flowing the wrong way. Deeply confused, he decides to trace the stream to its source to check if he is right. On his way, he comes to a house in which he sees a woman tied to a chair, forced by a man to drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Instinctively, Olivero hurls himself through the open window and rescues her and he and she travel together to the source of the river, which lies at the bottom of a deep pool of water on the moor high above the village. After this bewildering set-up starts one of the most bizarre novels I’ve ever read. Inspired in equal part by Read’s two literary heroes, HG Wells and Joseph Conrad, The Green Child breaks all the rules of conventional fiction and is a real one-off, a true original. You will never read anything like it.

DM Thomas’ The White Hotel

Where Herbert Read’s The Green Child is Jungian, DM Thomas’ The White Hotel is Freudian. Thomas’ book is divided into six parts, the first of which is actually a long, highly erotic, prose poem that we later discover was written on a score for Don Giovanni. The second section is a journal, a prose version of the same events. In the third section, Sigmund Freud introduces his case study of a woman called Frau Anna G, an opera singer who has come to him complaining of pains in her breast and womb. It isn’t until the fourth section, well over halfway through the novel, that we meet the ‘real’ main character—Lisa Erdman—for the first time. In the fifth section, we follow Lisa in the present day as she gets caught up in the deportation of Jews from Kiev in September 1941. The final section is a coda: a kind of dream, or maybe a (death)wish fulfilment—we are never sure what. The oneiric narrative of The White Hotel demonstrates that time is once again treated as an element to be shaped and shifted. The Russian-doll-like structure of the narrative means that we never discover the truth of Lisa Erdman; her character constantly eludes us, just as her own past eluded her.

Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

This book, which I reviewed for the Financial Times in 1998, was a huge influence on The Red Dancer. Ugrešić’s book is one of the most unusual and original novels I have ever come across: diary entries, footnotes, quotations, descriptions of photographs and bits of autobiography mixed with the cultural history, myth, fables and dreams of her native Croatia—social realism shot through with magic realism. Bears more than a passing resemblance to another great novel of political exile, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Hugo Wilcken’s Colony

The year is 1928. Sabir—petty criminal, drifter, war veteran—is on a prison ship bound for a notorious penal settlement in the French tropics. On his arrival, he is sent to work camp deep in the South American rain forest. There, he wins the confidence of the camp’s idealistic commandant, who sets him the task of landscaping a lush garden in the wilderness. At the same time, Sabir is planning an escape with a group of fellow inmates, but he realises that his only hope of escape is to become someone else entirely, to slip into a different dream. The novel’s two sections shadow and mirror each other in distorted form; they are internally consistent, and yet not quite consistent when set side by side. The novel travels along a narrative faultline, resisting a totally logical, realist explanation, forcing the reader to look elsewhere for resolution. Think Papillon meets David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

This list appeared as a guest post on Ruby Speechley's blog in October 2017.

Review of 'Legend of the Necessary Dreamer' by Carl Lavery

2/1/2017

The question of power, in particular its relationship with language, is a question that has long interested me, and it for this reason that I have felt so overwhelmed by Maria Fusco’s new novel, lost in its slipstream, always catching up. Like her earlier radio play and site-specific performance Master Rock (commissioned by Art Angel in 2015), The Legend of the Necessary Dreamer is a text that transmits matter through language, writing that is both about materiality and is materialized in and by itself. Hence, I think, its power, its capacity to touch the body of the reader through the ear, even though (and for obvious reasons) the writer has absented herself. In this text, through her prose, across some great distance, Fusco transmits a kind of strange power, power that undoes itself, weak power we might say, power that ideology is unable to measure or constrain. Maybe magic or alchemy are better words than power…

At any rate, the magic is a magic of voice, its rhythm, its pitch, its capacity to transport.

The Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, to borrow a favourite word from Antonin Artaud, is 'telluric'. It is a book about bells, dreams, memories, architectures, cities, houses, peacocks and earthquakes. Things radiate and reverberate in it. It is an affective read. The reader is bombarded with space, tripped out on signs, disorientated by stucco. The ethos is sculptural; the logic Orphic. You are moved around; the text sings. Bells speak, dust articulates, earth tremors seek intimate discourse. There is also, I think, an attempt to resurrect the dead.

This is a book for our time, the Anthropocene. The setting in Lisbon, in the labyrinthine rooms of the Palácio Pombal, is no coincidence. Lisbon’s earthquake and tsunami on 1 November 1755, All Saints Day, mark a moment of profound ontological and epistemological rupture in the European project. We are haunted by Lisbon. The moment when the earth speaks back, a ‘quake in being’ that Immanuel Kant repressed and Voltaire was astounded by. In the very heart of the Enlightenment, with its myths of progress and science, Lisbon showed that the end was in the beginning – that matter is not only brilliantly vibrant (Jane Bennett), but molten, dangerous, dark. It can destroy you.

In the face of Lisbon, more than two centuries after the event, Fusco’s poetry is a poetry of equivalence, language that seeks to speak the secret language of things – walls, floorboards, beams. Like Virginia Woolf before her (To The Lighthouse) Fusco is, I think, a Deleuzian. Her writing expresses the world of matter, producing haecceities and refrains, making the world expressive – and thus, perhaps, liveable. If you want to understand The Logic of Sensation read The Legend of the Necessary Dreamer. This is fleshy writing, writing as meat and bone. There are no abstract concepts. Fusco performs theory, making it her own, sending it off, always and again and again, on some dizzy line of flight, the revenge of the aesthetic. Only the work of Lisa Robertson gets close. History, philosophy, theory: thinking through the lyric.

The book is a book of fragments and slippages. Words, sentences, clauses are always liable to implode, collapse, and go molten. The text is like lava, stone that flows. There is profound generosity in this quest for equivalence, an openness to the non-human world, a search for some kind of intimacy. And yet there is also, too, how could there not be?, a reckoning with grief, an articulation of loss. In one of her daytime reveries, Fusco says:

'To walk on history. To believe I am walking on history. I am concerned the floor will not remember me… Where the nails have hit home, a split transpires in the oak, and this marking of time, of time creeping through organic substance makes me mope.'

Fusco’s writing is distinctive, easy to recognise as hers, the persistence and distribution of a voice in diacritics. The sentences are full of brio, confident, up front. They astound and declaim: ‘We human creatures must find our match in scale’. But this frontality is a lure. As the eye follows the signs, easy meaning unravels, the texture start to bevel, and suddenly you find yourself through some seductive opacity, lost in a logic of language alone, a logic, that like the texts of Rimbaud, Genet, and Patti Smith, affirms that all reality really is just language, and vice versa. Politics is at work here, too. In Portugal, a country of conquest, and Lisbon, a city of empire, Fusco makes us feel like strangers in our skin, foreigners in the house, shipwrecked on the shores of a Europe full of cracks, crevices and fissures, in which the walls are always already breached. An immense sense of hope rings out of the text, a pedagogy of affect, a bell that ‘persists in duty’, a clapper that cracks open power’s obsession with measuring the time of production. In the Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, time percolates and flows, it is a sky that no power can anatomize or set to work.

This is power of another order… maybe alchemy or magic would be better words….

Carl Lavery, Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Glasgow

Introduction to the reissue of 'The Red Dancer'

1/4/2017

“History is nothing other than a distillation of rumour.” Thomas Carlyle.

Before I wrote The Red Dancer, I had no idea who Mata Hari was. I thought of her in the same way that I thought of Rasputin, or Madame Blavatsky—she was a ‘name’, yes, but why? What did she do to make herself so famous? I started researching the life of Mata Hari in the summer of 1998 by reading all the biographies of her life I could lay my hands on in the old British Library Reading Room with its beautiful blue-domed ceiling. As I read them, I found that they all contradicted each other, and so I thought I couldn’t trust any of them. But, crucially, they all had one thing in common—there seemed to be two keys to understanding her life: personal reinvention and self-delusion. How strongly we identify with historic figures depends on the idea of singleness and consistency—the more singular and consistent they are in the way they live their lives, the more ‘knowable’ they become (think of Einstein, Churchill or Gandhi)—but the life of Mata Hari was neither singular nor consistent; quite the contrary. Rather than let that stop me from writing the book, though, I decided to see if I could structure The Red Dancer around this problem of who exactly Mata Hari was. I eventually arrived at the idea that the narrative could be a series of multiple and inconsistent points of view, made up of eyewitness accounts by people both real and imagined, mixed together with letters, newspaper cuttings, documents, quotations, interviews both real and imagined, as well as fiction.
   My idea was that each of these chapters, narrated by people who encountered Mata Hari, would be discrete entities which, taken together, would paint a fuller picture of Mata Hari in a way that no single viewpoint could. But each of these narrators wouldn’t know that their testimony was part of a larger picture. They were not narrating with an agenda; they were just telling their story. The only character who doesn’t have a voice in the book (except in the Prologue) is Mata Hari herself. Living in the public eye as she did, and in such a male-dominated world, Mata Hari’s life wasn’t entirely her own to control or keep. This is the real sadness in the story. In some ways, I think of Mata Hari as a proto-feminist but, at times, she was also her own worst enemy. Ultimately, my aim was not to take up a position for or against Mata Hari; rather, I wanted to present enough material for the reader to judge for themselves. After all, as Carlyle’s quotation points out, history itself is nothing other than contesting stories and the different stories surrounding the myth of Mata Hari is what lies at the heart of The Red Dancer.
   Every novel has its antecedents in other novels, and mine is no exception. I read Madame Bovary for the first time just before I started writing The Red Dancer—indeed, it was the very fact that I was going to write The Red Dancer that made me read Madame Bovary. The two women have much in common—dissatisfaction, self delusion—and meet much the same fate. More useful, however, was the amount of detail in Flaubert’s book about the kinds of cloth, furs, dresses, haberdashery, hats and gloves Emma Bovary wore. Fabulous. What a wordsmith he was.
   The other book that was a huge influence on The Red Dancer was The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić, which I was reviewing for the Financial Times at the time. Ugrešić’s book is incredible—one of the most unusual and original novels I have ever come across—diary entries, footnotes, quotations, descriptions of photographs and bits of autobiography mixed with the cultural history, myth, fables and dreams of her native Croatia—social realism shot through with magic realism.
   Even more so than books, however, I would say that behind every novel I’ve ever written there lies a film or films as the main influence. In the case of The Red Dancer, this influence was François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, which I had seen at the Venice Film Festival in 1993 when I managed to persuade the Sunday Times to issue me a Press Card. As with Ugrešić’s book, Girard’s film operates around the theory of montage, placing things in harsh juxtaposition rather than in smooth transition and thus we get 32 mini-documentaries: five interviews with people who knew him, re-creations of scenes from Gould’s life, as well as various odd items such as “Gould Meets McLaren”, in which animated spheres reminiscent of those in McLaren’s animations move in time to Gould’s music. Girard said: ‘As Gould was such a complex character, the biggest problem was to find a way to look at his work and deal with his visions. The film is built of fragments, each one trying to capture an aspect of Gould. There is no way of putting Gould in one box. The film gives the viewer 32 impressions of him. I didn’t want to reduce him to one dimension.’
   All this was intoxicating to me and Ugrešić and Girard taught me to be bold in how I structured The Red Dancer. I decided that I would fragment Mata Hari’s story by including several non-fiction chapters, which would serve to arrest and open out the story to provide a cultural and social context. These chapters would show how the times in which Mata Hari lived helped shape her life. They were also great fun to research and write and, when I delivered a draft of The Red Dancer to my editor at Faber, Lee Brackstone, there were almost as many non-fiction chapters as fiction. He and I spent several weekends at his flat in Battersea while he went through the text and, much to my alarm, stripped them out one by one. Out went chapters on maths, fashion and truffles. Lee felt that so many non-fiction chapters left Mata Hari out of focus and he kept cutting until the ratio of fiction to non-fiction chapters was about 2 to 1. He was absolutely right, of course.
   Since its original publication in 2001, I’ve dipped in and out of The Red Dancer but I haven’t reread it in its entirety. For this reissue, Faber asked me if I would like to make any changes to the text. It didn’t take me long to realise the problem with an invitation like that—where would you stop if you did want to change something? You would go on and on making changes, unravelling the original story until there was nothing left. Each time you write a novel, there’s only so much time it remains malleable in your mind and, once it’s been ‘cast’ and published, you can never revisit it in quite the same way again. That way madness lies and so, for that reason, I quickly decided that I would leave the text as it was, warts and all. Looking back over the book for this reissue, I’m glad Lee and I made those decisions to cut and cut. I like the way the book still operates around the principle of harsh juxtaposition, rather than smooth transition, with the character of Mata Hari herself represented, not as a continuous wave, but as a storm of interruptions. This is perhaps a more honest way of portraying such a complex character. After all, how many of us can truly say we are the same ‘being’ at any given moment? We are, in fact, all complicated people with many facets to our personalities and this is what the structure of The Red Dancer tries to portray in the case of Mata Hari.

Plug—'Back on Time'

12/15/2016

In a 2004 interview, Luke Vibert (aka Plug) insisted that he hadn’t released the best tracks that made up his 1996 album, Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa. ‘I really like Plug 1 and Plug 2, Plug 3 is OK and the album was pretty good too, but I don’t think I compiled the best tracks.’ This is an astounding admission, not least because the album was one of the seminal releases of the flourishing and divergent dance music scene in the mid 90s. He has admitted, too, that he can no longer create any new Plug tracks. ‘Y’know I just can’t,’ he says, ‘it’s hilarious. I still try every so often to do a Plug track and I just can’t do it - I don’t know why. It just ends up sounding like an Amen Andrews track which is why I came up with that stupid name in the first place. I think the Plug stuff was how it was because I was just getting into jungle and I wanted to have a bash and it went slightly wrong in a way.’ So, if Vibert thinks he got it wrong on Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa, did he get it right on these 15-year-old Plug tracks, finally gathered together onto an album entitled Back on Time?

Proceedings kick off with ‘Scar City’, and ‘kick off’ is the right expression. The bass drum kicks in straight away and we are immediately back on familiar territory. The track is a stunning mix of sampladelic vocals and a melodic, metronomic bassline, all driven by an off-kilter yet highly infectious rhythm track. ‘A Quick Plug for a New Slot’ is equally impressive and could have easily sat anywhere on Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa. Its beats are so propulsive and catchy that the whole thing just leaves you breathless with its energy and enthusiasm. Perhaps the album’s best track is the title track, which has the same monster bass and sprangy, time-stretched beats as the title track of Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa. The album closes with another highlight, ‘Flight 78’, which has the same tight, ersatz-jazz feel as ‘Delicious’.

One of the most amazing things about Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa was that no track was under 7 minutes long. The vocals on the brilliant early Plug EPs were goofy and the beats choppy, but Papa showed more attention to the development and flow of each track as it was built up steadily to a head-crunching climax and was then given a slow, long outro. That’s not the case on Back on Time - only two tracks exceed 7 minutes and a couple hover around the 3-minute mark. ‘Come on My Skeleton’ is a bit ravey while ‘No Reality’ and ‘Mind Bending’ would fit better on one of his Wagon Christ releases, but these are mere quibbles when faced with such killer tracks.

As with previous Plug releases, Vibert’s trademark humour is evident all over these tracks, but don’t be fooled - behind the apparent tomfoolery is a master producer, whose productions are tightly arranged, beautifully programmed and sequenced. Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa was a showcase for Vibert’s extraordinary production skills and techniques. He is a master of making a track that, while seemingly cut’n’thrash and throwaway, moves you forward in unexpected, compelling and clever ways and the tracks on Back on Time are no exception and equally good. Luke Vibert might think that the output released under his Plug moniker ‘went slightly wrong’ but Back on Time shows how wrong he was. It brings him right back to the future and bang on track.

This essay appears in Vade Mecum.

Steely Dan—A Lexicon

12/6/2016

A is for Aja (1977), possibly Steely Dan’s finest hour and certainly their most commercially successful record. Aja made Steely Dan as famous as Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. Using more than 30 musicians, mostly jazz musicians (including sax legend Wayne Shorter), the album is brimming with complex jazz chord changes. Its gatefold sleeve, featuring Blue Note-style liner notes, added to the impression that the roots of Aja lay in the 50s jazz scene. But the subjects of the songs were still those down-and-out characters living on the fringes of society that so fascinated Fagen. “Deacon Blues”, arguably Steely Dan’s greatest character study, is a song about an aspiring musician dying drunk in an after-midnight car crash. It is the closest Becker and Fagen ever came to autobiography. Fagen says, ‘It was a kind of socio-cultural explanation of how we grew up and some of the reasons that people became musicians.’

B is for “Barrytown”, one of Becker and Fagen’s oldest compositions, which finally saw the light of day on the band’s third album, Pretzel Logic (1974). The song is named after a hamlet near Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where Fagen and Becker first met in 1967. The sci-fi writer William Gibson is a huge Dan fan and references to their songs litter his work, including his novel, Count Zero, in which the futuristic settlement is named Barrytown.

C is for “Charlie Freak”, the eponymous character in a song (from Pretzel Logic) about the effects of drugs and the levels to which people are taken advantage of in their pursuit of them. On a par with those other classic drug songs, Bert Jansch’s “The Needle of Death” and Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done”, it is beautiful but chilling… ‘And while he sighed his body died in fifteen ways.’ Don’t do it, kids, just say no!

D is for “Doctor Wu” (from Katy Lied, 1975), one of the many Asian-Americans to inhabit the Dan’s songs. A song about loss, illusions and how the image we have of certain people fades in our minds. Or does it? The narrator goes searching in the Biscayne Bay, ‘where the Cuban gentlemen sleep all day’, for the song that Doctor Wu used to sing. But he finds nothing, only the shadow of a man he once knew.

E is for “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo”, the cover of the Duke Ellington track that appears on Pretzel Logic. Becker and Fagen got hold of all the available versions of the song and combined elements of them for their ‘cover’. It amused them that a wah-wah guitar could sound so similar to a muted trumpet. The song was originally recorded in 1926 and is an early example of what Ellington called his ‘jungle music’ (See also the line in “Babylon Sisters”—‘turn that jungle music down, just until we’re out of town’).

F is for “FM”, the best Steely Dan track never to make it onto an original album. The track’s propulsion was built up entirely from a click track (metronome) in the studio. Becker did the guitar bits and Johnny Mandel did the string arrangement but, brilliant as both are, they are upstaged by Fagen’s fantastically sneering vocal. Lovely sax, too.

G is for “Green Earrings”, one of my favourite Steely Dan songs, taken from my favourite Steely Dan album The Royal Scam (1976). Its upbeat, infectious shuffle masks a very seedy story of the mysterious Greek man (a pimp? sugar daddy?) who is eyeing up a much younger woman. What catches the narrator’s eye is the rather fetching jewellery she wears, which he remembers because of their ‘rare design’. Lovely.

H is for Hoops McCann (who features in “Glamour Profession” from Gaucho)—another fantastic Steely Dan hipster. Apparently a ‘crowd-pleasing man’ with ‘brut and charisma’, but just who is Hoops McCann? What’s he doing lurking in the shadows, accepting packages outside a basketball court? Is he fixing a tournament? And why is he going to Barbados?

I is for Influences. Becker and Fagen were passionate devotees of jazz, obviously, but in the mix there is also some blues and numerous songs that would fit perfectly into the Great American Songbook, plus smaller amounts of rock, bossa, reggae, etc. Contrary to popular belief, Steely Dan are NOT predominantly a rock group. In the 70s, Rolling Stone magazine opined that ‘Steely Dan are the only group around with no conceptual antecedent from the 60s.’

J is for the swampy R‘n’B groove of “Josie” (from Aja), one of the many women who appear in the Dan’s songs, the others being Peg, Aja, Ruthie, Rose (Darling), Snake Mary, Rikki, Katy (who lied), Lucy, Babs (in love with Clean Willy), Lady Bayside, Cathy Berberian, Louise (the pearl of the quarter), the Broadway Duchess and the Queen of Spain. Fagen has said the name Aja came from a schoolmate whose soldier brother had returned from Korea newly wedded to a woman named Aja.

K is for “Kid Charlemagne” (from The Royal Scam), yet another druggy Steely Dan lowlife, dressed up (I imagine) just like the Harvey Keitel character in Taxi Driver—tight stripy pants, white vest and a trilby with a feather. Cooking up dope in his hotel room, Kid Charlemagne has to go to ‘LA on a dare and go it alone’. His cover is soon blown and he has to do a runner. Is there gas in the car? Yes, there’s gas in the car.

L is for Lhasa, which pops up in the song “Time Out Of Mind”, from Gaucho (1980): ‘I am holding the mystical sphere / It’s direct from Lhasa’. Seemingly continuing Fagen’s fascination with the Far East, the song was actually yet another song about taking drugs. Becker’s heroin addiction was getting out of hand around this time, culminating in him breaking his leg in a traffic accident. The song features a guitar solo from Mark Knopfler, who later explained how exasperating an experience his guest appearance was. Becker and Fagen insisted on take-upon-take but, as he couldn’t read music, Knopfler had to take a tape of the song back to his hotel room and work on it through the night.

M is for Mizar, a star in the constellation Ursa Major (better known as the Plough), approximately 88 light years from Earth. In fact, Mizar is not just a single star, but a ‘quadruple’ star—consisting of two binary stars orbiting each other. A reference to ‘Mizar Five’ crops up on “Sign in Stranger”, from The Royal Scam, and is typical of Fagen’s interest in sci-fi, more fully explored in his solo album Kamakiriad.

N is for Napoleon, who is name-checked in the song “Pretzel Logic”. The narrator says he’s never met him, but plans to find the time. “Pretzel Logic” is one of the Dan’s three 12-bar blues songs, the other two being “Bodhisattva” (from Countdown to Ecstasy, 1973) and “Chain Lightning” (from Katy Lied).

O is for oleanders (Nerium oleander), a poisonous evergreen shrub with fragrant white-to-red flowers and narrow, leathery leaves. Originating in the Mediterranean, it is now in common use as an ornamental plant in gardens around the world. The plant appears in “My Old School” from Countdown to Ecstasy another song about Bard College: ‘Oleanders / Growing outside her door / Soon they’re gonna be in bloom / Up in Annandale.’

P is for “Parker’s Band”, a track from Pretzel Logic, the Parker in question being Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, born 29th August 1920 in Kansas City. Renowned as probably the best and most influential jazz saxophonist of all time, he died aged 34 after a life of serious excess. In Ken Burns’ magnificent documentary, Jazz, Winton Marsalis described Charlie Parker as a man ‘who could never outrun his appetites; his appetites always outran him’.

Q is for … Nope, couldn’t think of anything for Q.

R is for Rikki. Whatever you do, Rikki, don’t lose that number because it’s the only one you want.

S is for Steely Dan, a type of (fictional) Japanese dildo featured in William Burroughs’ 1959 novel Naked Lunch: ‘Mary is strapping on a rubber penis. “Steely Dan III from Yokohama,” she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room. “Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don't go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa.”’

T is for “Third World Man”, the melancholy story of demented youthful idealism gone psychotic. It was originally recorded at the Aja sessions but, when they needed a song to finish Gaucho, Becker and Fagen pulled it from the vaults, re-wrote the lyrics, kept Larry Carlton’s gorgeous guitar solo and built up a whole new song about a Rambo-like youth. Beautiful and silky smooth.

U is for Ulysses, whose story is retold in “Home at Last” (from Aja), another of the Dan’s most beautiful and accomplished songs: ‘I know this superhighway, this bright, familiar sun’. The song is filled with natural imagery—sky, sun, sea, shore, rocks. Although it is not technically a blues, it nevertheless has a firm bluesy shuffle (named the ‘Purdie shuffle’ after legendary drummer Bernie Purdie), lulling like waves. The sirens serve the road-weary narrator smooth retsina, they keep him safe and warm, but it’s just the calm before the storm.

V is for Las Vegas, where all the “Show Biz Kids” (from Countdown to Ecstasy) live in their corner houses with their booze, Steely Dan T shirts and all that money can buy. They’ve been all around the world, and they’ve even been to Washington Zoo. They try, they really do, but they just make movies about themselves and don’t give a fuck about anyone else.

W is for whores, or, more precisely, the “Babylon Sisters” (from Gaucho)—so fine, so young. ‘Tell me I’m the only one.’ A song full of lust and longing and the dust of the Santa Ana winds. The sisters are like a Sunday in TJ—cheap, but not free, and they will make you realise that you are not what you used to be.

X is for … Nope, couldn’t think of anything for X, either.

Y is for “Your Gold Teeth”, a title so good they used it, not once, but twice. “Your Gold Teeth” appears on their second album, Countdown to Ecstasy and is as much about the tobacco they grow in Peking as anything else. “Your Gold Teeth II”, which appears on their fourth album, Katy Lied, is in a jazzy 6/8 time. The drummer on part II was a young Jeff Porcaro, who described the track as ‘pure bebop’. In both songs, Donald Fagen implores their owners to ‘throw out your gold teeth and see how they roll’. The answer they reveal? Life is unreal.

Z is for drinking a ‘Zombie from a coco shell’ (“Haitian Divorce”). The Dan’s songs are filled with their favourite tipples—beer in “Here at the Western World”, retsina in “Home at Last”, coke and rum in “Daddy Don’t Live in that New York City No More”, piña coladas in “Bad Sneakers”, Scotch whisky in “Deacon Blues”, Cuervo Gold in “Hey Nineteen”, cherry wine in “Time out of Mind”, grapefruit wine in “FM”, kirschwasser in “Babylon Sisters” and a black cow in “Black Cow”.

This essay was first published in Vade Mecum.

Erik Satie—‘The Velvet Gentleman’

11/4/2016

Erik Satie was an iconoclast, a visionary and a pioneer. He was an iconoclast because, throughout his life, he refused all conventional teaching. As he said himself, he was a man who was happier using 13 letters of the alphabet to evolve his own language than using 26 letters like everyone else. He was a visionary because the music he composed broke so firmly with the past, particularly with Wagner. No one had written music like his before, nor have they ever since. His limpid, languorous style has often been imitated but never bettered. Finally, he was a pioneer because his music and ideas were the forerunners to a great deal of music that we take for granted today—furniture music, ambient music and repetitive (or minimal) music. Without Satie, we would have had a very different kind of John Cage, and without John Cage, we would have no Brian Eno.

Satie was born in Honfleur in 1866 and, apart from one trip to Brussels, lived in Paris the whole of his adult life. And, besides one disastrous six-month affair with an artist and acrobat called Suzanne Valadon, he remained single and celibate all his life. More than anything or anyone, he loved children and animals. For 27 years, he let no one into his room except stray dogs. He said, ‘The more I know about men, the more I admire dogs’. But Satie did have one great friend in Claude Debussy, who was the composer Satie most admired in his life and with whom he maintained one of the greatest ever friendships between musicians. Satie claimed to have only ever cried twice in his life—once at the death of Debussy and once at the death of Lenin.

One of the keys to understanding Satie’s life and music was the idea of Immobility. He said that, for him, it was richer to ‘imagine’ life than to experience it. For him, experience was a form of paralysis and so he withdrew into himself. I think one of the reasons the act of withdrawing was so important to him was because he wanted to live many different lives in one place rather than the same life in many different places. Immobility allowed him to stay in one place and grow, change and shed skins, and this was symbolised by the various ‘uniforms’ he adopted throughout his life. He started out dressing in a priestly, floor-length ‘smock’, then, for seven years, he wore nothing but seven identical velvet suits, and then, in the last stages of his life, he wore the black suit and bowler hat of a minor civil servant.

Another key to Satie was the idea of The Miniature. Jean Cocteau said of him that ‘The smallest work by Satie is small in the way a keyhole is small. Everything changes when you put your eye to it.’ He made countless drawings of tiny houses, manors and châteaux, the production of which would absorb him for hours and days. These imaginary worlds were, for him, every bit as real as the ‘real’ world and he felt more at home in them. For Satie, The Miniature was a refuge of greatness.

The final key to Satie’s work is the idea of Repetition. In 1949, John Cage went to Paris to find out more about Satie’s music (apart from a few cognoscenti, Satie’s work was unknown at that time) and one of the pieces he discovered was entitled “Vexations”. Played through once, this rather innocuous piece made up of 36 diminished and augmented chords lasts no more than 2–3 minutes, but Satie had set a trap for the performer by saying that the piece should be played 840 times in succession. To do this, he said, ‘it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities’. If you follow Satie’s instructions, the average time it takes to perform the piece is about 24 hours, which is longer than it would take to perform all his other pieces of music put together.

It might seem like a joke, but Satie was deadly serious and the repetitive nature of all his pieces raises interesting questions about the function of boredom in art. Satie said that ‘boredom is deep and mysterious’. Of “Vexations”, Cage said, ‘The music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after a while the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begins to set in … It is only boring at first. After a while the euphoria begins to intensify.’

In May 2007, I was in the audience in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern for a performance of “Vexations”, performed according to Satie’s instructions. One of the pianists for the event was Gavin Bryars, who talked about its difficulties for a pianist. He said that, even after performing it many times over, pianists have great difficulty committing it to memory because of the baffling complexity of its construction and notation, and the piece requires tremendous concentration to play precisely because you return to zero 840 times. It is only in time that the piece works. For both performer and listener, “Vexations” is a test of the limits of endurance and patience—it is a maze, a koan, an inner journey as well as a spiritual vexation.

Satie was never rich or famous in his lifetime; indeed he was a pauper by choice for the whole of his life, but he was greatly admired by many musicians and artists who would go on to become famous. At his funeral were, among others, Picasso, Cocteau, Brancusi, Man Ray and Georges Braque. Satie’s favourite book was Alice in Wonderland and he often said that, because he was half Scottish, he was the only Frenchman who could fully understand English humour. He approached life humorously and was by nature an absurdist, so when Dadaism and Surrealism came along, despite being much older than others in those groups, he fitted in quite naturally with their ethos. His younger friends called him ‘Le Mâitre’ (‘The Boss’) and he sat in on their meetings as chairman, but was also their mascot.

Satie always maintained that he was a bad composer and an even worse pianist. He was indeed a very bad pianist, but of course, we now know that he was, in fact, a very good composer. The most famous of his pieces for piano are the “Trois Gymnopédies”, written when he was 21 and ill in bed during his military service. They were three versions of the same theme and Satie likened them to walking round a piece of sculpture and viewing it from three different angles. Based on ideas of purity, antiquity and tranquillity, the pieces remain amongst the best-known and most famous ever written for the piano.

But of all Satie’s creations, I think the most magnificent was his own life. I’ve always admired his refusal to conform, his dedication to his art, the singularity with which he pursued his dreams. Just as he was receiving some small recognition for his work, Satie fell gravely ill with pleurisy brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. He was moved to the St Joseph Hospital and was given a private room paid for by the fabulously wealthy Comte de Beaumont. It was there that he died in 1925. It is hard to sum up any life in a single line, particularly one as willful and eccentric as Satie’s, but his contemporary Louis Durey came closest in his description of Satie as ‘one of those capricious plants which produces a strange unique flower in some solitary and inaccessible place’.

David Bowie Is...

11/4/2016

David Bowie is crossing the deserts of Arabia with his friend Abdulmajid in search of the secret life of the heroine before she dies. They have no idea where she is. It’s hot and they have misjudged the distance (as usual in deserts) back to camp and have to hunker down in a dune for the night. David Bowie is glad to be out of the sun. He has sand in his eyes. This week has dragged past him so slowly. The days fall on their knees. How he longs to be in a cool, wet moss garden in Japan, watching kabuki.

Abdulmajid has an infinitely long and sad face. Night falls. ‘It’s amazing how weirdly alone I feel,’ David Bowie says to Abdulmajid, ‘like I’m actually myself here, tonight, with you, but I’d rather be with my little China girl. Sorry, Abdulmajid,’ David Bowie says. The only other surprise of the night is a sudden star shower at around 3am. ‘Shooting stars!’ David Bowie says, but Abdulmajid explains that they’re not in fact shooting stars, they’re shots fired by terrorists from Somalia across the Red Sea. The tracers burst above their heads in starshells of orange, green, blue, and a harsh white, and the deeper colour of explosions. ‘I wonder what Somali women are like?’ David Bowie thinks.

Abdulmajid has seen these displays of colour in the nighttime desert a thousand times before and soon falls asleep, but David Bowie can’t sleep. He is thinking about all the love he has lost—in particular, a girl he knew in Berlin, a much younger girl with whom he fell in love, although she didn’t love him back, which made David Bowie love her even more. She couldn’t have been more than 14 years old. She was just a little girl with grey eyes. Her name was Christiane and she stirred a deep yearning in him. She refused to tell him her surname because she was afraid he would look her up in the telephone directory and lay siege to her home. But he knew her surname began with an F and, she was right, he would have done exactly as she feared. Things came to a head one night when David Bowie was mooning around her and she snapped. She said, ‘You’re the kind of man I’d sleep with only because I was too tired not to.’ David Bowie never saw her again and heard from a mutual friend that she had moved on to Zürich. Eventually, he got fed up of all the electric blue rooms in Berlin, with their high ceilings and huge windows. Too much light. Besides, Iggy was getting on his nerves, so he left Berlin.

As dawn approaches, David Bowie has been running through morning’s thoughts and fantasies and is now full of tension and fear. He realises that he and Abdulmajid are in danger, but then he has always put himself in dangerous situations—emotionally, mentally and physically—in order to produce any good work. Living in Berlin, and leading such a spartan life there, was something new for him. Forcing himself to live according to the restrictions of the city was good. Every day when he got up, he enjoyed cycling to the Hansa studios to work and then going to sleep every night and dreaming under his paintings. And, at the same time, he had locked himself into his own timezone, disconnected from the city. David Bowie knows that every timezone he creates for himself only exists for him—not everyone can exist in the same now at the same time. Only in memory can different timezones co-exist. And then, just as quixotically, he sometimes felt the need to move on and make a new career in a new town, and so he packed a bag and moved on. But where to now? He has written songs in all the Western capitals and he has always got to the stage where there isn’t any friction left between him and the city. They became too retro-nostalgic, or decadent. In London, he was Ziggy the alien, in LA he was the Philly soul boy and he was the Thin White Duke all over America and Europe, but he is no longer able to compose in London or LA, nor Paris, nor Berlin. ‘Where am I now? David Bowie thinks. ‘What have I done?’

David Bowie knows that, no matter how much he strives, he is never ‘finished’—he is only ever ‘becoming’. Looking at the sand stretching endlessly in every direction, he says, ‘I am not who I am.’ He has been so many men in vain but he wants to be one and himself. Now, he will ‘become’ himself, naked, with no more masks to hide behind. He will rise like Lazarus from the dead skins he has shed. This will be a new start for him. Just then, a small tree appears in front of him, hovering above the sand and shimmering like a hologram. It is covered in moss and is sprouting fresh, new leaves and vines all the time—the whole beautiful vision is an offering of a new lease of life. ‘Heaven loves ya,’ David Bowie thinks. He used to have ‘believers’ who believed in him, but after this night David Bowie realises he doesn’t need them anymore. He knows what he must do now—he must make one final, magical movement from Kether to Malkuth. The tree vanishes. He wakes Abdulmajid, who has slept soundly throughout this whole episode. ‘Come on, mate,’ David Bowie says. ‘Time to go.’ ‘What about the heroine?’ Abdulmajid asks. ‘Forget about her. I have to move on.’ ‘David, you never settle, never find a home in one place, always moving.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ David Bowie smiles, ‘Ain’t that just like me.’

Originally written for and performed at ‘#Bowie: find the others’, Brixton BookJam Monday 7th March 2016.

‘Walking the Line’ of The West Highland Way

10/4/2016

During the holidays after my A-levels, I worked as an aeroplane cleaner at Gatwick. I found many things on planes that summer but what would turn out to be the most significant was a small book called Of Walking in Ice by the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. While in Munich during the winter of 1974, Werner Herzog learned that Lotte Eisner, the famous German film critic and writer, was dying in Paris. ‘Es muss nicht sein’ [It must not be], he said. Taking out a map, he drew a line from Munich to Paris and made a pledge to walk the line in order to keep her alive. It took him 21 days to complete and the book is a record of his journey. (Interestingly, Eisner survived for another nine years after Herzog's pilgrimage.)
   Fast-forward many years to 2015, a year which saw the deaths of two people very close to me—my brother-in-law Pete Massey and my good friend and Goldsmiths colleague Bart Moore-Gilbert. Pete died of Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) skin cancer in August 2015. He endured years of terrible pain with great strength and stoicism. He was a hero and I was in awe of him. Then, in December 2015, Bart died suddenly after a short battle with kidney cancer. He stayed alive just long enough to see the birth of his son, Luke, and died a few days later.
   As many who have likewise lost loved-ones to cancer will understand, Pete and Bart’s battles left me feeling helpless, and I wanted to do something to address this. I have loved fell-walking from a very young age and have walked extensively in the Lakes, Skye, Iceland and the Alps. Walking was something I knew I could do. I chose the West Highland Way and decided to walk it to raise money for Cancer Research. Much like Herzog, I would ‘walk the line’ for Pete and Bart.

The West Highland Way is by far Scotland’s most popular long-distance walk and is included in the top 20 of the World’s Best Hikes in by National Geographic's Traveler magazine. Stretching 96 miles from Milngavie (pronounced Mull-guy) just outside Glasgow to Fort William in the north, the walk takes in the entire eastern shore of Loch Lomond, then into the Highlands of Rannoch Moor and Glencoe before descending into Fort William, at the foot of Ben Nevis.
   I wanted it to be a pilgrimage and so I decided I would walk on my own. I was apprehensive about this, but I needn’t have been. The walk is well-travelled and there is usually someone else within sight. I quickly got into a rhythm with the walking and soon became addicted to the relentless sense of forward movement, an urge that pulls you very strongly, regardless of the terrain. After the 15-mile days, I would arrive at my destination utterly exhausted and yet, after a hot meal and long sleep, I woke each morning raring to go. Any stiffness from the day before was gone after 10 minutes of walking again.
   I befriended many people along the way, crossing paths with them again and again. They were all pilgrims like myself, some also doing it for charity, all with their own stories. While stopping in a coffee shop in Balmaha, one fellow traveller happened to notice a photograph on the wall. He looked at it closely for several moments before pointing to it and shouting that the little boy in the photograph was him. It turned out that the photograph was of his primary school class. Why it was on the wall nobody knew and the man had grown up miles away and had no connection at all to Balmaha. What are the odds? Another man told me in The Drovers’ Inn in Inverarnan that he had brought his two children there to show them where he and their mother, who had recently died, had shared many happy memories.
   But mostly I was on my own and happy for that. I wanted the eight days to give me time to reflect, to switch off and allow for unconscious processes to take over. The link between walking and thinking is an old one. Thoreau, Benjamin, Nietzsche and Wordsworth were all inveterate walkers for whom walking was a form of creativity. I believe all writing already exists inside one’s self, in a preverbal, rhythmic, motor place in the body. The trick is to find a way of tapping into it. When I can’t find the words, a walk helps to free them from their underground chamber. As I walk, wild thoughts appear. They fly ahead of me and I have to follow them to understand what they are saying.
    Then there is the scenery. The further north I travelled, the greater the sense I had of being cast adrift in immense, magnificent landscapes. There are no words to describe how staggering Glencoe is. Only on foot can you get so close to the water, the land and the clouds and I felt I was disappearing into the landscape every day. For me, landscape is one of the sources of art. In Latin, ‘inspiration’ means breathing life into something while the German word Beseelung means to give soul to something. My task on the West Highland Way was to immerse myself in the environment, attune myself to my surroundings and listen to the silence of the place so acutely that it might reveal its melody to me.

By the end of the walk, I was in great shape. The blisters I had picked up on the tough days along the shores of the loch had all healed and I had walked myself into the week. In fact, I could have gone on another week. On the last day out of Kinlochleven and into Fort William, I started so early in the morning that I didn’t see another soul all day. I sang to myself. One of the things that Bart had asked me to do while he was in hospital in the summer of 2015 was to make him some compilation CDs, which I did. I still had them in my iTunes library, so I played them and sang along as I walked and remembered him.
   During the week, I thought a lot about the phrase ‘walking the line’. What kind of line was I walking? A tightrope? A tether? A leyline? A songline? Ariadne’s thread? Perhaps a little of all those things. Herzog’s walk was an act of shamanism, a trial by ordeal that Herzog endured, survived and recounted in his book. Ever since finding it that day, my copy of Of Walking in Ice has become my talisman, not because of what it is, but because of what it stands for: decision, resolve, tenacity in the face of adversity. It bothers me, niggles me, like a stone in the shoe; it remains in my body like a potential blood clot to the heart—‘Onwards! Onwards!’—and it has taught me that books can matter, so much so that they can potentially keep a person, or at least the memory of them, alive.

This piece first appeared in the January 2017 issue of Psychologies magazine.

You can donate to Cancer Research UK here.

Agnès Varda’s 'Vagabond'—a film that leaves no trace

7/25/2016

‘If you tell the story of Citizen Kane, it’s not much of a story. An old rich mogul man is dead. He said a word we don’t understand. We don’t discover so much, just some pieces of his life and finally it is just a sled. Is that a story? It is not much. What makes Citizen Kane so interesting is the way [Welles] told us about the man—intriguing us about what people think about him.’ Agnès Varda

If Agnès Varda’s 1985 movie Vagabond is like any other movie, then it would be Citizen Kane. When you’ve seen both, you see that Varda almost certainly used the structure of Orson Welles’ 1941 movie as a blueprint for her own. Both start with a death, both are an investigation into a life, both end inconclusively.
Vagabond is about a young woman, Mona, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, who has perished from the cold, and the attempts by numerous people who crossed her path to assign meaning to her chosen way of living. There are 18 ‘visions’ of Mona presented by those who came across her. The film is a series of gazes, of one-way exchanges from different people—dropouts, hippies, a prostitute, an itinerant worker, a maid (the ‘punctum’ moment when the maid addresses the camera directly)—but each of these ‘witnesses’ is not seeing Mona, but a reflection of their own regrets, secrets, longings. As the film makes transparently clear, Mona refuses to be co-opted into any image they may have of her. She defies identification and empties the mirror of any meaning. Her peripatetic and solitary existence (‘I move’) is a deliberate choice and functions metonymically for her unfixability. Mona is the blank centre of the film and she leaves no trace of her existence.

In Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Agnès Varda made frequent use of tracking shots to follow Cléo along Parisian streets; there is a lot of the same kind of camerawork in Vagabond. But while the narcissistic Cléo is nearly always in the center of the frame, Mona can barely stay in the picture. As she walks along beaches, streets, fields—confirming the viewer’s sense of her restlessness and rootlessness—she either walks into the frame of an already-in-motion tracking shot, or falls behind, or walks out of frame as the camera keeps moving. It’s as though she is on the periphery of her own movie. Varda says, “The whole film is one long tracking shot … we cut it up into separate pieces and in between them are the ‘adventures’.” There are 14 of these highly formal tracking shots and they all frame Mona at some kind of juncture. They are Mona’s ‘signature’.

In fact, we never actually see the “adventures” that Varda speaks of. The other distinctive feature of the structure of Vagabond is its highly elliptical editing. Huge chunks of time are simply omitted from the movie and so we have little or no idea of what has exactly happened between these tracking shots. Suddenly, nothing happened. But of course it isn’t the case that nothing has happened, it is only that the exact nature of what has happened remains uncertain. We are therefore plunged into a world of sporadic, discontinuous conversations, of remarks that miss their target, of looks that do not engage, of relationships that develop erratically. The form of the film mirrors its content and the elliptical editing prevents the viewer from establishing any motive for Mona’s actions—indeed, they help to preserve her secrets.

Vagabond is set up in the same way as classic detective movies such as Murder, My Sweet, Sunset Boulevard and the aforementioned Citizen Kane. The beginning of these movies sets up an enigma: “Who is the dead person?” We then flash back in time to find out how and why the death happened. The 18 witness accounts in Vagabond can be read as statements in response to the police’s attempts to find out what happened to Mona. But, of course, we have seen what has happened to her and so, for us, the central question in Vagabond is not ‘how’ or ‘why’ but ‘who’, a question that remains unanswered by the film’s end. We are privy to Mona’s gradual decline but her identity remains shrouded in mystery.

Although Vagabond sets itself up as a classic murder mystery, that genre and its traits are quickly abandoned. More accurately, Vagabond borrows many of the traits of the road movie, but of a distinctively European kind rather than, say, Easy Rider. Near contemporary movies such as Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983) and Alain Tanner’s In the White City (1983) are similarly about characters in a state of self-imposed exile and contain similar highly-choreographed tracking shots.

I first saw all three of these movies when they were given a cinema release, though I was too young then to fully appreciate their subtlety and sophistication. But they stayed with me. They are ‘writerly’ films—films that explore contingent states of being—rather than ‘readerly’ films, which allow easy access for viewers by conforming to the idea of causality in plot. I knew there was something in them that I would only understand in time and I now see that Mona’s independence from a fixed identity is an assertion of her ‘otherness’, her différence, and it is that which makes Vagabond a proto-feminist film.

Most put Agnès Varda into the French New Wave, with Godard, Truffaut, et al, but the subtlety of her camera-stylo places her more properly in the Left Bank movement alongside such literary filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Further emphasising this root in literature, Vagabond is dedicated to Nathalie Sarraute, a nouveaux romancier whose texts challenge conventional plot and characterisation, focusing instead on the physical sensations and ‘tropistic’ movements that subtend human interaction.

To its (open) end, Vagabond maintains the enigmatic mystery of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. It is a unique mix of fact (Varda’s film was based on a real-life vagabond Varda had met) and fiction, documentary, a road movie told in flashback—so many different kinds of text beautifully interwoven and rewritten into a highly distinctive structure that Varda herself has described as ‘cinematic writing’, or cinécriture.

Corbel Stone Press

12/31/2015

I first encountered the remarkable Corbel Stone Press late in 2013 when I bought a booklet of theirs entitled “Wolfhou”. On jet black pages were printed very brief texts that traced the changes in a Cumberland dialect over the last 800 years. It was a mysterious, mesmerizing publication and I have been an ardent admirer of Corbel Stone ever since. They seem to me to be doing something highly original—producing words, music and art that are the meeting places for their belief systems in landscape, ecology, folklore, animism, toponymy, archaeology, language & dialect, geology and history. Not only that, but these words, pieces of music and artworks are packaged into the most beautiful homemade, bespoke artefacts—like communiqués from another age—that display clearly the love and belief they have in what they are doing.
   Reliquiæ is another of their many productions, an annual journal that acts as a kind of calling card for what they do, an ambassadorial publication that carries in it the essence of everything Corbel Stone Press stands for. Volume Three of Reliquiæ appeared in November 2015 and is arguably the press’ most wide-ranging and impressive collection so far of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translation and visual art.
   In amongst the contents of Volume Three, there are five bardos (a bardo is a Tibetan word for a text recited for a person after their death and before their next birth) for vascular and non-vascular plants, beetles, butterflies and the species of insects that includes wasps and bees. There are six ‘scraps’ of folktales from the Aino people, an ethnic minority in Japan who live primarily on the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaidō. There are also fragments of Old Norse, five ‘cantations’ for endangered species and a fascinating piece on the mapping of place names in the Cairngorms.
   As its title suggests, Reliquiæ is also a vessel for much older texts and artwork. The writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, WB Yeats and Edward Thomas, for example, all feature regularly and Volume Three includes three pieces by WB Yeats—“Evocation”, “The Heart of Spring” and “The Song of Wandering Ængus”.
   Each volume of Reliquiæ has as its centrepiece an essay as a form of investigation into nature. In Volume One, it was a fascinating piece by Noor de Winter entitled “Landscape as the Origin of Music”; in Volume Two is was an equally compelling piece by Don Domanski entitled “Poetry and the Sacred”. In Volume Three, it is Tim Lilburn’s exquisite essay “How to Be Here”, which begins with the sight of two deer approaching Lilburn’s house at dusk to feed (‘Shadow soaks into them’) and uses that as a starting point for a long treatise on contemplation and what it means to enter the ‘wilderness of discrete things’.
   But perhaps my favourite piece in Volume Three is a selection of short texts entitled Stray Birds by Rabindranath Tagore. These gnomic pieces are closest to haiku, each a prayer or a koan, which, like Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, try to trace the secret harmonies of the universe. A sample text: 'The bird-song is the echo of the morning light back from the earth.'
   Corbel Stone Press are unlike any other press I’ve ever come across and their rare and ravishing work needs to be championed and celebrated. Do check them and their work out--Volume Three of Reliquiæ wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

'Terrace'—review by Roy Marshall

9/21/2015

'Richard Skinner’s new pamphlet contains some intriguingly enigmatic poems, many of which manage to be simultaneously elusive and memorable. Close observations of sound, colour, temperature and scent blend in poems that are muscular, musical, taut and atmospheric. There’s nothing extraneous here, and despite the complexity and variety of much of the subject matter, concision, clarity and precision of language make these poems easy to read. They are skilfully constructed and disguise the effort and thought which must have gone into them. This handsomely produced pamphlet starts with ‘The Structure of Magic’, a neat sonnet that offers a kind of home-spun but oblique wisdom in memorable lines such as ‘remember, the map is not the territory’. An early clue that Skinner enjoys employing unusual language comes with ‘senescent’, although the number of such words is not excessive and their application is precise and carefully judged.
    ‘Parma Violets’ switches location from ‘the colonnades’ where ‘Count Pierre stalks’ to a wasteland ‘behind the estate’ where the narrator meets a girl who uses the sweet of the title ‘like the pill’. The poem concludes with the striking image of dropped yew tree branches in a cemetery taking root. The juxtaposition of these geographical and historical features is skilfully handled so that this seemingly disparate material holds the reader’s attention. But despite the interesting confluence of a mysterious European plant collector, the presence of sex (the encounter with the aforementioned girl with straggly hair) and death (the cemetery with its intriguing ‘walking’ yew trees) I struggled to consolidate these elements, to meld them into shared meaning that might generate a single emotional response. But perhaps that is not the poet’s intention and the overall effect of these multiple perspectives and locations, is, whether intended or not, to create a feeling of ambivalence and unease.
    ‘Scent of Magnolia’ begins with a fabulously imagistic metaphor; the magnolia bushes are ‘faulty machines,’ their fallen petals ‘old sparks that refuse to ignite’. The park is ‘bored’, the floor ‘sleepy’, and the shore ‘aphasic’. The description of landscape in terms of human moods and afflictions is, though apparently childlike in its simplicity, a sophisticated device, and one which is applied consistently through the poem to satisfying effect.
    ‘Indoor Pallor’ is one of several highly filmic pieces. I found it a (necessary) pleasure to re-read the poem several times in order to construct for myself some sort of coherent story. As with other poems in this collection, this piece contains intriguing clues and elements of a narrative from which the reader can build their own meaning. Layers of nuance reside in a combination of the enigmatic statement ‘A lot of life is learning to like blue’ and metaphysical simile ‘you are the blue light in a block of ice, / hinted at, but never seen’. This might prove irritatingly obscure for some, but I found the fine detail and carefully placed elements made for an intense and poignant mixture. This poem seemed haunted by the simultaneous presence of attachment and detachment, of intimacy in proximately with the aloofness implied by ‘the imperious nose, the predatory eye’. In the context of the poem there is also an inherent vulnerability in lines such as ‘you wait for the men to come’, that builds to potent emotional effect.
    ‘Budgerigar’, with its vivid ‘stain of salmon red / on chartreuse green’ is one of several poems that are shot through with colour. In ‘Plaza San Miguel’ a light touch conveys an understanding of a sense of a place and history with an indomitable permanence beyond the narrator’s brief romantic immersion. The sequencing of this pamphlet has obviously been given a great deal of thought, with themes, locations and images echoing and melding to build conversations and reflections between the poems.
    ‘Nefertiti’ is a luxuriant poem of superb contrasts, managing to be both expansively panoramic and focused on fine detail. It embraces the exotic and mythic whilst also being corporeal and intimate. Next is ‘Pillar’, an atmospheric sequence which concisely evokes the shifting light and variations of weather experienced on a high altitude walk in the English lakes. Place names are markers on a journey littered with images, which will be familiar to hillwalkers. Nevertheless Skinner manages to make the familiar arresting and vital – ‘A sheep’s skull - sun-worn, wind-greyed - lies half in, half / out of the tarn, / its loose teeth chocking in the jaw.’ A valley of dark conifers ‘creeps up the elbow of Ennerdale, / like a mange’. The light is, in places, ‘dismal’, and the clouds, ‘like bits of fleece, lour.’ Ultimately, as the walkers approach the top of their walk, the sun shines ‘like a yolk broke on tin’ and the poem leaves us with the feeling of a journey completed and resolving into a sense of hard-won and fatigued wellbeing.
    ‘Death in a French Garden’ is essentially a list, but unlike many list poems, the cumulative effect is to conjure a real sense of place. The human presence in the poem is confined to two-short lines. ‘A rosary. Hands like leather’ and yet it is possible to feel a tangible presence, or rather, perhaps, a ghostly absence.
    ‘Two Views of the Lacemaker’ is a ‘cut-up’ poem, prefaced by the extract from which its two sections are made. It is perhaps one of the less effective pieces here, although its inclusion does demonstrate a refreshing confidence and willingness to experiment with technique and to candidly display the ‘workings of the machine’. The poem literally adheres to one of the main precepts of this collection, namely that perception is dependent upon point of view and that multiple readings can be made of a single piece.
    ‘The Monarch Foundation’ explores the warped and disturbing credo of a mythical experimental psychological institution that appears to want total control of its inmates' emotions. The faceless banality of some of the pseudo-analytical language, for example ‘Something abolished internally will return from the outside in the form of a delusion’ is mixed with more fanciful and bizarre ‘The maps of fields they have crossed to get here are engraved on their souls.’ I was reminded of the powerful critiques of institutions by radical psychologists of the nineteen-sixties, such as Irving Goffman and R.D Laing.
    Skinner has a fine eye and ear for detail, and he ambitiously and skilfully combines historical and geographical references with the more mundane or routine. His best pieces demonstrate a high level of craft and a singular vision. Overall, Skinner is not interested in writing sentimental renderings of events or offering neat one-dimensional snapshots, nor is he writing to ‘surprise’ for the sake of it. None of these poems contain pat ‘conclusions’ or ‘truths’; rather, they leave one with a sense, as Louis MacNeice wrote, of the world being ‘Incorrigibly plural,’ a sense of ‘The drunkenness of things being various,’ (MacNeice again): a sense that life is made up of contrasting and co-existing perceptions. There’s an impressive originality to this work and enough variation in subject and depth of intrigue to reward repeated readings. I look forward to seeing a full collection from Richard Skinner in future.' Roy Marshall, The Interpreter's House

Finding R.E.M.'s River

6/17/2015

They say there are only three kinds of songs in rock music—ballads, mid-tempo songs and full-on rock-outs—and Michael Stipe once said that R.E.M. did two of them ‘not bad’. From the beginning, the band drew comparisons with The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield because of Buck’s arpeggiated guitar style and Stipe’s political calls-to-arms in his lyrics, but when they came to playing ballads, R.E.M. didn’t sound quite like anyone else. And when they chose to end an album with one of their ballads, the effect was absolutely spellbinding.
   On ‘Green’, as the magnificent last track “I Remember California” slowly fades out, you expect that to be the end of that, but then an unsteady drum riff starts, then guitar and voices, and a mournful extra song plays itself and the album out on an unexpectedly uplifting note. This ‘hidden’ final track became known simply as “Untitled Eleventh Song” but the band never formally named the song, leaving its heartfelt, hymn-like allure to speak for itself. I remember listening to ‘Green’ for the first time and being thunderstruck by this final track. It was impossibly beautiful and arrived so completely unannounced. It was the perfect ending to an incredible album.
   R.E.M. did the same on their next album, ‘Out of Time’, ending it with the mesmerising “Me in Honey”. Again, no one really knew what the song was about—a relationship coming to an end? Pregnancy?—but its propulsive, insistent two-chord structure turned it into a mantra, something about looking at life and seeing beauty suspended in it.
   But the band took things to an even higher plane when they ended their 1992 album ‘Automatic for the People’ with their song “Find the River”. This delicate, luminous ballad is, for me, one of those moments when the band’s songwriting, instrumentation and arrangement all combined to produce a moment of transcendent beauty.
   A simple strumming of an acoustic guitar starts the song, then a plaintive mellotron and church-like organ come in and immediately cast the song in a kind of half-light. Then a piano and two sets of contrasting backing vocals come in, adding further elegiac layers to the song. It is an intensely crepuscular track, flickering in the corners of life where sadness and loneliness lurk. Indeed, the whole of ‘Automatic for the People’ is consumed with the recognition of aging and death and how we live with them.
   R.E.M. always wrote their songs first of all by Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry getting together to lay down the basic tracks. Once that was done, they would hand over the tapes to Michael Stipe, who would then drive around in his car listening to them and coming up with the lyrics. For ‘Automatic for the People’, however, Buck, Mills and Berry decided to trade instruments, with Buck playing mandolin, Mills on piano and Berry playing bass. This set-up naturally led the band away from their rockier sound to more acoustic arrangements, predominantly keyboard led—there is mellotron, clavinet, accordian, piano, electric piano and organ on every song on the record—with mellotron, piano and organ on “Find the River” alone.
   And then there are the lyrics. The song’s subjects are transience, midnight car rides, undertow and the pull of tides, all connected to “the recklessness of water”. It is a Thoreau-like exhortation for us to take notice of the world around us and find the hidden connections. Stipe has a habit of using lists as litanies in his lyrics to flavour and season the songs: “A can of beans/Of black-eyed peas/Some Nescafe and ice/A candy bar/A falling star/Or a reading from Dr. Seuss” in ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’ or “Hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras/seconal, Spanish fly, absinthe, kerosene” in “E-Bow the Letter”. “Find the River” is no different and is littered with references to bayberry, bergamot, vetiver, ginger, lemon, indigo, coriander stem and rose of hay, all herbs that add to its pastoral feel, to the age of Huck Finn and Dean Moriarty.
   “Find the River” has a sibling out in the world in the shape of Big Star’s “Watch the Sunrise”. Both are imperatives, instructing us to find life’s secret harmonies and to align ourselves with ourselves. Again, R.E.M. had a habit of using the imperative as song titles—“Talk About the Passion”, “Fall on Me”, “Get Up”, “Stand”, “Belong”, “Drive”, “Try Not to Breathe”—and all these songs are similar in their urgent plea to find direction, to acknowledge the real, to push on and discover for oneself. They are passionate, pressing appeals, and none is more magical or mysterious than “Find the River”.

'Tender Is the Night'

2/17/2014

This introduction is from Cliff Notes.

"Tender Is the Night's history constitutes a veritable saga of textual changes, changes that did not stop even with F. Scott Fitzgerald's death. And since there are two versions of the novel presently in print, it is a potentially confusing situation for the student. The fact that must be realized is that there is no definitive text for Tender Is the Night.

Fitzgerald had the germ of an idea for a story roughly a decade before it ultimately became the novel that was published. The story was to center on Francis Melarky, a young Hollywood technician who eventually kills his mother. Fitzgerald was grimly fascinated by the Leopold and Loeb murders in Chicago and wanted to experiment with the idea of cold-blooded killing.

Melarky, in the course of his travels, encounters a couple, Seth and Diana Piper, and their friend Abe Grant. Later versions of the story take the action away from Melarky and place it on the two males, Seth Piper and Abe Grant. The Pipers become, of course, the Divers, and Abe Grant evolves into Abe North.

An early version of the novel, now mainly about Dick Diver, appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1934, and the novel, revised again, finally appeared as a book later that year.

The difficulty of the Rosemary Hoyt section appearing initially in the novel bothered Fitzgerald in his own lifetime, and, perhaps because the work had not been a financial success and the author hoped that by reworking it, he could improve it, he suggested a rearrangement of the text to a publisher (Modern Library), but it never appeared.

In 1951 this suggested revision of the novel was edited by Malcolm Cowley and published by Scribner's. The changes that Fitzgerald had listed on the cover of a copy of the novel are the ones that Cowley attempted to put into effect. The 1951 version shifts most of Book 2 to the beginning, to be followed by portions of Book 1. It also would have deleted the section about the Diver visit to the Minghettis.

Cowley decided not to delete the sections that Fitzgerald recommended, so, in a sense, even the 1951 version is not what the author seems to have recommended. The truth probably is, however, that Fitzgerald's suggestions for changes were themselves never complete, since the dropping of the episodes he suggests leaves gaps in the narrative. The novel, then, is still in a sense incomplete, for had we known Fitzgerald's full wish, the text probably would read differently from either the 1934 or 1951 versions."

The two arrangements of the text are as follows:

1934 Version

Book One (pp.1-128)

- pp.1-33—Rosemary’s POV on the Riveria.
- p.33—Nicole’s POV for 3 pages then returns to Rosemary’s on p.36.
- pp.40-92—Rosemary’s POV of duel.
- p.92—Abe’s POV starts Gare du Nord scene.
- pp.99-110—Dick’s POV.
- p.110—Nicole’s POV for 2 pages then Dick’s.
- pp.115-118—Abe’s POV at the Ritz bar.
- p.118—Dick’s POV for 2 pages then Rosemary’s until p.128.

Book Two (pp.129-261)

- pp.129-178 (up to “...in the September afternoon.”)—flashback to Dick’s POV in Zurich.
- pp.178 (from “How do you do, lawyer.”)-182—letter from Nicole?
- pp.182-252—back to present from Dick’s POV.
- p.252—Babe’s POV for 6 pages then returns to Dick’s on p.258 until p.261.

Book Three (pp.262-344)

- pp.262-265—Frau Kaethe Gregorovious’ POV.
- pp.265-289—Dick’s POV.
- pp.289-344—Nicole’s POV.

1951 ‘Cowley’ Version

Book I—Case History (1917-19)
(pp.129-177 of 1934 version)

Book II—Rosemary's Angle (1919-25)
(pp.177-182/pp.1-66)

Book III—Casualties (1925)
(pp.67-128/pp.182-191[“...listening to time.”])

Book IV—Escape (1925-29)
(pp.191[“In November...”]-261)

Book V—The Way Home (1929-30)
(pp.262-344)

"Untangling the pose from the prose"

5/28/2013

Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences by James R Mellow.
Review by Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times, 20th June 1993.

Hemingway biographies should come with public health warnings, cautioning young writers that any attempt to imitate his career may seriously damage their well-being. Who knows how many ambitious boys, smitten by Hemingway’s near-perfect prose and expansive lifestyle, have drowned, suffered concussion, been detained in foreign trouble spots or wound up as members of AA in an effort to live up to the novelist’s legend? Even as formidable a writer as Raymond Carver once admitted that his own drinking problems stemmed, in part, from a wayward desire to mimic the great man’s epic whisky consumption.

James R Mellow’s fine, assiduous biography serves as a welcome tonic for this syndrome, showing how this swaggering persona was as much the novelist’s creation as his characters Nick Adams or Frederic Henry. Hemingway biographers generally fall into two camps those, such as Carlos Baker, who see him as the embodiment of rough masculine creativity, and those, such as Jeffrey Myers, who see him as a blustering, overrated fake.

It is to Mellow’s credit that he avoids joining either cause, writing instead an even-tempered assessment of the man who, for better or worse, has come to be an archetype of what it means to be a novelist.

A Life Without Consequences is the third instalment of Mellow’s study of the American literary expatriates who congregated in Paris in the 1920s, the first two focusing on Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald. It is this period that constitutes the meat of the book. Hemingway’s affluent, easy-going Midwestern childhood is treated as little more than a time of growing restlessness, culminating in his decision to join the Red Cross ambulance corps during the latter days of the first world war, and leading to his famous wounding and subsequent love affair with a nurse on the Italian front. He returned to America for a short spell as a journalist, but the exile bug had bitten. He was 22 when he returned to Europe with his first wife, Hadley.

It wasn’t long before his good looks, energy and charm had led him into the various interconnecting Parisian literary circles centring around Stein, Pound and Joyce. Mellow’s book is at its best here, capturing the vibrant atmosphere of a seminal time and place in cultural history, one of those strange and inexplicable brush fires of genius. It was Stein who proved the most influential on Hemingway, helping him hone his distinctive style, all gerunds and elegant connectives.

Literary style wasn’t the only thing Hemingway forged in Paris. He also constructed the faux-primitive mask that he was to don for the rest of his life. Far from being some crude yet gifted Caliban, who dazzled the world-weary Europeans, Mellow’s Hemingway is a clever, supremely self-confident careerist, a born expert at the intrigues of literary politics. While in Paris, he skilfully prepared the ground for his first two novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, both written before he was 30. Unfortunately, he would never write as well again.

With early success, the young writer became increasingly obsessed with his image. Like Stein, Pound and Eliot, he had brought with him to the Old World the very New World notion of personal re-creation. It is this lifelong manipulation of his persona that is the central theme of Mellow’s study. Just as Hemingway the novelist would take the crude stuff of his experience and transform it into art, so Hemingway the man used his talent and notoriety to create a public self that was in many ways at odds with his private one. It is to Mellow’s credit that he is consistently able to look behind the mask, to see the weakness, sensitivity and humanity there.

For instance, Mellow consistently equates Hemingway’s notorious queer-bashing and frenetic macho activity with the strong hints of repressed homosexuality in his work and his often stormy relations with male friends. Similarly, the obsession with the stylised violence of war and bullfighting has as much to do with his own self-doubts and fears as it has with the concepts of the heroic and grace under pressure. Just as Hemingway’s sparse prose cloaked great complexity, so his often boorish behaviour concealed his considerable contradictions in his character.

This constant need to walk a personal tightrope also proves a good explanation of Hemingway’s mercurial treatment of friends. Although Mellow never makes this point explicitly, his evidence indicates that Hemingway’s eventual breaks with Fitzgerald, Stein and Dos Passos had less to do with personalities and professional rivalries than with the fact that they had all glimpsed the real Hemingway, the insecure artist struggling to keep a grip on his fading talent, a reality very much at odds with the image of the self-confident sportsman which was spoonfed to readers of Life magazine.

Interestingly, it was far easier for Hemingway to maintain a lifelong relationship with Pound, whom he rarely saw, yet corresponded with regularly. The great white hunter of American letters was a master at covering his tracks with words.

His later years make for dispiriting reading. Hemingway had once written how his fictional doppelganger, Nick Adams, had longed to live a life “without consequences”. Sadly, the elder Hemingway appeared to be obsessed with nothing but them, staging media events and badgering would-be biographers as he tried to jury-rig his place in the pantheon.

As Edmund Wilson tellingly stated, the public Hemingway was “certainly the worst-invented character to be found in the author’s work”. Hemingway’s coverage of the Spanish civil war is energetic yet politically naïve, while his correspondence from the second world war is something of a farce, as if he believed the war was being fought for his benefit. Bad writing, bad relationships and bad drinking followed, with the great success of The Old Man and the Sea depicted here as basically an accident.

The myth reaches its apotheosis in Idaho when Hemingway, depressed and paranoid, places his trusty shotgun against his forehead and pulls the trigger, finally cracking that durable mask he had moulded more than 30 years earlier in Paris.

Morton Feldman

5/19/2013

Morton Feldman’s remark about the moment in his work when form becomes scale echoes Elaine de Kooning’s remark that Rothko’s work does not inhabit shapes but areas.

'The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others. The compositional concentration is solely on which pattern should be reiterated and for how long ...'

'In that sense, my compositions are not 'compositions' at all. One might call them time canvases in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of music. I have learned that the more one composes or constructs the more one prevents Time Undisturbed from becoming the controlling metaphor of the music.'

Feldman said his idea was not to ‘compose’, but to project sounds into time, free from compositional rhetoric. ‘I find that as the piece gets longer, there has to be less material. That the piece itself, strangely enough, cannot take it. It has nothing to do with my patience … I don’t have an anxiety that I’ve got to stop. But there’s less going into it, so I think the piece dies a natural death. It dies of old age.’

In his ultralong works of the 1980s, Feldman moulded repetition, sonority and memory on a timescale so large as to overpower the listener’s frame of reference. ‘My music sounds like Webern, except longer. But I didn’t get the idea conceptually from music at all. I got the idea from ‘Teppich’ rugs … one of the most interesting things about a beautiful old rug in natural vegetable dyes is that it has ‘abrash’, which is that you dye in small quantities. You cannot dye in big bulks of wool. So it’s the same, yet it’s not the same. It has a kind of micro-tonal hue. So when you look at it, it has that kind of marvellous shimmer which is that slight gradation.’

It is impossible not to mention Turkish rugs when writing about Feldman's late music, especially with regard to the visual aspect of his scores. Ex.8 and Ex.9 are visual renditions of the piano and string quartet parts respectively of Piano and string quartet (1985).

(Images courtesy Frank Sani)

Jacqueline Rose on Marcel Proust

2/10/2013

Proust both coveted and despised the society in which he lived.
À la recherche du temps perdu is a 'feminist Gothic horror story'.
The scene in which Vinteuil's daughter commits an act of Sadeism by spitting on a photograph of her parents sets up the whole novel.
No one does primal scenes quite like Proust...
The hypocricy, social fussiness, dizzy ascent and subsequent precipitous decline are all symptoms of social upheaval.
After attending Zola's trial, Proust asked himself how to introduce history and social justice into À la recherche du temps perdu without destroying it.
Proust was a total snob, but his book is an analysis of snobbery.
Proust's mother was Jewish but he was baptized as a Catholic.
The 'intermittencies of the heart' section of Volume Four: Sodom and Gomorrah is the greatest ever piece of writing on grief.

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