So Many Riffs, So Little Time

Fuck I feel a damn sight better now. My head feels clearer because I've been doing some serious riff writing. The roar of a fuzzedtofuckandback guitar at a stupid volume is still one of the best antidepressants I know of. You can take yr SSRIs, yr tranqs and yr mood stabilizers, I'll take six (and seven) strings over them anyday.
Bathed in phasing and filtered feedback my brain stops running in ever decreasing circles and puts it's feet up. I know when the music's good, because I stop conciously thinking, I'm just playing, letting my fingers go where they need to go, losing myself in the rush of sound, feeling the kick in my back from the low end when the amps maxed out and I'm whacking the crap out of the downtuned seven string, revelling in the biting, crystalline scream of the bottleneck on the semi, actually finding myself grinning like a fucking moron when I stomp on the fuzz and let rip with the bigsby. What can I say, I fucking love it.

Mindbreaker

It's a beautiful day today, I should be out in the sun, I love this weather. But I'm not. I'm sitting here with tears streaming down my face because I am so fucking angry right now. Sick of being taken for granted. Sick of being shoved to one side, sick of so many "friendships" being all one-way traffic, sick of being thought of as unreliable and rude.
I suffer from Social Phobia, and that makes forming friendships, let alone any deeper kind of relationship extremely hard. In my case it seems to have driven an awful lot of people I thought were friends away. Right now it feels like I can count my friends on my fingers, and still have a few fingers left. If I didn't come to yr party, or to yr gig, or to where you were dj'ing it's not because I'm being rude, it's not because I'm flaky, it's probably because i've rolled into a ball, in floods of tears, desperately wanting to go out, to see people, and finding the whole idea so frightening that it makes me physically sick. Even when I do get out of the house it means two or three hours of shaking and sweating, trying not to let my brain run wild. So many people who I've been there for in the past aren't here for me at the moment. I've lost count of the number of phone calls I've made to people which have started something like this; "Alright xxxxxxxxxxxxx".."Alright L, I haven't heard from you for ages". Now when I hear that, the first thing which goes through my mind is 'No, that would be because you don't give enough of a toss to pick up a phone and call me". It may not sound that bad to you, but in my position, when sometimes even picking up the phone is hard, it's fucking painful. When you think I'm being rude or stand-offish, I don't mean to be, I'm confused, I don't know what to say. There's a line in the song "Mindbreaker" by The Litter which contains the words "all my friends terrify me", and sometimes it feels like that. And one last thing, don't say you need to get out and try to meet people or some such shit like that. The next person who says that to me is going to get a smack. What in the name of fuck do you think I would love to do more than anything else in this world, have been trying do for the last six years? I'm trying to get through this and I could do with some help and some support, not some cunt stating the fucking obvious.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed Shortly

Two days of utter blackness. Getting through the day using the ancient reptillian parts of my brain. Get up eat go to work eat again back to work go home. Two days of feeling utterly disconnected, not even able to pick up the phone and talk to someone. Feeling like there's this space, a blank in my mind wherever there's a circuit (for want of a better word) that enables me to deal with the outside world, to interact, to empathise. Looking at the city around me going about it's business, and thinking "?" because nothing seems to make sense, nothing seems to connect with anything else. I'm lost in a maze that isn't there, tying myself in mental knots and it fucking hurts.

And Pat Stevens, Who Hates Buttermilk, Is Going To...

The above words stuck in my head seventeen years ago, and have never left. I have no idea what TV programme, or film, or whatever they originally came from. I have no idea who Pat Stevens is, or what he is going to do (presumably) with the buttermilk. I heard them, spliced over a particularly queasy, yawning analogue synth towards the end of the second track of (excuse the capital letters) Possibly The Greatest Album Ever Fucking Made, Alien Soundtracks by Chrome.
There are heavier records. There are more avant-garde records. There are certainly more beautiful records, but, if wallowing in psychedelic muck is yr thing then this is the motherlode. Some swear by Cottonwoodhill by Brainticket, The Boredoms' VisionCreationNewsun once made my room turn into an enormous jewelled cavern hewn from the living rock filled with prismatic light, and far below me, hundreds of Boredoms pounding out the unstoppable rhythm, but Alien Soundtracks is the sound of YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS.
The first ten minutes of this record contain more ideas than most bands manage across an album. It opens with Chromosome Damage, a claterring metallic motorik driven space dragster which introduced the world to the corrosive, acid drenched guitar of Helios Creed whose phasedfuzzedfiltered'n'fucked riffs launch this song into orbit. Two minutes in, it suddenly starts to fade out mid verse. A couple of seconds of silence then a groaning analogue synth and guitar appear, odd, indecipherable voices beneath them. the guitar almost becomes a riff then it all abruptly cuts dead. Then the band slowly fade back in, a backwards bass/drums/guitar/synth groove like Heldon on crack growing in volume and intensity, then suddenly, in one of musics perfect moments, it flips and is suddenly careening forward, Damon Edge's synths and clanking insistent drums accelerating as Helios Creed cuts loose with a ascending, spiralling motherfucker of a solo as the track fades and threatens to tear itself apart. Fuck, it still gets me everytime I listen to it. The moment when the tape-reversed part is suddenly flying in the other direction is a total fucking masterpiece of splicing. It flips a switch in my brain, and I'm there, in the sleazy, depraved and wondrous place that is Chromeworld...

(tbc)

The Headless!

The 12Bar Club in Denmark Street is a rather wonderful place to play. The acoustics and PA are great, you can actually hear yourself on stage, the staff are friendly and the engineer helpful, all qualities sadly lacking in many venues, but there is one thing which makes it truly unique in my experience. Beacuse of the height of the balcony and the height of the stage, if you're playing standing up most of the audience under the balcony appear to have no heads.

Simplexity?

Sometimes, simple ideas are the best. Not that I'm averse to complex, densely arranged music (unless it's by Yes, then I'm very much against it, but that's another rant entirely), but listening to it can be a similar experienece to walking through an ornamental garden, leading you to appreciate the shapes, the structure, the interleaving and juxtapostion of form and line, but not necessarily to an appreciation of the beauty of the materials themselves, be they sounds or plants. Complexity can be beautiful, but it's often a shallow, surface beauty. A forest is a wonderful thing, but looking at a single tree can be a far richer experience, allowing the eye to be guided by the ridges and loops of the bark, the twisting of the branches, the subtle gradations of colour in the wood and leaves. Stand back though, and you lose that richness, that closeness, that depth of experience and perception.
I guess this is why, after years of playing in groups of up to ten people, I find that the majority of the music I make these days is in duos. When there's just two of you, you can hear everything. Every tiny inflection and nuance of timbre is laid bare and because of this you're more aware, better able to respond and communicate on a deeper level than usual. There is complexity there too though, but it's buried in the sound and only reveals itself gradually like in the delicate dance of harmonics you can hear in a single harmonium note, or the way a single note from a guitar decays downward through it's harmonic spectrum as it dies away. Deep complexities buried in and arising from simplicity, like listening to the effect of Lorenz's butterfly as opposed to the ultimately Newtonian complexities of larger groups. I'm not saying the deep stuff isn't there with a big band, it's just a lot harder to get to, and right now, that's what I want from music. The core, the substance, the stuff, the SOUND.

Looking For The Hammer

The sun's out, there are too many people around and I haven't slept properly in three weeks. In a couple of hours I have to actually leave the house to go and play some music. First though, like almost every other time I want/need to leave the house, I have a little demolition work to be done, a wall you can't see that needs to be knocked down, or at least have a nice teak door with a wrought iron knocker put in it. There's a window in that wall, and everytime I look through it I get confused. When I go out, it's worse. I feel like the wall and the window has wrapped itself round me like a bubble, leaving me watching the world as I move through it, still at one remove from everything and everyone else. I'm looking for a hammer to smash it into tiny fucking pieces so I can touch the world again, actually feel a connection. I'm on my own eveywhere I go, no matter how many people I'm with.
Yet when I'm playing that all drops away. I'm free. I know what I want to say, I know how to say it. Fuck, I actually feel happy in those moments, involved and engaged with other people, able to share and explore with them. There's no need to put on a mask, to try to force myself to interact. In those moments I'm the person I really am, inside the bubble, not the scared, confused and lonely person that the world at large sees.
If music can put a hole through the glass that I can reach through, then there must be a way to break it once and for all. Like I say, I'm just looking for the hammer.

Too much ozone?

What fucker sandpapered my eyeballs while I was asleep? That's what I want to know.
Probably the same non-euclidean bastard that's turned the air into a thick humid soup that makes it hard to breathe and even harder to think. When it starts to rain I pop into the pub and take my icy bottle of porter into the garden and sit in the rain, drinking, getting wet and feeling my head clear along with the air. Too much ozone before the shower.
Don't get me wrong, I think ozone high up in the atmosphere is a wonderful thing, stopping us all from getting baked by UV, but down here, close to the ground is not where it should be, the free radical in the city's bloodstream. Wandering round London feels like walking through a giant substation where you can smell the stuff, that hot, thick smell of static and ionisation.
But like I say, the rain fell, and the air took on that wonderful clear, fresh quality you only get after it rains, when the atmosphere becomes negatively charged and the oxygen breaks free again. I found I could think almost normally again, and damn it, even my beer tasted better. And it's all thanks to electricity.