Bush of Goats

Pronounce as you like, take whatever meaning/individual files you want.

Roadskill

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The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.

Not my words, but the words of Jorge Luis Borges.

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My Xbox 360 has sat under all the TVs in our new house, but for the first time since we moved here nearly three years ago, I’ve recently found the time and the inclination to play it. My first act was to finish a game I bought from the arcade 18 months ago, but never really had the time for. But now I’ve played it and finished it and loved it.

Limbo is an independent production from Copenhagen and does game play just as I like it. Simple, with repetition in small part, not overly long, a plot you only really get to understand in the blank empty spaces as you try to figure out how the latest little block & weight puzzle needs solving, and perhaps most importantly, a really quick reload. Control is simple (back, forward, jump, action) and the manner of executions hilariously macabre: your little 8 year old boy is impaled by hidden spiders, crushed by blocks, drowned by dirty water and best of all, minced by circular saws. Luckily, all that horror and gore is depicted in a Jan Pienkowski-esque silhouette, adding to the fairytale feel.

Despite the youth of the protagonist, this is a very adult game (asides from the deaths) as you are given no real eexplanation for what is happening, or why. You must trust its worth it and do without the clodden hoofed exposition most games seem to think it is their duty to impart. best of all might be the ending, which tells you something – there’s a girl – but tells you nothing really. Seriously: she looks up; not even at you. I had feared the gloom would lift and it would be revealed as some kind of Nyan-Cat Mario-Land, but developers PlayDead held their nerve. I await their next production with much interest.

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The Boy is Mine – Brandy & Monica

My old friend Adam and I used to disagree vehemently over this. It came out around the time he left – as it proved, permanently for the Southern Hemisphere – and I did him a minidisc mix (ha! remember minidisc? No, me neither) which contained not only several false starts of it, but a complex set of gags about it using the editable track title function of said format.

How guilty do I feel? well, obviously not *that* guilty: it’s a great song. What is there to feel guilty about? If I wanted to have some actual guilt, I should prolly pick something by Screwdriver, or Wagner, or Tomorrow Belongs To Me (although the Cabaret scene is amazing), so there’s no pleasure part.

In my quest for guilt, I suppose there’s a not-so-subtle undercurrent of masculine infidelity, but the video puts the lie to that, with Mekhi Phifer getting the door slammed in his face at the end. He might have been slippin’ it both ways for an undisclosed period of time, but Brandi and Monica have come to an understanding and he gets a double rejection. (You can read a brilliantly deadpan promo synopsis and all the other details here.)

What occurs ot me now, writing this is that whenever I hear this, I end up thinking about a clip I once accidentally saw of R Kelly, dressed in a business suit, wearing earrings and lifting a pair of baby seats (containing babies) out of the back of a Ferrari. I’ve tried to find the promo it came from to check it is actually two babies, but after wading through the confused ego of R Kelly for twenty minutes, I can take no more. It’s a brilliantly lazy shorthand for half a dozen aspirational mores – ‘Hey, chicks, dig me – I’m professional, successful, caring and busy’ –  but it seems my subconscious has made the connection for me, whereby a pair of innocents are used only as ciphers in a male control fantasy.

OK, now I feel guilty.

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Wonderwall – Oasis

(It’s a strong word, hate. I don’t know I’d really say I hated Oasis; as someone very succinctly said of Ricky Gervais’ recent call to the haters to ‘bring it’, you have to care to hate and I don’t know that I really care enough about Oasis to hate them. But anyway, hate is the rules, so…)

There was a time when I was quite impressed by Oasis. I remember seeing the video for Supersonic on the Saturday morning chart show and being impressed with how arrogant and boisterous they were; how unlike the prevailing trend (this was 1994: the charts were a cheez-rave sponsored by Lucozade) and how they seemed to make guitars matter again. But as time went by, the bravura they showed in front of camera proved to hide nothing deeper, they were that arrogant all the way down. Money, fame and attention only made them (and by ‘them’ I mean the Gallagher brothers) worse. Noel proved himself a second rate Beatles copyist, and Liam… well. Rarely has so much affection and adulation been wasted on so underserving a wretch.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the working classes – why, great-Grandfather Daddo even worked at a colliery (admittedly, he was site manager, but he still washed his hands before he had a wee) – whereas Liam Gallagher represents just about every good reason why the class system should be firmly re-established. What little stage presence he had was based purely on his evident willingness to fight anyone who could get passed his minders; over the course of a decade he had the massive chip on his shoulder gilded, feathered and sequined in an attempt to convince all and sundry of his artistic relevance, while all the time decrying anything so fey as artistry. Oasis’ appeal is/was a largely working class one I suspect: there were a lot of people for whom feelings of superstardom and power were entirely bound up with weekend drug experiences and disbelief that fit girls would be willing to screw you if you acted like you deserved it. But Oasis never did anything more with this potential: they continued to act as if they were just like the audience: lads, out for a few, with a bit sniff on a Friday and Saturday night, when they were by now so wealthy as to be able to buy huge swathes of Manchester , should they so choose. But they didn’t. They continued to stick it up their noses, piss it up the wall and spend it on Rolls Royce’s in swimming pools for album covers.

There are many Oasis songs; I don’t even hate this one the most (the one about having, ‘been around the world’ makes me want to kill dead things). I chose Wonderwall because while on the surface it was a great record, it quickly became ubiquitous and was adopted by everyone as a special anthem. It was at this point I turned on them because everyone was starting to love them and if they were who they claimed to be, they should have been The Fall and told everyone to fuck off.

These days they’re reduced to whining at one another about clothes and side projects to drum up the column inches. Perhaps they only thing that depresses me more than the Gallaghers is the music press’ willingness to give them the attention they think they deserve.

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Tears in Rain – Vangelis (Blade Runner OST)

I first saw Blade Runner with the flu. I kept drifting off into sleep, leaving fragments of dialogue and 80s synth washes dotted around my fevered dreams. Then ten years after that, The Rutger Hauer snippet kept cropping up in ambient mixes, triggering in me the woozy sensations all over.

I still struggle to stay awake through the film, but that’s mostly for pleasure nowadays.

You may or may not know/care that the film and the soundtrack have been reversioned several times (5 versions of the film, going on 40 releases of the OST), but you should be able to get everything you ever possibly could from it here.

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Things I should be doing today include writing a pitch, moving the downstairs cooker and laying the stones around the chicken yard.

Things I shouldn’t be doing include dicking about making mix tapes. But seeing as I have…

Harsh Words In Savage Times 

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We saw some very old friends for the first time in the best part of a decade last weekend. Will and I are of similar(ish) ages and careers, and we both have wives with dark hair, neither of whom really seem to have the time or the inclination to listen to the stupid mixtapes we are both still (it transpires) spending days at a time tinkering with and fine tuning for their benefit.

That’s OK, I guess: they’re busy; we made them have children  and Facebook isn’t going to update itself, is it? So Will and I are going to continue to amuse ourselves with mixtapes, but now also each other. It’ll be like mutual mastu- I’m not going finish that. You know what I mean. Will sent me a spotify mix which was good ,but I was bemoaning how Spotify can’t give you all the little bits of found sound that form an integral part of a really obsessively-crafted mixtape, and would have to carry on creating zips of iTunes playlists and uploading them. Which is what this is.

Backstory – read only if desperate.
This is a Valentine’s mix from 2007, featuring my first few interesting edits (particularly pleased with the segue into Gypsy Man) and Daisy, aged 3, sounding bored on the potty.

Gareth Pitmann was just this guy I knew.

The Artwork was from the side of his van.

Some girl at the local college on the hairdressing A-level did it.

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6 Beloved – The Sun Rising

In 1991 I joined a caravan of hippies and deadbeats and found myself on Dartmoor at a free festival. It was the best kind of insanity: on the first night, someone crashed their car into a ditch beside our tent and just left it there with the engine running and the lights on. On the second night, Spiral Tribe turned up with a rig and I found rave. As the night gave way to the day, they played this and I watched, open-mouthed (and wide-open-minded) as a man climbed on top of a VW camper van with a large ring and a tray of liquid. He then proceeded to send long, worm-like tubes of bubble mixture into the air, with the sun coming up behind him. Cosmic, as a word, is used to take the piss out of hippies, but I can’t really think of any other way of describing what I felt at that moment.

There aren’t many moments or places in my life I wish I could go back to, but to be on Dartmoor watching the silhouette of a man catch the sun in a slow-mo pearly worm would be a mighty fine way to die.

Beloved – Sun Rising

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5 The La’s – There She Goes

Depsite a moment where ‘String of Pearls’ was challenging for all categories, this was one of the easier ones. I was about 20 when my first proper girlfriend – as in, we lived together – left me. We were both young and really just playing at being growed-ups. We were lazy, messy, screwed a lot and wondered what it would be like to have real responsibilities.

Then I somehow ended up in student politics and we started drifting into different worlds. The break-up was brilliantly written: I came home too late one night to find a letter and her stuff gone. I wallowed in a scene: I sat with a bottle of Jim Beam and played this record 42 times in a row. That’s how long it took me to finish the bottle.

Twenty years later , whenever I hear this, she’s right back in my mind, along with the taste of bourbon, folded and refolded paper, lifting the needle and starting over.

The La’s – There She Goes

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