Matador

MATADOR 

NEW EP OUT JULY 24TH 2020

https://muteswimmer.bandcamp.com/album/matador

Though it’s sometimes tempting, I don’t like to explain the songs. I fear that what I think it means will adversely affect what it really means - which is to say, what it means to you. It's a somewhat precarious and intimate act of letting go. After a song has left my hands, cherished or ignored, it’s not mine anymore. I think I'm still trying to understand the real depth and underlying meaning of that fact.

I will say that, despite the Spanish references, Matador was mainly written between Rome and Berlin in 2017/18. 

I had the initial idea of every verse being a one-liner - a joke, earnestly sung. I guess I failed in that, though a few found their way in, or created a certain play through all the lyrics, of which there were many. (I must have written 50 verses for Matador, which is a song of 5 verses and few words). Humour can of course be profound but perhaps its occasional absence left space for the other things that it became, and is, which I leave to your interpretation.

I can say I like the way the lyrics seem to shift the music from a major to minor feeling, celebration and lament, depending. I feel like that is some sort of progress in my work.

I can say that I wrote Matador with a circling acoustic guitar part that I couldn’t master with any fluency (though a modified form of it remains). I had a piano in mind from quite early in the recording process, but more as an accompaniment to the guitar than the other way around - which is how it eventually panned out.

I’m very grateful to Ben (Osborn) who did much to shape the arrangement of the song with his lovely piano and synth work - and by extension the folk at Donau 115 and Cafe Rita for use of their pianos during lockdown. His work really helped me see the end of the song, so to speak, and he made it instantly a richer and more layered thing. I would recommend you go check out his debut LP - Letters from The Border (Nonostar). 

https://benosborn.bandcamp.com/album/letters-from-the-border

Thanks also to my friend Oras, who can play clarinet like a demon but who consented to being an understated devil in the service of this one. 

Oh, I shot the cover photograph in Wales last year. It's a photo of my nieces and nephew. Perhaps the only connection between image and song is that it seems to me to have the same play of dark and light, major and minor.

Finally an apology to my Spanish friends. I do realise my pronunciation of matador is waaay off. No disrespect intended. My Spanish is poor but in this instance it was a very conscious choice. Simply put, it’s an English text, I Anglicised. 

I'll be happy to try a Spanish version when I return because that 'when' will no longer be an 'if'. I’ll be so happy to travel again in the service of my songs. I’ll be happy to be amongst you, to sing in your presence and it will be for once more joyful than shameful, to mispronounce your words. Like all of us, I'm waiting and hoping for that.

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF - F*CKING BAMBI

Fucking Bambi



There's no question. Bambi is a sad old lament. It's the most recent song that made it onto the record and it's probably the most personal too - perhaps for both reasons I find it hard to write about. Suffice to say it's littered with autobiographical distress signals but, having said that, I think the lyrics are quite funny - even intentionally so - in places. I guess I’m trying to do a lot of things with this song musically and lyrically (ie: by my standards, it's ambitious). I hope I pulled it off. It's a favorite of mine off the record.

Massive props to Daniella (Grimm) who played the violin on this song and who was so patient in interpreting my (non -violin playing) vision of it and innovating around those ideas in such a personal way. Her playing through the 'pessimists jig' at the end of the track especially kills me.

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF - AIR ITSELF

AIR ITSELF

The title track (obvs.) and a song that has been with me for a while. The band and I recorded a version of it on the Present Perfect EP (2015) but the one here is closer to my original conception of it. I struggle to feel completely content with anything I make but I am quite proud of the lyrics I wrote for this song.

Vincenz Kokot (My Sister Grenadine) provided most of the ambient sounds and percussion you hear. Not many people can have said ‘I love the sound of an old music carousel mounted precariously on an amped up electric guitar body’, but I can.

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF - ONE OF US (II & III)

SINGER (ONE OF US II)

This one might be familiar to anyone who has seen a concert in recent years. It often involves me singing a-cappella and wandering amongst the audience trying to burn off nervous energy. Here it’s in a kind of folk/drone setting largely provided by Daniella Grimm's violin and and effects. The vocal melody came to me walking along the street in 2012 I think. I have that half fear that I may have lifted it inadvertently from a turkish pop song emanating from a car stereo on Sonnenallee, although listening back to it, that seems highly unlikely.

ENEMY (ONE OF US III)

The unreliable narrator shows up again on One of Us III. This song, like Reckoning developed out of a commissioned piece for the funding of my last record. Vince Kokot played the glockenspiel. When I finished writing this song I somehow didn’t feel like it was mine. Now, for the same reason, I feel it's more mine than most.

Both the song’s texts owe a debt to Jorge Luis Borges’ wonderful disturbing short story Borges and I.

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF - STONE

STONE 

Contrary to popular belief and common sense I've always thought, to a certain extent, that writing oneself into a corner was an important, even necessary, thing to do. Not just because a corner is often the territory of your own peculiar obsessions, desires and fears - but because the implied negativity of that act is something that people tend to avoid or overlook - in both cases it's a rich resource for writing. Not feeling entirely comfortable with what one writes seems a quite an important part of the process.

I do feel like a lot of the writers that I admire are writers that explored their personal corner of the room long enough for one of those walls to yield another room  - or at least by confining themselves conceptually, they were able to illuminate their obscure territory sufficiently to make us re-interrogate that overlooked area in ourselves - like the point at which a microscopic image begins to uncannily resemble a telescopic image (and vice versa).

Sometimes I feel like songwriters are the most promiscuous people, their muse is drawn from all kinds of sources in a way that would seem dilute most other art forms and make them seem rather scatty, anecdotal or superficial (of course this is also the pleasure of them as well - that they sometimes get away with it so marvellously). Perhaps it’s my ‘education’ that inclines me to write in the opposite way (and I confess that sometimes I hate it -  my position and the writing) - but I’ve also felt a degree of gratitude and surprise that my own corner keeps yielding something to me, it keeps surprising me and occasionally that barren territory seems to get replenished against all expectation.

So in short I see this song Stone as giving the illusion of movement, it feels like a song of distances and of a journey - but it's actually kind of jogging on the spot or standing still. Or perhaps it's a dance, albeit a slow dance in a corner, but a dance nonetheless.

Vince (Kokot) played some wonderful damaged cymbal on this track as well as the glockenspiel and ukulele. Yan Fabre provided the otherworldly voice of the musical saw. Together, they feel like the air or the weather of the whole song. 

EVERY WEEK OVER THE COURSE OF THE CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN I'LL BE POSTING SOME THOUGHTS ON EACH SONG THAT FEATURES ON THE RECORD AND HOW IT WAS MADE.


IT WOULD BE MASSIVELY APPRECIATED IF YOU SHARED THIS SONG AND SUPPORTED THE CAMPAIGN TO TURN IT INTO A BEAUTIFUL 'REAL' THING OF THE WORLD (ie: a packaged LP/CD)

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF - SOUL MUSIC

THE SONGS

SOUL MUSIC 

Soul Music is a track that’s been loitering around my brain for years. The initial idea was inspired by a wonderful line of David Berman, 'won’t soul music change, now our souls have turned strange’ (Silver Jews - We Are Real). I remember coming up with the initial refrain as long ago as 2012. Some listeners may recognise it, albeit in a different guise, from last year’s Present Perfect EP. I’m not sure this is the definitive version of the song (is there ever?) but it’s certainly closer to my original conception of it. I think of it as a kind of damaged ballad or a supernatural duet set to a waltz on ketamine.

It's the song likely to start the LP and I guess it serves as a good introduction to the sound world of the whole record. This is one of four tracks that I worked on with the very talented Vincenz Kokot (My Sister Grenadine). The basic textures and ambience you hear on the record came together quite early and effortlessly in his rehearsal space. I recall him running radio static and tones from a tiny casio through all manner of effects over my two note ‘riff’. Daniella Grimm (Earnest and Without You) later added some wonderful violin to the carpet of sounds - more on her amazing work later. The rest of the arrangement I owe to Dorian's patience, red wine and sleepless nights exploring the cheap but satisfying effects of garageband and maxed out amplifiers.

Lyrically it’s a song built on a kind of reflexive self-questioning people might be familiar with in a Mute Swimmer song - the limitations of language and the seeking of some kind of spiritual agency or emotional catharsis through music and I suppose, by implication, leaving that an open question within the song to which you are listening. Soul Music also introduces the idea of an unreliable or uncertain narrator that could be said to be a theme throughout the new record.

EVERY WEEK OVER THE COURSE OF THE CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN I'LL BE POSTING SOME THOUGHTS ON EACH SONG THAT FEATURES ON THE RECORD AND HOW IT WAS MADE.

IT WOULD BE MASSIVELY APPRECIATED IF YOU SHARED THIS SONG AND SUPPORTED THE CAMPAIGN TO TURN IT INTO A BEAUTIFUL 'REAL' THING OF THE WORLD (ie: a packaged LP/CD)

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF - RECKONING / LEONARD COHEN

RECKONING / LEONARD COHEN

 

Reckoning is a rare thing. It’s a song that came to me to when I needed one. It was written, or at least it found its feet as a commision for the crowdfunding campaign of my last LP, Second. (Thank you Rita)

Structurally I guess it’s the most traditional song on the LP and there was a period where I almost abandoned it because it didn’t seem to fit. It was only when I recorded the bowed drones and backing vocals that I felt it began to speak to the ambient environment of the rest of the record. I had an idea for the piano part in the refrain that I thought was dumb, but then I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I asked Dorian to play it. He fleshed out the rest of the parts at the eleventh hour with his usual subtlety and calm.

I see it as a song held in a kind of strange purgatory between mourning and celebration - it's a reflection on time and aging and what it means to continue regardless of all impediments or reasons not to. Like many of the pieces on Air Itself (and elsewhere in the Mute Swimmer back catalog) it’s also a song about a song - the joy of singing and a sense of communion in (sung) self-forgetting.

Reckoning wasn’t intended as the track from the LP to share with you first but after the news of Leonard Cohen's death last Friday I felt it ought to be. A large part of my desire to write a song at all, I owe to him and, even though he’ll always remain several ‘hundred floors above me’, I think this song in particular owes him a special debt. 

LEONARD COHEN

As a seven year old going through my parents record collection I recall the impact of his face first. It was the out staring face of a singing convict with a shaved head smoking a cigarette in a prison toilet cubicle. I had fabricated this story based on the LP cover of Leonard Cohen’s Live Songs (1972). I looked in equal parts fascination and terror. I remember thinking that I wasn’t ready for it, for ‘him’ - I wasn’t sure what this man was going to tell me - if it was ‘age appropriate’. (I self censored and opted for the less intimidating Fate for Breakfast by Art Garfunkel instead).

I don’t know what happened during the following year, but as an eight year old I must have felt somehow ready and when I placed the needle on the record the voice that spoke to me was one of profound doubt and fear and questioning - it was also a voice I trusted implicitly, a cracked voice full of struggle, compassion and wisdom. I never recovered from that voice and I never wanted to.

‘I’ve been listening to all the dissentions, 

I’ve been listening to all the pain 

And I feel that no matter what I do for you

It’s gonna come back again

But I think that I can heal it

I think that I can heal it

I’m a fool but I think that I can heal it 

With this song’.

(Minute Prologue, Live Songs, London, 1972)

If anyone taught me that a song could be somehow unfathomably, intrinsically important - that music could speak your life back to you, reach you in a way that nothing or no-one else could - it was Leonard Cohen. I’ve found so much solace, humility and wisdom in his work I can’t find anything approaching the adequate words right now. Suffice to say the only relationship I had with him was through his work (and as an amazing orator I feel that I must include his speeches and interviews in that) and the great joy of art I suppose is that that relationship is fundamentally unaffected by (his) death, it doesn’t end. His songs and poetry will continue to act as a some kind of ultimate measure to me as a writer - and the rich, (dis)honourable life he appeared to live, an example I find difficult to locate in anyone else I’ve never actually known. RIP.

EVERY WEEK OVER THE COURSE OF THE CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN I'LL BE POSTING SOME THOUGHTS ON EACH SONG THAT FEATURES ON THE RECORD AND HOW IT WAS MADE

IT WOULD BE MASSIVELY APPRECIATED IF YOU SHARED THIS SONG AND SUPPORTED THE CAMPAIGN TO TURN IT INTO A BEAUTIFUL 'REAL' THING OF THE WORLD (ie: a packaged LP/CD)

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF 

Air Itself was recorded by Dorian Taywood in a former stable, now underground club/cinema next to the S Bahn line in the former east of Berlin. We mixed it there, at my place and in an old farm house out east towards the Polish border. Since the recording was done without a budget it was undertaken as and when possible and convenient for everyone involved - roughly an evening a week - without the pressure of pro-studio time.

Despite the conceptual constraints I often impose on the songs Air Itself is I think a quite personal, intimate sounding record. It’s hard not to describe it, by comparison with recent releases, as a solo album - yet this is far from the truth. The LP’s sound was very much shaped by the musicians with whom I was lucky enough to collaborate.

Unlike my last full length LP here it's acoustic instruments that predominate - nylon and steel string guitar, ukulele, glockenspiel, musical saw, violin and piano all feature. Nonetheless it’s hard to call the album an acoustic record. I was looking for an ambient, immersive sound world to place these songs into - and through some mysterious and circuitous process of experimentation and collaboration I began to find it.

EVERY WEEK OVER THE COURSE OF THE CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN I'LL BE POSTING SOME THOUGHTS ON EACH SONG THAT FEATURES ON THE RECORD AND HOW IT WAS MADE

IT WOULD BE MASSIVELY APPRECIATED IF YOU SHARED THIS SONG AND SUPPORTED THE CAMPAIGN TO TURN IT INTO A BEAUTIFUL 'REAL' THING OF THE WORLD (ie: a packaged LP/CD)

Making Second

I wrote these words to give a little context and history to anyone that's interested in the making of the new Mute Swimmer record Second. 

Second can't be called a spontaneous thing for lots of reasons - creative, personal or financial. Even by my own standards, it's taken a long time. 

Recording for the album actually began in May 2012 when, on the invitation of friend, musician and sound engineer (Troels Nygaard) I de-camped to an old out-house on a farm in the Danish countryside. I had the idea, strange to me now, of putting down guitar tracks and vocals for a band to later play along to. Second could conceivably have been this record, another kind of record completely - an acoustic guitar-based suite of songs backed with some discreet textures and effects - very much the follow-up to my self titled, lo-fi, kitchen-recorded debut. Perhaps this part real, part hypothetical record will find it's way out into the world at some point.

Second LP Cover Draft

However, often throughout these sessions, rather than my own acoustic guitar, it was an electric guitar sat in the corner of this old hut that I kept picking up. They say you learn more from your mis-steps. I can say it was thanks to this largely abandoned session (and that electric guitar) that I realised the songs I had written were demanding a different approach. A band certainly, but not a backing band, not an accompanying band working around the typical centre stage guitar and voice of the song-writer, but a band band. Equal parts vocal, bass, drums, guitar. I also heard brass. Sometimes I have these thrilling but utterly frustrating insomniac visions of entire arrangements for songs in my head. Frustrating because I have no adequate way of transcribing them. I'm merely left with some absurd nocturnal muttering on a muffled, over-compressed phone recording. But I heard the brass in my mind - arrangements that bordered on a portentousness that the songs themselves, lyrically or musically, undercut. I often found myself describing them, slightly facetiously, as sarcastic horns but they were also supporting or 'framing' the tracks in more traditional ways. Anyway, these Danish sessions flew by and I hadn't sung a note. I had some acoustic guitar recorded and a lot of material that sounded like someone re-familiarising themselves with an electric guitar. 

Berni and Nicolai - playbacks

Touring commitments prevailed throughout the summer (Germany, Switzerland and Slovakia) and then I moved house in August. It was autumn before I could return to the tracks and, despite having no opportunity to record as such, my ideas about the sound of the album, as a full band, had begun to take shape. I started messing around with midi horns on the train between venues on tour, just to try things out.

In November of that year when I played at an art opening I ran into Berni (Bauch) who asked me, apropos of nothing, if I had ever thought about having a drummer play with me. I told him that I had been thinking about that a lot and that, yes, if he knew someone, to please put me in touch. I'd known Berni two years and he'd never once mentioned that he played the drums himself. It was with a degree of trepidation (as when a friend suggests themselves and you are afraid to hurt their feelings should things not work out) - that we met up in a little rehearsal space in Kreuzberg to try some things out. I think we played 'Time Song' first, which went well enough, but it was his skittering hesitant insertions on 'The Idea of Zero' where I thought, not only that he was a great drummer, but he was a great listener (and as the old cliches have it, these qualities are not always combined in a drummer).

Recording Brass

It was a month later that Nicolai (Schorr) joined on bass. I'd met him the year before where we both played a show in Bremen and I became a firm fan of his own music (both under his own name and as Canoe Man). It wasn't really planned, I simply mentioned the idea of having a bass player over coffee, not considering how effortlessly Nicolai might adjust his talents from guitar to a bass. He suggested trying it and remarkably, thrillingly, in a very short time the songs began to approach the sound I had heard in my head when I wrote them. 

Between Nicolai's and my own touring commitments and Berni's work the three of us practised as often as we could throughout the winter '13.  Around April we figured we were ready to put the tracks down, but I had nowhere for us to record. A studio was out of the question - with no other source of income apart from my modest touring spoils it was, even at friendliest hourly studio rate, inconceivable - and it's simply impossible to record a full band in a Berlin flat, at least if you intend to stay there.

During that winter I had the good fortune to tour with My Sister Grenadine, these three individuals came to play different significant roles in the story of the album.

Vince overdubbing e/guitar 

Felix (Koch) accompanied me on one or two songs on that tour and took an interest in the brass parts I'd written. He helped me augment and realise these sketches and began playing with the band on our occasional live outings (eventually joining the band full time)

Angelina (Kartanski), violin supremo, provided us with Rue Bunte, a hidden little rustic sanctuary off Neukölln's busiest street. Rue Bunte became our recording studio/home for a week in May 2013. I was given the space for the smallest of donations and an agreement that I sweep the yard come autumn - outright charity in other words.

It was Vincenz (Kokot) who introduced me to Niko (Jeremic). Niko recorded and mixed the basic live tracks over our week in Neukoelln for less than a Tesco minimum wage. It was also Vince who later put me in touch with Antonio and Daniella - Wolfin Sound - who mixed Second and finally it is Vince who provided the amazing guitar squalls heard in  'A Melody (Strands 1-3)'. So in short, Seco:nd probably wouldn't exist without these three individuals. 

Nicolai with the bass 

Berni and Niko looking
like rock stars outside Rue Bunte

In August we began rehearsing and recording the brass section. Hitches abounded, technical and otherwise, the sessions were largely abandoned but the input of Frieda, Askin and Felix taught me a lot and many of their ideas are woven into the final arrangements you here on the record. However at this point I thought I'd never get it done and considered dropping the idea of brass all together. (I felt out of my depth, that it was an over-ambitious idea and crazily unpredictable in a recording situation). The reason the brass is there i guess is down to a kind of bloody minded stubborness to stick as closely as possible to the sounds I heard in my head when I'd written the songs. Eventually  I enlisted the help of some players from outside and recorded on and off throughout the Autumn, when i could afford it and with the continued charity of Rue Bunte.

it was a bit of comedown, having finally got the brass down to realise I still had the vocals to do. Again without the possibility of a studio and in need of somewhere relatively echo-less and quiet Nicolai suggested his back room workshop which we hastily converted into a child's den packing as much soft furnishings as we could around myself and the microphone. The rest of the year was spent touring, editing the tracks from the three different sessions (Band/Brass/Vocals) and wondering how the hell i was going to get the record mixed and made.

And so finally to the present point at which you find me - trying to fund the mixing, mastering and production of this crazy two year project. I'm pleased to say that with your help so far we have been able to mix most of Second. I have to say a few words about Antonio and Daniella at Wolfinsound, since I have lost count of the hours they have put into the mixing and editing of what will shortly be dropping through your letterbox. If I gave Antonio the entire money raised from the funding it wouldn't cover the time he has spent attending to my impossible requests, changing whims, perfectionism and blatant cul-de-sacs.

Patience. Antonio at Wolfin Sound

We now have the funds to master the record properly. This way it can sit alongside Beyonce on Radio 1 with no noticeable difference in audio quality. Thank you all.  We are also halfway towards getting enough for the actual product - the vinyl and CDs.  

I hadn't meant to write all that but I wanted to attend to the context and story of this record for anyone who cares to read it. This documents the challenges faced and, at the risk of sounding like a Hollywood trailer, of trying to stick to an artistic vision without compromise and to create something unusual and wonderful with no external financial help. But more than that I hope it makes clear the work of all the people above who believed in the project. Thanks.

Guy / Mute Swimmer

April 27th 2014

Recent Statement

My current work is performance-based integrating traditional popular song forms, performance art and site-specific film projection. These works utilise elements of folk and rock music to lyrically deconstruct the song writing process and act of performance itself. The (lyrical) space usually assigned to the narrative ‘other’ is essentially inverted resulting in a self-reflexive meta-narrative that is at once confrontational, ironic and absurd. Accompanying film projections run parallel, relaying footage of the same location, performer and audience in a looped time delay that is potentially infinite in its recession.

The work is performed in music venues and galleries and consciously seeks to test perceived boundaries between the two contexts. The adoption of a moniker, ‘Mute Swimmer’ and the works’ presence on internet music platforms such as My Space and Last FM similarly seek to disperse and subvert distinctions between ‘performance artist’ and ‘song-writer’.

Concurrent work under the name ‘Dala’ applies certain conceptual constraints to form the basis of an abstract sonic project. The work ‘PC’ for example is derived entirely from two minutes of amplified silence recorded on a computer and manipulated. ‘Guitar’ is similarly composed from a recording of a guitar being plugged in to an amplifier and then being unplugged.

My work in other media is similarly reflexive in nature, in the series ‘Interventions’ photographs partially replicate the locations in which they are situated, mediating the viewers’ experience of mundane public spaces. Paintings produced for the residency/exhibitions ‘Parallax’ and ‘The Wrong Map’ take the changing conditions of light and shadow on the painting support itself (canvas, stretcher, staples etc.) as a subject whilst the Replica series consist of slightly modified photographic constructions of existing objects.

A number of key themes underpin the production of these works. Firstly their resistance to an identification with, or projection of, an 'elsewhere' figurative, metaphorically or otherwise. These works exist, often transiently in situ, referring solely to their own means of production and the context in which they operate . Their mode is that of a tautological circuit whose ostensible absence of a subject provokes the viewer's interrogation and critique of structures previously considered self-evident or 'given' in the moment of viewing.

My own working process similarly compels me to consider what this emphasis on presentness might mean, how it is accessed or indeed if it is possible; it can be said to move between an idealistic fascination with the present or things as they are whist at the same time acknowledging the frustration and impossibility of that inquiry in the process.

If these notions are the lynch pin of my activities then failure, absurdity, irony and melodrama become sub-texts, an inevitable by-product of an impossible project. As such, for all their formal or theoretical constraints, I consider my project fundamentally romantic in nature.

Mute Swimmer - Record Release

I'm pleased to say that the record is done and available to your ears for an inevitable (but hopefully worthwhile) foray into commerce. You can get it from me directly for ten English pounds including postage (at the email above), at gigs for £8, or here:
http://www.woodlandrecordings.com

I'll resist the temptation to describe the music as such. Suffice to say the album is eponymously titled. It has ten tracks with a few hidden surprises. It was recorded by Lawrence Collyer, Stephen Burch and myself in various rooms in the south of England. I mixed it with some help from Stephen and we mastered it here in Berlin.
It features the invaluable musical contributions of The Diamond Family Archive (electric guitar, keyboard, voice), Nezih Antakli (Percussion and atmospheres), Kay Johnson (vocals) and The Great Park (organ).

There are 110 numbered copies with lyric sheet inserts, fold out covers and photos which I designed and made myself with moderate mechanical interventions and the help of Fee and Stephen.

As a taster here's a free download of the song 'Different Name' from the album:
http://www.mediafire.com/?gn4lmmg0jqi
Finally thanks to the many people directly or indirectly involved for their support and patience while I've been doing this.

I hope you find something to enjoy there.

Guy/Mute Swimmer

ps:
Here's a video of Saturday night at Ida Nowhere, Neukölln, Berlin if you want to take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M9KtSbx6ck

Thanks to Magdelena for this.

some thoughts on some songs

i’ve always loved john cage’s 4’ 33”. not so much because of the way it conveys the relative status and ultimate impossibility of silence itself but for the way in which the audience come to create the piece in some measure, they actively engage it’s principle through performance.

i liked the way david byrne always sang as if he was outside looking in – a kind of anxious, disinterested (unpoetic) poetry of the mundane and absurd.

i still get a weird thrill when i hear kylie minogue’s ‘can’t get you out of my head’. it is a kind of pure pop tautology – it puts it’s addictive primary hook precisely where you can’t get it out of your head and then it tells you so…..along with other aspects of her person, i just find that sexy.

steve malkmus is particularly good at splicing his lyrics with little asides as to the artifice of the song itself – occasionally he just steps out of it altogether and waves at you from the sidelines. ‘stereo’ is an obvious point of reference but it’s usually listening to ‘gold soundz’ when he announces, at precisely the point you know it’s coming, that they are ‘coming to the chorus’ that i usually fall off my stool or spit museli all over my lap laughing.

a lot of hip hop utilizes a kind of self-reflexive narration. the rapper’s flow articulating the very fluency and originality of the flow itself in a self-congratulatory loop. in ‘twice the first time’ saul williams ruminates on hip hop’s genetic connection to the slave song - imploring the beat (as a cipher for the burden of black american history), to stop just as it drops back in. brilliant.

i often come back to analogies with painting. i think of lyrics like recognizable objects or motifs on a canvas, a window into somewhere else. there is something in all the above and an attempt in my own recent songs, to bust the window in some sense. the song takes you on a journey with no essential momentum outside of itself and the moment it occupies in time. it acknowledges the artifice of the construction, self conciously taking apart its conventions and received paradigms whilst at the same time reveling in their peculiar characteristics and intrinsic pleasures.

www.myspace.com/guydale

Quito To The Border

Quito as a ghost capital city on the Sunday morning I arrive. Everyone partying in Puerto Lopez perhaps.

Making enough bolognese to last me four days in an expansive kitchen listening to Françoise Hardy.

Going to the cinema to see Benjamin Button with a girl called Emily Button - poetic, even if the film was utter shlock. (Enjoyed Cate Blanchett though, I have no critical faculties when it come to this woman). We had to sweet-talk our way in past no less than 3 armed guards to do it- because we are 10 minutes late.

Playing songs quietly on the terrace in the occasionally library like tranquility of Casa Bambu with the nice Chilean couple I forget the names of....an amazing view of the mountain flanked city.

Waking up with a feeling I was leaving too soon but going anyway.

The horror of finding my empty satchel still wrapped around my legs on the bus out of Quito....relieved of a laptop with all my own recordings from November, music and photos from my trip.

Arriving in Tulcan border town to file a report at a police station Samuel Beckett would have been pround of. Emily kindly buying some rum which the Ecuadorian police gladly consume whilst typing up my report. (This is the first of two times that someone has entered ´British Citizen´ as my first and second name). One un-connected officer gives me a torrent of questions about English whiskey and also if Scotland is in fact England.

Watching The Squid and The Whale on a double bed in the utterly seedy Hotel San Franscico before the power goes out. Feeling indescribably downcast and philosphical alternately....

A brain like a fly around shit for weeks after. Únable to leave the incident alone...an ever accumulating list of losses, involutary acts of (imagined) violence and voodoo directed at the faceless perpetrator.

A long ride to Cali through some beautiful countryside. Emily leaving for the coast on her birthday. Me being ill, again.

Characters - Puerto Lopez

John and Dennis from Minnosota. Musician and eco warrior respectively. Poker. The dog that follows them everywhere. They´re being quietly smart (Americans) and, I can´t think of a better way of saying it, kind of short and cute.....long chats into the evening with John. Later his lost camera grief.

Fabian and ?. Fabian´s inherently hilarious body language, especially whilst playing pool. Isla Del Planta, playing that weird fill in the gaps game about a guy in a car listening to a record skipping who then kills himself...seeing some blue footed boobies and...thats all. Arriving to a hill top vista and sitting next to two guys holding rifles. Me asking them where they´re from and realising I have never actually heard a broad Alabama accent before, at least not in real life....Fabian asking what they are killing...the slow drawled response. ´Aymm jurst killin cayts´ (I´m just killing cats). The highlight of an off day.

Playing cards with the very loud guy from Alaska who was absolutely fascinated with himself.

Micheal, late 40´s from Sheffield. Works as a driver for an incredibly rich sheik in London - I forget how this came about. Takes lovely pictures which he frequently ruins with unnecessary Photoshop post production (in my opinion). Endears himself to my two german friends by asking them exactly what town the Nazi rallies took place in Germany, by way of introduction...They perhaps understandably don´t reply....the look of genuine curiousity and mischief on his face, which despite myself I found contagiously humourous. ´Travels´ with a stunning 22 year old actress from Cali who cooks amazing vegatarian food, practises transcendental meditation´and poses but naked on the beach for his impromtu photoshoots. My redeeming memory of Michael is of his swaying gently on a hammock in the humid equadorian afternoon reading Edgar Allen Poe and listening to Skinny Puppy. A true one off.

Premature Nostalgia/Dirty Dancing (A Short Defence Of Melancholy)

Solitude. A kind of melancholy viewing photographs from the months past.[i] Meditating on the possibility of nostalgia for an activity that is, in essence, still happening. Perhaps I am more guilty of this kind of nostalgic revision than others, but in any case it’s not impossible to see how a trip of such length could entail such a sentiment.

I have been away over five months. It is now mid-february. I am, on the one hand, quite mystified as to where this time might have gone. On the other there is some evidence to suggest (a largely unelaborated lists of place names, events, smells, sights at the back of a book) that it has been spent in a wholehearted sensory overload kind of way.[ii]

So I am sat with this premature nostalgia and I’m looking at myself having it….and writing that. I suppose this is what I feared a Blog might be before I entertained the idea of having one. A self indulgent mess. I may have become my worst fear. Nevertheless I find myself considering the song ‘I’ve Had The Time Of My Life’ from the film Dirty Dancing.

I have no idea why this example above all others came to me. I can’t admit to liking the song (it reminds me of moles and bad hen nights) or for its context being at all apposite. Nevertheless it’s a song sung, we are led to believe, by two lovers who are addressing each other in the present tense and reflecting on, passionately some may say, a period in their shared recent past that is itself enduring through the course of the song. ‘I’ve had the time of my life, I’ve never felt this way before’. In this sense it seemed a good example of what  mean, of what premature nostalgia might be.

I wonder if it is a kind of nostalgia, if not precipitated by, then certainly conducive to the ‘holiday experience’ since contextually a holiday is, by definition, in parenthesis to the rest of your life. It has a clear beginning and end in time that is distinguished from one’s ‘daily life’ (whatever that may mean). Perhaps all nostalgia is merely processing information in a sentimental way and sometimes there is a temporal overlap not unlike the one used to explain deja vu. In my case this line, between 'daily life' and 'holiday' seems increasingly blurred and that is perhaps the motivation and reason for the reflective but ultimately pointless indulgences relayed here. The nomadic or holiday experience has become 'daily life'.

In any case I am lying in a hammock in Ayampe, a remote village on the coast of Ecuador. I have a cabaña right on the beach which has three beds of which, for two nights, I have been the sole occupant. It has a fan and a shower. It has silence or at least noise that is largely devoid of human intervention. (There are the cicadas and crickets who reach a fever pitch like a nature rave when the sun goes down. There is an insect, I don’t know what, that sounds exactly like the old dial phones used to sound when you let go after the number). It has a shop to buy basics and two restaurants that are virtually empty all the time. This place would be tranquil to the point of boredom I imagine if a complete lack of communication with the world and others hadn’t been the defining desire of your last two weeks.

The busiest the village gets is when all 20 residents and the five tourists distribute themselves into evenly spaced silhouettes along a stretch of beach 3 km long to watch the sun set. (The sun here is an enormous orange bubble that seems to deflate with great symmetry into the ocean around seven pm). In short this is where I want to be, my head and my location have co-incided perfectly. I feel very content. Nevertheless it is precisely here, out of this contentment that the nostalgia begins - is allowed to begin as I stop moving - and it is celebratory as much as it is a wistful acknowledgment of past time, you can ask Patrick Swizzle or Leonard Cohen.

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[i] I want to defend this word melancholy. To wrestle or distinguish it from depression or flagrant navel gazing and introspection with which it is often confused. Melancholy is something that I think can be defined as much by its great beauty and sense of rapture as it is by sadness and introspection. This sentiment seems to me to be exemplified in the music of Leonard Cohen. If it is sad (and often it is) it is sadness elevated to an art form, and one that does not fail to admit the light as well as the dark; broadly life’s sense of wonder as well as it’s disappointments and absurdities. In this sense it seems to me one of the most balanced and ultimately honest and of all sentiments – who has not at some point of great euphoria wondered why life is not always such? And in that thought encapsulated a kind of melancholy that cannot be called sad? (As an aside; a sad or melancholy song that successfully communicates what is I think a not uncommon feeling seems to me to be ultimately positive and edifying. Conversely ‘depressing music’ will always be something that seems utterly compromised by its mode of coming into being – derivative or commercial schlock in any idiom or style that seems bereft of its own voice).

[ii] I only hope these concise scribbles somehow retain their ability to jog the details of these events when I do actually come to set them down.