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.

Agua Caliente and Machu Picchu

A slow ride up through some smaller Inca sites until dusk in Ollantaytambo (via the Inca ampitheatre). The train being craziliy expensive (and in any case somehow too easy). The last meal for a while. Another incredibly bumpy, precipitous taxi ride to Santa Teresa in rain where we spend the night.

Waking at six. San Pedro and a cigarette for breakfast. Hot water from a remote first aid tent. Jordi mixing. Viscous green. A cartwheel on a trainline. Walking. Repetition, sweat and nausea. The wood slats being ou---t—ofs-y—n------c with my stride. Throwing up before a bridge, a little weightless, clean. Feeling better. The sun suddenly hot, present. Jordi, Thai and I bathing in pools around rapids – lots of butterflies, lucid and slowing down a little. Guarda and Lara waiting ahead on the platform giggling like little girls, covered in mosquito bites.

The incredible sound of white water, blocks of sound. Blocks of rock rising thousands of meters out of jungle. Valley gorge. Something about a proper relation to nature. Continuous awe.

Agua Caliente…utter disorientation. Jungle china town. The seeming plastic tin pot temporality of virtually all human constructions (endeavour?). Rain in mild air. Head back on rucksack, to find the middle of something. Turning to the river over and over, second wave, thinking to consolidate, rain on skin, ice cream – a worthy human endeavour.

Strange restaurant table, suddenly enclosed. Food, eyeing bags, others. Guide police lunching with tourists, ‘Inca laughter’. The wildly vacillating turns of my appetite. Fish proving good. Beer too. Ugliest town square I’ve ever seen (fascinating for it). Guada and Lara reprimanded by officials for mounting and embracing its cheap Inca statue. The eponymous hot baths full of fat tourists in brown water. Sickened some. Turning around, tickets in hand. A red hotel room with synthetic sheets. Skin. Sleep. Later, a lasagne, strung out Shithead – losing a lot.

Morning, bright. Out on the street. Late start. Sat facing tracks. Guarda and Jordi already on the cactus. Not holding it down.[1] Climbing steps – an inordinate number. Everything smelling of San Pedro. Ritz crisps. Fruit in a bag. Utter fatigue. Vomiting (again). Relief (again). Jordi’s multicoloured fatigue, green/red under yellow hat. Lara’s bitten up legs. Folk descending. ‘Quince minutos’ they said, every one.

At the top. Parking lot. Plastic ticket office, Americans, cars, buses…a glass of water that costs two meals. The potential that it’s a horrible mistake. Then through the gate and just staring…every direction an unmitigated visual pleasure, a fact in a natural wonder, an intervention so eccentric and perfect it defies belief. The inability somehow to believe it, comprehend it visually. Reframed, built, crazily built.

Two equadorians chasing the girls, but not quite hassling. Official whistles and cigarettes. All kinds of tourist. Its hot. We have no water – just warm yogurt and a mango. Try not to think about it. Climbing again suddenly easier, weight lifted, in mind, passing energy, mood, desire, laughter…charged silent looking. I didn’t think about it. On the steps - the saint who hands me a full bottle of water.

Coming down. Descending finally, the first time all day, in both senses - as if to be synchronised as such. The evening light bathing the whole place in new angles and dimensions. Light hitting rock on a grand scale. More whistles. Four reluctantly ushered out.

Fatigue. An expensive bus I dislike. Restaurant with kindly owner. Pizza. Coca Cola - the best drink ever (for a moment). A better hostel. Hot shower. In the plaza with Guarda later. Warm evening. Gentle, straight, philosophical. Some sweets in my pocket.

A slow, bumpy ride back in Cuzco in a very hot van. Realising how dangerous it was in daylight. Quickly becoming bored of the two fractionally differing locations for my feet. Later. Half hearted clubbing. Torrential rain on the last day. The market and the kindly juice lady for the last time. Saying goodbye to Lara and Guarda. Missing them all – Manuel, Jordi, Joakim, Lara, Guarda.

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[1] I’m sorry vomiting features so profusely in this and other accounts but it is only out of a desire for a kind of veracity and, it is fair to say that vomiting has been, if not (mercifully) a defining feature, then certainly something of a recurring theme.

Some Notes On Copacabana and Isla Del Sol

Copacapana harbour. Four grown men getting scared in a plastic peddle boat shaped like a swan….

Converting most everyone to the game of ‘Shithead’.

The utter strangeness of the spectacle of a priest blessing a meticulously decorated queue of cars whilst the family sup beers and set off fireworks underneath the back wheels.

Thinking Copacapana was a bit of hippy tourist shell with nothing in its middle and, after three days, feeling my first impression was probably right.

Saying goodbe to Joakim on the boat to Isla Del Sol.

Manuel’s obsession (which began in Sucre) with the Lithuanian girl and her ‘Brother’ reaching new levels of self deception.

The weird combination of charming curiosity and utter cynicism evident in the children on Isla Del Sol.

Forgetting my trunks (again).

Amazing vistas walking from the north to the south side of the island. (Isla Del Sol is the highest lake of its kind in the world, so I´m told.

Not seeing any men of the village for days. Wondering what the fuck they were doing and where.

The proportion of children working in South America is, I suppose, a necessity but still I feel quite over-joyed to see a few playing – no purpose (or commerce) involved.

A lighter exploding in my pocket on a floating straw island during a very tranquil wedding ceremony. The faces of the two fisherman sat next to me. One asking me in the most sincere and concerned tone ‘Amigo?’ and me, bemused, feeling myself up for wounds. Thinking for a moment I had been assassinated in the most bizarre location ever. I guess this was funnier than I can transcribe it.