Do You Still Think I'm The Nuts

 

notes from greater than the sum of our parts by Richard Schwartz

protector parts; being cold and numb; put care part at risk of emptying the well; not old enough to look after exile parts

care parts; fear of being falsely loved; makes fear part vulnerable

you can get close to your exiles but you can agree with them not to overwhelm you

panic; talk to the part and say you're going to help it

trauma; push parts out because they think they're protecting a young being

re-embody; our diet prevents full embodiment; when we are able to lead inside, our protectors step back 

when we can't access our parts they come out to us as illnesses / physical manifestation of exiles parts

 big defeats

little victories 

your body is like a garlic bulb

find the clove which is triggered by events

go to your parts with an open heart and an open asshole

                            

Lager Hell

 

Today marks the release of my long time friend and all time side kick's first album - A turnstile increase. I had no expectations for the outcome of their project but after listening to the tracks, I was not surprised  that each three and half (on average) track is quintessentially Jacob Stockings. 'Thrum my mind up' shuffles and buzzes like a drunken drone and sets an uneasy tone to which 'Impression one' settles you. Tape loop murmurs and raw piano recordings are elegant and somniferous. The title of  'Shifting into you' instantly made me think of Bridget St John "I'm moving on  / to you" from 'Song to keep you company', but in listening to the track, the two couldn't be more different. Forget folk, this track is fucking hardcore. Heavily gated influxes of noise create the impression of somebody gasping for air or life, the chimes injecting hope, almost Arca-esque. A figurative message for speech and it's stammers, perhaps. Then in 'SuperSunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday' some classic formant, something which usually makes me go woi but in this case the strings and sincere speech of mr.football commentator have me at the edge of my seat, again for 'how gorgeous it is' to bring me back to my recline, all tucked in. That is the nature of this eight track debut, you get shown love and warmth and then it pulls it away from you, testing you, making you feel solitary, and then you're taken back in, wrapped up. I could listen to this ornament forever, you can listen to it here.

Deeseven

 Another day of acknowledging a sense of detachment to almost everything and everyone around me. I keep imagining myself getting kidnapped or abducted to a foreign land where I have only one set of shoes and I don't know anyone. I imagine that the people here live a totally different way of life, not a capitalist society of course but also not one noticeably so - people don't get by through trading skills or exchanging apples. The place I get abducted to, appears to the passer by as any other city would. Thats as far as I can go with the description of that imagination as I nearly have to start work already. Got distracted putting a croissant in the oven  and now I'd rather talk about the sense of detachment which has come out of these imaginations. I have experienced loss to certain degrees over the last year and the pandemic has made really struggle with even the smallest of losses - a more sheltered life led me to becoming dependent on things and people I never usually would have.  More recently I have been really pursuing a mindset which embraces loss and change and have been finding it sort of addictive to challenge myself with thoughts of loss and abduction. I do this to the extent where I have imagined being removed from everything and everyone I love and I practice feeling ok with that. It is very freeing and makes me cherish smaller interactions more and things that could be upsetting, have a lot less effect on me as I see their value in life only temporary and subject to change (positively) at any moment. 

I got this record recently - Net  - from Offworld Communication Systems which a squelchy synth abduction funkline. A lot of Offworld's other stuff sits in the ambient breaks and IDM genre but this one is more spacey thanks to the vocals and definitely helps me with that sense of detachment, or maybe it just bangs.  Can't find much to download anywhere though so just going to get more OCS stuff on CD for abduction car journeys.

• Alien abduction, memories of being taken by apparently nonhuman entities from a different planet
• Bride kidnapping, a practice in which a man abducts the woman he wishes to marry
• Raptio, large scale abduction of women, either for marriage or enslavement
• Tiger kidnapping, taking a hostage to force a loved one or associate of the victim to do something

Spring - Settling In

In looking into starlings the other day and their tendencies to navigate towards the edges of dark and light boundaries, it got me thinking about edgelands.  I need to make a 'sonic reaction' to something for a friend by the end of the month and I was thinking that my time spent reading about these liminal areas, in combination with staying in a peculiar outskirt area of Belfast, would provide me with suitable content to respond audibly.  The track has to be fifteen minutes long so i'd like to use this time to journey from urban to rural zones perhaps, encountering the different natures of the untapped borderlands. Maybe I could sample some bits from the film which I'm halfway through.. going to watch the rest tonight. I got a book this week called The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey. Iain Sinclair describes Mabey as  the unacknowledged pivot between the new nature writers and those others, of a grungier dispensation, who are randomly (and misleadingly) herded together as ‘psychogeographers’. Iain talks about the other writers too in his introduction to the book; Will Self, J.g Ballard, John Davies, Cobbett, Defoe, John Taylor, John Hillaby, and the most submerged inheritor of the genealogy set out by Mabey in 1973 is the self proclaimed 'deep-topographer', Nick Papadimitriou. Having listened to many of Nick's podcasts and seen a couple of his documentaries, I'm excited to read this book and get a different, older insight into edge lands and what value they bring through Spring to Winter, as Mabey writes it.

Disciples of The Humming Machine

 Big week, very long, extremely fast and a constant pursuit for strength. Today's highlights have been watching the woodpecker in the park hammer into a very hard tree and listening to it's ricochet.  Also driving to Chatelheraut country park and seeing an exquisite timber truss bridge spanning across the fast flowing freshwater stream, where I am sure there were trout swimming. And finally the completion of my storage shelves, built from birch ply and for which I cam across many many hurdles and was reminded of how my impatience when things go wrong can really set me back. I need to ask for help more. Feeling too tired to write but loving listening to two lone swordsmen 2001 haywire session on groovewire radio. Favourite tunes from the mix to come.. 

Material Manifestations

I am writing this post retrospectively because I got a bit behind posting whilst getting distracted travelling to Belfast etc. but I am here now in the garage of somebody else and have a few hours each evening where I have been able to read. I am part way through reading Waterland by Graham Swift, a copy which my friend lent me before Christmas - slow reader. Published in 1983 this personal narrative is set in the context of a wider history, of the narrator's family, the Fens of East Anglia (the same fens I were surrounded by growing up), and the eel. I am going to watch the film adaption tonight. Yesterday I watched a film comprised of archival footage which explored the cultural geography of the fens. The film is by Rowan Jaines who describes her film as one that aims to show the Fens as haunted by both the past and those things that have not yet come to be. The opening shot is of a murmuration of starlings over a low-lit fenland. Murmurations have always fascinated me because of their mystifying scale and coordination. I have tried to find out a bit more to un-envelope the mysteries of starlings. 

Starling
- a murmuration is a word used only to describe the movement of starlings
million birds soar into the city and the sky would almost go dark 
- fluttering
- a flock of up to a million swirl over their roost sites before settling down
each bird is less likely to be preyed upon if its part of a large group and signpost to other starlings the best place to roost for the night
- from a distance they look black but up close they are green and gleam with purple iridescence, in winter they are spangled with a constellation of white spots, the stars which give rise to their name - starling
- in autumn, vast numbers of continental starlings migrate to the UK to take advantage of the warmer winters and gather at dusk to roost in trees, bushes and reed beds 
- they look like iron filings in the sky / crystal alignment
the birds see the direction of their neighbour and then steer their orientation to mimic, the alignment doesn't have a range, it is irrespective of the distance between neighbours
- the birds see a patchwork of light and dark, made up of the pale sky and dark birds and the birds fly towards the edges of the black and white boundary within their vision - they seek out the edges 
- print out picture of murmurations, punch out the pattern, put through a music box
- murmuration is an onoematapaeae 
- the sky is filled with tiny little apostrophes
- originally the birds were from Scandinavia and northern Europe and they have escaped the colder climate
- sleeping all together in the reeds keeps them warm
- the sound of their wings resembles sighing, a subtle hissing
- what do they do overnight? little bit of sleeping, little bit of dozing.. little bit of feather care prehaps
- starlings are imitators, they have a huge range of sounds that they can make with their pharynx so as well as making their bird like sounds they can also make guttural clicks and almost mechanical like sounds.
- they don't have their own natural songs, so what they tend to do is pull from everything they hear around them

Fen Dawn Chorus In Suffolk

Sandhill Cranes

Some Velvet Morning

 

Had a dream i cut my flatmates hair but it came off her head as orange peel and as the wind drew in through the crack in the window, a very strong gust, it dispersed the peel evenly all over my room. We then looked at images of Kate Moss in magazines for ages. Girllyyy. I think it's because I was listening to this song (Some Velvet Morning) yesterday morning and it surprised me that Kate Moss was present in a musical context, this time with Primal Scream. It's the first i'd seen of her collaborating with bands but it seems she has worked with The Lemonheads and her brother, Nick Moss' band. This Disco Heater Dub version is alright, I heard it in an early Weatherall mix, but there's something about the breathiness and sass of the vocals which makes me cringe a bit. The original version recorded in 1967 by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra can be found here: Some Velvet Morning. The male part of the song is in 4/4 time signature whereas the female part is in 3/4. Lee's voice is recorded with more reverberation than Nancy's, making it sound bi-dimensional. My favourite is Slowdive's cover (Some Velvet Morning) - overdriven guitars and hi reverb vocals, a dreamy shoegaze version.

Bats In The Park

Today I got a lot of sawdust in my lungs from sanding and sawing wood to make a platform and shelves for my turntables and records. I've been using a Kataba (backless saw) to cut the birch ply to make halved jointsand it turns out you can't use a chisel with ply as it's too hard.  
Besides the woodwork, I have been listening to lots of different zero Bpm recordings/tracks in order to get inspiration for a 'sonic reaction' I am to make for a friend's radio show. Radio aporee has been a constant source of inspiration since a discovered it a few years ago - it has encouraged my fascination with cartography, mappingdata, and field recordings. One user who's work I became interested in today is John Grzinich. He made a recordingof an installation using local ceramic roof tiles ('stresniki' in Slovenian) in Slovenia. The link to his recordings can be found below:
John Grzinich
At work today I learnt two new words:
Efflorescence is a crystalline or powdery deposit of salts often visible on the surface of concrete, brick, stucco, or natural stone surfaces. It occurs when water leaves behind salt deposits on the masonry surface.
Bitumen, also known as asphalt in the United States, is a substance produced through the distillation of crude oil that is known for its waterproofing and adhesive properties.

Belfast Packing List

A normal Monday at work with a greater sense of accomplishment from the previous week and weekend. Awakening into March with a lighter skin and a spring haze out of the window. This is my last in Glasgow before I head to Belfast for work on Sunday with A. Peebles.. should be fun..

 Packing list:

Hi-Vis
Torches (Laser)
Micrometer
Crack Ruler
Laser Measure
Bore Scope
Metal Detector
A5 Notepad

Last week at work I slightly over did it with listening to John Peel's Radio 1 shows from 1989 to 1990. I think I listened to about 15 episodes over the course of the week. I was really enjoying his incredibly laid back attitude to being a radio dj, he often accidentally plays the same song twice in a row or plays the wrong song and will follow with an apology. He gives the listener a sense of musical intelligence as he often starts a sentance off by saying 'as you probably know already,' - which is comforting but made me laugh a lot because I actually never knew already (about a record which came out on a certain label last week - last week is now 30 years ago for me!). It was also reassuring listening to his shows from 1989 to 1990 because all the tunes are guaranteed to be punk rock, post punk, metal, hip-hop , dub reggae, and indie rock.. and definitely some pop. All these genres are best defined by this era and I'm not that into anything from these genres that's been made since then, besides a few. There is a lot I'd like to find out about John as I feel I'm relatively new to discovering the depths of his work, sadly too late. However I will write about this in future posts as I need to get back to work. For now, two of my favourite tracks that he played in last weeks episodes:

Chicago Now - The Fall

Spirit Dance - A Certain Ratio