Disco Inferno – Next Year

I was living in guesthouses for about two weeks as I adjusted to working in Laos. Each morning I’d eat my complimentary breakfast with new people. Different faces, at least, even if there were the same questions asked of staff. Conversation was effortless – if you sought it. And if you found comfort in knowing where other people were from, where they had just been, how long they would be in Vientiane, and where they were off to next. Names, nationalities, pasts and futures collapsed into nothingness, though I tried to remember specific anecdotes as collectables to be traded profitably at later introductions.

One particular night, having just switched guesthouses, I befriended a young Lao sister and brother who ran a small bar down by the Mekong. Their English was only basic but I latched onto the company, downing several longnecks, breathing their realness and staying for hours. As we spoke and I showed pictures on my mobile ‘of Australia’, we were hit with a downpour that shook the little shack seemingly made of mud and branch. With conversation exhausted, or reduced to a trickle, I helped them close shop and waited nearly an hour for a break in the rain. Drops of water fell on our heads and pools gathered around our feet, and such was the density of water that you could no longer see the usually glowing lights on the other side of the river. A pleasant five-minute walk became a futile dash. No amount of speed or agility could prevent my soaking.

I arrived at the guesthouse to find doors locked and all lights out. There was an 11.30pm curfew and it was 11.25. After several minutes of knocking, a sleepy-eyed attendant jumped suddenly from what was the moment before a pile of washing on a chair by the entrance. Wordlessly he let me in. I pulled my bedraggled self up the spiral staircase to my fifth floor box. Grated against the crisp sheets, sore-throatily I swallowed and then I knew I was in for a rough night.

It was a disrupted sleep, night sweats punctuated by absurd, poignant dreams. Feverish and restless, I thought of the transience of being; my loneliness struck me as something I’d chosen and must accept. I felt anxious about what I was doing in this foreign land, about whether I’d ever feel more than a tourist. At this vulnerable hour, with an impressionable head swirling with Thomas Wolfe travel reading, I all but flung Gantian curses at the earth, its people and my plight. O lost!

By mid-morning my fever had broken, but my thoughts had only scattered. I was left in the odd position of having to choose whether to fulfil my Western-womb’d duty to explore the immediate surrounds or stay in and consolidate my health. It was the morning after, in effect. My desire was to remain reflective but not inactive: more than a spectator, get involved! Still sickness finds a way to linger and, quite inexplicably, its power to quell optimism and fragment thought is inimitable. And how does one celebrate more of the same, anyway? What is there to look forward to?

—

Those, for me, are better answered by Disco Inferno’s amazing ‘Next Year’ than anything I could muster. And I’ve run out of storyline. Stark, impressionistic and intentionally alienating, the song’s latent melody is too easy to bypass. But there is reward and, remember, small victories are, nevertheless, still victories. Set to the percussive-by-proxy backdrop of the saddest fireworks display imaginable, the track’s narrative questions belief, including the oft-held one that things will simply get better. The turning of a page, a chapter, the unwrapping of a fresh calendar, a new start: ‘The future is hung from the hooks of the past. I’ve seen next year and it’s just like the last,’ Ian Crause offers. Somehow optimistic, like shards of glass, shimmering though broken. A sample-heavy tableau so dense it captures the numbed aftermath of a new year’s eve gone wrong or merely tolerably, the harshbuzz comedown, the questioning of those things in which we seek solace. ‘Art doesn’t solve, it just makes excuses’. The uneasy acceptance, the dogged final stance to protect the right to criticism as only you can criticise yourself. ‘Oh, I’m burning am I? Then where’s the fucking flames?’ OK, it doesn’t answer anything. Just listen to it.

Hanoi Annoys – A Travel Mix

Get Experienced [Download]

And now, because I can’t quite leave my Hanoi experience behind, and fear I’ll be unable to update this blog as regularly as I’d originally planned (though I have done a lot or writing already), I present this travel mix. Sure, the actual Vietnamese-ess-ness-ness is tenuous, but it’s an eclectic set of Western-influenced S.E. Asian tunes (courtesy of Sublime Frequencies compilations), S.E. Asian-influenced Western tunes, vaguely Summer-inflected pop hits and drones, and simply good music. This goes some inadequate way to documenting my experiences so far in Vietnam, Malaysia and Laos. Here it is, Hanoi Annoys:

1. Animal Collective – Kids on Holiday
2. Onra – Take a Ride
3. Sinn Sisamouth – Don’t Let My Girlfriend Tickle Me
4. Arthur Russell – The Platform on the Ocean
5. Samsimar – Indang Pariaman
6. Arp – Potentialities II
7. The Magnetic Fields – When The Open Road Is Closing In
8. Warfield Spillers – Daddy’s Little Girl
9. Johnny Guitar – Bangkok by Night
10. Sun Araw – Bump Up (High Step)
11. Thee Oh Sees – I Was Denied
12. J.T. IV – Death Trip
13. P.M.7/Jupiter – Susie Wong
14. Studio – Out There
15. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – May The Music Never Die

Trauma Texts

In my honours class last year we dealt extensively with the topic ‘Terror, Pleasure and the Image’ largely by examining film through the filter of ‘trauma cinema’. Janet Walker coined the phrase, as far as I know, to describe films and documentaries that have trauma as both subject matter and aesthetic. Much of Walker’s focus centred on films portraying incest and the Holocaust, and the use of filmic techniques to convey the frailty of memory in the face of disquieting events that is evident in so much trauma. Two films that came immediately to mind for me were The Diving Bell & The Butterfly and Fragments of Antonin. The fact that the former was initially a published memoir, and my supervisor’s brief mentioning, in the same seminar, of the hiphop music genre as an outlet for catharsis or a bloodletting of trauma, led me to wonder about what other cultural items could possibly be defined as ‘trauma texts’. Now, I’m serviceably knowledgeable about film but no expert on ‘trauma cinema’, and to me the notion is transferable to other cultural forms, especially if part of the aim is to replicate the symptoms of traumatic experience on the audience (my supervisor largely disagreed). In relation to music, I definitely don’t mean isolating your average Emo narrative about being done wrong, I mean something much more holistic (as I’ll attempt to illustrate further below).

Walker employs theories of post traumatic stress disorder to illuminate the amnesias, fantasies, and mistakes in memory that contribute in order to better understand of how personal and public historical meaning is made. That is, partially, the way films represent trauma, and how they shape our conceptions of trauma. Film may be an high sensory medium, but it is like music and literature in that it can only re-present reality. And it does this through various techniques. As do literature, and, perhaps most contentiously, music. In relation to this discussion, novels like William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, in particular, stick out, for their use of stream-of-consciousness, non-linear narrative, vignettes, ellipses, in depicting heavy drug use and violence. The decentralising of the plot, particularly in Naked Lunch, contributes a disorienting effect that, in essence, mimics reality. Film may have a more overtly affective influence on its viewers, but, I would argue, the written word can be similarly enveloping, and capable of verisimilitude. The reception of the viewer/reader is what interests me most.

I might also argue that trauma representations are prevalent throughout much of ‘popular’ music (those quotation marks are important!). And so I bring up an extreme case, an artist by the name of Xiu Xiu, which is mainly one guy, Jamie Stewart. On arguably his most accessible and popular album, Fabulous Muscles (2004), Stewart manages a song that graphically depicts a U.S. troop killing a young girl, and others documenting instances of incest and sexual abuse. The narrative on ‘Support Our Troops OH! (Black Angels OH!)’ is delivered in spoken word, which means we aren’t necessarily coaxed into the illusion we are experiencing this event. But taking the whole song into consideration, the impact is not so far removed from ‘trauma cinema’. The musical backdrop is considerably confronting, dense and electronically pulsing but not entirely without melody. It can be an unsettling experience, providing spatial and temporal fragmentation. Is this the soundtrack to a traumatic experience?

Much of what Stewart writes is supposedly autobiographical (though liberties would lead me to dub him more auteur-biographical), something I think contributes greatly to his divisiveness. He is accused of being at once myopic and an exhibitionist, criticisms I find rather endemic of explicitly autobiographical/counternarrative works. Another way you could look at Xiu Xiu’s music is to say that it “sets out to disturb their audience in pursuit of higher artistic goals” (AllMusicGuide, 2004). To me, Xiu Xiu very occasionally achieves this.

Now, I may well be misappropriating ‘trauma cinema’, but it’s an interesting discussion anyway.

[Xiu Xiu MySpace]

Peaking Lights – Silver Tongues Soft Whisper

I used to buy all my music, or only very occasionally acquire music through illegal channels. Now, I probably download two or three albums a week. I still regularly purchase albums – it’s just that, needless to say, I’m exposed to a lot more music than I ever was previously. This is great. But it often means I don’t spend the time with an album I should. On this blog I’m focusing on songs and albums that have endured the test of time, no flimsy one-week wonders.

Peaking Lights’ Imaginary Falcons from last year is one such LP. In some ways it’s a very non-confrontational release; it doesn’t leap out from your stereo and thus probably doesn’t sell itself enough for many in this fast-paced digital age. It’s a fantastic package, including the Shawn Reed screen-printed artwork, which I feel privileged to own on vinyl. ‘Silver Tongues Soft Whisper’, in particular, feels timeless. The title is a perfect summation of the song’s softly unraveling power: all floating electronic pulses, waves of restrained feedback and looped organ and synth. Sure, it’s six fairly repetitious minutes, but it’s transfixing, a sort of reversal of time.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting Twinrex injections in preparation for my overseas jaunt and, while I’m not particularly afraid of needles, it has got me thinking of a time a few years ago when I did come undone via a spike in the arm. The one and only time (so far) I attempted to give blood, I passed out and fell into a semi-hallucinatory state. I remember streaks of colour and being overcome by an unnerving sense of bliss. It’s this state of not-quite-consciousness that I equate with ‘Silver Tongues Soft Whisper’. It’s blissful, lulling, but it’s not without a strange foreboding: a trap, some mystical Siren’s call, imploring you to sleep forever.

Writing this has prompted me to examine the lyric insert from the LP for the first time. These are some fine words but they’re largely indecipherable and, well, that doesn’t matter one bit.

[MySpace / Blogspot / Night People]

Babe, Terror – Nasa, Goodbye

Mancha Alvi-Verde! [mp3]

Babe, Terror is Claudio from São Paulo, Brazil. He has produced two of my favourite releases of recent years: 2008’s Babe, Terror EP (available for free download) and last year’s Weekend album (soon to see vinyl release in the UK/Europe via Erol Alkan’s Phantasy Sound label). I like to refer to his music, somewhat reductively, as ‘memories in slow motion’; his songs are not so much songs in the classic sense but sound collages, fragments of sound expertly arranged for optimum emotive impact. As Claudio told Sasha Frere-Jones from the New Yorker in 2008: “I make my music in a really homemade, crafty way. Every sound is based in some hand clapping, table beating, voice distortion, microphone, digital effects”.

It’s too easy to call the music of Babe, Terror ‘drone’: yes, it loops over and over, but it’s also dynamic, noisy at times, soothingly joyous at others. There’s a trace, a ghostly trace of tropicalia, but it’s been deconstructed, buried in the haze, or rather amongst other cultural debris of the past. Babe, Terror is highly conceptual: according to Claudio, it’s an attempt at creating a “musical fiction”. The songs, he says, tell stories about love, childhood, love during childhood, and memories – in a sense, Terror – but you don’t need to be told this. ‘Nasa, Goodbye’ is a headphone masterpiece that demands close attention, and invites a healthy dose of introspection. Take a trip, catch a train for the sole purpose of listening to Babe, Terror or Weekend and be transported somewhere not quite A nor B, not your origin nor your destination, but to some place rather more impulsive.

Highly recommended for fans of Panda Bear, Black Dice, Emeralds, High Places, Grouper, Julianna Barwick etc.

[MySpace / Perdize’s Dream]

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Every Night I Die At Miyagis

Off in the world… [mp3]

In late July I’m leaving Australia’s fair shores and moving to Laos. I’ve got some newspaper sub-editing work lined up, and I just want to have a bit of fun while getting some worthwhile work and life experience, dig? It’s a long and convoluted tale, just how I arranged this job, so I’ll spare you the details and instead write a little about my previous S.E. Asia adventures.

It was in January of last year that I spent a week in Laos with my then partner – and when the seeds of my upcoming relocation were sown. I had initially been tempted over to Thailand at the invitation of my parents, who had rented a multi-bedroom house in Mae Rampeung, a small beachside village some two-and-a-half hours northeast of Bangkok. So my whole family, including a pair of girlfriends, were living what may reasonably be called the high life for a month (or two, for the majority). The house sat some hundred metres from the beach, so we invariably spent our days there, eating freshly caught seafood (the non-vegetarians, at least), drinking Chang, and generally lazing about. Later on we’d catch cheap buses, or tuk-tuks, into the nearest city, Rayong. There we would peruse the night markets, thrilled even at its touristy trinkets and counterfeit goods, and particularly drawn to its aromatic foods, as the sun set behind the adjacent Tesco Lotus shopping complex. Next to that shining beacon of homogeneity, chaotic in its own way, the sprawl of the markets seemed anachronistic; this would have be one of those contradictions of progress that typify modern Thailand, making it such an intriguing place.

Mae Rampeung, for all its quiet charm, doesn’t really feature on the holiday itinerary for international visitors. For one, it resembled a ghost town: its inhabitants, mostly restaurateurs and fishermen from what I could tell, slept in shanties on the beach while three large skyscrapers cast an ominous shadow over them. The story we heard from locals was that in the early ‘90s, Mae Rampeung was earmarked for major tourist development, and anticipating an influx not unlike that captured by the seedy allure of nearby Pattaya, these large condo hotels were built. These dreams never eventuated and these tall buildings were left as artifacts of failure. falling into disrepair – at most we saw four lights on at night in a building at least twenty storeys high.

Here reminiscing, I strongly feel the music I listened to during my time in Thailand both enhanced and fed off my experiences. The two albums that I remember, accurately or not, to be the soundtrack of my trip were the Hospitals’ phenomenal Hairdryer Peace album and House Arrest by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. The former was totally new to me and, quite frankly, rearranged my ears from the first listen with its meshing of harsh noise and warped tropical feel. The latter I had owned for a good while but hadn’t yet resonated with me until this holiday. At the risk of conflating my musical consumption with my travel experiences, I have to say both albums to me represent a coming together of the new and old, a strange swirling of temporal and geographical memory. This is by no means an original thought – plenty has been written on hauntology, particularly in relation to Ariel Pink’s fuzzy, lo-fi take on AM radio rock, his degradation of a pop ideal. Fittingly, my memories of Thailand have no doubt been altered to fit these musical aesthetics.

One of my most vivid recollections of my time in Mae Rampeung was downing Chang with my father then joining a late night party-of-three at their shack of a bar on the beach. The longhaired barman and his two friends/customers, with scarcely a word of English between them, welcomed us with the blare of terrible mid-‘90s pop, shots of some unpalatable spirit, and a few choice moves on a dance floor made of sand and deckchairs. But the song I associate with the night? Ariel Pink’s ‘Every Night I Die At Miyagis’. This may be an example of history mediated by crumbling memory processes, or me romantically reflecting and distorting a past that may never have been there in the first place, but I kind of like that. To me this song encapsulates, as much of Ariel Pink’s music does, the strange effect music has on memory.

I think I’ll return to similar thoughts at a later time.

[MySpace]

Odawas – Harmless Lover’s Discourse

‘Just this once…’ [mp3 via Odawas.net]

I’ve read reviews calling Odawa’s stunning The Blue Depths album of last year an excursion into adult contemporary waters – and, even at the risk of damaging my brittle cred, you won’t find too much of an argument from me. The album is coated in a heady new romantic sheen, albeit what one might call ‘rural new romantic’ (with a nod to Flying Saucer Attack) due to its understated, organic feel. Similarly the album’s lyrical content takes on an unassuming, at times even domestic, warmth. The finest example of the band’s charms is ‘Harmless Lover’s Discourse’, a slowly unraveling mini-tragedy that acts as the album’s emotional climax. It’s slightly reminiscent of Devastations’ ‘Oh Me, Oh My’, but where that song’s protagonist sings of a lover bringing him back to life through domesticated acts such as shopping together and curling up in bed, ‘Harmless Lover’s Discourse’ talks of an unglamorous romance only necessitated by the threat of an impending end to the world:

‘We won’t leave home,
or see your friends that I don’t like.
This could be our last day on earth,
it may be false but it could be worse’

Stylistically I also hear similarities with another song notorious for tugging at the heartstrings, Slowdive’s ‘Machine Gun’, and there is an element of shoegaze to ‘Harmless Lover’s Discourse’. Mostly, though, it’s just what both songs leave unsaid that make them so unsettling – and yet all too compelling.

[MySpace / Odawas.net]

Home Blitz – Nighttime Feel

Yeah it’s not like no other [mp3]

I know little about Home Blitz but for what the tiny slip that fell out of my Out of Phase LP case tells me, and that’s they need a bassist in the NYC area. I honestly wish I ticked those two essential criteria: but, yeah, no bass, No New York. What I know is, phwoar, this shit rips!

‘Nighttime Feel’ is just this awesome skater/slacker anthem – the type that may yet turn this long-limbed shitkicker into a skater and/or slacker. I don’t know most of the lyrics, and I’m not sure a Google search’d turn up too much, but what stands out – “hangin’ out on a Saturday night” and “we got kicked out of the the  the half-pipe”, mainly – send me back on a faux-nostalgic trip to my school days. Difference is this time I actually feel like joining my homie bros at the skate park and taking part in some srs ‘subversion’. Trouble’s always been I’ve read enough literature on skating and graffiti and all that about how it’s like stickin’ it to the man – but that just didn’t stack up with my admittedly small small-town rural experiences. Sure, sure, wearing baggy jeans, getting’ wasted, and yelling at surfy cunts (and nerdy cunts and old cunts, proper cunts, yeah, cunts of all shapes and sizes) has its appeal… right on! But this track cuts a more romantic sick!

Now my whole point was ‘Nighttime Feel’, like most on Home Blitz’s debut full-length, is an absolute cracker. It’s just about hangin’: the good times, yeah, but mostly it’s kinda sad. It’s a primal garage stomp, brimming with vitality, like, I dunno, yr favourite no-fi group (nah, let’s just say Modern Lovers) fronted by a Steve Malkmus-with-real-feelings. It’s the album closer so it goes out with a bang. Like my face on the ground after attempting an ollie-something-something.

[MySpace / Richie Records//Testostertunes]