Would you? I wouldn't and goddamn i am not going to.
As soon as it was signed and in my wallet the whispering began. Not unlike the way i imagine The Ring talking to Frodo(The way i imagined it long before Mr. P Jackson of Fat Beardsville N.Z. rendered it 60ft tall, drab, long and obvious), those malicious yet beautiful murmurings, screams of pain becoming screaming orgasms.
Adverts looked different because of my new friend. Oh the possibilities! The cashpoint outside T**co's actually spoke to me. It said: "You haven't used me yet, not with your new friend, slip him in. Let me feel his lovely matt finish caress my lips, slide past and fill my mechanical maw. I wanna suck his virgin chip." Or something like that, it manifested itself in an incredible desire to withdraw cash. Fortunately for me though, i think i might be getting the hang of this sense thing, so i didn't draw any money. Phew!
But, my next task was to go round T**co's. Every product i looked at glowed with an aura, an aura that made my lower jaw slack and caused dribble to well up and cascade down my chin.
It was as if every single thing was mine, every product whether it were female sanitary products, goats cheese or even Bovril. I had a shopping list with me but what use was that now? A shopping list is there to limit you to what you need (or thats what i use mine for). With a list you get what you've written down and out of the 'super'market as fast as possible.
What need had i for a list now? I could buy anything... F**k it. I could buy everything. No matter what i bought i felt like it would sustain me. A trolley full of shoes would feed me for a month, surely? Oh joy! Oh to be one of the few happy people who see the world like this all the time...
But it's all a sham...
All of it...
And sadly that's how it works. It felt magical; like the first touch in foreplay or the realisation those chords work with that vocal line. Beautiful. Somehow i managed to control it. I escaped unscathed, my finances struggling back to finding their feet rather than one more huge step toward the oblivion of destitution. Ever Upward Comrades!
...That feeling though, of having that which i do not, being able to be that which i am not, the invulnerability afforded me by a small piece of plastic...
Friday, January 23, 2004
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Expression
Music. Sweet music. You're the Queen of my Soul.
The Isley Brothers i think.
True though. The one thing that i am fucking great at. The one thing that makes me feel like no drug, no sex, no film, no book, like nothing else i have yet done, can.
We haven't practiced for a month or two now and i'm restless. New stuff is sadly not appearing the way it has done before, i'm not writing as many words, though i think my work environment doesn't help. My words, particularly, come from whilst i'm at work. I never wrote lyrics whilst i was cutting lettuce, the leaves had wilted and obscured my etchings by the time i got it home. But the music came out of me. Armed with a 20 yr old Ta**am 4 track tape recorder, a 10 yr old Effects pedal, a microphone and myself, i created the bases for what we're achieving on PC now. My (Our) first album, still a few months from completion, has taken a year and a half or so. Had we been handed £50,000 at the time and given an engineer, producer and access to musicians, we would have a lot of money by now. But...
...The music wouldn't have been as good. The process of recording and re-recording, writing whilst recording has produced some of my best songs so far. They are still not on the level they need to be, not to get me someone who'll pay to produce them and distribute them. I don't ask myself if my songs are any good anymore because the people who've heard the music so far are complimentary. I haven't played it to as many folk as Luke has so haven't seen as many reactions to it. I find myself, as expected, over critical (should that be hyphenated?) of my music, i can hear all the mistakes, which usually distracts from the great bits.
Also we now have a drummer, though only a night or two a week. We still need a guitarist of similar or more likely better skill than i, so i can concentrate on singing, making strange, beautiful noises with the guitar, making strange, usually frightening noises with my organ (ooh-er) and generally not having to play rhythm guitar. This is because i still have some difficulty singing whilst also making a guitar sound good.
This is the challenge i have to face. The outside world has distracted me long enough. I love to do something and i believe i have the ability to succeed. Don't think for a second i mean Fame Idol success, though i can hold a tune fairly well, so i'd easily get into the top 10 if i whored myself enough, i mean my idea of success. Enough money to be able to spend my days making music. Making records for people who like music like i do. (What a wonderfully ambiguous phrase) The truth is within the sentence though. The music i like has made the music i make, though i have never copied or tried to sound like anyone else. What goes in must, as they say, come out.
So in theory, someone who has similar taste in music as myself, might appreciate my filtered, expression of that music. Equally valid though is the statement that people who enjoy music for similar reasons to me, might also appreciate my interpretation of music, my idea of what it is.
People say music is mathematics, this is true. Humans construction/creation of numeracy can express the components of sound in many different forms; graphs, charts, algebra, silly questions about train journeys. Other people think God gives Human Beings life. You don't know who to believe.
I believe music is a collection of sound though, not numbers or letters, combinations of noises that evoke/provoke/emote/produce/affect feelings within us.
I also believe that my interpretation of music, what I think and feel it is, would be appreciated by enough people.
I really must try and control my fingers, they keep saying things...
The Isley Brothers i think.
True though. The one thing that i am fucking great at. The one thing that makes me feel like no drug, no sex, no film, no book, like nothing else i have yet done, can.
We haven't practiced for a month or two now and i'm restless. New stuff is sadly not appearing the way it has done before, i'm not writing as many words, though i think my work environment doesn't help. My words, particularly, come from whilst i'm at work. I never wrote lyrics whilst i was cutting lettuce, the leaves had wilted and obscured my etchings by the time i got it home. But the music came out of me. Armed with a 20 yr old Ta**am 4 track tape recorder, a 10 yr old Effects pedal, a microphone and myself, i created the bases for what we're achieving on PC now. My (Our) first album, still a few months from completion, has taken a year and a half or so. Had we been handed £50,000 at the time and given an engineer, producer and access to musicians, we would have a lot of money by now. But...
...The music wouldn't have been as good. The process of recording and re-recording, writing whilst recording has produced some of my best songs so far. They are still not on the level they need to be, not to get me someone who'll pay to produce them and distribute them. I don't ask myself if my songs are any good anymore because the people who've heard the music so far are complimentary. I haven't played it to as many folk as Luke has so haven't seen as many reactions to it. I find myself, as expected, over critical (should that be hyphenated?) of my music, i can hear all the mistakes, which usually distracts from the great bits.
Also we now have a drummer, though only a night or two a week. We still need a guitarist of similar or more likely better skill than i, so i can concentrate on singing, making strange, beautiful noises with the guitar, making strange, usually frightening noises with my organ (ooh-er) and generally not having to play rhythm guitar. This is because i still have some difficulty singing whilst also making a guitar sound good.
This is the challenge i have to face. The outside world has distracted me long enough. I love to do something and i believe i have the ability to succeed. Don't think for a second i mean Fame Idol success, though i can hold a tune fairly well, so i'd easily get into the top 10 if i whored myself enough, i mean my idea of success. Enough money to be able to spend my days making music. Making records for people who like music like i do. (What a wonderfully ambiguous phrase) The truth is within the sentence though. The music i like has made the music i make, though i have never copied or tried to sound like anyone else. What goes in must, as they say, come out.
So in theory, someone who has similar taste in music as myself, might appreciate my filtered, expression of that music. Equally valid though is the statement that people who enjoy music for similar reasons to me, might also appreciate my interpretation of music, my idea of what it is.
People say music is mathematics, this is true. Humans construction/creation of numeracy can express the components of sound in many different forms; graphs, charts, algebra, silly questions about train journeys. Other people think God gives Human Beings life. You don't know who to believe.
I believe music is a collection of sound though, not numbers or letters, combinations of noises that evoke/provoke/emote/produce/affect feelings within us.
I also believe that my interpretation of music, what I think and feel it is, would be appreciated by enough people.
I really must try and control my fingers, they keep saying things...
Structure
With my career constantly in the air, not that i have a career, and my finances in freefall i find myself surprisingly chipper. As indeed, i do now on a near daily basis. My change in temperament i attribute mainly to the small amount of caffiene i now consume. For the last five years i feel like i've been trapped in a mindset of cynicism and anger; both of which i still display, though more calmly and less severely respectively. My mood now seems lighter and more carefree, not that it hasn't taken hard work to achieve.
Giving up coffee was the easy part. Coping now, with the smell of real, caffienated coffee is what drives me crazy. The part they take out for decaf is the taste and the smell. If made in a cafetiere the texture is still the same, but there is still no coffee taste or aroma to be sensed. I'm past the stage now of having a cup of decaf then spending a minute or two contemplating, almost physically, on the fact i don't feel different. I just drink it. I don't know why. Just the waft of my housemate's cupboard door opening, pushing enough coffee molecules towards my smoke-riddled nose and palate, makes me shiver and long.
Yet i do feel different now, the fug seems to be lifting. I have things to look forward to, which is something i've seldom done due to my 'thought based' mode of existence. The trick i have learned, and cutting out caffiene has helped me to see it, is to use your thoughts to look forward to and imagine things, rather than concentrating on the freakish, unfair, harsh, dark and plain horrible world that surrounds us. The world of pop music, corporate entertainment, civil servants, non-existent gods and far too real monsters, shopping as leisure, constant mass production of non biodegradeable and/or recyclable objects, house prices, fashion, disposablility, drug companies, famine, horror...
So i suppose what i'm saying is: i have tapped into the great unconscious, the waking dream most humans choose. The choice of ignorance over intelligence, the narrow mind instead of the plasma, widescreen, have-it-on-the-ceiling mind, dream instead of reality.
Or am i just talking bollocks? No. Not on this occasion, though my words do little justice to the notion i'm attempting to express. I want to say that i'm cocooning myself in a 24 hour a day marathon of viewing my own life as good entertainment. But that doesn't say what i mean either, that sentence just came out of the end of my fingers.
Giving up coffee was the easy part. Coping now, with the smell of real, caffienated coffee is what drives me crazy. The part they take out for decaf is the taste and the smell. If made in a cafetiere the texture is still the same, but there is still no coffee taste or aroma to be sensed. I'm past the stage now of having a cup of decaf then spending a minute or two contemplating, almost physically, on the fact i don't feel different. I just drink it. I don't know why. Just the waft of my housemate's cupboard door opening, pushing enough coffee molecules towards my smoke-riddled nose and palate, makes me shiver and long.
Yet i do feel different now, the fug seems to be lifting. I have things to look forward to, which is something i've seldom done due to my 'thought based' mode of existence. The trick i have learned, and cutting out caffiene has helped me to see it, is to use your thoughts to look forward to and imagine things, rather than concentrating on the freakish, unfair, harsh, dark and plain horrible world that surrounds us. The world of pop music, corporate entertainment, civil servants, non-existent gods and far too real monsters, shopping as leisure, constant mass production of non biodegradeable and/or recyclable objects, house prices, fashion, disposablility, drug companies, famine, horror...
So i suppose what i'm saying is: i have tapped into the great unconscious, the waking dream most humans choose. The choice of ignorance over intelligence, the narrow mind instead of the plasma, widescreen, have-it-on-the-ceiling mind, dream instead of reality.
Or am i just talking bollocks? No. Not on this occasion, though my words do little justice to the notion i'm attempting to express. I want to say that i'm cocooning myself in a 24 hour a day marathon of viewing my own life as good entertainment. But that doesn't say what i mean either, that sentence just came out of the end of my fingers.
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