‘…Then it’s ‘Fairy Tale’ (not of New York). We’re going to do a song for each archetype of text e.g. poem, prayer, screenplay, fairy tale etc…’
I’m sitting here opposite EILEEN CAKE (whose work we love) and outside Kimchi Cult dead hungry, in conversation with the new disco-drone outfit (one half Ian Macartney one half Santiago Taberna), TEXTURE TEXTURE. If you have two libras in a band together does their balance balance each other out? What would that look like? Balance balance is like dance dance is like boom boom is like vroom vroom is like horror horror is like well well is like never never is like dark dark is like bah bah is like la la is like ____ ____ is like Xiu Xiu is like EXTRA EXTRA. Read all about it! It is astrological excess equivalent to semantic satiation of the stars and their generalised synthesisers. Red velvet epizeuxis.
When I think of EILEEN CAKE I think of Eileen Myles eating a cake. And someone narrating the whole process like Come on Eileen!!!!! What kind of cake would Eileen Myles enjoy? In researching this topic I found an interview Kristin Grogan did with Myles in a cafe in Oxford, remarking on the excellence of its pear crumble cake. No guarantee that’s what Myles ordered or what’s on offer at EILEEN CAKE, here in Partick. The main thing is it’s not EILEEN’S CAKES, it’s EILEEN CAKE. The cake of Eileen. The name Eileen denotes, says thebump.com, an ‘old world charmer’, its derivatives meaning ‘little bird’, ‘strength’ and ‘desired’. Oh yeah baby. It also ‘derives from the french word “Aveline,” meaning “hazelnut”’. Okay there’s the segue. Ian Macartney has a pretty scary nut allergy. That’s why we’re at outside waiting for our bibimbap and not eating EILEEN CAKE (though certainly I would like to try it). We’ve just been to a poetry reading.
Every time I say ‘texture texture’ I sound like I am coaxing some cyborgian bambi out of the quantum realm for long enough to try a little pumpkin seed, some disco biscuits. Sometimes it sounds like a question, a comfort, compulsive loop. Last night TEXTURE TEXTURE played at the Bank Street Media Lab’s Episode 005: ZONE night at Ushi’s Coffee Corner. Don’t let cosiness fool you into thinking this isn’t a swag wee music venue home to many feline demons and the best soft drink selection this side of Eden. Anyway it really is snug and there are bare stone walls, an LED indigo glow and coils of wiring fit for a sculptural impression of e-waste baroque, say, five years from now in the trend cycle. The boys are knelt on the floor, one in white and one in black. When the white-outfiteer stands up, a little shaky, nearly knocking his head, the black-outfiteer tenderly holds his head to protect it. Bass hums. This reminds me of the Hilma af Klint painting The Swan, No. 1 (1915).
By which I mean the neck of the guitar is the neck of the black swan and the adam’s apple of clicky duplicity, swerve swerve. A transcript from the Guggenheim concerning this painting reads: ‘In alchemy, the swan represents the union of opposites necessary for the creation of what is known as the philosopher’s stone, a substance believed to be capable of turning base metals into gold. Here, af Klint’s black-and-white palette underscores the dualities of light and dark, male and female, life and death’.
People in the audience keep telling each other to coorie in which is fucking adorable, finally we are in a crowd of intentional nesting and care. Santiago is wearing waterproof trousers, perhaps as a gesture to the storm that is sweeping the country (though not Glasgow, which got a bonnie blue day in its favour). If Ian is summer bummer, Santi is winter rain and the mix of solarity and rush rush is the sznal dialectic of fuck us all back to the early 2000s (before the weather was really bad?!).
They play a set that opens with a sort of beckoning call to the muse, Ian’s elastic shouting — I WANT YOU — refrained over triumphant feedback. Santi holds his guitar upside down and twangs a lotta noise out it, so far so Thurston. This I WANT YOU is the same premise of seductive intonation as is inherent in the name TEXTURE TEXTURE, which is to say here are two trochees smushed together like ‘The XX’ except no that’s a spondee, right, ‘XX’. Which is to say, kisses, and tweets made out into cigarettes like that Dana Ward poem where cigarettes are made into tweets and when I keep saying it, kisses and tweets and cigarettes and kisses and tweets I wonder about oral fixation and its relationship to noise like the aerated acne of being teenage or trying too hard all the time. My favourite song by Third Eye Blind is called ‘I Want You’. I like it because it’s super horny and super gothic and ugh fat clicky beginning it feels like the end of the world of caring for someone in your marrow.
A TEXTURE TEXTURE highlight was one song from the end, perhaps ‘Fairy Tale’, a track which sounded like the Animal Crossing village song massaged through ovulation dreams of MACINTOSH PLUS to result in plaintive mall fables of yesteryear, which is to say 2006, with all its streaming puberty and cider. This is beautiful because it sounds like bagpipe midi cross melodics of having a thought. What else do I catch, something about watching waves. Something about time travel. This must be the place! etc. Earlier this morning, Ian left me a voice note saying ‘Just had a second recollection, I guess a proustian moment, of being extorted for peaches on Animal Crossing by my cousins’. Ian’s cousins were not available for comment. But god, the peaches! I wonder what brought this on.
Everything gets darker at the end with ‘For a Stranger’. The livestream voiceover says: ‘the audience look like they’re scared, scared to dance!’. The vibe is kind of industrial nananananananaa syncopated bop-it shifting, but there’s a James Murphy in Ian yet as he riles up the dance dance and a soft drum underneath. I voxpop Ian’s flatmate who says he has heard the tappy tap of the electric drumkit for days but the rest of the set was pretty secret.
Ian makes a point of pretending he is famous enough to not know the difference between Glasgow and Edinburgh. He does this by saying “THANK YOU EDINBURGH”. This, I argue, is not about ‘getting wide with the audience’ but evidence of a general veering towards ‘post-edinburgh’ which I have spoken of before (at length, in The Dram). It does remind me a little of when Desmond Dekker played a tiny field in Dumfries & Galloway and took to the stage with “HELLO GLASGOW”. This was in my childhood and I remember being very cold and desperate for my sleeping bag oblivion, listening to bass beats thrum through the grass. When someone in the audience goes ‘WOW’ with sarcasm and I repeat ‘WOW’ I am only repeating the mono-syllabic duplicity that is being awake, alive and scared to dance. Oh wow. Lovely. I’m feeling delicate.
Following TEXTURE TEXTURE were a bunch of trippy short films and two beaut sets from Slide Cancel and nil00. The former was super hypnotic, precise and really really cool internet music for melting your face off in the smoothest way possible ++++ and the latter was utterly enchanting crush ballads for the lovers. Special shoutout to this song, ‘Beautiful Fish (Just Remember You’re Beautiful, And Two Hours Comes Pretty Easily, I Wanna Spend It W You’: a perfect shimmery thought-loop of harmony and piscean energy I could get down with. Nooo it’s not lofi bubblegum pixel trap it’s lyric etherea, sorta a la Happy Spendy, a nu candy ballad which sings from inside the moon’s teardrop many aeolian harps ago, O angel you should’ve come to my little meadow of deconstructed cuddlecore. The fact there were audio problems to begin with (how many wires in the world does it take to connect our heaven) only added to the tenderness and play of the set. I was thinking about the fish song later drunk on the bus home thinking about fish and a thing my friend Frannie once said which is ‘I wonder where the fish go to sleep’ and I wonder where they do indeed.
𓆟
(beautiful fish)
Well anyway, the interview. Ian (Irn Bru) was wearing a stylish grandpa jumper testament to the heydays of west end thrifting, and Santi (Still Water) was wearing an ochre-beige coloured rain coat, so fall. The boys did not take turns answering in ecstatic monosyllables, so much as relish the dialectic of one’s reticence and the other’s intent. Sometimes, one would echo the other, recreating the semantic satiation which is the band’s lifeblood. More, more. Text, text. No, never. That’s all I’ll say of whose answers these are.
What is the poetic unit of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
TEXT.
What inspired you to start this band?
NOISE.
What was your first encounter with noise?
BABY.
How did that feel?
BAD.
Would you define bad as a value judgement, or something else?
ELSE.
How do you think your work was received last night?
BOUNCY.
And what did you think of the visual accompaniment?
GREAT.
Is ‘great’ an ethic to you?
SERIOUS.
What’s the biggest mystery of your life?
GOD.
If you had to marry a sound, what would it be?
CLANG.
If you had to kill a sound, what would it be?
BUBBLEGUM.
If you had to fuck a sound, what would it be?
COWBELLS.
So true, same. Did anyone ever tell you that you shouldn’t start a band, it’s a risky business?
YES.
Did you agree with them?
NO.
Describe your production process.
INTUITIVE.
How did you two meet?
SPAM.
Do you think it was a meeting of minds, souls or bodies?
SOULS.
What’s your biggest influence?
PEARLING.
If you could play any ocean in the world, what ocean would it be?
ANTARCTIC.
Why?
ANTARCTIC.
Are you a communist?
YES.
What’s next for your performance?
MORE.
Tell me about your outfit choices.
OPPOSITES.
Have you ever fallen out?
NO.
If TEXTURE TEXTURE were edible, what would it be?
SHRAPNEL.
What would you say is the big idea of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
DANCE.
What’s the spice level of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
PICANTE.
What’s the sun sign of TEXTURE TEXTURE?
SCORPIO.
If you could send a cassette demo to one living politician, who would it be?
SALMOND.
What are you looking forward to about the future?
HOPE.
(HOPEDARKEVERLASTINGISADANGEROUSTHING)
>> You can watch the whole stream here.
mariaology 