Tag: Bandcamp

On Musician Friends

It’s a beautiful thing, seeing your friends evolve for the evening. I suppose the first encounter is when you’re a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, and you go round to a pal’s house and they pick up an instrument. You’re dimly aware that they could play, they were learning, but it’s a whole different ball game when they’re sitting before you just riffing off something. You goof about so much together, it’s hard to believe this kid could ever be sincere. It took a little persuasion to get them to play, but here they are. Licking notes. Bashing out Nirvana or playing some Belle & Sebastian melody on trumpet. The way they’ve mastered trills or glissandos or weird keys already. You can’t help but feel a little heartsore, despite your jealousy. The neglected clarinet gathers dust in your cupboard. There’s a rolled-up poster of the Manic Street Preachers, sheet music slipped behind the back of the piano. Maybe there’ll be a subsequent period of practice, where you’re inspired by your pal’s talent to pick it up again. You join the school orchestra, ask a teacher for sheet music. Your lips start to hurt, as if you’ve been kissing someone too long and everything’s a bit sweet, a bit numb. Pretty soon though, you grow bored again. Other interests tempt you: the alluring world of video games, exams, alcohol, writing novels about warring planets or a town reservoir threatened by economic interest (lifted from a Neighbours plot-line). You get better at imitating the crazy makeup, backcombing your hair, attempting to be visually competitive. You find yourself drunk on somebody else’s bedroom floor. The room fills up with crushed aluminium. The instrument suffers again, like a child ignored. You can hear it whimpering in the cupboard, stewing in its velvet case. You’re a terrible parent, and always knew it. You let the dog chew the hell out all your dolls.

At some point, you’re old enough to have friends that perform. People you’ve known awhile—whether for years or merely months. Colleagues or soulmates; often the chiasmic entwining of each. When hanging out, you sing similar songs, you laugh about cringe-worthy hiphop or try imitating Mamas and Papas harmonies. The drunker you are, the more mangled, though sometimes the voices come out like honey. You talk about normal things, like tv shows or idiot customers you’ve served at work. Sometimes you share life’s sorrows. Then on a Wednesday night you’ll see them up onstage and each time it hits you afresh, that transition. You start to notice everyday stylish quirks, the way they cross their legs to roll a cigarette. A certain way of mussing their hair. Flickers of accents, little jokes, a certain smile they reserve for occasions. Feeling special to be around them, throwing creative conversation in the air and waiting for sparks. When you both hit upon a song, a wee thing cute and powerful from childhood. Sometimes you mess about, you have a gossip, a dissonant singalong. Some are more forthcoming about process than others. Secretly you just want to hear them wax lyrical about time-signatures or resistance to genre or the difficult middle-eight or whatever.

Onstage there’s a certain remove. Often you forget you know these people, that maybe you made them a coffee or found yourself in the same photo. There’s a respect for what they do, regardless of personality. Onstage, you just want to watch the way their fingers make effortless work on the frets of guitars, over keys; the caress of their voice on the microphone. Not everyone’s voice is a caress, but you know a girl who makes the sort of timeless sugary garage that cements a generation out of time; nostalgically in love with mid-century decades but caught up in the pains of the contemporary. Each crunch of guitar, another notch on the year’s backbone. Badiou on the Century, roll over to beauty. She has a certain command. You take a slice of that universal heartbreak, pierce through its sweet coat of icing. It’s lovely to look around at an audience and realise that everyone’s sharing your pal’s talent. It’s a type of pride you rarely get to feel. It’s not like the unconditional love of a parent; there’s an aspect of that, but also it’s based on genuine respect for the practise. If they fucked up, you’d equally feel bad for them, share in that hurt. You’d sit deconstructing it later over a Guinness or something. Even if you were too drunk to notice, you feign understanding of the gravity. You can’t do that with your kid; you have to pretend. There’s always a lush moment when they play your favourite tune or whatever and what you’re caught up in is a web of memories coming into fruition in this string of seconds where each chord and riff and melody soars through the white hot space between everyone. You feel a certain touch would incur a shock. That’s cool though, you enjoy the suspension. You want to tell them afterwards how much you enjoyed it, but words never reach their expression. It’s easier to distribute those sweaty, clumsy hugs. A sequence of thank yous. Do tequila at the bar. What it’s like to be with them when strangers come up in congratulation. A generalised bliss, the clink of ice cubes, eyes shining in the club lights. It’s good to see them up there, dancing. The electric sorcery of applause. A drunken continuity of feeling that connects you, despite the audience, like some invisible umbilical cord that is probably of your own imagination. Of course when they are up there, they don’t notice you at all. I think that’s important. There’s a sense in which you have to make the connection your own, internalise the melodies and progression for your own secret narratives. These songs will go down in the years, the meaningful soundtrack to your twenties. It doesn’t matter how much you love them, or how casually playful and silly they are. How much of sadness, whimsical commentary or hard-hitting truth.  Heavy or deliciously frothy, bright; it’s all a matter of gazing on starlight. It’s hard to admit. You love the outfit: the lipstick or smudged mascara, baggy jumper or gauzy dress, faux fur, tattered cardigan, tartan jeans, glitzy earrings. You love the tangled wires, the humming amps, the pure sense of paraphernalia. 

(Maybe you’ll find a video of them performing on YouTube, something handmade from a fan’s shaky iPhone. There’s a piece of them that you’ll never have, but that’s okay. Being creative is maybe the act of constantly splitting yourself into pieces, disseminating them in the hope that the world might nourish you back.)

One time, you dreamt you were a piano. It actually wasn’t farcical, or surreal as it sounds. How to feel that ache, all those shuddering, cranking pedals! You could smell your own wood-must, the crazy longing to be played. What stirs in the dust when the keys start to flicker. It’s music music music, this thing universal. You felt in the piano all these intelligent thoughts; it was like decoding the algorithms of an Aphex Twin track. Sensations in nerves never felt before. You make yourself vulnerable when sharing a friend’s music. Defragment the brain, look for meaning. Something inside just wants mutual approval. You need the rest of the world to know this whole process is beautiful. Not the stress of signing, booking and playback statistics, Spotify contracts, recording problems and the politics of gleaning a DJ set; no, the actual moment when they’re onstage just doing their thing, inhabiting a version of themselves that transcends, however slightly, the ordinary. That slippage is the charm. You love how they come offstage and the first thing they say is have you SEEN the drinks prices in here? or man I loved the support or god I need a fag or I like your dress. The simplicity. Is there anything in life as good as mutual respect? Later, you’ll stumble home, your head full of invasive tunes—each one recalling some dark room where another mind you love is at work, is shimmering in the ether of space where occasionally the stray debris of a melody will form something strong and good. It’s envy and admiration for that process that keeps you going. So you write about it, of course, because what else do you have? Sure, you know your minors from your majors, your sharps from your flats, but you lack the mathematical magic to do what they do. And that’s cool, because the chasm has its slender implication of cleverness—the ability to communicate in different styles, tongues, hieroglyphs. Remember that quote from Mean Girls about maths being beautiful, a universal language? The price of being humble is genuine friendship, and when you pay 99p for that Bandcamp release, you’re investing in somebody’s talent, the luminous halo that hangs over conversations you have in the future. I turned on the radio once, at 3am, and your song came on by chance. It felt like home, in the midst of that late-night shadow and angst. I hope you do well, I really do. I hope y’all know how much I admire you.

Record Ekphrasis: The Long Ocean

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~ https://thelongocean.bandcamp.com/album/the-long-ocean ~ 

There is a struggle, the suspension of hoar frost crusts time itself as it trickles over the sea. At first light we watch for an opening. Even in attics and city bedsits, the sea remains in our blood. We feel it cold as ice at the illness times: how darkly we sink into the sheets, hoping the pain in our skins will dissolve back to lucent matter, the night wisps of somebody else’s aura.

A voice enters soft and lo-fi, filling the interludes that swirl around haunted piano arpeggios, the silver streaks that spill on the ocean’s tides. I am afloat in muted clicks that keep me close to the surface, where the sound echoes in drips, as in a swimming pool. I listen for his voice as it mists the glass of the window. I inhabit that glass in the silence, waiting for some melody to sparkle with any dissonance sufficient to crack my crystal prison. Percussion is slightly hard, a clack, clacking. Crackle. Predictive appearance, seductive. “I’m under your spell / and I’m under under”. Subaquatic passion, staring at the world from beneath, behind, the film of its surface. See how everything shimmers. It’s quantum physics. You can’t peel off the surface of reality, its candy sprinkles, its gilt, to see what darkness and delight lies beneath; you’re already deep under, withdrawing, closing.

There’s the haunted aesthetic we find in Burial. Something more organic, elusive; the rural alternative to Burial’s empty midnight metropolis. On ‘Raindrops’ the muted sound of gulls weaves in and out of a DJ Shadow, Entroducing…..-era riff and the shimmering playful jazz of a brighter piano, a celeste of some sort…the sound of wind chimes through the minuscule ears of insects, so very high-pitched, so very sweet. You can imagine the tinkle of glass as you toast your favourite jellyfish, spirit animal that sucks its seven temporalities tentacular around it, moving them in sweeping undulations that rupture the cyclical moon-time of the waves. You open your flesh to the ocean, every salt crystal forming a bead in your pores. Desire is the fulfilling of absent substance, the spacing of the gap between lack and attainment. The passage of sailing, not knowing what darkness, what deep blue, you are setting off into, heart curved sharp by the cut of a crescent moon.

If Burial is, as Mark Fisher puts it, ‘London after the rave’, The Long Ocean is the abandoned nightclub pavilion, the sea’s dull roar mingling with those shadowy echoes of ecstasy. The slowed-down groans of a former generation’s momentary joy. Angels caught in the sand of an hour glass, being tipped, a largo mode of clock-ticking, grains of time slipping endlessly over the rasp of voices. I set this album to cassette tape, allowing the crackles to augment and mingle. I could be in the murmuring belly of a ship, hearing the rasps of a radio mix with this transcendent, nowhere music. It’s the sound of twilight set to reflections of quartz made bright momentarily by deepwater bioluminescence. What is that whine, that eerie peal? The sound of lost dolphins, the painful song of a lonesome whale? The whale is a heart’s darkness, a shadow-side of waking reality. You can lose yourself inside it, feel dreams close over you, prised from the wax, the oil-black skin.

Four Tet at his most otherworldly. Hypnotic loops, the soft distortion, the natural ambience. I am walking down an abandoned street, where weird green plants sprawl through the smashed-in windows of Brutalist buildings. Night birds chirp the tart remnants of forgotten songs. I am hooked on the wave-like rhythmic pulse of his words. My footsteps echo, down the street, down the passage, down the shallows to the deep where tarmac melts into oil-black sea.

There’s a sense of dark, spreading space, interpenetrated by twinkling scintillations; not unlike the plaza-like ambience of mallsoft and certain variations of vapourwave. Think: diamonds in the tarry pavement, stars reflected on the ebony surface of the midnight sea. A more crystalline James Ferraro, Marble Surf; The Long Ocean swaps those choir-like, ice-cream van speaker crackles for a more precise intricacy of lattice parameters, cross-rhythms of tinkling percussion and soaring, yet always subtle, beats. Think also of something like GOLDEN LIVING ROOM’s New Nostalgia, its eerie shimmers of late night lo-fi mixed with the bright sound files of near-future cyberspace, everything sounding slightly subterranean, that tinniness of dissonance. On The Long Ocean, however, instead of the glitch effects of hardware, the sounds chosen here are derived from natural materials and technics. The hollow click of driftwood, billows of cooling wind, cave-like echoes, the clinking of a necklace of shells with every percussive sprinkle (‘The Crest’). There’s a collector’s sense of amassed trinkets, effortlessly slinking along intricately simple bass-lines, hardened by industrial beats which burn in the weird space between background and foreground. What this music shares with vapourwave is a sense of slow, careful build towards the internal coherence of a detailed and evocative theme. The sadness and the beauty leaves its ghost stains on your brain, tugs at the blood which is full of the sea, makes you want to walk forever, or forever dream—rhythmic, contorted, returning serene.

Some of these tracks are totally devourable jams, the minimal intrusion of sampling giving way to those lusciously percussive beats, twists of lo-fi brass, crooning sexily over the building peal of mysterious beats (‘Gold Dust’). I’m reminded of a video game casino, an interlude space suspended in a three-dimensional, virtual world, where the colours and lights are all for our ersatz pleasure. On an island over an ocean we are sharing expensive littoral whiskies, toasting the way our skin glitters in its vitrics. Soon every vein will resurface, a curious craquelure marking time on the skin. Here we are, vacant, absent, deliciously distant.

Sometimes a roar of white noise, of wind rushing through a tunnel, subtly infiltrates a track (see the end of ‘The Crest’), reminding us that the space we’re inhabiting here is adorned by darkness and distance, is always deferring from itself. There’s definitely that Boards of Canada minimalism, the seamless weaving of samples in a way that seems hazy, reflective, a little haunted. A childlike naivety, a curious innocence; shadowed by the weight of a trembling void.

But there’s also a certain romance, even magic, to this record that I can’t quite pin to anything else. Not in the same way. Maybe it’s something to do with the celestial resonance of much of the track names, from ‘Star Light’ to ‘Gold Dust’ to closing beauty, ‘Stella Maris’. Latin for Star of the Sea, ‘Stella Maris’ is the feminine spirit, a protector who guides the soul at sea. This song is the album’s North Star, guiding us back through the waft and heft of its silvery, elusive currents. It sounds somehow out of time, built around the melancholy minimalism of a piano, sustaining its slow and careful path over the abyss of crackle, the tremors of the underworld, the ocean’s darkest depths. In the ‘Desecration Phrasebook’, a glossary collecting Anthropocene-related words, there’s a word, ‘shadow-time’, for ‘the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously, an acknowledgement of the multiple out-of-jointnesses provoked by Anthropocene awareness’ (The Bureau of Linguistical Reality). We have to accept we are already living in the end of the world; it’s just that our sense of its time-scale is far beyond human comprehension. The fluid, amniotic ambience of ‘Stella Maris’, coupled with its fin-de-siecle, 1990s-style exploratory piano (think: Aphex Twin, DJ Shadow), creates this haunted sense of dual temporality, of always being on the cusp of something to-come at the same time as being homesick, nostalgic for a dreamland that came before but perhaps never was at all.

There’s something in the way this album romanticises the sea that suggests Glenn Albrecht’s word solastalgia: a form of existential distress caused by environmental change, global warming being the obvious example, as well as coastal erosion and the weather manifestations of climate change. Solastalgia derives from both ‘nostalgia’ and ‘solace’. Whereas nostalgia denotes a feeling of homesickness for a place and time we are no longer present in, solastalgia evokes that sense of distress caused by our home changing as we inhabit it, the affective impact of huge global shifts upon our individual, local experiences of landscape. The Long Ocean doesn’t leave us washed up at the end of the world, but suspended in the glittery salvation of its dark and strange and shimmering beauties. We come close to the weird and the terrifying, the dissonant samples of unrecognisable times, of creatures whose tremors rise up from the deep. Think of the pleasure and slight terror of binaural beats, the sublime understanding of our human insignificance as we gaze at the stars.

The beauty of an ecological thought is that it doesn’t have to be clogged with guilt, it can create something even lovelier before in its collective, technological and temporal possibilities. What would happen if you filled every room with solar panels, invited the creatures in, suspended your desire forever in those flickering, dancing refractions of light and sound and colour and life?

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