Tag: music

Upcoming events – June/July 2023

20th June, 7pm – Dyke Magic zine launch (Bonjour, Glasgow)

21st June, 6pm – Poetry & Food workshop with Colin Herd (The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow)

22nd June, 9:30am – Performing your research: a poets theatre workshop at SGSAH Summer School (The Studio, Glasgow)

23rd June, 7pm – Launch for An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun with Briony Hughes, Ivy Allsop and Isaac Harris (The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow)

2nd July, 4pm – Fundraiser for ‘Kindness Street Team’ with Pleasure Pool, Gabo, J. D. Twitch, Sofay, Leo Bussi, DJ Michael (Queen’s Park bandstand, Glasgow)

5th July, 7:30pm – Glasgow Review of Books (re)launch (The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow)

7th July, 9:45am – Somnolent Cartographies: The Sonic Ecologies of Sleep all-day workshop (Civic House, Glasgow)

Alex G, God Save the Animals in Glasgow

God Save the Animals is a classic phrase, haunted by punk royalty and the entropy of petrol leaks in the garden growing flowers. Keep saying god as a speech act for staying, something I’ve always wanted. Being watered by the idea of voice. Like to wake up and in the morning you’re still here, watching over me I’m sleeping in the magazine with the gloss on my face. Like I want pop to shoot me for ecstasy blanks, it’s just who I am. I love it. I love Alex G. Last night I saw him play with Momma at SWG3, Glasgow, and he rattled through the hits in this dancey elemental way of just seducing all of us. No fan heckling bs. Last time I saw him was with D. and S. back in February 2020, time of portent, a delicious and messy set at Saint Luke’s where I said something to N. about the Joker fan club and all the young dudes, I liked being them sort of going insane in the moment before getting really close to the mic and losing everything. I liked being an idiot for Alex’s music. Do good noise.

It gives me this lofi permission to love love songs. Like I’m always stretched out on the bed of that flat in Finnieston I don’t remember the names of clouds just a starfish oversized in my hair I passed around, the starfish, we kept saying the celebrities we looked like vaguely and we listened to 2016. It felt like I could drink all the mysteries and stay sober, purple-lipped in the mirror just excited to get back from washing my hands to talk. There was a big feeling about that gig that was matched by how everyone seemed in this swathe of guitar haze, choose today, watching the little plonk piano riffs kind of imagining the whole thing composed on Casio and you know the sense of it — thrill of what happens when the bedroom sensation is blown up, squared, riven with song. I kept wanting to see what he was doing.

There are rooms where I can’t hang my head
There are tears that I can’t cry
In the years you feel the most alone
You will build the walls I climb

                                                (Alex G, ‘After All’)

These impossible places and water that exists and time folded into them addressing this to god I don’t know but I feel it with angels like sentences themselves are messengers, hi. They have many eyes and the grammar of wings. I’m here, on my tip toes. The plea to save animals is like determined ‘the’ and over there but nevertheless I’m one of them, aren’t you? We’re cowardly and in love with music, so much we climb the walls of it. We’re stronger than water. We’re blood and bone. Climbing all over the walls of each other to say something. I wanted to hold hands through golden trellises ascent to innocence, no bitterness, we had all these years the same thing, it made us children. We grew sideways over the same secret, screaming falsetto.

Break miracles to gold dust and be again.

So much of the gig felt like thanks. Thanks to the named ones and thanks to the animals. Thanks for honesty. There was this weird proggy encore that sucked us back into the sky castles of the past. Earlier, I can’t remember which song it is, but there’s a piano stem that sounds like playing Sims to me. I said to J. “welcome to Pleasantview”. We were all listening to build something, what can I say, looking for tiles through which to place our confusions. I jumped into the Pitchfork review of God Save the Animals, with its red juicy 8.4, and was thrilled to see the article open with a reference to Derrida’s essay The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow) – that shower scene with the cat staring back at you. I kind of didn’t realise how many dogs haunt Alex G songs. Feel it all. Thanks to the dogs and cats. A BACKWARDS GOD. You’re cool man. 

I feel like the songs keep me safe. I listened to them lots last year wanting to believe in something over and over again like to remake domesticity in the image of ocean, everything deep below like texts swimming around in the sunlight zone of my dreams, afraid to go further down and darker. You can leave it to me. I crossed fields for you. I called you baby baby. I kept this diary. The fields were kelp and basalt and blessing. I wanted to be in a band where we could use gravity to please listen, gift refrains. Momma the support were ace too. They played Californian indie rock of feeling good and fuck it slacker. I liked the zillennial vibe with the irony and sincerity of quotation at work in the heavy guitars and crushy vocals of mirror fry, having a good time. I’m every virtual scenario. The three-minute frisson is perfect. Still shimmering hyper-economy of Alex’s piano which is movies you watch at three am to make them poem perfect, cast aslant and barely remembered. Right now baby I’m struggling, we’ll see.

I had a copy of Dana Ward’s first collection in my little Work is Over tote, still rain crinkled from weeks ago. The bouncer at SWG3 said he was a bookworm as he searched my bag and approved of the title of Dana’s book like it wholly explained the world. That felt a good omen. This Can’t Be Life! Well, what can it be! Let’s see!  

Širom, Max Syedtollan & Cank, Fantasy Land

Alas I missed Širom but caught Fantasy Land and Max Syedtollan & Cank at Old Hairy’s. It’s late and the vax filter Perry gave me is keeping me safe from the mould. Fantasy Land make really cool unhinged harmonies with pools of lyrical beauty collapse in the middle instrument abrasion I felt green shoots breaking through concrete, green green electric strings. This is the busiest it’s been since 2016. I’m listening to someone talk about green shoots in the lungs and ashen something to do in NY. Max & Cank were making post-petrocultural fomo of the chlorophyll sapience off-kilter jouissance ouch variety, apple shard, imagine canines tearing apart their heart tulle to get closer to the false english sunset. Guitar but like a ruined beach. I loved Romy’s story about the east end left behind and falling in a hole of oil not long after the recycling site fire, toxicity I believe to be true and suck in the same air my lungs the same best minds of all pearls destroyed by mould, blue-black-black-percussive-lung-supper. Fffeeeeeedback. Watching the chime feast not knowing the key. 2 x whisky soda. Talking to you about a glowing deciduous tree in the story told to the ceiling and somebody’s anonymous acid trip commentary glows haribo in the back. Minting the inside crisp packet silver like it’s a cymballlllll :’)

Putting the heating on feels illegal. My thighs hurt with mystery. Glasgow is cold.

The Last Song: Words for Frightened Rabbit

Released 31st March, 2023 // 56 pages // 978-1-915760-92-0 // RRP £8.99

It’s been a real pleasure and twang of the heart to work with Aaron Kent on this anthology for Frightened Rabbit. How to make sense of all that salt and the greys in your eyes looking back through the years as if to still be sitting in the living room with a whisky, listening to ‘It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop’ or like analysing lines with the passion of teenagers trying to make sense of everything that can only be felt in the body, or walking backwards or into the wind and sea. Thank you to everyone who sent us work and especially to our brilliant contributors who have shared something really special. This will be with us in the world at the end of March, a weird three years on since my first Broken Sleep release with Katy Lewis Hood which came out on 31st March 2020. What times we constantly live in.

~

The Last Song is a poignant tribute to one of the most beloved bands of our time. This book takes readers on a journey through the heart and soul of Frightened Rabbit’s music, exploring themes of love, loss, and the human condition with raw emotion and lyrical beauty. Each page is a powerful reflection on the band’s songs, offering a new perspective on the music that has touched so many lives. Whether you’re a die-hard fan or discovering Frightened Rabbit for the first time, The Last Song is a must-read for anyone who appreciates the power of music to move us and inspire us.

PRAISE for The Last Song:

Scott and Frightened Rabbit left us a wonderful legacy of music and words in their wake. This collection shows that that legacy doesn’t have to be a passive, inert thing; the ripples of their writing continue to spread ever outwards, making tiny changes as they go. This is a beautiful tribute to art, and to an artist we still hold in our hearts.

   — Frank Turner

List of contributors

Foreword by Aaron Kent and Maria Sledmere
Laura Theis
Ian Farnes
Emma Whitelaw
Alice-Catherine Jennings
Catriona Murphy
Anthony Desmond
M Mccorquodale
Geraint Ellis
Michelle Moloney King
Aaron Kent
Jo Higgs
jade king
Carl Burkitt
Tulian Colton
Andrew Blair
Charlie Rose Evans
Maria Sledmere
Kyle Lovell
Vita Sleigh
Gavin Baird
Lynn Valentine
Al Crow

Preorder here

prince of the internet

from SPAM zine issue 7, Prom Date (2017)

Dear Matty Healy, 

I just saw you play in Glasgow last night. One time back in like 2017 I wrote a poem that compared some kind of narrative flip of my speaker’s life to the flip of your hair, back when it was longer and so mid-2010s nothing else compares to it. That whole decade followed the narrative arc of a terrible prom date, seriously, culminating in the good morning after vibes of the curly girl method. After your gig, which we arrived late for but still in time for everything, I got home and watched you on youtube talk with Zane Lowe about the various loves and how you used to want them all at once, all the loves of 10,000 people and your lovers and the love of a friend, but they’d be in conflict so the ‘malady’ of one love would taint the rest and you didn’t like them to bleedthrough each other. How you wanted to make the loves exclusive as possible. I wondered about that as a kind of ars poetica for what we are supposed to do with creation. How the song changes once someone adores it. When you pour all love for one person or many people shining into the same thing and each time someone reads or listens they replenish it with their love. Sincerity is scary! One time I walked through Manchester in semi-lockdown the rain was incessant, my love and I sheltered in shopping centres amidst the paramount sensation of repeating our steps, one of us was half without vision the other depressed in white lace like willows drooping in winter etc. 

I learned from Chicken Shop Date that you’re an Aries. The only other Aries I know are poets or massage therapists. People with fire in the tips of their fingers.

You said your favourite lyric from the new album is I’m in love with you
for me it might be Central Park is Sea World for trees…

*

10k Loves

O prince of the internet
   climbing the stage you want to dismantle
every night in the city
sets itself
ersatz sun
inhalations of metamodernism 
I am twenty nine for the last time being twenty nine in your song
many lambent americas remember you
some guys behind us screaming “CHANGE OF HEART
YA CUNT” all night
    until security confiscated their vapes 
and their jumping excesses
  I think your ardent excesses
are ascent to attention, this gelatine of the early set
nodding to lockdown
makes me jealous
she’s turned the weans into a kind of wine
against us
sucking a stranger’s thumb
Scott and I debate what’s in the vessels 
   is it water, true wine, lemsip or lucozade
various Platonic essences
mid-century realism never looked so good as you
peeling back the paint of the not really wood
or having a cold
thrusting up from the job opportunity of 
being a pop star’s
Harold Pinter pretence 
smoking fake cigarettes
around too many scented candles
   after your shift at the financial centre of everything
what’s a fiver
kids want the same dream supremely
   whole crowd shouting I took all my things that make sound
the rest I can do without
right back at you in the common heartbreak 
fake smoking out the window where the stars
of a trillion iPhones are
When he came around to switch off the lamps, gently
I silently recited my cloud password 
   in the hope of being swallowed in the play
of the warm, exterior moment
omnicringe to believe
lust songs are still possible
how earlier I had watched a square of you playing ‘These Days’
    on guitar for Lucy, Phoebe, Jack and Natalie
all in a moment’s notice
becoming a teenage rationalist
addicted to ballads
like Caroline going live to eat pasta 
you’re like our favourite band in the world is The Blue Nile
singing the present
gift 
I fucking miss 
once imagined myself lost in the rain 
   of sleeping lightly
sugar guitar
coming so far
I used to walk around in the love 
made myself into a sound
walking around  
helps to be happy
wintering too many lines 
You’re like even remembering the original camera shot 
    always saw you remembering to almost 
die a lot 
in the same dream
fuck it
everything tastes the same when you can’t be enlightened
trying really hard
to try 
silver hairs newly sprung from my skull
in the metafiction of being a genuine person
ringfencing fresh crush superlatives
The outside is horrible
I grow shyness in expensive monstera to never water it
better than when I am kissed
This is still a review of your gig! 
Talk of the fourth wall fell for it
   inside the house beat of collarbone
I feel like shiny roadkill 
At what point did the feeling thaw
   more jumping, climb the rig
inside its precious oil only knows you
want 
folk influence
like I want to be guys
augmented on stage
to climb through a video
saxophonist of the lonesomeness
inside all brass 
of the bar 
turning the lights off
marrying a new year to the same 
way it felt 
I can’t forget

When are you most happy?

Grating ginger from spoon feeling, lambent idea of no lucre to save, nothing at all, deposit of warmth – start using joy as a doing, you said I was joy, joying, unjoyed, a joyride ~ this belongs to you!

DROP SILVER INTO THE CLAMSHELL

ACID HARVESTS OF CHRISTMAS

DO THIS FOR KICKS

~

a sort of lacquer harvested from trip hop

✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ✿*ﾟ

Ornament & Missouri

Once, the temperament of the bellflower was of concern to me. I wrote down words like ‘ornament’ and ‘Missouri’. I had a Lamy pen to write sideways, slantwise, of my other life. There was one club in particular where I excelled in the art of other people’s music. What some call karaoke but I call languishing in melody, obsessively, falling apart in front of an audience. I was like the VHS girl-child in Aftersun butchering ‘Losing My Religion’ with such sweetness the whole resort goes silent. What talent had I for pitch or flourish? There was a column of white light above my head at all times which I imagined writing into, solemnly, a long list of my songs. The more they snared in my throat, the more they became me. The newspapers declared this behaviour ‘cheery perennial’ at the local, noted my penchant for particular martinis, the olive glow of the evening. Any evening, you could find me there in a sequin distress, picking my excess off the floor. I had this thing called a hem. It was the way my voice dropped. The way I gathered it up. Outside the club was a cottage garden, can you believe it, where I tended these purple flowers. I spritzed the last of my drinks across their wilted leaves and I murmured the inside scoop of each song, so only the flowers knew. Their growth was writing itself all over the skirts of the club, I was feeding it; soon we would nourish ourselves from the fruits of trial and error. It seemed appalling that my whole generation had fallen back into the habit of other people’s songs. As a child, I was dragged along to open mics, and all the songs were original, weren’t they? You had to put a few coins in the kitty to get on the list. According to the principle of locality, a particle is influenced by its closest surroundings, with interactions limited to the speed of light. But according to Bell, there are variables. The risk of being heckled or worse, adored. I knew my theory of the song to be incomplete and quantum. It went very far. I stroked the rare blue hue of my partial shade. I queued Outside. Sung the non-lexical vocables of glossy stars. Ate lyrics for kicks. I paid the price.