krishna the vido

RAGA YUTHANMI

ROYAL FREE ELECTRIC – HEKABABA

ENTROPY CIRCUS – JUGGERNAUT

Telephon II

After about six months of living there I spent a lot of time away from the apartment. Since Soma Jones wouldn’t visit me I would go to wherever he was drinking in the Royal Precinct. Daytimes that might be the Oslo Ice Cream Parlour, or sometimes he’d find local drinkers at the end of rows of 1920s Warner Flats.

For a while he even favoured the benches outside the gym which were uniformally splattered with pigeon guano and frequented by red-faced old men who drank Tennants Extra from cans hidden inside paper bags. Although he was initially enthusiastic about them, Soma soon tired of his winos.

“I thought they had something to offer. I’ll have to review outsiderhood.”

His reaction was typically gauche: he spent a few evenings a week working as a stage hand for a production of Oklahoma at the Little Broadway in Hatwell Cross. It was a woefully amateur production for teenagers organised by a discredited ex-headmistress called Finnegan. Finnegan had also been ejected from the Girl Guides and the WI but as far as I could see there was nothing suspicious or unsavoury about her execrable musical, sad as it was.

Soma would go out with the theatre crowd after rehearsal at The Jolly Butchers next door to the theatre. The walls of the pub were decorated with photographs from productions going back to the sixties. I had to know what it was about.

“What are we doing here? This is shit, you know?”

“You are a snob,” he told me, “you know that don’t you? I’ve always had an interest in stage design. It’s practically architecture, after all. And besides,” he inclined his head towards a scrawny redhead who was standing at the bar laughing, “I think I’m in there with the lighting crew.”

The affair with Heloise blew over before Oklahoma reached the stage. Soma spent a few weeks out of town visiting family and when he came back he bought himself a hatchback and a new sofa.

The first I knew about Soma Jones’ hatchback was when it almost knocked me over at a crossing in Petits Fours. Soma was driving with Clide in the passenger seat and Clide’s bass guitar taking up most of the back seat.

“Where are you going? Get in!”

I rearranged the bass across my lap and put my shopping bags on top of the body of the instrument. It was raining outside is a drizzling persistent manner. The car took of up the hill with a lurch.

“Where have you been?”

“Me?” asked Soma, “I’ve been out of town for a bit. This place starts feeling like a goldfish bowl. You go round and round…”

“And round and round…” added Clide.

“And round and round and before you know it another year has gone by. I’m not getting any younger, you know?”

“Yes, that would seem unlikely,” I said.

“Sarky bastard!” Soma dropped me at the top of my road, “you’ll have to come and see the sofa. It’s fucking great!”

“It really is,” added Clide.

That night it was very hot and sultry and I had a strange dream. I had been living in Kent for five years, somewhere near Gillingham. I was living with a woman called Sandra, she was a nurse. I was working on the railways. We both did long antisocial hours so we didn’t spend a lot of time in the flat together. We’d catch each other for a few hours mid-evening, mid-afternoon or mid-morning, depending on how our shifts intertwined.

My mother might have been living with us but I’m not sure. That part seemed grossly unlikely since she died when I was ten years old.

Sandra wanted children. For some reason this was impossible. Instead we’d buy each other little Lego sets as gifts. On Sunday nights we’d spread out all of the Lego on the carpet in the living room and make long chains out of it. We were happy doing that but the prospect of the long week ahead put a check on our happiness.

One weekend Sandra had to work a Sunday so we could play with the Lego. I wandered from room to room picking up things from tables and putting them on chairs, picking up things from windowsills and putting them on the floor. This wasn’t getting anywhere so I walked into town and got on a train.

The train took me to the far end of Maidstone beyond where I would normally go if we went shopping there. It was a warm afternoon and most of the shops were shut. In the distance sandy coloured brick towers rose above the trees. I went to investigate them, and as one sometimes does in a dream, found myself observing them slightly from above as if I was flying.

They were eight or nine storeys high and built from brick the consistency of biscuit. There were odd square absences in the walls where corridors carried residence past front doors and kitchen windows, like streets in the sky. Some of the towers had bridges connecting between these walkways. The afternoon sun turned the walls sometimes gold, sometimes ochre, and the shadows were a deep plum purple.

How had I never seen this place before? It seemed like I had missed out on something tremendously important and it was almost too late to make amends.

Trying to find my way back to the station I became lost. Streets trailed off at obscure angles to carry me to the riverfront or to vacant lots filled with broken blue pallets and newspaper. It was starting to get dark by the time I found the railway lines. They ran on in either direction undisturbed into the deep perspective crossing and merging into ever more complex junctions. One direction being as good as another I started to walk hoping to find the station again.

I woke up halfway through Jazz Record Requests. I’d left the radio on during the night, as well as my clothes from the day before. I must have got back from Clide’s some time in the early hours of the morning. I couldn’t remember anything much after eight or nine o clock. I wandered out into the kitchen and onto the rooftop. It was a bright windy day but it did nothing to blow away the mood of the dream. I knew that what I had remembered was only the tip of something far larger which was somehow submerged into the day I’d woken up into.

I also remembered that I was supposed to be going to see the new sofa. I showered dressed and got on a W12. It was a Sunday so the bus was full of noisy families smelling of roast dinner and sweat. I got of the bus a few stops early and walked to Soma Jones’ flat.

Clide was there. They’d apparently continued from the night before, or more accurately they hadn’t stopped.

“Where’s the car?” I asked.

“Fuck knows,” said Soma. Clide laughed.

The sofa was big, black and leather. It took up a good quarter of the room. It was covered in tabloids, blue Pelican paperbacks, cassettes, a spilled bag of tortilla chips and Clide.

“Is your bass still in the car?”

“Fuck knows,” said Clide. Soma laughed. Clide reached behind the sofa into a carrier bag and handed me a can of Tennants Super.

“Well,” said Soma, “you look nice today!”

I was in fact still very tired. “I didn’t sleep too well. I had this strange dream.” I told them about the dream. It was a pretty unfocussed performance. I was backtracking and remembering important points abruptly and inappropriately. Clide would occasionally throw tortilla chips at Soma who would start giggling or thrash his persecutor soundly with a newspaper. Soma lost his phone for a while and interrupted to story to get everyone to stand up so that he could look for it. It was, of course, in his pocket all of the time.

“I carry too much crap, you know?”

Eventually I brought the narrative to some sort of resolution which was greeted by some sort of distracted silence.

“Well,” said Soma, “what can I say? I wish you’d warned us about how boring your interior life was before you started.”

Telephon

“One is compelled,” said Soma Jones, “to discover what is around the next corner, what is over the hill, up the road.”

I set down his drink wondering what had caused this outburst and asked him to expand on his interesting comments.

“One lives one’s life within a walled garden. The walls of this garden are immaterial; formed by years and decades of habit. Around a corner one has never taken, on a street where one lives, there might be a row of shops, an unusual building – perhaps a telephone exchange…”

“Why specifically a telephone exchange? Why do you want to find a telephone exchange?”

“Perhaps not specifically a telephone exchange. But what I was trying to evoke was a place where people go every day, to work maybe, for their whole lives. And one has managed to ignore it for one’s whole life… That’s not really it though,” he took a sip of his drink and cast around himself for inspiration. “I find specialist catalogues interesting.”

“Don’t we all?” I said, “you have to be careful about giving out your real name though. I’ve heard about people who have been blackmailed.”

He ignored me thoughfully, “anything will do: elevator parts, radar equipment.”

“Knitting,” I suggested.

“Hovercraft manufacturing industry journals. Not that there would be many of those. You don’t get many hovercraft in these parts anymore.”

“And besides, they’re probably manufactured by the same companies that make aeroplanes and helicopters and the like.”

“But that’s exactly the problem!” Soma Jones jabbed a finger at me excitedly, “the world is becoming a smaller place.”

“You’ve obviously never taken a night bus back from Peckham.”

“London, Paris, Dubai, Sydney. One finds the same shops in the same malls everywhere, selling the same goods…”

“To different people,” I interjected.

“They become less and less different by the year. One cannot escape the homogenising global culture except through specificness. What I am concerned with is locating the specific and the unknown just off the beaten track of one’s habitual circuit. The shops and hovercraft and telephone exchanges themselves are unimportant.”

“Not to the people who work in them.”

“What one searches for is evidence that the world is larger that one knows. More unknowable. That’s how the world seems when one is a child. The field behind the park stretches on forever. The interstellar spaces beyond ones experiences are filled with spectres, appartitions and boojums.”

“Boojums?” I finished my drink noticing that Soma’s had barely been touched.

“Where one seeks new experiences one becomes increasingly disappointed as one ages. One travels further, experiments with the exotic…”

“Ah, those catalogues again!” I tapped my glass meaningfully.

“Like a heroin addict, one seeks increasingly obscure locations to jack up, to release oneself from the monotony of the real world. One should be perpetually travelling. In the Book of Job, Satan is constantly travelling “up and down in the world”. I often wondered what that meant.”

“It’s probably a mistranslation.”

“One imagines him walking on a treadmill in front of a blank screen upon which angels project his progress through the nations of the earth.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t say “one” when you mean “I”.”

It seemed unfair to provoke Soma Jones in this way but I didn’t have the time or the energy to follow up his enquiries anymore. And besides it seemed that he was no longer engaged in any practical psychogeographic work. If it was some sort of internal quest: so be it. There was nothing much I could do to help him with that and whatever energies were being generated through these experiments would most likely be dissipated in explanation.

Or so it seemed to me.

I wasn’t in a fantastic place at that time anyway. The apartment in Asciibridge seemed to have become a trap. I’d wasted a lot of time when I first moved in there on social functions. I showed off the “exceptional view” over the site of the future Olympic Village to anyone who I could bribe to visit me.

At the back of the flat the kitchen opened out into a wide flat concrete roof about forty feet above the ground. There were no barriers at the edges and down below was a wasteland littered with strange scrubby trees with purple green leaves.

One night, when there was a fire in the fuel dump behind the contractors portakabins, I was fortunate enough to have a gang of media students drinking cocktails out on the roof. They took pictures of each other standing near to the edge with the fire out in the dark behind them. It was a good party and I slept with one of them. That felt a bit cheap and I wasn’t sure that’s what the apartment was for.

I was very enthusiastic about the place when I found it. It came on the tail of a number of developments that triggered each other like dominoes. My work was no longer tied down to a single location as it had been in the nineties so I needed a more fluid base for my operations. The first month I was there I did no work at all. I spent a lot of money in places like Ikea and Homebase buying household utilities made out of innovative materials. Anything in primary  colours or chrome would attract me. I enjoyed the simple unfurnished spaces in there. In afternoons I enjoyed the quality of light in the big open-plan living area. I sent photos that I’d taken with my phone to a lot of my friends.

“Look at this!”

Very few of my real friends had ever visited the apartment. Clide came over once with a six pack of generic supermarket lager. I lent him a cracked saucer that I’d found in the cabinet under the kitchen sink to flick his ash in. The edge of the saucer had once been gilded, it was made of white china with roses painted artlessly in the middle where they would be obscured by the cup, if the cup still existed. Most of my crockery was heavy, rectangular and Japanese. Textured like tree bark or a chalk board and not dishwasher friendly.

Soma never visited.

“It’s right on the outskirts,” I said, “the W12 will take you there. It’s a little bus that goes all around the houses.”

“I don’t like Asciibridge anymore,” he said.

“It’s not like the rest of Asciibridge. Anyway, you’ll get to sit on a bus for hours with lots of pensioners. They might say anything.”

“Yeah, they might.”

“Will you come?”

“I might.”

proghibition 79-99

I hadn’t been back to the flat since forever. Partly because I was grazing in Barnet over the weekend, but also because the place was in a mess from the post-gig hangover that lasted about half of last week. But starting a new week I resolved to get my act together.

Actually I tidied my desk at work too. There was a load of crap left over from the end of last term which was now irrelevant, and for that matter a load of crap from the last few years that was now irrelevant.

Under my desk there are a number of old books. Mostly old library stock that has been withdrawn from the system. We’re having a big clear out of obsolete material at the moment in advance of the library being closed down next year. I’m limiting myself on the number of books that I allow myself, because I’ve already put aside too many from previous stock clearances – hence the books under the desk. There was also other stuff down there: cans of Giraf beer beyond its use-by date, trousers, coloured paper, Californian magazines, and a small collection of 70s vinyl.

My colleague Judy gave me the trousers and records a few years ago. Can’t remember when. I’d already taken home some Iggy Pop and Nico discs, but yesterday I found a Yes gatefold amongst them. Fragile from 1972, the year I was born. So at the end of the day I put it in a bag and took it home.

I recognised a few of the song titles from the Yes triple live album, Yessongs. Okay, okay, stop sniggering, fat face! Triple live albums are funny, but the idea that Yes and prog rock are inherently amusing would probably suggest that you bought NME or Melody Maker in the 80s and 90s. There’s an unexamined consensus amongst music journalists from this period that anything prog is bad, because that’s what punk came along to destroy, didn’t it? And these ageing punks, who are now as fat and balding as the prog rockers they came along to replace, are just *so* fucking dynamic that naturally you’d prefer to follow their lead than that of a goofy hippy with a twin-necked guitar.

Problem is: most of the people who unthinkingly follow this consensus have never listened to any prog. They might have *heard* some. They might have heard enough to recognise it as the enemy and not punk derived and therefore devoid of interest. But what struck me when I was listening to Fragile was just how dynamic and spiky the music is. Okay, there’s a small suite by Rick Wakeman based around a piece by Brahms, and each of the musicians contributes a mini-epic to the mix. But they are literally mini-epics. What was surprising was how concise they were. In fact this was true of the whole album – everything was so dense and exactly constructed. There wasn’t really much room for expasive self-indulgence.

In the last few decades Krautrock, whatever that is, has seen something of a revival of interest. It became okay for journalists to namedrop Can, Faust and Neu! and get into that extended freakout groove. Fragile wasn’t a hundred miles removed from these bands – technically much of it resembles Faust, but with Hobbit-orientated lyrics. But hell, Faust’s lyrics can be pretty woolly too!

The audience that has arrived since the Great Prog Prohibition that lasted from about 1979-1999 may be free of such prejudices. They are free to reinterpret generic niceties as they like. I can’t imagine what the kids get out of electro or acid house, which I found repugnant when they originally arrived, but this lack of respect for history is exactly where musical progress is made. Before the 90s it would have been impossible to consider easy listening as cutting edge, but the last generation to scour charity shops for forgotten vinyl bought this stuff up, firstly ironically and then because they started the recognise the merit of a lot of the material and how it could be recombined and reinterpreted knowing the place for the first time.

For my next trick I shall justify the existence of the Catholic Church and Thatcherism.

in the village

I came back to live in N16 a couple of months back for the first time in ten years. I decided, very specifically, to move to Stamford Hill rather than Stoke Newington. It’s a slight but important difference. Stamford Hill is less self-conscious and it’s nice to be able to hide behind he ubiquitous chassidim in a stealth dwelling near the public library.

Stoke Newington is more villagey. It’s spent a lot of time and effort making itself villagey so we might as well admit it. I saw one of those apparently pointless posters over the weekend flaunting the values of London Villages: that English image of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker. That and Patrick McGoohan running away from a large semi-sentient balloon.

But yesterday evening it actually felt like I was in a village. Wandering towards Morrisons (“More reasons to shop at Morrizhons!”) I slowed my pace to avoid an encounter with a twat who used to run a shabby N16 venue, shouldered past the Big Issue seller and navigated towards the fish counter to contemplate dinner options. Looking up from a battered pollack, I was presented with the gurning countenance of Mr Hugh Metcalfe, the cabbageheaded boss of The Klinker franchises PLC. He displayed some pigs innard to me and explained, “look! I’ve bought myself some new bollocks! Ooh!” An encounter with Hugh is always a treat, and it seems to happen increasingly often, which isn’t all that strange since he lives around the corner from me.

Returning home to find scary mail, a letter from my ex’s mother and a threat from the TV license motherfuckers, I settled to the business of the evening. This mostly involved fiddling with the levels of an envelope filter and a fuzz box and yodelling tunelessly. By ten o clock I was fairly satisfied that I had something to present to the audience and I recieved a phone call from Richard F. For no particularly good reason I deluded myself into believing that he was repeating the words, “the Crotch! Want to go to The Crotch!” I really should grow up one day. What he was actually referring to was The Rochester Castle public house in Stoke Newington. Known locally as “The Roch”, or as Tim insists “The ‘Astle”, but that’s just so he can say “Wanna go up The ‘Astle?” He really should grow up one day.

On my way to The Roch, I almost bump into Justin who is on his way to work. “Sorry, I didn’t see you there!” I say, quite truthfully. I was wearing a new pair of very large, very black sunglasses. We talk doom for a while, as opposed to talking Doom, and then he gets on a bus.

In The Roch is all Stoke Newington society. That chap from Builder’s Crack is standing at the bar looking vague, and half of Morning Bride and The Dublo are at the table with Richard and I am offered a position in a morris dance troupe. But that’s an offer which would be *way* too villagey to accept. And there’s some talk about a local policeman who used to frequent a gay karaoke up the road.

We are in imminent danger of losing our metropolitan anonymity.

game, set and match

Yes. I am actually blogging. You are right. More on this in future posts.

 More important at the moment is tomorrow’s setlist. I’m playing a solo set tomorrow at Stage B in Stoke Newington Church Street. Come along, it’ll be fantastic. To ensure that I’ll be able to make that sort of idle boast, I really need to sort out what I’m going to be doing. Which is a little strange considering that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last few years floundering around on various stages around the country, and occasionally nearby countries, not having a clue what I’m going to do. And I like doing that and it’s fine and good but the very reason for doing a solo gig is to try to push things forward a stage or two.

 Last solo gig I did was in May. It was at the new Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston and it was great. I’m not saying that in terms of how enjoyable it must have been for the audience, although I think it wasn’t bad at that, but it felt fairly comfortable. My first solo gig, about three years ago was not a comfortable affair: my synth didn’t get on with the venue’s power supply and was turning itself on and off in rapid succession, the electric sitar sounded rough as fuck through the PA and I was drunk and nervous. That’s bad. One gets drunk in order to avoid feeling nervous. The gig in May was pretty angry. Mostly for very bad reasons, but that doesn’t matter, it gave me a certain amount of energy and vitriol and that was what the set needed.

What held the set together though, was a solid structure. There were large spans of improvisation in there but I had a fair idea of where I could go if things got boring or didn’t work.

And since that’s getting boring here’s the current version of the setlist:

• Ain’t Got Much Money You & Me But Baby We Got (Toiletries)
• When You Go To The Sea
• Damp Samosa
• Mister Soleil
• Minor Improv
• Du Duh
• St Michael
• Piece’o'Shit

Anyone who saw the last gig or is familiar with my last ten years of material, which is none of you, will say, “hey Zali, there’s a lot of *songs* in that set!” And there are. In the last few years I’ve been trying to bring out more of my song-based material. The Entropy Circus gigs I played last year included a couple of songs in them, a cover version of When The Levee Breaks and my perennial Piece’o'Shit, as did the last solo. Since you’re probably not all that familiar with my material I’ll go through the setlist in detail:

Ain’t Got Much Money You & Me But Baby We Got (Toiletries): Wrote this song in a kitchen in Farnham about ten years ago. My friend Kanchi’s flat had a cupboard full of freebie soaps, shampoos and the like. But that’s not what the song is about. What is the song about? Not a fucking clue! All I know is that it starts with: “Don’t let Eastenders drag you down/ ‘cos like Grant Mitchell you’re always frowning…”

When You Go To The Sea: This was written a few year later. It’s like a Tim Buckley song if Tim Buckley couldn’t sing for shit. Another guitarist recently described the riff as “pretty”. It is. I played this one at my last gig and preluded (?!) it with a kraut-folk improv in the phrygian mode, which I’ll probably do again. Anyone want to know what that means?

Damp Samosa: A new song! Kinda shoegazey singalong stuff. The main chorus of “I had a damp samosa” has been around for a while and was based on a real damp samosa incident on a train going somewhere in Kent.

Mister Soleil: About eight or nine years old, this song. I wrote most of it at Hackney Downs station during a miserable winter. The chords I used for this are kinda mutant jazzy barre chords that I was using a lot at the time. They’re almost identical to the chords for another song of similar vintage called Waiting For The Lights To Change, so I might add a chorus from that in somewhere.

Minor Improv: What it says. This will probably be modelled on this progression that sounds slightly Jewish that I’ve been playing for about fifteen years. Not a real Sephardic scale, they have all sorts of interesting twin semitone runs in them. But I guess I can put a few inflections like that into the piece.

Du Duh: This was the most conventional song on a very unconventional set of recordings I did in about 1996, called Monorail. It has a nice descending major scale drone, although it might actually be one of those modal things which are almost major but not quite, if you follow me…

St Michael: Major pentatonic. If you play about with major pentatonics for long enough you will find yrself playing Michael Row The Boat Ashore. Fact. That’s what this is. Might augment it with a Casio drone. When done right this sounds fucking celestial. A version of it will be appearing on the new album, boys and girls!

Piece’o'Shit: The old favourite from Paddington Hardstare. I’ve recorded three versions of this song in the past and it has had a few live outings. Features the line, “if you’re needing me like I’m needing you then I might as well start sniffing glue instead.” It’s was originally about moving flat and not about relationship angst at all.

Well, wasn’t that interesting?