Okay, it’s Saturday morning now. Time to do a quick wrap-up of yesterday’s happenings I feel.
So, got to the site, got signed in and got my shirt, then headed out to the box office which looked like this:
My job was to stand on the left and deal with paper tickets, and door sales. Mostly paper tickets though. Rip the stub, mark the hand for friday only, wristband and programme for weekenders. Easy.
We kicked off around 9.05, and just as with last year, the queue was super-busy for the first hour, non-stop people. After a while, I stopped even looking at people’s faces, getting into the routine of ripping the ticket and slapping on a wristband. After the first hour, it died down to dribs and drabs. There were a couple of people looking for a nightclub, slightly confused as to what was going on, but otherwise, fairly uneventful.
Having completed my shift, I walked across the canal bridge and headed over to Space 2 for to be ready for the mighty Secret Chiefs. Playing at the time, Mike Watt & the Missingmen, they sounded okay, but I missed the bulk of the set, so I wandered over to the merch table. Unfortunately, no SC3 hoodies on sale, but they did indeed carry the new 7″ vinyl, featuring Ishraqiyun on one side, and the first new FORMS material since 2004 on t’other.
Yeah! I now have five 7" records, all of which are Secret Chiefs 3 satellite bands.
Next I watched the Secret Chiefs 3 setting up, which was cool. Lots of instruments being tuned in ways that western minds never intended.
Trey Spruance, on the left, one of my musical heroes, fiddling with his electric saz. Which he would later play.
Their set actually kicked off a good five minutes earlier than scheduled, which was nice, and lasted for over an hour. My brief summary of it, is that it was one of the best musical performances I have ever seen. I don’t think I can really overstate how enjoyable it was. Personal highlights included The 3, Vajra, The 4, Brazen Serpent, Book T: Exodus, and as if for a treat just for me, they whipped out Labyrinth of Light for an encore.
New guy Matt Lebofsky on keys, a perfect fit for this band I think.
These are some of the best musicians in the world, for sure. Shazad Ismaily on bass, and Timb Harris here playing trumpet for Book T: Exodus (of cover of the theme from the film 'Exodus'), but he also played guitar, violin and some keys.
Trey Spruance is quite a fellow, playing all manner of guitars and other stringed instruments. He also happens to have assembled a very formidable touring ensemble. So three cheers for the man with the masterplan, and long may his fine works continue.
After that, I went back to the hotel, ate some crisps and went to bed, for t’was about 2.10AM when they finished up.
So, didn’t see a lot of bands, but the one that I did see genuinely exceeded all expectations. Honestly, when it got to Labyrinth of Light, I could barely contain my excitement. It’s the just about the perfect surf-rock tune. Check out this video from another performance of it.
Anyway, time to get up and head out, because from 12.00 – 4.00 I will be soldering and no doubt burning my fingers a couple times in the Mute Synth workshop. And then later on, I will be performing live with my fellow workshoppers at 10.00PM. I’ll see if I can capture some document of that moment because it will my first ever live performance, even if it is as part of a large group of people.
Turns out the giant TV in my room won’t respond to any input for some unknown reason, so I guess I’ll inform reception. I wasn’t planning to watch any TV or anything, it’s just strange, and I guess they’d want to know, if they don’t already.
So, I am just about to leave to go to the site, the Custard Factory obviously, where I am to be given my wristband and staff shirt, which I need to wear on the outside of my clothing, and then i shall be assigned duties. I am still assuming it’s going to be box office, so with that in mind, I am going to pop into a clothes shop on the way (the Bullring is open late…) and get me some fingerless gloves, so I can operate a) the e-ticket PDA b) my phone c) my wallet, without needing to remove said gloves. It is after all a bitterly cold October night.
Those familiar with the Supersonic Layout may notice the significant changes in layout this year. It appears the entrance is no longer Gibb Street, but Floodgate Street, presumably for security reasons (The site was looted during the Idiot Riots 2011), and also new venues (no more outdoor stage? Makes sense given the time of year).
This evening there is just one act I am really desperate to see, and that’s Secret Cheifs 3. Interestingly, the line-up for this tour includes Danny Heifetz, of the original Secret Chiefs Trio and Mr. Bungle. Also, interestingly, they are a band I have loved for about 6 years, but have never yet had the opportunity to see perform. I will also try and grab some merch if I have time, particularly if they’ve got their cool-ass hoodies, and the new 7″.
If I have the time I will check out some other stuff, but there’s no strict plan – unlike tomorrow.
Anyway, gates open at 9PM, so I should probably get to going.
Edit: Also, I will be posting happenings on Facebook and Google+.
So Supersonic Festival 2011 kicks off this evening in the fine post-industrial city of Birmingham. And that’s where I am travelling to as I write this, on the 10:00 Virgin Trains service to Birmingham New Street, delayed by about an hour due to vandalism on the line by what I think I would be well within my rights to generalise as a bunch of idiots.
Here's me writing this post that you are now reading, on the train.
It’s a train journey so there’s not much to report. Not sure why I would even write this, but I got bored, and can’t sleep, or focus on reading (annoying because there’s books I want to read).
Last night I went for a drink with some work colleagues, which is not something I normally do because I am bad at socialising, but it turned out to be totally pleasant because nobody was really there just to get drunk. We sat and chatted, and I tried to explain to people that I would be performing live on Saturday night with an instrument that I have never touched, and isn’t even built yet… More on that later.
On a completely unrelated note, while at work I was speaking to a girl who disputed my claim that I can remember with perfect accuracy strange singular details from certain moments in the past, such as the pair of trousers I was wearing when I last played badminton with my friends in the School badminton club (which I went to probably twice), or that exact piece of music I was listening in certain exact places at certain exact times. I recognise the point she was making, about memory most often being extremely inaccurate (which is something I read about last year in The Invisible Gorilla), but this isn’t my false realistic remembering of a subjective event, in most cases it’s a memory of a an actual object in an actual place. In many cases it feels like it’s imprinted on my brain, that I was walking somewhere, or sitting somewhere, listening to an album on my Discman or mp3 player. Now that I have last.fm on my phone which I now use as my mp3 player, I’ll pretty much have a record of all that going forward anyway, but still, I was thinking about it this morning.
For an example, in 2003 and 2004, Murray and I saw the band Yes performing live. I remember very clearly several details from the trip to Edinburgh, including that I purchased a Frank Zappa box-set named Threesome No.2 containing Hot Rats, Waka/Jawaka, and The Grand Wazoo, and also Forever Changes by Love. I think there may have been another, but if there was, I do not remember what. I also remember Murray purchased The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which we listened to in his Dad’s car on the way home. I also remember that my parents were on holiday that week with my sister, and when I got home to the house sometime after midnight, I put some of this music on the stereo, and felt really weird and lonely, because it was one of the first times I was basically staying all on my own in a house for a whole week. Also because Forever Changes is an album that’s mostly about loneliness and despair and confusion.
Is this memory false? I don’t remember everything in clear detail, just several specific moments out of context, plus some albums that I bought and own. Those details I remember are clear as day in my mind… But then again, as she pointed out, that’s kind of how this illusion works. Maybe she’s right, maybe it didn’t happen like that at all…
Oh, but right now I am listening to Stained Glass by Kayo Dot (which happens to feature Trey Spruance of Secret Chiefs 3 who will be performing this morning at 12.50AM – words cannot describe how excited I am about that fact) and I am very vividly recall a time, earlier this year, when I was walking into town, listening to Stained Glass on my now obsolete Creative Zen, and I was walking alongside the Clyde while the twenty minute piece’s controversial synth solo happens, and it made me feel profoundly emotional, sadness and loss and bitter regret all at once.
I don’t know how that memory could be false, because to this moment, that music makes me feel this way. Though some of the details may be incorrect, I firmly believe I was listening to this song walking beside the river Clyde. I’m pretty sure I went home and told somebody about it too, because I felt real weird about it at the time, and I tend to tell people about stuff like that.
Anyway… just some thoughts about the fallibility of memory, which of course has nothing to do with anything. Train has now just passed Penrith, and Stained Glass is nearly over – 20 minutes is way too short for this song. Next up, Bjork’s Biophilia, which is friggin’ awesome (possibly the second best kind of awesome there is).
At Supersonic this evening, I am due to start working at 8.00, though I do not yet know in what capacity. Presumably box office like last year, but we shall see. The box office has moved location this year to across the canal. I’ll post this when I get to the hotel, and later on, before I leave, I’ll probably write something actually about Supersonic instead of a delayed response to a conversation from 15 hours ago that nobody cares about.
Left you on a bit of a cliffhanger yesterday didn’t I? No? Either way, don’t worry, we’ll get straight down to business. I’m not going to beat around the bush for comic effect. No siree. That’s just not my style. You know how sometimes when your favourite TV show comes back on the air after a cliffhanger, and they find some way of not resolving that cliffhanger the first week and instead do an episode about something else? Isn’t that annoying? I would never stoop to such tactics. What was I talking about again? Oh yeah…
We were looking for the missing element, the spark, the zing, the punch that would give our podcast that unique flavour. What would it be? Also, we didn’t even have a title for it.
Well, after literally minutes of discussion we found out what it was missing.
Hello sir.
Beef.
Not just any beef though, on no! We got in touch with our old friends at the Islay Beef Consortium, who represent the bovine interests of the fair island of Islay (aisle-ay), Queen of the Hebrides (he-brides) where men wearing wedding dresses walk out to the craggy cliffs and sing shanties to the ocean, before remove their clothing, throwing it up into the piercing winds, and then dancing home in the misty dawn air, before getting dressed for work at the massive Islay Abattoir, where the world’s most Islay-related beef product is produced.
Here then is episode two of what will hereafter be known as, The Islay Beefcast.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
In this episode, we somehow take two whole hours to ramble on about everything under the sun. We talk about our boring jobs, our boring lives, our reaction to the death of Steve Jobs and all the things I hate about Apple. Also films, other podcasts, television, music, books, and of course, beef. Sorry it’s so long, next time we’ll try and cut it down.
Next time we plan to have music, AND a logo! Until then, please enjoy.
Meself and me old mucker Murray have decided to try our hands at Podcasting. Why? Well, because sometimes we just get it in our heads to do dumb things for no good reason. We made a couple of attempts this year to produce some more creative content for the internet, but that didn’t go exactly to plan, due primarily to scheduling issues and that age old curse of laziness. So instead we decided to just sit down with a couple microphones and chit-chat about whatever came to mind. I’m surprised nobody else has thought of this before.
Here are the results of our initial session, as posted on Murray’s blog recently (only with some additional post-production.)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
In this episode we discuss some books, some music, some films, some television, some games, it’s FUN/NO FUN for ALL/SOME/NONE of the FAMILY/FRIENDS/BUSINESS COLLEAGES. There is no intro music, or snazzy logo yet. Also, it’s a rambling mess. Consider this a pilot episode.
If you would like to subscribe to this awful endeavour, please use this feed, free of charge to do so! We don’t have a schedule yet, so we will put out episodes when we’re good and ready.
Making this podcast was fun, but we realised afterwards that something was missing. It seemed to us that there was a magical ingredient absent from this otherwise tasty podcast. “Tune in” tomorrow for the second part of this story, and episode two of our brand new podcast, which possibly has a better name than this one… For now, stay strong out there in Internetopolis.
Due to some circumstances that I shan’t go into here, I’ve felt slightly melancholic and emotional lately. Just because of who and what I am, I tend to get caught up on little things that mostly only exist in my head and am unable to adequately express these things to others.
At my work, I’ve recently been forced by circumstances beyond my control to take on different responsibilities. Specifically, until further notice and for reasons outside my control, I am unable to do my real job. Instead I am now acting as a floorwalker to help my colleagues do their jobs. I wander around, people shout my name or put their hands up, I walk over and say “I don’t really know, sorry…” One of the positive things about this is that I’ve overcome my natural shyness and actually getting to know people, in a work environment kind of way at least. This is new and exciting for me.
Oh I’m still clumsy and foolish, and slow to pick up on certain social cues, but the point is that doing this has kind of brought me out of my shell a bit. On the other hand, the shock of this change has also exposed some of my vulnerabilities that I don’t know how to deal with. I muddle through, though.
On top of this, there are some big changes looming in my life, and for the first time I actually feel kind of sad about what happens next. Canada is more of an option for next year than ever, but I suddenly feel as though the place I’m in now is about to get ripped out from under me just as I was beginning to settle in, and I’m going to end up back at square one.
Anyway, all that life stuff aside, I have listened to music a lot lately, but I’ve jumped from artist to artist, unable to really stay on any one thing. It feels as though I’m searching for some emotional fix that I can’t quite pinpoint without music. Sometimes that mood is one of loneliness and isolation, sometimes of love and community, sometimes misplaced feelings or unrequited love, sometimes a vague sense of spirituality, and sometimes pure visceral energy.
Today I thought I would use this as an excuse for a blog post. So, after altogether too much ado about nothing, here are five songs that elicit in me a strong emotional response. In no particular order, let’s begin.
Tom Waits – Hold On
To my ears one of Waits’ sweetest songs. It’s a simple lyrical sentiment that I think speaks for itself. What really sells this though is its musical setting, firmly within Waits’ unique old-timey ramshackle sound, or at least a muted version of it. A quiet shuffling shaker rhythm sets the pace while guitars are gently picked and strummed.
Hans Zimmer – Time
I re-watched Inception a couple of weeks ago, which reminded me just how intense my love for that film is. It is pretty near to being a perfect film for me. It expresses ideas which are impossible and strange, but it frames them on such a story built of simple human emotion.
Having listened to the soundtrack a whole bunch for the past year, some of the moments in the film resonated even more strongly than they had before. None more so than scene accompanying this piece, Time, which I think is one of the best melodic themes from any film score of the past decade. It does not feature the trademark BWOM! noise that’s become so famous, but it does build to a fairly bombastic climax as the film draws to an end.
I’m not sure how to describe it exactly, but it plays on the themes of the film, of reality and of dreams, of inception and the power of ideas, and of course, of love, loss and regret.
The National – Conversation 16
Fun fact, I am not lucky in love. However, I am familiar with depression. This song is performed by my musical discovery of the year The National, and expresses a dark melodrama of a failing relationship. It’s about that place people sometimes get to where they still love the person they are with, but their own neuroses that they had tried to hide and ignore have started to eat away at everything.
Distant shuddering tremolo guitar and starkly pristine drums, surrounding a mixture of woodwinds, synth pads, and ghostly backing vocals forming the perfect accompaniment to Matt Berninger’s weary baritone, in which he somehow manages to make the line “I was afraid I’d eat your brains” a truly haunting metaphorical refrain.
There is a place in my heart for songs like this which are about love, but do not glorify banal teenage fantasies or empty materialistic lust, and instead examine the darker personal side of it all. I like it when songs deal with the strange feelings people don’t normally talk about.
The video is pretty stupid though, despite starring John Slattery and Kristen Schaal. Its silliness slightly undermines the emotion I’m talking about.
R.E.M. – Belong
“Oh god, not another R.E.M. song! WHY WON’T HE JUST SHUT THE UP ABOUT R.E.M.?!”
Yes, I talk about R.E.M. a lot. Sorry.
Anyway, this song is not Everybody Hurts. Nor is it Losing My Religion, though it is from the same album as that. This song is Belong. It is notable for a number of reasons, primarily that it consists of spoken word verse interspersed with wordless group choruses, that are really beautifully arranged and performed. There’s also a prominent little bass fill that’s very catchy, among the usual piano chords and guitar jangling you may have come to expect. Also, a catchy beat mostly consisting of alternating finger-clicks and claps over the regular drumming.
Oh, and the words are beautiful and abstract the way the best R.E.M. songs are. There’s a mother, and a child, and a sense of passing on, of some revolution or event that opens a child up to a bold new world of possibilities. I don’t know what it’s about really, but I get a lot out of it. What about you, huh?
The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – Triumph of Our Tired Eyes
Although this list was in no particular order, I think I did unconsciously save the most important one for last.
I probably don’t come across as a particularly emotional guy, but there are a lot of Silver Mt. Zion songs that hit me right where it hurts. For me, they specialise in the kind of songs that you feel like a strange ache in your heart. This band has more of them than any other band I know of. I think it’s because of some combination of their wavering tremolo guitar, soaring violins and broken untrained vocals singing beautiful words so damn beautifully I can literally barely stand it.
I think, if anyone wants to know how I truly feel about life, about love, about everything in the whole damn world, this song is a fairly close approximation. It is hopelessness and fear given way to redemption and love, but in a quietly mundane kind of way. It’s about the smallness and the strength of individual action. The words celebrate humanity in all its flaws, while still maintaining that hope of something strong inside us all.
***
Sorry for trying to put some genuine emotion into words, I’m not sure I’m very good at it. Now, if only I could express my emotions out of my mouth, to other people. Or know what to say at all to certain people for who my brain decides it’s vitally important to temporarily reduce the power of speech to incomprehensible babble.
You may or may not have noticed that I have never joined Facebook. There are various reasons, but one of them is that I really do not like anything about the way Facebook works or is run. If you like and use Facebook, that’s your business, and by all means enjoy it. I’m not going to rant about it. Obviously it’s a service that fits a lot of people’s needs.
Anyway, I use a lot of Google services. Over the past year, I have migrated a lot of my internet services to Google’s cloud-based services including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Chrome sync and most recently Picasa Web Albums. I like Google as a company, generally speaking, and I like a lot of their products. I recently got my first smartphone, running Android.
I watched Google+’s beta with interest (as I have with Google Music) and I was quite excited when it suddenly went wide release last week. I signed up, which wasn’t hard because it’s tied to my Google account.
So far, the main limitation I’ve come up against is that I don’t really know that many people, let alone people who will early-adopt Google+ while all their friends stay on Facebook. But as with all such things (remember Myspace, or even Bebo?) times change and people will migrate from Facebook to something else eventually. Google+ could be the one, or maybe it’ll co-exist, I don’t know.
I like the service, I like the circles stuff, I like the idea of using it as a microblog sort of thing, I like the way I can quickly post stuff from my phone (yeah, I know Twitter exists, but this hosts photo and video), and so far I’ve been able to integrate it into my life with minimal intrusion. So far so good.
Anyway, if you want to find me on Google+, click here.
Last year when I volunteered at Supersonic Festival, I blogged the event from the hotel bar, which was pretty fun. This year I am volunteering once again, and I think I’m going to do a something a little more immediate, exciting and involving. I’ll be using Google+ to liveblog the festival as it happens, so expect more pictures, maybe some short video clips, instant reactions and thoughts.
On top of that, I will of course use the blog here to do proper full-scale write-ups. Best of both worlds, except without Picard being assimilated by the Borg. I’ll look into integrating the Google+ feed into this blog so as not to split things up, but that’s enough info for now. You can add me on Google+, and keep an eye out for it in three weeks time, if you’re at all interested.
So, one of the world’s most beloved musical trios with a three-letter acronym for a name is officially no more. But, PMT aside, let’s talk about R.E.M…
Hah! See what I did there?
Seriously though, I kind of feel bad about making a joke like that because I like R.E.M. a lot, and I at best mildly regret the existence of PMT. I apparently have 10 R.E.M. albums in my collection, and that’s not nearly the lot. Today the three members of R.E.M. announced that they are now closed for business. When they announced that they would not be touring their current record Collapse Into Now (which I think is pretty swell), and based on the press they did around its release, I did wonder if maybe they were getting to the end of the line. But then, they made a bunch of video content for the record, filmed studio performances, and lyrics videos and what not.
Still, it was a good old run, 31 years, longer than I’ve been alive. However, this will make today, Thursday the 22nd of September 2011, the first full day of my life that R.E.M. are no longer a band. I know that doesn’t really mean anything, but it’s a slightly weird thought.
There's probably a sunset off-shot to the left.
Anywhatever, I figured what better way to remember R.E.M. than by resurrecting a dormant feature in which I gather together five related songs. In this case the relation is simply that they are R.E.M. songs, spanning their career, that I really like. Maybe not my all-time favourite R.E.M. songs, and certainly not in any order of preference, but possibly five slightly lesser known tracks I feel like pointing at and saying, “this one goes out to the R.E.M. that I love.”
Letter Never Sent (from Reckoning,1984)
This is a fairly simple song, but with a real catchy uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-ooooooooo-oooooo-ooooooooo chorus. One of the more plainly melodic early tracks.
King of Birds (from Document, 1987)
King of Birds is, I think, a clear sign of the future for R.E.M. hinting strongly at their early 90s style of slow and soft, but still full of the abstract half-mumbled mystique of their 80s output.
Me in Honey (from Out of Time, 1991)
R.E.M. in happy mode. The studio version of this also features Kate Pierson, female vocalist well-known for her contribution to Shiny Happy People. This song is better I think. This one is dripping with sweet, sweet melody.
Electrolite (from New Adventures in Hi-Fi, 1996)
I really appreciate the sentiment here, the Hollywood thing, reflecting on the global cultural explosion of the 20th century. Also, one of the highlights of their various piano-led songs.
Electron Blue (from Around the Sun, 2004)
Around the Sun was not a great record. However, this song is genuinely one of my favourite tracks in their whole career. It’s full of electronics, synths and a digital-sounding piano, and seems to describe a near-future drug dystopia. I find the song’s hook quite haunting for some reason.
PMT was a dumb project that aimed to be the worst band in the world. Alas, we were beaten in that task by Alestorm.
Zing!
That said, we were pretty bad, and it was pretty fun. We did a stupid internet show of us improvising horribly to other artists’ lyrics, called Jazzattack! We had planned to do it weekly, but one thing and another made that implausible. It also became a hassle to set it up and tidy up afterwards, so we became complacent and lazy. All the episodes are up on YouTube as of last night (except Episode 4 for some reason, which I will fix later) and you can view them here. They kind of look crappy now. I could re-render them properly, but that seems like a lot of effort for this crap.
About three years ago, after I moved out of the flat with those guys, we realised that we never did a proper farewell for PMT, and that we probably should. Vague plans got hatched, and then crushed, mangled, drawn-out, and finally I had all the pieces by the end of last year. Then I put off editing the thing for months and months, and, well… Time makes fools of us all. Me especially. Here it is:
Hello Internet. I am Paul F. Ferguson. This is my blog. I include the F. because I want to distinguish myself slightly from all the other Paul Fergusons on the internet, of which there are many. It also deservedly puts me in the company of other such presidential fellows such as Chester A. Arthur and John Q. Adams.
I currently live in Glasgow, Scotland. It's okay. I wouldn't mind living somewhere else though.
I use this blog to post things of various interest including thoughts, interests, music reviews, game reviews, photos, whatever I feel like. Sometimes I talk about my life, but it's not that interesting, so mostly other stuff.
