Oli's Adventures in Writingland

The life of a forgotten hero

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:44:12 +0100

The Black Count tells the story of one of revolutionary France’s leading generals, a man who rose through the ranks to lead large forces to decisive victories in the Alps and northern Italy, who acquired a reputation for strength and physical courage, leading his troops in person and engaging the enemy with his sabre, and who accompanied Napoleon on his ill fated first Egyptian campaign. He was captured by royalist Naples on his way back to France, held for two years, and returned home to discover that he had fallen from favour, languishing in obscurity in the remainder of a life cut short by the ill effects of of his imprisonment. This is a pretty dramatic tale in its own right, but all the more so when you know that I’m discussing a black man from Sainte Domingue (later Haiti), the son of a slave, who spent some of his own childhood as a chattel. He was also the father of the novelistAlexandre Dumas, and an inspiration for many of his most famous works. He was variously known as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie and Alex Dumas, the name under which he conducted most of his military career.

Although his mother (from whom he took his surname) was a black slave, his father was a ne’er do well French aristocrat, who eventually returned home, and brought his mulatto son with him to live a life of privilege and luxury. The second half of the eighteenth century was a time of unprecedented racial equality in France, even while it derived most of its income from colonial sugar plantations whose labour was provided by slaves under the most brutal treatment; until Napoleon introduced racist laws to secure the support (and wealth) of the influential planters’ lobby, France was unique in Europe in the liberty enjoyed by its citizens of colour, known as ‘Americans’, and Alex Dumas was the highest ranking black soldier in a predominantly white military until Colin Powell was promoted to four-star general two hundred years later.

The book that Tom Reiss has written about this fascinating character is the product of some determined research; Dumas is one history’s forgotten characters, who to this day lacks any kind of memorial in France. The documents that Reiss examined revealed a man who was as ferocious to his enemies in war as he was warm and generous to his friends in peace, an extravagant character given to addressing his superior officers with a candour bordering on insubordination. Given the paper thin pretexts on which quite influential people were guillotined during the Terror, Dumas did well to survive. The book paints a picture of the general that is not at all critical, but from the evidence it shares I get the impression he was a genuinely well-intentioned and highly principled man; Reiss writes with evident affection for his subject, and adopts a low-key journalistic style that abases itself to the requirements of the story. I’ve only just read it, but I can remember a lot more about the Count than I can about the book! The story is a gripping one, its hero is a very sympathetic, and tragic figure, and the times in which he lived are some of the most extraordinary in modern history (the pace of social change witnessed in France in the final years of the eighteenth century would not be equalled until the end of the twentieth). I couldn’t possibly comment on the quality of Reiss’ scholarship, but as a storyteller, he’s capable of some top whack malarkey.

Thoughtful weaving

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:13:45 +0100

Interesting movies come and go without me knowing the first thing about it. My commitment to word of mouth discovery works really well with music, but movies are generally a bigger deal to produce, so my refusal to pay much attention to mainstream publicity channels basically means that I have no clue what’s happening in the world of cinema. It’s fine though, because I don’t have enough time to listen to all the music and read all the books I want to. I had no idea that Babel existed, but randomly, I happened to watch it on DVD, and it’s really rather good. Some kids in Morocco are fooling around with a gun, and accidentally wound an American tourist; the film explores the impact of this event on the kids and their family, on the tourist and her husband, on the Japanese hunter who gave the gun to the man the kids’ father bought it from, and the hunter’s daughter, and on the American couple’s kids and Mexican nanny. All of these threads are interwoven in a chronically displaced manner, so that for example, when we first see the nanny, she has a phone conversation, the other end of which we witness at the very end of the film. Each of these interlocking stories is filmed in the appropriate language, and I don’t know how it worked in the cinema, but we had to specifically activate the English subtitles on the DVD; without them, Babel would have been the right word for the experience! It’s a pretty bleak film, and it paints a particularly harsh picture of rich Americans, not in a melodramatic way, but in emotional terms; self-obsession is the order of the day for Brad Pitt’s character. There’s some very fine acting, and some very precise editing, and even the spouse, who finds almost all films annoying, and the aforementioned actor extremely irritating, seemed to object more to the ill fortune of the characters than to the movie itself. Myself, I thought it was a very thoughtful and well made piece. Director Alejandro Gonzaléz Iñárritu has apparently made a trilogy of which this film is the final instalment, the Death Trilogy; I think I’ll be investigating.

My music on heavy rotation up to June 15

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:07:38 +0100

I’ve just had fourteen days of listening largely to this lot:

Nils Quak - ‘Aether’ Dusty and disquieting skeins of ambient texture. I don’t listen to a great deal of ambient music, but Nils Quak has a way with sound that speaks to the complexities of human experience, and the inscrutable passage of time. Beautifully made, and subliminally striking in effect.

Subhumans - ‘From The Cradle To The Grave’ One of my favourite records of all time, this album is everything a punk record should be: energetic, exciting, intelligent, political, angry, heartfelt, compassionate, atavistic, analytical and funny all at the same time. Carefully crafted musical materials, plus Dick Lucas’ incomparable lyrics and delivery. Utterly brilliant.

Triphasic - ‘Shaman’ Bassist Gary Willis is one of the musicians I most admire, and this is one of his most creative projects. Imaginative post-fusion, featuring almost unfeasibly skilled musicianship, complex and incisive writing, and a great deal of humour. This is the work of master-artists at the height of their powers.

VA - ‘The Wire Tapper 28’ The Wire has a funny idea of the avant-garde, if one is to judge by their compilation series; it ranges from minimal and ambient approaches, through any number of takes on musical abstraction, to really quite conventional songwriting. Notable by its predominant absence is any more complex tonal music, but within those limits, there’s some interesting stuff here.

BIG $OAP MON£Y CR£W - ‘WA$H YO FAC£!’ Potty-mouthed, satirical hip-hop from Tyneside. Lyrics are self-effacing or Napoleonically boastful, but always hilarious; it’s not ‘comedy rap’ though, but funky, witty, rapid-fire spitting that happens not to take itself too seriously. The beats are seriously funky too, and the whole album’s a fantastic listen.

I’ve also had some superior EPs on the go, from Ayenalem (hard-hitting French hip-hop), Beefy (bouncy nerdcore rap) and Flooding Opera (subversive avant-pop).

The self-publicising continuous cliffhanger

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:27:07 +0100

I’ve just finished a complete re-read of A Song Of Ice And Fire. I’m following the TV series as well, noting with some pleasure that it is far and away the best television fantasy series I’ve ever seen, and beats the hell out of a lot of fantasy movies as well, but the contrasts between the books and the shows do not favour the latter. George R. R. Martin’s close involvement in the TV adaptation has been to the good, and many of the changes make perfect sense in terms of the sort of narrative threads it’s possible to maintain in filmed drama as opposed to prose fiction; I have no objection to name changes, character replacements, plot adjustments or any of that. It is a bit of a shame though, that while the books are notable (with some exceptions) for their consistent adherence to the social, cultural and technical realities of the historical time and place on which their setting is based, the TV series’ writers seem to have granted themselves license to completely ignore such strictures. The casual manner in which Robb Stark breaks his betrothal in the TV show, as opposed to the weight which is attached to the act in the book, is a good example, as is Stannis’ decision to lead the attack on the walls of King’s Landing without wearing a helmet, but there are many, many more. It’s a shame that the expectation of the producers is that a TV audience will not notice or care about these things; the fact that relatively few viewers will have much understanding of the ins and outs of late medieval life and politics is by-the-by, because it is consistency that is the measure of a convincing fantasy, and the failure to respect the underlying social structure undermines the coherence of the work. The books on the other hand… well, there’s the occasional blip in those regards, but very rarely, and clearly accidentally. The prose has dull patches, but for the most part it is very well turned. Character and plot are always spot on, although without the attention to detail they wouldn’t carry me (I’m sure they’d carry many fantasy fans, having read enough Robert Jordan to have an inkling of how high the bar isn’t set) The real joy of this series of books is how well it spins out its various narrative threads; it’s like reading a single book on ten thousand pages, given the consistency of the prose and the measured, careful development of the plot, often producing reveals that were set up several books earlier. The accumulation of these narrative developments gives it an almost unfeasible momentum, and the latest book, A Dance With Dragons, is more or less pure continuous cliffhanger, from start to finish. It concludes with several major plot threads on the very brink of huge developments, and I’m completely sold on it after the second reading. I am utterly agog to know what happens, and I know that I’m probably going to have to wait at least another two years to find out! This is not only the work of a master craftsman, but a master publicist as well…

Don't rest in peace

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:01:08 +0100

I never met Iain Banks, but he died yesterday and I feel as though I’ve lost a friend. I’ve read virtually everything he’s written (although weirdly not The Wasp Factory), and he’s really the only author that I ‘follow’, in the sense of automatically reading whatever he publishes, pretty soon after it comes out. As soon as I started reading his stuff (with Consider Phlebas? I forget) I recognised him as a kindred spirit, a writer who saw things in a way that makes perfect sense to me, and who indulges in just the kind of wish fulfilment that I’d like to see in novels. I don’t really want to say a great deal about him today, because it’s too close, and I’m surprisingly cut up by his passing. I don’t have heroes; I am actively opposed to the ideology that says certain works of art have an objective quality of ‘greatness’ which derives from the genius of their creators, who also possess that quality. It’s the dominant ideology, but I believe it’s just one of the many ways that control is exerted by dominant elites, a way of instituting hierarchy in the world of culture, or of making art serve the interests of those near the top of the hierarchy. I don’t know if Iain would have agreed with me, as although he was a committed socialist I doubt he shared my anarchist proclivities (overtly at any rate; his work often shows a distinctly anarchist sensibility); but the point I’m trying to make is that he’s as close to a hero as I have. I admire his writing greatly, and I aspire to reflect that admiration in my own writing; if I could say some of the same sort of things that he said, in a similar (though different) sort of way, I’d be very happy. That’s not why I’m so gutted about his death, however; that has more to do with the very real sense of a friendly conversation that comes through all of his books. It’s as though every volume started with the words ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’, and (I guess this is a mark of excellence in a writer) everything that followed was something you thought up together. Don’t rest in peace, Iain; that would be a stupid thing to wish for an atheist humanist. You no longer exist, so resting and peace don’t enter into it. You are definitely going to be remembered.

How I utterly love a book with which I disagree completely…

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:01:19 +0100

I disagree with Gene Wolfe about an awful lot. He believes in the necessity of benign authority; my politics are anarchistic. He believes in patriarchy, as a natural and necessary form of social order; I believe in the equal entitlement and equal potential of all human beings, irrespective of any distinctions that may be made between them. I’m also an atheist, albeit one who sees the value of both ritual and spiritual contemplation; Wolfe is a devout Catholic, an ideologue and propagandist thereof, who makes his fiction a vehicle for his views. He, like the followers of many religions, believes that the material world is so much dross, of purely instrumental value, and that truth, beauty and apotheosis are to be found beyond its boundaries; while I in no way denigrate or discourage the pursuit of existential illumination by whatever means, be they relatively rationalist, like transcendental meditation, or fundamentally superstitious, like Wolfe’s Catholicism, I do not share the belief that we should wait for our rewards in the hereafter. That’s the creed of slaves, a tool for the control of populations by ruling parties; we will all eventually transcend material existence, by the simple expedient of dying, and the idea we should earn the right to subsequent happiness by ‘right behaviour’ in our lives, meaning obedience to externally imposed moral standards, I find utterly abhorrent. So why is Wolfe one of my best loved authors?

He is full of love for human beings, for one thing. He takes seriously the Christian injunction to love one’s fellows, and he also never presumes to pass moral judgement himself; as such, his work is populated with empathically and convincingly drawn criminals, prostitutes, war criminals, torturers and so forth, although also with more ordinary and law-abiding characters. That’s one thing on which we do agree: the inherent value and potential goodness of human beings. That for him these things are related to a deity, and for me they are not, is neither here nor there; because for Wolfe the only true authority is God, there is a deeply egalitarian element in his characterisations, and greatness can appear unexpectedly in the most unlikely locations. For me this observation is a token of the superfluity of authority; for him it’s a pillar of faith.

Being humane and empathic never made anyone a good writer, however; the real reason I love Wolfe’s work so much, is that he is incredibly skilled and astonishingly intelligent. The Book Of The Long Sun, of which Epiphany Of The Long Sun is the second part, is a single self-contained allegory of around 1400 pages, published as a series of novels for commercial rather than artistic reasons. It is a work of beguiling complexity, in which every technical aspect of the novel is carefully contrived to contribute to Wolfe’s central meaning; it is essentially an argument for faith, and for transcendence, but it is also a complex and thrilling science-fiction novel, which is never didactic in tone, and certainly never comes across as propaganda, although that is exactly what it is. This is probably true of the work of every writer with coherent views about the world, however, and is no ground for criticism in itself. The development of the characters, the specific forms and general tone of the plot, the language of the authorial voice and the dialogue, the science-fiction conceits, and the philosophical structure of the novel are all employed in very specific, carefully thought out ways. The characters in the story have a very partial understanding of events, and as we flit between their points of view we are able to gradually assemble some sense of the larger picture, but that picture is always changing, always contingent, which is an important part of Wolfe’s central argument; such contingency is important to my own worldview, but for very different reasons. For me it’s just the nature of the universe, and one of the things I love about it; for Wolfe it’s about contrasting human fallibility and material relativity with the absolute, which for him is the Christian God.

I should hasten to point out that while Wolfe writes a variety of deities into his narrative, he never talks about the Christian God directly, and I’m acutely conscious that I’m making this book(s) sound a lot less appealing than I want to. Epiphany Of The Long Sun is an exhilarating torrent of incident, adventure, ideas, human interactions, mystery and exciting revelations. It’s not necessarily an easy read; personally, I found it utterly absorbing, and fell instantly in love with its narrative voice and many of its characters, but it is deliberately confusing, and if that’s not your thing you may find it hard going. For me, it is both an extremely enjoyable book, satisfying on many levels, and an incredibly stimulating intellectual challenge. I’ve read quite a lot of fiction, and this is among the very best of it.

Unsatirically entertaining

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 16:06:45 +0100

I really did grow up with Judge Dredd, reading his stories in 2000AD religiously from around 1980 to 1990. I stopped for whatever reasons, but certainly not because I ‘grew out of it’; Judge Dredd is the kind of story that appeals to kids with its cool hardware and extreme violence, while pulling in the adults with its satirical elements, and pleasing all ages with its humour. As such, pretty much every fan of the comic was utterly disappointed by Sylvester Stallone’s 1995 movie, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete heap of shit. I missed the new Dredd at the cinema (as I miss virtually everything), but grabbed the DVD at the library yesterday. I won’t blether on for hours, as it’s hardly the most complex cultural artefact I’ve encountered this week, but I will say that I liked it. Main strength? It’s a very skilfully assembled and entertaining action movie, replete with cartoonishly exaggerated violence and spectacular visual effects. Main weakness? It contains very little of the humour, and almost none of the satire that makes the comic strip so engaging. It does however nail the atmosphere (although the setting is closer to the near future setting that was originally intended than the full-on SF setting that emerged in practice); Karl Urban performs Dredd exactly as he was written by John Wagner, without removing his helmet, experiencing doubt, or showing empathy. The only downside is that we are encouraged to sympathise with him as a good man in a world gone mad, rather than to see him as a fascist boot-boy, which was the only way anyone in 1980s Britain could interpret the character. Sequels would have been good, but I don’t think the film grossed enough at the box office; still, for all its faults, it was a lot of fun to watch.

My music on heavy rotation up to June 1

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 10:03:23 +0100

For the last couple of weeks the albums on repeat have been these:

You Save You - ‘Secondhand Suits And Cheap Sunglasses’ Thrashy acoustic guitar and vocals that sit somewhere between hoarse singing and declamatory spoken word. The delivery is passionate, and the lyrics are a humorous, dark, drunken, life-affirming celebration of life as seen from the bar of filthy old drinking pub. Some of the best, least pretentious poetry I’ve heard in a long time.

Charles Mingus - ‘Mingus Ah Um’ This is one of those records that never stales, but delivers the listener fresh each time into the middle of the recording session. These are some of the finest players in the history of jazz, but they largely eschew pyrotechnics in Mingus’ relentless pursuit of earthy, improvisational authenticity. Beautiful melodies, jaw dropping commitment, and an unbelievable album.

Zoe Keating - ‘One Cello x 16’ Beautiful live-looping cello performances. This release is described as an EP, but it’s half an hour long; the music is simple, atmospheric, and characterised by an unerring feel for melody and texture. Truly wonderful stuff.

VA - ‘We Love Trash - The Best of the GaragePunk Hideout, Vol. 7’ An instalment in the Garage Punk Hideout’s excellent series of compilations, this is savage, raw, demented rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, garage, rhythm and blues and what-have-you, universally intense and noisy. Diverse, and immensely entertaining.

Suus - ‘Jack Beatz Vol.2: Lights Down, Music Up’ An album length mixtape of entertainingly cocksure indie-rap from a young bloke who is clearly intent on making a mark. Witty, skilful and a lot of fun.

I’ve been enjoying some superb shorter releases from Aartwork (jazzy lo-fi instrumental folk) The Implicit Order and Elizabeth Veldon (experimental hauntological sound-art) Kylmyys (experimental dark electronica) and The Murder Barn (inventive and powerful roots-infused rock).

Ground, broken.

Mon, 27 May 2013 11:57:00 +0100

Will Eisner is a name I’ve been aware of for many years (decades in fact), but it’s only now that I’ve got around to reading any of his work. He’s a divinity of the English language comic book, having popularised the term ‘graphic novel’, having been the first author to publish such a thing, been the second winner of the premier French comic book award, published the first major English language books about comics, and given his name to the best known English language comic book awards. It’s hard for me to judge his importance, because my knowledge is limited; he comes from the commercial mainstream, while many of the loudest voices in serious comics have emerged from the underground comix tradition (Art Spiegelman for example), and I know very little about the development of the form in other languages. Francophone bandes dessinées are respected as the ‘ninth art’, but those that I’ve read have had pretty puerile writing, even the adult ones, which are full of sex and violence, but seem to lack much interest in literary modes of storytelling. So I would hesitate to say that Eisner was the first comics author to publish serious, long-form comics, attempting to tackle human experience with the same subtlety and complexity that is expected of ambitious prose fiction; but he’s the first that I’m aware of. Comics studies is a field that’s a bit short on textbooks, but it’s obvious I need to do some reading…

So did The Contract With God Trilogy live up to the expectations established by Eisner’s reputation? Yes. It lacks the technical audacity of a writer like Alan Moore, or an artist like Chris Ware, or the storytelling ambition of Art Spiegelman, all of whom are among the select group that set the bar for other comics authors to aspire to; but when Craig Thompson (for example) came along and jumped that bar, he did so in a manner that owes as much to Eisner as to anyone else. And without Eisner, whether those other authors would even have seen the possibility of creating such works is debatable; to visualise, and then realise a new form, to do so with work that seems mature and fully formed, that negotiates the demands of the form deftly, is a considerable achievement. A certain simplicity of approach is probably a prerequisite for the coherence and legibility of such groundbreaking work.

The several works collected as The Contract With God Trilogy show some evolutionary development, and some experimentation with different approaches to storytelling. The original A Contract With God, which was certainly the first graphic novel to be marketed as such, contains four short vignettes; although they work together, it seems that Eisner wasn’t quite ready to tackle the long-form, stand-alone narrative that is the standard fare of the prose novel, and of the modern graphic novel. The stories are effective, and formally interesting, with their lack of panel borders, small panel count per page, and extensive use of textual narrative, sometimes seeming more like illustrated stories than comic books; however, they sometimes seem clumsy in comparison to his later work.

Comic books developed fast after the publication of A Contract With God in 1978. By the time A Life Force was published ten years later, the three great early landmarks of the mature form had made their mark; Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Maus had been heralded as the harbingers of a new era, been fêted in the review sections of the broadsheet press, and inspired a publishing frenzy that would collapse in the 1990s with dire consequences for the health of the art form. This middle part of the trilogy is the closest to a novel in terms of its narrative conventions; there is still a certain histrionic flavour to the way in which the characters deal with the big questions of life, but maybe that’s just what New York jews are like. Eisner would know better than me! The final part of the trilogy, Dropsie Avenue, was published in 1995, by which time a reputation like Eisner’s was probably required to get a major publisher to release a serious graphic novel (a term which, by then, was routinely used to refer to omnibus compilations of monthly superhero comics). Dropsie Avenue tells the story of the neighbourhood in which the early parts of the trilogy take place, from a patchwork of fields tended by Dutch farmers, to the small houses with which the area is redeveloped after its last tenements are demolished and the drug dealers leave the area. As such, it is very dense, with years often passing panel-to-panel. Eisner concludes as property prices begin to sink and the area becomes run down once more: his view of social history is cyclical, and not hugely optimistic. He is a humane writer, and he is clearly a social progressive, but he is pretty cynical about politics, and doesn’t seem to see any alternative vehicle for development.

That’s not to say he dismisses the value of community; but community, to Eisner, is as much about the stultifying weight of social opprobrium as it is about mutualism and ‘neighbourliness’. In a neighbourhood that hosts a succession of immigrant communities, each despising the next as they were despised, peopled with the socially and economically alienated, a rigid adherence to tradition, convention and social hierarchy can be the only visible means of maintaining personal identity. Eisner is not afraid to portray the costs of this tendency.

The Contract With God Trilogy is full of love for its characters, full of compassion and humanity, but Dropsie Avenue is not a happy place. The characters begin alienated, and end, for the most part, disappointed. Eisner himself came from a background of urban poverty similar to that which he depicts, and used his art to gain material, and later critical success; but in 1970 his sixteen year old daughter died from leukaemia, which affected him catastrophically by all accounts, although he never spoke about it publicly. It did however give him the material for the story ‘A Contract With God’, and it seems to me to have coloured his perceptions as manifest in his stories. Tragedy is never far away.

The style of the art in The Contract With God Trilogy is cartoonish; this was a matter of some critical controversy when A Contract With God was first published, but for me this approach quite simply enables the artist to put narrative content more readily into his panels. As long as the reader is able to accurately interpret the language of the caricature, it works. AfterMaus it probably became more difficult to criticise a serious comic on those grounds, although it has to be said that Eisner uses the approach for more or less opposite reasons to Spiegelman. In The Contract With God Trilogy characters have the intended interpretation of their feelings and character written in their faces; in Maus all difference is elided, emphasising and highlighting the absurdity of perceived ethnic distinctions, and crucially, excising a layer of authorial commentary from the narrative. Spiegelman is at pains to avoid telling his reader what to think; Eisner is happy to spell everything out, although he is admirably non-judgemental, and allows us to draw our own moral conclusions. The omniscient narrator is a central element, however, and the book sometimes reads like an episode of The Naked City, with the narrator concluding and summarising the tale. It’s a compelling approach, and ideally suited to the subject matter; after this introduction, I’ll be seeking out and reading everything Will Eisner wrote.

Funny stone…

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:39:45 +0100

The best thing about working in a library is the people you meet, and indeed the friends you make. Of course it’s a small minority that you actually have enough in common with to think of them as friends, but one such, on discovering that I hadn’t read Keith Richards’ autobiography, immediately went home and got it so he could lend it to me. The usual arrangement is that we library staff lend books to the people that come in during the course of the day, but it’s always very pleasant to wear the shoe on the other foot from time to time.

Life is not a book I would have read, left to my own devices. I’m not usually exercised to read about someone’s life simply because I like their work, and I don’t believe that interesting art is usually made by extraordinary people; obviously most of the people I know are not tie-wearing wage slaves, and if they were I might be more interested, but I don’t see that the details of someone’s background is usually that illuminating in understanding or appreciating their work. The kind of biography that interests me is written because the life in question was an interesting one, not because the subject is well known for other reasons. However, I took my friend’s recommendation, advanced Life straight to the top of my enormous reading list, already having an inkling that Richards life was probably rich in anecdote at worst, and gave it a go.

It’s not the most extraordinary book I’ve ever read, but it was certainly very enjoyable. The ghost writer stays pretty much out of the way, and it’s clear that most of the text is a straight transcript of Richards talking to tape; he comes across as a likeable man, with a down-to-earth attitude, although he was probably a royal pain in the arse to work with at the height of his infamy in the 70s. This is not a man who seems to think his success makes him special, however, in stark contrast to his bandmate Sir Mick. Anecdotes do indeed abound, and there are many hair-raising scrapes, largely, but not all, related to the weird circumstances of the wealthy celebrity smackhead. Not many rock star biographies would be of much interest to me from this point of view, but Richards basically invented the clichés; he blazed the trail, and with Jagger was really the first musician to combine performance and songwriting with towering, monumental self-abuse and self-indulgence. The visual style and the lifestyle were defined by the Rolling Stones in their 1970s tours, and as such there is genuine cultural significance in what Richards has to say.

The most interesting things he has to say are about musicianship, songwriting and the creative process however. He’s an intelligent man and a deep thinker, who has made some effort to understand what he does; he worked hard even when he was a junkie, by the sounds of it, if in a very chaotic and unpredictable manner, and worried at his ideas like a dog with a bone in a way that I only started to be able to do when I started writing prose instead of playing music. There are no groundbreaking philosophical observations, and Richards’ understanding of art in general is a pretty conventional one, but there are some solid insights that will be of interest to open-minded composers in any field. I had a lot of fun reading this book, and it did make me laugh out loud on a few occasions (such as when he woke up under the desk after a protracted recording session, pockets full of drugs and paraphernalia, to discover a French police brass band in the room listening to playback from their own session!). The Rolling Stones are a cultural phenomenon of considerable influence, and they made some genuinely groundbreaking art in their time; Life is as good an insight into their story as you’re likely to read.

Where is everyone?

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:52:00 +0100

Sometimes gigs are crackling with energy with virtually no audience; it depends on the bands. Last night at the North Street Tavern in Sudbury there were times when I was the only audience member not playing in one of the bands, but it really didn’t matter. A few more people drifted in (and I ran into a whole bunch of people I wasn’t expecting to see, which was really nice, even if it did make me want to stay out and get severely hammered in several dimensions), but it was a pretty bizarre, if familiar, situation. Three bands, playing underground music, every bit as good as any of the best known acts in their field, virtually ignored in an ordinary drinking pub in a small provincial town. Quite a treat for me, since I could actually move around, and I could take a few photos without getting phlegm, beer and elbows in the lens, but honestly, people don’t know what they’re missing.

The Domestics were electrifying; I’ve reviewed a couple of their releases, and they are generally one of the bands I go out of my way to support, yet I had somehow managed not to see them playing live until last night. Playing in a small corner, with James Domestic standing to sing in a circulation space by the bar, basically among the select audience of fellow punk musicians, they gave it total commitment, humour, insanity and intensity. Selected observation: Paul Rhodes looks at his bass while playing as though it’s just said something really offensive, or done a revolting fart… Anyway, thoroughly top-whack band, political hardcore, and as good as they come.

Science Made Us Robots play fun bouncy punk, of the sort I used to call pop-punk, until pop-punk became indelibly tainted by an army of generic airheads stringing sugary vocal hooks together over a thick wank-burger of over-compressed shiny rock syrup. This was the real deal, and it was great to hear it. I’m a big fan of Agent Orange, founding fathers of pop/surf punk, and this band has the same combination of excitement, enthusiasm, buzz-saw intensity and melodic accessibility that makes all that sort of malarkey so good, although they have their own sound, which is probably more like some other bands, but I don’t go in for all that ‘X sounds like Y channeling Z while fucking Q over the back of L’s camel’ bullshit. Very entertaining.

Shithouse are total raving noise terrorists. Speed and volume are their weapons of mass destruction, along with a snare drum that gets in just behind your eyes and makes your frontal lobe bleed copiously. Obviously it’s not just noise; what they played was very clearly hardcore punk, but within the recognisable boundaries of the style they are apparently on a mission to find the most intense and brutal sound it’s possible to produce. At the same time they come across as pretty fun loving chappies, with a nice line in banter and japery. Their drummer gave Science Made Us Robots’ drummer a run for his money as purveyor of the evening’s most alarming facial expressions, but I feel the other bloke had the best of it in the end (see photo above). So yes, another completely superb band, strongly recommended. The whole night was an improbably high quality racket-fest, and if you have a chance to see any of these bands play, take it: we’re very lucky to have music of this standard available for free, and the nice people making it deserve your support.

My music on heavy rotation up to May 18

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:57:29 +0100

Over the past twenty-sixth of a year I’ve listening obsessively to the following records:

Slayer - ‘Reign In Blood’ On the one hand this is a manic frenzy of speed and volume, the perfect union of the punk and metal aesthetics; on the other hand it is crammed full of strange, angular riffs, abstract solos and otherworldly dissonances, courtesy of Jeff Hanneman who died a couple of weeks ago, and in whose memory I put this on heavy rotation. This is a perfect, epoch making album.

Five Hand Reel - ‘Five Hand Reel’ I grew up with this record, and then came back to it relatively recently. It’s my favourite folk rock recording, and it’s a total masterclass in arranging, with a really simple, low-key approach that has about a dozen brilliant ideas in each song. Also incredible musicianship, fantastic material and heart-stoppingly beautiful melodies.

VA - ‘A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters: An Instrumental/Post-rock Compilation (Issue One)’ First in a series of collaborative compilations that bring together some very creative and listenable instrumental/ math rock recordings for the very reasonable price of nothing at all. Really interesting and entertaining stuff, sometimes flirting with the sublime.

Vincent Berger Rond - ‘Elle Avait Raison Hathor’ Avant-garde post-classical music, albeit with a good number of rock elements in the orchestration, and a good deal of studio manipulation. A poetic exploration of several female goddesses through coherent but disturbing assemblies of arrhythmia, dissonance and ambiguity, plus the odd sample. Total insane brilliance.

The Phenomenal Handclap Band - ‘Form & Control’ Indie-rock meets Studio 54 era disco travels back in time to 1968, and hangs out in Haight-Ashbury. This is fabulous party music that takes a unique stylistic approach, and it’s just so full of joy and excitement that it’s very hard to resist. Sexy, happy and very accomplished.

I’ve also been ear-bathing in some top-whack short releases from Al Lindsay (beautiful acoustic songs without me playing on them for some unaccountable reason), Cex (disturbing yet groovy electronica), Dean Atta (sweet acoustic settings for heartfelt poems) and Solarno (Christmas carols translated into techno).

Flesh made word

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:18:26 +0100

I’ve just finished reading King Rat by China Miéville; as with all of Miéville’s novels I began reading at a measured pace, and ended up devouring it in huge gluttonous mouthfuls that took the place of doing any work of my own… I began reading Miéville’s work with the ‘Bas Lag’ trilogy, as part of my general effort to familiarise myself with what’s been going on in fantasy fiction, and after reading those books it was clear that I needed to read everything he’s published; this was his first novel, which is why I decided to start here.

King Rat postulates a hidden city, co-existing with London, parallel to London, connected to the London we know, but separate from it. It’s not one that is populated with a diverse range of colourful characters, like the fuck-wittedly twee hidden city in the Harry Potter books, but one in which a select group of powerful but lonely supernatural beings lord it over empires of spiders, rats and pigeons. I say that the book postulates such a place, and that’s the important point: it doesn’t just describe it, simply magicking it into existence by authorial fiat, but it imagines it with ruthlessly consistent logic, in thoughtful detail. It imagines it in the same way that any writer imagines the scenario in which their fiction plays out, and like all the good stuff, it imagines it with equal measures of fancy and truth. The fact that it concerns the fantastical and the impossible makes it no more fanciful or less truthful; its possession of both these qualities is a function of the skill with which it is written.

That King Rat is Miéville’s first novel is apparent, at least in comparison to his later work, for which ‘polished’ is probably the wrong word, but which is certainly more worked, more burnished, more worn-in and patinated. Darkness is a theme throughout the four novels I have now read of his, one of the materials from which his subjects and his prose are made, and there is darkness a-plenty in King Rat, but it is a brasher sort of darkness, full of noisy contrasts. The plot is pretty linear, and its more dramatic transformations are driven by deus ex machina, with a conclusion that provides the closure we’re looking for, in contrast to the bleaker conclusions with which the ‘Bas Lag’ novels are terminated; what the conclusion does provide is a nice moment of Iain Banks style wish fulfilment, however, which never really goes amiss.

Music is a big part of this story, and Miéville does an extremely good job of writing descriptions of it. There are times when he gets his terminology wrong, when he’s writing about electronic music production, but probably not in a way that would impinge on anyone who hasn’t made any electronic music themselves; his descriptions of sound, of timbre, of texture, and of the affective narrative of music are spot on, however. As someone who has devoted an inordinate amount of effort to the problems and challenges of writing about music, I have to say he acquits himself extremely well; a lot better than most writers of fiction, who tend to ascribe qualities more conducive to their plots than credible to the well-informed reader, and who tend to overlook the importance to musical experience of its status as social praxis. King Rat takes place (partly) in the world of drum and bass and jungle, and this is clearly a world that Miéville understands.

The real strengths of this novel are twofold: characterisation which doesn’t blink when confronted with the challenges of the scenario; and the language. Mieville has some real fun with dialect in this book, specifically with Jamaican patois and with a historically promiscuous cockney slang whose compass reaches back to eighteenth century cant; but there is a baroque complexity to the language of which these culturally specific patternings are only a part. Shady nooks of vocabulary are mined for the precisely apposite word, without regard to its common usage or otherwise; sometimes the reader is left struggling to keep up, but mostly context provides the necessary cues and clues. All of this bespoke linguistic specificity layers the tale with meaning and significance; King Rat has things to tell us, and it is up to us to listen if we want to hear them. This is what lifts it out of the territory of the commonplace commercial thriller; it is not a horror novel, or a fantasy novel. King Rat is a novel that makes use of the tropes to be found in both those genres, but it is not in any sense a generic piece of writing. It is entertaining, and it’s thought provoking, but it is most of all atmospheric; it is an experience, an articulation of mood, a colour in speech, the flesh made word.

Drawing, writing, and other cosmic life and death matters

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:32:17 +0100

This is a really extraordinary book, this Habibi malarkey; I don’t really know where to start talking about it. Craig Thompson’s previous big fat famous comic book, Blankets, was a beautiful and accomplished piece of work, and as it’s pretty autobiographical in nature, it’s the source of most of my information about the author/artist; it gives a hint, through its account of his (by British standards extremely) religious upbringing, of where the interests he develops in Habibi may have originated, but the later work surpasses it on most levels. It is a complex network of ideas and meta-narratives, decorative fields and calligraphic embellishments, symbolic imagery and metaphysics… and it’s a straightforward tale of life and love in conditions of great material poverty.

Where Christianity provided the moral and cultural backdrop to Blankets, the narrative of Habibi takes place within the Moslem world. Thompson has clearly done a great deal of research, as not only is his narrative informed by a sophisticated command of many threads of Islamic mythology, but the symbolic value and material form of Arabic script is a central thread; he begins by describing a ‘river of ink’, and the act of writing is one of the most value laden acts throughout the story. Islam forbids the making of pictorial images (and this irony does not go unremarked in the book), so its visual arts are based on abstract patterns, and on the symbolic representations of calligraphy; the tension between this restriction and the form of the comic, and between the competing representative modes of semblance and substitution, metonym and metaphor, are the central formal engines of the book.

Thompson invents a country to set his story in; it’s hard to say exactly where it is, either in North Africa or on the Arabian Peninsula, and it’s also hard to say exactly when it is. The lives of its inhabitants in the first part of the book seem pretty medieval, but they have motorbikes; I began with a working theory that it was set in the the 1930s, but what I’d seen at that point wouldn’t have excluded any of the succeeding three decades. However, a large part of the narrative takes place within the harem of the Sultan of Thompson’s country, and there’s more or less nothing of modernity in those sections of the book; there are also extensive sections in which one character recounts various Quranic (or Biblical) legends, and these are very close in tone the scenes in the harem. Later in the book we get to see the downtown of the Sultan’s city, however, and it’s extremely modern and secular, with the women dressed in western attire, their heads uncovered; there are still slaves openly on sale in the streets, though, which is not something that would be found in the modern Islamic world, certainly not in a gleaming twenty-first century metropolis.

The story is pretty harrowing; the suffering of the central characters is intense, as is the cruelty of many of the people they come into contact with, but there is a clear belief in the human potential for love and solidarity. Resilience is one of the major themes of the work. Really though, it’s all about stories: it’s about the power of narrative to heal, to inform, to comfort, to contextualise, to form identity, to explain experience, to connect the individual to culture and history to myth.

Habibi is a work of astonishing intricacy; its narrative is a monkey puzzle in itself, but it would do the book an injustice to separate the narrative from the visual. There are many pages of patterns and calligraphy, which some readers may mistake for relatively unimportant decorative end-papers between chapters, but this detailed visual world is central to the meanings of the comic. The book is a visual feast, a thing of enormous beauty, full of audacious, page-bursting layouts, but there are also pages where a simple grid of equal sized panels is populated exclusively with words; Thompson has really pushed the boundaries of the medium with this book, and without ever appearing to be clever, or self-consciously post-modern, he has explored the relationship between the different elements of the form in a way that I haven’t seen before. The meaning of a comic is never in one half or the other, words or pictures, but is always a synergy, just as the meaning of a song is always an experience that is not present in the lyrics or the ‘harmolodic’ content separately, and is always greater and more complex than a simple addition of one plus the other. However, the distinction between one and the other is not a given, and Thompson’s achievement here is to have made it less a given than it has ever previously appeared to be. Writing is drawing, drawing is writing, and Habibi is one of the most extraordinary achievements of sequential art.

Spread the word

Sun, 05 May 2013 15:19:38 +0100

I came across An Anarchist FAQ online, I forget exactly how. It’s what it says it is, a general guide to anarchism, organised according to the commonly asked questions on the subject, e.g. ‘isn’t that a load of old tosh?’ and ‘anarchists, aren’t they the ones that wear black and throw bombs?’. Well, those aren’t actual examples, since the project has been developed in a less flippant and facetious manner than it would have been if I were involved in it. I read Section A online, in breaks at work, and whenever I had none of my scheduled reading material to hand, but had internet access. I found it very informative, and resolved to read the whole FAQ, to which end I downloaded it as a PDF and put it on my phone; as I prepared to embark on it, I realised that there was actually a hell of a lot of it, and that it would be more comfortable to read on paper, so I ordered the AK press edition, in two volumes. When they arrived, I realised that I had massively underestimated the size of the project; each volume is around 500 pages, but they are large format with small print. I’m guessing that if they were printed and bound in the format of a novel or biography, we’d be in the vicinity of 4000 pages! So I decided to read it section by lettered section (from A to J), rather than in one sitting, starting with a re-read of section A.

Section A is entitled ‘What Is Anarchism?’ and it begins with a basic discussion of the meanings of the words anarchy and anarchism, the relationship of the philosophy to socialism, and its origins as an identifiable system of thought. It then broadly addresses the implications of anarchy for any proposed future anarchist society, and rebuts the most commonly raised objections; this subsection is pretty much a miniaturised version of the whole FAQ. After this there is a discussion of the various branches of anarchism, the historically significant anarchist thinkers, and the most famous examples of anarchist principles being put into practice.

An Anarchist FAQ is a collective effort, as befits its subject, but its cover bears the name of Iain McKay, as he has done the lion’s share of the work. It really is a gargantuan project, a comprehensive reference work, every section closely argued and backed up with extensive quotations, not in order to validate its claims by appeal to authorities (that wouldn’t be very anarchist, would it?) but to demonstrate the major currents of anarchist thought, and because it’s hard to put things better than many anarchist writers have already put them.

It’s commendable how completely the book (or section A at any rate) is informed by anarchist principles; it presents arguments, and allows them to stand on their merits, leaving the reader to reach their own conclusions independently. Yes, it is a passionate and committed piece of advocacy, not a detached external examination of the subject, but it lays every one of its assumptions on the table, and is ruthless in its examination of the unspoken ideologies that inform most other political creeds. It’s daft really to suggest that any such work should be truly objective; every writer is informed by their own sense of how the world (and their subject) works, and that sense is inherently political, just as it is philosophical and whatever-else-ical. When discussing worldviews, we can’t really pretend to stand outside our subject; this is a decidedly anarchist book, but that doesn’t make it any less a suitable introduction to the subject, even if you are a staunch conservative. Nowhere does it ask you to accept its arguments unthinkingly, or to buy into any assertions for which it does not provide sources or evidence.

Iain McKay is not an academic, or even a full-time writer, but an anarchist, for whom this FAQ is the main form of his activism. As such, he has had to work on it in the time that earning a living and leading a family life permits him. Consequently, it is not a perfectly polished document: there are many minor grammatical errors and so forth, the consequences of editorial changes and the gradual evolution of the work. He welcomes contributions, as this is a living online document (the paper version representing a snapshot), but he’s more interested in receiving informed pieces of writing on particular aspects of the subject that proof-reading. It’s always quite clear what is meant, and although there may be some errors of attribution and so forth it seems that McKay is always happy to put them right when they are brought to his attention. The important thing is that the reasoning on which the FAQ is built is always sound, humane, rigorous and falsifiable.

I expect later sections will become more technical and argumentative in nature, but Section A is mainly just inspiring. There is a hidden history of fighters for freedom that runs through the last two hundred years as an undercurrent, ignored and concealed by mainstream political thought, but emerging periodically to question and ridicule it. It’s a history with its heroes and its martyrs, but they are not saints or ‘great men’; they are simply ordinary people who refused to cease doing right in times when power insisted on their acquiescence. It’s a story of great tragedy, but also a hopeful one; anarchism has historically arisen from the actions of ordinary, predominantly uneducated people, and the famous anarchist writers have to a large extent been documenting practice, rather than prescribing it. The really beautiful, awe-inspiring lesson that is here to be learned is that when ordinary people become aware of the possibility of liberty, they rise to the challenge magnificently, casting aside their prejudices with their chains. It’s just a question of getting the word out.

My music on heavy rotation up to May 4

Sun, 05 May 2013 09:15:00 +0100

For the last 336 hours, I have been listening repeatedly to the following sounds:

Ayria - ‘Flicker’ Uncomplicated futurepop, a combination of bouncy EBM/electro-industrial dance beats and Jennifer Parkin’s vocals, which set out to be a bit dark and badass, but just come out cute. It’s a paler shade of cyber-goth music, very energetic, and accompanied by a full album of stomping remixes.

Meshuggah - ‘Contradictions Collapse’ More conventionally thrash-metal flavoured than Meshuggah’s later recordings, this is nevertheless pretty creative, with a lot of rhythmic trickery and incongruous jazz-fusion elements. Continually surprising and inventive, it’s a very rewarding listen from a band that seriously knows how to bring the heavy.

Chestburster - ‘They Mostly Come Out At Night… Mostly’ Grindcore, horrocore, goregrind… Chestburster play raw punk with incomprehensibly aggressive vocal violence, at tempos ranging from Sabbath to warp speed. Every song is ultra-short, and the (also short) album is programmed with a selection of apposite movie samples. Brutally, beautifully unhinged.

Tribal Tech - ‘X’ Their first album after a more than ten year hiatus, X is an incredible fusion odyssey, the perfect combination of chops, melodicism, improvisation, harmonic wizardry and sonic experiment. Every player is unfeasibly good, and while the album is hardly breaking new ground for these fellas, it’s impeccably written and arranged. Jaw dropping shit, yo.

Gary Willis - ‘Retro’ Tribal Tech’s bass player has tended to go to even more experimental places with his own music, but his latest solo release goes the other way. It’s fusion for being electric, but it’s basically a straight jazz album; a bass led electric-piano trio, demonstrating exactly how this stuff should be done. Stunning chops employed with total musicality, for beautiful results.

Also in the main vein have been some splendid short releases from Elizabeth Veldon (radical noise) Frappe Dreamgate (discorporate cubist pop) GHOSTS (post-trip-hop noir) Matt Stevens (his Christmas single, that’s how long it takes me to get around to listening to new music) and Quadrilles (brilliant indie-prog).

Chips and beer and vitreous enamels

Sat, 04 May 2013 20:24:00 +0100

Dave Charleston continues his campaign to make the village of Stoke-by-Nayland into the cultural hub of rural South Suffolk, with an exhibition of prints and enamels by the excellent Dale Devereux Barker, at the tiny but exciting Open Road Bookshop. The work has been up for a week, but the opening was last night. Although I was quickly inebriated enough to loudly ridicule it and its author in the hearing of his potential customers, I remembered to have a look first…

Barker’s work combines an enthusiasm for form and colour in the abstract, a rigorous approach to the creative and technical problems of articulating that interest, and a totally accessible, eye-pleasing sensibility, devoid of pretension or self-importance. Varying degrees of figuration can be found within the work, from total abstraction to fully representational, the latter extreme often laced with humour. Humour, or playfulness, is a noticeable presence in much of Barker’s work, and even when there is no obvious denotational content, there is always an evident delight in the process of composition.

Barker’s visual language is notable for how well it scales: many of his pieces are no more than three or four inches across, but he produces work at all sizes, including some major public art commissions; it’s always very clearly his work, and there is no obvious stylistic distinction between his approach to the large and the small, although he obviously attends carefully to the varying demands of different formats. He is extremely consistent, aesthetically and in terms of execution, the smallest work receiving the same care as the largest, and this makes him a good artist to collect. He charges commensurately with his skill and experience, but the smallest stuff is well within the financial reach of the humblest collector (vitreous enamel coasters like the ones above are £15), and is so visually striking that it will happily occupy as much wall space as you want to give it (within reason).

The show at The Open Road is necessarily focused on small work (it’s a very small bookshop, and the walls are mostly covered with books) but there are also (appropriately ) some artist’s books on display, something that Barker does as well as he does everything else. The Open Road is obviously worth a visit at any time, but while this show is on it’s virtually compulsory. The evening continued with a trip next door to The Crown for some of their very classy fish and chips, and I can’t remember much after that.

Unfeasibly cheap at the price

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:28:41 +0100

Saturday night, out at a gig. This is hardly a commonplace occurrence lately, and I had more reason than usual to stay in, as a very dear friend was visiting for the weekend and it would have been nice to spend a bit more time with her at home. However, not only were three most excellent bands of the local noisy bastard fraternity performing, the mightyThumpermonkey were making a rare visit to our Eastern environs, and I really couldn’t miss it (the last time I went to see Thumpermonkey was in London, and although the gig was £5 on the door, I ended up paying out about £50 for the evening’s excursion).

When I write about things here, it’s not like a proper review and shit. I just record my thoughts and impressions of all the cultural experiences I have, mainly books and movies, but clearly also all the music I devour; so I’m not going on too many critical flights of fancy, just saying a few things about why i liked it so much.

First to take the stage were Hobopope And The Goldfish Cathedral, performing as The Ted Mint Explosion. I’d been really looking forward to this, as I’ve heard tons of Hobopope recordings and seen the material gigged several times by Paul David Rhodes on his own or with Ted Mint, to the accompaniment of a backing track; now that Hobopope is a functioning five-piece gig machine I was hoping for a taste of the full band experience, but sadly there were members who couldn’t make it. However, Mint and Rhodes still gave good mental, and the whole deeply peculiar, savagely noisy dada-core shebang was still helluva entertaining.

Telepathy get tighter every time I see them. Heavy and precise math-sludge, performed with a pleasing absence of vocals and a huge amount of onstage vigour, this is music to wig out to or music to listen to in geeky fashion, as the mood takes you. It’s equally superb in either application.

Thumpermonkey were on form, with their well-drilled avant-prog sophistication and their extravagantly goofy antics (most notably at stage left) and their decidedly peculiar lyrical themes. I was as happy as aThumpermonkey fan at a Thumpermonkey gig so I bought aThumpermonkey tee-shirt, and even a Thumpermonkey CD of which I already possessed a promo copy, because I’m sad like that. This is a really really really good band.

Earthmass were also on good form, despite certain members voicing some trepidation about following the rather more technically elaborate acts on the bill. They really shouldn’t have worried because visceral noise-mongery like this is something else altogether, and it stands on its own merits. Their epic post-doom is stiffened by a hardcore backbone that comes to the fore in the noisier moments, and that power combined with an overwhelming melodic hugeness is enough to make my brain fall out every time I hear them. Earthmass are seriously deserving of positive adjectives.

All in all a splendid night out then, both for the music and the social interactions, of which there were several, all positive. I really should get out more.

My music on heavy rotation up to April 20

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:59:14 +0100

The last two weeks have been Krautrock fortnight.

Can - ‘Tago Mago’ One of the most experimental and avant-garde recordings among the definitive texts of Krautrock. This record is the first of Can’s albums to feature Damo Suzuki on vocals, and has been hugely influential, as one of the first examples of work within the rock/pop compass to transcend the American influence, and the creative limitations of commercial music. Utter brilliance.

Amon Düül II - ‘Phallus Dei’ This album exposes the more recognisable psychedelic-rock aspect of what was labeled as Krautrock in Britain; it’s absurdist, experimental, sometimes pretty abstract, but it also usually plays to the popular psychedelic aesthetics of its time. A fantastic, swirling entertainment, like a disturbing carnival for the ears and brain.

Neu! - ‘Neu!’ Formed by ex-members of Kraftwerk, a band which would ultimately become famous for imitating the sound pioneered on this record. As such, much of the electronic dance music from the late 80s on is influenced by this record and its ‘motorik’ grooves, but it doesn’t sound remotely dated. A shining example of ruthless creativity executed with brilliant clarity and simplicity.

Ash Ra Tempel - ‘Ash Ra Tempel’ One of the great monuments of space-rock, this two track album has extended passages of purely ambient guitar-generated soundscape, and long psych-rock jams exploring the potential of the electric guitar solo to transcend its own melodic utterances and articulate a pulsing, filigreed texture of baroque detail and complexity. Genuinely mindblowing.

Faust - ‘Faust’ Stunningly inventive, this album explores the potential of electronics and tape editing in a way that sounds entirely contemporary, and is imbued throughout with a combination of intelligence, creative seriousness, and humour. You’d never imagine you could make something like this out of the materials of rock, yet here it is. Immensely accomplished and rewarding.

I’ve also been enjoying some truly excellent short releases from Bast (dramatic and inventive doom-sludge) Iron Witch (intensely mental doom-sludge) The Murder Barn (dark and thunderous folk-rock) and Spiritwo (transglobal theatrical art-pop).

An unlicensed, underground enterprise that renounces established rules

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:44:06 +0100

Between each book I read, I read a magazine. I read several, some short some long, some technical and some packed full of entertainment. I don’t normally bother to make a note of what I read; I write something about every book I read, every record I listen to, every film I watch, every exhibition I go to, but my magazine consumption goes largely unremarked. I thought I’d like to write something about Paraphilia, though.

I’ve just finished reading the latest issue, which is the first to be released in a website format rather than as an ezine, which happens to contain the first piece I’ve written for the magazine (hopefully the first of many). There are a few interesting interviews (of which my piece is the shortest and least well-informed), and fistful of interesting reviews, a few videos, and a whole lot of pretty far-out creative writing.

I’m not going for a full-on review here, just making a few general remarks.Paraphilia’s basic schtick is one of which I wholeheartedly approve; it is ‘an unlicensed, underground enterprise that renounces established rules, regulations, guidelines, genres, categories, and all other humanmade shackles’. As such, it’s a haven for transgressive, outsider art. Some of the writing left me unsatisfied; certain pieces seemed to be inspired by the work of writers like William S. Burroughs, but forty, fifty, sixty years down the line, I have to say the once transgressive techniques and subjects of that era lack any shock value for me. I won’t go into specifics, because Paraphilia is meant to be a safe a supportive place for risk-taking, and I’ve never been the sort of critic that enjoys bad-mouthing anyone’s work.

In fact I think it’s a good sign that I don’t like everything here; there’a a really diverse and decidedly intense group of writings in this issue, and for everything that missed, there was another piece that was astonishingly on-target. Some of this stuff is mind-blowing, both in the sheer outlandish invention on display and in the humane and empathic characterisation of its protagonists. There’s a lot of sex, much of it pretty disturbing: some of the writing is out and out erotica, other pieces are on the borderline, and almost all of it is convincing. Street life, junkies and rent-boys, all that kind of malarkey tends to figure quite prominently, but it’s really so varied that I couldn’t even begin to sum it up. I love this magazine, I love the fact that it is so open-minded, I love much of the writing, and I’m really excited to be writing for it.