tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83362008055380966442024-03-13T07:52:13.302-07:00Calum A. MitchellCalum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-1304395216972786992020-10-15T11:10:00.001-07:002020-10-15T11:10:45.538-07:00Everything I Read in 2019<p><b> Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel</b></p><p>A psychic medium travels between drab commuter towns, making money from the grieving. She really is psychic, but she doesn't tell her clients the truth about the grubby, purgatorial afterlife she's in contact with. This is a knotty, upsetting novel - heavy with the textures of suburban emptiness, full of chain pubs, faded community centres and failing relationships. And it's also nightmarish in quite a literal way - its horror feels like the specific horror of a bad dream. Its ghosts have an invasive, grotesque physicality - a blunt but effective literalisation of the protagonist's childhood traumas. About 200 pages longer than I was comfortable with, but its grinding, queasy repetition was a feature not a bug.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XHPLbjQzvXA/X4iORp6EhkI/AAAAAAAAApA/8Aqo389fBkshhoUW469hMi3EaGIiz55sgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="324" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XHPLbjQzvXA/X4iORp6EhkI/AAAAAAAAApA/8Aqo389fBkshhoUW469hMi3EaGIiz55sgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="156" /></a></div><br /><b>Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights - Jay Rayner</b><p></p><p>A collection of reviews of expensive, terrible restaurants from Rayner's guardian columns. The prose is a lot of fun, and this is an excellent portrait of misguided excess. But these would definitely work better in newspapers than as a book: reading them in bulk, you can see the repeated joke structures that would be disguised by weekly gaps. And I found that eventually, the descriptions of Very Complicated Food all blurred into one. Still, this is short, funny, and does everything it sets out to do.</p><p><b>Lost Empires - J.B. Priestley</b></p><p>A young artist takes a job as a stage magician's assistant in the dying days of variety theatre. It's a vivid, meandering portrait of a vanished world - interested in the practicalities and psychology of travelling town to town, purveying lowbrow entertainment, full of picaresque, bawdy incident, and almost totally uninterested in plot. It's worth noting that its treatment of its female characters ranges from the questionable to the deeply unpleasant. And if you're interested in Priestley, the absolutely perfect haunted house novel "Benighted" is the place to start. But as a book about a specific place at a specific time, this is strong stuff.</p><p><b>Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer</b></p><p>Well this is superb - rich, playful, and contantly surprising. On the surface, this is a murder mystery set in a baroque, unsettling utopian future. But it's also a pastiche of 18th century literature and a fantasy novel interested in engaging with the questions of 18th century philosophy: this is unashamedly science fiction for people with humanities degrees. Occasionally it feels somewhat unbalanced by the sheer profusion of its ideas, its inventiveness knocking the structure slightly off balance. But this is a good problem to have - it was never meant to be clean or straightforward. And it is full of delights, whether those delights come from bravura plot-twists, a charmingly enigmatic narrator, or simply the sparkling weirdness of its world.</p><p><b>The Famished Road - Ben Okri</b></p><p>Brick-thick Booker-winning magic realism about a spirit child growing up in a human body in a small African town. I assumed - from its reputation and its opening chapters - that this would be an epic novel, covering decades and spanning countries. It's quite the opposite - a precisely detailed story of a childhood, with a supernatural phantasmagoria just peeking in at the edges. Tonally, this juxtaposition of carefully-observed childhood psychology with an ever-present spirit-world felt very Studio Ghibli to me - there's a big My Neighbour Totoro energy in this. But the book also contains a cynical eloquence about the interaction between national politics and local unrest, as well as, surprisingly, some of the best fight scenes I've ever read. The protagonist's father is training to be a boxer, and the brutal physicality of his matches are reason enough to read the book.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-eOpU2HS4dRI/X4iOe0llEWI/AAAAAAAAApE/76IZsXcPczs9aXnUgHb5AktSjF1uP7PhACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1332" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-eOpU2HS4dRI/X4iOe0llEWI/AAAAAAAAApE/76IZsXcPczs9aXnUgHb5AktSjF1uP7PhACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="156" /></a></div><br /><b>Metamorphica - Zachary Mason</b><p></p><p>I read this while suffering from a bad cold, and the physical discomfort probably caused me to underrate it. Mason's thing is taking Greek Mythology (in this case, stories from Ovid's Metamorphosis) and playing with it, turning it inside out and rewriting it from new angles. It's all very Calvino/Borges, and there's nothing wrong with that. I preferred his "Lost Books of the Odyssey" (where he did the same trick with Homer), but maybe that's just because the idea felt fresher the first time around. I'd also recommend the notes at the back, which reveal that stories that felt like effervescent games are actually deeply researched investigations into the original texts.</p><p><b>Melmoth - Sarah Perry</b></p><p>A novel that sets itself up as a gothic pastiche, a sprawling horror story about a guilt-monster who appears throughout history. But this is actually quite a small, bleak, quiet novel. There is the sweep of history, and the odd moment of spookiness or hallucinatory weirdness, but they all feel pushed to the side. This is really a book about people forced into isolation by their pain - all its most intense moments are strictly realist. It's a slippery book, hard to remember, struggling to balance the story of the private lives of suffering introverts with its more fantastical elements.</p><p><b>What is not yours is not yours - Helen Oyeyemi</b></p><p>Fantasy short stories, beautifully and intensely written, with weird fractal structures. Often, you'll be reading about a bizarre happening, before realising you were only witnessing the life of a side character to the main event, or you were in a frame story and are about to be spiralled off into something much stranger. It's richly disorientating - not helped by the way characters and locations spill from one story to another: there are no discrete units here, narrative spills out of narrative. The stories themselves are dreamlike - all puppet schools, hidden libraries, doors that will not close unless they are locked. They are also, usually, queer love stories of one kind or another. It's a book that lets you rest in the inexplicable.</p><p><b>The Long Take - Robin Robertson</b></p><p>A book-length film-noir poem, following a World War Two veteran through a monochrome America. It's interested in cinema, and poverty, and is at its best when simply describing cities in grand flights of excitable language. As a description of a place and time, it's vivid. As a whole, though, it didn't click with me - as either a work about a character, or a story, or an exploration of ideas, or simply as an place to hang around with Good Words. I couldn't find a way in.</p><p><b>Electric State - Simon Stalenhag</b></p><p>There's a story here, about a road-trip across a post-apocalyptic America. And it's a nicely managed story, with clear hooky stakes, well placed twists, and some pleasingly effective nastiness. But that's not the point - Stalenhag is a painter, and the story is a frame for his visual art. Its most effective moments come at the end, when the prose cuts out completely, and the pictures take over. It often feels like the story is an excuse to show pictures of something extraordinary, but that's not always a problem. The world of the novel is an alternative universe where the aesthetics of 1990s technology are dominant - all chunky white plastic, brightly coloured shapes and heavy wires. It looks amazing, desolate, and like nothing else.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5UWC6I596pk/X4iOm6_GqnI/AAAAAAAAApM/VmcOlzBQ4xQ8Pl6LJhXtwB-PHwabCdEMwCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1555" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5UWC6I596pk/X4iOm6_GqnI/AAAAAAAAApM/VmcOlzBQ4xQ8Pl6LJhXtwB-PHwabCdEMwCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="267" /></a></div><br /><b>Veniss Underground - Jeff Vandermeer</b><p></p><p>Early Vandermeer - not as ambitious (formally or politically) as his Southern Reach trilogy, but bursting with all sorts of weird fun. A night journey into a cyberpunk hell, a retelling of the Orpheus myth, but with all sorts of genetically engineered monstrosities - this is a book that uses a science fiction lexis to build a big mythy fantasy, more interested in imagery than internal consistency. The urban, decadent body-horror aesthetic makes it an absolutely typical example of the "New Weird" movement (Mieville's "Perdido Street Station" was only three years before, this is absolutely working from the same playbook). One odd complaint - the current edition of the book from Pan Macmillan contains an unfinished short story set in the same world at the end. However, it doesn't clearly mark where the novel ends and the story begins - so I didn't realise that the book was over until an author's note arrived commenting on the story.</p><p><b>Space Chantey - R.A. Lafferty</b></p><p>Homer's Odyssey - in space! With jokes! Lafferty's thing was merging Science Fiction with the forms of Irish traditional tall tales. This is a big, silly, rollicking thing, with a self-consciously arch prose style - all its brawling space adventurers are kept at an ironic distance. It's completely shallow, and Stanislaw Lem (especially in the Cyberiad) is better at this sort of thing. But Space Chantey everything you'd hope for from a book with its title.</p><p><b>Fourth Mansions - R.A. Lafferty</b></p><p>Now this is a weird one. Like Space Chantey it's an SF/fantasy/tall tale hybrid, with a self-consciously arch and witty prose style. Unlike Space Chantey it's... a conspiratorial psychedelic Catholic allegory? Maybe? The plot is extremely hard to describe, but at its root is about a journalist investigating a number of secret societies, who may be fundamental constants in the unverse. A whole bunch of identity warping and body hopping ensues. The whole thing feels enormously 1960s, and is a fascinating curiosity, but is not necessarily a great novel in its own right.</p><p><b>Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates</b></p><p>I've read, and loved, a bunch of Oates. Mostly short stories, but also her magnificent horror/historical novel The Accursed. I thought I had better try some of her realism, but if I was attempting to avoid Gothic Melodrama, a fictionalised biography of Marilyn Monroe was probably the wrong place to look. It's a huge, sprawling, epic thing - Dickensian in its enormous scope, its heightened reality, its propulsive narrative drive. Oates' conceit is that Monroe's life was a mirror for all of 20th Century America: poverty, glamour, low culture and high literature, confused religiosity, sexual hypocrisy, and the highest political offices. It swings gracefully between brutal realism and highly stylised surreality. It's also exhausting and inconsistent. There's evidence that the real Monroe was more knowing and sophisticated that the savant-like innocent of Oates novel, but you don't read this book as a biography of Monroe - it's much more ambitious than that.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--rZUSsa0rVE/X4iOy5dp8TI/AAAAAAAAApQ/Tvub8RRen-Eb9CDlQza6SiiRPUvAWKjYQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="309" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--rZUSsa0rVE/X4iOy5dp8TI/AAAAAAAAApQ/Tvub8RRen-Eb9CDlQza6SiiRPUvAWKjYQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="156" /></a></div><p></p><p><b>Shakespeare's Restless World - Neil MacGregor</b></p><p>From the author of "A History of the World in 100 Ojects", this has a similar conceit. Based on a radio series, each of the short chapters looks at a single object, historically and geographically adjacent to Shakespeare, and spins out an exploration of the chunks of history within it. It also links the objects to Shakespeare's writing, using the plays as historical sources in smart, unforced ways. It's bitty, and the chapters don't necessary build to a coherent whole (a legacy, perhaps, of its radio background) but it's illuminating, and goes down very smoothly.</p><p><b>Spring - Ali Smith</b></p><p>The third - and best so far - of Ali Smith's quartet of novels about modern England. This is urgently political writing, and its liquid prose perfectly balances anger and warm character-driven storytelling. While previous books in the series could sometimes set up characters as mouthpieces for sets of opinions, the handling is more subtle here: it digs deep by simply describing the workings of immigrant detention centres, and the lives of people imprisoned or working there. I can imagine that not all readers will be able to suspend disbelief at the wise-beyond-her-years child with apparent magical powers, but I think the fuzzy mysticism of that plotline works as a counterpoint to the bleakness. As with all of these books, the opening pages are an invigorating tour-de-force, magnificently furious about the state of Britain's discourse, and worth reading in a bookshop even if you've no interest in the rest of the novel.</p><p><b>The Templars - Dan Jones</b></p><p>An expansive piece of pop-history, and good at explaining all the ways in which the Knights Templar were *extremely weird* - deeply devout, stubbornly anti-intellectual, obscenely wealthy, very much into violence. When it has a good story to tell (especially the order's formation and fall), this is excellent, propulsive stuff. The problem is that much of the time the story of the Templars is quite a dull one - a repetitive series of desert battles where territory is gained and then quickly lost again. This is a long book, and there's only so much I can care about troop movements.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qW9igMCiX-o/X4iPUdLHceI/AAAAAAAAApg/w6yExQdaJs0ci08OiYbQHReSpWSaa_llgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="181" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qW9igMCiX-o/X4iPUdLHceI/AAAAAAAAApg/w6yExQdaJs0ci08OiYbQHReSpWSaa_llgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="156" /></a></div><br /><b>Ghost Story - Peter Straub</b><p></p><p>An attempt to mash up the commercial horror of the 1970s with the sensibilities of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories: a group of elderly men regularly meet to tell spooky tales from their pasts, but the supernatural forces they remember are coming back to get them. There's some excellent extended sequences - long, atmospheric sections that would work well separated out as short stories. There's also a serious, Middlemarch-y attempt to define and explore the character of a town, which helps drive the stakes when the bodies start hitting the floor. But overall I don't think the novel works - it's a baggy, meandering thing, the nature of the threat isn't sufficiently well defined (either in terms of its in-fiction powers, or in terms of what it symbolises), and there's a nasty strain of misogyny to its final, predictable, revelations.</p><p><b>Madame Zero - Sarah Hall</b></p><p>A perfectly calibrated book of short stories. There's fantasy and SF in here (a man whose wife transforms into a fox, a dystopian future where abortion is illegal) but mostly this is literary realism, circling around themes of the distorted ways we understand each other's psychologies, and especially the ways male viewpoints distort women. The strongest story is "Evie", an exquisitely disturbing piece of psychological horror about a man whose wife is becoming increasingly libidinous: it weaponises its eroticism in impressively nasty, clever ways.</p><p><b>The Thirteen Clocks - James Thurber</b></p><p>A perfect children's book - in many ways its rotten fairy-tale gothic reads like Gormenghast-for-the-under-tens. The language is astounding - full of puns and poetry, breaking in and out of rhyme, dancing across all sorts of formal and metafictional tricks. The Ronald Searle illustrations are also amazing - wild and gloomy and scratchy. I wish I'd read it when I was about seven, when all the literary mechanics would have been able to fall into the background, and the book could have become a world.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-JmkYQC3Y4gI/X4iPJMhA18I/AAAAAAAAApc/NAMs_gMRzg4ty8M0Xi4UCdBTqmxTqWWfgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="312" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-JmkYQC3Y4gI/X4iPJMhA18I/AAAAAAAAApc/NAMs_gMRzg4ty8M0Xi4UCdBTqmxTqWWfgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="150" /></a></div><br /><b>The Wonderful O - James Thurber</b><p></p><p>A piratical villain arrives on an island and bans the natives from using any objects or concepts that contain the letter O. What you get, then, is oulipo for kids. Musch of this is a game, a huge tumbling catalogue of all the jokes you can make about words that do or don't contain certain letters. And yes, there's an allegory here, about colonialism and oppressive governments, but the focus is always on linguistic exuberance. The Thirteen Clocks is better, but this is cleverer.</p><p><b>An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It - Jessie Greengrass</b></p><p>Precise, finely crafted short stories, less interested in incident, or character, or ideas, than they are in recording the movements of their narrators' thoughts. The varied settings of the stories (a modern office, a nineteenth century sea-voyage, a dystopian future) become faintly irrelevant, blank surfaces on which to project the movements of imaginary minds; often the stories slip towards essays instead of narratives. Which is perfectly alright, especially given the pleasures of the intricate and careful prose, or the sharp - often uncomfortable - play of ideas. But I wouldn't expect anything gripping.</p><p><b>Peril at End House - Agatha Christie</b></p><p>The second Poirot I've read (my wife is a serious fan, so I feel its important to explore), this is further evidence for my instinct that Christie is extremely good at something I have no interest in. This is a puzzle, really - the plot a mechanism for dispensing clues, and most of the characters are simply pieces on a board. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had a bunch of formal inventiveness and a real sense of a living community - this lacks that. It is, however, a very satisfying machine. And it's not without charm - the friendship between Poirot and Hastings is lovely - two men who find each other ridiculous, both of whom are correct. It's a shame that in the end the book leaves a bad taste in the mouth - its final line is an antisemitic joke.</p><p><b>The Book of Ptath - A.E. Van Vogt</b></p><p>A pile of rubbish, but an extremely *odd* pile of rubbish. 1940s pulp SF by an author who used to be extremely popular but is now (deservedly?) forgotten. This is about a World War II tank commander whose mind is projected into the body of a giant god, millions of years in the future, and who needs to fight to re-conquer a desert empire currently controlled by his evil psychic wife. Van Vogt used to base his novels on his dreams, and it shows. For all its attempts at weird grandeur, this is unfocused, far too short to make much sense (conquering the world in fewer than 180 pages) and full of the kind of nonsense words that people who don't like fantasy think fantasy is full of.</p><p><b>Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison</b></p><p>My God, this is amazing. It's a highly-respected novel from the 1950s about racial injustice and political organising: I expected it to be Important but perhaps a little dry and worthy. Nothing of the sort - its exhilarating: furiously propulsive and alive, pulsating with raw emotional intensity, all of which it accomplishes without flinching away from subtle, bracing political thought. Heady stuff then, and often powerfully upsetting. Part of its effectiveness comes from the fact that while its plot is the stuff of serious literary realism (a young black intellectual is kicked out of college and moves to New York, where he joins the communist party and eventually becomes disillusioned from it), the execution is often much weirder, skewing just a few degrees away from realism and into the realms of the allegorical or surreal. In the first chapter, for instance, the protagonist is living in a room full of hundreds of lightbulbs using power stolen from the electrical grid. This faint warping of the world pushes the book into an angry, passionate fantasia that switches between journalistic exploration and folk-tale purity at will.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-YBdHc3M3V4o/X4iPgvVUEeI/AAAAAAAAApk/RNNnb8AWCvs-WYYuJPphWABqGhN-bUaGgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1336" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-YBdHc3M3V4o/X4iPgvVUEeI/AAAAAAAAApk/RNNnb8AWCvs-WYYuJPphWABqGhN-bUaGgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="157" /></a></div><br /><b>In Patagonia - Bruce Chatwin</b><p></p><p>Literary travel journalism - Chatwin wanders round Argentina, visiting people and places, regularly digressing into anecdotes about history, or his own life. It's very well written, and there are number of fascinating stories and vivid images. But this is such a meandering, aimless book - short chapters arriving and dispersing like half-formed thoughts. Embarrassingly it kept putting me to sleep, even in public places. Which isn't to say it's boring - it's not at all boring - it's just that its rhythms are soporific.</p><p><b>Ways of Seeing - John Berger</b></p><p>Counterintuitive marxist art-criticism from the 1970s, and whether that sounds fun or hellish will determine how much you enjoy this book. It's refreshingly grumpy, uninterested in transcendence or beauty and instead seeing masterpieces as commercial products: oil paintings are simply status symbols, nudes remove humanity and replace women with objects of male desire. The arguments are lucid and readable, even when they start getting technical, although the wordless chapters consisting solely of images (supposedly making essayistic arguments) are sometimes too oblique to be useful. All its elegant irritability about what art means when art can be instantly shared and reproduced makes you wonder how much more bristly the book would have been if it was written in the age of the internet.</p><p><b>The Music of Chance - Paul Auster</b></p><p>I've read quite a bit of Auster now, and this is comfortably one of my favourites of his. It's a novel about self-destruction, asceticism, gambling, responsibility. It is, I think, an allegory for what it means to work under capitalism. It has a sleek, precise almost folk-tale-ish plot (at its core: a man driving endlessly across America meets a young genius-level poker-player; together they plan to win big money off two reclusive millionaires). It is fiendishly clever, full of all sorts of mirrors and patterns. A blurb quote describes it as a mix between Beckett and the Brothers Grimm, which is in many ways exactly right, but also doesn't capture what the book feels like. Because this also extremely good fun: Auster is so good at making complicated books go down smoothly, at setting up high stakes, at the textures of living, that this becomes marvellously entertaining stuff.</p><p><b>Pastoralia - George Saunders</b></p><p>Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo" is one of my favourite novels, but I've never had as strong a reaction to his (much-loved) short fiction. It's reminiscent of Vonnegut - abrasive, SF-adjacent, deeply moral, a light comic ease covering deep despair. The stories often have simple cores (a dystopian theme-park where actors live as cavemen, a self-help seminar advocating complete selfishness, a kindly old woman coming back from the dead as a decomposing id-monster) and spin those cores off into explorations of mortality, or the casual cruelty of everyday life. Recommended for fans of good jokes and sadness.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-wvE6tuyaBCI/X4iPxTSAgBI/AAAAAAAAApw/Wesv7B-0mC44L7xupUcpIybs24QTc-ONACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="318" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-wvE6tuyaBCI/X4iPxTSAgBI/AAAAAAAAApw/Wesv7B-0mC44L7xupUcpIybs24QTc-ONACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="153" /></a></div><br /><b>The Book of Swords vol 1 - ed. Gardner Dozois</b><p></p><p>I was in an English-language bookshop in Barcelona, with a fifteen hour coach journey ahead of me, and I thought "I just want some pulp". So this was ideal - a group of stories by contemporary commercial fantasy writers, where swords always play a central role. The best of them know that if you've picked up a book like this, you want some fighting and witticisms. So you get Walter Jon Williams, with a swashbuckling lawyer solving crimes in alternate-universe Elizabethan England, or Garth Nix doing a supremely inventive, densely characterised demon hunt in the snow. There's a nice, tightly circular story about blacksmithing and duelling techniques from K.J. Parker, and a grim, emotionally brutal medieval zombie story from Robin Hobb. At their worst, though these can feel a bit like D&D scenarios written up by someone with a thesaurus. Still, it's exactly what I wanted at the time.</p><p><b>The Magic Toyshop - Angela Carter</b></p><p>The third Carter I've read, and the first I've really loved (The Bloody Chamber was sparkling but felt a bit like a series of excercises - I probably need to re-read it; Wise Children is an amazing piece of work, but its exuberance gets wearing). On one level, this is a coming of age story, about a girl from a wealthy background having to live with a poor family under a monstrous patriarch, and as a piece of straightforward storytelling it is very effective. But there's much more going on here: a weird out-of-time aesthetic, occasional breaches of reality, magnificent prose, all sorts unnerving sexual symbolism. Without being a supernatural novel, it constantly feels like one. Also, good writing about folk music, which always bumps a book up in my estimation.</p><p><b>The Wine Dark Sea - Robert Aickman</b></p><p>Robert Aickman is almost always great: he's a writer of short fiction who works in the M.R. James-y tradition of the English ghost story. But Aickman's stuff is considerably more oblique and inexplicable than other writers in the genre, impossible things lurking just out of sight, and with the reader never given quite enough clues to decipher what is really going on. I'm a fan, but I don't think this is necessarily the place to start - "Dark Entries" is a more consistent and accessible collection. Sometimes the prose can feel a little stodgy, but this is always thoughtful and serious work: it's absolutely worth the effort for stories like "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen", about an addiction to a voice on the other end of the telephone, or the title story, which blends greek mythology with cosmic weirdness.</p><p><b>Indoctrinaire - Christopher Priest</b></p><p>Priest's first novel - it's an interesting experiment with some arresting moments, but never really flies. A researcher is strongarmed into a government mission, investigating a hidden facility in the Amazon rainforest. The frame is straightforward science fiction, but the mission itself is an absurdist, kafkaesque fantasy full of dreamlike imagery of architecture merging with human forms, and behaviour that doesn't attempt to make sense. Some late, perfunctory developments attempt to explain the weirdness, but they don't really stick: a more confident novel wouldn't have bothered with the rationale. Priest gets better later, but as a cryptic mood-piece this is alright.</p><p><b>The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman - Angela Carter</b></p><p>OK, so yes, this is amazing: it still needs a few more months to settle, but at the moment I'd put it alongside The Man Who Was Thursday, the Gomenghast books, and The Book of the New Sun as one of the best examples of what fantasy literature is *for*. The prose is astounding; the slippery, vivid worldbuilding is the perfect counter-argument to Tolkeinesque maps-and-languages; it's dense with countless ideas and implications. But this recommendation comes with a caveat: this probably beats Naked Lunch for title of "filthiest book I've ever read". During the protagonist's picaresque journey to defeat a scientist who has invaded his home-city with hallucinations, there are sexual encounters that break every possible taboo. It's a book full of violence, rape, paedophilia and bestiality. This isn't pornography - there's not, I think, any attempt to arouse the reader, and it's less about sex than about how sex is written about and thought about. But the book is sometimes sickening, and sometimes ridiculous - in both cases deliberately. You'll know if this is something you're ok with.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-zXw1Fqgo4Ec/X4iP7UShGPI/AAAAAAAAAp0/QmCt-JkLR5cLx5wzpDYBvJXKvIgoEDMqwCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1328" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-zXw1Fqgo4Ec/X4iP7UShGPI/AAAAAAAAAp0/QmCt-JkLR5cLx5wzpDYBvJXKvIgoEDMqwCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="156" /></a></div><br /><b>How to Be a Public Author - Francis Plug</b><p></p><p>Francis Plug is a pseudonym for Paul Ewen. Paul Ewen really *did* go to a lot of talks by booker-award winning novelists, and get his books signed "To Francis Plug". This book then imagines what those talks would have been like from the point of view of a chaotic, drunken force of nature, who hallucinates Julian Barnes levitating, and spreads rumours of the vicious murder of Ruth Rendell, all while apparently writing some sort of gonzo self-help guide. This is, as you've probably noticed, a really difficult book to describe - but it *is* extremely funny - on one level a satire of the whole idea of elite literary society, and on another a bizarre plunge into the mind of an extremely strange man.</p><p><b>The Book of Magic vol 2 - ed. Gardner Dozois</b></p><p>More pulp from the bookshop in Barcelona - this time a bunch of short stories about wizards written by contemporary commercial fantasy writers. More consistently good than The Book of Swords Vol 1, possibly because a wider variety of stories that can be told about wizards than can be told about swords. Highlights include George R. R. Martin's soupy gothic about a group of strangers gathered together in a mysterious roadside inn, and Scott Lynch's space fantasy about the sentient planet-sized stronghold of a dead sorcerer. There's not much rubbish here: most of it is airy, undemanding and inventive.</p><p><b>Rotherweird - Andrew Caldecott</b></p><p>This is pretty bad. A schoolteacher takes a job in a secretive town where there's magic, and everyone's a genius, and everything's sort of old-fashioned, and there are doorways into a sort of psychedelic otherworld, but an evil landowner has arrived and wants to mess things up. The prose is stodgy, there's no concrete sense of place (the eponymous town is odd but textureless) and it feels like the author's only real encounter with fantasy has been Harry Potter, which is a distractingly visible influence. When the twists start heating up and ancient secrets get revealed, everything descends into borderline incoherence. A book like this needs pace, warmth, tension, or intrigue - this lacks the lot. It's baffling how this got such a shiny production job and a good blurb quote from Hilary Mantel.</p><p><b>Everything and More - David Foster Wallace</b></p><p>And this completes my quest to read all of David Foster Wallace in my twenties. He remains (probably?) my favourite writer: the only writer whose fiction made me cry as an adult. Also, his prose style is wonderful, a rhythmic blend of the slangy and the literary. This, however, is *not* the place to start. Go in with Consider the Lobster, or Girl With Curious Hair, or even Infinite Jest if you're feeling brave. They're all amazing. Everything and More, unfortunately, is not amazing. It's a book about the mathematics of infinity. When it first came out, it wasn't well reviewed: people without STEM backgrounds found it hard to follow, people with STEM backgrounds pointed out that it was quite often wrong. There are a lot of equations. I reckon I understood about 60% of it. Still, for one last chance to inhale that prose style, it was worth it.</p><p><b>Die Vol 1 - Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans</b></p><p>I first got to know Gillen's work when he was a videogames critic, and his comics work is most interesting when it functions as much as criticism as narrative. Here, we have the story of a group of middle-aged people trapped in the world of the dungeons-and-dragons-esque game they played as teenagers. The atmosphere is bleak and gothy, the art is sharp and full of grandeur. But really, this is a vehicle for exploring ideas about how fantasy and RPGs work: what do rigid rules do to a story? Can game mechanics cheapen or pervert emotional truth? What are the implications of games that let people play as characters with genders different to their own? And what does it mean that so much of modern "nerd-culture" is riffing on a 1950s novel written by a traumatised veteran of the First World War? The storytelling falls away outside of these questions, which isn't a bad thing when they're addressed so thoughtfully. And the essays at the back about how and why the whole thing was constructed are easily as entertaining as the rest of the book.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-xuQG3Fx36ZE/X4iQCrs9oSI/AAAAAAAAAp8/HHcUlMNW3LsvHCwCB-zcDT2UZ0r2vC0pgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="989" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-xuQG3Fx36ZE/X4iQCrs9oSI/AAAAAAAAAp8/HHcUlMNW3LsvHCwCB-zcDT2UZ0r2vC0pgCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="158" /></a></div><br /><b>The Other Place and Other Stories - J.B Priestley</b><p></p><p>A collection of supernatural short stories, these are very readable, sturdily constructed, and usually pretty throwaway. Often, they describe a shift of perception: characters suddenly start seeing everything through a wonderful or horrible lens: maybe there are monsters everywhere, or a conspiracy is working against you, or there are giant statues from the future all over town, or you are suddenly in the past. The two timeslip stories in the book, Night Sequence and Looking After the Strange Girl, are probably the strongest, both melancholy and uncanny.</p><p><b>The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid</b></p><p>A superb novel. In a cafe in Pakistan, a man tells the story of his life to a stranger: how he studied at an elite American university and worked for an elite American financial institution, before returning to his home country. But there's something not quite right about the meeting - and it's clear neither the teller or the listener are exactly as they appear. As a political novel, this is subtle and bracing: exploring America after 9/11 and how the decisions of powerful people and institutions interact with daily life. As a human story, it's satisfying and psychologically rich. But my favourite thing about it is its narrator - full of wit and charm, aware of how much smarter he is than his listener, and dangerously untrustworthy. My wife recommended this to me, and she basically has a 100% hit rate with recommendations.</p><p><b>The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye - Jonathan Lethem</b></p><p>Dark 1990s Science-Fiction stories, by a writer who is clearly stretching at the edges of the genre and preparing himself to jump into more mainstream literary-fiction. The quality is variable: some of them are functional but familiar reworkings of SF tropes and themes. but the best three are strikingly impressive and horrible and intense. "Five Fucks" is about addictive reality-warping sex in a universe that is constantly degrading and cheapening itself. "The Hardened Criminals" is about a prison where still-alive convicts are turned into bricks in the walls. And both are pretty full-on, but neither compares to "The Happy Man", about a character whose soul regularly migrates between his body on Earth and a particularly disturbing Hell: it manages to fit more upsetting ideas into forty pages than most writers do in their whole careers. A recommendation, then, but go in prepared.</p><p><b>One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez</b></p><p>More impressive than it is lovable, but undeniably impressive. This books describes a century in the life of a fictional Colombian town, merging the mundane, the fantastical and the melodramatic. Multiple generations of characters have the same name, and their lives seem to repeat the stories of their ancestors, all of which leads to something extremely structurally and philosophically sophisticated: an interlocking jewelled pattern of narratives, where the pattern, not the individual stories, reveals the book's ideas about time, family, and the history of Latin America. It's all enormously clever, but rarely moving or gripping, at least until a thunderously beautiful final few pages.</p><p><b>This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone</b></p><p>A delight. A romance written in letters between two women on opposite sides of a war: they're both highly-skilled time-travelling soldier-assassins dedicated to warping history so that their culture becomes dominant in the deep future. As they fight to undermine each other's work, they realise they're the only people who understand each other, and it's enormously sweet and lovely, but also tense - the stakes are clearly set up so that it seems almost impossible that this could be anything other than tragic. If you're familiar with time travel in pop culture, you'll guess where a lot of the book is going, but this doesn't blunt the impact of its big moments. It's also a formally interesting piece of work - the two writers were each in charge of a different character, and wrote and exchanged the letters in order, so what you're reading is the result of an improvised, exploratory game. You can feel each writer's excitement at the other's invention.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-sJjcbbTKQX0/X4iQIgsdF0I/AAAAAAAAAqA/TBWBvCh13iMrOnb1KUII4aBCp2DEYBW5QCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="280" data-original-width="185" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-sJjcbbTKQX0/X4iQIgsdF0I/AAAAAAAAAqA/TBWBvCh13iMrOnb1KUII4aBCp2DEYBW5QCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="159" /></a></div><br /><b>Unholy Land - Lavie Tidhar</b><p></p><p>Unholy Land starts off as a noir murder-mystery set in an alternate universe where the Jewish State was founded in East Africa, not the Middle East. It soon becomes very much *not* that - the murder is solved by the end of the novel, but by then much bigger ideas have arisen. It stops being a book set in a particular imaginary Jewish state, and becomes a book about the *idea* of a Jewish state, and all of the real, imagined, possible and impossible versions of the Jewish state that have appeared throughout fiction. It also becomes a metactictional novel about how SF functions, about the ways in which alternative history novels are and aren't useful vehicles for political thought. I found this patchily written and structurally unsteady, but the richness of its ideas more than made up for it.</p><p><b>Under the Pendulum Sun - Jeanette Ng</b></p><p>A gothic novel about Victorian missionaries in fairyland. Wonderful, unsettling stuff. The setting is rich - fairyland is magnificent (vast wicker whales tunnel under the surface, queen Mab's court is grand and masked and alien) but is also a crumbling stage set, a cheap fake where nothing is natural and nothing has history. The melodramatic psychology of the missionaries is also well pitched - all repressed surfaces warring against fervid desires. I assumed that this would be a postcolonial critique of Victorian imperialism, but it's not really interested in exploring those ideas - fairyland ends up far stranger and more dangerous than anything the British Empire could throw at it. It's more interested in being a horror-pastiche of Bronte-adjacent novels, and in taking its theology seriously. I have no idea about the religious beliefs of the author, but in some ways this reminds me of CS Lewis - a fantasia on Christian themes, and an allegory for sin and redemption.</p><p><b>Chess - Stefan Zweig</b></p><p>A perfect novella from 1941. It begins on an ocean liner, where the narrator realises that one of his fellow passengers is a savant-like chess champion. From that point it extends outwards - on one level it's a precise, witty story, with a neatness that defies realism. But then it becomes urgently, despairingly political, all its cultivated elegance collapsing into a howl. The smooth, graceful prose (translated by Asterix-genius Anthea Bell!), and the balance between visible artifice and painful realism reminded me of Paul Auster. Also, it's extremely good at the nature of boardgames: the weird halfway point they occupy between art and science, the psychology of victory when winning is meaningless.</p><p><b>I Feel Machine - Various Writers</b></p><p>A collection of six brief science-fiction comics about the ways people and technology interact. A lot of it feels scrappy, experimental, playful, full of gaps and ambiguities. There's some great stuff in here - Shaun Tan's "Here I Am" is about a human child raised in a bizarre but deeply loving alien world, and it is full of amazing visual invention. Erik Svetoft provides a highly effective story as well: a shadowy body-horror heist, where quiet, rubbery figures plug themselves in and out of computers. It's not all good - the final story by Krent Able leaves a bad taste in the mouth: cheap and nasty shock-horror where kids addicted to their phones brutally murder their parents while being mind-controlled by some sort of oily Freudian nightmare beast. It's gross and stupid and casts a pall over the rest of the book.</p><p><b>Embassytown - China Mieville</b></p><p>A novel about human colonists on a planet where the indigenous aliens have a particularly strange language (it is biologically impossible for them to lie, for instance, but the weirdness goes much deeper than that). Dogmatism, petty bureaucratic infighting and greed eventually lead to a zombie-apocalypse. It's tense and stressful, dense with spiky ideas, and Mieville has great fun with his scenery, a whole city built from gloopy infected biotech. This is, in part, a novel about linguistics and an allegory about colonialism. Second-tier Mieville (it's not in the same league as The City And The City, or The Scar), but this is still sophisticated and entertaining.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c0KPxRg5xx4/X4iQQOG5UiI/AAAAAAAAAqI/GIJSWr3_aqsTopr3fAOOiE-SyUeLtYs2ACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="253" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c0KPxRg5xx4/X4iQQOG5UiI/AAAAAAAAAqI/GIJSWr3_aqsTopr3fAOOiE-SyUeLtYs2ACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="154" /></a></div><br /><b>Travels with my Aunt - Graham Greene</b><p></p><p>One of my wife's favourite books, this is a knockabout comedy about a pompous, repressed bank manager who is dragged into a life of international crime by his elderly aunt. It's all very silly until it isn't: the end plays a lovely tonal trick which cloaks everything that's gone before in ambiguous darkness. When it's about anything, it's about living in a world scarred by the second world war, but mostly serious concerns are irrelevant. One note: the novel's treatment of race has aged *extremely* badly.</p><p><b>Hellboy Omnibus Vol 1: Seed of Destruction - Mike Mignola</b></p><p>What amazing art, what thin writing. This is a compilation of the first few Hellboy graphic novels. If you want to see monsters punching monsters for hundreds of pages, then it's is a reasonable option. Hellboy is a monster, his friends are usually monsters, they work for an agency that mostly hires and kills monsters. Problems they face include Rasputin, Nazis, the Undead, and some shapeless Lovecraftian things. The plots are an excuse to travel from one fight to the next. And yes, the sharply geometric high-contrast art looks amazing. But if you want the warmth and wit and detail-rich eccentricities of the two Del-Toro films, that's all missing. It's all quite dour. I've heard it gets much stranger and more experimental later on; I'm not sure if that means it gets better.</p><p><b>The Night Visitors - Jenn Ashworth and Richard V Hirst</b></p><p>I just like ghost stories, I think. This is an interesting counterpoint to "This is How You Lose the Time War" - both novellas written by two authors, in the form of letters between two women. Here, an aspirant writer gets in touch with her elderly aunt, who once wrote a bestselling and critically acclaimed novel. The younger woman wants to gather research for a book about a silent film star who was implicated in a horrible murder. Soon, things get sinister. Yes, there's a supernatural threat, but the most unnerving thing is how untrustworthy both narrators are - their motivations are unclear and each seems to be manipulating the other. Ghosts, of course, are always the sins of the past, repressed secrets, the things we try to forget: in this book the past is more frightening than the ghosts. Excellent stuff.</p><p><b>Mythago Wood - Robert Holdstock</b></p><p>This was a Big Influential fantasy novel in the 1980s but it seems to have fallen out of favour. Returning from the Second World War, our protagonist finds that the small woodland in his family's estate actually contains an infinite landscape of English myth. It's an odd book - it mostly takes place on the edge of the woods, a portal fantasy that's more about the portal than the land on the other side of it. And early investigations into the wood have a hippyish pseudoscientific feel - all the talk of ley-lines and psychic energies feeling like something you might find in a second-hand shop in Glastonbury. The politics are dated too: the one female character is literally the fantasy projection of a male character's mind, and there's something uncomfortable and unexamined about a world created from an inherited English race-memory. Still, it has its strengths: it's inventive and well written, with sturdy, literary prose that comes into its own when the book starts journeying into the forest.</p><p><b>Nova - Samuel R Delany</b></p><p>This is Prometheus in Space: the scion of a fading aristocratic family sets off on a mission to steal energy from the heart of a dying star, thereby striking a blow against the all-powerful industrialists running an increasingly large space-empire. There's a magnificently hissable villain and a thrilling finale, but this is a much stranger and denser book than it appears. It's part of the 1960s New Wave of Science Fiction, when the possibilities of 1920s modernism and the 1950s beat generation start getting folded into genre pulp. Nova bounces between time periods, registers and viewpoint characters, and is pushed forwards less by plot or character than by repeated images: characters who wear one shoe, an impossible musical instrument, the grail, an exploding star. It's no wonder that a book powered by systems of images is also deeply invested in the tarot, which appears again and again throughout the text.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-vBaVsppU2z4/X4iQW8OlzrI/AAAAAAAAAqQ/woOZqGK0G0cddepiO3R2reg4Hm5JmNi5wCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="312" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-vBaVsppU2z4/X4iQW8OlzrI/AAAAAAAAAqQ/woOZqGK0G0cddepiO3R2reg4Hm5JmNi5wCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="150" /></a></div><br /><b>The Uninvited - Dorothy Macardle</b><p></p><p>A 1940s haunted house novel from a forgotten Irish writer, this follows all the beats you'd expect. A brother and sister buy a suspiciously cheap house, the former owners left mysteriously, there are dark rumours in the local village about what really happened, subtle supernatural happenings become more intense, lives are in danger, multiple women faint, there's a wise local priest and a nasty incident involving a Ouija board. It's well crafted, and contains all the cosy autumnal spookiness you could want. Interestingly, it's structured like a detective story - no one is skeptical about the existence of the ghosts, and instead the characters focus on attempting to puzzle out what the ghosts *want*, as an attempt to remove them. The eventual solution to the mystery is clean and satisfying. Overall then, nothing you haven't seen before, but absolutely worthwhile.</p><p><b>The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow - Danny Denton</b></p><p>In a dystopian future Ireland where it never stops raining, a street kid has impregnated the daughter of a supernaturally powerful gangleader. Meanwhile, strange figures such as Mr Violence and the revolutionary arsonist St Vincent de Paul lurk in the drenched shadows. With its Dublin setting, deliberate obscurity, and constant switch between registers and genres (the novel contains plays, poems, oral folktales, dense slang, pulp SF, and high-flown Serious Literature) the Joyce influence is pretty visible. Much of the ambition drains out in the final third, though, as it condenses into a sharply focused thriller. The real strength of the book is its atmosphere: a semi-mythical, richly described city under a deluge is a great place to spend time, and the book is, I found, a lot of fun to read out loud.</p><p><b>The Battle of Life - Charles Dickens</b></p><p>My third year in a row of reading an obscure Dickens Christmas novel in December. This one is presumably a Christmas novel because of its publication date rather than its subject - it doesn't mention Christmas, though it does have a general mood of goodwill-to-all-men. It's extremely slight, a quick dash through the romantic entanglements of two sisters, one of whom has two suitors. And like most lesser Dickens novels, the plotting is contrived and it occasionally trips up into a bucket of sentimentality. Dickens is at his best when he's allowed to sprawl, and there's no sprawl here. But he's still Dickens, so you still get blindingly good prose, strong jokes, an unshakeable moral core, amazingly vivid grotesques, at least one poignant death, and A+ descriptions of the weather. </p><p><b>The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu</b></p><p>A Chinese SF novel from 2008, published in English in 2015, when it picked up a lot of buzz and awards. As the novel begins, we get the story of a physicist who was killed in the cultural revolution, and a present-day researcher dragged into an investigation about why prominent scientists are committing suicide. To say much more would be a spoiler - and this is a novel that is *extremely* susceptible to spoilers - much of the fun is watching the plot twist and writhe unexpectedly every forty pages or so. It does go to some pretty extraordinary places, and it's full of sinister conspiracies, complicated (but lucidly explained) physics, really interesting bits of Chinese history, hardboiled police work, and brain-melting cosmic weirdness. Occasionally the book's scale gets the better of it, the plot taking hard turn into the silly, but it never takes long to recover. It's a fast book that balances energetic bounce with serious ideas.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-tKB2icWQ7YU/X4iQgEJLrvI/AAAAAAAAAqY/n6Jt2FEJ9KMqxf4KVfpJOMIVwAtBrkPswCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="633" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-tKB2icWQ7YU/X4iQgEJLrvI/AAAAAAAAAqY/n6Jt2FEJ9KMqxf4KVfpJOMIVwAtBrkPswCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="152" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-35629335033130127352019-01-02T09:17:00.000-08:002019-01-02T09:17:14.340-08:00Books I Read in 2018Here, then, are around 7000 words on the 53 books I finished reading in 2018. There's a fairly loose definition of "book" here, and I read a couple of comics on my iPad that I didn't get round to reviewing. But this is a pretty complete picture of the reading I did last year.<br />
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<b>Malacqua: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for an Extraordinary Event - Nicola Pugliese</b><br />
Meandering Italian magic-realism about a supernaturally intense, seemingly endless rainstorm. There's some amazing imagery here - drenched buildings crumbling like wet cardboard; coins singing to young girls. But in between these points, it's all foggy and directionless - snatched glimpses of people without motivation, caught in cycles of ennui. Maybe it's the translation, but the language is something of a dense thicket: there's a lot that needs to be hacked through, but isn't sharp enough to be worth the effort. It's difficult to make listlessness interesting, I'm not sure Pugliese manages it.<br />
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<b>Perelandra - C.S. Lewis</b><br />
The second part of Lewis' space trilogy, and a retelling of the story of Adam and Eve set on the planet Venus. When it's good it's fantastic: Lewis' merging of medieval theology with turn-of-the-century pulp science fiction leads to a bunch of weird and exciting worldbuilding. His Venus is vivid and admirably strange - vast inhabited lily-pads under a golden sky. His Satan is genuinely frightening. He can manage an action scene. But it's difficult to get over Lewis' hectoring evangelism: for all the wild imagination on display, Perelandra isn't subtle. And unlike when, for instance, Chesterton uses a thriller to mount a defence of Christianity, Lewis doesn't provide space for dissent, and regularly lets the plot grind to a halt for exegeses on the Book of Genesis or a meditations on biblical sin. The first in the trilogy, "Out of the Silent Planet", is much better.<br />
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<b>That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis</b><br />
The final book in Lewis' space trilogy. And again, Lewis' instinct towards polemic damages things (a lot of his politics are *uncomfortable*, to say the least). But this is such a weird, scruffy, fractured thing that it's hard not to have a good time. He's throwing everything into the pot here: social satire, Christian mysticism, SF dystopia, cosy intelligent animals, full-strength Arthuriana, campus comedy... It's tonally and structurally messy, but that's part of the joy of it. And as with Perelandra, his villains are remarkably well drawn: bland well-meaning bureaucrats twisted into madness.<br />
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<b>The Star Diaries - Stanislaw Lem</b><br />
Polish SF short stories, written between the 50s and 70s, about a hyperconfindent scientist adventurer, travelling between eccentric planets. The stories are comic, and structured like folk-tales. When they aren't fluffy and inconsequential, they're philosophically bleak (there's an impressively horrible bit about the fate of a missionary on a planet of kind and loving aliens). A mixed bag, but when it's good it's basically Calvino-in-space. The Cyberiad, by the same author, is similar but better - wittier and more inventive - though this may just be due to a superior translation.<br />
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<b>Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy</b><br />
I wrote about this on Facebook when I finished it, and still stand by what I said then ("350 pages of florid and blood-drenched prose poetry about cowboys, with one of the most unsettling endings I've ever encountered. I've no idea if I actually liked it, but I'm probably going to spend this afternoon feeling odd and disturbed and small, so presumably it succeeded at something. I'm very much into its many, many lyrical descriptions of the stars, though.") It seems to be structured around escalating walls of violence. As soon as you get desensitised, it intensifies. An impressive, horrifying piece of work, and one that feels like it takes physical effort to crawl through. Not for everyone, then, and very possibly not for me.<br />
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<b>Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner</b><br />
A twitchy, anxious thing. A graduate student wanders around Spain, lying compulsively to everyone he meets. He's either massively out of depth or suffering terribly from imposter syndrome. The novel is essentially plotless, but this only adds to its obsessive, self-examining discomfort. It's also really funny, in a dry, bleak sort of way. Really great stuff.<br />
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<b>Winter - Ali Smith</b><br />
An awkward family reunion in a cold, rambling house. The first sentence is a really excellent joke, and the first few pages that follow it are a joyous, musical flight of prose. What follows can feel slight, and works imperfectly (characters sometimes feel less like people than embodiments of political positions). But the slightness allows for a lightness and airy immediacy: there's something warm and redemptive among the punning, playful prose and sudden hallucinatory images.<br />
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<b>The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates</b><br />
This is the good stuff. A sprawling gothic epic about a demon infestation in turn-of-the-century Princeton, it’s consistently propulsive and unnerving and magnificently written: deeply interested in the nature of history, in hypocrisy, in American racism. It’s also vibrant and grotesque, the precise nature of its supernatural horrors just out of reach. I’m going to have to become a full-strength Joyce Carol Oates fan (I’ve read a bunch of her short stories, they’re all great), which is an intimidating task, given how much she’s written.<br />
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<b>Wonders will Never Cease - Robert Irwin</b><br />
Literary fantasy poised exactly halfway between Borges and Moorcock. A picaresque journey through a meticulously researched Wars of the Roses (almost all of the characters were actual historical figures). There's a lot of tricksy postmodern fun with the nature of narrative, and an entertainingly genre-savvy Thomas Malory, but this is more than just game-playing. Irwin's medieval England is convincingly alien, with all the expectedly murderous politicking and the protaganist's deadpan brutality. And it regularly swerves off into glorious flights of imagination, with grotesque magic rituals, deliberate anachronism, and bizarre hallucinatory passages.<br />
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<b>Authority - Jeff Vandermeer</b><br />
The second in Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy. Not as good as the first volume, Annihilation, but then again what is? A sort of paranoid horror-parody of the espionage genre, with the grey offices of a clandestine organisation as a haunted house. The book is at its best when digging into all the sticky ambiguities of surveillance and mind control. The setpieces are effective and arresting, but between them the book can ramble a bit - it misses Annihilation's lean tautness, and it definitely feels like it is enjoying its own obliqueness.<br />
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<b>Jacob's Room is Full of Books - Susan Hill</b><br />
The first non-fiction I read this year. Framed as a a reminiscence into a year of the author's reading, this is actually much less focused: a loose, diaristic account of the author's passing thoughts. At its best, it's warm and perceptive, eloquently enthusiastic about the books its writer loves (and I'm grateful for it reminding me that I needed to go back and read more Raymond Chandler). But it is extremely slight, and there's something faintly irritating about its wistful romanticisation of life in village England. It tastes Brexity.<br />
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<b>Acceptance - Jeff Vandermeer</b><br />
The final book in Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, and probably the weakest, though there's still much to recommend it. It's more ambitious than its predecessors, jumping between viewpoints and time-periods, and as such it doesn't have as clear a hook as "expedition into mysterious and terrifying wilderness" or "intelligence agency HQ as haunted house". There's also the difficulty of trying to bring a defined conclusion to a trilogy that has always thrived on ambiguous, unknowable dread. Still, when it works, it really works - the story of a lighthouse keeper warping into something alien just before the landscape shifts into monstrousness is particularly good.<br />
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<b>The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Cesares</b><br />
Argentinian fantasy from 1940. Recommended to me by a friend who said it felt like a Myst-style 1990s point-and-click adventure, and yes, it really does: all empty landscapes, ambiguous architecture, and a haunted island that is also a puzzle to be solved. The "twist" is obvious to anyone familiar with the last 80 years of speculative fiction, and there's some frustratingly slow passages as the protagonist struggles to work out stuff that will be clear to most readers, but once the true nature of its setting is revealed, the book flowers out into something wonderfully strange and anxious.<br />
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<b>Leviathan - Paul Auster</b><br />
Auster plays his hits: clean, cool prose; the lives of refined and well-read men crumbling into madness; wild coincidences; strident and principled American liberalism; moonlit, off-kilter cities. I like Auster a lot, and if this isn't necessarily the place to start (The New York Trilogy and The Brooklyn Follies are both better) this is a pretty good example of his strengths. There are, shall we say, *problems* with its depiction of women. It occasionally feels like a parody of a Great Male Novelist obsessing over female bodies - and while I did wonder if this was a satire, or a deliberately foregrounded part of the protaginist's psychology, I'm not sure there's enough data there to give it the benefit of the doubt. For the most part, though, this is intense, thoughtful and moody stuff.<br />
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<b>Inverted World - Christopher Priest</b><br />
If you get the Gollancz SF Masterworks edition of this, for god's sake don't read the blurb. Tear the back cover off if you have to. Not only does it spoil an extremely spoilable plot, but it sets up expectations which the book isn't even interested in fulfilling. A shame - because this is an excellent novel, and doesn't deserve to be broken by bad marketing. It's extremely high-quality Science Fiction, taking bizarre, head-spinning concepts from maths and physics, and applying them rigorously to a society and a set of characters. We start with a young man being accepted into one of the ruling guilds of a strange, cobbled-together city where none of the inhabitants are allowed to see outside. The novel then spirals out into a sort of warped bildungsroman marked by war, colonialism and political upheaval, while still juggling all sorts of gloriously high concepts in clean, measured prose. I'm not sure the ending really works - it feels like we're being set up for a big-twist revelation that never comes - but the journey is spectacular.<br />
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<b>Farewell, My Lovely - Raymond Chandler</b><br />
I don't often read crime, mostly because I'm not very interested in plot. And Chandler *wants* you to be interested in plot - the way the threads of the novel elegantly combine, the way information is deferred or characters enter and re-enter the narrative like expertly timed punctuation. It's all very admirable. But the reason to read Chandler is the prose - his showy, hardboiled noir style is often parodied, but only because it's so distinctive. It's magnificently satisfying - like taking a warm bath of vivid cynicism. He's also *extremely* good at dialogue, cinematic and sparkling.<br />
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<b>Under the Jaguar Sun - Italo Calvino</b><br />
You know what's good? Reading Calvino at midnight, in a faintly scuzzy takeaway pizza shop, just off an absurdly beautiful Venetian street. This is an unfinished book - Calvino died while writing it, so what you get is three short stories, each based on one of the five senses: a king with supernaturally powerful hearing listening out for signs of revolution; a pair of gourmets eating their way through Mexico and beginning to flirt with cannibalism; three men from different points in history searching for women by using their sense of smell. As ever with Calvino, he's walking a tightrope between a schematic, formal rigour and wild unmoored fantasy, and he does sometimes fall off: there is the occasional sense that the book is more interested in playing games with itself than anything else. It's often great, though: playful and ambitious, gracefully spinning across strange and heady ideas.<br />
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<b>The Fifth head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe</b><br />
Gene Wolfe wrote some of best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the 20th Century. His 'Book of the New Sun' quartet is a sprawling, phastasmagorical masterpiece: a propulsive quest-narrative, but also capital-L Literature, fascinated with unreliable narrators, the nature of translation, with the slippage between symbolism and literalism. The Fifth Head of Cerberus is nowhere near as good - but it is an interesting curiosity. It contains three linked novellas, each set on a planet of shapeshifting aliens long ago colonised by humans: the central mystery of the book is whether the colonisers wiped out the natives, or the natives wiped out the colonisers, shapeshifting and taking their form. The first novella is superb, set in a gothic establishment that is part brothel, part science-lab in a New-Orleans-style spaceport: it's somber, disturbing and plays dizzying tricks with time and identity. The novellas that follow, though, are disappointing: extremely oblique, delighted with their own obscurity, and more interested in playing games with themselves than anything else. There's also something uncomfortable about how the book uses colonialism as a backdrop but barely engages with it politically.<br />
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<b>Espedair Street - Iain Banks</b><br />
A reclusive rock star looks back over his life. It's propulsive, compulsive stuff. The sections about the protagonist's life as a music-obsessive in a deprived area of Paisley are very strong, as are the sections where he is older, living alone in a disused church, concealing his famous past from his drinking buddies. The depiction of his years of fame are weaker - curiously untextured, passing smoothly by like a magazine profile. It's a *blokey* book: full of booze, and fistfights, and nerdery about the minutiae of 1970s progressive rock, and underwritten female characters. But I had fun with it.<br />
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<b>Fen - Daisy Johnson</b><br />
It feels odd to put down my thoughts on a book written by someone I know. Thankfully Fen is *extremely* good - it's a series of tactile, painful fantasy stories set around the East Anglian fens. The prose is startling and immediate. And although the stories run on the slippery logic of folk tales and dreams, they have a sensory and psychological intensity that ensures they never risk feeling arbitrary or distant. Some of the concepts for the stories sound as if they would serve as clear-cut allegories - for obsessive love, for eating disorders, for the fear of motherhood - but in practice they are so vividly written that these direct correspondences fall away, and the stories stand only for themselves. An unreserved recommendation.<br />
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<b>Dinner - Moira Buffini</b><br />
Does the script for a play I was in count as a book I read this year? Yeah, it probably does. It's basically An Inspector Calls with swearing - a twitchily repressed upper-middle class group gather for a dinner party, a mysterious outsider arrives, surfaces are cracked, chaos ensues, something ambiguously supernatural - or at the very least grotesque - is unleashed. It's essentially a comedy, even if it's a particularly spiky and dark one. The jokes land. And when it wants to swerve into new tones, that works too - it's quite happy to be uncomfortable for long stretches, or horrifying for short ones. You're essentially spending time with characters without any verbal filters: it's not long before everyone is vocalising their least publicly appropriate thoughts. The way it shifts tones, or wheels freely from subplot to subplot, isn't to everyone's taste, but I enjoyed the chaos.<br />
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<b>Folk - Zoe Gilbert</b><br />
A satisfying mirror to Fen, which I'd read immediately beforehand, this is also a collection of folklore-ish short stories linked by a common location: in this case a fictional British island in an unspecified pre-modern past. Some of these stories are about how life on the island is mediated through tradition and ritual, like a more compassionate, less murdery version of The Wicker Man. Some of them are explicitly fantasy stories that run on folktale logic and contain supernatural transformations. Often they slip between the two modes, looking at the effects of fantastical on a small, close-knit community. And it works hard to generate a sense of a community - characters and their family members reappearing from story to story, or the plots of some stories being visible from the corners of others. But when it's at its best it pulls of a *really* impressive trick: taking stories with the straight, tropey bones of folk-tales, telling them simply, but making them absolutely gripping.<br />
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<b>The Lottery and Other Stories - Shirley Jackson</b><br />
Jackson is best known as a horror writer, but for the most part, these aren't horror stories: they're small, sharp-edged character studies. Her work in supernatural horror serves her well, though. Even when depicting nothing more unpleasant than an awkward social interaction, these stories contain a raw, jagged nub of dread. And when they do choose to slip away from the purely realistic, they do so with such a quiet precision that you barely notice the shift. The title story is by far the most famous in the collection, but it relies on a twist that has by now been thoroughly spoiled by pop culture. Far stronger is "The Renegade", about a housewife who hears her dog has been killing chickens, and discovers that her neighbours now expect her to put it down: it's hard to explain how it manages to generate such a thick, unyielding sense of wrongness.<br />
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<b>Kindred - Octavia Butler</b><br />
Involuntary, unexplained time travel repeatedly sends a modern African-American woman to a nineteenth century plantation. It uses all the conventions of the cosy timeslip novel, and turns them brutal. Despite the harrowing subject matter it reads very quickly and smoothly. Which isn't to say it takes its subject lightly: it's extremely good at the psychology of slavery - the way that a constant atmosphere of violence and degradation can warp and break a mind, how being surrounded by dehumanisation changes both slaves and slaveowners.<br />
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<b>Wise Children - Angela Carter</b><br />
A box of pyrotechnics - sometimes dazzling, sometimes exhausting, often both. It's the story of twin sisters - music hall performers in a family of actors - and it is rich with the messy texture of the theatrical world: tawdry and grotesque and pompous, but also full of grandeur and delight. It's full of flash: bursts of surrealism, all sorts of intertextual play with Shakespeare, bawdy set pieces, constantly surprising language. It's a book about the joy of perfomance, and it demonstrates this by being a joyful performance. But it does feel like the sort of book that'll give you a hangover.<br />
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<b>SPQR - Mary Beard</b><br />
I'm really bad at reading history. I lose concentration, and what I've read tends to slip out of my head only moments after it goes in. I didn't have any problems, though, with this. Beard is so fascinated by the Romans, and so enthusiastic about sharing this fascination, that not a page of this is dry. Even when its plunging deep into the academic detail of *how* we know what we know, it's fascinating. And whenever it debunks fun myths about the Romans (several of the emperors probably weren't as debauched as they were made out to be), it usually replaces them with something much stranger. It's a book full of stories, mapping an alien world.<br />
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<b>The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin</b><br />
Le Guin's work is extremely sensitive to the way environment affects society and the way society shapes people - these instincts found in the smallest details of The Dispossessed: see, for instance, the way a man from a planet without any animals large enough to farm is disturbed by the sight of a leather chair. The plot of this book should be schematic, didactic - a scientist from a planet with an anarchist collective government visits a planet governed by capitalist nation states. It's a book designed less for narrative than to explore structures for organising societies. But the sense of place is so rich, detailed and convincing that this feels less like a thought experiment and more like a journey through real worlds. The last ten pages, especially, are wonderful.<br />
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<b>All the Devils are here - David Seabrook</b><br />
An odd, disturbing work of non-fiction. Seabrook meanders between various decaying coastal towns in Kent, telling stories from their histories: of grubby sex and desperate tourist attractions, of murderers, madmen, and cells of fascist sympathisers. There's a strange sense that Seabrook is *involved* somehow, that all the weight of history has affected and interacted with him in some ill-defined way. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's fascinating. But by the end, this seems less like a travel book, or a history book, than a seedy, unsettled dream.<br />
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<b>Paper Girls Vol 1 - Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang</b><br />
A comic - a group of teenage girls in the 1980s end up caught in the middle of a bizarre, science-fictional war. It's super-light - zapping from setpiece to setpiece in a comfortably nostalgic US town: I reckon I ran through the whole thing in less than an hour, and I wasn't deliberately rushing it. But if you're comfortable with the lack of substance, it does what it sets out to do - clarifying its (witty, likeable) characters quickly. It's at its best when exploding with gonzo visual weirdness, which it does regularly. Its opening - a depiction of a nightmare, is funny and horrible and particularly strong.<br />
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<b>The Invisibles Vol 1: Say You Want a Revolution - Grant Morrison</b><br />
Another comic, and one that hasn't aged well. Where there's a plot (and for the most part it's hardly relevant), it involves a teenage delinquent joining a gang of counter-cultural occultists, who are working to free the world from the controlling forces of order. The comic is straining with all its might to let you know that it's Not For Kids - full of weird sex, weird violence, weird drugs, and continually dropping clanging literary references. It's a callous book, and I suspect its love of conspiracy theory feels far more tiresome now than it did on its publication 20 years ago. But look - it's not boring. There's plenty of flashy, striking images, and unpredictable (if often incoherent) turns in the plotting. Just don't expect to come out feeling satisfied.<br />
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<b>Red Thread - Charlotte Higgins</b><br />
A history of mazes. Or at least, it's a history of mazes *most* of the time. It keeps running off into areas barely relevant to mazes - snatches of art history, classical literature, autobiography, occasional experiments with style and genre. It is - aha! - structured like a maze. Which is almost a shame, because the sections directly about mazes are usually the best. But as long as you're willing to surrender to the author's whims, the whole thing is engrossing.<br />
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<b>Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco</b><br />
The weirdest thing about Foucault's Pendulum is that it feels like an erudite literary parody of a type of pulp that didn't start until years after its release: there's a weird resemblance to all those thrillers about academics uncovering dangerous conspiracies using historical books and artefacts (the National Treasure films, the Broken Sword videogames, the collected works of Dan Brown). And this makes sense: beneath the sprawl and learning and thick layers of ironic distance, there's a damn good adventure story hiding in here, about small-time publishers caught in a cult's search for an (imaginary?) templar superweapon. It's the part of the book that's most tempting to imitate. But describing the plot doesn't give you much sense of what it feels like to read Foucault's pendulum - it's a dusty book, interested mostly in other books. It seems to encourage scan-reading - large passages describe dry swathes of history, with the joke being how irrelevant they are. And its most successful features spark off in all sorts of unexpected directions: a very funny parody of the vanity publishing industry, a playful section about the the (then-new) concept of the word processor, an atmosphere of post-war Italian political melancholy, vague hints of the supernatural peeking around the corners...<br />
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<b>Benighted - J.B. Priestley</b><br />
My god this is an amazing book, and somehow almost completely forgotten. If you take anything from my pointless quest to record everything I read this year, it's that you should hunt this down. The plot is generic - travellers driving through a rainstorm are unable to continue, and take refuge in an old, dark house. But the execution is perfect: unnerving, surprisingly compassionate, and with the best descriptions of weather you can get outside of Dickens. The structure may be pulpy, but its depiction of flawed, decent people, haunted by their pasts and grasping for solace in the darkness, is properly moving. The only Priestley I knew was An Inspector Calls. This is far beyond that.<br />
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<b>The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson</b><br />
After Benighted, I felt the need to see if I had any other haunted house stuff lying about - and this, too, was superb. Like Benighted, the plot is generic: an academic pays some young, potentially psychic volunteers to stay in a notoriously haunted mansion for a month. But what follows is extremely unnerving - Jackson is very good at creating a threatening environment - subtly diseased architecture and decor, full of malicious intent. She's also excellent at creating affectionate camaraderie between her characters and then subjecting them to slow, paranoid degradation: it's a book that weaponises its own warmth.<br />
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<b>Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie</b><br />
Two British Muslim sisters, living with the knowledge that their father was a Jihadi and their brother has followed in his footsteps. This sort of plainly told realism is (as you can probably tell by now) a fair way out of my wheelhouse, and I struggled a bit with the prosaic domesticity of the book's earliest sections (very much my fault not the novel's). But the thing that shone through was how extraordinarily empathetic it was towards everyone the narrative touches, no matter how appalling their decisions or actions have been.<br />
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<b>Everything Under - Daisy Johnson</b><br />
So many of the canonical Oxford Novels follow children, or childlike characters, leaving mundane worlds, and entering magical otherworlds with limited access points, isolated from their previous lives, learning the rules and languages of their new environments and facing risks they couldn't previously imagine. Think of Lewis, Pullman, Tolkein, Carroll. Something that seems under-discussed about Everything Under is the way that it's a dark mirror to this sort of story. It's an Oxford novel - the city is named, but its urban centre is ghostly, barely described. Far more vivid is the otherworld that surrounds it - the rotting, isolated canals, infected by prophecies, monsters and violence, and shunning the rules that bind the rest of civilisation together. And much of the plot revolves around a child who escapes mundanity and enters this magical otherworld, becoming bound by the rules of myth. Here, though, the otherworld is shallow, damaging, and only half remembered. The monsters might not even be real, and the grand demands of myth may be nothing more than empty acts of violence. This is a shadowy novel, full of unreliable memories and shifting identities. It's a book where people use stories to structure lives which won't ever make easy sense.<br />
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<b>Flights - Olga Tokarczuk</b><br />
A Polish novel - if novel is the right word. Flights is a series of vignettes: short stories, philosophical musings, historical anecdotes, scraps of writing that glide between all three categories, delighting in blurring the boundary between fact and fiction. The vignettes circle two themes: travel, and anatomy - especially when anatomy involves preserving and examining human remains. It is all beautifully written - even when it's hard to pull the threads together, or work out what the author is trying to achieve, you can bask in the glow of the language. The lack of a clear throughline and the profusion of ideas and images mean that even though I finished the book relatively recently, I don't have a clear memory of the whole thing. But images and conversations I've encountered in everday life keep striking up memories of scenes from the book with unusual frequency.<br />
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<b>Senlin Ascends - Josiah Bancroft</b><br />
Pulp, and perfectly serviceable pulp. A mild-mannered school teacher goes on his honeymoon to the Tower of Babel (linked only to the mythical tower only in that it is tall, and full of sinful people). He loses his wife in the crowds, and must climb through the various dangerous civilizations that live in the tower in order to find her, having picaresque adventures along the way. It's the first book in a trilogy, so don't expect an ending. And although I had moderate amounts of fun, I probably won't be going to the sequels. There's an enjoyable aesthetic - a sort of Edwardian steampunk in a vast, ancient structure in the desert. The characters are charming and the action scenes are efficient. But despite all the surface flash, it felt rather plodding - you could feel the narrative machinery heaving itself into place before each plot turn or setpiece.<br />
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<b>A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride</b><br />
Well this is upsetting and intense. It's also very, very good. It's about a girl growing up in Ireland with a brain-damaged brother, an unstable mother and a predatory uncle. It's written in fragmented, half-formed, ungrammatical sentences: this is proper modernist stream-of-consciousness stuff, and unapologetically difficult to parse. Once you tune into its wavelength, though, all this smashed-up language pulls you extremely close to the narrator's self-destructive psychology. For an experimental novel, it's surprisingly plotty - structurally, there's a straightforward (if unflinchingly emotionally brutal) book in here.<br />
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<b>Roadside Picnic - Boris and Arkady Strugatsky</b><br />
Russian science fiction novel: the earth has been subject to a mysterious alien visitation, leaving a number of dangerous areas known as "zones" where the laws of nature no longer apply. Governments attempt to seal these zones off, studying and exploiting them, but mercenaries sneak in, brave the dangers, and steal alien artefacts for a thriving black market. Really, this seems more important for the stuff it influenced than for itself: the 1979 film adaptation, Stalker, is a much more sophisticated work, and I doubt Vandermeer's Annihilation could exist without Roadside Picnic's surreal, unknowable, somehow *conscious* wilderness. There are times when this book feels inert, and no more than functionally written. But there's a rich soup of sinister, cynical ideas in here. I also really like the title - it's evocative out of context, and frightening when explained.<br />
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<b>The Death of King Arthur - Simon Armitage</b><br />
A book-length poem from around 1400, translated into modern english. And if you want exciting descriptions of medieval battles, you're in luck: much of the book feels like a catalogue of all the cool ways you can describe someone hitting someone else with a sword. The book's main pleasure is its kinetic bloodshed: this is Arthur as a pragmatic general - we're told he's a good king, but most of what we see is him arriving in other countries and smashing them up. It's a version of the story without any of the courtly romance, folktale structures, or weird medieval Christianity that gets associated with Arthuriana, and instead replaces them with realpolitik and military tactics. There's no real interest in myth or psychology here, although Arthur's final farewell to Guinevere is poignant and understated, and there are some pleasantly grotesque dream scenes. I enjoyed it, but found it best to read in ten page bursts. Much more than that and the endless combat could become soporific and I would lose my ability to feel the impact and excitement of the language.<br />
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<b>White is for Witching - Helen Oyeyemi</b><br />
Another haunted house - this time a boarding house in Dover, where strange, slippery things are happening. The first two thirds of the book are setup - bouncing between various points of view, slowly constructing its characters, the plotting vague and dreamlike. For most of the book, it's ambiguous whether genuinely supernatural events are occurring, or if we're watching the messy perceptions of disordered minds (almost all of the characters are grieving, two of them have been diagnosed with perception-altering mental illnesses, another spends much of the time stoned). It's comfortably readable, and magnificently well written, but it feels a little like its caught in a holding pattern. But then the final third of the novel snaps into focus - the pace rockets, the threats close in and become frightening, characters start bouncing against each other in charged, unexpected ways. It also reveals itself as an urgently political book - a smart, unsettling allegory, sharpening and repurposing the tropes of the English ghost story.<br />
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<b>Lost Horizon - James Hilton</b><br />
Popular fiction from 1933, and the novel that invented the idea of Shangri-La. A group of mismatched Westerners have their plane hijacked, and are brought to an isolated monastery in the Himalayan mountains. It's a fascinating reflection of its historical moment, suffused by a sort of weary, pre-apocalyptic melancholy: the hangover from the first world war, the shadow of another war approaching, the fading of the British Empire. And yes, given that it is a book by a comfortably well-off white british author writing in the 1930s about English imperial functionaries in Asia, its politics have aged badly. It also feels brief to the point of inconsequentiality - the ideas and narrative vanishing at the exact point they arrived. But it's a strangely effective book: an eerie vision of someone else's idea of utopia, a book about the transitory nature of peace and the inevitability of loss.<br />
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<b>Dark Entries - Robert Aickman</b><br />
A collection of six ghost stories. Or is it? Aickman is undeniably working within the tradition of the ghost story - vaguely fusty middle-class English people stumbling outside the confines of their predictable, material lives and being confronted with horrifying supernatural dangers. But the things they encounter are always much stranger, much harder to explain than mere ghosts. The reader always feels as if they have enough clues to unlock what the stories mean, what the characters are experiencing, but the answers are always *just* out of reach. Aickman is a master of the accumulation of detail - before the true horrors break out, slight elements (the size of the furniture, the pattern in a carpet, an incongruous photograph) begin to hint at (explain?) the oddness that follows. He's also an astute psychologist - even as the stories lurch into nightmare, the characters remain grounded and understandable. This is the third Aickman collection that I've read - they're all great, but I enjoyed this one the most. Not necessarily because it's the best - possibly because the sheer oddness of his work requires some getting used to. By now I'm happily speaking his language.<br />
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<b>A Burglar's Guide to the City - Geoff Manaugh</b><br />
Non-fiction about architecture, city planning, and burglary. It's full of amazing anecdotes: it turns out that absurd, movie-style heists are a real thing. The central conceit of the book - that studying burglars and the people who work to stop them reveals all sorts of information about how cities work - is an appealing and convincing one. And I was always comfortable when the book went off on eccentric tangents, about communities of lockpicking enthusiasts, or surreal "urban survival" courses given to travelling businessmen by ex-marines. It's an overwritten book - it works extremely hard to make you care about stuff that would already interesting without the flash. But it's enjoyable and informative, and dozens of the stories it tells would make excellent films: I'm very much in favour of seeing a biopic of the rogue 19th Century architect who dressed his gang in elaborate opera costumes and built replica bank vaults in vast warehouses on the New York City Docks in order to practice his Ocean's Eleven-style scores .<br />
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<b>The Hell-Fire Clubs - Evelyn Lord</b><br />
A history of the secretive 18th Century clubs where aristocratic men were rumoured to partake in devil worship and debauchery. As is so often the case, the rumours are more fun than the likely truth: it seems the stories of satanism and dark rituals were overplayed - the clubs were much more of an excuse for the privileged classes to indulge in drink, sex, and fancy dress behind closed doors. Which does make the book a slightly repetitive account of wealthy people behaving predictably badly. But it's well-written, goes down smoothly, and does provide a clear window into a time I know very litte about.<br />
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<b>The first fourteen of the "Penguin Moderns" series</b><br />
Penguin released a set of 50 miniature books this year (each a6 sized and only around 60 pages along) showcasing various writers from its Modern Classics range. In each, you will maybe get a few short stories, or some poems, or some essays. I bought the full set and have been slowly working my way through them. It's been great - chances to see stuff from people I hadn't read before: Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail is astoundingly good, and this has been the first time I've read any Jean Rhys, Dorothy Parker or Danilo Kis, all of whom I'm sure I'll go back to. There's also interesting selections from writers I was more familiar with (Orwell, Lem, a fascinatingly odd Du Maurier story). Obviously I didn't enjoy everything: this was further confirmation that I don't like Kafka, and I don't understand at all what Gertrude Stein was doing in the extract from Tender Buttons. But the books are always brief enough to be interesting before they disappear. The highlight so far was the Ralph Ellison story "In a Strange Country", in which a black american soldier stationed in the UK, encounters a welsh voice choir. It's probably the best piece of writing about folk music I've ever seen - profound and moving and beautiful, and deeply interested in all the knotty ways that music interacts with nation and community.<br />
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<b>Human Acts - Han Kang</b><br />
Han Kang's The Vegetarian is one of the best books I've read in the last five years: a nasty, upsetting, beautiful and ruthlessly efficient novel. Human Acts isn't in the same league, but it's successful in achieving its own names. It's about the Gwangju Uprising, a civilian massacre that occurred in South Korea in 1980. Each of its chapters focuses on a different victim of the massacre: survivors, demonstrators tortured by the government, or in one case the souls of the dead. It's pretty unrelenting: as it flickers between the day of the massacre and its aftermath in years and decades that follow, it overflows with physical and psychological pain, and fixes an unblinking eye on mountains of decaying corpses. Some sections work better than others, but as a memorial to a tradedy, or a journalistic record of an atrocity, this is a very effective novel.<br />
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<b>The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie</b><br />
A quick note that there's some stuff here that you might consider spoilers - and this is an *extremely* spoilable book. I'm not going to explicitly give away the ending, but I'll say some things that makes the ending easier to guess. Anyway - given that I'm marrying a Poirot obsessive next year, I thought it was a good idea to try Christie out. And I can see the appeal: she's got the knack that most decent pulp writers have for making stock characters vivid. She can generate tension when she wants to, and propels her plot at speed. Her dialogue is sharp and smart - she's particularly good at characters being rude to each other. But for most of its length, this book doing something I fundamentally don't care about: it's a game as much as a novel, carefully laying out its clues and witness statements. It provides maps of locations, or tables of everyone's stated alibis. The whole novel is a well oiled logic puzzle that asks the reader to play along. This isn't an excercise I really enjoy engaging in: to me it feels rather dry and mechanical, though I can see why other readers find it fun. And yet - the last thirty pages are *superbly* managed. It's nice to experience a famously great twist without it being spoiled in advance. I'm not into the procedural drudgework of detection, but I'm *extremely* into the rug being pulled and discovering that I'm reading a piece of devious and formally playful metafiction, especially given that the book has been sneakily hinting at this all along.<br />
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<b>The Book of Evidence - John Banville</b><br />
A wealthy, middle-aged man who senselessly murdered a woman during a botched and underrmotivated robbery looks back over the previous few months of his life from the perspective of his prison cell. He's endlessly self-obsessed, self-justifying and self-pitying, at once attempting to explain his actions and claim a deep, unconvicing guilt for them. It's a dense novel - every page is thick with striking turns of phrase, surprising word choices, precise images and odd, angular thoughts. Sometimes this is invigorating, sometimes it's exhausting - especially given that the narrator is deliberately bad (if fascinating) company. It reminded me most of the bits of Nabokov I'd read - of the hyperverbal, deeply untrustworthy narrators of Pale Fire and Lolita.<br />
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<b>Snow White - Donald Barthelme</b><br />
Snow White lives with seven men who spend their days washing the walls of their house and looking after dubious vats of chinese baby food. She used to sleep with them, it seems, but now she ignores them, knowing that psychologically and narratively she is missing a prince. This prince, Paul, mostly just sits in his bath and considers whether he should become a monk. Later, he builds a vast surveillance complex in a bunker outside Snow White's house. It seems to be wired up to some dogs. So yes, this is absurd 1960s postmodernism, riffing on the fairy tale (or, more often, the disney film) like a wild electric jazz solo. If you ignore the fact that it barely makes sense, and appreciate its non-sequiturs, formal playfulness and stupid jokes, it's quite good fun. A minor work, though, from Barthelme, whose similarly absurd novel The King is one of the great works of 20th Century Arthuriana, and whose short story "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" is one of the smartest, funniest, and nastiest things I've ever read about the psychology of being in a close-knit group of friends.<br />
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<b>The Cricket on the Hearth - Charles Dickens</b><br />
The third of Dickens’ annual Christmas Books, and there’s a bunch of reasons why it’s fairly obscure: it’s full of all the elements that have aged worst about his writing - an excess of sentimentality and melodrama, occasional tweeness, and irritatingly perfect young women. But weak Dickens is still Dickens: there are still magnificent flights of rhetoric, excellent jokes, a thunderously evocative sense of place, and precisely drawn grotesques. If nothing else, it’s a good reminder that there’s a load of his big, important books that I still haven’t read.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-84227745323474325692018-06-06T03:06:00.000-07:002018-06-06T03:06:04.348-07:00Everything I Saw at All Points East Presents<u><b>Saturday</b></u><br />
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<b>Cavetown</b><br />
Solo singer songwriter with a guitar and a loop pedal. He looked so young that it seems cruel to be rude about him. And he was fine! But if he was on at an open-mic night, you probably wouldn't remember him the next morning.<br />
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<b>The Districts</b><br />
Crunchy, self-serious indie rock. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with crunchy, self-serious indie-rock, but you need some sort of lyrical or melodic spark in order to stand out. I only stuck around for the first three songs.<br />
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<b>Cosmo Sheldrake</b><br />
Fantastic. Whimsical, sample-heavy mad-scientist stuff, it sounds like Alt-J when Alt-J are at their best. In between songs we are informed that some of the beats are made from US-navy recordings of fish, or that some of the melody lines are made of pitch-modulated birdsong.<br />
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<b>Rostam</b><br />
Odd pop from a former member of Vampire Weekend. Lovely melodies, charismatic vocals, and the string quartet backing him are great, especially when one song blossoms into a series of country-style fiddle solos. It's a bit of a shame that a lot of this stuff is clearly tricky to arrange live: for a fair proportion of the gig he's singing to a backing tape.<br />
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<b>This is the Kit</b><br />
Woozy and detailed and layered and hypnotic. I like This is the Kit a lot, but they seemed to be playing too quietly to be heard properly under the conversation of the crowd.<br />
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<b>Public Service Broadcasting</b><br />
An absolute party. There are so many elements that should feel like gimmicks: the matching corduroy suits, the sudden appearance of a brass section or a dancing astronaut, the fact that all their songs are are built around samples from historical archives. But everything fuses together into a sustained and unrepentantly nerdy euphoria.<br />
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<b>Cat Power</b><br />
I didn't get this at all. She's clearly got a loyal fanbase, but to me this felt lethargic, tuneless and under-arranged.<br />
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<b>Future Islands</b><br />
80s-flavoured sythpop with the most barking possible frontman. While the rest of the band are crafting something clean and sparkling and finely-calibrated, Samuel T Herring is howling and sweating and dancing, pounding his chest and pleading to the audience with wild-eyed desparation. It's so incongruous that it's tricky to take seriously: there's a real emotional openness here, but it's so eccentric that it's hard to give in to that emotional openness without some ironic distance. At the very least, they're a fun curiosity, but you can see the shape of something much more complicated under the surface.<br />
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<b>The War on Drugs</b><br />
A very nice surprise. I've never really got on with their albums, but they're a different proposition live: it's much clearer that they are never about songs for the sake of songs: they're about songs for the sake of endless rolling guitar solos, locked into place by perfectly architectured keyboard parts. This music should be self-indulgent, but it's too well-crafted and too generously accessible for that. Really excellent.<br />
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<b>The National</b><br />
I love The National with an embarassing and obsessive intensity. We were in a bad bit of the crowd, but by the time they were following I Need My Girl with Slow Show, I'd tuned out all distractions. It was a warm and rich and poised gig - I've seen them on nights where they rock out a bit more, but they were playing to their strengths here.<br />
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<u><b>Sunday</b></u><br />
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<b>Jade Bird</b><br />
Country music! Surprisingly British singer, and somewhere in the middle of the scale between poppy and folky. In theory this could have been dull, but the band was exremely tight. The ideal accompaninent to cold beer and sunlight.<br />
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<b>Yak</b><br />
Punk band plus two saxophones. A wall of ridiculous noise. And a lot of fun, too, especially when they launch into an unexpected and explosive cover of "He's got the Whole World in his Hands".<br />
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<b>Bo Ningen</b><br />
The second in a quartet of Very Loud Bands we saw on Sunday afternoon. This was Japanese noise rock. Bracing and theatrical, particular highlights included a guitarist whirling his instrument around his head like a lasso, or frontman half-singing, half-rapping at speed, the words drenched in reverb.<br />
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<b>Shame</b><br />
Young and shouty London post-punks, all scrappy and grubby, this took a while to win me over. But there was a lot of charisma there: even if this is never going to be My Sort of Thing, it was hard not to be impressed by the energy on display, especially the frontman's sneering requests that the crowd stop taking it all so seriously.<br />
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<b>Black Foxxes</b><br />
My goodness this was loud. In the festival's only indoor venue, boiling hot, with the drums ricocheting off the wall. They were a lot of fun: bit accessible rock melodies sharpened into something harsher by sheer volume and intensity of attack. The highlight was when an unexpected trumpeter arrived, and proceeded to play a long, jazzy, piercingly distorted solo.<br />
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<b>Courtney Barnett</b><br />
This gig performed some strange magic: before I saw it, I didn't much like her new album; after I saw it, the album was suddenly great. Barnett is one of the best songwriters I saw over the weekend (possibly *the* best songwriter?) but her live show is so lightly and unfussily performed that you can miss how great it is - all that wit and rawness and energy and superb guitar playing delivered with a smile and a shrug.<br />
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<b>Patti Smith</b><br />
There were a bunch of odd decisions here. Patti Smith opened by performing a lengthy excerpt from Allen Ginsberg's Howl, read several of her lyrics from a battered ring-binder, told her band to stop and restart the ending of a song because it hadn't gone how she wanted to, and played another song that consisted of a long poem about Australian environmentalism and Aboriginal rights before morphing into a cover of terrible 80s pop-rock song Beds are Burning. But the oddest thing: all of this was *great*. Smith's voice is still astonishing, her band are tight and crunchy, and she has a blinding, shambolic, shamanic charisma that means she can get away with anything.<br />
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<b>Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds</b><br />
Firstly, I have enormous respect to the couple in front of me who brought their eight-year-old daughter to a Nick Cave gig (she seemed to be enjoying it). Secondly, in a moment of surreal euphoria, Cave actually brought Kylie Minogue on stage for Where the Wild Roses Grow. Later he brought about 200 audience members on stage with him for the obscene majesty of Stagger Lee. Thirdly, there was a surprising amount of terrifyingly intense Xylophone. Cave has perfected his frontier gothic horror: his sprawling band are able to crystallize their pomp into elegance and beauty (Into Your Arms was really bloody good) or devolve into furious chaos (From Her to Eternity was <i>really</i> bloody good). I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting anything as good as this.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-89168949619363836102018-01-19T09:47:00.002-08:002018-01-19T09:47:51.327-08:00The Last Jedi is More than a MachineThe final scene of The Last Jedi made me cry a bit. And at first I put this down to attending a midnight showing, immediately after my office Christmas party, and therefore being more susceptible to its manipulations than I otherwise would have been. But then I saw it again a few weeks later, and it happened again, which was a surprise. And it took me a while to work out why.<br />
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Every new Star Wars film needs to answer the same question: what makes something Star Wars? Why is this film different from any of the other generic space fantasies that followed in Star Wars' wake?<br />
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The Force Awakens tried to reverse-engineer the experience of watching a Star Wars film. It dug up familiar structures, familiar scenes, motifs in architecture, costume and music. It assumed (not necessarily incorrectly) that - as long as you got your maths right - Star Wars was a product, and it could be mass-produced. It worked. It was a fun time.<br />
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While The Force Awakens saw Star Wars as a machine for producing emotions, Rogue One pretended that Star Wars was a real place: that its mythic armies of light and darkness were functional organisations, that its planets had geographies, that its thin archetypal characters had histories and roots. It knew that its audience liked its world, and it let them spend time there. It worked. It was a fun time.<br />
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The Last Jedi plays a much more interesting, much more complicated game. While The Force Awakens and Rogue One throw all their energy into <i>inhabiting</i> Star Wars, <i>becoming</i> Star Wars, The Last Jedi strains against the formal leash. It's not trying to work out how to mimic the pop cinema of 70s and 80s. It's asking a slightly different set of questions: what are we allowed to do when we rebuild these old films? What does it feel like when we do it? And why are we doing all of this in the first place?<br />
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It is not subtle about this. In the world of the film, characters struggle with the weight of the generation before them - should they become one with it? Fight against it? Tear it down and create something new? It's the same question as the one faced by the filmmaker. And it's the same question faced by the audience - or at least the audience with a prior emotional link to these films: how much of the Star Wars' history should we keep?<br />
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Two characters embody this tension. Rey doesn't have a history - she comes from "nowhere", she doesn't have the ancestry or roots that Star Wars characters tend to have. But she wants them - she wants to be part of the history of the world she lives in - and therefore the history of the film franchise she appears in. See, for instance, her reverence towards Luke Skywalker. And - more importantly - see the way that she attempts to recreate the plots of previous Star Wars films; like Luke, she hunts down a Jedi teacher on a distant planet; like Luke she goes alone to the enemy stronghold to try to convert a villain to the light. Her desire to be part of the in-universe legacy of Star Wars sees her re-enacting scenes and structures from previous Star Wars films.<br />
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And of course, it doesn't work. She fails to convert Kylo Ren, and is instead confronted by her own rootlessness. The Force Awakens showed that merely rewriting and reworking old Star Wars plots simply emphasises the weaknesses of the reconstruction: Rey's narrative in The Last Jedi is a personification of this journey.<br />
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Kylo Ren, meanwhile, is on the opposite path. While Rey lacks a history and desperately wants one, Kylo Ren (the son of Han and Leia, and former pupil of Luke) is drenched in history and desperately wants to be rid of it. He is, in many ways, the symbol of a filmmaker straightjacketed by the conventions of making a film like this, pushing against the format imposed upon him by history. And Kylo Ren does break the format: he quite literally kills the main villain too early, Snoke's death coming about a film and a half before tradition demands. Just as Rey tries to re-enact previous films, Kylo Ren pushes against them, his in-universe straining becoming an out-of-universe formal shattering.<br />
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And it doesn't work for him, any more than Rey's strategy works for Rey. His plans fail, but more than that, he is cast into an unshakeably familiar role. While for most of the film he has been a confused, complicated, broken man, by the end is nothing more or less than the archetypal Star Wars villain, black-clad with a red lightsaber, an oppressive army at his back, facing down a Jedi Knight. Fighting against the conventions of a Star Wars film have only locked him into them further.<br />
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We have, then, a film that seems to be grappling with its own cinematic history and failing to come to any clear decision about what to do with it. Which is where we come to its final scene.<br />
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In this scene the slave children of Canto Bight are watching one of their number - a boy who is retelling a story using a small doll of Luke Skywalker. The slavemaster enters, and forces the boy to sweep the yard. We see the boy walk outside, and subtly - almost unconsciously - use the force to pick up a broom. The boy stands against the night sky, his shadow resembling that of a Jedi Knight holding a Lightsaber.<br />
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Now, there's been a fair bit of discussion about what this means, and why the film ends here. The previous scene had just shown the Resistance escaping Crait on the Millennium Falcon, and would have been a cleaner narrative jumping-off point. Most of the discussions of the slave scene justify its incusion in terms of its narrative impact: we're seeing the future of the Resistance, or we're seeing the future of the force. Some readings are clunkily literal, assuming for instance that the specific children shown here will be important in a future Star Wars film, as if films never showed you anything that wasn't directly relevant to their plots. But what's actually happening here is much simpler.<br />
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In this scene, we are watching as kids play with Star Wars action figures, and pretend to be Jedi.<br />
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All that struggle, all that angst, all that weight of expectations collapses into this image. At this final point, The Last Jedi turns arounds and shows us that Star Wars films have always been films for children, powered on childish imagination: these are playful films, and they are films of archetypes at play.<br />
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The Force Awakens tried to build a Star Wars machine, and Rogue One tried to live in a Star Wars world, but after all its debate, The Last Jedi finds another route. As Rey lifts the Rocks, as Luke faces down Kylo Ren, as Finn announces that he is "Rebel Scum" and as the Millennium Falcon stands as a symbol of hope, the film slides into myth. Star Wars has been in our culture for more than forty years: you don't have to buy into its methods to see how deeply it has buried itself under the skin. By the time the film finishes, it has dealt with its own anxieties and reanimated its basic, foundational archetypes.<br />
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We are realists. We know that Star Wars is a corporate product. We know it is cheap pulp. And The Last Jedi visibly strains to work out if Star Wars can be anything else. At the end, it decides that Just Being Star Wars is enough - because it demonstrates what Star Wars <i>is</i>. Not just a product, not just a series of films, but a joyous cultural well, powered by decades of play, and allowing a space for that play to continue. Star Wars doesn't need to kill its past, nor does it need to re-enact it. It just needs to provide a space where all its old archetypes can fly free.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-36184706094192723892017-11-02T15:06:00.000-07:002017-11-03T02:55:49.241-07:00SPIEL 2017 - impressionsSPIEL, in Essen, Germany, is incredibly weird. It’s a four day festival of boardgames, which gets 180 000 visitors each year, and is spread out across a seemingly endless series of convention halls. It’s like visiting an alternate universe, where boardgaming is the most popular sport in the world: snaking queues to get boxes signed by designers, crowds pushed against tables displaying new releases, huge advertising banners for niche companies, a bus branded with the logo for Settlers of Catan, hotel bars full until late at night with people playing the games they acquired during the day.<br />
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It’s a trade fair, really. An enormous shop. I went with my dad and my brother, and we spent most of our time moving from stall to stall, getting demonstrations of whatever the publishers and designers were selling. By the end of the weekend, I’d played 35 games that were new to me. These were mostly shortened versions of full games (the publishers want to demonstrate to as many people as possible; we wanted to try as many different new things as we could), so don’t take these as final reviews. But this should give you a good idea of what they felt like.<br />
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<b><u>Wednesday</u></b><br />
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<b>Tiny Epic Quest</b><br />
We didn’t play this one at the convention - we played my dad’s copy at the hotel after arriving on Wednesday night. There’s stuff to like here - sharp art direction that’s as close as it can be to a Legend of Zelda theme without getting lawyers involved, and tiny choking-hazard equipment that hooks charmingly onto your player figures. You send your three adventurers across the map to do quests, try to choose more efficiently than the other players, and roll dice to see how dangerous your actions were. But it doesn’t really work. There’s a lot of downtime, and very few points where you get to make interesting decisions. I picked one strategy at the beginning of the game, repeated it every turn, and got a respectable score while barely having to think. I hear it’s better with two players.<br />
<br />
<b><u>Thursday</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
<b>Transatlantic</b><br />
The first game we played at the convention, and a solidly good place to start. You play shipping magnates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, buying ships, managing your coal resources, and establishing trading posts. I found the theme a bit dull, but there’s a lot of geeky historical detail for people who are into it (although my dad was disappointed to note that the Glasgow docks where my great-grandfather worked as a toolmaker were absent from the game). The mechanics are knotty and counterintuitive, but in ways that reveal all sorts of interesting strategies once you get a handle on them. Yes, it’s a bit dry, but in the same way that a dry white wine is dry. Very sophisticated and adult.<br />
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<b>Flipships</b><br />
You know that pub game where you flip beermats into the air and catch them? This is that, but grafted onto a turn-based version of Space Invaders. I promise it makes more sense if you see it in action. It’s probably more fun if you’re at all competent at dextrously flipping stuff. I was terrible at it, my family was terrible at it, the demonstrators were terrible at it, and everyone else I saw having a go was terrible at it. So the cardboard alien fleet advanced inexorably towards the earth’s surface.<br />
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<b>Sentient</b><br />
This was the good stuff. A tight, nasty puzzle: you roll five dice and place them on your board. Then you select cards to place between the dice. The cards will only score points in certain conditions: maybe the die on its right has to be higher than the die on its left, maybe both of the dice next to the card need to show the number 3, maybe when you add up the numbers on both dice next to the card, the sum has to be lower than five. But each card you put down changes the numbers on the dice next to it, everyone is competing for the same cards, and certain cards will score your player more points. It’s horrible, in the best way: you’re trying to build a machine that is constantly changing around you. The game is massively overpriced (£50 for a small box) but if you like this kind of thing, there’s nothing better.<br />
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<b>Ex Libris</b><br />
It’s hard to say whether this was good (the demo we had of it was rather rushed) but the concept is superb. You’re at a magic school, trying to create the best library: you get points for keeping it in alphabetical order, making sure the shelves are stable, and collecting sets of the same subject area. The card art, showing shelves of imaginary books, is beautifully done: witty and mechanically clear. We were a bit concerned that the mechanics didn’t look too exciting - it’s standard worker placement stuff - but maybe they’d spark better in a longer or more thorough demo.<br />
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<b>Agra</b><br />
Oh god this monster. The components are lavish: a board larger than most tables displaying a ludicrously detailed Arabian city; a set of cardboard steps full of complex challenges; a large wooden elephant. It’s a trading game - you build up from raw materials to expensive goods. But there are so many moving parts here: actions contingent on other actions, mechanics that interlock mysteriously with other mechanics, sections of the board cluttered with cryptic iconography, victory conditions that seemed strange and distant and unachievable. It’s hard work, and I don’t necessarily mind hard work in my boardgames, but something like this is never going to shine unless you’re willing to put the hours in, and there’s no time for that at Spiel. Mostly I was frightened I’d embarrass myself.<br />
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<b>Justice League</b><br />
The best possible palate-cleanser after Agra, this is just dumb dice-chucking fun. The art looks cheap and the components are flimsy, but this is a game about superheroes fighting superheroes where *every* character, including henchmen, can run so hard at a building that they punch a hole in the wall, and if too many holes get punched into the wall, the building collapses. Attacks send enemies flying across the map, often into other enemies, and Batman can use his grappling hook to fling his allies out of danger and his opponents into it. There’s nothing smart about this, but it understands its sources and runs with it.<br />
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<b>Okanagan: Valley of the Lakes</b><br />
A tile-laying game about farming and fishing in the Canadian wilderness. It’s got an appealing cartoon art style, but I didn’t enjoy it much - the rules aren’t complicated enough to give you many options, but are fussy enough to make it difficult to get hold of the (very specific) resources you need to score points. Maybe practice would make it a smoother ride, but I found it pretty frustrating, desperately searching for the cards which would give me the exact fish I was after. Carcassonne is very similar in style, but lets you do much more with far fewer rules.<br />
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<b>Meeple Circus</b><br />
A delight. A family game about stacking tiny pieces of wood, it’s not just a test of your dexterity, it’s a test of your ability to know your limitations, or work out creative ways of solving the puzzles the game’s cards are giving you. “Hmm”, you might think, “this card says I get points for two figures upside down balancing a plank on their feet. But they get more points if they’re higher in the air, and this figure gets more points if he’s touching an animal. So maybe I could balance them *on top of an elephant*, and solve all three problems at once”. But then everything collapses around you, time is running out, and you realise you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.<br />
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<b>Merlin</b><br />
This is terribly clever: deep and crunchy, full of all sorts of options and goals, but always absolutely clear about what you might want to do and how you might want to achieve it. It’s a shame the board design makes it look like a kids’ game from the 90s, and the brightly coloured dice you throw don’t help with the cheap aesthetic. You roll a handful of dice each round, and choose which order to use them in, giving your piece a limited number of spaces it could potentially step on as it moves clockwise through the Round Table. Each space has different powers, and you’re trying to manage a huge number of different problems: knocking out the traitors on your walls, building castles in the wilderness, completing quests, sending ladies to gain influence with various factions, and so on. The vast number of competing systems and abilities should be a headache, but restricting the ways you can interact with the board solves the problem: every decision you make is interesting, but it’s always between only a few different possibilities.<br />
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<b>Azul</b><br />
My brother had bought a copy of this earlier, based on the hype it was getting. After we played it in the hotel bar that evening, I decided I was going to buy my own copy the next day. It’s difficult to explain how satisfying this is - it’s a completely abstract game about laying tiles in a grid, and its mechanics are difficult to describe without a copy in front of you. But it’s one of those games where every single rule is absolutely watertight and loaded with possibilities. It helps that the tiles you’re playing with are lovely - weighted and smooth and elegantly patterned.<br />
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<b>Alien Artefacts</b><br />
This is one that my dad bought based on its pre-release hype - my dad and my brother were impressed, but it didn’t click with me. It’s a card game where you’re building space empires, buying up and deploying planets, technologies and starships, hopefully in ways that complement each other. Turns are fast, there’s an admirable number of ways to win, and the card design is clean and functional, but despite all this I found it rather flabby. It takes a fair few turns to save up for your planets, tech or ships - you spend several turns essentially watching a loading bar rising. And once you’re locked into a strategy there’s not much need to react to changing circumstances - you just keep going through the motions. I also found that there was hardly ever any interaction between the players - there is a combat mechanic, but it felt too risky to ever engage in. Maybe a more aggressive two-player game might let it shine.<br />
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<b><u>Friday</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
<b>Alexandria - A Library in Cinders</b><br />
A magnificent theme - the library of Alexandria is burning down and you’re running through the collapsing rooms rescuing priceless manuscripts or (in my case) being an evil Roman double agent, burning all the carpets and knocking over the braziers for points. There’s a lot of downtime between your turns, though, and I wasn’t keen on the mechanic which encouraged players to steal actions from each other. I don’t mind boardgames punishing you harshly if they also include ways to avoid or mitigate the punishment: that way, when you’re caught out, it’s your fault, not the game’s. Here, it felt like there was nothing you could do to stop other players screwing you over - it felt random and unfair. Still, when tiles are disappearing around you, fire tokens are spreading, and the library is descending into a chaotic mess, it’s hard to deny that something atmospheric is happening.<br />
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<b>Paperback</b><br />
Astoundingly clever stuff. According to the (really good) card art, this is about writing pulp novels. In practice, this is irrelevant - it’s a deck-building word game where your cards have letters on them. You use these letter cards to spell words from your hand, earning you the money you use to buy cards with higher-earning letters and special powers. It plays fast, and lets you be smart and creative: tactical thinking will get you just as far as your ability to come up with anagrams. My brother has bought this one for my birthday, so I’ll be sinking a lot more time into it in December.<br />
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<b>Flick ‘em Up</b><br />
This is fun - a dexterity-based cowboy shootout game. In order to move one of your wooden cowboys, you flick a small disk, and place your cowboy where it lands. In order to shoot, you flick a smaller wooden disk from your cowboy’s location and try to knock over one of another player’s cowboys. The version we were playing at the convention was massively scaled up from the version you’d actually buy, and felt more like playing a very silly version of pool than a traditional board game. As with all dexterity games, I was terrible at it, but unlike with Flipships, this didn’t stop me from having a good time.<br />
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<b>Loot Island</b><br />
One of the most pleasant surprises of the convention - a tiny, £20 box containing what felt more like a chewy £40+ epic. You’re explorers, competing to get the best treasure. The trouble is that the treasure is cursed, and curses are expensive to remove. From this simple setup comes mechanics that are as weird as they are intuitive, leading to a whole bunch of cut and thrust between the players - smart manoeuvres and bluffs that can knock each other’s plans cleanly out of the way.<br />
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<b>Star Saga</b><br />
A throw-the-dice-and-kill-the-monsters dungeon crawler, and a well-developed example of the form. I was a katana-wielding alien, my dad was a sergeant with a flamethrower, my brother was a flying hacker-robot, and together we bounced around a spaceship smashing up enemies. It prioritises big silly fun over tactical intricacy, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and the miniatures are detailed and well made. Games like this are always expensive, though, and with a £70 price on the box, a thirty minute demo isn't enough for me to say whether this is worth getting over the genre’s more established entries, like Descent or Imperial Assault.<br />
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<b>Edge of Humanity</b><br />
A post-apocalyptic deck-builder that annoyed the hell out of my brother, but which I quite enjoyed. Each turn, you throw away the cards in your hand that you don’t want, in order to bid against other players for the cards that you do want, slowly constructing buildings and recruiting survivors. In theory, you’re gradually cycling out weak cards in favour of powerful ones. In practice, every card is useful, so you’re always trying to change what it is that your deck can do. It’s thematically focused and moves along quickly, but I don’t have masses of experience with the deck-building genre: I don’t know how well it stacks up against the competition.<br />
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<b>Pulsar 2849</b><br />
When I first saw that we were going to play this, my heart sank a bit. The board is a huge mess of lines and symbols, with bits of card sprouting oddly off other bits of card. It’s intimidating: there’s no clear indication of how you’re going to interact with it, and I was worried it was going to be another Agra. I shouldn't have worried. Yes, there’s a lot going on here, but the core is pretty simple - you’re pushing a spaceship around a map, building space stations and mining pulsars for energy. Meanwhile, you’re buying technologies and abilities that give you extra actions and let you generate points more efficiently. Once you realise this, the sprawling mechanics begin to look much more focused: like Merlin, there’s a dice mechanic that means you're always choosing between a limited set of options rather than trying to decide from everything on the board. It’s a complicated game, but one that’s fun and satisfying from the first turn.<br />
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<b>Professor Evil and the Citadel of Time</b><br />
I didn’t see another game with as big a marketing push as this - banners everywhere, and huge numbers of tables with it available to try out. It’s a co-op game about breaking into a mansion, disabling the security, and recovering stolen artefacts from the eponymous professor. The art is lovely and the mechanics are slick - we had a great time with it. But we were either very lucky with our dice rolls, or the game is incredibly easy - we sailed through it on our first run. Our best guess is that this is aimed at the family market. “Pandemic for kids” is a pretty good sales pitch, and if that’s what the game is going for, it succeeds excellently.<br />
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<b>Nmbr 9</b><br />
3D tetris! You need to fit weird, ugly shapes together, each vaguely resembling a number between 1 and 9. These shapes are jagged and strange, and don’t look like they should link up at all. But if you end up with a big enough space with no gaps in it, you can start putting shapes on top of it, and once you have a big enough space on your second level, you can start putting shapes above there too, and so on, until you end up with a strange alien pyramid. Shapes on your first level don’t score points at all, and the higher up a shape is in your stack, the more points it scores. It’s less a game, and more a strange puzzle. I found it enjoyably difficult - I imagine it’s a skill you could get very good at.<br />
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<b>Word Domination</b><br />
It’s not often you get bowled over by how virtuosic a game’s design is on its rules explanation. This is an area-control word game. You’ve got a grid of letter tiles in front of you, and every turn you’re spelling out words from the letters in a grid. Use the same letters in two consecutive rounds and you might be able to lock the letters down, claiming them as your territory. Use letters in other players’ territory and you might be able to steal the territory from them, expanding your reach. It’s sharp and slick - there’s some shared DNA with scrabble here, but while scrabble makes you feel like an idiot, this makes you feel like a damn genius, with words like “salutation”, “molasses” and “glaringly” being thrown around as if it’s no big deal. And all of this without mentioning the magnificent art, or the beautiful 1960s supervillain theming. I bought this one.<br />
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<b>Queendomino</b><br />
Kingdomino was fresh and exciting: an incredibly light, sub-fifteen-minute game that still allowed for a surprising amount of tactical meat. Queendomino adds a bunch of rules, extends the play time, and turns it into something much more conventional. It also makes it a better game - giving you far more options without reducing the speed of play or overcomplicating anything. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine going back to Kingdomino after this. On the other hand, it’s a shame to turn something that felt so innovative into something so solid and unsurprising.<br />
<br />
<b><u>Saturday</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
<b>A Song of Ice and Fire: The Tabletop Miniatures Game</b><br />
I haven’t really played any tabletop miniatures games since a predictable and brief dalliance with Warhammer when I was about twelve, and my familiarity with A Song of Ice and Fire extends to reading the first book, thinking it was pretty good, and never going back to the franchise again after being spoiled on every major plot point. So I’m not in the best place to judge this game. But it felt pretty fun, despite a little of the slow unwieldiness I’ve always (probably unfairly) associated with miniatures gaming. I hear the ruleset is a little oversimplified for people who are really into this sort of thing, but if you want to play with a well-made model of Jaime Lannister heading up a team of swordsmen, this is perfectly functional.<br />
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<b>Magic Maze</b><br />
OK, wow, I’ve never played anything like this before. The theme is absolutely barking - an elf, a dwarf, a wizard and a barbarian have been defeated by a dragon who has stolen their equipment. So they’ve gone, erm, to a shopping centre? To steal new weapons and escape before anyone notices? It only gets madder from there: the game is real-time rather than turn-based, there’s a distressingly limited timer going down, and you have to play in silence. You also don’t control the characters individually - instead, every player can move any character, but only in one direction, so one player can only move the characters north, one can only move the players west, and so on. This means that you’re almost always in a state of panic, as you’ve realised that a character needs to go in a certain direction, but the player in charge of that direction hasn’t noticed yet. It’s as tense as you can get, and euphoric when you win. I bought the game and the (very generous) expansion, as it didn’t look like core box had much longevity. I don’t regret buying the expansion, but I didn’t need to - the core box already has a whole bunch of options for increasing the difficulty or playing different scenarios.<br />
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<b>Exodus Fleet</b><br />
Solid but oddly unmemorable - you’re building spaceships to transport survivors offworld, and trying to gather the scarce resources that will let you do this. Pleasingly, you have to bid to perform almost any action - other players can beat you to it if they have been managing their money better. It’s a nice mechanic, but there’s much more exciting stuff out there. And a lot of the text on the cards is annoyingly small - when selecting which planet or ship to use, you really have to squint.<br />
<br />
<b>War of the Worlds: The Next Wave</b><br />
A deck-building two-player area control game, and a nice surprise. As the Martian fleet was slowly advancing south through the British Isles, frying civilians as it went, I was desperately trying to mobilise the army and set up bunkers, which I could only do by sacrificing my ability to evacuate the civilian population, as small pockets of guerrilla resistance bubbled up against the invaders. The art is great throughout, and it manages to be evocative and mechanically exciting with very few rules.<br />
<br />
<b>Dice Hospital</b><br />
This was superb. You roll a bunch of dice. These are the patients in your hospital. Each turn you can treat them in the various rooms of your hospital, making the numbers on the dice go up. If the number on a die is increased above six, it is cured and discharged But if you don’t treat a die, then its number goes down - if the number drops below zero, the die is dead. Every turn you’re buying better treatment rooms and better doctors, but more and more sick dice are arriving at the hospital. My brother was concerned by the almost total lack of player interaction, but I found the puzzle sufficiently engaging that I didn’t mind staring at my own sheet for the whole game.<br />
<br />
<b>Deception: Murder in Hong Kong</b><br />
As a mash-up of Resistance and Mysterium, this felt like it was aimed directly at me. Someone in the Hong Kong police has done a murder, and the rest of the Hong Kong police are trying to figure out who. In front of each player is four cards showing murder methods, and four cards with pieces of key evidence. Another player is the Forensic Scientist - they are the only person who knows which player did the murder, and which murder weapon and piece of key evidence were found at the crime scene. They answer questions from other cards about the murder: where did it take place? What state was the body in? What time of year was it? Did anyone see anything? Meanwhile the detectives try to work out which weapon and key evidence are relevant to the Forensic Scientist’s answers, while the murderer, playing as a detective, tries to deflect suspicion and blame other people. It’s tense and weird and moody: I bought it, and fully intend to force people to play it at parties.<br />
<br />
<b>The Palace of Mad King Ludwig</b><br />
The players are all collaborating to build a palace: each turn you pick a tile and decide where to place it. It’s always an interesting decision: there’s a huge number of ways to earn points, and you are constantly playing off guaranteed short term gain against potential long term success, and choosing whether it’s better to speed up or hold off the end of the game. The endgame is exciting, as a wall of water accelerates and overwhelms the play area. But the game has a fussiness that’s hard to ignore - after every decision you make, you need to pick up, place and maybe flip several tokens - it’s a lengthy, fiddly process and it’s easy to accidentally miss steps. And the scoring is baroque and confusing, sapping energy after the crescendo of the endgame. I imagine this would make a great app, clearing away the accountancy that gets in the way of its fun decisions.<br />
<br />
<b>Immortals</b><br />
This one has a sharp central hook: there’s a light world and a dark world, and when soldiers die in one they are resurrected in the other, leading to a constantly shifting battlefield and the need to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing on the same spaces in an alternate universe: an original spin on a familiar structure. Mechanically, though, it felt dense and stodgy, especially for a game that is essentially about setting up armies and throwing them at other armies. The man teaching us the rules was very keen to let us know that it gets much faster when the players are used to the round structure, but when big, sprawling area control games like Cry Havoc or Forbidden Stars are so tightly coiled from the beginning, there seems little point wading through the sludge here.<br />
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<b>Lagerstatten</b><br />
Unless we were misunderstanding something fundamental, this was a broken and barely playable mess. My dad bought a copy based on its excellent, unusual box art, and the fact that it was a Japanese import he was unlikely to see again. Yes, the graphic design is great, with a clean minimalism you rarely see in boardgames. But it doesn't work. You play as palaeontologists, digging up dinosaur fossils. If you get a matching set of fossils from the same dinosaur, then you can sell them to collectors, or donate them to museums. But there are so many different types of dinosaur available that you’re pretty unlikely to get even a single matching set before the game ends - you mostly spend your time picking up useless cards and waiting to see if one you want will show up. It doesn’t help that almost every fossil card looks the same, so it’s tricky to tell from a glance which cards are useful to you - you’ll spend a lot of time cross-referencing different decks looking for matches, when better card design would have made this instinctive. And in a three player game, the highest value cards are so deep in the stacks that they’ll barely show up at all. Avoid this.<br />
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<b><u>Sunday</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
<b>Galactic Warlords</b><br />
Sometimes it feels like all the obvious mechanics for area control games have been taken: new designs are no longer focused on modelling warfare, or allowing for tactical creativity, but on expressing warfare in ways no other design has used. This, therefore, is from the newly decadent age of area control. Many of the mechanics are interesting, but none of them are intuitive, plastic figures off on their own mysterious dances between assassinations and conquests. There’s a lot of good stuff here, though, and I imagine taking the time to get your head around it would be worthwhile.<br />
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<b>Destination X</b><br />
A trivia game - every round you’re trying to work out which of six countries a spy has escaped to by asking questions like “What’s the main religion of the country?” and “what is its largest export?” Once you’ve got enough information to select a country, you can catch the spy. It’s slickly done, but not especially enthralling.<br />
<br />
<b><u>Monday</u></b><br />
<b><u><br /></u></b>
<b>Talon</b><br />
The final game we played, back in my brother’s flat after returning from Germany. It’s about as old-school as you can get, a licence-free update of a 1980s star trek game, and its simulations of space battles involve elements barely seen over the last couple of decades: you’re noting damage and weapon charge with marker pens on laminated ships that move across a barely illustrated hex grid. It works nicely, though. Ship movement involves a lot of management of momentum and infuriatingly large turning circles: at first they seem to handle like drunken ice-skaters, with the key to mastery hanging just out of reach. Much of the challenge involves working out exactly the right moment to fire your weapons so that they’ll hit your opponents’ weakest shields, or spinning your own ship so that enemy torpedoes miss your weak spots. The art is functional at best, but there’s a lot of drama expressed in the mechanics.<br />
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Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-63510673015903991342017-06-01T09:14:00.002-07:002017-06-01T09:14:41.592-07:00American DragonsAmerica is too big to understand. Even though it has been mapped and analysed to the most minute level of detail, no mind can take in the size of the sprawl between its cities. We can't block out the signs in our heads that read Here Be Dragons.<br />
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We can understand England, though. We can cross it in less than a day. We know the names of its smallest towns. We can imagine the roads that link them. If there were dragons in the fields, we would have seen them.<br />
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There's no space to add anything impossible in England’s landscapes. Lewis and Tolkien and Pratchett and Peake had to build new Englands in impossible constructed realities. And yes, plenty of Americans have created imaginary worlds too. But they don't have to. There was still room on the map.<br />
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Twin Peaks and Pawnee and Gotham City and Metropolis and Miskatonic University can all be reached by road. Look at the impossible towns in John Crowley's Little Big, or Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs, and they fit comfortably into the landscape. You don't need to work at believing that there's space for them.<br />
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Try to do this in the UK, and you need to persuade people that there's room for something new. Alice's Wonderland, or any of Gaiman's hidden places, have narrow doors that few know how to pass. The towns in The League of Gentlemen, or Hot Fuzz, or The Wicker Man are protected: outsiders are repelled. It's not like America, where you can just walk in.<br />
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(There's an annoying counter-argument to this divide: 19th century realist fiction, which is full of places like Middlemarch and Casterbridge and Barchester and Coketown. Maybe imaginary places are easier to accept on a small map when they aren't impossible. Or maybe England was bigger before cars).<br />
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But in America, we’re happy to accept that there might be dragons. Not kept out of sight. Just in a field we haven’t visited yet.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-79547936569689440852017-04-26T17:12:00.000-07:002017-04-26T17:18:34.523-07:00Ten Notes Towards an Ideal Folk Session1) At least half of the music in the session needs to be stuff that you're interested in playing; at least half of the rest needs to be music you're interested in listening to.<br />
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2) A strong rhythm section is more important than strong tune players.<br />
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3) No one should ever hog the floor without the absolute consent of the room.<br />
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4) Non-musicians in the pub should never make life difficult for musicians. Musicians in the pub should never make life difficult for non-musicians.<br />
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5) Space should be left for surprising things to happen.<br />
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6) There should be enough musicians playing to cover up your mistakes, but not so many as to disguise your successes.<br />
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7) There should be enough room see every other musician directly, to sit down if you want, and to get to and from the bar with ease.<br />
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8) Hostility to musicians with different tastes to you is always a bad look. Never assume that a choice is made out of ignorance.<br />
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9) It is always better when the spectators are dancing.<br />
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10) There should come a point when the room clicks into focus. The point of focus won't come quickly, and will disappear shortly after it arrives. Perhaps a tune will be thundering off with unshackled heroism, perhaps it will have locked itself into a taut and bodily groove, perhaps the room will be brittle with a sort of quietly numinous tension. But there should be the sense from the musicians that they aren't just creating the sound, but <i>riding</i> it - that they are losing themselves in something much older and stranger and bigger than they are. And every preceding moment will have been worth it for this.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-19344086480206945852017-01-27T17:48:00.000-08:002017-01-27T17:48:25.380-08:00The 50 Best Songs of 2016This will probably be the last of my fifty-best lists.<br />
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When I started writing these, five years ago, most of the bands I was into had either broken up or were well past the period of their best material. I was hungry for stuff I could get excited about, and making a list was simply a way of recording everything I’d found while ferreting about various streaming services – a way of reminding myself how much good new stuff was out there.<br />
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But that isn’t really how I’ve been listening to music this year. I’ve had massive re-listens to Bowie and REM’s back-catalogues. I’ve got heavily into the Hamilton soundtrack. I’ve had the first Whiplash-inspired stirrings of a desire to get into Big Band Jazz (Count Basie just might be the answer to all your questions). I’ve seen more live music this year than I ever have before – I’ve seen Springsteen, Regina Spektor, Bellowhead, Frightened Rabbit, plus everyone I saw at Oxford Folk Weekend, Oxjam Oxford and Latitude Festival, plus everyone my band supported. And this year was the first year I’ve seen a West End musical, or a ballet.<br />
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But I haven’t really been hunting down new music. At least not instinctively. Gathering the songs for this list has felt like a duty, sometimes like a slog. And the lack of real new-ness can be seen from the fact that around half of these songs are by artists who have shown up in my lists before, in some form or another.<br />
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But none of this should detract from how excellent the music below is. I can’t think of another year when there has been quite so much great stuff lingering just outside the top fifty (apologies to Al Scorch, GoGo Penguin, Brian Eno, Bellows, Keaton Henson, Steve Mason, Afro Celt Sound System, My Bubba, Mogwai, Wilco, The Gloaming and Emmy The Great – you’re all awesome and none of you quite made it).<br />
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Which I think brings us to the central lesson of all of these lists. There is always, always, so much good music being made. You can have a problem with the way that the music industry is structured now, or with the ways that music is distributed, or the ways that musicians are remunerated, but if you think that there’s a problem with the music being made now, you aren’t looking hard enough.<br />
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Anyway – the usual rules apply (everything had to be released this year, one song per artist, and nothing by anyone I know) and the Spotify playlist is here:<br />
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<a href="https://open.spotify.com/user/mulac/playlist/6vjKiP6yCkhr9Lv2krGQx6">https://open.spotify.com/user/mulac/playlist/6vjKiP6yCkhr9Lv2krGQx6</a><br />
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And on with the songs.<br />
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<b>50. Doing the Right Thing – Daughter</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU5F-DvGLkA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU5F-DvGLkA</a><br />
There isn’t anything by The National on the list this year – usually I find something to crowbar in even if they haven’t released an album – but here’s something that creates the same warm cave of melancholy precision. An oddly detached singer glides across uncomfortable metaphors while waves of guitar wash underneath.<br />
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<b>49. East Virginia Blues – Dawg Yawp</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iddQPY9AW4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iddQPY9AW4</a><br />
A trad country song with – for some reason – a sitar as the lead instrument. There’s so much charm in the sitar break, about two and a half minutes in, when the song briefly flies away from its comfortable harmonies and structures, and owns up to its strangeness.<br />
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<b>48. High / Aflame - Knifeworld</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzXVxOT8an0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzXVxOT8an0</a><br />
A propulsive piece of retro-prog, drawing influence from the rougher, nastier parts of the genre’s more psychedelic edges. There’s a smooth assault of saxophone and bassoon snaking through here too. Dense and mechanical and unrelenting.<br />
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<b>47. Meet me in the Twilight – Seth Lakeman</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAJ98vTJPQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAJ98vTJPQ</a><br />
Every now and then (about twice an album at this point), Lakeman hits on a melody which lunges straight for the heart. Everything that his band and voice are doing is very simple - there’s none of the fiddle pyrotechnics with which he’s most associated here, and there’s a smooth accessibility you won’t often find in traditional folk. But sometimes it’s enough to put the tune on display and let everything else stand back.<br />
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<b>46. Invention – Anderson/Stolt</b><br />
Roine Stolt was the man behind the Flower Kings, a band who pastiched 70s progressive rock with admirable accuracy, but never had tight-enough structures, strong enough melodies, or good enough vocals to pull it off. Jon Anderson was lead singer with Yes on every Yes album worth caring about, but it has been years since he’s been able to access the kind of production his writing or voice deserved. Stolt solves Anderson’s problem just as Anderson solves Stolt’s. We get a swirling ten minutes of unironic hippyish positivity, with all the dense intricacy we could ask for.<br />
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<b>45. Towerblock – Frost*</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXCZis5qb9s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXCZis5qb9s</a><br />
Frost* is the third and final retro prog band to be hanging around at the lower reaches of the top fifty, this one headed by a man who used to write songs for Atomic Kitten. Eventually it degenerates into what sounds like broken, polyrhythmic dubstep featuring Rick Wakeman. If the sound of that makes you want to run a mile, then fair enough, but you’re missing one of the weirdest parties you’ve ever been invited to.<br />
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<b>44. Calendar Boys – John McCusker</b> [not on Spotify]<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UlvQR5k0FY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UlvQR5k0FY</a><br />
McCusker is obviously a magnificent fiddle player, but perhaps more significantly he’s a phenomenal writer of folk tunes - it’s incredibly hard not to sound soulful when playing one of his compositions. They dive down onto unexpected notes, or hop across unexpected syncopations, but never sound less than a beautiful, hummable whole. Bonus extra - the second tune here is Joe’s Tuxedo, one the finest jigs ever written.<br />
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<b>43. Sunset Over Manaan – ATTLAS</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYjFTJyLuTc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYjFTJyLuTc</a><br />
From an album of electronica inspired by (and sampling various sound effects and dialogue from) Star Wars. A lot of it is as terrible as you’d expect, but occasionally you’ll get something like this - something that nails the romance of Star Wars - the deep longing and nostalgia that lets people - people like me - take space wizards and space pirates seriously, for at least as long as the illusion holds.<br />
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<b>42. In Waves – Slow Club</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiU_8TjX_dw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiU_8TjX_dw</a><br />
As you can probably tell from the content of these lists, the music I’m drawn towards is usually flashy, self-conscious, deliberately seeking your attention. Sometimes, though, good songwriting cuts through. There’s a sober grace here, as a clean vocal melody glides across gentle feathering of guitars. There are also more tight hooks here than you’d notice on a first listen, the motors behind the charm and the poise.<br />
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<b>41. Rosemary – Brian Fallon</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2RVttubRs4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2RVttubRs4</a><br />
I think I’ve had a habit of underrating Brian Fallon. Formerly lead singer of The Gaslight Anthem, he’s spent a decade writing earnest, straight-ahead guitar rock, always straining for poetic yearning and sometimes hitting it. After hearing so many albums of this material, I’ve started to forget that what he’s doing isn’t easy - that songwriting doesn’t have to be clever or witty or subversive, sometimes it just has to hit you with a big happy hammer.<br />
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<b>40. I Wish I Was Sober – Frightened Rabbit</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki2FdTDhx7E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki2FdTDhx7E</a><br />
Speaking of yearning guitar rock, here come Frightened Rabbit, reminding you how much fun wallowing in your own misery can be. The bit at 1:17 when the rhythm section kicks in is key - somehow, they’ve converted self-pity into a communal joyous cleansing. It’s a song that straddles the gap between moody, introspective shadows and stadium lights.<br />
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<b>39. untitled 03 05.28.2013 – Kendrick Lamar</b><br />
I wouldn’t want try and analyse what Lamar is doing with his lyrics here - he seems to be constructing an anti-racist argument from racist stereotypes, and somehow it’s also about the music industry? But I’ve long realised that Lamar’s lyrics aren’t *for* me. Instead, this is on here for the sheer pleasure of listening to him rap, his words bouncing off and across rhythms with dizzying velocity.<br />
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<b>38. The Ardlair Tuning Fork – Aidan O’Rourke</b><br />
O’Rourke (best known for his work with Lau) is the finest folk fiddle player I know of. If you listen to the recordings that he made in the 90s with Tabache, you realise that by the time he was in his early twenties, he had already got as good as it was possible to get at playing Scottish folk tunes. The question became where he could go next. The Adlair Tuning Fork shows how many answers to that question there are: there’s folk fiddle here, but there’s also electronic music and contemporary classical music, flashing through odd, propulsive rhythms.<br />
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<b>37. The Rising Sun – Leveret</b><br />
The Rising Sun is the sort of coiled, angular tune that you can often find hanging around the corners of the English tradition - it’s easy to appreciate these tunes’ elegance, but trickier to hum along or lock into while playing. So it’s amazing how Leveret fill it with so many shafts of light, how it glows with warmth and triumph. Just listen to the way that Sam Sweeney’s fiddle smashes open the front door and lets the light in at 1:26.<br />
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<b>36. Adore – Savages</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ZpPsaMNMM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ZpPsaMNMM</a><br />
The guitars sound like loping, muscled threats, awaiting explosions of violence, but violence never comes - just a couple of brief and startling modulations to the major in the choruses, which disappear as soon as they arrive. Even the song’s final crescendo sounds anything but triumphant - it’s more like a ratcheting of pre-existing tension than a release. But the song *isn’t* threatening the listener - it’s mapping out the singer’s psychology; a prison of doubt and self-restraint which, despite self-affirming mantras, never really goes away.<br />
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<b>35. The Noisy Eater – The Avalanches</b><br />
Disneyland gone horribly wrong - a blazing, technicolour collage of sounds bouncing from one overwhelmingly kitsch idea to the next. Here’s a rap! Here’s a sudden children’s choir singing The Beatles! Any one of its elements could be charming. Together, they are a swirling mass of nightmare.<br />
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<b>34. Regular – The Range</b><br />
The Range finds scraps of music from old, barely-seen YouTube videos, and houses them in pristine storehouses of electronic sound, as if they were displayed upon an altar. Here, the voice of the unknown speaker is chopped up and repeated again and again, until the listener hears every catch of longing in his voice. From a few short sentences, we feel intimate with all the vulnerabilities of a stranger.<br />
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<b>33. Melin Wynt – King Creosote</b><br />
Bagpipes aren’t meant to be delicate, and they aren’t meant to appear in raw, heartfelt, indie-acoustic stuff. The first few times I heard the track I thought that they were tacky: gimmicky posturing; a way of making an ordinary song unusual. But the more I listened to it, the more I changed my mind. Bagpipes are as much about nostalgic haunts as they are about blaring assaults. Those long, slow notes are the cement that holds the song together.<br />
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<b>32. There Will Be Time – Mumford & Sons</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmycEKdD0b0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmycEKdD0b0</a><br />
Mumford & Sons were always at their best when marrying the aesthetics of Irish and American folk to U2-sized shiny hooky pop-rock. They seemed increasingly aware that they had taken this idea as far as it would go, but simply ripping out the folk elements of their sound proved disastrous. The solution, it seemed, was broadening their definition of folk: here, working with musicians from Malawi, South Africa and Senegal, they’ve produced their best work yet. Yes, it’s still broad and commercial, and if you’ve always hated them this won’t change your mind, but There Will Be Time is a stomping, widescreen, joyous thing, anchored by Baaba Maal’s waterfall of a voice.<br />
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<b>31. Noise Above Our Heads – James Blake</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u6kRQKEGy4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u6kRQKEGy4</a><br />
I still can’t connect to James Blake’s work on an instinctive or emotional level, but sometimes it’s enough to sit back and bask in technical precision. Blake’s voice is fluttering, sharp, and almost R&B-ish, and he lets it wander and settle in a glistening shadow-world.<br />
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<b>30. To the Great Unknown – Cloud Cult</b><br />
If you’re looking for sadness and grandeur and hope, Cloud Cult are a good place to go. There are no masks here, no irony, and very little subtlety - just a river of unrestrained sincerity. And, as ever, my critical faculties get damaged whenever I’m brought face-to-face to face with a huge major-key horn section.<br />
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<b>29. The Noisy Days are Over – Field Music</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FGPDau_QwA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FGPDau_QwA</a><br />
Swaggering in with all the dry funkiness of the 1980s’ cleverest pop, there are some air-punching moments here, but they’re held at a distance, as if the band are raising an eyebrow at the listener every time the listener falls for one of the band’s tricks. The whole thing is sleek, witty, stylish and fits like a new suit.<br />
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<b>28. Left Handed Kisses – Andrew Bird (ft. Fiona Apple)</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZwtWExDmoI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZwtWExDmoI</a><br />
Andrew Bird sings a song, Fiona Apple explains why the song doesn’t work. It’s a love song and a duet, but it’s supremely unromantic, a deft portrait of a spark dissolving into bitterness. Bt for all that bitterness, it’s also a smart argument for unrestrained romance, and an exploration of the limits of archness and artifice - so often Bird’s default modes. Which makes the song sound like nothing more than a smart essay, but the cleverness of its ideas is matched by the elegance of its craftsmanship, with swooping violin lines and a melody that keeps twisting into unexpected corners.<br />
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<b>27. John the Revelator – Tom Waits</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ZFV3wCTi4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ZFV3wCTi4</a><br />
Any scraps of material that Waits releases will end up on my lists. Because even if this cover of a Blind Willie Johnson song is a fairly minor work, when his voice shows up, you have to get out of the way. He sounds more like an oak tree than a human here - vast and ancient and cracked and indomitable.<br />
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<b>26. White Ferrari – Frank Ocean</b><br />
It’s startling how something that sounds so sparse and unguarded also sounds so audibly produced - it’s as if Ocean is standing alone with nothing except the quiet ghosts that flash behind him. All the expensive wizardry of modern pop production is being used not to overwhelm and thicken the sound, but to flicker and create intimacy.<br />
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<b>25. Had 2 Know (Personal) – White Denim</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSVP-Bw7zw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSVP-Bw7zw</a><br />
This one’s just a party. All the fun of distorted guitars and fiery urgency. There’s something slightly alt-country in its old-fashioned rough edges, and something slightly proggy about its flashing keyboard lines, but all of its mild oddnesses are in the service of fun.<br />
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<b>24. The Winter Hymn – Pantha du Prince</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBWo9xsJxGo">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBWo9xsJxGo</a><br />
Crystalline electronica, swooping through the clean and precise dreamscapes. There’s a vocal melody here, but the words have been distorted out of existence, leaving it feeling distant and sad, even as the song follows it through the dark.<br />
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<b>23. Wolves – Kanye West</b><br />
There comes a point where you wonder if being really into late-period Kanye West makes you complicit in his mental breakdown. The Life of Pablo is a messy, unpleasant, structureless album lit up by sudden moments of clarity. I'm not sure if Wolves counts as a moment of clarity: it's tense and nocturnal, fluctuating between anger and self loathing, and it seems to compare Kim Kardashian with the Virgin Mary. The listener is stuck at the crossroads between the slick precision of the production and the turmoil of the performance. As ever, what's so exciting about West is the appearance of something so jagged, confrontational and auteurist in a mainstream context.<br />
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<b>22. Voice Crack – Tim Hecker</b><br />
Electronic noise without a hint of a melody. Instead, flickering distorted signals (are some of them human voices manipulated into abstraction?) play across beds of synths that sometimes sound like choirs or sometimes like harps. It should be hard work, but it really isn’t - it’s just beautiful, in a very cold and alien way.<br />
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<b>21. Little Birdie – Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble feat. Sarah Jarosz</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjKaWTwPGrs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjKaWTwPGrs</a><br />
Fetishising folk music for its unvarnished simplicity is a pretty limited way of understanding it. This is a bluegrass song performed by a bluegrass singer, but the arrangement is knotted and filigreed: Yo-Yo Ma’s company of fussy, precise musicians bringing in influences from a too many different world traditions to be able to clearly distinguish each one. They lean over the song together like practiced technicians.<br />
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<b>20. Sugaree – Phosphorescent</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhver8g_KZc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhver8g_KZc</a><br />
I haven’t got to grips with the “Day of the Dead” compilation album yet - I’m not even sure if I’ve listened to every track. It’s a collection of Grateful Dead covers, curated by The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner, produced in order to raise money for AIDS charities. It’s also five and a half hours long, and contains a silly number of people I like (The National! Courtney Barnett! Wilco! This is the Kit!) With an undertaking so huge, it seems silly to pick the first track, but Phosphorescent’s contribution has such a warm, inviting bounce that it’s difficult to turn it away - it’s the lazy sound of an imagined 1960s Summer. There’s a lovely organ solo too.<br />
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<b>19. The Suitcase – Martin Green</b><br />
It starts with a monologue - a strange, atmospheric story which implies a much larger world than it actually describes. The song that follows pushes trad folk through a subterranean post-rocky tunnel. There are members of Lau, The Unthanks, Mogwai and Portishead here, twisting realist fiction into a vague and unsettling fantasy.<br />
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<b>18. Cabinet Battle 3 – Lin-Manuel Miranda</b><br />
Like every other member of liberal metropolitan elite, I got super into Hamilton this year. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, it’s a hip-hop musical about US founding father Alexander Hamilton, and it is dense with erudition, geeky wit, and boiling chunks of emotional heft. This year, “The Hamilton Mixtape” was released, which (among other things) contains demos of songs that were cut from the musical. The most interesting of these is Cabinet Battle 3: it’s full of the same West-Wing-But-Rhyming verbal dexterity of the political debates that made it into the musical, but here, all the joy of the fight is gone, as the characters debate slavery, and decide to do nothing about it. Everyone ends up morally compromised, and the song quietly shows how great evil can arise from political expediency.<br />
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<b>17. ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore – David Bowie</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zF2tsBJnpk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zF2tsBJnpk</a><br />
I bounced off Blackstar, mostly due to the ugly elusive rambling of its first track. But this is a beautifully twisted pop song. There’s something melancholy and poised here, but it’s sandwiched between those huge echoing drums and that greasy leaping saxophone. It’s also very funny, in the driest and most abstract way: “Man, she punched me like a dude” is a hell of an opening line, but it’s much improved by the world-weary theatricality of Bowie’s delivery.<br />
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<b>16. Mothers of the Sun – Black Mountain</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_USHKQ4Ntc8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_USHKQ4Ntc8</a><br />
Speaking of theatricality, this is built on one of those bludgeoning, crunching, and pure riffs that should have already been discovered and used at some point in the 1970s. A lot of the song is old-fashioned bluesy hard-rock, but it’s elevated by surprisingly long period of moody woozy synth build-up that helps you better appreciate the thunder when it finally arrives. I saw this band at Latitude when I was sitting in a camp chair and reading Clive James, which I’m pretty sure is not the usual way people experience them.<br />
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<b>15. Present Tense – Radiohead</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hgVihWjK2c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hgVihWjK2c</a><br />
I guess Radiohead are part of the Classic Rock furniture now - one of those bands people’s dads like, whose old records get put up on pedestals, and whose new records are deemed unimportant. And yeah, when so much of the musical landscape was built in your image, it’s difficult to startle people or point to the future any more. But maybe this gives us the opportunity to see Radiohead not as innovators but as craftsmen and technicians. You won’t be surprised by Present Tense, and it won’t change the world, but its smoky, translucent chambers are wonderful places to settle down in.<br />
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<b>14. Wristband – Paul Simon</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3crKHaBdy4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3crKHaBdy4</a><br />
Imagine that you’ve just met Paul Simon, and you’re getting on really well. You’re in a really nice bar, and you don’t need to worry about seeming overly fannish, because Paul Simon clearly respects you as a thinker and an artist. So you decide that it wouldn’t be embarrassing if you asked him if he had any good recent stories about being Paul Simon. He smiles - and suddenly, out of nowhere, this band shows up, and starts meandering around a cool, cool bassline. As the band play, Paul Simon tells you this anecdote. It’s maybe not the greatest anecdote in the world, and it’s a bit weird how he tries to claim it’s proof of some wider political point. But the way he tells it is so warm and witty and charming that you just want to be his friend. And also, you’re hanging out with Paul Simon! Isn’t that enough?<br />
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<b>13. Vincent – Car Seat Headrest</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEsItsZphwQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEsItsZphwQ</a><br />
Now this is from an album I haven’t spent nearly enough time with yet. It feels like it comes from the same tradition of scruffy intellectual rock as The Hold Steady, Courtney Barnett and Titus Andronicus, where all the wired cleverness only makes the clanging guitars hit harder. I love the moment at 2:15 where a trumpet ends its massive riff with two small vestigial notes that don’t seem to go anywhere - as if it had far more energy than could be contained within the boundaries of the song.<br />
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<b>12. Tunnel Vision – Kate Tempest</b><br />
It’s not like the arguments are new, but the delivery is so direct, controlled, taut and unignorable that they feel fresh. Tempest’s delivery comes as much from performance poetry as it does from hip hop, often flying free from the beat, the thoughts too expansive to hold down. The words stalk across a taut, restless wilderness of bass and synthesiser: it’s furious stuff, but never churns or froths with its fury. It never lets fireworks get in the way of its ideas.<br />
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<b>11. 4 DEGREES – ANOHNI</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi0q0O4V5Qs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi0q0O4V5Qs</a><br />
The actual apocalypse. This is like a Florence and the Machine song shoved into a weird art-rock cathedral: there’s the same sense of riding and mastering an orchestral tidal wave. However, I’m not sure if Florence and the Machine would write a song describing a passionate, hedonistic longing to embrace the climate-change-derived death of the planet and all its inhabitants. This is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.<br />
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<b>10. Older and Taller – Regina Spektor</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zB3fwHX83k">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zB3fwHX83k</a><br />
Spektor’s songwriting is varied and ambitious and stonkingly consistent, but she’s always best when her songs sound like warm hugs. You couldn’t produce something like this without a ton of wit and ambition, but that’s the scaffolding that gets removed once the song is complete - there’s so much density and wordplay in the lyrics, but you hardly notice them when the performance and melody feel so wise and comforting that any analysis feels like missing the point.<br />
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<b>9. Just Lay Still – John Congleton and the Nighty Night</b><br />
This is a scary, scary piece of music. Congleton is a producer before he’s a singer - have a look at his Wikipedia page for the ridiculously impressive list of artists he’s produced. It’s basically everyone who has ever received a good review from Pitchfork. And, yes there’s huge amounts of production here, crowding out and warping the structure of the song. There’s also a fist-punching anthem in there somewhere, one that’s difficult to resist, but the lyrics are nasty, dangerous, threatening - a blunt and ugly parody of every piece of pop desire ever recorded. If you can stomach the mess, it’s really quite something.<br />
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<b>8. Air ‘Em Out – clipping</b><br />
“Splendor & Misery” is a rap record which blends together a silly number of things I like. It’s a a science fiction concept-album prominently featuring Sea Shanties and Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs - so if I hadn’t come out enjoying it, I would have ended up seriously doubting my own tastes. And yes, its reach often exceeds its grasp, but so it should, or what’s space travel for? And at its best, the album comes out with stuff like this - a clattering, hooky piece of hip hop, which references a seriously classy selection of Science Fiction writers (Ursula Le Guin, M John Harrison and Octavia Butler can’t exactly be referred to as populist choices) with an aggressive cleverness.<br />
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<b>7. Katie Catch – Fay Hield</b><br />
It’s surprisingly difficult to write about traditional English folk music - especially surprising given that I spend so much time thinking about it and playing it. Sometimes something just works, and you can’t do anything but sit back and watch it click. This is laid-back, sun drenched contentment - happy to roll along without showiness, but given bounce and vigour through its crunching, percussive fiddle line.<br />
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<b>6. 22 (OVER S∞∞N) – Bon Iver</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZQrRMuENL0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZQrRMuENL0</a><br />
Bon Iver has soared off into weird realms of sonic exploration, and there are all sorts of strange noises here: odd glitches, chipmunk vocals, sounds that flutter in and out of focus, and odd mutterings of saxophone. But it all adds up to something as fragile and direct as the acoustic folk songs he was producing nearly ten years ago. Something this eccentric shouldn’t be this warm, but Bon Iver has always been communicating the same stuff - this just uses a different set of tools to do the communicating.<br />
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<b>5. I Didn’t Try Hard Enough – Kris Drever</b><br />
I’ve got sort of a weird relationship with the “If Wishes Were Horses” album. My mum passed away in December 2015, and when this album came out, it was the first time after her death that I experienced any art that I felt absolutely certain - on a weird gut level - she would have loved, if she’d been there to see it. Which sort of ended up being a way into Kris Drever’s solo music. I’d always found him a bit difficult and austere when he wasn’t playing with Lau, but now I’m fairly convinced he’s a genius.<br />
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<b>4. Fuck the Government, I Love You – The Burning Hell</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTHdVCrSkw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTHdVCrSkw</a><br />
Romance has never been so clever, cleverness has never been so romantic. A torrent of words, telling the story of a drunken flirtation at a party, the whole song is washed in the comforting embrace of booze and brass. (Which instrument is that? A trombone? If I’m writing music criticism, I really should be able to tell the difference between different brass instruments.) It’s very funny. It also has far more heart than you could have reasonably expected.<br />
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<b>3. Distant Sky – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCVgsI5h9p0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCVgsI5h9p0</a><br />
I’ve written about this this song (and the rest of the Skeleton Tree album) pretty extensively elsewhere on this blog. It’s an extraordinary thing, even if it’s difficult to listen to. The album was mostly written before Cave’s teenage son unexpectedly passed away, but was mostly recorded afterwards. This song is the album at its rawest. As the lyrics seem to approach discussing the tragedy directly, Cave absents himself, and is replaced by the Danish soprano Else Torp. He returns, sounding shaken and broken, to sing the words “They told us our gods would outlive us/ They told us our dreams would outlive us/ They told us our gods would outlive us/ But they lied”.<br />
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<b>2. You want it Darker – Leonard Cohen</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y</a><br />
Leonard Cohen meditating on his own approaching death: he mirrors the words of a Jewish mourner’s prayer; he repeats the Hebrew word that Abraham said when God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac; he growls, repeatedly “I’m ready my lord.” It’s unsentimental, unflinching and magnetic. But there’s no wallowing here. The song is funny (“I struggled with some demons, they were middle class and tame”) and confrontational - when Cohen addresses God, it sounds as much like he’s picking a fight as accepting his mortality. And Cohen’s voice is extraordinary - so deep a bass that it barely hints at melody, rolling through the words with gritted, clear-eyed determination.<br />
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<b>1. Call to Arms – Sturgill Simpson</b><br />
Let’s end on a high. This is an angry song - a vital, muscular, anti-war song of the kind that people have been writing for centuries. But the anger is hardly the point: the point is the catharsis, the elation, the ability to explode. One would think that things were already at full-tilt, but My God the horn riff that kicks in at 2:10 - the planet may never recover. And after that the song twists and melts and extends, billowing into a huge, extended jam that fluctuates between wild solos and the tightest possible grooves. None of the sonic elements of Call to Arms are new - the arrangement is a pretty standard mashup of soul, country and old fashioned guitar rock. But it shows off why these modes have always been vital, have always been alive. Sometimes music doesn’t have to be profound, or seek out new ways of doing things. Sometime it just has to soar.<br />
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Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-55155411216373324322016-10-23T15:11:00.001-07:002016-10-23T15:32:49.341-07:00On FestenLast night I saw the Oxford Theatre Guild’s production of Festen. And this isn’t a review. Because 1) there’s not much point reviewing a play once its run has finished, and 2) I know a small but not insignificant number of the cast/creative team, so any objectivity would be hideously out of the window. But it was astonishing - by the end of the show, I saw about four audience members in tears, and most people I talked to afterwards were too shellshocked to be particularly articulate about what they’d seen. And yes, I’ve seen a few professional shows that had this sort of effect on people, but only a few. And I’ve never seen amateur theatre have this effect on people.<br />
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I can be prone to hyperbole. And like I said, some friends were involved. But there’s a chance that this was the best amateur show I’ve seen.<br />
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Let’s take a step back. Festen is based on a 1998 Danish film, adapted for the stage and translated into English in 2004. It’s about a wealthy, insular family, who have reunited to celebrate the 60th birthday party of their patriarch. At the party, one of this patriarch’s sons announces that, as a child, he and his sister were sexually abused by their father, and that this abuse led to the suicide of his sister. The rest of the family spend the party trying to ignore, downplay, avoid and deny the accusations, treating them as an awkward embarrassment from an estranged relative. It is emotionally brutal, viciously tense and eventually cathartic. It uses many of the hold-and-release tricks of the genre thriller, but uses them to make its exploration of power, wealth and communication bruised and raw.<br />
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It is very, very good.<br />
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A lot of the reason for that is craft. The performers are great, but they’re also perfectly cast, and give drilled, polished performances. The location of the stage (the Oxford University Maths Institute, all glass and metal, full of pale and chilly geometries) suits the show better than any specially-built set could. The music, with its anxious strings and sudden waves of electronic beats, unsettles before the first words are said. All the older men wear masonic pins, a visual reminder their clubbishness and codes of silence. Every detail is precise; considered.<br />
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But there’s also the element of surprise. I’ve been involved in amateur theatre, on-and-off, for a few years, and there are very good reasons to avoid being too risky. Putting a play on isn’t cheap, and getting audiences isn’t easy. Self-indulgence, or picking deliberately obscure choices will financially ruin you. And this will stop your amateur group from being able to make theatre.<br />
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To have the confidence to make something so jagged and frightening and strange - to want to confront your audience rather than comfort them - to trust in the quality of your art enough to know that an audience will find and follow you - and to do all of this in the realm of amateur theatre - is brave. Inspiring, even.<br />
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And I’m not sure what conclusions we can take from this. Safe choices of material allow amateur dramatics groups to keep functioning. You can get audiences to show up for Shakespeare, or Wilde, or adaptations of popular classic novels. This isn’t bad. Good art gets to keep being made. And if Festen hadn’t worked, if it had dropped the ball, it would have been disastrous. The material it touches on is sensitive; bad handling could have rendered it glib or exploitative. And you can’t trust that every risk will end up a success.<br />
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But we can take comfort that this exists. We can take comfort that flying off the map is possible. We can take comfort that sometimes being unsafe is ok. Sometimes being unsafe is good.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-43213661671362741422016-10-18T12:41:00.002-07:002016-10-18T12:41:43.113-07:00Everything I Saw at Oxjam Oxford Takeover 2016I think seeing twenty local bands between 2.30 in the afternoon and 11.30 at night was pretty good going, especially given that I took more than an 90 minutes for dinner. I saw the whole set of about a quarter of these bands, but most of the time I stuck around for around 15 minutes before moving on to see what was happening in the next room. I’m not reviewing anything where I saw less than two whole songs.<br />
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<b>Atlanta Snow</b><br />
Tight, earnest synth-heavy pop; at their best when they were at their loudest and closest to the commercial and clubby. Not really my kind of thing, to be honest, but they did make a tiny community hall feel a hell of a lot bigger than it actually was. Given that they were the first band I saw on the day, I may well have overrated or underrated them heavily.<br />
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<b>Ghosts in the Photographs</b><br />
Instrumental post-rock in the tradition of Godspeed You Black Emperor/Mogwai/Explosions in the Sky, with snatches of found recordings and bellowing waterfalls of guitar. They nail the genre, and it’s an aesthetic I’m happy to get on board with. If you’ve heard their influences there’s nothing new here, but that’s hardly a criticism when they do it this well.<br />
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<b>Young Women’s Music Project</b><br />
The YWMP seems like an excellent initiative; I only saw one of the acts they put on, and I missed the bit where they announced her name. She had a very good voice, and one of her songs contained an absolutely lovely keyboard break, but she was one of the few acts I saw where 15 minutes or so didn’t seem enough time to make a fair assessment of what she was capable of.<br />
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<b>The Outside</b><br />
Impossibly young, The Outside played indie rock with some pleasingly knotty structures. They were looser than their songwriting deserved, and I’m not sure that the wobbly squalls of noise from their lead guitar suited the overall sound. But just as I was about to leave, one of their songs mutated into a properly magnificent riff. If they were capable of that, they’ve got some proper potential.<br />
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<b>Roberto Y Amigos</b><br />
Laid back folk-pop with a male and female vocalist warping in and out of the threads of each other's melodies. It was all rather too trembly and fragile for my tastes; it felt like there wasn't much meat to hang onto.<br />
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<b>Moogieman and the Masochists</b><br />
With the caveat that I know these guys personally, so biases apply, this was really very good. They come across as what would happen if They Might Be Giants were English and repressed. Their songs are arch, eccentric and witty without ever feeling twee, whimsical or forced; brief blasts of harmonica or sudden keyboard explosions reveal the beating heart of the music, before being quickly boxed up again, hidden behind a gleefully artificial twitching clockwork facade.<br />
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<b>No Dice Grandma</b><br />
Heavy instrumental riffing. A lot of fun, and very well put together, but after less than twenty minutes I’d had my fill. If they’re more to your tastes, they’re clearly great at what they do.<br />
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<b>Rob Harbour</b><br />
Perfectly pleasant folky singer-songwriter stuff, with a well-used cellist. The brief diversion into acoustic hip-hop was welcome and surprising, and his band were tight, but it wasn’t enormously memorable.<br />
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<b>The Dreaming Spires</b><br />
Commercial soft-rock arranged with a thick smearing of synthesisers. They’re aiming for a genre I’m not fond of, but I can hardly criticise them for that.<br />
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<b>Egrets</b><br />
It didn’t help that I was stuck at the back of an overcrowded bar, so that the stage was invisible and the sound was blurred. It mostly felt like blandly loud guitar rock painted in broad strokes, but they well have been more interesting than that if I was better positioned in the room. One of their songs was called “Renegotiating Your Mobile Phone Tarriff”, so full marks there.<br />
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<b>Dan Rawle</b><br />
Solo singer-songwriter, with tight songwriting, and a good voice. A little twee, but I think deliberately so. If you saw him at an open-mic night, you’d think “He is one of the good ones at this open-mic night”.<br />
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<b>Ute</b><br />
According to a friend who knows the local scene, they were a Big Deal back in the day and have only just reformed. As a result this felt like a bit of a victory lap - an odd atmosphere if you weren’t there for the victory. It was an acoustic set, and used a lot of the grammar of the folky singer-songwriter, but there was a Grizzly Bear-ish refusal to bow to conventional structures and patterns, songs swerving off into odd, crunchy directions. It was possibly all a little too academic, but I imagine I could get into it after further exposure.<br />
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<b>Crandle</b><br />
They’ve got an oddball 80s synth thing going on, that I think would sound better in a studio than live (my brief excursion to their soundcloud page has borne that out). Their singer’s voice is appealingly Kate-Bushian. They are a curiosity rather than a delight, but like most curiosities, it’s good that they exist.<br />
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<b>Storyteller</b><br />
Wonderful, wonderful stuff. A reggae/funk band who didn’t do anything unexpected, but had an almost supernatural ability to create a party. Their bassist and their saxophonist were particularly superb - revelling in their ability to be flashy - but the whole band was tight and punchy, puppeteering the crowd with practiced skill.<br />
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<b>Bright Works</b><br />
The best kind of mad: knotty, mathy rhythms, tightly-coiled and vaguely African guitar playing, lead vocals that are barked and yelped in a way that is inexplicably charismatic rather than annoying, sudden lurches into virtuoso vocal polyrhythms from three-quarters of the band. But if this sounds like hard work to listen to, it shouldn’t: all the experimentation is caged by tight poppy songwriting; clean, clear melodies and structures cutting through the chaos.<br />
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<b>Little Red</b><br />
This hit exactly the spot I needed. Sixteen bands in, mildly exhausted, and having eaten slightly too much inexpensive Chinese food, anything too intense was going to knock me over. Instead, I was sat in a very comfortable chair in a quiet room, listening to a trio playing acoustic americana-tinged folk music and getting it exactly right. There’s nothing flashy here, but there’s warmth, peace, variety and just enough menace to keep things interesting. Highly recommended.<br />
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<b>Coldredlight</b><br />
Coldredlight have a hell of a gimmick: they are an aggressive, punkish duo with one member who is simultaneously playing both the bass and the drums. When you first see it, you wonder how he manages it. And once the gimmick wears off, you’re left with something tight, precise and agreeably nasty - certainly, the crowd adored it. Looking back at what I’ve written, I’m surprised I wasn’t more enthusiastic - If I hadn’t just come off the end of three of the best gigs I’d seen all day, I would probably have enjoyed it much more.<br />
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<b>Jess Hall</b><br />
More solo acoustic singer songwriter stuff, and with probably the best voice I heard all day. The guitar playing, too, was delicate and lovely. But the songs felt structureless and directionless: any five-second stretch was beautiful, but any three minute stretch felt a bit flat - songs like still lakes untroubled by the breeze. Which made it difficult to concentrate - the murmuring and clinking from the bar behind me quickly breaking the spell.<br />
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<b>The Balkan Wanderers</b><br />
I didn’t get the pun in the title until my girlfriend explained it to me the next morning. Balkan Wanderers mash up high-voltage ska with Eastern European folk music, and make heavy use of a clarinet. They were clearly anxious that they’d been forced to come on late, and weren’t going to get as much time as they’d been promised, but it hardly mattered. We got 25 minutes of high-energy, gleefully stupid party music and an absolutely delighted crowd.<br />
<br />
<b>The Fusion Project</b><br />
It’s a shame I didn’t see more of this, really: the fusion of the title was between Western pop/rock and Indian classical music. The fifteen minutes I saw involved the western musicians setting down funk-like grooves while the Indian musicians swirled and spiralled around them. A startling, Jethro-Tullish flute solo was a highlight. All in all, an excellent way to conclude festivities.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-65028067479371315742016-10-05T05:40:00.002-07:002016-10-05T05:40:32.029-07:00Such Hard BluesGiven its history, Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree wasn't the sort of album you could first listen to in the background at work, or in the car. I started listening to it at twenty minutes past midnight, and finished it around one in the morning. Music always sounds best at the border of sleep: vivid images spring up in an almost synesthetic way. The shapeless layering of Magneto's sounds becomes a series of small wooden objects placed on a table surrounded by the dark. The muttering, aggressive drumming in Anthropocene becomes a threadbare black cloud, perhaps made of pencil markings or perhaps of birds, floating above the song's space. The thick, slow synthesizer notes in I Need You become rising columns, made half of light and half of fat metal piping.<br />
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Calling the album "haunted" is crass, but there isn't a more accurate word. It was written before the sudden death of Cave's teenage son, but recording was completed afterwards. So even if the lyrics revisit Cave's preoccupations (death, god, love, frustrated sexual desire) the album is somehow undeniably 'about' Cave's grief.<br />
<br />
Lyrics written before the tragedy keep flickering into stark focus. The opening line of the album is "You fell from the sky and crash landed in a field near the river Adur", a startlingly explicit opening given the nature of his son's death. When he sings "The urge to kill someone was basically overwhelming/ I had such hard blues in the supermarket queues", the listener gives a context to a line that must have been much vaguer on the page. When, in what seems to be a song about romantic love, Cave repeats "Nothing really matters" and "I need you" over and over, the pain is raw and immediate. The song might be about a breakup, but that isn't what Cave is singing about.<br />
<br />
Cave has never been an emotionally direct artist: his work is always masked in theatre, stylisation and irony. He tries on personas - he is the murderer, the monster, the doomed romantic, the mad prophet, the circus ringmaster. His imagery is often overwritten and grotesque. His music is gothy and very much performed. You do not get to know him by listening to his music. He's been doing this for nearly forty years. Making an album that is urgently, painfully about his own grief seems impossible - a swerve away from everything he has done before.<br />
<br />
And yet...<br />
<br />
The first album that came to mind when thinking about this was Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, which attempted to understand the enormity of the Holocaust through the medium of the love song and somehow got away with it. Neutral Milk Hotel understood the history of pop music well enough to know that pop was never designed to deal with the mechanized violence of the 20th century, and rather than risking something accidentally cheap, they emphasised the rough naivety of so much pop, and aimed it at a vast and distant target. The tragedy at the centre of Skeleton Tree is much more personal, and pop music has always been more comfortable with the personal. Nevertheless there is something similar happening here. The album doesn't ever confront tragedy head on. It uses Cave's familiar and comfortable forms and subjects, but allows the light to bend around them into the dark.<br />
<br />
The second album that came to mind was Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell. Like Skeleton Tree, Carrie and Lowell is a raw, stark examination of the artist's grief. But the two albums travel down very different roads. Despite its emotional brutality, Carrie and Lowell is oddly welcoming. Its melodies are delicate, its arrangements are simple, its lyrics are direct. Somehow it aetheticises pain without diminishing it; it invites us to share in the pain, to bring our own pain to the table. As an act of generous communication, it is extraordinary.<br />
<br />
Skeleton Tree is no less powerful, but Cave does none of this.<br />
<br />
Many of the songs on Skeleton Tree feel structureless, rhythmless. Cave often half-sings and half-speaks: his voice worn, breaking or constrained by emotion. Sounds swirl and disperse. The listener is unmoored, not quite sure where the song is asking us to go, what it is trying to do. Once again, Cave is wearing a mask. But this time, it's not part of a grand performance. This time the mask stops us getting too close. We can see Cave's grief, but it isn't ours to share. This isn't like Sufjan Stevens, inviting us in; we are watching Cave's world, we don't know the rules and he has no duty to explain them. We can see the cryptic, gothy lyrics, written without foreknowledge of the tragedy, but we can only guess at the ways his grief animates them. And guessing seems like voyeurism.<br />
<br />
The closest the album comes to conventional beauty is its penultimate track, Distant Sky. Here the clear melody and direct lyrics approach the methods of Carrie and Lowell. But Cave doesn't sing for most of the track. At the moment of his clearest communication, Cave absents himself, and is replaced by the Danish soprano Else Torp. He doesn't - perhaps can't - remove the mask. But as the song reaches its close, the mask slips, and he returns with the words "They told us our gods would outlive us/ They told us our dreams would outlive us/ They told us our gods would outlive us/ But they lied". Perhaps on Let Love In or Tender Prey, these words would be a gothic overstatement. Perhaps on Murder Ballads, they would be a theatrical threat. Perhaps on The Boatman's Call they would be sung with a sly irony. And perhaps they were written that way. But here, as the album draws to a close, they just sound true.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-10549715874791702882016-09-12T09:53:00.000-07:002016-09-12T09:53:08.318-07:00The Waxwing SlainI'm a year late to the party with this, but The Beginner's Guide is... a metafictional videogame tragedy about literary theory? I'm so glad that it exists.<br />
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The closest thing I can think of to it, formally, is Nabokov's Pale Fire. In both cases, we're being guided through an oblique artwork (or, in The Beginner's Guide, possibly a set of artworks) by an editor and commentator whose conclusions are flawed and whose motives are suspect. In Pale Fire we have a poem with a commentator who might be mad, leaving the whole book as a puzzlebox with no readily available solution. In The Beginner's Guide we have a series of strange, short videogame levels presented and narrated by an enthusiastic fan of their reclusive creator - a fan whose tendentious readings and airy editorialising seem to undermine the original "meaning" (if indeed, there was any meaning) of the levels.<br />
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The Beginner's Guide ends up being the story of a man who destroys a friendship and has a breakdown because he believes that authorial intent can be read into a work of art - or rather, because he believes he's "solved" a work of art and therefore understands the author, despite the fact that he's actually made some dangerously inaccurate assumptions. So far so good.<br />
<br />
But the game seems to go further than this.<br />
<br />
The first thing to say is that The Beginner's Guide stacks the deck. By the end of the game, it's clear that our guide and editor is indefensible. By sending these levels out into the public, he has betrayed the trust of their curator. It also becomes clear that he's made edits to the levels without the consent of their creator and without informing you, the player, that he has made these changes. It is clear that he's made these changes in order to bolster his own (erroneous) interpretations of the levels. But if these are the editor's greatest sins, it's implied that he has committed lesser sins too - that imposing heavy-handed interpretations onto the work has shackled and reduced the creator's abilities. The game's final image is ambiguous, but seems to show that player, creator and commentator are most at peace when the creator's work is understood as a vast, borderless labyrinth, free of meaning and free of interpretation.<br />
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Which is where I start to part ways with the game's ideas.<br />
<br />
You don't need to spend long looking The Beginner's Guide up on the internet before you find a couple of central theories about what it is doing. The first theory is that The Beginner's Guide is a fictionalised retelling of the release of its real-life developer's previous game, The Stanley Parable, which was a similarly oblique work that attracted a lot of heated critical discussion. By showing a critic and editor destroy fictional levels in The Beginner's Guide, the developer is trying to show how trapped he felt by The Stanley Parable's complex and contradictory critical response.<br />
<br />
The second theory builds upon the first by stating that, yes, the first theory might be true. But by buying into that theory, you're making exactly the same mistake as the fictional narrator/curator in The Beginner's Guide: assuming that the work is a reflection of the author and collapsing any ambiguities or complexities within it, in order to fit your own narrow interpretation.<br />
<br />
Ok, where do we go with this? Well, we could ignore these theories completely, and assume that the game is simply a short story about two people whose relationship is trapped and broken by a problem of interpretation. But I don't think we can read the game as simply a short story. Its final stages (which break the conceit of The Beginner's Guide being a collection of curated games, and become something much more abstract) seem to reach beyond the idea that this is about two people, and instead heads towards an allegory for the critical process. Even the name of the reclusive developer seems to hint that might just be an allegorical everyman: he is called Coda, a homonym for Coder - simply one who produces games.<br />
<br />
And if this is an allegory, it seems to be saying that any critical engagement with a work is damaging: that any addition of a meaning external to the author damages the integrity of that work; that the imposition of a single interpretation destroys other meanings; that editing and curating are destructive acts; that the ideal interpretation of any artwork is (like the game's final image) an infinite, borderless labyrinth.<br />
<br />
And this is nonsense.<br />
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<br />
All art communicates. This isn't the same as saying that the artist is communicating with the viewer/player/reader of the art; it is simply saying that the art will give a reaction to the viewer/player/reader, even if that reaction is as simple as "I don't understand it and I don't like it". And responding to "meanings" communicated by a work is a pre-conscious, automatic act. Processing, or discussing these meanings is vital, as is putting them into context, discussing them with others, curating them, and organising your thoughts. Otherwise, what's the damn point? If you aren't doing this, how is your response to art any different from self-indulgence?<br />
<br />
As I said before, The Beginner's Guide stacks the decks. The fictional level designer is revealed to be a recluse who never wanted to show his work to the world. The fictional narrator betrays him by publishing the work. But this deck-stacking is disingenuous. The game quietly pretends that the act of interpretation of a work and the act of illicit publication of a private work are the same sin - they both take the meaning of the work away from the creator.<br />
<br />
But here's the thing - as soon as a work exists, regardless of whether it was "private" or not, meaning is no longer owned by the creator. The creator cannot control what people think of the work. So in The Beginner's Guide, when the creator makes and re-makes level in which the player is imprisoned, the narrator assumes that this is due to an unhealthy obsession on the part of the creator. The game later counters that with the idea that maybe the creator just really liked building prisons. And, from the evidence provided, it's easy to build a reading where the fictional creator used the image of a prison as a healthy symbol of safety and containment. But the game gives no reason for us to believe one interpretation over the other. Seeing the huge number of prison levels, one after the other, is disturbing. Believing one interpretation over the other doesn't remove the work's capacity for ambiguity.<br />
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<br />
But this seems ridiculous, doesn't it? I'm claiming that The Beginner's Guide is publicly broadcasting the idea that art cannot publicly broadcast ideas. Surely this is self-contradictory?<br />
<br />
So maybe I'm wrong about what this game is trying to do.<br />
<br />
But here's my main point, and the idea which I think the game rages against. It's very hard to define what the phrase "being wrong about what this game is trying to do" means. I could come up with interpretations of the game that were useless and uninteresting because they were banal ("The Beginner's Guide is pretty to look at") or absurd and unlikely ("The Beginner's Guide is about the lifecycle of a frog") or that completely ignore context and well-worn literary techniques ("The Beginner's Guide is a real collection of games from a reclusive developer, not a fictional construct"). These are interpretations we can argue against, but they're not something we can <i>police</i>. We can't argue that these interpretations are <i>immoral</i>. Once the art is in the world, the artist has no control over what happens next.<br />
<br />
So yes, maybe I'm wrong about what this game is trying to do.<br />
<br />
But, although the game might argue otherwise, that's fine.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-56676800397374931342016-09-04T09:00:00.000-07:002016-09-04T09:00:23.935-07:00Circle<i>A poem from 2013, written on the notes function of a mobile phone, which is my excuse for the metre sometimes being a bit of a mess.</i><br />
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<br />
A dozen miles since dawn in the frozen
<br />
Fog, and the weathered Scots in front refuse
<br />
To tire. I'm drunk on cold. No: more than drunk,
<br />
Already face down, collapsed in gutters
<br />
Barely human and barely breathing. Christ,<br />
Can't they understand? It isn't human to walk
<br />
This far, this fast, in this tight, relentless,
<br />
Brutal chill.
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The overgrown fields are stiff<br />
With frost. It's too cold for snow, but they lie<br />
Blue with ice under the clouded light of
<br />
A heavy sky. Storm coming, just like all<br />
The other bloody days. Maybe something<br />
More than plantlife lives in those brittle<br />
Fields. I doubt it. Hope never got me far.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Still we tramp. The woman in front has new
<br />
Boots. All these Scots do. I do not. And as
<br />
I march on this tilted slither of cracked<br />
Tarmac (the remains of a better world)
<br />
I feel the boots begin to give way. The
<br />
Same feeling as yesterday, the day before,
<br />
The day before, the day before. I glare
<br />
At the boots in front. Enviously I
<br />
Sneak looks at the jackets, battered leather,
<br />
Worn but hardy, shielding out the winter.
<br />
They wear goggles, masks, or stride in long coats.
<br />
I dream of long coats, as I used to dream<br />
Of silk and silver. My own clothes feel thin<br />
Beneath the onslaught of the air. Patched and
<br />
Woollen, they'll warp and whither in the rain.
<br />
I look nervously to the heavy sky.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Perhaps I'm not the first one to see it.<br />
Above the dense and ghostlike haze of fog,<br />
A shape flutters, silhouette before sun.
<br />
Some of the Scots ready their weapons. I
<br />
Almost clutch mine. But then the cry goes up:
<br />
'A Bird!' A bird! In these ungodly skies!
<br />
We haven't seen an animal in weeks.<br />
She dives, she falls, a shadow in the dense
<br />
Grey light. And then she rises. One can just<br />
About observe the definition of<br />
A wingtip, and in the mind's eye one feels
<br />
The curved, hungry beak, the brace of talons,
<br />
The coiled muscle battering the air.<br />
And then she's gone. She flashes out into
<br />
The whiteness instantly, as if someone<br />
Had turned off a screen. These men see too much
<br />
To firmly believe in portents, but if
<br />
A supernatural joy is absent
<br />
From the troops, perhaps there's still a touch
<br />
Of succour from the sight. Perhaps the bird<br />
Sated some unacknowledged hunger. We<br />
March on.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They do not like me, these soldiers.<br />
Fresh from Glasgow's wreck, with hurricane eyes,
<br />
They grip their rifles with unyielding calm
<br />
And stare at the horizon - as if Earth
<br />
Were a disappointing game. God knows if it's
<br />
An act. Yes, they hate my guts, these stiff-backed
<br />
Soldiers, with their thick and bitter voices
<br />
In thick, bitter accents. They can march and fight
<br />
Like rusted machinery, burning oil
<br />
Powering clanking, jagged veins. I march
<br />
Alongside these weathered, broken giants,
<br />
And they are rightly suspicious of me:<br />
A slinking, weaselly English merchant,
<br />
Avatar of the ambitious middle
<br />
Classes. Yes, there's a world of difference<br />
Between me and these Scottish monuments,
<br />
And we both know - that if the need arose -<br />
I would betray them in an instant.
<br />
But at the moment, I am not a threat
<br />
And this blank-brained rabble of stern fighters
<br />
Is all that stands between my life and death.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A stop is called. Our noble protector
<br />
(The lovely Anna, clad in steel and scowls)<br />
Raises her tight-gloved hand, displays her palm<br />
To the assembled company, and barks
<br />
The order: 'halt!', and, with a smile, 'You've been<br />
Marching since dawn. You bastards deserve rest.'
<br />
The troops won't even mutter gratitude.
<br />
Instead, it is as if the muscles in<br />
Their backs relax. They have become aware
<br />
Of how bitterly hard they've slogged today.
<br />
Their frames collapse, as if with shame. Well, I<br />
Don't feel ashamed. Why should I? They are quite
<br />
Aware that I am weak, untrained, more than
<br />
Debased by all this suffering. And so, alone,
<br />
I lie upon the ground, staring up at
<br />
The blank white sky. The soldiers muttering
<br />
Around me pay no heed. They have their own<br />
Concerns, their own suffering to enact.
<br />
A man behind me laughs a hollow laugh,
<br />
And the familiar sound of dice on rock<br />
Is heard. (I sold a fair few of those dice.
<br />
Amazing what luxuries hungry
<br />
Soldiers are willing to pay for). Meanwhile
<br />
My aching body rests and I commune
<br />
With empty air. No thought but my naked,
<br />
Unwashed face and the weak and distant sun
<br />
Above it. I can ignore the hardness
<br />
Of the frosted road, and without movement
<br />
My limbs rejoice. I almost fall asleep<br />
But a spark of self-preservation burns,
<br />
And I remember that it's more than likely
<br />
That this noble regiment would leave me<br />
On the road to die. Alas, one cannot
<br />
Pick one's friends.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My reveries are ended
<br />
Before the troop moves out, by a raindrop,<br />
Exploding like icefall, screaming bitter<br />
Murder through my waiting neurons. With
<br />
Grim predictability, the sky starts
<br />
To swarm with static as the storm begins.
<br />
Let the drenching commence. Anna raises
<br />
Her hand once more - there's little point resting
<br />
In the rain - and the resentful soldiers
<br />
Will themselves to action.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And so we march
<br />
We march, we goddamn march again, just like
<br />
Every other hour of every other
<br />
Goddamn day. As if the cold relentless
<br />
Monotony were not enough, this rain,
<br />
This goddamn rain scars our bruised skin. It seeks<br />
Out and infiltrates each miniscule crack
<br />
Or tear or fault in the fabric of our
<br />
Clothing. I am marching through a white wall
<br />
Of pain. A white wall of pain, and my skull
<br />
Is screaming.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We will march for hours. There is
<br />
No other choice.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In time, my mind, afraid<br />
Of the burning cold, turns aside. I march<br />
Wraithlike, the pain real but distant. The rain
<br />
Is burning someone else; my thoughts turn back<br />
To Glasgow, and gunfire. The docks piled high
<br />
With corpses, and the stench of burnt plastic,
<br />
As drones dance and duel below a blazing<br />
Orange sunset. Pursued down burning streets
<br />
By the low whirr of a faceless monster,
<br />
Whispering through the air behind my back.
<br />
I trip and tumble, hurtle through the smoke,
<br />
Its dread electric mind hears the pumping
<br />
Of my blood, the battering of leather<br />
Shoes on broken glass. A bullet drifts past
<br />
My shoulder. I can't breathe in this smoke-clogged<br />
Air. Faster, faster, faster. Death will come.
<br />
I know it. And as I dive to the best
<br />
Of my quite limited abilities.<br />
The drone plunges on, thoughtless, endless, free.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The rain has stopped. I can't remember when<br />
This happened. Somehow, dusk has drifted down.<br />
Somewhere, beyond the fog, the heavy sun
<br />
Is setting. I feel my bones crack under
<br />
My body's truant weight. I know we won't
<br />
Trudge much further tonight. Soldiers begin<br />
To pull torches from their pockets, and light
<br />
The dark mist.
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A shape forms in the twilight.
<br />
It's by the roadside, some distance ahead.
<br />
And as the night gathers around our heads,
<br />
The fogbound monument reveals itself.<br />
A wind-whipped ring of seven standing stones,<br />
Grey rock, each standing taller than a man,<br />
Each spaced widely from its neighbours, and hunched<br />
As if against the cold. Their jagged points<br />
Bow faintly down as if with age, struggling<br />
To reach a vast, blind indifferent sky.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Without needing an order, we break ranks.<br />
We pause, then we approach the stone circle,<br />
And I attempt to build a metaphor<br />
That fits the moment. Is this thing a God<br />
That waits impassive for a puny gang<br />
of squawking heretics for it to smite?<br />
Or is it a forest in Winter, the dead<br />
Trees that refuse to speak to us, dry lumps<br />
Of dry wood that signify nothing? No.<br />
These rocks are bones. I imagine, beneath<br />
The hard Earth, an animal's corpse, long dead,<br />
Perhaps once beautiful, or perhaps wise.<br />
But all that remains of its life is here:<br />
A stony ribcage breaking the surface,<br />
Naked and cracked in the unfriendly air.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We walk through the field, between the grey rocks.<br />
The cold wetness of the grass nuzzles us,<br />
But there is a strange freedom here – a break<br />
From the relentless road. The line replaced<br />
by the circle; a reminder that life<br />
Is not simply a thrusting towards death.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And I halt as I pass one of the stones:<br />
An odd charisma in its hooded shape,<br />
Worn raw by centuries of bad weather,<br />
Draws me to it. I place my hand upon<br />
This scar of history. With my finger<br />
I trace lines invisible in the night,<br />
Carvings that are immeasurably old:<br />
The smoothly arching curves of bright spirals,<br />
The sigils of the cults of savage gods:<br />
This place is old. It reaches to the roots,<br />
Of time, the ways of all men and women<br />
Spring from gardens like this. Yes, this is not<br />
A mausoleum, but a living room.<br />
The soldiers mill and mutter through the field,<br />
But are, I think, restrained by something here.<br />
No blood will be spilled tonight.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The fog lifts.<br />
And the stars reveal themselves: hard diamonds<br />
in the Godless deep. The void yawns above.<br />
The moon is an open eye, a marble<br />
battle-scratched, prepared to fall. The cluttered<br />
Watching sky will keep us cool. But Anna,<br />
Builds a fire, and the regiment warms<br />
Themselves around it. I am reminded<br />
Of a ritual I saw, long ago.<br />
But no matter. I am almost content.<br />
<br />
Tonight, we sleep here. Tomorrow, we march.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image Attribution</span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">© User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons</span>Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-11704883083730453332016-03-29T10:52:00.000-07:002016-04-07T04:34:04.400-07:00A Haunted HouseWhen I was a child, Snowshill Manor was an astonishing place. I vividly remember the fleets of wooden ships, the shelves overflowing with theatrical masks and musical instruments, the darkened room full of Samurai armour at the top of the stairs. As an adult, the magic is a little faded. You become more discriminating, notice how the vast collection contains nonsense as well as wonders. You see the acres of bad paintings and the faded stuffed toys. You wonder at the necessity of hundreds of bicycles jammed incongruously into an attic. Beautiful workmanship nestles against rotting kitsch.<br />
<br />
You notice other things too.<br />
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The collection was the work of Charles Paget Wade, an architect who – after inheriting a vast amount of money and surviving the First World War – decided to buy an empty 17th Century estate, not to live in, but to store his spiralling collection of mismatched items. He was uninterested in the history or value of his objects: he chose them based on workmanship, colour and form. They drench the rooms: jade figurines, spinning wheels, tapestries, vehicles, sharkskin glasses cases, playing cards, dolls’ houses – all conspiring against the idea that a house is somewhere you might sleep, or cook, or live.<br />
<br />
The manor rests somewhere between a museum, a storehouse and (perhaps most accurately) a stage set. Wade would receive distinguished guests – Henry Ford and Virginia Woolf came. J.B. Priestley enjoyed the sprawling model village Wade had built in the manor gardens. Parties would be thrown; theatrical entertainments performed.<br />
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Sometimes, Wade would turn out all the lights and clank chains in the pitch darkness, as if the manor was haunted.<br />
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In 1951, Wade gave the house to The National Trust. He insisted that this wasn’t a place to learn about history – his objects shouldn’t be labelled, contextualised or explained. They shouldn’t be kept out of reach of visitors. They should continue to crowd the shelves – mysterious and uncountable and sometimes beautiful. The Trust has done their best to honour his wishes – this isn’t a museum. Most rooms have guides who will tell you about the objects if you ask, but the rooms feel heavy with stories that remain insistently untold.<br />
<br />
Stories are hinted at, though. You sometimes feel as if you are seeing more than you should. We hear that his fascination with crafts began when he became obsessed with his grandmother’s chest of drawers, which now stands proudly near the entrance. Later, aged seven, he began his collection by buying an expensive trinket in the marketplace: he never stopped acquiring. There are vast numbers of toys here. In many ways, the collection seems like the wild expression of a childhood fantasy: the sense of stasis you feel in all old manor houses is stronger here, headier. One can’t shake the feeling that the building is refusing to grow up.<br />
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If you can forgive a Freudian diversion: Wade lived in a cottage in the garden of his manor. He slept in a room designed to look like a chapel, with a gold-coloured altar and heavy crucifix that he had built himself. His wife’s bedroom was accessible through a stone passageway at the back of his bedroom. This stone passageway was built to be too small and inconvenient for his mother to pass through.<br />
<br />
Wade and his life are as odd and underexplained as any of the objects that line the house. We learn (from a few scraps of text and a few blurred photographs) that the money he inherited came from his family’s plantations in the West Indies. Quite what this means is unclear – we don’t find out from visiting the house about conditions on the plantations, or about whether his family were involved in the plantations long enough to have owned slaves. There’s the nagging feeling when walking through Snowshill Manor that you might be witnessing a vast, overextended childhood paid for by centuries of blood. But there’s no way to tell from what is written on the walls.<br />
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History has been wiped away here. Only the shadows of stories remain.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image Attributions</span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Samurai - By Celuici (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Masks - Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Spinning Wheels - Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Ship - Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
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Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-64564073048976392172016-02-28T08:57:00.002-08:002016-02-28T10:33:14.856-08:00The 50 Best Songs of 2015It's rather late this time, but my embarrassingly labour-intensive tradition continues. As ever, songs get better as you go down the list, anything that appeared on an album/EP/single this year is allowed, and 'song' is defined as loosely as necessary. New rules this time round: I've added a 25 minute time limit on music, which means that you don't get an entry for 'Africa Express Presents... Terry Riley's in C Mali' (forty minutes of hypnotic mid-century minimalism, rearranged to be played on traditional Malian instruments). And the list only includes songs I first discovered in 2015: this means there's nothing from Aidan O'Rourke's 'Music for Exhibition and Film' (like the best of Eno's ambient stuff, only with fiddle instead of keyboards; best experienced in cars late at night) or Rhiannon Giddens' 'Tomorrow is my Turn' (American folk with mind-blowing vocals; would easily be in the top twenty of this list). All that stuff is on Spotify if you want to explore further.<br />
<br />
Speaking of Spotify, the playlist for this year's list is here:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://open.spotify.com/user/mulac/playlist/4De85Wg4Zvy65WjEBVYVeE">https://open.spotify.com/user/mulac/playlist/4De85Wg4Zvy65WjEBVYVeE</a><br />
<br />
It's probably been the best year for music since I started doing this list, with the entries at 1, 2, 4, 7 and 9 all coming from records that I've felt are my album of the year at some point or other. And while I usually have to scrabble around to find music for the bottom end of the top fifty, this year I had a shortlist of 65 to choose from. This is all very good stuff.<br />
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<b>50. Random Name Generator - Wilco</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/v81vhGTzXKE">http://youtu.be/v81vhGTzXKE</a><br />
There are big pop hooks in here somewhere, but they're protected like the soft belly of a porcupine by spiny guitar-stabs. Meanwhile, its word-salad lyrics sound like you've misheard a fascinating but distant conversation. Cold, emotionally-repressed, defensive and brainy, but still well-crafted enough to be accidentally danceable.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Jefftweedyps07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Jefftweedyps07.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<b>49. Dani's Blues - it was beyond our control - Bop English</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/qfSYToTvxNI">http://youtu.be/qfSYToTvxNI</a><br />
Speaking of danceable, this one has "stomp" as its seventh word, a fair clue to its dominant mood. For all its yearning for wild roughness, it's engagingly mannered, the energetic hollering carefully arranged and designed. It's an alt-country bounce where the banjos have been filed off and replaced with a New York art school.<br />
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<b>48. At Once - Beirut</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/JkAyvVLOQ3w">http://youtu.be/JkAyvVLOQ3w</a><br />
It's definitely too early in my life to romanticise my second year at university, to forget the unrelenting deadlines and the fact that I lived in a filthy, slug-infested house, and remember it as some endless wheel of parties, plays and late night conversation. Beirut, with their lush rambling horns and non-specific yearning was pretty much the soundtrack to all that stuff. Most of their new album is, sleeker, poppier, less baroque and less interesting, but there is the occasional, brief moment which imitates their old days. Much like life really.<br />
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<b>47. Masters - Treacherous Orchestra</b><br />
Bagpipe-based thunder. In the post-Bellowhead folk landscape, there are now a few bands with seemingly infinite members playing high-octane traditional music for partying purposes (this is certainly a fair description of what The Half Moon All Stars [the band I'm a member of] is trying to do). Treacherous Orchestra are applying these methods to Scottish instrumental folk, and pummelling this listener into submission. Masters is great from the start, but improves immensely when the electric keyboards come out, and everything goes cheesily widescreen.<br />
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<b>46. Debt Free - Paul de Jong</b><br />
After beginning with a piano, a twilit stream of glitchery - strings cut up and reassembled into a rhythmless fast-forward blur. And then, as everything fades, quiet laughter, a dialling tone, a recording of tender words, the warm glow of late evening. Paul de Jong was a member of The Books, whose manipulations of found sounds were virtuosic, flashy and witty. This uses a bunch of the same techniques to create something without any visible force or strain.<br />
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<b>45. Better Not Wake the Baby - The Decemberists</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/cwqXNCl5-OM">http://youtu.be/cwqXNCl5-OM</a><br />
A two minute pastiche of English folk music, it's a deliberately minor song on a disappointingly minor album, but in the hands of a band as writerly as The Decemberists, it works. The words are just so damn nasty, with bile in every syllable and every image violently compressed. Using the folk song form gives the illusion of universality to a squalid scene of petty bitterness.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Decemberists_at_Merriweather.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Decemberists_at_Merriweather.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>44. Sunshine on my Back - The National</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/_Axr6d6G1DU">http://youtu.be/_Axr6d6G1DU</a><br />
I suspect my critical faculties are blinded by obsessive fannishness of The National's perfect run between 2005 and 2010: they could release any damn thing by this point and probably end up somewhere on this list. But even if the single they recorded this year doesn't match their heights, they can still produce rigorous, shimmering melancholy better than anyone else: it's full of striking phrases and long shadows.<br />
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<b>43. The Long Strange Golden Road - The Waterboys</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/7KDFVRVHTLU">http://youtu.be/7KDFVRVHTLU</a><br />
They weren't kidding about it being long: it goes on forever, verses piling upon verses, each more linguistically florid than the last, snaking through a vast and crunchy landscape of organ-led blues, the band jamming wildly. It's aiming for epic grandeur, but there's too much partying and posturing going on to take it entirely seriously. It also has a killer chorus, which is lucky, because you hear it an awful lot before the song is over.<br />
<br />
<b>42. Blood - Algiers</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/g3L0NI8vcMg">http://youtu.be/g3L0NI8vcMg</a><br />
Electronic gospel punk, which is certainly the most exciting idea for a genre on the list: this is sweaty, serious stuff, full of anger and weight. With the handclaps, rumbling bass, howling vocals and burning guitars, this has all the ingredients for a singalong hurricane, but instead everything is measured and manipulated into a cold anger, never in danger of losing control or focus.<br />
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<b>41. Dead Format - Blanck Mass</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/QXRJ3V7kFL4">http://youtu.be/QXRJ3V7kFL4</a><br />
Recorded by one half of electronic sledgehammer merchants Fuck Buttons, this spends its first few minutes getting you comfortable in its sludgy magma hell-disco, and then introduces some weird clipped-up vocals halfway between ecstatic communion and tortured horror. It's sensory overload, basically, but with its pounding beat it's also surprisingly good fun, and much more accessible than a lot of the abstract, abrasive material Blanck Mass released this year.<br />
<br />
<b>40. Gagarin - Public Service Broadcasting</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/wY-kAnvOY80">http://youtu.be/wY-kAnvOY80</a><br />
A big loud funk-pastiche party song that - if you relax into its charms - is also kind of moving and inspiring. Public Service Broadcasting's gimmick is taking archive recordings from between the 1940s and 1960s, and turning them into retro-futuristic pop. This celebration of Yuri Gagarin's journey into space is bright, clean and optimistic, illuminated by stabs of shining horns.<br />
<br />
<b>39. Spores all Settling - This is the Kit</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/ZPt8djTxac8">http://youtu.be/ZPt8djTxac8</a><br />
Late night indie-banjo. Initially the singing and the playing seem so simple as to be almost naive, the lyrics' sentence structures fitting awkwardly against the melody. As the arrangement becomes subtly denser, it becomes clear that the naivety was always an illusion. The National guitarist Aaron Dessner produced this, and it shares The National's cool, intricate melancholy.<br />
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<b>38. You Know Me - Eliza Carthy and the Wayward Band</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/O0c7sotgUjY">http://youtu.be/O0c7sotgUjY</a><br />
So Bellowhead announced that they were parting ways this year. And even though they were a literally life-changing band for me (as in, I probably wouldn't play traditional English music if they hadn't existed) it's probably fair to say that musically they'd got themselves stuck in a rut. So it's good to see that the generally godlike Eliza Carthy has started making the sprawling, brass-heavy high-energy stuff that Bellowhead specialised in. It’s a lot scruffier than Bellowhead, though. The lyrics are broad anti-Toryism, which gives it some punky heft, and there’s no better way to add grandiosity than a late-game children’s choir.<br />
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<b>37. Willie O - Sam Lee</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/p5zzcj0m5W0">http://youtu.be/p5zzcj0m5W0</a><br />
Some more trad English folk here. Sam Lee has the kind of weathered voice you expect to hear in a creaking pub at two in the morning, but it’s also the kind of voice which is going to make you put down your pint and pay attention. The more music he records, the harder work his arrangements get - there are points when his band almost starts playing free jazz. But it’s not really about the band, it’s about how far you can stretch traditional music while still serving the song above everything else.<br />
<br />
<b>36. To us the Beautiful - Franz Nicolay</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/pAd3U1SHA5U">http://youtu.be/pAd3U1SHA5U</a><br />
A straight-ahead rock song, with a huge woah-oah chorus and buckets of theatricality. Franz Nicolay used to be the keyboard player in the Hold Steady (still The Greatest Rock Band Working Today, even if I can’t persuade anyone else of this fact), and this song shares a lot of DNA with Nicolay’s former band, not least the pleasantly overwritten lyrics. It’s a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
<b>35. Hand Cannot Erase - Steven Wilson</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/UqQIAAkw_Gk">http://youtu.be/UqQIAAkw_Gk</a> (not on Spotify)<br />
Maybe Steven Wilson’s secret power is taking unfashionable things seriously. His (often magnificent) work with Porcupine Tree took prog and metal tropes and gave them an icy, unnerving sheen. But he’s also talked about his fascination with Abba and the Bee-Gees, so it’s no surprise that when it comes to tight, slickly-produced pop songs he can write material as good as this. Like much of his best music, it draws attention to its technical perfection, but churns with yearning and discomfort.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Blackfield-NYC-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Blackfield-NYC-01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>34. Unequal - Holly Herndon</b><br />
Electronica that resembles monastic chanting. Initially abstract and impenetrable, it's unclear whether the music settles into something beautiful and hypnotic, or whether you start to tune in to the beauty that was there all along.<br />
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<b>33. Get Low - Stornoway</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/gTN1L-eyUAk">http://youtu.be/gTN1L-eyUAk</a><br />
A great pop song: there’s nothing here that isn’t a hook. I didn’t get Stornoway at all until I saw them live this year, and realised how much craft, invention and playfulness there was in songs that seemed so relaxed and free.<br />
<br />
<b>32. Angela's Eyes - Guy Garvey</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/CIEhf4n221o">http://youtu.be/CIEhf4n221o</a><br />
Guy Garvey of Elbow impersonates Tom Waits, and even if he's a little smooth to fully inhabit the juddering junkyard he's created here, there's enough swagger and momentum to see him through. There's also a couple of mad spurting synth solos that show up unexpectedly and splatter themselves all over the furniture. It's invigorating stuff, especially after Elbow's recent lull.<br />
<br />
<b>31. Every Song Sung to a Dog - Fred Thomas</b><br />
Raw, unkempt outpourings, specifically about the singer's reaction to his dying pet, but more generally about everything else: the wordy stream-of-consciousness reflecting the flashing and casting-about of severe emotional distress. The scruffy guitars and horns (and eccentric turns of phrase) are reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel at their most ebullient. And this *is* ebullient - anthemic and cathartic, despite being a song about grief.<br />
<br />
<b>30. Otherwise - Roomful of Teeth</b><br />
In my experience, if they aren't interested in classical choral singing, a capella vocal groups tend to embrace a knowing campery. Roomful of Teeth are a long way from this: they are serious without sounding high-minded, whimsical without winking at their methods. This song is a bizarre cornucopia of vocal styles, weaving together to build an unearthly melodrama: I was barely aware that the human body could create some of these noises.<br />
<br />
<b>29. Stranger in a Room - Jamie XX</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/nioveoUcrl8">http://youtu.be/nioveoUcrl8</a><br />
One half of The XX has started making music in a radically different direction to his old stuff, and has been receiving serious critical acclaim for it. So it seems unfair that I've chosen the track that sounds most like his old stuff. But in the end I prefer my icy melancholy without dance pop, and Jamie XX has proved that - even on his own - he's a world champion at creating emotional shockwaves with understatement and minimalism.<br />
<br />
<b>28. Europe is Lost - Kate Tempest</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/TOXXdYtZSbQ">http://youtu.be/TOXXdYtZSbQ</a><br />
The first thing you hear is the production, dripping with sparse, loping, mechanised menace. And then the words - an unfiltered outpouring of political anger, seemingly without structure or filter. Some of it is brilliantly direct, some of it clumsy and vague, but what makes it compelling is the despair: the system has already won and resistance is futile<br />
<br />
<b>27. Wolfkids - Inventions</b><br />
Ambient loveliness, but spectral, subterranean, ambient loveliness, like waves of comfort coming from something vast and ancient and inhuman, with motives the human brain isn't constructed to understand. Every time I listen to to it, I'm surprised by how densely constructed it is, how many moving parts the wash of sound contains, how many brief hints there are of subtle changes in mood.<br />
<br />
<b>26. Dark Honey - Simpson, Cutting, Kerr</b><br />
Traditional English folk, arranged simply and performed perfectly, which makes it quite hard to write about. It's melancholic in the way that a bright spring morning can be melancholic, wandering through warm shafts of thoughtful light. And there's a winning confidence in the musicianship here: it achieves brilliance without ever coming close to flashy.<br />
<br />
<b>25. Capable of Anything - Ben Folds</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/OJttpMjPClA">http://youtu.be/OJttpMjPClA</a><br />
If you're going to rip anyone off, it might as well be Sufjan Stevens. Here, the agitated buzz and flutter of flutes, the dense hyperactivity of the string-section, and the sudden, minor-key instrumental breakdown are more than a little reminscent of Stevens' work. But they're reminiscent of his best work, and the soaring melody and detailed arrangement (treating orchestral instruments as if they were electronic samples) are more than worthy of their influences.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Ben_Folds%2C_Knoxville%2C_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Ben_Folds%2C_Knoxville%2C_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>24. Piss Crowns are Trebled - Godspeed You! Black Emperor</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/qeYTylOd6As">http://youtu.be/qeYTylOd6As</a><br />
Godspeed You! Black Emperor (and goodness, that band name is fun to type) are an elemental force. This is oceanic, apocalyptic stuff, waves of guitars crashing onto waves of guitars. I saw them live this year - the band were unlit; it was impossible to tell who was playing what. But as the music roared, huge monochrome films played above them - of grain silos, skyscrapers, collections of obtuse photographs: it was an exercise in sensory overload. Godspeed You! is a band who make an awful lot of noise and take this very seriously.<br />
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<b>23. Be Right Back, Moving House - Ghostpoet</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/S5mcMvDjfd8">http://youtu.be/S5mcMvDjfd8</a><br />
Ghostpoet has the voice of a man who knows what he's talking about - it's weathered and crackling with experience. This is wintry stuff, full of tightly drawn curtains and whispering fires. The song is one long crescendo, but at the end it's not catharsis that comes but measured understanding.<br />
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<b>22. Ducks and Drakes - Seamus Fogarty</b><br />
<a href="https://lostmap.bandcamp.com/album/ducks-and-drakes">https://lostmap.bandcamp.com/album/ducks-and-drakes</a> (not on Spotify)<br />
So I was doing the washing up late at night, with Radio 6 on, which is my usual way of doing the washing up, even if I feel I should like Radio 6 more than I actually do. And then this comes on and the mundanity evaporates, and the room is soaked by some trembling, forgotten ritual. There's a really lovely singer-songwriter thing in at the centre of this music, but it's warped by quiet electronic intrusions and jazzish moments that occasionally drift away from melody and into abstraction.<br />
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<b>21. The Legend of Chavo Guerrero - The Mountain Goats</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/4lqy7KBuO7Y">http://youtu.be/4lqy7KBuO7Y</a><br />
It probably points to a deep shallowness at the centre of my taste that I only really like The Mountain Goats when they're writing pop songs. But dammit, The Mountain Goats write good pop songs. It's so damn tight, with a monstrously catchy tune, eccentric subject matter (like everything else on this year's "Beat The Champ" album, it's about Mexican Wrestling) and an endless supply of startling turns of phrase.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Mountainsgoatscropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Mountainsgoatscropped.jpg" width="301" /></a></div>
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<b>20. Run Like the River - Vintage Trouble</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/2ymT3g5imIU">http://youtu.be/2ymT3g5imIU</a><br />
Impossibly propulsive blues rock: you think it can't be driving any faster, and then the first chorus hits, sending the song into hyperspeed. It's set alight alight by muscular gospel vocals and a spine of taut, unflinching guitar. People have been making music like this for decades, but it's always good to hear it done perfectly.<br />
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<b>19. Path 19 (yet frailest) - Max Richter</b><br />
This is an extract from an eight hour cycle of music designed to be heard while you sleep: live performances are meant to begin at around midnight and continue through until morning. As a result, this isn't exactly a party song - a softly repeating sequence of piano notes with a violin gliding across it - but it is quietly, restfully beautiful.<br />
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<b>18. Learning to Relax - Dan Deacon</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/RtjS3KN162s">http://youtu.be/RtjS3KN162s</a><br />
There's a sort of poignant loneliness you only ever find in nightclubs. Nightclubs are places designed to create human connection, but walls of noise overwhelm attempts to communicate. The buzz of alcohol and cheaply emotive music contrive to elicit a highly specific emotional response, but if your feelings are distant from the ones the environment is pushing on you, the whole room seems distant, disconnected. And yet there's something to be enjoyed about this feeling: the opportunity to be introverted and thoughtful in a room full of so much noise and movement. So it's a compliment when I say that Learning to Relax reminds me of this feeling - exuberant electronic dance music with a core of distant yearning.<br />
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<b>17. Grey Tickles, Black Pressure - John Grant</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/0rUw5FhgN4Y">http://youtu.be/0rUw5FhgN4Y</a><br />
Midlife crisis as apocalypse: an outpouring of fear, bitterness and despair. But it's also incredibly funny. John Grant's voice is a smooth baritone, the production is thick and soupy, with washes of strings and insincere choirs, but the musical-theatre histrionics are undercut by witty deadpan grumbling. John Grant's music has been getting odder and odder with each album: the disparate moods of this song really shouldn't work together. But here the bleak and the charming sit comfortably side by side.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/John_Grant_performing_live_in_Norway_September_2013.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/John_Grant_performing_live_in_Norway_September_2013.JPG" width="278" /></a></div>
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<b>16. 24 Frames - Jason Isbell</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/ZtgPeNKpnyw">http://youtu.be/ZtgPeNKpnyw</a><br />
Jaon Isbell is an alt-country singer, and for anyone familiar with the thousands of men who have flirted with steel guitars, rugged miserablism and checked shirts over the last fifty years, there won't be any surprises here. But Isbell is very, very good at his job. The melody is perfect, the lyrics heavy with Springsteenian grit. But there's also something oblique about its poetry - a strangeness verging on mysticism that Springsteen would never have attempted.<br />
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<b>15. All Fighters Past - Yes</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/xH8x5_CPTIs">http://youtu.be/xH8x5_CPTIs</a> (not on Spotify)<br />
Yes are kind of important to me. The first band that I loved (I have a vivid memory of hearing Sound Chaser when I must have been about five). The first gig ever saw (their 35th aniversary tour, 2004. I was fourteen. I still wear the t-shirt sometimes). The absolute bedrock of my musical taste (for me, wild invention, virtuosity, pomposity, overreach and bombast will almost always beat simplicity or subtlety). I may not listen to them as much as they used to, and they may not have released a decent album for the last 15 years, but no band has produced a more consistently perfect run of music than the five records that Yes recorded between 1971 and 1974, and I firmly believe that Close to the Edge is one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century. So when, for this year's remaster of 1971's Fragile, a brand new early 70s Yes track was discovered, it's a big deal. It's a two-minute jam with ideas that would later be used on future albums, but it still sounds incredible: five musicians at the peak of their powers producing something fleeting and joyous.<br />
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<b>14. Figure 8 - FKA Twigs</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/Bdj-urL1zNA">http://youtu.be/Bdj-urL1zNA</a><br />
Delicate and fragile, like a spider. Full of subterranean skittering, and waves of doomy electronic noise, FKA Twigs' pure and airy voice floats above the melee as if holding court at a carnival of the damned. Unlike a lot of the self-consciously arty electronica on this list (see the entries at 46, 41, 34 and 27), there's a practiced pop sensibility here, with a finely-tuned structure and subtle hooks, which makes the song a simultaneously comfortable and disturbing place to sink into.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/FKA_Twigs_2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/FKA_Twigs_2015.jpg" width="276" /></a></div>
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<b>13. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful - Florence and the Machine</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/Z1ZOmI_AR1k">http://youtu.be/Z1ZOmI_AR1k</a><br />
This is how you do bombast. There's a moment, 58 seconds in, when the suddenly excited horns make a noise that goes cha-ba-b-ba-ba-BA!, and then the fun begins. The orchestration is vast, monolithic, ridiculous in the best possible sense. And somehow, impossibly, Florence Welch's voice manages to overpower the orchestra.<br />
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<b>12. Milford - Leveret</b><br />
Three of the finest English folk musicians of their generation, improvising around a tune. There's nothing showy here, no conspicuous virtuosity, but what happens is beautiful: ideas bouncing off ideas and taking flight. It helps that the tune they're improvising around is superb, but the fact that an arrangement this perfect comes out of a jam is stunning. I imagine this is what hearing jazz would feel like if I was really into jazz.<br />
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<b>11. My Baby Don't Understand Me - Natalie Prass</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/5MgadJlTfdk">http://youtu.be/5MgadJlTfdk</a><br />
Sweeping orchestral soul, diving across mountainous crescendos one moment, and into poised repose the next. It's all rather mannered, more interested in polish than the raw emotional horror the lyrics seem to demand. But the polish is something to get lost in - it gleams with quality and care.<br />
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<b>10. S.O.B. - Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/1iAYhQsQhSY">http://youtu.be/1iAYhQsQhSY</a><br />
A glorious, gospel-soul stomp, and the happiest song ever written about alcoholism and failed relationships. It also contains this year's best swearing. The performance is raucous, but it's easy to ignore how tight the songwriting is: experience has shown that this works excellently when jammed through late at night in several Oxfordshire pubs.<br />
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<b>9. I Lost My Mind (+@) - Titus Andronicus</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/6mNB32TzFlsu">http://youtu.be/6mNB32TzFlsu</a><br />
Ragged, wordy punk, and an unflinching look at the singer's history of mental illness. It's not dour - it works far too well as rock music for that. And there's something triumphant in the song, even if the only triumph is daily survival. Titus Andronicus like to play with pretentiousness: this year they recorded a two-hour long concept album about manic depression, with song titles like "No Future Part V: In Endless Dreaming". But songs like this are a reminder that the pretentiousness is a pose - a way of containing and framing the wild directness of their best material.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Titus_andronicus_in_concert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="239" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Titus_andronicus_in_concert.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>8. The Only Thing to Do - Bella Hardy</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/d_C7dC277bg">http://youtu.be/d_C7dC277bg</a><br />
Bella Hardy usually sings traditional English folk music, but there's not much that's traditional or folky about this. It's a brilliantly realised piece of art-pop, with startlingly idiosycratic production: bursts of horns, burbling synthesisers, and snatches of distortion, all just restrained enough to keep the attention on Hardy's voice.<br />
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<b>7. The Blacker the Berry - Kendrick Lamar</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/Z0QoAIFUuWo">http://youtu.be/Z0QoAIFUuWo</a><br />
I'm much more comfortable writing about aesthetics than politics, but politically and aesthetically, this is bracing stuff. As a white listener, the song comes across as a confrontation, a reckoning, until it becomes clear that any white listener is almost irrelevant to the song's mechanisms: for all its visceral directness, this is as much a piece of introspection as it is a demonstration of righteous anger. Aesthetically, it's a series of explosions: Lamar's rapping is startlingly percussive; Assassin's vocal hooks surge between the verses like rising floodwater.<br />
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<b>6. Rey's Theme - John Williams</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/65As1V0vQDM">http://youtu.be/65As1V0vQDM</a><br />
When I was a child, I watched a lot of Star Wars. When I was a teenager, I listened to a lot of film soundtracks. Everyone knows that Episode VII was a hyper-efficient nostalgia machine, but the fact that its soundtrack may well be the last new John Williams Star Wars music we ever hear, coupled with the fact that - for me - it arrived at exactly the sort of emotionally gruelling time when nostalgia hits hardest, means that this piece felt important. Williams has always created music that feels as if it's already part of the landscape, part of cinema's history. Rey's theme is grand and restrained, and slots alongside its predecessors with practiced ease.<br />
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<b>5. Rock and Roll is Cold - Matthew E. White</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/co4krl2xge0">http://youtu.be/co4krl2xge0</a><br />
Matthew E. White is so damn classy. There are enough musicians here to populate a small village, but it's not busy or overblown: there's just a warm brassy groove that White floats above and sinks into. It's also genuinely funny - simultaneously mocking and celebrating the ways people think about, talk about and make music. With its ooh-la-la-las and horn-stabs, it feels like the kind of thing you should be able to punch the air to, but the song is far too knowing, sophisticated and self-confident for that.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Matthew_E._White.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Matthew_E._White.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>4. The Death of the Dining Car - Lau</b><br />
With the possible exception of Kendrick Lamar, Lau are - for me - the most successfully adventurous musicians working today: they're doing more than anyone else to expand the possibilities of music. They're still working within the walls of Scottish folk music, but they're pushing hard against the walls of what 'Scottish Folk Music' might actually mean. I could talk about this song's cryptic, conversational poetry, the psychic interplay between its musicians, or its thumping momentum. But mostly I love it for its fiddle part: a flashing, leaping thing, unmoored from gravity.<br />
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<b>3. Return to the Moon - El Vy</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/LUAOwceIzRM">http://youtu.be/LUAOwceIzRM</a><br />
The National's perpetually gloomy frontman Matt Berninger sings a bouncy, almost cheerful, piece of pop music. Sometimes it's hard to say why a song hits so hard, where to find the kernel of excellence that makes you come back to a song again and again and again and again. Maybe it's the whiff of melancholy nestling between the rhythmic spring of the guitars. Maybe it's the flashes of sudden wit or insight in the surreal whirl of the lyrics. Maybe it's just hearing a vocalist and writer that I love working in a new context. In any case, this has probably been played in my flat more than any other song this year.<br />
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<b>2. Elevator Operator - Courtney Barnett</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/10WO9czx8Ng">http://youtu.be/10WO9czx8Ng</a><br />
I've already described Titus Andronicus's entry on this list as "ragged, wordy punk", and this is the same sort of electrified verbal outpouring. Unlike the Titus Andronicus song, however, this is sunny and joyous, though not uncomplicatedly so: it's a smart, witty and perceptive slice-of-life, even if the life it's slicing is a very strange one. I've been concentrating on the song's wry eccentricity here, but it's important to note that it's also blood-pumpingly exciting - you don't get a chorus until halfway through, but you hardly notice because every inch of the melody is explosive.<br />
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<b>1. Should Have Known Better - Sufjan Stevens</b><br />
<a href="http://youtu.be/lJJT00wqlOo">http://youtu.be/lJJT00wqlOo</a><br />
I'm not sure where to start on this one. There are certainly songs on this list that are more fun, or cleverer, or more immediate, or more exciting. It's a song about bereavement, and eventually it's a song about hope, and love, and acceptance. Musically, it feels very simple. All of which, in the abstract, makes it sound like it might be a collection of platitudes, but it's the opposite of that. There's a knife-sharp precision and specificity to it, a shunning of cliche, which makes the grief Stevens sings about feel real, fresh, painful. And when the song moves on to sing about hope, and love, and acceptance, it's not that those moments feel earned - there's nothing so crude or artificial as a narrative structure here - it's that they feel true: the song doesn't walk out of the darkness into the light, it allows the light to coexist messily with the darkness. There are moments here that hurt, and there are moments that don't. But in his gentle, patient, devastating way, Stevens explains everything.<br />
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Sufjan_Stevens_playing_banjo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Sufjan_Stevens_playing_banjo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>Image Attributions:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 50: By Hectorcg (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 47: By Schorle (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 45: By Adam Shlossman (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 38: By Maybesometime (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 35: By Alex Harden from Harrisburg, PA, USA (Blackfield-NYC-01) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 25: By Michael Nutt (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nutt/137110246) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 21: By The_Mountain_Goats_Live_@_The_Rickshaw_(Vancouver).jpg: Klim Levene from Canada derivative work: CutOffTies [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 17: By Jan Frode Haugseth (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 14: By Bobo Boom (https://www.flickr.com/photos/fotnmc/16549707049/) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 9: By David J Lee (http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidjlee/5847553847/) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 5: By Kim Matthäi Leland (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Image under entry 1: By Joe Lencioni [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons</span>Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-61922896531647744422015-10-07T17:34:00.001-07:002015-10-07T17:55:49.800-07:00O Brave New World, That Has Such Minor Irritations In ItI saw a play based on Huxley's Brave New World tonight, and it was a pretty good effort, even if the novel is clearly tricky adapt to the stage. It did, however, remind me of one of my least favourite tropes.<br />
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It happens with dispiriting frequency when you have a fictional future society, cut off from the modern world, and with a vastly different set of cultural values. Someone in this future finds A Book (usually Shakespeare, but any other western canonical author will do) and - despite the aforementioned vastly different set of cultural values - they are enormously moved by it. They usually understand it *identically* to the way that 20th and 21st century readers would understand it. Often, the Timeless Truth and Beauty will disturb and shock the complacent masses of this future society, who see their shallowness reflected in its depth.</div>
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At least in the play of Brave New World*, John (who finds a complete works of Shakespeare when he can barely read, and grows up in a culture that has never even heard of theatre) quotes the *exact* lines of Shakespeare that would be famous to a modern audience. In Fahrenheit 451, rebels are sentimental and protective of Greek philosopers, renaissance playwrights and victorian poets, but seemingly unfazed by the burning of anything less respectable, and people with no knowledge of literature and history are brought to tears by, of all things, Matthew Arnold. In a fairly awful Dan Simmons novella called "Muse of Fire", a group of starfaring actors from the distant future discuss their favourite Shakespeare plays as if they were schoolteachers in the 1990s. The idea that context might colour reception is totally absent.</div>
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The thing is, we *know* what happens when we encounter literature that is contextually alien to us. I remember being an arrogant fifteen year old, studying Pride & Prejudice for my GCSEs, and despising every page of it. I didn't have the skill or sensitivity to empathise with the class anxieties of regency women. Working out why Austen is revered took a bunch of growing up, and a hefty widening of cultural reference points. But most importantly, it took living in a culture that was happy to point to why this stuff was so enormously popular.</div>
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And we *know* that we don't receive Shakespeare now in the way that it was received in any century since it was written. The idea that someone in a distant future would be instantly moved by the same words that move us today is bizarre. Most of the time, we like the stuff we like because we can grab onto it, find points of common ground, seize phrases and ideas and situations that resonate with us. If it's distant, alien and strange, that can be fun too, but parsing such works takes effort: it won't fire off the instant beauty and knowledge that this process seems to bring in dystopias.</div>
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(It's also creepily imperialist to assert that the most respected bits of English literature will be considered timeless by any imagined future; works by non-western cultures don't tend to get a look-in. But that's a whole other argument).</div>
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Right now, I'm reading Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and it's much, much smarter when it deals with this stuff. In a society where women are forbidden from reading or writing, it's not canonical works of literature that bring relief or freedom from an oppressive culture, but whatever scraps of writing can still be found: old magazines, school textbooks, scraps of graffiti, words sewn into cushions. To believe that great wells of feeling or thought can only survive in the most canonical texts devalues the rest of literature. And to believe that canonical texts can show up in radically different cultures with their interpretation untouched devalues what an exciting mess a culture can make of anything.<br />
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If someone in the distant future did find a long-forgotten copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, I'd much rather they *didn't* understand it. What they'd make of it would be so much more interesting.</div>
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*and probably in the novel too. I haven't yet put the books in my new flat into a searchable order, so hunting for my copy would time-consuming. And it's already half midnight.</div>
Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-67143816298770005942015-07-28T14:39:00.002-07:002015-07-28T14:42:39.543-07:00Prisoner of an A.I. God: What on Earth are we to make of Philip K. Dick's VALIS?Philip Dick was arguably the most important Science Fiction writer of the 1960s. He came to prominence at the same time that SF's New Wave movement was gathering strength, when writers like Ballard, Moorcock, Ellison and Le Guin were rejecting SF's previous dependence on straightforward prose and scientific realism, and replacing it with something more fluid, political, experimental and self-consciously literary. Dick fitted in well with this - his imagined world couldn't be more different from the leading lights of the previous generation. For writers like Clarke and Asimov the universe ran according to clean and logical laws, and was explored by clean and competent people: even the greatest mysteries were just puzzles we hadn't yet had time to figure out. For Dick, the universe was an impenetrable mess, explored by characters barely equipped to figure out the most basic facts.<br />
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Reality in Dick's novels is rubbery, untrustworthy. In <i>A Scanner Darkly</i>, a drug-addled police officer fails to realise that he is running surveillance on himself, and that the drug dealers and rehabilitation services are a scam controlled by the same company. In <i>The Man in the High Castle</i>, a man manufactures fake American antiques to sell to Japanese businessmen, the reality-blurring nature of his work mirrored by the reality-blurring nature of the setting, an alternate-history which the characters seem to realise is an impossible lie. In <i>Ubik</i>, no one can work out if everyone is dead, and whether this matters; in <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i>, no one can work out if there's a difference between a real or an artificial human, or whether this matters. Dick's novels are constantly searching for the difference between what is actually there and what is a hallucination, between an original and a copy, between truth and a manipulated image, and they are constantly concluding that it's impossible for anyone to discover what counts as reality.<br />
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Where is all of this coming from? Partly there's a woozy, cold-war sensibility to the books; a feeling that after the trauma of World War Two, and under the threat of the atomic bomb, cosy everyday American lives couldn't be anything other than a deeply creepy artificial construction. Partly there's an anxiety about religious experience, about how the mundane and the supernatural could possibly coexist and how anyone could value one against the other. Partly there was Dick's drug usage, warping the very idea of objective perceptions. And eventually, there was the fact that Dick himself became unable to distinguish between reality and hallucination.<br />
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Which brings us to <i>VALIS</i>.<br />
<br />
In 1974, Dick claimed that a bright pink beam of light was fired at him from an unknown source, and this allowed him to reach a new, supernatural level of consciousness. From then on, a disembodied voice began to speak to him regularly, and seemingly gave him the medical knowledge to save the life of his son. He decided that he had unconsciously learned how to speak an obscure dialect of ancient Greek, and experienced visions of Ancient Rome superimposed onto the streets of the California where he lived. He was quite aware that he may have gone mad, but he thought it was more likely that something very real was happening to him. The exact meaning of the experience was (in a quintessentially Dickian way) impossible to uncover, but this didn’t stop him theorising and re-theorising by writing a vast pseudo-philosophical text he called the Exegesis. He thought that perhaps he had been contacted by God, who may or may not have been an AI. Or perhaps a secret cult of Christians from the 1st Century were invading and rewriting reality. Or perhaps all of this was linked to three-eyed aliens from Sirius. And in 1981, he wrote a barely fictionalised novel about his experiences.<br />
<br />
That novel was <i>VALIS</i> – ostensibly a work of Science Fiction, but also a vivid, disturbing account of its author’s mental breakdown. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve read in a long time: it’s got Dick’s usual pulpy verve, but it is also a moving and uncompromising look at mental illness. And as a result, reading it feels voyeuristic, uncomfortably like we’re staring at a man’s private pain while he can’t tell how much he is giving away.<br />
<br />
The first half of the book is its most lucid and most autobiographical. The novel’s narrator introduces us to a man called Horselover Fat. Recently divorced and blaming himself for the suicide of a close friend, Fat stumbles between destructive relationships and psychiatric hospitals. He also experiences the same supernatural phenomena that happened to Dick: the pink light, the disembodied voice of an AI God, and the hallucinations of ancient Rome. Throughout this period Fat constructs and records a complex and constantly shifting cosmology, which can be simplified to the idea that a wise and godlike entity known as Zebra is recolonizing the universe, and that the universe is a corrupt and broken hologram currently in thrall to a force known as the Black Iron Prison.<br />
<br />
Fat is surrounded by a small, close-knit social circle: there’s a couple of stock Christians and a stock atheist, all of whom are uncomfortable with Fat’s heterodoxy. Pretty much their entire function in the first half of the novel is to argue against Fat’s bizarre philosophies, and to act as an audience when Fat wants to extemporise. The most interesting of Fat's friends is the book’s narrator, who is quietly sceptical of Fat’s experiences, but doesn’t have the narrowly defined philosophies of his peers. The most interesting aspect of the narrator, though, is introduced on the novel’s third page: up until this point, Fat has been described entirely in the third person, but here the narrator announces that “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much needed objectivity.”<br />
<br />
On a literal level (and as the novel later makes very clear) Fat and the narrator are the same person: they are either the two parts of a schizophrenic split personality, or the effect of a formal literary device - the narrator can only comprehend and describe his reality if he literally separates himself from his supernatural experiences and mental illness. In classic Dickian style, it is impossible to tell if there is any real difference between the formal literary device and actual schizophrenia. But to claim that Fat and the Narrator can be read as consistently the same entity is to underestimate the text.<br />
<br />
The narrator and Fat repeatedly merge and split apart: sometimes the narrator will disagree with Fat and take up a separate role to him in conversation; sometime the narrator will slip up and briefly describe Fat’s activities in the first person. The first half of VALIS is a realist psychological novel about a struggle with mental illness: when one realises how closely the story mirrors that of the author’s life, it is hard not to see this swooping between first and third person identities as an externalisation of Philip Dick’s own struggles. Dick is wryly mocking the absurdity of the beliefs he holds at the same time as passionately explaining and defending them. The reader is watching a breakdown in real time.<br />
<br />
Then the second half of the novel begins, and its disturbing sense of voyeurism escalates.<br />
<br />
Fat and his friends are persuaded to see a surreal science fiction film called <i>VALIS</i> starring a rock star called Mother Goose (according to interviews with Dick at the time, the film was inspired by <i>The Man Who Fell to Earth</i>, and Mother Goose was based on David Bowie). The friends all notice that the film is full of subliminal imagery referencing Fat's visions, and realise that Fat was right all along. Together, they contact and befriend Mother Goose, who helps them understand that the godlike force (known as both Zebra and VALIS) has been reincarnated as Mother Goose's two-year-old daughter, just as it was once reincarnated as Jesus and the Buddha. VALIS/Zebra has already used its reality-warping powers to unseat the antichrist Richard Nixon, and is preparing to create a new golden age. The two-year-old messiah heals the narrator/Fat's split personality, merging them back into one being, and tells Fat and his friends that there is no God but Mankind, and that it is their mission to go forth and spread this message across the world.<br />
<br />
It's tricky to know where to begin with all this.<br />
<br />
This isn't just a step from realist fiction to genre fiction, it's a leap into authorial wish fulfilment. Philip Dick's fictional mirror turns out to have been right all along, and is loved and respected by his friends for it. He meets Jesus, who heals him. He is pronounced a messenger of the new messiah, and will lead the world into a new golden age. He gets to be friends with David Bowie. There's no struggle any more, no sense of awareness that there might be something terribly wrong or unhealthy about his beliefs.<br />
<br />
And all of this is most clearly seen in the change in the relationship between the narrator and Horselover Fat. There is no longer a fluid struggle between two fluctuating devices, and no longer a sense that the narrator might quietly realise that Fat's beliefs are absurd. Firstly, the narrator's friends refer to him as "Phil", and he announces that he has written <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</i> and <i>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch</i>: the stand in for the author has become literally the author. Secondly, Mother Goose points out that "Horselover Fat" is a direct translation of "Philip Dick" (Philip is from the Greek for "Horse lover"; Dick can be translated into german as fat). Finally, when Mother Goose's daughter heals the narrator's split personality, the narrator's friends announce that they had been trying to heal him for years. Ambiguity and fluidity are lost - the narrator and Fat have always been the same man, and can no longer struggle with each other to define the nature of the author's experiences.<br />
<br />
Which would seem to conclude the matter: the book is initially about the author's struggles with how to understand reality, but eventually becomes a disturbing fantasy about the author as a triumphant saviour figure, unencumbered by reality. But the novel's ending further complicates matters.<br />
<br />
Mother Goose's daughter is accidentally killed by her family, as they attempt to extract knowledge of VALIS from her using a laser. This causes the narrator's personality to split again: Horselover Fat goes off to travel the world seeking a new incarnation of the saviour, while the narrator stagnates in front of the television, convinced that VALIS/Zebra is filling the advert breaks with subliminal clues to its existence.<br />
<br />
It's a conclusion that rests at the centre of Dick's fiction. As with so many of his works, clarity and triumph are fleeting and probably illusory. Reality remains liquid and untrustworthy, no matter how hard you stare at it. But in most of his fiction, untrustworthy reality is an interesting game, or a useful metaphor. Here it is reportage - the author announcing himself as lost and aimless, even when he has constructed a fantasy universe that allows him to be the saviour of mankind.<br />
<br />
There are long sections of VALIS that are reminiscent of William Blake: an outsider attempting to build his own heterodox cosmology to order and explain his anger at the world and visionary perceptions. But while Blake's visionary writing is full of fire and faith and certainty, Dick's is built of doubt and confusion. No frame, however bold or empowering, is enough to contain the chaos he experiences, so each frame is nervously and repeatedly rewritten.<br />
<br />
Would I recommend that you read <i>VALIS</i>? I'm not sure. If you're interested in Philip K Dick's ideas, <i>Ubik</i> is a smart introduction to them, and <i>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch</i> is a weird, dense masterpiece. Long stretches of <i>VALIS</i> consist of borderline nonsensical, mutually contradictory philosophical rants, and I've no idea how strange it would be to read without knowing the authorial history behind it. But there's an upsetting, ragged power to it, a sense that the reader has access to a mind desperately trying to work things out. It's unlikely that many people would believe it's Dick's best work but in it's own quiet way, it's pretty extraordinary.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-6288857611707366682015-07-15T14:29:00.002-07:002016-10-19T03:02:59.610-07:00Freeze the Wine<i>Some fiction from April 2013. A weird one this. Turns out that if you want to write three science fiction stories, linked obliquely by a bunch of visual and thematic resonances, you probably need more than 4000 words to do it. Looking back on it now, this seems vague, rushed, and full of graceless infodumps. Also, goodness, I was obviously reading a lot of Philip Dick in 2013. But there's some passages and ideas I'm proud of, and it was certainly an ambitious thing to try and pull off: it's a mess, but probably a worthwhile one.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
On the day that humanity damned itself forever, Spain's second-best pianist was unknowingly persuading Jen not to fall in love with the man sitting next to her. <i>You'd think if people could agree on one thing</i>, she thought, <i>it would be Mozart</i>. But despite the magnificence of the concert, Paul shuffled like a frightened rat, fighting sleep with every inch of his body.<br />
<br />
If time had run as time was meant to run, this would have been the year that Jen discovered a love of Sushi and Descartes. She would have finally beaten her insomnia and worked out how to play that bastard piece of Bach. It would have been a good year.<br />
<br />
But the explosion tore her to atoms, just as it did Paul, the Spanish Pianist, and most of the inhabitants of the provincial town in which they lived.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
Under the red sun, he tries to speak, but he has no breath left. He licks his lips, but he has no spittle left. His throat burns.<br />
<br />
His vision darkens and insect-bites ravage his skin. He does not yet long for death.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
He hears the jeers of the crowd, and tries to feel nothing but love for them. He is worried that he is failing.<br />
<br />
His heart hammers with pain. He is finding it hard to breathe. He no longer feels the roughness of the wood at his back, or the sharpness of the nails in his hands and feet.<br />
<br />
He has not yet even begun to die.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
Michal clicks and the data from the scuffed camera (Japanese-built – its engineer is drawing a wolf in black biro) is fired at <i>Paladin</i>'s sun-bleached Californian machine room, where blank programs built by blanker technicians analyse the particular sheen of Michal's sweat, the dilation of his alcohol-sodden pupils, and belch back a semirandom string of code opening a neon-bright webpage built by a bored Australian design team (high on Cocaine sourced from a burning field) informing Michal that he has WON TWENTY POUNDS, and then metaphorically routing that money from <i>Paladin</i>'s French bank account to Michal's British one, and more literally firing yet more information through a twisted warren of incorporeal datacentres constructed at great expense in a variety of nations, including but not limited to India, Singapore, South Africa, and Ireland.<br />
<br />
The lager turns lukewarm in the light from the slatted window. Not yet satisfied, Michal fingers his rosary.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
They took the overnight train from Minneapolis to Putrajaya, and as such were not used to the heat. The roads they walked above were jammed with traffic and sodden with rain; they tried not be overwhelmed. As one of the few old-school purists left in the twin cities, home was bad enough. Minneapolis hadn't been Bob's kind of place since the seventies, but Bob knew where to go and he knew who his friends were. Still, if his wife had called his fears paranoid before, she looked pretty worried now – he felt thin and pale in the fading light, like a lonely spark of sanity in a dense, alien sea.<br />
<br />
As they approached the warehouse, his fears multiplied. What they were doing was legal, yes, but it had involved talking to a lot of unpleasant people. But the place was clear enough. It was by the sign of the fish that they knew it.<br />
<br />
Bob knocked on the door, his wife scuttling behind him. It was opened by a little rodent of a man. The little man said nothing, simply raising an eyebrow.<br />
<br />
“Ted Idaho told us about this place”, said Bob. “We're interested in your product.”<br />
<br />
The man's face broke into a grin. “Oh thank god. Americans”, he said – his accent was East Coast – “The name's Steve – Steve Krasinski. Would you follow me?”<br />
<br />
They were taken down a scruffy corridor flanked by oppressively tall doors. They could hear the whirr of undefined machinery; Bob was pleased that he'd never really have to find out what those noises were. They approached a tall metal gate – Steve tapped a few buttons and the gate opened before them.<br />
<br />
The room they entered was vast – skyscraper high. The distant ceiling was almost vaulted, the resemblance to a cathedral oddly appropriate. And – floor to ceiling, packed absurdly tight and absurdly high – were the boxes. He might be here thought Bob, his heart battering like an angry bull against his ribcage. He attempted to hide his excitement.<br />
<br />
“This is one of seven storage facilities”, said Steve. “The other six are in currently undisclosed locations. We've produced about four and a half million copies of the product so far, which should serve global demand for the next decade or so.”<br />
<br />
“How much do they cost?” Asked Bob's wife, staring at them.<br />
<br />
“Five hundred US dollars per box, plus an extra two hundred for delivery”. Steve had lit a cigarette; something about the light tinged the smoke with green.<br />
<br />
Bob smiled – given the price he expected, it was as if he'd been offered a box for free. His wife was obviously thinking the same thing. “We'll take one” she said.<br />
<br />
“You're a lucky couple”, grinned Steve, “and I'm proud as hell that our first sale is to an American. Now Ted Idaho's a great guy, and I'm sure you already know everything about what it is we're selling you, but would you mind if I ran through a couple of caveats with you?”<br />
<br />
“Sure thing”, said Bob, staring up at the black rows.<br />
<br />
“First. You can't break into the boxes. Don't even try. Each wall is locked to a different point in time, and there's a difference of up to five seconds between each of its molecules. Even if you cut through - which you won't be able to do - the resulting blast would flatten everything within a kilometre radius.<br />
<br />
“Second. By being here, you understand that what you've bought is almost certainly empty. But I guess, you wouldn't be here if you wanted a full one”. He laughed – there was something indefinably grimy about that laugh, Bob thought.<br />
<br />
“Third. Tell Everyone! We don't want this business to be a secret. We think we're doing something important here – something good – we don't the box to be a private pleasure for you. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Tell your church. This is going to be a beautiful few years for all of us and I don't want us to waste our opportunity.”<br />
<br />
Bob knew all of this, but even if he hadn't, he wouldn't have listened. He felt too alive to worry about anything. <i>We might own it</i>, he thought, <i>we might own him</i>.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
<i>Presumably the funeral directors are making a killing</i>, thought Michal. Another one of those unbidden ideas from the uglier parts of the grieving brain.<br />
<br />
He swatted the idea away, too tired to feel guilty about it. It was an oppressively hot summer, and the funeral had been thick with unexpected incense. From the general numbness of his bones, he felt a right to be uncharitable<br />
<br />
Still, this was better than the candlelit pomp of the London vigil. The English could still excel at ceremony, but sincere public emotion still seemed something of an anathema to them. In the end, the whole night had felt hollow, like tacky costume jewellery. The prime-minister's speech had been ugly and stiff, still apparently of the opinion that Jen and the others had died in some sort of terrorist attack. Well, if the government and the media were still attempting to scratch out a motive for the explosion, then so be it. Michal had joined most of the population in beginning, painfully, to see it as little more than the whim of a blank-faced universe.<br />
<br />
His mother had been too ill to attend the London vigil, but she stood here now, stick in hand and greeting the attendees. She was pale and worn. For some reason she had brought her dog along; the elderly spaniel was almost amusingly incongruous in the churchyard. Michal supposed that no one was going to stop her.<br />
<br />
He felt a desperate need for a drink. He did feel guilty about that.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it was nothing but a trick of the light, but as Michal looked back to his mother, something about her pose surprised him. She had her back to the grey church, but her right hand seemed to be stretched behind her, stroking the stones of its wall. It was as if, he thought, she was trying to comfort it.<br />
<br />
Michal tried to smile at a weeping cousin. The sun burned on.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
The timeship drops back into the universe like needle onto vinyl. Below, the unlit disk of the pre-electric Earth rises to meet them. The sky is jammed with metal – <i>this</i> place at <i>this</i> time is a tourist hotzone, and ships from five dozen identifiable eras flash up on Hasker's scanners. As she blazes through the black, the sky thickens as a wilderness of steel springs into existence around them.<br />
<br />
“Are we ready?” she asks.<br />
<br />
“We're ready” the professor smiles. “You see it?”<br />
<br />
How could she not? It's there – the flagship, paladin class, vaster than the human imagination can really conceive, blocking out galaxies with its marble-veined expanse. At this moment, how many millions of techs, soldiers and priests, sweat-slick with nerves, are scurrying across its decks? Hasker smiles. Trust the papacy to send a big ship to do a small ship's job. They never learned the true value of efficiency.<br />
<br />
The flagship bears the marks of a vessel built a couple of centuries later than Hasker's ship, but the professor has been furiously insistent that he knows the beam technology of that era better than anyone born into it. And when the beam flares into existence, Hasker can feel the gap-toothed ferocity of the professor's grin without having to look at his face. He knows about this theoretically, but he's never actually seen it. And as the light fires down from the papal flagship to the Earth's surface, she has to admit that it is <i>beautiful</i>.<br />
<br />
Hasker swings her ship down and around, and dives hawklike and hungry into the beam's path. Time warps and slows, light and heat glaze the Hull. With any luck, the flagship won't have registered the movement. A speck of dust in a shaft of sunlight.<br />
<br />
The professor checks his readout. “They've found the cargo”, he says, “and they're pulling it up.”<br />
<br />
“Are we intercepting? Have they noticed?”<br />
<br />
“Of course we're intercepting. And if they'd noticed, do you think they'd tolerate our existence?”<br />
<br />
Distant shadows outside the light-circle of the beam, Hasker sees the tourist ships aiming cheap cameras at the surface below.<br />
<br />
“Two twelfths complete”, says the professor, “It's working – actually working. The cargo's moving to our box. We've hijacked the beam.”<br />
<br />
It is Hasker's turn to smile. All of the most satisfying heists involve stealing other people's work as well as their property. She's never been so pleased with the church's investment in high-technology<br />
<br />
And yet... there's something not quite right. Strange heat readings are starting to show up on her scanners. And it's almost imperceptible, but she could swear that the beam surrounding them is <i>flickering</i>.<br />
<br />
“Five twelfths”, says the professor. “A couple more minutes and we can leave this squalid little century.”<br />
<br />
She checks her scanner – ships seem to be blinking out of the period. That can't be right, she thinks, the tourists haven't seen anything yet. Why the hell would they be leaving? She tries to get a visual, but the space around the timeship is too flooded by the beam's light to see anything with clarity.<br />
“Seven twelfths”.<br />
<br />
And at that moment, a twisted <i>crunch</i> is heard above them, screaming out from a broken-boned sky.<br />
<br />
The professor swears under his breath, and looks directly at Hasker. “The beam is fading”, he says, attempting to control his panic.<br />
<br />
And so it is – as the white light begins to vanish, the stars regain their prominence. Which is when Hasker sees – with a horrified clarity – that the tourist ships are burning.<br />
<br />
“Get out! <i>Get out!</i>” Screams the professor<br />
<br />
Hasker doesn't need the warning. There's a new force in the sky – God knows what they are, but red, needle-shaped timeships are swarming across the night, firing indiscriminately at the buzzing metal around them. Struggling to drop back out of temporal space, Hasker thrusts forwards.<br />
<br />
A direct hit thunders across her ship; the force plunges her head into the hard metal of the console. Dazed and winded, she pulls herself up and realises that her left hand is broken. Twisting the ship around, she tries to wheel it out of the battle, just in time to see the papal flagship on fire and falling, drawn like a magnet to the planet below.<br />
<br />
She shakes the professor and calls out to him. “Have we got it? Have we got it!”<br />
<br />
The professor's face is bloodied. She's not sure, but Hasker thinks she can see him crying. “I don't know”, he says, “I don't know”.<br />
<br />
As the flagship plunges burning into the Atlantic, Hasker takes one look at the storage unit behind her – a unit which might – just might – contain the most valuable cargo in human history. She wipes the blood from her forehead and swears to herself. With the push of one button, the timeship blinks out of temporal space.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
“So what do we think of Michal Krasinski? You think he's suitable?”
<br />
<br />
“Oh, I liked him. A lot.”<br />
<br />
“Really? He came across to me as kind of odd. Intense, and not in a good way.”<br />
<br />
“It's not a customer facing role. And you can't exactly blame him – his sister died at Winchester, his mother two months later...”<br />
<br />
“...but still...”<br />
<br />
“...and he <i>gets</i> gambling. Gets it in all sorts of ways that our best people don't. Gets how we can make it <i>important</i> to people, especially now.”<br />
<br />
“Harry, his CV has gaping holes in it, we have no idea about reliability, I have no idea why he was in this room, and if you're going to start making decisions based on one wild-eyed interview...”<br />
<br />
“But dammit, you heard what he said. This is a man who reads gambling like most people hear music. We're flooded with accountants right now, but we're predictably short of poets. The world is turning too ugly too fast for us to keep expecting people to want to dive into the muck. Krasinski thinks we can make a profit by dragging people out of that.”<br />
<br />
“You think this man can turn our business into something like art?”<br />
<br />
“I think he wants to help us make money. And if that's what it takes, then yes.”<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
Potential causes of death by crucifixion include (but are by no means limited to) the infection of wounds, consumption by predators, asphyxiation, dehydration, heart failure, arrhythmia, and pulmonary embolism. The subject of the crucifixion is naked and – by necessity – immobile – he or she must piss and shit in full public view, surrounded by the insects that feed upon his or her open wounds and bodily waste.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
The professor, swathed in bandages, was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a Rwandan warehouse in an unfamiliar century. Hasker was pacing back and forth. Between them stood the storage unit.<br />
<br />
“What <i>were</i> they?”, asked Hasker, chewing her tobacco with violence.<br />
<br />
“God knows” replied the professor, his voice still a croak. “Something from far beyond any era I'm familiar with. I mean, you saw the way they tore the flagship apart.”<br />
<br />
“And what do we do with <i>this</i>” She gestured towards the storage unit.<br />
<br />
Yes, it was something of a problem. The professor had estimated around a seventy percent chance that hijacking the beam had worked – that they had managed to transfer the cargo into their own timeship. But that meant there was still a solid chance that the cargo had gone down with the papal flagship, and that the unit in front of them was empty.<br />
<br />
“There's no way of dealing with it”, said the professor. “The contents of this is storage unit is frozen in time. If the unit's opened, time will start flowing inside again, and we're fucked. History'll be changed, there's a high chance we'll end up with something worthless... it's not even a gamble.”<br />
<br />
There was a moment of silence. Hasker spat out her tobacco. And that was when she realised.<br />
<br />
“Gamblers. That's right”, she grinned at the professor. “Look – that cargo – if we've got it – it's not a machine, or a commodity. It's – it's an idea. And ideas can be – well – mass produced. Think what people would give for even the <i>possibility</i> of holding what we have here. We just need to copy the unit. Copy it on an industrial scale. Dammit, this is it. This is the best heist we've ever pulled.”<br />
<br />
Night began to fall. The timeship would not be staying in Rwanda for long<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
Paladin was one of the few companies of its kind to actually increase its profits after Winchester. Its logo stills appears oddly out-of-date, and to be honest always did – bold yellow sans-serif text hovers over two black dice, each of which displays a six on its facing side. Which implies, of course, that whatever number has been rolled on the <i>top</i> of the dice is <i>not</i> a six, though this fact is rarely commented upon. Paladin made its name with software using webcam images to determine whether a central computer system“liked” the user, but this iteration of the site did not gain more than cult attention: only a dedicated following realised that the system was infinitely more subtle and arcane than the random number generator it appeared to be. In a move that no one in the market could have predicted, however, the slow but sure popularisation of the subtle and arcane seems to have saved Paladin from bankruptcy. Now, gamblers lose themselves in shifting, brightly coloured games where they play with each others money and surrender control of their own, where they will not discover the total that they have lost or won until their deathbeds, or where sequences of flashing lights force them to forget the function of money or the size of numbers. Capitalism becomes a lightshow, a narcotic, the fragile dream of a light sleeper. There is no doubt that the influence of Paladin has been enormous. It has been cited as the central force in the move towards abstract, spatial, or icon-based economics in the mid twenty-first century, although most serious commentators believe that Paladin is a symptom rather than a cause in this particular cultural shift.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*
</div>
<br />
Bob and his wife kneel and weep and pray before their box. These days, they do little else. Some of their friends are worried about them, but others understand: Bob knows plenty of people who have gone out and bought one. Society might be going to hell, they say, but at least we've got our box.<br />
<br />
Bob dreams about his box most nights. Sometimes he wonders if things would be better if he bought another one.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
The Red Hoods came for Carl in the dark. He was an old man now, almost blind anyway, and as he rested on his staff in the quiet of the stone chamber, he knew that he was entering his final hour.<br />
<br />
His wolf came to him, and Carl stroked the thick fur on its neck. “So this is it then?” asked the wolf.<br />
<br />
“So it would appear”, said Carl. “I believe I have done right with my life. I believe that the world is a better place than it would have been without me. And you have helped me. Our God could have asked for nothing more.”<br />
<br />
“Time to stop hiding, then”, said the wolf.<br />
<br />
“I'm afraid it is, old friend”, Carl laughed bitterly as he turned towards the last reliquary. “I'd ask you to give them hell, but I fear it would be redundant”.<br />
<br />
The sound of marching could be heard on the stairs outside. Carl put his hand on the reliquary, and the wolf tensed its muscles.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
*
</div>
<br />
Experiments in deep space have proven without doubt the terrifying localised damage caused by destroying temporally reinforced material. But only the most recent research suggests that this destruction is far from exclusively local. It has been suggested that many of the radiation spikes or fluctuations in space detected by our telescopes are byproducts of an as yet unidentified future disposal of temporally reinforced material. The frequency of these energy spikes is steadily increasing, and we are concerned that their unpredictability and destructive power could endanger Earth ships, or even human settlements, on the homeworld or elsewhere.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
Michal woke up in a cold room. He realised that he had not turned off the light or the music before he slept. Given the boxes of old vinyl upstairs, he did not know why he always pumped in the synthetic noise, but it seemed to hover around him every morning.<br />
<br />
Day by day, the news had become increasingly inconsistent. The first meetings with the travellers had been confirmed, and frightened journalists were struggling to know what to think about reporting stories in a world where temporal causality no longer held sway.<br />
<br />
He could not concentrate any more – on his faith, on his loss, on his drinking. The sky seemed faded. Life was taking on the property of old photographs.<br />
<br />
He looked at the screen which covered the wall to his left. The pale colours of the game he had designed shifted across it. He tried to remember what he had won last night. A hatstand, an old bicycle, the memories of someone else's wedding, the smell of cut grass...<br />
<br />
The machine would not tell him what he had lost. But he was pretty sure he knew.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<br />
This was all theologically necessary. Although, if we are honest, it was also politically necessary. Either way, all of the bloodshed and the vast financial expense was, if not worthwhile, then at least unavoidable.<br />
<br />
A final red ship drops back into the universe, joining a massed congregation of its brothers. It trails one final black box. With an unfussy grace, it pushes the box towards the crowd.<br />
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Look closely, and you can see that there are millions of them – the multitude of black, mass-produced cubes are almost invisible in the darkness of space, seen only by the absence of the stars behind them.<br />
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The needle-shaped ships prime their weapons. Soon there will be a flood of fire. The destruction will rip a hole in the universe wide enough for love and beauty and truth and every other tired cliché of human meaning to fall out.<br />
<br />
But for now we can wait, and we can watch.<br />
<br />
Because he is probably still in there, somewhere. In one of those cubes stands a man frozen in the act of bleeding, a point of consciousness spread across unthought centuries. And perhaps his timelocked blood is wine, and perhaps his timelocked body is bread, but for now please forego abstraction. Please think of him as a man in pain, lost in the void.<br />
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And think of a woman, too young to know who she really is, listening to a well-played piano.Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-86425303846897691402015-07-05T14:50:00.002-07:002015-07-15T14:50:03.841-07:00Folk Weekend: Oxford<i>A festival review from April 2014, written for Music in Oxford. Originally published at <a href="http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2015/04/23/folk-weekend-oxford-2015-various-venues-oxford-17-190415/">http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2015/04/23/folk-weekend-oxford-2015-various-venues-oxford-17-190415/</a></i>
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<i><br /></i>
The first night of 2015’s Folk Weekend Oxford must have been horrendous for its organisers. The Randolph Hotel was burning, and by the time the number of fire engines had reached double figures, it had been decided that the festival’s box office and main stage were too close to the blaze: the Friday night headline acts were cancelled and the box office was stuffed unceremoniously into a local church. But it’s a testament to the excellence of the weekend that that this barely caused a dent in the enthusiasm of the crowds. It’s hackneyed to use a phoenix-from-the-ashes metaphor, but it’s also appropriate.
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Folk Weekend Oxford isn’t just a series of gigs, it’s a colonisation of the city centre. The first things anyone notices are the gangs of Morris dancers, holding court in Gloucester Green and making Cornmarket even weirder than usual. Look a little closer, and you’ll find groups of musicians gathered together in pubs, blasting out tunes on mandolins and hurdy-gurdys for their own entertainment, the regular drinkers a mixture of entertained and baffled. Folk music doesn’t just become omnipresent, it does everything it can to pull the public towards it: the Old Fire Station were putting on a seemingly endless stream of free concerts, there was a ‘Relaxed Performance’, aimed at creating a space accessible to people with special needs, there was a vast array of events put on specifically for families, and most of the acts I saw had a sizeable contingent of children in their audience. This was the precise opposite of elitism: joyously and enthusiastically inclusive, throwing music and dance out across the city with as much energy as possible.
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It was easy to find fantastic music. In the worst-kept secret of the festival, there was an unannounced reunion of local juggernauts Spiers & Boden, the founder members of Bellowhead who officially broke up as a duo last year. They played a stompingly sunny set of old favourites: with just a fiddle and a melodeon, they sounded like a band with triple their members. Later, Sunday night headliner Chris Wood brought charmingly abrasive grumpiness and idiosyncratic chord choices to small stories of everyday lives – his songs were rich with wit and pathos, and written with a photographer’s eye for detail. One of the best surprises for me was Kings Of The South Seas, who played old whaling songs with a Tom-Waitsian swagger and a flair for the melodramatic, electric guitar gurgling and muttering as if flashing out signals from the Mariana Trench.
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The gig of the festival for me, though, was Tandem, a trio who married virtuoso fiddle and guitar playing with dizzying swirls of electronics. Half way through their set, they announced that this was their final performance together, that the band was breaking up, and the music shifted from compelling to wildly beautiful. As the audience sang along with increasing fervour to ‘The Parting Glass’, there was a clear feeling in the room that something wonderful was being lost. I’ll be keeping a close eye out for what Tandem’s now former members do next.
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Of course, not everything worked for me: Boldwood (an acclaimed instrumental quartet who operate at the crossroads between folk and classical music) were a little fussy for my tastes, a little too calcified by their own academic rigour. And The Rheingans Sisters felt overly reverent, consistently pleasant but never calling for your attention. But it’s important to note that that both bands had enormous technical skill, and received enthusiastic responses from their audiences. Folk is a broad church, tastes are wide, and the festival catered for this broadness: if there was something you weren’t enjoying, chances are that someone else in the room was busy adoring it.
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<br />
That’s a good way of summarising the weekend as a whole: it is a repudiation of the idea that folk music is a niche, and a celebration of the fact that it can contain enough contradictions to keep everyone happy. Sometimes it will be about re-enacting the traditions of the past, and sometimes about forging new ideas for the future. Sometimes it will be about watching master musicians at work, and sometimes it will be about getting involved yourself, no matter how scruffy your playing. And with its ambition and scope, Folk Weekend Oxford is proof that the whole city can join in.
Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-35452083912981627412015-07-05T14:47:00.001-07:002015-07-15T14:49:50.342-07:00Four Scenes from the Major Arcana<i>Fiction from May 2014 - several friends were writing Tarot stories for a potential musical project at the time. And I’ve been obsessed with the literary archetypes of the Fool and the Hanged Man for years. </i><br />
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<b>The Fool</b><br />
The Year of Our Lord 1100, New Year's Day. Good Christian men carousing in quiet streets, rats lapping up their spilled wine. Between the empty buildings and deserted squares, I pass mercenaries playing dice in the doorways of impromptu taverns. I watch holy men swatting away a pickpocket while bartering bright jewels for food. I ignore the soft whisperings of a drunken prostitute.
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I had been warned in Antioch, but listening to warnings had never been my strongest suit. Six months after the siege, when the Franks took Jerusalem with steel in their hands and God in their hearts, the rot and rubble have filled this city with more vibrancy than we pilgrims ever could. My small white dog (acquired when we were both starving and shivering on the outskirts of Constantinople) still whines and retches at the stench of the long-dead. I've grown used to it.
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<a name='more'></a>The city is too big, they haven't cleared out all the skeletons. They hardly need to. Frankish noblemen are lying in mouldering palaces beneath the Temple Mount, nervous young monks reading them the psalms. The roads are yawning, the mosques are empty. Weeds begin to grow underneath counters, swarm through floorboards, wither in the sun.
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The sky an impossible blue, a wisp of cloud resembling nothing less than Christ as a lion rampant. Deus Vult.
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Pack slung heavy on my shoulder, I wander and witness. Ignorance is holiness. In a skull-white square, a leper knight, one-eyed and white-bearded, preaches to the carrion. Light in his eyes, he remembers the slaughter. He warbles between languages, speaking of angels and innocence. A brown streak of dry blood adorns his tunic.
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<br />
Every night, the memories of the city's stones multiply in my dreams. The armies of Christendom vaulting the walls, a flood of wolves tearing street from street, ripping up the earth, drowning the wells. Swords plunged hilt-deep. Jerusalem faltering on the cliff's edge. Plunge forward, weapon in hand, joyful.
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<b>The Wheel of Fortune</b><br />
It feels sort of twisted to say it, but I actually like A&E departments at three in the morning. I like the blurred, dreamlike blankness of the afflicted, the smooth professionalism of the nurses, the messy egalitarianism of battle-scarred drunks sharing space with nervous children and silent pensioners. The wash of chemical light merges with the hum and burble of electronic equipment, the sound shifting in and out of phase with reassuring regularity. Nothing smells of anything.
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<br />
I was sitting with my daughter on the hard plastic chairs to which we had been directed. She was shivering, and shaken by occasional storms of violent coughing. But she didn’t seem to be frightened, and I was grateful for that.
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There was a television hanging in the corner of the waiting room, small and old fashioned. No sound was emerging from it, and the rest of the patients in the room were ignoring it. Televisions are supposed to be distracting; I allowed myself to be distracted.
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<br />
The programme was badly dated. It was some sort of gameshow, with hairstyles and a garish set from a forgotten corner of the 1990s. A young man in a slim purple suit capered silently between the contestants, who looked tense and worn under the studio lights. At periodic intervals, the contestants would grab and then spin a rainbow coloured wheel, adorned with numbers, cryptic phrases, and alchemical symbols. A young woman with a feline grin revealed hidden letters from vast, blanked-out phrases.
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I began to feel unsettled. This didn't seem to be a broadcast from a television channel. The image quality had the thick, stuttering grain typical of a VCR that had been watched and rewatched to destruction. The fact that I was the only person in the room looking at the television began to feel odd, as if the others' refusal to watch was motivated by emotions that I could neither grasp nor understand.
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<br />
I stared at the television for some time. The rest of the room seemed to darken and pulsate, but the image on the screen only became brighter, harsher. The wheel spun and spun, the man in the purple suit laughed and laughed with easy charm.
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I blinked. The television was gone, a blank space in the ceiling where it used to hang.
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My daughter was coughing blood.
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<b>The Hanged Man</b><br />
Here’s Jonny Dostoyevsky, seven foot two in androgynous clothing, mottled with bruises and blood. He’s suffering badly from exposure, confused and disorientated. He does not know how far from the city he has travelled or for how long he has been travelling. Jonny is finding it hard to think straight, what with the mental flashes of the young men whose boots, bricks and bottles smashed into his ribcage with the force of asteroids, and who screamed hatred at him long into the night. It is unclear to Jonny whether he is experiencing this incident every hour in actuality, or whether he is merely subject to trauma-induced flashbacks.
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Jonny has found himself in a semi-rural churchyard on the outskirts of an upscale commuter village. In the daytime he might travel between tea shops, antique sellers and unwelcoming stares, but right now it is midnight, so he slouches between the graves, the trees providing shade against the streetlights. The church ahead is a massing of dark grey stones, Victorian if Jonny suspects correctly.<br />
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He walks then stumbles then walks again through the grass and the weeds, and pushes without hope against the heavy wooden door. To his surprise, it opens. Someone must have forgotten to lock the church tonight.
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<br />
The interior is pitch black, but Jonny is familiar with the architecture of empty churches in the dark. He fumbles briefly for a lightswitch, finds it, and the room is illuminated. It is rather plain and chilly, but unpretentious and well cared for. It will do nicely.
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As Jonny glances across the room for the safest and most comfortable place to sleep, he notices that something is wrong. Although the stained-glass window above the altar is dark against the night, he can see the form locked inside its mosaic. It shows what he knows to be neither Christ, nor the apostles, nor the prophets, but quite a different God hanging one-eyed and restless from the branches of the world tree. The figure is upside-down, a coil of green hoisting up his leg; his head flanked by two abstract scrawls of black glass suggesting the flight of ravens. The god is heavily muscled, in pain, waiting.
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With our heads bowed, let us walk respectfully away from the circle of rest. Let us pack up the old symbols of sanctuary and wisdom, of suffering and rebirth. Let us wrap them in silk cloths and place them in wooden boxes inlaid with pearl and ivory. Burned in ink across billions of pages, the signs and signifiers may stand sentinel, white shadows on a white screen.
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<b>The World</b><br />
Sir Hempsworth Bullhorn stood plump and jocular, armed with ceremonial pith-helmet, pickaxe and monocle. The room he stood in bristled with wood-panelling, stags' heads, incomprehensible paintings and at least a dozen almost-identical civil servants. On the table before him lay a young woman, unashamedly nude, posed in an uncomfortably artistic fashion, her elbow and hipbone digging into the hard wood.<br />
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“You have all met my wife?” asked Hempsworth, an attempt at a roguish smile congealing somewhere in his cheeks. The dozen almost-identical civil servants nodded smoothly.
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“Mrs Hempsworth Bullhorn is an extraordinary woman” her husband continued, “Magnificently accomplished. Magnificently obliging. And I am sure that she will be able and willing to assist us with our plans. Allow me to provide a few details.”
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The dozen almost-identical civil servants took out their notebooks. Mrs Hempsworth Bullhorn attempted to look satisfied with this state of affairs, but the strain of her pose was more than visible.
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“I have travelled”, said Hempsworth, “to every kingdom, principality, republic and unruled territory on the Earth. I've seen cities of glass hanging from ropes in the clouds. I have hacked my way through jungles of iron growing from the bodies of vast eagles. I have traded with men as small as mice and hunted mice as tall as men. I can tell you this much: it's a mess out there. And quite frankly, it needs cleaning up.”
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A rustle of approval from the dozen almost-identical civil servants.
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“The map is as good a way to start as any. A planet spiralled and spidered out into hundreds of warring, formless territories is no sort of planet at all. Especially when we own the whole thing already. So rather than continuing to pretend that the world is a plane of multicoloured scrawls and swathes of blue, I suggest we use my wife.”
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Twenty-four interested eyes on Mrs Hempsworth Bullhorn's uncomfortable flesh.
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“Pin her up like a butterfly, surround her with some vague but portentous symbols to get the blood up, and Bob's your uncle. The world as we know it captured and divided by clarity and simplicity. We'll hardly need to think about anything ever again.”
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There was applause, then, brief but sincere. The expression on the naked woman's face was difficult to read. And somewhere beyond the room's thick windows, the seas began to shift.
Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-86472177703587334452015-07-05T14:31:00.003-07:002015-07-15T14:49:42.211-07:00Oxford Circus, Saturday 21st December 1996<i>Some fiction from January 2014. Written as promotional material for a play that some of my friends were directing.</i>
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So I'm out of breath and doubled over, and I haven't run like that in <i>years</i>. And I'm laughing hard, so hard I think I might throw up, and there's a streak of english mustard on my bright white shirt, but in the heat of the platform I can't be arsed to cover it with my coat, and besides there's no one else around.
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I hope that the train isn't showing up immediately, because at the moment I just want to revel in my own dangerously high blood-alcohol levels and bellow obscenities into the echoing tunnels. I do this, but it doesn't take very long to get old, and I find myself staggering, so I collapse onto a bench and think about whether the hangover will be gone by Christmas. I giggle at my own wit.
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And then I wonder why there's no one else here.
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I blink, because I must have missed something. It's midnight, and this is an underground station in central London, and there should be <i>swarms</i> of people rushing to get the last train, but there's no one else at all. As far as I know this is unprecedented, impossible. But I'm drunk, so there's probably a basic and vital and entirely reasonable detail that I've overlooked. I think, and think hard.
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I had been running. I try to remember why. Was it from something? To something? And I had been laughing, hard. Was there a joke somewhere? Was it just relief?
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<a name='more'></a>I look at my watch. It's not midnight. It's two in the morning. Missed the last train.
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Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
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Ok, so now new parts of the brain begin to whir and spin. There's probably a night bus, but I would need to work out which one I needed. A taxi would be easiest, but I don't have the money, either on me right now or in the bank account. The last round of beers had seen to that. Could I walk? How long would <i>that</i> take? Would I have to go through anywhere dangerous? Maybe just sleeping on the platform would be best.
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I know I need to stand up and force myself through the winter night, but my legs feel too settled to respond to mental pressure. I'm deliberately ignoring the missing hours and the unexplained physical exertion, not out of nervousness, but because I've basically just got to get home and because that stuff isn't helping. I ignore my own laziness and stand the hell up.
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Which is when a train arrives at the platform.
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An unremarkable underground train, its windows wide, its paint predictably scuffed. The doors yawn open. The train is empty.
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I check my watch again. Definitely 2am, but perhaps I knocked the watch, perhaps it's showing the wrong time. Perhaps. But I need to get home, and I definitely don't want to walk. We all make idiot decisions when we're drunk. I board the train.
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No adverts, which is odd, and no map either, just plain white walls and scruffy red seats. I sit, warily. Machinery clanks beneath me, and we plunge into the blackness of the tunnel.
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I'm fine. It is definitely the case that everything is fine. I'm heading home now, heading East. I relax, and try not to doze.
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Which is when I realise that we've been in the dark for far too long. We should have hit a station by now.
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I wait. I wait twenty minutes. The light in here is hard, electric, clinical. It has the quality of forgotten things. Outside there is nothing but darkness. The clattering of wheels on rails whispers like a torturer. I need to get out. I scream, bang on the windows, but no one answers. I sit back down again.
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And then, from the windows, all the lights blaze on at once.
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It takes a moment to adjust to what I'm seeing. It's not a platform, through those windows, it's an overhead view of those anonymous bright-white corridors that riddle the tube. We must be in the ceiling, looking down. Impossible of course, quite impossible. But here I am.
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A man runs, panting, into view. With a start, I notice the streak of yellow mustard on the immaculate white shirt, the long coat hanging loose. It's <i>me. </i>He is – I am – panting heavily, decelerating after running hard, and just behind me is Katrina. Was she here tonight? How could she be? I hadn't seen her since Stroud. The sweetest of partings. She spat bile and I threw furniture.
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But I realise that I remember almost nothing of this evening, nothing before I arrived at the platform. So I try not to think. I just watch.
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Both Katrina and the version of myself below stop, breathe in, breathe out, drunk on relief. They (we?) say nothing, a wary glance is enough. Something has happened that's more important than us. There's no point in arguing.
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A streak of coiled energy leaps into frame, and knocks Katrina to the ground. It's too fast to see clearly, a thing rippling with muscles and thick with hard, wiry hair. She is pummelled, repeatedly, into the tiles. The tiles crack. I just run.
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All the lights flick off, both inside and outside the carriage. I'm swimming in oil-thick blackness.
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Behind me, I can hear someone breathing.
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<br />Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-5159269474386844162015-07-05T14:23:00.001-07:002015-07-15T14:49:29.705-07:00The Sloe<i>From June 2015. Written at 2am, in a mood of intense excitement after having just jammed through a bunch of folk tunes with a musical hero.</i>
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Some years ago I had a dream that I was asked to play drums for Yes. Now, Yes were the first band I was ever properly obsessed with, the first gig I ever saw, and there's still a sizeable chunk of my head which reckons that they're the pinnacle of human musical achievement. But in life, as in this dream, I've never touched a drumkit, and my subconscious brain had generated a vast baying crowd, waiting for me to replicate Bruford's hyper-complex, hyper-subtle rhythms.
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I also once had a dream where Jay-Z and Beyonce asked me to be present to rap at the birth of their first child.
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Both of these dreams were unpleasant.
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Tonight, in actual real life, John Spiers (Bellowhead's melodeon player and one of its founder-members) was present at the Bastard English Session at the Isis Tavern. Now I'm not at all exaggerating when I say that Bellowhead changed my life. I'd probably have got into folk without them, but not with the same intensity, and my attitude towards folk music and therefore culture and therefore probably maybe life is pretty heavily based on what they've done to English tradition.
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<a name='more'></a>And John Spiers started playing a collection of three tunes, recorded by Bellowhead, known as the Sloe Gin Set, and I was trying to play along.
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<br />
Now, the Sloe Gin Set is important because it's the first place I heard a tune called The Sloe. It's a very popular tune - it'll be played all across the country every night in pubs and at festivals and in quiet houses with locked doors. And The Sloe is pretty simple as folk tunes go, but it's probably one of the finest things that English culture has produced. It's a coiled spring of joy: you put it in a room and that room gets happier. It's a concentrated, unfussy blast of major key positivity. The dullest player could reproduce it at the slowest possible tempo, and the rhythm would provide an indefatigable bounce. It is a very easy thing to produce. And yet it is perfect. It is a perfect abstraction.
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<br />
And Bellowhead's* Sloe Gin Set leads up to The Sloe with two fiddlier, much more complicated tunes. They're both excellent tunes, they link together perfectly. But I've always seen them (probably unfairly) as the grand staircase that leads up to the monument of The Sloe itself, the fancy frame that holds the masterwork. And maybe we're more interested in the masterwork than the frame, the monument than the staircase. I've certainly never tried to learn how to play the first two tunes in the set. But the frame is important. It's how we know to take the painting seriously.
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The Sloe Gin Set is a sacred thing.
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And I can't rap and I can't play the drums, but I'm a pretty decent, competent fiddle player, and this was real, not some weird wisp of brain chemicals, so, you know, the stakes were higher.
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I don't think I managed to play the first two tunes. I don't think I could even get my fiddle to put down a competent rhythm part. And for a while it felt just like the dreams where I had been called upon and found wanting. But then The Sloe arrived. The tune took care of its players. And the room exploded with light.
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*I know it was first recorded by Spiers and Boden, but that fact is not useful to this narrative.
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<br />Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-40485175390590054752015-07-05T14:20:00.000-07:002015-07-15T14:49:14.346-07:00Happy Songs for the End of the World<i>From January 2015</i>
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Last night I remembered my enthusiasm for 1950s American pop music about the Cold War. This stuff is fantastically creepy. Nothing feels more like discovering a warped parallel universe than hearing bouncing, cheerful, formulaic songs haunted by the imminent fiery death of the whole planet.
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Much of it is bafflingly tasteless. A group of actual US Airforce officers, known as The Cuff Links sang ‘Guided Missiles’ (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HubzBcvlWS0"></a>) a doo-wop song in which they croon that their lover is sending “guided missiles, aimed at my heart”: I’m sure we can all agree that nothing is more romantic than a bunch of military men telling you that “now I know that the enemy is you” and that “those same guided missiles will get you in the end.” With pretty much the same metaphor, there’s Wanda Jackson with “Fujiyama Mama” (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DztFHvNwRb6Q&h=rAQFUx4Z4&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztFHvNwRb6Q</a>), upbeat rockabilly which doesn’t seem to have a problem with using the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to discuss how badass Wanda Jackson is. Then you’ve got oceans of novelty pop ephemera. Skip Stanley’s “Satellite Baby” (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAO77QLxRVw">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAO77QLxRVw</a>) is an example of this, mashing up meaningless scientific phrases with unsubtle come-ons: it begins to get disturbing when the atomic weaponry shows up: “Nuclear baby, don’t fission out on me”, he sings, “We’re going to rock it in a guided missile every night”. Sex and death have never sounded so jaunty together.
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<a name='more'></a>Then there’s the religious material. Gospel choir The Pilgrim Travellers performed the magnificently titled “Jesus Hits Like at Atom Bomb” (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13-exDYdf3I">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13-exDYdf3I</a>), which proposes that global thermonuclear war might not be too bad when compared with the much more pressing worry of Jesus’ imminent return. The Louvin Brothers’ “Great Atomic Power” (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DG9xB7usNSPo&h=OAQEFZM_S&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9xB7usNSPo</a>) also compares biblical and secular apocalypses with a wonderfully unnerving mixture of starkness and jollity. It’s a damn sight better than “They Locked God Outside the Iron Curtain” (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D954hpOYKISQ&h=qAQH3tdFu&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954hpOYKISQ</a>) by Little Jimmy Dickens, a twee slice of chauvinism which explicitly states that Satan has been crowned king of Russia (and that, for some reason, children aren’t allowed to play there any more, which seems a baffling leap of logic, even for this song).
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If we’re looking for anything here that really holds up today, then the best bet is Tom Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When We Go” (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTIoBrob3bjI&h=RAQGGKiF-&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIoBrob3bjI</a>). Tom Lehrer is probably Earth’s greatest comic songwriter; the urbane nastiness of this song makes deliberate and explicit what so much of this material veers into accidentally: that singing happy songs about the end of the world is always a transgression, especially when the end of the world is breathing down your neck. It’s also funny as hell, which helps.
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There’s loads of this stuff out there, if you want to find look for it. The best starting place I’ve found is the list of songs at <a href="http://www.atomicplatters.com/box_set.php">http://www.atomicplatters.com/box_set.php</a>. Most of them are youtubable, and the list of related links on the videos you find will probably lead to new wellsprings of paranoia, hatred and religious fervour.
Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-6621382912548086352015-07-05T14:17:00.001-07:002015-07-15T14:48:59.508-07:00The 50 Best Songs of 2014<i>From January 2015. Don't know if the youtube links are still active</i>
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Massive thanks to everyone who introduced me to these songs: there is a ridiculously large number of you, and you are all great. Usual rules apply: no more than one song per artist, the songs get better as you go down the list, and no songs by anyone I know personally, as it would be weird to try and rank them against each other. But if I <i>was </i>including stuff by people I knew, then you'd probably see appearances from:
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<ul>
<li>Threepenny Bit, who are a magnificently tight, inventive and exuberant instrumental folk band, and who released a blindingly good album this year. The best track is “Cabbage” (<a href="http://threepennybit.bandcamp.com/track/cabbage" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">http://threepennybit.bandcamp.com/track/cabbage</a>), a galumphing speeding bullet of a tune, which never quite twists off in the direction you expect it to, but always twists off in the best direction possible.</li>
<li>Ben Parker, whose song Broke as Hell (<a href="http://benparkerofficial.bandcamp.com/track/broke-as-hell" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">http://benparkerofficial.bandcamp.com/track/broke-as-hell</a>) is in the grand tradition of mashing together upbeat pop songwriting with ragged punkery: it's an excellently boozy celebration of irresponsibility</li>
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Anyway, on with the festivities. The spotify playlist containing 49 of these 50 songs is here: <a href="https://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://open.spotify.com/user/mulac/playlist/5uIuM3ElNzysZhWoHZNea3"> http://open.spotify.com/user/mulac/playlist/5uIuM3ElNzysZhWoHZNea3</a><br />
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<a name='more'></a>50. Carousel Ride – Rubblebucket
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QirwI-p0ZP4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QirwI-p0ZP4</a><br />
Let's start with some pop. Sweet, cheerful pop, torn between crunching chunks of a guitar on one side and loose, squelching synthesisers on the other. The lack of coherence is presumably the point.
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49. A Place Called Space – The Juan Maclean
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmlIZRUet5c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmlIZRUet5c</a><br />
Endless retro-synth futurism, and presumably the favourite song of every all-night day-glo spaceship racer. The first time I heard it I thought “this reminds me of a song that I like, but I can't think what it is”. Turns out the song it reminded me of was the Scissor Sisters' cover of Comfortably Numb, and I now have to face the horrifying possibility that there's part of my subconscious that thinks the Scissor Sisters' cover of Comfortably Numb is a good thing.
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48. Gethsemane – Dry the River
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdyudQwQEKE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdyudQwQEKE</a>
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Earnest, low-key guitar stuff that switches between great lyrics (“It started with the moon that turned an inexpensive room into St Peter's”) and awful lyrics (“There's a parabolic story but it's boring”) with disorientating speed, but I'm a sucker for vague religious symbolism, and there's a winning intensity of feeling here.
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47. Pro Anti Anti – Liars
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DAkkljKDeMvs&h=yAQEGmUti&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkkljKDeMvs</a><br />
Monotone non-sequiturs intoned over militaristic thumping and juddering. Or at least, one hopes the lyrics are non-sequiturs, and not some sort of peculiarly danceable satanic summoning ritual.
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46. The Courier – Seth Lakeman
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwDyXVsPwUZs&h=7AQEeVoZ7&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDyXVsPwUZs</a><br />
Seth Lakeman probably influenced my current fiddle style more than anyone else. Unfortunately, Seth Lakeman regularly wrecks his bows while playing, and now I have to go to a violin shop about once a year to get my bow repaired. Thanks Seth Lakeman.
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45. Side 2, Pt. 1: Sum – Pink Floyd
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DFJWppwotHJw&h=YAQFAA76N&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJWppwotHJw</a><br />
Pleasant surprise of the year: how good the new Pink Floyd album was. On the one hand, it's nothing we haven't heard before. On the other hand, it's excellent to hear it again. A bed of loose, wobbly clouds, and David Gilmour romping about in them, like a crystal lion.
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44. The Night is Young – Moulettes
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An old fashioned waltz, drenched with luxury: velvet, wood-panelling, and the unusual items found hidden in the backgrounds of Holbein paintings.
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43. Be Free – Polar Bear
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DOIr4eeWgX24&h=yAQEGmUti&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIr4eeWgX24</a><br />
Jazz of the spiky, muttering variety. Squawking brass playing with frayed subterranean circuits, which flick on and off like the lighting in horror-movie warehouses. You keep spotting tunes, but they vanish like ghosts in the dark, until you're no longer sure if they were ever there.
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42. New York Morning – Elbow
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DSSLzZJ9vLfI&h=-AQGtd6TW&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSLzZJ9vLfI</a><br />
Songs about how great New York aren't exactly rare. But thankfully, New York is pretty great, and the songs aren't running out of material. New York Morning is a great song on a bad album: Elbow may have struggled to recapture the low-key experimental warmth of their best work, but they still have a way with stadium belters. They can still sound as if a kindly wizard had turned U2 into self-aware Mancunians. They can still slip twists of unexpected poetry in between blasts of major-key grandeur.<br />
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41. 74 is the New 24 – Giorgio Moroder
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7u5c-Qndqio&h=GAQG84Eba&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u5c-Qndqio</a><br />
The title is the only lyric in the song, repeated in a metallic rasp over what sounds like a bouncy, upbeat version of the end credits music from Blade Runner. Giorgio Moroder is actually 74, and I see no better way of welcoming the conquering robo-geriatric armies than with pounding dance music.
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40. Mansions of Millions of Years – Mammal Hands <a href="http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmammalhands.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fmansions-of-millions-of-years&h=9AQEQGpVl&s=1">ttp://mammalhands.bandcamp.com/track/mansions-of-millions-of-years</a><br />
Lovely jazz, rolling softly across moonlit fields. There's a crescendo, and the expected further proof that jazz drummers are better than other drummers, but even then the whole piece feels distant, hushed, as if watched patiently from afar.
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39. Make You Better – The Decemberists
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DXq76aQRmbQA&h=vAQFcYQOS&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq76aQRmbQA</a><br />
So it's song about weary romantic longing, in the time-honoured indie-rock style. But the language feels slightly off, growing like strangely coloured mosses on old trees, as if nothing quite means what the cliches say they should mean. And Colin Meloy has a hell of a way with a melody. It's cathartic, but it's far from clear what's being released.<br />
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38. On with the Business – The Hold Steady
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DeIOgfFm27K8&h=0AQFaj4bj&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIOgfFm27K8</a><br />
The Hold Steady aren't the best-band-in-the-universe titans they were in, say, 2007, but they can still build bulletproof old-fashioned rock music with lyrics that straddle Big Themes and sharply captured images of grubby times, grubby places, and grubby people. As the guitars howl apocalyptically, the narrator takes the part of a jittery, loquacious small-time drug dealer. The words rattle with the rhythms of panicked speech: “I said a couple things that probably weren't technically true. Conventional wisdom says we should probably cruise.”<br />
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37. All Things Transient – Maybeshewill
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dt2kXiPw33qQ&h=lAQHKArS-&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2kXiPw33qQ</a>
Maybeshewill make the most accessible kind of sweeping instrumental post-rock: they're a one trick pony, but it's an excellent trick, throwing out grandiose build-and-release after grandiose build-and-release. This song is dense with hooks, sparking off each other in bright patterns.
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36. Booty Call – Sisyphus
<a href="http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2eAVPTuUDhg&h=cAQHsvsTl&s=1">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eAVPTuUDhg</a><br />
I don't listen to enough hip-hop to feel qualified to judge it. I don't understand a lot of the stuff that gets critically lauded – Run the Jewels this year, or Kendrick Lamar last year, for example. And it's not that I disliked those albums, or that I thought the critical consensus was wrong. Just that the music was so alien to my established points of reference that I couldn't grasp what people loved about them. So when I find something like this song, I don't know if I'd be spotting the things that would be spotted by a connoisseur, or if my judgement is to be trusted. But the production here is wonderful: stuttering, shifting, threatening rhythms that build a knotted, nervous prison of words before finally, in the last twenty seconds, releasing the shimmering ghost of a melody.
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35. Flashlight – Bonobo
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dl5gbk0xjRWI&h=_AQHQ0umh&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5gbk0xjRWI</a><br />
A warm, lovely electronic den. Like stroking a dog, if the act of stroking the dog was going to give you the power to control lightning, but you don't need to go out and use your lightning powers until tomorrow, and stroking the dog is really nice, so you think you'll keep doing it for a while.
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34. Plentyn – 9Bach<br />
Welsh language folk trip-hop with heavy use of harp, so it's already getting points for originality. The song is a fairly invincible argument that more things should be sung in Welsh, and it's happy to take its own time, to grow and breathe without pressure.
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33. Every Other Freckle – alt-J
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-mhgfXgwdls&h=DAQFL_MWN&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mhgfXgwdls</a><br />
Every Other Freckle revels in its own artifice and unpleasantness. Wizened goblin vocals leer across a faux-funk swagger, far too clinical and pristine to have anything to do with the raw lust it pretends to mimic. The lyrics describe sexual desire with imagery so bizarre that any actual feeling is wiped clean away. What is left feels like a threat, or a microscope trained at all of pop music's most unhealthy faultlines.
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32. Parallels – Eels
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_myUVbK49JM&h=_AQHQ0umh&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_myUVbK49JM</a><br />
Middle aged man with guitar; stellar levels of craft.
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31. DBF – Eno and Hyde
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqwnxypgED6s&h=LAQEx8f2n&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwnxypgED6s</a><br />
Karl Hyde (from Underworld) and Brian Eno (from being Brian Eno) collaborate on a jagged, messy onslaught of half-formed riffs and boiling rhythms. The noises are familiar enough for you to keep expecting that structures and melodies will emerge, but there's no signal: just accept the noise.
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30. Mr Tembo – Damon Albarn
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DODG3VRkncBc&h=fAQFu3Qva&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODG3VRkncBc</a><br />
Most of Albarn's album from this year was dour and ponderous. The one shaft of light was this joyously laid-back song about a baby elephant. Wrapped up in gospel choirs, 1950s comedy samples and a sun-drenched horn section, it somehow totally avoids schmaltz.
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29. Eternal Rains Will Come – Opeth
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DCoW3Sywb5xQ&h=3AQF01Pmy&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoW3Sywb5xQ</a>
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1970s-style prog-revivalism, but unlike the majority of bands writing songs like this today, they don't just sound like a faded copy of their influences. There's an aggressive tightness here gained from their years as a metal band, technical brilliance in the service of a chunky, meaty stomp.
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28. The Queen's Nose – Slow Club
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2zHEY5sImlM&h=qAQH3tdFu&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zHEY5sImlM</a><br />
It's all about the vocal performance, which rises to full nuclear assault without even seeming ruffled, while storms of trumpets and fuzzy guitars blast into orbit.
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27. Class Historian – Class Historian
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DBFo-Fp2eJWQ&h=AAQFPdXsB&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFo-Fp2eJWQ</a><br />
The kind of timeless, infuriatingly catchy pop song that could have been released in any year since about 1963. There's something undefinably sleazy about the lyrics and the vocal delivery, but that only adds to the fun.
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26. The Sailor's Bonnet – The Gloaming
<a href="http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fthegloamingbrassland.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fthe-sailors-bonnet&h=fAQFu3Qva&s=1">http://thegloamingbrassland.bandcamp.com/track/the-sailors-bonnet</a><br />
At first, it's a display of extraordinary Irish fiddle playing, which would be enough to merit its inclusion here. But once the masterful groundwork has been laid, a piano enters, dancing around the melody with clockwork precision, rippling the still pond.
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25. Music for Insomniacs, Part 1 – Matt Berry<br />
Yes, this is the actor Matt Berry, with the booming voice, from The IT Crowd and The Mighty Boosh. Who is, apparently an insomniac, and who decided that the best way to cure other insomniacs was to create sprawling pieces of electronic music in the mode of Vangelis and Tangerine Dream. It's questionable how successful this would be at sending anyone to sleep: it's far from ambient and its twenty minute length is soaked with melodies. And, despite its dreamlike slow-burn, it occasionally slips suddenly into nightmare: barely audible voices whispering “Just... watch your step”, or the volume suddenly surging, or distant panicked shouts heard behind the wailings of choirs.
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24. Frogs Singing – Andrew Bird
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQxgfWETcapo&h=XAQFO61K-&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxgfWETcapo</a><br />
An American indie-folk cover that was apparently planned and recorded very quickly. And that's audible in the simple, unvarnished freshness of the track. But my God the fiddle hooks are marvellous.
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23. Remurdered – Mogwai
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DsZ5nEuG-CRc&h=OAQEFZM_S&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ5nEuG-CRc</a><br />
Now that the ice-caps have melted and all of our cities have sunk beneath the waves, let's throw away our touchscreen technology and have a submarine war. Our computers will be made of rusting metal and battered plastic, their displays flickering blurred numbers and blinding green light, whirring, groaning and bleeping under the weight of their calculations. But we will hunt you down, no matter how silently your engines are running. We are waiting, beneath the lightless waves.
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22. Moon Hooch – No. 6
(Not on Spotify, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/moon-hooch/no-6">https://soundcloud.com/moon-hooch/no-6</a>)<br />
A joyous, squawking, honking racket. Moon Hooch build electronic dance tracks, then work out the sheet music and play it live with two saxophones and a drumkit. They've been banned from large chunks of the New York Subway system due to the impromptu parties which tend to break out when they arrive.
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21. Liquid Spirit – Gregory Porter
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D07rb7QQYk7E&h=-AQGtd6TW&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07rb7QQYk7E</a><br />
Gregory Porter asks the listener to “Clap your hands now” exactly thirteen times in Liquid Spirit. There's no need. This is tight, high energy jazz, Porter has a fantastic voice, and there's a killer piano solo. The happiest you can be in a minor key.
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20. Phoenix Island – Sam Lee
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dss24LSJqcqY&h=FAQGEnOES&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss24LSJqcqY</a><br />
Sam Lee, a young man with a much older man's voice, is making weirder, messier music than anyone else I've heard doing traditional folk at the moment. Sounds layer chaotically, and then suddenly make sense. Rhythms shift, clicking into focus, then dispersing. Brass, or other vocalists, drift in and out. But it's all in the service of the song's words and melody, which structure the haziness like hard, bright bone.
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19. Dead Man's Tetris – Flying Lotus<br />
A warped subterranean night journey, haunted by the ghosts of broken arcade machines and toy handguns. And like all the best subterranean night journeys, Snoop Dogg shows up at the end.
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18. Digital Witness – St. Vincent
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DmVAxUMuhz98&h=dAQHCTpYz&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVAxUMuhz98</a><br />
Digital Witness feels like pop music has been solved mathematically, as if the song is running on an engine that has been tuned for maximum efficiency, and then cleaned with disturbing thoroughness. It's clinical, streamlined, and catchy as hell.
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17. Glitter Recession – East India Youth
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-_WPP03DDOI&h=JAQHYD1i4&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_WPP03DDOI</a><br />
A slow instrumental crescendo – broken arpeggios clamber over each other as icebergs the size of cities collide and shatter into static.
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16. Garden Dog Barbecue – GoGo Penguin
<a href="http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgogopenguin.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fgarden-dog-barbecue&h=0AQFaj4bj&s=1">http://gogopenguin.bandcamp.com/track/garden-dog-barbecue</a><br />
An acoustic piano-jazz trio who will occasionally throw in dubstep drops. And who bounce a storm of notes off each that would probably take a weather-predicting supercomputer to keep track of. As a feat of engineering and technical skill, this is exhilarating. That it barrels along with such infectious energy is just a bonus.
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15. Lazaretto – Jack White
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqI-95cTMeLM&h=pAQG7XVUD&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI-95cTMeLM</a><br />
I think I've finally worked out why people like Jack White: he looks like he's having more fun than anyone else. Rock-rapping nonsense over one of those riffs so satisfying and simple that it's a wonder no one has used it before, and then unleashing a stupendous, vicious fiddle duet. It should all feel horribly derivative, and I think it's just White's bloody-minded confidence that means it doesn't.
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14. Little Maggie – Robert Plant
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DMlEJeZcvK4g&h=zAQHZSztZ&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlEJeZcvK4g</a><br />
Plant should not have been able grow old as gracefully as this. A traditional song which seems to have been plugged into a dozen types of folk music. The singing is restrained, kept at arm's length from the swelling flow of American, African and European instrumentation and the warm buzz of electronics.<br />
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13. Palace – The Antlers
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Du_I2bRwU1N4&h=HAQGvaZme&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_I2bRwU1N4</a><br />
Sparkle and wooze, in the grand old tradition of indie-rock melancholia. Trumpets call out across the dusky landscape, and an androgynous voice documents complex emotional states with the melodic control of Iron & Wine and the fearsome attention to detail of The National.
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12. Lights On – FKA twigs
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DkqFnLSGBVCY&h=yAQEGmUti&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqFnLSGBVCY</a><br />
Everything hangs on a contradiction. On the one hand, there's the vocals: vulnerable, raw, stark. And then there's everything else, doing precisely the opposite: showily theatrical production throwing out attention-shimmering effects and cloaking everything in a spectral fog of emotional detachment. All of which leads to a hefty sense of unease: what can you trust when you are hearing both a visceral portrait of human insecurity and a carefully choreographed performance of the same?
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11. Madman – Sean Rowe
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dess11y1oFiE&h=0AQFaj4bj&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ess11y1oFiE</a><br />
Firstly, my goodness, what a voice. And when the infrasonic rumble of that voice is twinned with an arrangement thrumming with satisfyingly hefty thumps, and when all of this almost parodic hypermasculinity is infused with with and light and warmth, you'll have the rare slice of Americana that I like very much indeed.
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10. A Little Lost – Sufjan Stevens
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DfnofnB5gNBY&h=CAQGyvRmk&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnofnB5gNBY</a><br />
A Little Lost is a cover of a love song that Stevens recorded for a charity album. It's bursting with near-saccharine sentimentality, but is floating so far out in its own dreamlike haze that considerations like taste and emotional restraint don't apply.
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9. Kirsten Supine – Swans<br />
Two years ago, Swans released an astonishing, brutal, terrifying, beautiful, sprawling album, in what one assumed was a near impossible act of effort. This year, they pretty much did the same thing again, as if making stuff like this was no big deal. Swans excel at looming threat and hammering assault, and here you get excellent samples of both. Also, it's apparently about Kirsten Dunst, though goodness knows how or why.
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8. Bittersweet Genesis for Him AND Her – Kishi Bashi
<a href="http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fkishibashi.bandcamp.com%2Ftrack%2Fbittersweet-genesis-for-him-and-her&h=8AQEFuDuV&s=1">http://kishibashi.bandcamp.com/track/bittersweet-genesis-for-him-and-her</a><br />
Stickily biological creation myth, eco-apocalypse, biography of a marriage, three minute pop song: you can't criticise this for lack of ambition. And as the orchestra swells and scatters, it feels as if Kishi Bashi is calmly and patiently explaining a distant universe you can never really hope to understand.
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7. Jack Lintel – Bellowhead
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Da6fVC7Kclvs&h=4AQEaggxS&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6fVC7Kclvs</a><br />
I think we can now be confident that Bellowhead have given up experimenting, and are happy to stick with what they do best. Thankfully they're still better at explosive, widescreen folk music than anyone else. And explosive, widescreen folk is the kind of thing I'll keep coming back for, again and again and again and again.
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6. Get Up – clipping.
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DgTPWY8MMGOk&h=kAQEH4G1F&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTPWY8MMGOk</a><br />
A male rapper, a female singer, the bleep of an alarm clock. There are no other elements: the arrangement is almost obnoxiously minimal. But the performance is absolutely maximal: a vicious torrent of vocal gymnastics given space and flight by the lack of musical support behind it. It's also a masterful experiment in what happens when you take away even the most basic musical flourishes, and leave the arrangement in the simplest possible shape: with so little to keep track of, the slightest shifts in production can generate earth-shattering sensory responses.
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5. Water Fountain – tUnE-yArDs
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dj-KulvW2TUQ&h=UAQFlHoWv&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-KulvW2TUQ</a><br />
A bouncing, technicolour playground chant, overflowing marvellous clattering percussion and laid-back bass-grooves. But just when the party is at its most ecstatic, you notice the lyrics: warped images of poverty, violence, capitalist excess, all thrown out with cartoon intensity. The jelly is full of razor blades, and the balloon animals are feral.
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4. Everything is AWESOME!!! - Tegan and Sara feat. The Lonely Island
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DStTqXEQ2l-Y&h=kAQEH4G1F&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTqXEQ2l-Y</a><br />
As featured in The Lego Movie, it's a merciless parody of contemporary pop music and also an incredibly catchy pop song. It's a skewering of the numbing banality of huge swathes of culture, and also a celebration of the joy that can be found in the numbing and the banal. In context, it's a warning that conformity of opinion can lead to monotony and oppression, and also a singalong affirmation of the strength of community and togetherness. It's an advert, and also art. It's making every point and counterpoint too fast for you to argue against either side.
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3. Micheline – Sun Kil Moon
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQvNAHBI1V4o&h=6AQE4wlnF&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvNAHBI1V4o</a><br />
Sun Kil Moon attempts to strip away the conventions of songwriting. His lyrics are unvarnished and journalistic: lines like “He had an aneurysm triggered by a nerve in his hand from the strain he was putting on it” or “In '99 I was on tour in Sweden when I called home to tell my Mom I got a part in a movie” don't <i>sound</i> like song, or poetry. But they do sound true, and the three meandering vignettes that make up this song are all vividly real pieces of storytelling, sharp imagery and graceful elisions rolling with the waves of memory. The links between the vignettes are hinted at, but never really drawn – they're all stories about different kinds of love and different kinds of death and the gulf between the narrator's feelings and his understanding of these feelings. But maybe there's not any grand thesis being made; maybe telling these stories is simply a way of honouring the past.
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2. Marshall Law – Kate Tempest
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DVaNh4J7qghI&h=kAQEH4G1F&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaNh4J7qghI</a>
Kate Tempest is a London hip-hop artist and award-winning performance poet. She has an absolutely magnificent way with words – an unsentimental grit, an infinite compassion, witty and playful (but never forced or strenuous) even when trawling through the banal or the hellish. There are so many fantastically quotable moments in this song, but I don't want spoil the excellence of Tempest delivering them against thundering, propulsive walls of electronic noise, which shift as perspectives change or new characters emerge. Because this is music about characters: like early Hold Steady records (and I know of no higher compliment than “like early Hold Steady records”) this is the first part of a novelistic story which grows and deepens as the album continues. You'll want to stick around for the whole thing.
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1. Did I Ever Love You – Leonard Cohen
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWo0C1_wb8yA&h=fAQFu3Qva&s=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo0C1_wb8yA</a><br />
Leonard Cohen is eighty, and this is a song about age. His weatherbeaten husk of a voice, rich with every shade of yearning and bitterness, is watched over by the oddly plastic sheen of a youthful choir, who seem simultaneously a source of compassion and of cruelty, pouring out singing that an old man's body could never produce. It's a song about forgetting: about decades of history being blurred and erased. It's a song about doubt and self-worth: about wondering whether even one's most basic emotions are real enough to count. It's a song about accepting all of this, about dignity. And every line is perfect, every line is devastating. The only hope it allows is that, sometimes, knowledge of the darkness allows moments as beautiful as this to shine through the cracks.
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<br />Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8336200805538096644.post-29063741012360188422015-07-05T14:06:00.001-07:002015-07-15T14:48:37.746-07:00Why I Play Folk Music<i>From October 2014. I’m particularly proud of this one.</i>
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Manifestos are a bad idea. If you decide you should only make art for certain reasons, or in certain ways, it ends up limiting what you do. So this is not a manifesto. This is not a set of instructions for an ideal way of doing things. This is just an attempt to explain why I make the music that I make.
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I'm a classically trained violinist. For a long time, the way I played music was exclusively about discipline, precision and repetition. I learned how to play pieces by staring at the individual notes, learning by rote the minute movements required to generate highly specific sounds. Each bar was a puzzle to be solved.
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I got pretty good at this.
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When I left for university, and stopped having lessons, my abilities degraded fast. I played in orchestras, but rarely practised more than once a week, and none of them stretched me (or if they did, I didn't work up the energy to do anything other than play badly). My focus and discipline were used up elsewhere. I missed playing the violin, but I knew it would take a huge amount of time and work and effort to get back to where I was.
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Which was when I discovered The Bastard English Session*. There's a pub in Oxford called the Isis Tavern, which you can't reach by road. It's a lengthy walk down by a canal, and at night it's mostly lit by candles and fairy-lights. Once a month, the Isis Tavern holds a folk session where (although you're certain to encounter some magnificently skilled musicians) the primary mood is one of raucous, joyous, anarchic silliness, where traditional English tunes and songs are held cheek-by-jowl with fiddle-heavy renditions of Queen, Lady Gaga and AC/DC. It's basically the best thing ever, and I soon as I encountered it, I knew that it was something I desperately wanted to do.
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<a name='more'></a>So I brought my violin along, joined in, and then kept going. It took a long time to work out what I was supposed to be doing. Classical training (or at least my classical training), hadn't prepared me for improvisation, or learning music by ear. But after months of irritating, up-against-a-brick-wall struggling, I started to work out how to match the notes people were playing around me. And sitting at the centre of that maelstrom, absolutely nailing a tune, and then playing with it, shifting it about, and warping its sound, was exhilarating.
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A brief pause for clarification: I'm emphatically not<b> </b>going to draw an imaginary distinction between precision and discipline in classical music, and an energetic sloppiness in other genres. That would be stupid and offensive and wrong. Bear with me here.
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Some people play folk music for political reasons. There's the conservative/nationalistic desire to shore up a nation's songs and stories, to keep a continuity of identity with the past. There's the leftist desire to keep alive a distinct working-class tradition, unmoved by the bourgeois machinations of the marketplace.
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Some people play folk music because, like all musical genres, it's an aesthetic to be appropriated. Because beards, banjos and dylan-worship are cultural codes for anti-corporate authenticity, or, at the very least, are a fun set of genre tropes play with.
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Some people play folk music because fiddles and tin-whistles and mandolins and melodeons and accordions sound <i>good.</i>
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Some people play folk music because of the Beauty and Majesty and Perfection that can be reached when insane levels of skill and talent are brought to bear on the aforementioned fiddles and tin-whistles and mandolins and melodeons and accordions.
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Some people play folk music because like, say, jazz, it's a genre that rests in part on a storehouse of known tunes and songs, and there's an intellectual challenge and pleasure in refitting and reworking and reperfoming them.
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Some people play folk music because it's really easy to dance to.
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These are not the reasons that I play folk music. Some of them might be the reasons that I <i>listen</i> to folk music, but it's not like the raw aesthetic hit that I get from listening to good folk is unique to folk. I've spent most of my life listening obsessively to prog rock, but I've never felt the slightest desire to try and make any. And hey, I don't have a problem with any of these motivations existing, and a lot of these motivations have created stuff that I enjoy the hell out of. But the important thing is that because the motivations for making this stuff are so divergent, the places where it is made are pretty divergent too. And there's nothing wrong with rooms where people insist that you can only play music from certain countries, where you can only sit down and play if you've got a certain level of ability, where only certain styles and techniques of playing are accepted, but it's not the culture I want to hang around in.
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I play folk because I've stumbled into a community people who have discovered a perfect way to make public art.
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People often enthuse that the greatest benefit of punk rock was its promise that anyone can start a band. You just have to show up and make noise. Worrying about who you are or what you can do will only slow you down and stop you making stuff. Now I never really liked the sound that punk made, but I <i>can</i> get behind its particular show-up-and-make-some-noise philosophy. But with punk you still need to get a band together, find a sufficiently soundproofed place to rehearse, organise gigs...
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The folk scene that I discovered, and the parts of the scene that I'm still the happiest in, doesn't have a barrier to entry, for the performers or the spectators. You don't need to know any of the other musicians, and you don't need to know what they're about to play. You just need an instrument and a willingness to learn, and it won't take too long before blasting out excellent noises with strangers becomes possible. I can't think of any other type of music where showing up unprepared can lead to such astonishing results.** It's fulfilling the promises that punk makes. And it sounds much better than punk does.
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And I'm not just talking about sessions. I've played folk gigs that went down well in a bookshop and an ice-cream parlour and grotty indie-rock venues and church halls and rowdy student bars and at least one idyllic allotment that looked like 1960s Hobbiton, and I'm still comparatively new to all of this. I get that there are a bunch of ways in which Oxford is a weird town, but it does feel that folk is uniquely agile and mobile, able to show up and be welcomed pretty much anywhere: in places where a metal band would be shunned and an acoustic-guitar strumming singer-songwriter would be ignored.
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Folk means different things to different people. I get that my attitude towards making music (mostly: sufficient energy and swaggering will counterbalance any technical errors or deficiencies) isn't going to be welcome everywhere. That's obviously completely fine. It would be weird to rail against subtlety or minimalism or technical perfection in music, especially given the stuff I like to listen to. But when it comes to choosing what I like to make, folk music serves a quite specific function: it offers the chance to shove joyous chaos into the corners of unsuspecting cities, it lets people experience raw sonic thrills without first passing through carefully sign-posted boundaries, it plants old and haunting and complicated things inside previously simple rooms. In the best sessions, even the musicians don't know what is going to happen next.
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So where does this bring us?
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One of my friends is a really bloody good classical singer, and she once played a free concert in a public library which caused a sudden and unexpected gathering stunned of children and teenagers. There's a gigantic, wonderful statue in Cheltenham town centre of a rusted scrap metal hare on an awkward date with a dead-eyed and naked minotaur, which is usually being viewed by confused and nervously giggling shoppers. The best public art is a disturbance, changing the way people respond to the familiar, startling them with strange things in brightly lit corners.
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Folk music does this all the time. And it makes doing it easy.
Calum A Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15464659607907276994noreply@blogger.com0