rest in peace, stylus magazine.

as of today, stylus is no more, buh. for five years, they covered all kinds of under-the-radar music and films, and they had some insanely good features from time to time (such as on second thought and seconds). even if their music reviews were a bit sucky every now and then, i’ll miss them!

they were a good alternative to pitchfork, and i think we’ll see their writers resurfacing at other webzines. still, the short list of sites i really like just got a bit shorter…

why are you sleeping in tomorrow’s world.

ah, i remember being a teen, listening to ladytron’s ‘playgirl’ on repeat and thinking i didn’t really exist. those were the days of drug abuse and anonymous sex, but then a certain someone came along and solved that problem. it is, however, strange that one should need to be subjected to all manner of annoying bodily unpleasantries to affirm his existence.

… ‘playgirl’ isn’t even a sexy song, like, at all. but it did make me long for the weirdest things. eh.

i do like those fancy claps.

from the vaults, vol. 7.

My Bloody Valentine - Loveless (1991)

i wasn’t going to write about shoegaze this much, but it’s autumn, after all, and autumn is the time for pretty swirly noises. there are books about loveless, too. it’s one of these albums that have magically been elevated to a legendary status, however, it also lives up to the legend, something you can’t say about daydream nation, psychocandy or even the white album (i abhor the beatles, so there).

part of the thing with my bloody valentine isn’t really the music. they started out as a bad eighties pop group (don’t believe me, huh? go check out the filesharing networks), then moved to jangly indie, and by the time their debut, the lovely isn’t anything, was released, they found themselves at the forefront of a new, exciting subgenre called shoegaze. then kevin shields started to go nuts, and the band did way too much ecstasy. that might sound bad, and i guess it’s not exactly healthy to be high on fuckall all the time, but they probably needed to be fucked up to create something as swirly and drugged-out as loveless.

the album was three years in the making, produced by seventeen different producers, and nearly bankrupted their label. it wasn’t even such a smash hit when it first came out. the years and money were well spent, though. you’ll rarely hear such accomplished music. ‘only shallow’ has the strangest, sometimes metal-sounding guitars, distorted to the point that they could be anything. ‘loomer’ approaches sonic perfection with its outlandish, heavy swirls of music around some kind of strange ballad. ‘blown a wish’, ‘what you want’ and ‘when you sleep’ are pop songs in a very noisy gift wrap. ’soon’ still sounds like the future of rock.

the album’s centrepiece, however, is ‘to here knows when’. the sonic barrage is almost too much to bear, but bilinda butcher’s drugged-out singing somehow smoothes the omnipresent ripples of monster guitar out. the singing on loveless is strangely androgynous anyway, it’s quite impossible to tell if it’s kevin or bilinda warbling on and on about sex on acid. come to think of it, ‘touched’ deserves special mention. if you can make what presumably is a guitar sound like an enraged elephant, you can use me as a foot bench anytime.

with today’s technology, all of this sonic trickery wouldn’t have been all that remarkable, i agree. and that’s precisely why loveless is such an extraordinary record: you can try to record something that sounds like it, but you’ll never quite get there. shields’ mysterious production techniques simply can’t be imitated with midi and protools and whathaveyougot. my bloody valentine made the whole shoegaze/noise genre seem obsolete and primitive in a flash, and then proceeded to blow their brains out with a vast array of hallucinogens.

is this a tragedy? maybe. imagine what’d happened if the mythical follow-up to loveless would have seen the light of day… and was no good. they were probably going to become a boring dance band anyway (oh yes, there’s evidence. ’soon’? the glider remixes ep?). the only thing they ever released after loveless came around, their home studio destroyed itself and kevin ‘fatso’ shields started hallucinating all day, was that wire cover, ‘map. ref.’. it’s good, but it’s not exactly magic. it’s… not loveless. so, will mbv ever reform? i really don’t think so. is that a bad thing? i… don’t know.

for you to connect these dots.

i touch your mouth, i touch the corner of your mouth with my finger and follow its curve as if it’s being sketched by this hand, as if your mouth is slightly opened for the very first time, and i only have to close my eyes to erase everything and start over, again and again i model the mouth i want to see, the mouth my hand chooses and paints on your face, a mouth i’ve chosen from a wide array of mouths, chosen freely to draw on your face, a mouth that inexplicably is the spitting image of the smiling mouth below it.
(…)
and there’s only one sole taste of ripe fruit, and i feel you shaking against me like a moon in the water.

julio cortazar, rayuela.

undrum to muted da.

subtly alluring music on the stereo, a cigarette and a glass of good wine. clothes, records and books surround me, and there’s lots of souvenirs from my travels in my impeccable bedroom. i’m also a little lost, though 失落感 or 失望 are slightly more accurate. the statistics have decided i have 54 years left to live, and i wonder if it’d be the same in 2019, or 2030, or, heavens forbid, in 2060.

of course i hope this won’t have to happen again, but i think it’s actually… normal. people always think they’ll run into exciting things later, so they keep postponing life as such and end up shelving whatever their hopes were. would that happen to me? no-oo.… yes. yes. and love’s underrated, but it will still kill you.

sometimes there’s nothing more comforting than knowing you’re doomed.

maybe i should read less douglas coupland and more ruth rendell. i could use some more crime, suspense and treachery in this poor little life of mine! and less drugs, as usual. and maybe i should start studying… tomorrow. next week. before the exam period starts. in august.

anything can happen in life
especially nothing
mainly nothing
piano magic, ‘disaffected’.

from the vaults, vol. 6.

Slowdive – Pygmalion (1995)

what is it about classic shoegaze that makes you feel like sitting in the window sill on a cold winter night, smoking cigarettes and overanalyzing your little dreadful existence? well, not all shoegaze was about that feeling. my bloody valentine just wanted to do more ecstasy and vanish in a colourful whirlwind, and the pale saints were all about valium and little kitties. slowdive, though, perfected the art of tasteful despair on their second album, the excellent souvlaki. you’ll never hear anything sadder.

oh, wait, you will, when you get around to their third and last record, pygmalion. this music isn’t shoegaze as such anymore. it’s cold, wintry, bleak minimalism, replacing the layers upon layers of heavenly guitars and rachel goswell’s dreamy singing with, well, mostly silence and drones. ‘crazy for you’ is built around a processed guitar riff and one single vocal line, and it feels like a cold winter night, the kind of night when it gets dark at 5 and the cold cuts right through your clothes.

then there’s the really minimalist songs, built around silence. ‘rutti’ and ‘trellisaze’ are what postrock should be: sparse, bitter and resigned music that sounds more like talk talk’s last two albums than anything else. ‘blue skied and clear’ is the only real ’song’ on pygmalion, and you’d almost wish for it not to be there. neil halstead has never sounded sadder than when he sighed ‘you said love can be so sweet, you said love can be so good’ with a zillion processed guitar noises swirling around.

this is really an externalization of embitterment and disillusion. slowdive had never been really popular, since the backlash against shoegaze had already begun around the time souvlaki was released. then, when they moved into the british strain of postrock, they blew it with their record label (they originally didn’t want to release pygmalion at all, saying they needed some real tunes in this britpop era), and then disbanded. some members went on to form mojave 3, which isn’t bad as such, but too folky for my elusive tastes.

pygmalion was also the last, and best, british postrock album released, postrock in the original definition of the word, that is. later, americans would hijack the genre and turn it into obnoxious bombast (tortoise? gybe? even, say, mogwai? bleeergh). come to think of it, it might be the last real shoegaze album released, too. pygmalion sounds like the end of an era should sound: graciously resigned, and making you long for something you’ll never have. oh and, the demos for this album are floating around on the net too. they’re a real treat if you like krautrocky, sad distortion.

dinosaur egg.

dinosaur egg, oh dinosaur egg,
when will you hatch?
cause i got a million people coming on friday
and they expect to see a dinosaur, not an egg

 

robot slave, oh robot slave,
when will you spring to life?
cause i got a million people coming on friday
i don’t expect to serve them drinks myself

 

my own reflection, oh my own reflection,
do you think anybody else thinks you’re quite as handsome as i do?
probably not, cause they’re not me
and i am biased

 

solitude, sweet solitude,
when will you disappear?
cause you’re an acceptable guest sometimes
but being alone is no friend of mine

 

my solar body, oh my solar body,
when will i join you out of this flesh
’cause i am sick and tired of being sick and tired
i’d much rather be a golden ball of light
but still have sex….

scout niblett seems to know how to externalize my feelings. i’m baffled. scout, you, me, a film and a drink or two? you won’t need golden, the pony boy when there’s a simon to keep you company and wail along with you.

fig. 1.1: scout niblett and golden, the pony boy.

the opposite of the opposite of hallelujah.

would that make hallelujah? anyway, things are good again, boyfriend- and macbook-wise. i’ve shelved my magnetic fields records (and the one where scout niblett wails like a madwoman of late antiquity, too), and now mostly listen to deerhoof’s friend opportunity again, choo choo choo choo beep beep!

in other news, the weather’s cold, and the trains are always running behind schedule, so i always get to see people i hadn’t seen in years, huddled together in the station platforms’ smoking lounges. i’ve also been reading douglas coupland’s swell new novel the gum thief, in which a character manages to plagiarise my unpublished novel with his own unpublished novel. the two wretched things are disturbingly alike. groovy!