Cycling the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains
“Consuming normativity can give us the illusion that we get to sample it when we choose, that it isn’t pressing in on us at all times. But at the same time, the desire to seize control of normativity…also generates a certain ambivalence. It confronts us with our lack of autonomy and the instability of our social position; it testifies to the necessity of constant self-presentation (as opposed to being accepted for how our intrinsic being “naturally” appears).”
—Anti-Instagrams, Internal Exile
“When you grow up in the East End of London in the 1970s, you wanna believe in evolution, I’m telling you. You don’t wanna believe that this is the end game.”
Hefty interview with Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane over at Tone Glow.
I’ve listened to the Up Home! EP a few times in recent weeks, A.R. Kane on my mind since the review of the box set in the Wire. Filleted from the Complete Singles Collection, the EP sounds more striking than ever, almost incomprehensibly accomplished for a band only on their third single, and a quantum leap on from their debut, “When You’re Sad”. The lacerating distortion, the cavernous dub spaciousness, the rough sutures between the musical ideas left defiantly exposed…even in the febrile milieu of early UK post-rock, there weren’t many bands who sounded so individual, so unexpected. Maybe My Bloody Valentine (the jagged stop-start noise of Isn’t Anything more than the amniotic wash of Loveless) or Disco Inferno. It surprises me that several times in the interview Rudy mentions Slowdive, who I always thought of as being irremediably obvious and plodding, but perhaps I underrate them.
Elsewhere:
Keith Leblanc (Tackhead, Sugarhill Gang etc.) talks to Burning Ambulance.
Aquarium Drunkard explores guitar/drum duos, talking to Steve Gunn, Jim White, and Rick Brown of 75 Dollar Bill (who played two transcendental sets at the Workman’s Cellar last Saturday).
Over on Retromania, Simon Reynolds notes a couple more symptoms of this lingering syndrome, before finishing up with this:
But there’s also an impulse to sort through/tie together/make sense of one’s life in loving music/film/books. Winnow down to the essentials and peaks. Create a map of a journey through taste; a consumer-biography. I can’t help sensing a morbid impulse lurking beneath this—almost like getting one’s affairs in order in readiness for death.
I don’t know that it’s growing awareness of the Grim Reaper standing at my shoulder but I’ve certainly been spending the last few years taking stock. I spent my thirties casting the net wide. The creative energy of jungle and post-rock ebbed and, spurred by the eclectic coverage in The Wire, I started to explore the wider world of music. At the same time, the reissue boom driven by compact disc reached its peak—an incredible range of music, from reggae to afrobeat to Ethiopian jazz to drone, was unearthed and put into general circulation. I gorged myself for years.
But eventually I realised that I didn’t care that much about a lot of the music I was listening to. Much of it I had barely listened to—some discs made the player just long enough to make sure that they were working, some I didn’t even listen to while I was ripping them (that Stravinsky box set). I had gone exploring, had gained a sense for the contours of the landscape, but I didn’t have a strong sense for where I wanted to be.
I cut way back, eventually trashing the music library on my computer and exiling all the files to a massive hard drive, and began to rebuild. It seems absurd to say, but after nearly four decades of listening to music, I am still figuring out what it is that I actually like. I haven’t entirely given up the search—I still hold out hope that some day I will hear the album that will unlock the pleasures of Brazilian pop for me—but I buy only a couple of albums a month, spend the rest of the time getting to know better the music I already own.
…
While I’m on a (blog)roll, my old comrade Ian went to see a clatter of films at the Dublin International Film Festival. For reasons known only to himself he maintains two versions of his blog, one on WordPress, one on Blogger, posting the same content to both. But sure, we all have our little foibles.
Back in the day, it was de rigueur for your blog to sport a sidebar stuffed with links to the other blogs you read, admired, commented on, considered your peers. Early versions of the WordPress CMS had a dedicated function for the care and maintenance of these links. That function has long since disappeared, replaced by a plugin, then by widgets.
It is now so far divorced from the operations of the typical site powered by WordPress that even the solutions I found when I searched online rely on a legacy widget that will doubtless be deprecated in another release or two. The article describing the workaround I’m using also warned gravely about the foolishness of pissing away your search-ranking juice by improvidently linking to sites that are not your own. Different times, indeed.
Still, we persevere, and the sidebar of Hors Catégorie now sports a larval collection of links, under the heading Essential Reading. Perhaps it says something that these four could have appeared on any such list I made in the last ten or fifteen years, the hardiest of survivors from a once-febrile blogosphere.
{ feuilleton } — John Coulthart recently marked his 5,000th post, demonstrating a work ethic I could only dream of. The steady accretion of posts over seventeen years has built into a massive reef, wide-ranging yet coherent: illustration, comics, psychedelia, surrealism, Ballard, Lovecraft, the occult, industrial music, animation, cinema…whether he’s writing about Thomas Köner or Tom of Finland, it’s astute, informative, thorough.
Blissblog — Ground Zero for Simon Reynolds’s blog empire, he lists ten more in the sidebar. Reynolds was maybe the first music journalist I learned to look out for, after his Melody Maker review of Flying Saucer Attack’s second album, Further. Energy Flash and Rip It Up And Start Again remain two of my favourite books about music, read and reread countless times. Our tastes have diverged over the years (I’ve never grasped the appeal of hauntology) but it’s still interesting to watch the endless flicker of connections and signifiers across his mind, the mulch from which his finished work emerges.
The Blue Moment — Richard Williams is nowhere near as prolific as Simon Reynolds, but his posts tend to be more polished and coherent, finished articles rather than unedited notebooks. A long career in the business (editor of the Melody Maker, A&R for Island) means that he brings impressive first-hand knowledge of some of the artists he’s writing about, but it’s the way he shares a lifetime of listening that shines. I might not listen to much of the modern jazz or vintage soul that he writes about, but I always enjoy reading about it. The blog is legacy from his book of the same title, which is long overdue a reread.
The Inner Ring — I have no idea who the anonymous author of the Inner Ring is, but it hardly matters: whoever they are, they know professional cycling. During the season, the bulk of the posts are race previews: analysis of the route, predictions of the likely protagonists. In the off-season they delve more into the wider pro cycling scene, the economics, the politics, the history. The Roads to Ride posts, detailing the climbs that any dedicated cycling fan dreams of tackling, are one of the inspirations for this blog.