Life does tend to be a balancing act – you get one thing right and another thing that you thought was perfectly fine suddenly goes wrong. These are the times in my life I find the hardest and I have been doing a lot of brooding. I guess I am looking to re-establish my focus. To this end I have been looking at a lot of things in my life. My music has slipped badly and I haven’t been making much progress in it – to this end I am learning CSound properly and trying to write some proper composed stuff as opposed to the random collections of sound and texture I normally produce. I have also been looking at my writing and trying to do much the same thing.
I am very good (in both writing and music) at establishing a mood and painting pictures what I need to work on is the narrative – we will see where it all ends up. No doubt I will be posting things here when they are complete.
I have been trying to catch up on some reading – Dead Air by Iain Banks is excellent – classic Banks and very counterparty. It starts with September 11th last year and is very modern in its themes and references. I’ve also been reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman which has a lot of resonances with the worlds I try to conjure up in my poetry. I heard This on the radio – you probably have to hear it read out loud, but its hilariously bad.
Music wise I have been listening to lots of good things - The Return of the Fenn O’Berg is a wonderful album – witty, inventive and a damn good listen. Christian Fennez and Jim O’Rourke are two of the most inventive members of the laptop brigade around at the moment I think. Original Pirate Material by The Streets is also wicked and well worth picking up – very funny. Its good to hear this kind of music being done in a very British way. Solaris by Mirror is also an excellent release – much in the vein of the Sylvian/Czukay collaborations. Very hard to get hold of though – I only have an mp3 copy at the moment.
A bad day for the surrealists ( HTML )
A short poem inspired by a comment in an email from a friend about having to go out and buy a wetsuit and some Kitchen cupboards.
Posted by Mark at October 2, 2002 11:36 AM