horsemouth's care package has arrived

featuring the angry brigade and utopia (books of poetry) and on the cusp (a guitar CD by robert john lawson). there was some concern about whether it would all arrive or not (it was miss post-coded) plus horsemouth has an ongoing paranoia about the postal service having it in for him. try E* was the helpful suggestion from some postie somewhere (and it worked).

horsemouth has a cough and so any time not spent working is being spent in bed sniveling (ok there’s the time spent coughing and spluttering on public transport). fortunately he hasn’t had to work much this week and then he’s into this is not the last week, ok this is the last week.

horsemouth has high standards in the poetry lark having been raised by ranting (ok, ok, ‘performance’) poet and king of the turn-around mr. social control. these poems do not disappoint - neither utopia ‘rain-swimming with my brother in the former west germany’ nor the angry brigade ‘a bomb in the boutique, a pox on those distractions’ - look at the castlist; anne sexton, anna mendelssohn, sabate, godzilla (‘giant radioactive lizard/ film star mostly tokyo based’).

as you know from recent posts, these are both very horsemouth topics. a friend pronounced himself heartily sick of utopia (after a year of art students rocking up with utopia conversation platforms and alike) - but for horsemouth the moment before the certainty came down, the moment when a better world became thinkable (and not just innevitable) is the interesting one.

cusp too - guitar instrumentals, some dialogue (sounds like kids at breakfast, some traffic noise, the wind, at one point a woman’s voice ‘I hear you’ causes the track to become self-conscious and quieten itself down) perhaps some hand drumming following the tap delays (very 90ies digital delays and reverbs here). is that poor boys... horsemouth hears in there? it cuts out suddenly.

(you’ll remember howard has gone in for some of this - on the last musicians of bremen album)

recorded on a ranch in the utah desert sometime in 1999 - 100 copies made and still a few left - kind of a late-fahey vibe edging towards that pre-loop pedal thing , of allowing the delay to support you and guide you forward (steve hillage style), a wyndham hill/ ecm texture. certainly as good as much of the stuff on dying for bad music (probably it’s natural home) - horsemouth will try it from howard.

'but is it an EGG or a TURD?'  asks the letter - it is of course eggs - but don’t knock turds, full of seeds they are, good sites for spore growth - all that we throw away as dirt could be golden for it all becomes soil with the help of the worms (here horsemouth is having a neal-style wonders of nature moment - aww bless). your egg is immediate. your turd a gift with a timer and a do not disturb notice.

sean was up visiting - now it’s irish pirates.

horsemouth will have to respond with some gifts.

‘one of the charms of photographs (is) that they include things unknown to their maker, things which he himself must discover’

so remarks kracauer in his theory of film: the redemption of physical reality (which - when horsemouth plucks up the courage to read it - is going excellently. we are moving on from photography - all fox talbot, muyerbridge etc. - and over into the world of moving pictures - between the presiding genii of lumiere and melies - lu(m(el)ie)re(S)) .


La Jetée from Orélie Nada on Vimeo.


the plot of la jetée is of course thing discovered and the means of the reveal is (in a photo);

 “ this is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. the violent scene that upset him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main jetty at orly, the paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of world war III. ”

what does it mean that the document of memory is a photo? (a atory frozen in time) what does it mean that it acquires meaning later? what does it mean when foucault quotes althusser at the start of the archeology of knowledge? horsemouth will have to think more about ben's running of time backwards...

the kind, wise and beneficent universe (huntington ashram monastery)

the kind, wise and beneficent universe has just cut horsemouth a break (it has retroactively hidden the fact that he’s thrown a ‘toys-out-the-pram’ tantrum - thank you kind, wise and beneficent universe).



similarly on saturday the universe cut horsemouth and howard a break by getting them into the alice coltrane ashram choir gig a mere one song in. a mere hour before this horsemouth had been cursing the air black and blue as he ran for the railway station. the gig was awesome - ok ok it’s basically indian bajans (devotional hymns) treated as if they were african american gospel tunes but horsemouth could definitely see it conquering the world - the kind of future that horsemouth always fantasizes about (one that connects different margins and routes round the west).

michelle coltrane - alice coltrane’s daughter - sang (om shanti if horsemouth remembers correctly), the choir sang, there were a number of solo spots, a number of swooping synthesizers, some gospel organ and piano, drums - shuffle beats and tambourine and even a house interlude. the audience even sang and clapped a bit.

horsemouth and howard left with big smiles on their faces (they did not hang around for the free food) - sadly then they retired to the masked jeremy where horsemouth poisoned himself with cheap beer (a fool’s economy) and spent the rest of the next day hungover. (no that’s a lie - he had to transport his mum across the seaside towns in this foul state).

tonight horsemouth should be doing something useful - but he’s going to bail until he’s feeling more cheerful - horsemouth is not only not the smartest person in the room, he’s also not the only person in the room, other people can get on with it for once.

‘it would be fair to advise the reader at the outset that this book does not include all the things he might be looking for’

so begins siegfried kracaeur’s theory of film - horsemouth likes books that begin with a warning (the goncourt’s perhaps? he’ll have a look), soon horsemouth will be reading it properly. kracauer sets the bar high,

‘are they films in the sense that they would make one see and grasp things which only the cinema is privileged to communicate?’ indeed he once made a note for himself ‘film as the discoverer of the marvels of everyday life’.



horsemouth typed this with nusrat fateh ali khan’s mera piya ghar aaya blasting in his ears (in bally sagoo’s ridiculous rave classic version, mind you the madhuri dixit version is pretty mental) - ecstatic music indeed.




over the weekend horsemouth failed to go out jazzing it (free jazzing it even) - doubtless he has missed the good as well as the merely worthy.

this afternoon he worked. in the evening he goes to meet eve (darsavini) and denise. wednesday (the budget) and thursday it’s world galaxy (days). saturday he’s two thirds of the way to winter solstice and he’s off to watch people sing the ecstatic music of alice coltrane.

final comments on where we now stand and where we are going

horsemouth is back from a gig (midweek horsemouth? yes almost exactly midweek).

the line up - poet (and now published author) justin hopper, film-maker and photographer wendy pye, sound-artist and writer angus carlyle and (the real reason for horsemouth’s visit) folk singer and musician sharron kraus.


sharron has set a chapter of justin’s latest book to music - they performed an excerpt of it, synthesizer drone, bells, recorder, the singing of hal-an-tow. this was awesome (beating the last time horsemouth saw justin and folk musicians thing (at the owl service’s south london almshouse all-dayer) into a cocked hat. if laura cannell is unavailable to live soundtrack the wickerman then horsemouth would definitely consider sharron kraus. she’s playing in hereford soon (on the 22nd horsemouth believes).

angus carlyle is the co-author of in the field: the art of field recording  - he read a series of dated 100 word short essays about his running experiences on the downs from his a downland index (for the downs is our ekthen here - our particular space). sound, as he pointed out, did not feature much in these writings, because sounds of running are subsumed in the physical sensation of running itself. (in horsemouth’s experience pain).

wendy pye showed her film 6 feet from the edge (about visitors to beachy head) and photos from her beachy head project. http://www.wendypye.co.uk/ and https://wendypye.wordpress.com/

It was an event to mark the launch of Justin Hopper's book the old weird albion (penned in the margins press ).

horsemouth survives (he abides)

the photo at the top of the horsemouth folk archive blogpost is from horsemouth's old flat. the one at the top of his google page is from howard’s flat from a few years ago.

horsemouth types this on a keyboard with most of the letters erased (yes that’s a ‘y’ there, the k has survived, the q,w,z, the p). strangely it isn’t slowing him down much. he’s done his monday morning - he’s in the library.

the social psychology of obedience - horsemouth is most obedient (even to unjust authority, particularly to unjust authority because he regards it as dangerous, this is the tragedy of his nature). surrounded by anarchists and animal rightists he was capable of many things - now he struggles to be practically invisible.

horsemouth needs to get new strings for his acoustic (steel strung guitars) - and he needs to get some new tunes up and running (or go bakc and relearn some old ones).





there’s the ford fiesta advert which says everything is changing and then shows us the miniscule changes in the style of things (one that cannot hide their essential technological sameness) - a chopper, becomes a fixie, becomes a racer (so what). horsemouth only regrets it is too late for ben to stick in his movie. for horsemouth the answer to every question is bookshaped. reality looks book shaped. at one point in his life horsemouth must have been given a book and it must have seemed like the answer to everything.

all souls - day of the dead (sun and moon)

high above, on the roofs of the south london art gallery, is a sun and a moon in stucco. horsemouth is down south hiding out in the library during a break in work and planning to raid some charity shops later to kill time. sun and moon - he has been looking at a book on tarot to remind him of the ‘meaning’ of these cards (arcana 19 and 18).

the killing season progresses well (the one in which horsemouth kills time by working) - horsemouth is nearly at the end of the week that will take him halfway to christmas (sorry if he has a tendency to go on about this).

we have entered the difficult transition around the celtic quarter day following the autumn equinox - the dead come close, the sun grows cold. tuesday susan krauss is playing (horsemouth may go out and see that). today (and tomorrow) - the anniversary of the recordings used on live at the village vanguard (one of horsemouth’s favourite ever jazz albums). soon (perhaps) some metal.


horsemouth is grumpy - its midweek - he’s halfway to the end of the halfway week - all he has to do is keep his head down and not bite anyone (even in his dreams). on the plus side in addition being up some books (halcyonandon) he’s also up some recordings. the prize is helen 12 trees by charlie mariano (presumably named after hollywood actress helen twelvetrees who had a mega sad life, and very sad eyes apparently) - an awesome german jazz thing that not even jan hammer’s portamento keyboard solos can ruin - it features a great indian split reed instrument on parvati's dance - but the prize for best title goes to the awesome avoid the monkey year.

charlie mariano played on black saint and the sinner lady with charles mingus. horsemouth once saw him (at a pre-g-g talk) angrily berate the head of the arts council (when he was part of a barbara thompson band - albert mangelsdorf, volker kreigel, eberhard weber, john surman etc.). the head of the arts council wanted stories about mingus - charlie mariano declined to provide them (saying he was interested in what he was doing now), the head of the arts council threatened to cut their funding, the musicians pointed out it was the last gig of the tour and invited him to fuck off. (fair play thought the young horsemouth).

the album had a sad release history - the 200 promo copies were supposed to be posted to a bauhaus architect for distribution round the newspapers and critics, sadly they were all sent to the little town of bauhaus by mistake, the local smalltown jazz magazine reviewed it glowingly and offered the remaining 198 copies for sale...