petrushka (‘I must start my story by confessing that i have somehow failed to become a real patriot..')

horsemouth is reading alexandre benois’s memoirs (he's peter ustinov’s uncle) - they’re an interesting family venetian-french-german st. petersburgers,

‘I must start my story by confessing that i have somehow failed to become a real patriot... petersburg itself I loved...’ 

benois is a so-so musician but an excellent sketcher - he collects toys - eventually his collection goes to the russian museum in st. petersburg. like benjamin he is fascinated by small things - dwarf world he calls it, book illustrations, gulliver’s travels (the lilliputians), robinson crusoe and by praxinoscopes, zootropes, and magic lanterns.

the first theatre he went to was a dog theatre,

‘I was not more than four years old... I remember most clearly a remarkably intellignt, beautiful black labrador, who.. executed the well-known dog’s valse on the piano with his master in a duet for two hands and two paws. I learnt afterwards to play that simple little piece.’

later he graduated to toy theatres and puppet theatres at home (taking his first steps to becoming a theatrical designer), and then to punch and judy (petrushka) shows and harlequin shows.

in the petrushka show there is an unexpected interlude (petrushka, on the run after murdering the policeman lover of his intended joins the army and has just killed his sergeant, now read on)- two ‘black men’ appear,

 ‘they both carry sticks, which they throw skilfully up into the air and from one to another, and then use to hit each other over the head with resounding blows’.

then we are back to the main action in the piece - a musician who petrushka has been insulting offers him a strange creature, which he tells him is a lamb, petrushka rides the strange beast back and fore a few times. but then, quick as a trice, it throws petrushka off and is revealed as the devil - the devil then drags petrushka down to hell. his death rattle is heard - the musician plays a gay gallop, and the performance is over.

benois notes the superiority of the street shows over those given by members of high-society and in doing show tells us what the street show puppets looked like - ‘chipped and faded’ and not ‘freshly painted’. 

owing to the cold the roundabouts of the fair had to be erected in tents - outside of each would be a barker (a dyed - or grandpa - to get people in), two dancing girls to skip round him, and two animal figures - the goat and the crane,

‘they were dressed in long white shirts, and from their necks, about three yards long, dangled a bearded snout with horns and a bird’s head with a long beak.’

eventually the temperance society succeeded in driving the fair with its puppet shows, pantomimes and drunkenness out of town, post 1880 heavy moralising folk plays (he names lermontov and pushkin) came to replace the stories of tricksters like punch and harlequin.

benois becomes a ballet enthusiast, harlequin has become mephisto, his interest in puppet shows feeds in to coppelia. soon he will be moving in this world himself.

his elder brother (the charmer) is a great improviser of music (benois is no slouch himself).

after the revolution they all continue to live in their old st. petersburg palaces but now must share them with the hoi-polloi.

horsemouth is reminded of a tale he heard told by an anthropologist film-maker one time. the film-maker is in china, but he doesn’t speak much chinese, he’s filming workers in a communal house, every so often a little old man will come up to him and begin chattering on nervously, the film-maker hums and ha’s - it’s not what he came here to film. later he is watching the film back with his translator - ah that’s interesting, wind that back says the translator, he was the owner of the house... and then, with the revolution it was requisitioned...

horsemouth and the british blues boom

horsemouth has been taking care of business - and sorting things out for the upcoming week - he didn’t (in the end) get a free ticket to see congo natty play (drat and double drat jungalist massive - ah well).

horsemouth spent a while in the library thursday listening to rory gallagher (ok ok - pride of cork/ ballyshannon etc. so not technically british but you know what horsemouth means), robin trower, ten years after (alvin lee), the list could go on - jeff beck, jimmy page, peter green, eric clapton even. almost all of these were jobbing musicians before the blues boom and yet what you can hear in their playing is a love of blues and soul - and yet the other thing you can really hear in their playing is the influence of jimi hendrix - either positively as emulation or negatively as avoidance. clapton (cream), trower, gallagher worked in power trios - none fell too far from the tree.


and yet none had (for horsemouth) the genius of hendrix - there’s no equivalent of 1983 (and a merman I should turn to be).
this was the music horsemouth found on vinyl in the basement of the camden record and tape exchange remaindered down to a pound in the early to mid eighties. indeed at one time he had a double album - one side rory gallagher’s calling card, the other robin trower’s long misty days. he had a lot of robin trower but bridge of sighs he never owned (for earth below he did, b.l.t, truce, in city dreams). jack bruce’s solo stuff also.

the who he never really bothered with (he’s not sure why). peter green he never heard at the time (he would have loved it - it’s smart stuff).

this was (however) possibly the worst decade to like this music - the anarcho-punks ran a strict year zero policy - either anarcho-punk or reggae (perhaps some earlier punk) and that’s your lot. horsemouth transferred his attentions to folk - bert jansch, john renbourn etc.

almost all this vinyl went west when he moved in 1995 - the door simply blew shut behind him as he was moving and horsemouth decided he couldn’t be bothered to break back in (he thinks cumbian chris and friends returned it to the record and tape).

the guitar changed too - van halen and a legion of shredders arrived. the edge in U2. horsemouth began to work on understanding how funk, reggae and african music worked and how to play it, hip-hop arrived, house arrived...

12 groundhogs (cloud gate) ten years after

so horsemouth watched source code last night. jake gyllenhaal does that,

‘this is the story of a man marked by an image.. The violent scene, whose meaning he would not grasp until much later, took place...’.

this is of course precisely the thing narrative cinema is set up to do (it is the thing chris marker manages with sound and static photographs in la jetée by means of a voice over).

horsemouth has an expanding list of these movies (in a way even usual suspects is one of them), there are books like it - william golding’s pincher martin for example.

through the time reassignment rather than time travel procedure of source code jake gyllenhaal can fight terrorism - in the end he escapes with the girl he meets along the way and they both stand hand in hand reflected in british artist anish kapoor's cloud gate in chicago.

gyllenhaal gets to repeat eight minutes - a groundhog 8 minutes - but does he get to change the future? it could be objected that his character is derelict of his duty in the war on terror (but the film takes care of this objection).

horsemouth is delighted with his title - 12 groundhogs - see what he did there? but he worries that he is turning into science fiction author and parodist john t. sladek, a man capable of giving you a pun or slight gag for every situation (just read his the new apocrypha). indeed sladek even has a walk on part in a science fiction novel about spontaneous human combustion as a man who can’t help the protagonists (but is capable of giving them a pun or slight gag for their situation).

in any event - soon it is groundhog day (again).
 ---------------------

horsemouth has been going through people’s rubbish again (in search of stuff to read). he has found a copy of the FT magazine for september 2nd/3rd - with a series of articles

ten years after the financial crisis - where are we now? 

alistair darling (the then chancellor) was on holiday in mallorca, sent out to get milk he picks up a copy of the FT, ‘buried’ in there he finds accounts of regional banks failing in france and germany, ten years later dennis grainger a former employee of northern rock, a north of england regional bank where there was no pension scheme and staff were encouraged instead to buy company shares, is still searching for justice. in the states, after a few years surfing holiday, the sellers of subprime mortgages are back at work, ‘nonprime has a nice ring to it’ , the super rich took a hit (but they have since more than recovered), we, the non-rich, on the other hand, have not, with the youth taking a disproportionate hit.

banking sector pay has however recovered (so that’s alright then).

in honour of ray thomas of the moody blues (RIP january 4th)  horsemouth will end out with them - his parents had two of their albums (and later horsemouth bought more), he always though they were a very under-rated band.

horsemouth royalwatcher (causes of death in english folk songs)

horsemouth has a day off.

the queen is talking about her crown and her coronation.

now as every storyteller knows the thing that symbolizes that the story is over is the reincorporation of elements from early on into the tale - when the first event is reincorporated the story has reached its (natural) end.

horsemouth has (once again) put up the pie chart of causes of death in traditional english folk songs to great acclaim- if you were to add scottish folk songs you could add poisoned (lord randall), you and your two sisters stabbed by a robber who turns out to be your brother (who then commits suicide when he realizes) in the ballad down by the bonnie banks of fordie. (horsemouth’s ganny’s maiden name - true story).

similarly the drowning does not include drowned by your jealous sister, your body hauled ashore made into a harp and that harp played at your sister's wedding to your intended, and the being mistaken for a swan by a trigger happy hunter does not mention that the girl shot was the hunter's girlfriend (a likely story).

folk songs tell a story (that is their main attraction and their main means of keeping themselves remembered). modern songs do not do this so much (they affirm and work emotions - they are attractions based around a moment of transformation - like a lumieres movie).

so with pop songs as with directing a film, by analogy, you want to get into the scene as late as possible (to move your story forward) and get out of the scene as early as possible.

horsemouth should really read his propp and all the other stuff round narrative and should think about the moment of magical transformation in songs. in some songs it is very early ‘STOP.. in the name of love...’ but this is still a chorus that will be returned to later - with the set up in the verse (the payoff line is of course think it over which is almost a throw away).

RIP 'fast' eddie clarke of motorhead this, hawkwind, and a lot of prog, the soundtrack to horsemouth's childhood and youth in the valleys.

 

'you can’t please everyone (and it is a mistake to try)'

'let me push aside the curtain once more, I step inside like odysseus entering the hall of hades; and out of the mists of time, through the clouds of tobacco smoke the shades of those who used to sit here approach... ... what they thought and wrote, spoke and created while alive, I shall try to tell elsewhere, for all of it was part of the voice of the age I lived through’
- richard seewald in the era of german expressionism.

saturday night horsemouth was out at a gig - neutral, triple negative, kostas kilymis.


he was (of course) there to see triple negative -  who are a re-incarnation of double negative (horsemouth has a CD somehwere - indeed he has a clinical wasteman cassette also ) and (by the miracle of recording) a whole host of bands (many featuring new zealand guitarist cameron bain) - from the earliest, constant pain (see it’s already marked by genius, ‘what band are you in mate?’ ‘I’m in constant pain...’), to clinical wasteman, philosophie queen (+microcosmically: THE MEAN STREAKS), heliogabalus, $urp!u$, aufgehoben & S.P.U.D, madame tlank.

horsemouth missed his chance to see the mean streaks (friends of his with a south london connection were always on at him to go see them), he might have seen anti-family, er... what we have here is a scene and a variety of expressions over the years. but we have not reached the stage of raabe’s the era of german expressionism or bunuel’s accounts of the ultraists in his/ my last breath where it is over, done with, safely entombed in history, it’s contradictions worked through, its participants dispersed, its contribution clear.

so who played?

m (guitar, vocals), a (piano, vocals, violin, glockenspiel, printed word on paper), d (saxophone, stoic immobility - who horsemouth was introduced to outside dalston kingsland station at about 7.30), some of the aforementioned bands in sample collage. sightlines between the co-operating musicians were terrible (perhaps intentionally so), a+d did a sterling job of backing up m - effectively the MC and focus.

audience response was perplexed, a little muted
(at last something the OTO crowd find difficult - history).

you can’t please everyone (and it is a mistake to try).
this is a lesson horsemouth should learn (he’s a bit of a people pleaser, it holds him back).

to horsemouth it felt like a sound collage of squat gigs - an experimentalism perceived through bad sound, it felt quite transgressive (given the (good) quality of sound these days) - but given also the mainstream embrace of the experimental it is difficult to transgress against - it is like being trapped inside adorno’s aesthetic theory). the incorporation of pre-existing material (the thing hip-hop and reggae do so well), it is the thing experimental music does badly. 

m’s war with bad materiality and the conventions attending performance continues (sample quote - if horsemouth has remembered it correctly ‘why would I play live? I have day job precisely to avoid this...’), the guitar wrestling not in service of a disciplined sonic technique to attain particular sounds but in frustration with the limitations of its potential for expression, with the limitations of the moment itself.

so onto neutral - swedish guitar noise duo- fine controlled droning (but in an experimental rather than a metal situation) -horsemouth was gone to do some babysitting after 2-3 numbers he was off.

kostas kilymis (who opened) electronica, voice and bass, some interesting things too far apart (horsemouth is pretty sure he met him at one of tim goldie’s stepney town hall things).

horsemouth should be out at a conference today but he’s still ill and saving himself for work tomorrow (which restarts after a 24 day rest).

film

last night he watched jacques tourneur’s city in/under the sea - taken from an edgar allen poe poem, vincent price playing jules verne’s captain nemo, pirates and gillmen, john le mesurier, cornwall, lives lived beyond their natural span, adapted as a comic book under the title war-gods of the deep, a predecessor of warlords of atlantis etc.

the spirit animal of the production was a comedy chicken (in a basket) - despite the fact that the pirates haven’t eaten meat in centuries it survives .

first post of the (new) year (when the faun met alice)

horsemouth did four gigs last year (two solo (thank you albino, thanks max) , one with howard, and one with peter as horses of the invisible).

he recorded some songs that have been hanging around a while (and some new ones) with howard and an indian harmonium (tuned plus 40% - so the guitars had to be retuned to that). they are just finishing off mixing them. you can hear a fragment on one of them (when the faun met alice) above.

hopefully there will be more gigs this year, they will get the recordings out (on both cd and download), and move onto the next set of recordings in the summer...

the stuff with andrew minty, morven and siobhan from the start of the year has ground to a halt - perhaps temporarily (shame, horsemouth was enjoying it - he likes singing with people, he likes the repertoire).

work continues to roll on ok - horsemouth has effected the transformation into new improved electronic horsemouth (the better to ensure his survival in future decades), he’s paying into a pension (the better etc. etc.), he should probably diversify his sources of work (the better... but he probably won’t - he’s a bit lazy).

financially things are tight (but not impossible) squeezed between rising rent and stagnant wages.

his homestead (the gaff) - horsemouth remains very pleased with (it has been - so far - almost entirely hassle free).

politically horsemouth expects it all to come to a head early in the new year (and this will set the pattern for subsequent years).

horsemouth has, since the summer, been putting himself about a bit more, hopefully it will all pay off.

right, on with the year.

Duncan - of horsemouth and goatboy  has been back in touch, he too has been recording, here are some of his more recent recordings.