'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 .