Surface Tension
On Derek Southall's Blackwater Recalled - Four Years After (1969) *

And, severance: a dreadful U,
carved from a block of night. Flicker
and swim of country bonfire light,
and past that moving on the face
of the waters. From underneath,

the bleeding. What does this ice-lid
scatter in the fields? Time becomes
the strata resisting footsteps,
the pulse of a camera shutter.
My homes echo with ripples, strokes;

crack with the black puncture of grief.


*This painting, which can be viewed at the Herbert Gallery in Southall's home-town of Coventry, was a reaction to the death of his brother in 1965, who drowned in a frozen lake at Blackwater in Hampshire, my family's home county.

26. Dissolution

Published in Plan B #45, May 2009. Thanks to Lauren Strain, for the editing, and David Tibet for the fact correction.

Current 93
Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain (Coptic Cat)

"Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience" - Frank Kermode, The Sense Of An Ending: Studies In The Theory Of Fiction

David Tibet, an autodidact prophet in the tradition of Gerrard Winstanley and John Lydon, has been preaching apocalypse for over 25 years. But no longer is he a voice crying in the wilderness: every day, the air now tingles with anxiety – global recession, energy crises, looming environmental disaster. Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain can be seen as a return to the matter of the first, recently reissued Current 93 recordings, whose ravaged soundscapes, a reaction to the Babylon of Thatcherite Britain, seem increasingly pertinent.

Aleph... is probably Tibet's most ambitious project since 1993's The Inmost Light trilogy: an eschatological rock-opera of sorts, acted out in Tibet's own bewildering, syncretic cosmology, the frequent incomprehensibility of which matters no more than it did for Blue Öyster Cult on Imaginos. Its theme - which, as far as I can tell, is that of the war of opposites: flesh and spirit, Rome and Jerusalem, Samael and Monad - isn't that important, except as a justification for Tibet to deliver some of the most overwrought, fire-and-brimstone performances in Current 93's history. Those who accuse him of being campy and OTT will find plenty of fuel here: when he draws the word 'murderer' out over James Blackshaw's Early Music flourishes on 'Poppyskins', or whispers that "my teeth are possessed by demons" - snarls of guitar like lightning in the backdrop - he seems possessed of both utter sincerity and an awareness of how ludicrous he sounds - a Gnostic Vincent Price, rolling his 'R's in his best Abiezer Coppe impression.

The (admittedly impressive) list of players gathered on this album is also unimportant. Except for Alex Neilson's supportive, malleable percussion - which occasionally resembles the eternal propulsion of OM's Chris Hakius - and Blackshaw's guitar filigrees, the ensemble is united in support of Tibet's benevolent demagoguery. In what is largely a continuation and refinement of the direction of 2006's Black Ships Ate The Sky, grinding rock sits alongside becalmed folk. Even the peaks of Tibet's sermonising aggression are balanced out by plateaus of slowly-building tension girded with strings and organ. '26 April 2007' is a narcotic glide shot through with coronae of fuzz; the voices - supplied by Pantaleimon's Andria Degens and Baby Dee, among others - drift like EVP. 'Not Because The Fox Barks' and 'As Real As Rainbows', are frighteningly intense: the former verges on metal, Tibet ventriloquising the final tribulation amid vast electric slabs - his incantations call to mind Ozzy narrating the end of Clash of the Titans. And, after the extinction of Antichrist comes the advent of paradise in the form of a stately guitar and piano. When 'As Real...' drops into a maelstrom of glitch, organ and piano - Sasha Grey multitracked over the top - it's as moving as anything on Sleep Has His House, still C93's peak.

"The deserts will be filled/With the comas of stars": words resonant with the promise of the millenarians who captivated England 360 years ago - that another world is possible, here and now.

"I live in increasing awareness that a Love will come suddenly who will finally tear our skies apart," Tibet wrote in the sleeve notes to Black Ships.... Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain is the most brilliant, preposterous warning yet of its imminent arrival; a vital reminder that the end, if we choose, will also be the triumph of love.

25. Caroline Weeks

Originally published in Plan B #44, April 2009.

A classical figure, misted as if the camera had caught something emanating from a pre-Raphaelite otherworld. Compare, perhaps, with a photograph of the bisexual American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay: the same classic-Hollywood poise, the same melancholy aura. She seems, though, to resist this framing as ethereal siren. She’s nothing if not real.

Caroline Weeks’ debut, Songs For Edna – its lyrics transposed from Millay’s exquisite, haunting poetry – has the feel of a record from a time-slip, an unplaceable artefact. The atmosphere of records by the likes of Karen Dalton, Linda Perhacs (Weeks is a fan of both), or Judee Sill, pervades: at once otherworldly and unerringly close, as if “the listener will… feel like I am singing in the same room as them”, cutting surgically to the heart of life. Her unaffected, direct vocal belies the strangeness of the act: over skeletal fingerpicking she reconstitutes the voice of a woman nearly 60 years dead – beautifully. “I was looking through a dusty old book of American poetry and I came across the sonnet ‘I Shall Go Back’, as I read out loud – the words danced off the page into song. Edna's poems struck a chord, deeply resonating with me on a very personal level”. It’s precisely that sense of uncanniness – the revenant past’s ability to shake us to the core – that Songs For Edna captures.

Weeks is very familiar with this sense of connection to the bygone. Her own musical background goes back some generations. “My great-grandad played in a brass-band where every musician was a member of the Weeks family… My grandma Gladys Weeks, who has sadly passed away now, had the most incredible voice, a very high-pitched warble. At a young age, sitting on my grandad's knee I would be mesmerised. I realised then that singing was something special.” Her childhood home was full of music: “my Dad would sing in choirs and listen to Leonard Cohen, my Mum sings around the house non-stop – mostly Carpenters and Joni Mitchell songs. I was always encouraged to sing, to sing from my heart, to sing for pleasure, in quite a spiritual way."

At the heart of folk-song is a dialectic between the experience of the singer, and the singer’s possession by the song. In this, poetry, with its penetrating focus on language, proves the perfect source. “There is a blank sound-canvas, I can colour the words, playing around with the rhythm, harmony and tone… the poems feel their way into music.” Millay is a marginal figure even within histories of American poetry, and the obscurity of source was part of the attraction: “The fact that she is fairly unknown makes her more attractive, or special in some way, like being let in on a secret.” This performative intimacy comes over in her live performances, which often includes “dance, choral pieces… tape recorders hidden under chairs and behind curtains.”

Solo recording is only one branch of the work she has been involved in around her hometown of Brighton, stretching from membership of the live incarnation of Bat For Lashes to “an all-female Bulgarian choir”. Her ex-membership of the experimental folk group Hamilton Yarns perhaps offers a background to her own aesthetic – a kind of futuristic archaism, appropriate to a landscape containing both the modernist incubator of Bexhill and the South Downs’ ancient beauty. “I feel that there are so many beautiful words in the world that have been lost and forgotten…there needs to be a renaissance, a revival of the past. I think we human beings need to slow down and appreciate what has come before us."

Begin here.

24. From 'Nocturnes'

From a currently dormant project, a sequence of prose-poems. I was considering including these in my end-of-year portfolio, then decided against it for reasons of space.

After John Burnside

I

These avenues are an absolutism. Statements in tarmac, red-brick, pebbledash, we do not want to hear. Webbed with traceries, absorbing the resonance of streetlight, the footsteps’ years. The mapping, above all, remains.

II

The marshes, a ghost-map on tarmac and concrete: fronds, tower-blocks. Congress of the semi-detacheds, sand-brick Barrett estates, mulched in brackish water. Curlews and bitternes ululating in public toilets, nesting in ground-floor offices, stalking between the flooded cubicles. The shopping precincts patrolled by fish, the charity shops flourishing with bulrushes and ferns, weevils devouring old hardcover Hazlitts. And, as evening draws on, the sputtering: sodium communing with marsh-light.

III

The beach sloping, stretching along the curve of God’s dragged finger, the churned-up mica in endless drift. Settling as a conglomeration of loose powder, congealing as the sea feels fit, repository of misbegotten stones, slashing razor-shells, the sea-life expelled. Charcoal petrified, a black, hard memento. And, in the evening, the half-lit swarming of Victorian needle-nuzzlers, parasols to the harsh moon.

23. Excavations

2nd draft of a story included in my end-of-year portfolio.

I have the photographs before me. They are spread out, like an ornate Japanese fan. Night came on some time ago, and I did not stand and switch on the light. But I can, for my sins, still see.

I do not know where or when I recovered them. They are already coated with dust again from sitting on my desk for weeks. Nonetheless, they do not show any age: the dress of the girl whose photo occupies the centre of my desk is as vividly scarlet, the flowers around its hem as white, as I imagine they were when first taken. She sits in a field, patches of daisies scattered behind, an acoustic guitar by her skirt, which sits placidly on a leg brought up to her body, thin as a switch. Her arms loop around her knee as if she were holding a dog. This is her only photo: there is nothing of her other than that smile, perturbing in its reserved curve, its flash of utterly white teeth, like the opening of a bean pod. I knew her, after then – we talked, sometimes, I’m sure. But the only extant information of her is that rictus. She is with others, whom I knew, also after these first days. In the other photos, they are gathered in twos or threes, the camera sometimes tilted at a crazy angle, the frame perhaps severing away half a face – for some, that is all I have. Some instinct other than that of survival draws them together, touching, clasping. No matter how long I look, it remains unknown. Skin, hands and hair blur into incomprehensible geometries. I pick up one, dust it off, scrutinise: a young man and his lady friend, slightly off-centre, almost compacted into one slithering shape. Their eyes are arrogant and supplicating: they know that the camera makes them, just as without them, there would be no photograph.

I stand, my body cracking out of inertia, and shuffle to the kitchen. Its unlit corners, crowded with black heaps, are a foreign territory. It is the places that come back, again and again: a palm tree, strung with fairy lights, people surrounding it in the background, the lit vectors of the city spilling away over the wall surrounding it. In one of the photographs, a young man plays rough-trade with it, his girl companion half-heartedly joining in. A slash of black hair frames her eyes, lit by the flash like a cat’s. I feel in these photographs, I am always just off-frame – in this one, sipping miserly at a Corona. But of course, I know I am not. If there is one fact they testify to, it is that. Everything else is supposition. Looking through the open kitchen window, down at the city, I know that this tableau of lights will have disappeared by morning. To have it set down in chemicals, unchanging – that is the thing. Everything else is tawdry imitation.

Standing over my desk, I glance down at them. When I try to remember, they come back, frozen and projected from that time, as if through a magic lantern. The geography of a face, certain senses of personality, affection. Where did they go, who were tied to these things? Where did I, to lose them? Of course, these are not my memories. I look at the arc of an arm, the tautening of skin around a cheekbone raised in smiling, the red cavern of a shout, and wonder where I was when all of this was happening. Dead? Dreaming? Some other world may have harboured me, but I do not remember it. The only, ignominious one left me is this, where the only voice is the October wind battering my window. They are the surface traces of everything that was never mine, like the coils of a sea-ammonite in chalk, the strata going down and down. When I try to remember these things – the heat of a hand around a shoulder, breath-explosion in another’s face, the ambience of beings – the only thing that comes is the heather blazing into colour on the scrubland, in the late sunlight, a fieldfare’s song whistling down from the distance.

There are two more photos of them in the fields. In one, three of them – two young men with scraggly hair, and another girl with the guitar – are sat around a fire of dead logs and ivy, more smoke than flame. In the other, the guitar-case lies by it, a copy of Shelley’s The West Wind and Other Poems sitting on its lid. Outside, I can feel already the evening’s coming frost preparing to seep in. They are saints, pasted into the gold frame of an icon. For them, it was the summer.

22. Why I Hate... Youth

Column, first printed in Plan B #36, August 2008.

“Flagging pursuit of happiness… Sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it’s over. [Pause] False ring there.”

--Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape.

In June 2007, the Observer Music Monthly dedicated an entire issue to “the bands and fans kickstarting a youth revolution” – an indication not merely of the OMM’s hubristic zeitgeist-tracking self-image, but of the music press’ singular reverence and hunger for ‘youth’. Since the mid-20^th century pop has been primarily consumed and performed by young people; the glamour of adolescence still forms a significant part of the music and PR industry’s language. Female singers are now accorded publicity and cred according to age – hence Duffy (24) being outclassed by Adele (5 months my senior) and Kate Nash – and are usually out of careers before 27. NME pronounces a new bunch of walking acne patches the Second Coming each week; Artrocker seems to exist to convince people that an unhealthy pallor, tiny legs and sixth-generation post-punk guitars do excitement make. Even the dadrock mags have token ‘hot new bands’ to get sweaty over – witness Mojo handing out 5 star reviews to whichever trad-folk wunderkinds appear.

Neither is Plan B entirely immune: its roots in post-C86 indie music-crit leave its unstinting and commendable neophilia open to moony-eyed sentiment about ‘innocent discovery’ and ‘childlike wonder’ – used, more than is healthy, to justify wilful underachievement and aesthetic conservatism. The insistence of some writers – especially those of a poptimistic bent – that youth’s music should not be subject to critical orthodoxy, only to the blind pleasure principle, is a means of draining ideas from music. As Adorno wrote, “Reflection that takes sides with naivety condemns itself: cunning and obscurantism remain what they always were”; it isn’t criticism, but a shutting-down of criticism, of discourse.

The fixation on youth – its supposed ‘excitement’, vigour, etc. – corresponds worryingly with the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism to deny the more unsavoury realities of human existence: suffering, aging, decay and death are elided from the spectacle. The ruling class obsesses over imitation philosopher’s stones (anti-aging products, alternative medicine), while tabloid readers worry over slippages in the celebrity façade of eternal youth. In music discourse, it maintains the claim that radicalism is reserved for the young, that musicians over a certain age are fit only for the nostalgia circuit, or PR-approved, Rick Rubin-assisted Creative Comebacks. This despite the fact that there are many musicians of middle-and-advancing-age soldiering on – Whitehouse, Richard Youngs, Matthew Bower, Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt, Portishead (average age 43) – and producing music far better than kids half, a third of their age. Some of the most compelling music writers around are in (or past) their forties: Mark Fisher, our own Everett True, Chris Bohn, Simon Reynolds. And look to the margins and the scale shifts: for example, 30 in jazz is young, and the number of musicians still keeping up the good work – Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Charles Gayle, Evan Parker, Keith Tippett, etc. – past bus-pass eligibility is inspiring; in classical, if you’re below 50 you’re no-one. The continual emphasis on the cultural production and milieu of youth is a perfect example of late capitalism’s fixation on a newness that isn’t new; a state in which, as Frederic Jameson pointed out, “an unparalleled rate of change” is twinned with “an unparalleled standardisation of everything” – the idea that the young might come up with art to shame their elders is becoming more laughable precisely as it becomes a yet more central focus of marketing rhetoric.

Youth has its tortures, too, among the worst being its ephemerality: it disappears soon enough, and to deny the value of age is to state that the rest of life is not worth living. The extension of adolescence – the impulse at the heart of poptimism and indie/hipster culture – is also the admission that the future is not worth it – the basis of a nihilism unable even to make demands. Observe the young today – their blank eyes, zombie movements – and try telling me these creatures are our be-all-and-end-all, rather than a (literal) dead-end; they seem to have, a priori, as Greil Marcus put it, “bur[ied] their nascent personalities in received images”; to have, in their regression to the boredom, indifference and petulance of childhood, foreswore any “need to explain themselves and explain the world”, any wish to change it, or their futures. These things signify not, as the myth of cool would have you believe, a spirit of adventure, of seizing the prime of life, but a resigned fatalism. The artificial excitement, the sweat and hedonism of adolescence that the press clamour after – the correlative of the hyperspeed production of late capitalism, its bipolar cycles of boom and bust – is merely the obverse to the plague of depression, mental illness and substance abuse among teenagers. The kids aren’t alright – and we should realise it.

21. Pomes

Found Poem
After Roland Barthes

There are two musics (at least so I have
always thought): the music one listens to,
the music one plays. These two musics are
two totally different arts, each with its
own history, its own sociology,
its own aesthetics, its own erotics.

Found Poem
After David Toop and W.G. Sebald

In Austerlitz, Sebald writes
of hearing a radio programme
about Fred Astaire:
"Astaire's father, who according to this
surprising radio programme came
from Vienna, had worked as
a master brewer in Omaha, Nebraska,
where Astaire was born, and from
the veranda of the Astaire house you
could hear freight trains being shunted
back and forth
in the city's marshalling yard.
Astaire is reported to have said
later that this constant,
uninterrupted shunting sound,
and the ideas it suggested
of going on a long railway journey,
were his only
childhood memories."