29 May 2005

Synaestheticals 2: The Seams of GoodWill

Because Mansion Mumra has recently been re-inhabited by mushroom sprites - see the middle classes rushing against time; see the nasty Government trying to make them hang out with crims - all kinds of things passing across the psychoscillators at the moment...

fluorescent activities from an unusually round Four Tet and the Smile Around The Face track in particular with it's sort of Julian Cope remix vibe, undulating up and down whistling and slight detourns in the progression (I especially like the the little guy panning around the speakers banging Gongs).

For some reason I'm put in mind of a very docile leopard.

and at 5 AM i found myself oddly attracted to the Amorphous Androgynous album The Isness, something that I've had for years and never really noticed, an album that slipped so far under my radar that I'd reconstructed my memory to forget it ever existed thus rendering the title ironic as the Kids From Fame not being famous.

The Isness seems to drift endlessly, the word ebb might have been created for it. The album ingratiates pleasantly rather than forces itself upon you, a bubble headed hippie girl with big eyes and a long Thurman nose.

(((((...speaking of bubble heads I made the mistake of catching Big Brother as the drugs began to take hold... Anthony looks like a Guy Fawkes Mask (surely a shoo in for V for Vendetta?)... Makosi looks like she's she's walked in off the set of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (a good thing but I hope she doesn't bogart the joint)... Max and Craig are twin pipes of Evil (awful bloodrush Righteous Brothers) while Sam and Saskia seem destined to a life of draping over cold cars in Birmingham Expos, perhaps helped by someone I can't remember who looks like a strip-o-gram who's just sat on a valve of a tub of compressed air... Derek seems like he's been drafted in as a Tory scene-setter, trying to dig the zeitgeist for the next elections, only to find himself soiled by the experience (later, we'll find him hanging upside down in the Groucho Club with an orange stuffed in his mouth and an expression of dull integrity on his foxblood spattered face... there's others but they fade, formless and redundant...

My wife, already beshroomed as the opening credits kicked in, started mumbling how there was no plot... ))))

Finally The (Other) Door's second single The Seams of GoodWill has been vein coursing since last night...

I first came across The (Other) Door via the now defunct Boiling Frogs nexus but, like The Isness, I never really listened too deeply - the slow pitter-patter of hand-drums, eastern howls and rolling mists seeming lost amongst all my i-pod clutter - but listening harder last night the gently strummed guitar gradually shifting in and out of focus and the Nasa Arab curls of alien voices creeping around the edges seemed to suggest some kind of friendly abyss.

It's definitely music that seems yoked to the kind of 24hr autism that accompanies nuits blanc, acting like a sort of psychedelic heli-pad. While The (Other) Door are hardly setting disco pulses alight, it's somehow comforting that 'ambient' music can drag your down to the depths without descending into painful industrial dirges (or worse the rightly maligned and very shortlived 'dark ambient' / isolationist nonsense).

The (Other) Door - The Seams of Goodwill


A rapidshare production so right/ctrl-clicks won't work - just press and follow the little fellah through

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