not another self-indulgent gig review!

After a day spent throwing stones at other stones on Aldeburgh beach, Mat, Dave and I went to the Faster Than Sound Festival at a disused airbase just outside Woodbridge. It would be safe to say that this festival does not yet have the pull of, say, Glastonbury. Perhaps some form of advertising would have helped - I only found out about it by examining Venetian Snares tour dates in the back of The Wire magazine. For a while we found ourselves standing at a perfectly ordinary bus stop in a High Street from which hardcore ravers were conspicuously absent. When a colourfully-dressed elderly woman appeared I joked that she was definitely attending. And she was. ‘I used to play lacrosse’, I heard her tell one of the (fifteen or so) hip kids of Aldeburgh. Because they had actually started to accumulate around us by now, all greeting each other as they arrived. It was starting to look like this would be that social nightmare, a festival where everybody else already knows each other.

As the coach pulled into the airbase, having taken an enormous detour to pick up nobody in some village or other, the old woman turned to us and asked: ‘Is this a rave? I hope not!’ Mat smiled sheepishly and shoved his glo-sticks further down into his pocket.

It was not a rave. It was a neo-rave. All kinds of electronic artists were represented: the kind that hide behind their equipment (literally, in Mira Calix’s case), and the kind that dance madly and make bad jokes (Max Tundra, whose music is also a kind of joke: a good one). Even those who didn’t seem to be trying too hard were still performing. Luke Vibert pursed his lips around a very thin cigarette and stared at his laptop with some intensity. Venetian Snares looked like an overgrown adolescent who never leaves his bedroom without a barrage of frantic beats and screams to protect him. His music is a lashing out, against everyone - especially, in this instance, the sound man, at whom he glowered and muttered throughout. Not enough bass. True: Luke Vibert’s had reconfigured our internal organs.

So, what with one thing and another, Shitmat proved to be the more intense experience. In baseball cap and sleeveless vest, gawping at his monitor, he looked like a slack-jawed work experience boy thrust in at the deep end. The monitor delivered, however, and he jumped around, delighting in his achievement: gabba hardcore drill n’bass, who knows? A happy chaos, anyway. A stuffed penguin we’d seen earlier was hoisted aloft, and snogged - I may have cheered at this point. Certainly I danced, if you can put it like that. Alright then, I reacted unselfconsciously to the music; Dave reacted so unselfconsciously that he all but destroyed his foot. Wreathed in completely unironic glo-sticks, we knew we were having a good time. So did the white rasta from the bus, who’d been at virtually every act we attended (dancing strangely or just staring fixedly at one point on the ceiling) and who now decided to break down the final barrier and join Shitmat on stage for some incoherent ‘toasting’. Shitmat took it all in his stride - you would, with a name like that - and only belatedly wrestled the mic away from him.

No doubt it was a disaster in real terms, and questions will no surely be asked in the Aldeburgh Gazette. They should not, perhaps, have targeted elderly ladies quite so much, even though the hardcore mash-ups were interspersed with Bach and the King Edward VI School Choir singing Vaughan Williams. Unlike the white rasta our own old lady never made the return bus. Lying in a ditch somewhere, off her face on pills, we imagined. Until informed that she’d got a taxi home. (No amount of lacrosse had prepared her for this.)

They’ll get it right next year: Coldplay will be headlining (instead of a computer performing indie hits) and the whole thing will sell out in about five seconds. I’m just glad we were there when they forgot to invite anyone.

on edge

I keep waking up at five and being unable to get back to sleep. Consequently I am tired, nerves jangled. When I got in drunk on Saturday night and discovered a bottle of Vaseline skin moisturizing lotion on the floor of my room I immediately became paranoid and lay awake wondering why someone would creep into my room and leave that there. Were they making a comment on my sexuality? (The Vaseline thing.) Or were they insinuating that I had ‘dry and sensitive skin’? It hardly improved my mood when I was woken up (for the eighth or ninth time) by what sounded like stones being thrown against my window. When I looked, there was only a solitary magpie, chuckling to itself on the roof. I’m superstitious about magpies anyway, but this was taking the piss.

When I got up Dave explained that Nicki Hunt had left the skin lotion there by accident after applying the stuff using my mirror (the only substantial one in the house). I remain paranoid, however, because she has supposedly left ‘other things’ in my room, things which I can’t see, but which I’m worried will creep up on me in the night.

I’d been out on a work leaving do. Alex, the manager’s daughter, is going to Honduras to ‘recruit fish’. For what? I never got round to finding out. I don’t really want to find out - better to give the imagination free reign. (In the leaving card, I saluted her wisdom in going to live under the sea: ‘If I could grow gills I’d do the same.’). Paul, rambling wildly as ever tonight, talked about killer dolphins with laser beams fitted to their heads, supposedly escaped from U.S. military research centres during the flooding in New Orleans. (That’s the Guardian for you.) We ate in le Tasca, gamely plodding through the Spanish names of the dishes only for the waitress to interrupt us with: ‘The salmon, yeah?’ We actually had a fluent Spanish speaker with us (not eating). We should have got him to order all the food. It would have been worth it to see the look of bewilderment on the (very Essex) waitress’ face.

hi I'm 19-40 years old and I enjoy despair

Mat has set up a new office - on the other half of his double bed. I tell him he is flying in the face of received wisdom, which has it that those who work from home should keep their workplace and their living space completely separate. He points out that all he has to do to get to work every day is roll over. Not that it will help with his latest moneymaking scheme: washing people’s cars. Friends’ cars, mainly. He’s not sure if he’s going to add the service to his company website: 3D visualisation and wash your car for a fiver. Nor has he washed a car yet (save his own). Too distracted by Yahoo personals. His latest prospect closed her introductory paragraph with the time-honoured phrase: I just want to be happy. I said I could picture her screaming those words at the end of the relationship, towards his fleeing back. ‘I just want to be happy!’ Honestly, what kind of insight does that phrase give us into someone’s soul? I enjoy doing enjoyable fun things. My dislikes include misery and pain. I think it’s very important to keep breathing…

My likes include really miserable music. Really, is there anything more uplifting? On Tuesday I went with Dave to see Silver Mt. Zion. That’s a band, not a landmark. Support came from Carla Bozulich, once lead singer of the equally obscure Geraldine Fibbers. She did some kind of murky country rock thing that was slow to get going but triumphed eventually. It was like watching something being dragged reluctantly out of the darkness. Into more darkness. And then massacred in a maelstrom of guitar noise.

Black Heart Procession, the other support, were a bit MOR in this context, like a Gothic Supertramp. But Silver Mt. Zion were fantastic. They’re a collective of sorts, based in a squat in Montreal, so I was surprised by how much the lead singer, Efrim, dominates. He looks like a cross between Jesus and Frank Zappa; like a cult leader traumatized by the responsibility of looking after his flock. He yelps all the world’s pain over music that swells from melancholy ambient into something quite ferocious before dying down to begin the cycle of misery again. And in between songs, he’s even funny. You had to be there, mind.

It was a bit of a contrast to our recent visit to the Pink Toothbrush in Rayleigh, in that we were not the only ones there older than nineteen. There were some very young people there though, including a guy I only ever saw from behind, whose fringe came down past his chin on both sides so that, from the back, he looked like his face might be entirely covered with hair. Only Dave saw Wolfboy’s face, in the lift at Mornington Crescent tube. He had an impression of teeth. Enormous jutting teeth. The music at the Pink Toothbrush was good, but if I’d danced I’d have felt like a performing freak (enough that I was breathing the same air as these people). So it was refreshing to encounter someone who really did belong in a circus. Or a band.

Though actually, it seems I have nothing to worry about. An online test doing the rounds currently has informed me that my real age is nineteen. Because I like tiramisu, apparently.

birds and worms and planes

On Bank Holiday Monday we went to Southend. The air show was on. Planes threw themselves about in the sky like birds buffeted by the wind. (There also were birds buffeted by the wind, which created some confusion). It rained intermittently but enthusiastically; despite this there was a carnival atmosphere. A lot of people in freakish costumes (their everyday wear, in fact). The people inside the costumes were pretty freakish too: the kind of folk who never get shown on TV, even nowadays.

We ate at a chip dispensing facility on the seafront, and even came up with a slogan for it: You’ve Had Worse! Southend is much the same as it was when I used to go there as a child. Only the names have been changed. We parked close to Bar Bluu, presumably named after the first few letters of the noise you make when you’re sick. Other trendy upgrades prove to be illusory: the Hotel Trance, written above one doorway, was merely ‘hotel entrance’ with a couple of letters eroded or stolen.

The purpose of our visit was to take photographs. Between the four of us we had about ten cameras, Chad, Dave and Mat all being serious photographers. Only when we moved down the coast a bit, however, did they come out in force. Nothing in Old Leigh was going to go unphotographed, it seemed: at one point the three of them rounded, cameras at the ready, on a (no doubt terrified) earthworm, like paparazzi who’ve just spotted Jordan.

A rainbow was provided (it’s a cliché, but then so is going to Southend on a Bank Holiday Monday), and even I couldn’t help but photograph that, so emotionally overwhelmed was I to step out of the toilet and see it. I was actually just glad to be able to get out of that toilet. It was an individual cubicle, with the telephone number of the manufacturer’s head office in Sweden written above the urinal, which raised the question of some kind of problem arising, even as it made you wonder how well placed they were to deal with it. A bit of a wait, possibly, if you got locked in. On the plus side, you’d be OK for the toilet.