burial

james recommended 'untrue' by burial a while ago and, cuz i respect the bruv, i gave it a listen and 'liked it'. today its genius, which everyone has tried to get across to me, hit me and, as talking heads put it, nothing is better than that.

its place is clearly in the early morning-sun rising, post-club, glasses of water, tired eyes, ears ringing, broken memories of the night you've had. everything is muffled, the music a darkness from which ghostly faces lurch out then fade back into. everything is fractured and distant here, you're alone on a flat, minimal plain. fragments of rave music wheeze out from its remains, beats skitter across the landscape, clouds of bass swarm overhead, vocals try to talk to you but they're unclear, uncertain and hard to decipher.

its brilliant and i need to hear it after a night out, lying in bed in total darkness as it rocks me to sleep.



also, new template for this blog. i like it a lot more than my old one that had that pointless random number in the top left corner. i really like the whole minimalist, simple circle thing you see these days on everything from album covers to cook books to wallpaper. the backround on my phone is one of circles shifting from purple to white and back again and it, rather pathetically, genuinely makes me happy.

and if anyone's interested the subtitle-'every day i wake up'-is a jay-z lyric. i'm very fond of double meanings in books and music, and that's one of my favourites.

also watched stephen hawking master of the universe today. my reaction to astrophysics is always one initially of awe but then, as the scale of what they are talking about becomes clear, sadness. what gets me is the university folk they have on there, all so clever, so brilliant. it dawns on me that i will soon be at university, in the english and history departments, reading books on trivialities whilst they across the corridor concern themselves with questions that all religion, art and science has tried to answer for thousands of years. the statistics given are just so incredible that in the face of them nothing else seems to matter. when they explain how small our planet is relative to the universe, all i can think about is how little a ramones album is relative to the universe, and how it would never have affected it if it didnt exist. what i initially found inspiring i soon find depressingly belittling.

it makes me feel all the more inadequate because the art i love the most is art concerned with trivial things: alan bennett plays where biscuits are symbolic, the fall writing about trucks, talking heads songs about paper. if i listened to the epic pomp of iron maiden perhaps i wouldnt feel so bad.

i think everyone in this increasingly secular world, where there are products to save you the bother of cooking rice, is constantly worried about the risk of wasting their life. and stuff like this always makes me feel that i am wasting my life, that anything i ever do will not be as important or significant as the ultimate findings of these experiments into the start of the universe. i find it difficult to believe that a book on the literary traditions of paradise lost (and there are so many) counts for anything next to this. but then as the dazzle of the figures fades, or rather i once again forget just what exactly they mean, i am back in the real world, and in need of the art i cling to in order to understand it. and it occurs to me how much more real this is to me than anything i saw on the program. the professors on the program by comparison seem lofty and even pretentious. my thoughts reverse and its their lives that seem to be a waste of time in the face of such greatness of expression. and thus, music and writing once again restore me to balanced levels. my amazement at the physicists never truly goes away but it is now equalled by my amazement at the music i have and the people i know and the the things i read. music is nothing, but theres something consoling about that. it's carefree and it doesnt matter and thats a beautiful thing. the physics is amazing and important but no one will ever properly understand it-its not stuff our minds can ever truly visualise. our bodies and minds have evolved for simpler things-community, speech, relationships-and those are the things i find myself most comfortable learning about. i disagree with oscar wilde; we shouldnt be looking at the stars, we should be looking in the gutter. innit.