i'm gonna breathe a new lease of life into this blog, and try to return it to its original intention which was to write casual, frequent posts off the cuff rather than my old myspace blog which took time and attention to write on. the revolution starts today.
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in past months i've sort of been binging on records, buying way too many at a time and it removed the excitement from buying records so i've deliberately forced myself to return to how i approached records when i was younger, whereby i want a record for a long time before i get round to buying it, giving a real (though now artificial) sense of apprehension before i get to listen to the record. so this week i bought two records i was desperate to own, the first is jimmy cliffs classic reggae soundtrack album 'the harder they come', and glenn gould performing bachs final masterpiece 'the art of the fugue', first on organ then again on piano.
glenn gould is easily one of my favourite classical pianists, along with rubinstein (who everyone loves) and kempff. one of the best thing about glenn gould is that he hums whilst he plays, which obviously the piano microphone picks up, but he doesnt hum the actual melody of the piece, so youre hearing him hum his sort of view of the overall structure of the music rather than the actual music, if that makes sense, which puts you into his mindset about the music. it also sounds really creepy which is great, he sounds like a real freak.
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for some reason the idea of nuns voting seems surreal
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back from leeds which we all agreed would be our last ever, for different reasons. for me its that i cant take the central motivation behind leeds, which for all the people that go seems to be that its a weekend to lose yourself in a field and cause havoc and perhaps see bloc party whilst you're there and i cant take it anymore. i didnt really want to go this year but everyone said 'yeah but you dont really go to a festival for the music' and i just kept thinking 'why the hell not?'. i think a lot of the people who go to leeds dont go for the bands and i cant stand being one of those people. this really came to light during the ting tings set, which i left after a few songs. you could actually see the lead singer struggling with her own mediocrity right there onstage in front of us all, like katie melua you could see it in her eyes that she knew she wasn't really anything. but no one really seemed to care, being in the crowd just felt like nothing, there wasnt really any good or bad anymore just music either being on or off and when it was off people applauded. the whole event had this atmosphere of people saying 'we should probably go see the ting tings now' and it upset me. for the first time ever, it put me in the mindset of the kind of people who just listen to the top 40 no matter what it has in it and nothing else and i didnt really care about anything anymore, it was shit. i eventually ended up like i always do at gigs that i'm not enjoying where i start fantasising about bands i do like and how heavenly they are, and just phase out the music in front of me.
i did see some good bands though. chromeo were good though their records are awful, which is the exact same reaction i had to we are scientists last year. i also enjoyed that fucking tank. these two bands sum something up about my attitude to music in relation to leeds; i really enjoyed bands that were either extremely 'left-field' or extremely pop-oriented, but rejected the bands that lay somewhere in the middle, trying to straddle both, which is what leeds, most of the bands that play there and the NME is all about and they all fail miserably at it.
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a lot of people at leeds had rave whistles and glow sticks and other things like that. i knew as soon as i first saw people using these things years ago in a club in warrington that i would never use them. what i love most about clubbing and dancing is that you are absorbed into a crowd and its more about the collective movement of the crowd than the individual; you're not really a person anymore, instead you're just part of something. to be like that for a few hours a week is a fantastic thing but glowsticks and rave whistles are peoples way of trying to return to focus back to the specific individual, where instead of people paying no attention to anything they are paying attention to them, and i think that's a really shitty thing to do.
is it so much to ask that you just shut up for a bit?
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on the side of a ride at leeds i saw the phrase, "putting the fun into the fair". this is EASILY one of my favourite uses of language ever and i think it may become a catch phrase of mine or the title of my autobiography. it can be interpreted in so many ways. honestly love it.
Saturday 30 August 2008
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