Warren Ellis » The 4am: 21 – Sleep Department.

It’s probably slightly impossible to classify the damn thing. It’s not a video set to AC music, and it’s not a movie w/ an AC soundtrack. The music’s really bass-heavy in parts, heavy atmospheric and trance bits, acoustic guitar and sudden dynamic shifts, vocals etc. So great. The visuals are chaotic and have a vague series of “stories” or “sections” — they’re more like video vignettes to accompany these soundscapes. The addition of the visuals makes the music less vague and more defined “dark”, imo. A lot of AC’s latter stuff has dark overtones but this makes it more explicit. There were a few things I could have done without — the “water static” scene about 10 minutes in went on too long, I found it kind of grating and boring, but that’s probably my only real complaint. The opening piece, bass-heavy and vocal, sort of like a trance-y meditation

During the Q&A period afterwards someone asks the question I am wanting to ask: “What does ODDSAC mean?” and Danny says “you’ll find out in the morning when the subliminal effects have had time to sink in”, everyone laughs and someone else asks about the equipment (DVX100, final cut pro, after effects,) and someone asks the most insipid question: “how much fun was this to make?” (which is maybe another way to say “I have nothing to ask but would like you to acknowledge that I spoke to you”) — unsurprisingly, it was apparently a lot of fun to make. I’m going to posit that the title is way to conflate the ideas of a jumble of oddness and a sort of nascent strange egg (cf Coil’s “Strange Birds” — “One day your eggs are going to hatch and some very strange birds are going to emerge”, although I don’t think that’s what they were referring or alluding to, I mean that it’s in the similar idea.) Other bits: the Guggenheim installation was apparently much, much harder to do than this (Danny Perez also did that w/ AC), although the dude asking also wanted to know if they had plans to do more work like this (or the Guggenheim thing) in the future, that was left sort of open — Deakin said that Guggenheim thing was a sudden thing they didn’t know about until it was possible; no word on whether they’d do another visual album like this.

At any rate, Danny’s joke aside, I did have a horrible nightmare this morning. Personally very frightening and woke heart pounding and angry and confused, woozy and headache.

Here’s the trailer, doesn’t do it any justice:

If you get a chance, go, it’s fucking brilliant. It’ll be on DVD in June, no non-DVD CD release.

Perhaps I should make a different-versions of the same song mix of “I Put a Spell On You” like I did for “Stagger Lee” and “My Funny Valentine”, although my favorite version of “spell” is still Marilyn Manson’s

via My Funny Valentine | yukbon | 8tracks.

via Stagger Lee / Stackalee / Staggolee | yukbon | 8tracks.

I don’t know, I kept dismissing Animal Collective for years — too twee, too annoying, too faux-artsy-fartsy. And then I heard this song and I couldn’t stop listening to it, sad chaotic and I didn’t know why; and then I heard “what would I want? sky” and I fell in love with the singalong and “My Girls” is very sweet and bizarro like a male Bjork. But I kept coming back to “Cuckoo Cuckoo”. In the broader sense it’s about losing childhood and sorrow, but in the more specific sense I am pretty sure it’s about a miscarriage. Note the album version has the last verse as “where’s my friend i wanna hold him tight” but this live version it’s definitely “where’s my wife i wanna hold her tight”. The piano part samples are so mellow and ordered — I want to say Chopin but it doesn’t feel sharp enough and I’m too lazy to google it out. Liszt maybe?

How I lost my boy

The king in I died
He kept floating past my eyes
And singing his songs
Life was good now death’s all wrong
Cause you can’t feel a thing
No heart flutters in late spring
You just drift and pray
For sun kissed golden days

And I can’t hold what’s in my hand
Don’t do any good to say this isn’t what I planned
And little kids sliding down the steel park slide
Little kids can’t play with things that have died
Sometimes all I want is one favorite song
And two to three minutes don’t seem so long
And where’s my mom I want to hold her tight
She’s so far away from crowded nights
I’m going cuckoo cuckoo
We’re all going cuckoo cuckoo

He said please stay
You can see me, don’t go away
I can’t see the landscape
Please describe its amaranthine haze
It’s odd where I am
There are people you’re not like them
They just look away
For rain quenched golden days

And my tears quench five feet of lawn
And I can scream, but I cannot yawn
And people gonna come and people gonna cry
He just woke and dreamt and ate and died
Don’t try and erase what you have done
Put your fingers in a mouth and kiss it if it wants
And where’s my wife, I want to hold her tight
He’s so far away from mountain lights
I’m going cuckoo cuckoo
We’re all going cuckoo cuckoo

via Pink Mania on Vimeo.

A mix of nothing but different versions of “my funny valentine”. I never get tired of that song.

So here’s to music I’ve hated but now insist that is fucking JAWSOME

I don’t know why I’m even thinking of all this stuff. Olive Oyl and her Tattoo’d Man broke up and I picked up his old bass at their we’re-breaking-up-and-getting-different-places-so-buy-our-old-shit garage sale for 20$, maybe that’s it.

Here’s the band that John Peel called ”always the same, always different”