Air, Talkie Walkie
Listening on headphones is always interesting; you become much more aware of the stereo mixing. Why the guitar in the left and the handclaps in the right? Was music designed to be listened to in dialogue? I’ve heard really interesting effects done with this, Kirstie MacColl’s Brazilian album (which I was shamed and ridiculed into giving away by an ex boyfriend. I miss it) did something really amazing with a small repeated guitar riff in the left, then the right, then the left…getting closer and closer to the centre with each repetition. Here, the guitar and the handclaps in the first track of this album are unified by strings in the centre, which dodge and disappear, giving shadow and shade where there could have been none.

There is something of the easiness of Moon Safari here, less of the angst and pain, maybe the adolescent jaw at an angle of 10,000Hz Legend. Cheery blossom girl – love is easier to be blasé, cool and Gallic about than loneliness and genuine desperation. Not love even, a kind of lingering thought. Cherry blossom which blooms and is blown away by a robust and decaying Autumn. Try to be true.

Those tiny record bumps Bjork has used so well…a very computer noise. Singing in megabytes. At once chilled and twitchy. Fear in repetition. Full of sex, but with no tone involved. We should be grateful – this is modern.

The next song reminds me of Corn Rigs and Barley Rigs from The Wickerman (my favourite musical). Like Moon Safari, there’s something 70s and Sunday afternoon about this. Bach now wakes up and shakes a finger at electro music. Mathematics made audible, architecture being frozen music, it’s all here now. Robotically generated – if the Baroque artists could have done it they would. Wasn’t there a vogue for mechanical this and that during the baroque? A time of artifice and gold has a lot in common with the virtual world. If all those strings and pianos were served up in a concert hall, or on a CD with unnamed musicians, or without the little beats behind it, which add very very little to the mix, would all the groovy 20 and 30-somethings dig it in the same coffee-table laidback way they do? Those beats are short-hand for “This is cool – do not worry”.

I went to a blues gig last week for my friend Iffi’s birthday – although I don’t really dig the blues or similar at all, I rather like the way it follows the same structure in song after song after song and still manages to come out with discrete, separate units of (almost) individual song. However, the singer kept doing those annoying call and response type things: “Say yeah if you like the blooooooz!!” and the like. Irritated the fuck out of me after a while, watching everyone whoop and holler in that choreographed way, all wearing the same blue jeans and easy T-shirts, knowing that they belonged and the musical code being given allowed them entrance into the club of people who like the blues because it’s laid-back and cool and authentic and unpretentious and allows them to go “Woo-hoo!” and “Yeah!” and “Alright!” like seasoned hillbillies before smiling it all off as kitsch or whatever and donning suits or similar to go to similar jobs on similar days where all the music and the electric lights are a little bit…similar.

I’m not saying I’m above all that, I’m guilty of belonging to the eclectic club who identify each other by having wildly diverse record collections (and doing things as geeky and self-absorbed as this blog for instance), but I do like to think I’m aware of musical code within the culture. How much do those beats on that Air track denote knowingness and distrust of classical music? It would be so interesting to play some-one that track without the bleepy beats, and then play it with. But to that without one listening being influenced by the other, you’d need a time machine of some sort. As I realised during my ill and panicky days, once you know or see or hear something, there’s no un-knowing it, no un-seeing, no un-hearing. You’re marked.

A seashore closes the album and I’m done with French electro-pop for the time being. Some of theses albums I own, I truly haven’t sat down and listened to as one would watch a film, since I acquired them, if at all. I wonder how my writing and thoughts will change when I get to an album I know intimately, rather than assessing these albums as if I was at a party and they were offering me canapés. I have enjoyed listening to Air.