Aphex Twin, Retail Item

I can’t do it. I’m having an anxious day and the first five seconds I got through are too much for me. I’m fucking ill dammit, I shouldn’t have to listen to Aphex Twin on top of it all.

No come on then, just turn it down low and it’ll be OK. This is what I feared previously. This might as well be the prodigy or something, I could be in a field with sweaty thugs all crawling over each desperate to prove themselves something, finally, chemically TRANSFORMED into something worth talking about for once.

I was talking to Sofia about scary music the other night; my current songs about nuclear war are making her and a few other people tell me not to be so ghoulish and morbid, but I think the way they’re shaping up shows a humanistic concern with all the factors involved, it’s more existence, non-existence, belonging, identity and all the other stuff that goes with it in a cloying soup of metaphors and megatons. Anyhoo…musically they’re teetering on the side of whimsical at the minute, although may not too much, I don’t know. Anyway, she suggested I write “something happy” to balance it all. I concede that it’s odd to be writing about such frightening things as nuclear holocausts and the ensuing chaos of local governments in the aftermath, but what’s the alternative? Fucking bunny rabbits? Or, screaming “spookily” into a microphone “Come to Daddy” and “I want your soul”? Seriously, this might have dated worse to me that it has done to other people, this is terrible, I might as well be a teenager drawing anarchist signs (and not understanding it either) onto a yellow canvas bag from Army and Navy stores, and YES I KNOW THAT WAS THE SORT OF TEENAGER I WAS but that’s why I grew up and started listening to Radio 3 dammit. And reading the Guardian and thinking about TS Eliot and loving Coronation Street and being selective in my choice of herbal teas (I hate the fruit ones – you might as well be drinking hot squash in a nasty little Church hall in Bolton). OK, I’ve given up smoking and drinking recently…does it show? Am I a wanker yet? It’ll come…

Second track slightly calmer. I’m on my fourth cup of “tranquillity”. Supposed to be writing things about the recovery model of mental health (Ha fucking ha) and I note all pleased that my clothes feel too big for me. Bit of a bummer I can’t quite afford new clothes to show off a thinner frame, but if governments want to keep us in poverty, that’s just what they’ll do. At least they’re not blowing us up or poisoning us (yet). I signed a petition against Trident this morning. Who wouldn’t shoot themselves if you heard sirens coming? Yes OK, maybe a song about bunny wabbits…

I recognise this from when Bjork DJ’d on Breezeblock. Or at least the backing line. This is a remix it says…who remixed it? Aphex Twin? There’s something more intelligent in restraint rather than out and out BE AFRAID OF THIS. I don’t want or like coffee table music though, no matter how much I like coffee.