Angelo Badalamenti & David Lynch
Fire walk with me (Soundtrack)

Already I can see some heavy and red velvet curtains, the stripy floor, the white horse that appears in the bedroom; the smell of sawdust and the knowledge of hard and alarming drugs gather somewhere in my memories of the film, and in my half-seen memories of the bits I half-saw…

I would like to know more about Twin Peaks – I grew up with Chris watching it a lot, talking and thinking a lot about it. I feel like I’m aware of the strands of story, as you grow up aware of King Lear, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch 22. Never having read any of those though.

The music is lovely, stripped away from the film, it always was. The theme from Twin Peaks was almost everywhere at one time. This is very much wallpaper music, and the muted trumpet solo reminds me so much of Chris, not just him-as-trumpet-player, but it’s his style all over – there is a beat in there, some form of control and organisation, but it’s very hidden in layers of smoke and wandering.

It’s so stylized, but I guess that’s the point – let’s tie up the strands I remember from the movie, it’s very much set in a redneck/American Dream brace-neck of industrialised but never-quite-made-it, everyone is tired and beneath the chintz and wall-to-wall carpets and high-school sweaters is some weird shit going down, whether it’s all those trips to the lodge with the wee midget guy, or a simple matter of nasty S&M parties with smeared lipsticks and negligent angels – it still looks damn 80s. But then 80s mixed with a film noir sensibility…certainly that’s where the jazz-lite music would appear to come from…there are vibraphones, ride cymbals shuffling along nicely and meandering fretless bass solos everywhere…it must be said that I have limited patience for this kind of music…they have a boring kind of theme, which begins to get somewhere, then they improvise, again it starts to get interesting then they finish on a 6th chord…

Thankfully here comes the “Sycamore Tree” song. Here, still, are elements of chance, spontaneity outside the printed page of music (oh god, those bass tremolos kill me), but it’s within some discipline…and you imagine that the music will last outside of the performance (could do without the fat saxophone solo though, it’s already been said, hasn’t it?)

I was starting to get a little tired of this already, thinking that without the movie the music didn’t seem to be much…but I’m liking “The Black Dog runs at night”, not as a piece of “music” to listen to, not as an adjunct to the movie but as art to listen to…there’s not much in it but it seems to have a little more discipline in it than some of the “This is what I like the sound of “ jazz stuff that was going on earlier…as I said, I have a limited tolerance of jazz, it’s not quite as bad as the way I feel about Christians and Hippies, but it’s somewhere shortly afterwards…

I don’t know what I think about this, I started it thinking a higher opinion of the music than I do now, but I’ve had a few peaks and troughs within listening to it, just as it starts to irritate me and I think about wishy-washy jazz-backgrounds, something interesting happens and changes my mind. Maybe that’s the trick David Lynch plays with all of his films, they nearly tiptoe into cliché so easily, and just as you think aha…cop show/sex scandal/murder mystery…I’ve got your number, something happens to make you put those thoughts down and stamp on them.

JS Bach, the Art of Fugue

Another one of these clean-up days. After a night of toxins with Iffi, I feel clean and it’s a shame the house doesn’t look it. B, finally. B-licious, b-lovely…
Fugues…all those interlocking parts and how to take them apart. I’d love to write like this one day. What to say, really. The music for putting things in their rightful place. Music for Winter. Something too stately to relate to the sunshine that's coming outside.

I like very much the way Bach called this the art of fugue; maybe it’s something to do with all of those dry harmony lessons as a teenager that I built up an inbred-dislike of Bach. I would also argue that his flute pieces never grabbed me. What was I looking for in their stead? What did I get from Debussy or Faure that I liked better? Is it something to do with growing up, and those free-flowing bubbles and ripples of “loveliness” seeming to be not freedom now, but indecision instead?

Something happened that bizarre and horrible summer of 2005 where I started doing sudoku puzzles. All the distractions of “I think…I feel…” which had previously helped and chided me where necessary suddenly could only leave me weeping on a sofa, or lurching around St Pauls at three in the morning going out for more wine (the fabulous Tasties…probably best approached when one is drunk, I fear). Instead, putting numbers in a box in the right place at the right time seemed to help, and since then it seems to have become an aesthetic of mine. And I did love the high-rise offices I saw around Broadmead on those new walks to work (the one I loved best has gone, but I got a photo of it before the wrecking ball came along), and I watched the traffic lights closer and I half-closed my eyes and imagined the cars as animals instead, and little by little I stretched out comfortably into these feelings and sights and loved more vocally than I had done previously the sights of repetition and clean lines. I went to the Tate Modern at some point in this time and saw a Sol Le Witt picture, instructions on how to draw a triangle. And I love Magritte, always will, and know it’s for the clean lines he does. Mondrian and Bridget Riley began to feature clearer in my head, and I suddenly got it. Freed up, I think, of scorn and ridicule about the plasticy things I loved dearly, I felt full of it, feel full of it.

That’s not to say that there isn’t passion or depth in there, nor contrast or blood. The tones from the bottom of the cello are amazing, almost like a bassoon. Not that I can in any way call myself “a violinist”, but since starting to learn it myself, I see this kind of music so much clearer too. I see how a minuscule shake in the wrist at a crucial point can ruin or redeem a note, and how one can bend and stretch the sound , and what an emotional instrument it is – that is sobs almost. Pious.

Somewhere between buying a Usborne dictionary of science (which explains in glorious diagrams how mid 1980s computers work) and imaging a future prosperity, my own flat and three motherboards from wherever I can find them mounted on the wall; I have learned to love Bach and understand the resolutions working themselves out like paperweights.

The Avalanches, Since I left you
You go back over enough history, and there are things in there to dismay and alarm. I know certainly that I feel a physical pain when I remember earlier incarnations of myself. I am pleased (roughly) with what I am becoming, but oh Christ, the years and years where I remained hating and hated, ridiculous and ridiculed. Debated or not, certain syndromes have been put on my lips, and I can see perhaps how I’ve woven them into myself (anyone want to know the mortality difference per British mile of a ground-burst vs. an airburst?) and done well with them, it’s still a sticky time in my head with too many dusty and gloop-y pages in-between.

Anyway, the point of that was a cringing at an earlier musical incarnation of myself who declared “If you can’t play it on a cello and an acoustic guitar, it’s not music”, which speaks acres I think of the person I was. OK, the only dance music I’d encountered so far at the time was Fat Boy Slim, Prodigy and Faithless (or anyone else who entertained sweating Boltonian types in Ikon where I collected glasses before going to University) so perhaps my aesthetic was ahead of the race (har-har)…Fat Boy Slim resonates particularly in my head as one of the York/Edinburgh people (a dance teacher/History graduate from Rossendale) chirped in the pub one night “As a dansurr, I feel I understand Fat Boy Slim on a much different level from most other people”…which kind of says all you need to know…

Something must have happened to my music taste at University…I arrived knowing precious little outside of the 60s and the Oasis/Blur/Pulp corridor everyone in Bolton I knew listened to…there were forays into Sultans of Ping FC, Elastica, Bjork, and of course, coming from the house I came from, a fair amount of classical-lite stuff, and (I see now) vaguely progg-y stuff my Dad listened to…and I left loving the Divine Comedy, Chemical Brothers, Elvis Costello, Portishead, Talvin Singh and Nina Simone. Or maybe music history changed with me. Music tastes anyway.

So I went through a phase (would still like to if I could afford it…) of buying random CDs for an interesting cover. I liked the cover on this, but I don’t know why. Looking at it now it reminds me of Monet, and I’ve never really liked him (too many reproductions on umbrellas and souvenir trays). I bought this in…May? June? 2001 anyway. I was going out with a blonde barman called Mike. I’d been hearing what I soon realised was the track “Frontier Psychiatrist” all over Channel4. I bought this, put it on, quite liked it, and then some amazing monumental “click” in my head of realising I was with a wave of something, that the CD I’d bought randomly had the zeitgeist-y tune that was everywhere on it. I liked the cardboard fold-over of the CD. I will admit to being a CD fetishist and loving seeing them lined up like books, to touch and uncover. Maybe the cardboard case looked like an innovation at the time, I can’t rightly imagine if they’re passé or not now…

And during the summer, where I started unravelling and not noticing things so much, pavements looking too bright and people talking too loud, I kind of forgot the CD. I lived in Bolton, in my grandmothers empty rooms, all oriental blue. I smoked freely in my bedroom. I worked as a cook at the Varsity in town. Irma took me out for lunch and told me I look depressed and I needed to eat. I forgot this album, I listened to other things (did I write Riverwild around this time and listen to it constantly?)

And we moved to Edinburgh, and early in the first couple of weeks we went to Henry’s Jazz Cellar, looking for some live jazz, or more likely, looking for this good time we’d imagined when we were alls cared and lonely and dark and cold. Or was it just me? Anyway, we all went. Live jazz a no-no; we drank wine and some-one played this album on a loop, again and again and again, offering apologies and yet no apologies for this lack of live DJ-ing, the live DJ-ing already done on the pre-done album (there’s an MA in there I want to do one day) and there was wax peeling down the neck of dark green wine bottles and everyone sat and listened. There was a hum around the room, and track ten (with the distorted and bending piano) staying particularly fresh in my head.


They were the big thing, the huge thing – there were articles in The List (which I would now refer to as the Edinburgh equivalent of The Venue, where it used to be vice versa) saying they were playing in Glasgow on 10th November (I remember that because I’m sure me and some-one else talked about going…or did we just miss them?) Anyway, I remember wondering how they could recreate all that live…they use the samples as instruments, as lines and contrapuntal arguments. As I’ve heard more and more music I recognise fragments of each song (they seemed to use Cabaret) quite a lot, and for myself, I sampled part of them for the opening of “Waverley”, my song about arriving in, and then leaving Edinburgh.

This is dance music as velvet, honey and sawdust, rather than plastic, burgers and lager, which I associate with the late 90s stuff I used to turn my nose up at. OK, I’ll hear things I like in them now…I used to get annoyed saying that “Selecting isn’t creating”, but reading and seeing and being and breathing postmodernism now, I suppose I can see it. Selective selecting, curating rather than consuming.