Naivety isn’t thrilling me today; instead it’s giving me a headache, all these shaggy-haired ex-indie boys running wild, rummaging in the blues cupboard, little cracked voices lifting up to heaven above, recording in the backyard, levels all over the place, how sweet….whatever. The rest of the time: I love you, you are my brethren. Today: whatever. Away with you all. Come back tonight when I’m holed up watching that Emmylou Harris documentary, and we can all hang out and talk about Sonny Terry.

But for now though

maybe it’s this weather, and oh this weather is just damn lovely. It’s cold in the mornings, cold enough for the special socks, but warm enough at lunchtime for vests and bare arms. The swallows’ frenzied peeping and wheeling has been replaced by a hardy greenfinch colony that means business, I can tell you; and the muggy hot-city haze is finally dispersing. I miss the swallows, ’cause they summed up my summer like no other summer I ever had - dipping, darting and flitting from one thing to the next, going round in circles; sometimes the circles spiralled around someone so tightly that I thought surely I must’ve garotted them a few times, or at least cut off their circulation, but of course they didn’t even notice. That’s swallows for you. They only have a few months over here, and they’ve a lot to get done, but after the first happiness at seeing one, you forget they’re there and all that swooping and cheeping just becomes like so many gnats to swat with your hand, and all that constant action just looks nuts and pointless. God, but I love the way they fly though. There’s absolutely nothing like it, watching swallows fly, and the few times I’ve stayed still enough to have one swoop right over me it sounded just like an ARP Odyssey only better.

But yeah

So I’ll let Entrance carry on til the end of the song, because he is lovely, and I’ll think some more about Ariel Pink and the way he sounds like a radio broadcast heard in a faraway car while you lie in the hot meadow grass phased on wine or numbed on prescription painkillers. And tonight I’ll be back on the old songs like that’s my drug, my treat, my dinner, and maybe digging the new Panda Bear album. But just to celebrate the new, sharp edges of Autumntime, I pad over to the disordered CD piles and shuffle about a bit and make a hello autumn playlist of Bach, Pan Sonic (CD2 of Kesto is ACE), Cluster, Reverbaphon, and some Raster-Noton bits and pieces. And wish that I had some Basic Channel stuff to listen to right now. The new DJ/Rupture CD just came through the post too. That’ll keep me going until night-time. Hey autumn, I am so glad you’re back.