I spent today at Pearl Fisher, the exhibition space showing Exhibit B, with Andrew, and my Dad.
Having lined our lungs with spray mount, we flattened air bubbles, and snapped surgical blades, painstakingly mounting, and arranging the work for the walls. We beamed from the exuberance of our progress, and the awesome contributions that have made the last six issues of the magazine so special, each with their own unique stories that get exaggerated each time their told. How could this first year have been anything less than a triumph?

Posted by Sarah Bowles on Monday, June 13th, 2005
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Man, those Diskettes are so cute, they came on over, they swapped stories about mutual friends and music loves, they drank tea and washed up afterwards, they removed their shoes without being asked, they made both me and Charlotte so, so happy, recording several songs (including two on request) live and acoustic onto my 4-track which frankly sounded better than pretty much EVERY studio recording made, they sat in the garden and revealed themselves to have an insinctive understanding of what makes POP so great (minimalism: harmony: found sound), they asked Charlotte concerned questions about motherhood, they even said they liked The Legend!’s music…

Afterwards, we sat and listened to the magical sounds they’d left behind, both of us just open-mouthed in disbelief that something so beautiful and complete could’ve been recorded just scant hours before by myself with only the most rudimentary knowledge of how recording works (ie: push ‘record’ button ON) and just full of awe for their unassuming sweetness and grace. We couldn’t see them play live - Charlotte is ill and Isaac wouldn’t have lasted 10 minutes without wanting more food - but we had something so special, just for us. It was like having The Roches harmonising live in your living room; or, the missing link between Beat Happening and doo wop. The only other band to play a show for me, just for me, was Melody Dog. Remember them?

I sat there and listened to them, tried to hide my inner glow and thought: life really doesn’t get any sweeter than this - Charlotte and our new baby downstairs, and here playing live just for me, one of my favourite bands of the last few years. Oh man.

Posted by Everett True on Monday, June 13th, 2005
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{{popup RIMG0002.JPG RIMG0002 442×629}}Jeremy Barnes:accordion, bells, hat, genius.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, June 11th, 2005
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Is he four days old already? That’s incredible. All the worry during the night, when Charlotte had to be rushed into hospital because meconium was found in her waters at 9pm Sunday (her waters broke just after we’d switched a Harry Potter DVD on to take Charlotte’s mind away from the preliminary contractions – I was in the kitchen cooking up fried rice w/prawns); the constant beat-beat-beat of the baby’s heart through the monitor throughout the misty night (she was hooked up immediately upon arrival, and forced to lose most of the massage techniques and birthing positions we’d practised); the fear induced in both of us at the sound of another woman in the throes of giving birth (neither of us admitted till afterwards); the suggested oxytocin drip (because her dilation was behind schedule) was followed by an epidural at four in the morning (Charlotte shaking uncontrollably and her eyes dulled through confusion and fear at the pain, just like my father can look in his bad moments) (by that time she’d had enough of the pain without much relief, only gas); the barrage of questions from doctors thrown Charlotte’s way when she was all the way off her head through pain and fatigue and nerves, the threat of a caesarean looming in the background (her anaesthetist was wonderful, though – enough to take the pain away, but not the feeling in her legs); ‘stonking labour’ wherein myself and midwife Lynn form a cheerleading support team for a fully engaged if thoroughly exhausted Charlotte; the actual untranslatable moment of the birth where I watched first my son’s head and then his entire body emerge shaking and purple and multi-coloured into the world; and even more so, the life-defining instant where Charlotte was given him to hold skin-to-skin, she uncontrollably trembling and shaking and crying and happy and a million other things…all that seems another country already…

Even the worrying hours straight after are alien to me now…Isaac (he didn’t have a name then) whisked straight away to have his stomach suctioned, more (fresh) meconium found in his stomach and throat, he didn’t draw his first breath until he was five minutes old; then he was taken away upstairs to the Trevor Mann Nursery to be cared for among all the scrawny intensive care babies, me standing by helpless and torn between duty to my wife and to the newly-created life, not even comprehending what all the tubes and drips meant (they were OK: just precautionary antibiotics mainly), trying to keep hold of myself for the woman I love so much; Charlotte all weakened through loss of blood and unable to move (she had an episiotomy – a small cut made in the walls of her vagina to assist the passage of the baby’s head); wheeling her upstairs in her bed to see Isaac five-and-a-half hours later (we decided on a name there and then); all the time spent moving between floors of the hospital, the check-ups, the disappointments and countless draining, rewarding phone calls to parents and friends…

No birth is straightforward. Every birth is different. When you read in black and white that a mother often goes through 30 hours of labour for her first birth…that’s commonplace. That’s nothing out the ordinary – and neither is having an epidural (or a caesarean, which means the woman can’t walk around for several days afterwards, come to that). But when it comes to your own wife…

The world is split into two: those with babies and those without. And as soon as you have one, you’re immediately flooded with an overload of information about secret paths and rotes and stories that just days before you couldn’t even guess existed…

But all this is so long ago now – four days ago! Four days! Jesus. We could tell when we were starting to register the outside world again…(but first, the sheer disbelief at watching something you and your wife have created wriggle and writhe and cry and making sucking noises with his mouth in front of you)…when the cranes looming outside Charlotte’s 13th floor window suddenly began being incredibly loud, when the hospital food became risibly disgusting and lacking in any nutrition whatsoever. I struggled home each night, drained both emotionally and physically and went to bed at one am after firing off emails and phone calls and trying to eat, and recording a few songs to try and capture the moment of birth and precious hours afterwards so Charlotte has something perhaps to measure my love by when she returns home…(and a special mention to Andrew Clare for helping me with the 4-track just when I needed help most)…

Finally. Yesterday.

Mother and baby Isaac and Jerry together at home…swamped with emails from friends and family, and cards and offers of help, and more importantly Charlotte able to grab her first four hours of concurrent sleep since the birth; later on, Poppy runs around our feet like a happy cat indeed, chasing after rainbows (or at least cat-baiting toys); later on, Chris comes over with our weekly shop and a tiny Ramones T-shirt for Isaac and I record another couple of songs; later on, we cuddle and look in awe at Isaac and his tiny wrinkled perfection (except of course he isn’t) (except of course he is) (just like my father in his moments of serenity) and are lulled to sleep and simultaneously kept awake all night by his snuffles and cries and demands for feeding…and sure, nappy-changes and all that have already taken place but who cares about that cos right now it seems all fresh and new and rather special…

That’s enough for now. Four days? Jesus Christ.
It’s an entire lifetime.

Posted by Everett True on Friday, June 10th, 2005
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Man, I’m tired. Isaac Snazell Thackray, born 12:04 on Monday 6 June, after a 27-hour labour. Mother and baby doing well in Brighton hospital. Father proud and emotional. If I get a chance tomorrow I’ll write more…

Posted by Everett True on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005
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My good friend BK is moving to Oslo. I am leaving the bookshop job that I do on Sundays. People are breaking up and getting together and all sorts. It’s all change and I feel sad and emboldened.

I try to persuade friends along to last night’s show with a text message that promised NORWEGIAN JAZZ AT BARDENS! I HAVE PLUS ONE! To my surprise, there’s no reply. See, I don’t know until about an hour before I got there that it’s actually a Four Tet and Prefuse 73 show that I was inviting them to; perhaps I should have said that in the text, huh? Although my wife emails me this morning to ask how the ‘noodling electronic boiz’ had been, and to tell me that she thought Four Tet were “horrible middle aged music for fat middle aged indie boys.” She oughta know, she has been borrowing his new album off me for weeks.

So anyway, ignorant of the sold-out noodling boiz show to which I’m actually going, I hurry off to see The Thing, who provide me with an 30 minute or so blast of undulating, parping, stomping ecstasy among the polite breakbeats of the rest of the evening. Last time I saw them was in Oslo, at Bla (can’t find the accent for the a, sorry), and for some reason I watched their whole set from behind, or at least almost behind. I think it was really crowded and we wanted to sit down and the only place was a flight of stairs just behind the stage. So I got to see their backs. Watching musicians from the wrong angle is strangely fascinating. Drummers from behind look especially odd, bouncing around on their seats and jiggling their legs, and when that drummer is Paal Nilssen-Love, energetic and rangy and nuts and quite wonderful, it looks even funnier.

Tonight, though, I squirm to the front and stand about 2 feet away from the band and let them move me to joyful, silly dancing. You can dance to jazz, not just when it gets all chuggy on those covers of Art Star and Have Love Will Travel. You just have to find a thread and follow it, and not care how you look. As I get older, happier and more confused, this bothers me less. Flick of the wrists, shake of the shoulders, don’t care if youthful quirkiness gives way to crinkly-eyed eccentricity, don’t care who sees me smile.

{{popup Mats.JPG Mats 392×628}}Mats Gustaffson, by way of introduction, says drily that he and his band are going to teach us about jazz music, or something like that; a piece of Nordic irony that isn’t really necessary, given Four Tet’s much-trumpeted love of all things jazz (and, one presumes, his fans’ heeding of his advice). But while you know that The Thing’s their fun project, the place where they go for it and have fun and burst a few blood vessels playing those crazy garage tracks, still, amid the indie rock that precedes them and the electronica that follows, they sound truly out there, raw and vital: more future that Prefuse and more farout than Four Tet.

Between the garage stompers and the more free pieces there are these bravura solo bits that could, frankly, sound like a load of wank, but somehow don’t. {{popup ingebrigt.JPG ingebrigt 480×640}}Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, on double bass, pulls the idea of the solo away from showing off and into this weird realm of demeted possession, scraping his bow right up against the bridge of the bass, fingers reaching as far as they’ll go as if he’s trying to pull sound from the very bottom of a great well. {{popup Paal.JPG Paal 529×455}}Paal Nilssen-Love is more showy, but even he channels an intensity into his solo passages that make you afeared even as they make you laugh. And the sheer volume of Gustafsson’s saxes (he alternates between tenor and baritone) is hilariously earth-shaking; and don’t you love it when the look of effort and vein-popping RRAARRRGHHHH on a musician’s face is actually comparable to the sound they’re making? I do. It doesn’t happen much.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, June 6th, 2005
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Posted by Sarah Bowles on Monday, June 6th, 2005
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I’m always really proud when I get asked to play at The Klinker Club. But they need to update their website! It has been June awhile now, and on June the 7th, that is next Tuesday, Nite and I are doing our drone thing in support of a band called Esoteric Fracture and someone called Sir Gideon Vein.

I am glad there are bands called Esoteric Fracture around. If you’re a nice, open-minded sort of a person and you like pubs with huge porcelain collie dogs and cheap double vodkas in the front bit and musical weirdity going on in the function room, do come and see us.

In other news, I am feeling very grateful to my dad for taping this Anthony Braxton thing off Radio 3. In my quest to make this blog a real blog and not just the contents of my befuddled head, I tried to find a recording of it on the jazzy bit of the Radio 3 site, but nothing doing. Well anyway, it is great. It sounds like things falling apart, tumbling, hitting walls, bouncing back. I don’t know who else is playing on it, but the percussion is rummaging and rumbling and fidgeting and quite wonderful. And it’s all so ominous, too. Constantly on the verge of something huge happening that never quite happens. Kind of apposite considering today’s heavy weather; London’s current tropically insane climate.

Yesterday I got caught in a storm I couldn’t stand up in halfway down Wick Road. It was beautiful. Because it was too far to go back, and because I literally couldn’t walk forwards, I just stood in it, soaked and whooping, while huge sheets of water sashayed off the pavement and slapped me on the legs. In Hackney Wick no one notices if you stand around getting rained on in a red anorak and marvelling at the vicissitudes of nature. They’re just like, whatever. London’s good like that. I did finally make it to Tesco, and left puddles of muddy rainwater all down the cheese aisle. A man came after me and put down sheets of cardboard where I stood. I said thanks.

Now I have a cold.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, June 4th, 2005
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i’m waiting for photoshop to turn an illustrator file into a 6 foot high bitmap for the exhibition. 2 hours and counting. the rest of the time i’m mixing. a new pine forest album for www.infinitechug.com and a new i’m being good album for a proper CD. 2 years in the making! where does all the time go?

Posted by Andrew Clare on Saturday, June 4th, 2005
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(Taken from the Plan B forum)
Yesterday, I made a shrimp and vegetable curry for Lou Barlow and his tour manager Ajay (formerly of The Membranes) that used a ground coriander, ginger, garlic, fresh lemon juice and chili (with tomato puree) paste - not forgetting to fry the fenugreek and mustard seeds for a minute on high heat first (just until they start popping everywhere). Then you throw in whatever veg you like, although onion is kinda mandatory. Frozen peas always work well in this sort of dish. You can add single cream at the end but a little water works just as well to create the sauce. I used cream as it was a special occasion…

The bastards never showed up!

Posted by Everett True on Friday, June 3rd, 2005
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