Where do you listen to music?

How do you listen to music? Where do you listen to music? Answers to these questions are key to our relationship with music. These days I listen to a lot of music on my iPod, but what I listen to is very constrained by the situations in which I listen. When I am walking to work, I want up-tempo music that is going to encourage me walk briskly and not dawdle. When I am listening to music before going to sleep I want relaxing sounds that will not challenge my brain. I have created playlists to cater to these two situations. When I add music to iTunes, if it gets into a playlist for one of these situations then it will get listened to. Otherwise not so much, at least not on the iPod.

In Panda Mansions we have the stereo set up in one room, but I tend to spend a lot of my time in the library-study, working away on my Important Project. We talk sometimes of rigging up speakers in the library-study, but it has not happened yet, so if I am sitting there I sometimes listen to music on an iPod (though not so much, as I find headphones a bit distracting if I am working), sometimes I play the radio on my computer (RTE Lyric or one of the BBC music stations), and sometimes I play nothing. My beloved does not feel the need for ambient music in the same way that I do, so often the only accompanying sound is the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard or the sound of the street outside. Other times I can hear the sound of Georgian music wafting from the other room, either as my beloved gives the Basiani record another listen or plays songs on her computer that she is trying to learn.

It bothers me sometimes that I have all this recorded music that I ostensibly like but do not seem to listen to that much. I am always talking about taking steps to deal with this.

And you? Where, when and how do you listen to music?

Panda Twin Birthday (Giant Panda Zoo)

[record] U2 "Songs of Innocence" (2014)

This is that U2 album that Apple gave away for free, annoying billions of people around the world who had not worked out how to delete things from iTunes. The extreme reaction to this whole business in some quarters did rather surprise me, as it seemed akin to throwing a massive strop because you find a CD you don't like cover mounted on a magazine.

The record itself… well I have listened to it a couple of times. It is alright, in that when it is on I do not think "Jesus Christ turn this shite off" but I would not go as far as to say it is actually good or anything like that. I certainly cannot see myself listening to it again much. I have long been a sneaking regarder of U2, for all that they are not particularly popular in the circles I move in. With this record I find it hard not to conclude that whatever spark U2 once had is now gone. Still, they had a good innings and few are the bands who have produced so much great work.

Sneaking Red Panda

[film] "Maps to the Stars" (2014)

I saw this David Cronenberg directed film recently. It is scripted by Bruce Wagner and contains many allusions or parallels to the Wild Palms comic he wrote in the early 1990s, including:

hallucinations
Maps to the Stars
creepy child actors
disturbing family dynamics
Carrie Fisher
'Nana Nana hey hey (Kiss him good bye)'
general dark side of Hollywood vibe

and so on.

The story is multi-stranded, though the strands of course come together: people who seem only to have tenuous links to each other turn out to have much closer connections than might initially be apparent. Cronenberg has reached that stage of his career where he can get good actors to appear in anything he does, so you get some stunning performances here. I particularly liked Evan Bird as the spoilt teenage actor. Julianne Moore as a disturbed actress and Mia Wasikowska as a new arrival in Tinseltown also impressed me.

Cronenberg might have gone off the boil a few years back but lately he has really got his mojo back again. Maps to the Stars does not fall into the kind of strange genre film territory that alienates respectable audiences, but it had enough creepiness and body horror to feel like a proper Cronenberg film.


Bruce Wagner's Wild Palms

I IS FOR… INSPIRAL CARPETS

In the pages of Frank's APA we are running through the letters of the alphabet.
Possibly the same summer (1988, 1989?) that I went to see Hawkwind with Mr W— in the Brixton Academy I also caught Inspiral Carpets playing in some venue in Camden (Dingwalls?). They were an up and coming band at the time. My memory is that all that Manchester stuff was on the way up round then, and as they were from Manchester they were riding that wave. By the time I saw them they had moved on from their cassette only first album and had changed lead singer to the one who would sing on all their hit records, but the basic template sound was in place. They had beaty tunes with the organ sounds of Clint Boon prominently featured.

Before the concert a looped voice played over the PA saying something like "Tonight… in Manchester… two hundred people came to see… Inspiral Carpets… the biggest bunch of wankers… ever". It was hypnotic and vaguely amusing. I think Mr W— and I kept saying it to each other for years afterwards. This was in the pre-Internet age; we had to make our own entertainment.

Inspiral Carpets were on the way up at that point and they did go on to some success, having hit singles and seeing one of their tunes used as the theme music to a Saturday morning kids TV programme. But I think the real prize eluded them and they remained a second string band. When I saw them again some years later in Dublin, they were still a a great live band and able to draw a reasonable crowd, but the sense was that they were a band on the slide. I remember liking the album they were pimping at time, and also the lead single 'I Want You' on which Mark E. Smith guested, but I do not think it overly excited the record buying public.

History has not been kind to the Inspiral Carpets. They seem to show up in books about the music of the era to be dismissed as the kind of rubbish band who acquires a certain following simply by association with other, better outfits. That seems a bit unfair. I would not make any claims for Inspiral Carpets being one of the great bands of the late 20th century, but they are a good solid mid-level outfit.

Or so I thought before I started writing this piece. Putting it together for the web I checked out some Inspiral Carpets tracks on YouTube and have been struck by what earworms they are. It might be that two unfortunate things counted against the Carpets. One was being associated with all the Madchester ravey stuff when they were basically a 60s revival outfit (which was the basic template of all indie bands pre-Madchester, except that they were a lot better than the others). As a non-ravey band they are always going to be remembered as not really a proper Madchester band and so will always be a bit marginal in histories of that scene. The other problem is that their biggest hit was something of a lovely song ballad; that is never good in retrospect. If they are to be remembered it should be for the likes of 'Two Cows', 'I Want You' or 'She Comes In The Fall'. Or this.

Dung 4 (Plain or Pan)

1988 band photo (Guardian)

[theatre] "Ganesh versus the Third Reich" in the O'Reilly Theatre

I theoretically love going to the theatre but never seem to do so in practice. This is one of just two things I saw in the Dublin Theatre Festival last year. What I picked up from the programme was that this play was about Ganesh (you know, elephant headed Hindu deity) coming to the Third Reich in order to reclaim the ancient symbol of the swastika from the Nazis, which was enough to make it sound like it would be worth seeing. I also registered that it was being performed by Australians.

When the play started, though, I had a slight moment of "where's the fucking Nazis?", as there were neither Nazis nor Hindu deities on stage but two fellows not dressed in 1940s garb. When they started talking I was further confused, as their speech was a bit hard to understand. My first thought was that they were speaking with incomprehensible Australian accents or else that some incompetent had taken over the theatre's sound. But something else soon became apparent: the two actors onstage were both people with intellectual disabilities.

It turned out that the play had three actors with intellectual disabilities and two without. And it was a bi-level thing, partly about Ganesh trying to take the swastika from the Nazis and partly about a theatre company featuring people with intellectual disabilities trying to put together a play about Ganesh trying to reclaim the swastika from the Nazis; the narrative about the actors was probably the dominant one here.

Split narratives often suffer from the problem that one of the narratives is a lot more interesting than the other. In this, though, they both seemed to work well enough together. In the Third Reich narrative Ganesh teams up with an intellectually disabled Jewish lad he rescues from Auschwitz, which of course reminds us that the Nazis were not exactly friends of people with intellectual disabilities.

Each strand of the narrative had at least one great scene. The Third Reich story had a great train carriage episode in which an over-familiar black marketeer starts trying to sell tights to the escaped Jew (who is in disguise, obv), asking an endless series of questions about his girlfriend, her sisters, his sisters, his mother and so on, all potential purchasers of nylons, with the questions forcing the invention of ever more outlandish details about all these non-existent people. It was a scene of the kind of building menace you get in Quentin Tarantino films (think in particular of that opening scene in the farmhouse in Inglorious Basterds).

The outer narrative, meanwhile, has a wonderful extended scene in which the increasingly unhinged actor-director is trying to get one of the ID actors to die properly when shot. It too builds and builds, from a physical comedy of frustration to a deeply uncomfortable episode of rage, to actual theatrical violence.

The ID actors were interesting, in that they were all really good albeit within a limited range. I don't think any of them would be able to convincingly play a character who was not intellectually disabled, but they very much came across as playing roles rather than just being themselves onstage.

There is a scene where the actor-director addresses the audience (or imagines addressing the audience when the play is being staged), accusing them/us of having come along for an evening of "freak porn". I think we were meant to shuffle uncomfortably in our seats at that, but it washed over me. I had no advance awareness that the play featured intellectually disabled actors and this must have been the case for many other people present, as the theatre festival programme did not mention it. Even if you had come along to this expecting something of that type you would probably leave a bit disappointed. The acting is too good and the play too tight to have any kind of freakshow aspect.

So all in all this made for an enjoyable if strange night of theatre.

image source (Sydney Morning Herald)

[music] Basiani "Folk Ensemble of the Georgian Patriarchy"

Basiani are from the country of Georgia. The title of this record is more an explanation of who they are. The Georgian Patriarchy referred to is the leadership cadre of the Georgian Orthodox Church and not the organised apparatus of male dominance (though of course there may be some overlap). Basiani are their folk ensemble and they sing the Georgian polyphonic music that everyone loves.

This record has been on heavy rotation here in Panda Mansions, mainly because for a while we were following something of an All Georgian All The Time listening policy, particularly in the fraught period when all the other CDs were still in boxes. This is my beloved's record rather than mine so I feel like I am not letting the side down if I say that for all that it has been played a lot I probably have not listened to it that closely. I think it may take the listener on a tour of the Georgian regions, mixing choral polyphony with people singing solo to instrumental accompaniment. The tracks with yodelling may be the best. While the Georgian polyphony is the main attraction with records like this, there are also some beautiful tunes on which solo singing is foregrounded.