He's full of fear and now she's taken flight
The fear's got so full that it's claiming the night
So he twists and he turns and he frets and he burns
It's always like this when they fight

If looks can deceive then his eyes are alright
For his eyes know the chance of the truth is so slight
It's the same as the lies from the mouths of the flies
Telling him darkness beats light

Posted by Hg on Friday 12 March 2010 at 11:27.
Received 0 comments so far.

I'm a chain male, forging links. A quicksilver smith, flowing and ebbing. My word is my bondage, though you'll never tie me down. A dribbling riddler, the trade of all jacks. Black heart and red diamond; suite, booted and frequently flushed. Bone shackler, cagey jailer, dwarf star juggler, sinister and dextrous. Sleight of hand and slight of figure, I'll run rings for red roses, ring the bells when you're blue. Green irises are the windows I gaze through, paned daily by hydrargyric tears.

I stole this laughter from around my eyes and laid it on a page for you. Bathed crows' feet in ink and let them walk over your body. Traced contours with a finger, mapping out your terrain. Kissed the purple stain where I pulled too tightly, the figures of eight where metal skated over skin. I described you in arcs, connected in circles. I ran like a river and never looked back... banking on precious metals, trading in goods and bads, monks and beasts, flippantly coined phrases.

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 10 March 2010 at 22:45.
Received 0 comments so far.

20100304brighteyeslifted.jpg


I mentioned a couple of months ago that DrunkenWerewolf's writers were recently invited to describe the albums of the last decade that most inspired them, for the magazine's fifth birthday celebrations. Here's what I contributed...


September 11th 2001 was the day I woke up and realised that I'd been dead for the previous ten years. The person I'd been in my teens and early twenties had left the building, replaced by a zombie sleepwalking through a banal and pointless existence. I'd done such a convincing impression of being a living, breathing human being that I'd even fooled myself. But I kept coming back to the thought of those people in the twin towers, knowing with unshakeable certainty that they had minutes to live: shouting, screaming, panicking, crying, calling loved ones, reflecting on what they had made of their existence. I imagined myself in their position and found myself dissatisfied with almost everything I'd achieved over the previous decade. That begged the tricky question: what was wrong, what should I have been doing instead?

Answers were a long while coming. But the process of questioning that began on that date turned into a merciless interrogation of every sphere of my life. My musical tastes, which had drifted down all kinds of fascinating but ultimately unfulfilling blind alleys, reverted to the personality-oriented intensity of my teenage years. I played my musical back catalogue constantly and wondered whether I'd ever encounter anything new that would have the same impact on me. And then in mid-2002, I read an interview with Conor Oberst in NME. Thirteen years younger than me, his pissed-off, questioning, articulate worldview encapsulated everything that I wanted to re-gain in my life. When Bright Eyes released Lifted or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground a few weeks later, I knew I'd come across something very special: an album that would sustain me for years.

Seven years later, it still sounds as astonishing as ever. The impressionistic, street-sound soundscape of The Big Picture, building over its first two minutes to a vocal that begins diffidently but is soon sneering "If you wanna see the future... go stare into a cloud." The confident pseudo-military swagger of Method Acting. The woozy, strings-driven balladry of False Advertising. The sonic journey of You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will., a slow walk towards a microphone as a tale of compulsion and control unfolds. The desolate, high drama of Lover I Don't Have To Love sliding into the prettiness of Bowl Of Oranges... it's a masterful, measured onslaught that gets sustained across the remaining seven tracks without ever relenting on the literate and naked emotional honesty. The closing track Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And Be Loved) clocks in at just over ten minutes in length. It sounds like a hoedown in hell and highlights Oberst's unique vocal mixture of warmth and abrasion as well as any other offering on the album.

Lifted was the perfect summary of everything Conor Oberst had been working towards over previous years. After this album, Bright Eyes' output became fractured and fragmented; it never held my interest in the same way. Lifted, however, remains a fierce, lonely beacon on the musical landscape of the 2000s, still burning like fire.


This piece was originally published in DrunkenWerewolf issue 10 in December 2009. DrunkenWerewolf is published bi-monthly and covers new and unusual acts who operate in a roughly acoustic/indie/experimental vein.

Posted by Hg on Thursday 04 March 2010 at 12:05.
Received 2 comments so far.


Esben & The Witch caught Hg's attention in a major way with their recent debut EP, 33. He made contact with them just prior to their appearance at the End Of The Road festival in September to find out more about their intense, beguiling sound, the influences that lie behind it and their future plans...


The band name comes from a Danish fairy tale in which Esben, the youngest of twelve sons, repeatedly thwarts the murderous intentions of a witch (usually depicted as a bearded hag). What particularly appeals to you about this?

The tale of Esben and the Witch was particularly loaded with rich imagery and dark disturbing ideas we thought were incredibly intriguing for a children's story. A fine example of an innocent yarn that holds undertones of malignance veiled in saccharine fantasy.

Your MySpace profile lists your influences as "glaciers, caverns and waning moons" and the artwork displayed on it includes mountains, forests and whirlpools. What's the attraction of the natural world, compared to urban environments for example?

The natural world and the beauty and wonder it contains is an obvious source of inspiration, how can it not be! However, we certainly don't want to neglect the excitement of the urban environment. For us it holds just as much esteem. Derelict mansions, spires, tree houses, cathedrals, nooks, bedrooms... all things that inspire us. The idea of our whole aesthetic is to create a sense, a mood, to induce a feeling of transportation once joined with the music.

Your music has an organic, elemental feel to it and it strikes me that lyrically you're following the tradition of story-telling, rather than direct self-expression of your own feeling and emotions. Is this fair?

Not entirely. Story-telling is of course something that interests us, but our lyrics are based on our real experiences, drawing from interactions and our surroundings. We draw upon stories and things we read to act as a vehicle instead of direct self-expression. We find the combination of the two most interesting and hopefully more intriguing to the listener.

When I reviewed 33 in the last issue of DrunkenWerewolf, I bandied around a few band names for illustrative purposes, but ended up wanting to compare your music to literature instead. Are you voracious readers?

Yes indeed, books are a major passion to us all and in many ways are the most inspiring of all art forms. The two (music & literature) are not so different in that any great song or album should, in the same way that a great novel does, be engaging and progressive and surprising. Narratives are important not just lyrically but also within the structure and development of songs, EPs and, hopefully, eventually albums!

So what are your favourite books?

Collaboratively... Jude the Obscure, The Master and the Margharita, Still Life with Woodpecker, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Drowned World, Heart Of Darkness, The Picture Of Dorian Gray. The list goes on and on and on...

Which other forms of art do you find yourselves drawn to? Painting? Sculpture? Cinema?

We're all drawn to many different disciplines... Architecture, Photography, Illustration, Painting. Cinema in particular is a shared passion. We all share the dream of one day being able to make the soundtrack to a wonderfully shot, beautiful film. That would be amazing.

Rachel, I understand you're largely responsible for the band's artwork. You appear to have a keen eye and a well-defined visual style. Where do you find your wonderful source material?

From an assortment of treasure troves! Libraries, online exploration and most valuable of all, I suppose, imagination.

Your debut EP, 33, was self-recorded and self-released. Did you have any experience in these areas before you embarked on this, or was there quite a steep learning curve?

Pretty steep for all involved actually yes... bathroom vocals, a slowly dying PowerMac and late, late, late nights with lots of Golden Virginia and bottles of red wine. It was a labour of love though.

Are you pleased with the EP's success? What are your plans for future releases, both in the short- and long-term?

Incredibly pleased, all rather a shock actually, we never really expected it to go so well. Not too sure about plans for the future, an album (or series of!) is obviously the dream. Coming up in the near future we have a new track being released on a 'Dance to the Radio' compilation so that's pretty exciting!

You've covered Kylie Minogue's 'Confide In Me'. Superficially, that seems to be an odd choice, though you give it an unsettling edge that reminds me a bit of The Jungle Book's 'Trust In Me'. Do you see it as a song of intimacy, or of potential betrayal?

Both, I think... the menacing vocal delivery certainly leads you to question the sincerity of the words...

I interviewed Michael McLinn for DrunkenWerewolf a few issues back. Dan, I gather you're producing his next album. How does the process of bringing someone else's creativity to fruition differ from dealing with your own?

It's incredibly different and wonderfully challenging. As a producer you have a responsibility to (or I feel this way anyway) give an outside perspective on the songs and therefore take them to a higher level. This can be tricky, particularly with someone (like Michael) who has a very singular artistic vision, we have had disagreements but invariably compromise is the key and I'm really excited by the record.

Where would you like to be in five years' time... in any sense of the question?

Wherever the wind decides to take us. Hopefully doing much the same, but with a couple of albums tucked under our collective belt and a few more stamps on our passports.

And what will we never, ever see Esben & the Witch doing?

Throwing a television out a hotel window would be a remarkably far-fetched notion...


This interview was originally published in DrunkenWerewolf issue 9 in October 2009. DrunkenWerewolf is published bi-monthly and covers new and unusual acts who operate in a roughly acoustic/indie/experimental vein.

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 03 March 2010 at 12:02.
Received 0 comments so far.

I've Had My Fun finds Paul Hawkins in downbeat form. "I've had my fun, I've had my moment," he sneers, in a way that suggests that the law might finally have caught up with him after a major series of misdemeanours. However, it soon becomes clear that this is a more mundane tale of maturing, disillusion and dissolution. As he outlines the despairing litany of a man sliding into mediocrity - listing the "minor promotion" ("A step up the ladder, two more grand a year...") and inevitable marriage and kids - everything leads to a blind alley.

He brings to mind Dylan Thomas' exhortation to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light", except the bulb has already blown and the hardware shop's closed for good. It's a gloomy dissection of an insecure life being crushed by the daily grind. The sentiment is pure punk - Crass dealt with similar territory in 'Systematic Death', an analysis reinvigorated by Jeffrey Lewis cover version a couple of years back - and it's possible to view the song as a broader comment on contemporary Britain, not dissimilar to Naomi Hates Humans' 'Pipe Dreams and Lullabies' (which we reviewed in DW issue 6).

It's long - over seven minutes - and the music underpins it beautifully, building in intensity via a dizzying whirl to a final crescendo and breakdown. It's tempting to suggest that this song might be Hawkins' definitive lyrical statement, ramping up the blank, bleak blackness of some of his previous work to hitherto unexplored levels of intensity. In reality, I suspect that he's a multi-faceted lyricist who explores characters in a way that makes them come alive - or half-dead, in this case - and this is merely another fine example of his ability to articulate complex ideas in a startlingly simple and direct way.


This review was written in September last year and originally published in DrunkenWerewolf issue 9 the following month. DrunkenWerewolf is published bi-monthly and covers new and unusual acts who operate in a roughly acoustic/indie/experimental vein.

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 02 March 2010 at 14:04.
Received 0 comments so far.

Paper cuts on my fingers. Blood on my hands. Whips and scorns, lashes and gashes. A shutter snaps open, a shot is fired. I hand over the image to be nailed to the tree. We are the dead, updated. We are alive again.

We stare through the window frame, I against I, eye against eye. Which of us has been captured, weighed and measured? I promised one, but have I given the other? Nothing to do but retreat, review, prepare to renew.

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 02 March 2010 at 09:31.
Received 0 comments so far.

"The structure of today's milk industry has made it more vulnerable to bad weather. The milk travels further to fewer, larger processors, which use larger articulated lorries that are less able to cope with even a slight deterioration in weather than the smaller tankers the Milk Marketing Board used to operate. "It can be mayhem even when conditions aren't really that bad," Tyler said. Huw Bowles, director of the organic co-operative OMSCO, agrees. "Forty years ago milk was processed closer to where it was produced and delivered back to the same area." The drive to make industry logistics as economically efficient as possible has also removed any slack. OMSCO has cut the cost of collection by 30% in recent years with these efficiencies but at the price of less resilience. "There are no spare vehicles any more. If the driving speeds are reduced by just 10mph on a nine-hour shift because of snow, they just can't get round the whole collection; the whole route is affected," Bowles explained."

It strikes me that this story highlights precisely What's Wrong With Modern Britain (And Possibly The World In General). Centralise for greater efficiency, where "efficiency" equals profit. Reorganise for the inward-looking benefit of the industry concerned, rather than the service it provides to the community. Remove the local element, because what did the bumpkins know anyway? Eliminate redundancy (i.e. resilience) by designing for optimum conditions rather than the, ahem, gritty reality of the days when nothing runs smoothly. All in the name of consumer benefit. The over-riding concern is that we must have everything as cheaply as possible. You remember them asking us that, right?

It's not just the milk of human kindness that falls prey to this appallingly dehumanised view of "service". Your local bank branch, rationalised back to a central call centre that was then moved 6,000 miles offshore. Your local butcher, baker, candlestick maker, all of whom failed to hold back the rising tide of the supermarkets with their centrally negotiated puchasing arrangements. Capitalism - the cult of money and profit above all other modes of being - pushes for ever greater "efficiencies". It also tends to prefer monocultural solutions... standards, embodied in systems. Individual autonomy is time-consuming. Conformity is predictable: it can be organised, scheduled, managed. Controlled

It's 'clipboard culture' gone mad, a tick-box style of management that forgot that those boxes were being ticked for a reason. Everything has become proceduralised, standardised, part of a larger system that reduces the "mistakes". Yet the system can't cope with complexity, with scenarios and situations that exist outside its neat and wholly self-defined flowcharts. So let's pretend they don't exist. Individuals with differing requirements? Hmm... messy... design them out. They'll learn to fit in, eventually. Either that, or they'll end up surfing an ever-rising tide of anxiety, building to a tsunami. A "natural" disaster that only breeds further self-defeating systems.

You want an image of the future? A rubber stamp, booted into the face of mankind forever, declaring compliance. A check-box tattooed onto our hearts, awaiting validation by the pen deadlier than the sword.

Posted by Hg on Monday 01 March 2010 at 09:17.
Received 9 comments so far.


Over Christmas, I was thinking about documentation. A couple of weeks previously, someone had told me that it's something I seem to do fairly instinctively. From a professional point of view this makes me laugh, because documentation is always the least attractive aspect of any project for me. But when it comes to something that I've got more of a personal interest in, I take the point.

I remembered something that I used to do when I was young. When we went on long car journeys, I'd sit there with a pad of paper in my lap and a pencil in my hand, trying to move my wrist smoothly along each line, but letting myself be influenced by the bumps in the road. I imagined myself as a human seismograph, making a "recording" of our journey that I could then "play back" in future.

Weird kid. But it seems that impulse to document began early and it has persisted in numerous forms (including this blog) ever since. Ultimately, I guess it's part of an ongoing, life-long battle against loss. Whether you view that as a positive, healthy thing or something that springs more from anxiety and nerves is another matter. It depends on the extent to which it's carried out, I suppose.

"To remember everything is a form of madness, Owen."

- Brian Friel, Translations

You could also argue that trying consciously to forget seems like another form of insanity too. I document far less these days... too little, I sometimes think. I don't feel as driven to do it. Maybe I'm like a recovering addict, trying to avoid that adrenaline surge that comes with the perfect encapsulation of the moment. Maybe I'm just better at appreciating the moment, then letting it go.

I do think the video above (via Caroline) is utterly beautiful, though. The structure of a song, dissected and transcribed into another medium, then undermined and dissolved before your eyes. Coincidentally, my first full-time job was working with a specialist printing company that produced the paper charts onto which those pens describe the music so insistently, with such precise lunacy.

Posted by Hg on Thursday 07 January 2010 at 20:33.
Received 4 comments so far.

I read the dead man's e-mail messages again yesterday. I wondered exactly what it was that I was looking at. They had none of the immediacy or intimacy of a physical artifact. A letter or a postcard would have given me a direct connection back to a time when his warm hands had held the paper, pressed ink onto its surface. Instead, a collection of ones and zeroes formed a different kind of memento mori: a purer, more abstract preservation of thoughts, ideas and words.

My thoughts turned to myself. When I die - for I am now simply too old to keep using "if" to start that sentence, as though youthful hope itself could hold back the tide of time - what will I leave behind? What do these words mean without a "me" behind them? Are they my best chance at immortality, or merely the dry ashes of a fire that burns brightly and will ultimately consume itself? If so, why bother at all? Better, maybe, to burn with a cleaner flame that leaves no residue.

Posted by Hg on Saturday 02 January 2010 at 21:38.
Received 0 comments so far.

I found him, mute and staring, in front of the mirror. His face was older and sadder than I remembered. I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn't say. He tried to push me away, but persistence is my speciality.

The mood was glass and reflection. It had been the oddest of days: a blockage, a breakdown and a broken promise being the least pressing concerns. No, the limbs were what had panicked him the most.

He had fought the urge for as long as possible, until every cell in his body screamed FLIGHT. He had run hard and fast until the darkness overwhelmed him, but in spite of everything he had still made it home.

I asked him if he understood. He did not. I asked him if he wanted to understand. He shook his head. I asked whether he wanted someone else to understand. His hollow laugh was the best answer he could give.

And then I remembered: eight times in and eight times further inward. I unfolded him slowly, but all I found at his centre was a tick, a cross and a question mark, blurred by the bloom of a solitary dried teardrop.

Posted by Hg on Saturday 19 December 2009 at 12:38.
Received 2 comments so far.

I writhe in fits and starts. Say something, don't do it. Do nothing, don't say it. A row of teeth in their chattering glasses: submerged, unable to be silent, but unwilling to be heard.

There is a picture that I must paint instead. A torrid collision of dried salt-spunk-shit, sealed in spittle. I bathe in cold grey light, sticky silver rivers and dirt-brown shivers.

Posted by Hg on Friday 18 December 2009 at 22:34.
Received 0 comments so far.


I got involved with DrunkenWerewolf towards the end of 2007. Having enjoyed issue 2, I wrote a handful of reviews for issue 3. With issue 4 I upped my game by submitting an interview with Michael McLinn and since then I've continued to contribute on a regular basis, only missing out on one issue when I was simply too busy to do the material justice.

This month, amazingly, DW celebrates its fifth birthday, a significant milestone in its progression from an online music blog to a well-respected print magazine. This coincides with its publication of issue 10, which in turn coincides with the end of the decade whose "underrated, under-funded and undiscovered [musical] artists" it has devoted itself to highlighting.

Issue 10 continues to focus on new music, but also features various pieces by (or about) some of the artists featured on the covers of previous issues. Many of the regular writers (including me) have also written about their most inspirational albums of the decade. It's not a "best of", more a summary of releases that have made a significant personal impact.

I chose Lifted or The Story Is The The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground by Bright Eyes, which I described as "a fierce, lonely beacon on the musical landscape of the 2000s". To find out more, you'll have to buy the magazine. It's bigger and bolder than ever - 50 pages this time round - and available free at certain outlets or by mail order from the magazine's website.

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 15 December 2009 at 15:22.
Received 0 comments so far.

Previously

As you might already be aware, over the course of this year I've become more involved with my favourite... »

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 18 November 2009 at 16:47.
Received 0 comments so far.

[ PDF version | trial transcript | strength & weakness ]... »

Posted by Hg on Thursday 05 November 2009 at 08:35.
Received 2 comments so far.

Five days in New York. A fantasy lifestyle: a hotel suite in the Upper West Side, an unlimited use... »

Posted by Hg on Friday 09 October 2009 at 22:37.
Received 8 comments so far.

Mrs Hg: Can you do that big pile of ironing today, because I'm going to stick another wash in the... »

Posted by Hg on Wednesday 23 September 2009 at 07:45.
Received 2 comments so far.

I was daydreaming on the train on the way home, after a night out with a friend. Slowly I started... »

Posted by Hg on Friday 18 September 2009 at 23:27.
Received 0 comments so far.

Caster Semenya - man or woman? Poor woman, because - however the medical evidence may decide to categorise her -... »

Posted by Hg on Saturday 12 September 2009 at 12:17.
Received 5 comments so far.

It visits me first on the train. Go away, I tell it. Fuck off. You were due yesterday. You're late.... »

Posted by Hg on Friday 11 September 2009 at 21:56.
Received 1 comments so far.

I've come across Esben & The Witch before and appreciated what they do, but I've never taken the time... »

Posted by Hg on Tuesday 08 September 2009 at 08:53.
Received 0 comments so far.

Earlier

Visit the archives for a detailed list of posts in reverse chronological order, or if you're looking for something specific, try a search:

Elsewhere

You can also find me on Twitter, Tumblr, Last.fm, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can e-mail me at Hg At [The Name Of This Blog] Dot Com.

Copyright

All original material on this site is © Hydragenic, 2002-2010. Extracts of other people's work are used for the purpose of criticism, review or news reporting, in line with the "fair dealing" (or "fair use") principle.