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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As you might already be aware, over the course of this year I've become more involved with my favourite band of the past five years or so, Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds. It started off with a website, but then I got sucked into the band's Crooked Family and now my roles are numerous: Minister Of Propaganda, Holder Of The Purse Strings, Head Trainspotter, Spelling Fascist, Diviner Of Order Within Chaos, Sticker Of Stamps and Chief Nag, amongst many others.

The band members, both individually and together, have done many interesting and amazing things this year, but I'm particularly proud to be associated with their latest venture. When I started freelancing three years ago, I always had it in my head that I'd eventually end up doing some voluntary work for a charity. Until recently, this penniless band was the closest thing that seemed to fit the bill. But now we've got involved with a real, actual charity: YoungMinds.

YoungMinds is the UK's leading organisation promoting mental health and emotional well-being for children and young adults. The band has chosen to support YoungMinds based on Lupen Crook's own experiences of being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder as a teenager, approximately ten years ago. A free download EP was released on Monday containing six songs that cover the positives and negatives of living with such a disorder. Donations to YoungMinds are encouraged.

As well as being a fund-raising effort to help out the charity (the band is directing donations towards the YoungMinds parents helpline in particular), the aim of this project is to help raise awareness of mental health issues. The oft-quoted statistic is that one in ten people is "mentally ill" (always a loaded phrase) at any one time and one in four people experience some kind of mental health issue throughout the course of their lifetime. Yet the subject remains awkward.

As well as handling the overall communication strategy for this release, I interviewed both Lupen Crook and his partner Sam about the day-to-day reality of living with a mental health issue and supporting someone who is affected. I was also particularly interested in the relationship between Crook's disorder and his creativity, a long-term fascination of mine that has roots in numerous places, but probably my admiration and respect for Kristin Hersh and her work in particular.

And as for the music itself... what are you going to hear if you download this EP? Six songs, two of which were written last year and four very recently. Recorded live, acoustically, just three and a half weeks before the release date. Sparse and intense in parts, relentlessly catchy in others. Bob and Clayton providing a rock-solid rhythm section over which Tom's beautiful guitar work and Lupen Crook's ambivalent tales (and increasingly resonant vocals) can unfold.

When I look back over all of the things that I've done in 2009, helping to get this EP out into the world is one of the things that I'm most pleased with. It's something that has blurred the distinctions between my creative output, my social life, my professional skills and my interest in health and wellbeing, to an extent that I've never managed to achieve before. If you're interested in checking it out, I'd love to hear your feedback, either here or over on the band's website.

Download & Further Reading/Viewing:

• Curse Of The Mirror Wicked download mini-site
• Interview with Lupen Crook (1 of 2): Gazing Into The Mirror Wicked
• Interview with Lupen Crook (2 of 2): Growing Pains Of The Mind
• Interview with Sam Hayes: Living In A Shadow
• Interview with The Crooked Family: A Good Heart And A Dark Soul

[ PDF version | trial transcript | strength & weakness ]

Five days in New York. A fantasy lifestyle: a hotel suite in the Upper West Side, an unlimited use MetroCard, an empty diary and a bulging address book. A city to be enthusiastically explored and disdainfully ignored. Conversations round tables piled with food, coffee, beer. Intense music and companionable silence. Combinations of old and new friends shuffled and re-shuffled: hearts and diamonds, jokers and knaves.

"What was it like?" people ask me on my return. Fuck knows. There's no narrative, just a series of fragments. Dysconnection on the Long Island Rail Road. Greek food at Niko's (pasta and pizza available, feta cheese obligatory). The slow regaining of consciousness in Starbucks each morning. The strange perspective on a home life 6,000 miles away. Shopping. Drum & bass and an infinite selection of t-shirts.

Sticky heat and torrential downpour. A mountain of fries in L'Orange Bleue. The magnificence of Grand Central. Midtown and Rockefeller. Meatballs and mash at Hallo Berlin. An upmarket fleamarket peopled with stall-holding eccentrics. Cognitive dissonance in Central Park as skyscapers clashed with trees. The Boat Basin Café, a mini log.nu reunion of sorts. Piercing sunlight in the Amsterdam Ale House.

Local and express. Sam Adams. Carnegie Hall - "the most beautiful room in the world" - and the tangible evidence of decades of music obsession. A few words. High-gravity jetlag in the Parker Meridien restaurant. Taxi-cab confessions ("Forgive me father, it has been four hours since my last taxi..."). Street pizza, then rock 'n' roll on the High Line. Armchair-sinking in the elegant bohemia of the Gaslight Lounge.

Beers in the Macdougal Street Ale House over $2.50 Mamoun's falafels. F-line FAIL, then on to watch a Packers game at Angry Wade's in Brooklyn. Lunch at the Slaughtered Lamb, washed down with Grey Dog cappuccino in Washington Square Park afterwards. A rush-hour walk and a good-natured bicker over the aesthetic qualities of the Port Authority building (beautiful; don't let anyone tell you otherwise).

Rogue Dead Guy Ale and avoiding the meat sweats at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Harlem. The iron grandeur of the Riverside Drive bridge. Salad ("Just to let you know, the dressing is vegan"), gossip and comparison with with English Girl #1 in the West Village. Bumping into friends on the subway. A taxi to the airport, our driver missing other cars with millimetre precision. Checking in and checking out.

Life and laughter. Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine. There was much more, but I'm already forgetting. Who needs a story? These snapshots will do.