get some sleep.

this is a photography slideshow for a recent narrative project @ college, carrying on the theme of sleep that i've been researching. it revolves around the changing brain waves with different stages of sleep, my experiences with sleep deprivation, and that hazy, almost hallucinatory "drifting in and out" vibe that goes with erratic sleep patterns. the text might not appear very sharp due to hideous youtube compression, but i guess it's a necessary evil. i'll be uploading all the pictures i used soon, with all the lovely visible grain that just looks like shit on youtube.
the music is an extra long edit of "keechie" by no age.

mix #1 - electroencephalograph

a mix designed to turn your beta waves into alpha waves.
oscillating motorik beats contrast with comedown blues, sombre ambience and lulling human voices.
get yr slow-wave on.

tracklisting:
1. chet baker - the thrill is gone
2. radiohead - packt like sardines in a crushd tin box
3. nathan fake - peary land
4. shocking pinks - this aching deal
5. primal scream - autobahn 66
6. the fun years - auto show day of the dead
7. léo ferré - la chanson du scaphandrier
8. this heat - sleep
9. the caretaker - von restorff effect
10. nina simone - i got it bad (and that ain't good)
11. the beta band - al sharp
12. holden - 10101
13. klimek - for marvin gaye & russel jones
14. high places - from stardust to sentience
15. new order - dreams never end
16. spacemen 3 - big city (everybody i know can be found here)
17. pyramids - the echo of something lovely
18. leadbelly - goodnight irene

download via sendspace

the internet...

...it still exists! i naturally assumed in my absence it would just decay and wither in the ether, unable to cope with the loss of one of it's many billion unnecessary bloggers. but i have returned, to resuscitate it from its lifeless stupor and make it somewhat readable.
after my computer started to fail to do the most basic of tasks (start up Windows) i had to get the whole thing gutted and stuffed again. and it's in brand spanking new working order - at least it is until all the programs i willingly download then never use (Google Earth? wtf) clog its pores and it goes catatonic again. until that day, i'm going to try and post as many entries as i can, hopefully at a more regular rate than last year.
it's been almost two and a half months since my last post, the first half of a year-end list of things that i dug the most. i'll not be continuing with that, as it's now march - and my ears, eyes and brain are so oversaturated with new media that to dwell even further on 2008 would be counterproductive, and probably cause some kind of tumor. look out for posts over the next couple of days on new music i'm obsessing over, and a mixtape or two of some old favourites. i'll still be posting my photography from the past couple of months when i get the chance - if you can't wait 'til then (who can?) then here is my flickr link - http://www.flickr.com/photos/_washingmachine/
it's good to be back, i suppose.

2008 - in retrospect (part 1)

cast yr mind back to midnight, december 31st, 2007, and - that's if you remember anything at all - you'll remember after all the drunken kisses and well wishes for the year forthcoming. what immediately followed (for me, anyway) was puns of varying degrees of quality on the year 2008. 'two-thousand-and-mate' was a popular one. 'two-thousand-and-hate' rhymed well enough, but didn't feel right. but the best one, and the one that stuck 'til way past the cider 'n' wine new years day hangover faded away, was 'two-thousand-and-great'. aside from being just an effective play on words, it made me feel genuinely confident and optimistic about the twelve months ahead. and in retrospect, that confidence was completely justified. pretty much everything about this year went great, from personal accomplishments, experiences and relationships, to the little extras that make life better - like music, books and film.
what follows is a list of those extras that made '08 great for me, starting with my favourite album and favourite gig. i'll try to steer away from the usual chutney you'll be reading on every blog, webzine and publication this time of year, cuz no one wants to read about Vampire Weekend and/or Fleet Foxes for the 643rd time this year, even if good things is all i'd have to say about them. however, one concession i will make is...

Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago (12th of May, UK commerical release)
my dead cert, all round favourite album of this year. i know, i know technically it was self-released in '07, but the general public (me, obv) didn't know about it til the commercial release from Jagjaguwar in May of this year. it took me a surprisingly long time to get into this album, considering how fond i am of it now. i bought it completely on a whim after reading the five-star review in Mojo, because it seemed to tick all the boxes i have for my lovelorn, one-man-and-a-guitar singer/songwriters. just like the critics and record-buying public, i was drawn in by the "recording in hibernation" PR story (which i'm sure i don't need to reiterate in detail here), and felt i had to get to know his songs. since then, it's had the same effect on me as 2005's Illinois by Sufjan Stevens - a life-enhancing album that you wish you could experience for the first time all over again. but its one of those records that, once you get beneath the surface of the songs and you know them inside and out, you won't be able to remember what life was like before you heard it.
which leads me on to...

Bon Iver, Wild Beasts & No Age @ Pressure Point, Brighton (15th of May)
...this. taking place as part of The Great Escape festival in Brighton's tiny (soon to be closed) Pressure Point venue, it's only in retrospect that i can genuinely appreciate what a special gig this was. at the time it just seemed like two relatively hip acts sharing the stage at a magazine-sponsered leg of a festival, nothing to blog about. but when the queue for entry started to form and snake along the pavement and up the street, often haphazardly spilling onto the roadside, i started to wonder. was everyone here just for Bon Iver? had everyone been enjoying the exact same listening experience as me for the past week or so? at this point i was still to find out the album had been available in some format for nearly a year, but even so, it felt like overkill for a one-man band with nine songs from out of Nowheresville, USA. it took until halfway through the set, for Justin Vernon to coax everyone in the room into singing along to the haunting refrain in "The Wolves" ('What might have been lost...'), that i was completely convinced the hype was justified. as if i needed further reassurance of the devotion he commanded, he took his acoustic guitar in hand and marched into the middle of the packed room and sang the album highlight "Skinny Love" without a microphone, and with every repeated bridge of 'My my my, My my my, My my', the audience contribution got louder, converting more unbelievers each time. without a doubt one of the best gigs i've ever attended, and i'm sure nearly everyone in attendence would concur.
such an act is hard to follow, and that unenviable task was given to Wild Beasts. another hyped-up band with a debut LP this year, the crowd had substantially thinned by the time they took the stage. their indistinct brand of Talking Heads'ish awkward pop definitely failed to impress. but i've since given a couple of studio recordings a listen ("His Grinning Skull", "The Devil's Crayon"), and they fare much better than the live interpretations. it's probably another case of a band who, when given the budget and studio time, can get their songs sounding exactly how they want, but the structures fall flat when they're faced with recreating them for the stage.
by the end of their set the crowd was filling out in places, the feverish anticipation starting to build for No Age. by this point i had been a No Age geek for some time, listening to Weirdo Rippers on a daily basis since '07 and tracking down every b-side from the limited vinyl EPs that had been cherry picked to make up that excellent compilation release. their debut album proper, Nouns, had been released earlier that month and i had been keeping it on repeat and soaking up all the tv static'y scummy noise pop it had to offer since it leaked to blogs earlier in the year. i hadn't seen them live yet and had high expectations, which had doubled since entering the venue and witnessing Bon Iver. the sheer volume with which they burst into action was startling, making opener and Nouns highlight "Teen Creeps" identifiable only by its dental records and a killer riff. halfway through the set came the first single "Eraser", a track i was one listen away from starting to skip on my mp3 player, was reanimated in a live setting. guitarist Randy Randall playing the minute-long intro riff wandering around the stage and into the crowd, before drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt chimed in, bringing the track to life by pounding on the drums with a force i'd not seen since watching Dave Grohl on my old Nirvana VHS. i soon realised that No Age are such a unique band, i felt instantly ridiculous for having tried to weigh them up against Bon Iver not half an hour before. they're two bands worlds apart in sense, style, and scene - but because they have the fortune of coming from similar DIY roots in one country (California and Wisconsin are close together when compared to the rest of the world), and both having debut albums in '08 on hip labels, they'll never be so far apart that a lazy blogger won't try and see a parallel between the two when they share a stage at a UK festival.

mp3: Bon Iver - "The Wolves (Act I and II)"
mp3: No Age - "Here Should Be My Home"

broken records, avalanche 6/11/08

these were taken last month at an instore gig in Avalanche Records on Cockburn Street. the band is Broken Records, a nice little folk band from Edinburgh. they reminded me of other Scottish folk types like My Latest Novel, but with the added Guillemots'y brassy pop edge that a lot of the "hotly tipped for '09" bands are sporting. currently doing the familiar circuit of touring, releasing records, touring, recieving lukewarm-at-best press from NME, and more touring, i'd keep an eye out for them in the near future.
the 'cigarette burn' holes on the last photo - i don't know how they got there, but i think it's Boots fault. they scanned them, and i think the negative sheets ripped somewhere. anyway, i like the happy accidents and how it came out so i included it in the set.

mixtape #1 - cold music

Mixtape #1 - Cold Music (Ambiance for Autumn and Winter) is obviously not an actual cassette tape or anything. but it's not a podcast as there are seperate MP3 files included, and it's not a full-blown mix as i haven't used a program to fade or sync the tracks to fit into one another - so a mixtape is the best way to describe it really. so says Wikipedia: "a compilation of songs in a specific order... which usually reflects the musical tastes of its compiler... a conceptual mix of songs linked by theme or mood". you don't argue with Wikipedia.
the picture (not taken by me) is of a Bed & Breakfast in Strathyre, Perthshire. it makes Winter in Scotland look idyllic and picturesque, when the reality of it is a dark, rainy, freezing couple of months, allowing for about eight hours of sunlight a day.
i've never been on the best of terms with Winter, in fact it's even injured me once or twice. the rest of the year i have an immune system like the Berlin Wall circa 1980, then December rolls around and i'm bedridden for the best part of it. the song choices reflect my relationship with this particular season - they weren't written to warm the cockles of yr heart on Christmas day. what follows is a selection of cold, hissing, clinical electronics and moonlit campfire songs that condense when exhaled.

Side A
1. The Radio Dept. - "Annie Laurie"
appears on Annie Laurie EP, 2002
2. Deepchord Presents Echospace - "First Point of Aries"
appears on The Coldest Season, 2007
3. Atlas Sound - "Headphones"
appears on Stereogum Presents Enjoyed: A Tribute to Björk's Post, 2008
4. Desolation Wilderness - "Come Over In Your Silver Car"
appears on White Light Strobing, 2008
5. James Blackshaw - "Past Has Not Passed"
appears on Litany of Echoes, 2008
6. Horse Feathers - "Helen"
appears on House With No Home, 2008
7. The Twilight Sad - "Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters"
appears on Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, 2007

Side B
1. Grouper - "Invisible"
appears on Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, 2008
2. Burial - "Night Bus"
appears on Burial, 2006
3. Spacemen 3 - "Feel So Sad (Reprise)"
appears on Recurring, 1991
4. Björk - "Cocoon (Instrumental)"
original version appears on Vespertine, 2001
5. Bon Iver - "The Wolves (Act I and II)"
appears on For Emma, Forever Ago, 2008
6. Explosions In The Sky - "What Do You Go Home To? (Mountains Mix)"
appears on All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone bonus disc, 2007
7. Windy & Carl - "Snow Covers Everything"
appears on Songs for the Broken Hearted, 2008
8. Do Make Say Think - "A Tender History in Rust"
appears on You, You're a History in Rust, 2007

Download Mix via zSHARE

it's meant to be listened to on decent speakers or headphones, so please don't rely on yr laptop's skinny pipes to push it out. it's only ten seconds under 80 minutes in length, so if your CD writer is a cruel mistress and refusing to write it, get hold of a C90 cassette and fulfill its Christmas wish to become a real live mixtape!

apple o'

this is a set of digital photographs taken to test the timing, available lighting and suitable shutter speeds in my kitchen... as part of a film project exploring the freezing and blurring of movement.
the kitchen's not the ideal environment to be doing my first shots for this project, but i haven't been best prepared for anything recently and i don't have much of a choice! i'll be developing the film tomorrow so hopefully i'll get some prints up before the end of the week. if they never materialise then you'll trust they came out terrible.




i decided to do these shots involving apples frozen in mid-air in reference to Magritte's apple themed paintings (The Son of Man, The Listening Room, and This is not an Apple) - plus they're yummy. for the pictures that emphasise movement with blur, i've thought about exploring something with birds - but Man in the Bowler Hat is something i'll leave to the surrealists.
check out the irrefutable evidence of scary skeletal hands in that last pic. who needs halloween costumes with digits like that?