It all comes back in many shades of blue…
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Tag Archives: soul
Just as the Sun Peaks Out
There was yet another place I had to venture… cold and wet had never been so accommodating. The cool vibrations of Jazz and Revolutionary Funk, Southern Soul that would chill your heart.
I must break out of the mould… it is holding me down. And now that the beast has been slain, crawling green out of a hole in my head, the insane can catch their 100 z’s and lay another tune down to shed light on 10 years to come.
A mark has been made in the sand and goals are forever to be reached… only way to have it when your spitting fire and screaming nothing into outer space.
Everything floats equal there… speed is everywhere.. nothing to stop you, there is nothing. And we sit on white floors looking at black ceilings.. picking out the favourite million year old specs.. wondering what it feels like to stand or even just be beside that. Is there a noise there? Does everyone still want to drink tea even when they are orbiting Arcturus?
At any given moment the eclipse is about to happen… we just don’t realise it’s not that big of a deal
This is a place….
This is a place that i wish i could return to… From a bus window.. there was a light breeze pushing the grass around..and i watched its footprints lead away from the road… along the meadow to where a family were walking… a man and woman, her dress rolling gently in the currents.. the little boy pulls against his fathers grip… enchanted by the expance before him, the unknown.. to be free and follow the wind, let it take him up the hill…towards the sun, flaring round the corners of the ancient ruins… atop this hill…sitting and waiting.. i want to go there again, and let the wind sing me up to its walls… i want to close my eyes and hear the world around it…the moving world…around this eternity… an eternity… somebody’s golden statue… somebody’s eternal echo, forever heard but its origins long forgotten… and i would stand there in the middle, waiting to hear the past..
and the bus rolled on.
Black Box Radio Show No.2
Response to Black Box Radio Show No.2
featured as comment under original Radio Podcast…..
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Since the mic broke on me, ill just fill in on what i was going to say bout these songs.
I had the pleasure of seeing Chris Cunningham, Pivot, Andrew Weatherall and one of my long time favourite artists George Evlyn of Nightmares on Wax perform in Paris last week as part of WARP20.. Here we have a track Jorgé from what some might consider Nightmares on Wax’s best album “Carboot Soul” ..”Soul” being the term that would tie this show together as we have a selection of artists who in their own way provide a different definition of Soul.. George Evelyn giving it an electronic treatment and sampling beautiful vocal lines leading us into Nuyorican Soul and the timeless “I am the Black Gold of the Sun” .. The Nuyorican Soul experiment resulting in this urban bustling modern soul, full of culture and truly redefining Soul in the mid nineties by combining the new with the old… the older sound represented in Nina Simone and Ray Charles.. who while not necessarily being considered “soul” in a Motown sense, reflect the undefinable nature of the Nuyorican Soul project. Ray Charles would reinvent Gospel and sexualise religion, bringing the sound into the pop world… an action which would be hard to swallow at first..such revolutionary ideas would echo that of many forward thinking artists in the past, not to mention another great composer for the piano Claude Debussy, who against the toughest of grains would bend every rule in Classical writing and create his dream worlds, romantic sounds and flowing pentatonic runs would outrage the staunch classical music traditionalists of his time.. I hear the same dream state qualities in the lyrics of Nick Drake, whos guitar playing in this track also shows how Debussy’s choice to popularise a simple pentatonic sound.. would define music for so long, clearly heard from Drakes strings…
While watching a Glastonbury festival clip from 3 years back, a Nick Drake song played over the images of love and peace from the original festival .. the Glastonbury Soundtrack to the Movie documentary released a few years back features a pumping performance of Primal Screams “Swastika Eyes”, a Chemical brothers remix of which also caught my attention from the Dirty Hits bonus CD..leading us to a chemical brothers classic…
The Grandfather Paradox is a compilation tracing the history of minimal music, this track by Pat Methany/Steve Reich opens the compilation, a track which seems to pin down the beautiful progression and relation one can achieve between the electronic synth and the electronic instrument.. a sound which brings us nicely into Squarepusher’s “Iambic 9 Poetry”, another Artist from the Warp label who also bridges the gap between live instrumentation and electronic performance, his incredible bass playing leading us into a beautiful “poem” of sound and movement… Autechre (Warp Again) expressing the electrical romantic expression… perhaps it is a little far reaching for me to claim to hear a quality of Debussy in this track. However its serenity and pulsing synth line does manage to lift the soul in a very clear way, a sort of electronic Psychedelic sound…..
cue Funkadelic’s “What is Soul?” and here we are back again.. Soul…
When i hear George Clinton define soul in his many ways…i often find myself starting to remember the Voice of Terry Reid.. here performing a song recently made hyper-popular by the Raconteurs (they didnt change much – thank god) ….just listen to this voice.. and then ask yourself is this not soul?
18-365
Second Toughest rips plastic vibrations through my home.. this is just one of the things that i will miss until the last moment away. Unsure of why but at last positive of how long, i reach again into the clouds to watch golden sunsets above my home. And into the dark abyss once again i dip slowly and surely towards you. The beasts and snakes and movement unstoppable.. forever breathing parties and screaming… this is not my home, this is just temporary, this is not my home, this is just temporary. And now we vibrate o destroy these city streets!
17-365
Roman walls were hard to topple but toppled they were.. great food from great people and happiness infected the environment. Shadows on well known streets reach out to hold me in but responsibilities are hard to resist and the foreign pulls me once again form the only thing i want.. last night is all to soon upon us.
11-365 (Storm in a City)
I did’nt know how best to take a photo of a storm. Well it’s not quite a storm yet, high winds and all but a bit of rain or hail wouldn’t be too much to ask for now would it? It’s nights like this that i can nearly feel the other people that are still awake.. everyone is disturbed by the banging and gusts of wind. It’s just not like a normal night. There is always something so strange about a storm, a special event… you feel that it means something sinister, or perhaps to take a Shakespearian approach, you feel that somebody somewhere is coming to a low point – exposed and out in the wind and rain, naked to the elements, their souls are being washed clean by the Gods, all the mayhem and agony within them is unleashed upon the Earth…….. and after…peace, calm, understanding, realisation, happiness returns.
I got rained on today, though it was worth it in the end… happy news could mean tougher times for me, more testing on the brain, but definitely better i hope.
More good vibrations from the neighbours.. its so handy its rediculous…talk about landing on your feet.
Echoes fall on deaf ears however and my heart tightens.. a little more when those movies that are just right hit the spot and send your mind to another in another place…
soon
Whats that under my finger?
This little tank of thinking, this little home of hailstone shower curtains…
Break it!
And were falling to the sound of the rythm city beats… breaking over feet and littering the streets and the fairy liquid cleans and the fairly liquid softens the feelers. this is the going of the good this is the going of the gone, and who are you to give me a name like this, who are you to set me aside and ligt my home on fie? ho are you to call to the people of this world and declare war on the others you dont understand. What am i to do… ceiling under my above land… a white canvas to be painted the walls too…they are quite [plain...lets get workin!.....]
empty.
And who is this? of course i know this person… looking in the same direction as myself…seeing the same things..and doing the same.
Beats of the inside…ding the dong and the breaking is unforgettable…. we broke that record and put it back to gether without even the slightest of screams…without even the slightest ofr broken hearted men…
broken souls are unfixable….broken souls are the glue for every solid soul…. broken souls are unfixable because they are useless when they are fixed.
Can i have a new one? Thios one has gotten awfully expencive…..yes…..uhuh…..i have fo……yes i have four of them already…. what?…speak up i can hear you….. are you on a mo……yes……hi?….yes i can hear…..helllo?!?…..hi!….ok yes your back…ha silly mobiles…no where was i?, oh right yes i have four of them and they break daily …..very usefull i know, this is what i was thinking! But you see im moving to a new soul-er system and i dont need all four souils there… oh yes no ill only be selling the one but you can choo… yes you can chose which one you want..
I assure you sir that this sould is in great form….
the pain?
well the pain of my soul is found everywhere in HEAVY LITTLE DROPS…
only the best quality i assure you…
yes…
i can take visa