I've Watched C-Beams Glitter in the Dark...
It's a rainswept and shadowy night here in Gotham City. The ginger fullball cat is asleep next to me, the lamps are on in each corner of my dark red and mahogany living room and I am curled up on the sofa with my laptop, freezing my fingers typing as the Scottish wind skelps the windowpanes of my flat, five floors up from the Partick Tavern and the ubiquitous Subway sandwich mecca.
I've just updated my online shop with paintings and prints and I suppose for tonight that's enough. I kind of blank out when it comes to promotion; it's like I'm trying to shine a torch in a musty old dark museum but the light gets blocked at certain areas and I can't see through. It's a vagueness that you can see (favourably, hopefully) in my artwork but it shows through in lots of areas of my life. It's a sort of dream-visual. I've had it since I was a tiny child and it's so hard to explain it except to say that it's almost like there was another life, semi-transparent, travelling along my timeline and sometimes we tangled over each other. JG Ballard's novels see to be able to descibe this unusual feeling even though he never makes it explicit. Chine Mieville's The City and The City makes it more palpable but it's entirely different with him and maybe less close than Ballard to how I actually feel.
In the early 90s I was too young to have a grasp of the emerging culture. Looking back, I feel like the future that was going to happen just didn't. Back when the Shamen and the KLF were in the charts, music was futuristic, movies were about Cyberspace and culture was looking FORWARDS. Did the Millenium destroy it? Did we all build towards it thinking it would be the future and then realise as it happened it was just another January?
Around that time we had the influx of retro New York guitar bands who kind of destroyed (or changed) the momentum of the preceeding electronic/trip-hop/big beat/electroclash/whatever scene existed before. Since then we have had beards and Ukuleles, EDM (talk about inventing a new term for an old thing?) and some very bland, lazy and worst of all COMFORTABLE music. Not only that, since the social depression of 2008, most popular music seems to be most interested in having a dialogue about wealth and status, as if talking about it will bring it all back. I understsand the Law of Attraction but this is crass...
Is it perhaps approaching that cusp time again when a so-called underground act of bunch of acts (lets not call it a 'movement' because that doesn't mean anything) are about to rise to the surface, gasping for air and punching with their fists to make a dent in the smug and empty smog of culture? Can we still have 'isms'? Is old music actually just better than new music?
Of course not. We just have to sift through all the shit, same as we ever did. There is so much to make music about, make art about, make chat about! I can't wait to do it all with you x
