It’s that time of year again where I’d rather just disappear and let you all get on with it. Imprinted upon me, indelibly, the hell of Meadowhall, recycling escalators and circling three floors, only to end up back at House of Fraser, again, eternally chained to some Muzak membrane. And don’t get me going on Christmas tunes. As much as I admire and respect the late Shane Macgowan (RIP) for his talent and contribution, I have to admit my first thought, on hearing of his passing, was oh no, it’s bound to be Christmas number one.
This year, I find myself alone. Waitrose had quality silver taper candles down to £1.25 a pack, so I bought four to see me into the New Year. I expect soft lighting, wind raging up through the plug hole in the shower at ungodly hours, and cocooning under the quilt - bar NYE, for which I’ve been asked along to In Dusk We Trust in the Acid Arch, which will be ‘blacked out with lasers, lights, smoke and a full on sound system to boot’. Maybe I’ll even get tasered. As women, we’re pretty lucky that our orgasms are never quite the same. They linger, ripple, go into hiding, deliciously undo, tease us with the prospect of a second (or third) coming, or madly thwart us; depending upon our mood, hormones, day job, perseverance, or psychosexual stimulus, etc. When I told an ex I wanted him to treat me like meat, I meant it. Suggesting he might pummel the living daylights out of me, at least three times a day, though, in that order might be restored might have been a step too far, particularly as he was still learning English at the time.
I recently met an Jungian astrologer in a coffee shop who suggested I get my chart done. It transpired that this woman is neither interested in star signs, or daily columns, but more Pluto moving into Aquarius during the pandemic, when everything went online. We got on to talking about the exponential pace of AI which she explained was due to this planetary alliance currently being acted out. I’ve always been fascinated by space, all that mysterious dark energy expanding the universe as we speak, planets spinning at insane speeds on their axes, amidst ever-proliferating and defunct man-made debris - Space Junk - floating around, causing trouble; and all this going on in divine silence, bar the grunt of gravitational waves.
On another note, there must be a plethora of social media accounts still in existence that belong to the dead, which nobody has deactivated. Passwords aren’t necessarily saved, and the dead can’t exactly pop back to do touch screen ID, so that a kindly relative could then access their devices, and delete their profiles. Plus, with more people living alone, more are obviously dying alone. These stories of some random council worker popping in on a tenant in arrears and finding them dead on the couch with the TV still on are so horrific, precisely because they are true. And no one even knew they were missing.
I rarely if ever use Soundcloud these days since it got taken over by bot accounts and spam promoters but I used to, back in the days when I started recording with my old Aria acoustic into voice notes, in the various studios I lived at, in itinerant jobs, and one of my followers was my Dad. His avatar is still there, and I expect it will still be there, after he’s gone. It put me in mind of a poignant passage written by the American author, Jonathan Franzen, describing how, on his mother’s passing, he went around to sort out her belongings (that inevitability we surely all dread) and opened the fridge to find half a tin of garden peas wrapped in cling film. It nearly broke him. And it’s just the type of thing that would break me too. These incidental habits and routines that make up a person. The people we come to know, and those we get to love; it’s a miracle, really.
The magnificent James Webb Telescope and the plethora of bejewelled images it has sent back to Earth is surely a greater invention than any ‘vaccine’. When I was living in the south-east my Dad bought me a telescope for Christmas. I had no balcony or garden and so all I could really do was point it out of the window opposite the Waitrose car park, and hope for the best. A colleague at the uni came around one night to inspect the telescope.
“I can’t see anything”, I said. “It’s not working”.
“Sam, it’s a telescope, not magic,” he replied, clocking I’d got it pointed at the glass. My Dad had previously text me back to check if the lens cap was off. (You get the idea.)
I used to watch Star Trek, like everyone else, fascinated by the fact that Captain Kirk et al. (who I once tweeted should have been P.O.T.U.S., no response there) could just land on a new planet every week, and things were never boring. These dudes with their immaculate silhouettes and gravity defying hair dos certainly weren’t stuck in bullshit jobs.1
I once laid down across a low lying branch of an indigenous tree on a bush house by a creek in the outback in Northern Queensland, and nearly came, with no thought of the spiders or snakes which must have been stalking me; gazing at the Southern sky, tipsy, trying to figure out the constellations, back to front.
The more I write about music, the more I’m coming to accept that there’s no point in writing about music.
I knew this anyway, but perhaps it’s a prepositional thing, in that we can write around it, rather than about, or on it. In his epistolary chapter, “Some Notes About Song (for Yasmine Hamdan)”, found in Confabulations (2016)2 his slim book of essays on post-truth (published by Verso a year before he died), John Berger addresses the Lebanese singer, Yasmin Hamdan; re-capturing, in his trademark, sensual prose, the one time experience of sketching her whilst watching her sing. This is something painters really do - pay attention. And it’s very erotic to be on the receiving end of it.
Berger, (who rarely wrote on song, which makes it all the more interesting), delivers her to the reader, holding onto the mic “as if she was about to go to sea”. This struck me, in the way an intuition does, in that we know it to be true. And the more I perform, and watch others perform, the more I’ve become aware of our relationship to the mic, rooted as it is to the stand. It’s about so much more than mic technique, though - it’s about our relationship to loss. And here, Berger perfectly encapsulates the way that - as singers - we pour ourselves into the mic, encased in wire gauze and meshing, as if it were a container we might spill out of (which, of course, it is). And the mic is never not erotic.
During my improv nights at The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, with members of GIOdynamics, on the last Wednesday of every month, I’ve taken to wrapping the mic loosely around my neck and shoulders, de-rooting myself. As I’m a mobile performer on stage, this enables me to get in amidst the gear and electronics, and up close to the other performers, if needed. These 5-6 minute sets, which we each do two of, in different groups, can get chaotic, which may well be the point - but there’s always a kind of internal coherence, because we’re all listening, as much as playing, taking every prepositional approach going to what is stirring in the room. At times, especially when in line with the noise guitar, it can feel like a sexual dialectic. He strikes a chord, I respond, and vice-versa. And there’s no time to think, bliss.
The black lesbian poet and activist, Audrey Lorde, theorised the erotic as: “… a power within each of us that resides on a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling […]” (1989: 1)3, reclaiming the erotic as a “genre of the senses” (in opposition to pornography) and a “technique of self” (Ferguson, 2012: 297), generating excess. Such an “aesthetics of excess” was also exhibited by the overlooked American black jazz vocalist, improviser, dancer, and teacher, Jeanne Lee, noted for her feral album Conspiracy (1974)4. Her’s was an “insistent embodiment” (Porter, 2006: 11) which tested the boundaries of vocal performance art, informed by what might now be termed her lived experience as a dancer. Lee’s contributions went unaccounted for some time, in the literature, due, in no part, to her marginalised status as a mother and black woman who just happened to make forays into experimental, and often elitist, avant-garde improvisation circles.
I came across Conspiracy (1974) at the same time I was listening to Alice Coltrane’s Eternity (1975)5 and was pretty much blown away by both; the latter sort of dissolving me. Such examples of intuitive “right-brained activity” (McGilchrist, 2019, 2021)6 of the type called upon in improvisation, for example, resist the dominance and control of the left-brained hemisphere, which, in accordance with McGilchrist’s divided brain hypothesis, is responsible for the rigidity of thought and control which pervades our systems and institutions. Intuition is not an ‘airy-fairy’ faculty but rather an immeasurable reserve, for as there is no certainty in life, and we would be better to embrace it than distrust it, and more so, in that empirical studies have consistently proven it to be not only a quicker decision maker, but a more accurate one. In brief, the more time we procrastinate or ruminate upon a decision, the less optimal that decision proves to be.
The ambient pioneer, Brian Eno, is an artist who has gone on to embrace such intuition in his working methods and processes in what he terms “in-studio composition”7. Going back to painting, Eno uses the analogy of the painter working with his material onto a surface, using an “additive” approach, on describing how he might “come [to the studio] with actually rather a bare skeleton of the piece, or perhaps with nothing at all. I often start working with nothing at all” [which] “puts the composer in the identical position of the painter […] working directly with a material […]” (2017: 185-188). With a singer, this material, is, of course, the voice, and its mercurial properties, leaving its signature upon the recording, which is already dead, and a ghost of itself. In performance, the voice would disappear, and one would leave the stage. In psychoanalysis, such death or disappearance would be countered by its opposition, Eros, from the Greek, which translating as ‘the carrier of chaos,’ the principal creative force. Repetition can play a significant part in how we generate and map these patterns. Music, is, at the end of the day, about rhythm, and rhythm is about sex, as is the drum kit, and the pulse. We repeat.
The term “repetition-compulsion” - which is classified as an ego-defence mechanism - was first defined by Freud in his essay: "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" (1914, quoted in Phillips, 2016)8, and subsequently expanded upon in his subsequent and seminal essay, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (2015). Beyond clinical practice, though, I’d say that “repetition – compulsion” also gets channelled into patterns in music making in which one ‘remembers, repeats, and works though’ their life, or, even, their “unlived life”9 (Phillips, 2013) - projecting their fantasies onto songs, and testing desirous boundaries, leaving traces on the material, in that “[r]epetition could be a love-test to the world, the individual’s unconscious quest for innovative response.” (2016: 380).
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My new EP - Blackout Baby - is out now. You can make my day by buying it here.
Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Allan Lane.
Berger, J. (2016) “Some notes about song (for Yasmine Hamdan)”. Confabulations. London: Verso.
Lorde, A. (2007) “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, pp. 53-59.
Lee, J. (1974) Conspiracy. [Vinyl] US: Earthforms Records-814.
Coltrane, A. (1976) Eternity. US: Warner Records.
McGilchrist, I. (2019) The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world, New expand edn. New Haven; New York, NY: Yale University Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2021) The matter with things: our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world, London: Perspectiva Press.
Eno, B. (2017) “The studio as compositional tool.” pp. 185-188. In Cox, C. & Warner, D. (2017) Audio culture: readings in modern music, Revis edn. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
Phillips, A. (2016) "On "Remembering, Repeating and Working Through," Again", Contemporary psychoanalysis, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 375-382.
Phillips, A. (2013) Missing out. In praise of the unlived life. London: Penguin.