Thursday, September 29, 2005

the best music ever (pt 1)

Christian Wallumrod Ensemble

Four men slip unassumingly onto the stage. They choose instruments: a piano, a trumpet, a violin and the drums. The piano plays, a note that holds on until it’s just a gentle resonant hum from the instrument. Then the trumpet, blown gently, it makes a noise like the wind, puffing and gusting around us. The violin is softly caressed with the bow: another resonant murmur emerges. The drums are tapped with brushes, the mottled noise of quiet rain emerges soon followed by the bass of thunder. The audience is silent, captivated by this wintry scene, by these men who can make such softness so enveloping and expansive.

Later a crescendo of shrill noise holding on for so long, so so long, as the drummer bows at a symbol, and the squeezebox bellows its note and the violin saws fast and steady and the trumpeter simply whistles. The noise fills up the room, you suck it up too until you’re so full you’re going to burst, then it breaks and you let out a sigh of amazement.

And then scratchy, raspy noises punctuated thrice, just three brief moments and no more, by a violin note and a choral cry from the trumpeter and it’s so beautiful I almost cry.

ecm records

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Milton Keynes

Grey. A lone business man wanders lost, in a daze: how did I get here, what happened in that meeting, where did I leave my car? The footpaths wend their way through car parks, bonnets shimmering unnaturally in the dull light (ten coats of wax on Sunday?). Once in a while an office building juts from between the parked vehicles, cuboid and stark against the sky. Concrete. An underpass, another, and another. Cranes in the distance, the city regenerates and expands itself incessantly. A place of four-wheeled fauna, on foot the streets seem deserted, the pavements great rivers of concrete slab; divorced from the roads, divorced from people, divorced from anything familiar. Desolation.

Periphery. Houses in a row, 60s estates. Small packs of people here. Midday, in the gloom, drinking White Lightning and Tennants Extra. A Happy Shopper, the first sign of life for a long time. Some kids boosting a trailer from a garage. No ties, no briefcases, no offices. Desolation, depression. The cars fly past over the underpass; beneath is nothing.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

what are my skills? (pt 2)

estimating rhubarb mass to 1.5kg.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

september flight #8


september flight #8
Originally uploaded by monkeyinfez.