1. It’s Canadian Thanksgiving, and I’m in Moncton, New Brunswick. I’m enjoying this gentle stretching of my legs, beyond Toronto and beyond the little bubble that sits over it. In a way Toronto’s most appealing characteristic – its successful multiculturalism – also means that if you’re a foreign visitor, like me, then you need never really face up to the task of becoming more Canadian.
2. I thoroughly intend to become more Canadian – first, imaginatively artistically, and then (this will always be completely secondary) in life itself. I’ve been reviewed in Toronto papers as a local musician, but not one of those reviews has failed to mention my Englishness. Considering the kind of songs I’ve made, I have to admit I’ve brought that on myself.
3. My current album, Persisting Like a Racehorse, might sound completely resolute in its Englishness – in its recitals of pastoral moods, in its reawakening of the English village or the cheerful, horrific seaside holiday. It’s only having finally released the thing that I’ve started to hear something else in the record. What I hear is the grim conclusion of Englishness. Never again will I revisit these lands… in art.
4. What then? I intend to make some Canadian music. When I think of independent “Canadian music” right now I think of all these bands that play in Toronto venues, singing songs about geography and recycling – bands with outdoorsy, camping-trip names like Rural Alberta Advantage and Wilderness of Manitoba and Forest City Lovers and Muskox and Saskatchewan Seal Farmers and Olenka and the Autumn Lovers. Apart from Olenka, who I once shared a bill with, I haven’t listened to any of these bands (and by the way I wish them all well). It’s not a flaw in my critical method that I haven’t actually listened to these bands – quite the opposite, because I’m talking about the cultural atmospheres that are created when thousands of bands choose a way to present themselves to millions of people who will or will not ever hear them. I associate those Canadian bands with a lot of beards, a lot of flannel, a lot of acclaim from the music prize panel.
5. I don’t think I will make that kind of Canadian music. For a start my Canadian music will involve much less music.
6. I also want fake Canadas. Quite recently I linked to some recordings of Celtic mouth music that I’d been enjoying, so imagine my delight when yesterday I got to listen to some Acadian diddlers while eating fish and chips. I’m a susceptible tourist at the moment and might have been fobbed off with reality, but I hope that they were totally inauthentic. That calculated mix of the east coast’s French, Scottish and Irish voices gets me thinking.
7. During this trip I’ve been reading Damian Tarnopolsky’s superb first novel Goya’s Dog. This book imagines an arch-modernist English painter called Edward Dacres, and sets him loose on second world war era Toronto. The grim and bitter Dacres is certainly the painting part of Wyndham Lewis (although Lewis himself was actually born in Nova Scotia), but there’s also, to my understanding, a bit of Fr. Rolfe involved too. What I find especially valuable about this novel right now is its ability to reimagine the strangeness of Canada in its earlier life, when the country was an enormous space with plenty of room to tell great immodest folk-lies. Horror also fills these spaces.
Click this link to buy Persisting Like a Racehorse on CD. The album will also be available on iTunes in a few weeks’ time.
There are two Ernest Hellos. One of them was a well-connected man of letters in nineteenth century Paris, a complicated Catholic with connections to some of the more mystical strains of French literature. This Ernest Hello no longer exists.
The next Ernest Hello hasn’t really much to do with the first. This Ernest Hello is claiming, slyly, to be responsible for the release and promotion of the new Idle Tigers album. And he also sings, shyly, on some tracks by Young Truck. You can hear them below. Like the Symbolists who followed on from his namesake, he’s just an unearthly kind of voice, his mind full of vapour, his body not substantial at all. It’s not yet clear what his intentions are.
These might still be tweaked by the supremely brilliant Young Truck, but here are a couple of song pieces for now: Teethcake, a sparse electronic song suitable for morning listening; and The Angler, which is a crucifixion image as visioned by a boy on a fishing trip with his dad.
Give us a nug!
Young Truck + Ernest Hello, Teethcake
Young Truck + Ernest Hello, The Angler
It’s fun to see my friend Lauren Kirshner making high profile public appearances all over the place in support of her ace debut novel Where We Have To Go. Lauren’s work is fiction, not autobiography, but nevertheless the fact that the novel introduces its protagonist as an eleven-year-old girl growing up in the Toronto got me thinking about my own eleven-year-old self in Bradford.
Other than that, I have no real reason to tell this story now, except that green seems to be the Idle Tigers colour of choice right now.
I am a schoolchild, perhaps 11 years old. I’ve recently left my comprehensive middle school, because I’m the embarrassed and reluctant recipient of an “assisted place” at a local school that classes itself as “independent” – neither a grammar school nor the classic public school, but some semi-antique product of northern Methodism where morning assemblies are soundtracked by Wesley’s Hymns and Psalms and the playing fields are used more for egg-chasing than football. Unlike those other types of private school, there are at least girls here, but I have no idea what they’re about.
Unsurprisingly, for the first couple of years my closest friends at the school will also be going there for free. Most of the other pupils, the ones who’d come through the prep school named after the Brontes, keep telling me that I have a thick Yorkshire accent, which seems to me like the most bizarre and stupid observation anyone’s ever made. My Dad will later point out that since I was born in Yorkshire and am living in Yorkshire, it would be much stranger if I were to have an Irish or Chinese accent, and I see his point. In the evenings I meet up with my old friends who stayed on at the comprehensive school, and spend most of the time flushing self-consciously, aware that I’ve made myself weak by going to the “posh” school. My natural shyness around brasher boys is exacerbated by a violent mix of crippling class consciousness and oddly-placed guilt. I don’t know this yet, but I’ll never quite finish my expected career at the posh school, and will leave in a horrible rage a few years later to sit on a park bench for five months and then resume my A-levels at an inner-city college in Leeds.
I don’t eat well. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that this is a class thing; based on experience I’d say that all eleven-year-olds are grimy little bastards when it comes to nutrition. After all, this is well before Jamie Oliver has even decided to be a cockney. What I’m saying is, the fact that I’m not particularly good at identifying different types of vegetables by sight isn’t as unusual as it may seem. Nevertheless, when it comes to a break-time ruckus beside the school’s vegetable patch, I’m there or thereabouts, by God, despite my ignorance of fresh fruit and vegetables, despite my natural shyness. You see, having learned quickly that in my new school, any old semi-insolent remark made to a teacher earns guaranteed laughter from classmates, due to my accent being just a bit thicker than theirs, I’ve volunteered myself as a bit of a clown. Even a plainly offered translation in French class, such as “’Ow much are t’carrots?” (now there’s a vegetable that I do know about) will get a response. A resourceful little mite even at eleven, I’ve started to trade on my provincialism. I’m a very able student when prompted, but by habit rough and unbookish, always enjoying being thrown in the boy-high rhubarb. At eleven, I’m known for calling most things in life, whether obviously enjoyable or not, “a beaut laugh”. Strangely, a few years later I’ll be known for finding most things in life simply painful.
I don’t know how the great Brussels Sprout fight begins, or through what series of negotiations I turn from innocent bystander to rogue participant. Whatever the case, it’s every man for himself and the situation turns grim when several of the principal sprout-chuckers are caught and immediately marched to the deputy head master’s office. I flee and hide out nonchalantly by the special needs centre for a few minutes, before being caught and sent belatedly to the same office, like forwarded mail.
The thing about the deputy head, Mr. Wilberforce, is that he is a man who lives up to all the might and severity of his surname. He has a fat bald brainy head, and two little lights on the outside of his office door labeled “Enter” and “Wait”, and he responds to knocks on the door by pressing a button that lights up one message or the other. I’ve never seen anything like it. By the time I’m deposited in Mr. Wilberforce’s office, the rest of the gaggle are already several minutes into their proper bollocking, augmented with all the usual feats of rhetoric: hints of violence, general appeals to the Christian spirit and unspecific aspersions cast on the boys’ manliness. At least two of the lads are in tears.
He addresses me. “Why are you here?” is his standard question.
It’s a classic disciplinarian’s tactic – it’s a horrid thing to have to name your crime, especially so just minutes after having been caught. I flounder a bit, but get it out. “I was throwing things.”
The answer obviously seems incomplete to Mr. Wilberforce, and he is not pleased. He probes, painfully. “What were you throwing?”
It’s a simple question, but one that I’m honestly not able to answer. I certainly don’t know that the missiles I’d been sending and receiving were sprouts. I could play it safe and just say vegetable, but I don’t know for sure that it’s a vegetable – you can’t be too certain what’s a vegetable and what isn’t, when there are untrustworthy articles like tomatoes and cucumbers at large.
He asks again: “What were you throwing?”
I decide that what I should do is go for a wholly descriptive answer. Resolute, I tell him straight: “Them little green things.”
Don’t mean to be a bore about this, but clicking on the tab at the top of the site will now lead you to all the lyrics for Persisting Like a Racehorse, with a few pictures to keep you happy. You should be able to order a copy online by this time next week.
Yours,
The Merchant.
My new album cover is under construction. It features an animal. It’s good – perhaps almost as good as the cover that Leonard Cohen designed (and Sony subsequently rejected) for the Canadian’s Ten New Songs.
The thing about adopting a name for yourself, as an artist, is that you might spend your entire career attempting to make an art that looks or sounds or feels like that chosen name. I’m listening to David Sylvian’s Manafon for the first time, and I think I can confirm that this is exactly the kind of song that someone called David Sylvian should be singing. It’ll take me further listening to explain exactly why, but I think it’s something to do with the fact that Manafon is all one creeping song, its purposes all hidden, its confessions shifty; Sylvian has never sounded quite so sylvanian, so much like the kind of forest that might grow in the future if all our media and information and small disturbances were left to plant themselves in a waste land and sneak up, centuries later, when no-one is left to scrutinise or subjectivise. There’s a cruel objectivity here, the kind of objectivity found mostly in nature and in the news media, but rarely in art. As I’m typing, Sylvian is singing “his aspirations visited him nightly, and amounted to so little”, in that voice of his that comes to mean more, the more detached the intonation.
And needless to say, in the unlikely event that I look as good as David Sylvian when I’ve over fifty, I’ll be rather pleased with myself.
(Particular thanks to my favourite radio programme for allowing me to hear this by playing the record in its entirety!)
(Later edit: I swear that when I wrote this I had no idea that the cover of Manafon looks like this:
— which is probably about as sylvanian as Sylvian could have managed!)
Over two years ago I wrote about the state that Bradford’s city centre was in. In fact, the city has been in much the same state since, and I’d given up on much being done with the site.
Fancy my surprise, then, on hearing that sound-architect / turntable collagist / Philip Jeck collaborator Janek Schaefer has worked on a permanent sound installation to surround the new park that will occupy the current wreck-space. The Bradford Soundpool will be up and running by 2012.
The work makes use of bioacoustical materials (“no Disney or Jean Michel Jarre”, Schaefer reassuringly specifies), playing with birdsong as “a sound icon of migration”, which is an interesting way of addressing the city’s multiculturalism. Chris Watson – that’s Cabaret Voltaire’s Chris Watson, and David Attenborough’s Chris Watson – will be chipping in with field recordings.
I also look forward to something called the “Bradford Blowhole”, which is “a piece written for uplifting brass band drones to coincide with the daily Bradford Blast fountain feature”. I have to say that this project is a million times more promising than another row of chain pubs or mobile phone shops. Note that the sounds that Schaefer is proposing to use are supposed to reassure by their echoing of nature and of a familiar local past; this isn’t going to be astonishingly transgressive sound art. I do hope, though, that there might be something gently disorienting about the ambient sound cycles that he intends to surround Bradfordians with. Ideally these layered historical echoes should intersect unpredictably with the still-present, undesigned sounds of the current moment. Which might include, of course, the nightly row from said rows chain pubs nearby. The interesting parts of urban atmospheres occur when the ideal meets the not-ideal, and clearly Schaefer’s intention is to introduce sounds that integrate rather than impose themselves, which in itself might suggest a model for cosmopolitan tolerance.
A provincial tradition tends to be that local people get prickly when an artist is commissioned to tell them something about their own city, but at this early stage I’m full of optimism.
As a brief sequel to my earlier post on doo-wop, I should mention that like most sensible people, I do like to root around the Ubuweb archives when I fancy something tasty, and one of my recent favourites has been their mp3s of Celtic mouth music. Otherwise known as didling, lilting, puirt a beul, cheek music… some accounts speculate that this music came about following the banning of pipes after the Jacobite uprisings in 1745, which if true is testament to a certain resourcefulness.
