It's impossible for a human being to be entirely happy.

[alexsarll]

In a late addition to the bill of entertainments at tonight's Love Your Enemies, there is to be some form of raffle, with Mute goodies* to be won. I think it'll be a get-given-a-ticket-when-you-come-in job.

Among the useful lessons learned at my_red_dream's housewarming - she has a tendency to confuse pigeons with poo, while her beau is a dab hand at drawing bomb turbans, even on such unpromising wearers as the golden-mantled tree kangaroo (possessed, icecoldinalex claims, of 'shifty eyes').

"Mr Chirac said any subject matter that could hurt other people's convictions should be avoided." Well, that's one approach. On the other hand there's the quote which one sees attributed to many press veterans, in many slightly different wordings - I was first told it as being from Lord Beaverbrook: "News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising".
(On which note, who's been editing Wikipedia?)

Among things making me cheerful today are dubnobasswithmyheadman (a listen this morning reveals that all the tracks are too long for LYE, but heavens it's still a great album), the supervillain Egg Fu (an Oriental supercomputer in the shape of a giant egg, who holds Wonder Woman captive with his moustache), the birthday card from Tuesday which was basically Brokeback Mountain with dogs, and Chris Oakley's abiding love for Millennium.

There's plenty of anti-psychotic drugs out there, but has anyone ever invented the opposite, a conscience suppressant? I realise it's not something your average shrink would want to prescribe, but I imagine it would be a godsend to the CIA or KGB, and they had neurochemists of their own.

*No, not including missfrancesca.

Comments

[exliontamer.livejournal.com]

Hello, both Chris and I have been non-insomniacs for at least three nights and so will both be attending tonight. "Huzzah", I hear you shriek.

xxx

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Marv.

re conscience suppressants

[rentaghost31.livejournal.com]

i would imagine that the US army have been testing such pharmaceutical marvels on their jarheads for years. or the populations of small isolated villages deep in the georgia woods

Re: re conscience suppressants

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I think with the jarheads it's usually more a matter of corporate culture than chemistry.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

I am DYING OF TIRED so probably no going out for me tonight :(

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

O noes! But I was going to play '13th Century Boy' and maybe even 'Let's Build A Zoo'!

Mute goodies

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

A Nick Cave ceremonial dagger? A pair of Alison Goldfrapp's pants? Some Client leather trusses? A Depeche Mode portable bondage dungeon?

Dubnobass... is indeed utterly ace. (Frustratingly, I saw it in a CD shop at the weekend for £2 and was gonna snap it up to replace my tape copy, but it was too scratched to risk). I'm still confused as to how, if you listen to it, there seems to at least one more song than the total listed on the tracklist. Some of the stuff on the third album, whilst not quite as great, is shorter, and might be worth thinking about if you ever want to DJ any Underworld.

Re: Mute goodies

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Alas, I only have that on tape - but yeah, 'Push Upstairs' and 'King of Snake' are killer. I did contemplate 'Moaner' for tonight, I have the single of that - but there was no time to give it a listen and check.

I have absolutely no idea what the Mute items are, so who knows, you may be in luck.

Re: Mute goodies

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

I've always thought 'Moaner' was fairly rubbish actually. It has a, er, good beat, as the kids say, but generally is a bit of a racket, and is a good seven minutes plus. Suppose there is the Batman connection...

Oh, I'll be returning the Sparks album tonight, btw.

Re: Mute goodies

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Cheers!

The single has an edit on there - and believe me, as with Smashing Pumpkins' The End Is The Beginning Is The End, I like it in spite of, not because of, its connection with Possibly The Worst Superhero Film Ever.

Re: Mute goodies

[exliontamer.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, Underworld are wonderful.
Play 'Cowgirl'! Not like I request that at every club I go to or anything. Or 'Dirty Epic'. Or not.

xxx

Here comes christ on crutches

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yes but wonderful as they are, they're both far too long. Maybe if I had a two hour set or something.
(nb I do not have the CD with me today, so attempting to bring this to pass by braining one of the other DJs will not work)

Re: Mute goodies

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

I wonder where they could have come from...*ahem*

Re: Mute goodies

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I believe Dave Gahan came down Jamie's chimney with them. Maybe.

[thermaland.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

The very worst thing about Chirac is that I can't even say "don't blame me, I didn't vote for him". I bloody well had to... Still, only a couple of years before he's in jail.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Oh heavens yes, I remember your frustration at that, and I sympathise. Still, you can see why a crook like him'd be in favour of a tame press.

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

Why did he have to vote for the little french man? Was the other man worse

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the other one was veteran fascist tosser le Pen.

[thermaland.livejournal.com]

Jacques Chirac is very tall actually.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I bet it's all done with smoke and mirrors, like when they try to make Tom Cruise look heroic.

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

i call everyone little men. not just short mens.

[hospitalsoup.livejournal.com]

I dunno if you could use drugs to suppress the superego - it's not like you're born with a conscience hardwired in - but since it's meant to be modelled originally on authority figures, extensive exposure to an irresponsible role model should work.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's a lot to be said for bad examples, sure, but they only go so far, at least on someone who's reached adulthood and has a fairly strong personality.

[ottah.livejournal.com]

Kingmaker!! Squee!!!

I thought money would change everything, it only changes what you drink.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I only really know The Two Big Singles from their heyday, but having found In The Best Possible Taste for about a quid ages ago, I think it's a bit of a Great Lost Album.

Re: I thought money would change everything, it only changes what you drink.

[augstone.livejournal.com]

a bit of a Great Lost Album

seriously?

what were the two big singles? i had 'eat yourself whole' and 'sleepwalker' (?) on cassette, and did like them. but now i can only remember 'really scrape the sky' and 'eat yourself whole'.

Don't pretend to care when you don't care.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yes, seriously. But that may just be me.

The two earlier singles I always used to hear out were 'Ten Years Asleep' and 'Queen Jane'.

Re: Don't pretend to care when you don't care.

[augstone.livejournal.com]

i remember the second time i visited the u.k. it was one of my goals to get the second kingmaker album. i'm pretty sure i was the only american, possibly only visitor, to have such intentions.

Re: Don't pretend to care when you don't care.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was even that common a goal among the natives...

[dignam.livejournal.com]

dubnobasswithmyheadman was the first CD I ever bought in England, and the first techno CD I ever bought in my life. I snatched it two weeks after it was released, around February of '94, after the Guardian reviewed it as "intelligent techno" (before the wonks started coining IDM, which itself is a lie)...

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Something tells me Skyscraper I Love You would be quite on the mark for LYE if you bled it into something else halfway through.

I'm a big fan of Moaner, personally. I have yet to find a better sonic representation of the pure -- but repressed -- vindictive rage of the spurned lover.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

But I'd never bleed it into something else halfway through! Not only can I not mix, I usually find it annoying even when done by those who can. There are a few over-long outros I cut off, but otherwise I much prefer to play songs as their creators intended.

[dignam.livejournal.com]

But Underworld creates their songs to be mixed! That's the one conceptual flaw in an argument with which I disagree somewhat, but can still respect.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

See, I only really hear that on the second album, which is why I don't like it half so much as the first and third.

[dignam.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, but if you take a full scope of their work, you can see the way in which they've used similar spectrums, similar types of sounds in order to make many of their tracks multiply interconnectable. For example: one of their first singles (not on any of the albums, but on the 10-year retrospective double-disc) was called "Dirty," which uses the same plaintive whine as on "Dirty Epic." If you have the "Born Slippy" CD single, it's actually two tracks: Born Slippy and Nuxx. On their live album Everything, Everything, Rez becomes Cowgirl becomes Rez again. The idea of telecommunications, wire connections, USB ports, etc being sexualized is a principal trope in their lyrics -- check Dirty Epic against Push Upstairs and Push Downstairs.

Sorry, I'm a bit of a fanatic.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

OK, granted, they can do it with their own material (and people doing that sort of stuff live is a whole different question - I don't like mash-ups, but I often love it when people cover two songs in one - indeed, I'll be playing something like that tonight). And I did, once, hear a DJ in Sheffield doing some amazing things with tantalising little snatches of 'Born Slippy' dropped in to other songs over the course of about an hour before he actually played it. But compare him to the hundred other DJs I've heard who only spoiled the track by trying to get clever, factor in my lack of skillz on top of that, and I know which way I'd rather err.

[dignam.livejournal.com]

And I did, once, hear a DJ in Sheffield doing some amazing things with tantalising little snatches of 'Born Slippy' dropped in to other songs over the course of about an hour before he actually played it.

I wish I'd been there. It's a very clever way of doing it -- acknowledging that it had been wildly overplayed, but it's still an absolute stomper of a track. I don't know if you have the Everything, Everything DVD, but Underworld do something nearly as fun: they initiate an absolutely clobbering beat from the middle of the track, and add to it only slightly. Everyone's going nuts with this very gradually amplifying beat, yet no one knows exactly what it is. Then the synth gets laid down. And a cheer goes up. Ahh! It's been here all along. Like dashing frenetically all over your house only to remember your specs are on top of your head.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

No, I've not seen that - I'm seldom much of a one for concert films, except where the visuals are inspired to the point of mental (eg Rammstein, or Pet Shop Boys' Performance). Wouldn't mind hearing the soundtrack, though.
There used to be something like the reverse of that at Cambridge bops - all the rugby players would hear the intro, think "ME LIKE LAGER SONG!" and hit the floor - then stand there like lemons, swaying gently and looking confused, as they realised they didn't actually know any of the rest of the track, or what to do while it played.

[dignam.livejournal.com]

Ha! I remember much of the same at That Other Place. The visuals in this are inspired to the point of mental. Because it's all controlled by Underworld. Underworld's larger than itself -- it has a visual-arts arm, called Tomato, which integrates a specific textual and geometrical aesthetic into a multisensory and intertextual experience. They excel at projecting individual words from the lyrics at syncopated juxtaposition to the performance (rather a postmodern rendering of Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues") so that the individual selected words form their own counter-poem to the song (much in the way Derrida has two texts working in books like "Cinders" and "The Postcard.") They play with slippage of meaning. During "Rez/Cowgirl," for example, "an eraser of love" becomes "any razor of love" becomes "an erazor of love" becomes "any reason at all" then "reason" becomes "raison" becomes "raisin". All flicking so quickly your mind interprets all of them simultaneously. You might think this is all parlour-trickery but I've been thinking about writing a serious piece on them for a long time. Now that I've started a major project, they will factor in quite importantly.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Cor, that does sound a bit good. Will have to keep an eye out.

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

There's about two really great songs ('Pearl's Girl' and the opening one - 'Juanita'? on 'Second Toughest...' but other than that I don't rate it much either. Most of the songs sound un-realised; half-way between the style of those on the first album, and those on the third album, and as such fall awkwardly in between to not great effect.

It's better than 'Underneath The Radar' though.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

'Underneath the Radar'?

I've still yet to hear that Hundred Nights Off or whatever it was called - the single and the loss of a member really didn't inspire me with confidence.

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

UTR is the album Underworld Mk 1 (i.e. without Darren Emerson, but with some other blokes) made as a band in the mid 80s; it's full of overblown 80s funk. (See also their second album, 'Change The Weather'). Neither are very good.

I heard the first single from the fourth album, which I thought was quite good actually, if hardly revolutionary, but I've still not heard the accompanying album.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, that era of Underworld - as I understand it, its erasure from history is as worthy as that of Eminem's real first album.
'Doot Doot' is OK, though.

[johnnyvertigen.livejournal.com]

I've got a Kingmaker album somewhere on vinyl, I can't remember a single thing about it except listening to it non-stop one night when I was teenaged then never again for some reason.