"Work Related Tiredness" and "Is There Too Much Noise?".

All the 7am starts are finally starting to warp my brain. I'm falling asleep at odd times, forgetting things all the time - like "Why did I literally just get up and go to the kitchen?", getting things mixed up - the other day I went to the fridge in the staffroom looking for my food and realised that I actually had thought it was my fridge at home, in general the tiredness is effecting every aspect of my brain. I came up with a song today. It doesn't have a title. It goes like this:

Take a leaf out of my book,
Put it in your book,
We'll have a mixed leaf book.

Prince Charles made love to a man,
But the man had a horses head.

I hate the sound of children singing.
I used to be one,
And I hated it then.

Yep, that's my masterpiece ladies and gentlemen! That's my number 1 hit! That's the one I'm gonna pitch to next years Eurovision & X-Factor song deciding people!

Gigs. Sunday & Monday.
Sunday equals the New Zealand band So So Modern at the Cellar who were fucking ace and made me want them in bed if only they were girl ladies. Seriously good stuff. But it did put a dampener on Monday, coz I just wasn't really in the mood for a noise gig. Especially when the opening act was Joey Chainsaw who I'd never seen before and everyone told me he was really good but it just reminded me of a drunk old man at a wedding barging onto the stage and grabbing the guitarist's guitar shouting "Look at me! I'm a fuckin' rock star!" and proceeding to make a total tit of himself strumming on it, coz of course he can't play, and drunkenly groaning out some half-arsed lyrics to a song that he's got wrong anyway. Anyway Joey Chainsaw didn't actually sound like that coz we weren't at a wedding, but if you took that drunk at a wedding guy to a noise gig and he did that, that's what it reminded me of. And why the fuck has everyone started sitting down at noise gigs?! Seriously, the noise scene is perilously close to becoming some sort of 60's beatnik hippy parody if it carries on like this.

Which would be a shame coz there is still a lot to be excited about in it. Egyptian Death play their first gig with a fairly typical but very good take on noise and then just when you're on the verge of thinking you may have heard this all before, tribal drumming saves the day!! A whole new persperctive is brought into play resulting in one of the most interesting noise performances I've seen for a while. Sure it sounds a lot like Black Dice, but I'm not complaining and if you do, you're a fool.

Star of the night though is undoubtedly Sorrel. A fragile female form takes to the stage looking like Wynonna Ryder and like she'd be much happier reading poetry ant home with some Shins album on the stereo or something. But this is Emily from PatelPretal, not some stereotypical self-harmer. Now, I was a little worried this would just sound like PatelPretal (Very good, but what would the point of doing a solo set be?), and yes, some of the method seems the same, but the instrumentation seems to be different and the sounds created are not those of PP. Whereas they use layered and treated vocals to create an incredibly warm sound that engulfs and captivates, Sorrel solo is a different prospect, instead seemingly building up a wall of sound of intricate and differing layers that simply mesmerise. I genuinely lose that feeling of "I'm not really in the mood for this" and am astounded by the sounds that surround me. I imagine this would be the kind of noise act that Phil Spector would produce, if only he hadn't gone so fucking mental.

Then came Telescopes. I was excited as last time I saw Telescopes they were incredible. Sure, I was virtually the only person in the room who thought that, but still, I thought they were amazing. Somewhere along the line though the innovation seems to have been replaced by extreme laziness and here comes that really-not-in-the-mood feeling back again, just for a few minutes before I fell asleep. When I woke up they were still playing and it was still boring and so I left. They may well have been invators, but the problem is they sound like they've only just discovered that you don't actually have to play chords, rather that the perfected lush wonder of that performance 3 or 4 years ago.

Maybe the noise scene is becoming a victim of it's own success and it just doesn't seem new, exciting or fresh anymore. Or it could just be coz these bollocksy work shifts I've been on have drained me somewhat and affected my moods recently.

Oh yeah, I really liked Munch Munch on Sunday aswell. 2 x synths + 2 x percussion = 1 good band. Not as good as So So Modern though. I can't seem to write about that at the moment though. I wrote about them before, and it's still all valid, so just read the previous post I wrote about them to find out how good I think they are.

Wow! I think I just managed all that without one mention of the word "Awesome"! I am very proud of myself.