Transplanted ghosts
I found myself walking across Eugene today, slightly overdressed (overblack?) for the humid, sunless weather. I remember coming to this city when I first moved to this part of the world, some ten years ago now, and being amazed by its vibrant energy. Here I found the "fucking hippies" my father had always bitched about, the scraggy mud-crusted satyrs who rolled their own cigarettes, the dreadlocked earth goddesses that provoked such unclean thoughts in my mind, the rolling tie-die volkswagen fortresses and patchouli and hand drums. Now it's become yet another repository for traffic, an artery for cars, and there's no place to sit down. And good luck finding a pay phone, or crossing the street safely. Somewhere along the line this place decided to choke to death in reaction to a lack of sustaining economic life. And now, it's like everywhere else-- impersonal, laden with trash, and full of street-wandering crazies.
The sign read 'Used cds, discount tobacco, vintage clothing, new & used DJ equipment.' I thought, that sounds promising. I've always been a sucker for the unique and unusual, you see, and the sign said this place had it. The dj equipment and other sundry audio torture devices were mediocre at best, with prices offering no incentive over buying them off the internet. The vintage clothing was standard thrift store fare, but the sort that frat boys will pay $50 to wear. And I didn't bother with the tobacco once I got into the CD section.
Obscure japanese pop. Musique concrete. Entire albums made with a single Theramin. Underground hip-hop. There were even experimental, ambient and minimalist sections. The cd that made me smile, though, was a mint copy of Pigface: A New High In Low. Though I didn't know it as such, this cd was the first exposure I got to what I'd later recognise as the trip-hop sound. A friend of mine copied cd1 of this album onto cassette tape for me during our freshman year of high school, sans the first two tracks. Trent Reznor and that Al Jourgensen guy used to be in this band, he said. You'll like it.
It's nothing like Nine Inch Nails or Ministry. In fact, it's more like Massive Attack as done by angry white Americans, and at age fourteen, I rocked out to it. Mum thought I was nuts when she found me bobbing my head to a combination of heavy funk drumming and digeridoo basslines with some nutball screaming Beat poetry over it. She was, after all, a big fan of Genesis. The tape lived a long suffering life until, after about three years of continuous use, it stretched beyond capacity and finally broke. Since then, like much of the other music I listened to during that time, I've been completely unable to find it again. Not even the internet has yielded results. That is, until today, when I bought another copy, used, for nine bucks.
(over a lurking, muddy bass loop) "I'm your three-pound coke babe, your rock-feeder, your dope fiend... I am the post-foetus that kicked you inside your porous, absorbant walls... I am the life you will give me, I am the life that will remind you of your true pain. I am your three-pound octopus, tentacled in plastic tubes, I am the living version of your autopsy."
The city's all wrapped up in plastic
like an electronic cocoon
if you lay in the street
you can hear it humming
filling up slowly from underground
if you close your eyes
you can observe the blue prints
the man-made DNA that spirals
breathlessly out of control
as synapse collapse
bridges snap
into a restless utopia...
UTOPIA!
[This song still gives me chills ]
I saved the cd until I got home, so I could hear it again through my bourgeois audio engineering headphones, letting the sound of a time and place long past leap out at me in terrible, sickly-sweet clarity once again. In a way, this album's socially conscious lyrics spurred on my own contemplation of things like justice, poverty, and all that terrible jazz that would come to fuck up my life in a few years. It also convinced me that sitar & 303 solos are cool. (up to a point, anyways)
Like Argyle Park's first and only album, Portishead's Dummy, and Manson's Antichrist Superstar, I still have most of this album meorised word for word, sound for sound. The songs play into my brain like a heartbeat... I feel like I've recovered a small part of myself. But I tell myself, It's just a cd. This is just music. This is stupid. (But it won't hurt anyone.)
The sign read 'Used cds, discount tobacco, vintage clothing, new & used DJ equipment.' I thought, that sounds promising. I've always been a sucker for the unique and unusual, you see, and the sign said this place had it. The dj equipment and other sundry audio torture devices were mediocre at best, with prices offering no incentive over buying them off the internet. The vintage clothing was standard thrift store fare, but the sort that frat boys will pay $50 to wear. And I didn't bother with the tobacco once I got into the CD section.
Obscure japanese pop. Musique concrete. Entire albums made with a single Theramin. Underground hip-hop. There were even experimental, ambient and minimalist sections. The cd that made me smile, though, was a mint copy of Pigface: A New High In Low. Though I didn't know it as such, this cd was the first exposure I got to what I'd later recognise as the trip-hop sound. A friend of mine copied cd1 of this album onto cassette tape for me during our freshman year of high school, sans the first two tracks. Trent Reznor and that Al Jourgensen guy used to be in this band, he said. You'll like it.
It's nothing like Nine Inch Nails or Ministry. In fact, it's more like Massive Attack as done by angry white Americans, and at age fourteen, I rocked out to it. Mum thought I was nuts when she found me bobbing my head to a combination of heavy funk drumming and digeridoo basslines with some nutball screaming Beat poetry over it. She was, after all, a big fan of Genesis. The tape lived a long suffering life until, after about three years of continuous use, it stretched beyond capacity and finally broke. Since then, like much of the other music I listened to during that time, I've been completely unable to find it again. Not even the internet has yielded results. That is, until today, when I bought another copy, used, for nine bucks.
(over a lurking, muddy bass loop) "I'm your three-pound coke babe, your rock-feeder, your dope fiend... I am the post-foetus that kicked you inside your porous, absorbant walls... I am the life you will give me, I am the life that will remind you of your true pain. I am your three-pound octopus, tentacled in plastic tubes, I am the living version of your autopsy."
The city's all wrapped up in plastic
like an electronic cocoon
if you lay in the street
you can hear it humming
filling up slowly from underground
if you close your eyes
you can observe the blue prints
the man-made DNA that spirals
breathlessly out of control
as synapse collapse
bridges snap
into a restless utopia...
UTOPIA!
[This song still gives me chills ]
I saved the cd until I got home, so I could hear it again through my bourgeois audio engineering headphones, letting the sound of a time and place long past leap out at me in terrible, sickly-sweet clarity once again. In a way, this album's socially conscious lyrics spurred on my own contemplation of things like justice, poverty, and all that terrible jazz that would come to fuck up my life in a few years. It also convinced me that sitar & 303 solos are cool. (up to a point, anyways)
Like Argyle Park's first and only album, Portishead's Dummy, and Manson's Antichrist Superstar, I still have most of this album meorised word for word, sound for sound. The songs play into my brain like a heartbeat... I feel like I've recovered a small part of myself. But I tell myself, It's just a cd. This is just music. This is stupid. (But it won't hurt anyone.)