Foresight isn’t anything at all

Berlin, Holocaust Memorial. Two slices of marble, above the sky.

There’s the progress
We have found a way to talk around the problem
Building towers
Foresight isn’t anything at all
REM – Fall On Me

We’re living in a moment when really, whatever concerns our future seems really written in the sky.
I don’t know a jack shit. I have no idea of what and how and why plunged us in this so-called pandemic situation.
I’m not here to discuss medicine.
I’m not a negationist.
I’m here to notice how much all of us, the ones who work in arts, music, movies, literature, are the ones who are experiencing the greatest disruption in our lives.
It’s not just a matter of economics, even if I’m tired of seeing pop up ads for shitty online call center or copywriting jobs for casino sites, as it’s our only escape to final misery.
We’ve been lucky enough, or hard enough, to pursue and obtain what many people stop dreaming about at the end of teenager years.
We escaped routine. The 9 to 5 job, the pub, the TV.
Paying for it, for sure, with no solid finances, no solid families in many cases.
But we had joy. Strong memories. Our family is friends with a common vision in every corner of the world. Corners that we probably touched, after 800km in a van, landing with a plane, carrying guitar cases and cymbals.
We are used to travel, to spend night after night in different cities.
We end nights sharing glasses and fags with almost strangers.
And hugs too, laughs and sometimes tears.
Weird as it is, it’s what made (makes) our lives special.
What we’re missing.
What I think makes other envious, and judgemental.

Try to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die.
The Verve, Bittersweet Symphony

Somewhat, we escaped our society, creating our own world. Our bubble.
Peter Pan. That’s fine. Life is not sacrifice, jobs shouldn’t be a pain you suffer until it’s weekend, and time to spend your money at the Mall.

Or online. This is what we seem supposed to do now.
Pay for surrogates of experiences online. Courses, food delivery, movies that we’ll never see, music we’ll never listen properly to.

Ok. I’m here to tell you. To gather consciousness.
We’re the right ones.
We don’t have to pay our happy years of happy work and travels and you know what, as we had enough from life and now it’s fair we pay more than the 9 to 5 receptionist.
He doesn’t have to pay too.
The boy at the call center, he doesn’t have to pay. The waitress paid on black books, she doesn’t have to pay.
We are the right ones.
Their life is senseless, and unfair.
They deserve better too.
It’s time to speak loud our identity.
We’re not pariahs, we’re an example, a model, we’re prophets.
It’s time to use music, arts, words, anything creative humans can produce, to reach people, and make them understand that they have same right too.
To travel, to experience, to get knowledge, to connect.

In the future. The future we must create.
A future where a virus don’t put at risk production, so economy, so more lives.
I don’t want to grow old looking as a crazy lady, telling tales to kids about when it was safe to explore cities at night, to hold strangers, and get lost in the moshpit at a big music festival.
Like that guy in the Brave New World.

So no, I’m not a negationist.
But I see the cultural challange here.
The prejudices. The envy.
This is what we must change.

I’ll write about and post music too, of course.
It’s better than one thousand words, quite often.

Stay safe and take care.

Monique M.

SLEAFORD MODS – ENGLISH TAPAS

It’s just that when you walk on sidewalks in the drizzly fog of a saturday 6am there are chicken bones everywhere, and it’s not a macumba ceremony but the millions of spicy wings devoured after karaoke nights.

It’s that the black girls with big asses but also the fairy skinned with small tits and the red haired ones too from the suburbs they all go to Primark, not ‘cause it’s trendy but ‘cause it’s deadly cheap, and they buy lycra leggings and then they fall from their plastic 8inches heels on MDMA and booze after another karaoke night.

It’s that your friends they work 8am to 6pm at a Shopping Mall’s counter for the minimum wage – when they’re lucky, if – then get packed on a smelly bus, go to the pub for the Champion’s and it always ends up in a fight.

There’s no Ken Loach here, this is Little Britain, no Time Out recommendations and trip advises for suicides. Nottinghamshire…in the ’90s I had a pen’s friend from there and once I wrote “Notthingam” and she praised my uncorrect spelling “for there is really nothing here”, she said. She was a goth girl. She ran a fanzine. You must find something to do to survive in the Notthingamshite, right? Jason and Andrew they go on releasing albums and songs. Hip Hop and Rap, some say. Public Enemy and Wu Tang Clan…and Happy Mondays, some add. I can hear Tricky and Massive Attack, too.
And their use of minimal electronic, it’s like catching the sound of your little bro drummin’ on cookware with two forks, then shaking it into a kitchen’s robot in broken tempo and sending it to the mixer through a valve’s radio. You must do with what you got, and it can be enough to do well if you know how to operate with a blown mind. So, these are Folk Songs. I’m saying it. These are the songs and the rhymes of the folks of England, here and now. This is folk music and that’s why it’s so powerful.
It’s the chorus / response of strikers shouting in front of the factory gates, the team’s supporters roaring in the arena, the boys skating and rapping under South Bank arches, it’s the random quixotic speaker at Hide Park’s corner.
No need to hang the Djs, this music they contantly play tells something and more than something to you about your life: that is messy, absurd, dirt, that you’ll never make ends meet, that there’s no Empire and the Queen is actually dead…
But if you listen closely they are also telling you that there is a damn soul inside of it. Beneath the punk and the rap and the beats Sleaford Mods have soul and they’ve got the blues. Just listen to “I Feel So Wrong” or “Time Sands”and you’ll feel it.
But it’s 2017, and these outcast howling wolves they’re pouring it over a rug weaved with fried chicken’s bones instead than in a cotton’s field. Little Britain, please stay Little and True, for no one needs your fake Greatness anymore.

“English Tapas” was released on March 04th, 2017 on Rough Trade and you really shouldn’t mind about Prince Harry’s wedding.

(Review originally written for and published by Dandysme.)

SINGAPORE SLING – KILL KILL KILL (Songs about Nothing)

A black field burnt by fire. A volcano exploding. Water breaking the dam, mountain drowning. The tower tumbling down mined by TNT. The fury of elements, deafening. Nothing left, like nothing happened, nothing was, nothing will be.
Piano, yes, beaten, delirious. And those cellos, raped. Trumpets, the apocalypse’s four horsemen. Guitars, shooting and weeping.
This Singapore Sling album is tight, compelling, glorious, inspired. Rebellious. It leaves you speechless. Arousing and filthy rock’n’roll with no excuses, desolate sad steel echoes at the desert’s corner between “nothing and nowhere”, unsatisfied appetites, free drunk dancings. Anger. Saudade. A Jesus chasing the merchants from the temple. A prisoner breaking his chains to kill tyrants.
A master of his weapons. He’s trained. This war is planned, no failure admitted. “Nuthing’s Theme” is meant to be played by an orchestra under the darkest sky with aurora dancing. A Ravellian’s classical modern and timeless composition, ambitious, fearless. A colourful and powerful crescendo built around minimal structures, a call to fight for a savage army clothed in rags, holding swords made of light. No more space for miserablism or self-annihilation, no time for doubts. No mercy, ever. 
The emperor’s waves here they come for justice, with terrible beauty.
And when the nothing’s done, when love and hate have consumed themselves, finally silence.
Ashla.

Out on Fuzz Club Records February 02nd 2017.

The Lucid Dream – Bad Texan EP

Come, blessed barrier between day and day
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
 William Wordsworth

You up for a challenge? You have to get hold of this EP first. Vinyl is best, but you also need a portable player and proper headphones for the experiment, so it has to be digital too. OK, now head for the nearest Luna Park, and take a ride on one of those mechanics octopuses with a cabin at the end of every tentacle. The wilder the better, up and down and in circles, fast, spinning, flash of lights and the world turns upside down. Do not forget to put on your headphones at  LOUD volume before it starts to move! If your stomach is strong enough to survive this, it’s gonna be the most exciting and unforgettable psychedelic experience of your whole existence.
Is there anything more exciting than lucid dreaming, indeed? To push yourself in another dimension to reach the unreachable! That’s what the Carlisle’s band have been doing now for years, and keep doing better and better. The “Unchained Dub” version offered here, recorded for BBC6, it’s a sunbathed duel between a Morriconesque harmonica and a Mad Professor’s turntable, doubled by a fat, groovy bassline.
“Bad Texan” – the only 100% new track – yes, it goes up and down and fast and forward and spin in circles firing kaleidoscopic flashes of lights, dreamy carillon-keyboards, dirty guitars and baggy vocals. It’s a dance, a dance, dance.
If this is an appetizer for The Lucid Dream‘s  third album, you won’t be risking to miss it.
“Bad Texan EP” was released on March 11th, and it’s available as 12″ and download through the band’s own Holy Are You Recordings.
The new album is scheduled for Autumn 2016. It won’t be long.