do you believe in the power of dreams?

i recited these dreams to myself many times, until i was sure to remember them. there was a third but it mustn't have been worth remembering.

dream one
i landed a job as a computer programmer. cause for celebration? no. the person working on my right was a hateful moron, and the person on my left was ollie glass. he had headphones on and asked me some question loudly. it may have been offensive, or it may have been understanding - i remember both emotions. so, this being a dream, i shot him, only, it turned out he was a t1000 and no matter how many times, he kept reforming; then i sodomised a penguin.

dream two
mark z. danielewski had a new book out. it was written in two colours, and had loads of inserts and junk kept falling out of it. it cost 68 pounds.
the manchester evening news reported that my father was having an affair, and as such, there was a media circus outside his flat (where i am typing this now, but it didn't look anything like it). he was nowhere to be found. i took a stroll down to his restaurant, and there he was, with a big fake moustache, odd clothing and a wig.

happy new year everyone!

self help graffitti

i've just discovered the joys of flickr, and it's much, much better than hello, which i'd been using. here are some recent photos.


pavement, brighton.


bin, manchester.


computer monitor, trafford park.

i've just had a very pleasant evening with ewa in an underground bar with loud music and a very good juke box. but today i really discovered the joys of 'his and hers', which i bought in a charity shop.
now, ever since my copy of mansun's 'six' came with an incorrect disc tray (opaque instead of clear) i've had an eagle eye for hidden secrets in cd cases, which explains my quick discovery of the kid a secret booklet. in my copy of his and hers, behind the standard disc tray, is a reciept: "virgin megastore brighton, 13/07/94, 13:26: 11.99, cash 15:00". oh. i feel so touched that the owner would keep that forever, and then simply discard the album to a charity shop. i will now go through the pulp back catalogue and buy everything. it is my new mission, since i have fallen in love with jarvis so much more than when i bought 'different class' nearly ten years ago, nearly ten years younger.
i nearly cried to 'pink glove' on the bus today.

doom on a phone/ spot the swastika/ VALERIECHRIST

doom on a mother fucking phone! jesus! and it's not even that much like doom!
doom rpg is a fairly simple, standard rpg, that actually reminds me of the 'desktop adventures' series by lucas arts. there are lots of graphics cribbed straight from the game (and wolfenstein 3d, which it feels more like since the levels are entirely flat, although the variety of enemies is definately more doomish). it distracted me for a good eight hours. there are some fun in-jokes, but naming the levels as merely numbers is a let down.


i took this photo:


and sent it to log (he had a thing on his website about a while back about crymi signs). he responded with a really very, very interesting fact. it is that this picture

(done by log's mate chi)
up until very late in the day, had a swastika hidden in it too. i wonder if you can guess where it was going to be?

so saturday, i got to see valerie. i didn't think it was going to happen for three reasons; 1, i couldn't get anyone to come, 2, val wouldn't be on 'til gone midnight which was getting a bit late for me, and 3, it was sold out. these were countered thusly: 1, you're being wussy; 2, you're being really wussy, and 3, ring up the venue and beg. and so it came to pass that i wandered across the river and into salford at ten o'clock at night and found a literal waste land, the manchester skyline beautiful cranes adorned with faery lights. i trotted into the venue with my three pounds (spent on a copy of the new valerie e.p.) and as chloe pomes (who didn't do any poetry, and wasn't even in drag - unless drag is defined as 'something a woman would wear' instead of 'something that a woman would wear that a man would not wear, unless he was.. (swallows own head trying to define the paradox of drag)') span around in a little circle on her own, i leant against the bar and read my private eye. when suddenly, pow! jo was upon me and being very nice and valerie are great to me. my great fear is that they're being sympathetic, and actually see me as a stalking saddo, which was properly allayed that night. i met another long term val fan, marion, and we got talking - she's got a show on local radio tonight which i will listen to - as long as i could, given the volume of the music and the throat-scratching affect of talking over it. a brief walk upstairs and there was a disco party on the middle floor, and a graffitti hang out on the top floor (the building is a dis-used mill).

the first band on were smartypants, two fun girls in the blue minkies/valerie vain, thus, young people using whatever cheap things they can find to make great fun music, and top they were too. banterlicious. then dragula, the three piece "undead dance-drag troupe", did a turn. given the darkness, make-up and people in the way, i honestly couldn't tell you if they were men in drag as women, or women in drag as men, or women dressing up as if they were men in drag (sailor's costumes), i've really no clue.
the next act was completely sick. jewish, of course, my parent in my head is telling me. gideon conn and his band were completely amazing, in the slickest most polished sense, and they're going to be big. they must know it; that's why they've got backing singers (ok, there's a cause and effect thing going on here). they were great, in a completely professional way, and what could make for a more classic valerie gig and playing after an amazingly professional band (are you listening, surferrosa, with your five 'k' debut?) then dragula did another bamboozling performance ('sometimes it's hard to be a woman', in army gear) and it was time for valerie, who hadn't played together for two months.

i don't need to go into the rest. they'd obviously planned the gig quite well, with songs seguing into each other and things, but it all went to hell. i can only laugh heartily as i remember the hi-jinx and antics, with elvis throwing potentially lethal objects into the audience, culminating in a cymbal stand hitting jo's head ("sometimes you can be a little too rock and roll, elv," she managed). i think they might have got in trouble for what they did to that drumkit. i think the gideon conn band might remember them for a long time.

it must have been nearly two when i left, what with everyone running late, and i swapped media with marion - i gave her a copy of purple milk, and she gave me a copy of her mini-zine, 'the wedding conspiracy', which i read several times on the way to mother's christmas party yesterday (more about that later) and really wanted to shove it in the face of the 'reveal' reading woman, scowling at everything across the waiting room for me, and say, 'look! some people have different opinions, and here they are!' anyway, i'm very impressed by it, and her entry on a certain work based website (anonymity is important here so i shan't link it or nothing) is really very well written indeed. yay me for finding someone new to mutually back slap!

over.

some things i found funny

the first annual cooked and bombed tumbleweed awards for bad comedy
including some awards made up just for nathan barley (Most Patronising/Annoying Reaction Shots In A Comedy Show'?). satisfyingly, little britain wins 'most overrated show'.

euros childs' tour diary
i've always loved him, but i never realised he was this funny.

it's important to laugh, because this morning i accidentally recorded five minutes of guitars one semi-tone sharp. i don't understand how it happened, i must have got confused during downtuning and ended up at the same pitch i was at before.

you've also got to laugh, because 900 protesters were "'rounded up'" at the wto summat in hong kong, which is slightly more important.

i think i'm going to become an anarchist.

cry out loud

i've just been listening to the best song i've heard all year.

and then i found out they played in this town four nights ago.

and i said 'noooooooo!'.

whatever happened to the spinach soup?

i forgot to buy stock cubes from the shop, so i tried to make a saag aloo instead, but it turned into mashed potato with spinach, on staffordshire oat cakes.

tonight i am keeping it simple.

whatever happened to 'go home and be a family man!'?

the observant amongst you may have noticed the disapearance of 'go home and be a family man!' from my downloads sidebar. there files are still on my music page, but i've decided to make them less obvious in light of my current and forthcoming releases. let me explain.

the story may start with my first cd, and second 'first album proper': grilly and the orange pants band's 'their orange, there pants, and they should be banned'. it was 74 minutes of hissy low-fi. somehow i'd unlearned the lesson of my first 'first album proper', 'campaign against normality', for which i'd bought a 40-minute cassette and filled it with my own songs. previous to this, i'd simply filled 90-minute tapes with covers and an occasional original number, ran off a tape cover in microsoft publisher; this happened about three times, the best being the first release, which was live recordings with ben dobson on piano. most of everything was awful, if not for the material for the execution - not owning a four track, i simply used two tape decks and a mic to bounce up a song. this meant that the rythm track was often the most indistinct in the mix, having been seriously degraded. my lack of playing ability, and fear of being caught recording so vocals were only semi-whispered also made matters worse. anyway, so i did a 40 minute album of my own stuff, as it was all the songs i had at the time. we can draw a direct line from there to here. my next record was the afore-mentioned orange pants band, which should have been split into two parts.
after this, i have another 45-minute side of unreleased stuff (one track was incorporated into ttvcb as 'pessimist's love song'), and then i went to durham and decided to record a proper album with a proper track list, ultimately 'try the view change button'. but it still had too much on. i originally envisaged it as having sub-sections, like e.p.s, but in the end just had the whole thing as one order. it was an hour long. i wouldn't say the album was too long.. but tracks were excluded from it. after i left durham, and the album still wasn't finished, i kept recording. and after a point, i thought, 'these tracks are too different to my durham material to use on try the view change button. that is my durham album, and it is as finished as durham. these songs shall make a new album.'

an album - be it a single, an extanded play or a long play - is all about the tracklisting, and how the songs work together. this is why i have always finished songs and put them online straight away, and then let the vision of the album come out of how those songs interact. i saved those new songs - ayufa, edmond, and david trimble - and then came 'dovedale joints'. divided into two distinct halves, with tracks fading into each other, real sequencing and seguing, and my first stabs at production, since during it's recording i attended a music tech/sound recording course. it was, at long last, my first 'real' 'first album proper'. the decks were almost cleared, although i still have unused songs from this era and before. and then came, slightly premature, my idea for my next album: 'go home and be a family man!'

i'm not sure when the title apeared in my head, but it must have been in first year of brighton when we found ourselves back on street fighter 2:championship edition. while back in manchester, i'd slightly written two very long songs: 'the girl in the kid a top' and 'new boyfriend'. but i didn't have the means in brighton to record them straight away, and used fruity loops to create music instead. when i did get my electric guitar down, i started recording 'the girl..' and a new song, 'love'. i envisaged the new album from start to finish, and recorded an acoustic demo of the whole thing in a night, plus the fruity loops material. but slowly, new songs ousted the old, and i changed the name and structure of the album; it became 'womansour', simply because i thought it was a better title. it would be stretched across two mini-cds, like a real record has two sides of 20 minutes. i had enough songs (i still have the conceptual covers for this version). but what with 'the girl' taking so long to record and being so central to the two-disc concept, it was cut along with half the material, and what remained was the five tracks you see today. four out of the five songs were entirely written in that year, so it's very documentary. 'go home..' was going to be along shortly.. wasn't it?

over the following year, i produced another full cd of material, 32 tracks, which lead me to start planning an album based around the levels of doom 2.. this never materialised, but the odd thing is, i've only used one of the tracks on that cd on 'on benefit', which is 'quinlank', recorded in a week long binge of whiskey and ciggerattes, because, seriously, i thought that's how rock stars got their creativity. i meant to record a whole album that week. so those doom 2 songs - including my banging first year fruity loops tracks - are still waiting in the wings..

so then rebessica arrived, and i started writing songs to be performed by a band - 'midweek cd purchase' and 'klein bottle' certainly so. so after my experiances with that falling through, and being on the dole, the new album has taken shape, but it is not 'go home'. it is not so different, but it is different. it's an interesting mix, that the first and the last tracks (also fanthorpe) were written some time ago, but all the others are 'new' songs. and the new material is really quite rocking - quinlank, midweek and klein bottle are pretty heavy songs, and forever was a rediciously heavy song, once. purple milk (acoustic), the newest song on the album, will offset this nicely, i hope. but i run the risk of falling into my own criticisms of my attorney's silver bullet that "it's a shame there's not a section with several 'proper' songs together" (a criticism that i now disagree with. i love the album to bits (as you can see from my new lyric below the photo), although i still think 'the moon and the sea' is underbaked). it's only eight songs, and one of those is a cover, although the overall length is a classic 42 minutes thanks to those bulky book ends.

i think i might go and do some recording now. or make some spinach soup.

a new irish joke

and i'm going to do this very quickly.


this english couple go abroad to ireland for their autumn break. they get across to galway on the first of october, and set up their tent in a camp site overlooking the atlantic ocean. they have a wonderful time, in this, the most cosmopolitan of provincial irish towns, and wake up the next day feeing fine. that day is full of fun walks, site seeing and entertainment.

imagine their shock the next morning when they wake up in their sleeping bags to find an irishman in their tent with them, pooing everywhere.
"bless my dear aunt sally! what in god's name are you doing!" cries the englishman.
"didn't ya know? it's de turd of de tent," replies the irishman..

















































































phonetically pronouncing 'the third of the tenth' in a 'hilarious' 'oirish' accent.

two minute songs

tracklisting, for those who've recieved, or are yet to recieve, this auto compilation in track-number order; my itunes, selected by 1:59 < time < 2:01

russell preston - picking
bal sagoth - hatheg klah (or something)
mansun - being a girl (part one)
stephen jones - +i'm not sure what it's called+
stpehen jones - +i don't know it's name either, but isn't this bizarre?+
half man half biscuit featuring andy kershaw - running order squabble fest
eels - blinking lights (for me)
grilly - shit
pentangle - cold mountain
half man half biscuit - new york skiffle
kefranski - morning sickness (jez alex acoustic session)
zabrinski - cewwlddieattt (or somethnig else. in welsh)
the serpents - dusted
pentangle - waltz
dillinger escape plan - calculating infinty
try to relax - +i'm not sure of the name - it's the one with the lovely harmonies at the end+
my attorney - i'm so tired
radiohead - hunting bears
pink floyd - eclipse
radiohead - i will
bjork - +something off medulla+
grandaddy - away birdies with special sounds
napalm death - the politics of common sense
frank zappa - let's make the water turn black
mugison - +unknown title, but it's a lovely piece of music, a little like some of those silly instrumentals damon would hide on blur albums+
daniel barenboim - +do you expect me to be able to know which bach fugue this is just from listening?+
hammell on trial - worrywort
realized? i've no idea of the name, and it's in japanese so i wouldn't worry. good though.
eels - blinking lights (for you)
nick drake - +home recording, don't know the name of the song+
nick drake - +as sim+
russ conway - rule britannia
unknwon digital hardcore track

game spotting

as i got up this morning, i noticed two things: i didn't have any socks to wear for work (i mean, *any*, they were locked in the washing machine), and i hadn't done the washing up from the night before. this wasn't such a problem; i only have one pan, and would simply have to wash it tonight. but i realised that the reason i hadn't washed it was to instigate the 'can you do your washing up?' conversation with my father, whose flat i am using to live in. i don't know whether i wanted this conversation out of familiarity or masochism, but sure enough, later he said it was a bit scruffy and i should clean up after myself properly. it wasn't a pleasant experience by any means. but i feel good about understanding my actions.

which leads me to a game which i never wrote up here: "the 'games people play' drinking meta-game". what you do is, as you go about your daily business, watch out for people playing life games, deliberately or not, including yourself. when you notice discover one, go out and get drunk.

by the way, i'm thinking of changing keeing up with the times by changing the ephel duath lyric above, 'are you coming to poison my remarks?', to one from their new album. the suggested quote in the packaging is 'when you still confuse the smile to offer/it's hard to feel the perfect vibration', but i quite like the self-explanatory 'to glide from the light blue of desire's room/seems to be my favourite sing song'. thoughts?

one more coversation unto the breach

today, she told me i couldn't contribute to the office soundscape and put a cd on.

joanna: i want to listen to the radio.
grilly: i *don't* want to listen to the radio.
joanna: there are other people in this office, you know.

why doesn't she know? how simple is she? of course i won't put on my offensive music. i put on my acceptable music.. and she goes and demonstrates her ringtones over it, while saying, 'no, this one's really annoying' to her neighbour. doesn't she realise that what i play is alrady a compromise? and why doesn't she understand democracy? there are three people in a room, therefore, time is split evenly between them as to what is played. i am happy with silence at work, fuck, i prefer it to the distress i get from key 103. if, there are five people in a room, and four want to listen to the radio, that still leaves me with time in a working day to put a fucking cd on, and still i try and not piss people off as much as they deserve for putting me thruogh this crap.

i could go on about what i hate about the radio. the adverts first, then the djs, then the music. but what i really hate is her, because of how she hates me with no reason, and because she makes me believe that the class system has something to say (no! cause and effect, dammit!).

the ironic thing is, the job isn't that bad. i've got to the stage where i've accepted it, and i could do it for another month (although i'd have to accept that i could do it indefinately before i'd really broken/been set free), but i have to get away from her. it's not healthy for me to be around her. i don't like disliking people. i'm terrified of what it could do to me, even if i try to stop it. i clearly don't belong there, and while trying to persevere has it's merits, what happens if i lose my a piece of my mind trying?

* lifelong disappointment
* because you're crippled by self-awareness, and they're not

gallow slutt 04

<p>ur</p>le milk is now online.

1. purple milk
2. love (try to relax remix)
3. sex
4. fair trade whore

upon downloading, update tag info accordingly, and please try not to think of 'start wearing purple'.

notae benne! this is an updated version of sex. the old version now only exists on your hard drive, if you downloaded it.

new valerie 7" out soon, performance on 17th december, guest list only, who's coming?

another conversation

johannnna: what do they check on your m.o.t.?
gary: your emissions..
j: what's that?
lindsey: *something to an effect*
j: oh! i thought you said 'your ignitions'!
g: no, 'your emissions'.
j: what's that?
grilly: *fumes*

ah, there's one in every office.