I remember having an online chat with this girl from latvia once.

It was all a bit stilted,her english- not so good (but certainly better than my latvian) and we didn’t have much to say to each other anyway. As the conversation petered a little I tried to keep the momentum going by talking about the weather, I think London was experiencing a mini-heatwave or something. I was naked I know that much*. Anyho as soon as I started talking about how hot it was, she became super amused -turns out ‘back in the day’ her english teacher had told her that people in the UK were obsessed by the weather, and now she had her proof.

Few things are worse than being busted mid stereotype.

Since then I’ve tried hard to justify this ‘british fixation’;'as a nation of island dwellers we are uniquely affected by dramatic climate changes….’ ….er …’as a rich multicultural society the weather has become a shared unifying narative…’etc etc. But might have to ‘fess up that actually I’m a bit of a latvian cliche.

Anyway it’s freakin windy today (and that’s ’six people dead’ windy, not ‘this is making by hair a bit buffanty’ windy****) and here is a track with wind in the title (see what I did there). It’s a vintage axelrod production and is all good (apart from the rubbish poetry bit which is just a bit too sixties.

It’s sometimes better to just admit that your flaws rather than desperately trying find excuses for them.

Letta-West Wind

*that’s a joke btw**

**we were both naked***

***sorry

****actually it’s both and my bouffant looks awesome

The image above is a photo of earth taken from Voyager 1, when it was 4 billion miles away (via futility closet), It’s also a picture of home.
All around is dead and lifeless and yet here is a speck of blue life.

Alice Coltrane died the day before yesterday-astral traveller that she was- maybe she would have found it easy to get her head round this particular notion of home. A place in the darkness, where we are all safe and protected from the unrelenting harshness of the galaxy.

Maybe she has a very different perspective on ‘being home’ altogether.

Anyway, her music always seemed crazily experimental but strangly melodic and accessible all at the same time- I really like it, not in a ‘it’s on impulse so I think I should like it’ sort of way, but in ‘it genuinely moves me’ sort of way.

There’s obviously loads of her stuff being posted at the moment -but here’s my two pennies worth to add to the mix.

RIP baby.

Alice Coltrane-Going Home

it was exactly this time time last year that i heard paul duncan for the first time (no, not that dude from blue peter).

GvsB had posted a track, oil in the fields, from his 2nd release be careful what you call home which i audiocrushed on so hard i had to go buy the album.

but home’s a funny concept.

and i’d have to agree with paul duncan here.

you want to be careful what you call home because oftentimes, its not where you thought it was, or even where you remember leaving it.

and sometimes its static and sometimes its fluid but its always somewhere around, so you just have to look for it.

i once sat on a canalside bench on a chilly february tuesday and listened to this album twice over when i was really without a place to live and knew then that theres something of home that we all carry in us.

hopefully its our dreams, though it can be our nightmares.

but when those get exorcised - even while they are being driven out, the idea of creating a new place to call home can be more terrifying than those nightmares themselves.

so as forwarned is forearmed, learning a new way home can be a long journey but, when it turns out to be where the heart is headed too, it’s worth it…

paul duncan - in a way

If things seem a little quieter than usual here at ‘the horse’ it’s because we are have a ‘man down’, jez currently on a sabbatical, hopefully not permanently has left a trainspotter/font of all musical knowledge shaped hole, that is pretty hard to disguise.

Something for the weekend was jez’s idea (trying to get us less ‘jazzy’ with our postings) so it seems fitting to dedicate this one to him.

It’s a maurice fulton production (which is pretty much all you need to know) and whilst never quite reaching the heights of his ‘jaksoul’s disco tune of the year’ winning Alice Smith remix it’s still supafreakin dope.
Kathy Diamond-All Woman(vocalmix).mp3

Have a good weekend.

i’m half way through about four different posts which need some serious research and attention to detail, not to mention the legendary (in my own lunchtime) mixtape, but all this life stuff keeps getting in the way so once again apologies for the lack of movement over the latitudes.

not that jk hasn’t stepped to the plate (and raised the game to boot) with his inspired postings of late.

when i finally got round to listening to my recent haul of fresh new tracks on the way to work this morning, i was hoping to find my new best thing i ever but, true to new year slump form it seems, i found myself shuffling past 95% of the most exclusive leaks and hotly tipped brand new whatnots, and frankly i got a little downhearted.

i just wanted something to be a bit excited about, something that i could lose myself in repeat over for a guilty half hour.

so i came back to a little something which has been rolling round my head since i went on an emusic spree late last year. now i know virtually nothing of contemporary gospel music (and consider this a preamble to another great unfinished horselatitudes mixtape) but this slice of bay area genius goes to prove there might be in something in the water over there in northern california.

starting with the plinky, pastoral yama-harpsichordiness of the intro (and letting slide for a minute the heartily clean mid-nineties production and slap bass) this track launches into celebratory gospel in a way that would befit a climactic scene in sister act 5 or something (i’ve not seen any of those movies so i’m guessing here).

the vocalists have got that smooth ashford and simpson duet thing going on.

but its when the breakdown hits at two and a half minutes that i really get into it.

the insistant shuffle of a tambourine and lean-back-formation-hand-clap is so gloriously infectious and each time i hear it ends up being more than partly responsible for dragging a smile out of my maudlin “can’t believe i’m back at this desk again” face.

listen and love it
bay area chapter of the music and arts seminar - i know that he cares for you

Been a weird week.

My mind has been flitting between ma-ho-sively different things. On Tuesday I (quite willingly) got caught up in the maelstrom of hype that surrounded the iphone launch. It was almost funny seeing the photos of people trampling over each other desperate to get seat for Steve Job’s presentation and pumping their hands in the air and screaming at every announcement. It’s not as if I can claim to be any kind of bemused, detached observer either. I had engadget and macrumours frantically auto-refreshing every ten seconds in a state of minor rapture as tiny pieces of the future leaked out line by line.

It was like the geek world cup final-I felt like everyone in the office should be allowed to take the afternoon off. We could all crowd around a plasma, drinking beer and high fiving each other when one of our favourite rumours was finally revealed.

Funny thing is, it doesn’t even make me feel good. It’s not a positive thing, it’s like a mania, like there is this disease that I’ve picked up somewhere and I see people around who have it worse than me and it’s not attractive. But I do it anyway.

So I had to leave my auto-refresh-athon early cause I had to go see this guy, Scott Harrison, at (of all places) the Apple Store on Regent st. I arrived, half expecting to see hordes of rabid fans descending on the place to bow down in worship, and sat down to listen to his talk. It was quite a harrowing hour really, the photos he shows are hard to look at, just the most horrendous things that poverty can do to people. All the time, just behind me, a hundred imacs are glowing with the freshly updated apple website and yet the more I listened the less it mattered. All this other stuff, reality, pain and suffering, the amazing work of people like Scott, it’s an antidote to all the junk we fill our lives with. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with apple or cool new stuff or brands in general, it’s just how hard it can be trying to keep things in their place, trying to maintain a balance. Everything in moderation (except moderation itself) as my mother used to tell me.

As for the iphone-I love it, but I think it seems a bit rushed somehow, like they weren’t quite where they wanted to be but have announced it anyway. It’s something beautiful, but it’s not for me right now-in a couple of revisions they will have made it something ubiquitous and perfect and I, like everyone else, will need and treasure them. But more importantly it’s just an object I can use to communicate with people I love (and I can do that, imperfectly, already)

Jo Mango-The Antidote

Find out more abut the amazing Jo Mango here.

And Scott’s charity here.

Scott Harrison is an man of extremes. From the insane extremes of the new york party scene to helping provide water to people in some of the world’s most deprived regions is along way to go in a lifetime (let alone a couple of years). hearing him speak last night, it was, ironically enough, this unlikely juxtaposition that gave his story real depth. There are plenty of people doing good works in Africa, but somehow his past life hedonistic extremes provides him with a unique perspective and drive,all of which is incredibly infectious.

He’s talking tomorrow at the Apple store shop on Regent’s St from 7 and you should try and make it down if you can. (although methinks it will be pretty busy down there for other reasons)

And there is more on his charity here.

last time we had an hl staff meeting, which was some time ago i might add, the subject of bands you know you probably should like but can’t quite get along with came up.

for me, its the doors. ok well, in my advancing years i probably shouldn’t like them but i just plain never liked them. and maybe its oliver stone and val kilmer’s fault. or maybe its jim morrison’s. either way i just don’t get them which might have something to do with the (lack) of time i’ve devoted to getting to know them.

anyhoo, for another hl staffer its the talking heads. so just for you, young man, this is one of my favourite talking heads tracks… from the album ‘77 (a very good year - as sci-fiers and port drinkers will for once be in accordance about) which also featured david byrne’s strained whiteboy karaoke classic, psycho killer, this is ‘the book i read’.

underneath the insistant disco inspired percussion track, clipped reggae guitar riff and rather funky faltering twiddly opening gambit theres a cute little love song about the meeting of minds - least that’s what i get from it.

and yeah, i know the pic above’s actually the cover of the follow up album, ‘more songs about buildings and food’ but not only does that have one of the greatest album titles ever its also an example of the way in which talking heads took such care about what they did, embracing the whole aesthetic of music production from the song writing through to the packaging. now i could whitter on and on about how david byrne has to be one of the coolest guys in the world and that’s even before i’ve started on my tina weymouth girl-crush so i won’t and i’ll challenge you not to be singing along to this one as you get back from the weekend thing…

talking heads - the book i read

On the way back into London last night on the serenely beautiful (when empty) westway. Had just decided (after 24 hours of country living) that I would ideally like to be living in a stilted house in the middle of some perfectly flat plain. I would have these amazingly calming views of nothing but sky and still be commutable distance to London.

It’s that time of year (for me anyway) whereby my holiday imagination hasn’t quite been beaten down by the realities of 9-5 living , leaving me a little out of kilter (in a good way) with the world at large.

A few more days off and i could have written my first (great) novel or discovered an enourmously creative way to make a living whilst still being on holiday.

Maybe in the summer.

Whilst jb was driving I was ‘doing my bit’ by taking control of the ipod deejaying responsibilities-this was the tune that was playing as we zoomed over west London and back to the world.

It’s kind of melancholic disco-saturday night music, heavy with monday morning’s regrets.

Jean Carn-Was that All it Was

ahh, a warm welcome back to the horse latitudes!

we’ve been quiet these past few weeks, because, frankly theres been presents to open, friends and family to see, copious amounts of food to be scoffed, afternoon naps to be dreamt through and drinks to be drunk (and *rubs forehead gingerly* it wasn’t just the drinks that got drunk, i tells ya).

but now we’re here in 07 and champing at the bit once more. i’m sure each of us will be reaching into our slightly grubby looking stockings, removing the overripe satsuma that, since it wasn’t made of chocolate or cash, we didn’t bother removing from the toe and plucking out something which jingled our sleigh bells over the end of year break. and to set you off, here’s my choice picking…

starting the year the way i’m inevitably going to carry on, with acoustic guitars and whistful boys singing songs about whistful girls - this track was on my autumn playlist but it wasn’t until a beautifully wintry cross country drive through gloucestershire over the no man’s land between Christmas and New Year that it struck my ‘hit repeat… oh go on just one more play’ nerve.

brooklyn based ola podrida are film score writer david wingo and friends who got together early in 2005 for the making of music and will shortly be gracing us with their eponymous debut album, courtesy of plug research records. jordanna is a fragile piece of loloping beauty, it’s also deceptively catchy and oddly poignant - despite me never quite understanding what its about. as its very early january and this morning is the first day i’ve had to respond to my alarm clock’s crowing in ten days that’s about as much analysis as i can muster.
but just to leave you fully furnished with a bit more information than you might need, an ola podrida is not only a band, but a Spanish sausage and chickpea stew and a term for a mix of incongruous elements, which might be the way forward for 2007…

hmm, can you tell i’ve had no one to vent my unfettered whittering on for the past two weeks?

ahh, baby. its good to be back.

happy new year.

edit: apologies, i posted the wrong track earlier. correct song is now upped right here.

ole podrida - jordanna