despite the fact i said i didn’t much like it at the time charlotte gainsbourg’s 5.55 has been floating in my head most of the weekend, though my internal dj has been cutting it up with another numerically titled track, james figurine’s 55566688833. and in here that sounds awesome.
not that his is a musical vibe i’d normally be following, it’s a bit too ‘warm leatherette’ for my taste but i love the musical assertion of the perils of non-premptive texts and failing relationships.
if you’re saving time with your girlfriend by sending texts rather than hanging out then it’s probably a relationship that’s serving your mobile phone operator better than your lovelife but hey, its just a super-catchy song not a life lesson.
still, go and listen to charlotte’s digital acoustic and see if you can make it add up too.
and while i’m sending you off to listen to things, its a good time to say head over to the hype machine and keep your browser open so we can all get a look at whatever newness anthony’s been planning.
last night i was looping a track- its not my usual sort of thing (even if it is somewhat traditional behaviour).
its led me to thinking about language and music and the inherent pre-babel power of music’s ability to communicate which its quite quite easy to forget as an english speaking, english girl with fairly english speaking tastes.
a friend of mine from the states commented when she arrived at my flat late one night to find me watching sex and the city (yep, i’m that sort of cliche too) and having just finished a frazier marathon weekend that she’d heard how ubiquitous us tv was around the world but not appreciated it.
and then i realised its practically all i watch. not that i watch that much tv but short of some apposite channel four news coverage and the occasional foray into grand designs or… if i’m feeling particularly home-y location, location, location or at the other end of the scale - sports, its the wire or arrested development. reruns of twin peaks or freaks and geeks or entourage or the sopranos. so it’s no wonder that i know the words to the oscar meyer wiener song without really knowing what an oscar meyer wiener is, that i could tell you the brand names for a whole bunch of american sodas i’ve never tasted, that i can run off a fair old list of us presidents and name several state capitals; its all been absorbed through tv and film and music. damn, even i find myself wishing they were all california girls, or being in a new york frame of mind or heading to galveston.
so when i meet a girl from venezuela whose english is impeccable and she tells me she mostly picked it up from watching beverly hills 90210 it makes so much sense. lots of my education came out of the same source - only it was the cultural flotsam & jetsam i clung onto and thankfully not the valley girl rising inflection.
which brings me back to my point, i was listening to mozart’s ave verum last night as i lay on my bed and read about moodymann and none of that was weird. and i kept hitting repeat because despite the fact my schoolgirl latin gets me by just fine with fading inscriptions in museums and working out word roots in spelling bees (ho, there goes another cultural phenomenon i’ve appropriated) i’ve never had an ear for it and all i can hear is the music; the swell of voices and the passion; the love and tenderness; the relief, joy and reverence which were written in 1791, in latin and still give me shivers today. and it doesn’t matter that its not glitchy or guitary or dubbed out. it’s not an issue that the bpm rate is way down and it’s not had a vocoder anywhere near it and it certainly doesn’t matter that it sounds better in latin because it still makes perfect sense.
i don’t know what recording this is from, in fact i can’t tell you anything about it except that when you least suspect it, it might well speak your language.
time’s a-ticking, it’s nearly christmas, nearly next year. heck, it’s nearly the rest of your life.
it’s also time to slow down a little, even if only for six minutes and forty two seconds and make the most of a day off (though not two; both me & jak are working come saturday night).
i’m always in awe of the new york jazz scene of the fifties and sixties. having only ever crudely managed to get tunes out of pianos, saxophones and trumpets in a hamfisted teenaged way and never having the talent or drive to take it any further than school recitals and local jazz competitions i feel this mild tension hearing the very pinacle of a genre i gummed at the edges of and disgarded in favour of the lure of boys with long hair and guitars.
the very best jazz recordings played back through a crackley stylus into my living room or headphones carries me away on a whistful cloud of admiration and jealousy at the fluidity of sound, the effortlessness of movement and the sheer emotive power of the music.
peace piece is one of those ‘in-tune-with-your-soul’ type joints. it sounds like breathing and takes you away with it on waves of lilting melody, measured harmony and pensive rhythm.
for taking on stuff he knows a little about (like me) and through willpower, perserverance and a not inconsiderable brain making it work for him.
for looking up through a narrow skylight and seeing out into space.
and that, reader, is what you see here.
while all around him might have seemed to have been a blur of wedding plans, trips to france, fried breakfasts, pastry and omnibuses of the wire he was tweaking his magic up in the latitudes to bring you this.
breathe it in.
it is beautiful.
your all new latitudes should make for a better reading experience.
for greater depth and wider breadth.
its like the great glass elevator, it goes sidewises and up and down - explore our old posts via tags and referrals if you’re new; relive them if you’re old.
last week was a fallow week for my horse latitudes uppage.
late to bed, early to rise. undoubtably there’ll be tears before bedtime.
for a while, i wondered what happened to my purple prose. but since its a week since i heard a song all the way through (with the exception of a sublime gig by the ukulele orchestra of great britain when i got twelve or so) maybe i was missing fuel to my fire.
but you know how you turn to old habits when things hit a tired, milky dusk - so is it a suprise that i’m posting a cover version?
a damien jurado cover version?
of a j.tillman song?
sounds like home before you’ve gotten your key in the lock.
i do love friends covering friends - rarely self-referential enough to be elitist, it’s a proud to call you mine moment caught on tape or on stage.
so thank you to the brilliant hard to find a friend for posting the whole kexp set, and j.tillman who loved it enough to call damien an asshole. since we’re sending you out of the latitudes for a minute to follow that link, do check out the several new tracks he and jenna also played, it’s little surprise that i can’t wait for the new damien jurado album.
and tour.
another week nearly over and i was determined not to let you off without a little something for you weekend.
while i do spend a lot of time listening to what might be termed airy-fairy acoustic music, every so often a little crashing cymbal and thuddering bass drum gets into my day and puffs up my chest.
admittedly i was attracted to this track by its title (who says i think too highly of my intended?) but the resulting download of a band i’ve sort of been purposefully ignoring in the whole pitchfork breaking bands saga is the sort of white stripes meets the walkmen-esque garage-noise it’s sometimes good to end a week with.
its turned chilly again here. not that it really got hot this year. walking home in a borrowed sweater with the hood pulled tight around my face i notice i’m crunching through brown leaves. i don’t remember them falling. perhaps last night’s fireworks left me with a november cordite memory.
still, this turn in the weather; turn in the season feels like the start of comfortable twilight for this year.
as blankets unfurl over bedspreads then; as cocoa steam curls me to sleep, some music to dream to… my log cabin in the mountains feels closer than ever. the dog’s in the yard and kids by the hearth not so much a distant idyll any longer. a crunch of tyres on gravel track, squeals as children run to meet the man we all four adore. and what’s on the set? fleet foxes.
we’ve j.tillman to thank for these guys. for introducing us to their manager, the utterly beautiful and delightfully talented aja. fleet foxes shouldn’t be able to sound like they do, since by all accounts these songs have been basking in the low evening sun in southern california for the past forty years.
fleet foxes are the all enveloping harmonies of crosby stills and nash, the soporific, rolling timpani of sunflower-era beach boys and that late winter sunshine which fractures into swollen beads of light on a camera’s lens. they’re northern european folk stories, snow shoes and moonshine. they’re heart broken times-a-changing, the music that robertson, manuel, hudson, danko and helm didn’t get onto acetate and a book of british birds.
i’m more than a little bit in love with this band and it won’t be long till you are too. go listen to more on their myspace page until they release a record for you to chart a new period of your life by.
the horse latitudes are looking for a new home at the moment; a real, four solid walls and well appointed roof terrace type home.
when we do find it however hopefully the moving process won’t be quite as traumatic as swapping servers (i’m not sure jak could cope with that). and while the all new hl towers’s precise location and number of bedrooms has yet to be decided the fact that we’re moving out of familiar digs into some place is becoming more real by the second.
when horse latitudes moved virtual house late last month we left a fair amount behind which means we get to repost our favourites from the last year. no surprise i’m going for a j.tillman re-uppage then.
i stumbled across josh’s music on gorilla vs bear last march and snapped up a first run of long may you run j.tillman. since then he’s put out two new records, answered our questions, come out for a beer, dedicated a song to us and even trusted his utterly gorgeous girlfriend to us for a night out in london. turns out, he’s as lovely a man as his voice is honeyed.
every time i’ve posted on him it’s been a struggle to choose one single track so i’m taking a revisionist stance by posting something i’ve not shared before but keeping the home theme alive.
as you know, we’re all for sharing music and the inevitable creation of the less industry more music-led music industry but do please go out and buy his music. from the utterly beautiful album, minor works
while i’d like to think i’m unpredictable and kinda hard to read, two things this weekend proved that absolutely wasn’t the case.
jak’s friday post pre-empted by a few short hours me mooching round a marylebone bookstore with a copy of updike’s ‘the women who got away’ in my hand which i’d picked up because i loved the cover but put down again because i wanted all the books in that series since they were all so well designed.
and over organic chorizo & butterbean soup (feel free to roll your eyes right now) at work an engineer who knows his stuff mentioned a band i might like. often, i approach recommendations begrudgingly, which has a little to do with my own personal brand of competitive, search & destroy new music hunting as much as it does to do with years of disappointment and mild disgust at the idea that your friend’s had your taste sooo wrong.
which brings me to the heavy (and how jules really didn’t get me wrong at all).
pah.
headnodding rhythmic hooks, fuzzed out brass sections, led zep-esque waves of sound and with the filthiest recorded drum sounds i’ve heard since ?uestlove, the heavy’s debut album ‘great vengeance & furious fire’ drops on bonfire night on ninjatunes counter imprint. they’re playing a week of pan-london gigs later this month (see their myspace for details) and i can only imagine how huge they sound, not that i’m planning to imagine it as i’ll be there.
with only one seven inch under their belt (not that impressive i know…) here’s a sample of what they’re due to drop later this year.
