Hello,
Strange Geometry is officially out now on Merge
Records. I think most European distributers will be
putting the Pointy release on the shelves this week
too.
Most of you who have ordered 'It's Art Dad' should be
finding them in your mailbox this week. If you have
sent an email to me and I haven't replied, please
double check that you sent it to the correct address!
We have the pleasure of being a featured band this
week at myspace! I put up the mp3 from It's Art Dad
there too, and all the concerts are listed, many w/
links to where you can buy advance tickets.
www.myspace.com/theclienteleofficial
-Marianna
Forget Altavista/Babelfish - here's the original
english text of what Alasdair sent to PopNews:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Strange Geometry
>
> I received a letter from my friend Julian in 1997: I
> had never made a
> record, but I was about to begin my first, and he
> was imagining the
> perfect sound for my band, the sound of the suburbs,
> which he
> envisaged as
>
> "a place filled with this magical sense of imminent
> departure, cranes
> on the horizons, echoes in the streets, the
> never-ending sigh of the
> motorway as the background to dreams, loves, hopes,
> laundry bills,
> letter writing, library book reading. Reality
> disappears into the
> airless atmosphere, fed by hopeless dreams, hypnotic
> boredom, and
> faded advertisments in bubblegum colours. Now
> imagine the feeling of
> being in love in this unreal place!"
> I wrote a series of songs eventually compiled as
> 'Suburban Light'
> which touched on these impressions, and I wanted to
> return to the same
> territory on 'Strange Geometry' but by then I had
> lived in London for
> 8 years and travelled widely, and I knew that
> everywhere else is
> equally magical. This album has been described as
> sad and spooky, and
> I guess it is. I think ultimately, it's a city
> album, like the Paris
> of Philippe Soupault's "Last Nights of Paris" or the
> mixture of
> Edinburgh and London in James Thompson's "The City
> of Dreadful Night":
>
>
>
> "The moving moon and stars from east to west
> Circle before her in the sea of air;
> Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest.
> Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
> The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
> The weak new terrors; all, renew'd assurance
> And confirmation of the old despair."
>
> Since K Got Over Me
>
> I remember reading that the author Mary Lamb's
> madness was heralded by
> dizziness, 'as if someone had drilled a hole in her
> skull and had
> blown in warm air'. This is a song about stalking
> the streets with
> nowhere to go. What's coming round the corner? Why
> can't we decide
> which way to move?
>
> (I Can't Seem to) Make You Mine
>
> A song, a fever dream about Beauty and the Beast,
> when the string
> quartet gives way to the piano, it's like midnight
> striking: the
> carriage will soon turn into a pumpkin, open plan
> offices will turn on
> their lights, the subway will begin running, the one
> night stand will
> fade to memory. The world will become recognisable
> again - but for a
> moment of beauty and terror we hadn't known where we
> were.
>
> My Own Face Inside the Trees
>
> "In those moments when everything slides into place
> Above the hum of wheels
> And the garden slides past, through a window of dust
> Receeding alone and unreal"
> (David Lygon - Paradise Gates)
>
> As you ride past on a bus, you see a gateway among
> shivering pines in
> one of these parks - is it Dante's entryway in the
> 'dark wood', or the
> gates of something else? How can you now face the
> weeks, the months
> that go by?
>
> * * *
>
> We now have a sound collage that begins with a short
> clatter from
> Pierre Henri's 'Apocalypse de Jean', segues into a
> long field
> recording of the interior of a Paris church, and
> ends with a kind of
> electric storm, as if we are tuning into a distant
> radio station, from
> a far away rain-drenched town, from rain-haunted
> decades ago, or from
> the future. You are now listening to this station's
> hits-only
> playlist!
>
> K
>
> This is a song for the survivors, the shipwrecked,
> walking the tracks
> of the haunted plain, sounding 'the eternal note of
> sadness' as
> Matthew Arnold puts it in his shattering poem,
> 'Dover Beach'.
>
> E.M.P.T.Y.
>
> I think this is the darkest song on the album.
> Bitterness,
> disorientation, hallucination, and the nightmarish
> feeling that
> nothing has any worth. Louis Philippe's string
> arrangements gave this
> song a baroque beauty that almost hides its heart of
> darkness.
>
> When I Came Home From the Party
>
> But our dead friends are walking again, tapping on
> your shoulder as
> you stagger home drunk. I guess this comes from T.S.
> Eliot's dreadful
> vision of the people he saw as spiritually dead
> crossing London Bridge
> in 'The Wasteland'; but my dead are absent friends,
> who now seem
> rather less friendly. They wander the streets of the
> city and in the
> crowds and doorways you catch glimpses of them in
> the dying sunlight.
> Eventually they disperse into the crowds, the many
> sunlit faces, and
> to your horror you can no longer tell who is dead
> and who is alive.
>
> Geometry of Lawns
>
> This odd sense - a faint suspicion - that the forms
> of the world are a
> little too aesthetic, a little too geometrical. Are
> we, in some
> Borgesian sense, lost, wandering around as a minor
> detail of a vast
> artwork, or as punctuation marks in some
> unimaginable language?
>
> Spirit
>
> "Forget about the bitterness of life" - sing the
> Wild Swans in
> 'Bitterness'. I love the humanity of that lyric, and
> I wanted to write
> something similar. But it turned out very
> pessimistic and crestfallen
> in the end. Obviously the lyric and melody quotes
> 'Disorder' by Joy
> Division. Writing this account, I'm rather appalled
> that I contributed
> so many depressed songs to this record.
>
> Impossible
>
> Mallarme wrote:
>
> "Mais, chez qui du reve se dore
> Tristement dort une mandore
> Au creux neant musicien"
>
> It seems to me he is describing an impossibility -
> "the musician of
> hollow nothingness".
>
> So we are back in the suburbs, witnessing the
> impossible. Only in
> these closes of redbrick, branded housing, piles of
> dirt and
> bulldozers and drab rhododdendron copses can we
> truly step through the
> looking glass. From the scrub grass of a field,
> freezing in the last
> January light, Roland, the cursed Knight of Robert
> Browning's poem
> rides out of his poem and into the album. I wished
> we could have added
> hunting horns to his section!
>
> ' ... Names in my ears
> Of all the lost adventurers my peers,--
> How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
> And such was fortunate, yet each of old
> Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
> There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
> To view the last of me, a living frame
> For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
> I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
> Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
> And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.'
>
> Robert Browning - "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
> Came"
>
>
> Step Into the Light
>
> A simple love song, to me it brings to mind
> wandering down the
> Embankment by the Thames, strolling along through
> the evening. When
> Louis played back his string arrangements to me, it
> brought a tear to
> my eye, they sounded somehow Parisian. I'm quite
> proud of the guitar
> playing on this.
>
> Losing Haringey
>
> I wrote this story years earlier, very influenced by
> Julio Cortazar,
> the great poet of the impossible. I originally
> wanted the track to be
> an instrumental, but I had stupidly added some
> singing, which I hated.
> Unfortunately everyone else insisted on keeping it.
> I knew I would
> have to pull something pretty agressive out of my
> sleeve to convince
> them to let me have my way. So I decided to read
> this story. Louis
> Philippe heard it and insisted on scoring it for
> strings. It ended up
> the key song of the album, and perhaps of our
> musical career so far,
> where all the themes we have played with come into
> relief and are made
> explicit.
>
> The Six of Spades
>
> The Six of Spades is like a plea, a prayer to let
> the weight of life
> fall from your shoulders, to escape if only for a
> moment. Some of the
> wording was inspired by Robert Graves' beautiful
> poem, 'the white
> Goddess'. It ends the album on a more positive note,
> I hope.
>
> "All saints revile her,
> and all sober men,
> ruled by the god Apollo's golden mean,
> in scorn of which we sailed to find her,
> In distant regions likeliest to know her,
> She whom we desired above all things to know,
> Sister of the mirage and the echo,
>
> ....
>
> Green sap of spring in the young wood astir,
> will celebrate the mountain mother,
> and every songbird shout a while for her,
> but I am gifted,
> even in November, rawest of seasons,
> with so huge a sense,
> of her nakedly worn magnificence,
> that I forget all cruelty and past betrayal,
> heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall."
>
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