new review of geometry, plus a review of art dad, here at tangents:
http://www.tangents.co.uk/tangents/main/2005/october/clientele.html
also previous review of geometry here:
http://www.tangents.co.uk/tangents/main/2005/september/clientele.html
and whilst we are on the subject of shameless self promotion, the
Unpopular 7" is still available at www.unpopular-records.com
plug over.
The Duke
xoxo
www.tangents.co.uk
the home of unpopular culture
po box 102, exeter, ex4 6yz, uk
On 11 Oct 2005, at 11:34, Marianna wrote:
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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