squirm

der klaus

commander of the starship schulze

glitchcraft

 

finally made it to staalplaat working space in neukölln last night to see glitchmaster phillipe petit scratch it up with schneider tm and four more dronesters. i've been trying to get more out of staalplaat after hearing them perform years ago at an electronic festival in budapest. that evening's soundscape featured a dozen or so tiny speakers splicing together sounds from at least as many sources with the help of some sort of disturbed algorithmic intelligence. in the charged darkness of the hungarian club it seemed a soundtrack created to accompany the dying dreams of an errant astronaut. but the best laid plans of mice and men to get down to the old staalplaat space on torstrasse came to naught, so i was pleasantly surprised when they resurfaced in neukölln last year. last night's performance was a swelling river of bells, bicycles and digital artifacts drowning an electric violin and guitar in the humming detritus of glitch city. many dreams were hatched and then abandoned as the onlookers watched petit and his fellow pioneers attempt to claw through the chrome creased crust of their own excitatory neurons. the staalplaat store itself is filled to overflowing with inexplicable graphic novels, noise 'zines and extensive recordings on various media. i took the opportunity to snatch up their last copy of romain slocombe's 'japan in bondage', a collection of his paintings on the same subjects he so lovingly depicted in 'city of the broken dolls'. thus, at the end of the evening, i was able to pedal my way northward with not only the crumbling blips and fractured bleeps of the performers ricocheting through my skull, but also the fractured femme fatales clutched close beneath my coat. 

boulevard of broken dreams

marc almond last night at the passionskirche. mushy sound marred an otherwise delightful performance. it was the first time i've seen almond live and he seemed the product of monstrous experiments splicing up the mitochondria of marilyn manson, jacque brel and pee wee herman. the evening's bittersweet melodies brought to mind a song i hadn't thought of for years. recorded on a long lost mixtape for me by a friend of a friend whom i met only once. it spoke of doomed love and loss - just the thing to get my juices flowing. having no idea of the artist or title i had long ago given up on ever hearing it again but inspired by last night's concert, and vaguely recalling a reference to the circus or acrobats, this morning i approached the altar and submitted a query "marc almond + acrobat". nothing. nada. zip. unless you count a billion pdf's. i went through his catalog at amazon, randomly listening to tragic titles. nothing. the doomed acrobats were nowhere to be found. i was forced to conclude i had followed a false lead. a last desperate search - an agitated ocean, my memory was tossing up fragments of despair  - acrobats, love, loss, addiction, needle - bingo! 
aah, now i can spend the remainder of the afternoon wading through melancholy.
 

Beuy Band

lately i've been watching

a few histories of the House of Tudor and the English Reformation - which proved handy when i came across this,,, 

first he took manhattan

then he took berlin. leonard cohen was in fine form when he played our obnoxiously large o2world arena this past saturday. while i expected a frail old man with a walker, 'the sinatra of the suicide set' bounded onto the stage with a spring in his step and noted he had last been in berlin fourteen years ago at age sixty - "just a kid with a crazy dream...."

the sad end to his folk career

the magnificent

ute lemper opened her set at admiralspalast last night with a cover of hildegard knef's für mich soll's rote sosen regnen“. after a long day spent flying to nuremburg (with air berlin losing the luggage), driving an hour into the countryside to the customer site, returning the same way, then racing down the the goethe institut for the initial meeting of my evening conversation course, it was luxury to settle into the soft velvet seating and enjoy her sweet singing. while more than once during the peformance she and the band made most unwelcome incursions into jazz territory (one one occasion resulting in an unfortunate drum solo) her chansons flowed like a honeyed nectar over my outraged sensibilities...

crumpets

and coffee saturday at a villa in berlin-dahlem. here i would meet my first actual anglicans - they seemed almost normal! of great interest was the vacant lot next door at number 24. a hillock of clay and a dozen small rosebushes huddled together providing the only evidence that the lot had once been the site of a luxurious villa, home to swedish chanson and film star zarah leander. the following day found us wandering through friedrichshagen, marvelling at the lakefront villas before venturing into the waterworks museum, which provided a look into the murky history of berlin's water systems. afterwards by tram and ferry to a late lunch in rahnsdorf where, at twilight, mosquitoes the size of small birds emerge from the pines.

Speaking of the German Commitment to Afghanistan

ear of squirm: Heidi Brühl's Berlin