Archive for the 'Music' Category

Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue, 2011

Dedicated to the few who messaged on New Year’s Eve.

2011 was a story I don’t know how to tell. It’s a year that had so many structural positives, countered by surface negatives. Perhaps it’s best defined by what others have said.

Shadows

In the early summer, I was ‘strange’, ‘sick’ and ‘damaged goods’. Thanks. In the mid-summer, I was an expletive abomination. Consequently, in the late summer, I was branded a defeatist.

Victimisation does arise sometimes. Not because it is wanted – if there’s a brand of people who don’t want to be happy, this author is not one of them – but because it’s a way of dealing with the various angles of attack and the after-effects that cannot be disguised.

Continue reading ‘Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue, 2011′

Music: Between Minds, Between Friends

A difficult anniversary is approaching, which has made me think a lot about personal relationships. Thus, I turned, as many have seen recently, to the virtues of music: as a companion, as a friend, and as a saviour.

The Ambient Man

It’s not easy out there. I’m sure many people join me in feeling that we are always fighting battles: some of our own making and some that aren’t; some that we deserve and some that we don’t. And part of that, from my side, is the life I have set for myself, and what it has done to me. “Damaged goods”, as the expression came recently. I should feel ashamed for living. What’s a man to do?

I’ve witnessed friends working together this week in perfect synchronicity. I’ve witnessed so many personal relationships thriving. And yet, as usual, while I’m glad to be on the periphery of anything positive, I’m so used to solitude (and occasionally negativity) on a daily basis that I’ve always had to find other coping mechanisms.

Music has long been that foil. That is not to say, of course, that there aren’t the best of friends out there, but working in isolation so long requires something that is always there, always tolerant, and always constant.

Music, oddly, cannot know me, and yet knows me better than anyone. When it speaks to me, sometimes I listen, sometimes I more than listen, and sometimes I unwittingly ignore. It cannot judge me or fall out with me. It’s a relationship I need, and cannot do without.

[Mobile users: a lot of videos under the cut] Continue reading ‘Music: Between Minds, Between Friends’

The Second Anniversary: A Song For No-One

A happy second anniversary to RoyalArbor, or Writing Privacy as it became. There is plenty that could commemorate this, but there was only one winner. First, it’s time to take stock for a moment.

A Space for No-One?

I think a lot about what goes here. Writing privacy demands it. It’s an oxymoron of sorts: to write privacy is to publicize it. Andrew Marvell not only withheld his works from publication, but he also privately considered the role of the writer in the new public sphere of the seventeenth century. That someone capable of such lyric majesty was so determined not to share it gives a permanent awareness to what should be allowed to escape into public space.

As such, this place never needed to be about me. It has needed to be about pieces of research that tell a good story; about events or developments that have some form of interest extending beyond me; and about privacy as a wider interest. The reason I left my old space behind was because it had become for no-one but myself.

We all live intricate and complicated lives. Continue reading ‘The Second Anniversary: A Song For No-One’

Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010

2010 has been, it seems, a sad year for many people. My own sad story has been punctuated with glimpses of light. End-of-year epilogues are so hard to write, but in the light of some illuminating and wistful hopes and dreams that have consumed me recently, I’d like to share some meaningful pieces.

I can be jealously protective of some of my favourite hidden treasures. It is part of what makes things appealing to me. But their allusions are telling, and stories can be built around them.

Continue reading ‘Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010′

Private Party: Catching Rays on Giant (Alphaville), Berlin, 2010

Alphaville, Catching Rays on Giant (2010)

Alphaville, Catching Rays on Giant (2010), signed by Marian Gold

Alphaville’s 20th anniversary celebration in Berlin in 2004 marked the best week of my life. Meeting the Alphaville family, seeing the band live for the first time, the adrenalin rush at meeting my idols: these created a unique kind of euphoria that will be difficult to find again.

The six years following have been very different: much darker and sadder than I could have imagined. Time spent living in Switzerland to try and grow as a person served only to burn away the core of my being, and left me a shadow of what I knew before. It became increasingly difficult to engage with the Alphaville crowd, and to be reminded of the euphoria that only ever seemed further away.

Returning after a long illness and months of recovery made travel abroad a real struggle. Prague last December seemed impossible. It is so easy to fall into dark behaviour that becomes increasingly hard to break. What could provide Miracle Healing? The late announcement (offering little time to ponder) of a small intimate event in the soulful city of Berlin made the opportunity of echoing that ineffable time of 2004 great enough to overcome the darkest of demons.

Continue reading ‘Private Party: Catching Rays on Giant (Alphaville), Berlin, 2010′

Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing

Autograph from Dr. Adam Fox

Writing is hard. It is harder still when fighting battles with yourself.

Yet this is trampled on completely when November’s fad of eleven years, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, comes around. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel by November 30th.

Like many other things around me at the moment, it is an alien existence. It has taken me three years to come close to 50,000 words for my thesis. Writers will be soon be surpassing that toil in less than 3% of the time.

NaNoWriMo has received a lot of strong opinion, largely because it encourages quantity over quality. The official page freely concedes, ‘Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap’.

Sometimes I have sympathy for the freedom, precisely because adding 500 words of quality to my doctoral thesis seems like a colossal achievement. It is also something that, for better or worse, the world of academia has contemplated itself. But I also loathe it for the way it can disregard the graft that goes into a small amount.

Writing often delves into dark, private pursuits. Continue reading ‘Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing’

Body Schema

After a day like today, recent goblin reminiscence and all, the search for “taking nothing seriously” (relating to this post) rounds itself here. I’m still a boy at heart who finds the childish banal so very funny. Perhaps that is why seventeenth-century literature appeals so much.

The Boys

The Girls

The Boys Again

Richings (left). His fault.

The legend, Matt Richings (left). His fault, as great laughter evolves in pairs.

There are many precedents to this kind of humour in English Civil War material. They come in fascinating shapes, forms, and stories. Continue reading ‘Body Schema’

Crackpot Culture (Gareth Malone)

[First featured in Noted, Autumn 2008]

Gareth Malone

BBC 2: The Choir: Boys Don’t Sing (22/02/08). Gareth Malone.

Since edited to become ‘Boys Don’t Sing’? Gareth Malone and UK Attitudes towards Music

It is so easy to deride someone’s music taste or involvement with music without realising the consequences. The last few years have seen choirmaster Gareth Malone working in schools and communities in England to try and reverse some of the powerful, almost discriminatory, stereotypes that have crept into modern culture.

Music can provide an intimate, private relationship with its listener, in addition to its social, public function. It has the capacity to help people learn other languages, to elevate, stimulate, heal, and have a positive impact upon lives.

Music, we are prepared to admit, is an echo of personality. Choosing what to listen to is one form of self-definition. It could potentially have a significant role to play in forming social bonds. But it can equally become a cause of pressure and inhibition.

Rigged by stereotypes, music is often a fast-track to ridicule. How many personal treasures lie on hidden CDs that must never be exposed? How many times have we pretended to love songs purely because they are ‘arbitrarily popular’, in order to benefit reputation? There is almost always some level of deception or silence regarding music taste which is designed to uphold a social credibility. The connection with age could be the most crucial of all.

Continue reading ‘Crackpot Culture (Gareth Malone)’


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