Doctor! Doctor!

It is a bug; it is a "thing" going around. Or perhaps because school is back in session all the children are spreading filth and disease amongst each other again. Either way, a lot of people I know are being struck down with colds, flus, coughs, sniffles and all those other disgusting ailments. One day, it made me wonder: how many songs are there about being ill? Then I realised that a lot of those songs weren't very good in the first place, whether they were talking about a metaphorical or literal sickness. In fact, a lot of them were downright boring, unless they were singing about having the "blues" for various reasons (but is that really legitimate?). So I decided to think of all the good songs that were reminiscent of being ill, or about doctors, hospitals, going through withdrawal, etc.

Here are a few in a nice eclectic package.

- Pink Floyd - Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk
- Jefferson Handkerchief - I'm Allergic To Flowers
- The Waterproof Candle - Electrically Heated Child
- X - Nausea
- Dr. T - Undertaker's Theme
- The Chants R&B - I'm Your Witchdoctor
- Wire - Sand In My Joints
- Killer Pussy - Teenage Enema Nurses In Bondage
- Ritual - Mind Disease
- Ultravox - Artificial Life
- Free Kitten - Smack
- 23 Skidoo - Mary's Operation
- Vitalic - No Fun
- This Heat - Sleep

Be kind and don't sneeze all over your hands.

A Cathedral Of Erotic Misery

I am an addict of Constructivism, Dadaism, avant garde, Surrealism and sound poetry, all of which are related somehow, although not directly. I am a creature of dizzy cycles and nothing is certain of when it comes around only vaguely knowledgeable of what will come around. At least once a year I have what I will now refer to as my Dada season. When I was younger I discovered Dada. Then sound poetry. Then I fell in love with Kurt Schwitters, simply because the first words he greeted me with were "My name is Kurt Schwitters... I am a painter and I nail my pictures together." He was not strictly a dadaist. In simple terms, Dada is misery - Merz, his own works of art, pieces built up of found objects - is happiness. He had no interest in politics; he was a one-man movement. Merz is Schwitters and Schwitters is Merz.

At this moment I can't find a recording of An Anna Blume to share but I can direct you to Ursonate, a well-known early example of sound poetry: Kurt Schwitters - Ursonate (save target/link as, which goes for the rest of the links on this page). UbuWeb Sound is a huge collection of sound art recordings in which I visit regularly and for which I am thankful exists or else I could not share some of these tracks.

Bob Cobbing - Portrait of Robin Crozier

Bob Cobbing was the first explorer of sound poetry in England and a long-time experimenter in visual and performance poetry. His works in the visual, sonic and performance medias are extensive, widely varied and difficult to classify.

Tristan Tzara - L'amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer

L'amiral Cherche Une Maison à Louer is one of the best known examples of Dada tonal poetry, in which several voices speak, sing, whistle, and so forth simultaneously in such a way that the resulting combinations account for the total effect of the work. The simultaneous poem demonstrates the value of the human voice and is a powerful illustration of the fact that an organic work of art has a will of its own.

Henri Chopin - Sol Air

Henri Chopin is something like the father of sound poetry to me, not in the traditional sense of a person "being there first" (he wasn't, becoming active in his own experiments in the 50s) but because he is an explorer of sound and mapped it extensively. Initially armed with just his voice and tape recorders, he went far beyond spoken word. His work is not of any language or Word. It's diving head first into our breath and soul and exploring the true and pure focus: our own voice, with no reliance on language.

In The Beginning

I've had a few attempts at "music blogs." Or, namely, just one: on a personal journal I would occasionally make mixes and compilations, archive them, and spend a few hours wringing my hands at terrible mp3-devouring sites like YouSendIt and SendSpace all in the name of sharing music with my peers. But it gives me a certain skin-tightening heart-leaping joy when people are turned on to the artists I spoon feed them and start asking for more tunes or where they can find the albums and such. However, I plan on maintaining this blog more on the grounds of actually sometimes-discussing/confusing myself/rambling about music and art, rather than continuously slapping up a link to ear-delight and telling everyone to get up and at 'em.

So, in my biased and uninformed opinion, I bring you We Are Murderers.

Lately I've been digging out a lot of my post-punk albums: they've been ever so slightly overshadowed by my pursuit of psychedelic music. I don't know what it is; it probably has something to do with a lot of bands currently surfacing that sound in that vein, showing appreciation for New Wave and No Wave and all sorts of experimental electronic work. Makes me feel all nostalgic and follicle tingly. I sound old/prententious for saying that seeing as I'm only seventeen and first started listening to groups like Joy Division and Suicide when I was about thirteen or fourteen, but I suppose it is because I privately and intimately discovered such artists on my own and by listening at the feet of my older friends who I had always admired for having these amazingly wild and eclectic tastes in music.

- Lemon Kittens - These Men Of Old England
- Siouxsie & The Banshees - Sitting Room
- Suicide - Devasation
- Bauhaus - God In An Alcove
- Virgin Prunes - Bau-dachong
- DAF - Als War's Das Letzte Mal
- Kas Product - Man Of Time
- Pop Group - Where There's A Will
- Pere Ubu - Real World
- The Cravats - Working Down Underground
- Glaxo Babies - Because Of You
- Metal Urbain - Panik

Manifesto (by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes)

TO THE PUBLIC

Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears,
your tounges full of sores,

Before breaking your putrid bones,
Before opening your cholera-infested belly and taking out for use as fertilizer

your too fatted liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys,

Before tearing out your ugly sexual organ, incontinent and slimy,
Before extinguishing your appetite for beauty, ecstasy, sugar, philosophy,

mathematical and poetic metaphysical pepper and cucumbers,

Before disinfecting you with vitriol, cleansing you and shellacking

you with passion,

Before all that,
We shall take a big antiseptic bath,
And we warn you

We are murderers.

(Manifesto signed by Ribemont-Dessaignes and read by seven people at the demonstration at the Grand Palais des Champs Elysées, Paris, 5 February 1920.)