Destruction | Mixtape | Mixtape IV, Thorn In His Side

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Music As Reading: Mixtape IV, The Poet With A Thorn In His Side (he only ever wanted to be a music-maker)

Armitage: “I really like your stuff.”
Mark E. Smith: “Got a light, cock?”

The poet who, really, would have liked to be in a band more than he enjoys being a really-quite-successful poet – an evocative, pathos-drenched, rather depressing image. And one of crucial import to the Music As Reader. For out of it buzz a swarm of questions at the heart of what the Music As Reading project is, really, all about: what is the relationship between the poet and the music he or she listens to – and what can one discover about both forms from that relationship? Does the poet who loves to music-listen read or write with, alongside music because of the benefits to be had out of this relationship? And is poetry (slash, the poet) not just ultimately, compared to goodmusic (slash, the musician) intolerably sad, po-faced, poontang-repelling, and does it (slash he slash she) therefore require an injection of rockandgoddamroll if it (slash he slash she) is to regain the reputation, readership and romanticism that once defined it (slash he slash she) as a mode? Because let’s face it, most people start writing poetry because they want to be Lord fucken Byron, not Sir Andrew Motion – ladies and gentlemen, we’re being cool-shortchanged… Why?

Armitage is so specifically important, though, because he did the unthinkable and actually started a bloody band – way late (perhaps middle would be the more appropriate word, actually) in life. Then wrote a book about it, Gig (published by Penguin) which contains the above two-line anecdote – and a full history of not-being-in-a-band-but-being-a-really-quite-successful-poet Northern miserabalia. In it, and generally, he is admirably open and generous about who he digs, who he adores, the kinds of artists he would have loved to be a part of. Unfortunately, his actual band, the Scaremongers (www.simonarmitage.co.uk for videos etc.) sound like nothing so much as Registered Trademark The Worst Band Of All Time, the Beautiful South. Only a bit less shit. Surely, Simon, there might have been another way? Surely, Simon, is not Music As Reading it?

Part one, Bands Armitage would like/have liked to be a part of.

Searching for Mr Right – Young Marble Giants
She’s Lost Control – Joy Division
Independence Day – Comsat Angels
Spoilt Victorian Child – The Fall
Wildcat Fights – Eyeless in Gaza
The Boy With A Thorn In His Side – The Smiths
Nocturnal Me – Echo and the Bunnymen
Diamonds are Forever – Arctic Monkeys
Ever Fallen in Love (with someone you shouldn’t’ve)? – The Buzzcocks
Blue Boy – Orange Juice

Part two, Bands Armitage’s writing/songwriting reveal would have, in actuality, been a slightly better fit (note, half the size of part one).

Lucky You – Lightning Seeds
Irish Blood, English Heart – Morrissey
Our Mutual Friend – The Divine Comedy
Perfect 10 – The Beautiful South
Put A Donk On It (original mix) – Blackout Crew*

* I suspect this one needs a wee explanatory note. Blackout Crew are, basically, the Beatles of the Donk scene, a relatively new species of drainpipe-techno defined by a quintessential northern-only-ness to compare with, say, Armitage’s rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Simon would surely approve – somebody should put them in touch with one another, get the poet to ‘drop’ on the next record (if there is a next record…) See the VBS donk-umentary (http://www.vbs.tv/watch/music-world/donk) for more information.

Prizes | Mixtape | Mixtape III, To a Wolf

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Music As Reading: Mixtape III, To a Wolf, after Luke Kennard

The Wolf and I visit the Arts Centre for the private view of Franklin Gewitz’s screen prints.

The Wolf signs the guestbook: Dear sir, I enjoyed your exhibition, but would have preferred it if all of the pictures had been of me. I suppose your meaning of life is different to mine. Wolf x x

Why is Luke Kennard’s wolf a wolf? There are clues. In the poem this mixtape takes its name from, the wolf reflects on the ‘rather circumlocutory’ novel the narrator has written about him: ‘Where are all the descriptions of my white-noise fur and bloody breath like the steam from a kettle?’ As if to confront the florid, melodramatic, vigorous connotations of the Wolf In Art head-on: feral, the opposite of a domesticated dog; Adolf, the most notorious name in the world (apart from possibly Lucifer) meaning ‘noble wolf’; Lycanthropy and Bram Stoker. And it talks! The talking wolf dressed up as Grandma in Little Red Riding Hood must be one of the most disturbing single images in all literature. Fairy tales, fables, parables. Wolf in sheep’s clothing. Boy who cried wolf. Three little pigs. I could go on. Musicians have, often.

Before shattering the very same connotations: ‘My girlfriend and I agree that the wolf should pursue a career – and there is just the position for him at Whitehall: WOLF REQUIRED, £20 per hour… ‘So what does the job involve?’ I ask, that night. ‘Nothing,’ says the wolf. ‘As I understand it, they mean to pay me simply for being a wolf.’’ Thus relegating the wolf to the mediocre-surreal, unambiguously middle class, two-dimensionally literary, academia- and ideology-deflating existence that all of the rest of Kennard’s characters enjoy. Modernity (in England, anyway) means a literary wolf is interchangeable with a literary centipede, fire, owl, Kennard’s poetic persona, Kennard himself – all have to deal with the same middle class absurdities, guilt, crises. The likes of the public-school-new-age-camp Patrick Wolf represent, I think, a similar joke. Others saw different potential in the shape of a wolf.

Luke Kennard’s wolf is such a brilliant, enduring (over three volumes already) character because he is a wolf, a creature laden with more mythological, monstrous, symbolic, humorous and pop-cultural baggage than, probably, any other. This mixtape offers an opportunity to get a widescreen sense of this phenomenon via a medium (guitar music) about which Kennard knows his shit – from the perspective of men and women from very different backgrounds writing at very different times, all of whom decided what they needed was a wolf. There are clashes here: what would Kennard’s wolf make of Peter’s wolf, Howlin’ Wolf, Three 6 Mafia’s bark (he’d definitely love Three Six Mafia)? From out of them, though, you may begin to understand: why is Luke Kennard’s wolf a wolf? Because of Duran Dumotherfuckingran.

(Luke Kennard’s wolf-poems can be located in all three of his volumes of poetry, all three of which are published by Salt)


Part one, The Wolf as Clergyman

Peter and the Wolf Op. 67, Introduction – Sergei Prokofiev
Howling Wolf – Muddy Waters
Wolf Like Me – TV On The Radio
Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts – Wolf Parade

Part two, The Wolf as Memoirist

Wolf in the Breast – Cocteau Twins
The Back Door Wolf – Howlin’ Wolf
Queen Isabella (She-wolf of France) – Patrick Wolf

Part three, The Wolf as Educator

Peter and the Wolf Op. 67, The Wolf – Sergei Prokofiev
The Grandmother Wolf – Pretty Girls Make Graves
Wolf Notes – The Fiery Furnaces
Wolf at the Door – Radiohead

Part four, The Wolf as Playwright

Crying Wolf Version – Lee “Scratch” Perry
The Wolf that Lives in Lindsey – Joni Mitchell
The Circuitry of the Wolf – Mew

Part five, The Wolf as Lieutenant

Peter and the Wolf Op. 67, The Procession to the Zoo – Sergei Prokofiev
Wolf Wolf – Three 6 Mafia
Killer Wolf – John Spencer Blues Explosion
Hungry like the Wolf – Duran Duran

Second Person | Mixtape | Mixtape II, Songs for Natalie

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Music As Reading: Mixtape II, Songs for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze, after Don Paterson

O who is this dark angel with her unruly Slavic eyebrows ranged like two duelling pistols, lightly sweating in the pale light of the TTF screen?

Writing actually about music was always going to be an early focus of Music As Reading – it represents a point at which a connection between music-listening and words-reading becomes kind of inevitable: here’s how a writer has described an artist slash song, now I’d better listen to it slash them myself to see how good a job he slash she did. Inevitable, then, but necessary? Does a writer writing about music have as much of an obligation to describe his subject with a precision and three-dimensionality capable of catalysing a reader’s mind’s-eye – without any kind of visual or aural aid – as, I don’t know, a travel-writer sketching a remote destination? Almost certainly – but looking at the breed of metaphor peddled by the NME (the chorus: Frank Black buttfucking Iggy with a barbed-wire-guitar whist Steve Albini squats in the background ejaculating asymmetrical reverb-lines by way of lubrication etc. etc.) rarely is this obligation met with much success (is it even possible?) And neither does justice or precision seem to be Don Peterson’s project with Song…, which owes more to the wonderful bad-poetry of William McGonagall than it does to the best of music journalism.

Rather, Song… is far more encyclopaedic than it is descriptive, choosing in the main to catalogue and generalise (although ‘a kind of glitch-hop Blossom Dearie’ is breathtakingly eloquent, it must be said). Indeed, against a backdrop of actual tracks, the poem sheds a good deal of its seeming music literacy, the sentence that inspires Part two of the mixtape appearing particularly problematic and uselessly generalising – until one remembers that the piece is, A, that rare thing, a genuinely funny poem, and B, as much an indictment of avant-garde electronic geekery as it is a celebration: ‘the true focus of one not merely content – as, no doubt, were others at the Mänover Elektronische Festival in Wien – / to hit play while making some fraudulent correction to a volume slider’. The layers of irony, deliberate obfuscation and acute, high-spec knowledge thus make for a more complex and challenging Music As Reading experience than, say, a haughty comparison of journalistic similes with the records they describe – isn’t writing about music far more about writing than it is about music?

(Don Paterson’s Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze can be located in his latest volume of poetry, Rain, published by Faber)



Part one
…your fine vocals, which, while admittedly limited in range and force, are nonetheless much more affecting than the affected Arctic whisperings of those interchangeably dreary / Stinas and Hannes and Bjorks, being in fact far closer in spirit to a kind of glitch-hop Blossom Dearie…

Gorod – Tusia Beridze
Butterfly – Stina Nordenstam
Break My Body - Hanne Hukkelberg
Everything I’ve Got – Blossom Dearie
Wound – Tusia  Beridze

Part two
…how can I pay tribute to your infinitely versatile blend of Nancarrow, Mille Plateaux, Venetian Snares, Xenakis, Boards of Canada and Nobukazu Takemura…

String Quartet, Allegro molto – Conlon Nancarrow
Frictional Nevada – Venetian Snares
Cvet – Tusia Beridze
Plektó – Iannis Xenakis
Kursaa – Tusia Beridze
Roygbiv – Boards of Canada
Alone with the Alone – Zü & Nobukazu Takemura


Part three
…this little I have gleaned: firstly, that you are married to Thomas Brinkmann, whose records are boring – an opinion I held long before love carried me away…

Hextention – Tusia Beridze
Isch – Thomas Brinkmann
Smattack – Tba
Walk With Me – Thomas Brinkmann
Late – Tusia Beridze

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

Issue 1 | Mixtape | Mixtape I, Berry Men

Music As Reading: Mixtape I, Berry Men

Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was bester! He wrote like wet papier-mâché, went the Heming-way, weirdly on wings and with maximum pain – we call upon the author to explain.

This mixtape represents the coming together of songs drawing upon the imagery slash message slash romanticism of a poet’s life and career, musical literary criticism, work with very similar creative specifications to the same poet’s best pieces, and combination’s thereof – the focus being that writer most beloved by contemporary American guitar bands, John Berryman. And more specifically, his 385 Dream Songs. In order to pose the following questions: can music about literature bring with it new understandings of literature? If not, does it have a right to essentially then leech off this literature – even if the result is a compelling new piece of work? What happens when a song like Okkervil River’s John Allyn Smith Sails reflects upon both literature and music (i.e. the Beach Boys) simultaneously? Do certain of these songs bring something new to the real-time experience of reading Berryman (have a look at Dream Song 4 with Gainsbourg on in the background and you’ll see what I’m getting at)? Is a musical thematic project (say, write a ‘Dream Song’) the same as – or at the very least, related to – a similar literary thematic project? And what happens in the spaces in between these questions – is the existence of a composition for a brass quintet entitled Fancies, Toyes and Dreams: His Rest pure coincidence?


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Part one, Biography

Intoxicated Man – Serge Gainsbourg
Stuck Between Stations – The Hold Steady
John Allyn Smith Sails – Okkervil River

Part two, Literary criticism

We Call upon the Author – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning? – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Softly and Gently (Angel), the Dream of Gerontius Op. 38, part 2 – Edward Elgar

Part three, Other people’s Dream Songs

Dream Song – Matthew’s Southern Comfort
Coat Check Dream Song – Bright Eyes
Dream Song – Scott Matthews

Part four, Combinations thereof

Papa Won’t Leave You Henry – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
We Live As We Dream, Alone – Gang of Four
Fancies, Toyes and Dreams: His Rest – Giles Farnaby


Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

Issue 1 | Music | Music As Reading Introduction

The Music As Reading Silkworms Ink Spotify Mixtape Collection, an introduction

The act of reading is, by and large, taken for granted. At least, the pragmatics of it are. Yes, critical discourse enjoys referring to good and bad reading(s), to close and, increasingly in a world of so-called world literature, distant reading. And popular debate about the positives and problematics of reading novels and newspapers from the screen of a Kindle or an iPad, about the essential literary qualities of the throw-aroundable paperback, continues to fill far more cultural comment column-inches than, really, it ever should have done. Still, certain practical basics of reading are taken for granted, assumed, agreed upon in a way that, when you think about it, is rather curious: we stand or, most likely, sit; we look at a book and only that book; we concentrate on the words, fully; we read them in the direction slash sequence that their author intended us to read them in; we re-read until we understand – perhaps due to distraction, maybe because of the especial complicatedness of a passage. And so on.

Now, of course, and particularly within poetry, this is not universally the case: B.S. Johnson’s avant-garde experiments with literary ordering, experimental sound- and picture-poetry by the likes of Keston Sutherland and David Morley (a chapbook of whose is a highlight of the current Silkworms crop), approaches to reading themselves taken for granted by non-Western and-or archaic cultural traditions (calligraphy, say; right-left reading versus left-right; Blake, and others, etching the originals of their poems in mirror-writing; codes; aural traditions) all attest to this fact. That many of these exceptions represent little more than tweaks to the conventional reading formula – often over-serious, invariably self-consciously niche, frequently debated with a fervour that far outstrips their actual, real-terms significance – suggests, though, that they might well be rule-proving ones.

Question is, is this reading-conservatism a problem? In many ways, no. In fact, it strikes me that reading is one of only a scattering of things that unambiguously benefit from a reasonable dose of conservatism – another example would be making tea. It is of fundamental importance that individuals continue to approach texts with the time, patience, reverence (to a point), a work-ethic, philosophy, lack of hurriedness, lack of expectation of immediate meaning, vocabulary – not to mention imagination, creativity, belief in magic – to do said texts justice. If this concept falters, at the highest levels of reading (for that is what we’re discussing: rigorous, scholarly, energetic reading, not snapshot-thought – so no, Twitter isn’t going to destroy proper reading, it’s simply a new tool for different reading) then literature falters with it.

However.

To focus too much on these conservative fundamentals is to lose sight of less conservative methods of preserving them in a changing world (ugh, changing world – my apologies). Indeed, it seems to me that for all somebody like Sutherland’s attempts to scissor poetic form and the block-structures of reading into something that constitutes, in itself, a form of political polemic, regardless of what convention states the actual words mean, his process represents in many ways an affirmation of the most traditional and conservative tenets of the actual act of reading (slash listening – are they really so different?) Getting anything out of a Sutherland text or reading requires a good deal of old-fashioned hard work. (We’re edging, I think, towards an Adorno-esque understanding of the crucial role difficultness has to play in resistance – a difficultness that is born, probably, out of a conservative approach to the pragmatics of reading – but I suspect that’s a story for another day…)

Long and short of it, difficultness is a good thing! Difficultness equals good reading! Difficultness is poetry, certainly! A by-no-means-new idea, but one that something like, y’know, the internet can facilitate in any number of new ways. The act of reading is taken for granted. This is a problem, because it has the potential to mean that reading, per se, gets left behind, churned in the wake of the digital revolution (ugh, digital revolution – my apologies) – at the expense of the part of reading that must be taken for granted, i.e. difficultness, rigour. We need New Readings. No, that’s not quite right:

We need New Old Readings. In this digital age (Jesus Christ, stop) of ours, we need more Sutherland-style new approaches to preserving traditional principles.

It’ll be with this somewhat lofty concept in mind, coupled with a more humdrum desire to find a way of featuring music on a literary (slash t-shirt) site – because music is a good thing – that Silkworms Ink will launch a brand new feature this coming weekend: the Music As Reading Silkworms Ink Spotify Mixtape Collection. I’ll let that sink in for a moment or two…

The Music As Reading Spotify Mixtape Collection will, like the Silkworms Ink Chapbook Collection, be added to each and every week of the year, the result being a glossy, erudite archive coming together in notimeatall, available for free to anybody – be they regular, contributor or stumble-acrosser. Like the Chapbook Collection, it will be open to submissions from anybody with remarkable ideas – all we ask for is a title, an explanation-blurb, a brief bio and a tracklisting and we’ll do the rest, artwork, the works. What I’m hoping most of all is that some of you start submitting Music As Reading Mixtapes featuring your own compositions, symphonies, soundtracks. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

The premise behind the Collection is a very simple one. We need New Readings. So here’s an idea: musical readings. Or, more specifically, Music As Reading: what happens when we make music central to, a fundamental part of the act of reading; if we sandwich music between a text and our comprehension of it; if we regard music as a means to unlocking literature as opposed to an alternative or accompaniment to it? What is music that claims to be about literature, or vice versa? Can lyrics, say, or a libretto, ever constitute music and literature simultaneously? Forget ekphrasis, art about art – what about a synthesis? What about art on top of art?

What happens when we read with music? Do good things happen?

Each week, a new mixtape will explore a different fragment of this utterly massive question. It may be a particularly tiny shard; in fact at the beginning, it probably will be, as the collection finds its feet – not to mention poetry-focussed, as this is where, I’m sure you’ll agree, the most obvious intersections occur. It may be a factual shard (exploring, I don’t know, Songs About Poets), a more practical-experimental shard (Listen To This Song Whilst Reading This Poem And See What Happens) or a philosophical-metaphysical shard (Is A Poem Not Exactly The Same As A Song?) There may be no coherent sequence over the course of a few weeks, followed a few weeksworth of mixtapes exploring exactly the same thing, in slightly different ways. Mixtapes might come complete with new writing, or aim themselves at ancient writing. All that is certain is that, every six weeks or so, my weekly blogpost will focus not on that week’s theme, but on what new lessons and understandings might have been gleaned from the Music As Reading experience of six new mixtapes. The introduction of new mixtapes will generally centre upon a clutch of questions: these mini-essays will hopefully offer up an answer or two.

I think I’ll leave this probably-too-long-already introduction there. Just a few practical details. You’ll need Spotify to listen to each week’s mixtape – register for, at the very least, the free, basic (‘Open’) service here. Mixtape submissions can take, really, any form you like as long as they include the basics listed in bold above – whack them over to music@silkwormsink.com, but I’d recommend leaving it a few weeks to see what the collection’s about before doing so. Music As Reading is a concept best understood through practical demonstration. Mixtape-Chapbook joint submissions are also welcome – up to you how you go about doing that.

A final thought: as this week’s theme is Issue 1's here’s a video of what might be considered the first major new-tech example of Music As Reading – on any number of levels. Music As Reading Issue One, then: Nick Cave, musician turned author, reading a chapter of his second novel published last summer, the Death of Bunny Munro, accompanied by a soundtrack composed especially by Cave and his right-hand Bad Seed, Warren Ellis. Oh, and below that, an App advertisement making the case for Cave and Ellis’ project representing a new mode of reading. Revolutionary technique or corporate gimmick – you decidez, kidz…

Nick Cave, novelist
App advertisement

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor