A Little Swedish

I have a wonderful friend who I met bouncing around a Jamie Woon gig two years ago this August. I remember that moment so well, a beautiful little Swedish girl with Madonna-like blonde curls and the eyes. She grabbed my hand and we oogled (or shall I say I oogled) Jamie Woon. She's a force to be reckoned with, she has created a community forum for female musicians in the UK. She also has a DJ set with the incredible Mooken Tooken called Social Monster.

She happened to have one of the most enchanting voices I've heard for a long time and a hardcore party spirit. Now she's put out a record that's been all over the place, radio and blogs are going mad for it. And I am too. Here's a special remix by Daisuke Tanabe.

The Weeknd

GIRL PUT IN WORK

It's been a while, a lazy old while. So I thought I'd slam you with something that I've been digging in a big way.

They are American that's about all I've got on them. And I've done some searching. They are a a duo with vocals from Abel Tesfaye. It's smoother than D'Angelo's abs.

But it's mixing some seriously intelligent beats and some trendy artwork, I'm pretty much a sucker for anything a little bit pretty.

This is sexy, this is hot.

http://soundcloud.com/adam-port/the-weeknd-what-you-need-adam

http://the-weeknd.com/

When Rock and Roll Saved Me

I’m pretty sad that the whispers about the Strokes new release are already smeared with resentment. This Is It was one of my favourite things to come out of the last decade as it was for NME and I was hoping for another classic from these boys. True guitar bands will always hold a special place in my heart. There is something beautifully nostalgic about a group of men thrashing about on stage with strong simple riffs. It makes you feel young and ready to take on the world.

So we can morn the passing of The Strokes genius. But you don’t have to throw your sweaty t-shirt to the ground just yet, look towards another great band instead. For rock and roll is not dead.

The Dirtbombs released their new EP this month and what a great noise it is. The perfectly named Party Store is a tribute to the 80’s electronic music revolution. But it’s not like a lot of the 80’s revival stuff that has been popping it’s head up over these past few years it’s something with a bit more musical graduation.

They’ve compiled a collection of covers of early techno and house tunes that originate from their hometown Detroit, whilst adding some of their wild live drums and smashing vocals from Mick Collins.

The best track on the album by far is Good Life. It’s that 1988 classic from Inner City, that if you don’t know the song by name then you’ll sure as hell know it by ear. It’s the one that you can out your fists up in the air with. And The Dirtbombs have made it into something that is so perfectly George Michael. They’ve cleaned it up with their trademark tight double drums and dirty guitars.

Jaguar’s instrumental thrash sends lifts you out of the vintage record shop isle and into the depths of a dark club with beautiful people doing less beautiful things.

Cosmic Cars is so dirty that it makes me want to scribble on walls. And the penultimate track Tear The Club Up is one of the best Friday tracks I’ve hear for a while. It calls for you to ignore your inbox and get your shirt creased.

This record is so fresh, bringing the old techno gems into their own. It’s just like Amy Winehouse’s cover of Valerie that makes the original sound empty and sad in comparison. So thank Detroit for The Dirtbombs, I think they’ve smashed it.

THE MOON IS LARGE

The moon is so near. This is what happens when it gets too close.

Fever Ray is an inspiration too us all. As is the director of this Martin de Thurrah.

Teaching Us How to Dress Well

I have gladly watched the James Blake mania unfold. Finally the masses are getting the subtlety of minimal beats and coming round to the idea of the whole electronic scene. The Blake frenzy brought back memories of when I first heard Crazy by Gnarles Barkley on Zane Lowe’s show in 2005. As I was not yet internet savvy I could only wait eagerly by the radio for its next airplay.

I stumbled upon Blake back in November of last year whilst on a late night blogging binge. Unlike so many, my love affair with his music didn’t start with his now populist record James Blake, but with his less known EP Klavierwerke. I was surprised by the space and choice of tuning on this record. It was so refreshing.

It was on this same midnight marathon I found something else that vibrated up through my headphones and made me clench my sweaty fists with excitement. How To Dress Well.

HTDW is a Brooklyn/Chicago based producer and caught similar attention in New York around the end of last year. He mixes heavy vocal samples and scratchy nostalgic hip-hop beats, bringing you a surprising combination of Bon Iver vs. Prince. The guy, Tim Cohen, has been releasing EP’s every month throughout 2010 banking an obsessive following and some serious bangers.

The lo-fi quality of recording scream for a perfect back-story. Like a modern day Robert Johnson. Maybe he recorded the whole album on the way back from his brothers funeral or was stranded on a ship 2000 miles away from his girlfriend and sent her these songs that she then leaked to the bloggers. But alas, he is just some weird kid from Brooklyn who moved to Germany for a while to do his philosophy post-grad.

His album Love Remains was released in Europe last month with some truly enticing tracks. The album starts with Ready for The World, a silently wailing tune with haunting, intangible vocals. My Body lifts you into something that sounds like a crackling Backstreet Boys demo. You Won’t Need Me Where I’m Goin’ is a bloggers favorite. You can imagine a beautifully trendy hipster playing the track to his girlfriend before he catches a flight to LA to meet his mate who is producing his own (delete where appropriate) band/record/performance hip-hop crew/TV channel/fashion label. But it’s still a bloody great track.

Walking This Dumb is a marching industrial mix, with a huge Berlin influence. But my favorite on the record and the true banger is Decisions featuring Yuksel Arslan. Arslan is an aged Turkish Surrealist painter, still very much alive. Although I’ve not yet understood how the artist was involved with the song the similarity of a fragmented dream-like creation is a huge motif for both musician and painter.

Throughout HTDW’s Love Remains you can recognize that he is at the forefront of the new lo-fi but highly skilled production that is beginning to hit the mainstream pop chart. If you need more of an introduction into this trend of great experimental pop I’d say start with this guy. The masses have only just opened themselves to James Blake’s smooth moves, but I am entrusting you with a deeper love affair.

A PORTRAIT OF MY GRANDMOTHER

The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

– Homer

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

– Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

She stands tall and wiry at the window. Her hair still thick short curls as they had been when she met my grandfather sixty years ago at a party in Oxford, when she was the protégé of a famous Austrian sculptor, when she was 18.

Her face now beautifully lined. Cracked like the Australian outback. Skin that I wished I could run my fingers over but for the icy cool blue eyes that stare back at you. Always a tight leather belt clinched at the waist with a smooth brass buckle holding in a small flat belly that had borne five children.

In the small little dining room is a large picture of the Dali Lama smiling forgivingly. Around are many small sculptures, smooth bronze and stone, all of them perfectly displayed. Not a place one lived would live in, the table a museum of a life, photos and ornaments take the place of plates and cups. And postcards of famous artists line the walls with their names labeled neatly underneath in tight handwriting.

She is watching a robin. It hops and takes flight to the next branch of the magnolia tree in the garden below. It’s cheerful chat comes up through the window and my grandmother smiles. The day is indefinable. Grey and mild, it could be any day. And to her it is. You see, my grandmother doesn’t know about time. She doesn’t know anything. She exists in a world of NOW.

A few days back I had to dismantle an artist’s studio. We moved my grandmother out for a week and took down every paintbrush and chisel from the room to make space for a live-in care worker. The layers of thirty years of creative harvesting in this small room at the top of her house now cleared and neatly packed away in the attic. She knows nothing. And she will never know. When she does remember the fear engulfs her, in her lucidity she remembers that days, weeks and eventually months have been lost and she is floating in a world of light and dark.

I’m not sure if this clear out is betrayal or helping her forget her former self. To me she is still grand and terrifying and beautiful, in fact more beautiful because she has left behind the terrors and insecurities of this world. She is like the little robin dancing from one branch to the next with no care in the world, often smiling to herself about an old deep memory of when she was truly happy.

Follow The Yellow Brick Road

(You have to read this in the mirror, technology won't let me flip the photo, but the message is apt.)

First off before I forget you can hear a guest mix that I did on a friends blog Chip's Blips.

http://chipsblips.blogspot.com/2011/01/aquila-roses-blips-january-2011.html

It's some music I have been vibing to while I've been away. This can aid you through my latest blog.

***

Tears stung my eyes as the aircraft ripped up into the night sky, up up through the heavy mist and lights. There is such a thrill of the pure blast of engine and wheels, the seemingly impossible lift of around 200 tons of metal. We sail up past those streets that had become my school, every corner a lesson, past the bright and disheveled island, the cracked sidewalks and magnificent towers. I looked down at my feet and two ruby slippers shone back at me.

For me New York was my emerald city. I had gone on a journey to get home, but no home in the obvious sense, home is a place you have to find within. I guess that is the truly inevitable answer you get from travelling. That no matter where you go or who you are with you will always meet yourself standing in the reflection, whether it is within the frame of a beautiful gilded mirror of a stately hotel or a muddied pool on a cold wide street.

One always has expectations, a mission to accomplish. My plan was to find me a Wizard, I had heard that they could make you a star. I collected some incredible companions along the way. One needed courage to live in that city alone and brilliantly and we found it for her in a beautiful apartment in Brooklyn and with late night pizza dates with street artists. Someone who needed a heart and we showed him how to love on subways and in the backrooms of East Village bars. Another who needed a brain and we all learnt with her through the galleries of Chelsea and in the books in my favorite bookstore on Crosby Street. We fought the witches together who drove taxis and took us down the wrong streets, who shouted at us, who stole our money. And when I finally did find a Wizard, he turned out to be just a magician, gesticulating wildly behind the smoke in coffee cups and the twinkling lights of the open mics.

So as I set out on my next adventure, back to a city that I thought I knew so well, I opened my eyes a little wider. The streets are so familiar here in London, the accents so dear, and the rudeness so sweet. I feel my world has transformed. I can look with eyes of a stranger at the loud cockney woman drunk and raving about politics on the night bus home, or the haphazard patterns of the streets and bricks and metal and glass and the forever stream of bikes. Because this is a journey that never ends.

F Train Ride

I’ve been a magpie for the last few days. Wandering round the city collecting shiny golden glittering things. Images, conversations, sounds, lullaby’s, shapes between people on the subway.

My favorite place right now is the subway. Sitting amongst the changing flow of people. I am living so far out from the city that I can experience the social demographic to extremes. When you get on the subway at Avenue U there are mainly Russians in the huge fur coats and Hasidic Jews with tall hats and curls. The Russian women are always so well turned out with perfect hair, plump in their seats. The Hasidic Jews, more than often only men and boys pouring over the Torah or dozing on their way to school. Everyone looks at me strangely, as I fit in better in Soho or the East Village.

These people normally filter off by Bay Parkway, leaving with one more inquisitive glare off to do what ever they do. Bay Parkway is where the graves stretch out either side of the station, the graveyard is huge and empty of life and so intriguing. Now these graves are covered in snow, quiet and cold.

The houses are plaid with wood in the true American suburban way, many different colours and shapes, with porches and with statement garages. They are uniform in their want for originality. This is so up until Church Avenue where the train rises and ducks down into the ground and leaving the streets and the houses and gardens alone.

The train carriages slug through the white tiles of Church Avenue, Fort Hamilton Parkway, Prospect Park, 7^th Ave and then up up up on to the rocky stilts of 4^th Ave and 9^th Street.

This is where the houses break up and the industrial mess kicks in filling the landscape with piles of dirt and huge yards full of old cars and machinery. The train carries on up and round to Smith Street over the estuary. If you get off on this stop going back towards Coney Island you can see the whole of the New York City sky line brimming up out of the gloom with lights, so majestic. The train curls down and round like a rollercoaster back into the ground and there it stays under until I get off.

Next comes Carroll St with its cherry tiles adoring the station walls. The actual neighborhood is very nice, with perfect little bars and resturants. Lots of young families and perfectly Stoke Newington minus the Whole Foods. Then is Bergen St which is pretty much the same. Jay St Borough Hall starts to get more industrial and less friendly and then York St.

York Street is in the center of DUMBO, the new very cool part of Brooklyn. It sits right on the edge boasting a very NY feel. The buildings are suddenly tall and old and fill the sky with an air of importance. There is an incredible bar round the corner from the station called Pedro’s. Of course it’s a Mexican joint with sparkling hats attached to the ceilings and perfect bar staff. Pedro’s is the only thing interesting in DUMBO I think.

Then over the bridge and over the East River to East Broadway and then Delancey Street where the wide road takes you back over the East River and China Town meets the Lower East Side. This is where Ludlow and Orchard Street start.

Where I took my first New York taxi cab with an Icelandic raver to a Balkan bar and drank sangria on a swing. Where I sat in a bar quietly reading my book to be befriended by not only the barman and his musician friend, but ending up making friends with the whole establishment. Where last night I went to see Jeffery Lewis, one of the legends of the Lower East Side, do a little gig with some friends in The Cake Shop. Where I met a great musician in Pianos from a band called Via Audio who you all should go and look up now and listen to. Where I sat with a friend on Christmas Eve weary with anticipation to then be caught by a street artist who drew cocks with the most sincere sales pitch that we actually bought one. Where I saw some of the best and worst music in the Sidewalk café open mic. Where on New Years day I fell upon a poetry reading which included a woman called Supolo, who’s words make me cry and die with joy inside. And there are so many other stories about the Lower East Side and the East Village that I could tell you. But for now I will take you off the train and off the street. And leave you with a song.

1.1.11

It’s as if the clock has been reset. We move through the city in a daze blinking. The diaries are blank and fresh and time seems infinite.

We jumped and threw our arms in the air and took to the table-tops and the doorways and made friends with strangers and sung all the way home and danced for the magic of 2010 and the new that we are entering.

The countdown brought the thought of my inevitable return to London. The bubble is slowly deflating around my head and the party will be over so soon.

But this is not the time to get nostalgic just yet. I’d like to sum up my year in a little list (if you click on the words they link you to an illustration)…

Gaggle

Pembridge Villas

Soho Theatre

Job Centre

Caledonian road

The Mall Tavern

Women’s Library

Camden Crawl

Election

Bush Hall

Festival tour

BBC Switch

Bike

Mr and Mrs Jess(ie)

Trace

The Correspondents

Norfolk

Germany tour

New York…

So here I am, and what a big old year that was. Let’s hope that the next year gives as much joy and lessons as the last. For now I’d like to share with you one of my favorite films and one of my favorite songs because I am too sad to write about this city that I have fallen in love with-