Uncategorized « Voices off Camera

15 – Alabama 3 @ Glasto

I saw them 3 times but the saturday afternoon when they were on one of the main stages was far and away the most fun.

14 – Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip (and Kid Carpet) @ Warwick tempo

I assumed this was going to be quite fun but it was so much better than I thought it would be. The Students Union used to be a shit venue but as part of the big union rebuild they’ve knocked together a really cozy underground venue and I really hope they keep it given I never conceived the students union (which I’m now kind of shackled to for another six years) would have a place for music that I actually really liked. Kid Carpet was supporting and I’d never heard of him but he looked like such a fucking tool I thought I would hate it. It was really fun though: lovely, silly and entertaining music, in a similar way to a lot of ska-punk. Dan Le Sac was awesome. Again this was party down to the venue though and the bass in Thou Shalt Not was lovely. He did awesome slam poetry while Scroobius Pip went outside to smoke, flawlessly timing it to last exactly the length of one fag.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6MKSCFufSeA

13 – Futureheads @ Warwick students union

I went to see this solely for Hounds of Love. From what little I’d heard, I’d never been interested enough to listen to anything else they’d done and I figured this song (which I adore) was a one-off. Even so I was stunned by quite how boring and, well, shit their other music is. I assumed they’d finish with Hounds of Love given it’s their only good song. I was in the toilet half-way through the gig when the initial vocal harmony bit started, cue excited jumping up and down as I tried to do my pants up, scaring the shit out of the guy who walked into the toilets at that moment. The song was fucking brilliant and kind of made it worth listening to 90 mins of shit music and paying a tenner for a single song. The night after was awesome as well, leading through the gig to a crappy but fun and very drunken rock/metal night to my living room and passing out at 7am in the morning. If I remember correctly – which I probably don’t – the following morning was the day of the riot. I got kicked out of bed by my ex to go buy milk and food, I left my flat at 11am on a saturday morning to find the high street filled with riot police, looking very nervous and with really old crap 1980s riot gear: the sort of small round shields you see police wielding uncertainly in photos of the miners strike, rather than the ultra-modern stormtrooper shit the TSG has. What must have been every available police body in Coventry on a saturday morning was out, as they had some football fans barricaded inside my local pub and they were periodically sending snatch squads in to bring people out and arrest them. Leicester were apparently playing Coventry and hoolies from each side decided to meet in my local area, which is nowhere the fucking stadium, to have a fight. I’m all for letting people who want to have huge fights do it, as long as it’s away from anyone who could get hurt (and I think the tendency of liberal thought to reduce this sort of phenomenon to ‘collective irrationality’ is a really interesting explanatory failure, given there’s blatantly a lots of quite complex emotional and social meanings tied into why people want to get together and kick the shit out of each other). However if you decide to this on a busy shopping street you’re simply a cunt. That was a weird morning and in the state I was in after the night before, it was deeply fucking confusing until I joined the large crowd of gawping onlookers (feeling deeply British as I did so) and asked them what on earth was going on.

12 – James Blunt @ Glasto

Everyone I’ve said this too has, perhaps justifiably, taken the piss out of mercilessly. I went to see it largely out of morbid curiosity and the fact there was nothing particularly interesting on at that time (it was also, I think, after the Editors so I was in fairly emo mood). It somehow seemed to fit the slightly confused and messed up state my head was in at the time, perhaps because watching Goodbye My Lover with my ex as we neared the end of a convoluted and depressingly protracted break up was a really sadly poignant yet strangely cathartic experience. He is such a cock though. He insisted on taking his shirt off for the crowd.

11 – Gogol Bordello @ Brum Academy

Great fun, though I wish I’d managed to see them at Glastonbury as well.

10 – A Golden Rule @ a pub in Leamington Spa

Far and away the best pub gig I’ve been to in my life. The other bands were quite fun but A Golden Rule were awesome, not least of all because of how much fun they were clearly having despite the dingy venue and tiny crowd. They’ve since split up which is a bit shit since I failed to make it to a gig they did in London which would have been really easy to get to. I listened to their CD so much that I killed the music for me a bit. They manage to take everything I like about skate punk and melodic hardcore and wrap it up in one lovely enthusiastic package. No youtube videos but their myspace is here and it has Trying So Hard which I enjoyed so much live.

9 – Reel Big Fish @ Brum Academy

I actually went to see Streetlight Manifesto who were supporting but I was having a shit night, found the mosh pot really claustrophobic and lost my friends because I can’t see for shit (very dark & crap eye sight) in the main Academy. So they were a bit shit. Reel Big Fish were so much fun though and completely cheered me up in the space of an hour. I’m seeing them again in early 2009 and I can’t wait particularly given that the above song has such amusing personal relevance to me now. I almost got the shit kicked out of me afterwards though when I intervened inside McDonalds as three rude boys started kicking off with this skinny 16 year old kid from the gig. I tried to do it in the most non-comfrontational way possible but it blatantly didn’t work as they were waiting for me when I left, cue me ducking back inside McDonalds and holding the door shit when I realised they were about 3 seconds away from punching me in the face. Such utter tools. It kind of took the gloss off the night a bit.

8 – Manu Chao @ Glasto

Skanking to this like uttery twats in sun glasses on a head full of mushrooms was wonderful. We were at the back of the crowd up a hill facing the sun as it set and it was truly beautiful. Even if the middle aged punks having a homoerotic orgy next to us was a bit weird. They all seemed very happy though.

7 – Bjork @ Wolverhampton Civic Hall

This was the third time I’ve seen Bjork and given that the first one, which the video is of, was – perhaps next to radiohead in 2003 – the greatest and most trippy set I’ve seen in my life, it’s always seems a bit of an anti-climax. God that was a convoluted sentence. Still an utter genius though.

6 – The Editors @ Glastonbury

Early Friday evening at Glastonbury, after a Thursday night that devolved into the most unpleasant kind of drug-fuelled melodramatic idiocy, and was the most fantastic pick-me-up. When this song started, I left the people I was with in a rather naive and overly enthusiastic attempt to get to the front of the crowd. This inevitably failed but I got right into the middle of a lot of very excited people and the atmosphere was fucking brilliant. It had never really occurred to me that the Editors were one of those bands who just sound exponentially better the louder they are. I’ve never seen them in a venue, though after Glasto I fully intend to and I suspect they’re one of those bands (much like Muse) who just sound far better on a main stage at a festival than they do anywhere else.

5 – Streetlight Manifesto @ Brum Asylum

So much fun. Even though my favorite trainers fell apart midway through the gig.

4 – Frank Turner @ Birmingham Bar Fly

Well I was utterly shit-faced and depressingly I remember this gig far less clearly than I wish. It was fucking fun though, though it occurred the next morning that the singing along probably wasn’t quite as fun for the more sober randoms around us. Frank Turner is a lovely hippy twat and particularly live he has a really affable humility about him and his music. He also wrote the four lines that have fascinated me more than that from any other music I can think of:

Yeah, well life is about love, lost minutes and lost evening
About fire in our bellies and about furtive little feelings
And the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering
And they help us with remembering that the only thing that’s left to do is live

As I go on about it here, I think it expresses an intriguingly ambiguous sort of late-modern romanticism. There’s a sense of the objectivity of moral sources expressed really poetically in it: ‘the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering’ and which push our gaze to the world outside our heads and beyond our evaluations. It’s like the classical romantic idea of turning inwards to move beyond rational introspection and (re)connect to transcendent nature. Of the late modern variety, the moral impulse is accommodated to a naturalist universe that preclude the metaphysics tied up in the classical conception. It’s the reemergence of a romantic moral realism: kind of like what Richard Rorty tries to do from a PoMo approach but utterly fails because of the theoretical knots he ties himself in. Yet music flows right over the antinomies that appear inherent in the ethos when you approach it theoretically. It’s a scrabble for moral meaning in a metaphysically degraded universe.

3 – A Wilhelm Scream @ Brum Barfly

They were playing to a near-empty Barfly on a freezing Tuesday evening in February. One of the most fun nights I’ve had all year, even if I almost died of drunken hypothermia on the way home.

2 – Gaslight Anthem (and the King Blues) @ London Astoria

At Glasto 2007, where the video is from, the King Blues were my favourite band in the country. Then they got shit. Then suddenly they seem to have got good again. Not quite sure what happened there. As a support act they were superb and Gaslight were just as amazing as I expected them to be. It’s a shame the video quality is shit because I’m in most of it. I love the fact that two days after a gig I can watch videos of it on youtube.

1 – Strung Out @ Brum Asylum

A near-empty and freezing Aslyum. Also my favourite gig of the year. 2008 was awesome.

I’m currently getting paid £80 to participate in an experiment at Warwick’s cognitive neuroscience institute and it’s got me thinking about all the problems I see with what is, essentially, quantitative psychology. In the particular case of the cognitive neuroscience institute, this is profoundly not an attack on what they’re doing (“studying the links between perception and action, in an attempt to better understand how so-called ‘controlled’ processes are instantiated by structures in the nervous system and their automatic functions, and how so-called ‘automatic’ processes are controlled by structural, intentional, and environmental factors“) as much as it’s an observation of the methodological difficulties inherent in non-hermeneutical approaches. They seemingly aim for experimental closure, yet they rely on paying students (in themselves a fairly atypical group and a dangerous starting point for inductive generalisation) and in some cases basically coercing undergraduate psychology students into participating by otherwise forcing them to do extra work. Externalities constantly seep into the experimental situation.

I doubt I’m the only one who finds it impossible to sit and perform a mindless repetitive task without interpreting the situation (e.g. thinking about what the designers of the experiment must be thinking about, thinking about the structure of the experiment) in a desperate attempt to make a banal task take on personal significance. The fact it’s being done for money, with my tendency to start thinking about what I’m going to spend my money on, further aggravates this issue, as the experiment becomes a challenge to distract myself through meaning-making (trying many different ways of understanding the boring repetitive task as having some significance to me). I guess the question at stake is whether the particular phenomenology of the experimental situation precludes their attempt to causally unpackthose cognitive functions usually deemed automatic.

I’m really not sure of the answer to this question but I suspect that the causal structures of cognition are constructed in a way that renders them epistemologically unproblematic and sidelines the phenomenology of cognition. The very way they pose their objectives as peering round the back of concepts naively understood as automatic/natural hints at the assumed epiphenomenality of first-person experience, presumably leaving it quite difficulty to sustain the sort of questions that seem obvious from a hermeneutical standpoint. At the end of the day, the researchers are embodied human interpreters and they are interpreting the interpretations of the participants. This dual hermeneutic is at work in all human science and an awareness of it should always frame inquiry. Obviously quantitative methodologies, which have a time and a place, must in some sense get beyond the dual hermenutic but it must be done so in a pragmatic and methodological way, rather than through a set of tacit ontological and epistemological assumptions that simply dissolve the questions.

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What a fucking twat

After hours of fun procrastination on youtube, my favourite gigs in 2008:

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Quantitative psychology

The revolving door

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