My Manta Ray’s All Right

You know that exquisite pain you get when a fantastic song is in your head, but circumstances prevent you from getting to actually hear it? I don’t know why there’s such a huge difference between hearing it in your head and hearing it from your speakers, but there undoubtedly is. You’re walking around for hours with it in there, and if it’s a song you love, chances are you know it intimately and your memory’s playing every note, but when you manage to get to your room and actually hear it in stereo, it’s like that moment’s a screaming orgasm and everything before was just indifferent foreplay.

At some point during lunch with Tamara at Belgo’s yesterday, Pixies’ Manta Ray started playing in my head.

I tried lots of ways to get it out. I went to Borders and listened to Sigur Ros, Black Box Recorder, Kid Loco, DJ Krush, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Sibelius. (Increasingly strange looks from the guy manning the listening station.) My find of the day: Pinchas Zukerman playing Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1, Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole, and Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No.5, conducted by Zubin Mehta, for 5.99! That’s the great thing about buying classical music that isn’t usually possible with indie rock – you can get so much good stuff for cheap. Supporting an indie rock habit, where every CD you want has an IMPORT sticker on it and costs twice as much as an ordinary CD, generally requires a willingness for turning tricks, drug dealing, organ farming or investment banking.

So anyway, nothing worked. I still kept having to remind myself not to burst out into “Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, YEAH!” in front of other people, and it was torture not being able to. Then I got home, scrambled to my computer, put it on and turned up the volume, and…

HOO-HOO, HOO-HOO, YEAH!!

:)

Adagio For Last-Minute Essays

Last night had to be one of the most chilled last minute desperate essay rushes ever.

Having been obsessed with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings over the past couple of days, I had Adagio for Strings, Agnus Dei (its choral arrangement) and William Orbit’s version of the work on repeat in WinAmp, and it’s interesting how each version creates a mood of its own quite distinct from that of its counterparts.

The strings arrangement gives me a feeling of overwhelming grief, tempered with dignity. The sort of grief that is tight-lipped and painfully controlled in public but collapses into shattering sobs in private. You feel almost disrespectful if you don’t stop what you’re doing and listen. (This didn’t help the essay-writing process much)

In contrast, there’s little or no sadness in the choral arrangement. I think of worship and reverence, buoyed by quiet hope. This is obviously also due to its title and lyrical content, but even without my Catholic consciousness of what Agnus Dei means, I get a distinctly different feeling from this one than the strings arrangement.

To me, the William Orbit version lacks the warmth and depth of the previous two. It’s a wash of synth, from which I get little or no feeling at all. I just keep thinking of that beloved tribal gesture of trance clubbers, usually made while one track is seguing into another – the “raise your upturned palms in the air as if you are a lightless people and have just seen the sun”. Hmm. Sounds like a Godspeed You Black Emperor! album title. Where was I? Oh, the William Orbit version. I guess this illustrates my point – it’s just really forgettable.

It was almost cosy. Me, Samuel Barber, and the European Court of Justice.

Mama Was A Rock’N’Roll Band

Today, I did not read chapter 8 of Law and Economics, Cooter and Ulen, 1997. I did, however, read this Magnetic Fields blissout at Tangents, which made for much better reading.

He talks about having tears in his eyes during Papa Was A Rodeo, while people around him were laughing, and my heart goes out to him. Sure, there’s some sort of humour in that the lyrics read by themselves could come across as incredibly hokey and country-western-cliched, but actually listening to the song just changes everything. You feel the dead-end desperation of nowhere towns. You see the swath of road illuminated by the headlights of a truck, beyond which all is darkness, but you know the road just goes on and on. You squint a little at the sickly yellow light of a roadside diner, and rub your fingers against each other, thinking you can feel menu grease on them. And then the song ends, and you open your eyes, and you’re sitting in your room, and you just really really love the Magnetic Fields.

I borrowed Screamadelica and Pixies At The BBC from Nick, and Matt has lent me Little Kix in preparation for the Mansun concert we’re going to this Thursday. The loans from Nick were stuff I’d always meant to listen to but never really got round to getting my hands on. I’ve listened to each one once since Sunday, but don’t have defined feelings about them yet except that they’re definitely worth listening to again. The Mansun album sounds like, well, Mansun. Similar to the first two albums with none of what made them interesting. This is why I sort of lost interest in them after hearing the new singles on the radio last year. Oh, well. The reasons I’m going to the concert on Thursday are, firstly, that I thought it’d be good to see a really Britishy type band live here, just for the sake of it, and secondly, that my growing resignation about my grim prospects of watching bands I really want to see made me jump at the chance to see a band I didn’t really mind since I would at least have company to go with. I’ve written about this before, and it doesn’t sound any less pathetic the second time, so I’ll stop there.