Rhode Island

As my dad’s crooked hand is pointing out, we have two newly recorded songs up for free DOWNLOAD.

One is called Staffa & Fingal. The other is called The Old People.

You might already know them, but they sound much better now. And they are both correctly spelt this time.

We hope you enjoy them very much.  If you do, why not pass on our website address to a loved one?

Look, we have a new EP up for download called Internecine.

It relates to our recent album The Third Person in various ways. Think of it as its little brother or sister, perhaps.

Click HERE to own it.

Productivity,

productivity, productivity.

Here’s our new album. Enjoy!
Download HERE
Info/stream HERE

Good news! We’ve more or less finished the new album, and will put it here for free download at some point next week.

In the meantime click HERE to download a song from it, called In Your Eyes.

An Epiphany

She leaned right back against the car, placed her palm flat on the roof. It was toasty warm. The sun was beating down on her and the car, and she was truly happy with the hand on the roof, and her mind wandered and thought up strange scenarios, and they were filled with people she’d never met. She stayed like that for minutes.

After a while a man came up to her and asked if she would like to join a group, to move into the group, to make a radical break with the group. He looked really young, seventeen maybe, and he had very long nostrils. She stared into the nostrils, kind of up his nose, right into his head, and shivered in the heat for just a moment.

“Are you waiting for the street-car?” he asked stupidly.

“Nope,” she said, tapping the car roof, “this is mine.”

The man carried on: “Are you from England? I love your accent. Are you from London?”

Yes, yes, she nodded, even though this was a lie, but what did it matter, so she just said: “Yes.”

“That’s great,” he said, although he didn’t look like he thought it was great. He looked very serious and unpleasant, and she couldn’t keep herself from staring up into these long nostrils. And on he went about the group, and asked her to join, and she said “Nope”. He reluctantly left. No way, she thought, and he disappeared around the bend.

But, you see, the next day she changed her mind. It was strange. After the man had left her, she had put her hand back on the roof, but the evening was coming, and it wasn’t as warm, and it had started raining. She drove back to the motel, through Decatur, through raindrops as big as boiled eggs. The whole night she only left her room once, to get a drink from the vending machine, and she had raced across to outside the laundry facilities where it stood, and raced back, and her heart had pounded. And somewhere along the line she just changed her mind. Her back had been sopping with big raindrops, her t-shirt felt oily. She felt cornered and panicky. Maybe that was why. The next day she came back to the same spot and had the same conversation with the young man, but this time she said: “Ok”. And she was then in the group.

A Pincers

One thing the group insisted on was that a new member exchange gifts with them, as an act of mutuality. And the next day the head of Human Resources came up to her and presented her with a two pronged tool, almost like a pair of pliers. She looked quizzical and the man paused for a while then said incredibly quickly: “They’re a pincers”. It sounded incongruous, but was nevertheless important; a single article embodying something collective. And in return she went to her quarters and drew them a picture, the first thing that popped into her head. She drew a group of dodgy looking men. It was titled: “ROUGH-LOOKING JOKERS”. Make of that what you will, but it didn’t go down as well as it could have with some areas of the group. Human Resources said “Obliged.” And that was it.

Urban Renewal

Then they went north and rented out an entire floor of a block on 125^th and Maple. They became involved in the Urban League and chained themselves to the front of the Sojourna Truth development.  They held placards: URBAN RENEWAL HAS DESTROYED MORE LOW-COST HOUSING THAN IT HAS CREATED. The media and the digging machines were absolutely deafening.  The group won a moral victory, but were ultimately powerless. In the evening  well-wishers left flowers outside their apartment. The group declined to collect them but  wrote an open letter to the city, a radical gesture:

JOIN US

And people joined. And they were each presented with a pincers, and in return gave hastily thought-out, awkwardly executed gifts. And each time the man from the group waited and waited and blurted out: “Obliged.” Some new recruits were better cooks, and the group started eating really well, better than ever before. People would tell the cooks: “This is seriously good.” And the cooks would say: “Yeah, whatever.” It was a strange atmosphere, and they were strange people.

Cointelpro

Moving west, they liaised with the COINTELPRO operation headed by J. Edgar Hoover, and agreed in a shrugging kind of a way to help fight ethnic insurgency. The group divided into various chapters, and for months on end infiltrated groups deemed counter-productive to the national interest. In Buffalo they planted heroin on a Black-Arts Bookstore owner called Martin Sostre, and he went to prison for a seriously long time, for forty years. When he got sent down one member leaped off the sofa and punched the carpet in the expensive hotel room,  dust bouncing up into his face, shouting with joy: “Fucker!”. This was uncharacteristic of the group. But they ate increasingly well and shrugged more and more.

Disgruntled FBI members joined up without even being asked, completely bewitched by the grace and indifference with which the group conducted themselves. Hoover and President Nixon ate with the group, the latter declaring that if not President he would join up, no hesitation. He said the food was fabulous, and that the group symbolised the country taking responsibility for itself after a decade in a shit-storm. He got very little kudos for saying so, and left in awkward silence with Hoover. On his way out he stooped and said, curiously: “You can take that anyway you want.” He sounded incredibly like Nixon at that moment. The group watched him hobble out towards the limo and wondered what had gone on in his childhood. But ultimately they had little time for sweeping statements, and certainly weren’t interested in getting in bed with the state.

The New Left

The very next morning a small proportion of the group flew to Algiers in Algeria to set up an International Chapter. The long and short of it was that they spearheaded a diverse and global movement of class antagonists that would later come to be known as The New Left. They demanded that the liberal rhetoric of the postwar era be backed up with concrete reparations for past (and ongoing) injustices. One group member wrote an anonymous article for a Martinique journal called Tropiques. You know, it was warmly received, but ultimately preached to the converted.

Scandal

And all this time a tyrannical system of violent, sexual and psychological abuse was orchestrated within the group, between the members of the group, upon all members. This would all come out in a wave of publications at the beginning of the 1990s.[1]

Incident With Light

Right at the end, literally hours before the major arrests, one member of the group, Seb, had a visceral and personal emotional experience. In a hotel room, in the Austrian capital, the group had barracked itself inside. The media and the world were outside with cameras and police helicopters and breaking news reports. Seb sat on the floor in a dark corridor alone and watched a series of lights move in through the window at the end. Resting his whole back against the bare wall, he angled his face directly into the beam of a cold, bright, incredibly white light. He was thinking about the end, and the corridor smelt of mildew, and he could feel the nature working upon the building and in himself.

And he opened his mouth and the beam filled up his entire head. He was illuminated. He really felt illuminated. He opened his eyes and the beam burned them horribly, but Seb shook his head and did the opposite of sensible and opened them wider. Again, he very definitely felt upon his skin a deeper red colour move up his right side. It was deliciously warm, heating his right side, his back still cold against the wall, two opposing temperatures working slowly, ridiculously slowly on his body. The red light moved up onto his face and finally into his right eye.

He breathed in a big way and felt an erection and exclaimed: “Ohhhhhhhhh.”

And there, where the red and the white met, with the cold around the back, a vaguer yellow emerged, running slowly down his nose, oozing from the middle outwards. As in coming from somewhere inside of him. I think he was synthesising these lights and producing his own - an inaccurate synthesis, a wrong answer, but something that was strangely meaningful. Because everything was coming to an end.

And finally a flickering pin of blue that ignored him and moved rapidly down the dark corridor to reveal a girl who was on the verge of tears. They were both revealed by the various beams, and revealed to each other, and they looked at each other for a moment. And they felt so completely indifferent, so perplexed by the situation, so confused by themselves. And against all the odds they felt a profound, emotional kinship. Then everyone rushed in, and they were shot, probably.

The End

So it was a strange paradox. A mixture of personal and collective experiences, and protean politics. If I really had to describe the workings of the group (and I wouldn’t) I’d say they were built around the artistic technique of montage.

Carpe Diem, Leeds, 16/01/10

1. Next Exit

2. In Your Eyes

3. Englishman In Corridor

4. Hugh Person

5. Third Person

6. Landmark

Album coming week after next, promise, swear down.

It isn’t here. Not yet - we’re still waiting. But do not worry and worry ye not - it shall be here soonish. We have been listening and tweaking and thinking and moaning and fiddling and marvelling. Frankly I’ve been enoying The Third Person in all its forms, but it is closer to completion.

This is my date - December.

I’ve said it now. Under promise, over deliver.
But now - a link!

Three important, rather good things happened at the weekend:

1. Somehow, England destroyed the Aussies at the Oval and regained the Ashes.
2. Rhode Island rediscovered how good Chicken Kievs are (where have you been?)
3. We finished recording our album ‘The Third Person’ in a structured yet relaxed environment.

Being mixed and mastered, by someone with a degree in that kind of thing, as we speak.

Look here. (Try and forget everything about this video apart from the music in the opening minute)

Hello, click HERE to download a roughish demo called “Rust Hulk”.  This can be filed in the category “unused”, as it won’t be done for the album we are in the middle of making. Although I suppose it is being used here. Just in a different way.

RUST HULK

Don’t wake me up if you ever find me sleepwalking. Hey, look, the ash has spilled onto my shoes. But I still can’t recall a single thing about what you looked like or what you did. It’s the supermarket - they made me a monster! Or a changeling, a somnambulist, a still-becoming, a long-time dead, as thin as glass, but “my own man”, not yet a ghost, but still condemned.

I hung about outside a funeral, watching the families file in and file back out. I clung like a shadow with a Fairlight CMI. I played it back, and heard the most wonderful tapestry of sound and grief and human emotion. I was a facsimile, a plagiarist, one who cried at night and shuddered when he pissed. And there’s not a single thing, you can do for me, I’ve already lost, I’ve already lost. I’m a changeling, a somnambulist, a still-becoming, a long-time dead, as thin as glass, but “my own man”, not yet a ghost, but still condemned.

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful. It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust hulk of a structure.”  (Don DeLillo, Underworld)

…(coming soon)… an

Anecdote

Author’s Note: The private detective agency in this story works a ‘relay’ operation. This means they split all the functions of a detective into little bits, split amongst a large number of operatives. There are probably ten of them working on whatever it is they are working on, at any one time.

It was the summer. I was waiting for a phone call, and all the spiders were coming in from the rain through the windows. When I picked up a woman was speaking, giving instructions. I was full of affirmation. I nodded and said “I think so, I guess.”

I remember my boss, the head of the company, said in my interview: “You understand atomisation.” This was something stated, without a question mark. And I nodded and said: “Yes.” That convinced him to give me a job. He wore a blue suit. Its was the last time we met in person.

The spiders came in and the woman spoke a secret code. She hung up. The next morning I took off on foot to the address and waited. He appeared looking like they often do, like middle-aged men who had done something wrong or stupid or maybe misunderstood. He wore a grey suit and carried a green carrier bag, a shopping bag that bulged and flapped in the breeze. He set off up the street, then across another road and so on. He turned down an ally and we were suddenly in the countryside. It was incredibly hot, and people were doing farming right up alongside the backs of the big houses. He was a fast walker and overdressed, and I could see him a fifth of a mile away putting down his carrier bag and unbuttoning his jacket and being red faced and panting. He really just seemed like a fat middle-aged guy and I had very little interest in whatever he was doing. In fact I didn’t even know what I was looking at.

This makes sense, though. In the interview the boss had said: “Obviously, the point of the job is that you have no idea what you are looking at. You have no holistic stake in the operations of the company. None of us do. We deal only in pieces of information. Otherwise we become ideological, yes?’ The stresses were his own, and so were the big words, and he drummed his fingers on the desk. It made sense. “I understand perfectly,” I said. Next to him a backlit screen said the word RELAY, as if to intentionally overstate his point.

I should flesh myself out: when I was eighteen I fell hopelessly in love with a girl that I hated. It was the summer, and a load of us hung around the town square, just bumping into each other again and again, like in a soap opera. I loved her so much, I tried to fuck around with her all the time, I was just horrible. She was always there, and it made me sad that this person could have such a terrific effect on me. I said to her once that summer, I sneered: “why don’t you do something interesting with your life?” I can’t even remember what the context was. About two weeks later she went off travelling, to the literal other side of the world, and I had lost her forever. It left me very melancholic. Do you know the proper definition of the word melancholy? It means to mourn something that might not have ever been there in the first place.

So I was melancholy and became a detective eight years later, and I can’t for a second remember what the delay was for. And now the connections I make when I’m following the people who walk off into the countryside, or travel to airports and train stations, are entirely solipsistic, and I’m going a bit crazy. But, so it goes. I’m not paid to work these things out. I remember my boss said: “We’re not paying you… [etc. etc.]” I’m actually a very lazy man. I wouldn’t know a denouement if you hit me over the head with one. I prefer a good anecdote. Listen to this: I was once given instructions to follow a woman from an airport. And I was told her terminal, gate, physical appearance down to the fabric of her underwear. When she came out she had one arm. The point is, they’d told me all of this and forget to tell me she had one arm. She went off somewhere and someone else took over and I forgot about it until now. This is how this story ends, by the way. It ends with a slight shock followed by a complete disavowal.

But first: the man is sitting, by a barbed wire fence that separates a woodland from the big corn fields we have been in since we left the houses. The houses are out of view now. I am stood, still a fifth of a mile down, just looking at him, waiting. I may as well be five feet away, because this man is awfully serene and just staring across the corn field, his gaze at a ninety degree angle from mine. He is staring at nothing, in the most literal sense you could possibly get. I’m suddenly struck with the thought that I don’t know where his jacket is. He must have taken it off and put it in the bag. He’s sweating and panting. He has brown sweat stains under his arms that look like tea. So do I.

Suddenly he stands up with the bag and takes something out, a container, letting the bag drop to the ground. He sort of skips a couple of paces and hurls this container out into the cornfield. It carries a few feet in the air, not so much an arc as a downward gradient, a straight line. But, still, the throw has character and meaning. It suggests the man is trying to smash the object. I notice something, see some stuff coming out of the top as it crashes into the field. The man just stands with his chest out looking at the field for a few moments, breathing in and out very deeply. So do I. Then he sits back down. He walks a few steps back in a slightly dramatic way and kind of drops down on his backside. He is still looking out in the field, at the space that used to be nothing, which is now something but I don’t know what it is. I think back to the impact and grope for an analogy. I think of an aeroplane crash.

But this doesn’t work, and instead one of the things I remember now is from a few years ago, when I had a terrible time with depression and had tried to kill myself with an overdose of pills, which didn’t work, obviously, and a couple of days later I was out of hospital and in bed at home. Then I got some money out at the cash machine, and saw this police ‘wanted’ sign above the cash machine, with a photo-fit face of an Asian man in the middle. This man had raped a student in the supermarket car park, and the girl had remembered his face enough to put together this photo-fit and description. But me, I knew this man from work, from following him a month before. I knew where he lived, that he walked to a huge number of garages, and talked with mechanics, and then went straight home afterwards, on an almost daily basis. I knew that about him, and suddenly I knew this, and I began to make connections, and I felt as if I was betraying my company and my boss. And, weirdly, myself. And so I decided to cut out the mental gymnastics and simply go home. I didn’t ring the police because it would have been unprofessional of me. I didn’t feel any better or worse after this.

And now after an hour of looking at this latest man, who is sitting motionless at the side of the field, I realise I’m in something of a new quandary, because he isn’t doing anything at all. You see, I really have to stay with him or I’ll lose my job or worse. And he’s not doing anything. He has outfoxed me by doing absolutely nothing. Isn’t this stupid? He has me pinned against a barbed wire fence, and the night comes, which is very cold, and then the morning. And still nothing.

It’s in the morning still. I realise the only thing I can do that makes any sense is quit work by telephone, even though this will get me in serious trouble. So maybe I will quit tomorrow. I walk up to the man, and I discover that he has died without visible injury. I head out into the field and discover that the object he threw is an urn and that some of the ashes have come out of the top and spread about randomly, and, hey, look, they are on my shoes now.

Will