Space Funeral

Woke up at 2 AM again and spent a couple hours lying in bed thinking about how to develop the scenario.  If this seems like a problem, it is, but the problem isn't Star Wars.  Before I started distracting myself with this nonsense I'd wake up at 2 AM and spend two hours panicking about geopolitics, so trust me, all this is actually a good thing.

Before I start recapping this a brief digression about music.  I've been trying to use music to help me write and work, which isn't something that's always easy.  Yesterday I found a pretty interesting comp called "Space Funeral" while looking for a copy of an early '70s Paddy Kingsland cut.  I assume it's some kind of a bootleg mixtape, maybe from the Blog Era (she says, on her blog).  It's kind of an interesting work as a mixtape, because half of it is Ruth White stuff from "Fleurs du Mal" and "Pinions".  Then there's a couple of early '70s Radiophonic tracks, a couple obscure haunted organ tracks by V. Mescherin and Vernon Geyer... and then there's Love's "7 and 7 Is", Mink DeVille's "Spanish Stroll, and a Les Rallizes Denudes track.  It's those last three offbeat picks that really make this a worthwhile boot mix for me.  Anybody can make a weirdo mix of Ruth White and Radiophonic Workshop tracks.  To take that and throw in Mink DeVille and Love's greatest garage single... that takes talent!

Looking on Discogs to see if there was an original release of this anywhere I found a couple more records.  There's an electronic thing by Expo '70 called Psychic Funeral - Umberto is on it, if that gives you any indication.  (Still haven't found that obscure record by the unrelated earlier Brazilian band Expo '80, other than the couple really nice tracks on a comp somewhere.)

I also found a split by Nexus 6 and Funeral Diner.  Apparently Funeral Diner are really well-regarded in the screamo scene, but this, their first release, is _not_ terribly well-regarded.  Personally I like it a lot more than their later work, which tends towards a certain strain of post-rock that I, rightly or wrongly, dismiss as "boring".

It continues to surprise me how much I like screamo - I grew up in a scene that viewed "emo" as a pejorative, that the only way to go was to be constantly loud, political, and uncompromising.  Nowadays I see being "political" in that sense as tiresome.  Jello Biafra going off on his constant tedious Noam Chomsky conspiracy rants, and if I point out his tediousness I'm just not GETTING IT, MAN, I'm allying myself with THEM, and then he's off telling you again how this person or that person is a fucking sell-out traitor.  Maybe he comes up with a "clever" pejorative nickname for them.

That's just not how I do politics.  For me, the personal is political, unavoidably so, and thus all politics is rooted in my direct personal experience.  And I can't just nope out of it whenever things start getting "unpleasant" the way a lot of my cishet white male friends tend to, because the unpleasantness has a tendency to being specifically targeted at people like me.  Ignoring "politics" can be dangerous to my personal safety.

So I do like screamo, especially once I realize that a lot of the stuff that was claimed to be "screamo" is a later appropriation of the name for a different, less interesting style of music, sort of the thing Skrillex and his ilk did with dubstep.  Not all of it, but some of it is really quite good.  Today I'm digging the Brave Little Abacus.  I definitely need to explore the genre more.

Well, that wasn't a brief digression at all!  I guess I'll start a new post to talk about the silly Star Wars crap.