Hi. Since I received my Voice the other night I thought I should use it and tell you all a bit about myself. I'm Erlend, but sometimes I go under the name of Erland. That, however, is only when English speaking people have mis-spelled my name, something which happens quite a lot for some reason. I am 21 years old and I live in Norway. For the last year and a half I've been studying Art History at the University of Bergen. Bergen is a rainy city on the west-coast. Next semester I'll most likely be studying Philosophy, simply because I'm trying to study the most useless subjects known to man so that when I'm finished at uni I can go on the dole or live off my parents. (Unless someone offers me a lush job in the art or music world that is.) At the moment I'm on vacation, well almost I still have one oral exam to go, and I'm working as a substitute teacher at the school I attended when I was wee bairn. Children are naughty these days. My favorite book of all time is Dostoevsky's The Idiot. But the most intense reading experience I've had was The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, perhaps the most disturbing book ever written. Even though I can't exactly say why. As I'm writing this I'm listening to the Tribute to Spacemen 3 album. I like Spacemen 3. And I love Spiritualized. I tend to become obsessed with things and one of my current obsessions is that I need to get every Spiritualized record ever released. I am also obsessed with learning to play the piano, and learning French. Should I say something about Belle & Sebastian? Maybe. The first time I heard them was about a year ago when I was sitting in my sister's room watching MTV's Alternative Nation waiting for a Mogwai video. Hmm, wait, I wasn't actually in my sister's room, I'd stepped out to go to the loo and when I came out of the bathroom I heard a voice which I thought sounded a bit like Nick Drake. The video showed a rather handsome young man walking around a nice-looking town. Anyway, I forgot about this song and the band for a couple of months. Then a friend gave me a tape she'd made me and on it was a lovely song about getting away from somewhere because one was dying. I immediately fell in love with this song and went on a quest to get the album. And that wasn't particularly difficult as a record store in Oslo was selling it cheaply at this time. I read the liner notes and thought to myself that The Idle Thoughts of A Daydreamer would have been a good title for my then current writing project, ludicrously titled The Erlend Hammer Manifesto. As you can probably guess "TEHM" was a right self-indulgent load of bollocks. And a few months later the Manifesto was put to sleep during a depression caused by a young lady. I deleted it and hopefully those of my friends who received copies have done the same. And since then my desire to write has turned to eraserdust. When I was 18 I swore that if I had not written the greatest Norwegian novel ever by the age of 25, I should kill myself in shame. (And writing the greatest Norwegian novel ever really wouldn't be that difficult.) Anyway, I think I have rambled enough for now. Thank you for allowing me entrance into the collective consciousness that is this list and I'm off to watch re-runs of Home And Away now. Cheers. Oh, I'll leave you with a limerick about the first time I heard Belle & Sebastian: I discovered the band on the telly, coming out of the room that was smelly. I applauded their song, but it didn't last long and the next vi-de-o was by Belly. Bye for now. Erlend +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the reborn Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". WWW: http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "jelly-filled danishes" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+