On the way up to my room after dinner yesterday, just getting out of the lift, I perceived from outside the door to the main corridor that someone was playing music at an unnecessarily loud volume. Not big news really, and in the short space between the lift doors and the corridor all I discerned of said music was a loping beat and a similarly undulating bassline. On autopilot, my thought pattern immediately switched to distaste ‘What rubbish have they got on now?’ I thunk, or words to that effect. On opening the door I was able to properly hear the track, the woozy synth line that I could now hear over the top of the aforementioned components made the whole thing naggingly familiar – this, however didn’t alter my judgement on the tune one jot, after all, they’re often blasting out things I’ve heard before. It wasn’t until I’d gotten all the way down the corridor, found my keys, opened my door and sat down inside my room that I recognised the song. It was in fact ‘Aquarius’ by popular beat-combo Boards of Canada (it’s the song with the counting sample and the guy saying “orange!” over and over), a group which I would purport to be a fan of – not a huge fan, but I do like the album on which that song appears a fair bit, in fact I’d been listening to it just a couple of days previously. Incidentally at this juncture it’s worth pointing out (not in a show-offy way, but if you’re impressed then feel free to be, I don’t mind) that I recognised the Boards of Canada track which they flogged to Mercedes (I think) on that advert almost straight away, ditto when they’ve been the background music on various BBC trailers for shows I’ve been able to spot them behind whatever dialogue is going on over the top – so why then was I unable to spot possibly their best known tune for a good minute and a half while it was playing at top volume just outside where I live? It’s a tricky one, and reconstructing the situation without making me look bad is yet more tricky. See, it sort of goes like this – I get out of the lift and hear music, music that loud equals irritation, I become vaguely irritated. That’s the easy part. The more problematic part is my judgement of what I hear and my immediate dismissal of it – it’s music being played by people I don’t like therefore I don’t like it. That sort of thinking, which is the sort I automatically employed is awful, terrible stuff, and the roots of all sorts of unsavoury consequences if followed through to its logical conclusion. That knee-jerk reaction was the one that clouded my judgement and rendered me unable to recognise a song that I like a lot, is very familiar to me, and which I’d played myself just a few days previously, and it’s quite a disturbing thought that my perception can be that easily changed. And not just that, but the idea that I’m still making aesthetic or even moral judgements about these people worries me too – what business is it of mine that they like a piece of music that I also like – ok they play a great deal of stuff that irks me, but I’m sure I play a lot of stuff that irks them also. Quite what they think of my petty retaliations at their Doors marathons or repeat plays of MC Hammer by turning up Fushitsusha or whatever just that bit too loud I really couldn’t say. The point is surely that my take on all this is outwardly ‘Their tastes are nothing to with me, so as long as they don’t impinge upon my freedom or privacy with them or try to force them on me then I have no right to complain’ so I can take issue with how loud they were playing Boards of Canada, but the fact that I passed judgement, and passed it so quickly is in direct contrast to the above and indeed to my own tastes. I’ll have to be more careful in future, but it’s an important lesson anyway. That aside, today was most pleasant – one of the things I really like about Sheffield is that because I don’t know it all that well, or I only know a tiny bit of it well, there are still huge swathes of ground that I’m unfamiliar with, it’s so nice to be able to just wander without any particular destination in mind in a new place. And round here there are so many little avenues and side roads that you can quite quickly find yourself in a place that doesn’t have to be Sheffield anymore, that could be anywhere at all. That sense of escapism is important. Of course it’s nice too to be grounded, and to know exactly where every next turn is leading, to be able to go either way at a junction and still be able to get home in time for tea. That’s the kind of comfort I have at home I suppose. But that isn’t to say that discovering new things isn’t possible on familiar ground, far from it, there’s always a new level of detail to be uncovered, or a new perspective you’ve not thought about yet. When I went home for Christmas for example, riding about a bit on the number 97 bus, which I used to get usually twice every day when I went to school, I was shocked at how little had actually stuck in my memory – I think by last year I sort of assumed that so much had I seen those same landmarks and rows of houses and shops and stuff that my eye was fixed on looking for marginalia, details, or else for novelty from people on the street outside or on the bus. I hadn’t really been seeing the bigger picture, as it were. But after four months of absence those places that I expected to seem drearily familiar actually seemed comforting, and interesting again, as though I had forgotten what attracted me to them in the first place, so eager had I been to look past that. Wood for the trees I guess. Well I talked about Plone the other day, annoyingly I have left their record at home and thus can’t listen to them at all, but more importantly I went on about headphones and listening on the bus to them. And I was thinking about this a bit, and I suppose it’s a sort of post-Cageian idea, but I’ve really gone off the idea of wearing a walkman anywhere, for fear of missing something. It’s great fun walking around with something like Merzbow on your headphones (I did this a couple of times through Birmingham City Centre), where everything sort of turns into this big deflating miasma, the bob of heads becomes shreds of sculpted noise – everything is sound. But lately I wonder if this is the right way to look at things, it’s a bit like those awful jokes about lonely hearts columns (the ones that say stuff like “’Cuddly’ = Obese”) when the real columns themselves are much funnier and more interesting, why have noise music as the soundtrack to your catastrophe when the real sounds are potentially more unpredictable and more musical, and less musical and more interesting and less interesting than any record all at the same time if you’re listening hard enough. I mean, Walkman (Walkmen?) are fine and all, and I suppose nothing else can really approximate that completely private and internal listening experience and, as I say, they can alter your perception of your surroundings in novel ways but it kind of irritates me when I see people with headphones on all the time. What happens if our private soundtracks become the norm? It worries me. Fantastic news for you though – If you know Sheffield at all you’ll probably have been past the University Arts Tower, which is a beautifully put together building I think, very stark. Anyway just as you walk up towards it, as I did today, on the right in the distance is a big hill, which isn’t all that unusual for the Peak District, but what has often puzzled me about this distant rise are the long white channels that run down it’s length at skewed angles, marking a strange, artificial contrast against the green and dark background of the rest of the hill. For a time I thought it might be some sort of building site, that was my assumption when I first saw it in September, that the big furrows were sand or something, part of a construction, but that didn’t really follow – what on earth would they be building so far out and so high up? Months passed and nothing seemed to be changing out there, no matter how hard I strained my eyes to look, so my original guess just couldn’t be correct. The winter months grew mistier and the nights drew in and my squiffy timetable meant that I was around the Arts Tower mostly when the distant peak was shrouded in fog or darkness, so much to my frustration I didn’t really have much opportunity to discern quite what that puzzling landmark could be. Perhaps if you saw it you’d get it straight away, and you’ll probably wince when I finally reveal what it is, but for a while it took on mythic status for me, the building idea, the best one I’d had up to that point kept returning with niggling regularity – I considered taking a bus out there, trying to find it on maps, but to no avail. I remember walking up there once and asking whoever it was I was with at the time, I forget who it was now, but I remember the non-committal shrug they gave, and the clipped, uninterested “Dunno…” – how could they just not care? How exasperating. The Christmas holidays loomed and I was no closer to discovering the truth, could it be some sort of message encoded into the very landscape? But a message to whom? And saying what? Disappointed, I left for home where the various distractions of the festive season and family and new years put the mysterious white channels in the hillside to the back of my mind. Returning in late January the conundrum once again presented itself to me – it just couldn’t be a building site, unless an abandoned one, the spark of my intrigue burst aflame once more, with yet more fervour even than I had mustered prior to Christmas I devoted time and energy to pursuing the truth. For whole minutes I would stand and stare at the hillside, poring over each detail. I was sure on clearer days that I could see movement in the channels, little languorous black blips steadily descending – people? Machines? I just couldn’t work it out. I consulted maps, but they were no help, I couldn’t properly place the location and every feature seemed nothing like what I could see. One day in February I determined to go out there, or at least get a better vantage point so that I could properly make out the strange markings, off I strode through unfamiliar territory, but I was soon lost and a sudden explosion of heavy rain forced me into retreat. Back in my room and soaked to the skin I dejectedly gave up my quest – that old Pynchonian They did not want me to find out, it was something important, critically important, but I couldn’t, just didn’t have the power to find out. That’s why I couldn’t find it on any maps, my friend’s disinterested shrug wasn’t that, but fear – he must’ve known. These things are often intuition. I resigned myself to ignorance, tried to avert my eyes when approaching the Arts Tower, tried to put it to the back of my mind. And I met with some success, though I couldn’t resist the occasional glance I managed to let other things occupy my mind, sometimes even traversing that road with nary a thought to my mysterious hill. I was doing well. And then today, lovely and fresh and clear as it was this morning I was walking up to the library, which is just next door to the Arts Tower and I couldn’t tear my eyes away, this was the best view I’d had of it for ages and as I slowly moved along, the pale sun glinting off the still damp tarmac and car windscreens, rows of people pushing past me in both directions, the murmer of conversation, the shrill wind and everything all dissipated as three small words entered my head, three words that held more satisfaction to me than whole volumes, whole libraries of carefully worked metaphor and silken phrase, rang sweeter and truer than whole vistas of melody I had worked out what the strange hill was, had discovered its well-kept secret. In three small words was captured the very kernel of all earthly gratification. And do you know what those three words are? I’ll tell you: Dry. Slope. Skiing. Whisper them. Oh and on the way downstairs to post this out of the window I saw the last glimpse of a rainbow disappear into the sky. - Kieran _________________________________________________________________ Stay in touch with absent friends - get MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.co.uk +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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