Repro-Fuck Yourself! + Inventory .02
“I guess you’re everything that life’s not”
Year Future
Sometimes DIY sucks. www.evemassacre.de = www.evemassacre.org now and both are down at the moment. I had to switch providers and I hadn’t saved the site files properly so I have to build a new one from the scratch. It will take some time as my html-or-whatever-you-use-nowadays-skills are below basic.
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I’ve put a new song online, “Repro-Fuck Yourself“. My shortest and fastest so far. Pissed-off-ness cut to the chase, written and recorded on the 30th of November. Get it from the Myspace-Player or download the MP3 here. The lyrics:
“Oh, I could be so ultraslim, so meganice, so supercute… yes, I know.
If only I could remember what for… recreation? Reproduction?
What about you go and Repro-Fuck Yourself!
So love’s no drug and attraction is a market?
Fuck Houllebecq, I want to feel and not to Descartes it.
If only I could remember what for…
“What doesn’t crush you makes you stronger”, that used to help me through the night
But by now I have grown so pathetically strong that my crush on you could crush you, that my crush on you would crush you.
Now could somebody please tell me what the fuck that is supposed to be good for?”
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I love YEAR FUTURE‘s ‘First World Fever‘ album. I was really surprised how many bad reviews it got. Even my cat hates it. I’ve listened to it a couple of times today and he first crawled under several layers of blankets and then left the room. I guess you can be easily annoyed by Sonny Kay’s wailing angry vocals. I love them. ‘First World Fever’ is quite a step forward from their 2003 EP, it’s much more focussed. Drumpatterns with lots of toms and heavy driving basslines and guitars that switch from sharp little melodies to reverb-walls build a kind of music that has the dark rhythmic boiling feel of bands like SCRATCH ACID or like punky goth rock before it became a stupid medieval fetish genre. It’s kind of weird to get politically-charged anti-capitalist lyrics with that kind of music but it fits in a twisted way.
www.yearfuture.net
www.myspace.com/yearfuture
One of the points that reviewers held against this album was that you could have expected Sonny Kay (because of his GSL history) to come up with more innovative music but please, nerds: Das Oath, Holy Molar, Orthrelm – as much as I enjoy those bands, would you really still call them ‘innovative’? To be honest, I also don’t think of all of those experimental noise press darlings like Lightning Bolt, Aids Wolf, Wolf Eyes, Liars etc. as ‘innovative’. Some of them are technically brilliant and touch some edge with that, some of them have a great feel for improvisation, yes, but that’s not new. Great bands, but innovative? Somehow I think Justice and SebastiAn and Boys Noize and the likes bringing that ear-ringing distorted synth sound into mainstream clubs was more of an innovation than whatever any of those noise bands achieved.
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This Friday you have the chance to go to a very rare night of pleasure: the ARTCORE ACUSTIXX party. Prepare for sugarcoated brainmelters of songs when SELFINTOXICATED and STAXX meet LOST IN THE SUPERMAKI ON WHEELS OF FIRE (CASIOHEART, MISS KITTY, EVE MASSACRE). It will be at the DESI, doors 10pm, I guess. Don’t miss it.
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It’s time for the end of the year lists and once again I fail to be able to think music in release time. Of course there are obvious ones like: Justice’s “Waters Of Nazareth (Erol Alkan rmx), Some Girls’ “Ape” song (or was that 2005?), TV On The Radio’s “Wolf Like Me” or that Trentemöller remix of that tune by The Knife, but I feel like neglecting the less in-your-face songs. I guess I’ll make a super-extensive song of the year list. Maybe with a mix. Albums…. well, that’s tougher. The Paper Chase’s ‘Now You Are One Of Us’ and The Thermals’ ‘The Body The Blood The Machine’. Maybe also that Burial album although I’ll kind of mark 2006 as the year that dubstep died. Or at least got very sick and weak. Also the year in which brit-style stripe-shirted indie kids took back the scapegoat crown that had been owned by the emo kids for so long. Oh, and C.Aarmé’s ‘Vita’ album was nice. Ach, I’ll leave that list for my next blog.
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I’ll stop doing AUDIOPETS, my monthly radio show. That makes me a bit sad but I have to cut down on some things to get rid of that tinnitus. I had some meds for that but those did only ease it a bit. I’ll wait till the new year to visit the doctor again. The white noise and feedbacking is still there, almost constantly. I hope that it goes away when I work out how to relax a bit more and get rid of that superstresstension that usually keeps me going. The plan is to get involved with less different things and instead concentrate deeper on the few that I’ll keep doing.
One of those things is that I want to focus more on my own music and remixes again. FFS, it’s almost 2007, a new EVE MASSACRE album is overdue, and I haven’t played live since May 2006. I miss it.
Of course I’ll also stick to putting up shows. For 2007 we’ve already booked a lot of bands that I’m looking forward to: Van Norden, Killeraffentheorie, Hot Club De Paris, Thunderbirds Are Now, Lvmen, Elision, Comadre, Graf Orlock, maybe An Albatross again, maybe even Hawnay Troof, and later that year hopefully the Paper Chase, Kids On TV, Die Princess Die, The Locust, Architecture In Helsinki and Kid606 again.
I also want to go back to writing more about music in this blog. I miss that too. Or maybe I’ll set up an extra music blog. No, scratch that, I won’t do that. I like to mingle the private stories with reviews of music and films and random sociopolitical rants.
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“Can you judge a man by the way he wears his hair?
Can you read his mind by the clothes that he wears? (…)
Then mister you’re a better man than I.”
Sham69
Reading a friend’s latest blog entry sparked off some thoughts that I have already had in other contexts: Enough of the hate already. Scene cleansing is so passé. I’d rather have a diverse crowd that includes a few annoying people who need to be taught some respect than get stuck in a self-contained safe Biedermeier enclave of an underground scene.
Of course I want the parties I’m involved with to differ from the ones at commercial clubs (to name a few in our town: Stereo or Rakete or Star&Stairs. Or Citcat Club, hehe.) I want them free of sponsoring, free of rules about what I can play or not, free of competition, and I want guests that create an atmosphere free of sexism / homophobia / orwhateverelsemakesaspecialgroupofpeoplefeelumcomfortable, and of course I also want the music to be different. There’s nothing wrong with playing some heat-of-the-moment hipster tunes but I crave for contrast, I also want to hear some tunes that are older / considered uncool by the music police / weirder. Simplicity and hedonism isn’t everything, so stop requesting those soundalike bore-songs. There’s also nothing wrong with playing challenging experimental tunes, the most brutal breakcore, the freakiest 8-bit-pop and the most unstructured noise music jewel but again I crave the contrast of sweet melodies and 4-to-the-floor beats or simple rock riffs. Challenge isn’t everything, so stop requesting shock-out tunes. Best would be to stop requests at all. If you have to, please surprise us. I’ve drifted from what I wanted to write about. Beg your pardon.
Hey, what’s up with that anti-fashion stance? I’ve loathed that ever since grunge took over the few clubs that played good guitar music back in the nineties and wiped out any glam. I had already had enough of that at the hardcore shows I went to, and I hated it when it took over the clubs. I love it when people put a little effort in dressing up for a show or a party as it shows it’s a special night for them. Just as you put effort in a flyer design and do not just write the plain information on it. What’s wrong about trying to look cute for each other? It only sucks if it becomes some kind of standard that excludes everybody who looks different, like at bouncer controlled venues that sieve the audience they let in.
If some stripey side-parted heavy-fringed hipster kid doesn’t have the guts to style themselves up in another way than what their local H&M suggests, well, maybe they need it to feel safe, to feel like they belong to a group. Of course it’s fun to make fun of it but I feel a bit queasy with the rising amount of ‘everyone who’s dressed that way sucks’ comments that smell of ‘we are better than them’ elitism and lacks the soothing friendliness of self-irony. Instead it sounds far too bitter.
Hey, at least the indie dress code of the moment is a lot about looking androgynous, and genderqueering hair-dos and clothes get my yes-vote anytime.
I don’t deny the pesky existence of some brainless dumbdrunk indie kids who think poor pseudo-Doherty-carelessness is cool, but there’s not more of them than you were and always will be able to find assholes at any event in any scene.
peace and out,
eve
x
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Inventory .02
After my Mom’s funeral someone had warned me about the first Christmas without your parents being a really bad and sad experience, no matter how old you are. Well, it sure hadn’t been too bad the year my father died. Actually the first christmas without my father was one of the most peaceful ones I’ve ever experienced. It, or rather thw whole year after his death, was all about taking a deep breat, taking a look around and seeing everything in a different light. It was about redefining relationships, about re-becoming a family, about becoming some kind of friends with my Mom despite the huge generation gap. She really kind of bourgeoned after his death and it was so good to see her finally doing things for herself and not just thinking about the ‘family’: Travelling, joining a choir, having friends, going out for sports and memory training, a lot of things. It always made me smile when I went on tour with my old band and she proudly told me about some gig she had with her choir.
She has never been a person who could express her emotions in words. I missed that sometimes but she kind of radiated her moods. She was really contagious, also with her continuous boost of energy. She was happiest when she had something to do. It took me quite a while to realise how many things I got from her. I’m also not good in relaxing and feel best when I have stuff to do. And like her I often tend to bring a bit too much upon myself and live with a constant feeling of ‘I’ll never manage to finish this in time’. My Mom’s life also kind of helped me making sense of Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I will go on” which over the years has become one of my favorite quotes.
In the past I had often been angry with her for not getting divorced from my father. In my teens I judged her for not having the courage to leave him and rejected to understand why she stayed and fought and put so much effort in protecting the pathetic joke of a family we had become back then. Later I managed to see it in perspective: She had spent many more happy years with my father than me. Most of my conscious memories of him are from a time when he already was the drunk troublemaker. Thinking back I’m not only thankful for what she took on to give my sisters and me a childhood as happy as possible, but also for making me grow pretty strong. Even if our beliefs and aims differed, I think I’ve learned a lot from her about fighting for whatever is important to you. Like I’ve already said: I just wish I’ve had given her back so much more.
I also wish I had been there when the stroke hit. The doctor later said she didn’t feel anything because it was such a massive burst of blood vessels in her brain. I cling to that information. To think I’ve slept in the same house after a long night out djing at Maos Rache while she was lying there on the floor, shivering and hardly able to breath anymore… it makes me feel guilty, no matter how much reason tells me I’m not. I only went to her flat in the early afternoon to get my cat who had stayed with her. Although I guess it was only some seconds it felt like long minutes till my brain put together the pieces of information it got in a way that made sense. First thing that came to my mind when I saw her feet under the table and heard the rattling sound was that she had crawled down there to vacuum. Only then I realised it was the sound of her breath and that she shivered and twitched but was unconscious. It also felt like ages until the ambulance arrived. I tried to move her, tried to remember the ‘lateral recumbent position’ from a first aid course ages ago. I couldn’t work it out, so I just wrapped a blanket around her and held her in my arms in what I hoped to be a comfortable position and whispered to her like to a baby. When the ambulance doctor said “things don’t look good” I perceived it as “it might take her a while to recover”. When I waited outside the ambulance in front of our house and they didn’t come out of the back for ages, that was the first time that it really hit me that it her death was possible. That whole afternoon at the hospital was the scariest time I had spend in ages. No one should be alone in such a situation. I’m not good in calling for help though, and I had forgotten to charge my mobile. I called my sister and later I send an SMS to a friend. Thoughts like “I can’t call someone cause I can’t cope with a conversation right now so I better don’t call a friend” ran through my mind. Also I hardly dared to go outside to make a call cause I feared to miss the doctor coming back from the CT scan. (Please: If any of you ever is in such a situation, no matter how good or how little we are acquainted: Give me a call and I’ll be there. Don’t go through something like this on your own. No one is that tough.) I felt absurd. Helpless, scared and angry. Out of time. I held on to her watch in my pocket all the time, stroking the glass with my thumb. One of the male nurses had taken it off and gave it to me before they took her away. I think I had tears running down my cheeks for hours. It didn’t feel like crying, they just leaked out and blurred my sight of other people waiting in the emergency waiting room: someone with a cut finger, a couple of drunk football fans bruised from a fight.
Finally a nurse called my name and I felt kind of relieved not to have to wait anymore, no matter what the news would be. She told me where to find the intensive care unit and it sounded quite complicated and I was afraid I would get lost but I didn’t. Then I had to ring and wait till the door opened and a doctor explained CT pictures to me. She said that the stroke had already damaged my Mom’s brain beyond the possibility of feeling and of repair, and that it now was only a matter of time till the rest of her body ceases to work. Then I had to wait in another room until I could see her. I felt sore and numb at the same time and I couldn’t believe it. Just because some stranger says it, I was to take it for the truth? Then I was allowed to go to her and sat at her bed surrounded by all the machines that were connected to her body. Her breath sounded normal, quiet again. I touched her shoulder, put my hand on her forehead, it seemed cold, and I felt like asking the nurse to turn up the heating and then remembered the doctor saying that she doesn’t feel anything anymore. After a while my sister and her boyfriend arrived and that brought my inner feet back to the ground. At 9:30 I gave up. I hadn’t eaten anything since the afternoon of the day before that and my head hurt from all the crying and tension, and overall I had just run out of energy and asked if we please could drive home. I couldn’t relate to her in that hospital. I kept watching the machines, I looked at the person in the second bed in that room and I touched my Mom’s skin to make it all feel a bit more real and to make her notice that I was there. I didn’t feel close to her in that hospital. That body was hers but not her anymore. I was glad when I was at my flat. Seppo came over and we talked for a while and I tried to down some pasta with pesto but felt more like beer and cigarettes. Later I thought I was tired and tried to go to bed and suddenly realised that I wasn’t able to go to bed in the dark. Seemed too scary. Like a little child I had to leave the lights on in the corridor. In my thoughts I talked to my Mom all night. I hardly slept at all. The next day brought a call from the doctor at noon that prepared me and my sister for thinking about organ donorship. Kerstin drove all the way from Munich to visit me and I was so glad that she was there, I think I would have gone crazy without her. A part of me still waited for a call from the hospital that said “It was all a mistake! Your mother is doing fine!” I was unable to deal with that: Knowing that she was to die, knowing that she wasn’t able to recognise anything anymore but at the same time feeling bad for not being with her every second.