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#Post#: 700--------------------------------------------------
IN BETWEEN DREAMS (Project of the Month, Feb. 18 to March 18)
By: moleshow Date: February 18, 2019, 2:01 pm
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Howdy all and welcome back to the Project of the Wee--I mean
Month!
Seeing as the tour has gone where it intended to go, it's fair
game to talk about. Even with the setlist changes.
For those unfamiliar with how Project of the W--Month works, we
basically all gather around and put up reviews, theories,
feelings, thoughts, smells, anecdotes, etc, about the designated
project. Afterwards, it moves to the Project Talk section where
it remains archived. In addition to this feature, there's going
to a poll pinned for which past project we should revisit, since
it's been a while since we covered a lot of those and the time
finally seems right. For this current run, Intruders will also
be an option on there since we've yet to put that one up as a
Project of the Mmmmwmmmmwmmmonth. And folks should have that
option.
Currently, though, let's talk about In Between Dreams. See it?
Fail to see it? See it only partially because some lame folks
next door couldn't handle Tyrone's sweet angel voice? Talk about
it!
#Post#: 702--------------------------------------------------
The Nights Of Gorilla Smells Like Tongues
By: CheerfulHypocrite Date: February 21, 2019, 5:39 am
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In June 1840, the Manchester and Birmingham Railway opened a
temporary terminus on Travis Street. A large site, 1,700 ft by
500 ft, was cleared of terraced houses, industrial premises and
public houses to make way for a permanent station built on top
of a viaduct, 30 ft (9 m) above ground level. The station was
opened adjacent to London Road on 8 May 1842. The station
connected to the Oldest Railway Station in the World at one end
and to the Northern Industrial Powerhouse at the other. The
station would become Picadilly Station and one of the arches of
the Viaduct would become Gorilla, a nightclub on Whitworth
Street, Manchester. Gorilla is not huge but it packs something
astounding into the compact extent of a railway arch. The
vaulted roof survived, a century later, during the 1940
Manchester Blitz in which hundreds of people died as three
hundred tonnes of high explosives were dropped onto the City.
Onwards to the third millenium and Gorilla is a nightclub on
Whitworth Street, Manchester.
Like the Smell of Sulphur Underground. That unique chemical that
makes every nose twitch. Like a Smell Of Sulphur On The Wind. In
1970 Bill Drummomd attempted to walk down Iceland and failed.
The artist Richard Long attempted the same walk and succeeded in
1994. Long made works of art from this walk. One work is the
photography and text piece called 'A Smell Of Sulphur In The
Wind'. In 2001 Bill Drummond writes the book 'How To Be An
Artist' in which his relationship with art is examined. Having
purchased 'A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind", Drummond decides to
sell the work for £20,000 in 20,000 separate numbered segments
for £1 each. Drummond dissected the Picture and went on tour.
Giving a talk and selling slivers of picture. The job is
finished when, after 20,000 sales, Drummond will return to the
stone ring and bury the money. Job done.
A venue that sold every ticket for a stage that is no larger
than a railway platform is a venue that has to give something
more than a roof over your head. When Rilla contemplates love,
Gorilla contemplates more. Stones, like the landscape, record
memories. Ghosts sidle into the brickwork, spectres inhabit the
cornices. The Railway Arches have long been a powerful image of
Northern Culture. Northern Soul. Northern everything. Beneath
the ground, the River Medlock meanders. Above, night trains run,
rarely on time. Gorilla is not the Hacienda. It smells like it
sometimes. Perhaps there is some unique chemical that makes that
true. Something about the smell of obscurity underground.
The atrium beneath the aqueduct heaved with the (foul flavour of
vermin) assembled and expectant. The swelling night club crowd,
expecting a brief number from someone mysterious. A crowd whose
collective voice, a cocktail of accents, swirled until a certain
moment. When there was a silence. A pause. A moment of
something. The World Shifted. Smelling tension in the air as
three strange Bavarian Birds wibbled and waddled onto the stage.
The Bavarian lozenge of the Wittelsbach Family: rulers from 1180
to 1918, when the whole of Europe collapsed. Displacing the 11
year old Nigel Senada from the certainties of service to the
Monarch. As the Anif Declaration released all civil servants and
military personnel from loyalty to the house of Wittelsbach. No
formal renunciation of the throne took place and so nobody
really knows if Wittelsbach is, or is not. Just as nobody knows
if the young Nigel is or is not. But: England Expects, as they
say in the flag signals.The Wittelsbach sidled into obscurity.
There yet absent.
It started in an open spot, with words like: "In my dreams at
night, I hear a white hot light" - with Tyrone channelling Jack
who was wishing to be just a bird, singing simple melodies that
no one ever heard. Which, was just what the three strange
Bavarian Birds set about doing: making melodies. Emerging from
the sounds, like bricks and mortar, to make music. The only
homage to Senada that anybody could contemplate. The collapse of
Bavaria in 1918 left Nigel recording the sounds of birds,
knowing that eekie-erkie-cha-cha was merely a mnemonic for a
ballroom dance. Given the pack of the throng, an undanceable
swirl, only the conga would be possible. Tyrone - his Bovine
Holstein polka dot magnificence - began the gentle hypnotic
induction that would take us all between dreams.
eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha!
Eekie did something to a guitar. It may have been channelling
the Medlock River. Described by Friedrich Engels as being
"...the most horrible spot...", it is a hidden river of
Manchester. Filled with the undertow of Mancunian life. Eekie
was dredging up something from somewhere which scorned out into
the night time air. The room, once solid with people, their
collective mutter, and the aroma of human virtues, now filled
with sound. Quite literally, the vault beneath the aqueduct was
now sound from which music might follow. The plodwobble and
totter of Erkie and Cha-Cha becoming the Hawfinch and Shrike of
the Bavarian Forest. Tyrone had cast a subtle spell across the
Audience. Not some curse or cure or even a philtre of good
lovin' - but the kind of incantation that lets the human walk
between dreams. In between dreams, in a landscape made of sound.
A howlin' Holstein in polka dotage.
Brian Eno coined the term Ambient Music to describe sound that
is "as ignorable as it is interesting". Tyrone, Erkie, Eekie and
Cha-Cha seem to have embraced the Ambient in a novel hypnopompic
manner: sound that is the structural foundation of reality.
Audio-ontological-obscurity. Imagine, for a moment, being in a
railways station and hearing nothing. The silence would be
inignorable. The tension mumbling like a midget making reality
curl and sway and become something neither ignorable nor
interesting. Something unignorable masquerading as the mundane.
Dreaming of being a cowboy riding with the wind, at the fringes.
Ambient Music transformed into a cautionary tale of wolves.
Haunting the Dream. The American Dream of an American Band. The
dream of the Black Behind. Building upwards from sounds into
music is difficult in a studio where the knobs can be exactly
knobbled, dials dialed, sliders slid, and switches flipped. In a
live context, that is fraught. Building from the Ambient to the
Briciolage in the presence of hundreds of people is where the
Theory of Obscurity becomes something more than an affectation.
It is bloody hard work.
Which is the danger, when Tyrone bellows his bullhorn of black
and horror. The danger of the black behind all. That you are not
in between dreams at all but careering towards the thing that is
behind all the dreams. The good dreams and the bad. The dreams
that are as ignorable as they are interesting. Which is waiting
and not, in the slightest, far from danger. The lights spinning
round, As though some carnival abyss had crashed into the
viaduct. To make the point: the ambience of Nachtzug drifted in
and out in the moments between songs. Imagine. Imagine. Imagine
being in the belly of a railway and hearing the sounds of
trains. The sheer ignorable connection between the place and the
sound impresses the subconscious - the black behind everything -
with the bellow of an animal lover's monkey man we are moving
onwards. Onwards to an uncertain future because sound, having
filled the room, is filling the bodies, the faces, the smiles,
the eyes. Filling every Monkey in the room. Lights swirling
backward and forward. Like trains. Ghost trains passing through
the viaduct. We are all fleeing the abyss that we have willing
stared into and is now staring back. As Tyrone Howls. The
Brimstone of Obscurity curdled the night and nothing could save
us, not even a kindly nun.
It was, it seems, turning into an evening of animals and
machinery. Mother Theresa told us so. In a swirl of light she
grabbed Tyrone's attention and then we were off. We had thought
it was a mans world but it turned out to be a warning about
elephants and accidents and the endless swelling, turbid, turgid
howling. Mother Theresa chittering about the accident. Perhaps
channelling the vanished trains of the Whitworth Street
Underground Station. A station never built, yet evoking the
ghost passengers who were boarding the sounds the Tall Bavarian
Bird was dredging from beneath the pavement beneath Gorilla's
floor. Mother Theresa was there telling us the things she
thought important and impressive. Yet. She may have been a
forgery. A fake. A camp follower taking advantage of the plenum
of sound, light and something. She was here to tell her story.
Like a water colour of a bunny boy, she had a story to tell. But
it was filled with ambiguities despite having no ambiguity. A
slippery trickster intruding. A waft through the solid night of
Tyronism.
It was there, then, that moment: everybody apprehended that
Tyrone is, endlessly, a Shaman and that we were underground and
that this was a trip in between something more than simply
dreams. This was the endless dream - like the endless song -
that drifts across the landscape wherever there are trains. A
moment of silent, contemplation within Gorilla conjoured all
those people sheltering from the oncoming Blitz of 1940 or the
oncoming transformations of 1842. Which was the moment that
Cha-Cha became a Shamanic Drummer - summoning us all to the
lands after dreams. And the trains, these were a reminder of the
radical and tragic history of Manchester, that trains that run
on time are not always a good thing. eekie-erkie-cha-cha!
eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! A conga train to
oblivion.
And the room became a blue world. Not a uniform blue. Not the
Blue of Mother Theresa, nor the Blue and Red of Nixon's Blues.
This was the blue that filled and flowed out of everybody and
into everyone else. Unlike other Bands, whose endless chatter
punctuates and guides the Audience, this was a communion in the
medieval sense: the merging of the Audience and Performers into
a thing. More than merely a performance or individuals. The
hurtle towards a tourniquet of roses that nobody might ever
inhale. Punctuated by moments where Eekie stood, silently
holding hands behind. The black behind again. Even from the left
hand side of the stage, the infusion of lights worked a glamour
- that mediaeval sorcery of the Green Knight - that filled the
head from touching the eyes.
When John Wayne turned up with some anecdote about a Ballerina,
everybody had already been captured. We were all traipsing the
trail from the Plains to Mexico without even considering where
we were. We had been kidnapped by bears and taken towards the
most melancholy noise ever heard. The void had caught up with us
for staring. A kindly void. If we are to give character to
voids, the Gorilla Void beneath the Manchester railways has a
heart. It is a kindly and forgiving heart and one that beats
fast in the industrous heart of the busiest of bees.
In Manchester you are never more than six miles from a
graveyard. There were over 800 deaths in the Blitz in 1940, in
and around Manchester. Many of them from people sheltering
underneath the arches. It is a place of mortality. Six more
miles to the graveyard was the most poignant performance. Not
simply because of the resonance with the death of Hardy Fox but
also because it came at the end of a visual and physical
performance that was genuinely gruelling exertion. This was not
simply an encore to please a crowd. This was putting something
new into new dreams. Taking the sounds from the room to achieve
a moment of lucid reverence. This was a final exertion which
came at the end of an evening that had genuinely given something
to the audience.
Which is an achievement in a City where the tour bus got
ticketed for parking on yellow lines. Which is an entirely
contestable ticket as the yellow lines are not within
specification. Contestable from anywhere in the world via the
marvels of the internet. The new railroads in the plains of
cyberia. It is an achievement in which the posers would, before
a sound had been uttered, declared that the gig would never be
as good as the "thirteen anniversary in the Hacienda - I know, I
was there". They were wrong. They just like the name Hacienda.
Which is fine. Marvellous. Tony Wilson promoted the Residents
right across the North of England with the One Minute Movies on
the local news programme, "Granada Reports". He would have been
at home in a Gorilla. He would have understood the relationship
between mortality and giving. How Tyrone could invent an
invisible conga line from guest gorilla's - eekie-erkie-cha-cha!
eekie-erkie-cha-cha! eekie-erkie-cha-cha! The conga of hominids.
Then it was over. Gone. The lights changed. The Band vanished.
The whole thing had never happened. It had been a dream and we
were all, once again, in between dreams. Outside, we watched the
road crew loading equipment up as we waited. The rain was vile.
But that is the nature of Manchester: rain. It explains the
underground rivers and the endless raised collars. It explains
how the Residents came to town, drifting in and out and making
ripples that will expand outwards forever. Past the Quaker
Graveyard and Peter's Field and past New Jarusalem into the
aether. Onwards.
Strange birds waddle onto the stage. The room filled with sound.
The sound turned into music. The strange birds strutted away.
Leaving them journeying onwards. Always six more miles away. The
most melancholy sound, ever heard, is the sound of Tyrone,
having screamed Die! Die! Die! and told us all that there is no
more to say, telling everybody - those in the Renaldo and the
Loaf Poxodd Teeshirts and those in the Classic Eyeballs and even
the guy in his hand painted Monkey shirt - that "She's the best
friend I ever had".
It is in the loss of others that we know we have friends.
Did I mention that Gorilla is a really friendly venue: no. But
they serve coffee. Which was nice.
Did I mention that was the best event I have been to in a long
time.
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