This is an ‘every so often’ uncharacteristic post inconsistent with usual incoherent and lively atmosphere that exudes from your clickings on apfos.

I sense this is a busy time, otherwise Marcus might have had some music to talk about since my last excitement about Oxy-Yan. One of the reasons I feel at home on this blog is because each post is worth something; each word of each post build up pillars for a ceiling under which I sit looking out the name-scratched windows of a train often taken, thinking about…everything. It’s not a constant dribbling feed of sound/music/genres that got our attention for, say, 30 seconds before we realised it was cool and most definitely ‘blogable’ . the price of this is a slight intermittency to my input, but nonetheless I hope, sincere.

The fact of the matter is, I love a girl called Ella and I bought an egg-timer that looks like an egg recently and I’m really excited about both of these things.

-Break-

The Argonauts have a flair that comes through their live-recordings; enough to remind me of seeing them play in a village hall in Harwich. I love being and feeling down to earth with them and their believable stories of conversations with girls enticed by wankers and who don’t like change.

George

I can swing to and forth, from a fifth or sixth or however many months not spent, but given up in the cradle of coils, kept in form, kept in shape like the hammocks of brighter eyes been, in trees, in between time, sleeping, our sleeping scene. The current, the routes beneath our feet so spoilt with water of the lake of thought, today, now, a current circling the island in the middle, always north, shining so bright that it rose above the attempt of eyes. Our eyes darting while the currents circle. The current tries to wash up on the security of a hidden destination, always north.

Oxy-Yan‘s from the Netherlands, from Amsterdam. This song is great.

George

Plaitum – Temptress

Plaitum – Geisha (IntotheNorthSea remix)

This boy and this girl, Plaitum, they could turn up loud, turn up wanted, fashionably late in the middle of some room of decaying faces immersed in yellow light. Decay like growth, time-telling tales of all that makes one queazy with future thoughts, what the fuck is the future thinking that makes us roll and roll and roll like polished wheels for the exhibition of nobodies. This boy and this girl play into my momentary madness, they excite me hugely. They get better with each song as well, a sort of progressive process towards I don’t know what but it’s conceptually huge. The sprite of excitable  listeners bouncing under their belt are wondering why these  star correlations aren’t more famous, correlations uncoiling in the  spider-web. This is good rhythm.
Good rhythm I tell you!

Go and follow their exponential rise before it happens.

Thanks, George

I open holes in the wall, brick by brick, I scramble through to more trees, more tangled up angles through thickened air. I find the relief of the hill conquered, then to see from the mist, the white musty fog, another gradient opening up, a steep hill unseen, another wall to take apart. I feel the air clog up inside, each breathe an effort of pushing, of forcing out something that doesn’t go, concentrating on the work and means and ways of day-to-day life. If there are sounds that can awaken my head when I bury it in published textbooks, handed down from one bored pre-adult to another, a stationary flow and store of heads cocooned by their own eyes, all I see is the constitution of money, the one-dimensional growth and infrastructure of a confused race. As I momentarily thought, if there are sounds that can awaken my buried head, they would be strong, heavy, emotional, heavy footed yet in rapid motion, powerful, a purposeful invasion of silence.

Kohib has offered such a sound. His album, Make Fire, is perfect. My listening to it has resulted in high activity. One day at college in one of my free periods, after having burnt the album in the morning onto a cd to play in my new cd player, I was somehow inspired to just ‘keep walking’. That is to say, I was walking down the high street wondering if I should buy a bacon roll from Baker’s Oven and I ended up walking down a desolate footpath under the bridge, along the river, meeting the train tracks, past the old derelict area of derelict marmalade factories, through the construction sites of tea-drinking and cigarette-smoking builders huddled in a van, at the fringes of the town, I got a bus back. Kohib played a great part in this journey. He conquers the feeling of constriction and monotonous un-ending challenge that I tried to express at the open of this post.

Only a few songs on the album constitute lyrics, this is one of them.  The whole album, that you can download from many places, holds a threshold of dark-eyed and consistent walking pace rhythm, I find it hard to distinguish my ‘favourite’. If i was a gimp i’d call it violinstep or something like that.

Kohib is Øivind Sjøvoll from Sortland, a settlement far in the North of the world.

This concludes my special feature on good music from nice places in Norway.
Here are the previous posts;

#1 Autoband, Tromsø
#2 Snasen, Oslo
#3 Torkelsen, Fredrikstad

A conclusion of this operation is my recommendation to stay following these great Norwegian labels that have together recorded and affiliated with the inspiration for all 4 songs;

Beatservice Records, Tromsø
Sellout! Music, Oslo

Both are relatively small companies that do well from your interest, and mine!

Thanks
George

a ps. Autoband released his debut album, that was spoken of, today. I am now listening to it, to beat my review, get it here.

Running a blog means that your listening habits are pretty erratic to say the least. Chillwave comes and goes, Chillstep does the same, hip-hop indie covers make up your entire diet for a month or two before subsiding a bit.

Regardless of fads and fancies, there are will always be a bench of regulars for you to call on at any time if you need a musical comfort zone. For me it roughly entails the album All Mod Cons by The Jam, Boxer by The National, a compilation of folkish beauties my friend Claudia made for me, The Last Waltz by The Band, a lot of Dylan, The Dirtbombs  and 2 more recent additions in the form of Germany Germany and Eastern Conference Champions.

I don’t know if they are actually top 6 collections of music but they are all up there and I have worn each of them in with relentless plays over the years. But the comfort zone has also changed, albums have not stuck around. Albums which were seminal for me at some point but which I haven’t touched for a while now, usually because they were a soundtrack to something or someone which is now not a lot of fun to reminisce about.

The classics example is Yeah So by Slow Club, a lyric form which gives this blog its name. I saw them play less than 24hrs after coming home from a 6 month trip. The few weeks after that I was a complete wreck and struggling to really enjoy what was going on at home. Then a girl came along in the form of someone who I had always completely been head over heels for. About a year of on-and-offing later things got messy, people got hurt bah blah blah, standard stuff. All the while Slow Club was playing in the background, now I barely even listened to their new album. Most things Slow Club got buried a while ago.

Dan Mangan fell foul, so did the Red Hot Chilli Peppers Live From Hyde Park album and The XX debut. All great soundtracks to another relationship. The list goes on with a few dark and morbid twists , but I’m thinking that stories of broken hearts are a bit more blog friendly.

It pisses me off that this stuff doesn’t really go away. It’s probably the case that when I’m an angry aging man I’ll sit in a room and listen to all these records as part of some masochistic nostalgic regret. It pisses me off that I can imagine that all too easily.

Today better be a good day.

Marcus

Please tell me I don’t have to talk you into this track. Every so often a song or artist drifts onto your radar and after 5 seconds you know this is a song that millions of people could love, it’s simply a case of “I’ll see you at the top” and just a matter of time before you do.  Bon Iver is a great example, so are The National, The xx, Sigur Ros and The Naked And Famous. Slightly further down the ladder there are King Charles and The Tallest Man On Earth (that there is a link to our first ever blog post over 2 years ago!). Like them (which you should) or not you can’t deny that they will float to the top.

BOY have got bottles and bottles of talent. I have had this on repeat pretty much all day. I cant help but be slightly captured by the melody and also the lyrics which are scattered with so many perfect turns of phrase and images. I read an old interview with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame on Pitchfork last week in which he talked about writing lyrics that suits your voice. It kinda stuck with me and this song backs it up perfectly. I’m hoping you are already listening to the track as you read this and I don’t have to unleash a tirade of superlatives. But this has made my day

Acoustic EP coming out in a couple of weeks

Full length LP coming in April, download the opening track below via SoundCloud

First ever UK show: Feb 7th in Camden, London.

BOY – This Is The Beginning [Free Download] by The Mahogany Blog

Marcus

Photo: Cecilia Majzoub

But my new technique which half works and is, if nothing else, a lot of fun is to find tracks like this Shlohmo remix and read aloud the stuff i need to learn. Makes you sound crazy and it’s largely unacceptable in a library BUT you feel like a champion and after a while you stop listening to music and find yourself latching onto the words you are saying and I find it helps the information seep in.

So there you go, a brief and slightly bizarre insight into how I have been listening to music these last few days. Real, honest, hard-hitting journalism.

marcus

This picture was taken by 19 year old Nikoline, a seemingly staggering individual and a remarkable photographer with a convincingly well-informed perspective on her surroundings.

This song, from my eyes, starts in the surreal. It starts with murky car-stained streets of Circling City. It starts with the smell, the smell of a colossal herd of humans with their heads on their hands, looking at the clock. This momentary image flickers like a light on low life, stuttering under storms outside. 17 seconds into the song, this image is plunged into cloud covered water of the freshest kind. Blood rushes around, the herd of humans, far away, nowhere near, your own human heart rejoicing in the big open theatre of expanse, alive and well. Torkelsen, of Fredrikstad, will have you onto the floor of your mind, firmly rooted on the ground, you’ll be able to think clearer as you remember ecstasy.

This is the third post focusing on good cool music from Norway. Check out previous posts:

#1 Autoband, Tromsø
#2 Snasen, Oslo

There’s no particular reason for all this Norwegian fuss… it’s just my imagination of the northern air is very much fitting into the gaps within my mind that are hacked open each day through the monotony of time and work and seriousness. for every imaginary place of escape, comes an imaginary journey to get there; i don’t know where the fuck we’re going but this song, Lavkarbovar by Torkelsen, will definitely be playing while we get there.

Amazingly, you can download it over at XLR8R.

He’s got some other gems as well; here.

There’s a really nice indie-signed girl band from Norway called Norma Sass, I want to write about them in the future. Torkelsen made flattering work of their Robbery. Listen!

Norma Sass – Robbery (Torkelsen Remix)

, George

This joins the select playlist of covers that I have heard and gone bonkers for in the last 6 months.

Rivalling Lucy Rose – Driving Home For Christmas (which I will probably listen to all year round). Just as beautifu as Benjamin Francis Leftwich‘s version of When You Were Young, which is phenomenal. As different to the original as Germany Germany is complimentary to The Dream of Evan and Chan which is a match made in heaven.

[edit: WOAH, hold the phone! How did I forget Peter and Kerry working hell out of Amerie? One Thing is the answer to a lot of problems]

Enjoy them all below.

marcus

Photo taken by Alex Trimble

Your map has been hastily stolen by waves bouncing off the sea-wall, colliding against each other. Some waves aim to land, to absorb into the sand of stones, the company of a million tiny travellers. Others hit the wall like fingers clenched away from comfort, they hit back, they confuse the direction. In this way, the north is obscured by the pull of wet winter winds. The trees on the cliff, once solemn-looking, are now deliriously confused for the sight of lifeless bodies running in the night. The water, once a resource, is now all over my eyes.

Our necks out in Norway once more, for the future,

we have here Snasen, lovely tune. The opening paragraph was to reflect some of the energy that makes this song a stand-out mover, to be interpreted differently; the clacking heart beating percussion + drawn out head-spinning synthetic lead.

George