Jo Quail - Five Incantions (Mick Buckingham review)

The uniting factor in Jo Quail's music has always been its all-consuming omnipresence. How it engulfs the listener whether listening loudly or quietly, softly or harshly. Where opener 'White Salt Stag' on this beautifully designed digipak CD edition is earthy and enchanting, closer 'Gold' takes a malleable, shaping of man-made metal angle in the form of Quail's use of electric cello and electronics, and the formulation of solid materials. There is a probability you'll not have a
whisper to it, but a blast, as the mourning strings stretch up through the inner ear and the drones throe-in the low ebb.

I am certainly taken by the 'Five Incantations' theme: take five simple steps, craft five complex tunes with over twice the narrative arcs interwoven. It is spectral music; to borrow Simon Reynolds' term, it creates a "cathedral of sound". A line can be traced like a silken sheet, a thinly woven cloth, a metal wire, all tension and never enough to satisfy in one take. Indeed, the music doesn't sound one take at all. Jo as her name goes knows how to put the work into her rhythms of refuge, her insomniac getaways. The sound art is rife with the kind of aching passion that teased through Greg Haines'
'Until The Point Of Least Resistance' from 'Until The Point Of Hushed Support', 2009. The psychological unease of it all.

Luckily for us there are plenty of moments where the tension reaches satisfying climaxes rather than plummeting us down. This factor makes a good album, in short, especially one that takes mood music so seriously. Mood music has a specific aim:to create that mood, to set one mood, no other mood, and anything else is futile. Resistance from the creator of the music would be his or her achilles' heel in the eyes of a mood music connoisseur. I have spoken of fine lines, and this record
is like a spider diagram, in that respect. Full of bewitching Bjork-esque cello and viola-register harmonies, the genie inside 'Five Incantations' is no fickle spellcaster - that thing has a mind of its own, an organic one, one that grows on you like greed does to a gambling addict. What does this mean? If you have any money left by now, by now, buy it.



www.joquail.co.uk

Mick Buckingham

Pseud's Corner (Philosophy)

Philosophy - mrb

One of the most tired, commercialised and ridiculed predicaments of pseud's corner is connoted from this well-worn phrase:

Glass half empty/glass half-full.

This is often used to denote placidly for the idea of overachievement, and not vice versa, because simply, humans want to feel good about themselves. This is all well and good, until you get a plethora of anecdotes joining its mundane projection potential.

Putting myself in their shoes
I'm very empathetic
You get out what you put in
He who dares, wins, (Rodders!)

Of course, what are we really trying to say here? The meaning becomes diluted, the thing that fits with 'putting more in' to make the glass 'half full'. But sadly, this is an illusion that comes a cropper.

This is ultimately for didactic and syntactic reasons, abtruding to tactfulness in mind game form, to trick the brain that it won't crash when our mood shifts to the idea that, plainly, was the glass really ever even half full? If the glass wasn't half empty, or half full, in simple terms, to begin with, can we really say it will stay that way?

We are not talking about change, vacillaton, oscillation, movement. We are not saying someone will drink from the glass, or even fill it up.

What we need to do is come to terms with the idea of mirror neurons, the concept of mirror neurons in psychology; as my pinned twitter post says:

"Technology is at genuine fault to play mirror neurons in unconscious loophole, which is where delusion of the self arises. Often nominative" ~ @MuttleySV

Simply, to end this juncture: form is sometimes solid, but perception is ever-changing, and the less we depend on solidity, the better.

"Be water, my friend" ~ Bruce Lee.

Mrb (Michael Robert Buckingham - www.focisleft.bandcamp.com / www.kapsil.net/muttley) - Nova Cone Trail Poem.

Mrb - Nova Cone Trail

The moment you fall
Is the moment I wake
What moment
Just a moment
Love speaketh like slake
Scattered like ashes
Over a nova cone trail
Beaming into the present
Where a gift is a moment
Frail to the touch
Indebted to containment
And kindest in gentle hands.

I waited for your trail
Yes I did, and I
I might not have followed
In your footsteps
But I love that trail you walk.

Let's imagine we are doves
Swooping in and out of the trail
Creating a supernova of purity
Always cast on wind and sail.

Let's think? Slake speaketh like ash
That money did not bring us together
At best a vehicle, twas broken down
Filled in the bonnet with leaking
...Petrol a graze on mankind.

Let's graze
Like two collared doves
Indebted to containment
Kindest with gentile
..Touches, brushes, kisses, even drum kits
Beat hay, I do love that track you talk.

The momentous fall
Of a lumberjack carrying
An onion for a bonce
A drum kit for twenty pence
To try his luck
At the slot machine of your heart.
From the start I'll gamble too much
Love acts like one armed bandit
A candid toss of fates coin; Indebted
To containment; Kindest in gentle hands.

Maybe you'd give me a stake back
To nest upon, collared dove
I swiftly collared you, that's certain
Corny catchphrase of roboism
Sent from above? No, not.
I can do a lot better I know.
But I adore that braille you baulk for me.

Let's imagine, slake burning to ashes
Monty did not bring us together
I know you really don't care
Whether I am a prince or a pauper
You show you care omnipresent
And that's omnipresently enough
You love me for who I am - me
And I love you
unconditional
For you - a ram, regardless.
You like attention, so you told me in 1410
Way back in the day.

And like two collared doves
I became inseparable from you
Nowt artificial intelligence
You glow through the horizons mineshaft
Exploring that trail you walk
Leaving me explosive
And talkative.

Oh love, I love that trail you walk.