Hatchings: Ariel's Album Diary

Well I feel very remiss for not having blogged for a whole month tsk tsk. March - traditionally a month of madness - turned out to be just that. In the process of holding out for Springtime, letting go of all the accumulated debris of winter, it didn't feel timely to start fresh projects. Then I spotted the crocuses in all their violet and golden glory and thought - NOW. YES.

So what has Little Miss Hyper been up to? I've been in a very introverted place, working on eight new songs that I hope will be on my forthcoming album. I've been fortunate to enjoy mentoring and tech advice from Mick Glossop, the man behind Van Morrions's best work and many other artists who I love - Sinead O'Connor and goth band X-Mal Deutschland among them (yes, my tastes are eclectic). Mick has prodded me to go further each time I've felt at the end of my energy.

I was OVERJOYED when a fresh and powerful burst of creative energy came up from nowhere in mid-late March. I grabbed my cello and guitars and re-recorded all eight tracks. I got that curious feeling of satisfaction you get from hearing the nascent fluency starting to come through in the songs. And I love the songs. I think what I have now are demos that can go further and further still, as I bring in other musicians and perhaps and engineer to take over where my skills tail off.

I spent a further week listening, editing, crudely mixing. Now I'm fired up about working on the textures some more, now that the bare bones are there. I feel exciting possibilities for making a sound that's all my own, and not just vocally.

A great source of delight is that I feel like I'm making this album first and foremost to please myself, and if I can really succeed in this I know that others will feel the same (that's a whole separate thing, though). If a track brings me joy (and 'Neon Lights of London really does) I know it will for other kindred spirits. That response to music is a tender thing that travels far.

Last Friday night I lay on my bed with just an Occitane candle burning (I have a weakness for the French herbalists) and played a CD of the raw mixes. Four of the tracks made me feel I still haven't nailed it, but the other four gave me paroxysms of delight. I'm on the right track, so to speak.

So before I return to introversion I wanted to pop my head above the parapet, remind you I'm still here and just because I'm not making a sound it doesn't mean I'm not making strides!

Summertime, music, joy - we've got it all :)

Praise be for Amanda Palmer

When you think of the music industry - and the wider culture it forms part of - do the words 'censorship' and 'double standards' hove into view? The glorious force that is Amanda Palmer, lately creatrix of Brechtian Punk Duo Dresden Dolls, has sharpened my awareness of these worms in the proverbial apple. Read Amanda's blog

It turns out that a blackly humorous song about rape and abortion - her single 'Oasis' - has proved too bitter a pill for supposedly leftfield publications like Kerrang! and the NME. On her blog, Amanda hypothesizes that if she were to strip the comedy away and make us reach for the tissues, 'Oasis' might evade censorship.

The panicked response of the music media to the framing of these issues in a comic tone is sure sign that we remain in a strangle-grip of fear and denial concerning these challenging facets of life. I wonder when musicians will be given free reign to tackle the thorny side of sex in their songs, without having to dress it up in pathos and purple prose?

The job of the ideal head of state

Is it to distract us from the real power machinations taking place behind the scenes? In this sense the type of the Head of State is an A-grade actor, a magician beguiling the time with rhetoric of musical cadence. A Pin-Up for Hope. A persuasive idealist who lets the arms dealers get on with their dirty business while we are consoled, and clap and cheer.

Thought for the day: Do I dislike the vogue for folk - and, for that matter, Hugh Fernleagh-Whittingstall's product (nothing against the chap himself) - because the underlying ideology to all of this back-to-nature, knit-your-own hemp socks and eke a living from a televised smallholding is more than arcadian and regressive? I think so, for it wishes for its fulfilment in the end of the Chav. The shipping-off of the addidassed, Uggd, Paul's Boutiqued, saveloy-ridden, ringtone-addled, credit-crunching masses to new Antipodes.

Picturing FolkTown and its looking-glass counterpart, BlingVille, I can't help but conclude that at least in the Yes-Logo global mall of High Capitalism the historic poor were able to enjoy life in a way that was previously beyond reach. What genuine liberal humanist would hark back - of forward - to a time in which that swathe of humanity was kept below stairs or in rotting tenements? Huzzah for mass culture say I! We may not be able to save the developing world en masse but at least we can being with improvements at home.

Racial discrimination threatens live music in London?

If you're a music scenester familar with the various wonderful dives & haunts that nurture new music in the capital, you will have heard about Form 696 by now. The Metropolitan Police, in a thinly-disguised attempt to tether the media cause celebre of the (now waning) moment - knife crime - to 'urban' music such as Grime, Krunk & Rap - will require all music promoters to fill out a form detailing the ethnic background of the event's performers and punters.

In order to swerve allegations of discrimination against the ethnic groups who express their culture through those kinds of music, everyone will be expected to complete the form. Presumably this will enable our Boys & Girls in Blue to track down perpetrators of stabbings and even carriers of knives. But at what price? It is laughable to suggest that the communities being targeted won't be aware that this is precisely what the Met are doing. The damage to community relations alone is too heavy a toll.

Predictably, no-0ne among the music community seems impressed with this attempt to control, through laborious bureaucratic procedure, a spate of crimes whose causes and effects extend far beyond the bounds of music culture. Arguably the reduction in freedom of association at such cultural events (yes - even your local open mic night qualifies!) is not a fair price to pay for a spurious, illusory guarantee of absolute safety from harm in a public space.

Call it native liberal suspicion of any encroachment of the forces of the state into community-level cultural events - my gut reaction when I learned of Form 696 was that it would be useless if not damaging. I went on to

sign the petition in favour of binning this discriminatory measure, and I hope you will too.

Inaugural augury

January was a month that was tinged with relief. In the lead-up to Obama's inaugural speech I was concerned that the rhetoric of hope would be ratcheted up another notch. Thankfully, the mantle of dreams slipped to the ground, like a negligee. to reveal a pair of work-soiled dungarees. The seduction complete, the new President's attempt to lower expectations to manageable level appeared doomed in light of the ardency of his followers' faith in his status as a superhuman saviour. However, they Obamania will surely wear itself out before 2009 is out. I do not look forward to the predictable iconoclastic backlash and the political consequences of his fall from grace. It's pleasant to bask in the tepid waters of optimism while watching the economic motorway pile-up evolving all around you.

I can feel it in my bones

I came across this Londoner recently and want to pass on the chinese whisper. She's unique, carnivalesque and takes pop to its apotheosis - colourful candy. Check out Ebony Bones myspace here. Her sound reminds me of Bow Wow Wow, which is neither here nor there, but what I really like about EB is her presence and her 3rd Wave humour. More Power to She!

With respect for individuality Gaza could not happen

The most chilling news item at present is the Israeli military's attack on the civilians of Gaza which seems to be escalating and gathering a morbid momentum. Without claiming to be expert in the 'facts' of this unfolding chapter of a bloody history in that perennially fraught stretch of land, I was dozing off to sleep when a diagnosis came to me.

What is the psychic jetfuel that powers collective ideas of nationhood, with its fierce sense of entitlement, in non-secular states? Creed. How is obeisance to creed channelled into the service of state prerogatives? By reiterating that there is an equation between the spiritual rewards promised by the creed and the achievement of worldly aims. A transcendent aim justifies any means. The effective political leader uses any decontextualized religious briac-a-brac at his disposal to stoke the furnace of nationalism and xenophobia.

This much, so far, I understand with a species of grim resignation. Yet the strong sense of inevitability to long-running conflicts where limited land and divisive creeds meet does nothing to console us for that shudder we feel when listening to representatives (formal or otherwise) of a warring adminstration exercising his silvertongued diplomacy to utter nothing more sophisticated than "he started it...he cast the first stone".

On such occasions I feel we really are litte better than apes in Armani (probably considered a chav brand by the political elite, though I've never quizzed a politician on his wardrobe choices or had the opportunity to rummage for the label at the back of his neck) and feel quite sorry for us, as a species. Thank f*ck for the artists, the healers, the innovators and the real public servants for redeeming an otherwise shambolic show of naked - and murderous - acquisitiveness.

I can even accept that a soldiar can be an heroic fool. Yet I'm disillusioned by the naked political self-interest that informs where and when the wide-eyed young men are deployed to fight for whichever flag or abstract gets them away from their dull homes and towards duty and adventure. Still, I want my gas & oil pipelines protected as much as the next woman...

I'm not a pacifist, in the sense of being someone who believes war is an effaceable part of the human condition if only we managed things right. War is inevitable, written so profoundly deep in our mammalian genes and active on a mundane level between individuals as between tribes battling it out for land and "freedom" (don't get me started).

As it happens, I support neither side in this particular conflict. While my sensibilities naturally chime with the plight of the underdog, I also understand why people secretly rejoice when the acquisitive power-hungry socipaths they call their Leaders are effective in their endeavours. There is no more poetic word than lebensraum when it comes to imagining the dream of freedom and myth of unity that inspires humans with superrational attachments to explanses of land.

This position still does not stop me from reviling the savage logic that is masqueraded so glibly as reason when it is a mere bellow of atavistic hatred draped in civilized sibilants. I would almost prefer it if our contemporary warmongers in their closely-fitted navy woolen sheaths would just be done with the pretense and don iron helmets with bulls horns, leather breastplates and those studded skirts which films tell us were the apogee of masculine fashion on the battlefields of yore. And if they gave us bloodcurdling shrieks of rage like the alpha babboons that they so remind me of.

While artifice and reason are two things I cherish profoundly - though you may well quip that I've relinquished both in tapping out these late night ramblings - I feel quesy to see both values humiliated by those who are willing to stare into the camera's eye and not fall silent at the sheer inadequacy of words in grasping why it is that divergences in the names of prophets, dietary taboos and other cultural flotsam can be used like so many papier mache strips to cover over the brutal truth - that for land men will, in following orders the nature of which they are trained not to question, will murder children and strangle life. What strange apes.

It is impossible not to condemn the remorseless process underway in Gaza, where the losing side are caught in an ever tightening vice. I applaud Milliband's stand. I have always wondered why people continue to live in conditions such as those, why they don't just flee to more hospitable climes. I suppose that poverty is often the reason. But I doubt it's the whole reason. Which brings me to a paradox where I thought I would find a neat conclusion.

Some people - not all - but a good number, always fail to evacuate from the partitioned areas of land (what's the word we use...ah yes, ghettoes...The grim irony...) which the aggressive dominant power grants to them. I'm thinking of Warsaw, of Sarajevo, of Gaza. I wonder if for some of them it isn't because they have a unhoned sense of their right to occupy the small space that they call their own, regardless of how the Law is being manipulated - such that it ceases to be law and becomes raw power - to sweep them away.

I wonder if they stay and risk their lives every day from a sense that to take a stand in their little quota of space is more valuable than life. Call me idealist, I think I may have stumbled across something resembling a transcendent value that needs no credo to explain it. Perhaps the de-individuating, homogenizing effect of religion in the service of statehood - which has been the fuel for most of our father's wars - reaches its nemesis, its reversal, in the process of uneasy cohabitation --> conflict --> ghettoization --> genocide.

What I mean is that through becoming a member of a religion and citizen of a nation state above all other aspects of identity, these stubborn or naive ones who dig their claws into the dirt they call home uncover the value of their individuality. The very thing which their leaders have so avidly suppressed and discouraged, humiliated and effaced with their canon of rules and cruel punishments, has sprung up with ineluctable force.

And thank goodness my wander has arrived me back at my doorstep - for had the leaders not wrenched out so ruthlessly the green shoots of individual consciousness that threatened the unstable servility of the populace, they would not have had such a hunger to re-grow and to proliferate. I suppose this is that we used to call the human spirit, the essential presence that people and place combine to generate, and which cannot be erased without the shedding of oceans of blood.

This image reminds me of classical antiquity - the various myths in which blood spilled on earth yields immortal emanations. So, sleepily, I shamble in direction of spiritualism and muse that if I were a ruthless leader I would want to harness this marvellous stuff for my dire causes...And so it goes. Everthing makes sense once more.

It's difficult to stop the train of thought at the individual as the destination, the archimendean point, but at least I may naw console myself with the thought that in countries where the individual is treasured - or at least tolerated - instead of trampled, it is far far harder for Leaders to get their claws into the collective and redesign our lives around a monolitic goal. Phew. The cure is to individuate as though the life of the whole human community depends on it, and by extension never to cut down another in the process of individuation.

Goodnight. Something more lighthearted tomorrow xxx