Issue #9 : Headache

This issue's featured piece of music is:
'S L S' by Phill Niblock
From the 1991 album Four Full Flutes

I have just returned from Sardinia. It's great for the following reasons:

 - They have the coolest flag in the world – its' England's white and red St George cross but with a blindfolded, hoop-earringed pirate's head in each of the white panels. That's four blindfolded, hoop-earringed pirates' heads!
 -  The island is studded with almost 8,000 nuraghe – round Megalithic towers made of huge stones piled on top of one another, like squat lighthouses without the mortar. Trust me, they're brilliant. Chilling inside the cool depths of a 3,500 year-old nuraghi; well, our whole family felt very much at home until Faye and Reuben soon became bored and demanded we leave.

These are the main reasons. Plus they're actually having summer there, which made a pleasant change. Plus you can fly direct from Southampton, which was nice. Call me Judith m***********g Chalmers.

Stupidly, we forgot to bring any music with us to Sardinia, and seeing as the villa we'd hired had a stereo, I popped in to our local record store to pick up some sounds. How naïve. Hundreds of Zucchero albums – sung in Italian, in English, collaborative ones, compilations, Xmas, big band, even one entitled Zucchero - Live at the Kremlin. That famous live venue. Obviously a fortnight's silence – a year's silence – was preferable to any of these. And so I tried elsewhere in the record shop. Yer ubiquitous rancid international corporate gloop, of course. And a tiny opera section, and that was all. So I picked out a 3CD opera box-set entitled La Scala – which seemed to be an operatic version of Now That's What I Call Music, filled to the gills with the Big Italians' (Verdi, Puccini etc) best-known arias. As somebody who has never got to grips with opera to say the very least, this seemed like a timely and responsible prescription: all the supposedly best stuff sung by all the supposedly best singers – Maria Callas and that. And so this La Scala box-set was all we listened to for two weeks. We became rather fond of it. The voices bothered me less. We began to hum along. I even decided to select one of these arias for the Bitterest Pill – why not, eh?

But then I got home and wondered what on earth I'd been thinking of. I hate opera! I don't get it at all! I'd been duped by the climate, environment, lack of anything else to listen to, and the local wine. I destroyed La Scala with a hammer.

So I have chosen Phill Niblock instead, probably much to the horror of all those unfamiliar with his idiosyncratic, minimalist idiom: that of the merciless drone. On the piece featured here, 'S L S' from his first full-length release Four Full Flutes, Niblock does what he always does, which is getting a musician or musicians to play sustained single notes, out of which Niblock removes the breathing spaces / bowing pauses / whatever, so that what's left are constant, digitally overlapping, shifting tones. The effect of these drones can be simultaneously soothing and overwhelming. I remember my own Niblockian initiation well: my friend (and bandmate) Paul lent me his copy of A Young Person's Guide To Phill Niblock with instruction merely to 'listen to it as loud as possible'. Which I proceeded to do, with startling results. I would lie in bed at night, listening to it at maximum bleed through earphones, wide-eyed, breath held, in awestruck reverence. It was almost a religious experience. This was the purest, most compulsive music I'd ever heard. The merest microtonal shifts almost brought tears to my eyes. All music was here – hanging off these elegant lines – if you went looking for it. Here was music's skeleton; its pulsing ectoplasm stripped clean of bourgeois trappings such as melody, rhythm, texture and form. These held tones' power seemed unceasing. I quaked in righteous appreciation there in my bed (I fear Faye thought that I was playing with myself – and not for the first time). This went on for night after night - it felt as if I was purifying myself from something; purging. Perhaps from all my previous musical baggage, which, over these synapse-shredding sessions, fell off me like old skin.

And then a year or so later, I met Niblock at London's ICA, where he was giving a performance (which sadly wasn't loud enough). He turned out to be a fat old bearded American man. There were three of us: myself, Paul and Steve (all three members of our improv group Crater – www.myspace.com/crateruk), all of whom were in pathetic, starstruck awe. We talked complete fawning drunken c**p at him for two minutes before he managed to extract himself from our suffocating presence. Never meet your heroes. Not because they'll fall from grace before your eyes (although this is likely), but because you'll make a total d**k of yourself before they manage it.

I recently lent a Niblock disc to another friend, however, who told me he'd listened to it in his car and that it had given him a 'sicky headache'. So this isn't for everybody. But please try some. And turn it up. And stick with it. It'll reward you. Or give you a sicky headache.

Bitterest Pill Readers' Experiment: After you have listened to the Niblock, please hit reply to this newsletter, writing either 'I'm on it' or 'I've got a sicky headache'. I'm extrememly interested to hear what people make of it. If there's a general thumbs-up, then there will be further things like this coming in the future. You have been warned.  

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Download 'S L S' from Four Full Flutes for free here

Buy the CD from amazon.com here

And you can still buy my new book from amazon.co.uk here

 
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Readers' Comments pertaining to Issue #8

'You should have told us when you were going to be on the radio, and then we could have phoned in to complain when you came on. Actually I might complain anyway.' – Ms L. Stark, perhaps Bristol

'Can sympathise with doing the rounds talking to numbnuts local radio hosts. In my last job I bizarrely became Berkshire\\\'s resident talking head for all things to do with American politics and would do the rounds of two bit local stations at election time. First inkling of how low my opinion was actually rated was in 2000 when I had given up waiting for a result in the early hours and went to bed. Was woken up by some station or other ringing to ask for an interview to explain the latest developments, I pointed out I\\\'d been asleep for the last 5 hours and so had no idea what said developments were. I was told it didn\\\'t matter, the reporter told me all the latest, started the tape, I repeated exactly what he had just said and he went away very happy.' – Ross English, Brighton

'I heard you interviewed on Radio Solent. You weren't that bad. That's all I have to say.' – James Craven, Hampshire

'Who are you?' – Ian Cusick, United Kingdom