Tuesday, September 24, 2013

of shoegaze, landladies, and cups of tea.

I knew I'd be tired this morning, fatigue haunted me all weekend. No amount of tea and coffee sufficed, and sleep was hard to come by.

I went to see Alcest and enjoyed them even more than last time, the songs I didn't get to hear live this time around I got to hear the last, Neige made some comment about how the last time they were here no one was there, which was probably true, since it was right around the time Ecailles de Lune came out and I didn't know they existed until Randal's end of the year list.

It was nice to go to a show and soak in the atmosphere without gazing at it through an iPhone being held aloft in front of me. This crop of kids and older prog rockers were rapt around me, no one had their phone out to text or post on instagram. A little surreal to watch a bunch of blastbeat loving dudes getting all blissed out to some of the most sublime shoegaze being created now. Songs I was kind of ambivalent about on the last album had a lot of gorgeous crunch live and it was beautiful to see them coming into their own even more.

The rain was pouring down and I ran into a girl I knew from class so we hung out in the doorway, because I didn't want to cut across that giant parking lot alone and Anathema sounded all right but I wasn't in the mood to stand there alone in that crowd of people and the volume was perfect where we were.

I came back to my friends' apartment, where the cats greeted me ambivalently, slept, made goodness for a cookout, stayed up late, stayed up even late because I couldn't fall asleep, realized I completely started doing my take-home midterm wrong, attempted to remedy, went to sleep early.

I have yet to fail an exam that wasn't written, but I can tell I'm not doing my best work here. I wonder how much of this is just that I've been taking slacker classes for so long, or have had actual textbooks, or if it's just that I've been doing a million other things. I'm so good at regurgitating, or I was, or I'm overthinking it, and it's just taking longer to coalesce into anything coherent.

And with four days to finish two more pages and put some flesh on the skeletal outline, it made perfect sense last night to do some initiatory noise-making. I cooked dinner this time, he sliced up garden tomatoes and walnuts as the spaghetti squash roasted in the toaster oven and I cooked down spices on the skillet.

My landlady was having some junk in her basement hauled away and the dudes were creepy so I was glad I had someone else there.There's some disingenuousness afoot with her as far as how the place is zoned, that bothers me, I'm not sure how much it should, since property owners with tenants don't always seem to be the most scrupulous, but I don't like being pressured to aid in lying to anyone, I can't do that.

But we played music last night and it sounded good, and it's the first time in awhile where I've felt like I had creative freedom and we clicked so much, building off each other's notes and chords, scrawling them in a notebook as I tried not to make it too noisy with all the pedals since I didn't know when she was coming home, but we're on the same musical trajectory and it sounds good, I'm almost surprised at how good it sounds since we've never played together before, and I can only imagine it'll sound amazing with another guitar and drums in the mix.  We shall see...


 

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