Museum of Fire

Museum on the move

2010-10-27T12:43:00.003+11:00

Hello there.

While Blogger has been a nice enough home until now, the Museum and its various offshoots have kind of outgrown the available floorspace.

There is a new project afoot about which I am more than a little enthused and it needs a little more breathing space.

So, with a promise that offerings will be a little more frequent now that I'm less inclined to be randomly roaming, you are hereby invited to visit the Museum in its new home:

Museum of Fire - The Wordpress Experience

There will be tea and biscuits for the grand reopening, and possibly even balloons. Red ones. If you're quick.

The Music Box: Chapter Eighty

2010-06-13T12:01:00.005+10:00

Emily woke to a silent house. As she peered over the edge of her flower-embroidered bedspread, watching the patch of morning sunlight where it fell on the wall, she noticed a small shadow broke the straight lines of the orange box of light.

She turned slowly towards the window and saw that a little round bird had alighted upon her window sill. It appeared to be observing her quite intently with its beady black eyes, but as she watched it swing its tail feathers side to side another bird came, seemed to have a quick word in its ear and the pair flapped away as though they had been caught somewhere they shouldn’t be.

Emily had never seen such strange looking birds in her life and it took her some time to register what she had observed – the first bird was mostly green with a bright red chest, a green head and then a blazing red feather ruffled from the very top of its head. The second bird, which she saw only briefly, was the complete inverse; right down to the bright green feather poking off the top of its head.

But surely not.... Emily rubbed her eyes, deciding she must have imagined the whole thing.

Yet a moment later, as she watched the space on the open sill where the birds had been, another landed. From its long, sleek body, a shimmering silver-blue, she saw a pair of bright white wings emerge, then fold back in. She at first thought the bird was looking at her down its long straight beak, but realised that its eyes appeared closed.

As Emily watched the unseeing bird, a moment passed between them.

The bird began to sing.

Fin

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Nine

2010-06-11T10:19:00.003+10:00

Percy reached for the bag and suggested that in the circumstances it was perhaps best if he took care of the final act. But Emily insisted so firmly that it had to be her that Percy, with a great deal of apprehension, relented. He stood up and let Emily take his seat, while he took the space she had left vacant.

Squeezing Isabelle’s hand tightly, Percy kept his eye glued on Emily as she reached into the black sack and drew out the box. Whether or not it knew what fate had in store for it or not, the box seemed to be going to great lengths to avoid it.

It was pulsing with light and had never looked more beautiful, the green glowing against Emily’s white dress highlighting the delicacy with which every corner, edge and figure had been carved. Six eyes rested on the box where it sat on Emily’s lap. Six ears began to hear the music that swirled around them, that seemed to be the sound of every mermaid in the sea whispering to the sky, every angel in the sky opening its heart to the sea.

Both Percy and Isabelle reached as one towards the lid of the box, desperately keen to take one final look inside. Yet before they could reach it the box was gone, hurled as far as Emily’s strength would allow.

With a blood-curdling shriek the box broke the mirrored surface of the sea, then sank from sight.

The water where the box had hit bubbled and hissed, a cloud of steam forming above. But little by little the steam spread and lost its form until disappearing completely, the ripples spread in wider and wider circles but then abated, leaving only the still, watchful reflection in the quiet waters of Emily, Isabelle and Percy, staring at the place all their troubles now lay.

As Percy returned to his seat and took the oars, they began gliding back to shore in relieved, exhausted silence. Isabelle suddenly realised what had been so familiar about the day – she recalled with crystal clarity her dream in which Emily had stepped out into the sea and they could never quite reach her. And surely enough, as she turned to her daughter, who was wearing the very same white dress that had appeared in her dream, Isabelle watched her staring wistfully back towards where the box had sunk into the fathomless depths below. She placed her hand gently onto Emily’s leg, feeling how tightly coiled she was, as though ready to spring in an instant.

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Eight

2010-06-09T16:08:00.003+10:00

Isabelle and Emily sat side by side, watching as Percy pulled on the oars. The day was calm, the water impossibly still – the dip of Percy’s oars creating tiny little swirling whirlpools the likes of which you would only ever normally see appear on the most sheltered of lakes. The only sound was the creak of the oars in the rowlock and the light slap of the paddle in the sea.

Above them, the last of the gulls that had followed their passage, perhaps in hope of an easy food offering, gave one last twirl and took off back to shore; for whatever reason this was as far as they had decided to follow. The sun gently tickled their skin as a deep blue sky opened out above them. Now that they had all but left land behind, there was little but the blue above and the sea below, an inky purple perfectly reflecting the few tiny, puffy clouds that lazily drifted by like dandelion heads bobbing in a breeze.

This all seemed strangely familiar to Isabelle but she couldn’t quite put her finger on why, as they had never all been out to sea like this together before. Despite being a warm day, she could feel her daughter shivering at her side.

She discretely looked sideways at Emily, only to find her daughter’s gaze transfixed on the black sack that sat between Percy’s feet. Isabelle, too, had been having great difficulty taking her eyes of the bag, but was nevertheless worried to see Emily’s attention so drawn in this way.

Isabelle realised with a pang of shame the feeling that had just hit her – jealousy. On the walk down from the house to the harbour, Emily had told them everything. From the moment she had left her house, pretending to be off visiting Tabitha Tibbits, to the instant they had found her back in her room, finally back as Emily.

It had all sounded so unlikely, the over-vivid imagination of an 11-year-old. But when Emily had started to tell them about what she had seen in the forest, the incident with the wolves, she knew it had to be true. She still hadn’t told Emily about any of that, so she would have had no other way of knowing. Unless Percy had told her? But he had clearly read her thoughts, for when Isabelle looked over the top of Emily’s head at her husband, he simply shook his head and shrugged.

Although Isabelle was appalled and aghast at everything Emily had to say, there was still something about the music box that intrigued her. She felt that as she was older than Emily and would not fall so easily under its spell…

She looked up from the box to see Percy looking directly at her. She was once again ashamed at the thoughts that had been passing through her mind and felt Percy had followed every last one. He looked at her with his sad, wounded eyes and she realised that he must have thought it was somehow Aloysius that she wanted to see.

She tried to show him, merely via looking back into his eyes, that this certainly wasn’t the case. She loved Percy with all her heart, and Emily too. She loved her simple life here in Seaforth, she realised, and would never do anything that could upset Percy or leave him feeling anything less than her utter devotion.

The last trace of land had by now disappeared from view. Isabelle hoped Percy still knew which way the return journey lay, but trusted him to find their way home.

The moment they had been avoiding talking about all this time had arrived.

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Seven

2010-06-07T08:34:00.004+10:00

Drawn by the sound of her parents’ voices from the living room, Emily walked down the stairs. Her disturbing dreams had continued through the night and she had woken, if anything, more exhausted than she had been when she fell asleep.

Yet she had to know that everything had finished, that the music box had been destroyed.

Why had she been so selfish? How could she have put her family into this situation? Emily vowed she would make it up to her parents somehow, that she would win their trust again, whatever it took.

Reaching the doorway to the living room, Emily saw her parents talking. She stepped in and looked over to the fireplace as they turned, realising she was there.

Emily felt weak at the knees and would have fallen completely if Percy had not reached down and caught her as she buckled. The music box sat there, glowing against the white pile of ashes that surrounded it.

“We tried Emily,” her father said gently, running his hand through her hair. “We kept the fire going the whole night through, we have no wood left.”

“Your father and I have decided we must go and bury it in the woods,” said her mother, a consoling hand on her arm. But Emily knew this would not suffice, that the music box would find a way to be found.

“That won’t be enough,” she announced to her parents, feeling the energy return as she realised she would have to be strong. “There is only one thing we can do, and I must be involved. It must be cast to the very bottom of the sea, to a place so deep that it can never be found.”

Emily knew both her parents were very much against her being out of bed, let alone out of the house, but she was so resolute in her purpose that they soon understood there was little point in trying to resist any further.

Isabelle knew, too, that Emily had been right. Nothing happened in the forest without being seen. Before long the temptation to peek at what they had buried would grow too strong and it would be unearthed by some witness or other.

But more than this, she knew that she herself could not have a day’s rest, knowing it was there. Already, she had been feeling urges, stronger by the hour, to have just a tiny look inside the box, to see what could possibly be inside that could explain everything that had happened.

She knew that it would be foolish, madness to tempt fate, but it felt like something that was increasingly out of her control. She wasn’t sure how Percy felt, but something kept her from talking to him about it, which in itself she knew was a very bad sign. She knew, for everybody’s sake, that Emily was right. The sea was the only place it could be, the only place where whatever power it held over Emily, and now threatened to hold over her, could be laid to rest once and for all.

They must do this, and they must do it without waiting one moment more.

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Six

2010-06-05T09:47:00.002+10:00

Emily experienced a dizzy sensation of spinning, with a sickening blur of colour swirling all around her, then a panicked moment of weightlessness. She was falling, where she could not say. Then suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. But it took some moments before she realised where she was – back in her own room, lying on her bed.

Her tummy still hadn’t settled and her eyes were still adjusting when she realised she was being shaken.

“Where is she! What have you done with our Emily!” the voice cried, Emily slowly picking it as her mother’s.

“It’s okay,” she murmured. “It’s all okay. It’s me.”

“Hush Isabelle, step back and give her some air,” said her father, his blurred features slowly coming into focus.

“Okay. But remember, I told you, this isn’t Emily.”

“Oh mama, please!” Emily tried to sit, but fell back onto her pillow as it felt the room was still spinning around and around any time she moved. “I know it wasn’t me before, but I’m here now. Take my hand – you must know it.”

Emily felt a warm hand gingerly take her own icy fingers, then close around them tenderly. “Oh Emily, it is you! What has happened?”

“Shhh dear, from what you say we can’t begin to imagine what she has been through,” Percy said, taking Emily’s other hand in his own reassuring grasp. “We must not push her just now.”

“No, mother is right,” Emily said, trying once more to rise but not getting much further than up onto her elbows. “There isn’t any time to waste.”

“But you are not well. Your fingers are icy but your forehead is in fever. You just rest a moment, then when you have your strength back we can talk," Percy gently chided.

“Okay, but listen. You must do this. That box on the dresser-” Emily lifted a heavy arm and pointed over towards where she had last seen it, where it had been when she had lifted the lid and… but she must focus. “You must take it downstairs and throw it into the fire. We must do it now.”

“But Emily,” her mother began. “What’s…”

“I will explain,” Emily said, feeling herself slip out of consciousness, fatigue gripping her and refusing to let go. “But please, now…”

At this the last of Emily’s strength and resolve passed from her fragile, spent body. She slipped into slumber, a heavy, uneasy sleep in which all the events of the past few days swirled around her in a dreadful mix. She suffered terrible visions in which she was trapped in a glass bubble in a darkening forest, attempting to scream out but unable to utter even the hoarsest cry, watching helplessly as a wolf in a top hat leered at her, licking its lips, before dashing away with her mother under its arm.

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Five

2010-06-03T11:18:00.003+10:00

“…oof!”

Knowing there wasn’t a second to lose, Emily raced towards where Crouch’s voice had moments ago been taunting her. She willed an unlit torch perched on the wall to spring to life and its flickering light fell over the room just as she reached the tangled mess that was Crouch, Oscar and Bernard, all grappling on the floor. The lolly bag was just beyond the grasping clutch of Crouch and he was struggling to reach it and draw it to him.

Just as his fingers closed about it Emily stamped down onto his hand, causing him to cry out in pain, furiously spitting curses as his fingers lost their grip.

Once she had realised Crouch had been right about her not having any sway over him, she had realised there was only one chance left. She had pictured Oscar and Bernard creeping into the room and flying with full speed at Crouch, tackling him to the ground. It had been her only chance and they had not let her down.

Emily reached down for the bag, but as she picked it up Crouch grabbed hold of her ankle, clutching it in his vicelike grip. Pain shot right through her, but she heard a howl and felt his grip release, turning to see Oscar had poked Crouch in the eye. Bernard now pulled Crouch’s hat right down over his eyes, blocking his vision as he lashed out wildly.

“I can’t hold him forever Emily,” panted Oscar.

“Go – get out of here!” added Bernard.

“But I can’t! You shan’t be safe if I go.”

“And you are not safe if you stay, Emily.” This was Minerva’s gentle, warm voice. Emily turned to see that during the struggle Minerva had drawn herself up from the floor. “You must go, for your sake the sake of your family, and everyone here you hold dear.”

“But I can’t just leave Crouch here with you all.”

“It is true that there will be no life for us with Crouch in here,” Minerva returned, “but nevertheless we must never let him out.”

Emily choked back a sob, but knew Minerva was speaking the truth. She had to go and she had to do what she had earlier promised to do – destroy the music box.

“But how can I ever thank you?”

“You already have, Emily. You gave us a life worth living; you showed us that there is more in the world out there than evil. Whatever happens, I am sure, some day, somehow, we shall meet again, in happier circumstances. Farewell, brave Emily.”

Emily smiled sadly at Minerva, blew a quick kiss to the panting Oscar and Bernard, who each winked back in reply, reached into her lolly bag for a humbug and put it in her mouth.

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Four

2010-06-01T08:54:00.003+10:00

“Oh I can assure you that I have,” Crouch purred.

“You have not.”

“Emily, I just this very moment did exactly what I just told you. If I had not, surely Minerva could speak up for herself and suggest otherwise?”

“That is indeed the case, Aloysius, thank you for pointing it out.”

Emily felt a thrill of triumph as she heard these words, for they had not come from her. They had passed across the room from where Emily had only moments before seen a crumpled Minerva lay.

“Why this is preposterous,” Crouch thundered. “What’s happening here?”

“How easily you seem to forget what you once told me,” Emily said, the strength coming back into her as she felt she may, finally, have the upper hand.

“You may recall, as you were sending me into the box, cutting out my soul so you could steal my body, that this box would be a projection of my own self – my own wishes and dreams. Well I suspect you will find that is now coming back to haunt you. This is my box now and nothing will happen while I am here that will hurt my friends. I simply shall not allow it.”

“But you forget, Emily, that I know this place far, far better than you,” Crouch countered. “I devised it, I made it happen and I have been coming here for a long time now. I know it as well as I know the world out there and everyone and everything that lives in here knows me and knows that they must fear me.”

“Perhaps that is so, perhaps it is not. You thought you had silenced Minerva and you clearly have not. Explain that.”

“I made it up. It was a lie to shock you.”

“You did nothing of the sort. You believed it. You still believe you did it and you are afraid of what it must mean that Minerva is now speaking again.”

Emily was feeling nervous now, as though she was getting out of her depth. She knew she had to deal with Crouch immediately, but all she could think about was running away. The only thing that kept her there was knowing the safety of her friends inside the box depended up on her. As did that of her parents outside. If Crouch was ever able to escape, he would not rest until he had avenged himself – and this time he would make no mistakes.

“If I have no power here, how, then, am I able to do this?” Crouch demanded. Emily heard the sound of a heavy object rapidly dragging across the floor to the edge of the space and the muffled cries of Minerva.

“Stop!” Emily demanded, a fierce anger boiling within. “You will not hurt my friends.”

“Just go Emily,” Minerva pleaded. “Don’t think about us again. You must go while you can.”

Emily shook her head silently, more determined than ever to stay until she had finished what she must. But a sudden, sickening thought flashed into her mind before she could stop it. The lollies that she had placed in her pocket before lifting the lid on the box – now that she was back in her body, and Crouch in his, they were within his immediate reach. He need only put his hand in his pocket and…

“Haha!” Crouch cried triumphantly. “You should have watched what you thought more closely than that, Emily Button. You know lollies are bad for young teeth, but in this case they’re a lot worse for you than simply that! Well, look what we have here,” he teased, and Emily heard the rustling of the bag.

She had no chance of crossing the darkness in time to snatch them away, so willed Crouch to stop what he was doing.

“Oh you may be able to affect other things in here Emily, but you have no such control over me,” he sneered.

“I am not of the box, so I am beyond your reach. Wish all the harm you can muster, it shan’t affect me one little bit. Now if you will excuse me, I’m a little peckish and have unfinished business to which I must…”

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Three

2010-05-30T18:15:00.004+10:00

The moment she opened her eyes Emily felt she had made a terrible mistake. How could she have been so silly? Finally reunited with her parents, out of immediate danger with Crouch now out of the picture, she had almost everything for which she could have dreamed. So what could have led her to do something so stupid?

Sitting here, back in the woods inside the box, Emily wondered whether Crouch had deliberately released the music that brought her here. If so, then he still had the potential to do harm. And if that was the case, simply having him trapped here in the box would not be enough. Emily was devastated she had been so easily lured back here, but knew there was no time to dwell. She had to think. Where would Crouch be?

Revenge. That would be first and foremost on his mind, even moreso than escape, Emily felt. Revenge upon those who had helped Emily to thwart his plans with Isabelle. Minerva.

Dashing through the trees, Emily raced towards what she felt must be the heart of the forest, keeping her ears primed for the slightest hint that would suggest she was near one of the entryways to Minerva’s underground dominion. The further she went the more she was certain she would never be able to find her way, until she stopped dead in her tracks.

“Of course I won’t find it if I think I won’t,” Emily chastised herself. “That’s exactly how this place works. Now if I turn around and look at that doorway that has just opened in that tree behind me…”

Emily slowly turned and was amazed to see a gaping doorway where only moments before there had been a solid tree trunk. So much had rested on this being the case, for she now knew what she must do.

Winding her way down the spiral stone staircase, Emily guided herself down through the darkness by running her hand along the cool stone wall. She stopped briefly to rest her burning forehead against the stone, knowing she must have all her wits about her. The stairs now opened out into a passageway, again unlit. Emily didn’t bother trying to produce any light, now trusting her way simply by deciding the passageway was wide enough not to run into anything.

“Okay, I’m ready,” she decided, knowing she had now emerged into the room where she had first met Minerva. She just hoped she had arrived in time.

“So lovely of you to join us,” came a voice from the dark, the unmistakable, bone-chilling tone of Aloysius Crouch. But how had he got his own voice back?

“Because I wanted it back,” he said. “I believe I have talked like a spoilt little girl quite long enough, don’t you Emily Button?”

“If you say so, Mr Crouch,” replied Emily, shocked to hear her own voice emerge. She put a finger to her nose and felt not the sharp, pointed thing she had expected but rather her very own.

“That’s right, Emily,” Couch cooed. “I no longer need it, so it’s all yours. Of course I now no longer need you at all in the slightest. In fact, it would suit me greatly for you to disappear entirely!”

At this came a sudden flash of light, so bright after all this darkness. While relieved to have escaped Crouch’s body – she still wasn’t entirely sure how – she was terrified by his sudden appearance across the room from her. He appeared to be standing over something, a huddled bundle on the floor. As quickly as the light had appeared, darkness closed back in.

“It was very valiant of you to come down here, Emily, but I am afraid you are too late. Minerva should have known better than to help you against me and she has now paid the price.”

“You vile beast!” Emily cried, tears welling up in her eyes. “What have you done?”

“Oh, not so much so far, merely removed her tongue. She may still be able to hear, but she won’t be able to tell you anything. She will certainly never sing again.”

Emily was lost for words. After all this time she was still shocked that anyone could be so heartless, selfish and cruel. Could this really be true? Emily tried to hold her feelings in check and see what might happen if she decided – truly convinced herself – that he had simply made it up to try and unsettle her.

“You’re lying. You may have wanted to do that, but you haven’t.”

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-Two

2010-05-28T16:00:00.004+10:00

Emily’s mother looked at her steadily, putting her hand out to take her own.

“How can it be?”

“It’s a long story, mother and I’m afraid I have put us in terrible danger. He wanted to find you, to have you, and I almost let it happen.”

The fear, the frustration, the exhaustion of everything that had happened since she had left home in pursuit of the music box welled up inside her. Emily broke down into a fit of sobbing, collapsing onto the bed beside her mother and putting her head on her shoulder. She felt her mother flinch and realised why. She may have believed her story, but she would still be appalled at having Crouch so close. Emily wiped her nose and rubbed her eyes and stood up again.

“He’s in there,” she said, pointing at the box. “He is using my body, but now he has disappeared into the box, but I cannot tell you how long we have. We must get rid of the box.”

“But what about you, Emily? We can’t just leave you like this.”

“I know, but I don’t know what to do about that.”

“Begin by telling me everything. No, wait. We must get your father too. Give me a moment to see him first, I have to explain the situation to him, little as I understand it myself. Wait here and I will be back.”

With that Isabelle strode from the room and Emily heard her cross the landing and head straight into her father’s study, something she would never normally do so abruptly. Emily made a point of sitting with her back to the box, studiously avoiding even looking at it. But in the newly silent room, it began. It was barely discernible at first and Emily thought she must be imagining things. But there it was again, that music gently wafting around the room, brightening everything and making her feel entirely at peace.

She smiled dreamily, gently stood and walked over to the box on the dresser. It was pulsing gently, a beautiful glow that spoke to her of the end of pain, the end of suffering and the promise of life back to how it had been before any of this had ever happened.

Extending Crouch’s long, cruel fingers, Emily reached down and lifted its lid.

The Music Box: Chapter Seventy-One

2010-05-26T09:26:00.002+10:00

Isabelle reached the landing. Just as she was about to knock on Percy’s closed study door, she heard a muffled sound from Emily’s room. Gently stepping over to the door, she wondered why it had been closed. Slowly pulling it to, she was startled by a hulking shadow passing across the wall. A hand gripped her wrist and pulled her through, her heart threatening to jump from her chest as she caught in the mirror a glimpse of the dark-coated Mr Crouch.

She gasped a large gulp of air and was ready to scream when Crouch put a finger to his lips. He released his cruel grip on her wrist and for some reason she could never work out, Isabelle stayed silent. She saw, in his deep-set eyes, long body, sharp nose and the sleek, jet-black hair peeking from beneath his hat the familiar face she had recalled just moments ago.

“Aloysius”, she whispered.

But Crouch shook his head.

“Stay very still a moment, and please hear me out. I didn’t mean to grab you like that just now, I must have given you a terrible fright, but you scared me so.”

“Why would I listen to you? What are you doing here? And where’s my Emily?”

In the shock of finding Aloysius here, after all this time, and in the personage of a human, not a wolf, Isabelle had been so confused she had momentarily forgotten all about Emily.

But not now. “What have you done with her?” she growled, anger boiling her blood. Tell me now!”

“Please, I shall explain. Emily is safe, she is well; she is near.”

Isabelle glanced around the room to see if her daughter could be seen anywhere. Her eyes passed the sweets she had bought earlier that day, the tray with Percy’s tea on it and reached a small carved box she didn’t recognise. As she reached out to pick it up, Aloysius jumped towards her and wrested it from her grasp.

“Don’t open that,” he exclaimed, snatching it out of her reach. “I’ll explain everything, but please leave that be.”

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t scream now and get Percy in here,” Isabelle demanded.

“If you want to see Emily again, I strongly recommend you don’t. Please, just listen.”

Aloysius gestured to the end of Emily’s bed and Isabelle tentatively sat, though her body remained coiled, ready to spring. She glanced nervously at the door, wondering if she could make it if she needed to. Aloysius caught her line of thinking and moved further away, towards the window on the far side of the room.

“Let me just say you have nothing to fear. You did – you certainly did – but I assure you that you need worry no longer.”

“And what exactly is your assurance worth? You come here after all this time, and why? There’s something wrong with Emily, something has happened and I just know you’re involved. What are you doing in my home? How did you get here? What is going on? And why are you back, after all this time?”

Emily wondered what it must be like for her mother to be seeing Aloysius after all this time, and here, in her home, like this. But she pushed these thoughts to the side for the time-being and measured her words very carefully.

“As I was saying, Emily is well. You are right, there has been something wrong with her, and this box is a big part of that. I found it just now under this bed. Did you know it was here?”

“I’ve never seen it before in my life. What is it? How did she get it?”

“It’s a music box. It was built by Mr Crouch – Aloysius Crouch – to help him take on the forms of other beings, to lock them inside while he became them.”

“But you’re Aloysius! You’re the one doing these things.”

“I’m not. I know I appear to be, but you have to believe me – you must believe me – I’m not Aloysius Crouch.”

“Then who are you?”

“It’s me, mother. It’s Emily.”

The Music Box: Part V: Chapter Seventy

2010-05-24T15:07:00.003+10:00

The moment Emily had seen Crouch swallow the licorice, he vanished from her sight. She made herself wait at least 10 seconds, but still nobody appeared, so she slowly opened the cupboard door. Stepping out into the room, she felt a momentary surge of triumph. She had done it! Crouch must now be back in the music box. But with the floods of relief came a troubling thought. How long could she be sure he would be there?

She was almost certain he would not have any food with him, so there was no simple way out for him that way. But perhaps he knew of other ways to escape. She herself had found at least one other way out with Minerva’s help, through the music, and she knew that Oscar had also passed out through other means. While this passed through her mind, she absentmindedly pocketed the remaining sweets from the dresser.

There still remained one aspect of her plan that Emily had never really worked out. She was still here in Crouch’s body and now had no idea where hers might be. As she considered all this, she examined the room for the music box. She knew it must be here somewhere, but where?

It had not been in the wardrobe, nor could she see it on the dresser. She thought for a moment longer then dropped to her knees, lifting the bedspread and peering beneath. And there it was.

Lifting the music box gently, she carried it over to the dresser and set it down. Here it was, the reason she had got into this mess, the reason her father had nearly died, for she was sure that it was poison she had seen Crouch slip into her father’s teacup, which sat just to the side on the tray, now cold.

Despite everything that had happened, Emily was still drawn to the box. As she ran her finger over its carved edges, she felt a warm, happy feeling pass through her body. Her head emptied of all other thought but for the box and she was on the verge of opening the lid when she heard footsteps at the door. Snapping from her reverie, she glided across the room and hid behind the door.

The moment had arrived and she must now explain all.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Nine

2010-05-22T17:12:00.003+10:00

Emily watched in horror as the doorknob stopped turning. Before she even had time to think of what to do she realised she was wrenching open her wardrobe door, folding Crouch’s ungainly frame down to fit in the cramped space and pulling the door closed just as her bedroom door swung open. She put her eye to the keyhole and watched herself cross the rug, carrying something on a tray.

Emily saw Crouch carefully place the tray on the dresser. He seemed to take a few moments to decide what to do next, but she realised he was looking for something. Whatever it was he must have now found, for he was lifting a small glass vial up to the light. Turned side on to the window like this, she saw her own features break out into a smile that made her shudder. Crouch removed a cork from the top of the vial and emptied its contents into the teacup she could now see sitting on the tray.

Emily knew this was her father’s teacup and it took all the will she could muster not to burst out and confront Crouch. She weighed up the possible outcomes of such a sudden surprise move, but decided she should wait just a few moments more. She knew she could not allow Crouch to take that tea to her father, but knew that to appear now would be too dangerous to countenance.

Crouch put the stopper back into the vial, which he now placed back on the dresser. Emily held her breath and willed him to notice the sweets where they still sat. Whether through the force of her wishes or Crouch’s own volition – she was never to know for sure – he must have done exactly that for she saw him lift some of the licorice pieces to his lips and pop them in his mouth.

Vinyl Diaries XXXVI: The Paradise Motel

2010-05-20T22:29:00.014+10:00

choose your own way

i will remain

as the ghost in fading pages

and the dust between the cracks

'Ashes', The Paradise Motel

I can still recall the exact moment the bulk of my thankfully still nascent music collection was rendered unlistenable evermore. The night after my 18th birthday I caught the train up to Sydney to The Basement to see my first ever (legitimately attended) 18+ show. I was there to see the specialness that is Josh Haden’s Spain, supported by a new Australian band about which I had been hearing more than the occasional excitable murmur, by the name of The Paradise Motel.

Drifting out onto the tiny Basement stage, these sartorially splendid Tasmanian/Melbournian boys and girl seemed to my overly vivid imagination to have stepped straight out of a Great Gatsby cocktail party. The boys took up their places with their assorted musical toys as Merida Sussex glided up to the microphone, gazed around the hushed, smoke-misted room, and it happened.

smiling from the page

lied about my age

now I’m lost forever in this town

I wasn't the only one in the hushed room to realise there was something a bit special happening here, quite unlike anything I had encountered in music up to that time. As the set continued, it was a near note-perfect lesson in what I have since come to seek in almost all my music-snooping meanderings – what the band themselves later described as ‘the violence and the silence’.

The set continually took us to the verge of a perfect storm, only to each time step back from the brink. Instead of the longed for release, I was being wrapped ever more tightly in a cold, coiled menace. Pacing the stage like a wounded wombat, lyric penner and primary songwriter Charles Bickford was the most on edge, guitar slung low, foppish fringe dangling, bumping into his fellow members. But he wasn’t yet being let off his leash, and though a troubled rumble was swelling in the music, it was still being held at bay. The rhythm section was still keeping it all in check at this stage, along with the haunting voice of a gently swaying Merida Sussex, the rockingest librarian that ever there was.

danger all around

pulling me down

love for me is never to be found

Merida had a knack, never missing from a single show I went on to see, of convincing everyone in the room that she was singing directly to them. Her piercing, eye-locking gaze seemed a challenge, almost, daring you to suggest the songs were coming from anywhere but a place of utter musical integrity. It has always seemed to me a voice strangely free of emotion, yet in its icy detachment it is somehow altogether more convincing in the tales it tells.

During this particular encounter, the inevitable finally occurred. Everything, of course, had to tumble down. The drums finally let out some chain and nobody let their chance slip. The bass boiled over as the guitars crashed into a metallic, junked heap, while the Hammond – that ridiculous, hulking beast they insisted on dragging from show to show – stoically took one of its absolute beatings, thumped and kicked and thrashed into submission.

Standing solitary before all this, barely a hair moving from place, Merida carried the whole thing through, the ice queen who could melt any heart.

From that moment I was hooked – not on ‘valium’s wishing bone’ as per 'Stones', but in this delicious noir web they so effortlessly weaved. They had moved me without whining at me, destroyed my resistance without numbing my resolve.

Caress before catharsis.

At this stage, 1996, The Paradise Motel had only released a solitary EP, Left Over Life To Kill, with the scattered scraps and remix outing Some Deaths Take Forever soon to follow. I managed to catch a generous handful of shows and their first (and only) two full-length albums over the next two years, following them into tiny caves in Kings Cross, corner pubs in Melbourne and RSL clubs in Wollongong. One of the rewarding joys of this happy stalking was that no two shows was remotely alike – compulsive deconstructionists, there was no such thing as a definitive version of a song.

What may have been the incidental scraps and scrapings of one show became the lynchpin of the next, the beating heart of one night the shed skin of another. Their line-up would ebb and flow, with the occasional appearance of a string-quartet or brass section adding some lovingly textured layers, or an extra guitarist prompting tingling, scissors-on-strings, electrified terror.

But whatever the make-up, there was always a moving, living heart beating beneath Merida’s voice – a bass pulsing like blood through your temples, knife-edge metallic guitar jangling, strummed acoustic warmth and that mad old Hammond.

On the live stage The Paradise Motel was most certainly a collective effort. But behind the scenes, while Matt Aulich cobbled together some memorable string arrangements and always seemed the most proficient musician, one felt Charles was the mad scientist with the vision. And the boy certainly had an ear, turning his deft hand to producing an amazing album by my lovely school friends, those krazy Kiama kids Arrosa. Charles helped hone the sublime, aching, fractured artistry of these then teens into a beautiful beast, but the album sadly never saw the light after the always fragile band imploded on the brink of… who knows what?

While I hadn’t heard anything quite like it before, The Paradise Motel wasn’t entirely without reference points. The dreamy, reverb-soaked miasma was not a million miles from Underground Lovers. The nattily suited, sideshow drama nodded to a certain incarnation of Nick Cave. Dirty Three, Low and Mazzy Star are all there too - maybe even a hint of Portishead or Lamb - but not in any easily discernible style or sound or obvious conceit. It is there and not there, in the way one may lazily group Faulkner, Steinbeck and Salinger – it’s fair and fruitless at the same time.

If a band can ever be summed up in a single song, it was, for The Paradise Motel, the two-act 'Men Who Loved Here (Grew Sadder)'. Opening with a jagged, wrenching slice of feedback and gentle if minor acoustic chords, the signs are more than a little ominous. Come the 36 second mark, viciously abrasive guitars slashing in like a rusty scalpel wielded by a deranged doctor slit the whole thing open. Merida’s reassuring view on the matter?

the agony

will set you free

There is precious little of their music floating around the webisphere, and I guess it's really not a vision that translates well to a little yootoobish box. But perhaps the closest clip to capturing the quintessence of The Paradise Motel would be bad light.

So, it’s a tad melodramatic and no doubt a little ostentatious. But it hit me there, in that spot, that only a select few have tickled since. And that’s perhaps the bittersweet twist in this tale. They ruined so much music for me that I had until then happily, mindlessly enjoyed.

Perhaps The Paradise Motel struck a lasting chord with me because at the heart of things they were not simply performers but also consummate storytellers; first and foremost as chroniclers of the disappeared. I didn’t realise this straight away, so it was somewhat curious to discover over time that my initial response to the music somehow picked up on this at some level. From those very first moments I had felt this was somehow a musical instantiation of Picnic Rock – both the haunting and haunted Victorian place of myth and mystery, shrouded as it is in mists real and imagined, and the classic Peter Weir film.

Which finally brings me to the point of this nostalgic little wander down musical memory lane.

The Paradise Motel left our shores in the late 1990s to try their luck in the UK and had disintegrated within two years. But now, 10 years on, they are finally about to release their third studio album. This latest musical outing is conceptially inspired by and entirely devoted to the mother of all Australian disappearances, that of Azaria Chamberlain. The unfortunate Azaria, whose purported disappearance-via-dingo remains officially unsolved, would have been 30 this June 11 - the date The Paradise Motel will release Australian Ghost Story. This thematic realm has the band back doing what they do best, delving back into their spiritual home - that of our most haunted country.

While there have been other great Australian bands before, during, and since The Paradise Motel, and allowing that there are the occasional moments that have dated a little more than ideal for a 'timeless' tag, my revisiting of these earlier recordings with fresh ears still leaves me with the softest of soft spots for these marvellous if morbid miscreants.

The museum reopens

2010-05-15T21:42:00.002+10:00

Hello world out there.

A little while longer than intended it has been, but the Museum is about to pull off the dust cloths, cast back the curtains and throw open the doors in an attempt to return to its former levels of semi-regular sporadicity.

The curators have been busy behind the scenes and promise to take advantage of finally being in the one place for more than four days, although there is speculation afoot that they may still be dividing their time on imminent postings for that other place of tappings, a reawakening of the stolen-laptop hobbled Hobo Diaries.

Back soon... with a word from Emily B.

the littlest hobos...

2009-05-22T21:28:00.001+10:00

Just a little note I should have left earlier:

The Museum is temporarily closed while the curator goes for a little wander, but he will in the meantime be popping up at his home away from home, Hobo Diaries.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Eight

2009-02-05T12:16:00.003+11:00

“Can I take Papa up a cup of tea?”

Isabelle turned at the sound of Emily’s voice. She would have preferred to keep an eye on her, but this seemed a perfectly reasonable request and she would have aroused suspicion by refusing.

“Sure darling, let me put one on.”

Isabelle placed the kettle over the fire to boil and pulled down the teapot from the shelf. Lifting two small spoons of tea from the tin in which it was kept, she watched the dried leaves tumble into the pot, hooked together until the water would tear them apart and swirl them around.

Once the tea was made she poured a cup for herself and one for Percy. Emily, who had been hovering close to her mother all this time, took one of the cups and placed it on a tray. Isabelle watched as she walked carefully across the kitchen and through the doorway, listening for her footfall on the stairs.

Letting out a deep sigh, Isabelle realised how tense she had been with Emily watching over her. Rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hands, she realised she could no longer face this alone – the time had come to talk to Percy about what was going on.

“I really should have taken that tea up myself,” she thought, kicking herself for letting Emily – she could not think what else to call her – go. Her mind was spinning too fast to make sense of anything, a barrage of thoughts and images passing by. Then, out of this spinning, blurring mess, a sound emerged. The high pitched laughter of the wolf, emerging from the fire, rang in her ears again, but this time his image aligned with a face long consigned to the faded memories of a former life. It was Aloysius.

Aloysius, who had helped her and Percy escape after the wolves had turned against them. Aloysius, who she now knew had been acting not out of a compassion he would have extended to anybody, but a specific desire to see her safe. Aloysius, who she had long since even ceased thinking about, as she moved on with her new life here by the sea, a life with no place for the fraught power struggles and endless dangers of the forest she had long left behind.

Aloysius, Isabelle realised, had returned to claim what he believed his rightful entitlement.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Seven

2009-01-27T15:55:00.002+11:00

Emily paused halfway up the stairs, in a panic of uncertainty. She could hear the sounds of domestic work being undertaken in the kitchen, so knew her mother was busy down there. She had seen her father at his study window only a few minutes earlier, but had trusted he would be there for a while. A moment ago, when she first approached the window, she had caught a glimpse of Crouch as herself just coming into the room.

A moment later and she would have been caught, but Emily felt she had ducked out of sight just before Crouch would have seen her. Peering carefully through the bottom pane, Emily saw herself reaching for a book, examining its cover and wiping traces of dust from the top of the pages. Seemingly happy with the choice, Crouch had turned to the door and left as quickly as he had appeared.

Although unsure as to whether Crouch was going out to the hearth in the kitchen or up to her room, Emily knew she had to risk it. She had shivered with dread as she saw her mother and Crouch return home and knew that something terrible was going to happen if she didn’t act immediately.

As she pushed on the sides of the window, trying to open it as carefully as she could, Emily had cursed the wet weather that had swollen the frame. Hoping for a smooth slide open, she was furious at how much noise the window was making as it refused to let go of the frame. With a surrender that sounded to her like two trains at full steam running into each other, the window finally began shuddering its way up the frame. It still wasn’t wide enough for her massive frame to enter, so she gave it one last heave.

Sure it had been loud enough to alert the entire neighbourhood, Emily swallowed her breath and slid through the window, barely able to get Crouch’s shoulders through. Wriggling over the sill, she has used her hands to guide her body quietly to the floor. She didn’t want to make any more noise than she had to, but sensed leaving the window open was a bad idea. As gently as she could, and pleased to find it more willing to slide than at first, she pulled the window back into place, swinging the latch back to a locked position.

Walking over to the door – cursing under her breath when she crossed the creakiest section of the room, Emily had paused at the doorway. Her breath was coming in short, shallow gasps and she took a moment to try and get it under control.

Pushing open the door, she peered across to the open door to the kitchen. She could hear her mother working away busily and was pleased to see nobody was in sight of the doorway. Stepping slowly out into the hall, she had made her way slowly up the stairs, and it was here she now paused, ears straining to hear any movement from above. All seemed quiet. Wary of being caught out in the open like this, Emily took a deep breath and forced herself to put one foot in front of the other and not stop until she reached her room.

Closing the door behind her, Emily let out her breath and sighed with enormous relief. She still wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but felt she had at least a moment’s respite. With any luck her mother would be keeping Crouch busy in the kitchen, but she knew that would only be for so long. Peering around, she felt an uncanny sense of calm from these familiar surroundings. How long had it been since she had been here, safe in her little girl’s room? She realised that not only had she lost all sense of time – was it a day, a week, a lifetime? – but that she was seeing her room with new eyes, feeling suddenly too old for these lace trimmings, picture books and stuffed animals.

Her gaze had been scanning slowly around the room and now rested on her dresser, taking in the bag of lollies she knew must have come from Mr Pollock’s lolly shop – one of her favourite places in the world. Stepping closer her attention was captured by the mirror. She was mortified to be looking in and seeing Crouch look back, but forced herself to scrutinise her features more closely. She saw how old Crouch looked in the light that gently fell through the window, how his smooth skin was such a deeply pale, bloodless tone, as though he was a wax caricature of a creepy man.

His cruel lips were twisted into a tight sneer and his sharp nose seemed almost to have been sharpened as one might an arrow tip. His expansive brow sat under the rim of the hat, an ivory scar running down from the hairline to his jet black left eyebrow. She reached a finger up to trace its line, wondering who Crouch might have crossed too pick up such a souvenir. Looking now into his eyes, she was repulsed yet intrigued by their hollow depths, black tunnels that seemed to catch and swallow all passing light, letting nothing escape.

A scraping sound startled Emily out of her hypnotic swim in these inky pools. Percy must simply have been pushing his chair back in the study across the landing, but it reminded her she couldn’t afford to waste any more time. Her hand had idly found its way back into her coat pocket and Emily drew out the little blue bag with the liquorice that had come from her time in the music box.

Untwisting it, the task made quite difficult with her fingers now trembling quite badly, Emily drew out the pieces of liquorice within. Opening the lolly bag on the dresser, she drew out the pieces in there and popped them into her mouth, replacing them with those from the bag. Replacing the empty bag in her pocket, Emily turned to leave.

As she reached for the handle of her bedroom door, the knob began slowly to turn.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Six

2009-01-13T10:34:00.001+11:00

Helping Emily remove her coat, Isabelle saw how soaked her daughter had become from their dash home through the rain.

“You can take those sweets up to your room for later Emily – I want you in some new clothes as quickly as you can, then back down here before the fire so you can dry out.”

Clutching her bag of lollies from Mr Pollock’s seemingly endless selection, Emily headed silently up the stairs towards her room. Isabelle took off her own coat and decided the rest of her clothes had been adequately protected from the rain, so headed into the kitchen to begin her preparations for the evening meal.

While the outing had fallen short of what she had hoped, Emily did at least seem a little happier than she had been. She had seemed less excited to have been in Mr Pollock’s store than Isabelle had expected, but had seemed quite grateful to have been allowed to choose a bigger bag of sweets than usual.

Stoking the still glowing embers of the earlier fire, Isabelle was again whisked back to that experience under the tree – the strange little man, the laughing wolf, the fear that ran through her veins like the freezing river that had tumbled her along. It had all felt so real, so much more vivid a part of her memory than any dream ever could.

She knew it must have something to do with Emily, the way she had been behaving. ‘She’s not been herself at all’, murmured Isabelle, and she was so shocked at what a voice in the back of her mind then said that she fell into the nearest seat, catching her breath in her chest.

“It’s not Emily,” the voice had offered.

That was it. No explanation, no introduction, gone as soon as it had come. But it was crystal clear and so simply put that Isabelle was struck to the very heart of her knowing.

“It’s not Emily.” But how could that be? Of course it was Emily. Yet, somehow, her heart of hearts knew it was not. Her senses were deceiving her, everything she knew had somehow been turned on its head, yet there was such a strong sense of, what was it, relief? As though this impossible thought, once uttered, suddenly made sense of everything – explained Emily’s strange behaviour, her own sense of unease, the strange encounter and its cryptic message.

Putting aside the grotesque impossibility of such a revelation, Isabelle tried to think how it could be so, and what it could mean. She concentrated on when her feelings of uneasiness had begun. Ever since Emily had been late home from her visit to her young friend’s, Tabitha Tibbits, Isabelle had been uneasy. It’s true that being quite so late was out of character for Emily, but it must have been something more than that. Since then, Isabelle realised, she had been entirely out of sorts. She hadn’t slept properly, her nerves were more delicate than she was used to, and Emily had simply not seemed herself.

It’s not Emily. It was so simple, so straightforward, so – she realised – obvious. It still didn’t make sense, but that wasn’t enough to bring any further doubt. Now that she had made up her mind, Isabelle felt an incredible weight drop away. This burden had been oppressing her for days and now sloughed off, a snake relieved to have shed its too small skin.

Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Isabelle considered the situation. Upstairs, in one room, was her husband, Percy Button, no doubt lost in his writing and oblivious to the entire situation. In another room, somebody who to all intents and purposes appeared to be her daughter, her beloved Emily, but was not.

And here, in the kitchen, the fire before her crackling in its newly awaken state, the orange shadows flickering against her closed eyelids, Isabelle sat, helpless in the face of her revelation.

“Are you okay?”

Isabelle jumped at the sound of Emily’s voice, her eyes flying open to find her barely three feet away.

“I, I was just a little tired from our outing,” Isabelle stammered. “I was just enjoying some of the warmth in here – it was so cold out there.”

Isabelle put on a smile, not wanting to show any signs of concern she would have to explain any further. Her mind was ticking over too quickly, but never settling on anything that pointed to what her next step should be.

“Why don’t you grab a book and spend some time in here Emily, keep your mother company while I do some chores?”

“Sounds lovely, I’ll just go grab something.”

Emily was soon back and Isabelle watched as she took a seat, opening the leather-bound book on her knees. The sound of the water with which she had filled a pot coming to a boil brought her attention back to her duties. She went about her ordinary business of the day, distracted by the Emily issue but also keen to avoid the impression that anything was amiss.

After a few minutes this way Isabelle’s ears – sharpened by the tenseness of her mind, heard a scraping sound. Her eyes darted over to Emily, but she hadn’t appeared to hear anything. The sound had come from the front room - ordinarily she would have gone in to check, to see if it was Percy wanting something or simply her imagination, but this time something was holding her back.

There it was again – the sound of wood scraping against wood. This time Emily looked up.

“It must be your father after a book,” Isabelle said. “We’ll leave him to it, when he’s this hard at work there’s no point distracting him, he’ll hardly take in anything we might even say!”

Emily smiled and returned to her book. Isabelle’s heart began to thump as she heard the creak she knew came from the floor of the front room when anybody walked near the window. Worried Emily might take any more interest, she made sure she made plenty of noise of her own, jumbling around cutlery and rattling a stack of plates.

As the stairs creaked, then stopped, creaked, then stopped, Isabelle’s pulse thumped in her ears. She felt a hot flush hit her neck and face and the sickening burst of adrenaline flood her tensed body.

If she had misjudged, she had made a terrible mistake.

Vinyl Diaries XXXV: Taikoz

2008-12-22T10:39:00.002+11:00

Drums.

Big ones.

Vinyl Diaries XXXIV: Natsuko Yoshimoto and James Cuddeford

2008-12-12T15:25:00.001+11:00

Violins.

Lovely.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Five

2008-12-11T10:02:00.002+11:00

Knocking sharply on her own door, Emily still wasn’t sure what she was going to say. Standing there, as Crouch, with Mr Wills by her side, shifting uneasily from one foot to another, each opening line jarred as too strange, too likely to raise her father’s eyebrow in that quizzical manner he had.

The door suddenly swung to and Emily’s heart jumped for joy to see her father well; distracted and a little vacant - he must have been in the midst of writing – but seemingly safe.

“Did you forget something?” he asked, clearly expecting that it had been her mother and her back from their walk sooner than expected.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, rubbing his eyes and taking in Mr Wills and Crouch standing in his doorway.

Emily looked to Mr Wills and cleared her throat loudly.

Mr Wills looked sideways at Crouch, stood up a little taller and addressed Percy.

“Mr Button, this here is Mr Crouch. He has, he says, a message of some import which he hastens to impart.”

“Oh, I see.” Percy looked from Mr Wills back to Emily, who had finally come up with her story.

“Well, do come in from the cold, it’s awfully draughty out here.”

Percy took a step backwards and opened the door more fully so as to let his visitors through. Emily stepped over the threshold from the cold street into the warm vestibule, but Mr Wills hesitated on the step, fiddling nervously with his hat.

“Um, if it’s all the same to you gentlemen,” he began uneasily, his eyes shifting and downcast, “I really should be getting home to the wife. Martha’s been a little poorly of late and I don’t like to leave her on her own too much.”

Percy looked from Mr Wills to Crouch, hesitated a moment and then replied. “My good sir all is well, return to your wife and please send her our regards and best wishes for a hasty recovery.”

Mr Wills replaced his hat on his head, touched its peak in thanks and turned on his heel with no further word.

Emily stood waiting for her father to close the door and usher her through to the living area.

She allowed Percy to take Crouch’s coat and hang it by the door, then accepted his invitation to proceed through to the living room and take a seat by the flickering fire.

Every moment was precious and there was little time for formalities.

“Mr Button, you are no doubt wondering what has brought me here.” Emily was fighting the urge to reveal everything, knowing there simply wasn’t a chance to convince her father as to what was happening in the short time before her mother and Crouch were due to return.

“Well, I must admit it seems it must be an unusual occasion that would bring you here,” Percy began, carefully.

Emily could see there was a wariness about her usually open father, a certain distaste for Crouch’s presence in the home. If only he knew that he had been here for some time!

“It’s nothing too unusual. I have it on good authority that you are a man who has what they call a ‘way with words’. My business has been a little slow lately and I was thinking, with a little more time on my hands, it would be a good time to get my story down. I have, Mr Button, led a somewhat colourful life, but when I try and find words to explain half my deeds, a quarter of my experiences, one tenth my adventures, they invariably fall short. If I need a poker built that befits my fireplace, I would visit a blacksmith. As I need a story told that will befit my life, I have sought out a wordsmith.”

Emily stopped to let the words sink in. She was surprised and somewhat disturbed at the way this little speech had rolled off her tongue. It had come all too easily and she didn’t like how much it had sounded like Crouch, how easily his words still came out of his mouth. Emily began to wonder if she was losing a grip on her own self, if the longer she was in Crouch’s form, the more she was being absorbed into him, becoming like him, until, some time likely quite soon, she simply ceased to be.

Watching her father carefully to see his reaction, Emily She knew his interest would be piqued. She knew how much he loved to write, but knew also he would find Crouch an unpleasant character and would find this a less than appealing approach out of the blue this way. She felt bad to have had to mislead him so, to tap into this love of his to justify her presence in the house, but had seen no other way. She only hoped she had calculated her father and his honour correctly.

“Mr Crouch,” Percy began slowly, clearly measuring his words. His piercing blue eyes, eyes Emily felt lucky to have inherited, did not dart around the room to avoid Crouch, yet he managed to avoid revealing too much distaste.

“It is true that I have devoted much of the latter portion of my life to working with words. My hands were never able to turn wood as well as many, to swing an axe like other men. Not for me the underappreciated artistry of a perfectly formed loaf of bread, the tailored coat or the coaxing of sweet musical joy from a flute.

“I could be surrounded by all the fish in the sea and never catch one, or return from a day in the mines with not even a pocketful of coal.

“But one could say that yes, words, though arriving late, live with me in some form of affinity.

“That is not, I hasten to add, a suggestion that I command them, that they somehow jump to my every whim and fancy. Quite the converse in fact. At their most generous, at the height of my powers and when I am in what I consider to be a realm where they are aligning closest with my wishes for them, it is at best an uneasy truce.

“For the most part, far more often than not, it is a pitiable struggle to make the least sense with the most recalcitrant of building blocks. Imagine for a moment, if you will, the task of building a house.

“Now picture undertaking this task with no tools but your bare hands, with not bricks but a substance akin to sand, or even, at times, water; trickling between your fingers, no straight edges, no reliable form, no consistency of density or shape or weight.

“The location upon which you must built this structure is not, as you may prefer, a level, sheltered position, but in fact a steep, undulating hill, naked to the elements, cursed with the wildest winds, the most violent storms.

“Now, consider that you finally succeed in creating a stable foundation upon which to build the rest of your project. Suddenly, the plans you had carefully stored away in a secret part of your mind, a part you thought impenetrable, have simply vanished. Crystal clear the day you began, they’ve now faded beyond all recall, turned inside-out and upside-down and simply blown away like so much dust.

“Meanwhile, the sand and water, at first so prone to slipping and blowing away, have sat just a moment too long. The sun has got to them and they’ve clung to each other so tightly, baking under the glare of scrutiny that they are solid as a rock. Your bare fingers are powerless to prise them apart – they are no longer what they were, they will not do what you had hoped they might do.

“This – this is what it is to write, to work with words, to turn a life into and the scribbled soaking of ink into paper in the vain and ultimately fruitless hope that, at some time in the future, that ink will somehow be able to be drawn from the paper once more, to pass up the quill and leap out from the paper into life once more.”

Shocked by the passion which her father had displayed, Emily wondered if he was addressing himself as much as Crouch. Rarely had she heard him discuss anything in such a manner, much less his own involvement in writing.

No doubt it’s because I’m seen only as a child, she thought, wondering if that is how she would forever be seen.

But he continued.

“Every time I sit down to write, these are the things I face. This, when I work with love. This, when I wrote of what I know, of what I wish to know, of what passes through my mind in those moments of unbridled life, where we are bursting with an unquenchable desire to dance, to shout to the world, to belong to a life that has so much to offer.

“Now, what you ask of me is this. You want me, I am thinking, to get inside you; to retrace your steps, rewind your days - re-breathe your very breath. You want me to get inside your skin -” at this Emily gave an uncontrollable shudder “- and, to all intents and purposes, become you.”

Her father paused a moment, and Emily was unsure whether to say anything, whether this was a question, or a statement, which is more, she thought, how it had been weighted. She took a breath to gather her thoughts but thankfully Percy continued.

“Now, nothing gives me greater pleasure in life than my writing – my beautiful family aside of course – but it’s not simply a matter of rolling up my sleeves and writing whatever I like. Far from it in fact. And, the simple fact of the matter is, Mr Crouch, I would find it very, very, difficult I suppose you could say, to take the steps that would be needed to take on such a task. I’m certainly not one for rumours, and I take all I hear with a liberal dose of salt, but, to put this in the gentlest way I possibly can, there are certain aspects to your story, as I understand it, that makes what you propose something beyond what I feel can have events transpire in the manner in which you may have envisaged in coming to me today.”

Soaking up what her father had said, picking apart the carefully couched words, Emily deduced that he was gently suggesting to Crouch that his request would find no succour in this instance. She weighed her next words carefully.

“Do I take it then, Mr Button, that what you are suggesting to me is this. My life, as it is, would find nought but trouble when measured against any attempts to wrest it into a shape suitable for notating; that any efforts to render it in a form other than that in which I myself must live, no matter what inspiration and perspiration were applied, would be ultimately futile regardless of to whom I entrusted the task of wielding the quill, no matter what faculty such a person may have with language, be it spoken or written?”

Emily was once again disconcerted by her own unexpected faculty with language, this speech that began carefully in her own thoughts but quickly developed a pace and level of reflection that she believed beyond her conscious application. She also knew this is not really what her father had indicated, but wanted to give him a gentler way out than she is sure Crouch really would have.

Her father looked at her closely and for a moment she was sure he had seen her – not Crouch but her, Emily, looking back at him. But her jolted shock of excitement at the prospect was short-lived.

“Mr Crouch, you have understood me very well. While your proposition intrigues me, it is, ultimately, an endeavour that can only end in disappointment. My suggestion to you is to entrust these tales, these chapters in what I have no doubt is a most intriguing and incomparable life, to your memory. The mind is a most wonderful thing, the master storyteller. Your retrieval of these memories will offer you far more than any mere scribe can hope to emulate.”

Emily sense her time was running out. There seemed to be little opportunity to slip upstairs as hoped – on what pretence could she possibly draw? Then it occurred to her. She raised her hand to her mouth and coughed lightly, then more violently. Her throat made a choking sound and as her father looked at her with concern, she croaked the word ‘water’. As Percy raced off to the kitchen, Emily stopped her racking cough and quickly turned to the window. She has just enough time to turn the latch and step back to her spot before Percy came in, a cup of water in hand.

Emily let out a couple more coughs for good measure, and took hold of the cup. Holding it to her lips she took a small sip and returned it to her father.

“That’s better. And Mr Button, may I say I am truly sorry to have troubled you so.”

“Think nothing of it. I’m sorry I can’t be of more assistance with...”

“Oh do not despair on my behalf, I see in what you say the good sense of one who knows about such matters. I will take your advice and take leave of you without any further ado.”

“I shall see you out. Here, don’t forget your coat. Good day Mr Crouch.”

“Good day Fa- Mr Button,” Emily stumbled, passing from the warm, stuffy air of her home into the bracing cold. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind her that she realised how heavily the rain now fell. It must have been falling for some time, for there were large puddles forming where the cobblestones were less evenly placed.

A passing carriage sped by, its spinning wheels flicking up muddy water from the puddles and forcing Emily to jump back from its splashing passage. After it had passed she raced across the street and took shelter in a doorway a few doors further up, away from town. She watched the upstairs window and was pleased to see the light that showed her father had returned to his study. She ducked back behind the doorway when she saw him peer out from behind the curtains, evidently looking to see if he could catch a last glimpse of Crouch disappearing down the street.

Percy must have been satisfied Crouch had passed the corner out of view, for the curtain dropped back into place. The soft light against it grew a little brighter, suggesting he had turned his lamp back up and was settling down to some more work after what must have been a most disturbing distraction.

Emily had just worked up the courage to return across the street and try the window, when from the corner of her eye she saw two figures walking quickly up the street. The woman cowering under her coat may have been any mother living up and down the street, but the young girl in bright red relief against the dun coloured terraces was unmistakably Emily Button.

Vinyl Diaries XXXIII: Halcyon

2008-11-27T14:54:00.003+11:00

Oh yes, I forgot I had even written this one - was quite a nice night, and proves I haven’t been entirely lazy...

Halcyon turns 10

Feet and their itchy ways

2008-11-19T09:57:00.003+11:00

My it's dusty in here...

I really have no excuse, other than having spent much of recent time in the vicinity of Vietnam, and been a little distracted by the endless beauty of her landscape, culture, food and people.

Planning for imminent further travels seems to be taking up a bit of time now that I'm back, along with sifting through these memories.

Words will find a way to seep up and out though, as is their wont, so I'll coral a few and drop them in here soon.

Vinyl Diaries XXXII: Alex Masso Ensemble

2008-09-05T14:31:00.002+10:00

While it may appear I’ve been a little lazy of late, I’ve at least managed to put a few words together for the Alex Masso Ensemble show last week, and they’ve just popped up over at the always peek-atable Resonate magazine.

Vinyl Diaries XXXI: Chante avec les loups

2008-08-13T13:57:00.004+10:00

The next wolf-infused chapter of The Music Box is almost ready, but I’ll stall for the time being with a wolf-themed link to ‘La Blogotheque’, a French music weblog with rather fine tastes.

They’re using a photo I took at the Iron and Wine show earlier this year in talking about Sam Beam's wonderful Wolves (Songs of the Shepard’s Dog), as part of an article about the Wolf in popular music.

I’m pleased to see they made mention of Bonnie Prince Billy’s stellar Wolf Among Wolves, and of course gave thought to the darkly delightful Wolves by The Accidental.

Well, here it is...

Vinyl Diaries XXX: Sigur Rós

2008-08-08T10:40:00.008+10:00

Sigur Rós
Hordern Pavillion
August 2, 2008

I faced a small dilemma in even coming tonight. So perfect was the last Sigur Rós show I saw, so rich and detailed and finely hewn, it seemed it would be tempting fate too sorely to expect such an experience again. And yet if it was too similar, relied upon the same buttons being pushed, even that would disappoint in its hint of stasis.

I needn't have fretted so.

It was a chilly night it's true, but I doubt the Hordern Pavilion had ever hosted such a natty collection of scarves and woolen hats. We Sigur Rós people seem, it turns out, to be scarves and woolen hat people. Either that, or the chilly, glacial scope of their music subliminally works its way down to our bones and it's not so much a matter of predisposition as self preservation.

The audience was younger, too, than I recall. Yet this seems fitting for Sigur Rós' regressive trajectory, their swim upstream back from life's very precipice, wisdom gained and the end stared in the face, before they turn, quietly, walking away from the light, from nothingness and weightlessness towards that first moment of wonder, of childish glee at the colours and sensations and incomprehensibility of all that simply is.

The stage lit only incidentally, the band emerged from the wings, regally attired and positively glowing. What would they start with, how would they set the tone? Judging by the response, the opening submarine 'ping' of Svefn-g-englar was the perfect choice for many, the ideal entry-point for our magical mystery tour.

There is something inexplicably hypnotic about that depth-sounding 'ping' that carries us through helplessly, wisps us away from our firm grounding and takes us on a submarine meander beneath the ice floes. The water outside is so cold it loses its miscibility, twirling in a slow dance that leaves oily outlines against the portals; sea monkeys gazing idly back as we journey who knows where.

Kjarri Sveinsson's organ carries us along until the first of those sweeping, bottomless cello bowings across Jónsi Birgisson's electric guitar brings in turn the night's first shivers, the sky above splitting wide open (ignoring for the time being the minor matter of the roof in-between). His singing, the untethered Hopelandish wail that hovers high but unforced, flies out in clear soaring lines, before the drums, reliable until now, suddenly stutter and the whole precarious puzzle tumbles into its own icy undertow, which we only now realise had been there all along, shadowing every step.

Just as it all begins to fade away, Jónsi's voice, not so much dominating as increasingly holding a certain sway, breaks out - an impossibly long, sustained note, a siren call we can't help but follow; if we perish, so be it. We catch our breath in consort, waiting, waiting, and still it holds. This is no smoke and mirrors, it reminds us, this is the outer limits of the possible, being pushed that little bit further than we ever knew they could.

Finally, with gasping relief, we surface at our first secret destination, the frightfully graceful picnic spread of Glósóli. Treats beyond our wildest imagination are spread as far as the eye can see, and we gorge on creamy sugared treats beneath fluttering coloured flags catching the cliff-top breeze. Jónsi's every slicing bow guitar peals off a reverberating sliver of live electriciy, racheting the tension notch by notch.

Only two songs in, and the rest of the world is forgotten. Even the very constructedness of what we're seeing and hearing melts away – there is such a seamless, intuitive communication in the band's musicality that they rarely become themselves; they are already and always Sigur Rós.

The joyous innocence of Sé Lest is a striking follow-up, all music box melody and tinkering toys taking on a life of their own, our Icelandic elves playing percussively in a magic toyshop overflowing with beautifully hewn trinkets and wide-eyed whimsy.

Such is the inspired flight of imagination that when they reached the moment on the album at which the horns in Sé Lest enter, it seemed as though a marching band has appeared on stage, crisply dressed in flawless white, gold tasselled and chiming in to perfection. We pictured them marching across the stage for the short passage and then simply evaporating, leaving us wondering if such a preposterously perfect occurrence had been nothing more than a collective wish and melding of memories rendered momentarily material.

When the brass playing foursome The Horny Brasstards did return to the stage for Ný batterí, it appeared that they must, after all, exist.

There is a space or dimension that exists uneasily between the childish reverie of the voyage of discovery and those midnight phantoms that are its flipside; wonder and terror two facets of the same experience. It’s through this slippery netherworld the goodship Sigur Rós sails, charting new territories while laying their faith (and we ours) in the stars.

Originally drawn to the drama, the mysterious romanticism of these vast Icelandic soundscapes, it's been a perilous but rewarding journey to follow Sigur Rós into newer territory. Takk managed to balance the grander, sweeping statements of ágætis byrjun and ( ) with some more optimistic, concise tracks and consequently benefited from the breath of fresh air.

Their fifth full-length album með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust ("with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly") has continued further down this vein, stripping away the layers and exposing the skeleton within.

Though breaking with their signature strengths, this immediacy and intimacy is not entirely unwelcome. The conciseness and precision serves two purposes, both on show tonight. The first is breaking up the longer, swirlier pieces, providing some calm against which the storms appear to reach even greater heights.

The second and perhaps most important for their longevity is to reveal a little more of themselves. Counter-intuitively, the more we're faced with ceaseless doom-laden ice-castles in the sky, reverb-soaked end-of-time crescendo-driven epics, the less we believe in them. But when more austere works such as the joyous lilt of Hoppípolla are neatly juxtaposed with the more brooding works, we feel we're witness to a truer picture, a more multi-dimensional wholeness that makes the peaks and troughs all the richer for their surprise and intensity; it more closely reflects life and we sense they truly mean it, that they aren't simply going through the motions.

It is these moments of light that made it so deeply unsettling when Jonsi drove his bow to destruction during Ny Batteri and made set highlight Festival all the more bewitching.

There were times at which I missed the strings, those curious imps Amiina who so delightfully lent their talents to fill out the more pastoral pieces on previous tours. Without them there are moments in which we miss the delicacy, the lightness of touch and the revelry of the incidental.

But the horns played their role superbly and made for a worthwhile deviation. They are offered up with a deft touch, made to shimmer and vibrate rather than honk and puff. This helped to add a sense of subdued desolation, the fog rolling over us from the sea and enveloping our thoughts and very being.

Something I also realised tonight that doesn't jump off the albums at first listen, but is in retrospect quietly buried there, is the integral role of the rhythm section in anchoring Sigur Rós, keeping them from drifting away into pure ambient wallpaper. Orri Páll Dýrason's drumming is tight and disciplined, a clock-work reliability to its machinations, while Goggi Holm's bass is restrained, yet highly fluid. It's sensual, yet not solipsistic or romantic, slinking just beneath the radar but leading us along all the same.

They know when to catch, and when to release. Simmering away imperceptibly beneath Sæglópur, biding their time during the gentle piano opening and as Jonsi's vocals weave in with the bright semi-hopeful chords, they let the more melodic elements dance merrily for a while, before gatecrashing with fearful power. They trigger a violent reaction in turn and before we know it searing strips of molten electricity are torn off the guitar, Jonsi's previously measured voice now hauntingly plaintiff, drowning in a sea of pain.

Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur offered a brief respite, a few rays of sunshine breaking through, but they were soon snuffed out by Hafssól and its relentless bow-shredding menace and ache.

After this exhausting and troubling intensity one wondered what could be pulled out next, and set-closer Gobbledigook was a startling but contagiously joyous choice. The subdued stately hues that had been the provence of the simply-lit stage throughout the night were shaken off for a clap-driven kaleidoscopic rainbow, an eruption of playful chords, acoustic guitar scratchiness and major-key celebration. 'La-La-Las' were spilling from every corner of the stage, the song and set climaxing with a snowstorm of confetti bursting forth like the joy bursting from thousands of hearts.

It was such an uplifting, surprisingly unmisanthropic finish to the main set that we were all the more disarmed by what was to follow after a brief break, the harrowingly destructive Popplagið that stood as the first encore.

Opening gently enough, that rarest of Sigur Rós devices - a guitar riff - lulls us in and draws us along without too much caution. It’s a touching little riff, minor and almost apologetic, but it’s hummable and sneakily draws us into the dark heart that opens around us before we realise.

Coddled by an equally unthreatening bass, it’s not until we’ve wandered far too far into these verdant woods that we hear the first thunderous clap, the distant rumbling storm rearing its unsettling green head upon us. But then it eases and we laugh at ourselves - 'jumping at shadows' we knowingly smile.

And yet... those drums. They’re building. The Horny Brasstards have laid down their brass and taken on drums, pounding them with increasing fervour, banging away in primal synchronicity.

The Sigur Rós entity soon lets out a sigh. It's not simply ghostly, not merely a dream - it crosses over into a ghostly dream, thrashing on and on mercilessly into a phantasmagoric nightmare. On and on they push, a raw, draining, eviscerating exorcism that seems to have no end, until, finally, it peaks, spills over, topples forward in a frothing surge. Desperately, sinking sinking, you cling onto some passing flotsam, chewed up, spat out, exhausted - exhilarated. Shivers run through your skin, then you shed it, soar above, looking back down upon the spent shell.

At this point they could have left us, battered, bruised and broken, to wander off into the night. It was the kind of transcendently majestic rock finish that stays with you in tingle form for days, so it would have been tempting to send us off with its aftershocks still washing over us.

But, perhaps a little wary of just what frame of mind that might leave us in, Sigur Rós returned for a final time to bring us back to earth, wrapping us in the quiet embrace of All Alright. This sweet, pretention free lullaby brought us down beautifully, not so much anti-climactic as rejuvenating; a gentle butterfly wing on the cheek to wish us well along the long and winding path ahead.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Four

2008-07-23T10:28:00.004+10:00

Isabelle closed the door gently behind them, noting that it was catching again, due to all the recent damp. She still wasn’t sure about heading out in this weather, but felt compelled by something she couldn’t put her finger on to follow her instincts and go. She wondered whether it might be something to do with the man she had imagined meeting in the forest.

Perhaps his cryptic little spiel would make more sense if she was in the woods? His words kept playing around in her head – “trust yourself”... but with what? The image of the laughing wolf also kept flashing before her eyes, and she shuddered. There had been no wolf sightings around these parts for years, yet some strange things had been happening lately.

With all this playing in her mind Isabelle was quite startled when she looked around after closing the door and, just a few doors down the street, saw that strange, cold Mr Crouch.

“Emily!” she cried, putting a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Emily had been looking back up at the window through which Percy was still working. Something told Isabelle she must not let Emily see Mr Crouch, under any circumstances.

“What is it?”

“Oh, it’s just, do you think I might have left the copper too low? I don’t want it boiling dry.”

“It’s fine, I saw it myself before we left, it’s quite full.”

“Oh, that’s a relief,” sighed Isabelle, truly relieved as she saw Crouch disappear though Mr Wills’ front door.

“Okay, well let’s get going, if we’re going to beat this rain.”

The pair walked down towards the main road, the daughter stepping in big strides to try and keep up with her mother, than giving up on that tactic and going for swifter, smaller steps. Emily was wearing a big red cloak wrapped around her shoulders and a bright red woollen hat, while Isabelle had opted for a simple black cloak, her head bare so as to better sense the true state of the weather.

Isabelle puzzled over what had brought that Crouch fellow up to their end of town, and what he and Mr Wills could possibly have in common that would have brought them together this way. She hadn’t ever spoken directly to Crouch, and did not usually make it a habit to take a dislike to somebody without having at least met them, but for him she was willing to make a rare exception.

There was something about his cold, shadowy look, his way of moving that seemed immediately like skulking, and though she was not a fan of gossip, dismissing most as mere scuttlebutt and a sign of someone with too much time on their hands and too little respect for others, she had heard enough stories about him to know she wasn’t comfortable with the thought of him being anywhere near her Emily.

They reached the corner where the lolly shop stood and Isabelle waited for Emily’s insistent tug on the sleeve that always followed, but she was quietly surprised when no such tug came, when no imploring eyes looked up at her like saucers brimming with spilt tea.

Of all the small things that had seemed strange of late, this one threw Isabelle the most. She didn’t exactly approve of Emily’s sweet tooth, but it was simply too strange that she seemed not even to give the window, crammed with every colour of the rainbow in the form of lollipops, humbugs, bullseyes and liquorice, a second glance.

Emily must have sensed Isabelle’s concern, because she shortly felt her eyes looking up keenly at her, burning two small holes through her cloak. But the pair walked on in silence, their pace picking up a little – due to the chill in the air, Isabelle told herself, pulling her cloak a little more tightly around her shoulders.

Isabelle felt something touch her hair, and then again. Small round specks began to appear on the path, dark little dots that began appearing on the road as well. Isabelle looked up to see heavy black cloud passing over the top of them, galloping by like frightened stallions.

“Emily, I think we best turn back,” she said, looking down at her daughter, who seemed to be lost in thought.

“Mmm? What was that?”

“Look, it’s started to rain and I think it’s going to get much worse any moment – it’s best if we turn back.”

Emily slowly returned from wherever her mind had drifted, looking around and seeing the spattering rain drops. Isabelle once more saw that dark shadow pass across her face, then slip away as she looked up.

“I suppose you’re right mother, I imagine you know best.”

Isabelle thought that a strange way to put it, but by now the rain was gathering a bit more force and was spitting quite heavily. The pair wheeled around and began to head for home, but before they even reached the corner the skies opened. A blinding flash of lightning forked above their heads, seemingly jumping from one roof to another, followed almost instantly by a tremendous crash of thunder that sounded like the sky was splitting in two.

Grabbing Emily be the hand, Isabelle pulled her into the doorway of the lolly shop, just as the rain began to torrent. Even from the doorway they were getting splashed, so they opened the door and passed into the shelter of the shop.

“Ah, the delightful Miss Button, so good of you to drop by," smiled Mr Pollock, the silver-haired shopkeeper. “And I see you’ve brought your big sister along.”

Isabelle smiled, for Mr Pollock seemed never to tire of this flattering line.

“Isn’t it simply ghastly out there? Come in, get warm. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“No thank you, but you’re very kind to offer.”

“Oh phooey, it’s nothing at all for my favourite Buttons.”

“Emily, while we’re here, how about choosing a few treats? It will make up for not getting to the woods today.”

With a wan smile, Emily nodded and began looking around at the shelves. All along the walls of the shop, the side walls and the wall behind the counter at which Mr Pollock stood, his hands pressing down, fingers poised like five-legged spiders, there stood jar after jar of treats.

Boiled sweets and chocolate pieces jostled for shelf space alongside sugar-coated nuts and – Emily’s favourite – liquorice.

“Lovely weather,” observed Mr Pollock, a gleam in his eye. “Just the day for a picnic.”

“We were lucky to get away without being absolutely saturated,” Isabelle said. “A couple more seconds and we’d be drenched.”

“Well, stay here as long as you need, it was all pretty quiet so it’s nice to have the company.”

“Thanks. We’ll choose a few treats and be off once it settles.”

Vinyl Diaries XXIX: Sono Perception

2008-07-15T12:52:00.003+10:00

In which I waffle on a bit about this and that in the general hope of making some sort of sense of 'Sonic Art', all over in the part of the webesphere known as Resonate magazine.

She sits to write

2008-07-10T11:38:00.003+10:00

She sits to write, but her fingers freeze.

She sits to write, but nothing comes out.

Snatches of conversations, snippets of thought, countless answers to questions long since past – things she could have said then, but make no sense now.

She sits to write, but the weight of all those words already out there, pushing back against all those clouding her own mind, is too much. They laugh as they casually poke each word that threatens to spill back in, warning her to find a new patch, to go somewhere less crowded.

She’s on her second cup of tea. She’s quite full enough from the first, but the familiar action – the flick of the switch on the kettle, the brief silence, wondering if she has switched it on properly, then the slow hiss as the water begins to catch, begins to swirl, organises itself and votes on which particles will become steam and escape through the spout, which will be poured into the teapot and take on the honey hue of the tea leaves – soothes her.

It’s all part of writing, it’s all part of the delicate mask that must be assembled, the hood put over the writer who must become blank, erased, forgotten, before she can begin. Her stories must not be hers – they can’t be hers anyway, she doesn’t know who she is.

Thinking about who she is is the quickest way to upset her, freeze her. She has no idea. She fancies she should, by now, have a clue, an inkling, an occasional wake-in-the-night connection that whispers to her a truth, a secret, a startlingly clear image that disappears as soon as it arrives.

But no, never. Not once.

Is that why she writes? To find herself? Not likely. She’s looking to lose herself, find out less and less about herself until there’s nothing to know, or not to know, there’s just nothing, which leaves knowing at the door, knocking gently, half-heartedly, disconsolately perhaps, then wandering away, down streets black with lost tears, a black as silky and shiny as a raven’s haunch, a street rustling with the same sound of death upon us that’s brought by that very same raven’s swishing, time-stopping flight.

She sits to write, lost inside that veneer of time that sends the minute hand swirling out of control, yet the hour hand never moving.

She sits to write, but now her mind has wandered. Her nose itches, her foot’s asleep, tucked back under her chair. The birds are carrying on like they’ve just woken to find a new day waiting, but she knows the day is well underway. It’s passed her by really – while she sits, waiting, trying, it’s gone. She has nothing to show for it, no trace of writing, no hint of an idea. She could have walked down to the small park on the corner of her street, felt the sun tickle the back of her neck like a familiar love, pulled out a favourite book, fallen asleep with the smell of its well-thumbed pages and old ink gently wafting into her daydreams.

But she didn’t. She stayed to tackle the empty page, to put her demons to rest, drive a pen through their mocking heart, their leering, jeering faces that once peered round doorways, but now perch happily on the edge of her desk, flipping through old magazines, laughing at her choice of passages pulled from other books, written in her leaning hand in a small exercise book originally bought for her own words to fill.

She sits to write, but blood pounds in her ears, blood she pictures a deep black, a stultifying inky black, blood sour with loss, blood thickening by the moment, stale blood that’s curdling and crusting.

‘Help’ she whispers, but nobody hears.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Three

2008-07-01T12:41:00.004+10:00

Slipping off Crouch’s wet boots, a torrent of water pouring from each as she sat sodden on the edge of the sea, Emily knew she had to get going. There was no time to even stop in at Crouch’s store and see if there was anything into which she could change – she would have to go like this.

With no real plan at all as to how she was going to get inside, she knew she must make for her home if she was going to have any chance of getting her parents out of harm’s way. Striding briskly away from the shoreline and up to the main street, Emily was intensely aware of the stares she was drawing. She must have been quite the sight! Throughout her ordeal her hat had miraculously stayed perched on her head, and now she was grateful for the chance to pull its brim down over her eyes. Even so, from their corners she could pick out the village folk past whom she wilfully strode, catching small snippets of their murmuring as she stomped by.

A squelching was coming from her boots as the last of the sea water hung on tenaciously, as though excited to be travelling this far from home. She squeezed what water she could from the ends of the coat, feeling the chill in the air start to penetrate. She was bound to end up with a cold is out much longer, but had more pressing matters in mind.

After what seemed an eternity – learning that the when people were staring at you, time seemed to all but cease to tick, Emily reached the top of the main road. Branching off onto her street, she began to slow her step. She tried to shrink into herself, which wasn’t so easy with such a large frame as Crouch’s. Moving from doorway to doorway, she kept an eye scanning up the hill, where her house stood.

A sudden gust of wind managed what the ocean hadn’t and swept Crouch’s hat clear off her head, sending it tumbling across the cobblestones. She was so used to wearing it now that without a thought she went after it, stooping to pick it up where it had settled on the edge of a step. The door opened and a stern face peered out, though Emily saw this quickly skip to a look of near panic.

“Oh, Mr Crouch, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. What... what... what brings you here?”

“Oh, I’m just passing, my hat...” Emily trailed off and didn’t know what to say. She spun on her heel and made as if to leave, but saw the front door of her own home, just a handful of houses up, had swung open. She was stuck to the spot as she saw herself step down into the street and turn her way, with her mother following just behind.

“You must let me in!” she cried to Mr Wills, as she now realised him to be, sending the poor man jumping half out of his clothes.

“I mean, please could I see you for a moment, I have something I’ve been meaning to ask.” Emily saw Mr Wills was most unimpressed at the thought of Crouch crossing his threshold, but also that he was scared enough that he seemed like he would not dare the consequences of saying no. After wavering for what seemed like eternity but could have only been a moment – Emily aware that if the real Crouch or her mother looked up for a second, she was sure to be discovered – Mr Wills stood just far back enough for Emily to brush past. She felt very rude and knew Mr Wills must be scared half out of his wits, but knew a second longer and she would have been discovered.

As it was she had caught a glimpse of her mother as she hurried to close the door. She longed to turn and embrace her, to jump with joy to know that she was still okay, but to have done so would have been impossible – she would have scared her to death and had no chance of setting things right.

No, her only chance was to get into her home unseen, to leave the liquorice Oscar had slipped into her pocket somewhere Crouch would find it, and wait for him to eat it. She still wasn’t sure how she was going to explain to her mother what had happened, but that seemed less important at this stage than getting into her home. She knew Crouch and her mother would not be out long. She wanted to follow them, to see what Crouch was up to, but knew to do so would be to miss what could be her only chance to get inside.

Emily didn’t dare think about what might have happened to her father, but took heart at seeing her mother and, yes, even Crouch, acting normally enough. If anything had happened to her father, she reasoned, they wouldn’t be getting out and about so casually. After the shock of having seen them began to subside, she began to wonder where it was they might be heading.

“So, how can I be of assistance, Mr Crouch?”

It was Wills – of course he would want to know what business she had here.

“Oh, well, I was going to ask you something, but it’s completely slipped my mind. I‘m afraid I must bid you farewell.”

Emily raised her hat as politely as she could, spun on her heel and made for the door. Then a thought struck her.

“Oh Mr Wills?”

“Yes Mr Crouch?”

“Tell me, are you on good terms with your neighbour, Mr Button?”

W-well, yes, I suppose you could say so,” he began, warily. “W-w-why do you ask?”

“Do you think you could grant me the courtesy of an introduction?”

Mr Wills just stared, his dry lips slightly parted, clearly not quite believing what he was being asked. And it must seem awfully strange, Emily realised, Crouch here completely out of the blue, not giving his reason for arriving and suddenly asking for an introduction to someone else – again without explanation.

She had to think quickly.

“It’s just that, well, I have some important new to share with him, but would you believe we’ve never had the pleasure of meeting in person. I just thought that, well, it would be best this way...”

It was the best she could do, and though Mr Wills still had a puzzled look to him, she saw that while he was wary of anything further to do with Crouch, he realised this was at least a way to get him moving along and keeping him happy.

“Well, I suppose I could. Just let me get my coat and let Martha know where I’m going.”

Vinyl Diaries XXVIII: the hermit awakens

2008-06-27T17:00:00.003+10:00

A small milestone passed quietly this week.... three months since attending my last gig.

Now by gig, I should clarify by pointing out that I did not consider the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, any performances at the Sydney Conservatorium (where I saw an inspiring rendition of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time last Sunday), various jazz and improvisational shows and their ilk to count as gigs. By gigs I meant bands playing songs that the ordinary man or woman in the street would say was a band playing a song at a gig.

One of the main reasons for the three months was to see if I could do it, the other was a slight case of simply going out too much and not having much time left to do my own things. In a ridiculous six or so weeks from late January into March, I seemed to end up at gigs by fourplay, tunng, low, mice parade, joanna newsom, sufjan stevens, arcade fire and bjork (all in less than a fortnight), iron & wine, broken social scene, okkervill river, feist, beirut, pj harvey, sonic youth... and more. After the joy that was Múm I decided to take a bit of a break, and here we are three months on.

It's possibly a coincidence, but during the break I've enjoyed the orchestral concerts more than I have in a long time. But I think that might be more interesting programing and better seats than in the past few years - the ACO's show last week with guest director John Storgards on lead violin was outstanding, particularly Lutoslawski's vivacious Preludes and Fugue for 13 Solo Strings.

Certain wags may argue (have argued, continue to argue) that my three month moratorium was made simpler by the paucity of touring acts through the period and my tendency to talk my way out of most of the performances I actually went to as being gigs as such.

All I know is I made it. I've now got a Sigur Ros ticket for their August show, but that's far too far away - I think I might have to go see Grand Salvo next Friday, but even that seems a long time away.

Vinyl Diaries XXVII: dj museum

2008-06-26T13:48:00.004+10:00

When last we were away Peter and Angela were kind enough to water our plants and bring in the mail... while they're away it seems to be our turn to repay the favour by hijacking Peter's splendid radio show, Utility Fog, which features, if i remember correctly, postfolkrocktronica, from granular pop to orchestral breakcore and beyond...

I think I know who got the better deal, but given they're off gallivanting around Europe and off to see My Bloody Valentine in Glasgow maybe they're coping somehow. Oh well.

While I've been doing bits and pieces of production, it's been a while since I've done any programming or on-air presenting. I'm rather looking forward to it and it's been fun auditioning tracks that might get a spin - the idea being to try and keep to the flavour of the show while lending it a benjamin and serena sprinkle.

Thanks to the wonders of the interweb, apparently it will be streaming from hereabouts from 10pm Sunday to 1am Monday, Sydney time.

So thank you to Peter for letting us play with your shiny show and enjoy the rest of your trip - we'll try not to break it while you're gone ;-)

outing

2008-06-24T09:21:00.002+10:00

She stares out of her window, sitting straight-backed behind the empty passenger seat. The passenger door is open, nobody is sitting there. It must be for her mother – the father would be driving, a car like this. The years on her face outweigh her size, the muscles drawing her brow in, like she’s squinting against the glare of existence, or as if she's seen it all before. Seen all there is before her, already. She seems to be wearing make-up, but isn’t. She seems to be looking past wherever her eye appears to be resting. Though it isn’t resting at all, it’s working, always working. What she’s seeing is not necessarily there.

She’s lost in thought. Not imagination, but reflection, not possibilities for the future, but ruminations on the past. She’s all in black, a crushed velvet, lace trimmed. Real lace. Her hair is a shock of white spilling over its gentle, scalloped neckline, preternaturally blonde, prematurely straightened before it could find its natural curl.

She stares at the spot her mother’s heel last trod, before the glossy green door closed. She’s gone back for something – a scarf, a glove, something they forgot to pack as they went to the car. She forgot it knowingly, aching for the moment to herself. She left it on the dressing table well aware she would have to go back, timing it so they were all in the car but the key hadn’t turned. She knew he would be annoyed, knew he would spend the time tapping on the dashboard and looking every ten seconds at its clock, choking with silent rage, as if that would somehow make her any faster.

She walks up the stairs, not fast not slow. Her breath is so tight, her chest so locked, you could hold up a mirror to her mouth and no mist would appear. She wants to go faster because that’s how she does things, slower because she needs that moment to stretch on as long as it can, as far as it can go before snapping.

He drums his fingers on the dashboard. He looks at the clock again, then checks his wristwatch. Its heavy, gold body gleams against his tanned arm, black hairs curling over its band. The cuffs of his starched white shirt peek out past his coat, the gold cuff-link flashing like toothache.

She looks down at her shoes, their tiny buckles, the rough scuff on the end of the left one where she dragged it over the gutter getting into the car. ‘Mother will not be pleased’, she thinks, not sure whether she herself cares. Not sure of anything. She looks at the freckle just below the third knuckle on her middle finger. She scratches at it, as she always does while waiting for something, anything, to happen, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It never goes anywhere. The skin beneath it whitens and the freckle slides back towards her wrist, but then returns to exactly where it had been.

She is too cold, or too hot, but not quite sure which. Her father drums on the centre of the steering wheel, sucking his back teeth.

She is close to the window, so close her forehead almost touches the glass, yet no mist of breath appears.

She closes her eyes.

Vinyl Diaries XXVI: Mike Cooper & Chris Abrahams

2008-06-17T16:36:00.003+10:00

Mike Cooper & Chris Abrahams
+AustraLYSIS Electroband
April 4, 2008

I've been tinkering on a few things lately, but here's another piece put together for resonate magazine.

Back soon...

Vinyl Diaries XXV: Sydney Symphony Orchestra

2008-06-05T09:43:00.003+10:00

Dimitri Shostakovich & Georges Lentz
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
March 26, 2008

A little something I put together that's now popped up over at resonate magazine.

back from bundanon

2008-06-01T10:28:00.005+10:00

It’s been less than a fortnight since I left Bundanon, but already it’s feeling like a fairly pivotal turning point in my creative life.

Having moved fairly smoothly from school to university to the workplace, finding myself in jobs (journalism/newspaper editor) that offer plenty of challenges and require a substantial amount of attention from my mind, I’ve never really had the opportunity to spend any great stretch of time on creative projects.

Those that I have pursued have been, invariably, either spontaneous or reactive. My two novel length works-in progress both began as short stories that simply got out of hand, taking on a life of their own. On the photography front, I’ve been very much of the verité school, shooting what I see, the world ‘as it is’ without my interference. I acknowledge, of course, the choices I make in subject selection, framing, composition and the like, but have rarely been active in setting up or directing a scene or an image. I’d figured this was a stylistic choice, a philosophical consideration of photography as documentation and momentary, but am now wondering whether it was simply a lack of time.

On the writing side, the hope entering the fortnight had been to finish a few projects, in any spare time that may have emerged around our main major life between buildings project. Yet after two weeks these never even made it out of the suitcase – this was a place and a time for thinking afresh, for inventing/crafting not polishing; opening doors not closing them.

So instead of wrapping up existing projects, I seem to have started more than I can keep track of. Central is the life between buildings song cycle, to which I intend to co-contribute text along with Rhiannon and Danielle, and work on more visual ideas that will hopefully augment its final presentation.

‘The Last Supper’ is to be a 12-song song-cycle, co-created by the life between buildings team of Serena Armstrong, Danielle Carey, Rhiannon Cook, Julian Day, and, in there as well, me.

The cycle will build upon written texts exploring the last meals of condemned death row prisoners, combining the irresistible motifs of Food and Death.

The idea is to create a work that can stand alone in a traditional performative sense, incorporating visual elements , but there is also strong interest in looking at the ‘event’ possibilities the idea holds, to explore its potential in installation or even ‘happening’ terms, such as incorporating the work into an actual meal with audience interaction, a blurring of the active performer/ passive audience lines.

This idea developed throughout Bundanon and grew richer each day, particularly in the second week. We would share our thoughts and ideas for it, discussing its difficulties and problematic aspects as well as what intrigued us.

Once the idea had developed to a point where we could all see where it might be heading, we were each able to work on bringing our various strengths to it, working on potential texts and some basic musical possibilities.

Amidst all this, as I was being drawn further and further into the surrounds, I also found some windows to experiment with some visual ideas. With a fortnight to spend free of daily concerns (cooking and grooming matters notwithstanding), my early ideas for some photographic series developed, expanded and then shifted quite substantially. For reasons I expect I’ll explore at greater length down the line, I’ve developed a fascination bordering on obsession with red. Red in all its forms, but particularly red as a thread – in this case wool.

‘Threads’ are a theme I’ve begun to quietly follow, but the red is quite recent and appeared quite suddenly, almost violently. Apart from its symbolic elements, which I’ll discuss down the track, I’m quite taken by the difficulties cameras appear to have in processing reds of this intensity.

My early red interventions at Bundanon were quite rushed and quickly executed. I wasn’t sure if the idea even had any lasting worth, and hadn’t fully understood what it was I was trying to say. Spending more and more time wrapping objects, winding the wool around the man-made or natural items that drew me, that seemed to be asking for a red challenge, or echo, I found the time and space to think more about what it was I was trying to do, and say.

I had gone into Bundanon thinking I would look at spending more time on photo manipulation – working with layers to get my photos to look at the relationship between the ‘observed world’, text and music. But instead of post-production and scanning, layering disparate images for a common cause, I found I was more and more drawn towards creating these layers in real-time and real-space.

The poetics of the bush and its musicality was utterly enthralling. I couldn’t face sitting at my computer trying to recreate when here was a chance to create directly, to interact with the natural surroundings and enter into a type of direct dialogue.

Hence the paperbark/paperback project, the Byron rock, the Haydn gum, and variations on the ‘poe-tree’ project. Many more ideas have also been sifting through since my return, with the urge to create kicked along again after seeing Jeanette Winterson, a favourite author, speak at the Sydney Opera House to open the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Tuesday.

While perhaps seemingly like a fairly haphazard hotchpotch of concepts and threads, each, in their way, has been spawned by the Bundanon and life between buildings collaboration. In the past I’ve tended to work fairly individually, drawing upon my own ideas and bouncing them up against, well, myself.

I think what I’ve taken from this experience is not just the amazing time I had working closely with such creative, inspiring artists (and good friends!), but I have learned how ideas bounced around can grow and develop and take on a life of their own, thanks to the enthusiasm and input of others.

So while we have a common cause in our central project, we all each have other strands to follow, other threads to explore, that each developed, to some extent out, of the collaborative process. The actual ‘practice’ part, the writing or the photography is, for me, still a fairly personal path. I tend to process ideas over a longer period than some, then quietly chip away at them, channelling through my work things I can’t always explain in discussion. I think my strength in working with others is more likely to be a piece of text or a photo that tells a story, rather than ‘discussed’ input as such – that may change, but my work seems to come from a part of me I don’t necessarily have access to in conversation form.

To spend two weeks immersed in this, in such a deeply inspiring place as Bundanon, has been an experience that will ripple through my life for some time.

This was an inspiring group of artists to spend time with, and I like to think we’ll be able to keep working together, even if loosely, under the life between buildings umbrella.

Papyrus Diaries I: Jeanette Winterson

2008-05-21T21:14:00.004+10:00

In the lead-up to my Bundanon residency, organising anything AB (after-Bundanon) was pushed pretty much to one side. That was even going to apply for the Sydney Writer's Festival; I'd gone as far as making sure I put the festival guide safely away for my return, but wasn't going to fine-tooth comb it until this week.

That was until sister Sally pointed out that the opening address was by Jeanette Winterson, at which point we promptly booked tickets (an early birthday present from the sweet thing). Now sadly Sally couldn't make it, something about marking tests to discover just how illiterate
and innumerate our students are these days, so it's best if she's reading this now she doesn't read any further – you didn't miss a thing, I assure you.

Okay, now for the truth of it.

Winterson's address was erudite and inspirational, drawing together so many strands and threads to tie the practice of art into nothing less than the future survival of the planet. Her manner was beguiling and her points clearly illustrated, while the striking turns of phrase
that litter her books, seemingly so effortlessly, followed one after another. So much so, as pointed out by my fellow rapt attendee a little hummingbird you would be busy digesting and trying to file away one salient point and another three gems would go gliding by.

While it would have been an inspiration at any stage, it could not have been better timed in terms of my reflections on art both in general and specifically in terms of my own pursuits since Bundanon.

From her captivating opening: "History is not a suicide note, it's the story of human survival", the gauntlet was thrown down and we were taken on a ride through cosmology, melting ice caps, Marx, cave paintings, Captain Cook's amazement at being unable to entice Indigenous Australians with shiny new things (the population that seemingly wanted for nothing, the adman's worst nightmare), Chomsky and much much more.

Winterson traced the journey through the 'suicidal' 20th century to the first glimmers of hope of a new beginning – the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of Thatcher and Reagan – to 9/11 and the sudden return of 14th century notions of evil and the new Crusades. Her aim, it soon dawned, was to tie art back into the centre of all this, to make it make sense at a time when we wonder: surely there are more pressing matters?

The need to return art to the centre of our lives, the centre of our culture, is something Winterson feels passionately. Most artists do, of course, but not many explain it so well, show us why it is more than elite indulgence. For in Australia in particular and no doubt many other parts of the world, the arts are very successfully painted as elite, as indulgent, as detached from 'real life'.

Yet Winterson showed how art belongs at the centre of a life lived to its potential, that it exercises our brain as it is intended to be used. Her discussion of the mind as a closed off, resistant system that abhors change and struggles against the unfamiliar was not
exactly new, but the way she tied in the idea of art as the 'connector', as the conduit to understanding and opening up new potentials was revelatory.

She reminded us of Susan Sontag's own reminder, that we should ask not only what art is about, but what art is.

The idea that art predates history, that it's only through paintings, poems, oral histories passed down to today, that we only know of a history because of art, was followed by the discussion of art as not existing in this history, but always as part of a perpetual present. Hence we don't go and see Shakespeare to learn about Elizabethan England, but about ourselves, our relationships, our struggles.

Winterson made us think about the value of art outside a system that must see everything in terms of its potential to increase wealth, the bottom line that overlooks the cost of reaching it.

What I found very interesting, listening to Winterson with what I guess is my writer's hat (not a label I'm prone to using), was how different I found the message to that in her interview in the Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend. Approaching that with my reader's hat, writer's hat and journalist's hat all struggling for limited head space, I was left a little flat by what had seemed a world view that verged on nihilistic in its casualness about the future of humankind.

While I share similar sentiments about not wanting to get overly excited about this one particular species in the context of the greater universe, fate, design or sheer dumb luck has lobbed me smack bang in the middle of it, and it is something I tend to care about to some extent. Even some of my best friends are human. Hell in a handbasket we may be aheading, but in the meantime I'm still interested in what we can do to avoid hastening the self-extermination process. If the planet needs us to go ahead and do ourselves in all the sooner then fine, but if there's a way to undo some of the damage before we go, I'd quite like to at least explore it a little further.

I took a very different message from last night's address. This gave me a little more respect for Winterson's position on the one hand, but also made me put my journalist hat back on and wonder what happened to have such a disjunct between the direct Winterson experience and the mediated Herald one. In many ways a lot of the content overlapped, but I think the final message was very different. This reminded me, I suppose, about how much the media can steer certain angles, whether by design, ignorance or even by utter accident. Maybe Winterson has
shifted her view since they talked, or maybe...

It's got me thinking about those themes that keeps coming up at the moment in my work and those around me - truth and death. Or perhaps that's just one them, as death is perhaps the ultimate truth. But I've begun to see that there is perhaps far more truth in fiction than ever credited, and far less of it in real life than I've been realising.

The main message I think I will take is the idea that we can have a return to imagination, without infantilisation. The trick , now, is to ensure the creative life is a central part of life and not allowed to be deemed a luxury, a peripheral part of life.

not so grey

2008-05-20T22:27:00.001+10:00

another x-post, to bring the museum back up to speed...

Today marked the seventh day of our Bundanon stay, so why does it feel like we just got here?

I realised upon waking that while I had walked back and forth across the property many a time, had traversed its open fields, dipped a toe in its river, skirted its grand homestead and returned many times to the swallowing bush, I still felt strangely disconnected from the environs.

The visual sweep down from our cottage to the homestead and the river beyond, back up the treed ridge on the far side of the river, allows us to see much of the 300 cleared acres of the working farm. While perched on the very edge of the bush – which makes up the bulk of the 1100 hectare property – the cottage has its back turned to the trees. It’s their presence I feel strongest, but until today it had been a looming feeling rather than a deep awareness. I could hear the birds and had seen plenty of the kangaroos, wombats and even snakes that came and went, but all my time in there had been active; imposing art ideas and projects without spending enough time doing another of the things which I had come here to do – listen, learning, find what inspiration it could impart.

I realised in doing so, I was repeating a lot of the mistakes artists made early in Australian colonial history – their cultural and artistic baggage so heavily laden with British sensibilities that they – quite literally – couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Paintings from that era, pastoral projections onto an untameable bush, build from a palette entirely unsuitable for the subject matter; pastel tones and wan light borrowed straight from a British sky that simply does not exist here. I was reminded of a discussion with a Brazilian photographer who is often criticised because the skies in his photographs are deemed ‘ too blue’ – it seems we cannot conceive what exists outside our own engagement, comprehension and direct experience.

I wasn’t bringing this particular sensibility, but I certainly hadn’t taken the time or set up the mind space for meaningful exchange. I had come with ideas for how to interact and ploughed on with them with barely a moment to see what suggestions it might make.

Feeling it was time to try and move beyond the same mistakes, I took a new route up the ridge to an area of the bush I’d not yet visited. Clearing my mind of potential projects, of photographic or textual possibilities, I was there simply to be. To see, hear, touch and smell, though stopping short of taste. I wanted to hear what the bush had to say, before trying to speak for it.

Selecting a place in a small clearing, beneath a towering silver gum, I lay, considering what I saw and how it compared to D.H Lawrence’s description in Kangaroo:

But the bush, the grey charred bush... It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bushfires... And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting – the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting... it was biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men.

Was this accurate? Did it capture something essential about the harsh, unforgiving, unlovable Australian bush? Not from what I could see.

The green of fern of leaf of palm of moss of mottled bark; the countless browns of stripping bark of fallen leaves, their neighbours orange and red. Purple toadstool red berry golden sun silver gum cobalt sky. The white of flowering gums, the black of soil below – the one colour I couldn’t find was grey.

There were ghosts and phantoms aplenty, but these corpses spoke not of death but of life – every corpse-like tree and charred stump was swamped by viridian ferns and proud gums, played host to teeming life.

In place of stillness or silence was a ceaseless treetop chatter, gum tree crowns rustling their rasping dry leaves, while from beneath the soil a sub-aural hum, worms and ants and termites and beetles (not to mention the ubiquitous Bundanon wombats) rumbling about their business.

A passing fly with buzz in trail showed the first sign of life between soil and sky, but was soon joined by the melodious melange that made up even this tiny segment of bush. In the space of a few minutes, my ear slowly attuning to their song, there were chirps, twitters, flute-pitched whistles, twitches, wit-woos, zupzups, vupps, tzetzetzes, zharps and a dozen more songs that leave our alphabet adrift in their sonorous wake – the further from our language and ability to replicate they were, the more indelible their mark.

At first I couldn’t see from where any of these sounds were coming, but a few minutes of lying still and they soon started to emerge, swooping, fluttering and flapping their way across the clearing, from tree to tree and branch to branch, adorned in feathers blue, brown, red, orange, gold and green.

Amidst all of this, thinking once more of this ‘grey’ nothingness, fell a peerless light, a gold and silver gilt; dappled streaks of honeyed tones that seemed a rich and precious gift.

Seven days in, I had finally arrived at Bundanon.

- Benjamin

Bundanon - Day One

2008-05-20T22:14:00.003+10:00

Okay, so the Museum is about to reopen... a little dusty it is too, but seems ripe for a small revamp while the inspiration iron is hot.

I'm first going to cheat a little, and cross-post from over yonder in life between buildings land, as my follow up posts referring to Bundanon may then make a bit more sense.

Might not, too, but we'll see.

So, let's step back to Day One:

Guided safely to our destination by two giant wombats, it was a relief soon after 1am to finally reach the end of the long winding dirt road that passes as the link between Bundanon and the world left behind. With the bottom of the car scraping along the last 20-odd metres, Serena and Julian elected to jump out to see if the lighter load would ease the passage.

Danielle had arrived in the middle of Monday, her 30km bicycle ride from Bomaderry to Bundanon occurring with hardly a hitch (although with three enormous dogs in various pursuit), while Rhiannon had survived the epic journey from Canberra through Kangaroo Valley and down past Cambewarra Lookout a few hours earlier.

Waking up this morning it was exciting to realise that there was essentially nothing we had to do but what we wanted. After cups of tea, some breakfast and coffees, we elected to begin our stay by exploring the vast Bundanon property. Setting out from our 1870s cottage, we passed the cluster of studios presently housing photographers, writers and visual artists, visiting from England and Germany. Some have been here for weeks, with Margaret clearly sad to be heading off in a few days.

A little confusion over which side of the fence we should be on – and a pulse-quickening crash course in the difference between a cow and a bull – and we were soon on the sandy banks of the Shoalhaven River. Peering through the gentle water we saw small schools of fish going about their lessons, with balled up snow-white clouds tumbling overhead. A gentle breeze or jumping fish would occasionally ruffle the water, but it was mostly a clear sheen reflecting back grey-green gums and sandy boulders.

Across the river and perched loftily over an upstream bend loomed the unmistakable figure of Pulpit Rock. Pulpit Rock features in countless Arthur Boyd works and it’s easy to see what drew him to it time after time, what spurred that silent, see-sawing tussle to capture its ever-shifting pinkish orange form. A meander back through the Homestead gardens, fingers teasing smells from well-kept beds of herbs, was followed by a peek through Arthur Boyd’s studio windows before it was time for lunch.

After lunch came the serious business of mapping out our next two weeks. We’ve come to Bundanon for the opportunity it affords for a creative escape from the daily routine. A few familariar chores follow us along of course – the need to eat, tidy and occasionally sleep – but the emphasis is on freeing your mind and creative spirit in an inspirational environment; Arthur’s idea of a living arts centre.

Interaction with the environment is impossible to avoid – like nesting birds we each accumulated various leaves, barks and flowers that caught our eye, along with an all-but spent balloon that must have blown in over the trees and fields, a refugee from the distant clutches of a child’s grasping hand.

We’re all here to collaborate on our artworks, and the question of collaboration and what it involves seems to bring as many definitions as there are contributors to this collective. There is a spectrum of views as to what constitutes a collaborative model of art and the best way to get the most out of our time here. Also interesting is the range of views as to goals and hoped for outcomes – while some prefer to see this as an opportunity to learn more about ‘process’ and the act of creatively working together is an ends in itself, others are drawn more to an ‘outcomes’ based model whereby the success of the project will depend upon the measurable output of creative work and its ongoing appeal.

There’s still much to be worked out along these lines, but the immediate plan is to roll up our sleeves and simply jump into it; to soak up the beautiful environs of Bundanon, to take advantage of the rare opportunity to think and feel without a thousand other things – work, family, friends, Big Brother – vying for our attention.

-Benjamin

Bundanon

2008-04-29T22:19:00.004+10:00

Well we've made it - the life between buildings project has entered its Bundanon phase. Rhiannon, Danielle, Julian, Serena and I are all settling into our digs quite nicely, very pleased to have packed plenty of warm clothes.

As such, the museum is likely to be fairly quiet for the next fortnight, but we're expecting a flurry of activity over in life between buildings land.

-B

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Two

2008-04-17T16:49:00.003+10:00

Watching the dry twigs cast out their small spirals of smoke, their feet being licked by dancing orange flames drunk on the oxygen they drew all too quickly, Isabelle held out her hands to snatch some of their warmth. The day had started still and blue, the light tickle of the sun’s fingers on her exposed neck as she hung wet washing out on the clothesline. But in this last hour, a change had begun to send out an advance party from the north. Clouds of cotton candy escaping a distant carnival had at first skittered by, now being followed by a dense bank of sooty storm-clouds riding low on the coat-tails of an icy wind.

Isabelle shivered though was not sure it was through cold, for she was wrapped in a light grey cardigan against the settling chill. Emily had returned to the kitchen but she had sent her back up to get something warmer on. Isabelle turned at the sound of Emily’s light footfall signalling her return, seeing she had chosen a black coat that was still a little long in the arms, so that only the very tips of her fingers could be seen. She noticed that the fingernails poking out of the cuffs had all been nibbled right back, a habit she had though Emily had left behind some time ago.

While Emily had been upstairs, Percy had arrived home. He told her that Emily had seemed in high enough spirits and that though she may have been a little quieter than usual, he was reassured that there was no reason for undue concern. He had delivered Isabelle a light peck on the cheek with his hand resting on her elbow and told her there were a couple of things he need to be working on but that he would join her and Emily for lunch. As he had passed from the room and Isabelle heard the creaking of the stairs as he took them, seemingly untroubled and with his duties dispensed, she wondered if she was simply reading too much into things.

She decided the best thing to do would be to keep Emily nearby, to keep her occupied so she could keep her under a close watch. With Emily now returned to the kitchen, Isabelle tasked her with scrubbing the potatoes and preparing the table for the three of them.

They worked quietly, each making the odd reference to the weather or the tasks at hand, but mostly passing the time in silence. Normally Emily would have been restless by now, looking for ways to escape until she was called back for lunch, but she was instead going about her jobs with a methodical concentration, her normally gentle face setting tightly, a shadow falling across it and leaving her, Isabelle realised, almost unrecognisable.

The water over the fire had reached a rolling boil, the lid on the pot lifting and falling with a gentle clatter, puffs of steam lifting it on their search for escape. Isabelle had always been fascinated that something so slight, so insubstantial as steam – the same steam whose fingers would wisp around her face as she leant over the pot, leaving a damp warmth as it disappeared into nothingness – could get so worked up that it could, if only briefly, lift a solid, metal lid.

“Mother?” began Emily, breaking her from her steam-born spell.

“Yes darling?”

“I’ve been wondering. Is there any chance we might be able to go for a walk in the woods after lunch?”

Isabelle considered. While she would normally deem this weather to be far too unsettled to allow Emily to venture out, this might be just the breakthrough she needed to find out what was on her daughter’s mind. She knew walking was a good way to get talking, to go beyond the usual chatting and dig a little deeper.

“Let’s see how things look then, but I’ll keep it in mind and we’ll make sure we’re all rugged up if we do go.”

Emily smiled and Isabelle was heartened to see that she seemed the happiest she had for days. Perhaps everything was going to be okay after all.

Vinyl Diaries XXIV: Múm

2008-03-19T12:15:00.004+11:00

Múm
Manning Bar
March 18, 2008

How I love the Icelanders. Those cute little vikings, playing their strange little games. Perhaps it's the vast gulf between us, spatially but also geographically, that intrigues.

After days spent on golden beaches, baking under blindingly blue skies, it makes a pleasant change to don some wings and rug up for the journey north, to a land of ice-green castles and eternal childhood... or so it can often seem.

Predictably Björk (while in Sugarcubes) was my first encounter with this land, a snow angel with a Cockney twist. Along the way I picked up a certain fondness for the electronic tinkerings of Múm, but as they drifted along on unsteady seas following their excellent debut Yesterday was Dramatic - Today is OK it was soon overshadowed by an adoration for the bombastic dramascapes of Sigur Rós.

In their wake, Múm seemed a tad anaemic, a little too indecisive and directionless. Their lack of sweeping gestures, unwillingness to unleash grand musical statements about the state of human existence, relegated them to a pleasant background, unambitious glitchy aural wallpaper to cook by.

Tonight, however, they peeled themselves of the wall and plopped themselves fairly and squarely in the middle of the room, adding a little shimmy for good measure. Their line-up change has clearly done them a world of good and we're all the richer for it. Late on stage due to "getting caught up in the traffic of life", they quickly settled us in for the ride, setting the scene with an icy wind across the frozen tundra.

With the arrival of Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, not only do we have a line-up expanded to seven members, but what it's hard to call anything other than songs. In the past they seem to have worked in spaces, on scapes rather than journeys, moods rather than stories.

Electronics may be at the heart of the song writing and the general Múm experience, yet on stage it played but a bit part, subsumed by wave after wave of instrumentation - cello, violin, recorder, harmonica and even kazoo giving beautifully flawed flesh to the bass and drum skeleton that danced into being. And of course it wouln't have been Múm without plenty of the usual melodica mayhem.

I have a not-so-hidden soft spot for a bit of doom or gloom in my music, a weakness for a little nihilism with my glockenspiel, but I can see this new bounce in their step is doing Múm's music a world of good. The joyous 'Marmalade Fires' with its warm and fuzzy sweet nothings should be required listening for Architecture in Helsinki, a lesson in cheerful layering that manages not to descend into over-sugared, gratingly hyperactive inanity.

An extended 'Dancing Behind My Eyelids' was gloriously cheerful, a playful nod to Stereolab on its way to a three-way recorder duel breakdown. 'Blessed Brambles' was another uplifting treat, while the occasional Eastern European influence creeping in gave a welcome sense of them pushing into new directions and drawing us with them.

Of the older songs, it was heartening to hear 'Oh How the Boat Drifts' given some life, the twinned male/female vocals bringing it to a much more satisfying conclusion than the wispy coo of the Summer Make Good version.

The same reinvention lifted the two-song encore to delightful heights. 'The Ghosts you Draw on My Back' and that tingling final couplet: 'I hope tonight you will touch my hair/ And draw ghosts on my back' could have been the perfect slowburn ending for sending us out into the moonlit midnight, but the twitching electrowave clatter of 'Smell Memory' was more fitting for this newfound cheerfulness, the indescribably memorable synth line still skittering and jittering around my head, where it's bound to stay for days.

Vinyl Diaries XXIII: Iron & Wine

2008-03-13T12:16:00.006+11:00

Iron & Wine
Manning Bar
March 11, 2008

Welly well, this one is bound to split the faithful. But they can't say they weren't warned...

When Shepherd's Dog spilt from the Iron & Wine crucible last year, it was not quite what many may have expected. Where previous experiments had delivered a hushed, delicate substance, salty, brittle and liable to dissolve under the weight of no more than our gaze, in its place we now found a malleable, multi-hued affair with a whole lot more bounce.

There were hints of this fuller sound on 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, but the image that still came to mind when I thought of Iron & Wine was the bushy-bearded The Creek Drank The Cradle and its fragile, acoustic, front porch whispers. We were reminded tonight of the intimacy of these early songs, the husky hush over finger-plucked guitar, when Sam Beam and sister Sarah took to the stage for the hauntingly gorgeous 'Trapeze Swinger', its eloquent graffiti at the pearly gates a peek into a vivid past near-perfect. Sitting back-to-back with 'Jezebel', we are struck by the powerful forces that are absence and memory, and how well Beam paints with these themes.

At this point, for better or worse, things took a turn for the fuller. The band took a few songs to settle in, but once they did there was no denying they had found a groove. What's more complicated is deciding whether this groove was the right one. I expect there will be a bit of angst about the drumming, and the general direction in which it carried the show. The dub element gave Sam a fairly strong base from which he could branch out, opening up new spaces for jamming out a few ideas. It was a little unsettling to see this go as far as the Fozzie Bear pedal (wokka wokka), but when it clicked it carried us along quite well.

A niggling feeling I couldn't shake was a certain paint-by-numbers approach from the band at times, coming across like session musos out on a field-trip. There wasn't the same fire in the belly Sam clearly has, and Sarah was really the only other one who kept us believing that they meant it. So when working it was a treat, when not quite working it came across as a lite-dub Wilco.

The fuller arrangements worked really well with new songs such as 'Boy With A Coin' and the fantastically hewn 'House by the Sea', and even gave a nice kick to older works - 'On Your Wings' and 'Cinder and Smoke' revelling in their make-overs while retaining their low-key rhythmic genius.

Yet one also couldn't help but wish, at times, for a little more breathing space for Sam's more delicate pieces. 'Sodom, South Georgia' needed stripping right back, the beautiful bare bones on the album sadly over-dressed. And surely with a band this size, there was room for the occasional banjo outing? Oh well, minor quibbles. As the songs gained in instrumental richness, they lost a little in terms of having our breath taken away by these snatches of lyrics for which I fell in swoon with Iron & Wine.

When I first heard Sam's voice warble "Those band-aid children chased your dog away" over the edge of a gorgeous 'Sunset Soon Forgotten' precipice, I was swept off my feet and haven't turned back. Dig a little deeper and such turns appear all over the place, but are harder and harder to find as the music does more and more of our thinking for us.

So here I am again, facing the same dilemma posed by Jason Molina a little way back. I cherish these troubled gents in their nakedly exposed solo mode, and humour them well enough when coddled by a band. They're enjoying it, it's where their path has taken them, and the choice is to get used to it or miss out on those moments of magic they can still deliver.

Vinyl Diaries XXII: Beirut

2008-03-06T13:58:00.007+11:00

Photo by obo-bobolina

Beirut
Manning Bar
March 5, 2008

This could have been an utter schemozzle. Shuffling onto stage lost in the midst of his eight-piece band, bedecked in a cartoonishly ill-fitting sportscoat, Zach Condon was looking more than a little ruffled, to put it politely. Watching his eyebrows try and find a horizontal as he finally located the microphone, one darting away just as the other was brought into check, it was as though Dylan Moran had taken his place and we were about to be treated to a stumbling run-through of Black Books: The Musical.

A couple of slugs from a silver hip flask - 'Jamesons, the only way to beat the jetlag' and a few mumbled nothings that made less than no sense and all did not bode well. Until...

'Nantes'. Condon the crooner shook the shabby Irish whiskey soaked 22-year-old by those over-fabricced shoulders (helped in no small measure by a fill-in drummer who seemed at times to be the only one holding the whole show together). While singing, Condon thankfully slid into some parallel universe, if not of sobriety at least of comprehensibility.

The twin-ukele urgency leading into 'Brandenburg' took us out of the Francophilic The Flying Club Cup and back to the Balkan whimsy of Gulag Orkestar, with the set travelling fairly neatly between the two with a spattering of pieces from the Lon Gisland EP.

While centring very much on Condon's rich, dreamy voice, it's the thoughtful instrumentation that makes Beirut that little bit special. It's all been done before, and pinches shamelessly from traditions with their own rich history that we're all a bit too short on time to thoroughly explore ourselves, but it's no less fun for it.

There is a risk of such rampant eclecticism and pilferring devolving into mere pastiche, unreconstructed gestures of overbearing irony and knowingness with a wink. But Condon skirts this danger with his unbridled enthusiasm, the collector's glee in the finer points of his obsession. Seeing these broad brushstrokes of influence all brought together on stage was a treat, witnessing the way such simple drum and bass patterns are so cleverly layered with violin, piano accordion and, of course, the brass.

Of such brass, there was no shortage. Condon took to the ukelele a couple of times, but it was the trumpet that got more of his attention. Most songs took advantage of the playing talent available, with neatly-layered combinations of trumpet, euphonium and baritone sax all adding their warmth.

Come to think of it, brass seems to be the new black. In the last couple of months no self-respecting artist/band has toured without a brass section - it's been used to fairly good effect by Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, Bjork, and even Broken Social Scene. Sufjan is probably the only other act where it was quite as essential as it for Beirut. As with his show it's no mere adornment, but weaved into the very essence of the music. It gives it both its drive and its colour and it's nearly impossible to imagine it being left out.

The best thing about it tonight, for these brass-jaded ears, was the way it fizzed rather than honked, slid rather than popped. And the rather sexy baritone sax always makes me smile. Melding with the rest of the ideas floating around the stage, the brassy bits provided rungs by which to follow Condon on his merry, spiralling march.

Whether this march is ascending or descending I'm not quite sure - and I don't know if they are either. Perhaps its neither, and both; Escher writ musical.

Relaxing into this hot air balloon ride across continental Europe, vast green territories dotted with the occasional spire or lake, its a highly pleasurable journey. He might be drunk as a love-sick skunk, but Condon's charms are in the outpourings of his affection, for travel, for music, for life.

Those wondering whether Gulag Orkestar was a lucky strike by a precocious one-trick pony might these days need to reassess. Despite the affection I felt for mournful 'Mount Wroclai' and the nicely complete 'Elephant Gun', one moment right near the end of the first set stood out and gave plenty of hope.

This was 'Scenic World', which started its life on Gulag as a near-throwaway; two minutes of cheesiness slipping along on a lo-fi bossa beat. It was reborn on Lon Gisland, with an all but hidden keyed riff from the original passed on to the piano accordion, taking more of the spotlight. Tonight, however, it had been handed on to the violin, with glockenspiel in support. The sea-scouting, see-sawing trip was slowed to about two-thirds of the pace and all these beautiful, previously undiscovered crevices opened.

While I don't expect these crevices to be re-explored by Beirut - the eternally restless Condon unlikely to give his laurels such a resting - this reinvention did show that these are living works, breathing and growing gracefully and opening up new paths, rather than museum relics destined for the dustbin of musical history.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-One

2008-03-05T12:59:00.002+11:00

Food! Emily finally had it, the secret to how one could get into and out of the music box without Crouch’s infernal machine.

She now knew how he was able to come and go on a whim, how he could put terror into the hearts of those who lived in the box, of Oscar and Bernard and Minerva and – she had to stop thinking about them, it was all too much.

Emily had known all along that there was no way she was ever going to get Crouch back in that chair, there was no way of tricking him that was going to have any chance of success. But this – this opened up a door of opportunity. Even if only the merest hint, it was still something to latch onto, it was the return of hope.

Her heart raced with excitement, but before she could double-check the last thing she had read – to make absolute certain that what she believed was true – the book burst into flame. Emily was still sitting and the book has been resting in her lap. In seconds it was a blazing ball and she had no choice but to push it from her, watching as it fell towards the sea. It hit the water with a hiss and plunged instantly from sight beneath the seething froth, just as Emily saw with horror that the flame had licked at Crouch’s suit, catching the end of the jacket and racing up towards her chest.

Without a second thought she followed the path of the book, tumbling through the air and crashing into the water below. For some time, Emily wondered why the water wasn’t colder. It dawned on her that shock had set in – she had only moments before she would feel the icy clutches of the sea’s frozen fingers drag her even further down. Emily forced open her tightly clenched eyes, desperately seeking a sign of where in the depths of the water she had finished. Shattered shards of light danced teasingly all around her, but she thought she could perceive the direction from which they seemed to be coming. But as she began kicking out, hoping she was heading up, Emily was sure she could see bubbles passing her, racing down to the floor below.

“Bubbles don’t drop!” a voice shouted in her head. “You’re going the wrong way!”

Struggling against the weight of Crouch’s heavy clothes – now unfeasibly heavy as they soaked up what seemed like every spare ounce of the sea – Emily felt the searing heat of lungs desperate for air. She kicked and kicked but could bear it no longer, feeling her chest ready to burst. She opened her mouth and sucked in, waiting for the choking torrent of water to fill her. But the crisp cool sensation in her throat was not water at all – she had somehow broken the surface and was drinking in the beautiful clean air.

Emily felt her body dragged away from the pier, drawn out towards the horizon, but the next sensation was of being drawn up and up and up, climbing a wall of water building high over the surface below. She watched in amazement as the shore came hurtling towards her, finally realising that it was she being thrust towards its edge. Emily careened down the front of the wave, twisting and tumbling all the way, losing all sense of direction and even where she started and finished, what was her and what belonged to the sea. She finally found herself tangled in a pile of slimy green seaweed as the wave receded.

Lying flat on her back, staring up at the darkening, heavy grey sky, swollen like bee-stung lips with an angry stormhead, her chest heaved with the precious life-giving act of breathing she has always simply taken for granted. It occurred to Emily that she had never been taught to swim.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty

2008-02-28T09:53:00.003+11:00

Isabelle came to with this final vision of the laughing wolf dancing before her eyes as clearly as if he was standing there right now, making himself at home in her own kitchen. She felt as one does after swimming up from the fathomless depths of an impossible dream, but there was also the niggling sense that it was no dream at all; that she had been somewhere and seen something that although it could not be easily explained, was as real as the chair on which she still sat.

Tilting Percy’s hat back above her brow, Isabelle gazed around, hopeful of anchoring herself with the familiar. Powdered ash, a chalky dull gray, sat in the grate on the far side of the room, remnants of last night’s distant warmth, of which there was now not a trace. It reminded her that she should have relit it by now, lunch would be quite late by the time it was ready for cooking. Before it sat the table, reassuringly solid and worn, its wooden top scoured smooth by a thousand plate scrapes, arches of blunt cutlery ends leaving tiny little pocks that slowly wore each other away in greeting.

The shadows of the morning had swung around, giving Isabelle the troubling impression that things were now leaning away from her, distancing themselves from her plight. She rose unsteadily from the chair and walked to the window, three measured steps across the wooden floor – feeling how it dipped in the middle, reaching for a hold on the walls. She must think. What could it all have meant? Who was that strange little man doing coming to her like that? What danger where they all in?

Isabelle cast her mind back to her last conversation with Emily, the question about the woods left hanging in the air between them, thick with meaning. Something had already started to change, and she knew it was not for the better. She felt a little bad she had not been paying more attention to her only daughter, did not show her enough just how much she was cherished. But now was not the time to worry about such things, she had to focus on what to do from here. Isabelle wondered how long Emily and Percy had been gone, where they might have been all this time.

A creaking floorboard sent Isabelle spinning around, her left hand catching on a cup and sending it crashing to the floor. It was Emily’s favourite, bearing a picture of a rabbit and an owl in close discussion about something they both seemed to find quite mirthful. Isabelle looked up from the cup to see Emily standing before her. They both looked back at the cup, Isabelle waiting for Emily to say something about it, let out a whimper or a sob – anything. But Emily simply looked back up at her mother and shrugged.

“Not to worry mother, it’s only a cup.”

Isabelle’s hands wrung the edge of her apron, pulling it this way and that absentmindedly, her fingers suddenly feeling thick with clumsiness, little sausages with a mind all of their own.

“Yes dear, I suppose you’re right,” she said, her voice catching a little but smoothing towards the end.

“I’ll just have to sweep it up. And how was your walk?”

“Oh, it was fine,” Emily sighed. “Percy – I mean father – has just stopped in at the baker’s, so I ran ahead.”

“I see. Well then – let’s not dally. You can help me make lunch. Go wash your hands and then you can come back and help with the potatoes.”

Emily looked down at her hands, Isabelle noting she was peering at her upturned palms, rather than holding up her nails for inspection as she might have expected. Without a word she spun on her heel and disappeared back through the doorway through which Isabelle had never heard her arrive.

An unpleasant shudder ran up her back. What had that man said again?

“Trust what you know,” she mouthed to herself. She knew there was something very, very wrong.

It had worked.

Vinyl Diaries XXI: Sonic Youth

2008-02-25T10:49:00.005+11:00

Sonic Youth (Daydream Nation)
Enmore Theatre
February 18, 2008

Twenty years after its creation, it can be a little too easy to take Daydream Nation for granted. Growing up with Pixies, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr, Pavement et al as the rough-edged yet melodic backdrop, swapping endless mixed tapes overflowing with off-kilter indie licks and crunchy guitary goodness, it's difficult to imagine a time when all of this wasn't quite so.

But a wee back-pedal to 1988 and all this was yet to be. The mood, madness and the method was lurking, of course, spilling out of north-eastern colleges and bursting from Washington winters, but there was still little sense of a collective thrust, a yellow ribbon to tie around the ol' indie tree.

There's always the chance hindsight sweeps away too much in its quest for seamless tidiness, but one suspects Daydream Nation could well have been the penny-dropping moment - the point at which disparate and seemingly incompatible movements were drawn into an understandable and exciting singularity, a common cause still unsure exactly what it was that it was railing against, but finally able to feel a part of something, and not just apart from everything.

If all this has been easy to forget in the time since, it was impossible to ignore tonight. What it lacked in surprise or shock value - familiarity breeding not so much contempt as awestruck-respect - it made up for in its encapsulation of everything that has made Sonic Youth such a crucial part of the last quarter of a century music.

Their sixth studio album, this was the moment at which the times synched with their timeless appeal. The planets aligned to bring an eclipsing beauty to their electric chaos. Their performance tonight, in keeping with the album from which it was drawn, walked a tightrope that was the perfect blend of sonic experimentation, open ended trajectories, uncompromising density, off-kilter tuning and - let's not forget - razor-sharp melodic hooks buried deep and snagging the unwary.

Predictably but no less tinglingly, the show opened with the impossibly shimmering spirit desire of 'Teenage Riot', Kim Gordon's breathy prelude the gathering clouds to Thurston' Moore's sudden thunderclap - the urgency in stark contrast to his occasional laconic daydreaming. The punishing punk surge of 'Silver Rocket' burned brightly, chased hot on its heels by Kim's menacing 'The Sprawl' - a steel trap with lurid candy luring us into its bone-snapping jaws.

''Cross The Breeze' keeps the wick well alight, with the next major change in direction coming with Lee Ranaldo waxing near-sensically through 'Eric's Trip', as a railroad runs through the record store at night.

'Total Trash' is no misnomer, yet it's a case of pop-tinged detritus - a tangy taste of Washing Machines to come. Ranaldo takes the vocals again for 'Hey Joni', a dirty mess with moments of jangling clarity, metallic ringing like church bells pealing across the litter-strewn town square. 'Providence' breaks in disconcertingly, drawing in sampled answering machine messages that sound like Houston transmissions and all.

'Candle' was one of the evening's treasures. Tight little note clusters spilling into jagged riffs, then a chugging undertow stringing is along, the interplay between Lee, Kim and Thurston was at its best, intermingling ideas that clashed and coalesced in equal measure, creating a wonderful whole. It spilt perfectly into 'Rain King', a dark and dirgy noise-fest forced along by heavy kicking on the drums and monsoonal cymbal splashing.

'Kissability' has lashings of that, but expect a black eye to follow if you try your luck. Kim's confusing taunting, drawing you in and pushing you away, lays upon a bed of squalling licks, leaving us much in need of the release promised by 'Trilogy'. Part a) 'The Wonder' begins strangled, but finds the odd breathing place. Part b) 'Hyperstation' is another set pinnacle, an epic, cutting affair that again draws together Kim, Lee and Thurston perfectly, the drums punching in just the right places. It's like a summary of all that's gone before, a map with which to understand the Daydream Nation journey. Tiny little riffs come and go, nicking at our heels, pushing as along into 'z) Eliminator Jr', in which Kim leave us bruised and exhilarated.

One wonders, when ears finally stop ringing, exactly what the terms of Sonic Youth's Faustian deal might have included. These perpetual teenagers push musical boundaries and expectations on album after album, side project after side project, tour after tour, never seeming to lose their enthusiasm or hunger. Tonight's Daydream Nation set was, thankfully, not a note-for-note attempt to recapture whatever it was that they were seeking to say at the time. It was a revisiting but also a revision, refining and redefining as they went.

There's a risk that a venture such as this could prove to be nought but a nostalgic trip down long forgotten lanes, but in the hands of Sonic Youth it proved anything but. We, along with the band perhaps, were reminded of where much of the journey began.

Back on the road of the riot trail, we're once again ready for anything.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Nine

2008-02-22T10:49:00.004+11:00

Emily strained to hear over the din of the sea now brushing her toes. Trying to turn her mind from the rising tide, knowing there was not long before the waves would be crashing over where she stood, she leant as far forward as she dared, pleased for once of Crouch’s strong fingers as she used them to hold onto a beam overhead.

Snippets of talk rode the wind her way, handfuls of words mingling with one another in combinations she was sure had not been assembled by the speaker. The wind died a little and she was able to catch a few more snatches, coming together in more comprehensible forms.

“Mother seems a little worried about you at the moment Emily – is everything all right?”

“Oh, everything is...” Another gust of wind carried the rest of her small voice away, just out of Emily’s reach, then back again: “...tired and a funny tummy, but nothing too...”

“Well, as long as it’s nothing too serious. Now I know I’ve seemed a little preoccupied lately, but you know you can always talk to your mother and I don’t you?”

“Of course daddy, of course. It’s nothing, really. I’m all better now, back to my old self.”

“That’s the girl. Well, your mother must be wondering where we’ve gotten too, it’s probably time we got back.”

“Yes daddy, I imagine you are right. Thank you so very much for bringing me down here today.”

“That’s quite okay my dear, it’s been my pleasure. It’s good to have a chance to spend some time with you.”

Emily watched as her father’s right leg disappeared and then his left. Her own shiny, black, buckled shoes both disappeared at once as though flying, and Emily knew her father had lifted Crouch up by the arms and would have swung him around in a full circle, like the chair-o-planes at the fair, knowing it was one of her favourite things to do.

This shared intimacy was the last straw for Emily – Crouch had gone too far this time. She reached into her coat pocket to retrieve the spyroscope, in a hurry to get back onto the pier but terrified she would be spotted if she made her move too soon.

Digging around in the pocket, her fingers brushed against something she hadn’t felt there before. Closing her fingers around it, she pulled it out for a closer look. It was the little blue bag with the liquorice she had conjured inside the music box!

But she thought one of the Topkinses still had that. Unless, when Oscar hugged her farewell... But why? Puzzling over what it might mean, Emily was stumped. Putting the question to the back of her mind for now, she reached into the other pocket, the one in which the spyroscope actually was, and peered through it. She saw her father and herself heading back up the main street, the collars of their coats turned up against the cold. She turned her mind to her mother, but was confused to see what appeared to be a running river, but no sign of anybody.

With no time to lose, and a particularly swollen looking wave bearing down on her, Emily reached for the edge of the pier and pulled herself up. There was little chance she could have pulled that off usually, but with Crouch’s long limbs it was a cinch. She ached to be racing up the street and to her home, to get there ahead of her father and Crouch, but knew that only danger could follow such a path. Crouch was too unpredictable, who knew what he might do?

No, the only thing in her favour was the element of surprise. As far as Crouch was concerned, Emily was trapped away evermore in the music box, unable to have any bearing on his plans. He could bide his time – although Emily knew enough about him to know that he could only do so for so long. Such was his hunger, his insatiable need to have his way, he would make something happen sooner than later. And her father was likely to be the first victim. She knew, too, that whatever happened with her mother could not end well. If Crouch could not have her, for a second time, he would ensure that nobody could.

Emily pulled out Crouch’s book and opened to the last section. It was the only chance.

***

Today I journeyed somewhere that has long intrigued me. I sent myself into a box.

It was a dangerous step to take, for there was no guarantee I would be able to ever make my way back out. But I had thought long and hard about this and there was no choice. If I were to make the most of my discoveries, extend them to their full potential, I needed to enter the realm I had created in the boxes and unearth what could be found within.

I have made the boxes in a way that nobody could really complain about being in there. If anything, they are frightfully lucky to have the opportunity, to be in a world in which their wishes and desires are rendered flesh – a vast improvement on the sad lot of their pathetic, provincial lives.

Although I have created these boxes, it is from my own mind that their idea has been shaped, that the music has been drawn, there was one thing about which I was not entirely certain. The key! How to get in and out safely? I knew it must involve a link with the other side, a way to tap into the life that was existing in the other to which one found oneself. And then it dawned on me – what gives life, sustains one’s life?

It was food. To return to the life from which we have stepped, we need but partake of the life-giving sustenance that supports that life; that makes it what it is. Loading my pocket with a small bag of candy from the jar I keep on my bench, I set forth and took the step I knew I must take.

I spent a great deal of time in the box on my first visit, intrigued by the resemblance of its world to my own, yet by its differences. In this world I could achieve in a moment what it would have taken a lifetime to execute in the world from which I had come. All the rules had changed, and in my favour. Invention required only imagination – the usual laws of physics, of time and space and more, were no match for the power of the mind. The possible became actual, thought become action.

At first I was captivated by its near perfection, by the granting of any whim I could conjure but one – I could not make Isabelle appear. Night after night I would return to the forest in search of her, the music box forest reproducing in its entirety that which I had come to know so well, flawless similitude, but for that one element that made it what it was for me. Hope as I may, focused as I was on this single most desire, she never appeared.

Frustrated by this fatal flaw in the box, I vowed to dedicate my life to making it happen, that I would have her once more. I needed to return home, to discover why the music box would fulfil the wishes of those I sent there, yet failed to provide me with the one thing for which I asked. Carefully selecting some blueberries that I could take back with me, knowing I would be able to return any time I wished if I was to eat them, I retrieved a piece of candy from my pocket, placed it in my mouth and returned home.

Vinyl Diaries XX: PJ Harvey

2008-02-19T10:06:00.007+11:00

by Ella Mullins

PJ Harvey
Sydney Opera House
February 15, 2008

The many masks of PJ Harvey – just who is the real Polly Jean?

The first time I saw PJ perform she was dressed to kill – long limbs fleeing her man-eating blood red dress (with lips to match), a vampiress stepping straight onto stage fresh from a fleshy feast. The set was charged with hunger and hurt and was PJ the axe-murdering guitar queen.

The last tour she was dressed not so much to the nines as the twos or maybe threes, a fluorescent mess scratching out the curled lip dirty cut-up blues trash of Uh Huh Her.

This time, in the rarefied majesty that is the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, we were witness to yet another creature all together. With frightful paleness, dark hair piled high into a hive compiled by outré bees and a long black dress both rags and riches, dripping silver sparkles, she seemed to have stepped straight from a Tim Burton dreamscape.

It may seem a tad off the point to be discussing outfit choice rather than simply the music, but that would be to miss half the PJ experience. This is very much a show steeped in performance, in the sense that while at heart it is of course about the music, what seems to be happening overall is a working through of deeper levels, a journey of self-discovery that we relate to for we all undertake a parallel path in one way or another.

With each new PJ encounter, it’s as though she is trying all of these lives on, looking for which might fit. The angry, pained caterwauling and Doc Marten stomp from the early days of Dry and Rid of Me, the vamp sassiness of To Bring You My Love, the windswept, troubled landscapes of Is This Desire? – all were on the one hand PJ through and through, yet on the other it felt like she was also struggling to find her way; we were witnessing a ‘becoming' more than simply a reflection of a space in which she had already grown comfortable.

The same seemed to be true with Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea – the girl from the gently undulating English countryside smitten by New York City and its ceaseless promise, its vertiginous verticality, but ultimately unable to give it the name 'home'. Its follow-up Uh Huh Her read as a reaction to the polish and easy Friday night glamour of Stories, a deliberately confrontational cut and paste tantrum.

Each album serves almost a denial of the last – is certainly reactionary at the very least. But it’s not merely a flip to a flop, a busy, highly produced album giving way to a stripped back counter, then back again. Each is a progression on the last, even if it’s via denial and rejection.

In many ways this is the secret to PJ's ongoing appeal, and her continued relevance as an artist. She appears forever to be struggling against boundaries, pushing the envelope – then licking it, hopping in, closing it up and sending it off to some new place altogether.

This has all taken place over a period spanning more than 15 years, so it was intriguing to see the journey in miniature tonight. Playing handfuls of works off pretty much every album, the songs were bracketed together from each era, clusters nudging shoulders with their usurpers, but all getting along just fine, letting bygones be bygones.

Opening with the sparse menace of ‘To Bring You My Love’, the welcome mat was laid out by the guitar-wielding dominatrix in (metaphorical) shiny boots of leather. Those unmistakable six notes, the third deliciously slurred, drawing us in with ease. Each set tends to begin with one of her opening album tracks, songs that have always been perfectly selected to reel us in and not let go. This did just that, that half-pace opening, the perfectly measured distortion and a promise we couldn’t refuse.

'Send His Love To Me' let added a hint of dark folk to the mix, before PJ took to the piano stool for the first of her White Chalk pieces. The disturbing ‘When Under Ether’ was an ideal entry point, setting the mood for what was to follow. Not everyone’s taken immediately to the predominantly piano ballad driven White Chalk, missing, perhaps, the guitar, bass and drums set-up. But this adventurous leap into unchartered waters is a slow-growing delight, and the well selected pieces from it tonight were brought to life with a shiver-inducing touch.

The mood is cool and creepy, Victorian drama evocative of late 18th century London. It’s a snapshot of life hidden in sunless back alleys, mossy cobblestones and dankness, houses of ill repute and gas lanterns, unimaginable poverty and coughs that take root and never leave. The instrumentation is mostly acoustic – piano, acoustic guitar, harmonica. At certain points it’s not a long way from what Grant Lee Phillips has been doing for some time, but instead of exploring the different layers of the small town American past, it’s thoroughly, unapologetically British – Dickensianly dystopic. It may be because I’m re-reading Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, but it seems a perfect fit for that slightly unreal underbelly of London’s shady past, the soundtrack to the larger than life past being recounted by Fevvers.

Such leaps and projections are easily made, as with PJ there’s always a sense that these songs are inhabited by a cast of conflicted characters. Some bold some shy, some wise some naive, many seeming salvaged from a history that would have otherwise overlooked them completely. Over the course of the journey the possibly misguided suspicion dawns that these characters are all facets of the one complex, contradictory soul. But don't let her here you say so.

The sense of this is very strong with White Chalk, a return to an approach last truly developed on Is This Desire?, from which the next batch of songs were drawn. Delicate and piano driven at one end and drum-machine and synthesiser cold at the other, it’s highly unusual to have any of these songs worked into a live set. This is PJ’s most under-rated album, lost between the cracks in just the way its characters all were until PJ salvaged their memory from the far-flung corners of forgotten time. So the fragile beauty of ‘Angelene’ took us back to that moment PJ first allowed us to peer behind the curtains to a gentler, fractured side. It was a touching caress of the cheek that turned into a back-handed slap in the form of the frumpy, squelching, fuzzed up ‘My Beautiful Leah’, and the disembodied ghostly horror of 'Electric Light'.

As well as being a dab hand at just about any instrument that comes within reach, PJ can sing a little. Her voice will twist and turn on the merest whim – from witch’s cackle to banshee wail and rumbling bearded lady in the blink of an eye, soaring at times to the roof a long way above, spilling on the floor in a glorious broken mess at other.

Her ability to swing so effortlessly from style to style and persona to persona is not as unsettling or off-putting as it could be in a lesser talent. She’s not exactly a chameleon, for each change builds a layer upon the prior. She’s what she was and what she is now, an oil-painting where each stroke, even if we can only see its ghost, is as essential as the last.

Weaving through the icily clanging 'Silence' and austere 'The Mountain', watching her come up 'Mansize' and riding the horses in her dreams as we joined her 'Down By The Water' - infanticide at its catchiest - one was led to wonder. Who, then, is Polly Jean Harvey? For songs so simple in structure, so upfront about their intentions, the question is surprisingly complex. And the stream of potential answers could be endless, or could be dead simple.

After all of this, she's still just a West Country girl with a big fat cat, who brought her mum along to see her play at the Sydney Opera House – and then dropped a very, very rude word.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Eight

2008-02-13T15:45:00.004+11:00

Isabelle’s mind raced. How on earth did this strange little man, as round as we was tall and wearing the most unusual attire, know her daughter?

“It’s a very long story, and one for which we don’t have the time to truly unravel,” he smiled.

“Suffice to say, she is a courageous, intelligent, charming young girl, and from all appearances it comes from her mother’s side.”

“But, how...”

“Because you have not been where I am from, I cannot reach you in your own world, in the ordinary way. But, because this forest is a place that was opened up to Emily, and is a place that you, too, know, it is somewhere that we can meet. Although you began your travel back here via memory, you deviated from that path and have since lapsed into dream, which enables me to appear despite me not being a part of any existing memory you have. Our dreams are where our memories meet our hopes, where what we know meets what we seek to understand.

“You are seeking to understand what is happening in your life and drawing on memories of a time where you were in control, a time that you feel has something to offer up to your present circumstances, though you don’t know how.

“That’s all I really have the time to explain. I hasten not to be rude, but this is a serious matter with not a moment to lose. Your family is in grave danger. Though it pains me most grievously, I’m not able to tell you exactly how. Certain limitations have been placed on me and my appearance to you now that make it impossible to tell you what that danger is, though I would dearly love to. He who opened the door to where I come from does not know that the door has become a means of two-way travel for more than just he, that others can exit without his beckoning if they know how. When he finds out, and learns that one of us has come out without it being of his bidding, there will be hell to pay.

“Nevertheless, though he could not imagine any of us ever coming out, he has made the precaution of making it impossible for us to speak ill of him – a physical impossibility that leaves our tongues tied and unable to utter another word until he reverses it himself.

“What I can say Isabelle is this – trust what you know. What you feel. All is not necessarily as it seems, and how things seem is not necessary all. There are things that we know to be true even though they are impossible, and feelings so strong that they overwhelm the very evidence before our eyes. You have long known this, but never has it been more important to trust yourself.

“And that, I am afraid, is all I can say about the matter.”

“But...” Before Isabelle could get out another word, he was gone. It had happened in the blink of an eye – the funny little man before her, who looked more likely to roll along than walk or run, had simply vanished. The sounds of the night slowly came back to Isabelle, the rush of the river and the hushed sound of the last of the wood in the fire settling into its final resting place.

Her head echoed with his speech, snippets bouncing and clashing and making all new phrases. But there were two lines that kept recurring – her family was in danger, and she must trust what she knows.

Isabelle knew this must have something to do with Emily and the way she had been behaving. Ever since she had returned from the Tibbits’ that evening, something had felt wrong. But what was it? Isabelle still could not put her finger on what was different, what had shifted. She resolved to find out what it was that had troubled her daughter and do everything in her power to set things straight.

Staring into the fire, Isabelle crouched down to warm her hands. The chill of the night was finally catching up with her and she wasn’t yet dry. Absentmindedly her fingers swept around on the forest floor and came back to her with a handful of dry leaves. She tossed them onto the remains of the fire. A wisp of smoke arose and the deep red embers ignited the fresh fuel. Orange flames leapt from the leaves and the smoke wisp thickened, swirling into a small cloud. The cloud thickened and stretched, building in height. Isabelle tumbled backwards as it grew and she saw it take shape.

Looking back at her, watching over the edges of a heavy cloak, was a wolf standing tall on two legs – laughing she was sure.

sorry

2008-02-13T14:58:00.006+11:00

Sorry.

What's in a word?

For our previous Government, under John Howard, being in power meant never having to say you were sorry.

This morning our new Prime Minister, Labor's Kevin Rudd, opened his first term leading Parliament by saying the word so many had so-long needed to hear.

In apologising to the Stolen Generations, those Indigenous Australians of mixed descent torn from their families by policies that lasted the better part of a century, Rudd kept a promise he had taken to the election.

Policies explicitly determined to culturally assimilate generations of Indigenous Australians, to 'breed out' their Aboriginality, resulted in the removal of at least 100,000 children. Not one Indigenous family has been untouched by this forcible removal. Not one.

Howard could bask in the reflected glory of the ANZAC spirit, the triumphs of his boorish yet cherished cricket team. But the petty, mean-spirited, ideologically driven and empathy-stunted man could see no link between the actions taken by Parliament through most of the 1900s and the Parliament he led - a Parliament he came into a scant five years after forcible removal programs were still in effect.

His idea of 'practical reconciliation' - a new paternalism with frightening echoes of such damaging past policies - was a cynical smokescreen perfectly in keeping with his government's insistence on blaming the victim. But now he has gone, and we can thankfully move on, regain some of the lost ground and missed opportunities of the last 12 years.

The fragmentation and sense of dislocation and isolation inflicted by this deliberate and systemic cultural genocide cannot even begin to be understood. This morning, Mr Rudd said the Parliament apologised for laws and policies which had "inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians."

"For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry."

The words themselves can of course make no difference in and of themselves. So much more must now be done if any improvements are to be made to lessen the disgraceful gaps in health, literacy, mortality rates and life expectancy that exist between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.

But there is hope that the apology will at least be a step towards closure, a move towards redressing the atrocities of the past, stemming the pain and healing the deep emotional wounds.

Postcard from an absent muse III

2008-02-12T14:06:00.000+11:00

B,

Fill up the kettle and put out my slippers, I have a feeling I'm on my way home.

-M

postcard from an absent muse II

2008-02-11T09:22:00.000+11:00

Dear Benjamin,

When I left, I was unsure how long I would be gone. All I knew was that it was time. My wings, previously proud and lustrous, had grown dull with disuse. My mind, once running clear as a stream of crystal droplets, pure as angel tears, had silted with the detritus of the everyday.

The winds brought me here, Jukkasjärvi. The River Torne has iced over, yet I am swept up by the ceaseless passage beneath the surface, the long journey from Torneträsk into the Gulf of Bothnia. The cold is really helping. The bracing invigoration promises to dispel any last vestige of sluggishness. I'm remembering things. To breath. To want. To feel.

To live.

-M

postcard from an absent muse

2008-02-08T16:05:00.000+11:00

Dear Benjamin,

Sorry to leave without saying anything. I didn't want to interrupt, you seemed so busy, preoccupied. I came to say farewell, but looking in the window, seeing the dry creek bed furrow of your brow, the way your fingers twitched as though hoping to pull from the very air answers as to what it was you had forgotten was next to do, I paused before knocking. I thought after some time you might see me there, thought you might turn for a second and remember who I was, invite me in.

You left the room.

I'll be in touch soon,

M

Vinyl Diaries XIX: Low

2008-01-21T17:52:00.001+11:00

Low
The Famous Spiegletent
January 17, 2008

Whatever the weather was doing outside the small confines of the Spiegletent, we had long forgotten. Wherever they go Minnesota's Low carry with them their own little micro-climate, a dry, static threat of a storm that refuses to break.

The wind comes up, ruffles our hair and swirling leaves and dust and torn up receipts, forgotten shopping lists and discarded love letters, but just as we try and grasp them - dancing within our reach - they are torn from our fingers.

There's nothing especially complex about what's going on here, and therein lies the secret. Alan Sparhawk's chord clusters brush up against Mimi Parker's spacious Mo Tucker drum patterns, with bass lines that never stray too far from a song's heart. Yet with each loop of an idea, each thematic return, every subtle scrape and tic has you holding your breath, your ears pricked for the menace that lurks just beyond the door.

There's a stark sense throughout of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia - Low leave you crouching in a creaking, paint-stripped shack while your thoughts of escaping into the world outside offers no respite. The tin roof pops and buckles from the heat, the blowing sand scouring the last skerricks of colour from the warping wooden boards only just holding together with rust shaped as nails.

Once a musical base is firmly bedded in, Sparhawk's voice cuts through with an alarming menace. Parched yet powerful, it is born of clenched teeth and a concrete jaw. Fourth-grade sweetheart and now wife Parker's voice, in contrast, offers a soothing, vibrating warmth that works in perfect counter-balance. In a set that works with so much nuance and such slight changes of sandy shade, the vocals are the main points of departure and were in beautiful form throughout.

Treating us to many of the strongest moments from Guns and Drums and a spattering of older works, the rapt audience watched from seat-edge in hushed expectation. Highlights included a near wistful 'Dragonfly', a pointed 'Pissing' and a gently drawn 'Belarus', with 'Sandanista' also an evocative delight.

Nothing came close, however, to the chilling offer made in 'Murderer' for "Someone to do your dirty work", and the unhinged, violent beauty of 'Take Your Time', which left the warm taste of blood from a bit lip rolling around in the mouth. We wonder as to "what it takes to get a bad mess out of a bad dress" as we sink our nails into whatever (or whomever) is near, unable to stand the slow torture of it all.

A torture I wouldn't trade for the world.

Vinyl Diaries XVIII: Tunng

2008-01-17T12:27:00.001+11:00

Photo by DG Jones

Tunng
The Famous Spiegeltent
14 January, 2008

Around a bend, beyond a bush, beneath a bough, he sat.

‘Goo goo g'joob’, he would say, though there was nobody there to hear.

‘Goo goo g'joob,’ the walrus added, just in case someone had recently passed.

They had not.

Upon a bough, beyond a bush, around a bend, he appeared.

‘Ha,’ said he, ‘I am here it seems, and that, I must say, is that.’

The Cheshire Cat was pleased indeed to find he had appeared just where he had, for if he had appeared anywhere else, then he wouldn’t be here, and that would be no good at all.

‘I am here and here I am and that is that as that is that,’ he added, for effect, for he liked to hear the purr of his voice.

‘And once I know where here is, then here it is that I shall certainly be.’

The walrus looked up from his restful repose to hear what all the fuss was all about, but he could see not a thing.

‘What is this that I hear, yet cannot see?’ he wondered to himself.

Yet ‘Goo goo g'joob’ is what he actually said, for that is what it is he would say, when he was to say what he said.

Beyond a bush, around a bend, beneath a bough, Eeyore did pass. Well, to be exact, he did not pass, but waited so as to pass. Alas, thought he, he could not pass, for in his way, and it was a very long way, was a walrus.

‘In my way, and it is a very long way, such a very long way for me, I seem to see what I can see is a walrus sitting right in front of me.’

Such is what Eeyore though, and such is what he said, for for Eeyore to say is to think and, indeed, to think is also to say. For one really must say what one thinks, and should most certainly think what one says, if one is to make one’s way – and it is such a very long way – through this very long life we lead.

The walrus was, indeed, sitting before Eeyore, in a way that Eeyore could not help but notice was a rather glum seeming way, that is to say, in a way that seemed as though glum was here and so was the walrus, and the two were indeed as though one. But whether as one or as two, it mattered to Eeyore not, for as two or as one something would need to be done, if he were ever to get beyond the bend and beyond the bush and beyond the bough.

Beyond a bush, beneath a bough, around a bend came – of a sudden – a maid.

‘And what kind of maid could this be?’ wondered the Cheshire Cat who, from upon the bough, had watched as Eeyore came upon a walrus and wondered aloud as to the fact of the walrus being beneath the bough and barring his way.

‘And what kind of maid could this be?’ wondered the walrus to himself, noting that she was a maid most fair.

‘Goo goo g'joob?’ the walrus said, just so, with just the faintest trace of an upward inflection to match the ever-so-slightly raised eyebrow that accompanied what he considered the most appropriate question in the circumstances.

‘And what kind of maid could this be?’ wondered Eeyore aloud, for as we know, aloud is how he wondered.

And thus the maid, beneath the bow, came to answer.

‘Marian,’ said she, for that was her name.

‘I am known, hereabouts, for the most part, when known at all, by those who know who I am, or come to know who I am, by way of wondering who I am, and learning that who I am is I – Maid Marian.’

‘I see,’ said the Cheshire Cat, from above the bough, who had taken quite an interest in wondering and learning and knowing who this Maid – who was now known to him as Maid Marian – had been. And was. And, perhaps, would be.

‘I see,’ said Eeyore, for he could, of course, see, although only on occasion for he was tending, for the most part, to hang his head quite low, so low in fact that his eyes were brought level with Maid Marian’s knees, which – as far as he was aware, though he had not, it is true, actually asked – were not also called Maid Marian, by those who knew her or otherwise.

‘Goo goo g'joob’ said the walrus, to – it must be said – the consternation, bemusement, and curiosity of, respectively, Eeyore, the Cheshire Cat and Maid Marian.

‘And what brings you all here?’ asked Maid Marian of the three, despite still not being able to make eye contact with Eeyore, understand what it was the walrus was trying to say, or even see the Cheshire Cat.

‘Some kind of party perhaps? A gathering to celebrate a birthday? A meeting to decide upon exactly what type of cheese the moon is made of?’

‘I’m stuck,’ said Eeyore, ‘hopelessly stuck.’

‘I am here and here I am and that is that as that is that,’ said the Cheshire Cat, for he had so liked the sound of it earlier that he could not help but purr it again, just so.

They all turned to the walrus. He simply shrugged.

‘And what brings you here?’ asked Eeyore, not because it was the polite thing to ask, though it probably was, but because if he was going to be stuck he may as well try and find out how everyone got stuck there, just in case by tracing backwards from the answer they gave it offered a way out – though of course it would not, for nothing was that easy in life, least of all becoming unstuck once one was so very stuck.

‘Well I’m glad you asked – I was on my way to pick some berries, blackberries in fact, with which to make a pie...’

‘Pie!’ exclaimed Eeyore, for if there was one thing that could turn his mind from being stuck it was the thought of pie.

‘Yes a pie,’ smiled Maid Marian, pleased at Eeyore’s brief flirtation with mental if not physical unstuckedness.

‘I was on my way to pick some blackberries, when I heard your voices. They were mingling so beautifully, I thought you must have been performing a little impromptu concert beneath this bough.’

The Cheshire Cat looked at Eeyore, Eeyore looked at the walrus, the walrus looked at Maid Marian.

As one, they blushed. The Cheshire Cat, though ostensibly still invisible, turned a deep scarlet kind of invisible. Eeyore looked like a beetroot with very floppy ears and a strange saggy tail, while the walrus looked like a giant tomato, with tusks.

'Were they really?' asked Eeyore, who had never before heard the word 'beautifully' uttered in association with anything he had done.

'Were they really?' asked the Cheshire Cat, who loved to hear glowing praise he could associate with himself, despite having little difficulty in taking almost anything said about him in a way that he could deem glowing.

'Goo goo g'joob?' asked the tomato with tusks, reminding them that he was, after all, still the walrus.

'Why yes, they were,' said Maid Marian, a new twinkle in her emerald eye.

'You know, I have an idea. You should all join me tonight, and we shall perform songs right here beneath this bough.'

'And what will we sing about?' asked either Eeyore or the Cheshire Cat, it's not too important which.

'Why the usual of course,' answered Maid Marian, thinking briefly about what the usual would be.

'Tea and freedom, friends and your eggs getting cold, catching bullets in our teeth, raves on a riverboat and housewives who rob banks. That sort of thing.'

'We'll sing about singing as the sky collapses and being turned into a hare by the decree of village committees and wind-up birds and running away across the fields and buying a dog and calling him Pete,' added the Cheshire Cat, warming to the idea.

'And sleeping inside the north wind in a coracle at sea and black twisted branches that hid all the things that we did and threading wasps onto string,' murmured Eeyore, saying the first things that came into his head so as not to miss out, though in his heart of hearts he really just wanted to find out more about this blackberry pie.

'And what kind of music will it be?' asked the Cheshire Cat.

'Well what kind of music do you like?' asked Maid Marion.

'I'm somewhat partial to the Beta Band, but my heart is in folk really,' admitted the Cheshire Cat, flinching slightly lest he be deemed less than cool for admitting such a thing.

'I think The Books are onto something' threw in Eeyore, lowering his head even further in the hope that nobody saw his well-worn Smiths t-shirt. 'That Animal Collective also has a certain way of making you think, at the very least.'

The walrus said nothing, but began nodding in a very contagious way. He was thinking he quite likes the sound of several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict.

'Well it's settled then,' said Maid Marion, in a very 'it's settled' kind of way.

'Our music will be a glitch-tinged rustic folktronica, a new primitivism if you will, drawing on all that we know about the deepest darkest reaches of this here forest, channelling ancient spirits to produce music that on first aural glance appears upbeat, yet has a lingering undertow of something just slightly unhinged and sinister.'

'That's all very well,' thought and said Eeyore, 'but let's get our priorities in order. Namely, will we be able to drink lots of tea? Will there be sweets involved?'

'Of course there will be plenty of tea, that's really the whole point - it will be the finest tea rider you have ever seen. Sweets will also play a central role. In fact, we shall have a song called Sweet William, and we shall pass out sweets to the audience and their job will be to join in the making of music through creative rustling of the cellophany wrappers.'

'And what shall we be called?' asked the Cheshire Cat, looking at Maid Marion.

Maid Marion looked at Eeyore.

Eeyore looked at the walrus, who buy now was fast asleep, his tongue lolling languorously from his mouth.

'Tunng!' he exclaimed, in a moment of inspiration (for he was not one to spell very well, especially in moments of inspiration, either in thought or in speech).

'We shall have a special sign, hanging from this very bough - "Upeering Toonite - Tunng."

And appear they did. And such was the rapture with which their performance was received, they decided that far from being stuck, the bough was exactly the kind of place to be, if one was to be anywhere, and if they were going to be in such a place they may as well make the most of it.

'And we all had a lovely time' said they, and they said it was a lovely time.

The rest, as they say, is history (and herstory too, for the Maid beneath the bough had no small part to play, as you can hopefully see).

Vinyl Diaries XVII: Sufjan Stevens

2008-01-16T11:28:00.001+11:00

Photo by joe lencioni

Sufjan Stevens
The State Theatre
13 January, 2008

If angels have iPods, they doubtless have them chock full of JS Bach. But those in the know, those who’ve swung a little low, tasted the forbidden fruit of earthly delights – they’ve got a little Sufjan in there too, ready to get them through a long road trip, or for kicking back with a Sunday afternoon Moscow Mule.

Sufjan, the little Michigan boy scout who could, has a grand total of two songs. Fortuitously, they’re both utterly irresistible, able to be rolled out in all sorts of guises and variations, unresolvable twists and turns that lead places we’ve never quite been. He brought them both to town for his Sydney Festival shows, along with a ten-piece music making ensemble to realise his vision writ large.

My softest spot has always been for Sufjan the Fragile, the bruised, overwhelmed little choir boy lost we find cut adrift through Seven Swans. But the sweeping, brass-blast majesty of Come Feel the Illinois finally clicked into place hearing it in the flesh, witnessing the way in which the boisterous parts were wrapped around what still remains a brittle core, a delicate and bleeding heart.

The childish super hero outfits and the rambling tales of heightened nonsense proved a perfect fit, not so much for the music but for what I imagine must be its genesis. One gets the distinct impression that Sufjan is bewitched by life’s boundless possibilities, amazed on a daily basis by things many would walk past without even seeing. This eternally wistful, open-eyed wonderment is precariously child-like, but what emerges manages to side-step tweeness and a misguided elevation of naivety. It’s innocence without the jettisoning of reflection, joy without a cloying sentimentality – parable at all times before preaching.

Constructed with a deft sense of balance, tonight’s set charted a course that made the most of the band and Sufjan’s orchestrative flair, yet allowed the space and silences required for his special brand of scratched intimacy. During the passages with only a piano for adornment, his voice is revealed as a thing of cracked beauty. My threshold for singer-songwriters indulging via piano is remarkably low, but as with Catpower I can make a special exception for Sufjan. Whether the haunting 'Casimir Pulaski Day' and intricately textured 'The Seer's Tower', or giddily driven 'Come On! Feel The Illinoise' and 'Chicago', he held us in the cupped palm of his hand, shaking and blowing on us gently. The highlights were when he was able to weave these different shades through a single piece, as in the flawlessly gorgeous 'The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us!' and a dark reworking of 'Seven Swans' that crashed and soared in equal measure.

I’ve long been intrigued by the imagery and iconography of Sufjan’s pieces. His Christianity is always there on the sleeve to be seen, but it’s not exactly a technicolour dreamcoat. It seems more as though it’s just one of the pieces of a patchwork quilt, popping up every few squares but blending in with a bigger picture; a Midwest Belle & Sebastian, where Sunday school is as good a place as any to try and score a snog.

Working through most of Come Feel the Illinois – the sprawling opus against which one feels the majority of his career will be judged – there were moments both gaudy and rapturous, essential and tangential. The brass filled many of the pieces out and gave them a sense of spectacle and bombast, trumpets heralading the opening of new doors of possibility to us all.

Whatever musical detours were taken, it all kept coming back to that voice. A husky wisp or a bell-clear chirrup, a stifled sigh or a rose petal rubbed between thumb and forefinger – it’s a gracefully contradictory gift that’s the secret to the whole affair, keeping it simultaneously grounded in earthly experience and blissfully soaring heaven-bound, with the rest of us in tow.

I’ll try and send a postcard.

Vinyl Diaries XVI: Fourplay

2008-01-14T12:38:00.001+11:00

Fourplay String Quartet
The Famous Spiegeltent
January 10, 2008

Unsure as to what to say by way of introduction, I might simply point you to whatever it was that I said yonder in the realm of Mess + Noise...

dew

2008-01-10T14:14:00.001+11:00

hair flares scarlet
mute edges tinged
by sandalwood's
flickering shroud

cross-hatch heavens
peer silently
warm breath nestles
knowing nape

dew drops
lightly night
falls

Skip, The Rabbit

2008-01-08T13:18:00.001+11:00

Cleaning his paws carefully after a delicious dinner of carrots and honey, his absolute favourite, Skip heard the unmistakable rustling of someone moving through a nearby bush. Freezing to his spot, his ears twitched to full attention. Maybe it was his friend Snowy, or perhaps Patch had come back from her trip sooner than expected. But just as he was about to call out a friendly hello, Skip looked up to see the tell-tale bushy orange tail of his nemesis, Mr Fox.

"What on earth could he want at this hour?" wondered Skip.

"Surely he should be off having his own dinner..."

So that's what he was playing at - Mr Fox must be thinking he would try and pinch some of Skip's food for dinner, rather than find his own. Maybe he thought Skip had gone with Patch, and left his larder unprotected?

"That terrible sneak," Skip thought. "He certainly is lazy. If he spent as much time getting his own food as he spent skulking around, pestering everybody else, then he would be a very well fed old fox indeed."

Mr Fox's sly visage appeared around the bush, his hungry green eyes peering straight ahead towards the entrance to Skip's warren. Silently slinking across the clearing, Mr Fox's reddish coat was impossible to mistake, along with the white patch that ran from his nose and cheekbones down to his belly.

"Looking for something?"

Mr Fox jumped high in the air, Skip's measured voice giving him a fright. But he soon regathered his composure, circling to take in Skip, who stood tall with his smooth brown coat and coal-black eyes, pointed ears and slowly twitching whiskers.

"I, I have a message for you," Mr Fox slowly drew out. "Yes, that's it, a message."

And what, pray-tell, might that message be?" asked Skip, dubious to Mr Fox's ways.

"Your friend, the one with the floppy ears and big feet - she wanted me to tell you something. She said to, uh, make sure you remember to, um, water the carrots."

"I see. And she sent you to tell me this?"

"Well, I suppose it might surprise you, but I am generally well trusted around these parts."

This would indeed have surprised Skip, if he could have believed it for even a second. But in his experience, Mr Fox was without a doubt the least trustworthy character he had ever come across.

"And it's just a coincidence you came to tell me this at dinner-time?"

"Well, I wanted to tell you before I forgot. Dinner time you say? Why it hadn't even crossed my mind. Now that you say it, I suppose it is."

A smile danced across his lips.

"Hey, I suppose you wouldn't have a little something to tide me over for the long trip home by any chance?," he simpered, a tone that Skip figured was Mr Fox's attempt at seeming likable. As it was, Skip couldn't have given Mr Fox anything if he had even wanted. He had just polished off the very last of the honey, savouring every last drop from the jar. That's why he had still been cleaning his paws, as he had run them right around the jar to make sure it really was finished.

"I'm afraid you've just missed the last of our food," Skip told Mr Fox.

"I suppose you'll have to just find something of your own."

Mr Fox peered down his nose at Skip, who realised that he must have forgotten to bring his glasses.

"Find something of my own, yes, I suppose I will," he said, licking his lips.

"A splendid idea."

Skip was glad he had kept a close eye on Mr Fox, for at that moment he pounced.

By the time Mr Fox had landed where Skip had just been standing, Skip was now on the other side of the clearing. Mr Fox pounced again, but Skip was still too quick.

"Stay still, there's nothing to be frightened about," Mr Fox panted.

"Just the small matter of you trying to eat me!" shot back Skip, thoroughly irritated at this turn of events. Mr Fox ran at him and Skip stepped off to the side at the last moment, with Mr Fox skidding to a halt. Skip began running around the edge of the bushes, just out of reach of the fox in hot pursuit. This went on for what felt like an age, with Skip making a bee line for a blackwood tree just past the entrance to his home. Just as he reached it he stepped to the left, brushing the rough bark as he went by.

Skip looked back just in time to see Mr Fox mistime his evasion and go crashing into the tree. Mr Fox gingerly picked himself up, dusted off his coat, straightened his gloves and promptly fell in a dead faint. Taking advantage of the respite to regain his breath, Skip went over and prodded Mr Fox with a toe. Nothing happened. He prodded again, but still there was no response. He saw the rise and fall of Mr Fox's chest and, confident he was out to the world, began to hatch a plan.

Skip raced into his warren, looking for a pair of floppy rabbit ears he had brought home one day after a visit to the fair.
He found them perched on the top of a bookshelf and busied himself in search of a pot of glue. He then chose two small pieces of coal from the hearth and found a couple of pieces of chalk as well.

Creeping back up to the surface, he set to work. Mr Fox was still lightly sleeping, but Skip knew he didn't have long. He pulled out the glue pot and began. Stepping back to admire his handy work, he was most pleased with himself. With coal eyes, chalk teeth and the ears, Mr Fox's tail could have been a quite cute red-haired rabbit.

Finding a spot just beyond the clearing where he could still see back in, Skip watched as Mr Fox began to stir. In the growing darkness he could still see the hungry look in Mr Fox's eyes as they opened, one after the other. Skip watched as out of the corner of his eyes, Mr Fox saw he wasn't alone in the clearing. A sudden movement to the left and a flash of teeth followed, with a baleful howl erupting into night.

Skip almost felt sorry for Mr Fox, until he realised that could have been him and not Mr Fox's own tail if he hadn't been quick.

"That should at least take his his mind of his stomach a little while," he thought, watching as Mr Fox wandered out the clearing, holding his tail and muttering darkly to himself beneath his breath.

****************

I'm pretty sure I caught a glimpse of Skip one afternoon, walking with my grandfather in the bush that began at the end of his street, at the bottom of St Ives. It was no more than a brown flash from the corner of my eye and then he was gone, but Pa assured me that it must have been the Skip I had heard so much about, coming to say hello but seeing that he had company. Pa often told me new stories about Skip as day turned to night, stories that he assured me Skip had passed on to him directly. When I would ask how a rabbit could pass on a story to a person, he assured me that if a rabbit set its mind to it, then a rabbit could do anything it pleased. This of course included telling tales to humans.

My dearly-loved grandfather passed away this week, but I know Skip is still out there, passing on his stories to other grandfathers like Pa so they can send their own grandchildren to sleep with fresh tales of Skip's exploits. I know, too, that when my time comes, I'll be able to rely on Skip to keep me up to date with his adventures so I can ease my own grandchildren safely into their dreams.

Vinyl Diaries XV: C.W. Stoneking

2007-12-17T10:27:00.002+11:00

photo by 1981 Adam

C.W. Stoneking
The Factory Theatre
December 15, 2007

Should a white man be singing the blues?

It depends, I think, but however you feel about it C.W. Stoneking certainly throws up a few more issues than your garden variety show.

More over at Mess + Noise

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Seven

2007-12-14T14:14:00.000+11:00

Emily put the book down. So this was what Crouch was playing it. After all these years, he had discovered a way to be near her mother again. He had of course explained all this to Emily when first she arrived in the music box, but so overwhelming was the situation she hadn’t been able to understand what was really happening, the full ramifications of what he was saying.

And now, who knew how long later, he had been living in her own house – no doubt sleeping in her own bed – biding his time until he had a chance to do away with her father and... who knows what he planned to do with her mother? Clearly he had to get out of her form at some stage, but from what she had learned of Crouch at that point she would be highly expendable, from his point of view.

She had to act, and quickly. But there still remained the issue of how she could possibly get near the house while she looked like this, and what she could hope to achieve even if she were to try.

By now the day was growing quite warm, while the sea was picking up even more of a swell. Emily knew she had to revisit Crouch’s notes once more, to see what the final section might reveal. There was one more thing she needed to understand – the music box itself. How was it that Crouch had come to place himself in there? How had he learnt to come and go as he pleased, to treat it as a world into which he could pass and make anything he wanted happen – well almost anything, as he had clearly been unable to make her mother his own, even in there.

Loathe to pick the book up again just yet (it had once again grown very hot, threatening to burn her fingers as she touched it), Emily decided to have another look through the spyroscope.

Holding it up to her left eye – Emily was proudly left-handed, fondly wearing her ‘sinistrality’ as she had learned it was sometimes called – she saw her father leading her by the hand down the cobbled road just past Gould’s General Store. With a start she realised that they were only paces from the Pig and Whistle, and here she was, in full sight of anyone who might come around the corner.

Emily did not dare to take any chances and lowered herself over the end of the pier, hanging from its edge while her feet sought out something onto which they could latch. Thankfully her ankle knocked against a cross beam and she was able to gain a foothold and swing down. From here the sea spat angrily at her, white foam surging right up to Crouch’s boots, licking them as their peaks passed in a hissing froth.

Realising with a jolt that she had left the book up on the pier, she reached her hand up and poked about blindly until its cover heated her fingertips. Emily snatched it up, thrust it into her pocket and steadied herself, then looked around to appraise her situation. The beam on which she now stood ran from one side of the pier to the other. Worn from years of pounding by the sea, it featured deep grooves, where the weaker grains had been worn away sooner than the more resilient.

There was really no way to go other than back from where she had come, or down, into the rolling sea. Not enamoured with either scenario, Emily elected to stay put for the moment, at least until her sense of danger cleared.

Over the incessant hubbub of the sea, she began to make out voices. An incomprehensible murmuring to begin with, they grew a little more distinct. Two pairs of legs abruptly appeared from above and just to her left, and Emily almost lost her grip when she realised that the shoes sitting at the end of the smaller pair were hers.

Straining to hear over the fizzing and lapping of the water, the voices soon crystalised for her. Her heart leapt when she realised the man’s voice was irrefutably that of her father Percy. She could picture him as though he were right in front of her, his brow furrowed as he thought a little too hard. Her mother often told him he needn’t worry quite so much, but Emily knew he loved to think about everything there was to think about, to turn his mind to problems that others found too difficult, or never even thought to think about in the first place.

There had never been a question she had asked that he had not put his mind to working out. The simpler ones – why the sky was blue; why one never saw birds fall from the sky like stones, and where they must go to die – he would answer straight away, as though he had been thinking about that very matter when she asked and he was glad that she had taken an interest in where his thoughts were heading.

Others took a little more consideration, a little more thought, but he never shied away from providing some form of an answer. Emily had for some time suspected that these answers weren’t always, technically, the right ones, but she loved to hear him tackle them, cherished that twinkle his blue eyes gave, like the reflection of a campfire blazing back out at her, while he shared the secrets of what a dog was thinking about as it drifted off to sleep, how man grains of sand there were on a beach and what happened to us when, finally, we die.

As high as her heart had leapt when she heard her father’s voice – realised that he was alive and well and so close – is just how low it sunk when she heard her own voice, was reminded that Crouch was in total command of her and spinning his deceitful web.

From gas-filled balloon to lead balloon, she was brought crashing back to earth in an instant; cold and alone, so near to what she wanted back more than anything in the world, yet so far.

*********************

to be continued

*********************

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Six

2007-12-10T14:38:00.000+11:00

The water was like ice. The swift-running current grabbed at Isabelle’s body and sucked it into its racing flow. What it was running from, where it was going, neither Isabelle nor the river knew. For a long while it dragged her beneath its surface. Her open eyes knew she was still facing upwards for she could see the way the moonlight fractured on the top of the running water, split into silver shards like a shattered mirror. She lifted her hands towards them, half expecting the shards to slice them open, spill her hot blood into the cool water, but of course it was just a trick of the eyes and mind, an associative conceit.

Isabelle remained resolute in her decision to have plunged into the hungry river and felt, for the first time in as long as she could remember, at peace. A voice at the back of her mind reminded her that she could not stay underneath the water forever, so she calmly set about drawing herself closer to that dancing light above.

When she finally raised her head above its surface and took in air, the sudden rush of sounds reminded Isabelle of where she was. Still she refused to panic – in all her time, her tangled life, apart from Percy and Emily it was water that she most trusted. But it was a strange kind of trust. She knew it would ultimately look after her, but she was uncomfortable admitting just what a hold it had on her, what a pull it had on her heart.

This was the reason she could rarely bring herself to take Emily down to the sea, though they both loved it so. If she was to be honest with herself, it was a form of greed, a jealous protectiveness. She did not want to lose Emily to this love, for it to capture her daughter in the way it had captured her own young heart, filled a spot in her that for others family completed. She knew she was being selfish, but so important to her were Percy and Emily that she could not bear to think that something else could take the place she held for her daughter, could draw Emily in under its unmatchable spell.

The river, Isabelle realised, was starting to lose the edge of its frenetic pace. She had been tumbled this way and that for who knows how long, whereas now she was able to feel part of its rhythm, moving with it rather than it simply tossing her along. Resting on its surface, drawn along on its merry dance but now well and truly in step, Isabelle saw that the river had widened since she jumped in, but that up ahead there was a peninsula of jutting land, slowing the water as it had to squeeze past and around into its next bend.

Near the end of this peninsula, just above the water line, she saw a fire was burning. Shadows played in the treetops as the fire danced and twisted, drawing in new breath as deeply and appreciatively as Isabelle herself was now doing. She felt the loose folds of her dress drawn across her body as a cross-current pulled her towards the side of the river, and is it passed into the small bay that the peninsula had created, she felt her feet touch the stony river bottom. She stood and waded through the water, feeling it tugging her back but this time resisting. She was loathe to disappoint it, but knew she had been brought to this particular place for a reason.

As she reached the river’s edge, water streaming down the hair plastered to her head and dripping off the clumping ends, Isabelle pricked her ears to see if she could hear anything that would alert her as to what she should do next. But apart from the ceaseless, whooshing, rushing of the water and the dry, raspy crackling of the fire, there was no sound at all. The birds had curled up under a warm wing for the night, while the nocturnal army of creatures that came out after dark were perhaps hiding in the trees, eyes drawn in slits so as to not let the whites give them away, but none was uttering a peep.

Isabelle clambered up the river bank and walked slowly towards the fire. It was only small, taking up no more room than a small stool, and was burning quite low. Maybe she was too late? Somebody must have been here recently, but there seemed no sign of anyone at the present. And anyway, why would somebody be waiting for her here? How would they have known she might come by? She certainly had not planned anything of the sort, so there was no way anybody could be expecting her.

“Now that’s where you are wrong!”

Isabelle jumped near out of her skin, her heart racing at the shock of the voice coming from out of thin air. Dropping from a branch that was hanging from the tree just behind her, a small red-headed man gave a low bow to the startled, dripping lady before him. Isabelle’s mind raced, trying to work out whether she had ever seen him before.

“You don’t yet know me, but you will be very glad to have made my acquaintance,” he smiled, replacing a green felt hat upon his head.

“My name is Oscar, you might say I am an acquaintance of Emily’s.”

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Five

2007-12-04T17:22:00.000+11:00

Emily pored quickly through more of Crouch’s notes, increasingly frustrated at not being able to find a solution to her dilemma. Muddling her thoughts was the dawning awareness of just how inhuman Crouch had become, the twisted experiments and the wild ideas he was spouting. She learned of how his chamber had been used to achieve all manner of frightful ends, reading with horror of his joy at chancing one day, in a walk through a distant forest, across a wolf that had wandered into a steal trap left by one of the local hunters.

The wolf had been there for days, unable to wrench its leg from the trap. Without food or water it had weakened dramatically, wasting away to skins and bones. It was left so weak that it could do nothing as Crouch dragged it back to his hidden laboratory in the dead of the night, securing it in a special cage he had built. Over the weeks Crouch tended to the wolf, feeding it and nursing it back to health.

Emily was nearly physically sick as she read a passage in which the wolf, nearing full strength, had been fed an old man Crouch had found slumped outside the Pig and Whistle early one morning. With a sadistic glee Crouch went into graphic detail about the way the wolf had picked the man apart piece by piece until nothing remained.

Once he was assured the wolf had returned to rude health, Crouch made his move. He had thought long about how he would be able to safely trade places with the wolf. If he was left in the cage, then Crouch wouldn’t be able to get out once the swap was made. But if he let the wolf out now, he was surely exposing himself to a danger that was too much of a risk. For though he had returned the wolf back to health, he knew (and admired) that the wolf would feel no debt, that there would be no regret or remorse if he did to Crouch what he had done to the old man.

While not perfect, he decided the only solution was to put the wolf to sleep, then open the cage. He could make the change while it was still under, then when he came to it would be he, Crouch, who was the wolf, with the wolf confined to one of his boxes.

Mixing up a sleeping draught, Crouch was shaking with anticipation. Emily read how he had never been so excited by the potential of an experiment, thrilling at the chance to finally achieve his ambition of running with the wolves. He mixed the draught into the wolf’s water and waited. It grew drowsy, closed its eyes and came to rest on the floor of the cage. Crouch made his move.

***

Much of the middle section of Crouch’s notes meticulously detailed his time in the forest, his experiences living as a wolf. From what Emily could work out, he spent years with them, and she wondered why, if he was so happy leading such a life, he had decided to return, to take up where he had left off in human form. Then she saw it:

She brought me back. I would, I believe, have never returned otherwise. I went in thinking I would learn their tricks, their ways, grow to think like them and then return to being Aloysius Crouch, with all I had learned. But the longer I lived as a wolf, the more I realised how perfectly their form was suited to this way of life, their sleek dark fur wrapped around pure, taut muscle, powerful jaws from which there was no escape.

Yet, deep within, as much as I was them, as much as I belonged, a trace of something else remained. I would never even have known if I had not seen her there, this beauty of the forest who appeared as though from nowhere one night and was to make the forest as much her home as I had made it mine.

I watched her, day after day. At first it was a balm, a soothing experience to lay my hot, hungry eyes on such a gentle, refreshing creature. But it grew too much – day after day I would draw near, but was unable to make the final step and reveal myself. It tore me up inside, these contradictory feelings when I was here to learn to let such thoughts go entirely.

It was no use. I had to meet her, discover who she was, what she was doing here. I should never have given into the temptation.

Shaking, Emily read on to discover how the wolves had, though Aloysius’ persistent arguing, taken her mother in. She experienced the scene she had witnessed in the music box, the confrontation in the Golden Grove where her mother and father had fled as one, through Aloysius’ eyes. Once he stood up to Jericho, taken him on directly in front of the other wolves, there was no future for him in their company.

Lucky to escape with his life, he fled the forest and resumed life as Aloysius Crouch, to all appearances an ordinary human being. But he burned inside with an uncontrollable fire. He was, as far as such a man could be, dangerously in love.

Vinyl Diaries XIV: Bridezilla

2007-11-30T09:19:00.001+11:00

Bridezilla
The Mandarin Club
November 28, 2007

They're not quite there yet, but the kiddies in Bridezilla are on their way...

More such talk at Mess + Noise yonder.

Going feral

2007-11-27T11:32:00.000+11:00

A few weeks ago I was roped in by the lovely Angela Stengel as photo monkey for an article she was writing for Cyclic Defrost on Danny Jumpertz and Feral Media.

I was warned that I would be rendered fairly jealous by the Camperdown warehouse that is Feral Media HQ, doubling as a home for Danny and Feral Media co-runner Caroline.

The prediction came true. But putting the green-eyed monster to one side, I managed a few snaps, which can now be found over with Angela's delightful tale.

Farewell

2007-11-26T11:47:00.000+11:00

He's gone.

After more than a decade of deceit and divisiveness, Australia can finally emerge from the long dark shadow cast by outgoing Prime Minister John Howard.

Acknowledged even within his own conservative party as a mean and tricky piece of work, Howard missed the perfect opportunity to retire at the top, steering the Coalition not only to utter humiliation across the nation in Saturday's election, but looking like being only the second prime minister in Australian history to also lose his seat.

A master politician, Howard held onto power as long as he did by preying on ignorance and fear and tapping into the worst aspects of Australian culture and parochialism, through dog whistling xenophobia, pork-barelling and cleverly milking any 'anti-' sentiment onto which he could latch.

This, at a time where the resources boom flooded government coffers with cash that they could use to selectively bribe key constituents in their desperate (and largely successful) bids to stay in power.

As with any election in living memory, it was not won by the opposition but lost by the government. The Coalition's extreme workplace laws and the disgraceful stripping of workers' rights - introduced without even the hint of a mandate - appear to have been Howard's undoing, along with his broken promises on interest rates. An ugly, sloppy campaign based on scaremongering and union-bashing failed to win back lagging support.

Pulling rabbit after rabbit out of the hat in previous elections, there was always the fear that Howard could do it again, but thankfully there was nothing left in the bag of tricks this time around.

The starkest reminder of what we have lived through for almost 12 years of his rule comes in the responses given when Howard or his fellow party members are pressed to point to highlights of his time in power. Again and again they raise his response to the Port Arthur massacre (a welcome tightening of gun controls) and the Bali bombings.

Not a single example is put forward of a visionary policy, a uniting moment, a symbolic or practical gesture that suggests he will leave Australia a better place to live for the trust he has been given.

It would be nice to imagine the landslide return of the Labor government from the wilderness was a vote for a return to decency, respect and caring for others - particularly those most in need. That it was to send a message that we will not tolerate a war-mongering, narrow-minded, lying leader who could share no vision for the future beyond preserving his own legacy.

It's far more likely to reflect the government getting a kicking for rising interest rates and costs of living, with the opposition finally putting forward a candidate that the Government wasn't able to undermine.

But for now there's at least a small window of hope. We have a new government that is not helmed by a climate change skeptic and ideologue on a crusade against 'political correctness', that has promised investment in health, education and tackling climate change, as well as a staged withdrawal of troops from Iraq. A party that will work closely with the US, but hopefully not hand over foreign policy for a chance to be considered George Bush's deputy sherriff.

Issues such as the life expectancy and living conditions of Indigenous Australians are still, as ever, likely to take a back seat - and new leader Kevin Rudd has given little hope to those looking for a more humane refugee policy - but at least we can finally look forward to taking one step at a time towards a brighter future and not feel like we're caught in an inexorable slide into a social, cultural and environmental abyss.

To steal Mungo MacCallum's recollection of Gough Whitlam's quotation of the last line of Dante’s Inferno:

E quindi uscimmo a reverder le stelle

And thence we emerged, to see the stars again.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Four

2007-11-22T09:36:00.001+11:00

Isabelle felt her soft footfall lightly crunch on fallen twigs and drying pine needles, smelling the cool air of the approaching evening. She would need to be back to the shelter she had made herself fairly soon, the electric smell of an approaching storm was tickling her nose. To her left and right the forest appeared an impenetrable tangle, growing in a calculated disorder intended to discourage wayward wandering. The path along which she travelled would not have appeared to almost anybody else to be that, but Isabelle had been here long enough to recognise the telltale, if slight, signs that others had been this way. Small animals mostly, but occasionally a larger creature; man-sized but not walking on two legs as she was now.

She understood that she was looking for something, but wasn’t sure what that might be. She wasn’t retracing her steps, of that she seemed certain, yet the feeling that she would know what it was when she found it was strong.

Isabelle felt an unnerving sense of being watched. She carefully looked around as she went, trying to appear nonchalant, but nothing caught her eye that betrayed the presence of anyone but herself. She was unable to shake the feeling, but was determined not to let the rising fear take hold. She had lived here before, she reminded herself, was familiar with its risks and dramas, and had met and faced them all.

Reaching a huge grey tree, its gnarled branches twisting to the sky like witch’s fingers, thick, coarse bark cracked like a the mud in a dry creek bed, Isabelle stopped. There appeared to be a fork in the path, the choice of which way to follow weighing surprisingly heavily on her, as though a momentous moment was resting on such a seemingly simple decision.

Once she chose one there was no going back. That much she knew. Unsure of what it was for which she was searching – but increasingly certain that it would be found, for better or for worse – Isabelle took a deep breath and looked up at the tree for any sign it might be trying to send. After a long moment, its uppermost branches began to stir, although there was very little breeze in the cooling air. The stirring grew into a twisting, tangling dance, the uppermost branches waving and turning with enchanting grace.

The few tenacious leaves that hung on to the occasional branch held on for dear life, although one that must have been surprised by the sudden activity, caught napping, fell from its previously stable perch. It began a slow flutter towards the forest floor, tracing a diminishing parabola as it fell. Instinctively, Isabelle put out her hand as it neared. The leaf settled neatly into her small cupped hand, a brittle aged leaf alighting like the ghost trace of an ancient butterfly.

Closing her fingers gently over the top of the leaf, Isabelle felt it tickle her palm. She opened her hand again and jumped as the leaf unfurled – it really was a butterfly! But not like any she had ever seen before – a grey-green colour when it had first landed on her palm, it was now a deep blue, the inky near-purple of twilight after a particularly warm summer’s day. It hovered in front of her, darting in small, dashing sweeps in a vaguely circular arc, then took off past the tree, darting to its left. Isabelle hesitated, but seeing the butterfly loop back towards her and head back down the path again – now a crimson flash in the shadowy late afternoon, she followed.

Isabelle had made up her mind to head the other way, but felt compelled to follow, taking it as a sign – of what, she had no idea, but it was too late to go back now.

She followed into a part of the forest she could not recall ever having seen. She had made it her own during her stay, explored what she had thought at the time was every twist and turn, every nook and cranny, so was surprised to be so disoriented.

It was growing cooler as she went on – the sun had dipped over the horizon some time ago and the brush here was quite thick and damp. Every now and then she lost sight of her guide, but just as soon as she was certain it had gone too far to keep up with, she caught another glimpse. Now that it was quite dark it seemed to have a glow of its own, a gently pulsating yellow light flickering with each beating of the wings.

She followed it until it reached a bend in the path that opened out onto a river. Wide and swift-flowing, there was a silvery-sheen on the surface of the water where the break in the forest canopy allowed the full moon to shine. Isabelle watched as the butterfly travelled halfway across the river, soared vertically, then exploded into a million tiny stars that scattered over the water in a blaze of light and colour, then vanished.

Without a second thought Isabelle drew a deep breath and plunged into the river.

Vinyl Diaries XIII: Machine Translations

2007-11-19T11:23:00.001+11:00

Machine Translations + The Bank Holidays
The Gaelic Club
November 16, 2007

A handful of words over at Mess + Noise

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Three

2007-11-16T09:15:00.001+11:00

Something strange was happening. When Emily opened the book to read, she was met with a jumble of letters and images and sketches that bore no relation to anything about which she could make sense.
 What could have possibly happened? She turned to the first page, the passages she had only just read, but was met by the same jagged junkheap, letters used and abandoned, crashing into the corner and jutting nonsensically.

“It knows,” she murmured. “It’s realised I’m not Crouch.”

Emily closed the book again and stared intently at the cover. She placed a hand on its leather front and boomed.

“It is I, Aloysius Crouch. Do you dare to defy me? Reveal yourself, be true to what you are!”

Emily was shocked to hear the cold, fearful voice, not sure where as to where the command had even originated. She had not consciously considered what she would do, yet here she was, bellowing at the book in Crouch’s chilling tone.

While she considered what might have happened, the book started to shake, suddenly so warm she almost dropped it off the edge of the pier, into the lapping waves below. Luckily it caught on one of Crouch’s bony knees and she was able just to keep hold. Tentatively, she reopened the book and saw –with a mix of relief and sickly fear – that the jumble had now rearranged itself back into Crouch’s carefully laid out hand; it was back to how it had been when first she picked it up.

With the same mix of fear and relief, driven by curiosity and urgency, Emily turned to the end of the first section and began to read from where she had left off.

As much as Man fears the wolves, Wolf cannot stand to be around Man. They recognise him for what he is – a weak, pale imitation of what he could be. They have no respect for this, and rightly so!

So how, then, can Man get close enough to Wolf to relearn what he must know?

Until now, there has not been a way. But I, Aloysius Crouch, have discovered a way to become what I need. My many experiments have led to a breakthrough. I have unearthed a process through which I can take the form of any subject of my choosing. At first I was unhappy with the process, unwilling to give my body over to those whose body I was to command. But I have devised a way that this need never occur.

I can keep them, their so-called ‘selves’, in a box as I take control of their form. I need only their body - the rest of them just gets in the way, dilutes my being and makes it difficult to achieve full command.
 By sending them into this box, I free the only obstacle that ever stood between me and taking them over entirely. While this has now worked on a number of occasions with various, expendable urchins from around the village, I now need to find an appropriate form by which to get closer to the wolves who can teach me so much.

Which brings me to my greatest challenge of all – finding just such a wolf that I can become.

Emily had to stop again, feeling her tummy turn backflips as though she were going to be sick. This sick, twisted, cruel monster had so casually talked of using and discarding children in the village – she herself had witnessed just how readily he could sacrifice them.

This time, however, he wasn’t going to get away with it. The determination to put an end to Crouch’s evil-doing boiled Emily’s blood. She could almost feel the steam coming from her ears as she experienced anger and bitterness at those lost lives, all in aid of his sick depravities, this idea that we should live our lives as though beasts.

Emily didn’t have anything against wolves. Her experience in the music box showed her they were far from the kinds of creatures with which she would ever wish to associate, but she also knew that they simply were what they were, you couldn’t hold them any more responsible for that than you could blame the wind for blowing, the moon for rising.

She remembered a day when she could have only been three or four, on a forest walk with her mother and father. As her parents were choosing a spot for their lunch, she saw across the clearing what she had first thought was a funny looking dog. Black, long, large, it had met her eye as she watched it. Silently they stared at each other, her parents busy setting up a blanket and setting down their basket. She looked to see whether her parents had seen it but by the time she turned back to where it had been it was gone.

Emily hadn’t thought to say anything to her parents about what she had seen. She didn’t feel any fear – hadn’t known that she was supposed to – but merely believed it was just one of the forest’s many creatures and no different to have come across than a bunny or a deer.

But now she shivered at the thought of it, wondered if it really had been a wolf after all.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Two

2007-11-13T10:16:00.000+11:00

Isabelle dropped the brush she had just picked up, hearing only a faint distant sound as it clattered to the floor.

She had never told Emily about her time in the woods, or in fact anything from the time before Seaforth. Often Emily had asked about why the other children had grandparents and she didn’t, and where Percy and Isabelle had come from if they had not grown up in Seaforth, but they had always assured her that they would tell her everything when the time was right.

Her voice, trembling, caught in her throat, but she managed to get it out. “What did you just say?”

Emily gazed up at her with her piercing eyes and Isabelle suddenly felt like she had to close her mind off, that Emily was somehow reaching in there and seeing things without her saying a word.

“I asked about your time in the woods. I would like to hear about them.”

Before Isabelle could say anything, Percy came through the doorway. He had his hat in his hand and was just pulling on his coat, so Isabelle knew he was off to town.

“Percy love, why don’t you take Emily down with you? You know she loves a visit into town.”

“Hmmmm?” asked Percy absentmindedly, patting his coat pocket as though assuring himself that whatever it was he had in there had not mysteriously disappeared as he walked into the room.

“Oh yes, why not? Come along Emily, we’ll not be out too long and then you have the rest of the day.”

Isabelle watched Emily and saw she frowned her brow, before quickly forcing on a false smile. She knew Emily normally jumped at the chance to get down to the main street, so was perplexed at the cloud that passed over her. But if she had blinked she would have missed it, for Emily was now nodding at the idea, though a furtive glance thrown over her shoulder told Isabelle that her daughter seemed quite displeased at the prospect of being out with Percy.

“Go get something warm on Emily, so you don’t catch a chill.”

Emily slipped from her seat, and without further a word slipped out through the doorway.

“Percy?” Isabelle began. “Have you noticed anything at all… strange about Emily?”

“What? Oh no, not really. I mean she seems a little quiet at the moment, but then I daresay that’s not all that unusual, she definitely goes through these patches.”

What neither of them would say, but each must have known the other was thinking, was that Percy wouldn’t really have been able to tell if Emily had grown a second head and was speaking fluent Chinese. Percy knew as well as Isabelle that he could be a little vague and distracted while in one of his writing periods, but Isabelle was so proud of him that she did not dare burst his bubble with too much worry, particularly with him so close to being finished.

“Oh, never mind, I’m sure it’s just something that has happened with one of her little friends or something, I’m sure it will all blow over,” Isabelle said, not sure whether she was trying to convince Percy or herself.

She gave him a quick peck on the cheek just as Emily returned through the doorway, now wearing her scarlet cloak and a woollen hat. Percy patted Isabelle goodbye on the arm, took Emily’s hand and walked through the door.

“Your hat!” Isabelle yelled, seeing he had put it on the table while he pulled on his coat. But the sound of her cry was met with the slamming of the front door - they had already gone.

For the first time since she had returned home, Isabelle felt deeply troubled. Everything had seemed as though it were getting back to normal, and now this. What could Emily have possibly meant? Perhaps she had confused the question, so Isabelle wracked her mind for whether she had been on any recent outings into the nearby woods that Emily may have been confused about. But, hanging over this, was the brightly lit world ‘lived’ – Emily had definitely asked about when she had lived in the woods.

Had she said something to Emily about it after all? During her turn perhaps, and that’s why she didn’t remember? But that didn’t seem right, it was some time now that she had been home and Emily had only just sprung it on her, just like that.

Making it hard to work any of this out was the pull her memories of that time were now having on her. While she valiantly tried to stay in the present, to work out what was going on, and what she could possibly say to Emily when she came back – she was not prepared to lie to her daughter – she was drawn down an increasingly slippery slope to that time, to her forest life.

For the last few days it had been so close, somehow within arm’s reach everywhere she went. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but now felt that there must have been something in this strange proximity that had led to Emily’s probing query.

Absentmindedly, Isabelle fiddled with Percy’s hat. Its soft felt contoured to her fingers, acquiesced as she spun it, feeling its familiar shape in her hand. Without really thinking she placed it on her head, feeling it fall over her ears where Percy’s wider head must meet its band. She thought about how good Percy had been to her, keeping things going while she was away in the hospital, looking after the house, after Emily, still working to keep bread on the table and still finding time to come and see her.

She felt bad for having told him about what she had seen, as though it betrayed a weakness that she couldn’t deal with it herself. But she knew he would have wanted to know, knew that they shared absolutely everything; that they had done so ever since...

It was pointless trying not to think of the forest any more. Isabelle had long tried to bury that part of her life, but there was no way she could pretend it had never happened. Not least because that was where she had met Percy, the love of her life, the man for which she had risked everything, and who had now only recently saved her in return.

For a long time it really had seemed like a dream, or a particularly vivid story – somebody else’s – that she had read. Her parents had never read her any stories as a child, but Isabelle had still been in possession of a strong imagination. At times she could feel that this was the realm to which her time belonged, but now she knew there was something holding her back that was in there. She had to go back if she wished to move on.

Isabelle pulled the brim of Percy’s hat down over her eyes, allowing the curtains to be drawn on her present self and entering the memories that had been banking up and seeking release.

Vinyl Diaries XII: Bill Callahan

2007-11-08T11:37:00.001+11:00

Photo by fernando [pixelstains]

Bill Callahan
The Factory Theatre
Wednesday, November 7

If you're in or around Sydney and wondering what that low, humming sound is, you will find one Bill Callahan to blame. Weaving together painterly strokes of life, photographic snapshots taken through windows of strangers left open to catch the breeze, these misleadingly straightforward songs carry deep into the part of our minds that is responsible for our humming cords.

You'll have to excuse the mixed craftaphores above, but Callahan's songs seem to draw heavily on the visual as well as musical arts - subtle gradations of and shifts in colour, light and shading are of utmost importance.

With dark humour and a light touch he deftly opens our eyes to pockets of the world that exist mostly on the periphery of our vision (if at all), leaving traces of these lives indelibly printed on our hearts.

Having toured previously in solo mode as Smog and (Smog), this was the first chance to hear Callahan working with a band, drawing closer to the sounds of his prolific recorded output. The strength of their performance was quite remarkable given they were all local musicians, no doubt fairly hastily cobbled together for a short run of shows. On drums was the ever-more ubiquitous skinman savant Laurence Pike (Triosk/Pivot etc), with Tim Rogers (better known to most as Jack Ladder) on bass. The 'strings' billed for the show were fiddlers three, including Lara Goodridge of Fourplay.

Opening the set with 'Our Anniversary' from Supper, Callahan shares the droll tale of an anniversary night where the car keys have been hidden to keep itchy feet from fleeing:

It's our anniversary and you've hidden my keys
This is one anniversary you're spending with me

'Diamond Dancer' is an odd yet infectious little groove, and you know Callahan's into this ghost of Bowie number because his left leg does a little back kick from the knee - like that in a kiss on a bridge in a film you once saw.

And that's one point to mote about Callahan's music - it's odd. I suggested earlier it's an open window, but perhaps more accurately it's a fractured mirror. We're staring into it and while we may occasionally catch fragments of our own reflection, we're seeing, layered over this into a composite reflection of humanity, the lives of those beyond, the yet-met, the long-forgotten.

'Held' bounces in like the big old baby to which Callahan compares himself, the bass bumbling it along just so. It's a cheerful, smoky, Texas-flavoured chomp on a side of beef with lashings of sticky barbecue sauce.

This showier side warms the night up nicely, but the special moments are those that quieten, and a hush falls as the finger-picked opening to 'Teenage Spaceship' marks the first such moment.

Adept at turns of phrase that lift the corners of our mouths, Callahan lets the shell drop and twilight fall. You realise that while he looks closely at the audience between lines, drawing connections and truly appreciative for the interest, his eyes reflexively close as he sings each line. Though closed the lids remain wide - they're not clenched but veiled, alligator eyelids that he can somehow see through.

This twilight seems a natural fit for Callahan, reflective yet optimistic. The upbeat 'Sycamore' from this year's Woke on a Whaleheart pulls on the going-out boots, which we wear down to the stables for the rather insistent 'Let Me See The Colts'.

Throughout the ste, as those familar with his work would expect, there's something wonderfully soothing about Callahan's voice. He has a warm, mesmerising baritone that can't help but put you at ease. It seems drenched in honey, but even richer - royal jelly perhaps, a bee conspiracy.

Hand in hand with the loping, looping music it evokes autumn time and falling leaves, reds, oranges and browns, golden light under silver skies. He uses it beautifully in 'The Well', in which a foolish act spurred by frustration leads him to chance across an old abandoned well in the woods that demands to be yelled into:

I gave it a couple hoots
A hello
And a fuck all y'all

I guess everybody has their own thing
That they yell into a well

It's these moments in his story-telling that you think about your own life, its pace and direction and whether you are still in touch with enough of the simple things - when did you last let a river carry you in its current, how long since brambles nicked at your knee, what are you doing that can possibly match the joy of swearing down a well?

These questions and images travel with us as we weave down Callahan's river into b-side 'Bowery' and the haunting 'Say Valley Maker'

With the grace of a corpse
In a riptide
I let go

We let go too, feeling currents warm and cool cross paths. They steer us downriver into the splendid 'Bathysphere' where we reach the open mouth, our seven-year-old selves dreaming of life at sea, between coral, silent eel, silver swordfish.

"My home is the sea" we are assured... until, at the very end:

When I was seven
My father said to me
'But you can't swim'
And I've never dreamed of the sea again

That last line always slices like a knife - a twist in the tale that abruptly sends us crashing back to earth. Catpower's wonderful cover of the song on What Will the Community Think is perhaps more driven, hence a heavier crash at the end, but Callahan's near-whimsy in the lead-up makes it a more surprising turn.

We're now well and truly in the palm of his hands, so it's with tingly, overbrimming joy that I realise he has started playing 'River Guard', so minor and delicate a piece I had never dared hope it would make it to a live set.

But here he was, the prison guard with a heart of gold, sitting in the tall grass while his charges gain a rare glimpse of life as it could otherwise have been.

When I take the prisoners swimming
They have the time of their lives
I love to watch them floating
On their backs
Unburdened and relaxed

The gooseflesh he experiences later that night, standing on a cliff, watching wind rip the leaves from the trees, is the same we feel now, and that stays with us as he and the band leave the stage.

This is the Bill Callahan I love - that, if he retains a belief in his craft and his gift, could have him one day wearing the boots of Johnny Cash that no soul has been able to get near. He's got a long way to go and many more roads to travel (he's nudging 40), and may very well toss it all in for a back porch somewhere with lady-friend Joanna Newsom and a horde of shoeless mud-caked little people, but it's worth tagging along for the journey for as long as we're invited.

There is a truth, honesty and integrity to his stories, songwriting and performance that while not necessarily peerless, certainly stands heads and shoulders above the bulk of the singer-songwriter field. Which isn't to say we're privy to the full picture - there's more burbling beneath the surface than we've yet been allowed to discover; but in time...

To some, Callahan comes across as dispassionate, echoing Lou Reed in steadiness of tone and play with meter, but the passion is buried within and well worth scratching around to discover. At heart and adding to its likely longevity is a defiant optimism. It's small-scale and complicated by dreams that are a little beyond our reach, but it avoids all traces of resentment or bitterness. We see this in 'Hit the Ground Running' (not in tonight's set), in which he calls bitterness the lowest sin and paints a gruesome picture of the bitter man who rots within: "I've seen his smile/ Yellow and brown/ The bitterness is rotting down".

Returning to the stage, his foolish heart dives into the glittering 'Rock Bottom Riser', coming up for a breath of fresh country air 'In the Pines'. This gorgeous traditional song has a fragile moonlit beauty and a strange effect - anaesthetisising yet invigorating at the same time.

Closing out the evening, the upbeat near-jauntiness of the slide up the frets that is 'Cold Blooded Old Times' ensured toes would be tapped through the rest of the night, dreams would be hijacked with golden light-painted country cottages and days would be spent humming jewels from the treasure chest.

Having wondered what to expect of Mr Callahan finally stepping out from behind the Smog handle, there need have been no fear. The mask has dropped, the Smog has lifted; we are still in safe hands.

Vinyl Diaries XI: Radiohead - In Rainbows

2007-10-30T11:08:00.001+11:00

Rainbows? Not exactly miserabilist material. But then neither, quite, have Radiohead ever comfortably fit the bill as moping marauders.

Posterchildren for the disaffected, perhaps, but those with at least a modicum of interest in the world beyond. While their albums have steered, at times, into near sociopathically paranoid territory, perversely revelling in android tendencies and industrial coldness, there’s always been a heart beating away in there – a tendency towards shedding the replicant’s tear.

Such has been their impact on the musical landscape since emerging from Oxfordshire in the early 1990s, a new Radiohead album can never simply arrive according to its own terms. The past rests heavily on each new outing’s shoulders, recent releases dealing with this by smashing any traces of a link with the past before they have a chance to find a foothold. It’s not a stretch to suggest that their 19997 opus OK Computer irrevocably changed the face of modern music, a multi-faceted monster that simultaneously tore the still beating heart out of the sickening rock beast and breathed new life into the decaying form.

The claustrophobic Kid A and its slow-burning late-born twin Amnesiac took a twist for the darker, while Hail to the Thief put the piano front and centre and ratcheted up the ice quotient, veering into a realm of electronic detachment and giving slightly too much rein to Thom Yorke’s maddened disconnect.

The long-awaited follow up was finally unveiled last week, a commercially courageous (yet ultimately savvy) decision to release it online without record label backing, with fans allowed to decide just how much they wished to pay. But gimmick or musical distribution model of the future, the simple and wonderful fact is 10 new Radiohead tracks are available, and in the context in which the band has always worked best – album form.

Opener 15 Step misleads with the electro-clap impulses of a semi-detached drum-machine, not a million miles from recent Yorke territory in last year’s solo outing The Eraser. But after Yorke drops a few vocal lines, the humans arrive in force. There’s an organic, jazz-flavoured licking from Jonny Greenwood’s crystal clear guitar, Yorke warbles through the next section over the top of Colin Greenwood’s bass murmuring along near-funkily, then, instead of a chorus as such, Yorke shimmers in as Jeff Buckley piped through a church organ.

Phil Selway’s complex beatkeeping breaks, snaps, crackles back into being – and then they’re gone.

Bodysnatchers swaggers in on a fuzzy, looping riff – an old-fashioned rock stomper that cuts through the skin, peels to the core of your being, appeals to emotional fraughtness rather than the intellect. It’s the long-lost missing link between Pablo Honey and The Bends, unapologetically abrasive and squallingly . Yorke’s in typical self-deprecating mode - “I’ve no idea what I’m talking about” - but the music just doesn’t back it up.

It thumps and stonks along on this rollicking rock plane until, suddenly, smack on the halfway mark, it tears headlong over the precipice – a gorgeous, bruising, soaring bridge bringing a quick run of shivers to the spine.

Has the light gone out for you?
Because the light's gone out for me
It is the 21st century
It is the 21st century

It's glorious, an unshackled freefall with the euphoria one experiences in a dream of flying, over far too soon and dropping you back into a squalling shambles of a noise-pit, hungry for more.

Avoiding the comfortable format of verse-chorus-verse, these tracks are being built in ways that seem a natural fit for the idea being expressed. The strongest point in the track is echoed throughout the album – occurring in the bridges, in which the extrapolation of the elementary ideas has taken place, taken hold, and the shackles are off. They, and we, are free to roam in this new place, a new space of imaginative freedom where nobody will laugh at you for falling.

Long-time live fan favourite Nude is the perfect comedown, wandering up a damp and dreary corridor with a ghostly passage of backsucking drums and Bjorky ooh-ooh-oohs, dropping away to reveal a bassline of Mogadon funk and gentle tacka-tacka-tacked drums, before Yorke’s echoing, plaintive, signature angel-whimper:

Don’t get any
big ideas
They’re not
gonna happen

Stripped back to blues-jazz flavoured guitar, vocals, bass and drums, it’s unadorned, warm-blooded, breathing, the human condition adrift in a cavernous darkening. Cue the sample wash, then Yorke’s first real soar skyward of the album – deliciously confusing, as it is with the word ‘sinking’. More oohs follow, then it’s gone.

Counted in on drum sticks, crystalline single guitar notes and then overlayed with handfuls of broken chords, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien's guitars tangling deliciously, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi is a bottom of the ocean swim through a tangle of lushly fecund reeds.

Again you actually picture a band, musicians playing to each other, for each other, chancing across the magical chemistry that has kept them yearning, stitched together for nigh on two decades. It’s the second track in a row that wouldn’t have found space on any of the last three albums, the mood too open, too natural, and one feels that Yorke’s solo album has freed up the band to explore new territory together, free of the electro-clinical albatross his dabbling was threatening to offer their exposed necks. It's not that the push towards these cold new boundaries wasn't welcome - it was an essential part of the Radiohead experience - but that it was threatening to become something of a new orthodoxy.

As the track progresses we’re sinking into the deepest ocean, drifting to the bottom of the sea. Yorke’s projecting out into the fish, but also drawing us with him. We’d be as crazy not to follow as he felt he would be, so we all weave amidst rocks phantom and real, perhaps searching for the near-mythical coy koi upon which Frank Black once chanced while on holiday from his mind.

This joyous underwater dive gets us three quarters of the way through, before we realise we really should have gone up for a breath much much earlier. It’s far too late now, and carried along by a sudden change in current, bright explosions in our mind as the oxygen entirely depletes in the form of the spangliest guitar undertow since Johnny Marr was but a Smith, we hit the bottom.

The track shimmers and glitters some more, light shattering as we look back through the ocean’s surface, absent-mindedly running our fingers against our scales and so comfortable in our new gills we don’t even wonder about them. Hidden at the very end, buried in the sand like a sunken gold sovereign, we hear Yorke’s chest voice, the rarely offered baritone we nearly never encounter these days, an alter-ego to the alter-ego reserved for a disarming dropping of the guard.

From the sea we travel into space, All I Need an open-sky odyssey that has Yorke waiting in the wings as angelic synths roll in, rippling around the growling, purring bass. It is a stripped back work of breathtaking beauty and heart-rending fragility – it’s Radiohead as the battered, heart-on-sleeve, baffled romantic, laying it all on the table for the world to see. Glistening glockenspiel gives it a bright innocence, until, once more, the safe ground crumbles beneath our feet and we’re thrust, along with handfuls of loose piano chord tumbles, into an Icelandic abyss reflecting a glacier blue hue borrowed from Sigur Ros.

Just as abruptly we’re tipped into Faust Arp, a strange, finger-picked acoustic guitar and string-swept folk-tinged affair. It’s modern folk yet without the psych or the freak, Nick Drake gone Mersyside.

Through headphones or well-spaced speakers the urgent coruscations of Reckoner offer disparate pieces playing in each ear - the left offering a 60s, Byrds inspired pop affair of tambourine and assorted other shakery, the right offering brilliantly broken beats and clangy cymbal stumbles. The two seemingly incompatible halves are allowed to drift in and out of their own parallel universes until the bass burbles in and the drums follow its looping bumble, the whole wonderful mess eventually sutured via plaintive falsetto, Yorke relishing his Dr Frankenstein stitching together of an album highlight.

The strings sweep back in for the bridge, the drums having dropped out to give them room, before all the goodies that have reared their head until now return. Divine melodies and optimistic progressions give it an air of hope, a move from minor keys into a more positive space than they may ever have inhabited.

This mood sticks around for House of Cards, yet there is ultimately something a little flat about the whole affair. It’s worthy enough in its own right, but too easily dealt with by that handful of dangerous tags – ‘pleasant’ perhaps being the most concerning. It drifts past without drawing the usual emotional response – there’s none of the sting in the tail we have come to crave. Perhaps it’s a grower, but I fear it’s a skipper.

A timely save comes with Jigsaw Falling Into Place, a rhythmically driven exhortation to ‘let it out’ and to dance - to dance the dance of the damned perhaps, but at least a dance to remember, a blunt instrument propelling us all gleefully along the road to ruin.

Album closer Videotape is the most pianofied track of the whole journey. Resting on a simple drum tack-boom, there is a pearly gate optimism difficult to recall anywhere in the Radiohead ouvre. Perfection is contemplated and – surprisingly - accepted .

No matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
Because I know today has been
The most perfect day
I’ve ever seen

Doubled piano chords high and low, tight drum rolls and stuttering tacka-tacks keep the space contemplative, the final lines echoing in our minds, a most un-Radiohead-like sentiment metronomically dropped and indelibly imprinted on the psyche as In Rainbows fades to black. The pot at the end of the rainbow reveals not gold as such, but life as it can be, a dream made real because, let’s face it, it’s there for the taking.

Surprising in its lack of grand gestures, histrionic propulsions and dramatic flourishes, there is a refreshing honesty throughout In Rainbows that is in reflection quite exhilarating. It is perhaps most groundbreaking in the sense there’s nothing groundbreaking about it at all. It doesn’t smash its way through, it doesn’t reinvent a wheel. It’s a band, five no-longer-lads from Abingdon, in love with music, perhaps even life, shamelessly, guiltlessly, displaying that love for the world to see.

The feeling is not that they are playing safe, but playing true. Muse can keep the overwrought drama queen territory they’ve carefully mined, Coldplay the syrupy hollowness over the emotional equivalent of a scraped knee. This newfound territory for Radiohead is both more moribund but – because of it – more true to life. It’s British but not the stiff upper lip; it’s the awareness of class, of difference, of struggle – personal and social – but with a newfound celebration of what can exist alongside and within all of that. If someone wants to be fitter, happier, and do so in a way at which they may once have reflexively sneered or despaired, they will, for now, be let be.

It’s not a return to any earlier stage, nor is it a complete exorcising of their last outing. Yet it’s undeniably, quintessentially Radiohead. The most striking thing is they seem comfortable in their own skin, finally happy to accept they are what they are and, as such, they have produced an unapologetic Radiohead album, soaked in the toys with which they love to play, the feints and glancing blows against normality in an unthinking sense, in favour of an aware position, an understanding of self in relation to a wider picture.

We don’t need to stop the fight for what we believe in, but we can occasionally let down our guard, smile at what we love, touch what we cherish, revel in the golden rays of sun peeking from beneath the approaching (or passing) storm.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-One

2007-10-19T09:20:00.000+10:00

Emily had to get out. Somewhere in this book, she knew, must lie the answer to how she could get her life back on track, undo the damage she had done by going behind her mother’s back and seeking out the music box from Aloysius Crouch, knowing all along that it wasn’t the right thing to do.

She realised she was getting nowhere by simply being angry at herself for having led them all into this mess. She had to come up with a way forward and dwelling on the past was not going to help.

Placing the book in a pocket inside the coat, she looked around to see if there was anything else that might prove of any use. It was all pretty much as she remembered it, although something further down the bench did catch her eye. She wondered if it had been there the first time – a round, wooden, tubular device that looked like a small telescope.

Emily walked over and gingerly picked it up. It felt quite heavy for its size and as she turned it over in her hands, she saw that it did have an eyepiece – perhaps it was a telescope after all? On closer inspection it seemed more like a kaleidoscope, a glass dome perched at the other end.
 Emily raised it to her eye, but couldn’t make anything out. She began to wonder what Crouch used it for and was startled to find his image suddenly appear. She almost dropped it, but realising he wasn’t in fact in the room she managed to keep him in sight. She watched as he picked up the device, placing it to his own eye, twisting it around for a few moments, then making some notes in his book with his quill.

Emily’s mind turned to Minerva, and Crouch’s image slowly faded to be replaced by that of Minerva at home in her subterranean sanctuary, deep in discussion with both Topkinses.

Lastly, Emily pictured her mother. As Minerva disappeared from sight, her mother replaced her. She looked happy and well, working on the garden of their home. Emily knew the image could be coming from any time, that she couldn’t be too certain that all was still okay, yet she felt a reassurance at having at least seen her mother after what felt like so long away.

She placed the ‘spyroscope’ (as she thought of it) in another coat pocket and turned for the door. There was much to be done and Emily had to get somewhere she could think.

***

Emily opened the door and stepped through into the empty shopfront, better able to see it than her first time through, her eyes far better adjusted to the gloom.

She saw now the shop must have once been a toy store. Along the wall there still remained shelves that held a few spinning tops, some books and a few troubled looking dolls. Emily wondered what those dolls must have seen, who they may have witnessed coming and going from this place, what secretive business they were here upon.

Making her way to the front door, Emily turned the handle and was shocked by just how bright it was outside. She lost her footing as she stepped over the threshold, not noticing the street was a little below door level. Her hat tumbled off her head and rolled a little way down the street. Leaning down to pick it up, she was surprised to see Trixie Sopworth, a girl in her year at school.

“Trixie!” she exclaimed before thinking, so pleased to see a familiar face after all this time. She realised her mistake just as she saw the petrified look in Trixie’s face. To be addressed by Mr Crouch would have been bad enough, for him to know your name would be truly terrifying. She knew there was little she could do to allay Trixie’s fears so she quickly dusted of the cap, placed it on her head as she regained full height and stepped quickly down the street.

Emily knew she was heading the wrong way, but catching a fresh waft of the harbour, she knew this was the place to go to clear her head and work out her next step. Passing the last of the street’s shops, she stepped out into the cobbled road, passed the whitewashed Pig and Whistle inn with its gently swinging sign and turned the corner, a blast of sea breeze stinging her eyes as she stepped onto the rickety pier.

Sea birds hovering nearby took off as she neared, their soft white feathers fleeing from the black coated intruder, circling warily and keeping a safe distance. Their harsh throaty cries layered and built with neither rhyme nor reason; a messy noise far from that of the tuneful twittering of those living further up the hill in the glens and dales she would occasionally wander when given free rein to disappear for the day.

She had often wondered at the life of the sea birds and how different it was to their cousins up the hill. They were separated by only a mile or two, but their worlds could not have been more disparate. The sparrows and starlings seemed to Emily very much home bodies. They may dart and dash here and there and poke about for bugs and worms when hungry, singing out their lovelorn whistling at others, but she knew they spent much of their time attending to fairly domestic duties, improving their nests, picking for it choice twigs and preparing it for laying.

Their colouring was complex – mottled, speckled, browns and blacks and reds and yellows and blues, while no two of their songs ever seemed the same.

These sea birds, on the other hand, the gulls and terns and cormorants, were almost uniformly black, white or grey. While they would hover in the same places, it never seemed to Emily that this was home. It was certainly their territory – Emily had seen some quite territorial behaviour by certain characters – but it seemed more like a marriage of convenience to a location that supplied them with enough fish scraps to fight over than any true link with the place.

Their cries seemed so base, greedy, always warnings rather than greetings, spiteful rather than playful.

She wondered at how little interaction there was between the two worlds, how rare it had been to see these sea birds up in the hills. Occasionally she would see them soaring high above them, but never landing and exploring, showing any curiosity about this green and brown world so differently textured and populated than their own grey and blue.

Once she had seen a lone sparrow hopping along the shoreline, as though looking for something it had lost – little sparrow spectacles or such. As the waves crashed into the beach and the suddsy wake washed up the shore, the sparrow looked so out of place, so dwarfed by the sea, she suddenly feared for its safety. It must have been innocent to the sea’s power, her ability to spring a fatal surprise as easily and thoughtlessly as a person might sneeze.

She watched it travel further and further up the beach, losing sight of it before she could be certain it would be able to return home safely. She wanted to follow it, to make sure it was okay, but knew she had to let it be, do its own thing regardless of the consequences.

Before this she had thought the sea birds somewhat simple and lacking in the charm of the hill birds, but seeing the sparrow up against the sea she realised she had been looking at the sea birds through unfair eyes. Now she saw their inner grace, the way they danced and tussled with the sea, the manner in which they were effortlessly at ease with her, in tune with her rhythms and pulses. She would watch them glide along invisible currents and soar with the updrafts, now almost disdainful of the hill birds and their nervous, stuttering flights that seemed in contrast so random, at odds with nature rather than one with her.

She never failed to thrill at that moment, that brave flash of courage and certainty, when they would soar up, up, up, and then plunge – a vertical missile ploughing through the sea’s barrier at break-neck speed, a precision dive that penetrated the unknown.

Emily had by now reached the end of the pier. She sat with her side resting against a white painted pylon, dangling Crouch’s long, thin legs from under the coat over the edge of the drop. The wind was a quite solid gale, lifting spray into her face as she kept her eyes open, smelling deeply of its freshening promise. There really was no better way to clear the mind, scour the jumble of thoughts and fears, except perhaps to plunge into her depths, feeling the buffeting waves tumble and toss you, all your thoughts spent on breath and survival and leaving no room for day-to-day trivialities.

While she longed painfully to run up to her home, throw open the door and confront Crouch for his wrongdoings, Emily knew this approach was impossible. She could try explaining to her mother what had happened, but how would she even get her to listen, let alone have any chance of convincing her?

And even if she did, what of it? She was still trapped in Crouch’s body, Crouch in full control of hers. There was no way she could ever hope to have her old life back if she lost her chance of drawing Crouch back to his chamber, finding a way to swap their bodies back. Emily closed her eyes, letting the sound envelope her. There was a guilty pleasure in all this, knowing her mother rarely brought her down to the sea.

She loved it here and she would often wonder at why they didn’t spend more time down by the harbour, or further along the coast where the village tapered out and only a few rough shacks, inhabited by silent, bearded men, shirtless, linen pants held up by a rough twist of rope around the waist, seemingly forever drunk on salt and sun.

Emily took a deep, salty breath, reached into her pocket, took out Crouch’s book and began to read.

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty

2007-10-08T21:26:00.000+10:00

A slanting diamond of sunlight framed by the window rested on the kitchen floor. Isabelle wondered what would happen if one stood in it for too long; if the floor might open up and whisk you away, closing behind as if you had never been.

Going back over her dream of last night, a dream that hung in the air this morning like her own personal rain cloud hovering over her own head, she wondered at what it all meant.

It was true that she hadn’t had as much time to spend with Emily lately. While Percy worked by day and finished his book by night, a study on bird life that had received interest from a publisher he had met quite by chance passing through Seaforth, she had been working overtime to keep the house in order.

Percy, meanwhile, had been distant for some weeks. It wasn’t that he was deliberately avoiding them or anything like that, but even when he was there, at the dinner table or on their evening walks, you knew his mind was really in his papers, worrying over a wingspan or a flight pattern or a nesting habit.

Isabelle was immensely proud of Percy and his work, but she nevertheless felt a terrible loneliness when he was in his writing and sketching frame of mind, detached from her and impossible to form a connection. Emily always seemed to take it quite well, seemingly understanding that what he was doing was quite important to him.

The creaking door brought Isabelle back to her senses. Stepping carefully through the doorway, Emily shuffled through into the kitchen. In one hand she was holding a boar-bristled hair brush, in the other a length of buttercup-yellow ribbon. The way she held them out towards her mother seemed almost a peace offering, which Isabelle took it to be since Emily hadn’t come to her to have her hair brushed for a long time.

Wordlessly, she took the proffered brush and began stroking it through Emily’s hair. A pang of tenderness made her heart flutter. All her anger of last night began to dissipate. Isabelle thought back to when she was Emily’s age, the impossibility of relating with her parents, the troubled childhood that their chilly indifference to her existence entailed.

She wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to that fierce, independent spirit. Her family life was in many ways ideal – Percy was a loving, considerate, caring man; Emily was a bright, intelligent and generous daughter. They made ends meet and lived in relative comfort, certainly more so than she had ever imagined possible as a child.

Yet somewhere along the way, with all her needs met and a comfortable, untroubled life, something of her essence, her fire, has been snuffed out.

When the wolf had appeared at the window, everything changed. What had scared Isabelle most, what had terrified her more than the prospect that the wolf would enter the house and devour her, was the frisson of excitement that she felt, the sense that, finally, something was happening in her life again.

She did not dare admit anything like that to poor old Percy, particularly because she was unsure herself what it even meant. Spying Aloysius that night – for she knew it could be no other – she was given a glimpse into a world that could have been hers. She knew, of course, it was not a world for her, that she had followed her heart and that she loved Percy and Emily more than anything in the world, but it was nevertheless a shock to discover in herself these strange feelings of ambivalence to this life and an uncomfortable attraction to the danger of the unknown.

This had all messed with her fragile mind terribly and she put up little resistance to some time away to regather herself, relieved to be away from the scene of her encounter.

“Mother?”

“Yes Emily dear?”

“Tell me what you are thinking.”

Isabelle realised she had been brushing Emily’s hair in the same place over and over, quite absentmindedly. She reached for the ribbon and looped it underneath, crossed the ends and formed a quick bow.

“Oh, nothing particular,” Isabelle said in what she hoped was an off-hand fashion.
“Just thinking about what we might get up to today.”

Emily put her hand up to her hair, felt the ribbon in place and turned around.
“Mother?”

“Yes dear?”

“I’ll help you with anything you like today. But can I ask you one thing?”

“And what’s that?”

“Tell me about your time living in the woods.”

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Nine

2007-10-04T11:11:00.000+10:00

Emily sneezed. She was shocked to hear the sound it made, a rough, deep noise far from the dainty ‘atchoo’ to which she was accustomed. It reminded her of the task at hand. Alone, her thoughts twisted and tumbled and she found it difficult to put them into order. She looked around, her eyes now accustomed to the gloom, settling on the bench across the room. Striding over, Crouch’s coat billowing behind her with each step, she reached the bench before knowing quite what drew her. There, lying closed once again, was the book she had earlier spied:

Metaphysical Marvels and Unlocking the Unknown:
A study by Aloysius Crouch

Reaching out, her fingers softly traced the hard leather cover. She lifted it, her nose catching its musty, inky, bookish smell. Opening to the first page, her finger tracing the curve of Crouch’s neat looping script, she began to read.

It is here that I begin. Until now, there is nothing. After now – everything. The past is already forgotten. It never happened. It belongs in the dustbin of history, so much rotting horse-flesh, a broken vase that cannot hope to hold even a semblance of life, for the decay of its own demise has already overtaken the living, already stamped on each and every one of us the foul stench of defeat. Defeat at the hands of time, of the unswerving march of the flesh’s weakening.

I will not allow this to happen to me. I have too much to do to allow this pre-ordained defeat to diminish my grand plan.

There is, in this life, one chance given to us all. Most never truly grasp the moment when it arrives. But not me. My moment has arrived and I have taken it. I have the will, the need, and now the means to reshape this seemingly unbendable trajectory.

I will bend time to my own will. I will dictate how it moves, where it goes, what it allows to happen. No longer will it shape me, tell me what I am. I am in command. I will prevail. It is here that I begin.

Emily had to stop reading. The forcefulness of the passage had left her winded, a powerful blow that stopped her breathing. She wasn’t really sure what Crouch was on about, but more unsettling than the content was the sheer, naked vociferousness of its thrust, a brutal and unflinching hunger that felt distinctly at odds with nature.
 Crouch was clearly determined to go to any lengths to pursue whatever twisted plans he had in mind and Emily was unsure as to how she could possibly hope to have any chance of coming up against such a man, of triumphing in the face of such a single-minded and calculating foe.

Forcing a deep breath, she read on.

I deny history but I hold on to what I have learned. That is this: Man is the greatest contradiction. So powerful. So weak. So capable. So inadequate. King of the jungle. At the mercy of all beasts.

It needn’t be this way. This weakness can be stripped away, this inadequacy banished to the pyre. Man can learn much from the beasts that show no mercy. Mercy is for the weak, the foolish, the misguided. To do so, Man must turn to the beasts that hold the secret of what he can be. There is much to admire in the lion, the jackal, the panther. But there is one beast above all that can open the door to understanding for Man, that can unlock the answer of how to be everything he intends to be.

Emily knew what must come next. She cast her mind back to what she had seen in the forest, the encounter between her parents and the wolves, the way her mother had saved her father all that time ago. An image of Aloysius burned brightly in her mind, quite literally – rimmed with fire, his very fur glowed with the intense heat of unbridled passion, aflame with his hunger.
 She saw now what she had not seen the first time, the way he looked at her mother, the way the whole show seemed to be for her benefit. If he had thought she would be impressed he was severely mistaken – this brutality and blatant flaunting of power against the prone figure of her father had instilled in her mother an icy regard for Aloysius, while further cementing her love, care and affection for Percy.

Forced to risk everything to protect him, their hearts held so close to each other against a common threat, they began to beat as one. From that moment forward, there was no question of their separation. To be apart was to attempt the impossible – to be without their own heart.

Though she knew what was to come, Emily returned to the book. She hoped to glean at least some idea of how Crouch’s mind worked, to draw from his writing a hint of the man beneath the mask. The more she read, the more worried she became, but she knew she must go on.

The wolf has no contradiction. It is only what it is. It is power, hunger, need. It can be trusted for it holds no store in trying to be anything but what it is. The fox will wile, the hyena wait. The wolf will be itself, at all times, acting in its own immediate interests and answerable to nothing but its own hunger.

There is much to admire here, much to learn. Man, so distracted by notions of morality and social acceptability, has buried his true self. He is much closer to the wolf than he is prepared to admit. Man and wolf are born almost the same, yet from there everything is done to change Man from what he truly is. The wolf has no such shackles put on him and is free to be what he was born to be. Man, meanwhile, is made weak, compliant, shaped to believe that he is no better than his fellow, need want nothing more than what it is decided he should have.

I will change this. I will make Man everything he can be. I will learn to be Man from his closest cousin, I will run with the wolf and relearn how to be what I know, deep inside, I already I am. I will be reborn as myself, as who I was always supposed to be.

Robbed of this self for so long, stripped of my true being, I denounce all that has come before. History is dead. It is here that I begin.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Eight

2007-09-28T14:25:00.000+10:00

Isabelle woke with a start. Her unsettled sleep had been even more fatiguing than having been awake, suffering under the weight of exhausting, messy dreams. She didn’t want to remember them, but they were too fresh, too clear to avoid.

She was out on the sea in a small wooden rowboat with Percy and Emily. It was a calm day, the three of them sharing in the peace and tranquillity that can only be felt without the distracting influence of landscape. Gently bobbing on the slightest of swells, the sun was shining, the sky a deep blue perched atop the emerald ocean and a restful spirit hung lightly in the air.

Without a word, Emily stood up. She smiled at her parents, waved her fingers in a gentle farewell and stepped delicately over the edge of the boat. Isabelle watch in frozen terror as her daughter plunged into the sea, disappearing below the green surface. After a few moments passed she caught sight of Emily’s white dress billowing on the current and was relieved to see she was coming back to the surface. Emily broke through and reappeared where Isabelle could see her, her hair plastered to her head. She opened her eyes and looked into her mother’s, peaceful and free of the anxiety that one might have expected.

A trace of a smile played on the upturned corners of her mouth. She kept her eyes on her mother as she slowly began to drift away. Isabelle was unable to act as she wanted. She was prepared to leap into the sea and wrap her arms around her daughter, paddle her back to the safety of the boat, or sink quietly with her if need be, but for some reason she was simply unable to move. Emily had been quite near at first, but now drifted further and further away. Girl and boat seemed to be answering to two separate flows, cross-currents that tore the daughter from her mother’s life.

Isabelle turned to Percy to prevail upon his fatherly love to save Emily, but the same near-smile danced upon his lips as it had on the daughter’s. Isabelle was confused as to why he wasn’t helping, hating his indifference to his daughter’s fate, but also curious as to whether perhaps he knew something about what was happening that she didn’t realise.

Snapping out of her frozen state, Isabelle took to the oars. She rowed and rowed as fast as her slight form could, Emily drifting tantalisingly close, yet also too far for her to seriously believe she could reach out and draw her back in.

Long into the afternoon she rowed, while twilight soon smeared the sky with pastels stolen brazenly from the orchard. She rowed through until the stars in the sky seemed to outnumber the drops in the ocean. She let them guide her, for now she could not see Emily at all. She knew she was still nearby, but had to take the whispered word of the stars for it.

It was from this starlit striving that Isabelle woke, in naked despair that she had not reached her daughter before waking. It felt like a terrible omen, despite being only a dream. If only she had slept long enough to get Emily back in the boat.

Isabelle wondered at what had woken her. The wind was howling, but that wasn’t it, there was nothing unusual about that at this time of year. As though her question had summoned an answer then and there, she heard it again – the footfall in the hall that must have woken her from her uneasy passage through the night.

It sounded like someone was very carefully making their way down the creaking hall. She heard more footsteps, and one final creak just outside her bedroom door.
 Isabelle waited for the crack of light to appear, for the door to swing open and reassure her that her daughter was indeed safe and well. But there was no light, the door remained closed. Isabelle realised she was holding her breath – the covers were pulled up to her chin, but her ears remained attuned to hear the faintest trace of sound.

An interminable time passed, then she heard the creak of the hall again. The footsteps were in retreat, heading towards Emily’s room. The mother pictured her child returning to her own bed, having decided in some internal struggle against turning to the comfort of her parents. Isabelle turned to the window, but shut her eyes tightly when they saw the stars, a painful reminder of her draining, horrible dream.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Seven

2007-09-26T09:07:00.000+10:00

“Are you sure you can’t come with me?”

Oscar shook his head sadly, just managing to catch his hat as it fell off his head.

“I’m sorry Miss Emily, but I really shouldn’t be here at all. If I don’t get back now, I won’t have time to say goodbye to everybody.”

“Goodbye? But where are you going?”

Oscar bit his lip and stayed very quiet, suddenly finding the back of his hands very interesting.

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Oscar, tell me what’s going on.”

Oscar looked up at Emily, then looked around behind him as though he expected somebody must be there, listening. Although the room was empty, he dropped his voice and leant in.

“Don’t let Bernard know I’m telling you this, he wouldn’t approve,” he whispered.

“I promise,” Emily assured.

“Well, as you would know by now, we live inside that music box.”

“Yes, but...”

“Well surely you’ve worked out by now what you have to do?”

“I have to get home. Get Crouch away from my family.”

“Yes, but that’s not quite all. You need to stop him once and for all.”

“And how will I do that?”

“You must destroy the music box.”

Emily was horrified. How could she even consider destroying that world, so rich, so wonderful - so full of enchantment?

“But Minerva never...”

“She told me to tell you once we were back. She though if she told you while you were in there, there was a risk you would make a big deal about it.”

“But it is a big deal!”

Emily couldn’t believe what she was hearing. There had to be another way.

“There’s no point thinking that way, there’s simply no other way,” Oscar said firmly.

“If you don’t stop Crouch now, who knows what more harm he might be capable of? We always knew he was a dark horse, but what he has done to you completely crosses all the lines. We need to find a way to get him back in the box, then you have to destroy it so he cannot destroy any more innocent lives.”

Emily’s lip trembled. She realised Crouch’s stern face wasn’t used to showing emotion, so it must have looked quite strange. She was tempted to push Oscar on the issue, but saw that he wasn’t about to budge. There was nothing to be done about it for now anyway, there were too many other things to consider. What was she going to do next to get home and protect her family? There had to be a way to get her mother to realise that the Emily who was with them was not what she seemed. But how?

“Miss Emily, if you will excuse me, I really best be off.” Oscar was avoiding looking at her. She didn’t blame him – she was beginning to wonder how long she could stand being in this body. It was giving her the creeps.

“Okay Oscar. Thanks for everything. And tell Bernard thank you too.”

“You take care too Miss Emily – it was a true pleasure.”

Oscar turned around and walked towards the wall. Emily saw Bernard open his eyes and give her a wink.

“Look after yourself Emily.”

“I will Bernard, thank you.” She watched as they stepped through the wall as though it wasn’t even there. Then there was quiet.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Six

2007-09-22T22:22:00.001+10:00

The three of them sat around the table in stony silence. Percy was lost in his stew, or perhaps still mulling over some problem or other he had not been able to solve before coming downstairs.

Isabelle was not very hungry, having worried her tummy into a tight little knot.

Emily seemed to her mother strangely eager to eat every last morsel before her. Normally there was a bit of a struggle to convince her to pay attention, but tonight she seemed to be eating with a hunger Isabelle could never really recall having seen before.

She was about to say something, but thought better of it. If Emily was eating without a fuss, without getting lost in some story or dramatic re-enactment of something that had happened that day, she wasn’t going to interfere.

Percy smacked his lips together and gave a satisfied sigh. Rubbing his belly he winked at Emily. “Not bad hey ‘Ly? Your mother certainly has a way with cooking, that’s for sure.”

Isabelle watched as Emily looked up over her spoon. She though she caught a dark flash in Emily’s eyes as they fell on her father, but it was gone so quickly she was convinced it was a trick of the light.

Emily looked from her father to Isabelle, but her eyes quickly dropped back down to her spoon as though it suddenly required all her concentration to eat the next mouthful.

“It is very good mother, very good indeed.”

The clock that sat on the wall near the doorway was ticking more slowly than she could ever recall, dragging on as though under sufferance. Each tick seemed to require an incredible force of will and Isabelle realised she felt dreadfully tired. Her whole body seemed to ache with a fatigue that she felt a week of sleep would only begin to help lift.

She excused herself from the table and began clearing the now empty dishes. Percy declared that he was off to the garden for his final pipe of the evening, planting a kiss on Emily’s hairline and wishing her a good night’s rest. Isabelle watched as he reached for the handle on the door that passed from the kitchen to the garden, his other hand absentmindedly rummaging through his jacket pocket to retrieve his pipe and tobacco.

“It’s time we got you off to bed little missy,” she said to Emily, whose eyes she felt boring into her back as she washed the dishes clean.

“I still haven’t forgotten about today, but I think tomorrow would be the best time to discuss what we’re going to do with you.”

Emily nodded but didn’t leave the table. Isabelle sensed something about her was different, had changed in some almost imperceptible way since she had left that morning, but she was too tired to be able to devote the necessary thought power to it to untangle what it might be.

“Well off you go and brush those teeth. I’ll be up in a moment to tuck you in.”

Emily gave a wry smile and pushed out her chair. She pushed on the table so the legs scraped back across the room, then slipped down over the front of the chair. She seemed as though she were on the verge of approaching her mother, but instead turned around quickly and disappeared up the stairs.

Standing where she was, Isabelle could again hear the sea quite clearly. She realised it still had that unsettled and unsettling quality to its voice, its troubled faltering giving way to a reckless wildness. The wind was back up again and she could hear it whistling through the many-fingered trees at the end of the garden, even reaching in under the eaves and sneaking into the house, dancing around the rafters. It was going to be a rough old night, with a high likelihood of a storm hitting before it was through.

Isabelle went to the window and saw the faint glowing ember of Percy’s pipe, willing him to be done and come back into the house. She dried her hands on a small towel hanging from a nail next to the oven, placed her apron back onto its hook and took a deep breath. Emily would be in bed by now, she thought, and I best go and wish her good night.

The glow had dies from Percy’s pipe and she could no longer make out where he was. She knew he shouldn’t be too far behind so, leaving the door unlatched for his return, Isabelle set off for the stairs. Reaching the bottom, she was startled when she raised her eyes and saw Emily standing on the landing, watching her intently with that steady gaze.

“I’m ready for bed now mother,” she said levelly. “It’s been a big day.”

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Five

2007-09-19T09:13:00.000+10:00

Emily couldn’t see a thing. All was black as can be, an all-consuming darkness that allowed no sense of anything beyond the self. She realised that even the self wasn’t all that conceivable – she struggled to grasp any idea of where she was, what she was.

“I’ll start by touching my nose,” Emily thought, but there was no sensation of having done so, no matter how she tried. Trying not to panic, she thought through what might have happened. The last thing she recalled was the intensely white light that enveloped her inside the music box. She had heard the choir reach incredible heights of song, an incomprehensible cascading of the most beautiful sounds with which her ears had ever been caressed.

This black was as deep and dark as the white was rich and bright and although she was disconcerted at her inability to make head or tail of it, Emily felt she had at the very least escaped the confines of the music box, which was, she knew, the first step to getting home. A sudden thought struck her – her weightlessness and the ‘foggy’ feel, the lack of a sense of her own corporeality, suggested she had arrived back in the chamber in which she had been thrust into the box in the first place, the one in which Crouch first trapped her and then stole her body.

Now it was all coming back to her. Bernard or Oscar (she couldn’t remember which had agreed) were to arrive separately, and – using whatever technique it was with which they passed through from one side to the other, she had never really found out - with their bodies intact. They would then make sure Crouch’s body was still in the chair where he had left it and still unoccupied, then start the chamber up and get Emily fed from the chamber into his form.

With everything so quiet, Emily began to fear the worst. Who knew whether they were going to arrive as they should? Despite developing a bit of a soft spot for them, Emily was not so deluded that she credited them with any great deal of competence. For all she knew, they had got distracted along the way by a chance passerby, or perhaps came across a morning tea that they simply couldn’t resist.

She did not have to worry long, however, for she soon heard the sound of the chamber coming back to life. Although she still had no feeling of limbs or body parts as such, Emily still felt a surge throw her across the chamber, before squeezing her through a narrow opening. She was tossed about in a looping passage before coming to a sudden halt.

Everything was bright again - Emily could finally see. She looked at her hands to make sure, and almost fell over backwards when she saw the long, pale, slender fingers, the pale half moons at the base of each of the fingernails. Turning them over, the smooth palms were no less a surprise, but somehow less confronting. She looked past them and saw Oscar trying to hide on the stairway – failing miserably, as the railings really didn’t hide all that much and he was a most rotund little man.

“Oscar – you made it!”

Another shock as her voice came out in Crouch’s unmistakeable baritone, the rich tones that had put her at ease sounding decidedly out of place carrying her cry. Oscar seemed to be willing the ground to swallow him then and there, shying a little further back into the shadows. Emily realised he would be scared out of his wits, being addressed so by Crouch.

“Oscar, don’t be afraid – it’s me, Emily!”

Still he held his ground, although he did seem to be poking his head a little higher over the banister.

“Prove it,” he challenged, clearly ready to run (he would never get very far mind you) if need be.

“How?”

He thought about it for a little while.

“Tell me what riddle I asked when I met you in the forest.”

So much had passed since then, Emily was sure she wouldn’t remember. But she had been so annoyed once she realised the riddle was useless to her that it had somehow stuck. She first remembered the fawn, and the rest soon followed.

“What sleeps through a storm, rises afore dawn, shares thoughts with a fawn, is already torn and has never been born?”

Emily was relieved to see Oscar break into a smile.

“I don’t know – tell me.”

“Oscar! You know I don’t know.”

“Oh I know you didn’t, but I wondered if as Crouch you might have been able to tell me.”

Emily felt her temper rise, but then realised what Oscar had said. Perhaps he had a point. Although Crouch had left his body here seemingly empty, surely there was some way of accessing his mind. Whether it was getting into his memory or tapping into the part of his brain that calculated his dastardly little plans, there must be some way of making use of this opportunity to find out what Crouch was up to – and how she could thwart his evil intentions. She had been unable to do so from her dreams, but this was different, this was him, his body she was in.

Yet this was no time for sitting around – Emily had to get going and find out just where Crouch was and what on earth he had been up to since he crammed her in that box, mistakenly believing she would never get out.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Four

2007-09-15T23:56:00.001+10:00

“And where, pray tell, have you been young lady?”

Isabelle allowed into her voice a note of disappointment, one of anger, one of near despair, let them jangle uncomfortably and wash over Emily. She was her daughter and she loved her dearly, but she had to know there were rules and responsibilities and that they meant something.

“I was at Tabitha’s, helping Mrs Tibbits with her garden,” Emily said. Her stance was one of remorse, hands clasped behind her back, a pointed toe swivelling on the kitchen floor, her eyes downcast. She raised them briefly to gauge the look on Isabelle’s face, but the mother remained inscrutable. She didn’t want to draw this out too long, but felt Emily had to feel the weight of her disappointment if she was to lean that she could not simply come and go at any hour she pleased.

“I hadn’t realised it had gotten so late, we were very close to having all the planting done and the time just flew by.”

Isabelle loved her time in the garden, so knew how easily this could happen. One minute you’re there with a row of seedlings that need some attention and a few weeds peeking through to deal with, the next thing you know you have worked your way around the entire garden bed and the afternoon has turned to evening. But the fact was, Emily must learn to take responsibility for her actions and for their consequences.

“Well that’s all very well, but your father and I have been worried about you,” Isabelle said, looking right at Emily who still avoided her mother’s eye.

“What if something had happened? And out at this time of night in such a thin dress and no woollens – I will be most surprised of you don’t come down with a cold.” Isabelle realised her own hands were shaking. To steady herself, she went over to the stove, removed the lid from the pot of the stew and began to stir. This simple domestic ritual helped calm her nerves, which were more frayed than she had realised.

“Anyway, we’ll talk more about this later. Your dinner is growing cold and I don’t want you going to bed with an empty stomach, though you should know we are quite unimpressed at you being out so late, you’ve let your father and me down.”

Isabelle knew, and suspected Emily knew, that this talk of Percy being disappointed and unimpressed was a bit of a stretch. He was unlikely to be impressed if he had realised she had been out so late and walked home by herself in the near-dark, but it’s unlikely that he had even realised. He was a good father, it’s not that he didn’t care, but when he got involved in his writings, there was little that could distract him.

Feeling she had been about as stern as she could be and still be in a state where she could face dinner, Isabelle allowed some of her usual softness to return to her voice.

“Speaking of your father, how about you go and let him know that dinner is ready?”

“Okay mother.” Emily slowly turned and began to walk to the stairs. She stopped after just a step and turned back around.

“Mother?”

“Yes Emily?”

“Please don’t stay mad at me.”

Isabelle’s heart melted, and she caught herself about to tell Emily it was all okay. But she bit her tongue and regathered her composure.

“Let’s just get dinner happening shall we, we can discuss this more once we’ve all eaten.”

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Three

2007-09-12T12:58:00.000+10:00

Emily closed her eyes, just as Minerva had explained. Her heart thumped in her chest until she thought it would hammer a hole right through to the outside – and then what? She could picture it going on thumping until it burst, the pressure too much.

But of course it didn’t. She stood as still as she could, waiting. Minerva had explained what to expect, but she was still as nervous as could be. To settle her nerves she tried to picture her family, imagine being back with them, but every time she managed to see her mother and father as anything other than cloudy forms, Crouch popped up and leered at her with a frightful glint in his eyes that she could not bear.

Emily tried the last of her bag of tricks – counting backwards from 100. This, thankfully, seemed to work and distracted her just enough to keep her trembling under wraps. Standing back in the forest, she felt very vulnerable indeed – she was ashamed to realise she missed the presence of Bernard and Oscar. As infuriating as they had been, she had to admit the forest had been a lot less scary when they were with her, even if it was only because they tangled up her brain quite so.

A breeze tickled through the clearing and Emily realised it was not just any breeze. Even with her eyes closed, she realised it was a deep blue. From the other side came a red gust, followed by a green wisp of a wind. These looped and tumbled around at ankle level at first, then began filling the clearing as high as her knees. Soon swimming up past her waist, Emily allowed herself to relax back into their cushioning embrace. As they reached her shoulders, she felt a lightness in her feet as though she was resting on a blanket of air.

The blue streak was the first to reach her ears. She let out a shocked cry as she heard its song, a melding of the most beautiful string instruments ever devised but with a purity and joy beyond the ability of any mortal to ever hope to produce. Next the red gust arrived with its warm, woodwind tones, but again too hauntingly, achingly beautiful to be anything short of enchanted.

Emily had by now forgotten her fears – forgotten pretty much everything truth be told. The urgency with which she had awaited this moment was being replaced with an infatuation with the moment in which she found herself, a hope against hope that it would never end.

Yet this was just the beginning, the prelude to her journey. For rustling through the trees and drifting into the clearing now was the white light – the miasmic fog of angel song that had been Emily’s undoing all those days ago, but now had a counter role, serving as what could well be her only possible saviour.

Succumbing to this overwhelming of the senses and the joyful expression of her deepest wishes – for though she did not realise, it was these wishes that underpinned this musical flight of fancy - Emily let this white light in.

Bursting into her head in a blinding shock, the choir announced its arrival with a sonorous blitzkrieg, a thousand unearthly voices melding into one triumphant whole.

As she drifted into a blissful reverie, Emily faintly realised she was being lifted lightly by her elbows. Weightless, she was carried higher and higher. They took her off the forest floor, through the tree-top canopy and past the clouds that had been her outermost limit when last she tried to escape, higher and higher until white cloud turned to searingly blue sky, higher still until blue sky turned navy then black, then a place awash with a sea of stars twinkling like a million halos singing her home.

The celestial journeying continued apace, now at such a speed that the stars were curving streaks of white smearing across the black until even the black had disappeared entirely and all was white once more. But this was not the white of the clouds – it was too bright, too dazzlingly luminescent. It was pure light, the untainted and utterly complete expression of reflection and expulsion. Everything that was, that existed in all time, all space, was being sent to her in the form of light. It was all there – her past, present and future, every world side by side and placed before her.

Emily was still in the music box, of the box, but the box had found its own way to turn itself inside-out.

The world beyond the box was therefore now as much inside it as out, and vice-versa. Its walls, boundaries, ceased to exist in any true sense. The doorway was open.

With a pang of regret but her heart full of hope, Emily stepped through.

The Music Box: Part IV: Chapter Forty-Two

2007-09-08T21:08:00.000+10:00

Isabelle Button heard the front door creak heavily on its ageing hinges. From where she stood at the stove, she couldn’t see directly through to the hall, but she could tell by the way the door was slowly being swung back into place that Emily was trying to keep as low a profile as she could.

And no wonder - it was well past the time she should have been home. Isabelle hadn’t been too worried, she knew Mrs Tibbits would send her off if she was too underfoot, but it wasn’t like Emily to stay out so long after she would have known her mother would have expected her back. Isabelle put the lid back on the stew she had been keeping warm over the stove and turned to face the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

She waited for Emily to appear in the doorway, but heard her footfall moving up the stairs.

“Emily Button, I would like to see you please,” she said firmly, flinching as she realised her ‘no-nonsense’ voice was not a long way from that her own mother used to use. This softened her slightly, for she prided herself on being nothing like her own mother in any respect. “Please come to the kitchen.”

“Yes mother, I’m just going to freshen, I’ve been helping out in the garden and I have just seen my hands are still quite dirty.”

Isabelle acquiesced, busying herself with the cutlery and plates on the table, rearranging them for at least the third time. She liked to think she was an easy-go-lucky, carefree kind of mother, but the truth was ever since her turn she had been drawing a protective wing tightly around Emily. She wasn’t sure if this was for Emily’s protection or there was more to it than that, as though she needed the weight of motherhood as an anchor to keep her grounded, stop her being spirited away by whatever malevolent influence was able to have its affect on her vulnerable state.

She had resisted going over to the Tibbits residence herself to check on Emily. While she may be fretful, she was also wary of showing her concern to the rest of the village. The last thing she or any of the Button family needed was for there to be more talk than there already must be.

Finding herself standing at the window, Isabelle gazed out into the darkening twilight. The bare trees were sending their long slender fingers clawing up into an indigo sky. Darker, bruised clouds hung near, in anticipation she felt - waiting to hear what admonishments she had in store for her only daughter. Lower, through the trees and sitting just above the horizon line, the pale liquid violet that marked the last of the day, fast scampering away, sat brimming with resistance to its banishment. But even as she watched the heaviness of the blanketing evening squashed it lower and lower until there was barely a trace to be seen, as though the very day itself had buckled under the sheer dense triumphalism of night.

The day had been a relatively fine one, enough sun to put a reddish rose into her cheeks and only the odd bright cloud lazily sweeping overhead, dancing beneath the sun but never really threatening its reign. Yet by the middle of the afternoon that warmish breeze that had rolled over the hill was in retreat, in its place the salted bluster of the sea. Short, sharp gusts that swept even the light away, for it was a tired, wan light that closed out the day, the sun tiring in its fight against the wind and bedding down. It sank silently behind the sea, which responded by lessening the violence of the wind it sent, not so much a graceful victor as one that simply lost interest once the struggle was over and won.

None of this escaped Isabelle’s notice. It didn’t sit there at the front of her thoughts, but registered at a deeper level, it was part of her make-up, the seasons and nature’s unpredictable dance in a way at the very centre of her own relationship with the world.

She had been a child of the sea and nothing had really changed. While she might not have spent her days out on the ocean, dropping nets into its invisible depths and rounding up what mysterious bounties could be divined, it was no less coursing through her veins than it had been of anyone else in her family.

Her childhood skin had been scoured with its abrasive promises. She would lie awake at night, picturing a life out on one of those boats such as her father’s, absent-mindedly tasting the salt crust on the back of her hand. One night she had stayed away at the home of a distant aunt and uncle and was terrified by the silence, the missing roar of the night ocean like a missing body part. Her thumping heart was terrifying her more, the blood in her ears making her want to cry out. It took all her will not to swing her legs out of bed and tear off into the night and for home.

She slept not a wink and vowed she would never return.

Though the wind had dropped, the sound of the sea was now carrying up through the stillness of the night. Isabelle listened to her faint lullaby, knowing it wasn’t to be trusted. There was something a little off-kilter in it tonight, a wisp of a warning, but Isabelle closed her thoughts to it so as to better concentrate on the tasks at hand. Her mind was brought back to the house by the sound of wood scraping on polished wood – Percival in the study upstairs moving his chair back from his desk. She knew, from experience, that this did not signal an impending arrival, but was the first in a series of little rituals that would eventually deliver him downstairs and to dinner.

First he would push back from the desk, his hard-backed chair sliding across the floor rather than being lifted. But it would be some time before he took advantage of the extra space to depart the chair.

He would twirl his quill lightly in his right hand, replacing it carefully in its stand. Next he would remove his glasses with his now free right hand, holding them by the arm while he rubbed his tired eyes with his left fingertips, which would move from his eyes up to his creased forehead where they would continue to rub.

He would close the book before him, the leathery weight of the binding producing a small whump as it pushed the pages together. He would run a hand over the cover, feeling its texture, its light rises and falls. Finally, he would replace it on its side at the end of the line of such volumes collecting at the furthest reach of his desk, then close his eyes.

Here he would sit for another few minutes, drawing his thoughts away from the front of his mind, where he had been juggling them and attempting to fit them together like a jigsaw, filing them away for next time.

Isabelle heard Emily’s light step coming back down from the top of the stairs, a pause after each left-right step to delay the telling off she knew would be coming her way.

Finally she appeared in the doorway, resting a small delicate hand on the doorframe, the flickering light of the lantern casting a strange shadow across her face.

“Hello mother.”

It's been a little while since the last chapter... jump back to July posts if you need a refresher as to what on earth is going on

Vinyl Diaries X: The scenic route to politics

2007-09-02T04:36:00.001+10:00

This post began life as a look at politics and music, but, realising I was frowning a little too intently, is about to take a turn for the cheesy. It was going to be too big a leap in logic from the last vinyl diary anyway, so instead I'll see what babysteps can get us there.

Which means starting with Feist. After her airport shenanigans of a vinyl diary not so long ago, here she goes again. Her 1 2 3 4 video is even dancier, but was a little too technicolour for me even in this strange mood.

While there's nothing I like more in my music than a feel that it's balanced precariously on the cusp of gloaming, or toppling ever deeper into the glooming, sometimes there's a small window (usually around 4am) for some gleaming.

And while we're busy dancing in the streets, it's a rare gem that could offer a brighter gleaming than that found shining from Lavender Diamond, so monstrously sweet your teeth hurt for days with the guilty pleasure of it all. This pinker than pink fairy floss moment is pure, unadulterated joy, of a kind rarely admitted to by those who feel they should know better. I think if I had gone to school with Becky Stark I would certainly have pulled her pigtails, for reasons more complex than I would ever have understood.

Though not dancing as such, it's not a huge stretch to move from rollerskates to bicycles. Plus at least there are handclaps and synchronicity aplenty in the Bat for Lashes video for What's a Girl To Do?...populated by the evil bmx bandit doppelgangers of the Flaming Lips stageshow troupe.

Unable to take my eyes off that Frank-esque bunny, the Gary Jules take on Mad World from Donnie Darko seems the obvious next port of call. Here I get a bit stuck, but will throw in the fairly tenuous 'children' link as an excuse for wandering by Glósóli.

Which isn't really getting us much closer to the whole politics thing... so maybe a quick peek at Hoppipolla will help, as then we can ride the oldies' pirate-cut coat-tails over to Ant Music. I know this is his dandy highwayman period, but he's about as pirate as I can think of right now. How much deeper can this hole get...?

Well, Elastica did cover Cleopatra, so we can dip into Connection if we're so inclined.

And we best be, for that's as far as this little diary is going for now... the museum is closing its doors to catch a wee nap.

*

2007-08-28T10:27:00.000+10:00

You get further as
I draw closer as
You whisper words
That I never thought
I’d hear again

You get closer as
Days grow longer as
You say to me what
I don’t want to know

I get further as
Night draws nearer as
Birds draw wings over
Tired eyes

I get closer as
Those wings draw nearer as
The night draws the curtain on
You

Vinyl Diaries IX: Feist

2007-08-26T04:57:00.001+10:00

A little while back, in a vinyl diary not so long ago, I mentioned the physicality of music – music for the feet, the mind and the heart.

Well I’ve realised I overlooked something when I left out the shoulders; it seems there’s an artist for everything.

The music for the shoulders that’s been growing on me lately is one Leslie Feist.

The Calgary chanteuse has been around a while, but I only stumbled on her a few years back through her dalliance with the Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People, where she does a rather splendid job of cutting through the hazy shambles that is ’Almost Crimes’, an album highlight and jump-around-like-a-lunatic delight only topped by the banjo-plucked Emily Haines-driven ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl’, which to this day never fails to steal the breath and cut to the quick.

It would be easy to file Feist away as a composite of ballpark fellow-travellers – ‘marked by specks of Dusty Springfield's soul, Björk's confrontational adventurousness, and Joni Mitchell's warmth’ as Pitchfork would have it, with a dash of the piano bar jauntiness of Catpower or an edge-roughened Regina Spektor.

But there’s more going on here than that… there's the shoulder thing for one.

Don’t take my word for it though, pop over here and try to sit still.

I kinda like the video too… even if there are certain shades of OK Go about it.

Regret

2007-08-25T22:18:00.000+10:00

I dream of the flower
The bird on the bower
I watch as it takes nervous flight
I spin upside down
Begin now to drown
I wish that I’d wished you good night

Fade

2007-08-24T14:49:00.001+10:00

Starved of sun
He fades to an echo
Of what she first thought she had found
His ruby red lustre
Shortly proved bluster
But it was a promise to which she was bound

Steam

2007-08-24T09:16:00.000+10:00

The mist of her memory
Pooled on the mirror
Rendering reflection mute
Blocks of non-colour – shapes
Without edges

She wrote her name with a finger drawn
Awkwardly eking
Sudden squeaking
Where she pressed too hard and then slipped

She wrote his name in the space beneath
Had to squash the last letter in
She had not left enough room
Thought he might fit in the space
He did not

Kindling

2007-08-23T09:40:00.000+10:00

Misty matter and pliplop splatter
Winter devotion grows ever fatter
On fire’s warm gloating
And me ever doting
Sending you mad, as they say, as the hatter

Curled up in its shad’der
As smoke climbs the ladder
Of beams that sit under the roof
And if you needed more proof
Of the folly of youth
Then watch us get gladder yet sadder

As the sun starts to scurry
With most undue hurry
Towards hidden homes for the night
Our thoughts turn to dreams
That will burst at the seams
As our angel wings unfurl and take flight

So turning on in
With an end to the din
On the rooftop that sits right above
We lie deep in silence
And consider the violence
Of some little thing they call love

Spill

2007-08-22T09:33:00.000+10:00

Weeping, soundlessly, wordlessly, a pouring forth of hidden consonants.

Sprouting violently from the ducts, the welling ache of unspoken acts, unacted speeches, unsure of where they might land, what may grow, who will tend the tangled garden.

Not even sure who you are, why you came here, what brought on this sudden – nameless – response, the unbidden retort to the fallen leaf, the slanted light, the crooked branch, the too-soft petal.

Bruised, battered, forgotten.

Alone. Surrounded by the alone. Buried by the alone. Just one amongst many who thought there would be more. Not even special in your pain – it’s everyone’s. Not even different in your torture – it’s the usual.

That’s what is hurting most, that the hurt is not even yours. You wear the cast-off coat of hurt immemorial. And worse: it doesn’t even really fit, the shoulders are too big, the seams don’t align, it sits on your shin (not at all today’s style).

Their words rings in your ears as you lay in damp grass, gazing upon the curve of the sky, the night (endless) and the million pin-pricks that can’t burst it, bleeding its white blood that trickles and winks at you in mock-solidarity. You reach up to tend (or taste) its wounds, but it, like the rest, doesn’t need you.

I really can’t help. Those consonants you cry, the dry, ragged, hoarse scrape of unfulfilled promise, fall in such a twisted jumble that there’s no saving them. Their sharp edges pierce whatever soft rounded vowel tries to tend them, they crash and jangle with no sense of sense. These, at least, at last, are yours only, and I watch as you (cackling) jealously guard over them, sweep them into a little pile of dusty fear.

My tears I offer but they would only confuse you further, although we shall never really know, for you keep them at arm’s length. You are afraid they will melt your edges, your hard-fought angles turned to slippery curves that catch every passing shower, sensuality where there was a steely resolve never to let anything in.

I leave you weeping, soundlessly, wordlessly.