Photo: A. Gilhespy
The Vapours
Music
Blood Red Shoes, Trencín, Slovakia 19/07/08
Vapours contributors Adam Gilhespy and Andrew Fenwick were sent to report on the Pohoda Festival in Slovakia for a rival publication. Initial suspicions that the festival was a massive fundraising effort for an anti-abortion campaign proved unfounded, and Enjoy Bratislava and Slovakia magazine made a superb guide for the weekend:
Stop to smoking
“The [no smoking] act actually in force orders the owners of bars to separate these two [smoking and non-smoking] zones but in practice often the imaginary boundary is formed by vacuum or other meaningless absurdity.”
Drivers, Beware!
“The influence of drugs used before the ride is different. Some kinds suppress and slow down the reactions, others on the contrary evoke accelerated reactions and a sensation of dauntlessness.”
Celebrations of victory all over Europe
“A war that spread almost to the whole world, killed tens of million of civilians and soldiers, destroyed innumerable quantity of towns and caused property and cultural damage of incalculable dimensions.”
Undignified primacy
“Despite the tendency of constant reduction of unemployment, in the scale of all EU member countries we are still in the desperate last place.”
Photo: A. Gilhespy
Aluminium in Iceland: like shooting self in leg
According to Björk, the image of Iceland is being destroyed by an increasing number of aluminium smelters: “If they build an aluminium factory in Helguvík, it will be the first thing tourists see when they arrive in Iceland [at Keflavík airport], then they will drive past [The aluminum factory in] Straumsvík on the way to Reykjavík. That is just like shooting yourself in the leg. This is bad for our future as a green country and for tourism. It is also bad for Icelandic artists who are aiming at international success, because we are trying to promote the image of purity, clean nature and our relation to nature.”
Last weekend Björk, with the aid of Sigur Rós and a bunch of lesser known Icelandic musicians, performed a concert at the Botanical Garden in Laugardalur, Reykjavík to raise awareness of the omnipotent chemical element which handily boasts the atomic number 13.
Source: Iceland Review
Local music celebrity roundup
Singer songwriter Beth Jeans Houghton, touted as Newcastle’s answer to Amy Winehouse because of her wild behaviour, was injured when she was hit by a falling pair of shoes that became dislodged from the Heaton Park shoe tree as she attempted to add a pair of her own. Be wary of playing football with Maximo Park’s Paul Smith, as he is reputed to be a goal muncher. On the plus side he is a willing lender of DVDs. Red Monkey/Chronicity member and Slampt! co-founder Pete Dale lists ‘moisturising’ in the hobbies and interests section of his CV. The talents of Sunderland brothers Peter and David Brewis appear to end at basic electrical fault-finding, as they have been listening to their ELP tape through only one speaker for weeks now.
Biz Markie, The Vapors (U.S. spelling (an editorial))
From his debut album Goin’ Off, you could say this track sparked the inception of this project when our first priority was to agree upon a title.
‘Old School’ jambuster Biz Markie (Marcel Hall), MC, DJ, and comedian, really summed up the mediator’s relationship with his public when he famously expounded:
“[...] Nobody want to be down when you’re down and out [...]“
This—as Biz sucinctly puts it—is the meaning of this song. And here we are, The Vapours (a fledgling blog with high aspirations of serialization in the third dimension) recontextualising Biz Markie’s lyric descibing his experience of the cult of celebrity on his debut—a phenomenon we are now all too familiar with—to locate a viewing of these words through the quantum spectacles of space and time: reveals the temporal, somewhat transitory nature of fame and—pardon my boldness—life itself. An apt title for a publication whose main priority is time I would say! Hence The Times, or the suffix Times, or indeed the prefix The Daily… enjoying ubiquitous use for any serious news medium with a firm grasp of news’s priority as a durational. We’ve all heard the contradictory expression ‘old news,’ yes?
I suggest that the important information (ie. news) is not necessarily what is current but what is in fact important and relevant to us. Let’s be honest, who actually reads all the papers all the time unless it’s their job?
The Vapours (as a title for a publication) is an equivalent to titles like The Times but suggests either an interest in the wake left by the latest ‘news’ or being the object or person who has left the wake in space time which has now become ‘the news.’ This is of course a medium specific issue. As The Vapours is not a news channel, there are no live links to events as they unravel per se.
“Stop and think about one thing at a time, and don’t just walk around consuming loads of crap and then not have a opinion on the crap, or indeed an awareness of how you are influenced by it.” Jurgen Habermas*
There is only this moment, this moment: is right now. As you read this your mind is spinning in many ways not directly related to the text. We perceive time one moment after another but only now, in this moment can we effect the future. Let’s create a wake in the wake of those whose vapours we have caught. Forward to the past.
Bottom line: The Vapours = history.
*Just kidding.
Coltrane’s Digital Hymn Unmasked
“At John Coltrane’s funeral service in 1967, Donald Ayler stood on a balcony beside his saxophonist brother and played a spine-chilling lament. Wildly flagging his trumpet valves and swaying backwards and forwards, he seemed to scream through the instrument. Forty years later, that music still has the power to stun and dismay.” - Val Wilmer, 2006.
Until now, the legendary performance of the brothers Ayler at John Coltrane’s funeral in 1967 has eclipsed what conspiracy theorists are now labelling “a cover up” and “an audio sham”.
The following recording is believed to have been made during the opening 15 minutes of Coltrane’s service. Until now, there has been no evidence to suggest that this hymn was ever part of the proceedings.
It was discovered last week by a European jazz academic researching analogue hard drives.
The hymn is entitled “Sermon en Croute”. The identity of its performer remains unknown.
Romford Slim invites a Vander-pump onto off-world colony
French avant-prog rock eco-warriors Magma’s Christian Vander sings about his love for Otis Redding in the made-up language of Kobaïan. I most definitely “caught the vapours” from these guys. I’ll never look at tv music performances in the same way again…
One afternoon when I was 11, my dad took me out of a maths lesson to watch late 80’s snooker giant Steve ‘The Nugget’ Davis, ‘cut the red ribbon’ at a new (pre Superdrug) chemist in my town called ‘Tip-Top’. Little did I know that this ball clacking ‘ginger magician’ was also a vinyl junkie iconoclast masquerading as a soup sniffing square.
At the zenith of his career, Davis arranged and personally funded UK tour dates in London for Magma just for his own amusement. He was astonished to find that other (fuck Japan, save the whales) Kobaïan/alien shagging weirdos turned up too:
“In the late Eighties, I thought it would be nice if they came over to London to do a gig, so I set up Interesting Promotions to promote it. Well, I paid the bill is what I really mean. I never realised that there were 14 of them in the band, which raised the overheads slightly. They did three nights at the Bloomsbury theatre; the last night was a sell-out. I’d done my nuts [spent too much money] too, so it was great. Then I went back to [whispers] playing snooker.”
Proof positive that there’s more to ‘Mr. Interesting’ than meets the cue ball.
Quote: My obsession, Lee Honeyball, Sunday March 7, 2004, The Observer
1998: The Golden Year of Hip-Hop Photoshop
Trick Daddy - www.thug.com (1998)
This may not be in the classical style of early-Photoshop era rap albums, but i feel that taken as a whole it presents a distillation of what was going on during this new, exciting movement. People were beginning to have regular access to the internet, and with a few right clicks, drags and drops an album cover, nay, an entire album concept could be created.
Juvenile - 400 Degreez (1998)
Everything you need to know about the artform is here. The layout, the literal representation of the album’s title, the font effects, the bizarre posturing, some fire. Consider this one the blueprint.
Master P - MP Da Last Don (1998)
Master P’s No Limit label, often referred to as No Talent, is considered by scholars to be the major player in the Photoshop album cover game, with memorable efforts for Soulja Slim, The Hot Boys, C-Murder, and some of the albums pictured below. Particularly noteworthy here is the strong work on the ‘large hand/foreground’ effect.
Silkk Tha Shocker - Charge It 2 Da Game (1998)
More vintage ‘large hand/foreground’ creativity from No Limit.
Capone N Noreaga - The War Report (1998)
The east coast gets involved here, as the ever-present sinister undertones conveyed by fire, smoke, and in this case waves of heat continue. For me, this is classic in it’s close resemblance to the SNES game; Probotechtor - Alien Rebels.
Snoop Dogg - Da Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told (1998)
Whereas pre-’98 Snoop album covers featured cartoon drawings of dogs and pimps, the PS-era Snoop album (for which he briefly signed to No Limit) carbon copied this style directly to the Photoshop format, paradoxically resulting in an image even more reminiscent of a comic book.
Dr Dooom/Kool Keith - First Come, First Served (1999)
Although this album dropped a year outside of ‘98, Keith expertly apes the genre with all the giant hand/font/posture techniques pitched alongside a couple of different species of simian, a cockroach, and a burger with a mouse in it. The sad conflict of this work is that it stands as both a death toll to 1998’s Hip-Hop Photoshop creative outburst, and a final classic example of the artform in it’s own right.
Getting Back into Braille pt. 1
Person a- What a bad song that is.
Person b- What’s that you said? That’s a bad song? But it’s not a bad song. It’s just that you don’t like pop. That’s just good honest pop. Listen to it. There’s nothing pretentious about it- it’s pop through and through, nothing else. That’s the difference between you and me- I can appreciate a good pop track and you’ve never understood pop. If you put that pop song on a stereo, I’d enjoy it, because it’s pop and I’ve always liked pop. Pop music has always been successful because it’s never been anything other than pop. You don’t like enough pop, so get off your high horse, get your feet on the pop moral high ground, and start listening to honest pop. And don’t turn your nose up at pop, because you don’t have a nose for pop. I’ve always understood pop- great honest pop, it forms the basic of any good pop song. You say “bad song”, but I say “pop”, just keep the pop coming. All the great composers would like pop you know, if Schubert had been around now he wouldn’t like your music, he’d like pop, because pop can be clever, but not so clever that it stops being pop. Pop composers are the smartest people there are, just like classical music was pop back in the old days, they’re both the same. It’s all great pop. In a lot of ways Steps are better than Mozart, it’s more honest, it’s all pop and nothing else and Mozart would probably be the first to hold his hands up and say “I admit it, they’ve made a better pop song”. He’d have a lot of time for good pop. The sooner you like good pop, the sooner we can have a chat about pop, even though you’ve never understood the genius of a pop song. But I agree it’s quite difficult to appreciate the genius of a pop song, but I can definitely do that.
