I kid you not - all my muscles (I don't mean the bulging kind, of which I am bereft, bur rather the bits of meat) are aching so bad.
I had no idea, when I started doing these walks, that my body would react like this. Damn. I'm stuck at this moment where I want to rest but I also don't want to stop. But I can't stop.
Does this have anything to do with today's musical interlude? Not really, I only found out about A.A. Williams not too long ago, and only because Mono released an EP where she sang. Guess what, she's sure going to stick around. Take a listen and fall in love.
Once upon a time, like four years ago, I used to run on a daily basis, something like around twenty km a day or so. Then one day I hurt my leg, and since then I've never managed to go back to those days - I'll sometimes try to pick it up again, and then run for a few days, but then the pain just makes it unbearable. So, running, at least for now, is off the table.
But what I can do is walk. And so I decided, a few days back, to go for some long walks - I'm figuring 10 km constitutes as 'long' - and man... I haven't felt so physically exhausted in years and years. Probably not since my boot camp training at the Air Force.
In anticipation of this, I decided to load up my iPhone with a plethora of songs, and though for the first few days I stuck to pre-existing playlists, I recently started to listen to Mono's discography while walking.
Mono is one of those bands that's not easily describable. Post-rock? Yes. Modern classical? That, too. Epic, majestic, imperial? Oh yes.
I'm widly in love with an album of theirs called 'Hymn to the Immortal Wind' - a soaring, uplifting, transcending work of art that always leaves me a bit breathless. It's also an album that, for some reason, makes me think of religion. Or at least have religious thoughts.
Just so you know, I'm neither religious nor spiritual. Nothing against those who are, but that's not me. That said, I was raised catholic, and I did my first communion and got baptized - though I was 12 at the time, so it was wholly my choice.
As I grew older, I sort of imagined that one day I'd have some kind of crisis where I'd turn to the faith - but this has never happened, and frankly - I don't see it happening. But there's a caveat here - my disbelief in God, the god found in all bibles and sacred codes - is also tempered with a knowledge that there exists a higher... I don't know. A higher something.
I just tend to feel that this thing, whatever it is, is dispassionate about all it's created, and basically leaves us be. It cares not for our belief or attention. But sometimes I'll feel god when watching the sunset, or when I'm ambling through the woods, he's there on the sighing of the winds through the trees, he's there when the sun shines down through the canopies, he's there in the distant buzzing of insects, he's there in the melodious secret language that birds chirp in.
That there shows me God more than any soul ever did.
There was a version of this post that I composed in my head around 3 or 4 a.m. today, a time where I was desperately trying - and failing - to fall asleep, and in the meantime I rehearsed in my mind one of the most difficult talks I ever had to have with a living soul - and yeah, it wasn't the conversation as it did happen, but the conversation as it should've happened, where I should have been completely honest both with myself and the other party. But screw it, I'm not going to wallow in more self-pity. At least not right now.
And then there's the original version of this post - I was going to wax lyrical about my summer of 2011, when for some odd reason I was feeling invincible, and so much seemed to be going my way. That was the summer of Filipa and of long, drunken nights, nights of music, and sex, and dancing, and yes - plenty of alcohol. But that story actually lends itself to another future post, about a month from now.
There was a somewhat golden age for telco ads here, around maybe 2003-05, where mainly Vodafone and Optimus could do no wrong in both their visual presentation and choice for music. I fondly recall the Vodafone ad that was set to Bloc Party's 'Banquet' as well as Optimus's own ads set to The Veils's 'The Leaver's Dance' as well as Shout Out Louds 'Tonight I have to leave it'. Good stuff, back then.
I'll leave this here, time to take a shower and then try to get some rest. It just feels like it's impossible.
You know, I often dream of places that no longer exist. It's not nostalgia, or longing for what I perceive as a better time, I don't think. It's just that some of these places have left some very lasting impressions deep inside my mind. One of these recurring themes are record stores. There's one in particular that I dream of, and these dreams actually include a part of the store that a) I've never actually been to and b) I don't even know if it existed at all, which is its stock room. Now, when I dream of this particular store, this room is either directly behind the counter, or in some hidden room above the store itself. It's usually the same dream - I go in, I browse whatever they have on display, and then for some reason I get invited to see the back room, and they have oodles of long out of issue records, deleted singles, you name it - and it's right there for the taking, only I never have money on me, and that door is closed forever.
The real life record store was in a teeny tiny shopping centre that still exists to this day, and it's funny how huge it seemed to me when I was younger, it seemed to contain everything that mattered to me in its limited space : a record store, a toy store, a fairly decent bookstore, a theater, some arcade machines littered throughout and a pet shop. It was a two floor thing, and yet it seemed bigger than the world to me then - I literally spent so many hours there because my mother used to work not even two minutes away from there, just across the street.
I still remember this record store in the pre-CD days, where it was just vinyl and tapes, long plays and seven inches, boxes and shelves of it, neatly organized.
It was here that I fell in love with Sétima Legião, named after the Legio VII Gemina, and its glorious singer, Pedro Oliveira, owner of one the most amazing voices I've ever heard in any language.
One thing I actually miss is feeling this sense of wonder I felt then, when every single trip to one of these stores could mean some surprise. It's one of the necessities of modern life, what with everything so readily available, and so spoiled for you months in advance. I remember going into a toy store and a whole new series of Transformers would be up for sale, so many new characters, so many cool transformations, and sometimes - better yet - there'd be a new free G.I. Joe catalog that you could take home with you, and you'd painstakingly scrutinize every element of those pictures in the catalog and you'd feel excited and raring to collect those figures, you'd make a list of those who you'd prioritize and sometimes, every so often, you'd even be thrown a curve ball because you'd see some Joe or Cobra (or my faves, the Dreadnoks) that wasn't even in the catalog and you'd wonder where he came from... was he from a past collection? was it an accident that somehow threw him in the mix, and there he was, a lone figure among his new collection of buddies that you just had to have. That was actually how I got my Dr. Mindbender figure, true story.
Lana is fairly recent in my life as well - I knew of her, but I don't think I'd ever really listened to one of her songs before. Back in the dark year of 2013, I vividly recall one day watching TV - maybe the History channel or something like that - and during the commercials a song started playing, and I was left wondering whose voice that could be. It was beautiful, powerful, sweet, certain of itself - and yet it seemed fragile, almost on the edge of cracking. My old buddy Shazam then told me it was Lana herself.
Oh boy, time to hit the internet and get what I could. I still follow her to this day - hell, her last album 'Norman Fucking Rockwell' was one of my albums of the year last year. But truth be told, I don't always have the patience to listen to her, at least not a full album. It's a phenomenon that's not exclusive to her, it's something I find when all the songs sound pretty much all the same as one another. I do need some diversity in an album to keep it interesting.
One of my fondest memories of Lana is being in the goth festival 'Entre Muralhas' in Leiria, and while pretty much everyone was clad in black, wearing all kinds of goth get-up and knee-high boots, I wandered in knee-length denim shorts, white tank top, my copy of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' and by a tree I sat down and read it while she sang the body electric.
So last week I finally took the plunge and got the Anbernic RG350 for retro gaming on the go. Without going into the technical details - go here for everything, and I mean EVERYTHING you need to know about the system. I'd actually never heard of it, but then some guy I follow on Instagram decided to showcase it, and I was intrigued. I read up on it and became decidedly interested.
So, what actually prompted me to get it? A memory.
A couple of minutes away from where I live there's this tiny, greasy restaurant, the kind where you go when you want cheap, hearty, good and, well, greasy food, and cheap wine. It's been closed since lockdown, but the other day I went past it and I remembered being there, somewhere in 1990 or 1991, and they had a couple of arcade machines, one of them was the perennial 'Pinball Madness' and the other would cycle through a variety of games - including Cabal and Juju (A.K.A. Toki). As I stood in front of that restaurant, watching 13/14 year old me playing those games, I got flooded by a rush of memories and emotions.
Some bits of my life I really hate to think about. Especially when I think of the years between '90 and '95. Those were hard years for us.
Around 1990 my family finally fell apart - it had been years in the happening, really - and that event set in motion a series of other events that would be disastrous for us. It seemed that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. My father disappeared for a while, my mother lost her job and fell into a deep depression, my brother got into drugs and ended up in jail... these were hard times. We'd gone from having a sort of tranquil life to being on the edge of poverty. Poverty, without squallor, we were poor but not destitute, we'd sometimes go hungry but not really know hunger. It's all relative, right? We still had a roof under our heads, so right there we were blessed, moreso than many. And yet... we had precious few luxuries. My grandmother got my mother an old, beat-up car, but that was mainly for visiting my brother. There were no more family vacations. And things that I'd easily taken for granted, like asking for some change so I could go play some games in those arcade machines - or some others, bigger and better, but much further away from where I live - those days were gone.
It left me with a bitter pang inside, even then, and yes, I do know there are far graver injustices in the world, and yet this was my family life that had been upended and I'd eventually come to learn to adapt, before something bad happened to me.
So with that in mind, I did some digging and found a deal online that suited me just fine - it fell right where how much I was willing to pay for it, and it just felt right.
I placed the order, and it got shipped from Spain to me on a friday, and monday it was already in my hands.
I had to wait until my working day was done to start playing with it - and I will say that the OS does take some time getting used to - and taking an inside look at what it offered in terms of games.
A cursory glance showed me a bunch of embedded emulators, for a number of systems, ranging from the classic NES to the lesser known WonderSwan. We've got Megadrive, Neo Geo, SNES, PS1, Famicom, PC Engine and more. And the great thing about this open ended OS is that it is fully customizable, so you can load more emulators, and as many games as your SD memory card will take. But for me, the key selling point is the embedded MAME and FBA emulators - these are the dedicated arcade games emulators. And it comes pre-loaded with hundreds of games, including the aforementioned Toki, as well as a number of other older favorites of mine.
When I used to go to some of the bigger arcades here, now long gone, there was always a distinct winner. Whatever Konami did, I played. And boy, those very early '90s were a treasure trove of amazing games by them, all side-scrolling, multiplayer beat'em ups - X-Men, The Simpsons, Teeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Asterix, Sunset Riders, the side-scrolling shoot'em ups Wild West : C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, and the G.I. Joe shoot'em up - a game that I absolutely loved back then.
Another favourite was Capcom - I'm not even going into the Street Fighter series at all - but sticking with those side-scrolling beat'em ups, they had Final Fight, the absolutely batshit crazy Captain Commando, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Punisher, and the greatest of them all - Aliens vs. Predator.
And what do you know? All these are included here. Oh! And also, some from my pre-teens as well - Snow Bros! Shadow Dancer! Hammerin' Harry!
Because I usually wake up really early - especially now that I managed to more or less get my sleep schedule a bit more under control - I´ve been playing these classic games before I start working and I always do a complete run of them just for the fun of it. Truth be told, what with unlimited continues it's far easier to just plow through them - these games were HARD and for sure they were quarter munchers in the old arcades.
I'll eventually get to know a bit more about modding the console itself, installing custom firmware and whatnot, but for the moment it's all about keeping on diving in and seeing what else we got there - there's still tons I've yet to explore.
Be aware that I might be telling a lie here. Meaning that things might not have happened exactly like how I'll describe them, but there might be some mitigating circumstances - it's possible I was maybe a bit drunk, and this might also have been close to twenty years now as well.
Be that as it may, my dear friend Sérgio has another friend called Ricardo, if I'm remembering right. Now, this might not be his name after all, I only did meet him the once, and maybe heard about him once or twice throughout the years. We all met for drinks in this dive that no longer exists, where the goth and cyber-goth and heavy-metal dudes used to go back in the day. If my memory serves me well, this was one of those proper metal guys - long hair, black clothes, sweat-shirts of obscure Norwegian black-metal bands, the whole deal. And I do remember that amidst all the hubbub we did manage to talk quite a bit, not only about music - I'd been veering away from metal around that time, so already there were plenty of bands that I knew nothing of - but also about other things; both of them were taking their degrees in philosophy, and although I might not have been to catch up with everything, it was still a solid, entertaining conversation.
And it's from that very same conversation that I gather I heard the name Agalloch for the first time. I don't know. I can kinda sorta remember it being mentioned. I didn't pay any attention to it at the time, just another in an infinite slew of weird sounding bands. It remained somewhere in the back of my mind.
A few years later, circa 2006/7 I followed a blog - no links from me, I can't stand the guy - that, unfortunately for me, was far more interesting than my own back then, and the guy piled good music upon good music there. I'm fairly certain he posted some Agalloch there. Fairly. Can't be 100% sure. So somehow, I'd dredged up the name from the depths of my mind and turned to my ol' pal e-Mule and got their discography. Sure, I might've played something or the other here and there, but I left it mostly untouched. Years go by, and it's now 2013 - the dark year - and one of the few good things to come out of that depression was the amount of music I listened to, their updated discography included.
They're a dangerous band for me, evoking in me the same feelings that 'Into the wild', 'White Fang', Leaves of Grass', 'Walden' and other works of the same genre do - that temptation to leave everything behind and eke out a living from mother nature itself.
Then I remember who and what I am and realize I'd probably die on day one.
I'm always fairly envious of notorious reclusive writers like Thomas Pynchon, J.D. Salinger or Cormac McCarthy, who mostly eschew from living in a social way, and instead live their lives according their own desires. It might also help being a bestselling novelist in order to afford such a life, though. I should maybe try to get into that racket someday.
I don't usually spotlight the same album twice in a short period of time, but for the past few days - hell, for the past few months - Her Name is Calla's latest and last album 'Animal Choir' hasn't left me for a single moment.
The band itself is fairly new to my life - I got to know them in 2013 only, when someone sent me a video to their song 'Dreamland'. That was my gateway into the band, and I've followed them ever since. Strangely enough, I don't have much of them on vinyl, and it was only with this new record that I decided to start getting their records. A good thing I did, because the awesome folks at Dunk Records put out an amazing vinyl edition of 'Animal Choir' that I just felt I had to have. I even ordered it without actually listening to the record once - it's just one of those bands for me.
If I recall this correctly, I actually didn't know at the time of purchase that this would be their final album - they disbanded after it - and I guess it might've only been through some reviews I read online that I found out, though by that time I'd already listened to the record a number of times.
Knowing the story, and understanding the lyrics written for it, makes for such a better experience altogether - if a somewhat painful and wholly emotional one at that.
I'll not review the album, that's not my purpose with this post.
My purpose is reasoning the whys and wherefores of the impact this record has been having on me.
My first listens to it gave me - here and there - a message of hope, a feeling that after all the darkness there could be a shining ray of light from on high, as a line in the beautiful track 'Frontier' so beautifully puts it - 'Love will bring you back to me'.
Further listens started to bring more than hope to the forefront. Dissatisfaction with so much that's part of our normal lifes, the breaking down of relationships, the strengthening of relationships, the questioning of the past as a means of ascertaining the future - see the recurring motif 'Am I the last of your life?' heard in 'To The Other', 'Robert and Gerda' and 'Bloodline', the complicated task of saying goodbye to so much of what you knew, of closing a door behind you and moving on, and the absolute despair that comes with the realization that you don't want to do what you used to anymore.
The aforementioned 'Bloodline' has a bit that says 'Everyone wants to be here, but no one knows why. Everything leads back here, but no one knows why.' - and it posits that question of whether or not you want to keep doing something that may no longer make you happy or fulfill you.
And, of course, it's replied by another line, repeated like a mantra, the singer's voice increasing urgency ringing in your ears : 'I don’t want to be a part of this'.
So what does one do when one makes that decision? How do you stop, how do you move on? How do you reason with yourself and with others that not only was this the right choice to make, it was the only choice left to make? What do you do when the bad starts to outweigh the good, but the good is still so good that you fear it becoming something else, and before it does, you have to make that decision?
'We wanted this loop and we’ll live it out now for as long as we can I don’t want to be a stranger in a strange land anymore There’s nothing else to say. there’s nothing else to do This is the part where we change or we fade or we dig even deeper down I’ll see you in the next life.'
These decisions are the type of stuff that I've never been good at. I never knew when to stop. I never knew when to let go. I never knew how to move on.
And as I listen to these words, all I can say is 'I don't want to be a part of this'. I'm exhausted. Life has been draining me and I have so little joy in the mere act of living. Maybe I don't live at all, I just exist.
Maybe I'll learn these lessons. Maybe now. Maybe in the next life. I'll see you then.
Pondering on yesterday's post, and on how the mere act of dreaming can conjure up so much from your past, I had a flood of memories this morning, and it does tie into a theme I'd touched upon before, which is remembering the exact first time you listened to a song.
I'd been impressed with Bloc Party's 'A silent alarm', but not so much so that when their sophomore album 'A weekend in the city' came out, I rushed out to get it. Or even listen to it. I did listen, though, to maybe a couple of singles - 'Hunting for witches' to be sure, at least.
Now here's where the math doesn't add in my mind : the album was released in February 2007, and my recollection of listening to 'Sunday' was certainly - in my mind's eye, at least - on a summer's day. It could very well be that this was so, though I can't really account for that gap.
It was, and of that I am sure, first listened to on a very apropos sunday. At the time I was dating Sil and this had to have happened before she left to the Netherlands in September. I was also DJing at the time, and usually I did my gigs on saturday nights, meaning that my sundays would normally be very hung over. The folks at the bar where I played made sure I always had something to drink, especially Lisa, who I knew from another bar where I also played, she'd give me these massive glasses full of vodka and red bull - like 80% vodka, and man, there were some nights when the trip back home would be quite the chore.
Anyway, I was lying in her bed, a tiny thing barely enough for her, let alone the two of us. The radio was on, she was already up, and the noise from outside kept me from sleeping in. I got up and sat on the bed, still bleary eyed, still groggy from the previous night. I notice that the radio was on, I'd been ignoring it so far. She sidles up to me and serves me a bowl of cereal and fruit she'd kindly prepared for us, and we just sat there, in silent contemplation of her coming departure. Then the drums come in, accompanied by an almost churchlike organ before Kele starts singing. We sat there, munching to our heart's delight, and the song played.
A few months after that we'd be trying - and failing - to make it in London, and Bloc Party became part of my soundtrack to those days. Both this album as well as its follow-up, 'Intimacy', were an integral part of my day. So many hours spent traversing that sprawling city, embedding its nooks and crannies in my mind. I once plotted - but never followed through on it - a trek through London based on a chapter of Alan Moore's 'From Hell', where Sir William Gull guides his driver Nettley across the history of the city, going back hundreds and hundreds - maybe even thousands - of years.
Ah well, maybe next time, eh?
Dreams can be quite complicated. Sometimes I'll dream something oddly prophetic, sometimes I'll have these vivid, so real that they're almost lifelike dreams, sometimes I have dreams like last night's, which tend to be more a visitation than actual dreams.
There's a story to this dream, and a story behind the dream that is something that happened in real life. That story was told only the once, and the record of it has been excised and is no longer extant.
But without telling the story, let me tell you that it begins with someone I met almost a lifetime ago, Y.
She was the first girl for whom I felt love, but not necessarilly 'love' as I know it today, or as how I define it today. It was something different, something more pure, I'd say. Besides one small kiss, and a short embrace, there was no physical side to it. And yet, love it was, love we felt, and lo these many years later I still feel that love. In a sense - though it's a far different story - Craig Thompson's 'Blankets' often reminded me of those days of feeling love for the first time.
(All the cartoon and comicbook characters I loved deeply - Gwen Stacy, Elektra Natchios, Jean Grey, Candy Candy, et al - do not count!)
Y died at a very early age, and that's an ache I still remember. Now, what I'm about to tell you may require some suspension of disbelief, but throughout all these years I've had Y visit me, in dreams. and sometimes in waking moments as well. She's a presence that will always be with me.
Last night she visited me and we spoke of some matters that have weighed heavy on me. After I woke up, I stayed in bed for a couple of hours, feeling the warmth in the air slowly permeate me, and my mind lingered on the dream for a bit. The mind tends to wander, and soon I found myself thinking about a girl called Mariana - we were in class together, in the 9th grade, and for some reason I thought she'd be the love of my life.
Now, she never actually gave me me any sort of time of day, but in all fairness - that version of me, that '93 kid decked in cammo shorts, Sepultura t-shirts and a walkman blasting the loudest prophanities wasn't appealing at all to someone such as her. And it's not like I made much effort - though I did do one of the bravest things I ever did then. I somehow cajoled my english teacher to give me access to her record, and I got her address from there. My masterplan was that I'd send her a valentine's card and she'd fall wildly in love with me. I did send it, guess how that played out?
But that feeling for her remained quite a bit after that, though I was never to see her again.
In '95 I joined the Air Force, and at that time I still nurtured the hope that we'd somehow get together, I had this 'An Officer and a Gentleman' type of vision in my mind where she'd see me in uniform, and we'd have loads of babies together and be happy ever after.
Then something strange happened.
I remember one day I was lying in my bunk - I'd chosen the top bunk when I started my basic training - and I was thinking about her and I realized I couldn't even remember what she looked like. This sudden realization led to much of that feeling I was still clinging to begin to ebb away. And I felt so disheartened at this, a part of me thought that love meant that you could never ever forget people - and to become aware that this was so chipped a bit of my soul away.
And that's true for so many people in my life. Even Sílvia, with whom I shared my life for five years, I can barely remember her now. I have a vague impression of her, of course. I have tons of memories of being with her, I remember how much she impacted my life, but her physical self - it's almost gone.
What I see most of the time is a smudge, a blob, something undefined where someone should be.
It's a heartbreaking thing, for me, to realize this. That no matter how much you may have loved someone, time erodes that version of someone that only you got to see and know. These silhouettes of people that haunt us. These faded mirror images are the ghosts that we carry inside.
I wouldn't be able to tell you for sure exactly when the first time I listened to Morrissey's unique voice was, it could have been in one of those many tapes my brother used to have, or maybe our older brother played it, but it's also likely that I might've seen a video on TV - I have faint memories of watching the video to 'Ask' somewhere, or something like that.
I do have a memory, though, of being with my family down in Algarve, and at the time, for some reason, I thought that Morrissey was actually called Morrisson, and somewhere I overheard people talking about Van Morrisson. I thought they were actually talking about Morrissey and I tried to get closer to them so I could get in on the conversation, but someone pulled me away and off we went, far from a conversation about Morrissey that existed in my mind only.
Starting when I was about six or seven, I was studying English, and as I grew older I started to get along with not only my fellow students, who were, for their greater part, older than me but with some of the faculty as well. Marina - on who I had such a crush on - was my fifth year teacher, and she was still fairly young - twenty something or so, and then Richard - to whom I'd like to apologize profusely in person for putting him through the wringer so often back then - were some of the people I could talk to about music.
Back then I used to sport my metal shirts all the time - Napalm Death, Obituary, Carcass, Overkill, and a bunch of others. These shirts would prove to be a point of contention between and the school board, because some of them were downright offensive. Did I care? Not really, no. Hey, I was young.
But they'd also come to be a springboard for some really good talks about music. Richard, a born Mancunian, would talk with me about some of these bands I listened to, and explained to me how much originated from the punk movement - crust, grindcore, extreme metal, it all came from that punk/hardcore source.
He, being older than I, obviously knew of many bands I did not know, and some I only knew of in passing. The Smiths was one of them, and I grilled him on them, and eventually he got me some tapes with their records. Richard got me some other stuff as well, including some Vini Reilly, the Buzzcocks, very early James, as well as New Order - he blew me away when he told me that they were Joy Division minus Ian Curtis. I had no idea!
Yet it would be those tapes with the songs of Moz and Marr and Joyce and Rourke that would capture me forever. Think what you will about Morrissey and what he's known for saying, I can still detach myself from that and still enjoy that music - I will do so forever.
I've always entertained the notion that in my lifetime I'd see The Smiths reuniting, but that is highly unlikely, not to say outright impossible.
If you're curious about the stories behind their albums and songs, I highly recommend Simon Goddard's books on the matter, 'Songs that saved your life' and 'Mozipedia : The Encyclopedia od Morrissey and The Smiths'.
By the way, I did not completely dislike 'England is mine', the Morrissey biopic.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, panic coursing through my veins, screaming silently in abject terror at how much I managed to fuck up my life.
And then I remember someone I know, and think I ain't done that bad after all.
I used to know a girl, way back in the day, we used to go out to the same places, we sort of knew of each other, but we never truly actually met.
Sometime around 2006 or 2007, when I DJ'd, she'd sometimes swing by and say hello - we were facebook friends, and I always used to advertise my events there.
Then one day I hear that she's moved to England, somewhere in the countryside where she lived with her fella. And that was that, the last I knew of her, even though I also moved to England a bit later.
A couple of years ago I suddenly came across her name, in the news, of all places. I'll leave her nameless here, though a google search could easily reveal the identity.
It seemed that somewhere along the way she'd hooked up with some right wing extremist gits, and... god, I don't know. They were all into that nazi crap, and they even had a baby and took pictures with him whilst saluting the flag or some such idiocy. What it boils down to is that eventually authorities wised up to this bunch of twats, and they were all (or so I'd imagine) put behind bars. Her, I know for sure, was locked up.
And it always felt like such a stupid waste. She's a beautiful, talented woman, she had a keen eye for photography... and to throw it all away for what? For people who don't care if she lives or dies?
It's madness.
To lose it all, in such a stupid manner... Well, even I wouldn't fuck up that bad.
And what does all this have to do with the band I'm posting about today? I'm not too sure either. I know I liked her taste in music, and I'm pretty sure she may also have posted some ORE when we were facebook pals. But maybe I'm also reminded about another girl, someone who we knew in common, who might also be guilty of posting ORE. I don't know.
It's hard to know anything, when you ponder the infinite stupidity people are capable of.
December 4th 1994 was a momentous occasion in my metal years - there was a gig slated for that day that I'd been eagerly anticipating, yet couldn't even begin to process just how much of an impact it would have on me.
The venue, one of the then ex-libris for concerts of this ilk, was a particular favourite of mine at that time, I'd been there many times before, and would return a few more times after. A small, two-tiered building, it still had pretty decent sound - except when sound engineers screwed everything up and the bands sounded crap - and got a bit famous for some morons diving from the first floor onto the crowd.
Three local bands would be playing, as well as three foreign bands. The national roster was comprised of Thormenthor (I hated the gig back then, hated how they sounded in genereal, but in my adult life I came to listen to them and thought 'hey, this isn't so bad after all', Disgorged (who actually didn't play at all for some reason) and Moonspell, who'd go on to become Portugal's greatest metal band. I did quite enjoy their gig - it was short and sweet and well played. Surely it was a herald of greater things to come.
As for the other bands, now those were my main draw. I was dead eager to see all of them live, though my knowledge of their backlog of work may not have been the best. But playing that night would be Anathema (the proper, doom-metal Anathema, with Darren White still on vocals), Samael (of whom I knew because I had their 'Blood Ritual' CD and Cannibal Corpse, quite likely my favourite death-metal band of the era.
Anathema was an amazing gig, though nowadays whenever I see the setlist for that particular gig, there are some songs there that I just can't remember having been played. Granted, it was over 25 years ago, but still.
Cannibal Corpse's gig was tremendous - Chris Barnes was on point, the sound was absolutely crushing, and the crowd was wild. It also holds the distinction of being the last ever gig where I moshed. Now, truth be told, the physical aspect of heavy music never appealed that much to me - the moshing, the slam dancing, etc. - but during that particular gig I got hit in the head by a steel-toed boot one time too many and decided to call it quits.
Ever since then, I'm either comfortably sat down enjoying the concert, or safely off to the side just taking it all in.
But the highlight, for sure, was Samael. I might have not been that impressed with what I knew of them, but they were then promoting their new album 'Ceremony of Opposites', and they just completely blew me away.
From the first moment they set foot on the stage, I knew it was going to be something special. I'd never seen someone like singer Vorph on stage - his was a palpable hatred that emanated from him. The visceral performance he delivered, coupled with Mas on bass and Xy on drums was, by itself something to behold, but even further stealing the show would be that man behind the keyboards, Rodolphe H.
A mohawked, sunglassed, black clad figure who stood behind the keyboards, themselves hidden behind a cloth of blackest black, he seemed to not move at all - but his hands would often move up and down as if they were playing the notes to armageddon itself.
I left the gig impassioned, and would acquire their 'Ceremony of Opposites' shortly after.
In a curious turn of events, a few months after this gig, in May 1995, they played another gig in Lisbon, this time with fellow label mates Tiamat and Sentenced - two of my favourite bands then, as well as some national acts, Thormenthor yet again, Sacred Sin, and Exomortis. If I'm honest, the only one of these I remember actually seeing was Exomortis, and I did finf them quite interesting, but never really followed up on them.
I was somewhat occupied to absorb much from the other gigs, but that was the gig where I met the future mother of my son.
Is there like a city or place or whatever that you could never quite get? Like, for instance, you never gel or vibe with somewhere? I have that exact thing happen to in regards to the city of Coimbra. And I never quite managed to figure out why, but it's a place from where I can't draw a single good memory. Every time I've been there has just been... weird. I dunno. Maybe it's got it's own thing going on, and people who get it, get it. And you'd think that it would be sort of an ideal place for me - it's got a vibrant music scene, it's got a good nightlife, the city's fairly young because of its university, but ultimately it just leaves me cold.
Maybe this all could change, I guess. Maybe someday I'll go there and it'll make sense.
As it is, the best memory I have of Coimbra is actually a memory of someone I know who's from there, Raquel.
We were in this Facebook music group and she'd always post the oddest stuff - some of it so odd that I can't find traces of it anywhere. So one day I hit her up and we started talking, and for the next few months we'd trade songs with each other. She opened up my eyes to a lot of stuff I don't think I'd usually listen to, stuff like this lady here, Soledad Vélez, Dirty Beaches, The Shaggs, and god knows what else.
True, some of it just didn't stick, but some other stuff became instant favourites.
It's not much of a memory to attribute to any given place, but hey - them's the breaks.
I'm sure I've already told this story elsewhere, but Joy Division was one of those bands that I first got to know through my older brother's tapes. Sometime after the mid-80s, when we were living in a wee hamlet about an hour away from Lisbon, my brother started hanging out with some of the local kids who introduced him to a bunch of bands, all of them with weird sounding names, like The Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, The Cure, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Joy Division. Hey, the bands I listened to may also have had weird sounding names, but they were my bands.
Anyway, he'd listen to those tapes endlessly, and sometimes I'd even like some of the music being played. Some of these bands became highly significant to me, others I mostly just could never really get into.
One that remained with me since those days is Joy Division - though their impact wouldn't be felt until sometime in the early 90s.
I couldn't now tell you exactly where this happened - my mind does have the tendency to sometimes gloss over some details, and I'll mix up places and years and whatnot. As it was, this might've been in either a number of bookstores that a) no longer exist or b) if they exist still, look nothing like they were when I knew them. The problem with trying to remember this particular bit, is while I can remember the book quite well, where I'm holding it could very well be any of those places. Or maybe none of those places.
Be that as it may, I'm browsing the shelves, taking in the racks, something I've always loved doing. Taking a book from the shelf, holding it in your hand and feeling the weight of it, turning it this way and that way to see if it's in a good condition, then leafing carefully through it, its scent wafting up to your nose, filling you with that delightful book smell. There were a number of these bookstores here that I used to go, sadly most of them just don't exist anymore. But in one of them, what's happening is that by chance I grab a book - my mind is trying to tell me that the book might have been somewhat grubby, maybe even dog-eared, which makes me think that this may have been somewhere that also sold second-hand books, but then again - some of these bookstores might not always have had some great standards when it came to displaying their books and keeping them in ideal conditions. I've picked up the book, and I'm finding out that this is some sort of poetry anthology, though the author's name was unfamiliar to me. What was familiar to me, though, was another name on the cover - Joy Division.
This was a bilingual edition, where on one side there would be the original poem, and on the other a portuguese translation. I gravitated towards the original, and I'll own up to having intensely disliked some of the translations I read - even then I could see what was being lost in translation.
I read those poems intently, without knowing what to make of them. I had no idea at the time of that initial reading that these were lyrics to songs, some that I'd even listened to in the past.
Bear in mind that this was pre-internet days, and finding out stuff was much, much harder.
Eventually I had to leave, and left the book there, unfortunately I couldn't afford it at the time.
Time moves on, and in 1996 I'd come across the book once again, as well as the portuguese translation of Deborah Curtis's memoirs 'Touching from a distance'. Now, where I found these books and perused them, that I can remember - it was in yet another store that doesn't exist anymore, the old VC kinda but not really megastore downtown. In the second floor there was a book and video section, and while the selection there wasn't very expansive, it would yield the odd nugget or two. I did get a bunch of anime VHS there, as well as some imported books.
I chanced upon these aforementioned books one time whilst there, and I've since experienced a sort of Mandela effect, because I seem to vividly remember a bit in Deborah's book where she mentioned something about Ian not being comfortable with holding his infant daughter Natalie, for fear of dropping her and somehow injuring her, or worse. And yet I never seem to catch that specific part when re-reading the book.
Yet, having been exposed to these writings stirred something in me, and in the coming months I'd experience three more moments where Ian's shadow would loom large in my life.
It's now 1997, and in april of that year Theatre of Tragedy would release an EP called 'A Rose for the Dead' that contained a Joy Division cover - 'Decades'. This was one of the songs that I remembered best from listening to my brother's tapes, or maybe from some local radio. These small towns did have a quite vibrant alternative scene, with plenty of tape trading, and semi-obscure garage parties, and in the small hours of the morning they'd maybe devote an hour or two to these more underground bands.
'Decades' is still my favourite song of theirs, and I've always felt that this cover did them justice.
So it comes as no surprise that this EP became a perennial choice at that particular time. Not long thereafter, I'd work with a guy - wish I could still be in touch with him, but I can't even remember his name - who was massively into Joy Division, and because we both worked the graveyard shift, we'd have these long conversations about the band. There were many things I learned from him about Joy Division, and from him I'd borrow and read those two books, Deborah's and that lyrics anthology.
Not very long after that I'd get the 'Heart and Soul' box set, and I could finally start to fully get the words - both written & sang. Reading the books, listening to the songs, getting to know the man - and the tragedy of his existence, would leave an indelible mark in my life - so much so that I would name my son Ian after him.
It's now 40 years to the day since Ian Curtis took the fateful decision to end his life. I can't even begin to fathom the depths of the despair he must have felt, but I certainly ponder that quite a bit.
I don't think I could take that kind of plunge, not really. However much I wish I could somehow be erased from creation, I wouldn't be able to move myself against me. In truth I can't imagine a way of pulling it off without traumatizing someone deeply.
I've stared long into my own personal abyss, and so often the abyss stares back at me. There's a chasm between who I am in this physical world and who I am in my mind's eye, and I'm yet to learn how to traverse that distance.
I can only stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before me, and learn from their deeds.
So it seems summer is finally on its way. The days are indeed getting longer, and hotter too. Not very long from now I'll have to bring out my fan, just so I can survive the heat.
I am not a huge fan of summer... I haven't been in a very long time, I guess. Which is odd, because when I was a kid I did enjoy summer a lot. I'd say that maybe up until I was 12 or 13 I had plenty of great summer related memories, especially when we'd go down south and spend our vacation with the family, and we'd go to the beach everyday, and sometimes we'd even go to the aquatic parks and we'd have a blast.
Something did change, though, as I got older. I stopped going to the beach on a regular basis; in fact I sometimes spend whole years without setting foot in one, and if you asked me now when was the last time I spent a day at the beach, I'd say that it was maybe 3 or 4 years ago.
I don't know what happened, maybe I became too self aware and self conscious of my own body and disliked people looking at me, maybe I started to shy away from having to compare to others.
I don't know. One day it just happened, and I decided to not go anymore.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I love more than going to the beach - in the winter, when it's cold, and the crashing waves spray you with their salt. That's my truth right there - I just prefer winter so much. People may say that summer's the season of life, I say that winter is the season of the soul.
All that said, though - I do love songs that remind me of the summer.
There are so many songs that can conjure that perfect picture of a warm summer's day, no doubt.
This morning I woke up with sunlight emerging from the slits of the shutter, and I had a pleasant memory of listening to this song in dear Isabel's car some years back.´
Yet another story where I could've, should've, would've, but stupidly failed to act on it.
Do you know how sometimes a song can get attached to the memory of a specific person, even though that person actually didn't do much (or anything at all) to get linked to your experience with the song?
I woke up today with a song in my head, and a part of me wanted just to get up and spin the record.
But as I slowly started to get out of bed, I felt pulled in again. I hadn't slept well, and the bed was warm and inviting. I closed my eyes and then slept a bit more.
I dreamt then, a weird dream. I know a girl called Sílvia (not the one I've mentioned before) and though we've not seen in each other in a few years, there's an undeniable history between us.
In this dream, I guess it was in my house, not this one I live in or maybe any other that exists or even existed, and we were both working on something. I was at my PC and she at hers, but in truth the inside of the house was quite large, almost like the inside of a restaurant, with individual tables here and there.
I have no idea what I was working on, but it must've been something that demanded my full attention because I didn't even notice her there.
Here was me, looking at me, seeing me this time - very slim, almost on the haggard side, hair cropped very short, and I was wearing glasses, something I've not done in an age.
Sílvia was sitting somewhere to my left, and as I said, I wasn't aware of her presence there. The dream then pans to her, and then we see her looking at me. She's undecided about something, she glances at me fleetingly, and then gets up. For a split second, it seems like she's going to come up to me, but she decides against it and leave. From the corner of my eye, I get the impression that I'd seen her, but then I get up and look around and she's nowhere to be seen. Just as I make my way to my table, I see that she left an envelope with my name on it, a colorful envelope, with my name written in large, garrish letters.
I want to open it, but I can't, for some reason. A part of me wants not the written words, but rather the spoken ones.
I think I'm about to start looking for her, but just as I do, I start to wake.
Today I want a more pleasant memory. Some days I listen to Sopor Aeternus a lot, and it always brings me back some good memories.
As these writings often take a more confessional turn, I here admit that I have been in a number of relationships in my life, most of them very short lived.
In 2003 I was in a very brief relationship with a girl called Sara. No, not the one I previously wrote about. And before that Sara there was another Sara too. Ugh
There's this thing where I can't really remember much about many of those failed relationships. Some things I do have oddly viviv memories of, but mostly, I can't remember much.
It's like they sort of just happened, and they were not that important to either party.
(God knows I do not presume to think I was ever important in the life of many people.)
Now, with Sara - I can remember how I first met her. I can remember the very first time we were together (it's a hell of a weird story), and I can remember when and why we broke up. But most of what's in between, I can no longer recall.
Sure, every now and again I'll get a flash of something, but that's pretty much it.
But... I do have a pretty great memory from that time.
It's either very, very late 2003 or very, very early 2004 and Sara and me had gone out with a couple of friends - Fi & Carla. We were at this place somewhere, just sitting down, and enjoying a drink, when out of the blue we decided we'd get into Fi's car and drive out to Tróia - a peninsula just outside Lisbon - that, under normal circumstances wouldn't be too much of a hassle to get to, but considering that it was already after midnight, getting there became something far more time consuming.
One thing about me is that I don't often smile. I know of people who've never seen me smile. Even Silvia, with whom I spent some five years, would often comment on much I didn't smile.
It's not for any specific reason, it's not like I'm some perpetually maudlin, miserable old sod - it's just not something I've often had a cause to do.
Again, this would've been during winter, and I do remember that winter being especially cold. And because I'm someone who's always ill-prepared for pretty much anything, instead of wearing the far more reasonable combat boots I usually wore, I was sporting my red chucks. Instead of wearing a warm woolen sweater, I was wearing a plain black tee under a leather jacket that, while undubitably cool, warmed me not in the slighteste. So off we go to Tróia, braving some backroads, all the while listening to music on the way.
Now.. at the time, Sara's favourite band was Sopor Aeternus - I knew of them by name, but had never listened to them. It was during that fateful trip that I'd first come across that creature that goes by the name of Anna-Varney Cantodea. Let it be said, though, that I didn't pay that much attention to the songs - I couldn't even make out what was being sung.
But the seed was definitely planted that night, and I'd soon get to know them much better.
In the meantime, we were making our way to Tróia and shortly after we get there, we make our way to a semi-abandoned children's playground where I used to play as a young boy - my family vacationed there sometimes.
So the first thing that happens is that my trusty chucks become instantly soaked, on account of all the dew in the grass - what a fun way to start the night!
And yet... and yet I jumped on a swing at once, and for a long while, I swung myself ever higher, ever faster, something I'd not done in oh so many years. While I was doing this, Sara and my friends were watching me - I daresay some pictures were taken, though I no longer have them - and after I got out of the swing, they stood agog, looking at me. After a few short moments they asked, almost in unison : 'You can smile?'
Indeed I can, though I rarely do.
Today is my father's birthday. I don't really think about him that often, and I can't even quite remember when I last saw him. I want to say it would have been circa 2006, 2007 at the latest.
My father and me have never been close, in fact, we've never even liked each other. I know these are difficult things to understand, I know. Alas, in time I came to know people who've estranged themselves from their parents, and who've long cut their filial bonds.
To me it's not so strange, not really.
I'm trying really hard here, and I can't remember a single moment when I felt loved by this man, and conversely, I can't remember a single moment I felt love for him. What I felt the most was fear; my father was prone to violence, and my family felt it deeply. I recall a number of times, we were in the car going somewhere, and out of nowhere he'd say stuff like 'one of these days I'll kill us all' or 'next bridge we cross I'm going to crash the car and we'll plummet to our deaths'. It could all have been a joke, of course. But I do not remember my mother laughing at this.
With time, our family disintegrated, and for a little while he was out of the picture. The loss of this family we had translated itself in something that has since been with me - the feeling that I do not have a home. Now, let me say that I am extremely grateful for the house where I live. In some way or the other, I've lived here for decades. All my life is here.
But there is that hole deep inside my core that screams for home. And I never really knew what home felt like, not even when I lived with Ian's mom. Not with anyone, really.
I take two positive things from my father's existence : a) he taught me what not to be as a dad - and though I am far, FAR, from perfect in that field, I fortunately knew where I could improve on him and b) the ripples his presence made in the waters of my life were not unlike a stepping stone from which I would go to where and who I am. And I may haven't always been the boyfriend, I may not always have been the best guy, but if I had to measure the good against the bad? Maybe I did far more good.
This takes me to - again - circa '93/94. I've never been one to have many friends - I explained in an earlier post why - but I've always been blessed with great, true friends. And one of the things I didn't know about friendship back then is how cyclical it sometimes can be. How someone can opt out of that friendship. How you can spend a bunch of time without hearing word one from a friend, and out the blue, there you are, like no time has passed at all.
Around that time, I had two pretty good friends, and I was happy with that arrangement. One of them - Valter - was someone whose house I was always welcomed to, and by then, he was certainly the person who knew me the best, and in whom I would confide the bitter pangs of life at home. In a sense, being at his place was sort of like feeling at home, though I quite envied the stability he had - granted, mostly of the financial kind. You know how the grass is always greener on the other side? Well, I eventually came to learn that the grass wasn't always greener for him. It would be a rare thing, but on occasion he and his father would get into massive rows, sometimes getting physical as well.
If, by the time that '94 drew to a close, anyone had told me than in a half year's time we'd not be friends anymore, I wouldn't have believed it. Again, friendships and their cycles.
As one ends, another blossoms. S and me met each other in '93, and he knows full well this story. I've written to him sometime last year and I put into words how that time was so important for me, how his house was more of a home to me than my own. Some stories needn't be shared. We know.
I am here, and to my left and to my right I see myself surrounded by those who matter the most to me. In front, I see nothing but a shining light heralding white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Free time leads to more thinking, or in my case, to overthinking. I'm thinking about memories a lot, I mean I'm not remembering memories, I'm thinking about memory as a whole. Perhaps it's age, perhaps it's exhaustion, perhaps it's side effects of all the chemicals that course through me, I don't know. But I find myself not remembering things that I used to know so well. Songs I sang a billion times, now I mumble my way through them because words escape me. Or maybe I find myself misremembering things.
I've never been good with either faces or names, certainly not even when I was younger. One of the things that scared me the most in recent years was actually being with people - like girlfriends - and I'd panic because I couldn't remember their names. We'd lying in bed and I'd look at them, trying my best not to give away the panic in my eyes, thinking what their name was.
And memories can be repressed, or maybe supressed, one or even the both. Sometimes in dreams I remember things. Sometimes I have a conversation with someone, or walk by somewhere, and things come back to me.
There's a girl that lives in my building, on the fourth floor, two floors above me. She's lived here since forever, because I remember her since forever, and yet, I don't even know her name. Other than some perfunctory 'good day' or 'good evening', we never talked. Sometimes I'm coming in as she's leaving the building, or maybe we pass each other by in the stairs. I know she has a sister. Or maybe even sisters. In my mind they are very similar.
This has gone on for years and years.
Today I had to go out and do some shopping. Just before I left, I was in the living room - it had been raining incessantly up until a few minutes, and I got up to look out through the window to see if it was ok to go out. As I stand by the window, I see the 4th floor girl crossing the street, maybe she was going out to do shopping as well. I got dressed, went out, and came back home.
As I was getting in, I noticed that she was already there, checking the mail. I did so as well, and after saying hello, I stopped before going up and talked to her.
I told her how I found funny how we've lived in the same building for decades and yet never even talked. I might've said something else. And then she asked me if I didn't remember. Remember what, asks I? Well, we used to play when we were smaller. We played where? You used to come up to my house. I've never been to your house, that's impossible, I've never even went up to your floor. No, you did, you used to come up and we'd play. We'd play in my room in the loft. No, that's not possible, I don't remember any of that. But you did, she smiled. No, I remember sometimes I dream about a house on the fourth floor, but it's not yours. It is. How? She shrugged, and carried on up the stairs.
Memory's a funny thing. I was sure I'd seen Lacuna Coil opening for Cradle of Filth around '96 or '97, but apparently they opened for Moonspell in '98.
The '90s were very formative years for me, those pre-internet days where you really had to do your homework if you wanted to find out what's new. Those were the years where I read the most magazines as well.
Let's see - late '80s, early '90s I was way into skating and metal and comics and horror/sci-fi movies and videogames, so Thrasher was a must for my skating related news, Metal Hammer was my go to choice regarding heavy music, I wouldn't know of Wizard until about '93 or '94, and the only stuff I'd ever had in the way of comics news were some Amazing Heroes back issues I'd found somewhere, though by that time they were horribly dated. My horror and sci-fi fix came through Fangoria and Starlog, and videogames came through a number of different sources, including, Edge, Mean Machines, Computers + Videogames and a couple of others I can't recall anymore.
And let me tell you something - all of these mags cost a pretty penny back then, and considering that in '91 my folks split up and all that middle-class living I'd enjoyed so far became a distant memory, I had to get... how shall I say this? let's go with 'creative', in how I acquired them.
There were a few stores here that specialized in the import of foreign magazines, from wrestling to computers to cars to health to whatever. They literally had hundreds of them at any given time. These stores were especially vigilant, they had cameras all over the place and the price tags had alarms on them. I quickly learned that I could peel them off easily, and with the aid of a nifty folder I carried with me, I could conceal them quite easily, and abscond with them just like that.
Over the years, it is possible I might've taken quite a large number of magazines home with me.
I know, for shame. The follies of youth, eh?
Anyhoo, around that time something started catching my eye - the early issues of a new magazine called Terrorizer. Words can't begin to describe how instrumental this mag was back then - though very rough around the edges in its inception, it still proved a veritable treasure trove of new bands for me to find out - both good ones and bad. I'll never forget the 'five star' review Frater Nihil gave to Diabolical Masquerade's 'Ravendusk in my heart', naming it an essential listen, and I rushed out to get it as soon as I could, only to absolutely dislike it.
And yet, ads from labels such as Century Media, Spinefarm, Cacophonous, Music For Nations, Peaceville, Nuclear Blast and so many others were my very first insights into a number of bands I'd come to follow, one way or the other, lo these many years.
Lacuna Coil were billed as the new, defining voice in Gothic Metal, and I absolutely loved their first E.P. - still do, in fact, that's why I had to grab Alone Records recent vinyl issue. What they did afterwards left me a bit cold, but that's ok - that's why you have the memories of the good stuff to tide you over.
It's 2008 and I'm living in London with my then girlfriend. Sometime in maybe October, I guess, she moved back to Lisbon to go work with a famous architect, and I remained in London. Around that same time I started going to the gym at the YMCA. My routine was fairly simple, I'd do some biking and then go for a run, and I'd top it all off with some laps at the pool. Some days I'd do some strength training as well, but not very often because that bored me easily.
The treadmills were located in one of the mid levels of the gym - it was a multi-tiered building - and there were a number of rows of them, all of them facing some TVs at the far end of the room.
It's not a question of superstition or anything, but I do tend to use the same equipment most every time I go for a run at the gym. Went for a run, I should say. And it just so happened that the treadmill I chose to run on was located a bit far from the TVs themselves. Sure, I could kind of see what was happening on the screen, but not with great detail, and I certainly couldn't tell the name of whoever was playing.
One day I was running and after a Black Eyed Peas video, some video came in. No idea who they were, though they certainly looked like some indie band. Skinny kids, befringed hair framing their lanky bodies, pasty complexion - to be fair they did look like 99% of any other indie band. But the video caught my eye. I had no idea what the story was, there was just a bunch of guys seemingly playing with garbage, throwing rubbish at each other, breaking stuff, and a guy was prominently featured on the video - he was covered with oil or muck or what have you.
I was so intrigued by the video, but in a few minutes it was gone, replaced by some idiocy.
Having no idea who those people were, having no idea what the song even sounded like, I filed it somewhere in a deep recess of my mind.
So a few years later - probably around 2013 - I found out what the video actually was. And you know, I felt doubly stupid because a) it was the video to a song that has been on my playlists since 2008, a song I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of times and b) it's quite likely my favourite song by Foals.
It's a song that I, in all likelyhood, had actually listened to on the very day while exercising - I just never knew that the video I was watching was the video to it.
Because, and if I'm honest, I've long lost the necessary patience to watch music videos. I'm not saying they're without merit - they're not - it's just something that I don't do that often. Most times I'll play a video, and just listen to the song while doing something else altogether. True, I've seen some really good videos in my time, but it's just not been my preferred medium for a long, long time.
Songs and your ability to remember the very first time you heard them, yeah?
It's somewhere in early '85, I know for sure way before summer, because I was still attending school and it was still fairly dark in the early morning when I had to get up and get ready to go to school. Where I lived back then, man, a part of me would love to one day go back to that house and just take a good look at it - for many, many reasons that I won't speak about here, I absolutely dreaded living in that house.
But in my mind it's something that just looms so large, I remember it as being very spacious and comfortable, with two rooms, a large living room, a nice kitchen, and a shared backyard where us kids would play. Somewhere in that house there would have been a radio - my memory is telling me that it was in the bathroom, and try as I might, I can't actually picture it anywhere else. The living room had our stereo - actually just the record player - and my parents had an alarm clock, and maybe it had a radio as well. I recall it being white, or off-white; the kind of white that slowly turns a dirtier shade and begins to yellow with time.
It's very early in the morning, around 7 a.m. or so, and my parents are already fighting over something. I'm seven years old, my brother is ten and my sister is three. The fighting continues as I stand motionless in the doorway to my room, and I'm crying because I don't want my parents to fight.
My brother is somewhere else, probably in the kitchen eating his cereal, or maybe he's brushing his teeth already.
Somewhere that radio is playing, not too loud, not so loud it drowns out the fighting, but loud enough for me to hear the sadness being sung.
I didn't know what song it was, nor did I know who sang it, but it became imprinted deep in my psyche.
Slow and mournful, a waltz turned into a dirge, the music flowed from the ether to my soul. Those precious few minutes spent there that morning would become ingrained in me.
I wouldn't know of Leonard Cohen until a few years later, and the song itself would take me a few more years to return to me.
It's funny because I'm remembering now things and places that don't exist anymore, all those smaller, as well as larger, record stores that mostly disappeared in the early aughties. It would have been in one of those, nestled within some tiny shopping centre that's now defunct or derelict, that those notes would haunt me again.
I'll dance, I promise, I'll dance to the end, to the very end.
I created this blog back in 2016, at a time when I was away from social media, but still found the need to write something. Posts were far more erratic back then, with neither rhyme nor reason to them. Whereas now there is a sort of overarching theme to my texts, it wasn't so when I first began writing here. Eventually I came to abandon the blog, like so many of my previous blogs, and it was stuck in limbo for all this while.
Picking it up again gives me a chance to put to words some thought that swirl inside me without ever fully coalescing.
Case in point :
As I get older, I get increasingly more tired. Everything exhausts me, even the most minute task leaves me depleted. I know all the reasons why it can be attributed to - lack of exercise, wrong diet, not enough sleep, and when I do sleep, not enough rest, etc.
I know all this.
But it's also deepened a certain malaise of the spirit I've long carried. As a child, I was quite prone to sudden fits of melancholia, and I'd turn inward and languish in morose silence. My eighth birthday comes to mind, and I've no idea still why this happened thus, but that day that ought to be filled with laughter and joy was a mirthless day for me. In some ways I guess this was the first year I noticed I was aging, I'd stopped being seven, and was now eight - a gap that to me seemed infinite. It stood to reason that everybody else aged too, and one day they'd age too much and die. I still cared deeply for my family back then, and these thoughts brought me nothing but pain.
I am remembering now the last time I went to Switzerland - I'm sorry, Hugo, I did mean to visit you this year, but it's looking increasingly like it'll be next year - and that was 2012. That was an odd year for me, a year where I finally overcame the mourning of the love I carried within me for the previous six years, and the outcome of that was meeting the person with whom I would have a relationship that would ultimately shatter me. Funny thing is, in between these loves there was an old flame of mine who, out of nowhere, developed an interest in me, and we spent a few months in a courtship dance. Trouble is, she lived in Zurich. As time went by, I decided to go and be with her, she'd asked me to go spend a few days there with her, and I said yes.
What happened is that a few days before my flight she got cold feet and decided that the timing wasn't right. That's fair, I guess. Who am I to judge?
Anyways, I still had a flight to Switzerland booked, and instead of going to Zurich, I stayed in Nyon with Hugo.
I don't really recall much about those days spent there other than an Alien marathon, probably some playstation, me figuring out that beer + Schokokuss made for an incredible meal - consequences be damned, and something Hugo said to me that left me in shock : 'In fifteen years time we'll be fifty years old'.
That's a really good way to stop for a moment and think. And I did.
During my days there, I was texting this girl I met just before going to Switzerland, and I thought that there was a friendship growing between us. We'd actually gone for a walk on the day before my flight, and it was quite pleasant, but I had a friend of mine who was really into her, and I did not ever want to come between them.
But that good, long walk we took did start something. All those texts between us during those days created a need in us - the need to be together again, if only to see where things could go. I still remember meeting her at the library where she was studying for her master's degree, and how effusive and heartwarming her embrace was. My love began at that very moment.
No details need be put forth; maybe in another story I'll touch upon this matter. But I lived for months under the strict impression that what we were having was real. That the plans we were making would come to be. I believed. And one day it all came tumbling down, she said it had all been a mistake on her part.
In May 2013 I was going into a week where I could see my future clearly. I'd have what I'd dreamed about, I'd be happy, finally happy, and however crappy my job was, I could always get another, maybe a better one.
One week - one week is all it took for me to crumble. First, all the heartache surrounding the breakup. Then I lose my job. All in a matter of days.
I began falling to pieces.
In the coming year, I would be under a deep depression that left me medicated, often confined to my room, feeling sorry for myself, broke, broken. Only in May 2014 would I start building myself up again.
But it never happened. What did happen is that I'd continue on this streak where not only everything outside work kept going wrong, but also I'd come to develop an aptitude for self destruction. I tried. God knows I tried. In late summer 2016 I was actually feeling energized and ready for a big change, and up to January 2017 I was feeling the best I'd felt in years.
Then my body played a trick on me, my right leg started to give in on me everytime I went for a run. Somehow, I'd managed to pull a muscle thingy and actually damage a bit of my bone. That was when I started to really give up on everything.
My last message on the original iteration of this blog was posted on March 15th 2017 and it read : 'I'm destroying myself'.
Over three years and I'm still destroying myself, I can't, I can't, I can't not do it.
Even when my body sends me warnings, even when I retch my insides out, even when this pounding headache I have keeps me from getting any sleep, even when I find myself unable to stomach the voice of another human being... I choose destruction.
I want to change.
I want this to end.
But I'm tired.
I'm tired of the pain I feel in my heart.
I'm tired of what this pain has fucking done to me.
I'm
so
tired.
I miss running. I really do. It's something that I pretty much stopped doing regularly four years ago.
But I also miss liking running. The last few times I ran I just didn't enjoy myself at all, and eventually gave up. I'm always thinking about starting again, but then I never do.
Another thing I miss about running was curating my playlists for my runs. I'd always be sure to include songs that I absolutely loved and that would give me that extra boost, so I'd most of myc choices involved a lot of metal and a bunch of future pop/EBM songs as well.
Eventually, I could figure just how much of a song I could listen to per kilometer ran, songs like !!!'s 'Me and Giuliani by the schoolyard' were almost 2 km worth of' running, and for a while there - when I was running at my fastest - Eagle Fly Free was precisely 1 km, 5'08'', which I don't think is that shabby. The last time I ran it took me more than six and a half minutes to run a full kilometer.
I'll get back to it. Don't know when, but I will get back to it.
Once upon a time, and even without ever listening to a single note from one of their songs, I couldn't stand the idea of Sigur Ros. Let me expand on this : the main reason I felt this way was because of the video to 'Svefn-g-englar' - it seemed to haunt me, and I'd see it everywhere. Usually, what I can't seem to escape, I run away from.
I'm sure any number of good people I knew tried to talk me into them, but I just couldn't even pretend to be interested. I knew of them, I knew they existed, I knew many people loved them - I just wasn't one of them.
Until, of course, I was.
This came fairly recently, back in 2007. I was entering my final few months here before moving back to London, and I was cleaning my room with the telly on. Out of nowhere comes this tiny melody followed by a thunderstorm of a riff, that rendered me dumbstruck. I looked at the telly - it was a commercial for the 'Hvarf/Heim' record'.
So this is what Sigur Ros sounds like? Goddamn me if I didn't kick myself for being so daft.
Did I learn from this? Did I bollocks, I still can't give bands a chance for petty reasons like stupid names or drab, uninspired artwork on their covers.
Makes me wonder how many great bands I may be missing out on.
I don't think about you very much anymore, Sara, but sometimes I do.
The counterpoint to my years of hedonism and reckless abandon, with you began the penance that I'm still paying.
One of the greatest things of the courtship phase of a relationship is the bit where you're finding out stuff about the other person. Long walks through the park we used to go to, walking barefoot in the grass, fingers slowly intertwining, shy, happy smiles, a subtle kiss that no one sees.
Inquisitiveness as an obsessive art, what books do you like, you ask; and I reply and then ask what bands you like to listen to. So much in common, yet so little hope for us. I couldn't imagine all those nights spent worshipping your feet, your feet that graced the earth with the sweetest perfume, would be kin to nights of unrelenting tears and 3 a.m. phone calls trying to keep you from taking your own life.
I knew what I was getting into, Sara, and I only wanted to help you. And I tried, I tried until I was losing too much of myself. I still don't know if I walked away or if you pushed me away, but I know that we weren't happy very often.
Sitting down on those cement benches in Gulbenkian, trading songs with each other. We shared your headphones and listened to music. Show me something beautiful, I asked. You placed your hand in mine and smiled. This is a song, you said. And you pressed play and the song became our touch and our touch became the song and that moment became forever.
I don't think about you very much anymore, Sara, but sometimes I do.
Sometimes memories aren't pleasant. Not because they remind you of someone else, or because they evoke pain or misery or suffering. Sometimes memories remind you of who you used to be, and sometimes who you used to be ain't such a pretty sight to see.
HIM is band that I quite enjoyed in the late 90's, early 00's. I know that I eventually stopped paying that much attention to them, but here and there I'd listen to some of their older stuff - stuff I find still holds up to this day.
But I can't listen to them without remembering one very specific incident.
I can look back now and say that I don't much like who I was between 2002-2006. I don't think I much liked myself then, either. It all feels like it was set in a different life, almost.
Hard as it may be to believe these days, back then I never lacked for people in my life. It was rather far too easy to be with someone, and they'd come into my life and then leave before I knew it, in a recurring series of quite hard to tell apart from each other events, and for years I just threw myself away at whomever wanted to have a go.
One such unfortunate soul one day approached me at a club I used to go to and, not knowing me from nowhere, claimed I looked just like the lead singer, Ville Valo.
I smiled coyly at this, knowing all the while that she was wrong and very drunk, and then... ah, hell.
How I wish I could go back and slap myself some sense into me. How I wish I could excise the memory of me from all those poor wretches. They certainly deserved better - and more - than me.
Two very similar stories coming up, set roughly around the same time, one of them set in Portugal and the other set in London.
I used to go to a gym quite near where I live here - sadly it doesn't exist anymore - and, pretty much just like any other gym, they had a bunch of TVs on, facing the treadmills, and if you plugged in your phones you could listen to whatever was being played. I always take my own music with me when going to the gym, and so I'd always be listening to my tunes while watching some clip or the other on the TV.
I remember watching the video to this song while doing one of my epic 20k runs, all the while having no idea what song it was, but just being very, very fascinated by the girl who was singing, falling completely head over heels for her. Man, girls with bangs are my weakness.
They'll be the death of me, too.
As the video was ending I learnt the name of the band - I guess I might've known it from my days working at FNAC, but then again I do get a lot of bands confused. Around this time I was also DJ-ing a bit here and there - memories of which will probably make their way here - and I never played this song on one of my sets until a girl asked me to. I usually didn't mind playing stuff on request, but it had to be something that I had. It also helped if it was something I did like..
This bar where I sometimes played had a pretty decent collection of CDs of their own, and every now and again they'd have something that I would actually use, even though at the time I mainly played vinyl - which in and of itself was quite a bitch of a thing to pull off.
They had this record, and I can't stress enough the past tense of the verb, because I might've borrowed it and erm.. forgot to return it? Fun fact : I left it in the apartment I lived in Mile End a few years later.
James is one of those bands that although I know them somewhat well, I don't know them that thoroughly. I mean, I know for a fact that I've not listened to a few of their albums, and some others I might've only listened a few times. I don't know them well enough to know most of their b-sides - though this might also apply to some other bands that I know much better than I do James.
I've always meant to go back and do some in-depth listening, but it never became a priority.
In 2013 I was going into the worst phase of my life - though I kind of question whether or not where I'm at right now isn't just as bad, or perhaps even worse - and one of the few things that helped me cope was music. At the time I had a 1.5 TB hard drive filled with music, and my iTunes told me that it would take me some three years of non-stop listening to get through that backlog.
One of the great things about random play is that it can produce an unexpected pearl out of some murky depth. This one was just the case; one thing I did then and still do now a lot is playing solitaire, and I almost always do it while listening to music. Usually, I'd just listen to an album to death, whatever fascinated me at the time - The National's 'Trouble will find me' being a particular favourite then.
Every so often I'd roll the dice, though, and hit that random play button. This brought me a great number of songs that I a) hadn't listened to in a very long time or b) had not ever listened at all. To be fair, not all of them were that great, most were ok-ish at best, but some, like 'All Good Boys', the b-side to the 'I Know What I'm Here For' single, was an elegant, unexpected nugget of gold that made my heart soar - still does, in fact, up to this day. Tim Booth has one of those rare, unmistakeable voices that provide a song with such effortless beauty and grace.
James is a band who found a devoted audience here in Portugal - much like The Durutti Column - and they always deliver. I have fond memories of a gig they gave for free in Cascais almost a decade ago.
Placebo is one of those bands that took me a good, long while to get into. I first got to know the name sometime around '97, when I met my friend Hugo. At the time, I wasn't overly interested in things that fell outside my usual sonic stomping grounds, as it were, and whatever someone would try to get me into, I just couldn't even spare a listen or two to judge its merits. This is mostly true, for every now and again I could - and would be surprised - but that's something I'll go into more detail one of these days.
But some people leave seeds in you, and that's what Hugo did back then. It wouldn't be until 2003, though, that I'd take to Placebo.
Take a walk with me now, and it's '97. I'm twenty years old, two years into the most lasting relationship I ever had, and - just as I am now - completey lost. I'd gotten out of the Air Force a year prior, and this would be the beginning of my string of dead-end jobs. I was on the dole, and as it was running out, I figured I should get a job. I don't remember how anymore, but I ended working at what was then the biggest shopping center in the whole of Europe, and for the next seven months or so, I was to work in its huge hypermarket, restocking milks and eggs and yoghurts and such like products.
It was a dreary job, and I couldn't wait for my contract to end so I could move on to whatever was to come next. But I did need the money, so I stuck at it.
One of the things that I recall was that so many people worked there right at the beginning. Some 1500 people had jobs there at the time. So obviously, I didn't get to know very many people; other than those of my team and a few others who started working when I did, very few I actually got to know.
At the time, I was very into collecting comic books - it was my hobby for the longest time, and it wouldn't be surprising to catch me reading some comics in my free time, of maybe the latest issue of Wizard Magazine, or the new Previews catalogue. And that's how me and Hugo started talking, over our mutual love for comics. Do you know how sometimes, just sometimes, you meet someone and you just know that you're destined to be friends? That's what it felt like. Like in some way we'd always be connected somehow.
And shortly after we'd met - we'd actually started working on the exact same day - I did something I don't very often do, which is getting someone a birthday present. I got Hugo a nice copy of Peter Kuper's 'Give it up', in which he adapted a few Kafka stories, and that started the ball rolling.
It's been 23 years since then, and I've been honored to be his friend since; Life took us in different paths, but whether it be Madrid, London, Lisbon, Warsaw, Lausanne or Nyon we've always managed to be together, and from the very depths of my heart, he's one of a handful of people that I just can't imagine my life without.
His kindness, generosity, intelligence, depth of heart and mind are an inspiration to me.
You bless me with your friendship.
So, seeds. Even then they were being sown, though what fruit they'd bear would be years in the making.
It is now 2003, and I'm on my second year at FNAC, doing what I loved the most at the time - working with records. Out of the many things that the aughties brought me in terms of new music, 2003 would bring with it an undying love and appreciation for Placebo.
And it was hardly something I could escape from, really - we had the album on heavy rotation in the store, it was one the best sellers at the time. The clip to 'The Bitter End' was just so inescapable, that I found myself thinking 'OK, I'll bite' and I got the album.
And all at once I became infatuated with the record, and shortly thereafter with the band.
'Sleeping with ghosts' is one of those records that from beginning to end grabs you and won't let go. Everything gels so perfectly there, everything touched me so - I go no further than 'Centrefolds' and 'Protect me from what I want' as absolute victories - that I still feel the same giddy feeling I did in those early listens.
It's 1995 and I'm walking into a record shop that no longer exists and I get the one-two punch of both Anneke and Liv Kristine's voices, as they played 'Mandylion' followed by Theatre of Tragedy's first. Both amazing and unique voices that I've been following for a quarter of a century now. I don't think I'd ever listened to The Gathering before then, and honestly - I don't really like their older stuff. I played 'Mandylion' a lot back then, and 'In Motion #1' is probably my favourite song of theirs. Flash forward a couple of years and I'm getting the new Rotting Christ CD, and it came bundled with a Century Media sampler that included a bunch of bands I loved, a bunch of others I'd never even heard of, and a few surprises.
One such surprise was The Gathering's new song 'Nighttime Birds', from the forthcoming similarly titled new album. And this was such a massive leap forward from what they'd done, that it truly felt like they'd reinvented themselves, and started to fulfill their enormous potential. (Future releases would see the band evolving ever further, though.)
'The May Song' was actually the first single out of that album, and I snapped it up eagerly. I will confess to loving collecting singles, always have, though these days I have very few of them. Last year, Alone Records released a special limited edition box-set containing all of the singles from the Century Media era, issued on vinyl for the first time. It was a pricey acquisition, to be sure, but the production values make it completely worth every single cent. It's one of the jewels in my collection, for sure.
For the past 15 years or so I've had this tradition of heralding the month of May with this song. I don't think that'll be ending any time soon.
I was trying to figure something out. See, I was trying to figure out how many songs I've listened to by now, and it's got to be, what, thousands? Tens of thousands? Maybe even hundreds of thousands? And I mean songs that I listened to either directly or inadvertently. Maybe it's a staggering number of songs, or then again it's actually not that big a number.
But it'd be pretty much impossible to say, right? So it stands to reason that the average person also listens to a bunch of songs in their lifetime. Some less, some more, but it all adds up.
And out of those many, many songs, how many, would you say, you could recall the exact first time you listened to it?
Well, I do have a few I can quite vividly recall that moment, and the odds are that some will end up here in some form or the other.
In 2009 I was living in London with my then girlfriend, and she was unhappy there. Unhappy with me, unhappy with life, generally quite unhappy. And so she did what people usually do when they feel unhappy, which is finding that which makes them happy. She packed her things and moved to Switzerland, and this began the long, slow crawl towards the end of our relationship some two years hence. But while that final moment still lingered in the horizon of our lives, there were still some moments of quiet reprieve, as well as some others filled with immeasurable sadness that no words could bridge.
I started visiting her in Geneva in the winter of 2009-2010 - it's hard to believe that it's over a decade now - and in my time there I grew quite fond of the city. It also helped that my closest friend lived (still lives) quite near there. I'd usually catch a flight from London to Geneva on a friday after work, spend the weekend there, and be back in London in either a very early flight in the wee hours of a monday morning, or a very late flight on Sunday.
This day in particular was quite cold - I remember being warm and cozy under the duvet, the warmth of her body still clinging to me, and the silent sigh of the snow flurries outside. She was up already, and she'd turned on her computer to check if there was something we could do in the city later on. There was the suggestion of maybe going to a concert, but I didn't know any of the bands. Maybe she googled them, maybe it was embedded on the website itself, I don't really know, but music started playing.
Half asleep, I listened to some very quiet notes being played. Softly, softly, a voice sang.
I couldn't yet escape the temptation of that warmth, so I just stayed there in bed, eyes half open, almost drifting in and out of sleep, taking in that beautiful sight of her, glorious in that white wintry morning, and the song now becoming more urgent, more desperate, a cry, a longing, howling, howling in time with the falling snow.
I got up and joined her there where she stood, hunched over the screen, and I gave her a gentle, loving kiss in her lips.
Outside, the snow fell in tiny specks of white. I moved closer to the window, and looked out.
I prayed that we could somehow make it work, a prayer set against the dirge that encircled us.
