Due to some bright spark having [REDACTED] after work, a situation made worse
by my having [REDACTED] and furthermore and unrelatedly due to me being wholly
incapable of finding any of the screenshots I took in New World via
Geforce Now the other day, tonight's post, which was to have been an
unutterably tedious piece of nonsense about corrupted rabbits has been
indefinitely postponed. Count yourselves lucky.
Since I now don't have remotely enough time to come up with anything halfway
decent, I am forced to cannibalize the post I was planning to write tomorrow
night, a music post, which was never going to be much more than a
thrown-together stopgap anyway. God knows what kind of rags and tatters we're
going to end up with now.
The vague plan - and calling it even that is an insult to vaguery - was going
to revolve around a few tracks I came across recently by way of my YouTube
subscription to Spanish record label
Elefant, an estimable source that I've mentioned before and which rarely lets me
down. There have been a few releases on Elefant of late that seemed striking
even by their consistently high standards so I thought I might ride on their
comet tail for a while and hope some of the stardust might rub off.
Tamagotchi - PUTOCHINOMARICÓN feat. GFOTY
Opens with a long spoken-word skit in Spanish, which you might want to skip
unless you're fluent. The good stuff start at about 0.50. I played this one on
repeat for most of the day I first heard it. Can't play it too loud, either.
It has another great use of a swear word in the lyric. I really must do that
post sometime.
It's quite conventional by the standards of the next one one, though. I just
love this stuff. I realise I might be the only one.
AliExpress
- PUTOCHINOMARICÓN
Oh what the hell, let's have something else by GFOTY too. With
100 gecs, why not. They're sitting on a yellow sofa. That's a good
enough reason. Let's call it a theme.
stupid horse - 100 gecs [feat. GFOTY and Count Baldor]
Now I want to know who Count Baldor is.
No! Stop! Have some discipline!
Shall we have something a little more relaxing? Yes, we shall. Sort of.
Club de los 27 -
Pipiolas
This one starts out as if it's going to be quite normal but don't let that
fool you. It seems to be at least three or four different songs welded
together. It seems to be their trademark. (Too many "seems". Ed.) As the record company blurb says
about another of their songs "In barely four minutes we have gone from bedroom pop to house, then
suddenly to techno-pop, and then another quick change and you’re rubbing
elbows with punk-pop." We might as well have that one as well.
Narciso - Pipiolas
I like the first one better but all their stuff is worth hearing, or all of
it that I've heard has been, anyway.
If you've made it this far, here's a reward for your patience.
No Sé Muy Bien - Lisasinson
The always-reliable, always uplifting Lisasinson with a song that has a
hauntingly familiar descending cadence. I think it reminds me of something by
papertiger sound and there's no chance on God's earth they ever heard
it, so coincidence is a true thing. A judge told Ed Sheeran that, I
think.
And since we mentioned her, why not let's end with her?
Lisa Simpson and Billy Eilish, together at last. I think the
yellow theme is really coming together...
Sadly, I don't have Disney+ so the trailer's as good as it gets.
I'd finished cropping some screenshots for a follow-up post to Wednesday's "Working With Fire And Steel". I was ready to write but it felt too quiet in the room. The ambient sound of passing cars. Occasional birdsong. Oppressive.
I opened YouTube. I have it configured always to open on my subscriptions. Most days it's a sea of yellow/turquoise banners from Elefant Records, occasionally interspersed with Ardwulf unboxing something or the latest burst of PR static from Poppy.
Ah, Poppy. I may be over Poppy, by the way, in case you were wondering. There was a time, not that long ago, when I seriously considered buying and wearing a pin so other members of the church of her poisoned mind could recognize me. Quite glad I didn't do that.
Not Poppy, then. My gaze shifted to the latest drifting dream fix from my enablers at Elefant: La Bien Querida feat. Los Planetas with their new single Domingo Escarlata. (Do we say "single" any more? I doubt it).
Elefant Records runs out of Madrid, Spain. Many of their acts map the Spanish diaspora, although you might not realize it from that anglocenteric Wikipedia list. Now, my Spanish is not good. Tourist Spanish plus. I can read some, though. I studied Latin, the key to any romance language, and I know French. One romantic tongue is much like another, on the page. I at least know enough to translate "Scarlet Sunday".
And look, more of those tropes I love so much; a color and the one day of the week I favor so strongly I once wrote a song about it. I called it "Everything's Sunday" because I wished it was. There's even a visual trigger in the thumbnail - red hair. I have a lot of triggers.
But I was not prepared for this:
Watch and wallow. That's pop perfection, that's what that is. I wrote a whole, elegaic paean of praise to its drifting, mesmeric beauty in the draft that was lost. Oh, did I not mention that? I wrote this post and then lost it right at the end. Don't you hate when that happens?
I don't think I'll try to recreate it. Just watch the damn movie, alright? And I do mean watch, not just listen. Because, glorious though the music is, it's the images that carry the weight. That drugdealer opening under the bleak bridge. The vials. And the blue.
All that blue. Her fingers in the soft wool's warp. Oh my. Oh my.
Continuará. I hope so. I really hope so.
And, look, the timeslips, the juddering. Books skittering on shelves. The telephone changing form. Isn't it the game I was playing and posting about just a few weeks back? Californium. Yes. Yes it is.
It's all pure Philip K Dick. Unless it's just me. I read a lot of Philip K Dick at an impressionable age. I was ahead of the curve, an early adopter. I see his influence everywhere, have done for decades. Now it's his vision we all see, coming clear around us.
If I don't see you again I won't understand Because life showed me that you existed And all hope I'll lose My sky will cloud, the seas will dry up, alas!
If I don't see you again, if I don't see you again For I want nothing, if I don't know what to do If I don't see you again I'll never know Everything you and I could have done
Because when you kissed me the sky would open On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you And when you touched me I would come back to life And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine
If I don't see you again I will die of grief From black sorrow I die because I can't see you If I don't see you again I'll never know Everything you and I could have done
Because when you kissed me the sky would open On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you And when you touched me I would come back to life And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine
How Kabiria Films or Ana Fernández-Villaverde
herself, whoever took the lead, made the leap from these sad love song
lyrics, rendered into English with surprising feel by Google Translate,
to that saturated, entropic feverscape... well, it beats me. I'm
just so glad they did.
Elefant Records, like me, have history with Philip K Dick, it seems. I already had another of their roster earmarked for a post I've been marinating on music inspired by the great man. But why sit on it? These aren't times to wait. Let's have it now.
There's no mystery hanging over the provenance of this one. La Monja Enana lifted the title wholesale from a Dick story first published in 1963. All they've changed is the language: Los Dias de Perky Pat.
There's a squelchier version I much prefer but it doesn't have a performance to give it visual heft. The real kicker, though, is the lyric.
A few years after the short story The Days of Perky Pat appeared in Amazing. Dick reworked the premise for one of his greatest novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the lyrics, Ana Vaquero and Juan Alonso twist that narrative once again, to their own purpose.
I don't know what made me accept the transfer to Mars A higher salary, an exciting destination It was my great chance to get away from Earth I wanted to start again, make a blur and a new account And it is that in advertising everything was so beautiful A natural paradise, how have I been so lingering? The air doesn't smell the same, the sun shines without force I can't take another day, I'm going to lose my mind At night, in the neighborhood, none of this matters Everything is solved by taking a dose of soma And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat I'm not going to work anymore, I spend the day locked up Next to Perky Pat, in a more human world But I begin to suspect that nothing is what it seems Everything around me trembles and fades I don't care about the time, none of this matters anymore Everything is solved by taking a little more soma And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat And I no longer want to distinguish the real from the unreal It's so much better like this, living with Perky Pat
This is where I lose out, not speaking the language. Google does its best but falters. Worse, the tension between the bouyancy of the music and the desperation of the words is lost. Even so, though, eh? Even so...
I won't point out the synergies and synchronicities between those lyrics and our current situation. Oh, I just did. I'm sorry about that.
Third, because good things always come in threes and bad things too, there's this, about which I can find nothing. The song has the same title and it sounds quite similar, really quite very similar, although I can't convince myself it's a cover.
The lyric is in English but I can't make it out. Comments on the thread are blocked and the band seem to have no internet presence whatsoever.
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