screaming into the eye of a lens.

--

Be back soon. Promise.

digging a hole in your neighbourhood

we are close to each other, the weather is like the wind that blows hard and bothers me

burn in the face of love.

walking through a paper town, counting all the reasons to burn the others down
seems like every chance i take brings me ever closer to being far away

Surely there must be hundreds of thousands of teenage girls like me, out there. Unfocused, impotent anger with the world at large, an arrogant delusion that there's a quick fix to all the world's problems and all it takes is one pure, focused mind to put it all back into order.

That's what I thought at fifteen, anyway. Now, things are a little different, but some things stay the same. Nothing changes: we are all but a whisper in the passage of time.

"There is nothing new under the sun" was first written in the book of Ecclesiastes and then quoted by Alan Turing centuries later in a paper on the metaphysics of thought and mind. Turing was a mathematician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher, who in his writings, focused in particular on the philosophical question of whether it was possible to conceive of machines as having the same abilities as humans, capable of cognitive thought.

While that quote takes on a different context with background reading on the topic, it's still a thought that tends to stick with bitter little girls studying Year 11 Philosophy, such as myself. Nobody should give half a shit about who I am and where I'm going because I'm just another cliche. I'm just another story somebody's already heard. I'm nothing new.

Drop another pill. Write a half-arsed fucking poem about it. Fuck a stranger. Make jokes. Don't take anything seriously. Delude yourself into thinking somebody cares in an attempt to cover up the gaping ache. Kill yourself, inch by inch, measure by measure. When you're nothing but dust, who's going to know what your story was?

it comes out above my head, close to you, close to you.

photo from OLEJNICZAKmatthew_swin.

A change in pace. You aren't screwed if you don't know anything. You're screwed if you don't know anything and you've lost the passion to learn.

I've finished my very first remix ever. Dance music website Beatport are known for running remix competitions and when I saw that they had released the stems for a song off Underworld's recent effort Barking, called 'Bird 1', it was the kick in the arse I needed to fire up Ableton, force myself to learn it's ins and outs, and get something made. Not that I particularly care about the fact that it's a competition (like any person out there, though: I wouldn't say no to thousands of dollars of new production equipment!) - to be honest, the opportunity to remix an artist like Underworld I'm so in love with and inspired by was something I'd hate myself for passing up. Here is the result:

Underworld - Bird 1 (Autoimmunity Mix).

Inspired by many of the emerging post-garage and dubstep artists I've found myself listening to lately (Scuba, Distance, Vaccine, Burial - and more), I wanted to take the original track and remove many of the elements that annoyed me about the original (that fucking four-to-the-floor beat, ugh!), stripping it back to a clean, minimalistic piece where the focus was on the syncopated rhythms of each section interacting and shifting with each other. The vocals were, for some reason, a struggle for me to work with - which was the perfect excuse to rip most of them out and keep the focus remain on the slowly-evolving and shifting beats.

I also took the liberty of referencing Underworld's earlier work not only in terms of structure and sound, but there's a brief snippet of me speaking that happens to be borrowed from a Second Toughest in the Infants track - I'll be pleased if somebody gets it!

Despite the obvious flaws (the kick-drums have a strange echo to them, the flange applied to the hats doesn't sound right in places - and the pacing could be better, among other things), I'm terribly pleased with the mere fact that I've finally finished something, learnt a thing or two about a very powerful piece of sequencing and recording software, and know now I've got the potential to learn and achieve some really cool things - despite only owning a MacBook and the intro version of Ableton.

Watch this space.

a god that plays dead.

we sit and we sigh and nothing gets done
so right so clued up we just get old
and all the while been torn asunder
nicotine and bacteria

The days burn out like the final breath of a cigarette, tossed to the side and dreamt away.

a final hit.

Worthless
by Nick Flynn

My fingers
cling to your shoulder blades now
until fucking becomes
an urging, a way to shake you, gently. How

can I tell you I don't feel
safe, when inside
a man holds bars before his face

believing himself into a prison,
when parrots fly from his open mouth
as he tries to speak, repeating worthless,

worthless? I'm trying to love you

but I don't know how, & then
I start to remember we are locked together
& pushing, pushing.

--

"I need one more fucking hit!"

blueski.

no-one must know, judith pordon

You lean to my side
tickling my desires.

Below my clothes
I quiver in infinities.

Others lean towards us.
Do they sense

your exhale is my inhale,
your out, my in?

We sit motionless
but betray ourselves,

glancing around
to see if anyone is looking.

and when i dream, i dream of you.

"Limerence is an involuntary cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another person. The term was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov to describe the ultimate, near-obsessive form of romantic love. Limerence is sometimes also referred to as infatuation, or is colloquially known as a crush, but in reality it is something much different. In common speech, infatuation includes aspects of immaturity and extrapolation from insufficient information, and is usually short-lived. The concept is an attempt at a scientific study into the nature of romantic love. Limerence can often be what is meant when one expresses having intense feelings of attachment and preoccupations with the love object. It can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether the feelings are reciprocated."

rapture's coming.

Struggling to breathe. This is like watching myself drowning in slow motion.

slowly.

The light of day is slowly bleeding away into the streets. The world is silent, waiting for you to move. No birds. Just you.

wishful thinking.

Naked beneath your gaze. Watching me through glass. Fragile, steady. The train is leaving. Be careful with me.

morning comes.

Every second is electric around you. You're a golden haze on the horizon above the buildingtops in my eyes, the gentle kiss of twilight across the suburbs. You think my life's a dream - I dream my life away.

silence is returning your voice.

I like watching you, watching you.

why don't you turn your radio up?

Writing clears your head in a way that’s difficult to describe. It’s a sense of things lifted from you, a sense of freedom that’s found in the stream of electric things scribbled down in notebooks, on scraps of paper hurriedly, tucked away in coat pockets and drawers. You walk through the streets of the city with ink-stained hands and a secret smile that nobody can read, carrying messages to lovers and friends understandable only to you.

we are the night.

You're unreachable. Alive, alone.

simple distinctive (floating world)

My headache pounds with the same force of a kick-drum and my eyes look dark and blank, ringed by circles from exhaustion. The blur of scenery outside the train windows is too fast. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

That said, here are a list of things I am grateful for.

Taking acid on sunny, Sunday mornings with two of my favourite people. Recon missions for pancakes while tripping something shocking and scaring the normals out in the wilderness. The strawberries that came on top of them. Sitting in sunny playgrounds shooting the shit with these two wonderful creatures, playing on the swings and hearing their voices come to me from three metres above the earth, quietly humming You Do Scribble to myself and feeling like a little princess. The sight of a bird's wing splayed perfectly across a glass window in your loungeroom, the way the sunlight lit up every single feather. Wondering at it's beauty as it takes off in flight. Almost falling asleep peacefully on an 9:10 train to Epping and waking up in a glorious sunlit morning, ready to take on the world.

What are you grateful for?

always loved a film.

Maggie is a doll and I'm a big sister, I'm a little girl, and I'm a little princess.

The night is deep and the sound of your footsteps make me quiver. I have to remember how to breathe, sometimes.

the sun does not yet know it is a star.

(photo by matthew strong.)

the rhythm of legs moving in the sun
the rhythm of an engine deep and throaty
the rhythm of a summer that you walked in
the sound of a barking dog on a loop
a plane rises in the crystal blue
the rhythm of keys swinging in your hand
the rhythm of light comin' out of your fingers—

light in the west, light in the east.

On overdrive. Taking in so many things (small, fragile moments; the beautifully elusive nature of the written word) that it feels as if my heart will collapse under it all. The trick is to keep to the corners and the shadows, quietly observing. Keep breathing. Listen to your thoughts.

descent.

(photo by ginger caravan.)

Beneath the cold concrete again, halfway through the underpass. An eerie, orange glow cuts across your cheekbones, razor-sharp. In your black coat and wrapped in steely remoteness, you’re the one clear detail in the nightmare.

--

Scuba soundtracking a lot of late nights, recently; the gaps in between consciousness and half-dreams, covered by darkness. Moody, beautifully-produced sort-of dubstep: crisp beats and innovative rhythms, moody and urbane soundscapes. Headspace/innerspace music.

it tastes sweet.

"We're travellers, you and I," he wrote.

2AM.

Another cigarette out on the back doorstep in the middle on a freezing Melbourne evening. In this chill, it becomes difficult to tell where smoke ends and condensation begins. I shiver, wrap my free arm around myself a little tighter. The only light on in the house is my bedroom's, cutting through the darkness with a weak glow; the world is still and waiting for something - the sound of your voice riddled with interference, but still there, maybe. A notebook filled with scribble and half-thoughts, fragmented poetics. The perfect silence of the night begs to be cut through. I am patient and I wait for you to take me in.

spin spin sugar.

Old memories come out to play on the stereo, and for a brief, fleeting six minutes my eyes are closed and - do you remember dancing to this? I'm in Luke's loungeroom again, and for a small moment in time, everything is okay.

and it's okay - you give me everything i need.

"Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahn! I feel you!"

—Karl Hyde, 13/06/10

ninety-three years on.

Wrapped in the chill and silence of June, I find myself aching for long stretches of sunlit concrete and hourless, blurry days and nights. Today is for rain-streaked streets and my too-slim, miserable reflection in glass buildings watching me back from unrelentless grey. I always seem to fold back into myself during the winter.

--

your airplanes
Rachel McKibbens

I.

over breakfast,
my father asks what you see in me.

I bite the inside of my cheek,

shove a forkful of pancakes into my mouth,
notice the salt shaker eyeing my wounds.

II.

you launch "I love yous"
from a Brooklyn fire escape.

they travel 3,000 postcard miles
and collapse into my ear, exhausted.

I pinch their noses,
breathe new life into their lungs,
fold them into airplanes,

send them back to you
and wait.

III.

there isn't a building
taller than two stories
here in Orange County.
not a single fire escape.

no point in jumping.
the worst that could happen
is a broken leg or heart.

this is why the sad kids get
so goddamn creative around here.

the mayor's son rigged his noose
to raise with the garage door
when the Mercedes came home.

a nine-year old leapt into the lion's cage
at Prentice Park Zoo after
her dog was hit by a car.

IV.

on our wedding day,
when I tell you "I do,"

it's because I do.

it's because you understand
how ten-thousand dollar apologies
still keep fathers worthless,

it's because my ribcage expands
every time I think of you,

it's for all the things
you see in me

and pretend
not to notice.

hello, world.

Underslept and just surviving this haze of days.

ties.

eating a $5 plate of string hoppers, I think of my father
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

snoozing in front of Seinfeld on the beige on beige recliner
his belly folds after years
of american chop suey, hamburgers and Michelob
Nothing
he really wanted to eat
was ever on the shelves
of Iandolli's or the Big D
I think of that man
who cried three times in my life
once when appamma died
once when our dog died
& once when I sent him
a 99-cent package of tamarind candy
& he called me long distance after Ma went to bed
weeping from tasting tamarind
for the first time in thirty years

you haven't seen enough.

image courtesy museom of dirt.

this is really happening, happening, happening—

you're the one clear detail.

"They're more impressions really, they're fragments. I always saw it as the way that a drunk would see the city, walking through the streets. That seemed to be the key to a lot of the ways that we put text together; it's just these fragments that you're taking, you're picking up on all the time and I think that's the way we all do it anyway, that when we walk down the street, it's made up of fragments that tell us we're in a particular place."

two snakes in a bed.

image courtesy big screen satellite.

A little-known fact about electronic music act Underworld: before the release of their groundbreaking first effort, dubnobasswithmyheadman (a seminal record in the canon of dance music), there was a demo version of this first album that was constructed, then distributed among friends and family of Karl and Rick for feedback before they went back to the studio to finish it off, once and for all, that features a number of tracks that never made it onto the final album. Courtesy the lovely boys at RTSR, I managed to acquire a copy for myself and have been spinning it ever since.

One of the tracks on this demo tape that never made it onto the final record was titled 'Big Meat Show' - available for download here.

'Big Meat Show' makes explicit the overarching themes of wild, delirious sexuality running through dubnobasswithmyheadman - a breathless tribute to the fiercely dirty hedonism of midnineties electronica. A simplistic synthesiser and guitar loop meet the thumping rhythms that Underworld are synonymous with; Hyde's Beat-esque poetics are focused here on a dream of a "waitress working in a restaurant" that immediately delve straight into wild fantasy. She asks him to be on a quiz show, but instead, takes him to a makeup room and "starts kissing him all over". It's sex, viewed through the eye of a lens for the pleasure of voyeurs everywhere. Adult filmstars, channel sixty-nine: it's intensely charged and provocative, almost pornographic. Yet Hyde's lyrics are never explicit: he manages to retain an originality of expression that distunguishes Underworld as one of the most credible acts in dance music.

I find it intriguing (but understandable) that this piece never made it onto the final album - lyrically, it's quite a strong piece, but the very basic progression of the track, musically speaking, let it down - it sounds almost half-finished, and a letdown compared to some of the more polished, stunningly adventurous and original tracks such as 'Dirty Epic' and 'Mmm Skyscraper I Love You'. It's still worth a listen, however, for fans of Underworld, casual and obsessive alike. Mmm, yeah. Turn it up: welcome, one and all.

life's a gun that's always pointing in my face.

A few hours, lost in the alleyways and hallways of the city in the dying light of afternoon, behind the eye of a lens: the best thing I've done for my for my head in weeks.

love, death, and the changing of the seasons.

We are all our own ruin.

beneath the city.

For a minute there, little blog, I'd almost forgotten about you. Long, sleepless nights and endlessly grey days: it's been busy.

But today the sun is shining outside, I spent an hour in the city at quarter to seven, photographing the streets waking up, and things are kind of okay. I'll make the effort to update more often, I promise - armed with a photographic ear and a desire for words that shimmer on page, searching through relentless stretches of streetlit concrete and messes of barbed-wire and steel - beauty in the ugly and abandoned. Old comforts.

you never pick up the phone these days.

A very first attempt at putting together a song, constructed entirely from Mixcraft samples. Told you I was serious about getting into this music-making thing!

'half-moon rising', the autoimmunity project.

A meandering, rain-soaked ambient piece. I know it's flawed (the bassline is completely off in the last minute or so in the song) and not even finished (needs a proper ending and some lyrics I have written), but I'd absolutely love to hear some feedback on this.

and boeing jets, in the sunset make glowing twins.

I keep finding myself in dark places. Alleyways, gazing out onto midnight streets in the city. Walking past alcohol-fuelled rage and fights down near Spencer Street. Waiting for the last tram home in the pouring rain. A kiss on an unlit doorstep. Awake at four in the morning, a beautiful boy sleeping peacefully next to me. Navigating through blacked-out streets in the furthest suburbs of Melbourne, just trying to find my way home through pools of streetlight and the calls of cicadas, ringing through the air. It's where I feel most comfortable.

So I made a mix for it, and now it's up on dirtyRadio for you to enjoy. Iconastasia, episode 1: the city is a whore tonight.

In other news: the new Massive Attack tracks I've been hearing are outstanding. In particular, I've had 'Atlas Air' on repeat for an untold number of days. Robert del Naja's half-whispered, half-sung vocals are captivating and hypnotic; tense and threatening and utterly beautiful. Listen here. His words speak subtly of some of the most atrocious things we as a sociey have done to each other: "I know the drill. Got cells to burn. I'm dressed to kill." The whole album, thus far, seems very cohesive in that sense: a look at the darker side of politics and war in the new decade. A fantastic lineup of guest stars (Guy Garvey of Elbow, Martina Topley-Bird, Damon Albarn, Horace Andy, Hope Sandoval, and more) and Massive Attack's usual originality and flair for beats and sounds. Extremely excited for the proper release.

And they're in Melbourne in March, too - oh, this is going to be a wonderful year for me and music.

mmm, skyscraper. i love you.

I had one of the most beautiful experiences of my life on Saturday evening. Chemicals, beats, some of my favourite people, old and new.

At one point, out of nowhere, I had a Bloc Party lyric stuck in my head: "We're all scared of the future." Everything seemed overwhelming, and I kept wondering: what if this is it? What if it all goes downhill from here? What if my life falls to pieces, what if my future isn't as bright and beautiful as I want it to be? At one point, I almost started crying because I was afraid to verbalise this, because I thought it would make it real.

Then somebody put on a new song, there was a gentle hug from a boy I've grown so close to. And I came to realise that no, the future is entirely in my control. I am going to take charge, I am going to meet a whole slew of wonderful people along the way, keep the wonderful creatures I call my friends right now, and I'm going to do amazing things. I just have this funny feeling, building up inside me.

And we all danced 'til sunrise, we laughed, shouted, span, and I screamed the lyrics to 'Moaner' by Underworld so loudly I thought I was Karl Hyde. We shook our arses and moved our bodies, laid on the floor, mind filled with beats and basslines and let myself fall away from reality into some perfect dream.

Thank you: this, this and this. Thank you, Luke and your generous spirit, thank you James and your big heart, thank you to everyone else for sharing the dream.

I'm useless, but not for long - my future is comin' on.