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!"