11/02

There is no need to re-enchant world. Stimulants drew me awake till today and I couldn't help taking coffee everyday, even though I don't like it and promised myself never to do so; even though I have felt like spinning my wheels, doing daily tasks like an automat in a dreamlike torpor and keeping on dissolving, being less and less there, the way everything mundane has been shifting to eerie is still far from unpleasant - all sorts of enlightening and little cheering things have sprung up, others are running underneath; even exhausted I'm stridden with energy.

The schedule was very tight, with another exam and another concert on the same day, and other duties inbetween. Been dealing with applications for my placement, and getting more and more enthusiastic as I drew up the documents. ITe would be a seriously good occasion, this one. At all levels... Hope they'll understand, and accept. There is now nothing else to do than hoping, but I do, almost frantically.

Funny how musical considerations can make you drift towards long-forgotten territories. The way chords sound on Spiritual Front's latest releases recalled me of Paul Roland, whose music I had discovered long ago with the track Wyndham Hill on the Looking for Europe compendium. This track too is charged with bittersweet memories, though only of the kind of melancholy it feels good to nuzzle in... Also, I could track up to Paul Roland's latest album why I had been offered this book of Arthur Madchen, and the connections between the book, the music, the distant dedication and us - he's vaguely missed. Anyway, I truly love Paul Roland, the way he's completely ignored in his country, and largely elsewhere, eccentric and doing music for dozens of years, but only well-known for writing popular occultism books; his sheer dedication to what he does, and to the stories he tells, about werevolves, pirates, English ladies, gallant nostalgic love, horror writers and movies, and so on. The old stuff gathered on the first half of Gaslight Tales is truly ravishing, between baroque dark folk, chamber music and delicate pop. I wonder if Paul Roland is an irregularity in my musical tastes, at least is it difficult to communicate on it with people whose tastes are usually matching mine, but who knows. Hope I'll meet him someday. Listen to what he does if you have a chance, ask me, maybe.

Saturday evening was strange, we were supposed to go together (meaning with some  foreign students) to the Eläkeläiset show as afterparty of the Kyykkä championship. But all of them declined at the last minute, and I ended up trying to figure out where and how it would take place, calling the friend who bought the ticket for me and getting only shoutings and drunken songs in the background. I was ready to go since the end of the afternoon, and learnt it would only begin at midnight; thus the inbetween hours were spent in idleness and vague expectation, hours lost somewhere. Suddenly as I was awaiting a very late bus irreality got overwhelming... It seemed it was night eternal, and that it could be the middle of the night or the middle of the day. The very late time of the concert had surely something to do with that, as the manner the city center and the venue were crowded with drunk students. I found Ben who gave me the ticket, joined Markus who was plotting to get in despite it was sold out; he managed to enter through some absurd process, likely as absurd and dreamlike as the rest of the night, massive drunkenness, my exhaustion, recuperating beers straight from the stage, people dancing for hours after the concert ended in the empty venue and on any music, moving jackets from a room to the other with strategies worthy high-rank spies, coincidences galore, people sleeping on the floor, the main street again crowded in the early morning with all shops open as in the middle of the day, Markus with his pizza. As I was about to step off the bus back home, some guy hailed me by telling he guessed I was French, that he knew people from a lot of countries but not France, and that I was his destiny; to the point of leaving the bus much earlier than he should to have the time to get my address. We shook hands with another guy standing besides whom none of us knew and I laughed all the way back to the flat.

But to come back to the Eläkeläiset show, I can confirm this is definitely about drunkenness and nothing else, a collective experience of being drunk, be it on the stage or in the crowd. It is not only musically terrible, it just has nothing to do with music. Nor with humppa. It is only about being drunk.

         
    

Back at six after having slept four hours the previous night, I spent most of this day in the same out-of-function state than yesterday; the accumulated lack of rest is not only sensible but heavy enough to make me sleep really anytime. I maybe had better spent the whole day in bed. But tonight as I was absent-mindedly checking Last.fm, I read - and couldn't believe my eyes ! - that to the performance of Anenzephalia I was vaguely planning to go was added Zoät.Aon... Just got in Paris the wonderful Triplex Bestial, totally matching the feeling I had when I saw him live back in November, of synthetic jungles and electronic fauna. Can't believe such a coincidence. This is all so great! See? Magic things happen...

Edit, 03:30. Seriously, would you believe I learnt just now that Naevus would play in Tampere next April? But what it this country? Oh...