Tom Milsom

Cage against the snow explorers!

tommyf — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 20:46:17 +0000

For those of you who were getting a little confused by my new video, here are the scripts:

Cage Against The Machine
Two mondays ago, I assembled with many other musicians and artists to record a cover of John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds, a piece for any number of performers that asks them to remain silent for just over four and a half minutes, in an attempt to get the UK Christmas number one. As Cage knew, true silence is impossible, and that is what this piece demonstrates. Even in a room full of quiet people, there will always be sound. Cars outside, Air conditioning. People breathing. If you treat sound as music, it can change the way you think and work. We recorded the piece to counteract the noxious force of Matt Cardle’s X Factor win and subsequent single, and all the proceeds of our recording go to various hearing and mental health charities that are listed in the description box. It is available on amazon and iTunes, and today, the 18th of December 2010 is the last day it will count towards the chart, so please buy it now to help us make a statement about consumerism, music, and the way we hear and think.

The physicality of snow
Two mondays ago we were on the bed of an invisible ocean that rarely bothered us, and now the sole physical manifestation of weather is constantly on our minds. You might see it as fun. You might see it as something that stops you from getting to work in the morning. There is no other meteorological phenomenon that sits so heavily on our roads or on our minds. It changes everything. Cars outside are blanketed in snow. Air conditioning units sit unused. People breathing florid dragon puffs of condensation. This could be why our country insists on panicking at the first sign of snow, we’re used to the X Factor and chocolate biscuits, not weather that hangs around once it hits the floor. Rain turns into puddles. Sunshine turns into warmth. Snow stays snow for days, months, sometimes permanently.

News of Explorers 6
Two mondays ago I said that Explorers 6 would be out soon, and I intend to keep that promise, but it’s taken a lot of work because it’s a gigantic leap up from its predecessors. You might see it as fun, you might see it as a work comparable to my two proper albums. In any case, I hope that you find it as exciting as I think it is. The thing about the Explorers series is that they’re all recorded in my bedroom, with no extra effects. I intentionally leave them raw. I take care not to record cars outside, or the air conditioning, but you can sometimes hear me breathing. I think it’s refreshing to hear the love that’s gone into a song, unlike Matt Cardle’s X Factor win and subsequent single, where all the love has been polished right out of it. It will be available to download next week on bandcamp, before christmas. I promise. It won’t be available on Amazon and iTunes at the start, but I plan to release it properly, mastered and fully finished, early next year.

This Shore

tommyf — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:06:10 +0000

Here’s the poem, for those of you who wanted to see it in its original form or were struggling a little with the lyrics

This shore has rhythm. A fractal beat
On surf and sand. A wave. A wave.
The ding ding, the hum,
This hiss and smoke from Manhattan’s mouth is loud
But young. It will pass. Shore
is forever. A wave. A wave.

A wave in wet paint on metal,
Wet orange reflections, captured light set forever.
Wet paint is like brick in this city.
The sky is made of air,
The doors are made of wood,
And the heads are made of paint.

East river water is made of paint.
It’s wet and every night the light
from its twin in concrete waves,
Waves, shows it colour and contour and form
And lets it play; a thick sodium slug
That sticks to the sides, shimmering.

This land has deep vibrations,
Anger and strong footsteps, rumblings
And penetrations and this
Shore-to-shore shake that keeps it
Up. Wet, dry, hot, cold, down,
It’s a furious nightlight;

Ding, awash in a river
Going east to an island and floating
Easily on the wind like a gull;
Ding, going east to the ocean and
A gulp, a wash, a river of spit
And an ocean of shouting flotsam.

Paint this city black. Paint this city black.
Shout amongst this hum, this hiss
And Manhattan’s smoke and mouth your words
So every silent phoneme is a subway tunnel!
Ding, a wash, a gulp, an ocean, a river.
Ding, strong penetrations, footsteps, vibrations.

Ding, Thick colour, concrete, night and paint,
Ding, the heads, the doors, the sky is wet.
The city sleeps beneath a pillowed sky
And suffocated hum and hiss and smoke
Can not disturb a wave. A wave.
This city sleeps surrounded by the shore.

Lentil Dahl

tommyf — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:29:32 +0000

is DELICIOUS, and so easy to do. All you need are about 500g of red lentils, an onion, garlic, ginger, mustard seeds and coriander. Finely chop the garlic and ginger and whack it in a pan, leave that to cook for a bit and fuck this, I’m going to make a video of it.

So I went to a Man Man gig once

tommyf — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:40:12 +0000

and one of the bands supporting them was a group of guys who called themselves Three Trapped Tigers, and they absolutely rocked. I don’t know why it took me so long to get hold of their first EP (like, two years?) but I just have, and it’s pretty fantastic. It’s not often that music makes me rock out quite so apoplectically, and I’m seeing this as a really good thing. I like to treat some of their songs like Jackson Pollock paintings, following individual strings of instrument through. The rhythm section in particular dances all over the place. It’s a numbers-factory. It’s rust in motion. Get this EP.

Tonight, I shall be cooking a lentil dahl with quinoa and broccoli. I’ll let you know how it went.

New project

tommyf — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:46:24 +0000

Something else that I failed to mention earlier is that I’ve got this new project that I’m working on called Nowhere Near News, my podcast with Tom Bacon where we dissect idiotic women’s weeklies and get progressively more pissed off and suicidal; it’s funny, and hopefully will continue to be so past the third episode. Hooray!

(Oh, and by the way, did you ever see this?)

The Long And Winding Road (Closed For Resurfacing) from Tom Milsom on Vimeo.

New music

tommyf — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:33:53 +0000

So I guess if I just write all these things down they’re going to be meaningless strings of names and words, so I’ll try to put together a short review of each one as well (which will have periods, since they’re considered pieces of writing, which is a pleasant side-effect I hadn’t considered, but hey, there you go). These are the CDs I bought in LA:-

Indeterminacy John Cage, David Tudor, 1959
90 lectures on indeterminacy written and spoken by John Cage, accompanied with music by David Tudor. I haven’t listened to these yet, but John Cage has never let me down so far.

Pop Tatari Boredoms, 1992
Awesome anarchistic noise-punk that sounds like a million guitar-staircase interfaces – this record breaks so many rules, minds, hearts, and is so much fun. It takes cliches and then pisses about with them. Ultimate lawlessness.

Super Ae Boredoms, 1998
Like, I don’t know what happened between 1992 and 1998 (that’s a lie, I know exactly what happened, the Super Roots EPs happened, which you should also own) but at some point in those six years, Boredoms became amazing and released Super Ae, which is so far removed from Pop Tatari it’s laughable, apart from how insanely loud it is; it shifts and re-invents and pushes and pushes and pushes, and it is full of energy, life and light.

Sequenzas I-XIV Luciano Berio, over, like, 34 years from somewhere in the 1950s onwards
Berio’s Sequenzas for solo instruments push musical instruments to their limits, and make them do things that they’re never meant to do. They’re an inventory of every sound the instrument can possibly create. They remind me of Alvin Lucier’s Silver Streetcar For The Orchestra for solo amplified triangle, but more batshit insane.

Studies 13-32 for Player Piano Conlon Nancarrow, 1927
A whole host of pieces written for a grand piano with an Ampico player piano mechanism attached, which basically means that Nancarrow wasn’t limited to ten fingers, he could play as many notes at the same time as he liked. Which is a lot. A lot of notes. Also, the man had amazing facial hair.

Early Keyboard Music Philip Glass, 1969-78
This CD features Contrary Motion, Mad Rush and Two Pages, three beautiful bits of minimalism for an electric organ. It’s also got these two versions of a piece of music for solo table.

Zaireeka Flaming Lips, 1997
Still haven’t listened to this one, because it comes as four CDs to be listened to at the same time on four different CD players. And I haven’t got four different CD players. I’ll have a listening party soon, where people bring their Hi-fis and we all sit around listening to Zaireeka. Good times. (PS: If you haven’t heard of the Flaming Lips, check out The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots)

Feels Animal Collective, 2005
We’ve been over this.

Continued Story/Hi, How Are You Daniel Johnston, 1983-85
Two tape albums on one CD, which is great value for money (came with a poster of his Symbolical Visions too!) – awesome poppy tunes rendered on fuzzy incredibly lo-fi tape in a garage on a shitty organ by a manic-depressive teenager in the middle of the night. Powerful stuff.

Before Today Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, 2010
Ariel Pink used to be worse than Daniel Johnston, recording these incredible 80s pastiche numbers on tapes so fuzzy they were more snowstorm than actual music, but then, like Daniel, he got a recording contract and did this. Where the two differ is that Johnston flounders a bit in the studio, and it all detracts a bit from the immediacy of his music, but Ariel Pink flourishes and has put together an amazing laid-back synth-pop groove album with great tunes.

New things

tommyf — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:57:09 +0000

So I’m gonna tell you right now how I feel at the moment about blogging and I’m gonna try to get it out pretty quickly because I feel almost embarrassed by it, which is exactly how I feel about blogging, I feel embarrassed by the things I have to tell you, because I want to wrap them up in music or whatever and make them more palatable than they are raw, on their own, without any sort of true attention given to them before sharing with you guys, and I find it really hard to just write something as I go and put it up for public scrutiny, and even something like Explorers 3 or whatever, which was played all in one take straight off without ever having played it before, was planned and organised and couldn’t have come out that much different if I played it again today, so whatever I do there’s always a whole lot of forward planning, something which can’t really happen with blogs, which is why at the moment I only feel comfortable putting it all in one sentence, almost as though it’s just one long thought in one long breath and I’m not dressing it up as something it isn’t, because periods at the end of a sentence indicate an end, they say ‘this is the end of a thought, or the end of an idea’, and these blogs don’t have ideas, just lots and lots of little things that I’m sharing with you, so hopefully (maybe) given time, I’ll feel more comfortable putting periods in the middle of posts, and perhaps this attention I’m drawing to the idea of it might be enough to help me start placing them around a little more, but until then I’m gonna keep writing in one long sentence, stream-of-consciousness style, because it’s all I feel I can manage at the moment; and I apologise to the people who read these and find them difficult and question just how much reader annoyance I’m shooting for here exactly, but I feel comfortable with this, a lot more comfortable than if I were shuffling these unconnected strains of thought into a structure that didn’t fit them, which would probably look less pretentious than these megalithic blocks of text but would if anything be more pretentious, dressing my thoughts up as something they’re not when really all they need is to just sit in their own teeming space, wriggling around with all the other thoughts and hiding among the words that were generated in exactly the same way, thick and fast and without pause, every now and again metafictionally informing you that I’m going to be moving on to the next subject now, rather than veiling it with any sort of segue or rhetoric, like how I’m gonna tell you right now that I’m listening to Feels for the first time (which is crazy considering Animal Collective are one of my all time favourite bands and Merriweather Post Pavilion is an album that hit me in a pretty life-changing sort of way) and it’s phenomenally beautiful, and filled with the moments that normally happen maybe twice or three times during the first listen to any album, that make me think ‘holy crap, I’m going to fall in love with that moment by the fifth listen’, particularly because I’ve always wanted to hear something by them that was a hybrid of their electronic new stuff and their older freak-folk acoustic stuff (by the way, I listened to Sung Tongs yesterday for the first time in, like, months, and I’d forgotten how much I loved it) and this slots perfectly in to that hole, as sort of a missing link, which is awesome; I dedicated today to listening to all the new music I bought recently, a list of which I will post in a new blog entry, but now it seems I’m gonna be going to Ikea to do something amazing, which I’ll tell you about later as well, end sentence.

A post on my blog

tommyf — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:30:35 +0000

Look, I don’t know what the deal is with this, how many people read it or follow it or whatever, and whenever I do post, people rarely interact in any meaningful way about it, but I’m just really excited at the moment about a few things and it’s seven o’clock in the morning and the only people I want to share it all with are YOU, (which is hardly as exclusive a statement as it sounds, considering how bloody many of you there are, be it ten or ten thousand, because really, any sort of validation makes it worthwhile, and if one person reads this and takes something amazing away from it then y’know, it justifies the whole exercise) so I’m going to tell you about these discoveries I’ve made this morning that will hopefully impact your morning in a similarly clear and piercing way, the first of which is this band called Ratfuck, who seem like just the sort of people who’d call themselves post-hardcore, or even be so post-post-anything that they’d just nihilistically deny any sort of categorization, even though they’re basically punks, and they’ve put together this amazing EP with amazing lyrics that just defy common sense but paint these amazing pictures of just being completely comfortable with being dust and nothing, and you should definitely check it out at http://ratfuck.bandcamp.com (my favourite track is Hoppipopolla, and I just love the way the group shouting moves so freaking fluently around the intonation of the ‘Fuck you’s), but if it’s not really the sort of thing you like (which I am totally cool with) you should perhaps check out Gallop, who are a band who were played on Radio 1 last night for a reason I’m not entirely sure of, since they seem to be somewhere in between math-rock and post-rock with keyboards, but perhaps it was just on the virtue of them absolutely rocking, because if you go to http://myspace.com/thegallopband you’ll see how awesome they are after one play of Miami Spider, which is a great track, sort of post-rocky in a really really fluid, almost animal-collectivey kind of way (although I hate to say that, because it’s totally not even similar, it just crops up in my mind for some reason, perhaps because it sounds a lot like some of the new Panda Bear tracks that have been surfacing recently) but whatever, let’s take a little detour here to tell a story, because after I was listening to Gallop I was all like ‘hey, I miss actual real awesome post-rock’, and then I thought ‘what’s the most post-rocky post-rock group I can think of, like, that absolutely crystallises the essence of post-rock to the point where it’s almost a parody of itself’ (which is the sort of music I love, because it means I can crystallise the essense of ME while I’m listening to it, and sort of anthropomorphise my own soul in a cartoony kind of way, which makes me feel comfortable and proud) and then I thought ‘Red Sparowes!’ because they’re pretty much the poster children for pure post-rock as far as I’m concerned, so I went around looking to see if they’ve released any new stuff since 2006′s ‘Every Red Heart Shines Towards The Red Sun’, and they HAVE released a new LP, called ‘The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer’, which I’m listening to right now, and enjoying an awful lot, despite pitchfork’s rating of 5.2 for it, which in many ways backs me up entirely in my beliefs, because it says that all Red Sparowes do is rely on the same old formula song in, song out, and never try to change it, but to me that’s what makes listening to a new Red Sparowes record feel warm and comforting, in that the music is different, but in many ways you know exactly what’s coming next, and you never feel you have to think too hard, or that they’re asking something of you that you don’t want to give, but just that you’re there, and they’re there, and they’re going to play you some songs that you love, and you need never stop loving them ever, ever again.

Explorers 4 is out today!

tommyf — Thu, 20 May 2010 08:24:13 +0000

Yeah guys! The fourth EP in the Explorers series is out today and it’s got PIANOS and SINGING and is TOTALLY PALATABLE! Here’s the cover:

And here’s the player so you can listen to it for free:

As usual it’s pay-what-you-like, with the minimum being absolutely nothing. It’s the most ambitious Explorers so far in terms of scope and attention to detail, and it’s a proper return to actual songwriting. Consider it, if you like, as a brief return home after explorin’ for a bit, to get ready for more adventures in the future. Hope you like it!

Tom

Gotta Catch Your Love

tommyf — Sat, 01 May 2010 23:44:56 +0000

So it turns out that my girlfriend Hatti was texting Alex about how awesome it would be to start a pokemon rock band called Nurse Joy Division, after Alex’s failed attempt at a Chameleon Circuit spinoff playing said pokerock. This is hilarious already, but I only heard about it today from Becky:

[01/05/2010 21:59:07] Becky: You and Ed should form a Pokémon rock band call Nurse Joy Division. Please make this happen.
[01/05/2010 21:59:20] Tom Milsom: hahaha
[01/05/2010 21:59:28] Tom Milsom: but what about Charmeleon Circuit?
[01/05/2010 22:00:51] Becky: Charmeleon Circuit were one-hit wonders. Alex wrote ‘My Life Would Muk Without You’ and then the band was never heard from again.
[01/05/2010 22:00:59] Becky: WE NEED A PROCK REVIVAL.
[01/05/2010 22:01:56] Tom Milsom: MY LIFE WOULD MUK WITHOUT YOU
[01/05/2010 22:02:01] Tom Milsom: HOW HAVE I NEVER HEARD THIS
[01/05/2010 22:02:13] Becky: (Prock Revival. its funny coz revievs r used in pokemn ololol)
[01/05/2010 22:04:18] Becky: I don’t know how you’ve never heard MLWMWY. They dressed up as Muk and performed it on Glee.
[01/05/2010 22:04:29] Tom Milsom: wha…
[01/05/2010 22:04:58] Becky: Phone up dear Alexface and ask about the song, although be warned, it’s a bit of a sore spot for him.
[01/05/2010 22:05:10] Tom Milsom: WHAT IS THIS MADNESS
[01/05/2010 22:09:51] Tom Milsom: what is this
[01/05/2010 22:10:04] Tom Milsom: I just found myself playing an accordion trying to write a song called ‘Gotta catch all your love’
[01/05/2010 22:10:12] Tom Milsom: WHAT DO YOU DO TO ME
[01/05/2010 22:10:34] Becky: HAHAHA
[01/05/2010 22:10:36] Becky: <333
[01/05/2010 22:11:17] Becky: You have to make this song. HAVE to.

So I did. Here it is for your beautiful ears; Gotta Catch Your Love.

Gotta Catch Your Love by Tom Milsom

And if you think I’m gonna make a habit of this, you are sorely mistaken.