After a hard night's plumbing, I was relaxing this evening with some of housemate K's vodka aux fines herbes - or somesuch - which she kindly brought back from her recent work trip to Poland. We were trading stories of the last 20 years and laughing like drains.
She headed off to bed saying ' I think I just need to listen to a bit of Oasis before I go to sleep'. Now I am very fond of housemate K but I can't fucking stand Oasis (with the exception of Champagne Supernova, which is ace). I needed a Gallagher antidote, and fast.
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Diamanda Galas is the sun! Here was a copy of Saint of the Pit, kindly lent to me by A last weekend at the end of a long and great evening featuring much red wine, much random conversation and many organic root vegetables. What, bar something featuring a harpsichord, could offset Oasis more appositely?
M, arriving home on a high from the inaugural meeting of his new band, said something along the lines of 'I'm so pleased that you have found avant garde music that you like; I just wish I didn't happen to think it was unbearable'.
Now I have said this before, but it bears repeating: as far as I'm concerned, Diamanda Galas's music is like the inside of my head on a bad day, maybe with extra goth sound effects. It's elemental female raging against the machine of church and state and I love it.
Now, M has a lot of John Zorn albums. To me, they seem to form the soundtrack to joyless postmodern existence... such as the lives surely lived by the new Observer sex columnists.
But not everyone is alienated by the sound of powertools meeting asbestos and kicking off an inescapable chronic lung condition while millstones grind on regardless. I mean no offence by this, but something in Mr Zorn's musical take on life clearly resonates with M, just as something in Ms Galas's resonates with me.
Which leads me to surmise that one person's eardrum bleed is another person's ambient. We could all learn something from that, no?
joella
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