I've been tweeting a track a day from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod" for the last few months. However, this track, although it's on my (broken) iPod, seems to have vanished from YouTube. In its (hopefully temporary) absence, here's the relevant extract from the book...
March 28th
Air Traffic Controllers-Live at the
Australian Grand Prix- Live at the Australian Grand Prix
It’s
unseasonably hot today for the end of March-up to 20 degrees. It’s as hot
apparently today as it was during any day in June last year.
Because of this
warmth, which has been happening over the past three or four days, things are
going a bit out of kilter. Driving through the city today, I’ve noticed that
the apple blossom has popped out on loads of trees-I’m no gardener, but I don’t
think that it usually happens so early in the year. In fact, I think that last
year around this time, it was unseasonably cold and that there might have even
been a bit of snow.
Other strange things that have been happening include too
many convertible cars driving with the tops down and too many blokes wearing
shorts and drinking cans of lager in the street. There is additionally a
distinctive aroma of barbeques in the air that for a Wednesday evening on March
doesn’t make sense.
We could almost be in Australia. Which is quite apt bearing
in mind that this track has just turned up.
The only
connection I can see or indeed hear with Australia in regard to this track is
the title and a bit of something that is quite specific to the event. It’s an
11 minute plus track of heavily improvised music that I got somewhere off the
internet about ten years ago. I know nothing about the artist/band and think
that typing either the name of the band or the track into a search engine would
be a pointless waste of time.
As improvised
music goes this is as avant-garde and free form as it gets. It starts off for a
few minutes with someone picking a rough tune on a single electric guitar,
quite quietly. It’s got a vaguely psychedelic/Spaceman 3-like feeling before
it peters away into what seems to be somebody else trying to tune, or really
disassemble, an electric organ whilst it’s switched on.
All the time in the
background, from what appears to be an adjoining room, the television
commentary from a Grand Prix (I’m presuming the Australian one), is drifting in
and out of earshot.
Every so often the names of drivers can be made out or
references to Ferrari and McLaren waft over the rest of the noise. It does
sound as if it’s been recorded using one microphone on an old cassette recorder
stuck in a box in the corner of a room. After five or six minutes of these
ramblings, the television stops and a couple of dogs can be heard barking in
the background. This is pure conjecture, but it’s as if they are in a back yard
or garden somewhere in the vicinity-but they may be part of the band of course.
The guitar has long stopped by now and whoever is tinkering with the keyboard
has grown so bored or frustrated that they’ve given it up as a bad job.
For the
remaining six minutes or so of the track all that there can be heard is the two
dogs barking, doors being opened and closed and someone wandering around on a
wooden floor with clogs on.
Perfect music for a barbeque.
"Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod" is available here as a Kindle book
and here as a paperback
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