'I Have No Faith'

Ain't Talkin' Religion

After I wrote 'Leap Into The Dark', I was challenged to write about religion, specifically, my religion. Of course I don't have one, which sort of left me at a loose end as to how to write the words. Which meant I was destined to just do an instrumental - and this is that instrumental. Just as arbitrary as my lack of faith, I picked a bunch of interesting groovy bits I had assembled and joined them together, because that's kind of the creative process when you're really stuck for making a statement.

In an ideal world, an artist makes statements, and not gestures. That is to say, an artist should work towards making good, first-order-meaning work. I know the advent of post-modernism has introduced notions of irony and distancing oneself from making grand statements because those might be misconstrued as self-aggrandisement or egomania. At the same time, the works that are brimming with playful irony and undecidability about the artists' intent about the world, or that which is full of ambivalence lean towards being artistic gestures, which in many ways do not have the power to move the audience on a visceral level. Instead it retreats into entertainment; which is fine, but we should all accept that is what is going on.
It's the difference between whether you deliver a gut punch of meaning or whether you tickle the brains instead.

That said, there are wonderful works of irony and ambivalence that make a deep study of gestures, like 'Seinfeld', so it's not a hard ad fast rule. But the world is pretty tedious when everybody's going to be reflexive, funny and garrulous. Somebody has to get up and make simple statements about the state of being. It's tough being put on the heath, howling at the wind.
It can lead you to an aporia - a speechlessness pregnant with unsaid meaning.

Which is why, in a round about way, this thing is an instrumental.


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'Dreams of You'

Things You Can't Control

Not everything makes sense, even with rational dissection with all of your might. That's the nature of trauma that people leave on your life. If you try and repress it, the repressed emotions come out in strange ways to screw you up or screw you over. Often the absence of people who were there one moment, and suddenly weren't leaves a surprising mark on your psyche.

Sometimes, there's no controlling what goes through one's mind. Sometimes, it's all just out of control and your pre-frontal consciousness is riding a wild scree.

You might try to rationalise it away, but what you feel is stubbornly what you feel. In turn, the things you then try to put out of your mind come and haunt you in your sleep in the guise of dreams. Sometimes the dreams are so close up and personal, you wake up in the middle of the night devastated and disoriented. It's kind of mad that way.

So, no, this song isn't about dreaming of a girl that one yearns for longingly; it's about the the rather uncomfortable moments of remembered trauma that come to you in your sleep. I'm really not one for romanticism in my lyrics.



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'I Told My Therapist About You'

Well, You Would Too If It Happened To You

There's some guy out there with a page on Facebook with the very same name. It's a pretty funny page. I saw the very name of the page and thought, "good heavens, that's exactly it, isn't it?"

Like it or lump it, some people are simply too traumatic to be around, and if you spend any amount of time with them, the trauma just grows. I could have written about my lousy ex-boss at the lighting company, who indeed was a class AAAAA asshole... (yes Iain Reed, I mean you, you fuckhead),

...but I'd rather not write about that.

As it turns out, I didn't really have a specific person in mind, or for that matter a scenario that would cause trauma, so I made one up and that ended being in the song. Note, I don't actually say what the traumatic event actually is, in the song, but you can well imagine it has something to do with mass murder and mayhem.



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'The Tedium of Medium'

Middle of the Pack

Not many people like coming second. God knows how it is to come in the middle of the pack. I never liked it, but if life is a race you run haphazardly into death, then heck, maybe it's alright to come middle of the pack? After all, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse is the provenance of the famous and beautiful. What are the rest of us mere mortals to do, but shuffle mindlessly with the crowd towards the day we shuffle off this mortal coil?

Then again, life in the middle of the pack can drive you nuts. It's hard enough staying with the throng for the duration of the race. A lot of people are full of everyday aggro based on their perceived lack of  excellent joy. Road rage and general hostility of the bustle of cities can be seen through the prism of everybody's anxiety just to stay in the middle. It hurts just to be ordinary, average, and mostly medium.

Life in the medium is exactly the life you don't see as the one you wanted. any human being with a modicum of self-respect wants something interesting in their life, but there is no guarantee we get those moments. And so we're hung with the tedium that comes from being in the medium.
This is a song about that phenomenon.

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'Intractable Difficulty'

Love-Goes-Wrong Songs

It's not easy coming up with new ideas for song lyrics. My usual fall back is to write about break ups.
This is possibly because I've been traumatised by mine in a way that the only way to come at it is through creativity, and really, does the world need another freakin' love song anyway?

While I think the world can do with more love songs in a way, I also think I'm probably not the best person to be contributing a whole bunch of those. From time to time I will have a song about falling in love or something, but at this point in my life, I think my strengths lie in writing songs about how love goes wrong.

In that light, the title is self explanatory. You like somebody and you've built your life round them being in your life, and somehow it's the worst thing you could have done because they take you for granted and they're going to just suck you dry; but you love them still. What is that? It's the kind of difficulty that can only be described as intractable.




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'Camouflage'

The Fine Line

There's a funny, fine line between applying makeup and then putting on a disguise. There's a funny, fine line between being the road and being on the run, avoiding issues back home. And just like that, there's a funny, fine line between simply dressing to blend in and being camouflaged.
Not that people want to go prodding around with definitions of what is what in the land of semantic calls and un-referenced opinions being thrown around like player cards.

Instead of writing any old love song, it struck me that might be interesting to write about the desire and the decision to cross the line. It's not like there are too many songs about such desires.
So here it is:



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'Nobody's Looking Now'

Goodbye iComp Edition

It's been over a month since iCompositions.com closed its virtual doors and all I can do is try and pick up the pieces. It's hard. We all relied on it being there in semi-perpetuity, and when you have something like that taken out of your life, you're forced to scramble.

By the way, apologies for being away a few weeks. Life, as it has a habit of doing, got in the way.

This track was written during the early years of my time at iComp. In fact it was written early in my time at the wretched Lighting Company with the shitty little boss, but hey, some of these things are linked together in a time for no good reason. It was more related to the fact that I binge-watched 'High Fidelity', 'Grosse Pointe Blank' and 'Being John Malkovich' with a friend.

That is to say, the concept of the song was to make it like some movie where you'd cast John Cusack. It's not really how I feel, it's supposed be how this character feels. The only problem is that people are wont to interpret songs as confessional and somehow illuminating the inner machinations of my emotional life. Uh, no. (You can got 'Kitsches fo Pain' for that sort of thing).
Unfortunately, this is not one of those songs.




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'Terrorist In My Neighborhood'

Giving The Benefit Of The Doubt

I don't like David Hicks. I don't like what happened to him at Guantanamo Bay either, and I sure don't like the War on Terror that has informed the first part of this century, but in the scheme of things David Hicks is still eminently dislikable. I don't know being dislikable is enough to get you tortured in camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, but I always suspected it couldn't have happened to a more deserving shit-head, and everybody wanting for him to return were misguided peaceniks, rallying around the worst shit-flag with the worst shit-cause.

Maybe another way of putting it is this: I don't like the death penalty either, but when applied to Shoko Asahara, it blunts my objections considerably. If they had the death penalty in Norway and applied it to Anders Brevik, I wouldn't mind. That they don't execute Brevik in Norway is a testament to Norway's level of civil progress, and maybe I'm too flexible in my beliefs about these things. They're clearly better people than I am.

Maybe David Hicks doesn't warrant being lined up with the likes of Asahara or Brevik, but to my mind there's no doubt he went to Afghanistan for some kind of military adventure and ended up paying for it heavily. His denials have always rung hollow, given everything else with which he was reported to have involved himself.

So at the barebones level of it, I found it really hard to argue against US torture in Guantanamo Bay leading with this white kid form South Australia. Other people? Sure. This guy? Puh-lease. It's a bit like arguing against the Death Penalty with  some C-Level Guard at a Nazi death Camp. How culpable were they? I dunno - but they sure meant to be there doing evil shit, that's why you'd stick them on trial. Hicks was culpable just by being there. how big that culpability was, I don't know, but he sure as fuck was up to no good.

Here's the crucial thing: Most civilian people on the planet that saw 9/11 unfold on TV did not think to themselves they needed to get to Afghanistan. He got exactly what he bargained for; he gets absolutely zero sympathy from me.

After the weird political deal that returned Hicks to Australia - god only knows who's face exactly was saved in all of it because nobody looked good - Hicks started living in my area. He was spotted shopping at the local supermarket. This prompted me to write this song.

I don't think he lives in the area any more. I believe he's back in South Australia, beating up on some other life partner. He's still a dick in my books.





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'Pony the Orangutan' (Album Mix)

"She Gives You More Pleasure Than A..."

And so we come to this song.
Again, I wish not to be shot for being the messenger. It's not like's my idea to shave an orang-utan and put her to work in a brothel. It's not my idea that there is a 'prostitute village' in Borneo. The world is a far more, deeply fucked up place than we imagined before. We're simply finding out more as the internet enables us to do, but we must also process the horrors in our heads as well, and in my case I obviously chose to write a song about it.

So yeah, no. I'm not advocating or supporting the idea of an orang-utan prostitute.

Over the years I've encountered a lot of indignant people as if somehow the song brought humanity into disrepute. The song doesn't, but the kind knee-jerk moralism thrown around lightly not only does not help the orang-utan, it doesn't really help anybody except the person throwing it around. It's not that I'm unsympathetic, it's just that I'm tired of the moral response that doesn't really produce anything except more argy-bargy.

And yeah, it's mind-warping and revolting.




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'I'm Sad'

The Working Title Was 'I'm Fat (and I've Never Made Love)'

Sometimes people drive you crazy.

I used to have a friend. He is extremely personality disordered. I can't cope with his insanity, when I have other insane friends to whom I must attend. It's not my fault that he's fat; or that he's never been in love; or that he stalked a girl from church to church, suburb to suburb; that he held a flame for the wrong girl for ten years; that he was rejected not just by her, but by her whole church; and that he ended up grooming a girl in school he taught at; only to be rejected by her as well.

There were plenty of places where I offered the stop sign in red as advice, and each time he simply drove past that point, headlong into a series of personal disasters. Then one day he was the forty-year old virgin, years before the movie even came out. He became the original ranting right loony Incel dude - angry, fat, lonely and hateful.

It's hard to forgive somebody who is out to get you because they blame you for all their trouble.
What else's a man to do but write a song about it and lament. These are my lamentations about said ex-friend. The world being what it is, you probably know one of these kinds guys.




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'Dungeon Dad'

The Criminally Insane Patriarch

Sometimes the new you read is so horrible you kind of have to get it into some kind perspective. Which is why I do tracks like this one, about Josef Fritzl of Austria, who imprisoned his own daughter for 25 years and repeatedly raped her, and much, much, worse along the way. It's pretty mind-warping stuff.

Sometimes people abreact to songs like this thinking that somehow I approve of this kind of behaviour. Quite to the contrary, I utterly disapprove of behaviour like this; and yet it needs to be commented upon with maximum derision and contempt.

If you're the sort to shoot the messenger, fine, shoot away, but I'm telling you right here you'd be shooting at the wrong guy. It might make you feel better to shoot at me, but that's just your own problem. The real problem is that there are many, many criminally insane assholes like this all over the world. Just look it up. Then have a deep think if you really think I'm promoting this kind of shit behaviour.

Really. I mean it.




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'Leap Into The Dark'

The Hard Way

I wanted to write something about faith - faith in anything - and really only had Søren Kierkegaard to go on. Kierkegaard famously described faith as having no basis in reason and more like choosing to leap in to the dark. It's kind of true of people who believe in science above all else as well, that in as much as one believes, one is leaping into the metaphorical dark.

If you talk to Christians, they all insist that it's leaping into the light, the light of God, but clearly they're too obstinate (or stupid) to understand what Kierkegaard is talking about. You believe in anything at your own risk, and that risk is not just that it is completely wrong or misguided, but also, it's not something you're going to get a handle on until you tangle with it.

And that's one half of it. The other half of it is that maybe this impulse to want to believe is at the heart of a certain kind of cultural experience. We want to believe in abstractions and generalisations and abbreviated, un-nuanced observations, heck, even politics, all on thesis that once we believe we can proceed with action. The illusion is that belief begets cause and momentum of its own.

Look, if you believe something, that's perfectly fine. I just want to point out that the deeper you believe in things that are unfounded on reason, the darker you're walking into the heart of darkness. And it's not even the Martin Heidegger kind, where the future is the shining darkness, projected on to the sheen of a screen, but just brutal darkness that makes the dark ages, the Dark Ages.






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'Hypocrisy For Consumption'

We Eat Chicken, Don't We?

If you've read this blog for any amount of time you'll know whaling's a bit of a touchy topic for me.

So... I'll just say this: I don't want to be told whaling is bad by somebody from Canada, a land where they club baby fur seals; and the indigenous population go whaling; and the said indigenous population buy their whaling harpoon guns from Japan; and Canada isn't even a member of the International Whaling Commission exactly because these very issues might come back to bite them. I get enough from Australians and New Zealanders on this topic. Honestly - it might seem abrupt because I do love your land but please - if you're from Canada... don't start.

With all due respect to you Canadians out there, unless you're Vegan, you've got no stake in this topic, no dog in this fight - because you've eaten your dog.
That is all.

This one is a very short instrumental to express how I felt about the above.




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'The Monster Is Behind You'

"The Monster Is ALWAYS Behind You"

The metaphorical, figurative, non-material monster in your life is rage. Especially the sort that surge forth in moments that maybe it ought not do so. Rage is a terrible thing - it can eat you up from inside, but if you legit out at the wrong moment, the consequences can eat you alive. I'm an idiot that can't follow my own sage advice so I've had these moments where I came to blows with strangers over basically not much.The anger is always there, ready to explode. It is indeed the monster that's always behind me, ready to pounce forth.

So, yes, there's all that; but of course there may be moments in your life when there really is a monster right behind you.



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'Astronaughty'

Straight From The Headlines

Sometimes a song just happens. A heading is there and you just know how the whole song goes, and this one was one of those.

This song is about Capt. Lisa Nowak, who was an astronaut that made herself famous for let's just say, the wrong reasons. In truth, looking back on the story, it still seems surreal, perhaps even hyper-real. There's the weird juxtaposition space and earthbound passions; there's the contrast between the demands of being an astronaut and more private feelings; there's the absurdity of obsessive love and the impossibility of owning love; there's the long drive during which she thought god-knows-what; and the absurdity of trial by media over something that probably should have been sorted out discreetly private.

I feel sorry for the good Captain Nowak to this day. You don't get many bites at real love in this life. I'm not surprised somebody as fiercely competitive as a NASA astronaut sought to fight for hers. It's hard to judge her harshly - I certainly don't.
So you could say I really mean it in this song.



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'Miss Belinda'

And When I CameThrough the Other End...

After my terrible breakup that made me write all these mean songs in this series, I ran into a woman who was seemingly bouncing around between a bunch of guys and I was just one in a series men she had a thing with. I think it was one of those validation things -the more guys found her desirable, the more validated she felt. For the unsuspecting guy, it's kind of a shock to the system.

Of course, things can get complicated in life. People come and go and sometimes they do you wrong without them even meaning to do so. The flip side of this is that you judge people according to your means for forgiveness. If you can afford to forgive people, then you tend not to judge too harshly. I'd already been put through the ringer by another woman, so I was able to come at this situation with a bit more sanguine humour. A woman's gonna do what a woman's gonna want to do - what's the surprise in that?

And so, we have this song.
I didn't want to use her name in this song because it didn't scan properly with the chorus. So instead I landed on Belinda. The real Belinda I knew was nothing like the girl in this song, but that's another story, another song altogether, for another occasion.



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'My Only Regret'

We All Have A Few

Edgar Allan Poe said something to the effect of writers being unable to put truth to paper, because truth defies being put down to paper easily. It might well be true. It's sure not easy to write something that stands as fiction or even journalism or a poem or a lyric, that also shares so much with the real world. All verisimilitude in the arts is a kind of fabrication, an elaborate artifice, a dirty ruse and a fine line of spun bullshit. As such, the kinds of truth that writers might want to write into their work may either be truthiness with a dash of embellishment, or facts with a dose of editorial fondling. In any case, working in any kind of arts project has a way of precluding one from truth being put into the work.

In turn, there is something to the truth presented in things like honest testimonies of genuine horrors. You only have to read the accounts of people who fell victim to terrible things like the Holocaust or randy Catholic Priests or Genocide, or brutal white police beating up on indigenous peoples in custody. There is no adornment to their accounts - Artifice, or simply arti-ness subtracts from the power of such testimony. The honest blunt truth is not an artistic thing.

So I guess that's just a preamble to the fact that this tracks called 'My Only Regret' but that's one of those adornments to get the song over the line. It's natural in life to have lots of regrets. It's only in the Arts that we get to take the radical pose that perhaps we only have one thing that we regret in life. If we're going for even more truthiness, I can't really say I regret this one thing all that much. People can be really shitty to one another when they split up. One can't go around judging people by the way they treat you when they part company with you.


 Such is life.

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'Love Lobotomised Me'

It Started As A Challenge

Today's song from the playbook.

The chorus of this song was actually a play out on another song I'd written for Beaver Patrol, the band I had with the Dude form Audio Darnok. That song was sort of a nonsense song to begin with, with its rather oblique references to the Police album 'Regatta de Blanc'.

Anyway. Sometime early on over at iCompositions, - probably around 2006 - somebody said they loved the play out, could I write a song using that as the chorus? - and so this song was born.

It is, sort of manic because parts of it were built from loops and other parts were put together from sections of arrangements I had for another track I was working on at the time. It seemed appropriate to cannibalise that and put in the chorus people wanted. I never went back to that other song.




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'Burning Shrubbery'

It's An Instrumental

So there's not much to say. It is, how ever...  uh... orgasmic. I'll promise you that!

I will say this instead: I saw 'BlackKKlansman' by Spike Lee tonight. It's a delightful movie with some amazing bits of casting. it was funny watching the thing in Leichhardt of all places where once Italian emigres ruled supreme. I turned and saw most of the  audience were ageing white folk. I couldn't tell if the message and the dialectics and the didacticism hit home, or perhaps not.

It's funny Spike Lee necessarily talks about the race conflict and identity, but it ends up demonstrating that perhaps socio-economic factors have a greater impact on people than identity. Some of the good ol' boys Spike Lee mercilessly portrays as idiots are clearly products of a deprived stratum of society. It's not just fear of the black uprising and incredibly low IQs that makes them join the Klan. They're also the product of economic deprivation. The film walks up to the door to Marxism and stops short. All the same, it's a fun film worth the price of the ticket.

And now, here's the track of the day:




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'Girl With The Golden Hair'

Entitled People Blues

I used to live in Neutral Bay, which is a nice place if you don't really talk to some of its denizens.
Occasionally you come across the most mercenary psychopaths on the North Shore and you think to yourself, "how do they think like that?"

But of course, the thing about being well off for some people is that they don't have to think, don't have to apologise, they just go through life on their own fucked up trajectory. It's life Jim, but not as most of us know it. I did meet a few people who made me wonder - seriously wonder - about their mental health.

Anyway, this song is about one of those kinds of entitled people. God only knows what happened to them.





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'Cosmic Egg'

I Guess I Will Always Be Angry

One wants to face one's later years with some modicum of grace and style and calm and wisdom and whatever else you're supposed to gain as one ages.

Well, screw that. This one has its origins in a stupid gift I got when I turned 19. My girlfriend and my other friend in the faculty got together made a paper mâché 'Cosmic Egg' because ... well, because in a tutorial for Behavioural Science, I was asked to demonstrate language use that was not going to convince a third party and the best thing I could think up was an impromptu rant about 'The Cosmic Egg' which gave birth to the universe.

Now, I'm no believer in cosmic eggs and weird-ass cosmogonies, but obviously the silly speech left an impression on my girlfriend and our friends they thought I deserved to get my own 'Cosmic Egg' so they spent days making this stupid thing.

I mean, it was cute when they gave it to me, and it just sort of sat there until my relationship blew up. I won't go into the details here, but basically, the end featured these two people metaphorically stabbing me in the back and leaving me for dead. Honestly, they may have actually stabbed me in the back and left me for dead because everything in my life since then has been scrambling to overcome that moment.

So, what's a person to do but exact metaphorical and artistic vengeance. That's what this whole 'Kitsches of Pain' album is all about, and above all, this song spells it out. I'm not proud of it, but some things, you just gotta get them out of your system.

Here's a life lesson for all you young people. Don't ever trust anybody who laughs at your jokes. The joke will be on you eventually.




Oh and fuck you Nikki. Fuck you very much. 
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Temporarily Back With 'Cocaine Friends'

I Know, I Know. It's Been A While But things Have Changed

I won't go in too deeply the reason for it. Yes, I'm totally over dealing with Google, but it's so big you have to deal with it.

The story goes like this.

I've been releasing music over the last year, all of which I've noted in the discography page. In most part I've relied upon iCompositions.com to be the place where I park all the legacy recordings and left it at that, but iCompositions retired as of 11 August 2018, so now there has to be a new place to park all this stuff.

I've had big think about it, and it comes down to something simple - it's hard to beat Google as the place to store information - and so I'm gradually moving my entire music back catalog, over to Youtube.

*ugh*

But that's life in the digital 21st Century. So say hello to the series of songs that came out as 'Kitsches of Pain'.



Oh, and I forgot to say, I missed you all.
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