Erm... someone actually compared T.S.R. (an honourable, dignified, well-earned sound / noise) to Mogwai (an ugly, brattish theft of other people's hard-earned noises)... And I was in such a good mood... I have always considered myself a Post Rock type at heart, and it's only the likes of Mogwai that make me turn away.

Do you want to hear my Mogwai story again?

And surely the term 'post rock song structure' is a paradox????

Season's great things to you and to yours.

X
 

I rather like Mogwai for precisely the reasons you just mentioned Mart, and I did wonder where he'd plucked that from. The bit that really makes me chuckle is that everyone seems to think Youth of America is about Bush-era paranoia... It's actually very literal, and is based on the film Independance Day, featuring everyone's favourite jug eared 'funnyman' Will Smith.

I don't believe I've heard your Mogwai story, please dear sir, do elaborate :)

I'm with you on the post-rock song structure as well... Mine are mostly fairly conventional song structures in the popular indie mode, just applied to somewhat more downbeat thematic material. And love songs to deep sea creatures... and talking about Will Smith films...

The best of the chilly December festivities to all chez Mekano!

Doom
x
 

Hell, I'd love to be able to actually write a song about something! Even Will Smith (I often find myself amused by the amount of time I've spent watching Will Smith battling aliens / zombies).

Song structures - well, it was something I never considered at all until I gave a CD to a friend who is a writer / arranger by trade. And his response was basically 'you need to write some proper songs mate', and he gave me a set of instructions... can't remember the details but it was basically something like '8 bars intro, first chorus, first verse, second chorus' etc. and something called a 'middle 8' that I'm still not sure about even though Beth Garfield did try to explain it to me more than once.

At the time I think I said to him something like 'have you never heard of this thing called 'groove'? And things like 'krautrock', traditional musics, and 'dance music' etc.

And I realized that I just let the thing go where it needs to go, which is usually along the lines of 'intro, verse, chorus, end'. It didn't occur to me that that was in any way unconventional, it just seemed somehow right. Maybe it's just laziness. Although I have accidentally done something more conventional.

I wish I could do the classic space-rock groove thing but I can't stick with it.

It also freaked me out to think that 90% of 'pop' is essentially the same bloody song!


So, I was lucky enough to be at an early Mogwai / Arab Strap gig with Ade from Stray Dog City. I'd heard Arab Strap on Saint John Peel's show and was really intrigued. Live, they weren't too interesting, at least at that point. Mogwai came on and proceeded to throw what seemed entirely un-ironic rock shapes with their classic / expensive instruments and amps, doing what seemed like a bad Loop impression. As someone that was obsessed with the ideas of Post Rock / Drone Rock / Trance Rock etc. at the time, what they were doing seemed really overblown and 'token'. But what stuck in my mind was that the main man kept getting really pissed off with the fact that his mic was feeding back. It was funny because the quality of the feedback from the mic was no worse than the noise they were trying to make. And he kept having to adjust his cardigan.

It became an in-joke for me and Ade for a while after that. We'd shake our heads in mid-set and stop songs because the tambourine wasn't feeding back quite right, or my cardigan wasn't on properly (I like cardigans).

One day I'm going to write a conventional song, then remove the beat, the bassline, the melody, the chords, and just leave the abstract stuff...

Season's great things to you and yours me old china! XXX