fumybataripriot by sonja berlin-jones

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TUESDAY 5 FEBRUARY

I am disgusted at myself for making these two tracks because they really are the last refuge of a musical scoundrel. The first track is a standard dollop of harsh noise. I can't bear to even waste time thinking about it. The second track is timidly-harsh dance. Looking at the screen as the vertical line moves left to right and meets each new event it all looks fascinating.

But for the normal listener it's just like hearing a camel farting into a tin can for half an hour. I can try to kid myself that it is a bold new direction and one day the world will listen But that is bollocks. The Wire can ring me up and tell me that every bloke in a homburg craned over a quiet laptop up on the tiny stage making the same old hissing noises is at the forefront of something that our grandchildren will marvel at. But that's not going to happen.

All the musical revolutions that lasted were fundamentally about pop music and making a new kind of pop that the people didn't realise they wanted till they heard it. I don't know why the Bandcamp spell-checker always says I've spelt "realise" wrong. I suppose in America it's spelt with a "z". Here goes - realize. Yes it likes that. It's also telling me that I've spelt "spelt" wrong. I can't think of any other way of spelling it. I have become a very anal musician.

Every thrill is a generation discovering that they don't need to be so anal. That it's all right to have happy tunes. That it's all right to be louder. That it's all right to make the intoxicating beat go on for more than ten seconds at a time. That the best music today is the stuff that you really really like - not the stuff that's done on Ableton-live by a stuffed dummy.

I want to wake up beside the younger Brian Eno and the older Richard James and the still-alive Klaus Dinger and fuck them empty and walk out into the early evening and leave the world behind me panting and saying Oh Sonja you were right all along - but this crap album is still a rehearsal and 22 years between albums ? - you've got to be inside the wrong obsession and all those Cold War hippies who thought they were punks.

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