Life is exhausting, sometimes, a constant process of doing and undoing. A cosmic timelapse would see us flit from chore to chore and collapse, activity to activity and then the bliss of sleep, hopefully undisturbed, but often a half oblivion where anxiety is played out in odd dreams. It's not always a bad thing, to be busy, I tell my love, who's collapsed on the couch. It's just life, unfolding itself.
We aren't good at chilling, unless we're paralysed with fatigue. Even collapsed on the sofa, our minds are whirring in the way Type A brains will, constantly inventing, processing, creating, thinking. There's a sense of guilt that we're not achieving, when we aren't physically doing. Yet we also long for the rest that we find impossible to put into action - it's really just another thing on the 'to do' list that shrinks and grows every day.
It's easy for me to give advice as I tidy up and make dinner, and pack lunches for work the next day. ON this day I'm full of beans, happy to do, even if my hip is hurting and I can't fit in all the activities my mind longs for. But Jamie needs to be assured it's okay to not do anything. He's the typical ADHD adult - or at least partly - who does until he drops, usually every few days, where he finds himself half asleep on the couch at 4 pm.
Momentum is hard to keep in check.
Today, he's made me a chicken tunnel (catch my post on it last week), painted the skirting boards in the shed and nailed half of them on, gone and visited a friend, and had a bike ride, so I laugh at him and tell him that maybe he's done plenty enough today.
The lorikeets land in the trees like unseasonal Christmas decorations and we watch them for a while, then as I cook a veggie curry he puts on Jamie XX on the telly. It's funny how we listen to albums non stop then don't pick them up again for a few years, and we find ourselves absorbed in the video clips of the tracks, many of which we hadn't seen before.
I loved this clip because I had no idea there was a half abandoned city in China modelled off Paris. Tiancheng's landscape gives the video a ghostly, surreal quality as the figures gather around a central messiah, perhaps, and there's a sense of hollowness in this unnreality - a constructed city, a constructed guru. It's a cool song.
Gosh is also a great song - in fact, there's a ton of great Jamie XX songs. We actually started playing him this afternoon because he's recently released this awesome duo with Underworld of their song 'Born Slippy' - it sent shivers up our spine watching it for it's old school nostaglia. There's a lot of his vidoes that show ravers dancing and we talk about how nothing has ever matched the euphoria of the dance floor, and how these days my hips couldn't handle it and how incredible it was we didn't fuck our knees dancing for eight hours straight. Which brings us to this song, 'All Under One Roof Raving'. Say what you like about electronic music or raves, there was always this sense of unity that you just can't replicate elsewhere.
Check out the dancing in this song. It's a remix or sample of a Cutty Ranks track which we have on vinyl somewhere. Jamie's got a great collection of vinyl and used to be involved with sound clashes in Brighton with a soundsystem back in the '90's and early 2000's. He misses those days a lot, as many of the old crew do - it was a bit of a golden time in their lives.
'Limb by Limb' is a dancehall track that was quite controversial for it's lyrics. It's got this great riddim but then you here the patois of:
Limb by limb we a go cut dem down
Send fi the hacksaw, take out dem tongue
Limb by limb we a go cut dem down
Send fi the hacksaw, take out dem tongue
You're shaking your ass around the loungeroom to what essentially is quite a violent song. It's more performance bravado though - part of a sound clash system where the music postures and battles for supremacy. There's an awesome stripped down bassline and heavy drum programming - I love it, and love how it works in this track.
Despite feeling fatigue and not wanting to do anything, the music suits our want to energy - we just wish we were in our '20's, all under one roof raving.
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