Electronic, punkatonic, ultramoronic anthem...

I have just, to my own surprise, recorded a song. Very, very quickly, and most enjoyably. Melanie Houston (DJ, musician) invited me to try something with her. We met up in an improvised home studio in Brunnenstrasse. (Brief description of studio: a couple of doors laid flat on trestles, covered with black cloth, on which lay a tremendously chaotic bunch of, ah, let’s call them "vintage" Korg rhythm boxes, a keyboard with one key jammed down, and a mike with its mesh so bent in that it may have been used as a hammer, or murder weapon, all enthusiastically and incomprehensibly wired together. Everything fed down one wire into a hard drive.)

We spent ages working on a fairly traditional pop song, until we both lost the will to live and abandoned it.

Then, as so often happens after wasting ages on something that doesn’t work, we relaxed, gave up, started to play for the joy of it, and came up with something we loved. In the next thirty minutes, we wrote, rewrote, and recorded a 200 beats-per-minute, electronic, punkatonic, ultramoronic anthem that is almost certainly the first great song of the new millennium. Well, that’s what it felt like, halfway through the first take. I was on my knees, scrolling through stacks of lyrics on the MacBook, rewriting and reciting on the fly into the crunched mike, while Melanie played keyboard, avoided the stuck key, messed with the rhythm boxes and mixed the master live, all at the same time, with no way to go back, cuz it’s all on one track...

It’s called It Makes The Sex Exciting (When There’s Been A Little Fighting), and I’ll try and get it up on the site somehow, soon. Oh, and Melanie will be DJing in White Trash , Schoenhauser Allee, on February 9th, if you’re in Berlin…

Meanwhile, here’s the lyric:

...No, it's not. This is that very rare thing from me, an edit in a post. About a year after posting the above, I reworked a lot of those words into a poem that I rather like, and I want to send it to some people who frown on reading anything that's been published. Yes, I know, cheerfully slapping stuff up on your own blog isn't exactly publishing, but rather than risk confusion I thought I'd pull the lyric from my post. It's been very enjoyable, back-engineering a song into a poem. The words started off, as words do, in my notebook, with no job description (song lyric / poem / aphorism / diary entry / whatever). But, hmmm, they make a rocking poem... I'll put the poem up when all this is over... (This edit done July 29th 2008.)