Aaaah-tchooo!

There’s an awful lot of pollen in Davis. The air is disgustingly fecund right now, and my hayfever is the worst it’s ever been. Clarityn, my antihistamine of choice, is unable to stem the flow of phlegm. I can actually feel the sting of the pollen as it blows into my engorged eyeballs.

Now I have health insurance I can go to the doctor and get a prescription for something stronger then Clarityn, but it’s not at all obvious which doctors participate in my health insurance scheme. If I go to one that’s not on the list I have to pay in full for my consultation. Whatever its faults, I’ll take the NHS any day.

I’ve been spending quite a few hours lying in my darkened bedroom with wet paper towels over my eyes, which has one advantage. This enforced rest has given me time to listen to some new music.

First, there’s the fairly recent re-release of a record I first heard in Israel in 1999, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno. In the process of making the record they experimented with new ways to make music from tape loops, trying to “[find] music where music wasn’t supposed to have been,” they invented what later became known as sampling. They took snippets of from late night talk show conversations, radio evangelist sermons and arabic pop records. To create the backing for their samples they drew on an astonishing range of music including, of most interest to me right now, the work of Miles Davis and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The album they made sounded like nothing else in 1980, and it sounds unique even now. This re-release features excellent liner notes written by David Byrne that give a fascinating insight into the work without explaining it away.

The first time I heard the hysterical evangelist railing against MTV on Mylo’s Destroy Rock & Roll I thought of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Contemporary electronic musicians are still drawing from the well sunk by Eno and Byrne.

Second, I picked up Stereolab’s latest full-length CD, Fab Four Suture. It’s a collection of EPs released in the last year that you can find in the kind of bleeding edge ultra-cool record shops that don’t exist in Davis. Stylistically it’s trademark Stereolab, but I have a great appetite for complex arrangements of vintage synths, muted trumpets and jangly guitars and songs sung in French about the principles of Mutualism. There are some wonderful grooves on it, too. Particularly in the middle of Get a Shot of the Refrigerator.

I’m still getting round to devoting the right amount of time to the Cinematic Orchestra’s first album, Motion, which I downloaded from bleep.com and Belle and Sebastian’s latest, The Life Pursuit, on loan from Rev Rehash. There’s a song on it, Sukie in the Graveyard, that reminds me of Lloyd Cole & the Commotions. It’s in the vocal delivery, the hammond organ and the tone of the lyrics – so pretty much the whole song.

When I’m forced to rest my eyes I can still exercise my ears. Every cloud of powdery plant jizz has a silver lining.