Fennesz: Seven Stars

Viennese guitar-electronics maestro Christian Fennesz has a new album titled Seven Stars; four-track 10" out now with full length CD in September. The title track features drums, first time to be included on a Fennesz release I believe?

His last album, 2008's Black Sea, was a high point in a career of them, but we all have our personal favourites. Here Fennesz allowed for more pieces featuring the guitar largely untreated, naked ringing tones against a backdrop of relative emptiness.

Grey Scale:


Glass Ceiling:


Elsewhere his trademark granular wash was present and as beautiful as ever:


"Seven Stars" is also a leading brand of Japanese cigarettes. I smoked "Mild Sevens" when I was there, both available for international purchase here.

"The Seven Stars" is also a pub in London. Located behind the Royal Courts in Holborn, It was one of a handful of local buildings to survive the Great Fire (1666) and in 2002 celebrated its 400th anniversary with a street party.

The proprietor is eccentric Australian ex-pat Roxy Beaujolais with a penchant for French cuisine, so the food is tops. My first visit I was befriended by the barman who gloated about England's Ashes victory over Australia. We stayed until closing whereupon the barman pulled the blinds and kicked off a "lock-in" - allowing us to drink past legal closing time.

The pub is famed for its cat which wears a choristers collar.

Harry Matthews: Cigarettes

Not sure how the title fits in but this book was as smooth and refreshing as a packet of Laramies. Weirdly pitched between realist melodrama, postmodern sexuality deconstruction and (subtle) Oulipo construct, Matthews ingeniously ties these ideas together such that they're less independent strands than a well-stirred stew, a multi-voiced multi-layered narrative of love, loss, art and aging in America. Dedicated to Matthews' mate Georges Perec, Cigarettes contains something of Perec's desire for structural logic, not that I'm sure how it works. I never grasped what Perec was doing with Life: A User's Manual though, but enjoyed the knowledge that something overarching was at work. That same sense is present here. Here, each chapter explores a different pair of individuals, the narrative developing as these characters interact, with one another, in the art - and horse - world, and across time. The cast is incestuous, and piecing together the historical web of relationships, and following their implications, is where much of the pleasure lies.

This structure allows for a complete flattening of hierarchy, with no character or narrative element allowed to dominate. Rather, the drama is less concerned with individual character development (although this does occur within individual chapters) than with overall relationships, the picture rather than the puzzle pieces. This isn't entirely true, as those chapters involving the extreme sexual antics of Lewis and Morris naturally stand out, yet by the final pages they too have been subsumed within the larger whole. I read an old Collier edition with the eighties graphics (see top) which seeped into my reception of the book, not the less leading current Dalkey Archive version (below). I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Mathews was once assumed to be a CIA agent in Paris, due to his 'man-of-leisure' lifestyle. This swanning about Parisian high society itself attracted the attention of the CIA and was documented in Mathews' pseudo memoir My Life As CIA. He studied music at Harvard but no idea what, or whether, he composed.

I just finished Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, a hilarious study in uniquely Japanese misanthropy, which I'll comment on, and quote, soon.