Floatweed (2010)

so, after literally years of work i am finally ready to "release" an album of sorts with some degree of officiality. the first time, it was a rushed, experimental and (extremely) lo-fi collection titled "fool pillar", on PAR records in 2006. then it was the very limited, very self-released "faithful grass" e.p. in 2007. for those two releases i referred to the project as The Heaving Seas. a while after that i created a myspace page for a new project to be known as Floatweed. eventually i decided that Floatweed was more suited to be an album title than an alias and so the concept of this album was born. it's a collection of songs that i wrote and recorded throughout 2008 and 2009. i play every instrument on the album, apart from the intro of "photograph" which was programmed by my friend avess. "black girl" is a traditional folk song and "love song" was written by lesley duncan. the front cover is a photo of the basketball team from my great grandmother's highschool yearbook.

- "african ocean" and "look up at the stars" were recorded towards the end of spring in 2009.

- "mistakes" was first recorded around summer in 2008 and then had a chorus and birds added around late summer in 2009.

- "portland road" and "a wolf" were recorded around january in 2009.

- "april" and "black girl" were recorded around march in 2009.

- "photographic" was recorded in early 2008.

- "tall trees" was recorded at the beginning of autumn in 2008.

- the music of "josemaría" was first recorded in spring of 2008 with vocals added in december 2009.

- "banana milkshake" and "love song" were recorded at the end of summer in 2009.

- "today" was first recorded in late 2008, with vocals added in summer of 2009.

anyway, i'd like anyone who wants the album to download it. it's completely free and everything. here's the link:

http://www.zshare.net/download/71311474cb8d4081/

faggy

here are some of the best and faggiest album covers from the aesthetic goldmine that is the disco era.

"take me to baltimore" by ruth copeland. yeah. faggy painting and anal pose.


















"love to love you baby" by donna summer. i bet straight guys liked this back in the day. you can see nip and everything.


















"thunder & lightning" by dee d. jackson (donna summer meets kate bush. i love space disco). i like how her bodysuit tells you where to look.


















"take me home" by cher. i hate to have a blog that mentions cher. but this is a sick album cover.



















"knock on wood" by amii stewart. it came out before the cher one and i think maybe bob mackie stole the idea a bit... although i wouldn't be surprised if bob mackie actually designed the outfit here too. i don't care enough to research (as difficult as that may be to believe). but yeah. the headgear is amazing.



















"paradise bird" by amii stewart. here she is again. her album covers got totally boring after this. but this completely reminds me of yuna's floral fallal dress sphere from final fantasy x-2*. i'd make a self-depracating quip about how faggy that game is but it seems kind of irrelevant based on the idea of this whole post.


















"never trust a pretty face" by amanda lear. i saved the best for last, didn't i?

















this is all a tribute to why i don't want the art of the album to die. i want vinyls to be made forever. i want tapes and cds to be made forever. even 8-tracks. i love to have the artwork to see and to hold and to smell. some of these great album covers do not house great albums. time stands still when i listen to a great album. but time won't stand still for the art of the lp.

*see:

happy noel

i have a friend called harry. this is him, as an elf

recently harry appeared as a contestant on the new years day special of deal or no deal, a programme i have never watched before. so i thought it would be a nice tribute to recap his appearance for him, inspired partly by the pictorally-aided recaps of america's next top model by rich on fourfour. right, so. i guess they have all these people on the set waiting to get chosen to be the ...dealer? yeah, i don't really get it. but harry (aka "haz") gets chosen and proceeds to walk out and performs a few very poised and dancerly bows for his fellow contestants.

he appears to have a lovely rapport with all of them. the men and women alike repeatedly refer to him as a lovely guy. because he is! harry and noel edmonds sit down for a bit of a chinwag and harry is accused of looking like

gok wan

buddy holly (apparently wearing a leather mini - it IS harry)

wally of "where's wally?"

and most bizarrely of all, lorraine tighes from the apprentice (another show i've never really seen before). i hear she's a sex freak though. honestly.

so basically, harry looks like anyone with thick-rimmed glasses. although i admit i can sort of see it with buddy holly and wally. noel then tells harry he looks like a reject from the royal ballet. harry takes this all in good humour. when noel mentions harry's trousers, it is accompanied by a lingering close-up

they talk a bit about harry's life and harry recalls a mugging where he was told he would get "mashed up". noel enquires of a lady called tina, who i guess is another contestant (do they just have the same people on every week? they're all so familiar with each other), what it means to be mashed up and she goes on some weird little tangent about being smashed (i.e. drunk). probably because she was drunk. see:

it took less than one second for her face to get from a to b. anyway, they begin to actually play the game and i think the audience are told that if a certain amount is in a certain box, they get all get a free bottle of champagne. so every time harry opens a box there is a collective grown of disappointment as it is not the right amount. harry tells the audience off and it's hilarious. harry addresses a lady he calls glinda although her name badge states that she is in fact called glenda. they're both great names, so i don't mind. glenda is amazing, by the way.

see? apparently she cleans her hair with washing powder. more on glenda soon. in the mean time, noel tells harry that he will do really well, at which point harry crouches down and begins to drum on the floor in his touch wood ritual. looking particularly morrissey-esque, he reprimands noel for potentially jinxing him.

an odd exchange involving harry exlcaiming to noel that "you're going to fall over and hurt your ear" leads noel edmonds to do an impression of a cat pawing a blanket ready for a nap.

how did i not know this shit was so bizzare? noel's response to being taught how to touch wood: "you should eat more greens". harry ignores this. welsh lyn calls harry a "fantastic whatever" and tells him that he'll never be forgotten when he goes. dark. so he pulls out a box with £250000 written on the lid and then that's gone? and that's a bad thing? so now he can't win it? i think i'm getting the hang of it. noel asks "why are you wearing cartoon underpants?". harry responds: "so you've got something to read". hahahahaha. the homoerotic, pederasty loving audience are excited by this and applaud wildly.

soon a girl called beth is chosen to reveal what's in her box. says she hopes it's a blue number? ok, i dont get it anymore. however, harry goes apeshit at her for jinxing him and makes her cry.

drama. can you see that tear on her right cheek? next time i see harry i'm going to throw a black cat over his shoulder. the attention hasn't been on noel for a while so he starts talking again and harry's all in the zone and annoyed so he screams at him. noel shuts up and touches wood. not in that way. harry reveals that he used to pretend to be aerial from the little mermaid in the bath. so i had to do this for him:

in a cute moment, another contestant named vicki says that she'd be harry's flounder any day. when they're about to start playing again there's a long pause where no one says anything and harry basically calls noel an incompetent presenter. it's funny. next, a cute looking girl called debbie thanks harry for letting her bounce on his bed and then opens her box for him. i know. another contestant named jardi didn't want to go to harry's bedroom to bounce on beds with debbie. but harry didn't want him there anyway because he looks like chad kroeger with a shave. inside debbie's box is the amount of 1p. this is a good thing, so harry screams and squeezes debbie's head.

just like this













bad times. and, saying debbie and harry so many times made me want to include this:





















there we go. so harry and noel are talking some shit for a while about "doing it" we get this shot of glenda looking rather confused.

my reaction is pretty much the same. glenda further cements her place as my (second) favourite person on the show by giving harry some sage advice about not accepting an offer of £11,000 (where do these "offers" keep coming from? i don't get it). she might have been talking shit in her surprisingly youthful voice but, when you give advice with this expression of wisdom:














you can't help but take it. unless you're harry, who swiftly dismisses her and moves on. what's wrong with him? glenda belongs on a book cover. like this





















and she looks like how dolly parton might look today if she never had a million madame face lifts, and if she still wore the same wigs she wore in 1980.



































spot the difference! the scary thing is she's probably younger than dolly anyway. so a bunch of stuff i can't really follow happens again. chad kroeger intervenes and i think he's done something nice? so harry wins £12,000 and everyone's happy! the end? ...NO. apparently we are going to get to see what goes on behind the scenes at the show but they currently appear to be still playing the game. i thought he'd won £12,000! ... it's some confusing shit about how he might win £50,000 but he doesn't and he has £12,000 instead. which is still a lot more than what i have! so well done to harry. and the behind the scenes is more of a cheesy montage of the year. how misleading.

but well done harry! it was a marvellous performance. make sure we boogie some time, ok?