great danes

june 5th

Current conviction in level of genius: 7
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 30 mins, scribbled on the Guardo Friday Review
Hair day: blondeness looks very lurid today. Need some kind of miraculous face bronzer to balance it out

Friend Des, who works for the supremely ace Leaf label (experimental beautiful acoustic/electronica) in Brixton, got me tickets to Efterklang's gig at the ICA. The ICA is great, if possessing risibly snooty bar staff who frown at your order if you accidentally order a pint rather than a .... whatever it is of their Dutch white beer, and is naturally full of peasant-skirted, thick-specced, pixie-cropped artbohos that I both scoff at and want to be. The support was another Danish band who were fairly rockin', but use of two drum kits playing identical rhythms was less novel and more plain annoying, and the pencil-thin/skirted front chick's breathy noodlings got a little too abstract. They paled in comparison to the wonderfully soulful, musically rich soundworld of Efterklang, a collection of charmingly rangy Scandinavians including a trumpeting drummer, electric violinist, trombonist, live laptop visual artist, fey singer who would occasionally spark up, bash a cymbal or two and croon sweetly-clipped English nothings into the mic. Of course, I'm a sad muso who got excited because they could play in angular time signatures (5! 7!) quite unobtrusively, but they were an inspiringly engaging lot who made me sigh dreamily to myself for half an hour afterwards. I want to be on Leaf. After encouraging feedback on my quirky little minatures, recorded on my hissy mic into crappy basic hand-me-down version of Logic, am fired up to work on more and create a whole new world of Kerry magic!