We’d missed our chance at an actual trip to the Statue Of Liberty, but this ferry ride, the Rough Guide book assured us, afforded close-ups of the iconic landmark as the ferry shuttled across the Hudson River on its short journey between New York’s most out of the way borough and Manhattan. One afternoon we took a trip on the Staten Island Ferry. Even the locals make you feel like you were a bit-part player in some never-ending, ever-changing movie. I needed two goes, on account of the fact the cyclist damn-near killed me during my first attempt. “ Get outta the road ya freakin’ jerk!” shouted a commuting cyclist as I stepped into the cycle lane on the Brooklyn Bridge in an attempt to snap the most perfectly symmetrical of shots. There’s something happening all the time no matter where you rest your eyes, although you should never rest your eyes in the one place in New York for very long. Look up, look down, look all around, as the song goes. This time a dozen years ago I was a gape-mouthed, goggle-eyed, free-spending tourist in New York City. We’ll never be as good as this, they admit, though they’ll continue to give it a good try. Shh! Listen! That quiet, respectful popping noise you hear near the end is the sound of Stereolab crying into their Rice Krispies, totally defeated. Or is it actually a manic Velvet’s violin, noise-as-art aesthetic, screeching/keeping time like John Cage on Black Angel’s Death Song, trying painfully to be heard above the apocalyptic din? Maybe it’s both. Just as your mind alters to the staggered groove – are we at the end of a bar or midway through? – a keyboard floats in, keeping time with its Farfisa parp. But as soon as you remember the guitars, there they are, suddenly at the fore again fizzing static bursts of beamed-in-from-the-outer-edges art rock and long, howling notes bent out of shape by distorted wah-wah and studio trickery. That guitar ambience that kicked it all off? You’d forgotten about that, hadn’t you? It’s still there, of course, aural background wallpaper, the splashes of colour in an otherwise steady and unshowy room. It’s Keith Moon tripping up and falling down the stairs, landing the right way up and falling straight into the beat propulsive, steady, not in your face but driving the whole thing ever-forwards. Dum-deh-dehdeh-deh-dum…Dum-deh-dehdeh-de-dum.īut wait…is that a vocal? Is it? A sort-of chanted, Tibetan monk-influenced calling from some far-off metaphorical mountaintop? Remember when John Lennon had this idea – and he had it first, by a good eight years – for Tomorrow Never Knows? This is what I think he had in mind, if indeed a vocal is even here at all. Disciplined, repetitive and worming its way into your consciousness, it’s now the lead instrument, a counter-rhythm to the relentless guitar noizzze that came before. Here comes the bass…woody and electric, looped and repetitive, recorded in an era long before Ed Sheeran and KT Tunstall and even loopers themselves were a thing.
From underneath the blanket of restrained, compressed noise creeps a tambourine, its steady rattling jangle enhancing the drumless, beatless rhythm that’s unfolding in front of your ears.
It lurches in on a slur of stretched 3″ studio tape…or perhaps a divebombing whammy bar…and layered fuzz guitars, overlapped and saturated to white noise levels of intensity, fall into a snaking groove pattern, panned from left speaker to right and back again, an instant head trip.ĭer-der-derder-der-duuh…Der-der-derder-der-duhh. A dozen minutes of head music expansive, noisy and pretty, pretty essential. Julian Cope, in his worth-stealing Krautrocksampler book, called the track ‘ a continuation of (Faust’s) whole trip‘. My Bloody Valentine damn-near bankrupted Creation to make an album only a fraction as exciting, as intense, as self-indulgent as Faust‘s Krautrock, a track so good they named an entire genre after it.