Not much coming up (lie)

I've been flat out running events. I hosted a bunch of stuff for Manchester Science Festival, and for Bad Language. Oh and I did a really fun support slot for Zach Roddis (pictured) which was the closest I've got to an Edinburgh-type performance since the Fringe. Eight events in nine days. It does mean I've been off the radar a little this month.

I've not much coming up. November and December will feel like time off, despite at least four Bad Language events. Also, later this month, I compere a new spoken word night in Didsbury called The Word. I'm really looking forward to this: it'll be in an old stomping ground with a fairly new crowd for me. Then in December, I return to the Contact Theatre to perform with Mothers Ruin, alongside local poetry legend Gerry Potter, spectactular drag hero Cheddar Gorgeous and whole bunch of other talented alternative artists. This will sell out, so grab a ticket now. It'll be fun to play with queer identity in my usual idiotic style.

Someone asked me today if all this performance stuff is leading me in a direction I want. I dunno. I'm lucky enough to have spare time to trounce round Manchester stages building and knocking down weird word sandcastles. Other people my age have families and commitments and boring things like organised sock drawers: I get to splurge my idiocy over audiences in the name of art. I'm having immense fun.

Perhaps there are two things I'm neglecting. Partly my health: I definitely could do with shedding a pound or twenty. And mainly, my fiction writing: I have a file full of stories to polish, and new ones to write. Proper page stuff, not throwaway idiot open mic stuff.

Like I say, not much coming up. Ahem.

Fat Roland summer (er, what?!) playlist 2015

I knocked together a playlist over the summer then forgot about it. Here is that Fat Roland summer techno playlist.

Only thing is, you musn't listen to this in any other season than summer. The techno contained within might sound a little miserablist right from the start. but it was designed for the summer and only for the summer.

If you listen to the skittery madness of Jlin, the punchy rave of Blastto's Acid Light or the carefree house of Shana Halligan's Been Waiting in autumn or winter or spring, you disgust me. Why would you even do that? Why? Whhyy? WHHHYYYYY?!

Ghost written: podcasts, music, Buffy and emails

I'm going to blog more even if it kills me.

Dammit. It has killed me.

I am a ghost.

At the moment, Ghost Fat Roland is listening to a whole load of podcasts: Lore for its storytelling, Richard Herring's interview and snooker podcasts, Comedian's Comedian and, recently, the Black Tapes Podcast. Ghost Fat Roland got rid of his telly a few years ago, and podcasts somehow seem like a healthier way of consuming media.

Ghost Fat Roland has been listening to Call Super's compelling Migrant EP and the gentle strains of HVOB. Here Call Super and HVOB (suitably ghosty) to nuzzle right here right now:





Ghost Fat Roland watched Buffy for the first time ever. It's surprisingly good, despite being massively dated. Ghost Fat Roland loved a crucial plot point that pivoted around an inability to use a phone if someone's on the internet.

Ghost Fa-- wait, I'm going to stop this, it's annoying. I threw Tony Wilson's 24 Hour Party People across the room because he kept referring to himself in the third person: please don't fling this blog post across the room.

Finally, I'm trying to build up a mailing list for Bad Language, the spoken word night I co-run. Do join if you want: click here. I promise to make the emails entertaining for those interested in live literature in Manchester.

That's it for now. My next blog post will have loads of music in. Ghosts hate music. TRUE FACT.

I love acid and the acid loves me

I'm pretty sure acid is the best kind of music.

I go through phases. Recently it's been ambient dub centred around the Beyond label of the mid-90s. I went through a big house phase a few weeks ago. And sometimes I just want noisy techno (Objekt's pretty good for this: I keep hearing sounds on the street that sound like this album).

Acid, though, is the music I'll always go back to whatever my mood. Because of its technological restraints (imagine having a genre of music that can only be made on the banjo), acid barely changes. One Josh Wink record aside, it has never commercialised, nor has it ever faded to nothing.

I Love Acid are parping out some great records at the moment. And imagine my delight when I discovered this Twitter account.

New favourite Twitter account: @303OClock. 1,505 acid tracks and counting. I'm going in. I may be some time.

— Fat Roland (@FatRoland) October 1, 2015

And nothing will beat Hardfloor's sledgehammer acid build-ups.

Maybe the best thing about acid, whether it's acid techno, acid house, acid gabba or acid trousers, is it's never going to be a topic of conversation at a family dinner table. There may be spilled gravy over Ed Sheeran's performance on X Factor, but no-one's going to get into a humus fight over the best era of Lords Of Acid. Acid is somehow secret clubber's knowledge, forever shaded from the glare of the mainstream. Maybe it's the drug connotations, I dunno.

Not that I've ever done the drug. No seriously, I haven't. My mind's weird enough as it is.

Acid is totally the best kind of music. Delve into those links above. Because when it's good, it's proper good. Even acid trousers, which is definitely a thing, honest. Ahem.

> Further Fats: Painting 2010 beige: Eno, Orb, Hardfloor and Seefeel

Why can't I just invent Facebook like normal people?

It took me weeks to recover from Edinburgh. Not physically, because the Escher cobbles of that city give you biceps of steel. No, I'm thinking more of admin. I still have August emails blinking at me with sad eyes. "Why won't you read me? Whhhyyyy?"

My life is a torrent of activity. It's always been this way. The only thing is, it's weird activity. If I was a clever web bod like Mark Zuckerberg, with a few lucky breaks I'd be a millionaire by now. Easily. Y'know, because of my natural genius. What? Shut up.

But instead I produce exhibitions of strange broken words (my work with Art Works Manchester) or have a breakdown about balloons at a bunch of Indiana Jones fans (Flim Night) or shout the word "hat" continuously at a startled crowd (The Lowry's After Hours). Yes, all these things happened.

Why can't I just invent Facebook like normal people? Everyone else does that all the time and they become billionaires every day.

Anyhoo, in the free time I do have, I've been scouring Discogs for albums I used to own but had forgotten about. I stumbled across the Positiva Ambient Collection. I knew this album inside-out but forgot it after some scrote stole all my CDs in the mid-90s.

It triggered some memories on Twitter...

Suddenly remembered this. I played it to death 20 years ago. The Positiva Ambient Collection. http://t.co/WeyGF36LDe pic.twitter.com/g6oG5ChhBY

— Fat Roland (@FatRoland) September 22, 2015

@FatRoland I think all of my Positiva records were awful.

— jazzbo (@jazzbo32) September 22, 2015

@FatRoland I remember a Positiva cover mount tape was one of the first things to set me on my path.

— Simon Whight (@fourfourfun) September 22, 2015

I love all the stuff I do, even if it won't make me rich. But I need to find time to focus my creative energies. Give myself some aims. Take the energy of Edinburgh and turn it into a bit of a masterplan. I may even make a list, although I guess that would be admin.

What this old Positiva album has given me is some slow-down music. A soundtrack for thinking. Watch this space as I come up with a kind-of Fat Roland strategy, all to the sound of The Irresistible Force's Sky High. And you never know, I may even get round to checking my emails.

Dogs

I found this in my drafts. No, I've no idea either.

Dogs.

Dogs.

Dogs.

Dogs from my knees to the horizon.

Dogs.

Millions of dogs,

their stupid faces blank and

puddling wet.

Dogs.

I've never seen

so many dogs. They all

stand there on twenty-five centimetres of air,

hovering,

bobbing as they pant.

Dogs.

Dogs.

Millions of dogs.

Slow Reader: an exhibition of broken words

Slow Reader is an exhibition of broken words created by me, and hinted at in this here blog post here, and brought to you by Art Works Manchester.

I created this work as a kind of escape from the intense writing process for my Fringe show (see posts passim). There are a bunch of themes at work in Slow Reader, namely:

> Good writing is about editing, about ditching everything superfluous. It’s likely, therefore, that a writer will have deleted many more words than will have ended up in their final draft. Slow Reader is about that creative process of cast-offs and half-ideas; the fuzzy fragments that live at the edges of the creative mind that either don’t coalesce into something solid, or are written and then destroyed.

> The text in the exhibition is taken from several years' worth of my short stories. Many phrases and feelings live on from that work as fragments in my mind, as half-memories. This is those fragments writ large on the walls of a Manchester pub.

> The title also plays my habit of losing my place in a book. I don't fold pages or use bookmarks. I am an idiot.

You can see Slow Reader on display at Sandbar, Grosvenor Street from now for a couple of months or so.

   

I'm holding a launch tonight (not really a launch, just some drinks and that) and there are examples of the exhibition pieces below.

I feel empty (a Slow Reader teaser)

I feel empty.

I feel like a Cadbury creme egg that's had its sweet gloop tongued out by an anteater.

I feel like a Stereophonics jewel case without its CD, just some pastry crumbs and a greasy fingerprint.

I feel like a room without a roof nor walls nor furniture nor that family of spectacle-wearing grouse that I swear I saw living here last week.

I feel like the innermost soul of a television talent show: a yearning, brown vacuum of lost intent and forgotten dreams.

I feel like the inside of a balloon.

I've barely gone a day this past couple of weeks without a deadline approaching in the next hour, whether that means show editing, or hitting a flyering spot, or meeting up with someone, or - indeed - sleeping. The fringe was like a hurricane, or at least, a very stern gale. I'm now untethered, flapping gently in a dull breeze, waiting for someone to blow me.

Jeez, I really fancy a creme egg.

Anyhoo, I need a new project. And that project is about to hit like a hurricane train full of creme eggs and grouse.

Watch this space for Slow Reader, coming to a Manchester near you (i.e. Manchester) (i.e. it's a new thing that's about to happen somewhere in Manchester and it's been months in the planning)...