Friday 17 December 2010

Headache

Playing Halo: Reach till 2am last night,
My own fault
Headache comes on thick and tense,
Brain snap crackles and pops

Clumsily claim the last cheese and pickle roll
from the sandwich guy who comes round the office,
"Only vegetarian thing...can I...have?"
Words departing, replaced by gummed-up stupid

Damn I want my head back,
Without the ache.

Tuesday 7 December 2010

Shower gel and sexy funk

Just to get you up to speed, two things sparked off this blog entry: one, dancing like an idiot around my room to Big Boi's latest album and two, using Original Source black pepper and cardomom shower gel. In the shower that is, not in combination with the dancing and music.

In the shower I was faced with the choice of two shower gel options, the nice winter cardomom stuff or lime and tea tree. I had a brief thought that the lime and tee tree might work as something to take the edge off the horrendous cold weather that London has been having. It may well seem painfully obvious to anyone reading this, but the kind of light Brazilian bossa fantasies that flashed through my mind when I was making the crucial shower gel decision don't really work in the depths of winter. Black pepper and cardomom definitely wins the day. Then, in a fairly inspired piece of musical synesthesia I thought of two albums I have been listening to a fair bit in recent months, each one corresponding to one of the shower gel options. The lime and tea tree is an excellent collection of German-Brazillian crossover house music mixed by the perma-genius Rainer Truby, called Glucklich Vol.3, the black pepper and cardomom is Sir Lucious Left Foot: Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi.

I love the kind of music that weaves inbetween latin, jazz and more traditional European house styles, so when I came across Glucklich three months ago it was a dream. Even though the summer was already becoming a distant memory, Truby's picks dominated my stereo like a funkier version of the music bore you find in the corner of all the best parties. Summer does fade however, and with it the pleasure of lime shower gel goes too. Winter requires deeper, dirtier notes to get things moving, whether you find them in soap or audio. So although it was actually released right in the middle of summer, when Big Boi came into my life about a month ago with his dirty winter stank, well, sorry Rainer, but there was no contest.

To cut a long story short, the video below celebrates the kind of butt-naked funk that should be the soundtrack to your Winter. And in case a fortitous google search should bring you here six months late, have some lime-flavoured house on me too.