twenty odd years now

1. The beard in my life and I took a trip to berlin last week, we have never been so cold before or indeed since…the last time I was in berlin. Minus thirteen. That’s intense when you come from a country that empties its collective bowel (its up to you to pick a county to defile at this point by implying that THAT VERY ONE is the bowel in question) at the sign of some frost. Said Bearded boy’s eponymous facial accessory was all crunchy from icey spit. But hey, warm hearted folk more than made up for it, we shared a living room with sociopathic house rabbit named pok. carried on my irrational obsession with photographing every holiday meal I eat, and this time we ate a whole lot of them. The city is beyond good for vegan options – particular recommendations are Yoyo world in Friedrichshain (hawaiian pizza!) and Vux cafe in Neukolln, for all your Brazilian-inspired cake and bagel needs – with insane things like guava jam in them. No meat, no dairy, no fucking about. Too tasty. Seek them out, and go buy records from Bis Auf’s Messer, I got The Anals 7” and moreover, really like the sensation of browsing records in someones front room, complete with huge cellar door that nearly claimed my young life due to overzealous tape browsing. Thanks Emma and Joe!

2. I was trying to think of musical commonalities shared by most people I know (I work a job that involves lots of staring at walls) and my main conclusion was that I seriously don’t feel like I know a lot of folk who aren’t dealing with a sliding scale of general obsession with Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Testament to this is my having to buy up all four copies of the Goner repress of the first LP when it showed up briefly in Rough Trade East, even at £16 each. Whether it’s a kind of long term slow burn every-evening-after-work record or sudden infatuation (see the song ‘Precious Rose’) for you, I heartily recommend you join us. I recently read that the singer is also a well-known graffiti writer and gallery-showing-type artist as well, and an animist, which I think is something weird about spirits, as if their whole mystique even needed any further propping up. They’ve got me wearing weird gloves at all the most inappropriate moments. At least I can now take comfort knowing I’m not the only one that finds myself howling in a frankly un-pc approximation of that nasal bogan-baiting drawl ‘I deserve, my dessert, uh uh ughhhh, cool ice cream!’ On a Melbourne-related note, can someone please make sure that MV and Steve, both sizeable chunks of my life-support system that have just upped and moved to your city (in a funny repeat of when my parents did the exact same thing five years ago, thanks life!) are both being looked after, oh and get them to buy me a Diamond Sea record? All I see are heavy skies. YES!

3. Bear with me here as I know this sounds like I need a slap and a quick listen to the Cro-Mags (this is normally true regardless), but Tunisian yé-yé music is actually incredible. Nothing moreso than the 1967 legit hit by a woman (although she was no doubt marketed as une petite fille) called Jacqueline Taieb, called ‘7 heures du matin’, that has a The Who-pastiche ‘g.g.g..eneration’ interlude that is probably the sexiest thing to be recorded in le langue d’amour since…oh no wait, Serge Gainsbourg was a total creep. I started researching yé-yé, apparently Gainsbourg was behind some of it but still, think of this as more like a Shangri-las for your younger sister, after she’s been necking cough syrup and fapping furiously. Apologies if you actually have a younger sister and feel a bit weird now.

4. Guinea Kid – demo (repressed recently on not normal tapes) I really, really like this even though it has that slightly confused out-of-place last song thing going on that you occasionally get on demo tapes where the songwriting cohesion has fallen down and there is, in the case of this tape, a cringey breakdown half-timey bit in the last tune, that jars rather sharply with the other songs – tastefully assembled skummy hardcore with the correct amounts of both squall and scree that requires. I have to say I kind of like that the icky tune is on there, though, because it lends an (I’mm cringing at myself here) authenticity that gets me thinking (probably totally inaccurate) they maybe have a longhaired drummer to appease, that is still way into sports metal or something. And that’s cool. Anyway, Guinea Kid may be way overhyped by now, but fucked if i knew that, I stumbled upon this and would recommend checking it out. In an age where so many clamor to be bored of even the most unavailable punk, it’s nice to hear a genuine rag bag of referents that actually rages, and is surely better than the thousands of message board derivatives with ‘i wanna do a band that sounds like blah blah blah-syndrome’ from the usual places exercising levels of stylistic fascism that only serve counter a lot of their own potential.

5. Cold Wave the genre and Cold Cave the apparent ‘band.’ I say stem the tide of mediocrity and resist this reprehensible guff.

6. Completed an almost-sentimental-if-I-wasn’t-so-happy-about-it bank transfer last month, in that I drip fed my last pound of the Queen’s money (well, mine…) into the nefarious and frankly parasitic legion of shit hawks that make up the buy-to-let property market in this country, and paid my last month’s rent to a private landlord. I’ve just moved into one of 8 houses that are part of a housing cooperative in North London, a fact that I still can’t quite believe as they are by no means common here, and this one has an incredible history which I’m going to detail hopefully in the next Modern Hate Vibe by interviewing my ‘housemate’, a 60 year old chain-smoking lefty archaeologist that is both bang on awesome and my buddy’s mum. She and her pals squatted the whole block in the late 70s and has been here ever since, in spite of the wider ravages of Thatcherite reality. Speaking to longer term residents it seems maybe they feel some of the realities of cooperative living can themselves be less than golden, but i’m really hoping i can bring some idealism-borne-of-ignorance to the equation and maybe help spark a little progress where it’s needed. Exciting times!

7. I’m off to cement my simultaneous statuses as world’s coolest auntie and most chastised sister (they asked for transfer tattoos after my last visit, UH OH) by giving my four year old niece ruby her christmas present, her first skateboard. I hope she’ll thank me in twenty years time.

8. I like all music with swagger and balls, send me some at my new house and I will send you some toenails or something, possibly taped to a cassette. Modern Hate Vibe, 12 Richmond Ave, London N1 0NF

Thanks! bryony.beynon@gmail.com // Bryony http://www.bigtakeover.co.uk