#362

I’m listening to so much good new music and new music that suits my state of mind nowadays that I  can hardly think about topics that would be worth to discuss here. Thus being smart or decide for you how to do punk is out of the game. No meaning, just nerding. Awkward raging but that isn’t true either. I feel like I have disappeared from my social life - still I was there when a friend of mine almost beat up some hip hop dj at 4 am with whom i I was smoking weed in the back of a bar - and think that everyone is having the blue around me. Truth is, I’m the only one who’s having hard times which in my mind are harder than in actual reality but total apocalypse hanging as a lure in front of me in my one-competitor dog race might indicate some radical changes about the way I survive life. Anyway this should be about music because hearing sounds are still the best thing in life. It’s sometimes funny. That how people think about you just because you could be the one to think about. I was listening to an Ian MacKaye Q&A and he said it’s really depressing and stupid what has happened to straight edge. It was his thing, it was a personal lyrics and now it’s a good excuse for people to call me and my friends drug addict fucking faggots. Dude you should try weed with beer and then tell me that it’s easy not to get at least half naked and make out with your best buddies. I find it funny how serious some people take our circle of friends aka the defekt scene just because I have written about it couple years ago here in the magazine. While it was just a personal report on Hungarian punk that I liked back thenFor some it’s sealed in cement ever since because this is bible. Like how shocked people are when I don’t know some legendary, musician, song, or band. Yeah I don’t know everything. First of all because I have a strangely functioning memory, second: when I’m listening to music I focus on  enjoying it rather than to learn it. For me it doesn’t matter when it was recorded, by whom neither what color of shirt was the producer wearing and in what type of chair he was pressing buttons and turning potmeters. Why should I give a fuck? I love how humans’ brains work that they are obsessed with information but why the fuck does it matter? For me it is just if I could connect to the music emotionally or not. That’s why I just said new music for my state of mind because I’m listening to lots of music that I have already owned or known about but lately I approach some of them differently  to how I did before. And this is how I like it. I don’t care about facts or trivias I love them when I care enough to memorise them but they won’t make music better to me. Shirts on the lp cover’s might but not the back information. I would fucking hate CIRCUS LUPUS if I knew Joan Jett was the producer for one of their records. I hate fucking rock and roll, that’s the last thing I wanna love. Alright I love the fact that Hüsker Dü was doing backing vocals on the first DYS record but for me this is when life becomes a mixtape. Some people just cram all the informations that are available into their heads and others just try to understand the basics of the subject. It is like how acting works. In some movies you see people play a character while in the best movies you see people being filmed, who by the way are actors. There’s a difference between transforming into another person or just acting in a role. So for me the best bands are not just playing songs because they have learnt notes and figured out how three tunes fit together but because they play themselves, they have something that could be told through instruments or through screaming like a baby. And I can enjoy the fact that Crass put out Minor Threat in the UK but mostly because I love both bands and adore their connection even if their music sounds different. But I only have vague ideas about the exact date of this release cause does it really matter? It’s just their music that sounds different, not what and how they do it. It could be called pear or could be called apple what matters at the end is how they taste. And I have no idea what color that girl’s eyes were I just remember how I felt when I looked into them. Quoting Modern Lovers here it’s that power that matters. I’m in love with that.

There are just too many things in life that I wanna do in a really short time. To mash everything together and have that elevated fun. I have this will to do basic stuffs. Like write again a zine about music and about how fun is it to fall in love with bands or just one of their songs. I wanna go down to a rehearsal room and jam with a drummer with me playing guitars blasting out simply raw hardcore songs. Like Faith demos, mixed with no wave New York falling apart shit, with Beach Blvd total drugged up youth drying dead on the sun, entertaining nihilism. I listened to the first Mika Miko lp and that sounded like this. While it’s just simple noise made by awesome people. This is it what I’m looking for, complex things in simple cases. I want people to play power chords the way I can hear through their shredding that they love million bands and still they have found their peace in playing infinite adolescent punk songs. I want to listen to bands that sound like bootlegged Neos shirts or reading coffee stained novels after midnight in your bed but in a coat. I want this collapsing cottage to be my shelter. I wanna disappear and live forever as a footnote. If anything being a fan of punk music made me, is a recluse, but I love this solitude. It has become fun to act for the outsiders like I don’t have a life, I don’t have thoughts or things I like just so I don’t have to blow my cover of being a fan of crazy damaged music and radical ideas of surviving life. Or living it. Nowadays I’m getting confused by it. But I have high hopes. Cause as how it happened with music I believe that there’s gonna be a point where the stone wall of bullshit will just break and through it’s cracks the real things will come out. Some guy called me up if I want insurance for the flat I live in and I told him no, and as a reply for his question why? I told him because I live like a 16 years old. He then asked me to hand the phone to my parents but I corrected him. I’m not 16 I just live like one. And it felt good just to blow my cover to rise above the bullshit. To tell him how all this game will go but I won’t be a part of it. This is what I look for in music as well to stop the bullshit, to be brave enough to be freaks. I’m jamming Finnish spunk and Fall and weird post hardcore punk records like Middle Class’ Homeland lately. I’m siked for the new Sickoids record and will be amazing to have them here in Budapest, get drunk with them. Good Throb is my jam, so Crass-like but more concrete of what they are angry about. Crass is articulated for sure but they sounded like they are playing music for the whole world while Good Throb is yelling against assholes. Also avant-garde-ish bands like Pink Military or Raincoats. The whole world is a mixtape if I have enough space for everything to fade into each other. And the worst fucking shit happened: I started to listen to some jazz musicians but even though they are technically more advanced than the punk players, I love, in a way how this chaotic „we play against each other, we play what we want, we play ourselves with instruments” method could click with the total teenage angst music that is the kick drum for my heart. But don’t believe it’s progression. I still don’t like it that I can appreciate some crazy tunes and I mostly love it’s benefit to get my focus improved when I look on my music. Maybe it’s a better thing to be open to new tunes or realize their greatness than learn all the useless infos about bands you should love. Fuck everything that is mandatory.

So many great records have come out lately, this means 2013 will be a joy ride of a year of listening to punk and used-to-hang-out–with-punx-but-now-rather-have-buddies-as-pr agents bands. Even if I think Church Whip’s excuse for naming their tour what they had, and while I hate it when people just shrug their shoulders when it comes to people might get offended and hurt – for real I even hate bands being named after rapists, murders and criminals - I also think stating that something stupid over a whole coast is like when you say fuck everybody, that’s a usual but still stupid punk sentence while saying fuck a specific group of everybody is just as dumb as racism. So on one hand I think what they got, they have deserved it. Open a bottle and don’t be surprised when something might spill out. I also think that the new Merchandise lp is just soo good and dreamy it starts to grow on me. Hope they won’t be lived up by shit culture. I just recently saw The Men and it was sad as fuck. A band that used to be interesting with mixing almost everything that is good in guitar music has become a band that plays alt rock country bullshit, American dream in Dylan shirts and just a band who plays a type of music or tries to keep up with a trend not creating their own sound. They played for mid level managers and for people who drank their cocktails with straws. Maybe it was just me who was enchanted for no reason from the start but at least I have woken up. New Milk Music is mellow as well but cool too. Even if it’s a bit more rockish and mostly stays on mid tempo rather than how raw and more straight ahead they were on their previous records. Even if I suspect some tricks I can indulge myself in this living for the moment cause everything else is shit but „hey, I still got some pot and dumpster dived pizza so let’s party” sound. They are not doing something new or original still it seemed people were hungry for their full lenght lp. And I could no longer say it was anticipated because finally the music was played again by whom noise should be played. They toured Europe with a fucking plane. They are not making anything new still it’s refreshing to have a band this simple. They don’t lie about  their music, it sounds like the lp cover for Beyond Living. Total nihilism. It’s for you to make you swing your hair around the room. I’ve heard lots of lame things about them but I’m not innocent either. Is there a better proof of that your band is playing awesome music than having a really stupid name as Milk Music still no one cares about it’s goofiness really? They sound like artificial nostalgia. They create long time sweet memories of events that you only wish have happened. And here they are with their grand work, a perfected rock record that sounds like a dream of a pot head locked into his room with the will to write songs about his whole world which is basically his room. It sounds like late night music for those who worked the whole day or haven’t worked for ages. They have lost their rawness but they seem to stretch out as far as they wanted and luckily not further. It’s just a great rock record that still carries some of the dirt of their past. No, Nothing, My shelter sounds like the never ending story sequel where that boy flies with the dog what looks like a rug. Here’s also the new Gun Outfit. Which is amazing for sure. I was raving about that band here before and they still have it or have it even more. Making epic soundtrack for the spoiled american dream, of how the sun forms all of us, it really sounds like people in confusion among doing something and there is that creative power that gets us out of bed but also that fear of failure in the real world. So imagination creates this shield that is a moment of fragile innocence. Hard Skin always as fun as hell but catchy as hell, like if they have figured out the right formula to write amazing oi songs by listening to decade of amazing punk. Just perfect and everybody was right that there are too many bands whose name start with S, lately I’m nerding out on total hardcore trash of Society Nurses and Stoic Violence. And these are just the new records. I just love everything that is filth and failure based punk music. And I ran out of space.  

this column was edited by the amazing Dori Radics who is a hairdresser on fire in London. Go visit her: The Rabbit Hole - Vegan Hair Parlour