SMOKE, POLING INTO THE SKY

Tara Jane O'Neill - "In the Sun Lines"

"When the little kid is sitting at the table in Ratcatcher and he has the well of salt in front of him, he's just running his finger through it, round, up, left, right, in, out. All the while, his mum's flitting around him, talking to him, he's answering on auto-pilot, totally consumed by the salt on the table. His whole world, lots of little grains for him to play with, and he's just making these really beautiful sweeping movements of his little fingers. His friends just died, because he pushed him in the canal, and outside the world is full of the dirt and dregs Glasgow's binmen have left to him. In a couple of weeks his dad will hit his mum after getting slashed looking after a kitten, and the whole world has dissolved into the cusp of these grains. And always with the fingers: in and out, through and round. And then! One movement, he wipes the whole beautiful mess onto the floor, without a thought for who'll clean it, because we all know, from being kids, that if you hit salt hard enough, it'll spread out over a distance and no-one will see it, maybe little trace elements as you look down guiding the hoover round its course, but nothing to get you into trouble, no blame. One swoop, and his whole world disappears. And where's he? He's off. Can you believe it? He's off!

(That'd make me so happy.)" - Me, 'Happiness'

So there’s a war on; people reporting about the feelings of overwhelming immensity of widescale actions often conclude that they’re retreating into a world where ‘small things’ ‘matter’. The weight, and the gravity, and all the things that are pulling at them: they release these tethers and channel the feelings of helplessness into the small, the particular, crossed t’s on a shopping list, the controllable. And though, I’m in this place where the war doesn’t exist, where there’s no Dialektiks im Stillstand, where there is no wait for the messianic ‘moment of war’, I can’t help but feeling that its with inexorable momentum my world is changing itself, so I choose the small, the things I can ‘deal’ with, the static. And Tara Jane O’Neill comes out.

Tara’s music is really subtle. When she’s boring you it’s normally with cyclical patterns of guitar, played once, repeated on warm analogue delay: vanilla notes swirling forever. With those scuzzy sawing wheezeboxes choking their last breaths over the patterns, wheezewheezewheeze. These aren’t vicious circles, circles for the sake of circles, ‘cos every time she goes round the loop she gets closer to the center of the thing. Spiralling in towards the moment she’ll never reach, the asymptotal centre of meaning in the world, which she can’t ever break through, which if she could, she still probably wouldn’t, because then she’d have no journey left to carry through. I don’t know why I’m saying this. Neither do you. The immensity of something that big? Coming at the centre of something so small. (“The situation of the post-Communist state seems ideal for literature.”)

Her music is really beautiful, slow rinse cycle guitars, that are just... beach blond, or something. I saw her here in Glasgow when she toured, hiding behind her hat, with a pall of smoke permanently obscuring us from her. She seemed really coy. The room was skin-loosingly hot and I regret not enjoying it as much as I should have. It's not really music for a live setting. It's music to be listened to alone, when you feel a little crushed, I think.

Really, really beautiful music.

Her cover of Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" is the greatest song ever. That weird, familiar cooing at the end. The circular guitar motif. The tongue-click, steady drum. Really, really beautiful.

So yeah. Take a little time to think about listening to Tara Jane O’Neill and, with your face pressed hard into the words on your screen, think about the things that you’re doing to make your life seem a little more stable. And take care.