Having unexpectedly survived the Friday evening at the pub with my colleagues, I set off on Saturday evening to have dinner with friends at David’s place, in Elephant & Castle (which is officially the best name ever).

Once all the great food and wine and whiskey were over, we left to find a floor to dance on. We passed by the Ministry of Sound, but the queue of Swedish proportions didn’t seem that inviting, so we carried on walking towards London Bridge. Another club, seOne, also boasted a long line of the weirdest people imaginable: guys disguised as smurfs, dressed up transvestites of unidentifiable genre, gals following fashion rules of an alternative and definitely distant parallel universe. All of this in a brick tunnel pulsing with the loud, rapid hardcore beats of the music inside. We pressed on again.

Eventually, we found what we were looking for right next to the entrance of the London Bridge tube station. There was no queue at all (all the artist performances inside were already over), which reinforced the Harry Potter’s platform 9-3/4 feeling of the almost invisible door: walk quickly, pretend you’re going to enter the tube station and you’ll get into the club. Which we did.

Shunt Vaults, by forzagaribaldi

Inside, arches of bricks expanded into a long empty tunnel lightly illuminated by sparse candles and various artsy audio-visual installations. At its end, the tunnel opened on the spacey rooms that, we realised, were all part of this huge underground club. There was a movie theatre with red velveted seats stolen right out of a surreal dream, there was a small elevated stage on which people were dancing now, there was a room painted in white with crystal lights and paper birds hanging from the ceiling, there was a babyfoot, there was a bar in a dark corner, there were impossibly immaculate toilets, and there was an improvised dancefloor with plenty of room to dance on the random pop music that was playing.

Day 51 of 365 – Love life colour and club, by Zepsis

For the Lausanne people, it could roughly correspond to an exponentially enlarged Romandie, processed through a series of drug-induced dreams/nightmares right out of David Lynch’s mind.

When we left, I asked the doorman what was the name of the place.

“The Shunt“, he replied.

DSC_1798, by SimSullen

We walked to London Bridge. While waiting for the night bus, we stood against the chilly wind peering into the night at the Thames and, farther away, the illuminated structure of Tower Bridge.

As I was saying in yesterday’s post, it has been snowing last night.

Well it turns out it hasn’t stopped, and it brought pretty much the whole city of London down to a halt. Not that we’re anywhere near some “Day After Tomorrow” scenario with liners ships unexpectedly showing up around Oxford Circus. It is a mere 15-20cm of snow, which would be a disappointment in Switzerland, but it’s still the heaviest snow in 18 years here.

Snowy view from my room, by theefer

Which means today there was no tube, no bus, no trains, at least not where I live. Taxis were overwhelmed and slow. Even after only three weeks of living in London, a street free of massive red double-deckers is about as peculiar as seeing someone carrying skis along the Thames. Which I also saw this morning, when I went for a walk around the neighbourhood to take pictures (see the Flickr set) while waiting for 10am, at which point I could ring the office to get remote access to my computer there, since there was no way for me to come in physically anyway.

Discarded buses, by theefer

It turns out many people don’t have jobs who can be transparently performed over SSH, HTTP and XMPP, and all these people (up to a fifth of the workers) seemed to be busy shopping, taking pictures and throwing snowballs.

Skiing along the Thames?, by theefer

Now, let’s see how many days it will take to clear the mess up and go back to normal… The snow is still here.

White roads, by theefer

Petite escapade nocturne vendredi, après le pub avec les collègues, pour aller voir Max Tundra à Cargo, à deux pas de mon bureau à Londres. Entrée gratuite pour le concert de l’auteur d’un de mes albums préférés de 2008, Parallax Error Beheads You, dont j’avais déjà parlé ici. A déguster d’urgence.

Max Tundra @ Cargo, London / rave with a mouth keyboard, by theefer

Le concert à proprement parler était tout à fait chouette, et m’a permis de découvrir que:

1. Max Tundra est très petit
2. et très sympa
3. et très à l’aise pour chanter et improviser aux claviers sur ses chansons
4. et pour transformer un clavier à bouche en son rave (sur The Entertainment).

Et comme je lui ai promis de faire de la pub: pour les suisses, il passera au Bad Bonn à Düdingen le 21 février… Allez-y!

Max Tundra @ Cargo, London, by theefer

And yet, it isn’t raining. Not as I speak. Not inside, anyway.

Instead, the roofs are all covered with a soft layer of fresh snow. The sky adopted a gloomy, reddish grey texture, the texture of winter nights.

I have been in London for merely three weeks, and I’m still struggling to figure out how to turn this new adventure into a new and interesting/entertaining iteration of this blog. I’m only beginning to find my marks here as I pass daily by all the local hyper-places: Waterloo, London Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Brick Lane.

Market arcades in Covent Garden, by theefer

Deeper thoughts and stories will come in due time, but for the moment, I will simply quote Georges Baumgartner, the famous Swiss correspondent in Tokyo, whom I’m going to have to translate to maintain the linguistic coherence of this post, since I arbitrarily started writing it in English (later posts might come out in other languages, though I will try to spare you of Swedish tribulations). In closing of a very interesting week of reports “Un dromadaire sur l’épaule” did about Japan, he said:

Putney Bridge and its reflection on the Thames, by theefer

[...] in Switzerland, there are people who are very well adapted to live in Switzerland, like in Porrentruy, where I’m from. For instance I knew someone who lived in Porrentruy and who told me that going to Delémont, passing the Col des Rangiers, was already like passing a frontier and it seemed very far to him.

And there are other people who might not fit in their own country and who need to find a place in the world where they can put up with themselves.

I don’t repudiate where I’m from. I’m in transit. We’re in transit. We’re all in transit.

Light and boats on the Thames, by theefer

Comme chaque année, l’excellent Bon pour les oreilles, blog musical helvète et pointu de Christophe Schenk, a invité ses lecteurs à s’adonner au jeu de l’album préféré de l’année. Des coups de coeur à découvrir, auquel j’ai modestement participé avec
ma critique du délicieux album Parallax Error Beheads You de Max Tundra.

De quoi faire le plein des oreilles dans les minutes restantes avant 2009!

The Hype Machine challenged bloggers to post their Top 10 music albums from 2008, and I thought it’d be a fun ride to comply, going through all I’ve been listening this year to pick what I most preferred, or expect to come back to in the future…

10. Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours (Modular)

An uptempo melange of influences, In Ghost Colours coherently blends sweaty stadium-sized synth pop and intimate indie electronica. Explicitely reminiscent from the 80’s, Cut Copy escapes the suffocating darkness of that era (unlike fellow Melbourne-based Midnight Juggernauts) by throwing swirling melodies on it, in reference to 90’s disco tunes. Or how to make disco music for hipsters.

9. Cobalt – Domestic (Urbanseed)

Thick, organic electronica layering mysterious melodies on top of an industrial machinery of rhythms, a fugitive violin and the hoarse voice of the singer lost inside this oppressive but carefully crafted debut album.

8. The Raconteurs – Consolers of the Lonely (Warner Bros.)

The easiness with which The Raconteurs reinvent rock’n roll in 2008 is almost indecent; tunes rock, melodies swirl in your ear, and forty years of rock pass by, from blues to ballads, from Led Zeppelin to The White Stripes. Rare genius of disconcerting perfection.

7. Stereolab – Chemical Chords (4AD)

This is Stereolab: playful melodies, clean guitar riffs, a Farfisa organ jumping around and, in the middle, Laetitia Sadier’s imperious voice. One more album that proves their astonishing ability to reinvent themselves within their universe, each time opening the doors of a new realm, building on top of their discography without repeating themselves.

6. Beach House – Devotion (Carpark)

On Devotion, the melancholic dream pop of Beach House unfolds in the vast space of a timeless musical box, halfway between an eery, black-and-white funfair and a choir of gentle ghosts. A timid guitar dancing around Victoria Legrand’s vocals, soothing organs floating above the muffled drums, the atmosphere is conflict-free and yet, sublime.

5. Ladyhawke – Ladyhawke (Modular Recordings)

Synths and beats stolen directly from the eighties, Ladyhawke escapes the traps of tedious revival nostalgia thanks to her strong presence, both vocally and in the upbeat melodies and rhythms throughout the album. Quality electropop, rockier than Zoot Woman, and borrowing some funky frenzy from the French touch but only to combine it immediately with some sort of movie-like, Californian prom night naiveté.

4. Cat Power – Jukebox (Matador)

In the shadows of a smoky bar, Cat Power’s voice emerges above the thrifty bursts of guitars, above the tremolo chords of Rhodes and Wurlitzer, a voice filled with pain and courage, mirror of a soul caressing nostalgia and, sometimes, hope.

3. Max Tundra – Parallax Error Beheads You (Domino)

Pitchfork brilliantly summed up the album as “[a] reality show where XTC, Prince, Aphex Twin, and George Gershwin have to live together inside the sound chip of an aging Game Boy.” Indeed, its cheap computer banks would put Mika to shame, but Max Tundra still exponentially surpasses the latter by glorifying his lo-fi instruments, crafting complex songs on them without any inferiority complex.

From the stroboscopic pop of “Orphaned” to the dancing swarms of digital synths on “Which Song”, Parallax Error Beheads You opens the door of an unsuspected musical universe, in which a geeky musician could overperform most the yearly production from inside the heart of a vintage console.

2. M83 – Saturdays=Youth (Mute)

Embracing the nostalgia of a fantasized imagery of the United States in the 80’s, M83 conjugates its shoegazing roots with late night pop reverie, voices reverberating amidst vintage drums and guitars. This powerful feeling of longing for an iconic past reaches its climax on “Couleurs”, a progressive nightscape stolen from some dreamed of silent chase scene in a yet-to-exist Michael Mann movie.

1. Portishead – Third (Island)

After ten years of silence, Portishead comes back with an album so coherent and evolutionary that it feels like they never left, but only muted their sound for a while.

While Dummy and Portishead were urban westerns, their mechanical texture softened by the humanity of their hip-hop roots, Third is resolutely post-apocalyptic, its coldness only salvaged of complete desolation by the flickering flame of Beth Gibbons’ voice. As if all hope had been forsaken, as if humanity had already failed and beauty was now to be looked for in the depth of darkness, in the industrial caves of abandoned factories.

Down there, spectral ballads evolve into obsessive electronica (“The Rip”) and laments are rhythmed by automatic weapons (the fantastic “Machine Gun”).

Oscillating between alarmed urgency and numb despair, Third brutally forces us into a universe populated with tribes of drumming machines, shadows of ghostly survivors, scaring us and, simultaneously, comforting us that everything is over, but it’s okay…

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