|
Mike Daily
Ingvar Loco Nordin’s Second Fall Forward Through the Timbres of Daily hdkjhjhadshkjdashkjasdkkjsjk Mind Ok, I’m just out of the shower, on my way to the laundry room in the next building, to put my clothes in the drier. Ok, yes, yeah. I’ve been exercising again, biking under the skies – and where else could I do it. I did it in the January dark, after work, with a Silva headlamp, lighting up the winter road at least 100 meters in front of me – and I can blind moose and foxes and hares just by looking at them, hehe! Yes, I had to come back to Mike Daily’s book and double-CD ALARM, because I know this release was the release highlight of 2007, and yet I’ve only considered it in one or two of its numerous aspects. I’m pretty convinced that Mike Daily and his band O’Grady have no real understanding of the groundbreaking intellectual, emotional and PHYSICAL force of their art. I’m here to try to guide them along this path to a deeper understanding of their doings. Since I last reflected on ALARM Stockhausen has left his body and moved on, surely igniting himself in another body-vehicle, the way a bodhisattva like he will. One more go at Existence, my man! … Mike Daily is the current Buddy Holly of Flash Tongue; the Big Bopper of Limping Literate Lingo! I’m gearing up! I feel a new time, a completely fresh zone, Nitzschean: the image breaking out of the rock; the future slipping out of greedy grips, hooray! This Buddy Daily Holly of the Crossroads is opening a civilization critique to the watchful listener that I haven’t seen the like of in my lifetime, perhaps but for what Elvis Presley did to the 8-year-old in my rural Swedish habitat back in 1957, with Tutti Frutti and Tryin’ To get To You. Presley didn’t lay any anthropological or even psychological or semantic truths on us, like Mike Daily – intuitively and on purpose, in your face – does, but the mental havoc the innocent truck driver Elvis Aaron caused the young enfant terrible on the Swedish 1950s’ farm can perhaps be compared to the glare that Mike Daily’s ALARM pierces the mind of the now 58-years-old crime investigator in 2008 with… This hands on and yet lofty and noble insight of Daily’s stands through the mind like the sun always does in J.M.G. Le Clézio’s novels; relentlessly. You zoom in on detailed accounts of life and out to life as a minor disturbance on the calm swell of the Universe, and “the phone is ringing” in a stark reality through which a used theater ticket blows down the gutter, in Existence as such. Mike Daily delivers pinpoint observations right out of the shredder of Here and Now, in the revealing light of Never and Forever. As I bike down the winter country road to keep my old anatomy at the high end of fitness all the way into an unavoidable oblivion, crouched in technical garments that make me unaffected by weather and temperature, I let ALARM on the iPod accompany my deep breathing in my endorphin high, traveling down that cone of Silva light in front of me; like a furious lighthouse from Moomin seascapes gone ashore. The headlights of cars that I meet in the coniferous forests of my native land swing by in time with Mike Daily’s jabbing remarks that tear the protecting veil off of the Karen Horney and Ronald D. Laing Western world in a magnificent, rhythmic catharsis of light-speed lingo; a sword of inspirational light through the mellow mist of ignorance and downright upright no-right stupidity. I recall the carpenter cleansing the temple from hawkers. Jepp, that feeling, that holy strength: righteous indignation! This is how it is: I bike out of town on my 18-speed Nishiki – this small, rural Scandinavian town where I grew up – and escape the street lights, boring into countryside winter darkness, weary of the glittering stars in the asphalt up ahead, signaling treacherous, slippery conditions as the temperature falls on damp road paving, opening an illusory (?) cosmos in the surface I travel on my thin, hard tires, pumped up to their pressure limit of 8 kilos per square centimeter. I watch the increasing glitter in the asphalt: “Oh my God, it’s full of stars!” The tempo of Daily’s and O’Grady’s deliverance is perfectly fit for workouts of all kinds, be they intellectual or physical, and as I’ve concluded from a life on the racing bike, bicycling, in its more ethereal, endorphin realms, combines the two aspects, making for a true life-enhancer. Since last year and the purchase of an iPod Nano I’ve found the perfect afterburner, that renders me that extra power that pushes me right across that threshold of magnificence: Mike Daily’s and O’Grady’s ALARM, praise be! I’m mostly talking, above, about the studio CD of this package, but there is a live CD too, which I might return to later for a third review of this stunning release, not to forget – of course! – the book itself, which can’t be read on a bike ride, slashing through the terrain with oxygen consumption on your mind, but it’s great to seep through at home, burning some Nag Champa incense and turning the volume of your reading UP inside your mind, losing yourself completely in the mad magnitude of linguistic light bolts through the circuits of our society and of our psyche; society turning up as a mere funhouse mirror of our… psyche – which in turn is just a morbid (or magnificent) conclusion of a Cosmos that keeps on astonishing itself… and I believe that the force and power of Daily’s and O’Grady’s performance is this ascension that they incite; this shooting up out of the secular, day-to-day struggle, out of anthropological nearsightedness, out of the sin of home-blindness and motherfucker ignorance, up to a layer of existence that one otherwise might reach through meditation or the illegal consumption of dangerous drugs – or exaggerated, excessive, extravagant bicycling! Rock star, poet and now DJ Dylan did arrive at this exuberance in rhythmic stanzas like “mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes, daddy’s in the alley, he’s looking for food, I am in the kitchen with the tombstone blues”…, and surely Allen Ginsberg caused minds to burn in word orders like “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”… and so forth – and Dylan Thomas induced almost the same feverish spontaneous combustion even earlier, with “do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of light”… and now I’m in the same ever-expanding spot with ALARM; the brainchild of Mike Daily. It does provide that catapult of intensity and existential bravery that us spirits need to take off and shoot out through the star clusters of our mind. ALARM is a continuation of a core necessity of culture critique and human rage, of lust for truth and life, that has manifested itself in the examples I’ve touched upon above and in other instances, so recognizable when they appear – and Mike Daily’s and O’Grady’s contribution is PERFECTLY fitted for out times and minds, cutting that signaling line which keeps us moored to dullness, greed and convenience; making us prone to healthy adventure. I keep on biking through darkness, in my Silva cone of light, now and then observed by flaming eyes at the roadside: cats, foxes, hares. I keep a straight line not to crash into the slippery, icy asphalt, and keep a steady pace, in beat with O’Grady’s pumping machinery of will. I head exactly 15 kilometers out, swinging around at that same spot, to bike 15 kilometers back. I need at least 30 kilometers a day to keep sane… or at least fit, to my liking, and it’s become a pleasure, to get out there in nature regularly, no bullshit about weather and circumstances. When the conditions aren’t icy, I do various other rounds, but in this iciness I take the simplest alternative; just a pretty straight and wide road with nice shoulders for bikers. I turn around at the 15 kilometer mark, gearing up again, to the messages of the iPod: “I take off my apron, I clock out, my new thing is getting off work and going straight to work. I park behind the coffee house. […] My boss has this thing where he says, ‘Cut to a commercial.’ That’s when you know he’s done talking. No one knows why he says it. No one asks.” I meet more cars on my way back to town. The citizens return to their houses in the little village where my 15 km mark is, after a day’s work in town. A line of headlights, sometimes interspersed with just darkness. This isn’t a densely populated area. It’s rural Sweden. And cars are worse than the atom bomb and the plague combined, should be outlawed. Cars are for idiots and ambulance transports. I soar on, really getting into the pumping of energy through my body and ALARM vibrating my tympanic membranes. Daily comes on like the young Rimbaud, or perhaps the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The band O’Grady gets more and more impressive. The beats are poignant but complex, sturdy but vicious – and “me, I can’t sleep, I can’t get to sleep, I can’t get to bed”, in a madly hammering sitar and percussion spree… The anxious, malfunctioning Western hemisphere, soaking itself in desperate healing: “I had a surprise for you this morning (that came out of nowhere) What? We have coffee. I’m having coffee. She’s having tropical tea. Tropical iced tea. A surprise! What was it?”… And here Daily shows HOW MUCH he really worked with this, revealing it in the shadow play of JUST A FEW of those words. You’ll get it when you hear it. Magnificent! One of my favorite spots is the one about drum machines. It’s a frantic section, in which Daily longs for a radio station that would play nothing but drum machines, 24/7. “I know we’re low on canned goods… […] I keep going [bang bang bang bang bang bom bom bom bom bom] Seems to be picking up a little. It’s like a video. It’s like a Spike Jones video… [Bass and percussion go on, accompanying or masking or… amplifying Daily’s words out of his body] but that was not the section Drum Machines, It was Van Nuys Blvd. This confusion is in place, inserted at its proper level of consciousness. Now actually getting to the Drum Machines part, it opens in a bossanova kind of percussion, streetwise, in a crowded area of downtown or the psychiatric ward: “I wish there was a radio station that just played drum machines, 24 hors a day, 7 days a week. Eureka, eureka, I just thought of something!” The music is just ven ven venomous here, and the colored girls go “aah-haa, aah-haa, aah-haa”, the percussion bomps and oohmps, oohmps and bounces, the electric guitar plays its canned goods mood, and the colored girls go “aah-haa, aah-haa, aah-haa”, while the electric guitar picks up its Les Paul and Mary Ford mid-Fifties mode. Buddy Mike Holly Rimbaud Daily has outdone himself here! Wow! I pull into town again, merging into the circuitry of streets and blocks, speeding up to my house, carrying Nishiki up the stairs and into the bathroom, where I rinse it from salt and mud with lukewarm water out of the shower. I dry it up and lean it against a wall in one of the bedrooms. Later I head on down to the laundry room to pick up my stuff. The drier didn’t work properly, so I had to spread my clothes all over the apartment, across chairs, tables and even all over the floor, over night. I can stand myself, but nobody else could, except my two pals in the bathroom, those two silverfish that reside there since years. Somewhere in a uterus Stockhausen is beginning his next journey. |
