FAG: Shimura Curves at Cargo, Tuesday 27th September

Anna, I'm so sorry. But think of the lovely money!

They like literary things there! My ex housemate Daren did a reading there! And M@tt Th0rn3 as well! (I just remember getting drunk and talking about shoegazing with him.)

it depends how loud and dark cargo is at 7.30 or so, outside would've been ideal but winter appears to have arrived.

< /plug>

I doubt anything but soundchecking would be going on at 7.30 - and besides, there's that lounge area where it's always quiet - that's where the reading was.

It's not the biggest venue I've ever played (hello Shepherds Bush Empire) but still quite cavernous. Even if we get a good crowd, it will still look empty. :-(

http://www.cargo-london.com/tech.php

Does anyone want to throw together some trippy shit to project onto us? Or should we just bring along a DVD of Barbarella or something?

x-post

::bump::

(Blimey, our soundcheck is early - load in is at 3.30. What are we going to do for all that time?)

(That said, it will probably get cancelled at the last minute like the other gig we were supposed to do this weekend.)

He could tell us if AC Milan really did think he was John Barnes when they signed him, then give us the goss on Elton John.

Is it licit to blame Umberto Eco if a group of young people has drawn inspiration from one of his novels, fostering chaos in the media and promoting blasphemous cults? Imagine that the things depicted in Foucault's Pendulum escape from literary fiction and infect sick brains. Fictional strategies continue working and mix reality and fantasy in an amoral disorder. In Italy and the rest of Europe, an obscure and delirious Internet youth movement called Luther Blissett are increasing their influence; they seem to have turned Foucault's Pendulum and Eco's philosophy into the Holy Writings of a "pop" "subversive" anti-media religion, a life-size role play with the tradition of hesoterism.. An anonymous pamphlet titled Umberto Eco's multiple name started to circulate recently. It aims at exposing the underhand dealings and connections with Italy's left-wing milieux which shaped the project, revealing the likely involvement of Eco himself in the scam and calling him a "master of deception", accomplice of the Intelligentia's hesoteric-gnostic activities. .

L'Espresso, a big italian information magazine, once described Luther Blissett as "an extraordinary mix of the Internet and the Knight Templars". Nowadays the collective imagination has completely merged with the media and the show-biz, and these descriptions cannot come as as surprises anymore. Consider that "Luther Blissett" originally was the name of an AC Milan soccer player! But who or what is Luther Blissett these days? He is famous for several hoaxes pulled on the TV and the press; he is a mass-media spectre whose legend has been constructed as that of a pop star who may be impersonated by anyone. Luther Blissett is a multiple name, that is a name which everyone is exhorted to adopt and spread, a collective character which some young people are using as a Trojan horse in order to infiltrate popular culture, using his reputation to foster apocalyptic cults, rave parties, radical "performance art" and a huge amount of World Wide Web activism. Their plans are definitely subversive: a semiological guerrilla against the media which has a plenty of coincidences with Eco's theories. Who knows what the author of *The Name Of The Rose* is thinking about his kinship with the mysterious creature... So long he played with the fanta-occult that he got involved in it as a protagonist.

I like that!

No, *I* am Luther Blissett!

(Don't like the footie connections, though, natch.)

Kate, Eoin could hardly help the venue getting double booked. He's far more pissed off about it than everyone else is.

Tasty right foot, mind.

Wait, where did I say it was? I was merely explaining that first of all, it wasn't happening now (for whatever reason, and to be honest, I'm slightly relieved not to have to play 2 gigs in 3 days) and second to say that it wasn't a SECRET GIG, OOOOOH but merely a private party.

Between this and the Poptimism thread, I'm getting that paranoid feeling now that no matter what I say it will be wrong. :-(

(That said, it will probably get cancelled at the last minute like the other gig we were supposed to do this weekend.)

That just sounded a bit like it was a deliberate cancellation rather than a fuck up.

Apologies. You can say right things, honest.

I don't know. I'm sorry you have to deal with the flapflapflap. So actually, it's probably better for you not to have to deal with the flapflapflap of a gig as well!

Sigh.

(last minute cancellations are never on purpose anyway - I thought that was the point of them. If you knew you couldnt' do it, you wouldn't have cancelled last minute!)

(I have The Fear really badly right now, but I'm going to get my hair cut and buy some boots this afternoon and hope I feel less like a talentless bag of laundry by tomorrow.)

Wanted to get my haircut and see the doctor to sort out this brainmess I'm in lately, but only accomplishing one of those things, it seems like.

Hopefully sex wellies will accomplish what serotonin can't. :-)

http://www.toolfinder.co.uk/catalog/images/silverline/pics/slv_749248.jpg

Mine was red, though.

I think this might be the last gig because I'm just getting very frustrated by people who commit to doing things, and then flake out at the last minute, repeatedly.

So frustrated and I know this is not the place to be venting my frustration but it's impossible to organise things like this. I don't have the time or the concentration right now for this. :-(

seriously you need to play up near liverpool or manchester again.

That depends entirely on whether or not Interpol's tentacles have yet reached Cargo's door staff...(the police organisation, not the goff band...oh never mind)

kate, anna, you want me to bring you owt?

But not as great as Shimura Curves, who played some really impressively fine pop songs!

I think the Shimura Curves song playing in the dream was Elephants.

I had forgotten Elephants, that's a good one.

Would liek to third and fourth what wa ssaid above. Despite the experimental nature of the second song, the gig was a poptastic delight and we say get thee hence to a studio and record Stronger and "The Last One" as soon as possible.

Blimey, I didn't mean to start a controversy in this thread with my temper tantrum - so that's why so many people turned up! Maybe I should start throwing more tempter tantrums and breaking the band up on the interweb and pull Ant0n Newc0mbes and sack people onstage if it's going to have that kind of a response! (or... maybe not!)

We will definitely be recording soon. More gigs? Well, we need to sit down and have a Band Meeting about how to make them stop being so Not Fun for me. Maybe we could get some special hair straighteners that can be applied direct to the brain.

Anyway, thanks again.

This is U&K. Also, the OMD one, and the Magnetic Fields/Kenickie one! Oh, that's "Stronger".

Also, how come I'm sure I know "UPC", even though I've never seen Teh CurvXors before?

We will definitely be recording soon.

Lovely band! Woo.

Charlie, you probably have heard OPC before. It was on a demo I made with Jesse several years ago. I performed it with the EBA a couple of times, so you would have heard it there.

Partial thingey fraction theorem? Oh, that sounds like such fun. I wish I'd done the maths course this semester, but I really haven't got the time. :-( It was, however, hillarious, trying to explain our name to a highly talented writer friend after the gig, and she looked at me patiently while I explained about Fermat and transdimensional donuts and all that... and then just shook her head and said "I can see you lips are moving, but the sounds that come out make no sense."

come and play Oxford first!

Shame to hear about the Cargo people being rubbish to you Kate and not giving you the chance to soundcheck properly. I can't say I'm at all surprised though - there was this huge, arching gulf between the quality of the venue and that of its staff. I thought CARGO was a wonderful place. I want to go back there during the day for lunch, hmm....bit of a long way to go for lunch. But the doorman was like "Huh? Do I work here?" as if there was a question-mark hovering permanently over his head.

I so, so want a full set of lyrics to the opening song...the one with ammonites and the Isle of Wight and "no-one is an atheist" etc. What would David Hume have made of it?

Well, that was my THIRD Shimura Curves gig and they get better and better each time! Please, please don't split the band up.

And Anna dances just like Joanne Catherall (or is it Susan Sulley) and not at all like Phil Oakey.

Oh, and free beer all evening RoXoR!

(I found the demo CD Kate gave me at their first gig and played it on loop at work last night.)

He would've been skeptical! He was an atheist, but not dogmatically so, right? Otherwise he'd have got on better with d'Holbach.

Anyway, those lyrics...

Thoughtworm

(1, 2, 3, go...)

I'm sleepy but I'm not tired
Half awake but feeling wired
In the morning, I'll be wrecked
Eyes closed, what did I expect

Mood comes down like a cold grey fog,
Grips me like a fever
Thoughts come on go round and round
Like a worm burrowing deeper

(No one is an atheist when the lights go down...)

Squelch!

When my skull feels like a cage I
Wander round my mind like a stranger
What if I should lose my reason?
Dream myself divine, find religion?

(No one is an atheist when the lights go down)

But the same moon that shines on me at night
Shines on a beach on the Isle of Wight
Shone on the fossils and the amonites
Faith in evolution's gonna make it alright

Squelch!

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray to god my soul to keep
But in the morning when I wake
I pray that science my mind will take

(No one is an atheist when the lights go down...) x2