Arriving in Paris, one is struck by the surprising abundance of two things: graffiti and dog-shit. After a few minutes, though, the city starts to work its subtle charms, and the myriad of droppings, both fecal and paint, become part of the necessary background.

    As I write this I have just arrived in Amsterdam after something like a week in Paris. I'm writing this in a small coffeeshop near the Leidesplein that also has some computers and is kind of a 'cyber cafe,' one of the only ones in town --there were 8 people waiting in the rain for 4 computers here. Luckily there are copious amounts of Dutch hash and weed, so nobody seems to mind too much.

    Trying to remember Paris, so much seems a blur. It's the kind of town where drunkenness and depravity can sneak up on you like a mysterious rash. One minute it's just one little red bump, and the next you're causing an international incident at a brothel you mistook for a really swanky piano bar. Anyway I've had to smoke constantly since I arrived (about 45 minutes ago) just to chill out and try to recall Paris...

    I remember quite clearly the day I arrived. It was sunny, cloudless, and serene. The lifeless, funereal pallor of the buildings  belied the gaiety of the streets. Blondes leaned out of cafes to watch small children playing in the street. Old men grumbled to themselves. Crazy people were picking their noses with reckless abandon. I felt free... finally I had left America, where people think the entire social order will break down if you double-park your car or cut in line.

    That day I kind of generally moved about the city, soaking in its sunlight and sipping its various liquors. All was fine, and I smiled at the women and children who passed me on the street. This time, things were going to be different. Maybe I would move to Paris permanently, I thought. Little did I know that le police would have other plans for me, and I would end up being told in no uncertain terms not to come back for a long time. But anyway the first few days were extraordianarily pleasant.

    The next day I found myself in the Bastille, an area that was hip three or four years ago but now is hype. All the hipsters of Paris have moved their "anarchist-in-a-nice-scarf" scene to Menilmontant by now and all that's left in Bastille is the remnants.  It didn't matter to me anyhow, I wasn't looking for mock-dive bars blasting the latest bullshit, I wasn't interested in trendy restaurants serving half-assed Arabic food served  by bored British wait-staff-- I was after a far sweeter and elusive prize: underground music.

 

    In one of the small cafes on the side streets, a petite waitress with white faux-dreadlocks directed me to a cluster of record stores just north of the main neighborhood.  Most of them specialized in hip-hop and dance, and I picked up a couple of local DJ mix tapes from the well-coiffed and immaculately-clothed sales-people. They were blasting Biggie and nodding their heads knowingly to the beat, but looked like they would scurry under a rug  if they saw "blunts and broads" or the 10 Crack commandments anywhere nearby.

    I wandered the streets still unsatisfied.  Dispairingly, I even checked out a BMX place that was selling a few local house mixes. One of the guys there, a short, sideburned guy with 'more than 5 bmx tatoos' ,  told me that there was kind of a weird store down the ally to the left.

    The place turned out to be strange mix of Japanese manga and photography, fetish lit, French graphic art, and a small but impressive underground music section. I struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter, who was reading a Japanese-American Graphic novel that I was kind of into. After a while he let on that he played in an art-noise band, and then gave me three tapes of the underground noise scene to check out. They were:

Snake Rio,  Under Your Come Hand's "Frottage" and Palo Alto's "Nom de los arbols". That night I went out early for a little drink at a neighborhood bar that also made an an ammazing crepe. The place was in a basement, with about 5 bar stools and too many kinds of liquor (as if there is such a thing). I started with a simple Cronenbourg...

The rest of the week is kind of hazy. I remember, as I always seem to, certain details in crystalline clarity: the tip of a policeman's boot, and how it showed signs of recent polish; the way concrete sometimes seems to have glass embedded in it; a fat woman taking off my pants and either helping me or robbing me... I didn't get a chance to listen to the music until I got on the train to come up here.

    From the first sounds of the Palo Alto album, I regretted not having known about it at the time-- its occasionaly pounding drums, mournful Arabic vocals, and random bits of noise and feedback would have made the perfect soundtrack for my confusing and delerious time in the city of lights...

    The Under Your Come Hand album seemed to be 74 minutes of guitar feedback that was called "Festival Songs of Joy and Praise." The weird thing was that I could have sworn that the guy at the counter had said that he played drums on it-- maybe they were only in his mind because they sure weren't on the album.

    The true revelation was Snake Rio, which takes the bleeps and bloops of lo-fi electronic music and renders them as the theme song to a new ultra-mega-happy McArmy of plastic warriors. This shit was extra bizarre-- alternately the music of Tron's niteclub and its marching bands, and either passionately annoying or sublimely ridiculous. While obviously influenced by Japanese electro-pop, the recording quality and sheer simplicity of the music gave it a completely different feel. By taking noises, both ambient and synthesized, and fashioning it into ultra-bubblegum rhythmic dilation, Snake Rio is able to slowly take the listener into a universe as complete as any animated film. The musical vision of John Cage by way of Japanese Anime has been incarnated in Paris as a sickly sweet, yet deeply ironic, comment on life at the end of millennium, and has to be heard to be believed.

USOUNDS || 1998