A Crucible Remakes

like a crow's waiting cry
spiralling over highways
between the reeds
one stony eye
venerates the turmoil
within your soul
a deeper heat
encircles your dreams there
but purity is what we seek
one crucible remakes me

these times are trying
we're walking through fire

senseless everyday the wasted time
the baptist's body is tired
i'm a philistine one stupid fool
please cleanse me with fire
as a floating leaf
as a razor's plea
cleanse me with fire
but purity is what we seek
one crucible remakes me

these times are trying
we're walking through fire
we will find release here tonight
as we're walking through fire

held up my hands cupped the wind
one step to another leads
one blur of time burnt within
and all is beautiful

with our feet on fire
we are gold
with our feet on fire
we are
we are gold
all is all

all is all
is now remade
is purified
we'll find release tonight we will find release

Jordi

With a heavy heart we would like to announce the departure of Jordi
Reddy from The Sleepers.

Jordi has been studying towards his Masters degree in Biomedical
Engineering, working on artificial artery design and testing. This is
something that obviously requires a tremendous amount of focus and
dedication.

His decision to leave the band comes with the realisation of the
pressure that awaits him next year, when he will be doing his PhD,
which involves the development of synthetic heart valves. He says
that, although he’d like to carry on, he feels it’s better to bow out
now than be unable to give the attention he feels the band deserves.

Though we are deeply saddened to lose him, we fully support him and
wish him the best of luck with his studies.

Jordi has been a member of The Sleepers for four years. After original
member Carly Phillips suddenly passed away due to complications with
leukaemia, he respectfully joined full-time. His contributions to the
band have been vital and we are eternally grateful to him.

But all is not lost! Although Jordi will no longer be with us we will
be carrying on. As yet no plans for a replacement have been made
(these are big shoes to fill, after all) In the meantime, our dear and
talented friend, Chris Truter of the band Fezray, has kindly been
filling in for Jordi when deadlines were looming.

Jordi will play his last show with the band at the Synergy Live
festival. The festival runs on the last weekend of November - 27 -29 at Boschendal Wine Estate.

The Sleepers would like to thank Jordi for his strong character,
musical brilliance, powerful stage presence and continuing friendship.

Pandora

heaven send a helper
she's tied to iron
too weak to move it
pandora find it

your face
your smile
the noose you love and hold
the key behind
the way out of this hole
your knees in the dirt
too young to know the mold
in the eyes
your wrists
twisted tight as screws

the box
it's maw
yawns in the dark and dust
those things let out
were shaking at our heads
and blood we drew
to keep the devils out
see this tonight
the hope you crave to hold
is behind you

feather your nest girl
with your barbed wire white cotton dress
and all those pretty little things
that your lover used to bring last summer
black and brown feathers girl
are you'll have to sleep on in winter
even linen's blushing to keep you from the cold 'til now
after your penance

look behind
the box's maw yawns

here we see the order
one quiet murder the weapon's inside her
pandora find it

Protection

a wave of bliss
engulfed my thoughts
pleasure pounding down the door
here i soar to new heights
now knowing this
all my words floating out into the world
won't change our frail existence

voices call
come inside
is that vitriol that you hide
the cycles of self destruction

imagine this
no more walls
no more seeking for a door
to lead you to paradise

seek inside

my hands on the pavement
push up slow
my knees scraped open
here we are fighting slow
i will line up empty bottles on the outside wall
i will beg the wind to blow and call out your smoke
lift up my fists it's my turn to strike now

this is the world spinning round
eclipsed with certainties, breaking grounds
between the poles there's no real distance
outside the moths fan our wounds
dirty hot swollen wounds
you drew the line
you drew the line

inside the urgency might burn me hollow

The Waning Tide

this is one last stone to the waves
and you'll have our love

november was yours not mine
as we trail over all the details
november was yours not mine
a split second that won't be erased

through the waning tide
a lifetime wide
we sent our beggar's prayers
but they all washed up on shore

oh that was the day
when god had to fall away
if you couldn't stay
he knew he had to give up the game

all our clay is given to break
now watch through the swells
the waning tide
and you'll have our love
you'll have our love

Bye Bye Miss American Pie

I don't know if you've been watching television lately. If you have I'm sure you've seen it, but basically it's Chris De Burgh releasing a tepid album of covers. It makes me shudder every time I see it. Plus it sounds like Mr De Burgh and his ocular caterpillars took the midi to a bunch of overplayed "hits" and sang over them. The "studio shots" included in the insert looks a bit like someone's bedroom.

I used to be quite a fan before Chris went off on a strangled path about the whole healing hands business. But "Spanish Train" is still one of my favourite albums of all time, and looking back now the sci-fi Christianity in "Poor Boy" was not as fantastic to Chris as he made it out to be. A few too many glasses of red wine poring over "Chariots of the Gods" methinks.

But this led me on to thinking about our careers and what senility has in store for us. What would we do to keep our slice of the limelight? These are obviously things we can't predict. I might one day be draped over some piano somewhere, varicose veins a-pumping, doing my helling best to murder some Streisand cover. Who knows.

Losing favour with a previously loving audience is hard (and you will lose them, you cannot please everyone) but you should never bring that bitterness from being cast aside into what you do. Crowds are strange and stranger still are "scenes". They are fickle grey undefined masses. Tastes change. People change. Sometimes they don't. You can't predict.

But,

I don't think I will ever think that releasing my own little vapid version of "American Pie" will ever seem like a good idea.

EVER.

little tiny goldfish

... i read this on BoingBoing who lifted a part of it from here - http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=10297. But this is the whole article.


Michael Erard
A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention


In 1971, the oft-quoted political scientist Herbert Simon predicted that in an information age, cultural producers (that's designers, but also filmmakers, theater types, musicians, artists) would quickly face a shortage of attention. "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients," he wrote. The more information, the less attention, and "the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

Now we have a wide-ranging discussion about what is and what can't be free (Malcolm Gladwell on Chris Anderson, Virginia Postrel on Chris Anderson), which is basically about the future of profit. Maybe we should be considering a dilemma of a human nature: the future of attention.

Because there's a connection between the two.

Making something "free" is obviously an allocation strategy. "Free" attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn't sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.

We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.

I imagine attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them. All the candy for the human brain — haiku, ringtones, bumper stickers — would be priced like the luxuries that they are. Things requiring longer attention spans would be cheaper — they might even be free, and the higher fixed costs of producing them would be covered by the higher sales of the short attention span products. Single TV episodes would be more expensive to purchase than whole seasons, in the same way that a six-pack of Oreos at the gas station is more expensive, per cookie, than a whole tray at the grocery store.

I imagine an attention tax that aspiring cultural producers must pay. A barrier to entry. If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. Give your attention to the industry of your choice. Like indie musicians have done for decades, conceive of the scene as an attention economy, in which those who pay in (e.g., I go to your shows) get to take out (e.g., come to my show). It would also mitigate one oft-claimed peril of the rise of the amateur, which is that they don't know from quality: consuming many other examples from a variety of sources, even amateur producers would generate a sense of what's good and what's bad: in other words, in their community they'd evolve a set of standards. This might frustrate the elitists, who want to impose their standards. But standards would, given enough time, emerge. (In this I have faith.)

I imagine software, a smartphone app, perhaps, you can use to audit your attentional expenditures. So that before you embark on trying to write a book, you will be able to see how much time you spent reading books over the last month or year. So that before you design a marketing campaign that assumes that people aren't doing much else with their time until you show up, you will be able to see what you yourself were doing with your time, which was something perfectly good. This will show you that you're a savvy allocator of your attentional resources — and so is everybody else.

And yet I can't shake fantasizing about attention that has no price, that can't be bought or sold, but is given freely: a gift. I buy and read books because I want to give the gift of my attention to the attention economy I'm (as a writer) a part of. I'm inspired by Lewis Hyde in The Gift, who says that what distinguishes commodities is that they're used up, but what distinguishes gifts is that they circulate — the gift is never trapped, consumed, used up, contained or confined. That seems like the best basis for cultural production to thrive.

So this is what it's come to: when an attention gift economy seems more practical and sustainable than an exchange economy for information commodities, which is being rotted by the gift's ugly negation: the free.

A Song Is Born

These are some photos of us working out the parts for I Tend To Believe Her.

Hey hey!

As this is my first entry into our blog I thought I would give you a small glimpse into one of the days of being Steven Gary Jacobson.

Mondays, Mondays, Mondays (I wrote this on Monday) not the favourite day of the week for most people, the idea that you have no more weekend left, the drudgery of traffic and back to seeing the colleague that you would prefer not to see… ever!

I on the other hand don’t mind my Mondays, too much. I start work at 8am in Melkbos Strand (only on a Monday, as every day I am in a different part of Cape Town) which is about a 35 minute drive away, on an open road, as all the traffic is in the opposite direct. This is round about the time I open my window and blast which ever CD is in my player for that month. I have this silly obsession of listening to one CD over and over again. One reason is that I can’t stand the music that is played on the radio!

This months CD is by a band from the late 60’s called The Turtles, best known for their single, ‘Happy Together’. If you have a moment, take a listen one of their other tracks, ‘The Guide for the Married Man’ and ‘You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain’. The Turtle are one of my favourite bands and one of the many bands that I practiced to as boy and that have influenced my style of playing. They are very old school but fantastic! Let me know what you think.

Now that I have my window open, the crisp morning air flowing in and the music blasting, I get that ‘holiday’ sensation. That ‘no worry in the world’ feeling, which is even further emphasized by my first stop, Melkbos beachfront. The smell and sound of the ocean, the cold breeze and the random people either fishing or taking a jog. I get out the car, sit on the bonnet, stare out at the waves and wonder away for a moment …

Then about fifteen minutes later reality sets in and off to work I go…

So just as quickly as that reality hits me on the back of the head with the force of a ten ton truck (if you need a better analogy just ask Adam, he is full of them) let me remind you that you have work to do and that you are not on holiday…

Thanks for reading, more to come soon. Have a great week and I hope to see you at our next gig or whenever I see you…

Ciao

Steven Gary Jacobson

Pre-Production 2007

Here are some (very bad) photos of our pre-production sessions for our debut "A Signal Path" in 2007. The practice space has since turned into Kill City Blues, which is a significant improvement from the smelliness in these photos.


Jordi Reddy with his bow

Steven Jacobson behind the kit, and me looking especially young for a 24 year old.

Steve again.

Mr Adam Hill.

Nicolai Roos with his bow.

You see, when a band loves another band… a beautiful thing happens

This is our and my first entry of our blog, we’ll be posting some behind the scenes news, info, gossip, flattery, insults and a large collection of big words to impress you. See what challenges we face, and learn of our achievements. Like reality television without having to watch us eat live cockroaches or making a number two in one of our backyard flower patches. Each member will be posting their own news, posting links to things we find interesting or funny. Follow this blog – click “follow blog” at the top of the page or RSS Feed it – and be the first know of our skullduggery. Check out our other online activities on other platforms on the web on the right.

We were very happy to play two awesome shows with one of our favourite bands this week, Isochronous. We played a Saturday at Zula Sound Bar and then the following Friday we played Mercury Live. They delivered a whirlwind of their jazzy dream pop even though Richard Brokensha (lead singer and guitarist) was taken with “the black lung” - this nasty strain of flu floating around – at the Mercury show. Mother Nature gave me the black lung a week ago too: flu, an ear infection and a big cup of bronchitis. So anyone who thought I seemed a bit “out of it” at Zula should know that Myprodol played a big part in my demeanour that night after having been bedridden for five days straight.

On the Friday at Mercury we started a little filming project of ours – more on that later. So you’ll soon see some footage of our performance, and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready. Omega Bronkhorst from Madbrew Productions and Nico Roos were kind enough to skilfully guide the lenses.

Some of you have asked us where you can get hold of our album – we launched it on the 27th of March at Mercury Live. Unfortunately at the moment it’s only available in Cape Town at Hi Five in Kloof Street. But distribution should be resolved shortly and I’ll let you know when and where you can get your hands on it.

Simon