Author: RatsontheRun

Installment 6… Fritch, Tx (or ‘Keeping Creative on Move’).

Back home I had intent and purpose. I made shapes and sense of music and words and all time was divided, devoted. I made time to draw lines from without to within and direct them back out in new twists. People around me helped me build a home studio and they’d switch out the songs mine to ours.  Back home I made time to make something with all of my tools at my tips.

Here we move place to place with a speed and a greed that breeds barely no time to take in. We breathe in the air but don’t pick up the scents, time to reflect slim to none.

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Heat on a Leash (from Fritch, Tx.)

Follow from Installment 6…

Typewriters clack with their meat cleaver keys,
Stamping their feet in red letters,
White ribbon scriptures hang cracks to the walls,
And I cant catch a break of a word.

Fragments hang backs to the rafters,
Sheets pass their last owner’s best incantations
Up into my skin with precision.

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EP Review: The Strays – Brand New Day.

Polka dot dresses swirl through the mind in tail finned gas swilling automobiles. Iced beers drip in sunshine, drive in movie screens show black and white flicks over slicked back black hair and blonde lipstick curls. This is cherry coke sweet. Polished like high chrome in saccharine shades.

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Installment 5… My New New Orleans Muse

We’re still star-fishing our way in and out, back and forth spikes out of Panama City Beach, moving on interstate spines. This is last trip where we go out and back before leaving our friend’s nest for good. Three New Orleans nights and return then it’s not so straight lines to nowhere.

New Orleans Street JazzNew Orleans is glistening voodoo jewel jubilation with rhythm and heat in the pit of its soul. New Orleans sleeps rough in the dirt of it’s past, it’s disasters and racial divides. It’s truth is a sweet spot between.

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Installment 4 …Nashville, Tennessee.

Nashville has an ego. Lights, signs and neons all big as that ego with history gone to it’s head. It’s been ‘Music City – USA’ since WSM AM radio cast out it’s shout over 38 states with weekly live shows and recordings. Broadcasts began in 1925, name was claimed 1950 set against rock and roll. ‘Birthplace of bluegrass’, ‘home of country music’, ‘songwriting capital of the world’; There’s plenty of others to pick from.

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Album Review: Slumb Party – Happy Now.

A full blood moon’s hanging thick over Rockies. Earlier on I saw dinosaur steps and bones, pressed into layers of once-flat beach sand that turned into mud that turned into rock that turned to upended slabs that jut out of the sides of sharp mountains. What was flat nearly upright. What was beach now a cliff. And everything round me got here out of chaos.

Now I’m sat between ridges and ranges and chaos is here in the house… It’s been in my ears and it’s been in car stereos and it’s given long journeys brief fever. Slumb Party’s ‘Happy Now’ is breakneck in pace and in place of a thrill is a pupil dilation from trying to make sense of each track; these things pass quicker than oncoming cars at a speed that I don’t want to print.

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Installment 1 …Panama City Beach, Fl.

Rats on Run began here, in more ways than one. Took five years to work out what to do with the offer…

A man I barely knew and his American wife said come stay in the states anytime. He left UK for US and with wife and new life they’re deservedly proud; of each other, their changes, their hard graft and payoffs.

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Travelling by Installments… An Intro from Austin, Tx.

It’s the third in a clean three day stretch of 95+ degrees F here in Austin. Tomorrow’s looking like stretching to four. We’ve wore off sore heads, oozed out our insides and wrungout our ears with slabs of music and noise. Fuzzed 60s garage slams out of bars, so does country, old and new RnB, rockabilly, thrash and New Wave.

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