the tree bleeds for you and me*

Corporate responsibility mandarins at Tesco seem to be stocking their shelves with plenty of pots and kettles. The giant retailer's Christmas card recycling campaign begins today, imploring us, in a faintly judgmental way, to save some trees.

Because Tesco does everything it can to save trees, doesn't it?

Nobody would disagree that Slough is not the loveliest town in Britain. It's a temple to the Concrete God, in fact, and its green spaces are safely tucked away so all that nasty clean air can't get into its residents' lungs.

So when 'save a tree today' Tesco rolls into Slough to expand its already enormous store into a great angular ivory tower of consumerism and Krispy Kreme stink, what gets in the way? A tree. Not just any tree, but a 250-year old Lebanese Cedar, of which less than 500 remain in the UK, and subject to a Tree Preservation Order since 1980.

But Tesco wants to save trees, right?

Wrong.

Despite much local outcry and vain protestation from various community-minded people (one of whom found that 'reasonable force' meant being sat on and punched in the face by security guards), down it came. Could impoverished Slough Borough Council resist the might of Tesco's Big and Clever Lawyers? Did they even care? Who knows.

But...Tesco...trees...save them?

Nope.

Tesco wants to save trees so much that it managed to overturn Tree Preservation Orders on ten 120-year-old sycamores in Shaftesbury, so that it could chop them down and build another store. Following this, Tesco's tree-saving executive went into overdrive, causing a further four trees of similar size to become unstable due to Tesco's own construction work. Down they came as well.

So, Tesco wants you to save trees by recycling your Christmas cards. Go and recycle them, recycle everything you have. But don't expect Tesco to worry about saving trees when it wants stores built. Money doesn't grow on trees.







*if anyone's following these titles (yeah, right), I know that's not quite its meaning...

just chiselled stones

Yesterday I spent a small amount of time watching Einstürzende Neubauten's Liebeslieder DVD, which made me realise two things:

1. When I was a kid (I still am) I was fascinated by the noises made by ordinary things - the fridge, wind, rocks, water, cutlery, lego, corduroy trousers etc. My favourite was the noise made by an enormous green oil tank outside our house in Scotland - a meaty slab of metallic thuddery followed by almost endless reverb. I could have sat there slapping it for hours and listening. Anyway- on the DVD there's a clip of Alexander Hacke climbing into a spherical (and empty) water tower in Berlin and stamping on its floor. The infant joy on his face as he listens to the slow slow decay of this great cavernous sound was exactly how I felt on slapping the oil tank. Which got me thinking.

Back in 1983, Neubauten's second album featured some interesting guest instruments: "N.U. played the wardrobe. It features our longest tape loop (30 seconds), Alex's dog Lola, singing chainsaws, a rank of 3m high airducts arranged like dominoes, snapping wood and water dripping on a hot stove." Now fast forward nearly 20 years to 2002 and Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, containing, among other things, what Marcus Eoin describes as a beat "that sounds like someone stretching a rope over the surface of a wooden ship".

In 1983 Neubauten couldn't sit down on a big comfy cushion and mash all their found sounds up on a laptop, or even create them electronically to any great quality. BoC (and pretty much anyone else) can do this to their heart's content. Again, as a kid I was equally fascinated by the electronic sounds made by tinny Casios and Bontempis - mainly whooshes and zaps that don't often occur naturally. Having made various attempts at electronic music in the past 20 years (the Spectrum's unforgiving AY chip notwithstanding), I became tremendously excited about finally having access to some reasonably good software - and the samples to go with it.

Now I have thousands and thousands of samples garnered from CDs and the internet on my hard drive, of all sorts of interesting things - from Japanese dial tones to mountains of 808/909/727 samples, nesting songbirds to F-16 afterburners. But it's all become very boring. The sheer choice is hindering what passes for my creative process. Of the 30,000+ samples I have on this computer, I only use about 50. I spend more time going through them thinking 'naah' than I do on the actual tunes.

BoC's Mike Sandison : "We began to use more computer technology with the wrong intention of accelerating our composing process. But computers always end up bothering the possibilities that technical production offers, that has the unpleasant effect of drying up progressively all your inspiration. So we react against that and now we’re back in a more simple way of doing things, just like we worked in the beginning."

So this is where I'm going this year - out goes the bolus of synthetic mush on my hard drive, and in come all sorts of different microphones and my trusty MD recorder. After all, it's always been the best fun finding these lovely odd sounds things make. I don't want to copy it off CDs and the net, I want to do it myself.

2 (no, I haven't forgotten). My German is so poor that I understood about 25% of it. The irony of this is that when I was studying German for A Level, 50% of my vocabulary was supplied by Neubauten lyrics.

Meanwhile, I will suggest that anyone with a working set of ears promptly diverts them to the emissions of weirdo prog-punk band Deerhoof.

NB. The list below is my top listening for the past week, apparently.