The Time Being | Steve Kilbey

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the mystical deepening evening

thought appears out of mind

i wander around but a hard rain comes down

stranded on the beach i hide in a green moss lined cave

for weeks i survive on fresh water and fruits of the angels

alone except for the ever wheeling stars and birds of the air

alone except for schools of bright fish who dart in the rivulets

the rainbow pools a glowing world

meditating on christ meditating on buddha

feeling of sudden warmth

outside the trickling of water over rocks

meditating on ahimsa with my DMT gland

once a great healer playing himself over and over

sometimes his strength is his weakness

incarnation over and over playing himself every time

the rolling rumbling thunder rolls away and away

lightning so white so electric white sharp on grey

billowing shifting waves

graves of brave sailors

damascus turn around

the old low down

trembling lamb

i am i am

*NEWSFLASH* Special guest announcement – “Steve Kilbey and Mark Gable – Discover Australia”  are very pleased to announce they have none other than former church drummer RICHARD PLOOG joining them for this ONE OFF special tour. Steve and Mark are honoured and excited to have Richard along for these shows, its been 25 years since SK and RP shared the stage (spoiler alert – setlist includes Choirboys and Church songs). You WON’T want to miss it

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Australian popular music is as good if not better than any other popular music in the world. Steve Kilbey (The Church) and Mark Gable (Choirboys) will prove beyond any doubt, that this is the case as they stagger, sing, crash and STUMBLE through every decade of the greatest pop and rock music that helped shape these 2 Aussie icons. Over the years Steve and Mark have created some Aussie music history themselves. So now it’s time for them to embrace, expose and tell the stories of all the local music by other Australian icons who they love. It’s funny, it’s rude, it’s tragic and exciting. Ronnie Burns, The Group, The Easybeats, Daddy Cool, Paul Kelly, The Bee Gees just to name a few that Steve and Mark will drag through the bushes backwards. If you love Australia you will love Discover Australia (A Stumble Through Australian Pop History) Starring Steve Kilbey and Mark Gable.

• Central Coast Lizottes – Thursday, 6 March 2014.
• Newcastle Lizottes  – Saturday, 8 March 2014.
• Dee Why Lizottes – Sunday, 9 March 2014.
• Canberra Smiths Alternative – Saturday, 15 March 2014.

music from your forgotten dream

in some fevered forgetful state i record snippets of music

after all logic can do anything and so can i

but mostly i’m leaning towards music from an ancient world here

stories from harsh and glorious times transmitted to me

through the haze of my present incarnation

music is ready to be created

you can be focussed or you can just go with it

music and logic are just toys to me

in some dream i plug in and i record music buried in amnesia

stoned crazy dream music from my deep past bubbles to the top

visions anchored in a pool of vague memory

its 2014 and i am everyman on the edge of everytown

this gadget that creates music i come to it and i fool around

i just start anywhere i like

and sometimes its happy and sometimes its sad

and sometimes its so full of conflicted feelings

music and words are always there

they fall out of the sky whenever i want whenever i dont want

music from ancient civilisations baby as well as cute pop songs

music from the dim remote interior locked up from us

but nevertheless trickling out

music oozing out of the atmosphere from other places

foundering its way into logic and then unlocked by me

miscellaneous sparks from miscellaneous fires

every style no style

vienna parades by

and then Alexandria in her former glory

i compose those stories written as music

i start and i stop and i leave off

and i rediscover

religious order gives way into chaos

the centuries roll on

the guitars scream oh i dont know

its just kilbey in his bedroom and hes got some new music

hes trying for that biblical sound

the sound of some phoenician blues band

music songs words fragments of a vase

music from the morning of the earth

some stuff we just made up

alices poison became  bittersweet in strings and spades

find the pathos in anything boy i tell you

and then i believe it all myself

i knock out music and i do

music knock me out sock it to my jawbone song

swing on lightly by

music from the moon

kilbey in his room again

knocking out a song or two

half finished half forgotten

ssshh its late at night he works in the light of logic

working playing singing but not saying

it doesnt matter

miscellanaea swirls around my fingers on the keys and frets

whatever all these instruments are in the banks of sounds

i dont know what i’m doing

its glimpses of something

its bits and pieces of all my lives here and there

some words too but much more music

music which aims to be mostly strange to provoke some thought

which will someday mean something

even if not now

from the rich eventful past of sound trumpets fanfare in suite garden song form

thanks to all the people who bought MISCELLANAEA

and made it my fastest selling record to date

bad to the bone

The ruins of cities lie in ashes or sunken in lakes

A glacial fault opens up the tundra and wonder…Byzantine judders!

A ship goes down on razor teeth reefs beyond belief

The staring crowd in white pancake quite the face ache

Theyre looking for someone to cut off their head it is said

The greedy villains and dogs of disdain again… oh the pain!

Cheering on the dumb hero who slays knights and days

War comes to Africa through Egypts back door

The vultures crooked cat and claw

Telambi was singing her million songs writing any wrongs

Jungle creeps around sleeping sickness the thickness of stone

Which doctor will it be … the hyaena man or silent tree?

And everything unravelling unseemingly

We just lay here in the subconscious realm no one at the helm

We falter senselessly

We sense falteringly

Something out there bearing down

Tearing down this pageant of tents

A defense of magic

We are born again and again and again

Moving upstream through a river of men

sate her one way or another

In the cloven moonlight in the dell in a grove

Where holy Ash and grape doth grow

A rendezvous oh a marvellous faun approaches!

A dandy fellow with horns newly burnished

He slips like a dancer through shadow and sylvan paths

He laughs a strange laugh like a tiny trapped river

Rippling over stones in dappled drabbled bed

The girl is a dryad some kind of tree creature

Summer drunk and unclothed by her bower close by

The leaves that cleave to trees seize every squeeze

The girl touches his face and space separates and waits

The very moss they lay on a day on greenest velvet it seems

The drink is strong it belongs in a potent potion

The air is balmy the forest looks calmly on not far from Ocean

The Olympian gods slumber on inner number of clouds

They shower blessings and flowers in the hours between noon and moon

The faun satiated initiated his snooze while evening oozed

The drowsy dryad dreamed she had lied to her tree

Tied to a mortal she caught all her branches and let them go

Tripped over a mountain a giant avalanches the snow

There  if not nowhere

The sacred river Alph must surely flow

In cloven moonlight in the dell in a grove

Where holy Ash and grape doth grow

Marcus sit down you fool and have a drink

The evening is warm and the moon isn’t going anywhere

Its still early and this wine is dark and sweet

The streets lead away into reveries and fevers

You know all my scars tell a tale

You can read your own life in my poor torn limbs

The whirlpool of seas chained to my fear like an oar

The biting slice that first time an arrowed ice

The smack of a poppy blew open my red head and I bled

The shielded oak knelt down to cuff my throat

The hallowed earth swerved and curved through universe

The blackened skulls scream mercy sound like gulls

The whitest woman in the world uncurled her bird

The sword is hilted in every jilted wife

The battle line drawn in dawns rosy light withered by night

The marches through the marshes in camouflages

The pitch of the green waves a screen saves you

The mirrored halls of Pompeii are free today

The famine in the fields yields the fruit of sickening hunger

The boys in the coliseum well you wouldn’t want to be ‘em

Marcus sit down you fool and have a drink

The evening is warm and the moon isn’t going anywhere

not tut

In gold and splendour

Beaten on wars white hot anvil

Inlayed with bloody rubies and diamond tears

A thousand blacksmiths hammer down down down

We stretch forever unto the horizon which in itself still belongs to us

We go back into the beginning that we have not forgotten

And in Deaths dark realms we have mapped the dimmest lights

Where judgment fails hard in chambers of despair

And walked among the stars disguised as shining beasts

When the black Nile ripples and the forests recede

And crocodiles wearing the robes of priests sit in the temples

And mothers weep and pray for the sun to rise up from Ocean

And Nephilim gather in the darkness of mens daughters minds

Everything from then until now and even more

All of this is ours forever

Black cat go out into this night at once

See for me the trouble burst first under the sprawling ocean sky

Beaten blaze of the unphased sun in orbit around little extra terra

The creatures who hear with their eyes are looking for me tonight

Black cat find out who has tormented the stars on river side

Who owns the keys to the dark doors in the tombs

How the menacing raven is entered by arrow

The narrow escape of a mouse from an owl

The howl of fury that’s purely bleating  ram

Eating up the atmosphere I am

Crammed into the shape of a man

Began to suspect that vengeance spent

And anger vented

And unnatural vices unrepented

All adding up to this void of some complexity

Cat what would you know of that which has vexed me

Now go forth amid the silhouette shrubbery and verandahs

Amongst the oleanders and pines you will find a scent

Blackberry thorns and brambling hump nimbly jumped

listen at the taverns and caverns and ravines where my name is seen

hold your head to the ground that is the sound of birds

tilt your eyes to  flame interpret the game of air

turn your head in your hands understanding gods arching planned

cat the bridge and the swamp seethe with triumph find the cause

the dead trees in the lake still ache for life so use your pause

the rat in a hole thinks himself rich with his bowl of blood

the villains and serfs perfectly wrong for the song of  the earth

now find out who sent who

and how many bent souls they were lent

cat stevens hims elf

sprook no moor

The immaculate black night is out of light

I had passed out sometime back

The chanting head voices had gone east somewhere

The limitless byzantine of my other world

I was anybody as I lay there in the dark

A breeze stirs from somewhere

Its breath disturbs the fragility of my connectedness

A breeze that whispers stuff about a country that aint out there anywhere

Little bells outside a childrens church

I hear a choir singing some faraway song as if through an astral line

On a Sunday morning not yet come they will unfurl penance

Drowsy little town at the foot of a mountain

Even as my world infects you and crumble

Silent chatter of cactus

The slow nodding of the fir

The gentle groan of the man on the ash

Echoes of squabbling gulls

The waves have ceased their crashing

The sea itself is quiet and listening

Listening to the music deep inside itself

Huge whales and sharks under the waves

Gentle lapping of dogs

The crack and creak of Hesperus in a dim mist

Laocoon calls out to his sons too late in the day

The universities are full of such monsters in these times

The finality is much more than many of us can stand

It doesn’t matter

Eventually all pain will subside it will reside outside nowhere

The truth will keep becoming strange and changing

Sleep escapes me although I pretend to dream

A pretender to a crown of wrought slumber

I take a number and wait

la smith (for no particular reason)

In the avenue of the armistice

war has damaged the graves of the peacemakers

Me and some fading actress lying drunken underneath the plane trees

Our fingers are dripping lemon and salt in the sea air

Above us mackerel cloud and salmon sunset

Below us white river upon black swan

Sentry upon century

Mausoleums loom up suddenly emptying us of our mirth and our fucking chuckle

We stumble all the stagger way home clutching our bottle of nepenthe like it was an oracle or a lamb

On the darkening streets the new night is warm and stormy

A certain recklessness has filled the quickened city

More than ever the moon filled sky presses up to windows to gaze in

We meet our friends the acrobat Lucid and Mallet the carpenter in a park

Torches fire across the harbour and the reflections of smoke swim on the sea

Some strange drug has numbed my tongue and I hum dumbly

Some distant star has crossed my path I can feel it rather halved

The revelers dressed as ghosts called out for more music and thus it begins

The big drum pounding in my veined interior mirror

We glide over fogged time pieces lay forever shattered

At the Splendid Bull with the decantered wonderful wine of Wednesday now gone

And the faded flotsam and jaded jetsam cast away out of the Emperors sight

A time of long sleeps and small dreams