Comfortably alien. Magnetic Furniture is a blog written by Christian Jones.
Fish in a barrel That is you. And me. We are fish glubbing along in a dark forest of kelp and barnacles. We exist on the World Wide Web in a state of perpetual precarity. Fuck your techno-optimism, you’re reading this on a mesh of nodes originally funded by DARPA and still to this day monopolised by a tangled mat of interchangeable barefoot whitecollar CIA operatives and/or techmasters and/or…
My most listened-to playlist at the moment, by far, is called (Really) Long Soundbath. It's a bit of a misnomer in that I would hate to reduce any of my musical library to spa wallpaper, but it's apt in that I play these songs when I need to think and move and feel held. They are all at least 15 minutes long. We feature William Basinski's Watermusic I & II , Kara Lis Coverdale's Grafts , Stars of…
I went for a walk today and saw an electrical box. It made me think of a sound map I'd been researching / listening to / pondering: Matilde Meireles' X Marks The Spot . The sound map was discussed in passing during a couple of workshops I've recently attended at Ibraaz, hosted by an Oxford Uni project called SONCITIES, which aims "to better understand cities and urban life through a critical…
We're back! I'm learning that to Blog is to orbit, to recur, to boom & bust. It's hard and weird to sustain any kind of written practice with barely any external feedback and no real structure. I keep wanting to write regularly and like any sort of rigid structure I aim to impose in life, the actuality of life, its unpredictability and viscous vividity, get right in the mother-fuckin way. That is,…
These are gonna be monthly at the least from now on I've been trying to work out how to write about being recurrently ill and I've gotten nowhere with it. Completely stuck. It feels self-pitying or explicit in some way that makes me cringe - I don't want to sit down and spell out a catalogue of all the ways my body hasn't worked right in the last 8 weeks. At the same time though, when you have…
I was stuck in one of those conversations. A plughole moment. A house party in a newly-purchased 2-bed flat in Queens Road, Peckham. I circled, the drain gulped and belched, and down I went. Slurping and spluttering into an addled abyss. For the sake of all, locations and names have been changed and it must be said that all parties associated with this anecdote are very lovely. I was primarily…
A system designed to function with the constant possibility of slapstick failure. If you're unlucky I might have spoken at freewheeling speed and with little clarity to you about a YouTube video published this year called 'Buckets'. It's by musician and filmmaker Adum Brate and is hosted on Madjestic Kasual's YouTube channel. It's an onslaught. Buckets makes reference to some of my favourite ever…
Needing hand cream so walking 15 minutes to a pharmacy to buy cream and not wanting the one which was “urea” on the front but buying it anyway. It sort of stings but seems to work. Then finding a doner place nearby but going there and queuing and realising you have no cash and its cash only So walking back to the mall of berlin to look for a cash machine Its very cold You’re thinking about…
The sky above Clapton is a deep grey-blue tonight. I can see some of the red lights on the totally cuboid newbuilds in Stratford off in the distance. The rain is beautiful, warm and clear. I smell white sage. I press play on my most-listened-to cassette, Ana Roxanne’s ~ ~ ~ , and sit here on my laptop. I’m thinking about water. This tape is about fluidity, personal and temporal. Kids out of time…
A little thinky on trusting the new headache album and also just a blogpost. I really tried to write this blog regularly. I did! I'm full of ideas and they're all stewing but I have struggled to put pen to paper / fingertips to chicklet keyboards anywhere near the frequency I wanted for magnetic furniture. I'm resorting now to writing on my phone even though I mostly detest writing sentences on…