Today's huge thunderstorm is making such a racket it's time to be as experimental as Dr Frankenstein in some ancient movie. If this blog disappears completely then I've made a very big mess, but I must bring those dead links here to life again, I don't want them forever broken. My flat is as clean as it will be after a week of very hot and bright days when I could see all the mess. And I am flat broke until the end of the month.
I thought it was buying music by too many VoWs and suchlike greed until I checked and saw the horrific phone bills that have gone through the bank in June. Monstrous bills always come at once, don't they?
 While I fix stuff, does anybody know lots about Aino Laos? She and her band came in handy after a truly African storm that struck Paris during the week, being in my head when I behaved more or less like a gentleman for some of its victims in a very packed, soaked Métro train.
My own previous reference is almost all a search engine will give you in English, apart from Belgians wanting "More, please". CD Baby says little:
"Harvest Moon is a record based on blending the mesmerizing voice of Aino Laos with a unique & beautiful music created to take you on a travel through time & space. Recorded in 2003 in locations in california & danmark, the blend of different styles & influences will please & surprise."
Actually, they wrote "travel trough", which isn't a bad description of the M at the height of the rush hour. This isn't Africa yet. That morning, women had done what women do, saw a very hot day coming, put on as few clothes as they dared to look attractive without being arrested and left the umbrellas at home.
They and everyone else who hasn't yet realised this found out that global warming, summer after summer, means you don't have to go to Africa to have the air and the sky become stickier and heavier and darker as the day goes on until it explodes. When it did, the rainstorm was the kind that drenches you in less than a minute. Isabelle, a top news editor who knows about these things, said: "And it's not even six o'clock yet!"
Some time well past six Aino Laos was singing 'Stranded' (you'll find decent song excerpts at the iTMS, forget Amazon, she's still not there) and it was one of those evenings when I let two very packed trains through before playing sardines again in the third.
The rush hour M was full of women going home and mostly robbed by the rain of any more choice about how much of their bodies they wanted to show. Crushed up beside me, one was very young and so ill at ease I didn't have to look to feel the "vibes". I gave her what space I could ... but she closed in. Within a couple of stops, she had her head resting on my shoulder, it stayed there for 10 minutes, she relaxed, and not a word was said. Another woman had a "tit problem". When she left for work she didn't mean everyone to see them.
Since my last notes about the "psychology of the iPod", people have told me they don't get it themselves: my own experiences, the easy chats, are less common that I thought. The point remains that when listening to music in the M, it's not to shut people out (unless somebody I don't like gets on and I'm happy with an excuse to avoid them), but I'm very aware at a conscious level of what's going on around me. iPods certainly help remove the element of threat among strangers people feel in the animal environment of a crowded train, but there's more to it. I caught the eyes of the tanned woman with the drenched blouse and gave her body a long and leisurely look before meeting her gaze again. She glanced down coyly for a moment, then looked up and smiled. When they got off, they both smiled. No words, but the three of us made a 13-minute world in our corner of train that put them as much at their ease as 'Harvest Moon' had put me.
I've no idea if other people are so conscious of these behaviour patterns, but when, in the late 1960s, Desmond Morris published 'The Naked Ape' and went on to write more books about body language they became such huge bestsellers, people must have found it new. Anyway, I know if there's one thing guaranteed to make a women feel uneasy, it's furtive looks from men who mentally take her clothes off and then stick their glance elsewhere before they think she's noticed. I mention it because I watch many men do this I've got news for them. She does notice and it doesn't do you any favours.
Before writing more about Aino Laos, I listened again in the M today, then plugged the iPod into the hi-fi. The brief CD Baby blurb on 'Harvest Moon' could lead your imagination as astray as a wet T-shirt on a good-looking woman, while Google and other search tools give you Danish (MyMusik -- biografi) and German, but little English apart from me and one of the slowest Flash sites any of my browsers have met.
I'll tell her this because it's about as unhelpful as men who annoy women like Gudrun Laos with sly, hungry looks, while the noisy default music on it for now says more about musicals than a subtle solo album that's neither "new age" nor "alternative pop". Once you've found the rest of the music, though, it's a generous selection.
Gudi is Danish and 'Harvest Moon' is a largely gentle collection of songs with lyrics good and sometimes poetic enough to make you think English is her first language. On the opening track, which came out as the single 'Time is a Healer', Aino Laos's first question is "If time is a healer, why am I still weak inside?"
And if "new age" means being idealistic and adding a little electronica to perceptive songs full of questions and stories about live and love, including some gorgeous ballads ('Blinded by Silence' and 'For a While'), about life and love, there's a lot of it about. The words are all Gudrun's, who accompanies several songs with an acoustic guitar, but if she's a show star, mainly in Germany, that'll be because she can certainly rock when she wants and doesn't always dress like anyone I've seen in the M.
People like Gudi Laos are reasons I spent a whole evening stripping the musical genre labels others have put on many albums on the iPod, but that's a story for when I plan to discuss both the miracles and the drawbacks of the Gracenote data base.
6:45:46 PM link 
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