Trap Trap Trap
What goes around comes around.
I’d never heard of him before but a Resident Advisor email just announced the demise of Timothy (DJ Tim Dolla) Foster, credited for being one of the early founders of Jersey club, having launched one of the genre's first collectives in Newark, DE.
A life is a life.
I want a tribute listen, I’m in the mood for some phat beats, something draws me, so I do a quick search on Tidal. Ears bristle in readiness, but wait, there’s that other sound again…. a periodic electronic crackle coming from near the plug sockets… Tim’s first track ‘Trap Trap Trap’ gets put on hold while I investigate.
It’s not faulty wiring but I think it’s coming from inside the cupboard where the computer is, I hope it’s not on the blink with that storm. Kneeling down, head near the ground now, there it is! I look into the 6” gap under the old sideboard. There’s something hanging there. Oh shit. I back up, flipping on the phone light and video. Pointing it in the dark, what I see is repulsive. For a moment, I’m unsure if it’s a difficult birth from an old chrysalis skin. No. A large spindly spider hanging in its sticky threads chomping on a monster black fly, also alive, both swaying, the fly’s fat rear-end squirming and pulsing and that weird, ungodly rattle emitting from its trapped wings or for all I know, the spider’s teeth. I’m being compelled to witness that beautiful and terrible archetypal moment as the world eats itself. I suddenly recall seeing a black object moving fast under my chair earlier that day, the hairs on my neck go up and I’m in a horror film. I go into flight mode, hopping on a chair to text SOS to the landlady. Most natural phenomena doesn’t bother me, but there’s something about this scuttling, huge, nasty gorge-fest under the cupboard and its accompanying death sounds, that refuses to compute. Sod this old barn, I think, as the landlady gets down to where I’m pointing and grabs the dying horse fly with a hand, arachnid now nowhere to be seen.
Trap trap trap.
As DJ Dolla’s 2020 album, ‘Unreleased’ on my Sony XM3’s delivers an ecstatic-amphetamine mix of jarring, silky and boomy blips, flips, beats and loops and I shut my eyes, also so I don’t look down. Landlady texts me not to use chemicals on a ‘taon’ - horse fly.
Trap trap trap…
The thing about this quiet, hot isolation of the South-West France countryside is that everything that happens is more pronounced and soul-stirringly significant. Things happen one after another in isolation, not all at once like before in the city, and the senses are keener, thoughts are clearer. The sun pours down reliably all day, every day. Out on the quiet lane an overweight sheepdog dog appears from nowhere, takes one look at me, turns round and runs off. A fly walking across bread, a glance from a woman in a passing car, the golden flash of a deer in the trees, the first taste of walnut and almond cream-cheese, looking at the sphere of floating rock we call ‘the moon’ from the empty, silent field just outside, a new friend insists on listening to a collection of classical music in silence, to the point where our beings merge and there’s the self-realisation we are always the same.
This is dialogue. This is a dialogue, where the mind takes second place because there’s not enough material noise for it to latch on to, and it’s seen that witness and witnessed is one. Time and space are kinder, gracious and spacious here, to the point where they give way fully to the now. A fuller emptiness gives rise to more potential and less sticky definition, less nouns and more verbs, less thoughts and more thinking, less concepts and more flow.
Unreleased. The magnificent Samsara.
Do it Johnny! Seems like you're doing it
See you in September
Carol et Jean