its been aaaaaaages since i put a post up on this blog just yakking about my favourite music, and also a long time since i’ve had an ill-conceived rant that makes no sense, so i’m doing those two things simultaneously this afternoon, feeling juiced after having just completed a hardcore civilization 4 session. all of these mp3s are either widely distributed already, or not nearly distributed enough, so download, share, and then find ways to support the artists that you love …

before i get into it – its short notice (as usual), but tonight i’ll be appearing on maudie’s show “dappled beats” over on 106.7 FM PBS FM in melbourne… i’ll be selecting some tunes and talking some crap. maudie has great taste, lots of electronic and leftfield type stuff (check her playlists here) so it should be a lot of fun. pbs fm streams online here.

its the PBS radio festival this week, which means they are hollering for your support. so if you want to directly contribute to a true music-lovers station – and the ’sister’ station to the one that i do my show on, RRR – give them a call and become a subscriber. its cheap, and you win prizes. if you subscribe during maudie’s show (between midnight and 2am tonight) you can have a free faux pas cd! as if thats something you want!

ok lets go:

MP3: Moonbeam – Slow Heart (2008)
this is simply a beautifully produced and arranged piece of heart-tugging minimal techno music. or progressive house or progressive trance, or something, i don’t really know… ‘this type of music’… but this track (by a russian duo) is somehow bleedingly emotive without being too saccharine, and sits just (and only just) on the right side of that line that so much of ‘this type of music’ seems to cross – the line that demarcates heartfelt from tacky, accessible from obvious. a lot of ‘this type of music’ is so utterly boring, and so much of it is so utterly trashy, this track is like 10x the achievement because it is so easy to make bad bad generic music when you are working within a genre with what seems like such strict conventions. it makes me think of one of my favourite albums, “wearemonster” by isolee… although in many ways i feel like that isolee album succeeds so well because it breaks out from the generic conventions that i associate with ‘this type of music’. what is isolee doing now anyway?

every single sound in “slow heart” just sounds perfect to my ears… the cymbal rushes, the… is that a guitar?… the layers of alien technology. anyway. its a late night song, obviously.

see also:
MP3: Sascha Funke – Mango (2008)

a lot of my favourite recommendations of the more edged electronic variety come from leighton’s blog keytars and violins, so at this point i would like to shout out to him. LEIGHTON FROM KEYTARS AND VIOLINS

MP3: Thom Yorke – The Eraser (XXXchange mix) (2007)
this song is almost exactly what i think music should sound like. i mean, i don’t want thom yorke singing on every song, but i think you know what i mean. this is the kind of track i listen to on repeat, studying it to try and unveil its secrets, only to be left confused and a little alienated, perhaps coming to the conclusion that this kind of thing only happens by accident. the case for aleatoric music strengthens.

from one thom to two toms:
MP3: Tom Tom Club – Lorelei (1980)
sometimes i get the distinct impression that the tom tom club is a great secret kept by those in the know. recently i finally tracked down a copy of the self-titled tom tom club album, the one with the hits on it, i’m talking “wordy rappinghood” and “genius of love” of course. the album is basically everything i thought it would be and more – so innocent, so thoughtful, and so great to dance around to in your loungeroom in the middle of an intense board gaming session

imagine listening to this track while playing an intense german board game about farmers in wooden shacks trying to make cows breed and shit. agricola! did i mention its my birthday soon? this track is so totally about farmers in wooden shacks trying to make cows breed. probably also about a girl.

MP3: Regurgitator – Feels Alright! (1999)
another song to go batshit to while you are playing board games. well i guess anyone who knows me knows i have a soft spot for vocoders. who doesn’t? this song has a vocoder. it is from the regurgitator album that we had to have, that no one really understood, called “art”.

regurgitator and custard are two – much-maligned maybe? – bands straight from the heyday of australian alternative music, the mid- to late- nineties, when triple j ruled our tastes not with an iron fist and a copy of NME but with dreadlocks, a devo greatest hits album and a bong. it was kinda cool to be daggy, or at least i imagine it must have been in brisbane, if bands like the ‘gurge and the ‘tard rose to dominance – hell even just the names are hilariously reflective of the times.

i really hope that in the future these two bands in particular – regurgitator and custard – are remembered as being iconic, important, influential bands, and not just some pseudo-novelty pitstop that australian music made in the 90s as it slid – on what, to me, seems like a strangely linear and now obvious progression! – from generic 80s pub rock to 2008 modular (capital M and no capital m) “fash” electro. when the musical archaeologists try to piece together the history of australian popular music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (and surely they’ll only do it as a kind of irrelevant footnote to the history of music in general worldwide), they might be puzzled about how this ‘new electro’ thing took hold in this country, in some ways out of nowhere. thats until they unearth the fossils of a presets concert, the one in 2011 where everyone was killed in a freak concreting incident, immersed and preserved for millenia in some carbonite-type han-solo-type shit… thats when they’ll realise the crowd – you know, all of ‘their people’ – have the exact same DNA as the cold chisel fan fossils they unearthed from back in the late 70s!

pity me my befuddled theses and ill-conceived tea-leaf readings into the future of concreting and electro! honestly even i’m not sure what point i’m trying to make here – all thats really important here is that there’s a whole lot more ideas and risks being taken on that “art” album than on those two modular albums – the hoodied elephants in the room that is electronic music in australia – put together.

perhaps this is a good time to remind you that one of custard’s more famous songs was a song called “music is crap” which basically was about aliens coming to earth to tell us how crap our music was.

MP3: Custard – Music Is Crap (1998)

Don’t matter what you like, aliens hate it…
And I’ve found they dig the silence, hate the sound

sometimes when i listen to radio, i think i’m one of the aliens…. and the guys at work have been telling me recently that i’m hating more than usual… but you have to voice strong opinions in order to combat the dark forces of homogeniety, isn’t it. even if you have to force them out of you. or couch them in poorly chosen allegories.

i guess at the end of the day its all personal and subjective… its my perogative, to paraphrase bobby brown… and ahh i guess i just really like risk. this “new electro” or whatever you might like to call it, in this country, is about as risky as eating a sandwich. hegemony is bad if you appreciate forward-thinking music! kick against it. its also really fashionable and i don’t like that either. in fact i hate it! look ma! hatin is easy!

somewhere in another universe there is a tim who can tie all of this together – from aleatoric (or “dice”) music to dice-rolling board games, from risky fractured music to homogenous fluoro cardigans.

in conclusion… risk.

“electronic” music in australia. choose which side you are on, dudes!