Air - Surfing on a Rocket (Juan Maclean remix) (9.4MB)

on air: something that i’ve often wondered about frenchies (apart from ‘i wonder if they would mind if i call them frenchies’) is what their opinions are on their successful left-of-centre musical exports such as air, phoenix, daft punk. if i say to a french music nerd, “yeah i like french music, air and phoenix” is that akin to a french tourist saying to me, “yeah i like australian music, jet and powderfinger?” would the french music nerd scoff similarly? am i going to get my head beaten in by stripey-shirted beret-wearing french music snobs?

on juan maclean: i found this via one of my new favourite websites, cliptip. a great film clip for a great juan song (not the one posted above), where they’ve completely nailed that male-gigolo-white-undies-alien-abduction narrative that i’ve always thought suited this track.

i have received my new toy courtesy of kind kevin from los angeles. i’m bodyrocking as we speak. or as i speak. or as i type. thanks one more time to anyone who has bought my cd, and directly contributed to the get-tim-on-stage fund.

i came across a band called the free design like a lot of people probably did, via the stones throw label that recently commissioned a wide range of contemporary acts (incl. peanut butter wolf, caribou, stereolab, danger mouse) to do remixes of old free design tracks. it led me to their greatest hits album, and subsequently to this perfect nugget of baffling folk-pop:

The Free Design - Bubbles (3.13MB)

through some strange twist of fate i managed to catch both the AFI awards and the IF awards (via the wonders of vhs) on saturday night and i was struck by how terrible and gaudy and generally shithouse the AFI awards were in comparison to the classy, relaxed IFs. the AFIs were an utter train wreck, russell crowe with jokes almost as bad as his suit, ongoing gratuitous spruiking for completely irrelevant corporate sponsors, a set that unbelievably out-yukked melbourne’s premier yuk events venue ‘the crown showroom’, unlucky award winners having to do the 100m dash from the back of the room to collect their awards with 5 second acceptance speeches… and holy shit COMEDY INC was nominated for 2 awards! at least safran won, although i’m sure it would have been a tough choice for judges to toss up between safran and the replacement nudge from hey dad.

i’ve been listening to this song on repeat for the last 24 hours - when not in my playlist, its been in my head, or popping up as a jose gonzales cover on sony tv ads.

it doesn’t get much more exciting than this: oprah to appear on letterman. i never thought i’d live to see the day that the superbowl of love became a reality. i should organise some kind of ‘oprah on letterman’ party.

the espy shows are over. thanks for those who came down and shuffled their feet.

the last few days i’ve been listening almost exclusively to simian. simian are an ex-band of four guys in london who put out two albums of classic fractured pop - sunny melodies, shiny harmonies, unexpected arrangements and lots and lots of toys that they borrowed from brian eno. every second song on their album is pure gold, which made picking one to post here hard - but i went with the song that sold me on them, when i heard it for the first time a few years ago.

Simian - The Wisp (5.84 MB, removed)

i don’t know why they stopped making albums and i’m not sure what they are up to now, although i think two of them have carried on under the name ’simian mobile disco’ and have put out some great remixes.

and to that guy at the espy last night who asked me “are you faux pas?” and then i talked you into buying my cd - i love you. if you ever have trouble recognising faux pas in the future, here’s a handy little test that may also determine if you have low-level autism (its a pdf file).

thanks to fee, ryan, rich and owen at melbourne’s ace-est radio station triple r for spinning tunes from the disc. sydney’s fbi has put barry on rotation, with a few of the guys up there being very supportive. thanks.

i’ve also popped up on said the gramophone. good thing i haven’t really given up my googling habit or i never would have known about it - they’ve posted cup of wonder over there, and put out the call to get their readers to add their own sound effects on top, with interesting results… but they need only have asked me - here’s one i prepared earlier:

Faux Pas - Cup of Wonder (Drunk Cowboy mix)

hello to anyone who’s visiting via smart-music.net. my there’s a lot of you aren’t there. lucky for you i just worked out how to set up paypal, so now you can purchase the Faux Feels cd from anywhere in the whole goddam world.

this is very nerdy but i’m announcing today as ‘Google Finally Crawled My Website Day.’ after however many months, iamfauxpas.com appears in selected google searches. this is good, considering that i’ve recently come to believe that google is the internet, or perhaps even the universe. now i can stop googling myself (although i may continue to do it metaphorically)

to anyone asking “where have the capital letters gone?” - they were impeding the natural flow of qi in my blog posts. expect less constipated, more regular (get it?!) posts

and now - the kleptones. for a bit it seems it was cool to be into mashups, and now it seems to be cool to say that they are dead and that they suck and that they were so last year or something. but oh when they’re good, they’re sooo good. check ‘a night at the hip hopera’ by the kleptones - queen songs, hip hop a capellas, artfully chopped up with liberal doses of… well.. liberal anti-copyright-law propoganda. here’s the track that got me:

The Kleptones - Stop (4.80MB, removed)