ok so within 24 hours i’ll be on a plane and on my way to sunny LA, and then its on to new york, london, germany, amsterdam, eastern europe, london again, scotland, ireland, france, spain, london again, italy, france, japan. to my melbourne massive (which contains my mum and a stray dog), see you in 2007.

hey i’m so excited about that mix cd i made for my friend and by all the other great things that are happening to me at the moment - almost all of them unlikely and most of them probably undeserved - that i want to share some love. so i’ve decided that anyone who orders one (or both) of my cds for the rest of april is going to get a free copy of that awesome mix cd thrown into their package. love love love!

Skeletons & The Girl-Faced Boys - Fit Black Man
this band is on the ghostly international label. and this mp3 is hosted at the ghostly website, where they also have a few other tracks for download. and when i say a few, i mean, like, 12. ghostly seems to be essential listening at the moment, with a really diverse and interesting double cd sampler doing the rounds (this song is lifted from that sampler). this track stands out amongst more technical (distant maybe?) electronica/house type stuff that, as interesting as a lot of it is from a production kind of perspective, isn’t the kind of thing i’m going to be going back to next year, in five years, in ten years. this song though is something else and i don’t know how to describe it which is always a good thing. doom lounge soul rock? gotta love those lame compound attempts at nailing a song into some kind of context. you only really need know one thing - “this guy can’t control the shape of his face.” true that.

ok so for those of you who haven’t yet started compiling yesterday’s mixtape of next level type shit, today i’ll get you started -

Homelife - Buffalos
this could be the right time of the year - and the right record - for me to say those ten words that every music geek keep in reserve so that they can say it but once annually - is it too early to say album of the year? count them, thats ten. this is homelife, a loose entity formed around a man named paddy. simian dudes may be involved, and i don’t mean monkeys. already its sounding sexy. the album is called flying wonders, its engrossing, and i keep going back to this track. its hard to find real reference points, the books maybe? - this is some totally fresh stuff.

Aceyalone & RJD2 - Supahero
biiiiiiig rjd2 fan. this aceyalone record is pretty cool. the first rjd2 record had mcs on it, and the second one didn’t, so if you (like me) missed hearing someone ride over the top of rj’s singular production style then yeah…. i’m going to start up an rjd2 tribute act i think, and its going to be called obi 2 kenobi

i quickly threw together a mix cd for a friend last night, and it is awesome. if i had a radio show, this would be this week’s playlist. and next weeks. go find all of these songs, assemble as shown here, and then go forth and rock all parties with my blessings:

1 the flaming lips - free radicals
2 modeselektor feat. ttc - dancing box
3 isolee - enrico
4 j dilla - workonit
5 homelife - buffalos
6 beck - ghost range (homelife remix of e-pro)
7 hot chip - careful
8 skeletons & the girl-faced boys - fit black man
9 aceyalone & rjd2 - supahero
10 gnarls barkley - just a thought
11 danger doom - sofa king
12 headman - freedom drums
13 who made who - rose
14 jackson - rock on
15 baikonour - lick lokoum
16 the books - its musiiiiic!

i kind of simultaneously love and hate hearing the term ‘next-level’ used to describe music. in other news, thank god you’re here would be a great show if everything that wasn’t frank woodley was removed. i’ll be back tomorrow with more mp3s - i’m trying to keep sharing the sharing up until i get on the jetplane..

Unkle Ho - Grace of the Guru
ethnic cries + beat + plodding horns + hair metal guitar = grace of the guru. ‘unlikely’ is one of the best things that a song can be, in my humble opinion. there is too much music around for you not to be trying to take risks - its just too easy these days, the obvious ingredients are always readily at hand, you can stick to the recipe and bake a cake that tastes like everyone else’s cake. its not like i think everyone should be trying to reinvent the wheel with every single track that they produce, and i certainly don’t think that what i’m doing is, you know, groundbreaking or whatever, but why would you bother treading the same path as everyone else when its really not that hard to take risks and be a little bit ‘unlikely’. this is a shameless rant. unkle ho is a member of the herd and also put out a solo album on the elefant traks label last year - on his website you can also download the track ‘eureka’. note to self: i’ve got to stop watching cooking shows.

Grum Lee - Get Free
the vines have just put out another record and i probably couldn’t possibly be any less interested in it. but i love the vines, because without them there wouldn’t be this - a self-confessed 0% serious frenchman called grum who re-records, well, anything, with his acoustic guitar and his unintentionally (or intentionally) funny skewed french accent. outsider stuff rules. grum lee

Ween - Ocean Man
it doesn’t seem like a great leap from grum lee to ween:

Ocean man, take me by the hand, lead me to the land that you understand
Ocean man, the voyage to the corner of the globe is a real trip
Ocean man, the crust of a tan man embibed by the sand
Soaking up the thirst of the land

Eugene McDaniels - Supermarket Blues
my buddy eugene, the coolest soul brother with the least coolest soul brother name in the history of cool soul brothers - and this is over 30 years before “gnarls barkley” redefined what it meant to record smooth soul under the dorkiest of monikers. supermarket blues has to be one of my favourite songs about being beaten up in the supermarket by some white grandma. goddammmmm. i love that not only does this nasty white grandma call eugene a ‘communist jerk’, but then she commits the greatest sin of all and just generally gets uptight. that shit doesn’t fly with someone as smooth as… “eugene mcdaniels”… i mean seriously..

Blockhead - The Art of Walking
blockhead aka tony simon. ninja tune downtempo driven by nostalgia and melody. he and dj signify have come through australia in the last week with prefuse 73, so he has been popping up in the street press and radio, and he’s an interesting guy. a lot of what he says makes a lot of sense, which i always find appealing. theres a cool but couple of years old interview here.

hope you’re enjoying the mp3s - i’ve got a couple more coming in the next few days..

i’m still not entirely sure how this happened, but two of the country’s best radio stations - fbi 94.5 fm in sydney and triple r 102.7 fm in melbourne - have decided to make entropy begins at home their album of the week. holy shit! its all downhill from here i guess.

ps. support independent radio, bitches!

Hot Chip - Over and Over (quicktime video, direct link here)
i think i’m the last person in the whole world to declare that this is the single of the year, but yeah i cannot stop listening to this song. flicking between this and that ubiquitous gnarls barkley tune, i have a big goofy grin. sometimes its ok to like what everyone else likes (except when its wolfmother, or the grates)

hey gang, i haven’t posted an mp3 up here for too long, so heres some smooth afrobeat that i randomly found yesterday. this kind of stuff always kills me.

Rob - Make It Fast, Make It Slow

other great things i’m listening to a lot at the moment: blockhead, modeselektor, isolee. google it bitches! also, anyone have good advice about buying an mp3 player?