Showing all posts from November, 2006
Thu 30 Nov 2006
i’ve been asleep for most of this week it feels like, leaving john foreman to greet visitors to this here page for the last seven days. actually i got seriously sunburnt on sunday and spent part of the week in recovery from some sort of sun overdose. this is precisely the kind of information that you just don’t need to know about. welcome to the blogosphere..
faux pas at the moment is kinda moving in slow motion, me struggling to get back into gear and get things together again. the biggest news this week (and proof that it is a slow news week in the world of faux pas) is that i’ve been judged possibly not important enough for
wikipedia. in a perhaps misguided attempt to assuage my ego - i mean, drive more wikipedia visitors to my site (neither motive is noble, it turns out) - i tried to add
an article on myself to wikipedia. only a few hours after submitting it, it was tagged by a resident wiki-guru as being potentially unimportant (my words not his/hers). like all tormented artists, i continually struggle to find any meaning in what it is that i do - and being implicitly bagged out by wikipedia doesn’t help. damn you wikipedia! i’ve since read up on the wikipedia’s
criteria for importance or ‘notability’ - wonderfully anal and specific (honestly, i do love it) - and now i’m actually pretty sure that i am not important enough for wikipedia. i’ve decided to leave my article there as a testiment to my own stupidity, until such time as a wiki-nerd deems it worth deleting. i have also learnt that there are very specific rules to
what makes a porn star notable enough to qualify for the wikipedia, so - take note of them.
and now… i’m going to attempt to make something remotely resembling ‘commentary’, which may become more frequent on this blog if i continue to become more of a wanker (it seems inevitable really)… today was the end of
triple j’s oz music month. every november our national youth broadcaster turns its attention to australian artists with a wide range of special features and programs, culminating in a full day of australian-only programming on the last day of the month (today). does anyone else think it would be a great idea if they did this every month? say, on the first day of the month? it wouldn’t alienate triple j’s audience, and it would give a lot of worthy australian artists additional exposure. i caught only snippets of triple j today while i was out in my car, and i heard many artists given a spin that might otherwise be too leftfield to be given a run during regular programming. imagine what a bold statement the station could make by setting aside the first day of every month (including breakfast, drivetime and request) to an australian-only playlist?
of course, lets have some full disclosure here, i’m an arguably leftfield australian artist who could benefit from something like this. but honestly, is this not a totally awesome idea? there seems to be a lot of diverse music around at the moment, and there seems to be a lot more punters who are open to the idea of supporting local artists. and triple j would get to pat itself on the back for supporting australian music even more than it already does. its a win win.
File under faux pas, music, rant |
Thu 23 Nov 2006
its true

File under john foreman |
Wed 22 Nov 2006
imagine taking a song by
of montreal, replacing kevin barnes’ oblique and literate lyricisms with advertising jargon, throwing a didgeridoo into the mix, and then using the end result to score a 15 second commercial for an american outback-themed fast food joint, complete with fake aussie accent voiceover and not-even-borderline but just plain offensive animated indigenous dudes…
imagine no longer (and enjoy the bank of america thing while you are there)
Sun 19 Nov 2006
just an oddity i casually observed in the past week:
stylus magazine,
popmatters and
cokemachineglow are all currently advertising for new music writers. pros: you get paid to listen to and write about music! cons: you don’t actually get paid. but still, if you fancy yourself as a critic it looks like everyone’s on the lookout for fresh blood.

Roger Roger - Safari Park
“Roger Roger is to Library Music what James Bond is to spy movies; a figurehead that can’t be overlooked. Precursor of Electronic Music, sound explorer, great orchestrator… his career brought him worldwide recognition and acclaim. With a body of work amply sampled and reissued, Roger Roger is considered a pioneer from Paris to London, from New York to Tokyo, and is recognized, more than anybody else, as the man who brought nobility to the genre seen as “Music for images”.”
from
http://www.moviegrooves.com/shop/callhimrogerrogervadim7.htm
one thing is for sure. this shit is just too easy to sample. i want to stop but its hard to quit because its so easy. help me ma! i don’t know how to play nothing for reals!
this blog will hopefully get less silly as i get back into the swing of things here at faux pas hq. if you want quality blogging, look in my sidebar. you want awkward dork? stay tuned.
Fri 17 Nov 2006
about a month ago, while i was still on the other side of the planet, a circus called the
rad balls music academy rolled into melbourne. as far as i can understand it involved talented musicmakers and producers being flown from generally more exotic locales around the globe to wonderfully damp and grey melbourne for a ‘music school’ slash love-in curated by musical nerdites where they could play in custom built studios with large amounts of expensive and rare equipment and saunter about with music royalty under the guise of gettin a ‘good learnin’ from them. if i sound down on it, trust me i’m not, i’m just jealous - it sounds like big transcontinental party almost completely funded by an energy drink and also a seriously life-altering mind-altering musical experience.
the good news is you can catch up with the lectures from this years academy in the form of
podcasts. i took a four hour train trip up to wodonga a couple of days ago and got plenty of time to get through these mp3 highlights from this year’s lectures. i learnt that derrick may is not my friend. other lecturers include cut chemist, paul kelly, danny wang and peter hook. it all makes for great listening, with some great stories being told and some ‘industry wisdom’, but the podcasts contain only highlights from the lectures - you’ll be left wanting more, and for some inexplicable reason the good folks at rad balls pulled all the video streams of the lectures down at the close of this year’s academy. so that sucks. the closest you can get to feeling like you were there is probably to check out
this blog where one of this year’s ’students’, simon from sydney, got the whole experience down on type.
Mon 13 Nov 2006
i’ve mentioned homelife on here before, i think i initially came across them after a recommendation on matt’s
fortune grey blog. i found a copy of their album flying wonders online and quickly fell in love not just with the music (a homemade down-the-rabbit-hole blend of live instrumentation and electronic wizardry that is so intricate and unhinged that it walks the line between being inaccessible and rapturous - man i been reading too many blogs) but also with the idea. a small amount of googling revealed that they are/were an international trans-continental digital jam band of sorts, a collective of anywhere up to 12 people in various different countries trading ideas and recorded parts across the continents. the smallest amount more research would have revealed at the time what i have only just worked out now, that this crazy forward-sounding album was actually released way back in the dark ages of 2002 and is not even the most recent homelife release. its easy with blogs and file sharing to get into an album without even doing the most basic homework about it. an album just becomes a practically anonymous batch of files lost in the nether regions of your mp3 library.
homelife have been asleep for a couple of years but it turns out they and their hirsute bandleader/’ancient wizard’ paddy can be found on myspace, along with the rest of the god damn world. go over to myspace, kiss your rupert murdoch idol, hear some unreleased tunes, and send paddy a message, he may even invite you over for a beer
http://www.myspace.com/madwaltz (Homelife)
http://www.myspace.com/paddysteer
you can order homelife cds at
ninjatune, or through
inertia locally. and if you do go searching for homelife, track down their remix of beck from the guerolito cd, it is surely the blueprint for the future of music as handed down by the gods