i’ve been working as hard as a nut - and i’m talking hard nuts - on new stuff. meanwhile, the old stuff continues to do things. a review has been posted on an aussie arts website called the program which uses the phrase ‘inherent funkiness.’ awesome. community radio dudes - who are the coolest radio dudes of all - continue to play tracks from the ep, while ‘cup of wonder’ has been doing the rounds on triple j too. you can even request it on super request if you like to do that kind of thing.

the big news though is that soon the cd will be available in stores, like proper cds are, so thats a bit of a spin. so anyone who’s been freaked out by the whole ‘online order’ thing can soon go down to their local and only have to deal with intimidating indie record store staff instead of intimidating e-commerce technology.

i’m listening to deerhoof constantly at the moment, in preparation to see them in a couple of weeks. they are completely and utterly at the top of their game, whatever their game is. deerhoof are like the roger federer of whatever it is that they are actually doing. their last album ‘the runners four’ is like heaven on a cd-shaped stick. you should go and check out their website for a free quicktime music video and even a big scoop of mp3s (if you can find them).

i’ve rejigged the website a bit. if you come here often, have a look around and you’ll find things.

ok so if only just to prove that, yes, it can (and will) get stupider than yesterday’s post, i’m closing out this week of mp3s with something dumb. michael stavrou, aka stav, is an engineer who writes a column on mixing in australia’s audiotechnology magazine. now most of you aussie audio engineering nuts out there would already know that. but did you know he is also a magician? and an inventor?

anyway my audiophile housemate is into stav, and even has stav’s book on mixing called ‘mixing with your mind.’ after an invigorating chat one evening, when i was in a bit of a rut during the mixing of faux feels, my housemate convinced me that the key to getting a fresh perspective on my tracks was to listen to them backwards. this technique, obviously called ‘backwards mixing’, is one of stav’s calling cards. so i did it. and it was awesome. i don’t know if it helped with my mixing, but it was fun. the weirdest thing about it was that it was like it gave me a chance to listen to my own songs for the first time - all the melodies have changed, the song structure is obviously reversed, so the song is completely different. although it still sounds the same..

anyway, i nearly left the songs as they were, backwards, and had to be convinced that it wasn’t a good idea to start a new genre of ‘backwardtronica’. here’s evidence that backwards is better than forwards - and if you have an audio editing program yourself, you can of course reverse these two tracks and you’ll have two more mp3s from faux feels. i’m one generous geezer.

Faux Pas - Barry (backwards) (7.9MB)
Faux Pas - Angles (backwards) (4.4MB)

my mum recently got into soulseek and has started to download all kinds of stuff. when i was up at mum and dad’s for christmas i raided their computer and took a cd-r home with me full of mp3 albums from mum’s stash. among the jethro tull, devo and stewart copeland (?), i found the self-titled 1967 album from ultimate spinach. i haven’t yet had the chance to ask her about ultimate spinach, but luckily there’s always allmusic.com to fill the expansive gaps in my musical knowledge:

Ultimate Spinach was one of the most well known, and perhaps the most notorious, of the groups to be hyped as part of the “Bosstown Sound” in 1968. The name itself guaranteed attention, as one of the most ludicrous and heavy-handed “far out” monikers of the psychedelic era, even outdoing formidable competition such as the Peanut Butter Conspiracy. Although the group were competent musicians with streaks of imagination, their albums were generally poor third cousins to the West Coast psychedelic groups that served as their obvious inspirations.

well if that hasn’t talked them up to the point where you are just hysterically scrolling for the hyperlink, let me add three words: extreme stereo separation!

Ultimate Spinach - Funny Freak Parade (3.55MB)

for something different: here’s something from my past life as a wannabe mixmaster, when i was getting my kicks splicing together songs to rock 21st birthday parties and then just playing them to myself in my bedroom. oh those lonely nights. the doctor is in:

Mistr Doctor mix from ‘Dragon Drop’ (8.84MB)

taking a further, and slightly larger, sidestep from yesterday’s post… given that its hottest 100 time, it seems appropriate to come out of the closet and announce my love of custard, a defunct quirky pop-rock band who i’m not sure if it was ever really that cool to be into. actually i never really was into custard, until i got their greatest hits on a whim last year and realised that the band had like a million great songs and that i actually knew them all. custard are a band that suffered from triple j overkill, but hey it turns out they were alright by me. i used to think they sounded like pavement before i knew what pavement sounded like, and now for some reason i associate custard with mental as anything. similar quirkiness? similar career trajectory? i don’t really know. but its fun stuff, particularly if you were a teenager listening to triple j in the mid-late 1990s - grab the greatest hits comps of custard, regurgitator and spiderbait and you’ve got yourself some instant nostalgia. which makes me think, regurgitator and spiderbait are still kicking, but not custard?

i picked this song because it more or less turned out to be custard’s swan song, and sounds like it too. last year i went on a camping trip up the east coast of nsw, and my mp3 player for some reason would only play custard’s greatest hits; this song now evokes fond memories of that trip as well as the aforementioned late-90s nostalgia.

Custard - The New Mathew (4.31MB)

taking a sideways step from yesterday’s post - melbourne’s bogenschutzer is one man, matt archer, who makes electronica. we traded cds a couple of months ago after he got in touch with me, and we both liked each others stuff which i think is sometimes rare. this track has cut-up drums, and some frenetic and intricately programmed vibes work, at least i think they’re vibes, i get very confused with all those kind of melodic percussion instruments. his music is very focused, sometimes ambient and sometimes beatsy, but there’s never much going on, and i mean that in a good way. its good to unwind to if you spend most of your time listening to ‘kitchen-sink’ short attention span stuff, like i do.

Bogenschutzer - Glow (4.78 MB)

i know that the title of this post seems to imply that i’m going to embark on some list-building exercise but actually its just an excuse for me to post a song by my favourite ‘band who released one great ep and then broke up’: sydney’s own ukiyo-e who put out this great six-track ep of organic post-rock that i almost accidentally bought in 2001 (i think) and quickly grew to love. the band broke up in 2002, post-humously releasing a remix album that i found pretty uninspiring. don’t know what they are doing now. this track is the one that sold it for me. when i think about it there aren’t many other bands that i have been so heavily into that have broken up, leaving me disappointed and slightly angry. i wish ukiyo-e weren’t in that category.

Ukiyo-e - Anjouan (6.68 MB)

to make up for my absence over xmas and new years, i’m giving you seven songs in seven days starting with this treat from janko nilovic, an extremely prolific composer and arranger in the late 60s and 70s. his tracks combine jazz with funk, soul and orchestras. his arrangements are complex and exquisite, never more so than on the album rythmes contemporains originally released in 1974 and more recently re-released by cosmic sounds, a london label who also have a seemingly exhaustive janko nilovic discography at their site. if only i could find a similarly detailed biography; its hard to find out much about the man, except the cosmic sounds site seems to imply that he is still performing live. elements of janko nilovic tracks appear on nearly anything that i’ve put together in the last 6 months - take the janko out of faux feels and i’m not sure what you’d have left…

Janko Nilovic - Xenos Cosmos (6.82 MB)

i got totally festive. i hope you all got festive like i did. a few more kind people on the internet have been preaching the faux pas gospel while i’ve been away, including ron over at the music review site textura who has written a review of the ep that includes the words ‘tremulous’ and ‘propulsive’ and also the phrase ‘flirts with tastelessness’ (i think thats a good thing) and also five capital Cs. C is one of my favourite capitals, so thats awesome.

at the moment i’m in my bunker working on new stuff which will be coming out in a couple of months time. i’m taking breaks to eat, sleep, watch ‘black books’ and watch this awesome jason forrest video.