i’ve been busy working, both for the man and on the next record, so i haven’t had the chance to gush about two blog-worthy events of the last week. firstly, i saw deerhoof on friday night at the northcote social club here in melbourne. they were great. my only criticism is that satomi is too short. you see it seems at the nsc that unless you are in the front row, you’ve got buckleys chance of actually seeing anything besides the occasional hint of a haircut. i’m not a tall man, but i’m no shorty, and i seemed to spend a lot of the night on my tiptoes. so tall dudes, get thee behind me. also, i think deerhoof’s drummer’s drum kit consisted solely of a snare, hi-hat and kick - or at least thats what it sounded like. he was amazing - on top of his frenetic stop-start style of playing (which i totally dug), the way he manipulated his snare to get so much variation of sound was awesome. and on the record there’s plenty of crashes and cymbals, but live he managed to replicate the sound using only one hi-hat. awesome. of course, i could be wrong, i could only really see his head. my disco were cool too, possibly too cool for me, but they sounded great albeit too loud.

then on sunday night i went to the last show for a band called on the mountain, at the arthouse. this is a band that my friends and i started when i was in high school, fuelled by hormones and driven by a desire to emulate our grungy idols. i left the band when school finished, but it kept going, refining itself into what my good friend described as “neo-grunge.” (art-grunge maybe?) until sunday night anyway, when they wrapped it up after ten years. but let me get to the good part of this story: i’ve never been to a band’s farewell show before, i’ve never been to a farewell show for a band i used to be a part of before, and i’ve sure as hell never been to a farewell show for a band that i used to be in where damo suzuki from can miraculously appears, gets on stage, and jams the fuck out for fifteen minutes. how damo got to be there is another story entirely, but yeah, though i may not have vomited in his toilet, i did shake his hand.

Deerhoof MP3s 1 2
On the Mountain - Road Movie

there is some seriously good writing happening out there about music, the history of music, the current state of music, popism vs rockism, hauntology (?), and i’ve been spending a lot of the last week catching up on it. similar to the way that great music has a way of making me feel like i shouldn’t be wasting my time making my own stuff, i’ve found that the great music analysis and rigorous debate that goes on out there on some of the more literate music blogs has a way of making me feel completely inarticulate about an ‘art form’ that i’m supposedly intimately involved with. i’m no bozo, but i’m starting to feel like maybe i don’t think enough about what it is i’m doing, that i should be able to defend my art by using a lot of big words, or that i should be able to place what i’m doing in some kind of historical/musicological context.. for some reason i get defensive when confronted with the kind of analysis that cuts music to the bone, but that probably just reflects my own inability to properly engage in these kind of arguments.

but yeah, if you want to read about things like the impact of p2p and file sharing on music, the slow death of rock thru retro-fetishism disguised as new-pop, musical genre as racial divide, click click click click for some of the best in the business. just beware - if you, like me, are attempting to actually make music you may soon find yourself deconstructing what you’re doing, and end up in a big irrelevant, apolitical, uninteresting hole. maybe i’ll become a grime MC.

fog is andrew broder and i’ve been following him ever since i heard this song, which was given to me on a mix cd in 2002 when i was haunting the borderline-obsessive mixtape website www.artofthemix.com. probably because i heard them at about the same time, i always think of yesterday’s capitol k track and this track like they are brothers or something, like twin brothers separated at birth who meet later, in their twenties, to find that one has become joyful, optimistic, celebratory and the other has become doubtful, thoughtful, melancholy. and yet THEY HAVE THE SAME DNA. anyway as much as i love both brothers, ‘pneumonia’ is the one that gets me in the guts. if i was trying to explain my identity to aliens who can only communicate via indie music, this track would have a prominent position on the mixtape that i would use to illustrate my self. yep.

andrew broder, as you probably know if you are the blog-trawling type, has done many interesting projects since this including a collab with why? (more on him soon) and also some uniformly excellent mashup-style things, like his take on missy elliot’s ‘gossip folk’ which is one of my favourite bastard pop type tracks ever. FOG

Fog - Pneumonia

ok today a perfect slice of fractured pop with a side of digital bits. this is one of my favourite kinds of music, happy pop that gets interrupted by electronica and psych elements that threaten to go out of control. but let it be known that i’ve never really dug the flaming lips.

i heard this song in 2002 when i was just deciding that music that jumbled guitars, electronics, drums and whatever all together was actually rad, so this is one of a few songs that i’ll always remember fondly. capitol k is an english dude name kristian - here in australia i really haven’t heard anything about him since his 2002 album, and figured he’d packed up the shop. turns out he has released two albums since island row (which this song comes from) so i’ll have to track them down. he’s moved record labels - island row was released on xl, which i guess explains why it made it to the faraway land of oz when later albums didn’t.

this track is far and away the highlight of the album which actually turned out to be a bit of a disappointment (all the more reason to track the newer stuff down). and it turns out, after some investigation at capitolk.com, that this song was released on an ep as far back as 1999. woah. its held up pretty well.

Capitol K - Pillow