every week, a previously unreleased mp3 from the world of faux pas - remixes, retakes, demos, off-cuts, whatevz
existing at the intersection of twee glockenspiel pop, homespun banjo riffage, & “bug powder dust” - here lies “yumi and the sky” written and performed by adelaide’s
zeal (aka rob jarvis), mutated by faux pas (aka me). also featuring the tidy banjo and glock stylings of aleks (aka aleks) of
aleks & the ramps on certain likely instruments. this remix slays giants. bona fidey. dig the cornelius choirs and scandinavian vibes. woah! spread it like nutella!
although maybe the hairy-foot wearing hobbit mc is probably taking the piss, its pretty clear that the intention of at least some of these guys is not to make fun of or parody mainstream rap, but to take rap as a means of expression to talk about their peculiar and oft-ridiculed existence. serious or not, i can’t help but take issue with the purple-mask wearing mc declaring that rap is just like an attribute in d&d - “you might have a 3 and then you can’t rap, or you might have an 18, and then you’d be a great rapper.” i’m not sure if this is true, i would argue that a score of 18 (charisma presumably) would simply give you a charisma bonus to your performance skill, and that your proficiency at rapping would be more directly related to how many ranks you had put into that particular skill, what level bard you are, circumstance modifiers. what i’m saying is make sure you clear it with your dm before the game session.
he is faux pas is sponsored by wizards of the coast and is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of youtube
i knew that when i got back from overseas i’d be spending a bit of time catching up on things i missed in 2006, but it seems to be all i’m doing at the moment. the knife’s “silent shout” is getting a good run in my house right now. also, i’m finally discovering
juana molina. its funny, at one point last year i was at an fnac cd store in bordeaux, and i was trying to pick a few cds to buy that we could listen to in our hire car through spain, but i just seemed to be uninspired, nothing leapt out at me. i ended up leaving having made some decidedly dodgy selections - including phoenix’s latest, which was disappointing, and the new basement jaxx, which was abominable - but i do remember lingering at one point over the juana molina cd ’son’, not really understanding what had drawn me to it. i wish i’d bought it then, and fallen in love with it earlier.
her music is warm and strange, hypnotic layers of her vocals combining with elements of electronica and organic shifting noises and sounds to create something thats pretty hard to ignore. her back story is really interesting too, but it has been told many many times already, by better worders than me. the best place to start is at
woebot.tv. anyone who is hooked into the simon reynolds/k-punk/etc axis of music blogging to-and-fro will probably be familiar with the words of mr woebot, well he’s also now regularly releasing streaming video episodes that put a voice (if not a face) to the woebot name. his interview with juana molina can be found in the recently opened woebot.tv archives and is a great introduction to her music. it also features a great live performance.
faux pas recently featured on what is easily the most tastefully pimped out music blog on the net,
undomondo. my questionable viral e-marketing scheme (ie find blog that i really like, & email them with breathless desparation) wins again! undomondo unearths great forward-thinking music - you won’t find any mind-numbingly generic blog house there - and you should visit there every day, like i do. they do a weekly podcast that i’ve just started listening to and its great. mutual e-back-slapping rules.
and now some much-loved songs in a retro style, from me to you, because i’m feeling generous.
1. dutch funk band covers neil young classic featuring mad steel drum solo. no further explanation needed. in fact, that album cover there should be all the explanation you require… this song never ever fails to inspire me, & never gets tired and i’ve been wearing out for a few years now, since i found it while randomly trying to make someone a “river”-themed mix cd:
3. 1951. young jazz piano legend-in-the-making
ahmad jamal, recorded live in a bar. my favourite thing about it is easily the steady sounds of glasses being chinked in the background, people murmuring, occasionally a muted exclamation of appreciation or a hint of a jeer… the silence is alive.
every week, a previously unreleased mp3 from the world of faux pas - remixes, retakes, demos, off-cuts, whatevz
so.. this should last about three weeks
i’m starting things off with a monster. a few people have been asking for it so here it is. its the 60 minute mix set that i put together for triple j’s
mix up program last week. i’m calling it “the roland gift”.
it turns out that a number of people weren’t able to tune into the stream of the set while it was up at the triple j website last week, mostly mac people i think. i’m so sorry about this, because we all know that mac people are precious and delicate flowers. i, alas, am not a mac person, i am a cold and brittle twig that exclusively uses the
atari 800.
now you can download this mp3 onto your heathen macputers and find out what the rest of the world has been shrugging about.
artists featured in the roland gift include: prince, tunng, out hud, roots manuva, christopher cross, riton, ratatat and the electric indian. and a lot of, you know, the usual dj set bollocks. filter sweeps! whooosh! beat mixing! shazam! i posted the tracklist
here in a previous post, where you will also find the mix compressed down to six minutes. time-shortening is the new thing!
i’ve not read much critical response to the new air album but i’m guessing a lot of it is negative or at least “blah” - i think there is something vaguely easy listening or ’smooth’ about air that leads to a lot of people dismissing their work as being ‘nice’ but not interesting. but then there’s statements like
this - “With Pocket Symphony I’ve finally come to terms with the cold, hard fact that a return to the sounds of Moon Safari is unlikely. I’ve also stopped hating them for that.” what a toss. hey man, if you want moon safari again, go and buy yourself a second copy, voila. anyway, to my ears this record heads well and truly back into the territory explored by moon safari - the experimental peaks and gaps that littered 10000hz legend & talkie walkie have been smoothed over, there’s no “radio number one” or “run” on this album, nothing to jar the listener out of the smooth consistent flow of characteristic spaced-out ‘air-ness’. and there’s the same spacey atmospherics, kraut-rocky grooves & jazzy turns that characterise every air release (but especially their debut), here on pocket symphony sounding better than ever, better production, more varied and interesting instrumentation, and more focused songwriting. its a cruisy listen, & you can engage with it at any time or else just let it happen around you, just like moon safari. listen to pocket symphony opener “space maker” back to back with moon safari opener “la femme d’argent” - they are like the same person, la femme d’argent the naive unfocused younger version, space maker the wizened, focused, distilled older version. i mean thats whats kind of nice about moon safari, its naive, a band just starting out (i guess), but you can’t compare it to pocket symphony which is so fully realised and crystalline. AIR! you know, if you want to hear moon safari, get it off the shelf and put it on - that record has already been made, its not going to be made again. for the record i never really understood why people were so down on stereolab either, stereolab reviews always seemed obsessed with “yeah this stuff is ok, but why can’t they just make music like they did at the start?” - like they’d settled into some complacent rut because they actually started making interesting music. i went and bought old stereolab albums based on these reviews - they sucked! bring on “sound dust” & “margerine eclipse”!
incidentally, the new air track left bank really makes me think of nick drake’s river man, i don’t know why, i think its that i just love the sound of an acoustic guitar shifting from major chords to minor chords (and back again) in unexpected ways or ways that “shouldn’t work” but they do.
why are world cricket’s minnows (ireland, canada, united arab emirates, whatever) always called minnows?
thanks guys and girls for the feedback on my mix for triple j on saturday night. my two favourite responses were “sounds were overflowing out of my speakers like a torrent of fluid” and “i really couldn’t give a flying fuck about triple j”, so people obviously engaged in different ways.
people have been asking where they can hear the set - it is currently streaming over at the mix up website which is here:
http://triplej.abc.net.au/mixup
you have to skip about 2 hours into the “10pm - 1am” stream to get to the faux pas set - about the 123 minute mark. here’s a
direct link. i might put it online for download sometime in the next week.
hi guys. i know this is short notice but if you have nothing else to do late this saturday night than tune in to your radio, whether you be driving around town with your spunky night mates, or at home alone with your cask wine, tune into australian youth behemoth triple j at midnight, to hear 60 minutes of my favourite songs on their mix up program.
so to be concise - a 60 minute set from faux pas, between midnight and 1 am, this saturday on
triple j. triple j streams online for those of you fortunate enough to be living in what we in australia like to call “the rest of the world”. the set contains 30 songs by other people, 1 old song by me, and 1 new song by me. new song!
when they asked me to put a set together, i decided to attempt something that i’m pretty sure has never been done before. what i did was i started with a song that i like. then i found a second song that i liked. then, and bear with me because this gets confusing, what i did was i took the end of the first song, and the start of the second, and then - through a series of complex manoeuvers that would take far too many diagrams to explain here - i kind of segued (or “mixed”, you might say) from one INTO the other. it was a highly experimental procedure, but what i ended up with was some kind of “transition” between the two songs. i then moved on to a third, then a fourth, and so on. i think this is truly a watershed moment in the history of muzak.
now, i understand that not all people can spare 60 minutes to listen to a mix, let alone from midnight to 1am on a saturday night or, as it were, a sunday morning. thats why i’ve created a special “modern people” edition of my mix, for you modern people out there, as it were, who have not time to spare, as it were. with so many other mp3s demanding your attention on the internat, i’m doing you a favour by condensing this mix from a barely listenable 60 minute faux-dj-set, into a completely unlistenable mess of broken rhythms and textures that runs for less than 7 minutes. thats right - 32-ish songs in 7 minutes. who has time for anything more on this wild ride we call life!
Tracklist:
N Price - Wring Up Lot
Lickin Hearts in “The Cure” - Did the Whirl Own? (Chop Hit remix)
Slick Archie Hurtin’ the Teen - Window Deth Hirl (CATHY remix)
A Bent Sexx Jam - Wary A Beak
Clean Haute Jam’n - Hi Skinning In Fred’s End
Gnut N - Ore Sits
IRA - Urn
Do U Hut? - O Dear Mud Brush, Are There 100 Roves Or Only 1? For Ducky Drows Shift And Touch, Um.. “It.”
Sam Tom - Larry Navel
Lolo - Do Fear A Camping Barrel (Is Cod remix)
J. Arson Forest - My 35 Favourite Sunk Pongs
Leo, Ned, SOS - Max Tan
Jack Shits on Crab and Open Mud - Oi, Pa Greg!
U Vast Roo Man - Gloin, Class O’ Shit (Fish Putt Tronk remix)
How Head Mow - O, Telly Hemp Room
The Shave-A-Clan - Fence, I List You (Sonic Lure remix)
A Funny Boing In N Scale - NY John Come Home
Spock Rank - Um, BP?
Cris Cross Hoth Rep - Wide Like The Rind
Shat By Roody - Grilly Noel
Myths Who Hand Dutch R Steel - A Bare Fury an’ Jury
I, Tron - Cook and Cold NES
CK: Be - Greet Alp Aid
Wake Barter - Eat E, Thebes Laser
AAARTTT - Wait LCD (Ave X remix)
Hi Ram - Hake To Tim (Y Chat? remix)
Oh Pitch - Rove and Rove (O, U Bag Man remix)
Suede Lad - Thingo Be Smells
Willis Moans On - Voila! A Melt!
A Fax Pus - The Seer Fort
Lectern, I C India - Herd It Thru, Hat (i.e. Grapevine)
Pa Sux Fa - Hang SEC
flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. i am familiar with this elusive feeling, and concur with a recent description of flow which emphasised the fact that past, future, self and other concepts dissolve when so focused in the now.
examples of when flow has occurred:
- when i swam the english channel
- when i entered the roland gift and came first
- when captain picard travelled to an alien planet and finally got some, after nigh on 10 years of not getting any (time stood still and crusher doesn’t count)
- when i watched captain picard travel to an alien planet and finally get some (time stood still)
- when i saw commander adama with a moustache
- when i found spock’s brain.
this following musical/visual combination may lead to you experiencing flow, it did for me. don’t be scared, embrace the now, the future will continue after the song finishes… or will it…. in my time machine:
