pictured left: walter becker aka gotye
pictured right: tim sheils aka steely dan

MP3: Gotye - Coming Back (Faux Pas Bellheadless remix)

previously:
005 - Faux Pas - Wayfare demo
004 - Lon Suder - Untitled
003 - Faux Pas - Jaffee (Midwinter Song)
more…

never trust robots
don’t leave them with your kids
don’t invite them to play bridge

if you’re a human being, we’re in business

now that the focus of the blog has shifted squarely towards long-winded rants about psychological concepts illustrated by pictures of captain picard and self-indulgent clap trap concerning the finer points of spontaneity and self-editing, i seem to be finding less time to write about some of the cool local (ie australian) music that i chance upon. i’d hoped to be doing more of that around here, through some perhaps misguided or naive notion of ’supporting the local scene’ or whatever. so here is a bit of a raggedy collection of the bands that i have found and enjoyed recently, mostly via that dreaded myspace. each of these bands deserves an inspirational blurb that i’m lacking the inspiration to write at the moment, but more so than that, they deserve your time, so set yourself aside an hour or so and go check them all out. please.

this list isn’t exhaustive or authoritative, its an almost random collection. but i think it stands as pretty good evidence that not everyone in australia is making the same old stuff.

Barrage - website myspace

Blastcorp - website myspace

Cleptoclectics - myspace

Nick Huggins / Touch Typist - website myspace

Oddfoot - myspace

Solo Andata - website myspace

Spoonbill - website myspace

Sunnyboy Bops - myspace

progress continues.. i’ve had a couple of good days down here in my beachside hermitage, i’m making sounds i like, which are starting to arrange into layers, and then into ideas that seem like they might at some point become wholes, which in turn seem to carry the promise of being able to be threaded together into larger wholes or concepts which i may then be able to dither into a shiny disc and someone gives me ten dollars or something.

did i say wholes? i meant whales.

i’ve been listening to the field a lot in the past couple of weeks, after reading some interviews with him describing his process. “I use the computer as a sampler and I steal milliseconds from a track that I then rearrange and add new sounds and effects to.” SOUNDS EXCITING. thats a quote for the one-pager, no doubt. sure, so this most underwhelmingly accurate description doesn’t exactly imbue his music with much glamour, but it also pretty neatly describes my music too i guess. so perhaps we are brothers in trying to make exciting music via unexciting methods.

at least one part of that sentence isnt true - his methods excite me, particularly his approach to spontaneity. in another interview: “I can’t go back to a track. I have to make it when I start. If I don’t then I know I won’t make the track at all. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes a whole night… Live audio, the guitar, I don’t want to have to go back and mix it. Sorry [laughs].” i admire this. i wish i could work like this. that initial burst of energy ( flow) when something is first coming together is by far the most exciting part of the whole damn process of making music, and every single moment after that is less and less interesting. sometimes with my stuff it feels like i spend 30 minutes coming up with the thing i love, and then 10-20 hours hacking away at it until its ‘acceptable’ - mixing it into something ‘better’, all the while trying desperately not to kill the thing in it that i loved in that first burst of spontaneity. so much time is spent moulding it into Something Good, and after a while i begin to question whether its just me that i’m trying to please when i tweak this or that EQ or remove this or that offending beat… i want to be able to share with people that initial burst of excitement, do i have to sit through hours of mixing and tweaking to be able to warp what i have on the screen into what i hear in my head?

maybe its just that thing where you have to rehearse how to be spontaneous - maybe after another 10 years of making spontaneous music i’ll have it down to the point where i don’t need to go back and re-edit and re-mix things into Something Good, i can just sit down and bang a song comes out, and i instantly love it and it just stands as this live document of an experience i had, an intimate experience between a lonely man and his machine. this strengthens the case for the theory that i am currently developing, where i will probably only begin to make works that i am truly proud of (right down into my balls) in 10-20 years, and that i should just get used to being vaguely unsatisfied with my own work until that time comes.

hey, imagine that, if i WAS to actually re-edit and re-mix everything i did into Something Good. then we’d have a winner on our hands. utah saints, the field.. this post is like some weird subliminal kate bush tribute.. i am going insane.

here, then, is something that came out of me last night, presented here before that tricky, necessary, tedious, and destructive/contructive process of editing begins, mostly because i’m as curious as you are (no, wait - its probably a safe bet that i’m much more curious than you) as to how this version will stand up against the ‘finished’ version, whenever that happens. will it lose its edge, will whatever ethereal spontaneity that i attribute to this un-sanitised version be gone by the time that evil part of me deems it ‘appropriate for consumption’? or is that spontaneity just imagined anyway, something only i hear in it because, you know, i was there when it happened?

O, product of last night, pre-edit, still containing misguided ideas and bad decisions, barer than the average labored faux pas monstrosity (?), also known as “this is what happened last night after i watched spicks and specks and before i watched the larry sanders show”

MP3: Faux Pas - Wayfare (demo)

previously:
004 - Lon Suder - Untitled
003 - Faux Pas - Jaffee (Midwinter Song)
002 - Zeal - Yumi and the Sky (Faux Pas remix)
more…

MP3: The Field - Silent

MP3: Manitoba - Lemon Yoghourt

i put this manitoba album on the cd player at the family christmas once, and my nan turned it off when this track came on because she thought the cd player was skipping

MP3: J Dilla - Waves

& how about this: woebot’s video of an avey tare and panda bear instore performance; (circa “feels”? maybe.)

thanks to maudie at pbs fm for letting me take over her show last thursday night for 90 minutes or so, also big thanks for letting me stick around for the whole graveyard shift and listen to her selections, a whole bunch of electronica and idm-style stuff that i have not heard before, was a lot of fun. the playlist is here; the faux pas part of the playlist starts at the field and ends with grizzly bear. you can check out the whole 4 hour episode of “dappled beats” online, through pbs’s recently launched radio on demand… i wish every radio station had radio on demand.

———

in other news, i’m related to bjork! me and damo suzuki! who knew.

its late notice i know, but i’ll be sneaking into pbs fm later tonight to join the almighty maude brady for her graveyard show “dappled beats”, wherein i’ll be playing a bunch of my favourite songs out across the melbourne airwaves (and the internet via pbs fm’s online stream). it starts at 2am (Australian eastern standard time), about six hours from now..

pbs fm is broadcast in melbourne on 106.7 - the live internet stream can be found here.

here are two songs that i like. one of these i probably will be playing tonight on maude’s show, one of these i probably won’t be.

MP3: Michael Jackson - Human Nature

MP3: YACHT - See a Penny (Pick It Up)

http://www.richardcheese.com/rtech.html

every week, a previously unreleased mp3 from the world of faux pas - remixes, retakes, demos, off-cuts, whatevz

MP3: Lon Suder - Untitled (2001)

previously:
003 - Faux Pas - Jaffee (Midwinter Song)
002 - Zeal - Yumi and the Sky (Faux Pas remix)
001 - Faux Pas - The Roland Gift mix