thank me later

i’m going to be gracing the airwaves of pbs fm tomorrow morning (monday), exchanging words with the lovely nina-marie petrik on her show recovery. if you are in melbourne, tune in to 106.7 FM between 9am and 11am, we’re gonna have a good long chat about various faux pas related things as well as about some of the other music i’ve been bigging up recently on this here blog.

if you’re not in melbourne, pbs fm streams its broadcast online via this link.

when you travel through europe you go to a lot of museums and galleries. i tried to avoid as many old stuffy places as i could (i’m looking at you, louvre) & sought out ‘modern art’ museums where possible. what is modern art? a lot of things it turns out. sometimes its progressive, multimedia, forward-thinking. other times its just giant slabs of rusty metal curved into shit boring shapes. needless to say, as someone born after 1980, i’m more interested in things that are interactive, pop-culture focused. things that appeal to my characteristically short attention span. i don’t really dig big slabs of colors, or metal boxes, or giant slabs of rusty metal carved into shit boring shapes.

so something that stood out to me in contrast was christian marclay’s “video quartet”. it seems kind of pointless to talk about here on internet-world, as its not something you can view in any format online. its a video installation currently set up at the tate modern, in london, so its kind of hard for you to get an idea of it unless you can get yourself down to the tate. for most of us that would involve an airfare worth a couple of thousand dollars. anyway, its a great concept - four side-by-side projector screens play visual samples from musical parts of films from the last 50 years. meryl streep ‘playing’ the violin gets mashed up against richard dreyfuss’ kids orchestra from “mr hollands opus” while audrey hepburn sings moon river over the top - all side by side. marclay has been fusing music into modern art for decades. some of his earlier work included reassembling the fragments of shattered vinyl into weird new (still playable, apparently) pieces - like a very tangible audio version of burrough’s cutups.

“video quartet” was put together at home using final cut pro, no professional video editing equipment required. i think i could definitely live with being commissioned to spend a few months editing together musical snippets from the history of western cinema. where’s my pen, i’ll get started on my grant application…

as much as i enjoyed it, in the end i wanted more from it then it could give me, & i was left feeling a little disappointed. i think as someone who tracked the rise and eh of bootleg/mashups when that happened a few years ago, and hearing the best that movement had to offer in terms of the interesting and unexpected juxtaposition of sounds & messages never intended to gel with one another, i definitely could see a potential for the creation of ‘new meaning’ that was kind of lacking in “video quartet”. the little snippets of ‘musical cinema’ are so evocative, but didn’t really seem effectively matched to each other. it also wanted for real ‘musicality’ - rarely is rhythm established in the piece, repetition of musical/visual elements is used only sparingly, and there is little attempt to blend musical elements together to create ‘new music’ - anyway, i was left thinking that it was a cool idea that might have been better executed. kind of like “babylon 5.”

status ain’t hood interviews james murphy of lcd soundsystem:

“I never made a living making records. And I never expected to. I still don’t expect to. We go on tour and I lose money. But I actually get to make money DJing. I make a living DJing, straight up. My bills are paid by DJing and by production work. But I haven’t made money on production work because all the money just got reinvested in the studio for years. So I make money as a DJ. But I was so broke for so long that not selling a lot of records doesn’t phase me of affect me or bum me out because I never sold a lot of records. And nor am I 23 years old thinking it’s my time. My time was 1993, and I didn’t do anything with it, so this is a fucking bonus. This is a free shot as far as I’m concerned.”

the whole interview makes for good reading

in other news: paul simon in a hoodie.

MP3: Lady Sovereign - Hoodie (Basement Jaxx remix)

those 4 people seem to have made their minds up about me before even arriving at my website…

in other timcentric news, there’s a q+a with me thats recently been posted on the website for melbourne community broadcaster pbs fm. so, read it, i guess.

a couple of posts ago i mentioned machine translations - here’s my favourite MT track for you to enjoy. i don’t have it available for direct download, i notice that machine translations aka j walker doesn’t have any mp3s available from his website, and also doesn’t have a myspace, so i suspect he’s not the hugest fan of direct mp3 sharity. anyway, i’m sure the more committed of you will find a way to download this file from my server, but lets face it, thats only going to be 5 of you anyway, so thats probably fine with j, and me.

i’m not going to be embarrassed to call “poor circle” a true indie pop classic - and its aging well, can you believe its 5 years old! i got all of my cds back out of storage last week (after 12 months) and this album was one of the first that i went searching for, through all these cardboard boxes. i’ve missed it.

Machine Translations - Poor Circle (from Bad Shapes, 2002)

The is a so delicate expressions, to tread in klaveret. About Tim Shiel been Swede believes I he had taken the artist name Klavertrampet, but now is he from austrialien so he calls himself Faux Pas instead. Tim does most of it correct. He has a good-looking homepage where he is little sufficiently funny, he has an of his better tunes that nedladdinngsbar mp3 in decent quality. Tim seems ogilla myspace and to last hyfsat musiknördig. He advices about good tunes on your blog and länka to your myspacesida with the words “Lose the will to live here: “. Already where has he half in, but late is the musics he been busy together hugely delicate also.

The is difficult to describe exactly what pursues kinds’ musics the is only. The as listened&while street on last.fm thinks the goes to describe with among other thing the words: blender, communion, DJ, dryer, easy listening, electronic, experiment alder, funky, intercourse, progressive coat, samples, six&toaster. Torktumlarmusik? Yes, the perhaps the is.

MP3: Nick Huggins - The First Letter of Your Name

MP3: Nick Huggins - The Sea Adrift

down in point lonsdale, melbourne, australia, a guy called nick huggins is recording delicate folk music, filling the spaces between acoustic guitar strums with banjoes, found sounds & air. his voice brings immediately to mind another pastoral troubadour / recording wizard from melbourne machine translations, and i wonder how many similiarities can be drawn between them: both of them working in home studios in “remote” locations (look, pt lonsdale is remote if you live in fitzroy or north melbourne), both of them tell fractured folk-ish poetry in immediately identifiable (not to mention sweet) voices, australian accents!, interesting & carefully rendered instrumentation and arrangements. & like machine translations, nick is also involved in something of a local network, recording and collaborating with friends, side projects, et cetera.

anyway, this is something that feels to me uniquely local. but it is also amazing, gentle music, ‘gently’ experimental but with a universal appeal. its intimate without having that intentionally lo-fi shoddiness that sucks life out of so much so-called freak-folk that i think i might otherwise get into. instead there is a careful devotion to the sound of each song. his older material is available to download from his website and he’ll also trade you a homemade cd if you give him “something special” of yours. these two tracks will appear on his next album “shipwreck”, for which he has already worked out a professional marketing plan: “Maybe i’ll leave them all on a train and see where they end up, like those people do with books. Send them off into the sunset.”

machine translations, incidentally, has a new album - his seventh - coming out later in the year.

Nick Huggins website
Nick Huggins MySpace

MP3: Mirah - Make It Hot (YACHT Over Remix)

more YACHT tracks here

MP3: Kaigen - Curse ov the Kaigen

more mp3s at uberlingua.com

MP3: Daedelus - Sundown

elsewhere on the internet:

- yacht rock! i’d heard about this but have now finally tracked it down. from the same channel that brought us house of cosbys (and the story of channel 101 is an interesting one in itself, if you haven’t caught that particular meme yet) yacht rock is a series of shorts that peel back the ugly skin of that smooth brand of white-boy session muso pop from around 1979-1984 (think toto, doobie brothers, steely dan) to reveal the “true” stories underneath. check the hilarious first episode, wherein the true story behind the writing of “what a fool believes” is told. suffice to say it involves two badass motherfuckers called hall & oates. also check wikipedia for a definition of ‘yacht rock’.

- palms out sounds reveals the samples behind your fave basement jaxx songs. and 2 weeks ago they did daft punk! warning: hearing original samples for songs you like can sometimes ruin the “Mystery”

- when i went to uni i did a class on ‘pop music’. the main thing that i remember now was that my mate wrote a 10,000 word essay on the KLF, with pictures! but still it wasn’t nearly as cool as this - check out the week-by-week rundown of electronic music, as curated by wayne of wayne&wax… (this page serves as a pretty cool springboard to a whole bunch of interesting online articles and sites too..)

- an interview with kevin barnes aka of montreal, from remix mag. i like it when people whose music i am into do interviews in slightly nerdier, gear-related kind of magazines, because you get a bit of a peek into their process, & equipment (still haven’t listened to hissing fauna though)

- in aforementioned pop music uni class i read many articles by a certain simon reynolds whose blissblog is now a must-read: this past week he has been riffing on “hipster metal”… its news to me, but apparently hip pseudo-intellectual musicos have been flocking to metal in droves. but i don’t even understand grime yet, or dubstep! cycle back through the last weeks worth of simon’s posts and get yourself a wild, fractured education on the state of metal, or rather on the state of hipster/critic interaction with “metal”… seriously, this time next year, even you will be a metalhead, so get the jump on it now and get in first so you seem cooler than everyone else when the metal wave hits in earnest

- while we’re on the subject of terminally cool things, i like that klaxons song! and this video is cool! somehow i’ve avoided the new rave “is this anything” rhetoric/debate (by just not engaging with it or really understanding it) and just jumped straight into hearing a song and then liking it. thats hype the old-fashioned way! that track, and junior boys “in the morning”, and ratatat “wildcat” are my current unholy trinity of unstoppable pop songs on repeat. that klaxons song, to paraphrase something i read somewhere else, makes me want to be a promiscuous teenager in fluoro pants.. i’m guessing thats the appeal

- lcd soundsystem’s james murphy starts blog and then is assaulted by mobs of vicious comment-ers… sickburn