been quiet for a bit - if you’re reading this, it means i’ve successfully moved web hosts. iamfauxpas is now proudly slutted up against the unbearably fetishisable (mt), and we’ll see how that goes. so far, its sexy.
speaking of sexy. idol. i got into it this year. what fascinated me this year of all years? drunk astroboy? andrew g’s obvious battles with the wardrobe and hair departments - dude did his best to show how NOT to wear a suit as a man who isn’t stick thin like drunk astroboy. unbutton your jacket, dude, i kept screaming at the television. andrew g cuts a fine figure but spent most of the season looking like a barrel wearing a suit with an andrew g head stuck on top.
i was also bewitched by ricki-lee to some extent, i’m still not entirely sure why. strike that. i know exactly why.
did i ever tell you i wandered the streets of perth one night with a microphone and a cardboard andrew g mask? yeah that was ME interviewing you while we queued up to get into that bar
i didn’t really pledge allegiance anywhere during the show’s run but i think in the end my favourite was the husky melburnian foghorn leghorn.
i was as intrigued by his shocking resemblance to foghorn leghorn as i was disappointed by his failure to sing “campdown races” not even once during the course of the show.
for real. mark spano, your sex was on fire. buff dude from “the lost boys”, your sax is on fire. (thanks yerock)
interrupting the play-by-play on that inquiet remix - sunday afternoon seems like a good time to drop a few notes on what music i’m listening to at the moment. nothing too fancy, just feels a little overdue.
traffic sounds leigh (host of 2ser’s tape relay who, as far as i can tell from stalking her on mess+noise, is currently whooping it up with some kind of vincent chase lifestyle) recently put me on to eero johannes, for which i’m very grateful. he is a finnish dude signed to planet mu who is the torch-bearer for an underground movement of funky scandinavian chiptunez weirdly named “skweee.” the skweee movement moves into the spotlight, with a recent feature event on sonar and, of course, a wikipedia entry.
its scandinavian, so yeah, of course its too cool for itself and way too much fun. here’s a video sampler from skweee label harmonia (eero johannes from about 1:46 with skweee anthem ‘we could be skweeroes’ - yeah, seriously):
so fun, funky, so nerdy.
what else is around here… i went out to a bar at QV last friday night and the DJ played diamonds on the soles of her shoes, technically a tood terje edit but i didn’t figure that out until later. so i went and found that, and its dumb fun. then i went and found about 20 other todd terje edits, and couldn’t really figure out what the fuss was about. same DJ played this weird holy ghost vs the message thing that was pretty bad but reminded me what a mind-blowingly great sound “hold on” has.
i’ve been getting into a couple of tracks from a label/website called moodgadget.com - a label which, as far as i can tell, has several of their artists on extended loan to ghostly (mux mool, jdsy, reflecting skin). ghostly swim was such an amazingly strong compilation (and free too!) and one of the tracks thats really holding up for me from that comp is from moodgadget’s mux mool. not sure exactly how to track the threads on the moodgadget/ghostly connection, but anyway moodgadget put out a compilation of electronic artists earlier this year called “the synchronicity suite” which acts very much like a companion piece to ghostly swim, and has some great finds on it - the greatest being, easily, a track caleld “glad i met you” from d. gookin.
i can’t quite get into the alexis taylor record, its hard to figure out what its trying to be, if in fact its meant to be anything other than a collection of castoffs and throwaway recordings (which i think essentially it is meant to be). covering mccartney “coming up” seems obvious but its hard to hate such a loving rendition. alexis taylor’s “coming up” and max tundra’s “coming up” are like very odd bookends that now sit on either side of that early 80s mccartney pop gem.
ahhh. the new kieran hebden vs steve reid is cool, more engaging than the earlier collaborations i think. its cool that they are just putting out whatever they do, you might not enjoy every record but you can hear their process developing which is fun. trying to get into the new skeletons record but its even harder to listen to than the last. i gave the last record a lot of latitude i think because i was so enraptured by the more accessible tunes. this one… i hope it grows on me.
These hats are awesome :3
i became completely obsessed with this song a couple of weeks ago. it holds within it the secret of all music, and indeed, life and time and space. you think i’m joking? i want to throw away whatever ideas i’ve ever had about music and just start a new movement based only on what is contained in this song. you think i’m kidding? i want to coat myself in honey and jump from a tall building onto a giant piece of sourdough. you think i’m fooling around?
inquiet is a lovely chap named sam who founded melbourne’s rad diy label brothersister records with a bunch of his talented friends. i asked sam if i could remix a song from the record that he just put out - which is called “inq beyong”, by the way, and is really accomplished and good - and he said sure, so thats one of the things i’ve been working on lately.
i thought i’d do something new here on the blog, something i haven’t done before. its probably pretty obvious listening to the end result, but my music is iterations on iterations on iterations. thats not unusual, and potentially not very interesting either.. but lets see anyway. i keep a pretty good record of the way songs mutate as i work on them. my creative process with music is very much, um, every couple of days throw some new shit at the wall, and eventually you end up with a wall covered in shit, and hopefully it sticks and starts to smell rosy. often its just shit.
ANYWAY over the next couple of weeks i’m going to post up five different versions of my inquiet remix, starting with the results of my very first sit-down with the project, and then ending with a “finished product”… as finished as anything i do ever is (here’s a hint: it never is). not to say that i’m the wizard of oz, but this does feel a bit like opening the curtain and letting you see my hideous inner workings - its not necessarily pretty but maybe someone will appreciate it. it might be interesting to track where the different parts of the song move in each iteration, hear some of the differences in the mixing and arrangement as the track changes, and get a bit of an idea of how i work. that is, if you are a massive nerd.
ok. so, lets start with - version 1: september 25, 2008, which is about a month ago. i’ve been listening to sam’s record for a couple of weeks since its release and getting really excited about wanting to play with some parts. so i sit down for a couple of hours, record some guitar, dig out some parts from an old bread track, and this comes together. also in the mix at this point - a fleetwood mac drum machine, and some ethereal sounds from thin lizzy (you’d never pick either sample, its fair to say)…
note to self: don’t send copy of new faux pas album to the age.
“son, we don’t take kindly to your folk around here…. jimmy, pass me the new kings of leon”
the negative review of qua’s new record that appeared in last friday’s age is an absolute shocker: dismissing one of melbourne’s more humble and unassuming musicians as a “3065-postcode hipster“; equating his virtuosic production and composition to that of a “14-year old kid with a Mac“; and more or less saying that his album sucks because it doesn’t sound like Air or Daft Punk.
this is probably the kind of thing that should just be left alone - perhaps it’d be best for this review to simply be something for cornel (qua) and his mates to chuckle about, and then move on and forgetabout it. and don’t get me wrong i like critical reviews, even of my favourite records. but they have to be a lot more thoughtful than this.
the thing is, for me, this review is symptomatic of the australian mainstream music media’s lack of respect for music that actually pushes the boundaries a little. i used to think it was a bad thing that most of the country’s more interesting music gets ignored by the mainstream music press - now i’m beginning to wonder whether its better to be ignored. note to music editors: if your reviewers don’t understand “electronic music”, and if this is how you’re going to write-up one of the more respected electronic producers in the country - then please just leave it well enough alone. we can continue to play amongst ourselves and you guys can keep lauding the fashionable haircut rockers, shallow synth-pop combos, and heartbroken singer-songwriters.
what worries me most is that this might be the first time many age readers have heard of qua - and its a horrible and completely out-of-line (if mercifully brief) representation of him and his music. make your own mind up about qua at http://myspace.com/quamusic
the review can be read over at the to and fro blog, where you can also read an elegant dressing down of the review from my radio cohort dave, along with (more of!) my two cents.
and yes, these are just the personal rants of a couple of emotionally invested dudes who want to stick up for a guy whose music they like. we’re just mouthing off, but hey, thats what blogs are for. perhaps next time a reviewer decides to write a review that basically amounts to a not-so-thinly veiled attack on a kind of music they simply don’t like, they should consider blogging about it instead. we expect more considered responses from professionals.
a must-read article over at wired.com, surveying the effectiveness (or rather the damage done by) the RIAA’s five-year litigation campaign against individual p2p users. over five years, the RIAA has sued over 30,000 Americans for piracy - and only one case has actually made it to court:
Despite a fallow legal landscape, most defendants cannot afford attorneys and settle for a few thousand dollars rather than risk losing even more, Beckerman says. “There are still very few people fighting back as far as the litigation goes and they settle.”
“It costs more to hire a lawyer to defend these cases than take the settlement,” agrees Lory Lybeck, a Washington State attorney, who is leading a prospective class-action against the RIAA for engaging in what he says is “sham” litigation tactics. “That’s an important part of what’s going on. The recording industry is setting a price where they know you cannot hire lawyers. It’s a pretty well-designed system whereby people are not allowed any effective participation in one of the three prongs in the federal government.”
only one RIAA file sharing case has gone to court - that of minnesota mom jammie thomas who was last year ordered by a jury to pay over $200,000 for sharing 24 songs on her home computer. that verdict was overturned last month when the judge from the original case had second thoughts and declared a mistrial - so a court victory for the RIAA is still proving elusive despite having had 5 years to land a guilty verdict.
30,000 pirates settling out of court with the RIAA for a few thousand dollars each - that amounts to a sum of money but surely not even remotely enough $$ to cover the costs of their ongoing litigation campaign. never mind the fact that the money is not redistributed to the artists whose music is at the heart of the debate. the litigation was never about the money, but just about instilling more of that homespun fear into the already beleaguered hearts of americans:
The RIAA admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort… Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a “general sense of awareness” that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is “illegal.”
yeah, a “general sense of awareness” that if the RIAA decides on a whim to match your IP address to your kazaa profile, and you happen to have been sharing a couple of sade tracks and maybe something from lenny kravitz, you’ll be paying them a monthly stipend of $110 until february 2013.
the most surreal aspect of this - something absurd enough to make me think twice as to whether its some kind of piss-take - is that litigation targets can settle their lawsuit online at www.p2plawsuits.com:
This site will guide you through the settlement process for your case. You can pay the settlement by credit card, using either Mastercard, Visa or Discover. If you wish to pay the settlement by cashier’s check, you will need to telephone one of our settlement representatives.
In order to process your settlement, you will need to have your case identification number. That number appears above the salutation of the letter sent to you by the record companies.
is this for real? or are anti-RIAA crusaders subtly trying to undermine the litigators through the art of really lame web design?
here is the full wired article on the riaa’s 5-year litigation campaign.
He bought a coffee at Starbucks, where a young woman said something nice about “30 Rock.” “I do feel I’m entering that Clinton phase,” he said after we left. “I’m fifty. There are women who’ll go up to a young movie star and they’ll look at him, like, ‘There are certain things I really want to do with you, and it’s pretty plain to anyone why I’d want to do them with you.’ And then there are people who look at me now, at my age, and they’ll look at me and the look is ‘I can’t explain why, because it’s kind of strange . . .’ It confounds and perplexes even them. ‘In spite of the fact that you don’t look like a young leading man anymore, I’d quite like to throw you down on this blanket right now.’ A bit of that.”
…and a particularly succinct (if perhaps a little breathless) pro-Obama editorial. if you know any swing voters, send them to this link…
By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.
i’m very excited that obama is going to be the president because he is going to fix climate change, terrorism, the economy and basically eliminate famine, injustice and evil. this will take about 2 weeks. then he will take us aboard the mothership and we will all transcend into the singularity.
something else that got my attention over the weekend: a new dvd documentary on arthur lee and love is coming out. hooray!
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November 25, 2008 
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