welcome to iamfauxpas.com. when i initially decided i needed a website to accompany this faux pas bollocks, of course fauxpas.com was at the top of the list. that was about 3 years ago - then, as it still is now, the domain name fauxpas.com was taken. go there now - it is, as it was back then, a meaningless page of nothing links designed purely to lead you down the rabbit hole of fake websites and advertising clicks, a database-driven parody of the noble content-driven web, engineered to raise micro-revenue from click-based advertising - often literally income by the cent - by capitalising on a common phrase and, perhaps, the naivety of casual internet users.

anyway. now and then i check to see if miraculously fauxpas.com has become available, perhaps a gross lapse of concentration on the part of the owner - i know its ridiculous to even bother with this charade, given that domain registrations of this sort (of common phrases) are handled these days by bots and automated programs not by real actual people. i’ve even gone so far as to investigate the process of domain brokering, whereby a third party can contact the owner of the desired domain and submit an offer on your behalf for buying it from them. i think at one point, a year or so ago, i even paid a fee to a company to submit an offer on behalf, i think i put in some paltry figure in the hundreds of dollars, only to receive a counter-offer in the vicinity of $20,000.

the world of domain brokering is, like many things, disgusting and intriguing. i have in my travels come across this little article on a man named kevin ham, who built a $300 million empire simply by buying up expired domain names during the dot com crash, and then reselling them later to businesses and copyright owners trying to reclaim lost territory on the net:

At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn’t say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names — the so-called “root zone” file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day.

So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day’s list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later — at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.

check out the full article here. i’ve now learnt that i’m probably lucky to even have iamfauxpas.com, and that i’m going to be here for a while. incidentally, fauxpas.com.au was, until recently, the domain of a certain NSW punk band also named faux pas, but i think they must have called it a day because it is now available. so, go on you aspiring kevin hams, snap it up. i’m done with the business of acquiring snappy domain names. i am faux pas.

lee tran lam hosts a lovely radio show up on sydney’s fbi 94.5fm, its called local fidelity and it covers australian music - “wallflowerish bedroom singer-songwriters, beat-slick electronica, nerdy post-rock and much more” to be more specific. i tend to think of myself as a nerdy wallflowerish bedroom post-beat-electronica-rock songwriter, so i was very happy recently to run through a Q&A session for her new local fidelity blog.

go here to read some secrets that i’ve not yet divulged on this blog… like how beverly crusher keeps a watchful eye on me while i work… there’s also check out interviews with darwin’s jane woody and melbourne-via-japan indie hero alexis aka the motifs…

meanwhile, i’ve had a good weekend. on friday night i vanquished some possessed townsfolk, they were innocents but they probably had it coming, more specifically i utilised my cloud of bewilderment, which is incidentally what most people fall into after listening to a faux pas album, huh! then on saturday i got a year older, on sunday i watched battlestar galactica: razor, this morning i vanquished the vista that had come installed on my new notebook. feeling nerdy. i love it. now, back to the business of making music. today i continue fiddling with this band’s material and this band’s material. hopefully i can show you the results soon. in fact, head back to this post if you want to hear a sneak peek of the former.

here’s some songs. note the similarities in rhythm between ratatat’s absolutely sublime bjork remix, and t-fire’s 70s nigerian funk. then, if you haven’t already, completely lose your head over wax stag and how amazing their song ’short road’ is. then track down the remixes.

MP3: Bjork - Wanderlust (Ratatat remix) (download at motel de moka)

MP3: T-Fire - Will of the People (download at, well, here)

MP3: Wax Stag - Short Road (download at bibabidi)

the quote in the title is from philip k dick’s valis, thanks to the wfmu blog for reminding me of that one…

here’s my new guitar, check it out, i bought it on saturday, like how i said i was going to:

what can i say, chris willits‘ little guitar/ableton lesson inspired me, i now have a guitar midi synth thing coming to me (in parts, from hawaii and japan) thanks to ebay. all this purchasing feels so right given that its my birthday in a couple of weeks.

here’s what my guitar sounds like:

here’s what it sounds like, in context:

and here’s me, as chris willits, playing my shiny new guitar:

i had a great long weekend. i spent three days in the country with 11 of my best friends. i wouldn’t normally mention this kind of thing here, but today i’m making an exception. thanks to all of my friends, without whom i would probably be dead or at least on another planet.

i’ve taken a break from working on music for the last six weeks. that kind of break is unheard of for me, its been a mental health break, because i’ve been having something akin to a musical mental breakdown - coming on very slowly, like water on a stone - for about the last 6 months. the break has been good. now i’m psyching myself up to get back into it. for anyone paying attention, i really really hope the new album will be finished and released by the end of the year. i never wanted to take this long to make and release music, and i never want it to take this long again. but i’m hoping that the long wait and the hard work will be worth it.

MP3: Faux Pas - Minimums

i gets an email from bob zeal, who is currently working on a faux pas film clip (and blogging the process), which say:

made a wormhole this morning. sending a ship down it now :) i don’t know what stephen hawkings was on about. it’s not THAT hard!

a photo posted at the zeal blog provides more clues. for real, this is like some “dark knight” style viral marketing puzzle type shit for you. for example, at 54.3, a cat will be seen. at one point there will either be a long shot or a long shoe. and at 55…. re-unite! i’m not sure exactly what bob is re-uniting in this film clip, but i know i’m not the only one who hopes that it will be korea:

speaking of cats, and space…

i want to make sure that the next faux pas album goes number one so i’ve hired a crack market research firm - they research not just crack markets but also other markets - hahahahaha - to help me get my promotioning strategies right. one of the first things they have done is analyised the web traffic (or, as they call it, the “transiblogitor index”) of this very blog. i just got the first of their detailed reports sent through from head office:

so there is about 2% of you out there that are probably feeling left out recently, so i thought i’d make your dreams come true by dropping on this blog some details of the new faux pas album. because if theres ever something that doesn’t make me want to vomit, its when blogs breathlessly get jacked about upcoming release details. so here it is!

the new album is called “7 wolves 1 shirt” and it is a concept album about my favourite t-shirt. its a story about how if you look at a thing for long enough, a thing can look like seven things. how long? six months. it is also about girls, and about things like death and suicide, and also about serious shit like politics. of course several songs are specifically about how i feel now that the howard government has been ousted, because not only is this a seriously fresh topic to make music about, its also an endlessly fascinating topic to make music about! there is also a track about how i like to go to clubs, and one where i sing “la la la” a lot

guests on the album include eric the badu, rockhoreographer and tom selleck. it goes for 7 minutes and will be released solely on atari cartridge format. i will not be giving away the album for free, or saying you can pay whatever you like, or anything like that - i will be going a step further and will actually be paying every customer 5 dollars to ‘buy’ the album. this is about art not money, and you know, this is the new model and we all need to look to the future. no-one wants to pay for music right now when they can get it for free - i am one of few pioneering artists that understand that in the future, no-one will even want the music unless they are also getting cash as part of the bargain. its about the money and about the hos. it will be a limited edition pressing of 80,000. stocks may not last.

‘7 wolves 1 shirt’ will be released on august 7 - it will be released by EMI but distributed by pigeons. without further ado, here is a sneak preview of the hot artwork put together by melbourne’s own style icon yerock:

and here is the lead single from the album:

MP3: Faux Pas - Robin Uthappa Theme

my man in adelaide bob jarvis has spent a big chunk of time in the last few months making a film clip for my song “coach” - and he is just now starting to leak some of the details out onto the internet via his blog. check out this behind the scenes still:

yes. i’m blogging on my blog about a guy on another blog who is blogging about me! i have dreamed of this moment ever since the invention of the internet in 2003.

check out bob’s blog for more. it is worth mentioning at this point that bob records music under the name zeal, and as some of you probably already know, one of his songs - “yumi and the sky” - appears on my changes ep from late last year. he has recently uploaded to youtube some live footage from a gig he did in adelaide on valentine’s day - so, here check out this live stripped back version of “yumi and the sky”, and if you like what you hear head to bob’s site and buy his ep. i like to blog about my changes friends

visit the faux pas myspace to hear my remix of “yumi and the sky”

i’ve just gotten my copy of the new pikelet ep in the post, its really good. it is released on a label called sabbatical recordings that specialises in short-runs of local experimental artists. pikelet makes music by looping her voice, accordian and percussion and et cetera. if you were to make a lazy comparison you could maybe draw a line between pikelet and argentinian lady of the loop juana molina. i’m sure more apt descriptions of pikelet’s sound are out there - oh hey look, here’s one that i ripped off from the sabbatical website -

While the narrative elements of her self-titled debut are largely absent here, vocal harmonies continue to play a key role alongside melodic cycles and deceptively complex rhythms. Pre-Flight Jitters also pursues some unexpected textural qualities and compositional approaches, while maintaining the rich layering typical of Evelyn’s recent work.

check out this track “bryson” from the release and then make sure you head to the sabbatical website to pick up one of only 200 hand-numbered copies of the EP (mine is number 40).

MP3: Pikelet - Bryson

regular readers of the blog would know that i remixed one of evelyn’s tracks “bug-in-mouth” and that the remix appears on my latest EP. for the sake of having something to talk about i thought i would tell a brief story about how the remix came about. basically i became really obsessed with that song after hearing it late one night on the radio - i managed to track down a free mp3 of the track on last.fm (sorry but you can’t download it any more)… i resolved to get in touch with evelyn and ask her if i could get the original recordings of the track to play with - the separated parts - but for one reason or another it didn’t come together. late one night i was working in the edit suite of the production company of a certain australian ex-tv-game-show-host when i was fiddling around on my laptop with the mp3 of “bug-in-mouth”.. a few hours later the track was more or less finished. it was like 3am or something, and i was working alongside the hum of spooling tapes and buzzing tv screens. but yeah it was such a natural thing to play with, and fun to work with the track as a whole and not with the separate pieces of it, if that makes sense. it made me try some weird and wacky things, and i discovered a couple of oddball techniques (mostly involving the loooping and stretching of vocals) that i’ve been using a lot since, while working on new stuff.

so in conclusion, thankyou evelyn morris, and thankyou glenn ridge

you can hear “bug-in-mouth” at pikelet’s myspace, and you can hear my remix of “bug-in-mouth” at my myspace or on the changes EP or here:

my knowledge of computer game music is far from encyclopaedic, in fact its barely even a footnote on a random page of the great book that is computer game music, it is more like a barely legible scribble in the margins, in greylead pencil, that reads something like “you don’t know shit about computer game music”

but a couple of things have happened this week that makes me think i need to get my head back into that.

first up, while preparing to interview luke disasteradio - yes, theres that name again, he pays me in virtual synths every time i mention his name on this blog - i rediscovered my favourite commodore 64 computer game theme, commando. if you ever played c64, you probably played commando. when we played it during luke’s interview, one of the other announcers came in to the studio saying “i’ve played this game… what is it?!” its a song that never leaves you. this game i played a lot when i was a kid, though i could never get past the first few levels. i didn’t realise it at the time, but now i’m positive, that the reason i kept going back to it despite the fact that i was so shithouse at it was obviously just to hear rob hubbard’s amazing theme song over and over and over:

MP3: Rob Hubbard - Commando

what is amazing about this track, and i guess about all computer game music from this era, is how the composers could make such compelling and innovative songs using only the barest of building blocks. they were under such restrictions in terms of the sounds at their disposal - they were literally constructing music out of the tiniest shards of electrical noise. so they squeezed everything they could out of melody and rhythm. recently several groups have rather infamously started transposing the old commodore 64 game themes into orchestral arrangements.. eg the c64 orchestra… but there is actually something about the original distorted proto-digital sound that i find really inviting and comforting. but i guess thats all about memory, as most things tend to be, that really its just the way this song evokes so vividly a piece of my childhood, thats why it gets my rocks off so severely.

the second thing thats happened - and i see this to be some marvellous confluence of mystical energies that led these two things to happen in such temporal proximity - or perhaps it was a coincidence - it actually happened just a couple of hours ago when i got an email from marcus asking me about my EP changes (i hope he doesn’t mind me quoting some of his email here):

Incidentally, have you ever played the video game ‘Secret Of Mana’ or heard the soundtrack? The first time I heard Changes on the radio it immediately reminded me of a song from that game, which is why I like it so much. Listening to the rest of the EP, it sounds like it was very ‘Secret Of Mana’ inspired. Is this the case, or is it a fluke that they have similarities?

this is seriously one of the coolest things i’ve ever heard about my own music! i’ve managed to do a little bit of googling and tracked down some info about secret of mana, which i’ll be honest i haven’t played before. i think it was a super nintendo game - i never hooked into that generation of consoles to be honest. for me it went C64… xbox… neverwinter nights. and not much in between. except for civilisation. railroad tycoon 2- that shit is hot! but i digress. secret of mana:

The game’s soundtrack was composed by Hiroki Kikuta, and is perhaps his most famous work[citation needed]. It is known for its variety of tunes which tend to focus on the use of percussion and woodwind instruments, ranging from a lighthearted dwarves’ polka to a somber, wistful snow melody to a tribal-like dance.

my music sounds like a dwarven polka! if only! though i will admit - “tunes which tend to focus on the use of percussion and woodwind instruments” - this is not so far from the mark given the liberal doses of sampled drums and flutes that litter the track “changes” and also just most of my stuff in general. anyway, thanks so much marcus for making my day!

the secret of mana soundtrack can actually be downloaded in its entirety from this website. i’m just starting to give it a few spins and some of it is great stuff. here are a couple of samples to whet your appetite:

MP3: Hiroki Kikuta - Dancing Animals (Goblin Theme) (from Secret of Mana)

MP3: Hiroki Kikuta - Into the Thick Of It (from Secret of Mana)