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

be afraid, europe, be very afraid…

it seems bob from zeal has been on a similar journey rediscovering old 8-bit video game themes recently. bob is currently digging the 1986 nintendo game labyrinth, which was of course based on the bowie-in-spandex movie of the same name. head to bob’s blog for a ridiculous 8-bit version of magic dance…

LUDO FRIEND

hey bob! check this out!

i myself grew up on the c64 version of labyrinth. i could never get very far in it though - this was a pretty recurring theme for me playing commodore 64 games. i was not a good gamer. i tended to give up when things got hard, which is a philosophy that i have tried hard to carry over into my adult life. things would be much easier if david bowie visited me in a freaky dream

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:

last night i entered the tardis…
to chat with fenella kernebone on her show the sound lab on triple j radio.

we talked about my new ep “changes” and played a few tracks from it, including a brand new remix by cleptoclectics!

MP3: Faux Pas on the Sound Lab

this is the only place where you can hear the brand new cleptoclectics remix of one of my unreleased tracks “live shine see”. its pretty cool, although triple j’s audio streaming quality isn’t great. just wait til you hear it at full quality! but don’t be kvetching like a hommus, brother. the remix will be released on december 12 as the exclusive bonus track on the itunes release of the “changes” ep. hold up, magneto and titanium man! solid!!

i’ve edited out the other tracks we played and just left the talking, because i love the sound of my own voice - but you can stream my music at better quality at last.fm or myspace, so go there if you’d rather hear just the actual music. aside from the clepto remix, the tracks featured during the interview are all available on the standard shiny disc in cardboard wallet version of the “changes” ep.

more on cleptoclectics soon - tom and i are currently involved in some kind of self-congratulatory repeating blogger back-slapping feedback loop, and its my turn to say nice things about him. he recently called me an “internet juice mongering dynamo”. ha! i’ve always considered myself more of a crimson dynamo…

now here is a picture of me and my wife juliette upon first hearing the cleptoclectics remix of “live shine see!” see how despite a few hours on the hippie lettuce i’m still mildly shocked by its awesomeness! marvel at my darling wife as she allows herself a knowing grin, despite still entertaining suicidal thoughts following a disastrous hairdresser situation!

this
is
declan kelly

and yes, its a bit short notice, but tonight (in about an hour or two) you can catch me on the airwaves in melbourne, popping in for a chat on declan’s show against the arctic on 102.7FM rrr. i’ll be selecting a few tracks and talking a bit about my new ‘changes’ ep. rrr radio streams online here.

also, a big hello to anyone coming through the blog today who watched gotye guest program rage last night… its true, he was seen wearing a faux pas t-shirt, talking up this very blog, and guest programming a faux pas film clip. friends will be friends, right to the end! in order to extend the mutual back slapping, let me just say that it was possibly the best selection of clips i’ve seen someone program on rage. totally awesome!

lastly, here is patrick stewart. he makes me happy.

more music and rants later in the week…