blastcorp aka kris keogh, is a songwriter and glitch technician with a healthy love of both nerdy computer gear and twee melody, formerly based in darwin (where he helped to set up darwin’s happening art-farty nightspot happy yess) and now he is hanging in osaka doing any things, including teaching. here he gets down and dirty with a simple homemade MPC-emulator application on a nintendo DS…

there is something decidedly unreal about this video, in the sense that it is totally unreal (ie like ‘bodacious’) but also that it doesn’t quite seem right. i don’t know if there’s been some kind of post- manipulation on this footage from the good man kris, i don’t doubt his ability to rock the beat so to speak, but there is just something weird about the way his hand moves in this. i like it.

here’s a recent acoustic demo from blastcorp. his voice reminds me of the UK band hood. much more on his website. he a versatile dude!

MP3: Blastcorp - Keep Me Safe at Night

here’s a picture of kris with some osaka students who have recently had their proverbial beats rocked… “had the pleasure of conducting a monome and reaktor workshop yesterday, but not to your usual tech nerds and electronica buffs. the crowd was mainly over 40’s japanese women who conduct a lovely english speaking class in fukai.”

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:

this post is all about handsome men.

christopher willits is an experimental guitarist/producer from san fransisco who puts out releases through the horrifyingly consistent and interesting ghostly international label, here he is giving a crash course on why when he plays his guitar, god awful screeching sounds come out of his computer:

this clip, and the other two in the series - “what you talkin about, willits”, seriously - are worth watching if you want to know more about ableton live. he goes through it at a slow pace, excellent if you’re new to ableton. he is also quite strikingly handsome. i mean, look at his little hat! yes, the sounds that he gets out of his computer are kind of similar to the sounds it might make if you plug your toaster into your computer, but the concept is golden. and when he explains it, i die a little in his eyes every time.

honestly though, its a cool idea, using your guitar to trigger virtual synths in ableton. or even using it to trigger clips or move to different parts of your arrangement, or whatever. i don’t know why i’m not already doing this, because it seems like a carload of honest fun. i actually played a lot of guitars when i was in high school, but pretty much put them all away when i started using computers to make dodgy beats and crap synth sounds. now my fingers are all fat, the callouses are gone, and that only ever faint whiff of guitar skillz i ever had is pretty much gone. but i feel like getting back into it. thats why i’m going out the door, right now, to buy a guitar. wish me luck. guitar sales dudes make me want to excrete things.

i also just bought this on ebay:

many thanks nate from hawaii! if the next faux pas album is a whole lotta guitar synth, now you all know who to blame. nate from hawaii. another handsome man.

my ebay watch list hasn’t been this full in a while. i have an almost uncontrollable urge to shop.

some other things on my radar today:

- the fourth edition of dungeons and dragons was released last week. i am reading through the new players handbook at the moment. its interesting. i’m still yet to work out if i’ll be able to convert my current character - theo, the monk conjurer, who looks like an adult malcolm jamal-warner and can stun foes with his lightning-charged fists and has the power to teleport 10 feet in any direction at will four times a day - to the new rules.

- i’m listening a bit to this guy called donovan. never heard of him before, but i tell you what, i think he’s been listening to a whole lotta of montreal. my mate also told me he did a cover of that butthole surfers song “ hurdy gurdy man“. what a wild and crazy guy! but yeah i’m listening to his album a gift from a flower to a garden. here’s a couple of the reasons why i’m falling in love with it (aside from the fact that donovan is, by all accounts, another handsome man):

MP3: Donovan - Isle of Islay

MP3: Donovan - Mad John’s Escape

in conclusion, adult malcolm jamal-warner. another handsome man:

talk about adult!

i went to dixons and bought “under construction” by missy elliott, because i wanted to remind myself how kick ass she is…

“under construction” is the album containing “gossip folks” and “work it”. more high profile guest rappers than, like, a high profile guest rapper convention. i’d never heard the full album - only the singles really - so little did i realise that she basically yaks the whole way through it, there’s intros, skits, interludes, outros, whatever. its so good to hear her pop in and out and explain herself, do obligatory roll-calls and shout-outs and just generally crack wise:

why there aren’t more artist voiceover on records i’ll never know. or like a commentary track you can turn on and off, like on a dvd? is this some super audio cd or blu-ray feature or something yet? surely. surely the eagles would do it. surely the eagles have done it. i’d do it, except that my voice has been proven to be a major cause of ear cancer

MISSY ELLIOTT RULES!!!:

i also bought three custard records. i figure if i’m going to become a custard evangelist, i better start getting to know my stuff. its funny how dixons and polyester are practically across the road from each other in fitzroy - going into polyester, especially when its full, the record store kind of vibrates with excitement and just some kind of general vibe, like music lives there or something. dixons (its a second hand record store for you, out-of-towners) is like where cds goes to die or something, pudgy white dudes picking through the cd racks like vultures picking through a carcass. trying to find the meaty bits. no-one looks each other in the eye. the store just feels grey, like in the care bears movie when the villains steal all the color and everyone just goes dull and lifeless. scared the shit out of me as a kid.

ok so i’m giving dixons a really bad wrap when instead they are really a melbourne institution. while i was there, of course, i had to look under F, couldn’t help it. and sure enough, there it was - a copy of the changes ep sitting there, looking pretty untouched, probably a promo copy that went the wrong way to someone who couldn’t care less about faux pas - thats a kinder way of looking at it than to think that someone has actually bought it, hated it, and sold it again for a mere $3 or whatever! i often wonder what it feels like to go to a second hand store and see your own cds in the bargain bin. and now i know! it feels kind of… re-assuring?

well anyway, i think they were selling it for 6 or 7 bucks, which is cheaper than you’ll get it from me, so… bargain-hunters, get on it. it could be easy to find because i moved it to the front of the cd rack. yes! thats the kind of lame narcissistic thing i would do!

and you know what, for the record, if you ever buy a faux pas record from me and you hate it - get in touch! 30 day money back guarantee.

lastly, a missy-related curio from a few years back… andrew broder (aka fog) re-imagined certain hip hop a capellas back in the day on a couple of cd-rs he put out called “andrew broder’s modern music.” you can still order them as well as a whole bunch of other cool things - ie fog records and t-shirts - at his website.

“things being stuff….”

MP3: Andrew Broder - Gossip Folks

its been aaaaaaages since i put a post up on this blog just yakking about my favourite music, and also a long time since i’ve had an ill-conceived rant that makes no sense, so i’m doing those two things simultaneously this afternoon, feeling juiced after having just completed a hardcore civilization 4 session. all of these mp3s are either widely distributed already, or not nearly distributed enough, so download, share, and then find ways to support the artists that you love …

before i get into it - its short notice (as usual), but tonight i’ll be appearing on maudie’s show “ dappled beats” over on 106.7 FM PBS FM in melbourne… i’ll be selecting some tunes and talking some crap. maudie has great taste, lots of electronic and leftfield type stuff (check her playlists here) so it should be a lot of fun. pbs fm streams online here.

its the PBS radio festival this week, which means they are hollering for your support. so if you want to directly contribute to a true music-lovers station - and the ’sister’ station to the one that i do my show on, RRR - give them a call and become a subscriber. its cheap, and you win prizes. if you subscribe during maudie’s show (between midnight and 2am tonight) you can have a free faux pas cd! as if thats something you want!

ok lets go:

MP3: Moonbeam - Slow Heart (2008)
this is simply a beautifully produced and arranged piece of heart-tugging minimal techno music. or progressive house or progressive trance, or something, i don’t really know… ‘this type of music’… but this track (by a russian duo) is somehow bleedingly emotive without being too saccharine, and sits just (and only just) on the right side of that line that so much of ‘this type of music’ seems to cross - the line that demarcates heartfelt from tacky, accessible from obvious. a lot of ‘this type of music’ is so utterly boring, and so much of it is so utterly trashy, this track is like 10x the achievement because it is so easy to make bad bad generic music when you are working within a genre with what seems like such strict conventions. it makes me think of one of my favourite albums, “wearemonster” by isolee… although in many ways i feel like that isolee album succeeds so well because it breaks out from the generic conventions that i associate with ‘this type of music’. what is isolee doing now anyway?

every single sound in “slow heart” just sounds perfect to my ears… the cymbal rushes, the… is that a guitar?… the layers of alien technology. anyway. its a late night song, obviously.

see also:
MP3: Sascha Funke - Mango (2008)

a lot of my favourite recommendations of the more edged electronic variety come from leighton’s blog keytars and violins, so at this point i would like to shout out to him. LEIGHTON FROM KEYTARS AND VIOLINS

MP3: Thom Yorke - The Eraser (XXXchange mix) (2007)
this song is almost exactly what i think music should sound like. i mean, i don’t want thom yorke singing on every song, but i think you know what i mean. this is the kind of track i listen to on repeat, studying it to try and unveil its secrets, only to be left confused and a little alienated, perhaps coming to the conclusion that this kind of thing only happens by accident. the case for aleatoric music strengthens.

from one thom to two toms:
MP3: Tom Tom Club - Lorelei (1980)
sometimes i get the distinct impression that the tom tom club is a great secret kept by those in the know. recently i finally tracked down a copy of the self-titled tom tom club album, the one with the hits on it, i’m talking “wordy rappinghood” and “genius of love” of course. the album is basically everything i thought it would be and more - so innocent, so thoughtful, and so great to dance around to in your loungeroom in the middle of an intense board gaming session

imagine listening to this track while playing an intense german board game about farmers in wooden shacks trying to make cows breed and shit. agricola! did i mention its my birthday soon? this track is so totally about farmers in wooden shacks trying to make cows breed. probably also about a girl.

MP3: Regurgitator - Feels Alright! (1999)
another song to go batshit to while you are playing board games. well i guess anyone who knows me knows i have a soft spot for vocoders. who doesn’t? this song has a vocoder. it is from the regurgitator album that we had to have, that no one really understood, called “art”.

regurgitator and custard are two - much-maligned maybe? - bands straight from the heyday of australian alternative music, the mid- to late- nineties, when triple j ruled our tastes not with an iron fist and a copy of NME but with dreadlocks, a devo greatest hits album and a bong. it was kinda cool to be daggy, or at least i imagine it must have been in brisbane, if bands like the ‘gurge and the ‘tard rose to dominance - hell even just the names are hilariously reflective of the times.

i really hope that in the future these two bands in particular - regurgitator and custard - are remembered as being iconic, important, influential bands, and not just some pseudo-novelty pitstop that australian music made in the 90s as it slid - on what, to me, seems like a strangely linear and now obvious progression! - from generic 80s pub rock to 2008 modular (capital M and no capital m) “fash” electro. when the musical archaeologists try to piece together the history of australian popular music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (and surely they’ll only do it as a kind of irrelevant footnote to the history of music in general worldwide), they might be puzzled about how this ‘new electro’ thing took hold in this country, in some ways out of nowhere. thats until they unearth the fossils of a presets concert, the one in 2011 where everyone was killed in a freak concreting incident, immersed and preserved for millenia in some carbonite-type han-solo-type shit… thats when they’ll realise the crowd - you know, all of ‘their people’ - have the exact same DNA as the cold chisel fan fossils they unearthed from back in the late 70s!

pity me my befuddled theses and ill-conceived tea-leaf readings into the future of concreting and electro! honestly even i’m not sure what point i’m trying to make here - all thats really important here is that there’s a whole lot more ideas and risks being taken on that “art” album than on those two modular albums - the hoodied elephants in the room that is electronic music in australia - put together.

perhaps this is a good time to remind you that one of custard’s more famous songs was a song called “music is crap” which basically was about aliens coming to earth to tell us how crap our music was.

MP3: Custard - Music Is Crap (1998)

Don’t matter what you like, aliens hate it…
And I’ve found they dig the silence, hate the sound

sometimes when i listen to radio, i think i’m one of the aliens…. and the guys at work have been telling me recently that i’m hating more than usual… but you have to voice strong opinions in order to combat the dark forces of homogeniety, isn’t it. even if you have to force them out of you. or couch them in poorly chosen allegories.

i guess at the end of the day its all personal and subjective… its my perogative, to paraphrase bobby brown… and ahh i guess i just really like risk. this “new electro” or whatever you might like to call it, in this country, is about as risky as eating a sandwich. hegemony is bad if you appreciate forward-thinking music! kick against it. its also really fashionable and i don’t like that either. in fact i hate it! look ma! hatin is easy!

somewhere in another universe there is a tim who can tie all of this together - from aleatoric (or “dice”) music to dice-rolling board games, from risky fractured music to homogenous fluoro cardigans.

in conclusion… risk.

“electronic” music in australia. choose which side you are on, dudes!

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

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)

MP3: Disasteradio - Stairdancer

i saw wellington NZ’s disasteradio at a pretty small venue last night, and it was pretty awesome. if you are in melbourne i recommend you check him out tomorrow - he is defying the laws of time and space by playing two shows in the one day, first at this thing called the applecore backyard festival in thornbury, and then secondly at 2am at roxanne parlour. rock n roll. he’s a one man party. we just did a pretty extended interview with him on our radio show, which you can download here. check his myspace for the playing times tomorrow - or simply catch him when he comes to a town near you.

i gotta say i’m not really a strokes fan but this little clip (taken from camp a low hum 2007) is a pretty good example of the amazing inciting potentiality of the disasteradio performance. i think it might get a little crazy down at roxanne tomorrow night. i think luke is a bit disappointed there hasn’t been some serious stage invading, so if you make it down there tomorrow night then, well, get on that. invade a stage.

speaking of camp a low hum… camp a low hum 2008 took place a few weeks ago over there in new zealand. if you’ve never heard of this (i hadn’t until i read this a week ago) you completely have to check it out:

Camp A Low Hum is pretty small (no more than 700 people), most bands play twice and it’s BYO, but perhaps the key to its success is that it’s not about “what bands are playing”. Blink ensures this by not announcing a line up, but rather pushing the unique vibe of the festival. It’s certainly a difficult thing to sell, and before the first camp in 2007 many people (including myself) felt a bit too sceptical about travelling to a campsite an hour north of Wellington to watch a mystery band line-up. As it turned out, however, Camp 2007 was a total success, with many of my friends coming back raving things like “I can’t explain why it was so good but it was seriously the best weekend of my entire life”. After that I was basically sold on Camp 2008.

the lineup - not officially announced before the camp started - included the brunettes, the phoenix foundation, the ruby suns, liam finn, disasteradio, pikelet, & many many others. i ended up at radio new zealand’s website listening to this great live broadcast that they did from the camp - it opens with a great little candid interview with festival organiser blink and his sister. so choice.

on sunday i’m accidentally going to the laneway festival, melbourne’s “little festival that could”. i’ve not been before and wasn’t really thinking about going until a birdie gave me some tickets. friends who can get you free stuff are the best kind of friends! but seriously… i figured the line-up was just basically not up my alley at all, but it turns out i’ve actually got a lot to look forward to: did you know there’s an electronic stage? i don’t know how much fuss has been made about it, but the schedule for the ‘red bull music academy stage’ includes dan deacon, flying lotus, harmonic 313, plaid, steve spacek, declan kelly, qua..! i know where i’m hanging out all day. though i might have to sneak a peek out to the main stage when a certain belgian gets out there, because from what i hear i’m in for a bit of a thrill…

but yeah this RBMA electronic stage - how is this not news? isn’t it big news to have these kind of dudes all in town at the same time? have i been living under a rock, or is it just that in melbourne people don’t really make a fuss about electronic music? oh hang on, i have been living under a rock. strike that.

i think the RBMA stage is exclusive to melbourne too. so… sucked in, other dudes.

LOSIN IT