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.

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.”

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.

some music from around the blogs. i like blogs.

silence is a rhythm too has a neat little mix from kelpe, a nice mix of ambient and textured beat type stuff, the kind of thing thats nice to put on for a sunday afternoon when you are sitting in the backyard having a cup of tea. bumps, tape, gonzales. incidentally these will be the names of my first three children.

a mix from geologist of the animal collective. some cool stuff. mainly notable for the fact that it starts with “steppin out” in its entirety and then goes into a very cheap and nasty - but effective - re-edit of a phil collins song that is so cool i’d never even noticed before. “i’m not moving” its called. i tracked it down (the re-edit) here at a blog specialising in the “long seventies” called art decade - there you’ll also find the original phil collins track. just don’t tell phil. i’m guessing he is not down with the sharing of the files.

speaking of blog aggregators - rich mcf at rose quartz is doing a particularly good job at the moment of picking out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, vis a vis blog music… check out this playlist for example. consider yourself shouted out to, you vivacious kiwi.

aside from that - and heaps of other things - the new daedelus record continues to be awesome. and i’ve got the new cassetteboy on pre-order. woooo…

Video: Cassetteboy vs The Streets

i was talking a bit about record stores - specifically about the unique pleasure of finding a faux pas cd in a second-hand store for the first time - well i have to thank matt for pointing me towards this great interview with steve kulak, the man behind the title film and music stores (in sydney, and more recently, melbourne):

“People walk past the shop window, and they stop and then move, and then they stop again. They see an erotic book cover, and a Woody Guthrie thing, but then they see Bob Dylan, and then they see ‘El Topo’ and they say ‘Wait a minute’. The curiosity gets them in. Most people come in and don’t understand anything that’s there, but they’re willing to take a risk, a gamble - because there’s this edifice, this building, that represents a physical belief in taking that risk. They make a purchase … on hope.”

“So it’s a store for optimists?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

read the whole thing.

this is why the internet was invented.

slash shreds

santana shreds

eddie van halen shreds

i’ll be finishing off the r&d series of posts before the end of this week. in the meantime, please load the cannon in anticipation of mass excitement on the faux pas frontier. us two want to become one unit.

unit unit unit

before we get stuck into this 18-post mother of all faux pas blog events, just a quick round-up of some things on the internets. i know some of you are dagging around here waiting for new posts, praying to the gods mccartney and cornelius for some kind of sign - blog absence can be shocking, yes, please pull yourselves together. enjoy these recommended products.

a random mp3 i came across i’ve been getting a lot of kicks out of: eDIT - Artsy Remix (feat The Grouch) from over at audiversity. this song makes me want to kick people in the nuts. anyone wearing cardigans, floppy fringes, will oldham beards, more than 3 hoodies on at once, aviators, etc. that guy i always see on the corner, with the cigarette, in the skinny jeans and the stripey t-shirt. ironic moustaches, homemade t-shirts, scarves, modular mix cds. oh hang on i own some or all of those things. ah anyway, songs that denounce ‘being cool’ are themselves usually cool, even if in doing so they posit their own coolness in the place of said ‘uncool coolness’… “may all men posit their own coolness.” i do believe martin luther king said that, or maybe it was morrissey.

palms out covered rjd2 and m.i.a in recent installments of their “ sample wednesday” series. that is always entertaining. jimmmy….

stylus magazine with a good primer on “ when indie labels go digital“. well worth a read. on the same tip, something i only recently got pointed towards by a friend - tunecore.com. they offer digital distribution into iTunes and other stores for indie artists and artist-run labels, and instead of taking a percentage of your earnings (like traditional distributors do), they just charge a flat fee per recording. holy new business model, batman! as my friend pointed out “it looks legit”, and it does have some big names attached… at least you know that if they somehow screw you out of your royalties, or go down the tubes without paying your money, some of the guys from the cure, the pixies and tapes n tapes will get screwed too. perhaps thats some consolation - although it is true that the pixies are from the seventh dimension and are therefore not effected by either conventional weapons, or dot com crashes (well known fact). but yes, this is not really an endorsement as such, but its interesting to look at. at the very least the tunecore faq has some facts about itunes payment schedules and price points that makes for interesting if somewhat nerdy reading.

my fave playlist-based mp3 blog motel de moka consistently has the goods. check out this playlist to catch some roam the hello clouds, esg and a completely ball-tearing amazing breakestra-style recording of afrika bambataa’s “planet rock” by german funk band breakout. the roam the hello clouds album is, by the way, finally out and its amazing, especially since it was recorded in only one day. australian laptop/trumpet/drums combo who have, if you are into that kind of thing, the best ‘ dry indie humor band faq‘ ever.

other music i really been done enjoyin’ and you should get on with the njoyin of too
artanker convoy
cleptoclectics (more on him soon)
hot chip… again… don’t fight it just love it
jj cale “troubadour” album, thanks justin one tard for the recommendation

lastly, the radio show that my friend and i started a few weeks ago, we are now making our show available from our website for mp3 download. when we figure out the technology - technology! - we’ll get our heads around this podcasting caper too. so, if you are in melbourne tuesday night, tune in on 102.7 (this week with guest anonymeye) - or else stream it live at rrr.org.au or download it after the fact at toandfro.com.au. i promise i won’t be blabbing about this show every week, only occasionally, well actually whenever i bloody feel like it. support public radio, bitches!

so. all this should keep you occupied for a bit. go check it all out then come back here and wait til later in the week, when my mega multipost super blog event will hopefully begin. there will be mp3s a-plenty.

and for the hell of it - its almost time to break out my ping pong table again. so before you come onna my house and challenge me to a game, here now learn about the fine art of table tennis:

holidays are things that you earn after long periods of working really hard doing unfulfilling tasks, which is why the idea of me going on holiday right now seems somewhat farcical. but thats exactly what i’m doing.

when i return in a couple of weeks, i’ll be starting an 18-part series of posts (for real!) where i’m gonna go track-by-track through a sixty minute set i’ve recently assembled for the good folks at funky web periodical research and development - my mix is going to be featured as part of their next issue, and for numerous reasons i’ve decided to get jiggy with a full-on track-by-track rundown. there’s gonna be a bucketload of mp3s and a lot of me talking shit, because if you ask me, there hasn’t been enough of that around here in the last couple of months. a lot of youtube greatness, but not enough of me talking shit.

in the meantime head over to r&d and check out their last issue before they update it with the new one - and while you are there have a dig around the mixes section to find hidden gems from mountains in the sky, hey convict! and will holland aka quantic among many many others. these guys is good guys.

while i’m gone, you have homework. get your hands on mccartney ii:

apply liberally to effected areas twice daily. if problem persists, please see a doctor in the seventh dimension.

MP3: Paul McCartney - Secret Friend

oh, one more thing. does anyone want a faux pas t-shirt? cos i might be getting on to that soon.