URKEL
Urkel’s personality is perhaps too abrasive for him to function in a management capacity. but he would definitely win points with the hipster crowd for his wardrobe & glasses

UNCLE JESSE
sure Jesse has charm, but lacks organisational skills. however: can fill in on congas at film clip shoot

SCREECH
similar to Urkel i think Screech could best support the band in a sartorial role

CARLTON
a solid option. he’s organised, efficient, and has an “in” with Jazzy Jeff

OTTO
has own bus & can supply drugs – potentially an ideal candidate

ALEX P KEATON
pros: ruthless, entrepreneurial, money-minded. cons: Republican

BALKI
knows and understands the European market

i’ve been busy

i’ve remixed a song by gotye called “somebody that i used to know”

Gotye – Somebody That I Used To Know (feat. Kimbra) (Faux Pas remix) by Faux Pas

speaking of gotye, i had the pleasure last weekend of playing on the stage of the concert hall of the sydney opera house as part of the debut of his 10-piece band. its such a joy to be part of this awesome group of people. for the rest of my life i can point at the opera house and say “i did a gig there”

thanks to gotye VJ and super-friend jean poole (aka sean healy) for the photos – for more photos and a behind-the-scenes wrap up, check out sean’s always educational blog

speaking of sean, he is the man that has taught me all i know about VDMX/visuals, so he is to blame for a lot of the projector tomfoolery that i am incorporating into my time shield live shows. i’ve got a few gigs coming up that you might want to come along to if you are in melbourne:

Friday August 27 @ The Workers Club
THE TOWNHOUSES (Album Preview) + WINTERCOATS + TIME SHIELD + FOX & SUI

Sunday August 29 @ Grace Darling Hotel
SUPER MELODY and DARREN SYLVESTER (US tour farewell show) w/ TIME SHIELD

Friday September 9 @ Grace Darling Hotel
MONTERO 7″ launch + TIME SHIELD + SUPER STAR + DJ CLEM BASTOW

Friday September 16 @ Buffalo Club/ROABGAB
RAT VS POSSUM (single launch) w/ HORSE MACGUYVER, TIME SHIELD, NO ZU DJs

if you haven’t been to a time shield show… its sort of like this…

and its sort of like this…

oh yeah and i also wrote a photo essay called “time shield vs leather jacket dude” which you might enjoy

til next time
http://twitter.com/timshiel

I will make no excuses… by Mei Saraswati

instantly i liked it, downloaded it, cut it into pieces and started building a song around it. i got my guitar out. it became this kind of contemplative experimental folktronica piece. a day later, i uploaded what i’d made back onto soundcloud. people liked it. more importantly, mei liked it. we’d never met and i didn’t ask her permission to use her voice – so it was a relief when she said she loved it.

Rhythm King Mega by Faux Pas

curious about why i had been compelled to go into such laidback sonic territory, i got thinking about my favourite ambient/zone-out type records. this led me to making a playlist, which soon enough turned into a mix. then i remembered tatyana, a blogger from moscow who had been asking me to put together a mix for a russian music website, follow me radio. i thought this mix might be perfect. i sent it off. that was yesterday. today its online, to be heard by 100s of russian music fans.

i can’t wait to tell mei that her song is in this mix, on this website. we don’t know each other. i will tell her about it probably by sending her a link to this blog post, by commenting on one of her soundcloud songs.

every now and then i get pointed towards columns and articles where various people vent their spleens about the damage that they think file sharing is doing to the music business, and to music itself – most recently this one on the wire, and this one on mess+noise. when i read stuff like this, all i really hear is “i don’t like what The Internet has Done to Music”.

what i’m also trying to say is – i like what the internet has done to music. i LOVE what the internet has done to music. this story shows you how embedded the internet is in every stage of the process now for me as someone who makes and distributes music. it provides the inspiration, the means of collaboration, the means of distribution. it has enabled my musical education, providing me with access to the myriad histories of music, through vast catalogues of streams & downloads, not to mention its enabled me to learn how to use my tools better, with endless online tutorials, advice, production ideas. it even provides the platform upon which we can build really smart discourses about music, and about its distribution and its production. i honestly can’t imagine what it was like to be involved with music before the internet happened and i don’t care to. i can’t make music without the internet. if there’s hiccups along the way as paradigms shift, old businesses and structures fail and new ones alternately flounder and prosper – so be it, the internet has opened so many doors for me and my music that arguing over the finer details of business models sometimes seems so irrelevant. how to sell shiny discs to people who don’t know any better?… seems so distant from my actual experience of music.

I like Time Shield by the way, awesome name. My wife saw it on a poster and said ‘hey that name sounds like your friend’ and then I blew her mind: ‘it is’.

these three fine chaps are joining me (aka time shield – the audio-visual live incarnation of faux pas) this friday night at the builders arms hotel in melbourne … doors open at 8pm, $8 entry, and if you’re on facebook, the details of the gig are here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=199712030067326

check them out:

WINTERCOATS

ELECTRIC SEA SPIDER

KHARKOV

TIME SHIELD

plus, as a special blog bonus, check out some recent photos of me performing at laneway festival & groovin the moo festival as part of the gotye touring band – after the jump.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

download a new 10-track compilation of lost songs and b-sides made from between 2008 and 2010. lostworks is intended as a companion piece to noiseworks, the record that i put out about 12 months ago.

free download: click here

listen above to get a taste of what lostworks sounds like (a bit darker and moodier than noiseworks) and if you like it, please share it with your friends on your blogs, twitter, facebooks etc. here is a convenient shortened link that points directly to the .zip file: http://bit.ly/lostworks

or the full link is: http://www.iamfauxpas.com/mp3/faux_pas-lostworks.zip

stoffelsworks happened because erika’s friend andrew got in touch with me saying that it was erika’s birthday soon, and that she loved three things in her life: japanese television, cyberpunk clothes & faux pas. once i got over the shock of hearing that there might be such a thing as someone who loves my music as much as they love japanese television – japanese television is pretty awesome – i sunk my teeth into the project of making erika an awesome birthday present.

a couple of weeks later, she had a 2xCD compilation full of unreleased faux pas demos & remixes, plus a mediafire link to a mixtape full of songs that i’ve sampled for faux pas tracks over the years.

i have a folder on my computer called “faux pas” that contains every piece of music that i’ve ever committed to hard drive, and even a bunch of stuff that went down on cassette tape back when i was in high school – digitised into 128kbps mp3s at the time, because i had to conserve hard disk space… regrets, i have a few… we’re talking 12 years of music making, a pretty consistent stream of output even though the quality obviously wildly varies (from bad to worse mostly). upwards of 100 hours of original music.

i’ve always been fastidious at keeping everything i make, in fact i can’t really help but be, because its built into the way that i work. i’ve been making music completely ‘in the box’ – ie all inside the computer – almost from the start. so this ‘archive’ primarily consists of all the mp3s that i mix down for myself during the process of songwriting/mixing/whatever you want to call it. at the end of a session, i always bounce down a mix, and put it in this folder, so i can go back to it the next day and see what it sounds like. and i’ve been doing that for years. its how i analyse and develop the songs that i’m working on, and its how i get distance from what i’m doing, how i get my head out of the ‘project.’ its funny how the act of just bouncing something down, giving it a name (filling in the ID3 tags) and putting it in my ipod or my music library or whatever, and it instantly transitions from being an Ableton project to being a ‘song.’ and in turn i immediately assess it differently. its in my music library alongside “real music” – so it better be good, right? i find this is often when i get clarity about something i’m working on, and start to get an idea of whether the song ‘works’ or not.

the result of this is a vault of mp3s, all dated and named, organised by year, this grand (in my own head) canon that actually doubles as a journey back through my own memories, and my ‘development’ (however dubious) as a maker of music. spending an afternoon sifting through the old stuff feels like.. how do i put this in a way you understand… like going back through old facebook photo albums simply to admire how your haircut has changed over time. or how that one time you had a beard, which was weird, and then you tried those glasses for a bit but they didn’t really suit you. its like that. its the hallmark of our generation/era, right, your life as a digital record etched into hard drives/the internet for future reference. nostalgia, yes, narcissistic, definitely – but also potentially a really worthwhile experience that will feedback in to your creative process, going back and reminding yourself what you’ve tried before, whats worked, what hasn’t. what it is about what you do that you want to repeat or refine, or avoid.

there’s so much more to be said on this topic, but i will save it for my therapist. let me end by saying: erika, thanks for giving me the chance to share my haircuts with you, i’m very glad that you are abnormally interested in my haircuts. if anyone else is interested in commissioning a one-off faux pas release, by all means get in touch. and if you need a trim, i’ll have you know that ken sutcliffe is a qualified hairdresser.

ps. if you’re curious about the artwork that i used for stoffelsworks, this is a good place to start.

a blowing out of the cobwebs around here has been long overdue, the last theme that i made was kind of cool but i think was also pretty overwhelming. and i’ve been wanting to integrate a soundcloud widget into the site for ages – so you can actually listen to what it is that i do – so finally, it is done. if things don’t work or you have feedback please get in touch.

i’m also guilty of not writing a blog post for about six months. over the last couple of years, i’ve become completely addicted to micro-blogging and haven’t had the patience for the long form of the game, and its a shame because there are some rants from the past that i’m quite proud to have written. hopefully with a bit more discipline you’ll see some of them again from me this year.

you’ll be happy to know that i still seem to be incapable of using capital letters, just like a moody fifteen year old girl on her livejournal, or iggy pop:

anyway so i’m back, the blog posts will be bigger than ever hopefully, and if you want the short pithy absurdities, they occur regularly at the twitter

i may have left the blog to gather dust but there’s been plenty going on. i’m making music quicker and easier than ever before, which is nice, considering that the last album was so laboured and at times felt like such a trial. (with good results …) i try and upload new jams to soundcloud as soon as i create them, which i think might have resulted in a bit of overload over there. i am reaching the 4 hour limit that soundcloud imposes on their ‘lite’ customers, so might need to start culling things back. does anyone really want to sit on my soundcloud page and listen to four hours of my music? i don’t know.

i’ve been doing plenty of remixes since putting out the rat vs possum and flying scribble ones in the middle of last year – but none of them have quite seen the light of day yet for various reasons. stay tuned for remixes of: worst friends, josephine, hammocks and honey, congo tardis #1. you might not know those names, but you totally should. go google them now. the website is http://www.google.com. at some point i’d love to collate a bunch of the remixes i’ve made over the last 5 years and put them out as a compilation. its on the to-do list.

a lot of things are on the to-do list. maybe if i write them down here, it’ll force me to make them happen:

- release “Lostworks”, the companion album to Noiseworks, for free
- a remix compilation
- a new EP, probably called “Permatations,” released on vinyl

these are good releases, looking forward to showing them to you

oh and i am trying to start a band. regular readers (hi mum) will know that this is in direct opposition to everything that i wrote here

lastly, i joined the touring band for belgian-australian pop juggernaut gotye late last year, and have played a handful of dates with him already, including a show at the sydney festival and a bunch of laneway festivals all around this brown land. in the band i play MIDI, and just generally look uncomfortable, but i’m learning more than i thought was humanly possible, on a crazy steep learning curve that i think will result in me being a better musician. so thats keeping me busy. there’ll be more shows later in the year once he releases his next album. i’ve heard some of the new album – its ridiculous.

ok. i’ll be back shortly to tell you about “stoffelsworks” – a limited edition CD that i released a couple of weeks ago. limited to 1 copy. more on that soon.

i am now regularly posting new material on my soundcloud profile. below you’ll find a couple of my most recent uploads… go to the soundcloud for more. currently there’s 31 minutes and 36 seconds worth of post-noiseworks materials to listen to.

feel free to let me know which songs you think are and aren’t working, and why!

Becoming by Faux Pas

Everybody Knows by Faux Pas

Aches Water by Faux Pas

MORE HERE

1979

1980

2001

2007

2007

2010

BONUS BEAT: MAKING OF RYDEEN DOCUMENTARY

check here for part 2 and part 3

// MP3: Rat vs Possum – Binti Jua (Faux Pas remix)

// MP3: Flying Scribble – Walk the Line (Faux Pas remix)

Rat vs Possum = myspace.com/ratvspossum
Flying Scribble = myspace.com/flyingscribble