Currently viewin'
just da "rant" posts

hate! whats up with kids these days!
check for example –

what?

love! give a 4 year old an autotune and you get pure love! this youtube clip is better than 99% of music released this year. i’m serious! its even better than vampire wolf france! but yeah. you can basically layer this clip over the top of any song that you like, and the song instantly becomes 10 times better. honestly i’ve tried it, tonight. a lot. just pull up itunes or whatever, get a song started, then come back here and press play on the clip. love!

hate! google continues to funnel rabid pixies fans to my pixies ms paint creation / time-space continuum solution – although, the latest one was confused as to whether or not to actually hate or not. love or hate!? all 21st century dilemmas essentially boil down to this. hobble over to the right hand column to check out his love/hate indecision. its ok to love! also engaged in recent conversation with this blog – connie from network solutions weighs in on my last post. i can’t say it was my intention to get the attention of anyone at network solutions when i wrote that rant on the perils of parked domains – i didn’t even really refer to them in my post, their name was merely quoted in the article that i was referencing – but yes its still fascinating to me that companies now employ people to monitor the blogs and go into bat for them. i guess this is very 2005 but it still intrigues me.

love! i’m just coming off a moody blues bender, and i’m just starting on a bit of a robert palmer curve. here’s a bit of a taste of what my head is sounding like at the moment. the moody blues track is not a real edit, don’t get excited. i just took out some of the middle bit. you won’t even notice.

MP3: The Moody Blues – Question (edit) (1970)
(removed due to 40,000 downloads in 6 weeks… whoops… sorry moodies)

MP3: Robert Palmer – What You Waiting For (1983)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

hate! gotta hate how long its taking new faux pas material to come together. hold tight! the anti-climax awaits! the newest news i have on this is that the album is going to be called “CHARISMA MODIFIER” and its going to be a concept record about a 4 year old who communes directly with the forces of time and space (ie the pixies – voiced here by justin hayward and the guy from thin lizzy) finds an autotune plugin while searching for the lost orb of frobozz, and then buddies up with a savvy domain name registrar employee named connie to save the people of earth from the devastating forces of… well… dudes who wear white sunglasses! here’s the revised album cover:

love! tuned into a golden oldies station on the way home from work this evening i heard a song by bland mcbland band snow patrol that totally contained the lyric “Put Sufjan Stevens on / And we’ll play your favorite song” i knew you’d get yours, stevens!

shucks now i empathise with you again. i feel great pain… and… suffering

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!

the ball in my mouse is not rolling properly, in fact it hasn’t been rolling properly for a long time. is this some kind of weird allegory for my mental state? is the proverbial “ball” in my proverbial “mouse” busted? perhaps. but my actual real mouse is also busted, so i’ve had to buy a new one.

i’ve never been so acutely aware of how much i rely on my mouse when making music. it really is the main physical thing that mediates my creation of music – i’ve got keyboards and knobs and faders and pads too, but an unnervingly large amount of my work is done via the frustratingly fine movements of my shaky hands, trying to wrangle a little white arrow to do my bidding. drawing envelopes, grabbing hold of virtual pots, tapping in tempos and drawing midi notes with the unreliable click of the mouse button. now that i’ve got this new mouse, i’m finding that i have to learn its movements – its sensitivities are subtly different, the shape of the mouse in my hand is different. i took for granted how transparent my use of my mouse had become. now when i’m trying to navigate my way around music software i’m finding that my formerly trusty motor memory can no longer be trusted – i can’t make the fine and immediate adjustments i used to, because when my hand moves to where my brain thinks that things are, the mouse pointer now consistently misses the mark. i feel like a guitarist who wakes up to find he has webbed fingers. i must resolve to become less reliant on my mouse.

this, combined with the unseasonal heat, has plunged faux pas productivity to record lows in the last weekend but it means i’ve been doing a lot of reading. i’m learnin mama i’m learnin. a friend of mine – lets call him an ‘academic’ though that might make him shudder – he told me the other night that he wished that he could just learn knowledge and not be expected to do anything with it. i feel the same way. i have a tendency to suck knowledge in and then struggle to find meaningful ways to re-express it. knowledge just cumulates and confuses in my mind. i’m not sure what practical or specific use most of this knowledge has – i hold on to some lame hope that one day something will spring forth from my subconscious thanks to years of the gestating knowledge-mess. my mind is like the compost heap that i continue to pile shit on to, hoping that miraculous flowers will emerge despite my complete lack of interest in gardening.

–

i find this whole trent reznor thing that happened last weekend really exciting and fascinating. i’m not a NIN kind of guy, though i’ve got a soft spot for the perfect drug (admit it, you do too). reznor still gives me the willies for sure. his $1.6 million windfall points to a couple of things. firstly, if you are a musician with control over the distribution of your own material, and you also happen to have a huge, obsessive, internet-savvy fanbase, new digital distribution options give you the opportunity like never before to suck millions of dollars out of your plebs.

now, let me stop here for a sec. i’m going to riff a little bit on music and money. if it makes you uncomfortable reading about this stuff, look away now. i, like many others, am trying to make sense of all of this because it feels like somewhere in there, with all these new options, there might be a way in which i can set myself up to have a sustainable music career without making artistic compromises. thats a pretty big carrot dangling, so i’m not ignoring ‘the new model’ or leaving it to someone else to figure out. i’m no expert; lets figure it out together.

click to follow me down the rabbit hole (mice hole?): [Read more →]

so for those of you playing at home, the deal with the crying dawsons and the youtube wall of loneliness is basically that i haven’t been feeling very well lately. in an effort to break the silence on this blog – its not like i’ve got nothing to talk about, i just haven’t felt like talking – i’m writing an emo blog post, in the tradition of desperate livejournalers and suicidal myspacers. back to normal after this Ok.

sooo i’ve been in a bit of a low patch, creatively emotionally et cetera, and most of it is just due to frustration and a hint of desperation regarding working on the next faux pas album… things just aren’t going well with it right now. i’ve turned to some good friends for counsel in the last few days – i think its helping to crystallise a few things in my mind tank, and i thought i’d get them down as a means of maybe moving this blog past this uncharacteristic – may i say, first (and last?) – official emo blog patch and get back to the important things like posting youtube clips of robert palmer and talking about zork.

for better or worse, when i got home from overseas last year and started working on this album, i decided that i should try really hard to make the next album… you know…. “really good.” for my first album i threw a lot of sounds at the wall, some stuff stuck together, and i put it on a shiny disc. the album was started and finished (i mean, pressed onto discs) in a couple of months, which is pretty quick. almost 2 years later i can look back at that album and say honestly that i’m proud of it, it documents something. but its not a great album. so i decided this time around i would try really hard, make myself keep going until i made something great.

so — this is, like, way harder than it looks! first, you have to define great. i think some people make music because they have stories or messages or whatever that they just desperately need to express – the process of making a record for them is just about getting it down, accurately and with candor, getting it across. so “great” is kind of tied maybe to some kind of authenticity, being true to yourself or true to your vision or stories. this is especially true for twee dudes who write songs about girls, or something. it all sounds so noble. you strive to achieve your vision. or stay true to your heart. or tell that story about your grandpa, you know the one where he was in the war and people died and shit. meaningful shit! so therefore to make your music great – and that is, lets be clear, to satisfy your own desires, to make music yoou think is great, not other people – is really just about knowing yourself and having a clear vision. fucking noble.

for me its waay more coarse and obvious – and problematic – because i think i struggle not judge my own musics by the same standards that i judge the music that i love. back that up, what i mean is.. i want to love my own music the way i love my favourite music. is this even possible? do only conceited pricks love themselves? or on the other hand is it possible – no, mandatory – that you strive to make art that you can love, be so deeply proud of, fight for. but to set those standards by comparing yourself to your idols (really didn’t want to drop that word but can’t think of anything more appropriate)… well this is self-hating 101: set yourself unachieveable goals, fall short, hate yourself. fuck!

i should be inspired by great music, right?. at the moment, i’m paralysed by awe. i can’t help this feeling sneaking up on me that.. whats the point of even bothering when there is so much great music already out there? i listen to an album i love and it should inspire me… but often it just humiliates me. i read this blog post a while back.. it quotes a max tundra interview where he says:

“There is music everywhere that is very, very similar to music that already exists… making records and CD’s from an environmental perspective, there’s all this new plastic in the world, which is so wasteful. That’s such a responsibility, that you have to justify the existence of that product in the world. And if it’s really similar to something that already exists then you’re just messing the world up really, you’re polluting it.”

you have to justify the existence of that product in the world. shit! i have to justify the existence of my music, and its got to be more than just “it exists because i had some spare time and i made it”? damn. that is cold. and hard. also from that blog post:

“if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.”

fuck you charles bukowski looking into my soul! i got doubts enough to deal with without you giving me this extra layer of compelling shit! at the moment it is not bursting out of me. has it ever? bukowski you literary bastard!

so anyway what seems like deep shit is at most just some emo bullshit by a whiney guy who just needs to deal with the fact that he is not a special flower. this is not a nuclear crisis or anything. we are not at defcon one. security alert was beige at best. the problem here is – to paraphrase someone that i spoke to today – one of the dangers with trying to take your music or your art or whatever seriously is that you can begin to tie in your ideas of self-worth directly to how you feel you are doing creatively. what i mean is – on this stupid trip of making the “great” album, when things are going well i feel ecstatic. when things go badly, if i’m a bit uninspired or have a few bad days in a row, it kind of inevitably leads to despair. which doesn’t help the music any. if it sounds stupid that someone can be driven to existential crisis because he’s having trouble making a song sound right, its because it is.

the fact that having a sustained bad time working on my album can lead to a more general existential funk obviously says more about my personality than it does about anything else. people have different ways of dealing with stress, and i suppose some people see success and failure as binary while others are more generous with how they measure themselves.

so yeah what now? just finish the stupid music, put it out there, and try not to think about whether i think its “great”? or keep going with my ‘chinese democracy’ style approach of continually deconstructing and reconstructing my music because its ‘not quite there yet’… chasing some idea of greatness which i probably cannot get to, whether it be through lack of skill or because i’ve purposefully set myself an unachievable task in order to give myself a reason to hate myself. how am i not myself, bitches!? at the end of the day it is really just about knowing yourself.

countdown to return of normal programming commencing… might have a couple more emo posts in me but i will exorcise the demons and then get back to the usual shit

top ten mp3s most listened to according to last.fm

1. paul mccartney – letting go
2. cornelius – omstart
3. bachelorette – a lifetime
4. pikelet – bug-in-mouth
5. solo andata – a ballet of hands
6. phillip glass and david bowie – heroes (aphex twin mix)
7. j dilla jay dee – stop
8. the knife – silent shout
9. steely dan – king of the world
10. inxs – burn for you

top five obsessions

- paul mccartney (wings-era and mccartney ii)
- late 70s / early 80s soft rock
- last.fm
- that dodgy theremin synth sound from ableton that appears on nearly every new faux pas track/remix created in 2007
- dungeons and dragons

top 15 good times and great classic hits

10cc – the things we do for love
christopher cross – ride like the wind
fleetwood mac – big love
foreigner – urgent
icehouse – cant help myself
loverboy – turn me loose
michael jackson – human nature
michael mcdonald – i keep forgettin
prince – i would die for you
robert palmer – looking for clues
simple minds – promised you a miracle
steely dan – rikki dont lose that number
suzi quatro – primitive love
toto – i’ll supply the love
wings – band on the run

top two late night infomercials

- the midnight special
- the soft rock collection

bottom two late night infomercials

- proactiv
- that thing with the ball and nick lachey

top five unlikely places i went to in 2007

- japan
- living in country victoria for three months (the coastal town flooded on my birthday)
- walking around perth in the wee hours of a saturday morning with a microphone wearing a cardboard andrew g mask
- to and fro on rrr program grid
- triple j rotation

top ten albums that won’t be appearing in my top ten list. sorry

- justice
- midnight juggernauts
- animal collective
- panda bear
- lcd soundsystem
- burial
- italians do it better
- battles
- caribou
- m.i.a

everyone liked the same albums this year, which i found boring (the homogeneity, not the albums)… most of the albums this year everyone thought were amazing, i thought were simply great or even just good… to be honest about half of these i haven’t even listened to i’ve been so put off by the hype

top one prevalent over-arching musical trend, as has always been and always will be

- recycling

my top ten overseas

1. black moth super rainbow – dandelion gum
2. the field – from here we go sublime
3. bachelorette – isolation loops
4. oh astro – champions of wonder
5. skeletons & the kings of all cities – lucas
6. james blackshaw – the cloud of unknowing
7. yeasayer – all hour cymbals
8. disasteradio – visions
9. antibalas – security
10. paper – as as

seven more albums i liked from overseas

artanker convoy – cozy endings
bruce haack – the electric lucifer
folk is not a four letter word vol 2
pantha du prince – this bliss
principles of geometry – lazare
tele & the ghost of our lord – beach party blast/quasi immaculate deception
tussle – telescope mind

top three life-changing live shows

- andrew wk at meredith
- andrew wk at meredith
- andrew wk at meredith

top two most misjudged albums

architecture in helsinki – places like this
air – pocket symphony

favourite australians, alphabetically

aih
aleks and the ramps
always
brothersister label
cleptoclectics
curse ov dialect
devastations
nick huggins
pikelet
pretty boy crossover
roam the hello clouds
solo andata
zeal

top three rediscoveries from past headspaces

metallica – ride the lightning
simian (pre mobile disco)
the alan parsons project

new years resolutions

- learn to play ‘big love’ on acoustic guitar
- build a kingdom in that house on the hill
- figure out whether i like space/beardy/italo-disco or not
- become more inaccessible and change my name to ‘major cartologist’ in a cynical move to endear myself to the avant garde hipster set and too-knowing trendoid blogopshere
- become more accessible and buy myself over-sized novelty sunglasses in a cynical move to endear myself to the so-uncool-its-cool indie-disco doorlist jagermeister set
- become more drunk, buy myself tight leather pants, and vomit and/or bleed during live performance and also just general conversation in a cynical move to endear myself to the great unwashed melbourne dont-know-why-i-do-but-i-love-dirty-rock-despite-being-an-accountant massive
- become more theatrical in my descriptions of my character’s movements and give away magic items from my backpack in a cynical move to endear myself to the other PCs in my party
- become more cynical in a cynical attempt to endear myself to you

2008 anticipations

- ween touring australia in march
- new album from max tundra… i hope…?
- jason forrest band tours melbourne (cmon jason, DO IT)
- hot chip
- 19 debut albums by joh-un
- debut of faux pas live show (one man on stage in pyjamas sobbing uncontrollably into a microphone – think the famed commanding onstage presence of nick drake combined with the charisma of daryl somers and the musical talent of a pigeon with one leg and no ears)
- not one but two new faux pas albums

time spent writing these totally well thought out and meaningful end of year lists

- 20 mins

more top top lists:

- amazing, inspiring and obscure top 50 with mp3s, from rad turkish blog undomondo.com
- great folk-flavoured top lists at moteldemoka.com
- cool hipster disco lists at alainfinkielkrautrock
- local acts including always, francis plagne, geoff o’connor (and me) posting lists at rosequartz.blogspot.com