as for the arias themselves… best not to get me started. i think at one point daniel johns in one of his acceptance speeches made some kind of self-congratulatory statement about how great australian music is right now, about how we are ‘killing it’ or some such. i agree with him, but gee you wouldn’t have known it from watching the arias. i love a lot of australian music right now, and obviously i’m very keen to see it succeed. but the people out there who are making the really great and inspiring music, receive little or no attention from a commercially driven monolith like the arias. so while i guess its great to see “independent” artists so well represented.. i can’t help but be saddened that some more of australia’s truly great music can’t be represented via the arias to such a large audience.
i had to laugh when the point was made during silverchair’s puff piece that they funded the recording of their cd themselves. i don’t doubt this is true, and it probably wasn’t their decision to highlight this particular fact but come on – silverchair as independent self-funded act? please. reserve that particular brand of kudos for the real DIY heroes. (note that i’m not by implication extending this title to myself… i’m one of australia’s fake DIY losers, its a different thing altogether)
i guess me and nick cave can sulk in a corner while the music industry and the majority of music buyers please themselves. excuse me while i get down off my high horse (until next year anyway).
a month or so ago, declan from research and development (and also host of rrr’s great against the arctic radio show) asked me to put together a mix for r&d’s latest issue, which went live today.
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the last mix i put together was the one i did for triple j a few months ago, which was more of a kinda saturday night party vibe (well, the kind of party you could only have in your bedroom, i guess) – for r&d i had to do something different, so i tried to put together a pretty straight listening mix, not much in the way of home studio beatmatch trickery, just a bunch of songs i like, put together in some order that i hope is pleasing. the tracklisting can be found at the r&d site.
research and development is also hosting a second mix of mine, one from the archives – a shorter mix called “weird parties mix” which is full of wacky covers and oddball tunes. anyone who bought one of the first 50 or so copies of my faux feels EP (about two years ago now) will remember the mix cos i sent it out as a bonus cd. limited edition! well now its available to all. check research and development to download both mixes.
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people ask me sometimes where i find music from, so i thought i’d write up a few notes on this mix i’ve put together, maybe explaining a little bit about what led me to each individual track. i find out about most music these days through the blogs, so essentially this is a chance for me to give some shout-outs to some of the great blogs that i’ve now come to rely on to find out about good music. its also a chance for me to post up a whole bunch of other stuff, other mp3s that are related to the tracks i put in this mix. it feels like this blog has had a bit of an mp3 drought recently – i’m about to rectify that in a rather serious fashion.
i don’t want this to come off as conceited, i’m aware that this kind of track-by-track ramble is probably best left to the professionals, the true crate diggers or whatever, the historians, custodians. i’m doing this for fun, hopefully you get a kick out of it and maybe bump into some things you haven’t heard before. i’m of the opinion that music is to be shared, and i don’t really buy into the idea that things are somehow cooler or more worthy when they are known by only a few. if you’ve found the good stuff, you gotta spread it around, even if you don’t totally know what you’re talking about… otherwise we end up living in a world where everyone listens to powderfinger… mmm
anyway, once i got started on this track-by-track rundown, it got out of hand. so we’re getting daily on this thing..! strap yourselves in cos it starts tomorrow.
ooh one last thing, this kind of thing has been done many many times before both on and off the internet – but to highlight one in particular, my shot at it was partially inspired by dan seltzer’s rundown of his beats in space set – his write-up is far more insightful than whats about to take place and his selections i think much more interesting… you should check out his set and his comments.
some very favourite people of mine gave me a subscription to audiotechnology magazine for my birthday, which is very exciting. audiotechnology is a great read if you are a gear nerd, and its great to have a locally focused magazine that regularly does interviews with local acts, quizzing them about their live & recording setups and habits. for example a recent highlight was an interview with marty brown from melbourne’s much-loved art of fighting, talking about his completely analogue home studio out in the backyard, where the last clare bowditch record was made:
“I think Clare’s songs are often domestic, in that they’re not about unicorns and drug experiences… To bring out the ‘domesticity’ I wanted to capture the sound of the place where we record, which is at our home. So I made a concerted effort to get as many sounds from the location onto tape as possible – not only the studio space but also the next-door neighbours dogs, the Greek Orthodox church down the road, our squeaky studio door and the rainbow lorikeets. In fact, the start of the album involves me walking from our house to the studio; unfortunately, it sounds a little like a radio play, but I wanted to have it there because that was the sound at the start of each day’s recording. To me, these features make the album sound just like us playing music in our shed – which is what we do!”
marty goes on to talk about all kinds of interesting stuff – he goes through some of his gear, he talks about the songwriting process, and discusses at length his completely analogue computer-less (gasp!) setup. a bit of trivia: the interviewer in this article is greg walker, who i’m assuming is greg walker aka machine translations. though i could be wrong, it is within the realm of possibility that there is more than one musical greg walker. but here’s a machine translations clip for good measure:
any regular audiotechnology readers would be familiar with regular columnist stav:
his oddball tips on mixing and engineering are always interesting. after his column on ‘reverse mixing’ i briefly became obsessed to listening to everything i did in reverse. i don’t know if it helps with my mixing any, but it is kind of weird – in reverse it sounds like the same song but different, its definitely strange being able to hear a track that i’ve heard 1000 times, and suddenly feel like i’m hearing it for the first time… and stuff going backwards just sounds cool
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its a funny thing to like a song from a band that you’ve previously dismissed outright. these days there is so much music out there that its convenient to completely write a band/label/scene/whatever off on the basis of just one track that gives you the shits. then later on you accidentally hear a second song, and you like it, and it throws everything out of wack. you feel guilty for dismissing an artist so callously, you wonder how much other music you’ve neglected on the basis of one bad track… maybe smash mouth had a lot more to offer me, but i dismissed them out of hand on the basis of “walkin on the sun”. maybe pete murray is a genius of modern songwriting and i’ve just not given him enough of a chance to grow on me. how many second chances do you give an idea that initially does nothing for you..? i keep coming back to this, what does it mean to spontaneously connect with (or be repelled by) something, is that kind of reaction somehow more authentic or important than whatever comes later, when you ‘explore the background more’, ‘give it time to develop’, ‘try to rationalise away prejudices’ et cetera et cetera
i’m having an incoherent couple of days, my bad
anyway, mattafix’s “big city life” bugged the shit out of me, i mean really, i just can’t handle that track. “to and fro”, on the other hand, is great. i heard it on the radio last week. to me it sounds like the singer from clinic doing a timberlake turn over a very basic stuttery beat and endearingly general-midi-ish strings. actually theres some pet shop boys somewhere in there too, in the chorus particularly i can hear neil tennant for sure. its the kind of song that makes you wonder, “why isn’t neil tennant working with timbaland?” hello!
dorothy’s finger is the closing track to entropy begins at home, the album i put out in april last year. its a track i started early in 2005 – before faux pas was even invented – and it took me a year to finish it. this track just never sounded right, it needed tweak after tweak after tweak. it was laborious and frustrating. i don’t want to make music that way ever again, tweaking and tweaking and adjusting over a period of 12 months. nonetheless the end result is something i am proud of.
below is a version of dorothy’s finger from around about the time i put my EP out, so thats about 6 months before the ‘final’ version appeared on the album. i guess you can call this a demo. also below is a link to a place on the internets where you can listen to the ‘final’ version if you want to get all comparison-like on it.
i still feel a little uneasy about posting things on here that aren’t finished, but you know what, theres something kind of fun and honest about posting something like this online. i see it kind of like putting a crowbar into what i already perceive as the cracks of vulnerability in my music, and just wedging open those cracks to expose the flaws more openly for all to see! this is the track before the shiny mastering that made it all pretty, but perhaps more importantly, this is what the track sounded like before the final bursts of ‘inspiration’ (if you can call it that – i don’t) that turned the track into something more than what it is here.
a lot of sample-based music is built piecemeal like this, ad hoc, piece by piece, and sometimes i wonder what it would be like to listen to some of it while it was in progress, whether peeking behind the curtain so to speak might somehow destroy whatever it is that makes the final thing special. when collage/assemblage-ish type music is made to sound like it sticks together, with the edges smoothed, i wonder whether it becomes like a magic puzzle, take a few pieces out and it all crumbles. ahhhh most sample-based music sucks anyway. i don’t know really what i’m on about, lets get on with it.
oh hang on, one final point of trivia – while its pretty obvious to most avid soul/funk/whatever trainspotters out there that this track heavily samples famed ‘afro-harpist’ cum underground jazz icon dorothy ashby (and hey, if it wasn’t obvious to you, well, it is now – go check out her stuff!), it is perhaps not so obvious that this track also contains a sample from darwin’s own pop wunderkind blastcorp, previously mentioned on this blog… actually, to be exact its this sample. you see kris from blastcorp has had free samples available from his site for a while now, and i downloaded this one way back in 2005 and had my way with it. it made its way (quite audibly) into dorothys finger.
it is, appropriately enough, some kind of a harp sample. i’ve never publicly thanked him. thanks blastcorp.
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Listen to the final version of Dorothy’s Finger at last.fm here
/// New 6-track Vanderbilt EP features two Faux Pas tracks plus remixes by Crumbs, Aoi, Pasobionic and Lewis CanCut. Its a free download, get it here.
/// My album Noiseworks – featuring “Vanderbilt”, “Chasing Waterfalls” and “Silver Line” – is available here.
/// I’ve been working on remixes for local bands Rat vs Possum and Flying Scribble. These are good people.
/// I’ve started making some new songs – if you want to have a sneak peek at what they sound like, here is the place to start.
Tim Shiel lives in Melbourne. He makes music under the name FAUX PAS, and is also a broadcaster on public radio station 3RRR FM. This blog began in 2005.
1981: Born in Melbourne Australia, life feels empty and without meaning
2005: FAUX PAS created – life still meaningless
2010: Tim writes brand new three-line biography
Press photos:
“Cool Quotes”
“Psychedelic. Balearic. Straight up pop. Call it what you want, this is memorable music.” keytarsandviolins
“Lush, dreamy future pop that just begs you to dive in headfirst, your heart in close second. Just be careful how many times you dip in – you might find yourself blissfully lost in here.” mess+noise
“Impressive elastic strands of plaited sense associations; extract of flashy disco, pastoral swoon and computer exploration.” threethousand
“A total cottage industry – one guy recording, pressing and releasing his own music – and it’s an example of how to do it right from the bottom up.” Stylus
“A manic journey of sounds, bound by neither genre nor era.” Beat
“Cuts-and-pastes big samples with delicately rendered instrumentation. A party jam. Four stars.” Pitchfork
