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i’m sorry to say that i won’t be able to make it to ROCK 4 ROOTS in nauen, germany tonight, despite being listed at last.fm as part of the line-up:

my apologies also to the german band faux pas, who have to see my face plasted around last.fm while they are trying to promote their own gigs. i love that you can listen to a little playlist at last.fm, sampling the various metal bands playing at rock 4 roots, and in the middle of all that you’ve got “for the trees” wedged in there. if i ever go to nauen, someone in a dark trenchcoat with long hair is gonna recognise my face and bash it in.

but hey, looks like its gonna be a good show. germany’s number one exponents of folk-metal, XIV Dark Centuries, are going to be there:

meanwhile, if you are in melbourne and are looking for somewhere to go tonight, i highly recommend checking out pikelet at the tote in collingwood. also playing are extreme wheeze, charge group, the twerps, and you’ll also see me and dave from to and fro there making between-band song selections.

LYRICS: “Faux pas” means “Wrong move” or “Wrong act”
A song of Tabu Ley Rochereau, sang by the queen Mbilia Bel:

[Verse] Stay there where you are, I’ve heard that you are requesting my address
So you are being send by my rival
I want you to forget my man now. I can’t fight you because I’m peaceful
I’ve been hearing about you quite for some time. You’re being send to take my man away from me.
Go back to where you are coming from. Ask to those who know about me when I go crazy.

I’ve been hearing about you quite for some time. Where ever I would go you would inquire about my whereabout. You’re being sent by my rival. But the one sending you is fooling herself. Now she’s sending you to get my man for her, but at the same time, you yourself start to fall in love with him. “You can not leave a goat along with kassava leaves”.

there’s still so much i don’t understand. like for example, the fact that in congo a 9 minute song about guy troubles can be a pop hit. actually, at the end of this clip it just kind of cuts out, so for all i know there’s another 9 minutes coming. its a nice groove though. “you can not leave a goat along with kassava leaves”

this video is currently the first thing that comes up when you search for faux pas in youtube. the third video is a woman grabbing her boobs. when is it a good time to change your band name, or does someone have to sue you first?

local fidelity continues their series of local artist q&a’s by interviewing sydney soundscaper tommy mcsmith aka cleptoclectics. asked to describe his music, he responds with “swinging interval meditations” and “syncopated granulation edits”, and mentions that his dream collaborator would be rahsaan roland kirk. he also reveals:

I find Sydney isolates people a little, I’ve found it easier so far to get gigs in other cities. I’ve played almost as much in Melbourne, without really trying, even though I hardly knew anyone down there when I started. So my music isn’t made with much consideration for my immediate context, which is I think something that a lot of music from Sydney has in common, a kind of spatial dislocation, which paradoxically comes from the city perhaps.

read more here. local fidelity has also recently posted q&a sessions with catcall, firekites and me too.

tom from cleptoclectics recently put together a mix of jazz and downbeat sounds for our radio show – including faust, tarentel and sun ra – which we’re hosting over at the to and fro website. its a thoughtful mix that will probably make your brain expand a little. also, something you may have missed – a cleptoclectics remix features exclusively on the itunes release of my “changes” ep, which is available here. its his remix of an unreleased faux pas track called “live shine see.”

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and speaking of the radio show – tomorrow night dave and i speak to evan mast from new york’s ratatat about the recording of their new album LP3. i think that the new ratatat album is basically the greatest thing i’ve heard all year, so i had to do my best to avoid completely slobbering all over evan during our pre-recorded interview. it goes to air at midnight australian eastern standard time, tomorrow (tuesday) night, on 3RRR 102.7 FM.

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i’ve noticed some way off the mark reviews of this new ratatat album. the pitchfork review starts off by linking the album in with the concept of production music – on the one hand an interesting way of trying to put ratatat in context (as instrumental composers with a history of commercial placements for their music) – but on the other hand a potentially really lazy way of engaging with instrumental music in general. more worrying for me is the dismissal of the album as merely “a solid instrumental record…” –

“Aside from what visual or informational stimulus someone else augments Ratatat’s music with, there isn’t really that much content there – or, conversely, there’s potential for the music to be and sound like anything but no one discernable identity… Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. There’s nothing intrinsically flawed about what’s otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it.”

Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. as someone who has heard more than once the recommendation that i should get some vocals happening on my primarily instrumental music, i find this kind of approach to evaluating ratatat’s music, well, a little offensive. i have no beef with rihanna… mmm, beef with rihanna… but one of the reasons why this album is so captivating, to me anyway, is because of its overwhelming ‘musical-ness’. no vocals required. i know that a lot of people struggle to appreciate instrumental music on its own terms – but, believe it or not, there’s a lot of things to appreciate about music even after lyrics and vocals are removed from the equation (melody, rhythm, ambience, structure, texture, wow its like a whole world of sound)… even saying “removed from the equation” unnerves me a little because it implies that music without vocals is somehow lacking, somehow minus something. anyway, i understand some people don’t get that, but i’d expect more from a reviewer. i think its a credit to ratatat that their music is so laden with melody, structure and instrumentation that it can rival vocal-driven pop music in terms of holding a casual listener’s interest. for me at least, there’s more narrative, more dynamics, more fun in any of the tracks from the recent ratatat album than on most of the fawning indie pop that i hear championed on the radio recently. but of course, i am biased.

for a truly wayward review of the ratatat record, check out the one over at popmatters. i’ve always had a soft spot for the pseudo- (and, in fact, often very non-pseudo, but on-the-money “for-real” booksmarts) academia of the popmatters music reviews, slightly nerdy and bookish, much more likely to light a fire of cultural analysis in your hedgerow than, perhaps like pitchfork, simply try to establish markers of whats cool or not. but their LP3 review is really not so hot. i mean, only in a popmatters review will you have a reviewer attacking an album for not “establishing a leitmotiv or achieving cultural transcendence or musical syntheses.” leitmotiv? at least with popmatters reviews, i’m always learning.

more troubling than leitmotiv is this perhaps very casually thought-through idea of “cultural transcendence” – i’m not entirely sure whats being hinted at here, but i think the implication is that the “international” instrumentation of the album (his word, not mine) is some kind of tokenistic grab at exotica… and thats definitely not what i hear when i listen to the album. i think the use of “international” instrumentation is much more a case of them using what instruments they had at hand to create melody and rhythm. in fact, where other albums maybe falter by too overtly tagging their non-western (or read non-”rock”) elements as ‘ethnic’ or exotic elements – i’m reminded of some of the issues raised in the comment boxes of cyclic defrost last year over emmy hennings’ review of unkle ho’s self-consciously ‘exotic’ album – i think ratatat astutely avoid engaging with that by keeping the focus on ‘musicality.’

i mean, if this dude hears a tabla and immediately starts making assumptions about cultural transcendence or lack there of, it says maybe more about his hang-ups about “western vs exotic” instrumentation than any kind of cultural short-sightedness on the part of ratatat. and well, when he criticises the album for being “culturally amorphous”, i mean… welcome to the 21st century! in this grand paint-bucket blend of culture and globalisation, i’m not sure an album can be criticised for blurring the lines, if thats even what ratatat had in mind. its a shame that he doesn’t hear the album for what it is – a celebration of melody and sound – and instead takes to, in one particularly jarring paragraph, cataloguing the various “international” influences (Middle-Eastern, Japanese, Turkish…. Rasta!) like some kind of dirty laundry list.

anyway, thats just one way in which the review rubs me wrongly. he criticises “Flynn” for not having a beat (! – ); he concedes that “Imperials” succeeds in generating a carousel atmosphere but bemoans its lack of “allegorical motif”; his musical reference point for “Shempi” is, somehow, Justice; and he wraps it up with what reads like a punchline: “After peaking with their tried and true formulas, the group—unintentionally reaching predictability and mediocrity—should look to evolve their sound beyond the arcade and into the dance clubs, and one’s soul.” now thats either criminally misguided music writing or an elaborate and hilarious music-reviewer in-joke.

man it feels good to be a fanboy and come out swinging for one of your favourite bands, on one of the most inconsequential forums for doing such a thing, the goddamn internet! but yeah. they are not the only two “damning with faint praise” reviews i’ve read of LP3, and its just kind of shocked me because i think its one of the better things i’ve heard in ages. it reminds me a little of some of the reviews of the last few air albums – do a bit of googling and try and gauge the critical response to every air record since “moon safari” and you just get a lot of confused people writing reviews that seem to heavily praise them but at the same time kind of slap them with the back of a glove, like, “yeah air, they’re doing what they do, its really amazing, but, um, how boring”. i don’t know. i wonder if ratatat and air both fall into that category of bands who are actually way left of the norm, but accidentally hit upon some kind of wider level of awareness.. celebrated at first and then kind of ignored or castigated later. another example: some of the poor reviews of the last hot chip record. their sound and approach didn’t change much – but reviewers’ reaction to them did. anyway.

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and now, to lighten the mood… here is rahsaan roland kirk, live in 1969. i don’t know what that thing he’s playing right at the start is – before he gets into his trademark, playing five saxophones at once, including two with his nose and one with his ear – but i have a feeling it may be a very early hacked nintendo DS synth controller prototype… i’m happy to stand corrected if someone can tell me what that thing is (i ain’t no expert on these things)

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

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.