the love and the rough

2005-05-24T12:44:00.000+10:00

Walking around the headland, eyes on the water, the rocks lining the point, occasionally on the path in front but not often enough as something seems to have lodged itself in the palm of my foot. It can wait. Nick breaks into a trot and I follow suit, past the normal jump off rock, past the folks who don't know any better with no real idea of just how strong that current they're about to jump into is, folks with no more idea than I have but folks who don't have someone who knows better to follow, someone lit up by surf like this, surf far beyond my comfort zone, my capabilities, but surf I have every intention of launching myself into just as soon as I've scrambled across the rocks after Nick, who knew exactly what it would be like today long before he got on the plane to come up here, whose 6'3" six-channel AB has been chosen exactly for this sort of day. A no-nonsense surfboard for no-nonsense surf and a no-nonsense surfer who knows exactly what he's getting himself into and what he wants to do once he's there, and me behind him, ducking through the scrub and across the rocks, still overwhelmed by the piece of fibreglass and foam under my arm, my first custom, a board I hadn't expected to push for months.
I knew it would be like this too, knew from the charts and from the early I had at home this morning at a beachbreak that's always got a dozen people out even at six am but was deserted this morning, just me and six feet of straight swell, giving me some confidence to deal with this afternoon because I'd paddled out when others hadn't, and felt comfortable and focused but known that beachbreak was not what it was about, not really, not in swell like this when where you really, even if you don't, where you really want to be is at The Point.
Almost at the rivermouth, we follow wet footprints off the path through this odd little blob of national park down through the bush and onto the boulders, not stopping to watch the sets heave onto the rocks, picking our way across them, boards under arm, trying not to rush, a recent trip to get sewn up after launching into the water too early at the front of my mind and a quick glance at my foot finds it covered in blood, a 20 cent-sized piece of skin flapping under my big toe but it'd have to be a lot deeper than it is to be worth turning back for even as I watch someone probably someone who knows this place a lot better than I do scrambling out of the ocean with two pieces of cleanly snapped surfboard, session over before it's even started because this is really heavy, and jumping off the rocks isn't just jumping off the rocks, it's years of timing the sets and knowing the tides and there's a break in the waves that lets me pick my way from dry rocks onto the slippery barnacle-encrusted half submerged ones and overcome the knowledge that this wave bearing down on me will snap board and bone because it will also get me out into that mess of whitewater and somewhere, some half a kilometre back around the headland if I'm lucky into the takeoff spot and I'm in the water, scrambling to find purchase in the boiling bruised surface, bubbling and hard to paddle through, Nick in front of me, duckdiving wave after wave, both of us paddling away from the rocks but not wanting to get too far into the impact zone, not wanting to be anywhere near these waves when they stand upright and break, and we're paddling, and duckdiving and paddling and being swept down and the set's dying and I'm paddling to get beyond the break and round the headland and into the lineup and there with blue water in front and behind.

It's crowded, but unlike when it's half this size the crowd is not entirely unwelcome, people in the water looking each other in the eye not to stare each other down but to acknowledge that we're out here in the water dealing with this and not standing with the dozens on the headland as witnesses, but part of the spectacle, in the arena and people are smiling and nodding like they never do when the surf is not heavy, not of such consequence, but no-one is sitting on their boards, we're all paddling against the sweep, the bastard current that runs down every point break on this bit of coast whenever it's big, and there's a whistle and everyone's heading out to sea, towards this straight blue slab of energy that's sucking and lifting the water and the surfer furthest inside is wheeling around and paddling and the wave is already throwing wide open when he goes and we're over the back and looking for the next one and forgotten while he's in the barrel of his life or being dragged towards the rocks underwater but he'll be right and Nick is going and someone else is going and I'm furthest inside and this thing bearing down is my wave and it's why I'm here and I turn and paddle as the wave stands straight up and the bottom drops out and instinct takes over and I'm on my feet willing the rail of my board to stay in the face and looking down the line as this thing throws way out over my head and there's no way I have anywhere near the speed to come out of this and I'm straightening out, trying to outrun the lip, crouching, swallowed by the whitewater and coming up seconds later reeling in my board in time to get under the next wave and the next, paddling towards these huge caverns, lines of swell that have marched across thousands of kilometres of ocean only to hit this spot and turn themselves inside out, unloading down the boulder strewn point, take us with them if we're lucky and have known what we're doing our whole lives or giving us the most ridiculous hiding and two hours later we're back at our desks quietly buzzing and trying not to make a deal of it to the people in the office who couldn't make it out or stayed on land and watched because I know I got lucky today, got my waves and didn't get held down too long, didn't get wailed or have my legrope snap or board break and am back and can wonder how long this swell will last and what it'll be like in the morning.
Someone's talking about a nightsurf down the coast, if the cloud stays off there could be enough moon and it's one more thing to get excited about but I can't, but the next night we're on it even though it's cloudy we stand on the hill watching these perfect waves stack up and the swell's dropping and we know it's dropping and that's not really a bad thing not at night anyway, not when it's this dark and going out is just stupid and pointless but even in the dark those lines of whitewater breaking so perfect and even, stacking up like I'd scarcely have believed I'd see with my own eyes when I was growing up far from here and fuckit we're out there, the three of us in the dark in the middle of the night because come dawn there'll be the most ridiculous crowd all over this, and we're being swept past the rocks and there's a set and I'm watching a wave break, no idea weather I'm in position or what I'm doing so I dive and as I do so realise I could have gone so the next one no matter what and there's a wave out of the blackness and I'm far too late and get pitched and come up bummed I missed it but stoked, stoked to be in the water in the dark with two friends who would rather be nowhere else than here in these perfect little waves in the middle of the night.

2005-04-13T17:49:00.000+10:00

But sometimes, like having spent most of a day trying to think of ways to report the horrendous state Sumatra finds itself in, there's just nothing left in the tank.

People, even people my age, and a significant number of them at that, really do go to bed at 8.30 here. I can't get my head around this.
How can you possibly organise yourself into bed that early? I spose if you're getting up at 4.30 then it's a necessity, but still.
8.30.

2005-04-13T17:47:00.000+10:00

Herewith my problems with having a full time job, more than one hobby, and a blog about music.
Problem A) put best by this chap - "Hot shit rains down from all directions. And it's all happening so fast that most critical apparatus just spins in circles muttering about fertilizer brands."
Problem B) Off I set to write about something great I've just listened to. The new Slope album, say. Make ancillary mistake of reading something like this first, which, instead of being inspiring, brings to a jerking halt any thought I had something to share.
I don't know the A Frames yet, and they will never play on the Gold Coast, but this makes me think they are my new favourite band. "Walden Parking Lot"? Hats off, Yancey.
Problem C) Getting up at 5am to drive for half an hour through the rain, paddle half a kilometre across a notoriously sharky* seaway, walk another kilometre past already crowded first TOS sandbank, then surf for two before work doesn't make me want to do anything more than go to bed at 9.30 so I can do it again tomorrow.

*I'm not making myself sound tough. It just is. Couple of colleagues from work saw a hammerhead shark today, right just now for serious, while having a quick surf at lunchtime.

2005-03-29T17:18:00.000+10:00

Making a life-changing move somewhere I never, ever thought I could possibly end up took a lot of time, energy, and, went initial thinking, a lot of the inspiration for this blog.

I'm trying to avoid the cop-out that would be calling my new home a cultural wasteland. It might not have much of the sort of culture I'm enthusiastic about, but that doesn't make the Gold Coast any less interesting, and there's always pockets of your sort of sanity wherever you go. Even if there isn't (and there is), there's always the internets. Really though, not having much common ground with most folks here doesn't have a whole lot to do with not writing. I came here to follow a part of my life that has nothing to do with music, and makes thinking about music hard, harder than I was realising it already was to make what I wrote about worthwhile; something I was feeling I didn't have a handle on where I was.

Increasingly, this blog was feeling like so much air. Things happen that you should be caring about, but we're not given time to make up our minds about what's right, and decisions are made by people who should, but consciously don't have our best interests at heart before you've even begun to process the issues and it's already happened; a thousand sermons from the mounts of Blogville being what they are and nothing else. But that's part of the fun I guess. Right now, the ocean is distracting me from this sort of fun, and despite surfing in it being the greatest expression of living-in-the-moment-ness I know, I don't know how interesting that is to write about.
Thanks HG, ES and JJJS for the prod though. It could be.

2004-12-14T18:02:00.000+11:00

Tamas and I are playing a late set this Friday at Revolver. Go see Fat Freddy's Drop and Shapeshifter at the Prince then come and have a shuffle in the front room with us.

2004-12-13T08:14:00.000+11:00

As it manages to every year, Meredith proved to be the best music festival ever in the history of music festivals this last weekend. Despite the worst weather they've ever had during set-up and the gigantic tent-destroying, road-washing-awaying, biblically-proportioned storm on Friday night which had hundreds of folks sat in their cars outside the farm for hours while organisers wondered where they could put them all without getting everyone bogged and those of us already on-site battened down hatches and wondered what the hell we'd got ourselves in for, every band hit the stage on-time, and those who managed to get in front of them were rewarded with some standout performances, particularly from Ground Components, who played their hearts out as the storm eased off around midnight.
Were then blessed with blue skies and heat for the rest of the weekend, somehow mercifully being missed by two seperate electrical storms which came through around sunset on Saturday, leaving everyone wondering who the Dirty Three had called to make their set such an experience.
I'm eternally so-so about that band but always end up captivated by their live show, not so much by Warren Ellis' visceral stage presence or the way he uses his violin to wrench sounds from deep in his guts, but more by the way Jim White tethers their sound. His ebb and flow gave the screeching histrionics of Ellis and guitarist Mick Turner a sliding, shifting base that occasionally gave way beneath them as they picked over the possibilities each song provided. He had appeared earlier for M Ward's sloppily fantastic set of gravelly-voiced blues, one of the highlights of the day, more entertaining even than Sage Francis inspiring hecklers, clearly upset that by all appearances someone's dad had been let on stage to hector them about their uselessness and sing New Kids On The Block songs at them.
Dallas Crane were also upsetting, but only because mainstream success seems forever out of reach. Why they're not as successful as Jet is a crime, proof possibly that you can't be an incredible band and rock the leather jacket/aviator sunnies look, you've also got to have youth and good genes on your side to make a real impact. Still, that band has no weak link. Not having heard much in the way of live music this year and being able to see several acts trading in a similar sound on the same day I was really struck by the difference such concepts as 'musicianship' and 'chemistry' can make. Young Heart Attack, who played a few bands earlier in the day, were similarly loud and leather-clad, but despite the right posturing and energy to burn they just didn't shake me; their loudness seemed to lack focus and sounded tired. Dallas Crane by contrast were a ball of momentous momentumn; one killer riff after the other, the drummer absolutely rock solid, the harmonies fantastic, the whole band just cooking in a set that still wasn't near the best I've heard from them, and looking around the crowd as thousands of people pumped fists in unison and shouted 'See you in Hell!' was truly heartwarming. But then, travelling into the country with thirty of your closest to spend a weekend sitting in the sun watching music at a festival where the organisers give the overwhelming impression that actually, they're more concerned with your good time than selling you a beer for eight dollars, ones heart was warmed often.

2004-12-06T10:35:00.000+11:00

Harrumph. So that article was written by SMH's environment writers, who've been pushing this barrow for some time, but it was MY story, goddammit.* Just because it was a thought that no-doubt occurred to pretty much everyone, it doesn't in any way excuse the fact they totally should have credited this blog for their inspiration.
Still, seeing one of those green bags on the cover of the paper's A3 section last week did at least prompt me to resume normal services here at TLATR HQ, if not start pitching story ideas to that section's editor.
My November slid by in a few short weeks of getting on and off aeroplanes, broken up with a particularly nasty flu, but though December is shaping up as far more eventful, damned if I'm letting it go without being blogged about, vastly underprepared though I am for it to be this time of the year already. You say it every year until you realise you say it every year and you stop, but my don't they go by faster and faster.
Still, there are new songs that kill, different things to be grumpy about and amusing club-related anecdotes sure to please the reader still disposed towards casting an eye over this page, and it's you out there that make it all worthwhile.
The jetsetting part of last month saw Tamas and I make our first combined foray into the world of interstate DJ superstardom with a couple of gigs up in Sydney at Trevor Parkee and Nathan Mclay's nights, which went good and will be blogged about in the not too distant future. There was also a short trip to Queensland for the purposes of attempting to dramatically alter the course of my life, but it hasn't yet amounted to much so isn't worth commenting on at this juncture.
Still, word. There will be more of those here soon.

*The October 02 post. I can't be arsed turning on the thing that gives each post its own URL, but it's down the page there somewhere.

2004-11-29T14:08:00.000+11:00

short loud shouts.

"... So here we are with high education, long life, stability and fairness. That suggests that there is no need for enmity. No need for false populism. No need for malevolent division or unnecessary division. There is certainly no need for yellow journalism and false populism. And we have another advantage - all this remarkable technology. It doesn't make us think any faster, but it allows us to get the nuts and bolts of life into place a great deal faster than ever before. That means we have even more time to educate ourselves, to live, to be stable, to be fair, and above all to think and to discuss and to argue.

We've never been so free and so available for serious, prolonged, in-depth, complicated public debate. Never before.

And so it is rather surprising to look back at those astonishing moments in the second half of the 18th century when Pitt and Burke and Fox in the British Parliament took hours and hours to debate ideas; and the philosophical, ethical underpinnings of those ideas ... They themselves and most of their political friends were going to die young. They didn't have much time. Most of them would be dead before they were 40 or 50. A few made it to 60. And they had to write everything out by hand. And yet they found days and days to debate ideas. And had time left over to carry out a political revolution. Now, here we are living to be 80, 90, 100 and yet, we are virtually incapable - with the exception of periodic meetings like this - of devoting our public life to lengthy debates about ideas. And a growing percentage of the space occupied by the media is reduced to phrases of three or four words which don't contain verbs.

Or they are only verbs. An increasing percentage of our media experiences are devoted to little more than primal shouts. Shouts repeated again and again and again. Pulse news, pulsation. Pulsations as opposed to arguments or thought. Clips which are mere seconds long, repeated endlessly, so short and so endlessly that they become interesting in the sense that they are so uninteresting.

Endlessly repeated tiny little fractions of ideas. The exact opposite of a public discussion or debate. Fractions of ideas, shouts completely unattached to context, completely unattached to the possibility of establishing whether what is being discussed has any relationship to truth or to history or to anything else. These short loud shouts are little more than emotion; or the scripted facsimile of emotion. And so nuance becomes more difficult. Manicheanism becomes increasingly prevalent. We are presented with black versus white, good versus evil. Are you for or are you against? Three words in favour, three words against."

John Ralston Saul, March 20, 2004

2004-11-04T13:49:00.000+11:00

On the nail.
(courtesy Crank Crunk)

2004-11-03T17:04:00.000+11:00

Shit. shit shit shit.
I have been more desperately nervous than I could have imagined today. Oh please, make it right.

2004-10-27T17:44:00.000+10:00

If you're not going to the races (why not?) on Melbourne Cup Day but feel you'd be remiss in your duties if you didn't go out and drink, it could be worth considering the following; particularly if you're not averse to nodding your head, possibly even tapping your foot, while doing the above-mentioned.

Roger Yamaha from Turntablelab is being brought out for something insufferably dull like a Vice party (on the strength of his metal mixtape), but he's playing the next day with the Cut Copy DJs, Friends Electric, and me. Monk One says 'In a perfect world, we would all be able to hop a solar-powered interplanetary space-yacht to go skiing on Venus, sniffing microfiltered poppy resin and dancing with pneumatic holo-bot strippers as he plays', so probably he's pretty good.

APPLEJACK | St Jerome's | Cup Day 2nd November | 12pm - 12am
Bring the whole family, BBQ served all day. Entry is free.

2004-10-27T17:40:00.000+10:00

Of all the new releases I've come across in the last couple of weeks by far and away the standout has to be Alex Attias' Mustang album on Compost. Peshay's LP Jammin, the excellent Unclassics compilation and Dimitri and Joey Negro's new set for BBE are all great and will hopefully be the subject of entries in the not too distant future, but I always had a soft spot for that lovable Venitian stoner. While I was in London his records on Visions, especially as Freedom Soundz, were right up my alley - usually because of the way he programmed his drums, admittedly; there being something in his snare patterns I really, really enjoyed mixing with - they were always the focus of a track no matter what else was going on or who was singing on it and I liked that. His Beatless albums on Ubiquity were also nice, so Attias's solo album was much anticipated by this scribe, and christ is it awful.

I will give him the first track.
Help Me is a killer. The production faultless, Colonel Red's vocal superlative. Proper, hugely funky future soul that really moves. The rest of the album, save one or two tracks with those nice drums of his; an appalling morass of overwrought, nigh hysterical bombast, heavily chopped orchestral samples flying everywhere and hideous operatic pretensions that bring to mind that big blue alien type Bruce Willis goes to hear sing in the Sixth Sense. It's a bad joke, but funnier still was chatting to a friend who works for their distro out here, describing how earnestly the folks at Compost are hyping this. Apparently this is where the label is going. Having had their distributor (another one!) close on them they're changing direction, and that direction is harder, darker and 'more cinematic'.

If people hear Going Home and assume it's what nu jazz is about (there's even a track called Future Jazz, like it's some sort of definitive stamp on the genre) then God spare all who fly its flag.

2004-10-21T17:55:00.000+10:00

For sure it's worth getting all het up about Talib and Mos' new solo records and their respective so-soness, but where's the blog love (or hate) for Ali Shaheed Muhammad's LP? Okay not every track is a killer, (why, when a producer not known for churning them out wants to make a club banger, do they have to announce the track is a Club Banger with the same tired shouty chorus on an otherwise fine song? Why not just do it with a really funky beat? And while I'm at it, those synthesised strings! Gaaaaaahh!!)
but I'm liking this a lot. From the opening chord of Lord Can I Have This' it had me. Lucy Pearl didn't shake by any stretch and I was not expecting this to be great - so nice to have the back of mind hope it could be proved right. Beats on tracks like Elevated Orange (chorus aside) and Family are so nice you can almost forget the album has Honey Child on it.

2004-10-19T17:44:00.000+10:00

I pretty much dismissed Spacek outright based on desultory live performances they'd delivered in support of Mos Def and (I think it was) Rae and Christian, or Stereolab or someone, in cavernous London venues. I remember thinking while watching them there were probably some good songs buried beneath the muddy squelch of sub-bass and non-existant middle or top end sonics in their charmless big-venue live sound, but there seemed to be a lot of acts peddling dubby downtempo with a soulful crooner out front at the time, and they didn't seem overly good at it.
Having been knocked sideways by Steve Spacek's vocals on a couple of recent records, I may have to revisit this opinion - his track on Troubleman's Time Out Of Mind and an excellent SA RA remix just picked up on Sound in Colour.
His appearance on the Troubleman album is a no-brainer, a fabulous cut on an album that's very close to my favourite of the year (Jazzy Jeff's too, apparently), a wistful torch-song replete with swooning strings and shoop-sha-doops over a lurching, tripping-down-stairs on the third kick-snare-rim beat that sucker-punches me every time.
Then I heard the SA RA mix, wandering into Central Station on a lunchbreak to find J'nett unpacking the first boxes of a new shipment with the sort of timing that always seems to happen to everyone else.
It's quite similar to the Troubleman track; Steve's woozy, smoked-out vocal riding a bulbous, subterannian bassline clattering around and straining your subs while these ridiculously summery muted horns bring in the chorus. The beat is super-nice, but Steve's vocals, on both tracks, are awesome; so similar yet there's a detachment in his delivery on Without You and a contrasting closeness on Simply So that both devastate in such intriguingly subtle ways. Why has it taken so long to hear him working with producers like this?

And then there's this. Lazy folks and sales sheets have a point with the Outkast comparisons, there being more than an odd The Love Below moment. Unconditional love for this record right now, and for some reason released in Australia a month before the rest of the world too! If Plant Life don't blow up something's gone terribly awry; their album is a balm for trouble brows and no mistake.

2004-10-14T17:44:00.003+10:00

If you've come across any Australian blogs in the past week you'll be aware we had a federal election last Saturday, and the bad guys won. Again.
There's been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the left about how this cold-hearted, lying economic rationalist could have swept to power so convincingly one more time.
Though trying to hold onto some sembance of hope we all saw it coming, but a lot of folks, like my mate Hammy here, are taking it pretty hard.
The thing is though, even though there was a country-wide swing to the right, it's worth remembering that it wasn't that big of a swing. Not really. A look at how the votes were split indicates the number of people voting Liberal and Labor is actually a lot closer than we're led to believe, so I don't think there's a reason to pack your bags for New Zealand just yet.
Also, as Doug at Serepax pointed out, Family First - the Christian Right party that insists it's just a coincidence all their candidates are Christian and who look like holding the balance of power in the Senate - are certainly homophobic single-parent bashers, but might not be quite as rabid as feared. Still, the fact that, as Hammy notes, we're now paying for Labor's cowardly allocation of preferences to thwart the Greens, selling their faithful down the river in the process, doesn't change.
Arse.
Interesting to see the pull-out posters in the paper earlier this week, showing maps of how each electroate voted in bright blue and red. The predictability was incredible - all the suburbs you think of as working class were won by Labor, all the upper-class suburbs won by the Libs.
Sigh.
I'll get back to posting about music soon. It's just that I don't know if what I've got to say about the new Talib Kweli is that interesting.

2004-10-07T22:03:00.000+10:00

Going it alone this Saturday night with Mr Jigga at hot new city club VQ (disclosure - haven't actually been there yet, deemed hot by my editor). As well as the Jigga, Jase Knipe is also playing so come by and say hello if you're in town; should be a fun night.

In other news, just found out Stereolab have cancelled their national tour. Something to do with the festival in Brisbane that was bringing them out. A bummer.

2004-10-06T18:02:00.000+10:00

Especially right now there are far more important things to worry about, but sometimes you do wonder. Was made aware of this through clippings we get at work from media monitors.

B-to-the-E, Budweiser's newest entry in a long line of innovative beers by
Anheuser-Busch, is a distinctive new product for contemporary adults who are looking for the latest beverage to keep up with their highly social and fast-paced lifestyles.
As the industry leader, Anheuser-Busch is the first major brewer to infuse beer with caffeine, guarana and ginseng. Well balanced with select hops and aromas of blackberry, raspberry and cherry, BE will offer a lightly sweet and tart taste - a great mixture of beer and new flavors for adults to enjoy when out with friends at a club or at a bar after work with colleagues.
Brewed at Anheuser-Busch's Houston brewery, BE will be packaged in a sleek, slim-line 10-ounce can with stylish graphics. Pending formal government approval, BE will be launched in multiple phases throughout the year in markets across the country.
"Contemporary adults thirst for variety and what's new, and our B-to-the-E delivers a beverage that is true to their lifestyles and range of drinking occasions," said Pat McGauley, senior director of New Products and High End Brands, Anheuser-Busch, Inc. "Our new B-to-the-E provides caffeine, guarana, and ginseng in a great tasting beer."
BE will be priced slightly higher than Budweiser and marketed through local print
advertising, point-of-sale materials, bar and club promotions and online
programs. BE will contain 6.6 percent alcohol by volume.
"We created a great new drink that's outside the boundaries of the taste adults would expect from a traditional beer," said Nathaniel Davis, brewmaster, Anheuser-Busch, Inc. "With B-to-the-E, we've come up with a beer that has a taste with a 'wow' factor at the finish."

B to the E. Contemporary adults. Wow factor.
A thought: Why not, if beer sales are on such a downward turn in the States, start selling drinks for people who don't drink beer? Or do they really think introducing a beer that will appeal to a total of nobody who drinks beer is a sure-fire winner?
These people should be too ashamed to draw their paycheck.

Through this article I also learned that not only are Anheuser-Busch the biggest brewers in the US, they're also one of the largest theme park operators. Their chain includes Seaworld, Sesame Place and Busch Gardens. And here was me to whom the thought that Duff Gardens was based on reality never occurred.
There are two Busch Gardens theme parks, but having looked at their site I'd have to recommend Busch Gardens Tampa Bay. The Howl-O-Scream ride looks hot.

There's a lot hot in Florida right now. Poor buggers living in that part of the world have had a pretty rough go of it due to the weather lately, which has has brought up some thoughts around global warming, and who's likeliest to actually initiate meaningful action.

In meaningful terms*, those with most to lose from the increasing effects of global warming are insurance companies. The storms in Florida made this clear and if you look into it you'll find most insurance companies have been making provisions for this for a long time. In fact if there were still any doubt global warming is a reality it can be found in the research done by insurers and underwriters. Global warming has these corporations as worried as youd hope and we're already seeing them hit with much higher premiums for natural disasters in areas their research shows will likely be most affected. But what's more worrying to these monolithic firms than large-scale natural disasters? The possibility we'll catch on, and just stop insuring. In all likelihood, people who live in areas likely to be badly affected by extreme weather will scale down. Like folks in countries such as the Philippines, they'll construct housing from cheaper materials and may choose to personally own less in the way of consumer goods. May. It's unlikely, but people may start to reassess what's valuable to them if their house has been swept away.

Anyway. Fantasizing about the collapse of the insurance industry through consumer disinterest and shared appliances is perhaps indicative of th fact I possibly don't spend enough time looking for the latest beverage to keep up with my highly social and fast-paced lifestyle.

* terms meaningful to those who make decisions for us and base those on fiscal concerns, as opposed, say, lives lost. They're not my terms, don't hate me.

2004-10-05T17:50:00.000+10:00

Took the week's pile of dance singles for review to fill in for holidaying regular singles reviewer (one 'Forest Bump'), a marginally more interesting experience than you'd bargain.
Standing in elevator flicking through what it was I'd actually picked up, the first time I'd given thought to this cheaply packaged format in some time. Pouting young airbrushed RnB princess, flick, pouting young RnB airbrushed prince, flick, awful-looking trance from someone with a name like Darude, flick, Brio from Rio ..? flick, surly bloke holding a gun, flick, ooh, the new Pete Rock single, wonder if there are any decent remixeoh.
Huh.

not the beatnuts.

2004-10-02T03:48:00.000+10:00

Having played basketball in decently competitive leagues in good teams for 15 years I'm aware it's not a sport I'm good at. Like with surfing, which I've been doing my whole life; I have my moments, but they're not exactly many and often. For some reason, especially given how rarely I do it, snowboarding has never given me cause to wonder why I bother. The way you're supposed to move on a snowboard makes inherent sense. Something of a pity, as despite friends and industry hookups who can sort cheap gear and lift passes, it's not by any means a cheap pursuit. Tho it's continued into Spring to be the best season since the last best season anyone can remember, I've been really slack at getting into the mountains this year, but the few days had have been really good, including last Monday's split late arvo decision to drive to Mansfield, crash in a cheap motel and be on the hill first thing for a cloudless, warm day on snow mushy enough to give you confidence to try anything.
First thing and halfway up the chairlift from the carpark, a text message appeared from a friend stuck in workaday Melbourne wondering if I'd noticed the apparent latest trend for using a major supermarket chain's green shopping bags as handbag substitutes. I had.
In an effort to promote their doing something for the environment, supermarkets now sell these sturdy green bags, presumably made from recycled plastic, and are encouraging customers to forgo plastic bags for them. For some reason, this initiative has been an astounding success. Retail chains have tried this thing before, but never has such an initiative been so popular. These bags are on the arms of everyone. Young and old and guys too, Coles' bright green shopping bags are suddenly the must-have accessory. Huh? For some reason I find this more baffling than other trends, as its germination has no logic. Why does everyone, and it really does seem to be everyone - was talking to a friend who runs a farm outside Ararat and apparently country folk are even hip to this - feel the need to show the world they're doing their bit for the environment by using a gigantic supermarket chain's plastic bag substitute to carry their stuff, even when not going to or from the supermarket? Or does it have nothing whatsoever to do with showing you care, being just a trend like any other? Any thoughts?
This is made more interesting due to the federal government rejecting a proposal which would have required supermarkets charge a nominal fee for plastic bags, despite polling showing the majority of us would accept the charge with no problem. It's amazing environmental issues have no mandate on either side of politics. Actually it's not amazing at all - while GDP continues to be the barometer of a country's wellbeing, conservation initiatives will never be seen to have anything other than a negative impact on our economy (and therefore on the country's general health).
So yeah, it was a good day, and driving back from the mountain in a friend's brand new second hand car (excuse to take the day off work being he needed to 'break it in') listening to DJ Rels Theme for a Broken Soul, towards the end of the album I couldn't help but feel the only reason we hadn't put something else on was duty to how we felt about Madlib. I should at least be enthusiastic about this record, but for some reason I'm not feeling it, and feeling guilty, in a silly way, for saying so. Are you allowed to not be that into something Madlib does? I haven't checked the rules lately, but I don't think you are.
Like most people who like music I'm fascinated by Madlib and was surprised and pleased and felt fuzzy and warm towards the first Rels 12", buying it off an equally excited Jean-Claude without really listening to it when he pressed it on me in If Music last year.
For fans of his who haven't been exposed to broken beat, his Rels tracks might be a bit of a puzzle, but for someone who DJs this music more than anything else at the moment there aren't many tracks I'd play to a dancefloor. Wait, there aren't any tracks I'd play to a dancefloor. Folks in London was stoked Madlib was doing broken beat when Brownswood dropped, the record even trading a nice line in jazz-beard myth due to the title, referring to Gilles Peterson's old house, allegedly now unlived in but used solely to house his collection. Stones Throw getting the record distributed by Goya - a brave and noble (but slightly silly, you'd think if you'd dealt with them) move - at least ensured it would be noticed by the right target audience, but if most folks who bought Brownswood were asked, they'd probly admit they too wouldn't have if it'd been just another Goya white label. Once the excitement wore off it dropped out of people's charts pretty quick - like me I don't think many other djs would've once put it in their record bag since the first week after buying it, and it's the standout track on the album.
Riding one groove is no bad thing, but to these ears it's not much of a groove.
I feel far too undergunned to get into a debate about whether Madlib's all that and don't even think it's worth starting, but suffice it to say this is not his most rewarding release.
Feel very similar thoughts towards Diplo's album Florida which I've only recently caught up with. He's another producer who seems to come at hip hop from a different sensibility to a lot of other producers, and he works hard to make things sound like it. The first track proper of the album is built around the same string sample as used by Jazzanova on Another New Day (anybody?) and that's nice, and Martina Topley Bird is on it too and that's nice also, but I just haven't found it engaging as a whole, and I can't help feel more than a little churlish for not finding more to like from these well-regarded undie heroes. I'm the first to admit I'm one of those people who follow trends, and if a reviewer or magazine I respect says someone is great then I want to believe they are, and with that in mind I really want to support these releases. It's just they're not much chop. Diplo especially (with the exception of the single, which is really hot, and the track with P.E.A.C.E on it,) coming off like Kieren Hebden or Manitoba on an uninspired day, especially odd/disappointing if you've heard one of his mixtapes, which don't give me pause to think anything negative, relievingly living up to all the hype (I reckon).
Am interviewing Diplo next week - wonder if I'll have the balls to get his opinion on any of this.

2004-09-09T18:12:00.000+10:00

P.King has graciously deigned to give the love and the rough mix odyssey it's world premiere tonight on 106.7 PBS FM. Thanks mate!
If you're in Melbourne, he'll be playing it midway through his Radio de Janiero show, around 11pm tonight. If you're somewhere else, it streams live from the site (check a world clock).
We're doing the late shift at Republika this Saturday so come and say hello if you'd like a real copy.

2004-09-08T20:13:00.000+10:00

Despite, or maybe because of, its decreasing speed as a target, I've been reluctant to have a go at Vice magazine. There are a lot of reasons for not getting stuck into them, but few of those reasons have anything much to do with whether they deserve it or not, which they of course do - setting themselves up for nitpicking killjoys with aplomb you can only admire. For me it's around being bothered I guess, but their sorry state has been niggling at me because there was a time, and there must be a lot of folks who feel like this, when you really did feel Vice was that rare media outlet which conveyed how you felt about anything, even (especially) when you hadn't worked out how you felt yet.
I have no issues with their expansion or the fact they're becoming more mainstream and well known. I feel disappointed there's less to love.
Time was, Vice was full of words that managed to be acerbic and cutting and funny and angry at the right things while remaining hugely compassionate and hopeful, always avoiding the descent into fist-pounding empty rhetoric by, more often than not, adding something positive to whatever debate they were entering into. Their articles did everything you wanted a magazine article to do, and made you care about things and feel angry and appalled and stirred into action and sometimes even overwhelmingly glad because there were these other people who cared about people and had the balls to be responsible for how their actions impacted on others, even if they were fucked up on pcp.
For the past year, when not running terrible photos of their (celebrity and otherwise) friends, telling people what to listen to and wear or alienating any readership outside an apparently rigorously-defined demographic, their rage has been empty. Their newer readership is expecting sass, so when Vice editorialises about something that really matters the impact is lost. Current issues remind me nothing so much as the kid watching Homer perform at Hullabalooza, and going 'pffft. That's cool.' When asked by his friend if he's being sarcastic, the kid looks suddenly forlorn and says "I don't even know anymore."
Vice Australia launched last year, and I was stoked. I was surprised that I didn't know who was behind the move, but they held a few great parties and in the main just reprinted the US version of the mag but with local ads, so I wasn't complaining. Today I found out why I hadn't heard of the people behind Vice Australia, when pointed in the direction of this.

"... (Michael Slonim) has undertaken research projects, guided brand strategy and developed communications for a range of advertising agencies and clients. Michael worked with Nintendo on the strategic development for the launch of Gamecube, and ... conducted a major research study into the role of brochure merchandising in business banker communications at National Australia Bank.
Michael is also the publisher of VICE magazine. He discovered VICE in New York City on a trend-hunting expedition, and instead of reporting on it decided to launch it in Australia. Michael negotiated a joint venture arrangement for the Australasian region and successfully introduced the Australian version of the magazine in May 2003, boasting an advertiser list including Diesel, GeneralPants, Zoo York, Asahi and Rockstar Games."

I don't know Michael Slonim and I'm not interested in casting aspersions about him. He is a strategic marketing consultant and clearly good at his job. He recognised Vice for its marketing potential and put together a pitched based on that potential, which the owners of the magazine went for because he proved there was a ready advertising base for their product.
I don't use the above to excuse the downturn in Vice's editorial. Becoming wildly popular and making lots of money is no excuse for being less essential, credible, good. The Onion has shown you can sell out, go well and truly mainstream and make out like bandits while still retaining something of the integrity, humour and charm that drew people to your publication in the first place. Vice is on the fence, and has been for some time. It seems the only reason they haven't toppled the wrong way quite yet is that to most of their audience (here, at any rate), they're still relatively new, and the coolness associated with a new find is yet to wear off.

It's one more magazine to fall by the wayside, but Vice matters to me because for awhile, I believed them.

*Late addition: Excellent post
here with vastly better reasons to be irked by Vice (Courtesy hiphopmusic)

2004-09-08T18:05:00.000+10:00

what to do when you care about stuff.
Voicing opinions on how the world should work is a tricky thing. Being aware of the fine line between 'interesting', 'sanctimonious' and 'preachy' can be both good and bad, although it helps to keep the voicing of one's prejudices to a minimum.
It's not that I don't have courage in my convictions, it's just that I don't do that much in waking life to make good on them. I care a lot about stuff, but I don't do much about it, so am aware I've no grounds to whinge. With this in mind, the fact that seeing people driving to the park near my house to jog around it before driving home again ruins my day and makes me despair for humanity is one I in the main keep it to myself; like most things that happen, I don't presume it's that interesting to anyone else.
Sometimes though, an example of people's, say, ignorant hypocrisy hits you so hard it almost feels like a punch in the guts. Like the sticker I saw while riding to work this morning telling me 'Remember to Breathe.' It was of course on the back of a car, and of the same design as those 'Magic Happens' stickers, except so much worse in its smug implied assumption by whoever placed it on their car that they're more aware of life's bigger picture, and are deigning to impart a smidge of their wisdom on the rest of us poor, workaday saps. I hate 'Magic Happens', it makes the red mist descend, but 'Remember to Breathe' ... on a car. What on earth could that person possibly have been thinking? What?
Global warming isn't coming; it's here. The biggest environmental disaster we face (not to mention the biggest contributor to global warming) is the car. Nuclear power, deforestation, ozone depletion devastate in their own ways but don't come anywhere near the scale of damage caused by the way we use our cars, and the way our car use is supported. The Great Barrier Reef, to use a close to home example of the largest living thing on earth, isn't going to be dead in our lifetime because of over-fishing or tourism or evil big business or any other easily solved problems, it'll die because the increase of the average water temperature by one degree is enough to sufficiently stress the coral to death. That rise in water temperature is a direct result of all of us driving everywhere, all the time.
Why I am writing about this on a blog I'd decided would be about music? I'm not sure. It's alienating, talking like this, it makes people uncomfortable and worse, it makes me a bore. So many things happen every day that render you inert, struck dumb by the relentlessness of our narrow-mindedness and how defiantly comfortable most people are with their ignorance it honest to God distresses the hell out of me, but I have no idea what to do about it, to even begin to make my peace with it. Because I guess that's what you have to do.
Most people are not interested in being challenged into thinking about how their lifestyle impacts on people around them, much less the environment. When reporting for a current affairs program on national radio last year I had to fight surprisingly hard to get environment stories run; convincing the producer that actually, people are interested was a task I in the end wasn't up to. Most people are aware on some level that they aren't living sustainably and could be more aware of these things, which I guess is why they get so defensive and prickly if you bring it up, no matter how diplomatically. Everyone drives, why the hell are you giving me a hard time about it? I do my bit and put out the goddamn recycling so get off my case seems to be the general reaction so I try to hold my toungue outside of sympathetic company, because there's no point being a preachy git no-one wants to have a beer with. If you care a whole lot about stuff, you've made it your problem, and it's fascinating how badly some people react having you try to involve them in caring too. When they feel you're being presumptuous and holier-than-thou they've got a point, but the thing is, we're not hectoring because we like the sound of our own voices, or we want to score better-person points. We've got the world to a really scary, desperate point, but to most people, global warming simply is not happening, because it isn't affecting them in any real sense. To use an oft-trotted-out metaphor, we are that frog sitting in the slowly boiling water, and while there is a minority aware we're about to boil ourselves to death, most people chose not to listen because they don't feel it's happening.
What's horrible to me is all the fiddling around the edges. When people try to take misguided stands, like the colleague who hasn't caught public transport for decades but refuses to buy a real Christmas tree because cutting down trees is bad, and has often voiced concerns about my health because riding my bike through all that smog can't be good for me (she keeps the car windows up) - I often can't help myself. But where do you start when you've got someone like that who genuinely means well? How do you turn that well-meaning into something more tangible without being alienating, or, as the current federal government currently paints the increasingly-likely-to-have-a-real-impact-at-this-election Greens party, 'kooky'? And should you even try? It's not like you're Gandhi, so get back in your box, and act as surprised as everyone else when the apocalypse comes in our lifetime.

2004-09-03T15:25:00.000+10:00

Being able to track your online order is clearly a great addition to one of the Best Things Ever; like using sonar to watch Santa make his way toward your chimney. Occasionally though, it begs more questions than it answers.
F'rinstance: What's so problematic about using an NY airport for freight that necessitates taking my records through six (6) different US states before shipping them to Australia?

25 Aug 2004 18:56
ONTARIO, CA, US
ARRIVAL SCAN 18:16
ALBUQUERQUE, NM, US
ARRIVAL SCAN 16:01
LOUISVILLE, KY, US
ARRIVAL SCAN 9:16
PHILADELPHIA, PA, US
ARRIVAL SCAN 6:24
SECAUCUS, NJ, US
ARRIVAL SCAN 21:28
MASPETH, NY, US
ORIGIN SCAN 13:12
MASPETH, NY, US
THE
PACKAGE WAS LEFT IN A UPS FACILITY CAUSING THIS DELAY;FORWARDED TO
THE FACILITY
IN THE DESTINATION CITY 1:48
23 Aug 2004 21:38
MASPETH, NY, US
ORIGIN SCAN 14:52
BILLING INFORMATION
RECEIVED

2004-09-03T13:44:00.000+10:00

somehow it always turns out green ...
Jill Scott, we salute you.
No really, how do you do it? I want to know.
How can you be so goddamn incredible alla time?

2004-08-27T15:55:00.000+10:00

Currently listening to John Kong, bringing the heat again on the (semi)regular at Milk, the most noteworthy development in the world of internet for some time. Apparently Google have gone public, but wire services are leading with the John Kong story.

As well as the requisite amazing old disco and that new Sunburst Band everyone's hammering right now, the heat is really brought by his Canadian people, who seem to be the folks doing their best to keep the brukbeat flame alive right now.
Not even a year ago each week saw a handful of nujazz releases I had to own, but until today I don't think I've brought a record you could really describe as broken beat for months, maybe even since the Quantic album. And it's not for want of trying. Too much of it now seems either too polite and nice to leave any lasting impression (much less move a dancefloor), being the sort of thing that makes one wrinkle their nose at both the 'nu' and the 'jazz' in 'nujazz', or, like much of what's coming out on Bitasweet and Goya at present, too sonically heavy at the expense of everything else in the tune. I'm all for heaving basslines and gigantic rushing snares, but not if they're on a record that doesn't appear to have anything to say other than "look how well programmed and fantastically engineered I am."

Having left a pile of records in Tamas' studio while making our mix, he presented me with a CDR titled 'What Your Records Do When You're Not There' before I flew up to Brisbane the other week. On it were the fruits of an hour-odd's trawl through the clickier, glitchier end of one of my record bags - a mix of records he in the main hadn't previously listened to and I in the main had stopped playing. Listening to old Akufen, SCSI-9 and Perlon records reminded me how much I really like that music and how much fun they are to play, and prompted by that and the increasing interest (borderline fever-pitch, at least on blogs) in Michael Mayer and his lot, I went and bought Mayer's Fabric mix. It's great (really great) but what surprised me about it was how much micro-house there isn't. Or maybe how much micro-house has changed in the year or so since I've stopped obsessively keeping up with it. Vocals and melodies on the other hand - a surprising surfiet of. Although as Michaelangelo Matos pointed out (in response to another piece linked to below), it's not surprising if you know Kompakt as while they're subtle, they're also pop. It's a straight up great house mix, although a thousandfold more rewarding than, say the Derrick Carter/Mark Farina live mix on Om.
Listening to Mayer's latest effort on Kompakt, a remix for Supercollider with the most fabulously bulbous kickdrum (almost prompting me to buy the record for that alone), I couldn't avoid being reminded of a claim by (I think it was) Simon Reynolds about the similarities between Mayer and progressive house. A good point.
It's interesting to read folks talk about how subtle he is live (yes, this is Old News, but I don't spend every waking second trying to get up on all this, so it's news to me), and then stand in a record shop and have such bombast demand your attention. That Supercollider mix unfolds in an undoubted 'progressive' manner, its trajectory and climax moving in a way that brings to mind the unpleasantness of something on a label like Platypus - but where progressive house tracks conspire to help their DJ on his grim and unrelenting march towards arms-raised no-shades-of-gray euphoria, this Mayer remix is saved by it's neat subversion of the breakdown you'd expect (the kick slowing, then disappearing, then coming back, only backwards) and some things on it that just sound really cool and different.

Kevin Moonstarr's recent record for SK is epic in all the right ways. Light on for bombast, long on for properly devastating. Devastating. You can imagine Carl Craig smiling bemusedly as another young buck with the right synth and idea about how to make it sound like everything you love and nothing you've heard before out Carl Craig's him. Detroit is a killer house track, maybe the killerest I've heard this year, but interestingly even tho' it's been out a month (ie. forever) I've yet to hear any DJ outside of broken-beat circles play it. Has nujazz/broken beat been written off so outright, or is the gulf between it and, say, tech-house so un-leapable that a record on Jazzanova's label is ignored by every house DJ who thinks they're tougher than that?
Or is everyone really up on Detroit like they should be and I'm not going out enough?

While you're at the SK site, how fckn good does this night look?

2004-08-27T13:08:00.000+10:00

to the disinterest (possible slight bemusement) of everyone else: the Battle of the Streetpress
anyone in the city on Saturday night could do a whole lot better than watch a bunch of Melbourne music writers square off on the decks. Still, Spacey Space and Honeysmack are representing for the opposition, so it could be worth dropping by Bourgie to check out the fuss.

2004-08-17T17:14:00.000+10:00

Came back from a week amongst the canefields and dolphin-rich waters (buggers were everywhere - getting in the way when you're paddling for waves and generally being a nuisance) of the NSW north coast to play a fundraiser for a big charity. Fun as it was to play in a massive venue with such a great sound system (and for a good cause, at that), the crowd seemed almost exclusively young south of the river types, and all attendant south yarra stereotypes were in full effect; the young, rich and beautiful all out and misbehaving predictably. Was a bit of a shock to come straight from one of the last places in the country where hippies can weave beads, twirl fire and not wash with impunity only to be confronted by a thousand-odd well dressed youngsters crowded six deep around the free bars to make sure they got their ticket-price worth of champagne in. But maybe if Byron's free spirits had paid $80 for a glitzy open bar'd night on the tiles, they too would have donned their stilletoes and fake tan and got their elbows out in the queue for drinks.

Recieved the following from a good friend in London and thinking of coming home, which reminds me why I loved/loved to hate that city.

Went to the Jazz Cafe picnic yesterday which was the most middle class
festival ever, in the history of mankind, with Lambchop, Gilles Peterson,
the Matthew Herbert Big Band, and about a 99 / 1 ratio of birkenstocks to all
other footwear.
I guess I'll feel more like leaving come December, but in the middle of the
london summer where everyone is constantly frolicking in a park with a large can
of beer i just keep thinking...the cans aren't that large in Australia.

2004-08-16T17:44:00.000+10:00

I recently added a link to a blog called Kon-tent, after Philip Sherburne didn't get around to, then by all appearances forgot about, publishing his review of this year's Sonar festival. Following a link from Philip's site and reading the Kon-tent review caught me completely unprepared for the immediacy of the memories it brought back. Even the light in the accompanying photos transported me to the two Junes most previous, spent by turns having ridiculous amounts of fun under the auspices of work, and wandering about trying to summon the energy to sort life out.
It's sunny outside as I write and while Winter sun here is nothing to be moaned about, it's not shining on the city I am currently, in another life that exists concurrent to this one in a part of two people's heads in which they spend little time, living in.

Less cryptically, the new Choice compilation that recently graced my rusting letterbox also brought back memories of nights spent in cavernous Spanish hangars with 12000 close friends. I've enjoyed the previous couple of Choice releases more than any other recent commercially released mix CDs for a few reasons; partly because the DJs they've commissioned are people whose idea of what constitutes a 'classic' (the auspice of the series being 'a choice collection of classics') is one I'm actually interested in, but also because said DJs have taken the job seriously. Reverentially, even. I'm sure blokes like Francois K, Tony Humphries et al get asked to helm more compilations than they could be bothered with, but for some reason Choice has struck a chord - maybe Azuli is just paying them more, or has a bigger budget for licensing the tracks they really want to use - who knows.

So anyway; good comps. The new one by Jeff Mills; below-par. Sub-par, if you will.
While on the first CD he sticks to the general genre-blueprint mapped out by Derrick Carter and Louie Vega's excellent efforts - that being disco and proto-house - it just doesn't sit right. Louie's release was a rare example of a DJ delivering the sort of mix you'd always hoped they would - a coherently (at times fantastically) mixed selection that illustrates and encompasses his influences and inspiration. Louie's are amazing tracks that you can feel his enthusiasm for, but Jeff's selection is an odd one, partly because it doesn't gel with the myth that (with his careful guidance) has grown around him. The Jeff Mills of popular legend began DJ life as the Wizard, furiously quick-mixing up to 70 songs in his hour-long hip hop show on Detroit radio before founding Underground Resistance with Mad Mike and going on to worldwide superduperstar techno dj status, writing pompous treatises about the state of the world through his label-notes and having photographic exhibitions devoted to his hands (seriously. This happened). He gets asked to weigh in on the most relevant DJ mix series in current circulation, and what does he choose to represent the foundations of his sound?

Teddy Pendergrass and Chas Jankel.
I know Chasanova cut some funky ass songs and left an indelible imprint on dance music, but Jeff; are these really your roots?
For sure, he includes many great artists - Deodato, Gerardo Frisina - but despite the fact that there are some genuinely funky songs, it makes for a curiously funkless whole. It doesn't help that he choses to fade tracks in and out or just bump them up against one another, which I guess is his way of making some statement or other, but when he does it on the second CD too, which is mostly techno, it just seems odd. Having a review copy with no liner notes I'd be really interested to read the reasons behind including each track, but based purely on aural merits, I'm not sold.
Partly this is because I've never bought the Jeff Mills hype. I don't have an irrational hatred of techno, I like a lot of it, but the sets of his I've heard have never seemed particularly vibrant or surprising, just calculated and even somehow soulless.

2004-07-30T12:03:00.000+10:00

This mix from Theo Parrish has been killing me lately.
Was recorded a week or two after he was here in Melbourne earlier this year. He opens with the same song he did here, and does this thing with the Quentin Harris remix of Donnie and the Carl Craig Cesaria Avoria mix which has not failed to make me feel better every time i hear it.
The deep house page has been making the internet a better place for at least half a decade now, and all respects are due to the Gman for selflessly bestowing upon us such goodness.

2004-07-27T17:58:00.000+10:00

I've been letting this languish, partly because I've been making an effort to spend as little spare time as possible in front of a computer, but also because when I do, I read things like this (courtesy of Wonkette) or this (courtesy their bad selves), which make me want to leave this planet, and all the trouble that's in it.

In an effort to combine both planet and computer leaving urges and having a free Monday with not much writing to be done, a hunch that the surf was probably good and a borrowed hatchback, I drove through the rain down to Bells. The wind swung from NW to SW (bad) during the hour and a half on the road, and I arrived to find big, messy slabs of blown-out ocean unloading on the reef at the bottom of the cliff. The swell was still relatively straight and it looked okay despite all the chop, so I paddled out and joined a handful of locals braving the mid-Winter cold to get a few waves, and spent the next hour getting dragged down said reef by afformentioned large bits of ocean. While any time in the water is time well spent, sometimes; say, when you come to the surface after half a minute underwater having had a thick Bells lip land on your head only for the next three waves in the set break in front of you; you feel all you're doing is paying your dues.

Also though, Tamas and I have been working on a love and the rough mix CD. It's ridiculous how much time we've managed to spend working on this - off and on for three months at least - but unlike previous efforts we've managed during this time, I think we've near enough settled on a tracklisting that reflects pretty much everything we play, and sounds nice into the bargain. If we manage to get it recorded this week, come down to Republika this Saturday and we'll give you a copy. You should come anyway - we're playing with Damian Laird - a proper Melbourne legend who's been a bit quiet of late, so no doubt it'll be worth hearing what he's into these days.

Speaking of techier house DJs, we went by Honkytonks to catch DJ Diz on Saturday night. It's enough to make a chap wonder what it is about your city when so many people you've heard be ace somewhere else come to town and play such uninspired, workmanlike sets. I won't get started on Darshan Jesrani (although I'm more into placing blame for his Melbourne appearances here on the promoters, venues and warm-up DJs than the bloke himself), but I'd caught Diz a couple of times in London and have been keeping up with his productions since, and while there was nothing wrong with what he played on Saturday, it just wasn't particularly interesting or engaging. I guess I just don't expect a DJ to get less musical and less adventurous as they get older, but a few Chicago house DJs appear to have done just that. Maybe they're just feeling trackier music these days, but when Diz, having essentialy just played bonus beats and tools for about half an hour, finally played a track that sounded different (in this case, one with an interesting bassline and a bit of warmth), it was JT Donaldon's Vanguard Nights, a record I passed on when I heard it because it didn't seem different enough to any of the hundreds of tougher jazzy house records like it.
Maybe I really don't get it, but doesn't every DJ want to play sets where each record is interesting and has life, and soul, and takes the room in a newer direction to the previous one, instead of sets where you take the dancefloor into a dark, linear tunnel with only pots and pans percussion to supply the drive? I guess if you do that then the records that have a bit more life will make a greater impact, but all the music you play should have a bit more life, shouldn't it?

2004-07-07T11:52:00.000+10:00

The best request asked of a DJ is no longer a wearily amusing 'can you play something with beats?' or 'do you have any dance music?'.
Asked of Tamas while playing at Bimbo last night by an apparently deadly serious (though polite) young lady:
Do you know what song is next?

2004-07-06T20:50:00.000+10:00

And alone,
Means
All
By
Your
Self.

I interviewed Money Mark last week, so pulled Mark's Keyboard Repair from the dusty spot where it'd been languishing with other pre-loved lps, waiting for its day in the sun to come around again.
I hadn't forgotten how sunny that day was, but you know, you move on and records, despite their greatness and relevant to you right nowness, get passed over by new discoveries.
Listening to it again reminded me of discovering Mo Wax and those mid-90s records by DJ Shadow and Krush, the early Autechre - music that made you feel like you'd stumbled across some secret cubby-house society and for some reason even you couldn't understand, the kid who built it deemed you cool enough to join.
Those records were an epiphanical moment, when I heard something that changed the possibilities felt and seen in music. It was real nice to dig out the Headz comps, and Some Scientific Abstract Type Shit - You can still feel the weight of that music, seemingly worth more than anything else i was listening to at the time.

Mark is a sweet guy, and told some great stories about recording with Yoko Ono and Femi Kuti, who was in semi-exile in Paris when they worked together on Fight To Win , Femi having had half his band defect from Nigeria on their first US tour, and so had to escape an irate government and even irater bandmate's wives, pissed off at him for giving them the opportunity to leave and never come back.

We didn't get onto the Beasties for awhile - i figured maybe he was sick of talking about them and he's an interesting enough guy in his own right - but he did say the years working with them, in his life, were perfect. He also made it very clear that he was Not Around (full stop) while they made their new record, but i guess that's clear enough to anyone looking forward to listening to the 5 Boroughs as little as i am, or anyone unfortunate enough to have heard it.
Speaking of, this review on pitchfork deserves mention for niceness, and for being a review that doesn't ask to be agreed or disagreed with. Whatever your thoughts on the record or the idea of using a review as a swan-song, it's an most agreeable piece of writing, its out of context personal mumble forgiven.

2004-07-02T17:25:00.000+10:00

Here then, in the red corner, are Tamas' thoughts on Oliver and Jay's thoughts on my thoughts (see below for context).

It's great that we get to ramble-on with other people who live on the other side of the world and who also like to ramble-on. Tim, Jay, and Oliver - hats-off to you all for loving music. The writing thusfar has made me think a bit about hip-hop in the context of a few of my pet interests so I'd like to put some of these thoughts out there as a further provocation.

When Tim referred to 'the nerdy, beat-digging, wax poetics-theorising culture, thanks; no guns, misogyny, bling or hand-jive posturing for me, no sir,' he was, if the comment is taken in a literal sense, presenting what Jay in his response views as a 'false dichotomy,' but Jay's impassioned response got me thinking; firstly because it was obviously an informed view but secondly because it seemed to signify something aparent and yet actually downright cool; some implications of the cultural distance between Tim/Me and Jay/Oliver.

I get to hang out with Tim a bit so I know that he was not speaking literally but more generally about a gap in the culture of hip-hop, which I think is inevitable as a result of talking about it from an Australian perspective. The way in which an Australian receives / processes / understands and then appreciates the culture and the sound of hip-hop is inevitably and fundamentally different to an American. Jay and Oliver I'm sure are aware of this but choose to overlook it in their response. I've spent no more than a year or so in the US and have always found hip-hop to be immensely political and racial in the context of that country - even when it's just 'wave your hands in the air etc.' type stuff - because that racialness and politicalness is so ingrained in the physical substance of the music... and yet I also notice that the reception of that whole side of the music is altered if you're an Australian Kid who hasn't and potentially might never, meet, a Black American or indeed any American (a generalisation that, it may as well be added, does not include either Tim or I). Yet I would argue that this makes AK's appreciation of it in no way invalid or naive because AK could have the internet and (on this point we all agree) the shit-hot Wax Poetics magazine etc., and as a result might a) actually know a truckload about the culture factually, technologically and historically and, b) might have an acute appreciation of it from a rhythmic perspective which (we probably all agree on this point seeing as we all love hip-hop beats worth dancing to) is an essential and good manner in which this, and indeed all dance music is understood and it is mostly intuitive so it is not much of a geographically or culturally sensitive trait, especially now that hip-hop is one of the dominant contemporary music forms.

Now Tim's no AK but I think I'm mounting a decent arguement why his separation of hip-hop's hard posturing and/or gangsta culture from what he perceives (from afar) as a more general, intellectual interest in the music viz. Wax Poetics, might be a 'false dichotomy,' for those at WP, but that this doesn't hold when you find yourself on the other side of the globe. Further this is only one of many ways in which Australia, or any other country other than America is opening-up hip-hop culture. But unfortunately you're going to see a lot of AKs pretending to be American and rhyming in a false US accent before there's a greater acceptance of this fact. So I'm thinking it's precisely his geographic location that enables Tim to ask the sort of questions about hip-hop that American blokes like Jay and Oliver are likely to have some problems with.

At this point a quick aside; does anyone else except me think that it's incredibly cool that a song titled, of all things, Synthetic Substitution, would come to be so heavily sampled?

When Oliver writes of Tim's blog-blurt that 'Ideologically, I find that opinion to be problematic, especially b/c your explanation of how you arrived at said conclusion is quantitative rather than qualitative,' I felt that something was being side-stepped. Yes, it is problematic, but in the best way possible. The interesting thing about what Tim raises is precisely the 'quantitative,' and not 'qualitative.' To bring it back to a discussion of the qualitative I think overlooks that Tim was clearly not taking aim at cutting-edge producers when he wrote this (even a cursory scan of his blog shows he has a keen, thoughtful, broad interest in dance music) but about mass recycling of obvious source material, and Oliver and Jay appear reluctant to concede there's anything much wrong with this for reasons I don't yet understand. One responds with yet another comparison between hip-hop and jazz as if hip-hop needs the legitimisation (they're more different than alike but more about that later), while the other treads the path of qualitative vs. quantitative. It almost appears as if Oliver and Jay are apologising for the standards that Tim justly critiques, if a little haphazardly. Tim's question 'What does this say about hip-hop and what they're trying to sell us?' is a worthy one. Granted, on a fundamental level hip-hop is precisely the same as rock'n'roll when it comes to nostalgia for the "classics," but this music is for sale to a public and as Oliver points out, most of us don't notice when someone 'flips the same break twice.' This proves to be the Achilles's heel of hip-hop (and in another way a strength, but I only have so much time and space) because producers are excused of their laziness. And record companies realise this. Compared with the jazz days where they always had to pay a full band of trained musicians interacting with one another spontaneously to create music (afterall at base level this kind of communicative improvisation amongst fellow musicians within structure IS what I believe jazz is about and no, one person or even three in a studio cutting up samples is not the same as that. Jazz standards or not, the dynamic of its making has to be different, and any person with some sense of intuition and/or experience playing a musical instrument in an ensemble knows this), it might prove to be a comparatively efficient economy and, more relevantly, expedient to pay a lone producer with kick-ass modern equipment in a studio, to flip the same break twice.

In the early twentieth century Marcel Duchamp, the granddaddy of sampling, put a urinal in an art gallery and blew open modern art. This work was of immense rhetorical power and resonates still precisely because it tackled what Oliver succinctly summarises as a 'high culture/low culture binary about how "art," should be properly produced.' If an artist in the 21st century did the same thing the rhetoric would be limp; at best naïve and at worst stupid or lazy. That does not mean that the binary is tired, quite the opposite; it proves to be a source of inspiration for artists in media as diverse as architecture, film and music and seems especially relevant now that we're aided by computer software that dramatically levels the playing field. It also proves to be a good source of discussion I'm told.

If you'd like to weigh in - by all means.

2004-06-30T17:59:00.000+10:00

some horns to lock
Some weeks ago i had a bit of a muse about sampling, after chancing upon a site listing well-known hip hop samples. i didn't really think the argument through, partly because in my naivety i didn't expect anyone would read it, so just wrote what it was i was thinking about, and put it up here.
As i should have known, just as hip hop don't stop, neither do hip hop bloggers. A couple weeks after the post, i noticed a few fresh comments from Jay Smooth.

Tamas, who other Melbournites no-doubt know for providing the muscle in the love and the rough sound system (as well as being as well-rounded a renaissance man as one could hope to meet), was interested to see Jay hadn't acknowledged the fact that i was making the comments as someone - unlike him - pretty removed from the culture i was commenting on, and thought he was leaping to the defence of hip hop producers a tad, well, defensively.

At that time it hadn't occurred to me to think critically about Jay's points. Truth be told, i was just chuffed he'd found my post (altho' i still haven't asked him how he happened upon it - Jay?), and bothered to respond in such a constructive (as opposed derisive) manner.

So i checked out his site, something i unreservedly recommend everyone does, and noticed a comment from Oliver Wang referring to my comment as 'dumb ass'. I didn't particularly have a problem with this - you put things on the web, you take your criticism - but i was curious as to why someone so intimately involved with and knowledgable about hip hop would bother to post a permalink on Jay's site to something they were so dismissive of. So because i didn't want to think someone i admire and respect is an arsehole, i wrote him an email to ask if he could shed some light on a throwaway comment he made. I also felt the need to defend myself by using Tamas' point that us honkys out here in Australia come at hip hop from a rather different standpoint to the him and Jays of the world.
And here's what he wrote back:

Hey Tim,

Don't take my "dumb ass" comment personally. Wait, ok, it's kind of hard NOT to. I was being off the cuff in that "it's only the internet" sort of way which means I act like a complete asshole in ways that I don't at all come off in person.

So my apologies on being an asshole.

To lend some context to where my head was at in particular though (i.e. the constructive criticism element that you were asking for)...what bothered me about your post was this thinly hidden layer of derision. I mean, you weren't calling people who sampled dumb asses, but you were making a general comment on how creatively exhausted hip-hop has become simply b/c people keep using "Synthetic Substitution." Ideologically, I find that opinion to be problematic, especially b/c your explanation of how you arrived at said conclusion is quantitative rather than qualitative.

It's importnat that you should have listened to some of these songs before passing judgment on them or the people who created them. It's not like most producers remake the same beat twice in all its entireity. Marley Marl did it when he made LL Cool J's "Pink Cookies in a Plastic Bag," - basically a remake of Big Daddy Kane's "Ain't No Half Steppin" which he also produced. But examples like those are few and far between.

Most people who are not the most uber of uber-nerds will never notice if Prince Paul flips the same break twice. Partially b/c often times, the same samples will get engineered differently from use to use. Other times b/c producers will chop up drums and create a new pattern even if they're using sounds that possess a unique timbre (Premier, for example, uses the same snares ALL THE TIME). But the re-use, in and of itself, is not a sign of creative absence and I think to accuse it as such reflects a tired high culture/low culture binary about how "art" should be properly produced.

More than that though, your logic doesn't quite hold. Is a drummer who uses the same kit and plays some of the same basic patterns creatively dry? Or how about an artist who records with the same group of studio musicians on several albums, thereby creating a consistent sound?

So why then would a hip-hop producer be any less creative for working with some of the same sounds more than once?

Like I said, what it really comes down to is that you should listen to these songs first and then pass judgment. Here are two that are relativley easy to find online:

Gang Starr's "Dwyck" and "Code of the Streets." Both use the Melvin Bliss break.

Again, apologies on my lack of decorum from before.

Sincerely,

Oliver

I take all points, and said as much in my reply. Having been prompted by Tamas though, i find it interesting that in both Jay's comments on the original post and Oliver's reply, they don't see my argument holding any water. Sure, they may well've moved beyond it and in their contexts it may seem facile, but there was no acknolwedgement of the point i was making, which is this: with the entire history of recorded music avaliable to them, it's interesting/disappointing that so many hip hop producers return to the same source material.
Yes, i take the point that they use the original sources in different ways, and yes, i have gone away and listened to more examples. But in my own small way, i stand by the thought that this was worthy of at least a blog entry. Tamas, on the other hand, was really put out that Jay and Oliver choose to ignore the idea that how an Australian - who hasn't grown up with hip hop but nevertheless appreciates and loves it - comes at the culture can be as relevant as how they do. So when he writes his response, i'll publish it here.

2004-06-29T17:31:00.000+10:00

Listening to Rainer Truby recorded at Seen in Bristol about a week after he was here, playing many of the same tracks (the Sumo mix of Spirit of Drums, the new Ame, Spiritual South's Jazz Rooms rub etc) in a similar vein. In retrospect, i had a great time listening to him the other week. It didn't touch hearing him in Osaka at Freedom Time, but i don't think much could, that brief foray into the world of Japanese clubbing being on of my favouritest nights in memory.

I'm in two minds about how people reacted to him playing, by his standards, such a linear set. Of course it doesn't matter, he can play whatever he wants, but out on Saturday listening to Lava Nick and his Audrey crew doing a goodbye set at a great party celebrating last drinks at the sure-to-be-missed Liquorice brought it up again. Those guys are great djs and get as excited as i do about labels like 4Lux and other good broken beat, but really, they just want to play house. Nick and i were having a drunken mumble about this at the time and i commented on how tracky Dan was playing, to which he replied; "Tim, explain to me what 'tracky' is."
It's not something i've given any thought to, but all these terms used to describe dance music; driving tribal electro-tech dubby breakbeat tools; are completely open to interpretation, and often completely useless. You read them in reviews and on record sales-notes, but they're just handy bits of jargon for us folks who can't be arsed with the effort of actually thinking about what something really sounds like. Trying to engagingly describe this music in ways meaningful to people who aren't intimately aware of the differences between a tracky tech-house record from San Fransisco, and a tracky tech-house record from Sheffield, takes more effort than most of us would consider it worth.
But as Nick illustrated, even people who are aware of these types of music still find the terms unhelpful, as everyone in the scene assumes a knowledge of what they signify. As no-one has the balls to publish an explanation for fear they'll get it wrong, this means we all come to our own conclusions, and one man's electro-dub-tech is another's driving breakbeat.

All part of life's rich tapestry, i dare say.

2004-06-18T17:42:00.000+10:00

they've gone and fucked it up again
Here they come ... all the people i can find who agree with my view that even though i haven't heard it, the new beastie boys album plumbs new depths in cringe-inducing, head-shaking wrongness.
Did you really even need to hear the first single? Just seeing the title your reaction is like 'boys. Really.'
And then you actually hear the track and your suspicions that they're going to end up on that pile of bands in your head that make you wonder why people think they're relevant anymore because they just aren't even a little bit, are confirmed in the most disappointing way.
I think i heard a song off the album with Biz Markie on it which sounded cool but it woke me up when the clock radio went off so i wasn't totally listening and am therefore not sure, but don't think i care enough to investigate it.
Joe here has a nice post about it which i will quote from, if i may.

Today the number of cringe-inducing lyrics known to be found on To The 5 Boroughs has grown again, with the revelation of this little gem:

Walking down the block, you say, 'Yo, D!
'When you coming out with the new CD that spreads love in society?'

As Gear! on ILM so rightly says, "If the line that follows up is "I pull out my piece and take that motherfucker down/turn that big hippie smile into a motherfucking frown", all is forgiven." But I think we'd be a little optimistic to expect that.

As Joe goes on, Let me get some confusion out of the way by stating for the record that the problem with many recent Beastie Boys' lyrics is not that they are "simplistic" or "one-sided". (A lot of things in this world are more simple and one-sided than people would have you believe.) The problem is that they are bad lyrics, the kind composed by rubbish old men desperate to prove they are still 'down'.

I think he may have something there.

2004-06-17T18:02:00.000+10:00

A modern man's hustle
Have just been listening to this having been informed by Rens that it was the hotness, and would restore my faith in hip hop. It's pretty good.
I haven't heard much from Slug, but have been meaning to for awhile, altho' i gotta say at first cop J-Live kinda sorta blows this out the water.
Also finally got around to listening to Brett Johnston's Classic mix. I was just now searching for something to link to, and found a review of it by some girl who felt the need to give a p.s. at the bottom to Brett reminding him that he "had" her at some party. Even if she's not talking about a quick post-set shag, i found it incredibly lame, and it kinda killed my enthusiasm for saying anything about the CD.
It's not a Brett Johnson mix like maybe you'd expect from him, it's a compilation of Classic classics mixed in a pumping bigroom way - you know, like Roger Sanchez or someone where they never let the intensity drop, mixing the next track a good 32 bars before the previous one breaks down and slamming it in right as the first one peaks. That's fine and it's fun to play that way but i don't know if it brings out the best in these tracks, although they come off sounding a lot more fluid than anything you normally associate with Classic. It made me ride to work a lot faster than usual, so i guess that's something else.

2004-06-16T17:26:00.000+10:00

Yahoo: taking it to the Google pretenders.
i just logged into Yahoo to find i now have 100 megs of space. Not 6 megs. 100.
Don't give you any reason either, they just give it to you.
I guess they're taking this Gmail shit seriously. Can anyone tell me if Hotmail have entered into this fray?

2004-06-14T16:36:00.000+10:00

A dark and stormy Queen's Birthday holiday good for lots of indoorsy activities like eating toast, drinking tea and making a start on a review pile as top heavy on compilations as ever.
Currently listening to Gilles' Worldwide exclusives which is okay, but hasn't yet made any real impact as a whole despite a couple of standout tunes, but it got sent late and i'm only halfway through it.
Was at Revolver again last night - bowled up to find an insane crowd at the door, peopled most probably by no-one actually there to see Rainer Truby, which, especially after a brief, concern-inducing foray into the backroom, was most definitely their loss. Wheras back there was all tight jaws, vacant stares and 'bows being autopilot thrown to decidedly workmanlike techy-electro, the front room found Kaman and Kano laying down about the best warmup a dj like Rainer could hope for. As Annie noted, there were a lot of smiles in the room.
Having had Larry Levan throwing down the Salsoul classics for our cross-town pleasure in Nick's car we ducked past the queue to find Kaman in like-mind, playing some beautiful warm old mid-tempo disco before being joined by Kano to play the sort of latin-based music that never fails to make me smile. As we were expecting/hoping from Rainer, they moved through hip hop to drum and bass to house tempos, leaving him with Kaman's mix of Belladonna's Ebatule (which Irma have somewhat bafflingly not given a release date to, despite it being far acer than the DJ Uovo mix out earlier this year).
They left him with with everywhere to go, and for half an hour, Rainer held onto the floor they'd built with a slightly housier (but from the looks of the gradually thinning crowd, slightly less engaging) take on the same latin and afro-beat sounds, before moving into one of the nicer house sets I've heard in awhile. It was interesting hearing him play as hard as he did; tho there were points where i felt he stripped things back so far he lost momentum, when he reined things in after that one track too many by playing something a bit more dynamic, it was all the more appealing for it. The promoter who brought him out had come down from Sydney with stories of the last night's genre-hopping set, so it was a bit disappointing not hearing him play broader here, but i guess a dj like him doesn't often get to indulge in a straight house set - maybe people will talk. Personally, i'd forgotten how good it was to hear that sort of music, especially as so surprising a number of djs playing brukbeat won't touch it (which is weird).
Still and all, i didn't hear anything that had me rushing up to peer over his shoulder.

2004-06-11T15:25:00.000+10:00

bleurgh. far too tired for a friday afternoon not preceded by an evening of drinking and/or carousing. Instead spent helping a friend panel-beat articles written for the design magazine she edits into some semblance of readability; no small task given that most of these designers (ahem) cannot write for shit (aaaaaaaaa ha ha ha).
she had me write a couple of things for the current issue, the last she's editing before the publication moves up to Sydney, which was nice, as it's been awhile since i've had something published on anything other than music. One of these things was street art, and boy did having a tight word limit make for a pity.
Great frustration for me was not being able to properly lock horns with the people i was interviewing about what's problematic in the eminence of stencils, lightboxes, posters over, say, graf.
There's more to say, but just quickly, train-painting friends who've lived graf for most of their lives have a real problem with the stencil as street art; not (they say) so much for any issues of realness/hardness (though of course it's that too), but just because they see it as studio art that happens to be displayed on the street, not street art.
I'm not thumping any tubs over this, but i can see their point, although it's very easy to dismiss it as territorialism (especially in Melbourne, which isn't, after all, the Bronx). Is it sour grapes that artists who take less risks are getting more kudos for work in a forum that's always been the preserve of these mostly-maligned painters?
Being given The Art of Revolution, a German hardcover coffee table book full of photos of street art, has helped make my mind up on this. While it comes with a nice mix CD by Florian Keller, this book is so heavy on stencils, posters and stickers at the expense of any exposure of real graf you can't help but feel their defensiveness. Of course there are dozens of books featuring nothing but photos of whole-cars, but you know none of them were marketed, sold as well, or capture the imagination of the curious punter like The Art of Revolution will.
As if to defend it from this sort of argument, the book's collator refers to the work as 'post street art' in his introduction.

Two interesting things happening tonight making me wish i didn't feel quite so crap. Jamie Lidell and the unabombers.
For Jamie Lidell, see someone who writes better than me.
Both should be the hotness.

2004-05-31T20:38:00.000+10:00

Arse.
My suspicious that on such a gorgeous Monday, one on which i didn't have to work, no less, there would be really good surf, were unfortunately confirmed this morning. Unfortunate due to my idiot brother running the car we co-own(ed) into the ground (cracked head gasket = goodbye 20 year old car), and my housemate's car also being currently off the road leaving me to sit in front of the computer and wonder what to say about Jazzanova. I'd interviewed Alex last week from their label's offices in Berlin, and despite being sandwiched in the middle of a half dozen other press calls, he was pretty forthcoming and we had a pleasant chat. It's interesting how far ahead those guys are in terms of sales and recognition over all other future jazz producers. They're a force unto themselves with the hype and myth to match, and it's always nice to talk to people in that sort of position and find them still flattered at the forum given to them to muse publicly about what they do.
As i was still in town and not sitting in the water with the sun on my back at Winki i said yes to an interview with Texan house producer Brett Johnson when my editor rang later in the afternoon. Despite being a bit blah about it - i'm still yet to listen past track three of his new mix on Classic despite being sent it two weeks ago having looked at the tracklist and thought 'eh, nothing new here' - he made my day. Not in a worth missing probably classic waves way, but hearing a house dj/producer type who's thought for more than ten minutes about what he does and is still really enthusiastic about boompty after so many years of living it, was cool.
I'll hopefully expand this post once i get around to transcribing the interview, but word is he was one of the standout DJs at this years WMC, so will no doubt be well worth a check when he comes through town.

2004-05-28T17:11:00.000+10:00

the elephants of life
Sorry, the surf has been good.

Was riding home from a meeting south aye the river yesterday evening and sought respite from the rain in Mixed Bag records. It's this new store on Church St i've been meaning to check since it opened the very same week i moved out of the area, and despite the name, it pretty much only sells house. Time was i would've been pretty excited about something like this, but shops that just sell house don't seem to sell my sort of house anymore (no go on, hear me out).

I spent a good hour ploughing through 50-odd records yesterday, most by people or on labels i've liked enough to purchase previously, but none were hitting the spot, or getting even vaugely near enough to it to merit having some hard-earned dropped on them. I was getting pretty desperate after awhile as they were nice chaps in there, and ended up leaving with a deep chugger with some nice keys on the appropriately named Odds and Ends, a record i would have been really happy with if i hadn't filled my collection with dozens of soundalikes over the years.

It was faintly depressing though as i don't like house music; i'm obsessed with it. This happens far too often - i can no longer go into Rhythm and Soul because i just get cranky; not with them as they stock some surprisingly open-minded records for the sort of shop they are (actually, i get cranky with them for different reasons), but just with the amount on the shelves that doesn't sound any different to records that came out eight years ago.

Hopefully i can avoid this complaint becoming a recurring theme but it shits me when i don't feel i can argue with people who say house is boring.

2004-05-28T15:26:00.000+10:00

Doing early doors till midnight before Kano and Blue MC on Saturday at First Floor.
Let me know if you're thinking of coming down otherwise it's a fiver to get in.

2004-05-13T15:16:00.000+10:00

Managed to find the Sleepwalker track with Sanders. Is a killer; an inspired flurry of soaring, multiphonic'd beauty anchored by the jaw dropping drums of Nobuaki Fujii. Hajime's piano solo is bananas, but every member pulls out all stops for this performance.
Pharoah is there, but you feel his presence more than hear his playing on this song; the band obviously so stoked at having the opportunity to take it to one of their inspirations; the result being properly electric. Masato Nakamura channels more Pharoah than Pharoah, and when the two play together ... two thumbs fresh for being the only recent recordings that's managed to induce goosebumps through sheer force of passion. The sound of such a good group of musicians playing above themselves is a beautiful thing.

Check the May 5th broadcast of into somethin'.

2004-05-12T16:00:00.000+10:00

In a Village Voice article that starts with the complete sentence 'Sometimes New York city doesn't totally suck' comes news that Theo Parrish has started a monthly residency at the apparently totally incredible APT. According to Andy Battaglia, there were "maybe 60 people" on his first night.
Not sure what to think about a dj like him, one revered the world over (and one who also happens to be just really good) not really pulling an ny crowd (although maybe 60 is an ny house crowd these days), especially with his stock so high right now.
The Rotating Assembly album has everyone in a lather, and Ubiquity are about to re-release Parrallel Dimensions.
These kids are about my favourite label right now. The new Quantic album is something i'm hugely looking forward to, as are the Nobody and John Arnold remix 12"s which should hopefully be gracing the mailbox with their presence any day now.
They were always an interesting label for their reissues, but while they're still doing worthy things with Cubop in that area, it's the new hip hop and house releases that have me in my current tizz. As i said in last month's column for Inpress, getting two producers like Mr Scruff and Henrik Schwarz on the same record is like a gift, but giving them so great a source track they can't fail to turn out something interesting, AND putting two unreleased John Arnold songs on the same record should just shame other labels - how many times do you feel like you've been taken for a ride when you look at a 12" with two tracks on it that the label/producer has had the cheek to call an 'EP'?
Back to the reissues tho - any label that gives a proper release to a jazz record so rare they manage to piss off a dj like Gilles Peterson is alright in my book - but it's not just reissuing rare music that makes them worthy, it's that this rare music is also good.
Take the Arthur Verocai album, which is an incredible gem, or the Black Renaissance re-issue that stole Gilles' thunder - there's no way i would have come across this music without Ubiquity putting it out there again; i just don't have the time to dig that far.

2004-05-05T17:37:00.000+10:00

and these are the breaks, give it up give it up give it up ...

Back in the dark ages and without having really heard anything by him i just assumed Snoop Dogg was shit. Of course, a few years later i actually got around to listening to some of his records and realised that, well, whaddayaknow. But it was the clip for Chuuuch to da Palace that really piqued my interest, not just because it's a great video, but because Snoop seemed to be rhyming about absolute nonsense. Nothing new about this - Ghostface has made a career out of it, but there was something about Snoop's laconic delivery that killed me, and when i recently heard Batman and Robin on a mix by DJ Gilb'r from Versatile in Paris, and discovered it was from the same album as Chuuuch, it was straight down the local CD emporium to find it selling for an exceedingly pleasing $18.

Paid the Cost to be tha Boss is a good album and i'm glad i bought it, but how many times have i listened to it since that day?
I haven't.
As holds for every type of music i guess, what i find compelling within hip hop is a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of everything that falls under that genre. But hip hop is a funny one, because no-one dislikes it, and everyone will say they listen to it all the time, and that includes me. Like most people who like music at the moment, i have a silly amount of hip hop on my shelves. I also find i'm playing more and more of it out, too, but while i love the culture that surrounds it (the nerdy, beat-digging, wax poetics-theorising culture, thanks; no guns, misogeny, bling or hand-jive posturing for me, no sir), i don't actually enjoy listening to the music all the time, and the songs that i find genuinelly incredible are by the folks completely ignored by most hip hop listeners, or dismissed for their lack of hard/realness.
This is no beef against more commercial or popular hip hop - all the rest is cool if it's your cup of milk, just don't make me sit through a Too $hort CD.

Part of this is just down to taste, but following up some record or other i chanced upon one of those incredible websites that, while their incredibleness is incredible in its own right, threw open so much information it gave me cause to think about the constructs of a culture in a way i'd never been prompted to before.

This site, and there are probably many like it, lists breaks and samples used in hip hop. It houses a huge archive of hip hop tracks and the samples they used. Searching by the sampling or original artist leads you off on some surprising tangents, but most importantly helps you discover some really good music (and impress/bore your friends by name-checking every record used to create Midnight in a Perfect World).
But it just got me to thinking about how creatively dry the genre is becoming.

Take the Synthetic Substitution break.
While the song is not in the league of an Apache or Funky President, this Melvin Bliss b-side from 1977 is a good example as it wasn't on a huge label so isn't well known outside crate-digging circles at all, but for diggers - even casual ones like myself, it's far from obscure. I knew the break from De La Soul and Pete Rock, and kinda assumed a few other people must have used it too, as i'm not really up on hip hop.
So.
The site lists over 80 different songs that use this break. Some of them are unlikely - ie. Depeche Mode - but given the ubiquity of hip hop production in pop even in the 80s, i have no reason to doubt the legitimacy of this list.

Over 80.
From the Alkaholicks through Big Daddy Kane, Dee Lite, LL Cool J, the Pharcyde, Souls of Mischef and a swag more, Synthetic Substitution has been used by pretty much everyone.
More interesting/depressing is how many producers have used it more than once. De La, Wu Tang, Public Enemy, Naughty by Nature, Ice T, Kool Keith (it's used for a couple of Ultramagnetic tracks and a couple from Dr Octagon) have all used this break as the foundation of many of their own songs.

What does this say about hip hop and what they're trying to sell us?

A couple of decades ago when sampling was exciting purely for its newness and these breaks were undiscovered, there was no argument here. People were pushing primitive equipment to its limits, creating dynamic music by doing things these samplers and drum machines weren't designed for.
But that was twenty years ago, and the MPC and similar equipment have been explored in and out and surpassed many times over by new studio gadgetry. Talented producers have shown breaks and samples can be found anywhere, not just in jazz and funk produced in the late 60s and early 70s, yet most hip hop is still being made with the same breaks used all that time ago.

You just end up pondering how alarmingly low the bar is set for hip hop production.
Pharell and Chad from The Neptunes are great producers - i think it's genuinelly interesting and cool they can make their tracks sound so heavy and fat without using kick drums but really, how good a thing is it when all your productions are instantly recognisable as yours because they sound so similar? Do they deserve the feting they get?

With so many producers finding original ways to use samples and proving how much life the genre still has left in it, the only conclusion you can come to is that the rest of these guys aren't trying anymore.

Which, when you think about it, is no surprise at all.

2004-04-30T16:36:00.000+10:00

Republika was fun last week - and despite kind of dreading as i always do these late sets, it didn't feel like a slog, although i could have done without being asked to play an extra hour until 7am. Still, when a place is heaving like that and you're on top of things - instead of falling flat and spending the night on the back foot, struggling to think of ways to play music people might react to - it passes quite pleasantly.
Not, perhaps, as pleasantly as saturday morning had passed, sitting in front of the fire down the coast, drinking tea, reading the papers, listening to the wind in the tea-tree and cooking breakfast, but you take what you can get.
I hadn't thought to go down to Rob's place at Blair Gowrie with him, Matty and Houng on account of having to work Saturday night and the weather having gone from unseasonably warm to filthy over the course of the previous night, but was talked into it by Matt without much trouble and was glad he bothered. As he commented at some point in the wee hours while chucking another log on the fire and getting another beer from the fridge, "i dunno what we'd be doing right now if we'd stayed in the city, but it's a pretty safe bet it wouldn't be nothing." If 'nothing' can involve roasting a chook with your friends, walking out over the dunes to the sea before retiring to the fireside for an evening spent talking shit and listening to music, then one really should do it more often.

2004-04-28T10:37:00.000+10:00

Oo err ..
Despite being amongst my favourite djs, i want to like Kyoto Jazz Massive's recorded music a lot more than i usually do. That said, the projects they align themselves with are almost without exception excellent. Case in point being Hajime Yoshizawa's Sleepwalker. Don't take my word for it though. In this [beyondjazz.net] interview with Shuya Okino, he mentions a song they just cut with Pharaoh: "When we knew Pharoah was coming to Japan, we offered this recording to his management. But we got the answer (ok) 4 days before the day for recording. Sleep Walker made a song for this recording during this 4 days. Every member stayed at Hajime's house. When recording, Pharoah asked us the image of this song. Hajime answered that this image is the feeling from father and children met again after long time no seeing. So we decided to call this song “Chichi to ko (means Father and children in english)”. When Masa played tenor sax, Pharoah shouted "Masa"! It was very impressing. And when Pharoah started his solo, I couldn’t stop crying. It was so beautiful! Our dreams came true..."

2004-04-23T14:25:00.000+10:00

Rode home pondering whether i was enjoying the weather (unseasonnably sultry nights) still or whether i'd had enough heat for another half year, and was cooking dinner and entertaining Shepthedog when Pru came home to announce her crazy cousin from Sydney had just called to tell her there was a launch party for some magazine in Melbourne and he'd decided to get on a plane and go to it, and see you in an hour can i crash at yours please.
Having been convinced of said cousin's craziness by said housemate, and not needing any prompting to go out anyway (it being afterall, unseasonably warm), we headed off to the Public Office on the assumption that any party worth getting on an aeroplane at short notice for was at least worthy of our looksee.
Turns out it wasn't. Said cousin wasn't crazy, either, which was unfortunate, but he's a nice chap, and i wobbled into the kitchen this morning to find him playing Langquidity, a serendipitous piece of anorak happenstance enabling us to have a most illuminating (it being The Morning, after all) conversation about Mr Ra, Mr Sanders and Evidence, which released both Lanquidity and Journey to the One.

I had to feel sorry for the poor bugger - maybe he thinks nothing of dropping a cool couple hundred on a last minute plane ticket to attend a party in another state, but if you did that and turned up only to find a couple dozen people sitting on the floor watching video artists do whatever it is they do with their dubious talents, you'd be a mite put out, one would think.
This indeed being the case I cut my losses and went to Honkytonks to say hello to Nik Weston, which was similarly a bit of a bust. Not that going to Ennio and Kano's night is ever wasted time, they being purveyours of the finest music played regularly in an Australian club (a claim i refuse to qualify even if you can think of a better regular night; which you can't, because their isn't one), but the crowd was scant, at best.

Annie, the promoter, was really bummed as she'd done a lot of postering and flyering for last night and was feeling embarrassed that a decent crowd had utterly failed to turn out for 'an international'. I didn't say so, but being international doesn't mean a great deal if nobody in the country bar the djs you're playing with know who you are.

Actually, that wasn't quite true.
Was baled-up by two drunken English backpackers (from Chiswick, if memory serves) who decided i was an ideal candidate for Third Person on Otherwise Deserted Dancefloor, and, powerless to resist, was pulled floorward from enthuiastic conversations about various recent records to shuffle bemusedly while they flailed about, intermittently heckling Kaman for not playing DnB. Being a lovely chap, he got around to obliging the lasses with some ace hospital/drummagic-type business, and i was able to make good my escape.
To be fair, they'd left a pub crawl with their mates specifically to come and hear Nik W, so i'd feel exceedingly churlish for, say, calling them slappers or making some similar bigoted generalisation on drunk English tourists.

It confounds me how so few people turn out for that night. Kaman's radio show is hugely respected and widely listened to, so how can you go down to their night and not find it heaving, week in, week out? Sure, seeing him drop the odd interminable jazz-fusion dirge to a packed floor he has eating out of his hand can seem somewhat perverse, but generally, he and Kano play such fantastically ace music it seems a crime their weekly doesn't do better.

2004-04-22T17:46:00.000+10:00

Listening to Pharoah Sanders' 'Journey to the One', an album i've needed all my life, but only purchased today, when Discurio (bless their opera-loving socks) got a copy in for me.
The last time I played Open Sesame, Ennio Styles, who followed immidiately after, went bananas with the jazz-dance classics, playing a cut from this record that made me wonder how i could have slept on most of Sanders' post-Impulse output.
I haven't really tried to get into Ornette Coleman or Archie Shepp or even Sun Ra that much, and find myself losing patience with a lot of free-jazz. Like most folks i guess it's just too demanding, but there's something so affirming about Pharoah's noise.
It makes my heart want to burst.

Where are the rock gods?

2004-04-22T11:01:00.000+10:00

Good article in today's Age, reprinted from somewhere else, natch (in this case the Guardian; by Alexis Petridis, but I've been meaning to write a letter to the Age for some time asking why so much of their content isn't written locally) on the homogenisation of rock, among other things.

"The Sex Pistols and Throbbing Gristle appeared to indicate that the age of the self-mythologising rock artist was coming to an end: in future, mythic status would be something bands had conferred on them by others at a later date. The arrival of the video, however, gave pop artists a new medium in which to construct their own mythology ... But it soon became apparent that anyone, even Dire Straits, could make a visually appealing short film. Since then, pop has become increasingly prosaic. The discovery of dance music in Ibiza and the second "summer of love" produced no mythic stars, just ordinary blokes: the audience were taking the same drugs and, what's more, usually looked more glamorous than the DJs and performers on stage.

Likewise, Britpop was presented as a democratisation of rock: everyday, decent lads who wore the same clothes as you, who could have been you were it not for their way with a melody.

Yet audiences still want their rock stars to be touched with novelty and exoticism. That is one of the reasons dance music withered. It is why Robbie Williams, with his lurid tales of drug addiction, bed-hopping and mental anguish, became a star and Gary Barlow didn't. It is why the everyday lads of Britpop - Echobelly, Ocean Colour Scene, Space, Sleeper - were quickly forgotten and everybody remembers Jarvis Cocker. And it's why the White Stripes' Jack White keeps up the ludicrous pretence on stage that he is an aw-shucks backwoodsman having some kind of incestuous relationship with his sister, when everyone knows that he's a former upholsterer from Detroit and that's his ex-wife on drums."

Nice one.
Why don't more mainstream, widely read music writers aim this high?

*end of workaday postscript, re. comments from D&R
Dewi - word. But that doesn't mean it should go uncommented on. The fact almost every article in the Saturday Age is taken off the wires or reprinted from the Boston Globe, The LA Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times etc etc etc, should not go un-remarked. It goes without say we have writers who are capable of pieces like these, and kicking them in the teeth because you don't have a budget might be how it is, but it's just not right, dammit.
Interesting point about AFX, Rolly - I don't agree with everything Alexis says, but wanted to highlight her piece (and not just because she got Throbbing Gristle a mention in a daily broadsheet) as it seems as good a recent effort as any to explain people's ... i'm thinking about the word disillusionment but it's not really what i'm after, and neither is cynicism ... dispassionate (?) approach towards the music business, and said business' abject and continuing panic as their business-model fails to continue to provide them with the profit to which they're accustomed. Something i'm slowly getting around to writing is a piece on the hoodwinking we've recieved over the reasons for this panic. Music sales haven't tailed off in anything like the dramatic fashion major labels would have us believe, and whether it's got anything to do with file sharing or not ... is something on which everyone has an opinion, i guess.
Interesting to see that online music stores like Apple's itunes are actually doing quite okay, tho'.

2004-04-20T18:20:00.000+10:00

audrey
Playing back to back with Tamas for the first time in a while at Republika for Nick(lm)'s night this Saturday. On from 2am till 6 - come down if you're in Fitzroy, or you feel like a few cold ones in honour of our diggers before hitting the dawn service.

It isn't easy being green

2004-04-20T17:17:00.000+10:00

So this chap Kid Koala wasn't the most technically proficient, deepest, or even funnest dj i've ever heard, but for so many reasons he was the best.
There are a few scratch djs, turntablists, who can throw down on four decks, and some of them even do it without headphones. There are even more djs who can't do either of those things, but slay dancefloors week in, week out. The number of djs i've seen who can do both i can count on one finger of one hand.
Happy to take it up with you, but you can make a general rule about turntablists not being able to rock a party. They might leave you bedazzled as they juggle the shit out of battle records for 20 minutes, but it doesn't make you want to go crazy and act the fool on the dancefloor.
Folks like Cash Money, MM Mike and particularly Jazzy Jeff do, and are mind-bendingly precise while still playing a set chock full of party rocking hip hop, and maybe DJ Krush is still the only person i'd cross borders to catch.
But Eric Koala mounts the most convincing case for turntablist as master musician, and he did it with so much class, wizardry and fun it left you dazed.
As Tamas commented later, he makes you ashamed to call yourself a dj.
No headphones, four decks for an hour, playing the perfect balance between the goofy, wonky jazz of tracks like Drunk Trumpet - which i'd always assumed he'd built in the studio, but which he re-created live, and more soundscapey abstractions, beat-juggling Bjork and just going about the business of being poster boy for post-mondernism in the best possible way.
The Wire probably has more to say, the rest of us just thought he rocked it.

The crowd reaction was universally delerious but i can't help thinking about how easily hip hop djs can throw a crowd off-side by reminding people what hip hop is.
Watching Madlib wrongfoot a crowd last month by just being a hip hop dj (ie. playing disco, and funk, and dancehall made before Sean Paul was born), but not just wrong foot them, have them grow restless and turn off ... you can't help but wonder why they were there. Having had a rave about Madlib's set with Dexter a few days on, i bumped into a girl later who said he was shit because he "just wasn't hip hop."
I'm learning to hold my tongue, which is admittedly getting easier - i mean, if you hate on Peanut Butter Wolf for having the bottle to open his set with Stereolab, i don't know if we're giong to have anything to talk about anyway - but it does give you cause to ponder why these kids go to such shows, and what they expect to get from them.
What hip hop are they listening to?

post-script on Hammy and De's comments ...
Because this blog is mine *mwaaaa ha ha ha* i've got more than 1000 characters to comment on your comments.
Replying to Dewi:

It's not the crowd's fault, it's not the DJ's fault. There's no fault and I wasn't inferring there was one. The devil is in the assumption. As a punter/crowd member, you go to a club, you want the dj to help you get your groove on, as it were. You want them to play stuff that makes it a nice place to have a dance, or chat with your mates.
You pay $40 to see a dj in a venue like the Prince on the other hand, and you're paying for a performance. You're entitled to expect the DJ to respond to the crowd, but a band wouldn't (they have setlists), and if a dj you've paid to see perform doesn't, then that's okay too. International DJs have a hard time reading crowds. Even if they're there early and are listening to the support dj and watching the crowd before they play, they have no idea what people in Melbourne will react to. If the support dj is inappropriate, they may have very little to build on. I see good djs having two options here. They can try to guess what the crowd will be into, or they can trust that people have paid money to hear them do their own thing, and just do that. This is what Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf did. I don't think they were paying homage to anyone, they were just trying to present good music in a way that was faithful to their own beliefs about what that should be, and unfortunately it didn't work out for most of the people there. It was no-one's fault, it was just a thing that happened, and I found it interesting.

To Hammy: word. On any given night there are lots of djs capable of being the best you've ever seen. IMHO (and with my memory probably not serving me as best as could be reasonably hoped for) KK was better than the other DJs i've said were the best i've ever seen, because he was the most well rounded. Equal parts depth, funk, technical wizardy and fun.

Thanks to both of you though. See you at DJ Marky?

it's a small world, by jingoes

2004-04-15T17:48:00.000+10:00

People know this. You live in a city, even a big one like Melbourne (nudging 4 million, they reckon) for a little while, the degrees of seperation get whittled down so fast it leaves you dazed. For me and most people i know, it's around two. Like, when was the last time you met anyone, anywhere, who you honestly and truly don't have a connection with through any other aquaintances? I very rarely meet anyone, outside of work, who isn't a friend of a friend. I guess it's not that it's a small city, it's just that the circles you move in are.
None of this guff has to be negative.
Last night Interviewed Nik Weston, London dj/promoter/compilation compiler and japanophile extraoirdinaire from his office in London, for an Australian tour he's doing. He did press for Cisco, the Japanese distro i worked for in London. He has a residency with a dj called Koh Umura, who now works for Cisco, and who i met completely seperately from both job and Nik, when a friend of his started going out with an evil young man who moved into a house i moved out of in Kilburn.
Eh.
Interviewing Igor from Skalpel, new Polish signings to Ninja Tune, was much more exciting. I don't know many people in Poland, and their album is ace. Ninja is a good home for them, they sound like the Cinematic Orchestra; no bad thing.
More ninja madness tomorrow with Kid Koala at First Floor, the venue i love to hate (hate: dishonest management, dithering booking staff. love: knowing most of the staff [free drinks], the layout generally, the old school tabletop pacman games and the always on point projections).
For ten bucks, too! You'd be somewhat put out if you'd forked out quadruple that to see him and RJD2 last week at the POW.

There is THE NICEST sunset outside right now. RIGHT NOW. No wait, it's gone.
Damn you, Autumn.

2004-04-15T17:36:00.000+10:00

no really, De, all is forgiven
Review i wrote of the James Brown show published today in InPress. Marginally more considered than that written below.
email me if you can't be arsed looking for a copy.

2004-04-14T06:05:00.000+10:00

You have to start somewhere. Pharaoh Sanders at the Prince last night is a good start. A better start than 'Hello Folks'. Or than James Brown last, when, Thursday? As soulless as a Soul Man gets. But then he's 70. So is Pharoah, and he can still make The Truth come out the end of a saxophone like James Brown can't.
I don't know what I expected for my $100. Maybe the problem was it was exactly as expected. The crowd full of ... well, they weren't nature's winners. A curious, queer strata of folk I found uncategorisable, at best. Watching a bandleader going through ropes he's gone through so many times that you're sure he can't remember the real reason he tied them in the first place. With a band who were just tired. And wearing white slacks.