1. Plasticman - Be There Or Be Square : very very cold
2. Bedsit Bomber - Kangxi Radicals (live mix) : cluttered and ace
3. Ty - Groovement : POP SINGLE! POP SINGLE! brilliant.
4. Chicks on Speed - Wordy Rappingood : either crap or genius, not sure which. It'll be huge.
5. Kano - Boys Love Girls : blimey, another tune with a tune.
Guardian Unlimited Arts Friday Review Amateur night: "Some say modern classical music is so difficult that only professionals should attempt it. Nonsense, says Tom Service - a child could play it. And it's high time they did "
Agh, I haven't got tickets for this in Brighton tonight. I wish I had.
Torygraph Arts Hailstorms of sound
I want a tempo-tappy computer program so that I can do some snazzy beatmatching stuff (well, really I want a groovebox with tempo tappy features, but failing that: MusicMath, a free audio calculator will do for now)
There's a great article on hip hop cover art here, but it's dissapointingly brief - this is one that could run and run...
Guardian Unlimited Arts galleries Rap Pack index
some nominations of my own:
Apart from the enduring freak show car-crash appeal of the ever entertaining Genesis P. Orridge, you never heard much of Throbbing Gristle over the last ten years or so. But they seem to have undergone a bit of a critical rehibitation recently. The Re-TG festival, at Camber Sands, is on shortly, and the Guardian has a feature on the band today, who are reforming for the event. Here it is:
TG feature / 26 March
It reminds me that Alexis Petridis did a much more interesting feature on TG a while back. I may have linked out to it at the time, but here it is again anyway.
Throbbing Gristle were pioneers of industrial thrash. What sane person would listen to their 24-hour box set in one sitting? Step forward Alexis Petridis
Okay, so I'm going to collect together some of the links I've been visiting and try and do one post on Wiley Kat and Eski/Grime and leave it at that, as these links probably aren't of much interest to that many people. Nevertheless - counting down and we've only got 12 days 'til Wiley's 'What do U Call it?' is finally released. And the album, 'Treddin' On Thin Ice' follows it on the 25th April. There's an interesting interview with the man himself here.
Eski Beat: An interview with Wiley
Stayed up listening to Femme Fatale on 1extra last night, hoping she'd play some tracks from 'Treddin...', but she didn't get round to it (despite saying she would). Still, she did have Plasticman on, who was talking about the forthcoming 'Grime' compilation that him and Mark One are working on... on Rephlex Records, which is just brilliant - the darker, dubstep side of 2step has definitely got as much in common with techno and the likes of photek as it does with UK garage.
.
And Rephlex is the perfect home for any kind of experimental, innovative dance music. And as Rephlex put it:
"Grime. Sublow. Dubstep. It's Music. Different people call it different things, depending on when they discovered it. In the 80's, maybe it was House, Techno and Electro. In the 90's it was UK-G, Drum and Bass, Breaks or whatever. Now there are so many terms for it that the journalists can?t pidgeon-hole it any more. This is a good thing - it's music. Moody music. Multifunctional, multifaceted music created by Humans with Brains, Hearts, Machines & Electricity. Music that?s great for dancing to in clubs, or submerging yourself within your headphones, your car, your home, wherever. It's instrumental dance music, but it's the perfect forum for the best MC's and vocalists. We at Rephlex call it Grime to publicise to the people at large, outside of the specialist world of it's producers. The purists might debate the name, but while they do that, crews around the globe are uniting in this strong & fresh dance movement. In this age of Information Technology, people are able to easily find real quality that they actually want, without being spoon-fed compromised product. Now, it is a time of change and the soundtrack is Grime"
There's an excellent blog-feature on the Grime/Rephlex interface here:
more on grime / rephlex
and an absolutely massive overview of grime in 2003 here:
skykicking grime review 2003
And finally, because I'm conscious that apart from Dizzee and Wiley not much of this stuff has hit the likes of radio 1, a quick guide to beginners, and I'm stopping right...
(what is grime?)
...there.
Following in the footsteps on yr man Simon Reynolds, his fellow Wire contributor and MM's very own Mr Agreeable, David Stubbs has joined the (cough) blogosphere. Not even had time to look at this site yet - but I'm guessing it'll be quality.
David Stubbs [Mr Agreeable]
Some proper Assistant news to follow shortly, all, and the last word from me on Eski, and - briefly - a quick sidestep into the world of Micro House.
Can anyone tell me why I can't find Afuken records anywhere!?!?
Can't tell you anything about this beyond what's already there, but Andrew passed on this link to the website of a Mr. Matt Gunn, whose two MP3s are well worth a listen, if you like dark analogue electric stuff, like I do.
Elsewhere, should I buy the new David Byrne album?? Will have to try not to. Since we moved house my broadband has been disconnected, so, shocking though it may seem, all of a sudden I have to start thinking about buying music again. It's a funny old world. Been listening to lots of hip hop for the last few days, and really enjoying it. When I was about 19 I really chased after new releases and really kept up with US rap; now I doubt I could summon up the energy to get back into it. I'm certainly never putting myself through the pain of reading The Source again.
Jonathan's off-the-top-of-his-head hip hop top ten (not in order)
1. Big Punisher feat. Black Thought - Super Lyrical
2. Biggie Smalls - Party and Bullshit / JUICY
3. Capadonna - '97 Mentality
4. Boot Camp Klik - Heads are Readee pt. 1
5. EPMD - Who Killed Jane?
6. Mos Def and Talib Kwali - Twice Inna Lifetime
7. Slum Village - Raise it Up
8. Ice Cube - You Can't Fade Me
9. Blackalicious - Lyric Fathom
10. Masta Ace - Who Ya Jackin'?
An entertaining article about Squarepusher in the Guardian today, although one suspects you wouldn't want to be stuck in the pub with him.
"The number '0' will never be boring to me because in it I see the infinite, the string composed of the addition of all other numbers, stretching beyond sight in both directions"
Hmm. Still, I must get round to getting tickets to see him (performing with the London Sinfonietta as part of the ongoing warp-records/classical backslapping festivities. Still, music from Cage, Reich and - best of all - Varese, so I want to go. And SP himself, obviously.
Not much band activity at the moment, as Anne-Sophie and Sam are off snowboarding (yes, I know - the Nouveau Riche...) and Pete is acclimitising to life in his new flat up the road. Meanwhile, not much happening with me; my compulsive habit of reading the comment pages of the Guardian has been replaced by obsessive book reading over the last few weeks. Just read
1. The Honour's Board - by Pamela Hansford Johnson, which was excellent, although not her best: a story about a private school and the headmaster's impending retirement.
2. Tim Parks - Shear / Tim Parks - Goodness; both quietly brilliant, if not as grabbing as his recent stuff. They're both menacing and, in the latter case, riveting.
3. Maggie Gee - The White Family - my big discovery of late; not come across her before but excellent reviews of her new book, The Flood, persuaded me to read this 2002 novel. It's superb, a lively, involving tale of domestic trauma and racism. But fun.
4. P.G Wodehouse - Quick Service; only just started this one, but if you're feeling tired and not looking forward to work, then there's no-one better than Wodehouse to read on the train.
One book I've not read, and probably won't, is the (much promoted) story of Andrew Collins' (get this) happy childhood - "Where Did It All Go Right? Growing Up Normal In The 70s". Nevertheless, it deserves a mention, if only because the tag-line in the advertising is 'They tucked him up, his mum and dad'. Genius :-)
I just read that camp German pop idol contestant Daniel K had a car crash when he was hit by a lorry carrying gherkins. One of the paramedics on the scene is selling the gherkin he found on Daniel's leg:
eBay-Artikel 3277830143 (Endet 04.03.04 17:14:10 MEZ ) - Orig. Gurke aus Unfalllaster von Daniel K.
A good rehearsal on Sunday, if only because we finally got round to playing some new songs for a change, which was really nice. Pete was up in Oxford for the weekend and the stuff we still need to do for the demo can be done at home, so we thought we'd use the opportunity to play some new stuff - we dragged our melodic, indie-ish song without any lyrics from a few months ago back from the dead and played around it with it, and tried two of my new songs - Don't You and What it Means. Only the latter we did in any detail, but both sounded good.
For What it Means we started playing along to a pre-programmed tune on the laptop, but pretty much abandoned that once we had matched the sounds ourselves; it's got a fast, monotonous bassline which I thought may be better on keyboard, but it sounded pretty good with Andy playing it live, and everything else just seemed to form naturally around that. I played the little guitar riff and sang, alternately, while we get ourselves used to it, but think I'll probably use the Novation to play a synth line once we get Pete back. In the meantime, I wonder if I've invented a fairly rubbish vocal melody for this one? Hmm - I fear I have. Might have to work on it.
Don't You came out very different to how I imagined it. Ali had a good laugh at the crap drum beat I had programmed, and we tried to play along to the acoustic guitar line I'd programmed - Andy pointed out it sounded a bit 'folktronica', which was true, but I couldn't help feeling it lacked depth and pace. Only towards the end, when Andy and Ali played a bit more obtrusively, did it sound like it could go somewhere, but this soon gave way to their ritualistic and gleeful custom of rocking out to annoy me :-) Still, it could get somewhere, I think.
Lastly, we improvised a little tune around some synth stuff which Anne-Sophie had worked out; basically just a processed waveform with regular hiccups; we turned it into something quite dark and exciting, although I fear we only played it for five minutes and may have forgotten all by the next time we rehearse...
Look here! I've had 150 hits today from people looking up piranhas. What's with you? I mean, I like piranhas too, but... What's happening!? Is there a piranha epidemic that I've missed? I mean, don't get me wrong, you're very welcome, but I'm disturbed. If I knew how popular piranhas were I'd have written about them more. Well, before you shoot off there's another post at the top of my blog - with more piranha links - if you want to have a look: click here and then scroll down a wee bit. And feel free to say hi in the comments box below... Cheers. (Jonathan, 03/08/04)
---original post---
Wow, this article points out that
"Experts say [the piranha's] reputation for attacking humans is exaggerated"
which is a pity, already. Yet they go on to say
"it is thought a shoal of the fish devoured up to 300 people when their boat capsized and sank near Obidos in Brazil in September 1981."
Now that's what I'm talking about! Fantastic stuff.
More on piranhas, my new favourite animal, here:
http://www.aquariumfish.net/catalog_pages/wild/piranhas.htm
http://www.extremescience.com/Piranha.htm
(And a later post on the subject is here)
In case you didn't follow the first link, they found a piranha in the Thames today. Hence my sudden and explicable excitement.
Moving house tomorrow, so have to get my broadband switched over. True to form, I found a couple of links which feature things I now want to download, pah. El Mundo Perdido is a great, Blissblog-esque weblog with plenty of good music stuff on it (Scissor Sisters, Liars and 8-bar all mentioned in the last couple of entries), and Code Blue posts her tracks of 2003 and makes me want to go back to Limewire all the more. Ah well - next week.
A very good article in the Guardian today:
Guardian Unlimited Politics Special Reports Testosterone politics rules OK?
An excellent article from Sunday's Observer Music Monthly. Helen Walsh on raving - kind of a literary companion to The Streets's 'Weak Become Heroes'....
The Observer OMM My first love
A woefully un-updated blog in the last few days, argh. We moved house on Saturday, trecking as ever from one end of Brighton to the other, with appreciated help from Pete, Mark and Andrew; the move itself was as swift and hassle-free as I've ever experienced, and Pete's van-packing was Tetris-like in its efficiency. The new flat is lovely, although it hadn't been cleaned, which was a bit disappointing - still, we had Monday and Tuesday off so we rolled up our sleeves and did a fairly major imposing-of-order, and it all looks great now; significantly smaller than our last place, which was positvely cavernous, but somehow better for it; snug and handsome. Living back in Kemptown means more incidental noise and more crazies; after the neighbours from hell experience in Seven Dials we're kinda edgy and cautious at the merest sign of intrusive volume. But so far it's all been isolated - the car alarm, the passing revellers, a bit of sound from the re-decorated and newly-awful Sidewinder. So no sign yet of persistant noisemakers, but we'll see. Actually, having said that, someone further down our road was playing Guns and Roses at 2.30 in the morning last night, which was outrageous, but I refuse to believe anyone could do that regularly and not get shot by his or her neighbours. Surely?
currently loving:
1. Wiley - What Do U Call It?
2. Selfish Cunt - Britain is Shit
3. DJ Danger Mouse - Grey Album
4. Scissor Sisters - Comfortably Numb (Tiga Remix)
5. The Futureheads - A to B
and my favourite link in ages: http://www.animalsontheunderground.com/
Having got somewhere with searching for more information on Pamela Hansford Johnson a few days ago (having failed to turn up anything previously), I've been inspired by my participation in the work Book Group to seek out some more information on Robert Irwin, the other (mostly) out-of-print novelist whose writing fascinates me. Without much luck.
Here at work there's a group of about fifteen of us who meet up every month to discuss a book; yes, I know, rather a second-hand concept, and rather restricting reading books you wouldn't ordinarily read (but also quite surprising). But it's as good an excuse for a drink at lunchtime as I need. Anyway, I have to suggest a 'horror' novel tomorrow so I was casting about for something suitable ('...Confessions of a Justified Sinner?', erm... 'Jane Eyre'!?) and thought about suggesting Irwin's remarkable 'Satan Wants Me' - not really horror of course, but dark and satanic, as well as being hilarious and unconventional. Anyway, that got me thinking about what a wonderful writer he was, and that in turn reminded me of the occasion when I first heard of him.
I'm a complete hoarder - always keeping newspaper cuttings, leaflets, flyers, old cassettes, magazines etc - so it comes as no surprise that I once had in my possession a dog eared article about Robert Irwin which I lost long ago. I'd found it in a copy of something like The Times or The Telegraph on a tube train about six years ago, and it was basically a story about the journalist who, sometime in the mid 80s, had encountered a short novel by Irwin (at that point, even more than now, very much an un-celebrated writer) called 'The Mysteries of Algiers', which had amazed him. He, despite this, and like the rest of world, remained in a state of pretty much ignorance about the rest of Irwin's work, until he published the incredibly successful and absolutely wonderful 'Satan Wants Me'. So the book charted his re-discovery of the author. At the time, it inspired me to read Irwin so much that I sought out the new book (kind of Adrian Mole goes Satanic in the 1960s) and an earlier one, 'Exquisite Corpse', (which was set in the surrealist movement of the 30s) both of which I loved.
Since then, sightings of Robert Irwin have been few and far between, although, as one of the most celebrated scholars of Arabian art and Muslim thought he has come back into fashion post 9/11, in an academic sense, at least (he recently wrote a well received non-fiction study of the Allhambra). What I just tried to do was find that old article, or anything else I could - interviews, reviews, articles. Well, I found almost nothing. Still, Dedalus Books, his publisher, does at least have a bibliography of his fiction work on their website, and looking at Amazon, they've some of his books second hand. So far I've resisted putting my hand in my pocket, but it may be just a matter of time.
Most bookshops stock Satan Wants Me, however. There aren't many books I recommend more.
Know your enemy. Actually, the author of Conservative Commentary, a young, ahem, tory maintains one of the best political blogs I've come across, even if he makes me furious at every twist and turn. Still - his site is interesting and full of good links.
You'll notice I've been updating my links list, which is how I keep dredging up blogs at the moment. The ones on the left are all good; particularly ...greyblog..., which is Chichester based, and which delves into blog radio a little, no rock and roll fun, which is great for pop music news and links (it has a picture of The White Stripes in the top left corner, but don't let that put you off), and linkmachinego, which is just lotsoflinkstointerestingstoriesalltightlyjumbledup. There's a good link to recently updated uk blogs, too, which is hosted at the same site. And I just joined the Blogging Brits blog ring, too.
Ah, this is just truly, truly brilliant :-)
Guardian Unlimited Arts features Under eights v middle eights
Unfortunately I've just noticed that the link to the Danger Mouse mp3s which I posted the other day has gone dead; Andy Baio at waxy.org has posted the 'cease and desist' letter he received from EMI on his blog; I think we can assume the mirror site I linked to had a similar message, or at the very least, exceeded ats bandwith. Ah well. Good news is that the files are alive and well on Limewire. Get to it.
In the meantime, The Guardian says art rock is back, so it must be true, and John Sutherland is even deconstructing Franz Ferdinand's lyrics.
But let's be honest - as good as FF are, there's still something missing, no?
Ah, this is what we're after! Fantastic.
quick update on where we are with recording the demo:
Easy to Leave: done drums, bass and guitars - still to do keyboards and vocals
You Should Know: done drums, bass and guitars - still to do keyboards and vocals
It's Alright: done drums and guitars - still to do bass, keyboards and vocals
A Century: done drums and guitars - still to do keyboards and vocals
Vine to Vine: done drums and guitars - still to do bass and vocals
Engines and Anvils: done drums - still to do 303, guitar, melodica, keyboards and vocals
sorry, I must be coming over as some dreadful new Labour apologist at the moment, but another excellent idea announced today.
Guardian Unlimited The Guardian Meals free to all primary pupils
An odd sentence in an article about the cocklers in Morecombe;
Meanwhile a group of 54 Greek gypsies returned to Greece this week after a rescue mission led by the Greek Embassy freed them from what they called "slave labour" on an English flower farm.
So, Danger Mouse (one half of DM and Jemini, whose 'Ghetto Pop Life' is, apparently, one of the better underground hip hop albums of recent years - I won't pretend I've heard it) has just had his new LP, 'The Grey Album' shelved because of legal threats from EMI. Why? Because the album marries the entire acapella version of Jay-Z's 'The Black Album' to DM's twisted, cut-up remix of The Beatles 'White Album'. Apparently every note is traceable back to the original LP, and I've just sought it out online and been listening to it. In short - it's absolute genius. It may be true that I'd sooner gnaw my own leg off than listen to the Beatles(s) version, but this is well worth the effort DM expended. There's some info on the LP here, and if you hover your cursor around a bit you might just find a link to the album itself too.
For those of us who are completely caught up in Erwin James's Prison Diaries in the Guardian, today's entry comes as a warm and pleasant surprise. Read the good news at
Guardian Unlimited The Guardian Erwin James: A life inside
A couple of interesting Blogging links are worth a look too,
Presidential Race Goes Offline
Audible Revolution
and the Guardian gives us new bands, hurrah. With the exception of Black Wire, they all sound great. More on Danger Mouse to follow....
Stars in Their Eyes
and finally, a thought-for-the-day style aside from G2's sidelines...
· God gave us a booty, so surely she meant us to shake it, don't you think? Our long-held philosophy has this week been supported by Beyoncé, who has thoughtfully been explaining how she reconciles her raunchy stage act with her devotion to Christianity. "I honestly believe [God] wants people to celebrate their bodies, as long as you don't compromise your Christianity in the process," said the vigorous-thighed chanteuse. Absolutely, Ms Knowles. We're sure God herself is partial to the odd bit of spandex and groin-writhing from time to time.
Well, quite.
Not sure why I'm linking to this, but it's quite interesting...
Guardian Unlimited World dispatch A real handful
And I just read that Atkins (inventor of the diet) died grossly overweight and beset by heart problems. Funny, that.
Pete's just drawn my attention to the fact that the lovely Girlinky, below, have put up a review of the the last gig's proceedings up on their website - we get the following mention...
First up are Brighton's Assistant who play the game with aplomb, delivering a glittery sparkly set of offerings; an auricular Heptathlon with angular and meandering guitars running alongside warm and swirling electronics and a vocal tag-team relay to boot.
Which I'm more than happy with :-)
Girlinky at the Spice of Life
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