well… i made an electronic organ today. I’m so proud of it! (well I was when I finished it and it finally WORKED! but since then i’ve been waiting for camera batteries to charge and the excitement has died down a tad). YOu get a bag full of chips and pins and diodes and resistors, you have to figure out what’s what (resistors are a bitch!) then solder each one onto a blank circuit board.. or two. And for a full hour it DIDN’T WORK! fuckety FUCK fuck…

The only thing I’ve soldered in the past is my guitar leads when they’ve split. doing circuit boards is a whole other experience… this is a kit i bought from an electronics store, and it took at least an hour of tracing what wasn’t working to fix all my crap soldering from the day before. Google helped me find awesome soldering advice making this morning’s work much more reliable. what would I have done pre-google? chuck it in the bin i suspect, with nothing to show for it but the smell of burnt hair which Karen smelt when she came over to visit last night.

So this is part of my latest craze project, I’ve gotten some experts from the UK to circuit bend a new 1980s casio MT-40 I’ve bought, and in the meantime I thought I could try bending some of the electronic toys i have lying around. I just needed to practice soldering a bit first, so I bought a couple of kits.

The idea is to get a more crunchy sound happening with my music which is a bit too acoustic and soft for me at the moment. And while i’ve been sick has been the perfect time to sit and do projects like clean out my hard drive and soldering. Now if only I can get my neighbour to stop banging around like a maniac, so I can get some rest.

This whole thing makes me feel like I should get a teeshirt to show off my geek powers! actually speaking of tee shirts I made a couple for the sci-fi convention next month which I am hitting with ma girls, I’ve always wanted to do a sci fi convention with girls. we’re all convention virgins. We’ve had teeshirts made… mine says K-9 shits ball-bearings which he does. Tom Baker said so. I also made one I used to want to wear till Tennant pissed me off. But Kerri wants it.

Hope you all have a lovely Easter break!

so FINALLY i’ve finished a song.

I know you’re never supposed to qualify what you’ve done, or apologise, but for me this blog is about pushing and improving, and seriously you wouldn’t have believed the trials I went to to get this thing done to some degree I’m happy with.

it really is such a drama, you write all these bits but they never come together. and when you DO finally write and record some music, you realise – as I have here – that it’s in the wrong bleeding key if you want to actually sing something to it. so you have to transpose it and make the whole thing sound tinnier than it was meant to.

then you can’t come up with a decent melody, or if you do, you can’t sing it because it’s so high. or even if you come up with lyrics and a melody and transpose the song, you can’t record the vocals properly to save yourself.

and when it’s all done you say “gee I think it should be faster, poppier, punchier, or something” but of course you only know that NOW when you’re finished, not at the beginning when you have no idea what it’s going to sound like. BLAH. I’m pretty happy with it. it’s still a bit close to me, and it’s a pity I can’t seem to record the vocals satisfyingly….

We are apparently all mindless worker bees, drones. Ray La Montagne is on ABC today playing a few songs spilling his words of wisdom about how senseless and mindless people are going to work every day, doing meaningless, time-filling things, going home, sleeping, and that he guesses these people haven’t touched the reality of life so they don’t know any better.

Look as a teenager I was brought up with this idea too; hate the system, hate the mindless corporate scum, they’re just drones. It’s depicted quite beautifully in John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm, and anyone who catches Tram 86 or 96 (i forget which) gets this diatribe spat at them by the abusive homeless guy that harrasses travellers each morning. But it occurs to me these days that this is a very 1950s anti-conformist attitude, it’s SO fucking out of date. Back then, the beatniks were rebelling against an emerging consumerist society a society that is fully developed today, a society we are trapped in. but the beatniks in their day, they still had church, neighbourhoods, and communities. We don’t.

Many of us, not all of us, but many of us depend on work for social contact, for some kind of connection with other human beings. You take work away from us, and we are completely isolated. We rarely talk about the small family units, the loss of the neighbourhoods, the dismantling of community services and the isolation of living in cities. This is not something that successful musicians understand because their job description requires that they are excellent social networkers, so they fit seamlessly into whatever community they need to, in order to be the artist they want to be. How many ‘drones’ are people who used to dream of a career as an artist of some kind, and had to give it up and find an actual way of sustaining themselves in this world? How many things that these artists and musicians depend on would no longer be there if us ‘drones’ abandoned our dronish ways and led our lives like butterflies?

I’m not a fan of schools and therapists molding people into little cog-like citizens that support a status quo. I’m not into popping out kids like ping pong balls. And i’m not a fan of the working hours required to make a living, the way that work, travel and needy children take up valuable thinking and creative time. There literally aren’t enough hours in the day. It’s an incredibly effective way to keep the populace from caring too much about things like art or politics or the direction we’re all going. Office work does stifle creativity, but don’t blame the worker for how the system works, we just try to fit in as best we can so that we survive and get whatever it is we need – security, family, space.

I’m not leaning on family, or my partner to slave away in The System while I fluff about. I’m not the artist who got half rent in our share house ‘because she couldn’t afford it otherwise’ while I paid 1.5 rent because i had a full time job in a fucking call centre. Why am I subsidising her? I’m a musician, I should be subsidising my own work, not her shitty attempts on a canvas. This happens all the time, you talk to the beatniks with their inability to process the idea of an office job and you find out how other people are subsidising their lifestyles. Lucky them. or… unscrupulous…

Today most of us spend more time with the people we work with than anyone else, and more workers than not are completely cut off from any form of solid community. We talk all the time about how workers will work 21 different careers in a lifetime, we don’t talk about that meaning they traverse 21 communities in a lifetime, never fully holding onto a single one. But these transient relationships offer support and encouragement that is all too rare in a modern lifestyle.

PS. i know i’ve been doing a lot of ‘hating’ on my blog here lately and it’s not always so palatable, and i can’t always put it in the context it deserves, often i’ll say i’m talking about ‘musicians’ but really i’m talking about the people who do what i’m talking about, which is not necessarily all musicians, nor exclusively musicians. I’m just processing, thinking critically about what i’m being fed by other people, by the media, using this blog to reinforce my own opinions. You’re not supposed to agree with all of it.

so it’s festival season and a heap of bands i’ve never heard of but probably heard plenty of times on the radio are coming over. these are the alternative bands, the ones that do festivals, get an album of the week on JJJ etc.

I’m watching ‘rage’ at the moment, i usually like watching music videos (as long as i can avoid the booty-shaking women-are-a-piece of meat videos) so it’s a lot of mid paced ballads over a dance beat at the moment, the contenders for the mainstream charts.

And it’s all AUTOTUNE, CHORUS and COMPRESSION on the vocals, every single video. Well, particularly the American ones, as though they got these pretty people that can’t actually sing but look good in a video, so they’ll just put all these effects on 11 and you wont even be able to recognise if they’re male or female, let alone which singer they are. The only ones that seem to be spared the AUTOTUNE are winners of the Australian Idol competition and the Black Eyed Peas, but they still get the CHORUS and COMPRESSION on 11.

AUTOTUNE makes singers sound like robots singing in a box.

So i guess it’s apt for the mainstream music sound.

People often told me I couldn’t be a performer cos I don’t sing well enough (yeah those little comments you make to musicians, we never forget them), but it’s just that I don’t use vocal effects. How the fuck are all these artists going to perform live without their CHORUS and AUTOTUNE?

but you watch a video from some ‘indie’ festival band and it looks more over produced than a Black Eyed Peas video, with alice in wonderland costumes and elaborate sets and every girl is shout-singing because Karen O can do it, only they need COMPRESSION and all their instruments are PROGRAMMED IN. and shit i can’t tell the different between these supposed indie acts that sent $50,000 on their video and the mainstream acts that spent $200,000.

None of it feels real, none of it feels like theres a musician behind it. or that there might be a genuine enthusiasm and love for playing and entertaining their audience.

They all look like puppets.

All the songs sound the same.

What really concerns me is that truly independent music gets totally pushed out by the Laura Marlings and Passion Pits that try to keep it under wraps how heavily backed they are by their major labels because it would sap all their indie cool and they’d just look like lame ass acts that aren’t quite good enough to crack the mainstream.

seeing all this stuff, seeing their videos, albums, the massive promotions even for the supposedly little bands, their pretensions laid out in front of me. it doesn’t make me want to fight against it, it demotivates me, makes me want to crawl away and die and never make music again.

it’s the great war of modern music analog versus digital (or ‘didSHITall’ as dad says). if the idea of me going through a history of how i’ve learnt to make music bores you to tears I apologise, but recently, since I’ve had lots of time I’ve been able to work on my music a lot more and now that things are feeling more flowing, I’m finally reconciling with just how much hard work it’s been just to deal with this bloody modernisation of music (and talkingthese things out always helps me move forward).

More than any other format, music has suffered at the hand of digitisation, you’ll know this from the number of stolen MP3s in your iPod. but i’m not talking about that end, it’s the music-making end I deal with in my time off. Instruments now are more often than not born, raised and recorded within computers, they never breathe the light of day, they live in binary coding. I think this is hardest for guitarists… atleast piano players can pick up a digital synthesiser and it’s a familiar setting, but guitars will always be real living things best made with wood and strings, fed into crunchy amps that blast your ear drums so they ring for hours all the walk home from a gig.

I started out with a little Tascam 244 four track, I got it when I was 16, it has a cassette inside it and can record four things at once, so I’d do guitars, rewind, do vocals, rewind, do casio, rewind, to more vocals… you could quite easily record a song in a day on your own, write it, get out the 4 track and a mic, and record it straight away. VERY satisfying.

Of course there are problems… you have to tune your instruments to each other (easier said than done, have you tuned a synth?), you have to have relative quiet in the house, you have to have physical room to spread out your instruments and the wires between all of them.. you have to bloody FIND all the right wires hat will connect up each of your instruments, and replace the crackly ones that don’t work any more… you also have to know how to sing, and how to play in time to a beat (yeah… i’m not so good at this)… no computers to make you sound like Britney, or fix up your mistakes… it’s all LIVE, one take, beginning to end. which can be a bitch.

I built up an arsenal of instruments I could use for my recordings, Electric guitars, basses, recorders, casios, and big ol’ crunchy vintage synths. My pride and joy, and inspiration for today’s post is my Korg Poly-61. It was the very first digital synthesizer, it’s such a thick chunky bass sound, it’s easy to program but unpredictable in that, well it’s old and not feeling very well, much like most of my instruments and so it burbles and warps and god I love it! Next to my equally ancient casios (most of my instruments are circa 1980) it makes a great sound.

But it’s not MIDI. it can’t play to 120bpm, I can’t even tell it to play to a BPM i just turn a knob and hope for the best… this makes matching it to a drum beat in a computer, or even from my casiotone (which is also controlled by the randomness of a knob twisting) highly challenging and rarely successful… so my instruments don’t play together well unless you keep it real simple.

So recently I bought a little Microkorg, well, actually about 5 years ago. I promised I’d chuck out the big ol’ Poly-61, but I couldn’t, the sound just wasn’t the same, the Microkorg can at least play to a BPM, I can tell it, you will play at 130bpm and it obediently responds, it even sounds like my Poly-61, but it isn’t as beastly…

Living in this wiry jungle, of analog versus digital, might be messy and contrary, and professional muso’s scoff at me because really I should only need a laptop and a little MIDI keyboard and i’d be laughing. There’s a world of amazing sounds if I choose to learn all the software, but it’s just never been the same for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a nerd, I love sequencing out a beat step by step, but I prefer doing that for a drum beat, not for a whole song. Basically if going digital means leaving behind my casio’s, my korgs, my guitar, the sound of the room i’m in, the cricket playing quietly from the room next door, the bird chirruping outside… well I don’t want it. If going digital is all about being clever and looping rather than playing a whole song, editing out all the mistakes, having perfectly clean channels that sound like nowhere… i don’t want it.

So i continue to struggle, I spend most of my time trying to find a happy middle ground, depending on the song, depending on the instruments I want to play today. I may have left behind my cassette four track, for my iphone four track, and I may not be producing studio quality sound, but I’ve never been more productive musically. Today I woke up and without even thinking, I turned on the two Korgs and started playing and FINALLY recorded a song with the two of them together, I recorded it on my iphone’s tiny mic which sat in my lap pointing at my half dead BassKing valve amp which had both my Korg Beasties plugged into it. The mastering is terrible, the song is average, the hiss is incredible, and everything sounds like it’s dying a little bit. But the pure achievement of finding a way to work with both instruments at once is something i’ve been struggled toward for forever.

So listen to my happy struggle in synths of vintage [3mb download]

so it’s been a while since i’ve updated you on my life at home. things have been settling down.

In the past i felt lonely and listless a lot, now i seem to be filling my time more easily. there is a lot of television in my life, but I have been picking up the guitar and recording little bits on the iPhone on a more regular basis.

Christmas has broken my awesome no-spending period, i went about 3 weeks without shopping at all, and you don’t miss it. I believe catalogues are the bain of life, because they make you look at what you *could* be buying and how much money you could save doing it. So i never look at catalogues! But Christmas has the same effect, you have to go online looking for a cool present for a friend, instead finding three cool presents for yourself… then you go to Borders or JB Hi-fi to get the things people requested for Christmas and then you buy one extra thing for one person, so you have to find one extra thing for the other person, then you find out they already have that thing so you have to return it and find another thing.

So my savings are gone.

The dentist is the other bain of my existence at the moment. At first it was the money, now it’s just getting him to do a decent job for the rather large sums of money I pay him… grrr. I’m thinking of asking to see my x-ray and just grabbing it and running out the door. Go see a different dentist and fingers crossed! They’re worse than car mechanics!

Work is settling in, i no longer feel like i’ll be fired any second, i’m finally actually doing what I was paid to do – make a website! But my social life is still very quiet. what can I say? I’m shy. I don’t like going out with big crowds, I don’t like staying out till 2am every weekend, I don’t like drinking regularly. Fortunately I have atleast three work Christmas parties to make me feel like I have a social life anyway.

Can anyone recommend a good band to go see? I wish my damn job gave me access to myspace, so i could see when my favourites will be playing next :/

so I downloaded an iphone 4 track recorder, which apparently some band called the 88s made a rather good song with and put the making of on YouTube. I’ve just recorded a riff I had in my head, it turned out alright.

Hear my new song 7-11.

I think I prefer working this way it’s so quick! I only needed the computer to filter some noise and trim the end of the tracks. I have some much better, old riffs that I haven’t had the heart to record til now, now I’m all excited!

♪♫i’m alone, i’m aaa-lone, i’m alone.♪♫

So i’ve mostly made my life pretty comfortable and day to day stuff is kind of easier. i’ve even organised a housewarming tea party in a couple of weeks (which cost me a fortune in paper cups and things.. yikes!) Now when I get home from work, which I do pretty early, I kind of stare at the tv (off) thinking “i’m bored, what to I do now?” and i (reluctantly) turn the tv on and half watch it guiltily. make some dinner. check my email. i’m always feeling guilty that i’m not vacuuming the house, or writing new song lyrics, or calling a friend to go out. basically, now that I don’t have the excuse of living with family, I feel like i’m ALWAYS procrastinating. i’m told this is just the next phase of living by myself which is a relief, i want it over NOW!

However my sunday has been epic! I vacuumed, mopped, cleaned bathroom, did the dishes, did two loads of washing, got the groceries AND went out to see a gig! AND wrote song lyrics while at the gig!

I finally got to see Flying Scribble and Royalchord and Bachelorette all in one night! it made me sad I had to go on my own, I’m okay when the music is on, but between bands I just want to curl up and die. Sarah says I should feel like the “mysterious lady” . but really I feel like I am wearing the wrong clothes, unattractive and not drinking enough to look like a local. I did chat to the label owner i just thought he was a guy but he had sat next to me and he was interesting. and i chatted with the bar lady she was nice.

the nice thing about the night was that NOONE got out their phones, everyone was too cool to be texting and blah. except me, i felt peer pressured to go outside and check my twitter. and i did take just ONE photo (for you). to prove I was out-of-the-house. Actually the PA system wasn’t insulated properly so poor Royal Chord got the fright of their lives when one of their phones made that ‘clicking’ noise when phones change towers, and it went REALLY loud over the whole PA, it was doing it all night much more quietly from audience phones because people refused to turn them off. FYI i put mine in airplane mode for the photo… and accidentally started playing bachelorette (during her set) on my phone (which was muted dammit!) while I tried to figure out the name of the album I had and whether to buy her new album.

so it was an all girl, all electro pop night! i’m really glad I went. Bachelorette uses the same two casios I use. makes me happy. Her music is much warmer live than on cd, I find some of these types of bands’ recordings are very ‘perfect’, particularly the vocals, and they just don’t sound as endearing and ‘real’ as they do on stage… the opposite of Sarah Blasko who I saw the other week, I expected her to be all acoustic guitar, shy and sweet, like Missy Higgins or something. but she was a fucking marionette play-dancing in front of the microphone unable to banter with the audience at all. Meanwhile Bachelorette a lovely girl from NZ played the whole set herself from a laptop an acoustic guitar and three keyboards, with the sweetest voice and lots of jokes about the ‘bossy new zealand bitch’ that was telling people to turn off their phones.

Flying Scribble are a must-see two piece and they are releasing their ‘album’ as separate singles bit by bit, which is my idea but they beat me to it dammit. and their sound on recording is as effervescent on disc as it is live. which is the best compliment I can give.

any ‘Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time‘ which includes Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ and not Urge Overkill’s ‘Dropout’ is just another farse hijacked by record companies.

If indeed it is real, and these tweens voted for Rolling Stones and Elton John, they have deluded themselves into thinking that voting for what their Daddy’s like makes them somehow cool.

Either way questions are definitely raised about just who is listening to ‘Australia’s Youth Station’ triple j these days?

so my dearest friend linked me to doodlers anonymous the other week, and i happened to be on the lending desk on a very quiet day and was quickly inspired to put pen to paper.

You can see my confidence slowly growing through each of the doodles, and the pressure is taken off by saying “draw something you’ve drawn before”. this is the magic of doodles, scrap paper, biro and old ideas are perfectly acceptable. I’m using the scrap paper we expect students to write call numbers on.

I hadn’t put pen to paper in a long time, so i just went for an old classic – mushroom person.

Then I drew one of my newer characters, the lolloping-dog-sheep-thing. thinking “put a thick border around it, that always ‘pops’ a drawing”.

Then seeing a character with his head cut open in my rss feeds, i used another image from my library of things i’ve drawn in the past.

Then my shift ended.

what’s interesting to me is how quickly my confidence is growing though i’ve not drawn for ages. in the past it would have taken weeks or months to get to ’shading’ or even to think of what to draw next.

Today again i was terribly bored and sick of shelving things one at a time so it would go slowly enough to fill my shift. So again I picked up the pen.

I’ve drawn old men line drawings before, but i’ve never tried for a more realistic character, usually i go abstract. i got this idea from something in my RSS feeds.

I decided to try for some realism and a student had returned some biographies on Brett Whitely, so i drew (one of) his wives.

I know this isn’t so interesting to lots of people but the few who’ve been following my attempts over the years may be as interested as me to see the improvement in confidence to the point where i’m having a go at realism. It all makes me feel like picking up the pen this century was definitely worth it, even if i don’t do it all the time, i wont lose these skills.

Soon I will be having a go at listing songs that would make it into MY Hottest 100 of all time. I don’t think I could actually complete a numbered ordered 100 like Richard Kingsmill, but i’m interested to see what the results will be of this JJJ poll, as the last time they did this was 1991, i have the teeshirt, and the VHS highlights.

comments are no longer monitored… its a risk because i get 12 spam for every 1 genuine comment, I’ll try to get email notification turned on so I can at least reply quicker.

Loving the new Phoenix album!

Just got back from Canberra and Bris on Sunday still adjusting. We did exciting things like go to National Library and walk roiund Lake Burley Griffin. I really love the city though, so many trees, so spacious, it seems easier to think there, and it’s a great walking city as i discovered each morning. Also did a lot of drinking, ate japanese, went to National Film and Sound archive (sucked without a backstage pass though) and National Gallery which i found i really take for granted – as a kid we always had access to the best art in the country, so you know i just go ‘yeah, Charles Blackman, pffft Manet… whatever…” My ultimate favourite there continues to be Imants Tillers Terra Incognita 2005 which was their recent huge purchase… and yes i liked Pollocks Blue poles

Brisbane was all shopping, all the time. It was great to catch up with my favourite human, and peruse Target like it was The Place To Be. Do not ever ever go to Guggenheim for a hair cut they are suburban trash.. I suffer these pains only to serve you!

I watched a lot of Molly Ringwald films Bleak House (with Gillian Anderson in it) and caught up on some quality like Elizabeth and the latest Terminator both of which stunned me.

Bought lots of cds too:://:-
Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus
completely brilliant fun, theres about 5 singles on this album, great for walking/running to as well. Bit samey if you wanted to listen to it all night, but 1902 is SUCH a brilliant track
Lilly Allen – It’s not me it’s you
never really liked her because there were always too many awkward lyricisms and i often felt the stories she was telling made me feel bad/embarrassed, but this new album with the ode to the selfish boyfriend, the fuck you to the nazi loser, the vanity of the wannabe star…. really really brilliant, nice music too.
Metric – Fantasies
probably my least favourite purchase, they’re better than they were. I once heard the singer diss all people who wrote love songs which struck me as such a pompous self important attitude, all her songs have to be about something important.. which means i put my critical hat on and as she seems to have done with others and judge whether she really moves me in any important way. basically it’s nice pop, i’ll listen to it, but mockingly.
Pikelet – Pre-flight Jitters
An EP you can’t get in melbourne anymore which is much better than the new album. Still jarringly strange, has moments of brilliance that are successively destroyed by attempts to do too much, i speak from some professional jealousy as people compliment her endlessly as a ‘genius’ which is not really deserved.

discoveries thru last.fm so far…
bachelorette
electrelane

as a music lover, i do still go thru phases of “there’s nothing good out there”. sometimes for year after year. I love the discovery of a band seemingly noone knows about but me and makes just the kind of music i wanna listen to in my little headphone world.

what i’ve learnt is that there’s ALWAYS great music out there but often it’s a lot of hard work to find, keeping up with blogs, befriending ‘cool kids’ or record store clerks (whom i always end up crushing on). or traipsing through other peoples collections which are similar enough to my own to offer some new listening possibilities.

ANYWAY… this is why i pay for radio. I pay for RRR-fm because if they ever went anywhere i’d have nothing to listen to in the car (old car, just radio and cassette). It’s not cheap and I probably get an understanding of what’s out there more than discover that magical secret thing I’m alway seeking, but i’m supporting the local community which always makes me feel pious and ‘cool enough for the cool kids’.

But then I heard a lot about people listening to custom radio on their iphone/cancermaker through pandora or last.fm, it goes by what is in your collection and finds stuff you’ll like. Unfortunately after listening up my 30 free songs on last.fm I realised I had to pay if i wanted any more, but it’s cheaper than RRR-fm, and gives me the thing I most cherish in life, new music without all the shit. a radio station that will NEVER play ben lee or hole at me making me nearly have a car accident in order to turn the volume off before my ears bleed.

ps. comments at my blog are now OPEN!

i really haven’t bought much music in a very long time. partly a ‘poor student’ money thing but also it’s a lot of work to sit and discover good stuff… having a car is especially good because you can drive around listening to the radio and enjoying the spoils of some djs hard work.

hence two weeks ago…

i subscribed to rrr-fm again for the first time in year. i’m loving having a car!

one week ago…

i went to Polyester in the city (how convenient!) and bought the new Ratatat, two of Au Revoir Simone’s, and the Brunette’s new one.

Ratatat are awesome vintage synths in funky dancey irresistable pop not completely unlike Daft Punk. in a way the new album may be a bit of a rehash, less magical than the first two. These guys and The Notwist were the only things I bought in 2008…. sad i know. The Brunettes one is a bit weird, i’ll come back to it in a year when i have no expectations, i really just wanted songs rather than experiments in mono and stereo…. Au Revoir Simone play casios, so I should automatically love them except they’re a bit polished, both in look and sound. Three unnaturally tall, model-skinny girls all with long straight hair.

Actually this is a peeve of mine lately… how polished and ‘Styled’ bands seem to be, even the indie ones… you think you’ve found something really genuine and beautiful and then find out they’re signed to a major, major, major label and their song is used in a car ad…. it all just feels a bit cheap and nasty. i prefer the old days when bands had to pretend they hadn’t sold out in order to sell a record…. mmmm the nineties!

and today….

today I bought Lali Puna which is playing now and i LOVE it unreservedly, it’s all related to the German family of The Notwist along with Ms John Soda and a bunch of other artists. and the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs which i’ve only heard the single Zero but I love that it’s more electronic, I think they do that well, plus they use my beloved Microkorgs!

next it’s the adventures of last.fm

mmmm still haven’t plugged stereo into wall, or speakers to stereo, so mp3s have been made of some old favourites:

thats my mid nineties-oz-rock-pop kick… it’s only missing a few other classics like disnifist and you am i and the guttersnipes original… then of course there’s my oz-pop-pop kick…

this is easily the awesomest thing i’ve seen in weeks, pinched from a mate Ryan’s myspace page.

also for a place that links to new and interesting bands, this playdead blog is good too. i quite like FOAM and BATTLES who are both mentioned here… check their myspace pages out. ahhhh myspace. if only the login worked properly i might actually like the place.

so i moved house, i’ve been netless, and it’s completely thrown my creativity out of whack.

I’m now near East Richmond station and the people here seem really nice, but moving is always a wrench, new people to get used to, new house, everything’s been moved, all my routines are out of whack. i lost a heap of weight when i moved but put a heap more on in the last two week discovering the joy of being a 2 minute walk from a Coles that’s open till midnight every night. madeira! pikelets! rhubarb pies! custard! glace cherries! cornish pasties!

ugh..

i’ve potterized in the background of all this – it’s great to have something interesting and comforting to read when everything else in my life has been shaken up. And i also bought the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs ep this weekend, which is a real return to form, i haven’t liked either of their albums, i think the EPs are far rawer, more rock, more interesting.

even their band pic is a return to form, far less commercial and stylised. Reminds me of The Make-Up alot with Karen’s version of Michelle Mae’s beehive.

The best bit of the last week has been discovering the K.O. At Home mp3s which surfaced last December – i didn’t hear anything about this, but apparently some idiot left a cd of Karen’s recordings lying around and then had the gall to get shitty that someone who found it put it on the net – well duh.

The thing is – from a song-writing point of view it is a real eye-opener to hear the stuff that a professional song-writer DIDN’T intend to release. It shows me how Karen experiments, tries things out, sometimes wins, sometimes loses. Most of it is not lyrical either which matches where i am at the moment, heaps of pieces of music but no words to put to them. This has given me alot of confidence that what i’ve been doing is exactly what a song writer does, play collate and then pick out the best stuff. She even uses the loop pedal to practice arranging but playing live at the same time – i got one of these last year quite cheap due to a Coca-Cola competition and my dad’s hard work collecting labels. But due to delivery issues i had lost the momentum by the time it arrived and i’ve only played with it once.

Along side i’ve been listening to Tanya Donelly’s more finished demos of her Belly – Star album, which she reveals she originally wrote to be Breeders songs for Kim Deal’s next album. This explains why the style matched 4ADs Pixies/Breeders stuff so much and is nothing like anything Tanya released after that. Listening to the subtle changes in the songs before she finalised the album versions, hearing her try to realise the sound with only multiple layers of her own voice and guitars. It’s really a treat! The same can be found of early Helium tracks by Mary Timony if you go searching your mp3 networks.

I made some badges today, it was so much fun! it’s all borrowed art from other things but i bought some other people’s badges while i was there of original art and it was so beautiful! I loved it. I’ve been thinking lately of things i can make myself. I can knit, i can design, i can sort of sew.

I really shouldn’t be thinking about this stuff at all, i absolutely HAVE to start looking for a house… really really soon, or i’m going to find myself very alone in a very big house.

let me introduce you to my new love, it is a Martin Dreadnought DX1 steel string. Purchased today for double what i intended to spend on a guitar, i’m so happy i decided to fork out the extra and get an instrument of quality. It sounds so sexy and plays like a dream.

It’s pictured on the right with my 25 year old Encore classical guitar which is so old and worn it’s only barely staying in one piece! She needed to be retired while she could still play a tune, so rather than buy an average guitar that i’d never be quite happy with, I found one that truly suited me.

It’ll seem like an impulse buy to most of the people around me, since i’ve been talking about travelling and ‘doing something with my life’ but in fact, music is probably what i want to ‘do with my life’ so i am moving in a certain direction… albeit slowly.

Lets hope this baby treats me as well over the next 25 years as my old classical has. I still feel weird that i spent $1000 so easily and with so few regrets. (before you all google and tell me i should have payed $500, that’s the US price, Aust price is $1395.)

still crazily fucking sick and my second hand playstation, bought a week ago broke down just after i bought some new games for it. But looking forward to mums birthday i got her a great present i can’t wait to surprise her on monday!

anyway music development! i got a playlist from a radio show in my inbox this week and discovered quite a few interesting songs from it – even a few i loved.

so i’m going to share the fruits of my labour here, it’s very ecclectic as you’d expect from a radio show, i’ve kept the notes i added to each song, even though i’m sure they wont make much sense to anyone else.

LEGEND:
ARTIST “song title” [record label] — notes to myself so i remember the song | O=interesting | OO=like it | OOO=really like it

PREFUSE 73/THE BOOKS “pagina ocho” [warp] — gentle samplings soft vox. O
JUANA MOLINA “salvase quien pueda” [domino] — spanish gentle beautiful OO
ENTRE RIOS “cerca & extrano” [pelo] — french/spanish? electro pop OOO
TENDER FOREVER “tender forever” [kill rock stars] — girly slightly deranged casio pop. OOO
THE BLOW “hey boy” [k] — acoustic makeup with sassy michelle mae up front OOO
BOBBY BIRDMAN “moving on/up” [states rights] — electronic twists on good songs OO
I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS “lights” [secretly canadian] — the smiths meets belly O
THE LEGENDS “hide away” [labrador] — 80s goth rock O
SUBURBAN KIDS WITH BIBLICAL NAMES “guns n’ ammo” [labrador] — playful home recorded pop slightly swedish OO
EL PERRO DEL MAR “i can’t talk about it” [hybris] — motown retro odd but beautiful sad OOO
JENNY WILSON “crazy summer” [rabid] — quiet paced with harp, gospel sad O
THE WINGDALE COMMUNITY SINGERS “bitter angels” [plain] — crosby stills and nash meets The Owls and gets odd OO