In previous reviews the general superiority of Billboard as a venue has been mentioned and they remain applicable here; the light is better, the sound is good, the floor-design is excellent and they actually keep the place at a moderate temperature. With an audience of the usual suspects, The Damned came with two support acts. The first was some clown (I mean a magician) who didn’t like the fact the audience were indifferent to his tricks; the accusations of being on heroin and being a bunch of grey-haired “fruity arses” are obviously designed to endear us to the performance. To be fair ‘Dr El Suavo’ did have a cool mask and a stylish assistant, but the act and customer relations is going to need some improvement.

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“There are dozens of “art guitars” with multiple necks that can never be played. It’s just about the look for some of these creations. So, the NGM decided to go one further and create a guitar with 8 necks — more than any other in the world — that can actually be played. If you’re going to make something like that, it should be real. We got 8 guys together to prove it.”

Bluegrass firing squad, and other termination procedures. Leaving them at the truckstop is only the third option on the list. “It is true, however, that if one of your band members is completely off his/her rocker, the statistical odds are that person will play an instrument that’s tuned in 5ths.”

There is, er, something there. It appears to have a new story or two mixed in with old ones from 2006, all dated September 17th, 2011 or thereabouts. The software is not the Slashcode that Rocknerd v2 ran on, but appears to be mangled copies of the original content, roughly dumped into WordPress. The whois was previously registered to an eastern European domain squatter, but now names someone in Canada, with the IP address in the US. The site still claims to be run by Ben Butler and me. I haven’t heard from Ben in years.

What on earth? Does anyone have any idea what this is about?

(And if anyone cares that much, I do have a database dump from the tail-end of Rocknerd v2. But playing Gillian McKeith with the products of Slashcode is so tempting I haven’t even unzipped it in five years.)

Update: someone bought the domain name with plans to do new things with it and thought putting up the old content would be more useful than not while he works out what to do with it. (I suggested it should start afresh — and I really should get around to processing that database dump.) I look forward to his new thing.

The network died years ago, but Napster’s vegetative corpse was finally taken off life support Wednesday. They can’t even make money from the name any more?

It’s a good thing the legal assaults on Napster thoroughly eliminated the Internet and computer science in general. ‘Cos otherwise the attempts to bugger DNS to block all Hollywood-disapproved Internet sites might have inspired MAFIAAfire, a P2P alternate-DNS plugin for your web browser (Firefox: Tools->Add-Ons->MAFIAAfire).

There is the minor detail of trusting a bunch of leeches with a sense of entitlement with your computer, and that the existing shadow DNS proof of concept was invented to redirect your money to the Russian mafia. However, the proof of the pudding will be in the network effects — people already install all manner of dubious rubbish for the promise of telly at their convenience, all this network needs is users.

And the fundamental point remains that the Internet is a giant copying machine, and that every gadget imaginable plus computers — televisions, phones, record players, cameras, drawing boards, recording studios — equals computers. Everything that can be conceived of as information can be done on computers. There’s a reason it’s called “universal computation.” Call it as evil as you like, but while computers and networks exist, you just can’t assume copying is rare, difficult or expensive any more.

Feel like brushing up on your Beatles, but don’t have all day to listen to all 226 recorded tracks? Ramjac has helpfully put together all the tracks playing simultaneously, sequenced in order of lengths, with the longest starting first and all 226 tunes ending together.

Goooooood-byeeeeeee. Universal gets EMI’s recordings, Sony gets its publishing. Three dinosaurs left. “More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants seem inevitable.”

For your delectation: The Kitten Covers.

An earnest attempt to construct the world’s mathematically ugliest music. (Several minutes intro, then the tune.) Personally I think this fails to correctly ascertain what constitutes “ugly”: it fails to precisely jar against all human thinking. Though past attempts along those lines have resulted in works that have been hugely influential despite their superpowers of making people hate them. I was playing Metal Machine Music at work today, ‘cos it’s perfect for keeping the workplace jibber-jabber at bay.

Looks like no more major CDs by the end of 2012 — they’ll become boutique items for fans, like vinyl. About time too.

You thought trying to make a living as a rock musician sucked? You should be giving prayers of thanks that you’re not a classical musician.

The Clouds, The Wonder Stuff and Jesus Jones make a very good combination of acts, although holding the event at The Palace was a questionable choice. It is true, the triple split-level art noveau style from the early twentieth century has a great deal of dilapidated charm, but the acoustics are not the best. The three bands in question were, of course, very significant in the late 80s and early 90s but had only a modest amount of activity since then. As a result there was a fairly narrow age-band among the punters that had come along for the night.

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FUC51 no doubt shat, but crusty old post-punks like me will delight at Peter Hook interviewing John Cooper Clarke on BBC Radio 4 Chain Reaction. Though I kept wanting Hook to shut up and stop interrupting the professional wordsmith. You have six days to listen as I write this.

As I have detailed in the past, I want a paper fanzine again, filled from cover to shining cover with good writing about music that doesn’t suck. But not only are paper fanzines basically obsolete, the process of producing one involves dealing with ripoff cowboy advertisers, dealing with ripoff cowboy printers, dealing with ripoff cowboy record shops, dealing with bloody arsehole ripoff cowboy indie record distributors who pay only on threat of lawsuit KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL and I got just a little burnt out on it.

That said, I remember sitting around my then-girlfriend’s back yard in 1998, idly leafing through the Trading Post and looking at stuff going cheap I would have killed for in 1990. Linotypes! Halftone camera setups! Entire clunky publishing systems, Mac IIx still in the middle! That stuff was sorta fun. Except that even 1991-level desktop publishing knocked it into a cocked hat for convenience and ability to get the damned information out, of course.

So I feel some slight old man’s schadenfreude at these meddling kids set to the task of producing a magazine with the technology of the 1980s. Poor dears had to do arithmetic to work out their layout. HA! HA!

The Save Australian Music project continues apace, though not a very fast pace.

I have discovered (as I had presumed) that my old indie music cronies are enormously pleased with the idea of preserving the culture of their youth!

The main problem we have is we don’t have any suitable library to deposit it with. We are working on this. If any of you have contacts at state reference libraries, please get them in touch with us!

That said, there’s no reason to hold off on ripping and scanning. If you have an old flyer collection, then please scan the lot. (600dpi TIFF is ideal.) I have put up pages on digitising audio, image scanning and negative scanning, which I wrote off the top of my head and which desperately need knowledgeable input from others.

If this is catching your attention, do please join the mailing list.

Update: I’ve just posted to the Save Aussie Music blog. An attempt to entice bored suburbanites and leverage their nostalgia. I’ve certainly leveraged mine — just set up my cassette deck and ION turntable again yesterday afternoon.

What It’s Like To Interview A Celebrity, from Lovelyish.

Cleveland rock critic Jane Young died on Monday after 38 years at the job, from 1964 until 2002. Yeah, guess I have to keep rocknerding now until at least age 83.

Aggressive ahistoricality is a problem, but so too is the dead hand of nostalgia, follow the subjects of the nostalgia back when it wasn’t nostalgia as I might have (from afar). FUC51 ran through last year, ranting about the Manchester music scene being firmly fixed in 1988, yellow and black stripes with everything as the last echoes of Saville, New Order as the local Beatles. I’d still quite like one of those basses, though. And this with this is an instructive slice of history.

Update: This is a new low in … everything, really. “in the name of christs fat cock just step away from the mic and get a job in Currys or something.”

It’s always heartwarming when someone gets really pissed off and channels it into documenting something that sorely needs it. Kirrily Robert is about to start a project to document the lost past of Australian music. You realise there are ten-year-old records that are effectively orphan works?

Needed: co-conspirators. Preferably ones in the same country. And a good name for the project.

Update: Mailing list.

Last week I took The Wolfgang Press in Wikipedia from two paragraphs to a proper article. Yesterday it was on the front page Did you know? section for six hours and got 3065 hits, compared to its usual 25-50. Not bad for an article about an obscure band approximately no-one cares about. (“Kansas”, from Bird Wood Cage, is a lost goth rock classic. DJs, please play. Thank you.) I’d forgotten how much quiet nerdy fun it is writing and researching a Wikipedia article.

Writing about anything artistic on Wikipedia is arse, though, unless you can find critics to quote. Printed ones by preference. (Wikipedia’s epistemology is severely broken at the edges, and knowing how it got that way doesn’t actually help.) Google Books and Google Scholar help, but if you don’t have access to a significant clippings pile, or a really well-indexed library collection, it’s ridiculously difficult to write about things that happened before 1995. Though McFarlane is still on the Internet Archive and basically just needs someone experienced in Wikipedia’s little ways slogging through it. Do you feel lucky, punk?

The Forum is one of Melbourne’s many stylish venues. Built in the 1920s it has a baroque level of art nouveau features with a high-level of Hellenic influence. Designed for theatre and ‘talkies’, as they called back then, it proved to be a somewhat unusual venue for Gary Numan’s tour for the thirtieth anniversary of Gary Numan’s 1979 LP The Pleasure Principle with local band Severed Heads in support. The austere electronica, “slow industrial” as one punter put it, was a seriously juxtaposition with the surroundings. One cannot sing great praises for the acoustics either. The high roof of the main hall was perhaps acceptable, but the speaker system for the low ceiling under the balcony was very ordinary. Clarity of sound shouldn’t be an issue with either of these performers.

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TIME, Dark side of the moan, Wednesday (N! News) — Both remaining members of Pink Floyd have announced the launch of the “Why Pink Floyd?” reissue campaign, wherein literally every tape containing a detectable grunt or squeak is pressed onto CD, SACD and 5.1-channel DVD-audio.

“This is the last chance for really nice packaging,” said drummer Nick Mason, “because even in 2011, it’s remarkable what you can charge for a physical object rather than a download. Even a FLAC. You could make the complete collection, which of course you’ll be wanting, into a ring of standing stones for the lounge. You’ll have to rebalance your speakers to compensate for the gravitational pull, of course.”

(Read more …)

UbuWeb is an archive of avant-garde text, music and film operating on the basis of putting up unavailable stuff and taking it down as and when asked. They don’t take donations or sponsorship and serving is donated by various universities.

And you can guess what happens: artists decide they really want to be there even if their stuff is commercially available. There’s some controversy over this, but on the whole it’s loved and accepted. And as he says, if they asked permission for everything it wouldn’t exist. Go there and download to your bandwidth cap and beyond.

And now there’s a lovely interview with the founder, New York poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who says: put up more UbuWebs and make this one irrelevant. He’s right. Why aren’t you? Why aren’t I?

Melbourne’s famous alternative music venue ‘The Arthouse’ is closing its doors forever on May 1st due to issues caused by the same liquor licensing changes that closed ‘The Tote’ (now reopened under different management), compounded by a “frosty relationship” with the building’s owner.

It is however going out with a bang, with favourite acts that have played there in the past like Depression, Fuck I’m Dead, and Dreadnaught playing shows in its final weeks.

Saturday the 16th of April is International Record Store Day, but this photo essay documents the ones that are no longer with us.

Music services that aren’t iTunes need to be better to compete. Google is politely negotiating streaming. Amazon, on the other hand, has decided to just enable streaming — since people are only supposed to upload music they already bought, in which case they bought it — and have asked the RIAA’s lawyers if they’re feeling lucky. This would be the first locker service from a company big enough to shoot back.

The early 1990s were a depressing time, and even more so in Victoria, Australia. The Gorbachev revolution, which successfully led to the unravelling of dictatorships in the Eastern bloc, failed to transform those countries to a more ideal model of libertarian socialism. In Victoria a thoroughly ideologue government was engaging in savage cuts to basic public services that Thatcher would have been envious. At one stage the state was losing one hundred people per day to other states, mainly teachers and nurses. And as for music, the rise and eventual dominance of house and dance music by the late ’80s was getting very tired. To be sure, it had rhythm, it was sensual, it was strongly associated with the rave scene culture and happy club drugs; but it most cases it was seriously lacking in substance.

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As they announced, these are the warriors on the edge of space and time. Now in their forty-second year of performance and correlating with the release of their twenty-sixth studio album, Blood of the Earth, Hawkwind still deliver the goods when it comes to their diverse blend of space rock, psychedelia, proto-punk, ambient and progressive rock. The crowd too reflected this diversity: ageing grey-beards in Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd t-shirts, enthusiastic punks proclaiming their preferences to Conflict, D.O.A. and Black Flag, hard rockers in their AC/DC garb and even an eighties indie-pop fan with a Pixies shirt; that’s the sort of range and influence that one finds with Hawkwind. Although it must be mentioned that the crowd were about two-thirds blokes; being a participant in a science fantasy rock universe inspired by Michael Moorcock and Philippe Druillet is still something that some wimmin-folk are apparently less inclined towards.

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Paul Harding emails to tell of his blog Perthmusic (and earlier version), a pile of unavailable CDs, records and tapes from no-longer-gigging bands of the past thirty years. The gratuitous mention is also just fine. I would contribute except that I left almost all my tapes with Ross Chisholm when I moved to Melbourne in 1994. So instead I’ll just binge on the soundtrack to my youth.

I just returned from the last of many gigs I saw at the Luminaire, and indeed, the last ever gig there.

The bands playing were SPC ECO (whom I, alas, missed), Ringo Deathstarr (a band from Texas who are one of the better exponents of the shoegaze revival, mixing it with a bit of driving garage rock) and the latest incarnation of noir expressionists Piano Magic, whose first song, appropriately enough, began with “Music won’t save you from anything but silence”.

The Luminaire was (it feels odd to use the past tense, knowing it’s accurate as of maybe an hour ago as I write this) one of London’s better music venues. It suffered from being in the wrong part of London, in Kilburn, in the north-west, when the music scene started to solidify around the hipster lek of Shoreditch/Hoxton/Dalston. However, it had a number of advantages: a great atmosphere, good sound, and the famous signs on the walls, advising punters, in no uncertain terms, that if they came to talk to their pals while the band was playing, they were unwelcome. This made it more amenable to listening to the music, even if the bands weren’t balls-to-the-wall rock; you knew the bands didn’t have to compete with a bunch of loud haircuts at the front, standing with their backs to the stage and discussing who’s shagging whom in fashion school.

Now, the music has stopped and the punters have left. Soon they’ll paint over the famous black walls, sandblast the layers of stickers off the bathrooms, and remove the red velvet curtains and mirror ball, and so, a sacred space is deconsecrated. Perhaps it’ll become luxury flats, or be subdivided into cheap, miserable bedsits.

I remember the loss of another sacred space of music, nine years earlier and half a world away. It’s now a trendy pizza parlour which plays canned house/dance music to its fashion-conscious patrons, its artificially distressed walls adorned with an oversized kewpie doll. Before then, it was the place legends were born. The Lucksmiths wrote a song in memory of this venue; it’s playing as I write this, in memory of it, the Luminaire and all other sacred spaces now lost.