But think what I could have been missing out on: a chance to write about the poor oppressed mainstream. They just can’t get a break with all the hipsters running WAM. I hope the author is really embarrassed about this piece when they’re older.

Whilst the band has performed fairly much constantly since being founded in 1979 it has been a long, long wait since 1990 when the last studio album of new material (Vision Thing) was released. The Sisters have been “on strike” against WEA subsidiary EastWest records, despite providing new material at live concerts. This review was written whilst listening to the unreleased SSV album which was accepted by EastWest because it contains a few sampled vocals from Andrew Eldritch. It is not nearly as bad as one may have been led to believe, but rather serves as aural wallpaper at best.

The show opened with Kim Salmon, who provided local punk-blues talent. I’ve followed Salmon’s career with some interest for more than twenty five years or so, because I keep on ending up at his concerts, initially with The Scientists, then Beasts of Bourbon, then Kim Salmon and the Surrealists. I swear that I went to one gig that was advertised as “Kim Salmon and the Fish” just after the Surrealists phase, but either I was in a parallel reality at the time, or my google-fu is utterly failing me. There was a time when I though that Mr. Salmon was a little disappointed that his positive critical reception had not translated into deserved fame and fortune, but he seems at least somewhat content with his lot as being recognised and appreciated among a smaller and discerning audience. Salmon played a short (30 minutes) but enthusiastic solo set which one supposes was the idea of a support act, which is stretching the definition of the word. As a hint of things to come, the sound quality was not the best.

Presenting themselves in a haze of smoke and light, and on the dot as far as time goes – a rare commodity in the live music world – the crowd naturally greeted The Sisters with enormous enthusiasm. Consisting of the venerable Andrew Eldritch on vocals (and causing some raised eyebrows on his idea that a white hoodie was appropriate attire), enthusiastic guitarists and backing vocals from Chris Catalyst and relative newcomer Ben Christo, the band is much helped the latest incarnation of Doktor Avalanche. Christo is particularly notable for his youthful looks, kinetic energy, and a strong propensity to pretend that he’s actually in a metal band. Direct crowd interaction was far from overbearing, but it was quite clear that the band was very much playing for their audience.

Which is possibly just as well, as the first thirty-seven minutes of the concert was absolutely appalling. Not for the first time, the questionable acoustic qualities of The Corner Hotel were matched with a mixing quality that frankly was not up to an acceptable standard. Some years ago, the same venue managed to turn what was an otherwise good gig by The Buzzcocks into an audio train wreck; in some instances this was worse. Classic songs (in order performed) such as “Ribbons”, “Detonation Boulevard”, “This Corrosion” and “Dominion” received popular audience response as could be expected, but one scanning the crowd could also see that up to half had the confused look on their face that expressed “What the fuck is that?”. The juxtaposition was strongest in “This Corrosion”, perhaps the most well-known and successful hit of the band. On one level many members of the audience were quite enthusiastic. Yet, with eyes closed and concentrating on the music itself, one came to the conclusion if they hear this on a home sound system, they would consider the medium damaged beyond use.

There were some exceptions; an uninspired “Marian” droned on harmlesslessly, and the heavy reliance upon Doktor Avalanche on “Giving Ground”, resulted in a more successful sound. But as mentioned, at thirty-seven minutes past the hour, and about at the half-way point of the gig, the band paused for a moment, Eldritch muttered a couple of words of complaint, and the show restarted with some notable improvement. “Alice” came across with a greater degree of clarity, as did the somewhat challenging “Temple of Love”, “More” and “Lucretia, My Reflection”. With the show concluding on a reasonably well-executed rendition of “Vision Thing”, punters could leave feeling at least something was rescued. Overall however this was a very ordinary show and a reminder, once again, to avoid The Corner as a venue.

It turns out this is audiophool bollocks. Monty is the guy who wrote Ogg Vorbis — he knows his stuff. There are no humans found in the last century who can testably hear over 20kHz, ultrasonics encoded at 192kHz just cause intermodulation distortion, 16 bits is provably all the information any known human ear needs and the main benefit of 24-bit is headroom.

“Modern playback fidelity is incomprehensibly better than the already excellent analog systems available a generation ago.” Monty’s advice for actual fidelity? Spend effort on decent headphones.

(Can you tell a 320kbps MP3 from the FLAC? I know damn well I can’t.)

(This is what I get for declaring something the possible worst.)

Mostly. I have discovered the best Icehouse album ever recorded: The Berlin Tapes, a collection of post-punk covers Iva Davies put together for a Sydney Dance Company production. Yet again, we see excessively skilled musicians do well handed someone else’s songs. I most strongly commend to you “Disappointed?” His “Love Like Blood” wins as well. How the hell did I not hear of this when it came out?

The other support was the young Kill City Creeps who played competently and enthusiastically – and displayed more than a degree of adoration to the band they’ve come to support. It should also be noted that the intermission between the acts included some of the most awful moog music that has ever been created. A fellow attendee, well versed in such things, dutifully informed me that The Damned do this deliberately to remind their audience how bad music had become and why punk was necessary.

And what a necessity they were; The Damned, heralding from the dawn of punk rock, the people who released the first punk rock single (“New Rose”, 1976) have attracted more than a small crowd of fans over the years. Described by some as “Gothic Punk”, it is my considered opinion on the subject that there needs to be an ampersand between the two words in this case, to differentiate it from “gothic-punk”. Lead vocalist David Vanian, once described by NME as “a runaway from the Addams Family”, certainly fulfils the first half of the equation, with guitarist and occasional political organiser Captain Sensible fulfilling the latter. Old-timers certainly miss Rat Scabies (“let there be rats!”), although relative newcomers Monty Oxy Moron (keyboards), Pinch (drums) and Stu West (bass) were certainly warmly welcomed. OK, they’re not that new; Monty’s been in the band for fifteen years.

They started powerfully pounding out the first three tracks from “The Black Album”; ‘Wait for the Blackout’, ‘Lively Arts’ and ‘Silly Kids Games’. The fourth song in that sequence – which must be recognised as the one the best four-part meldleys in modern music – ‘Drinking About My Baby’ was played later in the set. Yet even at this stage there was a note of warning to my ears, that the sound was no quite at the standard that it should be, that the mixing wasn’t quite right. Yes, there is an inevitable roughness to live performances – and punk rock can thrive on that – but there are some subtle sounds to The Damned as well, and ‘Wait for the Blackout’ didn’t quite have those noises.

My concerns proved justified when latter in the gig tracks from their mid-eighties gothic period, namely the hit ‘Eloise’ and ‘The Shadow of Love’. Of course they were still great songs, and the crowd lapped them up as expected whilst David Vanian went into the crooner mode, but they were lacking some of the finer points of his melodic vocalisations.

On other tunes however where a higher degree of roughness is to be expected this wasn’t an issue; whether one ranges from the string of favourites including ‘New Rose’, ‘Love Song’, ‘The History of the World’, ‘Neat, Neat, Neat’ (I admit – my least preferred Damned song), ‘I’m Bored’ ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’, ‘Anti-Pope’ and the signature conclusion, ‘Smash It Up’. The crowd adored their performance; there was pogoing, crowd-surfing, and slam-dancing, there were cheers and chats with the ever conversational Captain.

It should be mentioned that Captain Sensible did also suggest Happy Talk as their concluding song, after all it was the most successful single from the band and its members somehow reaching number #1 in the UK for two weeks. My innate sense of musical perversity and appreciation of its brilliant combination of irony and genuine intent would have certainly supported such a decision, but I suspect this would be a minority viewpoint.

Overall, The Damned certainly showed that there’s more than a little bit of life and passion in the band and among their fans as well. As a 35th anniversary tour, they also have a wealth of experience as well as well as a small mountain of popular songs among their fans. Attending on my the eve of my own 44th year really reminded me that they’ve been part of my personal narrative as well; after all I did name a sf fanzine ‘Phantasmagoria’ in my teenage years. Yeah, I guess they did leave quite an impression on me – and continue to do so today.

Note: Sludge Factory have an awesome set of pictures from the gig.

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.

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.

The Clouds, who have always reminded me of a punk version of Enya, played well but were plagued by very ordinary mixing which has completely wrecked my recollection of what they actually played, or at least that’s my excuse. My addled brain seems to vaguely recall the delightful “Anthem”, the less impressive “Alchemy’s Dead”, and the charming “Say It”. Or maybe I dreamt it. What could not be mistaken however was the final piece, “Hieronymus”, where everything did fit together ‘just right’ and proved to be a popular conclusion of their set.

Less prone to such problems due to the style, The Wonder Stuff, performed an expected beer and cider swilling and stomping set (was it at all surprising to discover that the former drummer of PWEI has joined them?). Their enthusiastic set included many old favourites such as “Caught In My Shadow”, “Size of A Cow” (I recall a colleague moo-ing to a total stranger when that song was popular), “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Give, Give, Give”. New member Erica Nockalls certainly deserves mention for skill and style; as she describes herself “professional violinist with futuristic hair”. Yeah, and the fact she must stand over six foot as well.

Finally, my preferred band of the set, Jesus Jones provided their impressive and energetic combination of indie-rock and electronica. I’ve always appreciated how on the ball for their time they were with broad social and technological change. Coming out punching with “Who, Where, Why?”, “Move Mountains” and “International Bright Young Thing”, the Joneses certainly had a string of popular songs to draw from, and did so with “All The Answers”, “Real, Real, Real”, “Never Enough”, “Right Here, Righ Now”, “Zeroes and Ones” and their most famous piece “Info Freako”. The provided all this and more with a minimal of issues, even with a “slightly energetic” (ahem) keyboardist.

Overall a very impressive night, that was surprisingly inexpensive given the acts present. Although the mixing and acoustic was not always the best during the night it was acceptable and certainly a minor issue compared to the quality of these returned performers, all of whom it must be mentioned interacted well to an appreciative audience. Welcome back, all of you.

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!

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.

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.”

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

Update: Mailing list.

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?

Severed Heads played a typical set, which means minimalist audience interaction and annoyingly short, just under an hour. Although the band officially stopped working in 2008, they returned for a thirtieth anniversary show in 2010 and has revived itself for a second time to act as support for Numan’s Australian tour. This time however they assured us that this was their last ever show — really! Their self-produced computer-generated videos as always provided an excellent complement to experimental electronica, especially prominent in the brilliant “Choose Evil” (featuring trumpet-playing skeletons in sombreros) and the thoroughly bizarre “Oblique Firefly Overlocker”. Other pieces of note include “Pilot in Hell”, the classic “Dead Eyes Opened” and, most appropriately, their final ever song “Heart of the Party”. The audience showed their appreciation for their sustained effort over the decades with the most enthusiastic concluding applause that’s been heard for some time for a support band.

Gary Numan’s set, not surprisingly, started off with a number of tracks from The Pleasure Principle, including “Airlane”, “Metal”, a somewhat disappointing version of “Tracks”, “M.E.”, “Observer”, “Conversation” and “Engineers”. It was obviously appropriate and the audience appreciated what was being performed, but enthusiasm was somewhat reserved until the classic “Cars”. Despite being provided a much larger and more prominent screen, Numan hardly made any use of additional video display, although the light display was far superior and evident right from the start.

Returning from a break Numan returned to the set with a surprisingly higher degree of energy and stormed right in with an enthusiastic version of “Down In The Park”, a song whose popularity can be measured by the number of times it has been covered (Marilyn Manson, Foo Fighters, Christian Death and performed by Nine Inch Nails). Brilliantly composed and executed Numan lapped up the applause with what would be come one of many expressions of the Jesus Christ pose, which is a little too disturbing coming from a man who was, and still looks like, a Young Conservative.

There was perhaps a little too much of Numan’s more contemporary forays industrial music in the latter part of the set (e.g., “Haunted” and “Pure”) which may sound strange to Numan gronards, but are appreciated by the younger listeners. All however, reacted well to an clever pre-encore version of “Are Friends Electric?”, combining spoken voice, switching to powerful instrumentation, and extending with audience participation. Unsurprisingly returning to stage, as an encore Numan played another short set concluding with “I Die: You Die”, a fairly melodic and almost ballad-like conclusion which featured the best lighting accompaniment for the evening.

This was a fairly good concert that was critically spoiled by a combination of the venue’s acoustics, the shortness of the Severed Heads set, their lack of engagement with the audience. Whilst it is obviously too late now, at least for a final performance it is worth really giving an audience a lot of extra feedback. Whilst it may sound like total heresy, Numan’s set was perhaps too long in comparison and could have had some of the less prominent songs replaced with well-known missing hits like “Music for Chameleons”, “We Are Glass” and “She’s Got Claws”. Overall however, this was worthwhile, a fine anniversary for a classic album for one performer and a valediction for another.

“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 …)

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?

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.

It was in this environment that those opening words of Leftfield’s first studio LP, Leftism, echoed a common sentiment: “I’ve got to stand and fight in this creation; vanity I know can’t guide I alone. I’m searching to find a love that lasts all time, I’ve just got to find peace and unity”. It was just the shot in the arm that was needed. Leftism captured the imagination of a multitude who liked the new sounds but abhorred the vacuousness, an orientation bluntly described as “intelligent dance music”, although in Leftfield’s case it was more electronica and with increasing influences of dub.

Leftism was an incredibly well-crafted LP and was recognised as such; “Release the Pressure” was a top-twenty song in the UK singles chart for 1992 and 1996, “Open Up” with John Lydon reached 13 in 1993, followed by “Original” reaching 18 in 1995, “Afro-Left” reaching 22 in the same year. In 2000 Q magazine placed the album at number 34 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums. The second studio album, Rhythm and Stealth (1999), reached top position in the UK albums chart with the singles “Afrika Shox” and “Dusted” reaching 7 and 28 respectively.

Leaving but two albums for their fans to remember (and a couple of obscure singles) and going into remission for several years, it is perhaps inevitable that Leftfield’s first visit to Australia would come with some enthusiasm from a crowd that was 90% between the ages of 35 and 45. The Melbourne show was hosted at The Palace on Bourke Street, a well-designed dive known for the long-running nightclub Goo, allegedly so-called on account of the stickiness of the alcohol-soaked floors. Providing an expected combination of light and colour with appropriate computer-generated graphics throughout the night, Leftfield had an acceptable spectacle to accompany their sounds, especially good during the early tracks “Song of Life” and “Black Flute”.

A great number of their well-known tunes were played throughout the night. The first big event was the pounding dance of “Afro-Left” with and Djum Djum providing a new set of glossolalia, albeit with a consistent set of sounds for the numbers one to four, which everyone understood (Djum Djum has just invented a new language!), nicely complemented later in the set with “Afrika Shox”. “Original” also received an appropriately excellent reception, although for some incomprehensible reason, “Swords” was not played; I am sure that I am not the only person who places the two in a sequence. Crowd interaction could have been better as well; Djum Djum did engage well, but the ego-stroking by front-man Neil Barnes during the highly extended mix of “Inspection Check One”, inciting the crowd to greater levels of movement and passion – in a filler track if there ever was one – was a too much. Mind you, Barnes is prone to hyperbole – in the band biography for the show he made the comment: “The goodwill surrounding the live show has overwhelmed me, the expectation is tremendous. I simply can’t wait to blow everybody away – literally.” I literally hope he doesn’t known the meaning of word literally.

Indeed, this leads to the greatest criticism of the gig; too many of the tracks were extended remixes of their lyrics-light dance tracks rather than the content-heavy pieces. Rather than play, for example, “Chant of A Poor Man”, we’re entertained by a lengthy version of “Phat Planet” or the lyrically meaningless (but musically sound) “Dusted”. You could just forget about anything like “Open Up”, a song which allowed the gothic punks to share admission to a liking of some electronica. Of course, most of the punters simply wanted to dance away to the sounds of a classic electronica band, indeed, possibly the best in the genre. But a cursory scan of the crowd from my vantage point indicated that at least a sizable minority were somewhat perplexed by a 1980s style remixes common to the mainstream, which was not assisted by an insistence on loudness over quality with some very ordinary mixing.

The fact is that Leftfield produce extremely well-crafted music, but if two studio albums in all these years tells you something, is that they’re bloody lazy. Extremely talented it is true, but lazy nonetheless. It is much easier to churn out a ten-minute version of “Space Shanty” than perform any of the three most substantial songs (“Open Up”, “Swords”, “Chant of a Poor Man”). One goes to a concert expecting not to hear all their favourites if they are seeing a band that had been around for twenty years and produced a dozen albums. The same expectation does not hold with a band that has been around just as long but only has two. The concert was in that sense disappointing, and if it was any band of lesser quality it would have been sufficiently bad not to be enjoyed at all. But this was Leftfield, and that made all the difference.

Famous for their stage performance, the band did not disappoint. To be sure, it wasn’t anything like of the mind-blasting quality from the Space Ritual period, but it was certainly impressive. Supporting dancers Laura and Steph Witchwood managed to change several times throughout the show with highly elaborate and thematic outfits which complemented the audio experience perfectly. Aptly assisted with long-standing percussionist Richard Chadwick and relative newcomer Niall Hone, the band itself has effectively three-front men; original member Dave Brock who plays the role of a modest elder statesman, former road crew member Mr Dibs who looks like a cross between an old biker and Rogue Trooper from 2000AD and Tim Blake. With his wispy hair, wiry frame, drawn skin, elder pallor, tiny sunglasses and penchant to prancing up front Angus-Young style with his keytar, this synth and theremin player looks like a goddamned ghoul. “Hey, who let the ghoul on stage?”, “Don’t know, but he sure can play”, “Throw him another bone to gnaw on!”

The entirely genre-appropriate support act Night Terrors kicked off the evening. Apart from having a great band name and also including a theremin as an instrument these youngsters showed real competence in their performance and are certainly worthy of follow-up attendance.

Hawkwind themselves opened with very old classic “Assault and Battery” before moving on their unsubtle drug-references with the punk rock “Flying Doctor”, a song which, as Brock announced, is very Australian. He also made the comment that it was about 5.20am for the band members, which instantly made me recall a highly appropriate Australian-slang term — sparrowfart (Hawkwind … Sparrowfart … geddit? Never mind). The rest of the set showed a good balance between the wide range of styles that the band subscribed to, with material from their new album well interspersed with classics such as “The Psychedelic Warlords”, “Spirit of the Age” and “Angels of Death”. “You’d Better Believe It” was also performed, an old song that also makes its appearance on the new album, along with the somewhat creepy “Sentinel”. The two-hour set was concluded with an extended version of “Hassan i Sabbah” (a song which is remarkably easy to extend) followed by the classic “Silver Machine” as an encore.

It is very hard to fault the evening’s performance. Perhaps the stage performance could have been even more elaborate, heading towards a literal space opera. Perhaps they could have pumped in even more old classics from their extensive career exhausting these venerable rock gods towards a three hour concert. And perhaps I am deliberately suggesting that this was a superb concert in its own right, at an extremely well-designed venue with a skilled mixer not overlooked. Certainly the crowd thought so and responded appropriately. The elder space gods still reign, allowing the psychonauts of yesteryear and today to find unison in their harmonic chants and sonic explorations.

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.

So why do movies still suck so bad? Why does the conservatism of a control-addicted twentieth-century industry finding itself living in the future make the field suck for everyone? Because the means of production are still locked down. This leaves the key question being: “Can it be marketed?”

“The closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well have a vagina.”

Breaking the production monopoly will go slowly. But the Edge of the City festival has a category for films made on a mobile phone.

This post was submitted by Dave Cake.

The execs have finally noticed and, as usual, are channelling their inner Gollum. Streaming services (YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, last.fm) are now considered a bigger problem than piracy, because they’re not the cash cow CDs were. Note that this is the legal and paid-for channels they’re complaining about.

The kids don’t listen to radio, or any similar rigidly controlled stream fed to them on a provider-consumer model. The execs’ dilemma now is how to advertise the music without people being able to hear it. Or something. Analyst Russ Crupnick suggests creating some form of “artificial scarcity.” Let me know how that works out for you.

“We never really made the digital transformation,” says Crupnick. No shit.

However, all his other novels suck. All of them. Over the course of a few years I read as many as I could get my hands on, in the desperate hope of more Burgess greatness. Every single one was mediocre at best. Humdrum writing and story, lots of showing off, occasional attempts at epic, but nothing coming together properly. I can authoritatively state that A Clockwork Orange was a freak event: he accidentally wrote something that was significantly greater than everything else he did, and would never again get within a mile of it.

Here in the future, this is much easier. I recently heard a great track, “Herzlos” by Absurd Minds, a German EBM (bleepy “industrial”) band, on a compilation. Enormously interested by this, I went in search of more of their stuff. As it turned out, I had the opportunity to hear their complete works — every note they’ve recorded from 1996 to the present. All of it. The lot.

And guess what? That track was a freak — everything else they’ve ever done is mediocre at best and inept at typical. In fact, the original version of “Herzlos” also sucks — the good version was a remix by a third party. (And the lyrics, oh God. I’m glad they’re in German.)

The band is not important. The important bit is that even a burst of true brilliance will no longer let you get away with selling us pigs in a poke. This alone is why the majors are going DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, and musicians who still think the world owes them a living with them.

(For the indie stuff of the day, the canonical compilations are Tales from the Australian Underground and Do The Pop!, both of which are pretty much essential.)

Thomas Hesse from Sony says: “We are very uncomfortable with a model where you can just throw anything into the cloud and stream it, if what you threw into the cloud was not legitimately purchased.” Never mind we already have that — it’s called RapidShare. YOU’RE ALREADY COMPETING WITH FREE. PEOPLE WANT TO GIVE YOU MONEY ANYWAY. YOU’RE REFUSING IT. AAAAAAAA

This is someone who should know better. I’d thought the point was always the spread of music and culture without the gatekeepers of the labels, press and radio impeding its communication. Wish accomplished.

Note the quote “The Internet could easily stop this situation but there are darker forces at work and the value of music hits rock bottom.” The “darker forces” are the unforgiving hand of microeconomics — basic business — as marginal cost goes to zero.

I am not rightly able to apprehend the confusion of ideas that leads people to propose a Chinese-style firewall on the whole Internet just to preserve the old record industry. I want some musician holding this view to explain, in a manner that doesn’t treat computers as incomprehensible malevolent magic, how precisely “the Internet” could easily stop this situation. In detail, showing their working. What is the origin of such notions, apart from magical thinking? Give me something to work with here.

Note the upward curve of music industry (and, yes, record industry) revenue, even as someone else eats into the disposable income. The actual claim in the original post is provably false.

This question as approached by authors may be of interest. There’s been a teapot of kerfuffle lately about just how privileged a first-world problem it is to be able to complain that “oh no, people are copying my art!” Link collection; why the entire intellectual property regime is best understood as a mechanism of empire, and why its utter destruction is a moral imperative; author whines, is slapped upside the head with her own privileged cluelessness as to the world not actually revolving around her books. Physical books being obsolete as far as the actual readers go.

Meanwhile, the world continues to be as it is and not as it used to be.

We Internet types are so busy haggling over video games with DRM that we’re not grasping the scale of this. We’re like a dog who’s been cooped up behind a fence his whole life, and now a storm has knocked down the gate. The dog looks out and thinks, “Wow, out there is the front yard!”

No, Fluffy. Out there is the whole world.

So, what do I do with my vinyl records? I’ve had a USB turntable for four years and ripped zero records. This suggests I never, ever will. Even when I have a vinyl record I want to pull out and play, I seek out and download someone else’s rip.

They divide into various categories:

• Australian indie records where the master tapes are long lost and this music literally exists only on five hundred or a thousand pieces of vinyl. This is material of cultural significance that needs preservation. I have vague ideas of sorting these out and sending them to an Australian state library (the Western Australian one was enormously happy to get my fanzine collection, for example). At my expense, of course.

• Other rare material that isn’t widely available. Rip and sell?
• Stuff that is currently available on CD. That vinyl is superfluous and can just fuck off.
• Stuff that has previously been available on CD. That vinyl is probably not useful to anyone. There are exceptions, e.g., quite a lot of popular stuff on Mushroom or Festival is not available on CD because Warner, who own most of the catalogue, are fuckwits and won’t reissue it.
• Music that is or has been available but the vinyl item is a collectible to some degree. There used to be a slight market for this stuff. Some money for it would be nice, but it was hard enough work selling this stuff ten or twenty years ago and I know nothing about the field in the present day.

So the big win is culling the readily available — is there even a market for this? — and the big unknown is the market for the theoretically saleable.

Suggestions are welcome for how to dispose of this shite in a manner that preserves culture where it’s worth the effort, doesn’t throw away stuff worth money and — the absolutely key requirement — is not a major pain in the arse to implement.

Hissing At Swans are two girls with ukulekes and back-projected video. The music is dinky indie and the lyrics are cutting dissections of the inestimable joy of getting a degree in order to become an underpaid office administrator. It worked.

Hong Kong In The 60s are three people with shockingly good songs. They apologised for tweeness and they were completely wrong. The songs are substantial and muscular. They have digested the history of indie pop back to about the mid-sixties (here’s to Astrud Gilberto) and are giving it back. This band is worth your attention. Get the EP.

So I came out tonight to say hi to Laura MacFarlane, whose way with music I’ve been a fan of for about twenty years. She not only writes songs, she’s one of these people who can pick up any instrument and get something decent out of it. Tonight she’s doing a solo gig entirely on borrowed equipment. And also doing the sound, after the soundwoman dropped out at the last second. I suspect if you gave her a piece of string and dropped her in the middle of the desert, buzzards circling overhead waiting to poke her eyes out, it’d take her fifteen minutes to mike up the buzzards perfectly. And the show would rock. Instrumentation is a keyboard and voice, xylophone and voice or guitar and voice. Guitar direct into PA, of course, “I don’t know why anyone brings amps to gigs.” (Atoms. A curse.) I was delighted at the finish with The Man Whose Head “Woekender.”

So, yeah. I haven’t been to a gig in literally years. This was twenty people in a basement room, including bands and promoter. Its cultural impact will be laughably negligible. But it rocked, and I had a good night out. So there. Photos.

79 Revisited’s set showed Hankin well recovered and the band solid despite foldback problems. Crowd favourites like “Angel Witch” by Angel Witch and Diamond Head‘s “Am I Evil” (recorded by Metallica as the b-side to their ‘Creeping Death’ single, Lars Ulrich being a big fan of the NWOBHM) were interspersed with three new (old) songs including “Burnin’ White Hot” by Damacles showcasing guitarist Bob Miller, not surprising as he was in that band! The climax of the set was Iron Maiden‘s “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, with vocalist Josef Stanley nailing it despite suffering from a cold, and the guys from Embrace The Ashes moshing up the front, an appreciation of this important era brought to a new generation.

Disclaimer: redcountess is a friend of 79 Revisited and was their guest at this gig.

Based on past form however I was expecting to be disappointed, remembering well the cabaret style medley of songs from Kill ‘Em All Metallica did the last time I had seen them live in 1998 also at Rod Laver Arena, although I was also encouraged by footage from the ‘Big Four’ concert in Sofia and prepared to see a band that had pretty much become The Rolling Stones of Heavy Metal (which is no bad thing)

On Sunday night I was pleasantly surprised and delighted to find Metallica neither of these. Maybe it was sheer relief that the tour was over but they played well and showed enthusiasm, although hampered by a muddy sound mix. There were no long solos, another drawback in 1998, instead we got a few brief interludes that segued well into the songs. Only two songs from Death Magnetic, which I had wanted to hear more from to see how the songs fared live considering how compresed they were on the album, and none at all from St Anger or Load (although we got “Fuel” from Reload), instead we were treated with some rare gems like “Call of Ktulu” from Ride The Lightning, all accompanied by a light show and pyros that complimented rather than detracted from the songs.

Concert photos by redcountess.

So this is having the obvious effect: Broadway musicians being made redundant by synthesizers. It’s purely for financial reasons, and not like Frank Zappa recording his classical albums by Synclavier so as not to have to deal with musicians. Bless their little hearts.

I’ll tell you, Turkmenbashi wouldn’t have stood for this for a moment.

(Also from San Francisco Music Hack Day: Six Degrees Of Black Sabbath, which got me from Pink Floyd to VNV Nation in only eleven steps.)

Update: Someone’s put up a site that does it for you. Some of these are great.

Spandau Ballet headlined, granting them the final two hours of performance with the Fears being provided roughly an hour for their show. Dispute this unequal distribution of temporal power, the Fears came out punching with a combination of Mad World and Everyone Wants to Rule The World. As one would expect they also performed old hits such as Pale Shelter, Head Over Heels, Sowing the Seeds of Love, along with a spectacular Woman in Chains with some very impressive sounds coming from Michael Wainwright vocal cords. Not surprisingly they finished with Shout with requisite audience participation, but which seemed to lack slightly in the expected primal scream passion.

The Ballet started with To Cut a Long Story Short as a fine beginning with more than a dash of light and colour. It was a little flat for a short while after that, apparently the mixer making some last minute modifications. Like TFF, the Ballet had a string of 80s hits to entice the crowd such as Highly Strung, Round and Round, Fight For Ourselves, Communication, and True. Their concluding (post-encore, naturally) song was equally unsurprising – Gold. Tony Hadley, somewhat larger in presence than his time in the past, was very stylish in his single-breasted suit as he pranced about and crooned with the audience, who were very enthusiastic to see their return after a quarter of a century.

Both bands performed very well to the near-capacity audience and the set was managed professionally. As perhaps could be expected, Tears for Fears won on matters of substance. They are a band with a tougher, edgier approach in presentation and lyrical content. They have a broader and longer musical experience, and it shows. Spandau Ballet were more polished, more interactive, had more props, and a lot more charm – but quite a few of their songs blur together in similarity. As much as the concert was an absolute joy for fans of both bands, the organisers should have given equal time and emphasis to both acts in recognition of their respective qualities.

And, of course, the 7:30 Report. Now, I remember Hamish Fitzsimmons as my mate the Perth bass player who I swapped my 6-UVS T-shirt for a Mustang! Beer Makes You Smart shirt … just the man you want on this story.

Focussing on the explosion of Blues-based Rock from 1963-1970, “The Birth Of Rock” was a rocknerd’s delight, featuring rare performance footage, new and archive interviews with Keith Richards, Roger Daltrey, Ginger Baker etc. and insights from British rock writers including Charles Shaar Murray. I look forward to watching the rest of the series.

• Isis would be that girl who was amazing in bed until she started insisting on listening to nothing but Tool while you banged
• Explosions in the Sky would be that girl who’s great in bed, sure, but it’s EXACTLY THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER FOREVER
• Future of the Left would just donkeypunch you and then post video of it on the internet
• Sepultura would be a guy who completely ignores all erogenous zones other than the vag because they “get in the way”
• Coheed & Cambria would be a guy who you initially wanna fuck but he keeps you up all night talking about HIS FEELINGS instead …

Update: And more.

The stamps were launched on the 7th of January by Jimmy Page, and Led Zeppelin’s “IV” is included in the ten chosen from thousands by Royal Mail for the imagery of their covers rather than the music on the albums themselves.

The 2000s were the decade of falling record sales, plummeting profits for the six five four major labels, a number one single requiring only a few thousand downloads as opposed to a hundred thousand physical records twenty-five years earlier and a race to the bottom by the music industry to come up with something, anything, so horrifyingly insipid and stupid as to destroy instantly the mind of anyone exposed to it, like a saccharine Cthulhu, in the quest to find a sufficiently common lowest denominator.

(Read more …)

With SkullCandy Ink’d headphones. Apparently these are “hep” with the “kids.” They just happen to be pretty good for ten quid (seven on Amazon). Left and right aren’t marked, as is apparently the fashion these days (telling left and right isn’t “fab” or “bling” or whatever the “emo” term is). But if you’re too cheap for Sennheisers or Etymotics, they’ll do very nicely, thank you.

‘Pod is filled with This Kind Of Punishment, ’80s New Zealand indie on Xpressway. 1, 2, 3. Never say I never give you anything.

Redcountess blessed me with What Would Keith Richards Do? (“Everything.”)

Oh, and my mother gave me Christian Rock. I don’t dare play this thing in case it causes a vortex of suck consuming all in its wake.

So. How was your haul?

Anthrax and Slayer are also confirmed for the UK Sonisphere festival, but with the headliners already announced as being Iron Maiden and Rammstein it is unlikely that the “Big Four” pioneers of Thrash will all play at Knebworth. However earlybird ticket buyers for the UK festival will get a free ticket for the Poland show.

Titled Lucy, the song is about Lennon’s childhood friend Lucy Vodden, the alleged inspiration for Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, who suffered from Lupus for many years before dying in September this year. Cook had a grandmother, also called Lucy, who also died from Lupus.

If you feel so inclined you can send Ronnie a get well card or email to help him throw the horns at the big C.

The creators of the campaign are asking people to buy Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name Of online from iTunes, Amazon etc. between December 13th and December 20th in order for it to qualify for the Christmas no. 1 spot.

Fuck. Who can answer a question like that? I HAVE FUCKING THOUSANDS OF ALBUMS, MOTHERFUCKER. IF YOU CAN FIND THE COMMONALITY OTHER THAN “THEY’RE IN THE SAME HOUSE,” YOU’VE JUST PRODUCED A NEW GRAND UNIFIED FUCKING THEORY OF MUSIC AND THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER CAN JUST FUCKING GIVE UP AND GO HOME LIKE THE N00B IT IS.

(And pissed off at myself that I haven’t come up with a glib small-talk answer to that question that I wouldn’t choke on saying out loud.)

What makes you RAAAGE so hard you want to throw the record player out the window?

A buncha MP3s just really doesn’t cut it. Who has time, for one thing?

The answer? Digital Personal Property! Which is certainly not Digital Rights Management or Digital Consumer Enhancement, no no. It’s an entirely different wrapper for physically and mathematically impossible snake oil.

As Penny Arcade put it about similar schemes elsewhere: “Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.”