Soundtracks for Them

Gig Review: The Fall Tripod

2008-03-17T15:10:00.004Z

photo credit: Mc-Q

(This review was mostly written through robbin’ lyrics from popular toons – and under the restriction of having read too much Joyce on way too short a space of time…)

Wanted for continuous wanton crimes against the English tongue
– DJ Krossphader

City Hobgoblins

March 16th in Dublin. The eve of our annual celebration of being a nation of drunken wasters by being a nation of drunken wasters. Scuttling through the city to make the pub for 7.30. Round Merion square corner of a funfair. Through Nassau street by the Dail, round the Stephens Green shopping centre – girls there – tall – just past that and coming out of some new hotel very wealthy creative or criminal types – both? – They have hours fun embracing – sneak through Montague Street thinking the Scott Walker tune and nearly fall over two quite figures in tracksuits – end of an affair?

Even Flanerys is dead tonight – 3 ladies with patent leather boots and one saying “we really clicked all night and then…” – Onwards into Anseo and there’s Watts

– Hi Paul.

British People in Hot Weather

Anseo fills up very fast. It’s a land of baaad barnets, funny ha ha mustaches and “craaaaazy” side burns. Somehow it’s a place where the weird through some strangely, soft, Midas touch in reverse action - actually becomes “dull and dutiful”. Camden town One Nine Seven One anyone?

But that’s not to diss!

Actually it’s a decent class of a pub, when un-full, with Guinness at reasonable rates and you can get lucky with the DJ. We have got lucky! He throws down King Tubby, Wire, Buzzcocks, Couple by the mighty Fall themselves and “I had too much to dream last night” A nice French fella pesters us for a gig to go to – we direct him Tripod wise – wonder did he go for it?

About nine pm and the place empties out – and us with it

– all bound for Fall town.

Spoilt Victorian Child

Beautifully timed arrival taking in the last 30 seconds of support band two – don’t like em! A long gig hiatus to follow – badly recorded versions of Fall classics – echo reverb ily. Usual crowd annoyance tricks deployed– lights up and down – half hearted cheers from the cynical Fall massive – mostly male, mostly thirty plus. They have been to the bad Fall gigs. Finally it becomes clear that we are, in fact, listening to Mr. Smith his good self reciting strange, resentful verse over a shadowy mélange of electronics and echo. Its kind of OK but only sharpens the expectations which jump at every possible shadowy movement on stage. And then there they are – a very young looking Fall Mk ?? - Including the rather gothy but fetchin’ Mrs Mark E Smith III aka Elena Poulou on keyboards. They look scared but rock pretty fecking hard – Poulou even risks a lipsticky and nervous smile. Then man himself drifts on after a very tight instrumental number – in trade mark manky leather jacket and purple shirt – looking hardly a day over 300

(its hard to believe he’s actually only 106 in real life).

He does all his trade mark live band reconstruction work.

Throwing mikes about, adjusting amps, trying to play other folks instruments, and even trying to sing into one of the sensitive drum mikes – sound man is a head of him at the controls or it might have been good bye tripod sound system…

This Nations Saving Grace

My first time ceeing the fall by DJ krossphader aged? –

Well?

Well

-Aged at any rate.

I tink The Fall are a very fun band.

They are a skiffle band.

They rcok very hard.

No there’s no getting around it – I popped me fall cherry on the right night and they were great.

(not that this will stop em being fired at/before the end of this tour – will they care? Off course not – well not the Band as such

– but imagine being in the Band and married to the fecker – where are such woman heroes constructed – how/why do they endure!?!)

It was somewhat reminiscent of my personal favourite Fall period – the 1980s with Brix. Even more amazingly our freaky friend actually let them take over vocals on several tunes and Elena has a great voice managing to sound like a more musical Mark E.

Was remarked to me by one friend that the moments when he was off duty but patrolling around giving out “ugly looks” were rather reminiscent of a grumpy Mike Baldwin supervising the knicker factory in Coronation street! They really went wild on the encore – especially the last tune – which none of the resident Fall aficionados could put a name too which just rampaged off into an extended psychedelic wig out – and off they went – with zero words of the audience or acknowledgement of the rows of pogo-ing middle aged Youths.

Proper order.

Leave the Capital

Off to Devitts for a pint and then off out home through an increasing crowd of shamrocky Italians and French with inflatable tri-colour hammers.

Paddy whackery in the alleys.

Please take it- keep it PLEASE

– Its yours!

Gig Review: Gogol Bordello

2008-03-03T23:54:00.002Z

(Photo: Deathnabottle's Flickr set)

I headed along to the Docks last night, a huge sports hall by day and super club by night that creeps alongside the lake in Toronto, to see the insatiable and relentless stage show that is Gogol Bordello. The lead singer, Eugene Hutz, has been quoted as saying "Gogol Bordello is a collective, musically and politically. We create an insant party atmosphere to deliver messages of social and political commentary." With statements like that you are left wondering what exactly the politics of the band might be.

For a start, they have some great iconography: all fists gripping sling shots and slogans pronouncing global underdog and immigrant punk uprisings. Throwing out yet another blog posts that compares the band to the Pogues would leave me sinking well on the wrong side of cliche, however Gogol do contain that similar righteous outrage of diaspora mixed with a severe drink problem. It's something of that feeling of being perplexed at state borders that place themselves artificially between community and friends, then there's the alien laws and social mores that stand over and regulate how you socialise.

So a perfect theme for a Toronto audience then, it's a city where on Sunday's the off-licenses close at 5pm - so in short our gig going crew was far from the perfect state for a Gogol Bordello gig. The venue itself consisted of endless crowd control barricades, and stupid assed queues for drinks, all well out of sync with the theatrical abandon of show. Walking out at the end, the thought immediately struck me that the vast car park outside would have been the best setting for it, with a giant bonfire melting the tarmac and smoke plumes rocking over the Toronto sky line. Then, akin to one of the band's more popular songs, there'd really be dogs barking.

As the leader singer, Eugene Hutz has been pushed into the position of an artist extra-ordinaire, it's almost a reactionary thing - with Western journalists seizing on him as a little parcel of Eastern European myth they can package on cat walks and magazine covers. But from his state behavior he seems only too happy to be raised to a pedestal and endowed with a primal fury that drives his fans to Dionysion excess or so most of the media around the band push. Documentaries like The Pied Piper of Hutzovina follow this pattern, tracing his artistic and cultural roots, and how they manifest themselves in his music.

On the night itself, when he's tearing through his morbid love affair with booze in a song called "alcohol", I'm reminded slightly of the Manic Street Preachers own tragic Design for Life - with crowds flailing themselves in sweaty exuberance to a song that celebrates yet exudes the crippling emotional consequence of such wildness. He looks like Street Fighter's Vega, after raiding one or two items from a mustacio'd pointy shoed hipster's closet - the similarity goes further too, for most of the show he looks like he's about to swipe down off the stage in an Izuna Drop straight from the arcade classic.

Sergy Ryabtsev, the impossibly red faced fiddler in a Slayer t-shirt, adds a real carnivalesque feel to the affair - with a devilish menace he orchestrates most of the music leading with screeching assaults from his instrument. The show spirals through one climax after another - its fucking relentless and never ending - the best being an intense routine consisting of pom pom drums, bashed cymbals and a fire bucket in a discordant crescendo of building samba noise.

Apart from hearing a few tracks online, I'd little idea of what to expect on the night - it actually started with some transglobal dancehall riddims, the point where the Guns of Brixton meet arabic hip hop. At the end of the night, tiny little flyers were dished out to the crowd for one of the DJ set after parties that accompany the Gogol roadshow - I was pretty curious as to what he'd be pumping out, but with a work day brewing that morning there was little chance of getting sozzled. The web held the answers, and the guy's piece on music being a catharsis for freedom when taken out of the hands of industry parasite's is great too.

Broken Pencil Gets It's Irish On

2008-02-28T23:42:00.002Z

Sort of perfect timing this one, allowing me to throttle two zine related posts in one punchy go. First off, Loserdom number 17 came out some time last week. I've mentioned Loserdom over this direction before, when I was particularly delighted so that the whole affair had gone online.

Falling headlong into the clickaholic mode that dawns on me every so often, the new Loserdom announcement prompted me to run over to the Zine Wiki, where there's a brilliant history of early Irish zines by one of the blokes behind Loserdom. Now the best thing about the wiki, is not the information on the zines - mainly who copied with who and what local scene they covered - but the occasional splattering of links to some well dodge mid-90's Geocities pages that roam the net like the living dead.

These are left over as html-ified archives of zine based writing, great for those of us without old stuffed shoe boxes under their bed full of the original xeroxes. Here's some examples of where you can at least trace something out about how some of these dropped;

Slanted and Enchanted - love affairs with Warp Records, the long gone Temple of Sound and madser mid'90's Ireland at its proto-Slate best.

The Path - If that Crimethinc lot are indomitably associated with crust punk, then this was a double sided A4 page freesheet that shared at least some of their anti-work and sensational rage to life but through a laconic pill head trapped on the assembly line sensibility. Living with your ethics, the M50, a 24 hours where the end of the world was nigh and a social history of the Monto get a look in.

Direct Action Against Apathy - brought you a guide to squatting in the bushes on your travels, and free music from the band Devil's Bit Scabious, laced with anarcho politics too.

Gearhead Nation - said to be the original '90's zine that buoyed the boom of print copies during the period, it seemed quite politically focussed and a fair few copies online.

Analogue Bubblebath - taking its name from an Aphex track maybe, this one had an interview with Freebird Records' John Dee on the history of that Dublin record shop.

What interests me most about these is the level of variety contained within each one, it's impossible to slap them in the face with associations with only a punk mileu and tradition of music. Most of the Irish blogs knocking around today are certifiably monolithic in their pursuit of niche topics, it's either music or politics, film or literature, art or style, or continuous shout outs to their friends - completely one sided approaches. Where with these zines, they were at least somewhat multifaceted.

With the desperate lack of proper alternative free magazines around Dublin now, they hint at a rather bubbling mid 1990's independent spirit that really doesn't seem that well reflected on the blogs and websites that have come to replace the zines. Sure, it's the spurt in a culture of music forums over the past decade that definitely put the nail in the coffin of zine culture. But a young kid from down the train tracks, and up to Dublin to poke around Temple Bar, is not going to stumble upon, say, a lost copy of Thumped.com when having their coffee.

Blogs require shooting your mouth off impatiently, attempting to stay fresh - it must have been so much more appealing to relax and put together a zine, trading addresses and reviews to tap into further distribution channels patiently rather, than racing to keep a site updated.

Moving on, recently Broken Pencil, doyens of the North American zinester world, held their Canzine event in Toronto - a huge show case of independent magazine talent and music, I'd intended to put together a special offline zine version of Soundtracksforthem for the day that was in it and table it with herself, who was due to be distributing copies of the Rag at it.

I booked the table, but never got the hard copy versions thrown together quick enough. Copies of the Rag never arrived, but the organisers were kind enough to return the tabling deposit and throw in a free year's subscription out of sympathy. So it arrived in the post today, and holy moly they reviewed Soundtracksforthem in their ezine section. Click over this direction to have a read of the review. Matt Vinyl's in there too.

Fecking Civil Servents

2008-02-26T22:23:00.002Z

You know over at that Irish civil service website? Where it says "please complete the following Questionnaire" for the Temporary Clerical Officer role that's dished out to all sundry, and especially hopeless for the summer? I'm just curious, but the link to that test is a scrambled url reading https://www.publicjobs.ie/cand/%5C%5Cwww.publicjobsdata.com/tco-08. So that's a dead end then. Now that's something that might put a lot of less tech sussed people off, or at the very least, frustrate them into throwing a head but into their lap top screen. But that's not the only screw up with the whole affair.

The self assessment advises you to take twenty minutes or so, and put them aside to complete the whole shebang. Then the site downloads with all the pain and strain of a server vomiting its bandwidth over to you from a dial up connection, and choking half way through a screen load. It took me three hours, I swear to God - three hours to do one simple job application survey.

Now, is that a consequence of some cute hoor muck savage of a tech boy in one of the departments, sabotaging the whole affair. All in order to save the 500 advertised work placements for his own social network of third cousins, GAA club drinking buddies and young girls he's shifted out the back of Copper Face Jacks, then promised work to while they were stuck for a job between applying to Templemore? Or was I just having a real bad night online?

Fake Pharma Ads

2008-02-25T04:35:00.004Z

Over the last week or so, fake pharmaceutical ads for a drug styling itself “Obay” started jumping up across Ontario. Immediately the mind starts springing with”hey its corporate a rip off of Shepard Fairey (aka OBEY).” But no it wasn’t. With the transit commission and the ad regulatory body refusing to budge and give up the ghost of who was doing the advertising, it was left to the Torontoist to suss it out.

Vidiot: Data Entry

2008-02-25T04:34:00.001Z

Boy! Do we have the career for you. Do you have the talent and capability to pace yourself to avoid eye strain and other repetitive strain injuries? Have you ever thought you might like a workplace with good lighting, comfortable chairs and an actual desk? Think you can handle the responsibility of double checking? Then we might be able to plug you in as a data entry bot.

And there’s lots more benign helpful corporate advice for you lost mid-twenties souls out there all courtesy of some madsers called Gadball. It’s all a little too like one of those information videos Lisa Simpson always got subjected to in junior high for my liking.

Life and Debt

2008-02-25T04:30:00.000Z

Wiretap Magazine is a pretty liberal online creature, with its head well up the Democrats’ arse, but that said - at least it actually pays its youthful writers. This week it carries a decent piece on the crisis of credit facing North American third level students. Anyone that has ever seen the documentary Maxed Out will have some idea of just how credit has evolved as a a linchpin of North American consumer culture, but really it has quite startling effects.

For instance, try working in your typical North American workplace. In one call centre I did a stint in, way out in suburban north Toronto, it was pretty damn obvious that most of those working the 14 and 16 hour shifts, and without family, were there only as a result of credit card debt. Usually it was from frivolous expenditure or holiday resort based tourism binges in places like Cuba. The work ethic and job loyalty was frantic, and it was no surprise for me to hear today on CBC that something like 67% of Canadians disapprove of workmates using the internet for personal use. I mean, come on.

On a side note, one of thatWiretap site’s regular contributers Larisa Mann might be more familiar to readers under her DJ moniker of Ripley.

Last Night Cosmo Baker Saved My Life / Hip Hop History

2008-01-27T04:34:00.000Z

Photo: Nicked from Cosmo's Myspace.

Cosmo Baker comes straight out of Brooklyn. You might already have a hint of who he is - what with his re-jigging of that old synthpop classic "Oh Sheila" from Ready for the World, popping up across mixes highlighted on this blog, both on that recent one from DJ Half Dutch and, ages ago, on DJ C's Bouncement.

Last night he played Toronto, a tight blend of smarts from a man that really digs deep and back. His Martial Law CD, for instance is made up of old 45' funk records. Baker is sometimes mix buddy with DJ Ayres - one of those types that blows Baltimore club sounds all over poptastic hooks in a sick formula for club music. Grab a track called Shake from Ayres and you'll see what I'm taking about.

A few years ago, literally about half a dozen people I know had just read Simon Reynold's Energy Flash, his excellent journey into what would end up becoming know as the hardcore continuum, or 'nuum as parts of the blogosphere call it. At the time, compilations such as We Call It Acieed - named after that old D Mobb track, and The History Of The House Sound Of Chicago were passed around manically to accompany the read.

And here's where it's good, now it seems another book has popped up inspiring a similar infectious reading routine among friends. This time it's that Jeff Chang Can't Stop Won't Stop look at the hip hop generation. So no better time to check out the radio show Cosmo Baker does alongside DJ Ayres, it's called the Rub - and there's an amazing archive of shows on it, including 14 different specials looking at hip hop on a yearly basis from 1979 through to 1994.

Eye Candy: Dufferin Hoarding Gallery

2008-01-25T19:29:00.000Z

Gladstone library is located at the intersection of Bloor and Dufferin, right acrss the road from those every present Timothy Horton coffee joints, a franchise named after some famous Canadian hockey player - bought out and flung across the nation to giddy middle range entrepreneurs desperate for a quick buck from the hideously addictive vanilla tinged coffees they dish out by the gallon. With building work going on, hoarding has popped up all around the old library building. It's an area of the city on the fringe, walking distance from the hipster capitalism of Queen St West and mashed into an old Portuguese, come Ethiopian come what ever neighbourhood - one night framed photographs started popping up on the hoarding, and then more and then some more. Here's what it looked like yesterday.

Review: Heads for the heart of the Sun – The Welcome Return of Dumb

2008-01-22T16:13:00.000Z

Review: Under the Stress of a Headlong Dive – The Heads (Alternative Tentacles, 2006)

“…they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language...”

Karl Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

"Er ..." said Arthur after a moment, "what exactly was it that was wrong with your planet then?" "Oh, it was doomed, as I said," said the Captain, "Apparently it was going to crash into the sun or something
Douglas Adams - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

As popular music slowly faces the reality of its own terminal decline as a business, it finds itself tottering over the edge of an abyss. It is gripped with a fevered existentialist anxiety, or maybe even, terror! No one any more is “standing in the way of control” to quote Beth Dido. God is, in fact, dead!

A fundamental question leaps out of this void. The artist is now liberated from “the man” and with close to complete access to means of production and distribution - but has to create for close to zero financial reward - who’s going to be bothered? Nietzsche claimed creators needed to be hard. Karl Marx (retired rolling stone columnist) or Lester Bangs – one of em anyways - would have it these are heavy times in which, in ways, it’s easiest just to fetch some riffs and beats from the past in order just …to go on…

One could even roll, and then, smoke; seventeen hundred giant blunts and only to observe:
“Creating in the Eternal Now is Always Heavy” (last track on the album!)

Welcome!

You have emerged from the tunnel and this is one of several growling embers of the 1970s that are rekindling to light a possible way to move forward via the past. Step up Comets on Fire, Boredoms, Omm, Sun (O) Earth and a plethora of other bands with not, in fairness, that much in common except a toe dipped into the UR Ocean of stoner hair metal.

Step forward The Heads!

The first thing that strikes you about this album is that it’s a smashing mess of bass driven, oceanic, nay titanic, fuzzy nose-diving guitar rock – and that’s also the last thing that strikes you. Then an ambulance arrives – if you’re lucky!

OK there are some slow and gigantic nods to ambient (maybe on cloud) and a few other ideas floating about in the swampy dirge. But like who the fuck asked for “other ideas”!??! Lets Sneer at “other ideas” maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.
Is this jazz fusion? NO.
Is this post rock? NO!
Post, post rock maybe? NO NO, fuckedy, NO – Give it a rest!
This is the sound of R O C K with maybe even a little from its primitive blues prehistory. This is loud, huge glorious fountains of semi melodic troglodyte noise reverberating in some lonely, smoke filled bat cave high up in the smoky mists of don’t Bogart that joint mountain. Maybe its generic – definitely it’s been done (1970-3) but they are doing it so fucking well!
And they are doing this cataclysmic end times sounds-cape on Jello Biafra’s minute alternative tentacles label for little more than a toke and a bean…

It’ll be hard to be a creator in the future.
And that’s a GOOOD thing.
Hmmmmm these end times!
Smell of diving sales in the morning – yes we are “under the stress of a headlong dive”

Hey people worked (OK badly paid and treated) in HMV, Fopp, Virgin etc…

But these will not be times of record label advances, smoozing artist and reptile men, accountants thinly and badly disguised as bands (hi Thrills), unlimited coke budget and stretch limos and groupies in the back y’all.

Nor will these will not be the days of support for all the “causes” AFTER we’ve minted it and stashed the cash off shore (big up Bono!)

These will be hard times: the end game or, at least, the beginning of an end game – or the potential start of a new game.

It’s the maggots (to refer to a very old idea of Steven Wells) that have digested the past and can regurgitate it in luminous colours, the crazy ones, the big dope smoking, peddle stroking fuckheads who just don’t and just can’t even conceive of a bottom line who might just be the only look in that popular music is now going to get at movement…

In Me Ears Nine: Maximum Carnage

2008-01-22T01:18:00.001Z

Ever earlier in the eternal monologue that is Soundtracksforthem I stuck up some links around bassline/niche. Partially I was looking for some more pointers, none came - but I did stumble across DJ Venom through a mention elsewhere online. His Maximum Carnage mixtape is getting serious dues around parts of the net at the moment, it's well worth a listen if you can let yourself get past parts of the real ready for chipmunking vocals scattered through out.

The shout outs from Drop The Lime, DJ Assault, Starkey and others on the mixtape will give you some idea of who and where is converging through niche, sure to make it a much fuller part of their own sounds. The Smugpolice blog's worth keeping an eye on for more of this, while over at Fact magazine K-Punk looks at bassline as the feminine yin to the male yang of grime and dubstep.

In Me Ears Eight: Ghislain Poirier

2008-01-20T05:45:00.000Z

Ghislain Poirier is known for tearing it up over in the direction of Montreal with regular monster raves under the city's bridges. More fool me I've missed him every time he's hit Toronto, including both the release of his latest album down the Drake Hotel, then on Nuit Blanche - a 24 hour art mad rush around the city, and the only time it feels like there's a night life outside the Orwellian "clubbing district" - when his partners in illegal partying Megazoid played off the same hotel's roof to crowds below.

Poirier's recent "Blazin'" track was a pretty big number, getting the remix treatment from Trouble and Bass' Starkey, Modeselektor and ripped with the vocals of TTC's Telephone. He sounds a bit like a heavily fractured electro dance hall in places or just stonking slap down rhythms poked around some more familiar club voices and rap artists, at least that's my impression of his Bounce Le Gros mix CD.

Recently Pitchfork had him do a pretty short mix poking back and forth between African rap and grimey bass lines. Anyone that liked the templates of exotica opened up by those Maga Bo mixes I linked to before, is sure to like this shit. If you are looking for more along these lines, get yourself a copy of The Rough Guide to African Rap compilation and do check out X Plastaz, their "Msimu Kwa Msimu" number is one of my recent favorites.

Vidiot: Dubstep Dance Demonstration and Bassline House

2008-01-18T23:43:00.000Z

With Nialler9 throwing himself into some soul searching over how much life is left in that chest rattling beast they call dubstep, this Youtube video and the one below seemed too perfect not to share. It is shamelessly stolen from Prancehall's blog, but cuts to what dubstep appears to be for many now; a dedication to repetition, conformity to expectation and rigorous formula, things it once seemed to originally blow out against. For me AC Slater, Pirate Soundsystem, and Dexplicit seem to be taking things in a far more enjoyable direction than most dubstep production, though I'll still keep Shackleton and Appleblim's Soundboy Punishments for my reading sessions.

The kids in Toronto are raving about bassline, niche or what ever else they want to call it too. It slams around a club's systems in tandem with baltimore, grime, dancehall, juke, baile, all of the usual party banger mix. DJ'ing one style all night, something dubstep lends itself too, really seems tedious in comparison. Apparently bassline's what speed garage used to sound like, and if dubstep was some evolution of parts of garage (that's what the internet and tireless commentators have parroted so it must be true...) then maybe its a case of stepping back to go somewhat forward.

Fact Magazine have an interesting enough interview on one of the labels putting out such bassline, of course that master of the ghettobass Rupture has some links on it all too and John Eden has a pretty funny article making some serious points and, of course, Dissenus gets all psuedo-academic on it's ass. Anybody with pointers to more free downloads and other bassline artists will go home loaded with lots of virtual Soundtracksforthem candy. Either way Dexplicit who made his US debut courtesy of Trouble and Bass recently will be dropping a mix on Rupture's show on January 23rd.

In Me Ears Seven: DJ Half Dutch

2008-01-16T18:19:00.000Z

Spent a good chunk of time listening to this over the Christmas, it's one of a series of mixes released online under the title of the Chopshop Podcasts. Volume 5 in the series comes from DJ Half Dutch, I'm not going to say much about it apart from the fact that it's real soulful, full of old skool vibes from the likes of Kurtis Blow and with some very tasty exotica beats from that master of the favella beat DJ Sandhrino. In parts there's an odd soundtrack feel off it, or so I thought till a mate ensconced in Jeff Chang's history of the first hip hop generation Can't Stop Won't Stop, explained to me that releases from Ennio Morricone, especially his Apache were big DJ tools back in the day. Definitely my favorite mix of the past while, the perfect thing to sneak up and garrote you from behind with sneaky progressions on a night out.

Graphic Novel Review: The Blog of War

2008-01-01T16:55:00.000Z

(Review of Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappe, Shooting War, November 2007)

One of the most buzzed online web comics of the year finally got a hard copy release this side of the pond last month. It's called Shooting War, and it's made waves over at Smithmag.net since May 2006, when uber-Geek (that's hard ware and binary, not math rock and horn rims) bloggers Boing Boing blew the roof off it with a throw away casual link. It threads terrain typical of graphic novels, reaching into a future dystopia to stick some allegories about the present up our ass for awkward digestion.

The setting this time round is a 2011 Iraq, sectarian tensions are spilling into overdrive, rumors of an Iranian invasion from the south abound and President McCain's only exit strategy is a re-alignment with what's left of his old friends in Saddam's Baathist party. There's a My Lai massacre a minute, a McDonalds on every block and mortars are raining down on what's left of the Green Zone like it was Saigon '75.

Enter Jimmy Burns to the fray. He's your penny dreadful Brooklyn blogger churning out anti-corporate rants all over the east coast but has no mass movement market to hitch his ride to. One day he's doing a story on the new enclosures brought about by eminent domain. It's a nasty piece of legislation allowing re-distribution of your property to corporations that find a more productive use. Next thing a terrorist bomb goes off in a Starbucks behind him and he's got the exclusive.

Suddenly stuck for footage, mega media bad guys Globalnews steal his video blog feed, turning him into an insta-celebrity and selling him to the world like a new brand of toothpaste. Forced to dance a line between his DIY journalism and corporate cash, he's shipped to Iraq as one of only four American war correspondent's left there.

It's nothing but a slight stretch to guess the novel comes from the direct experience of Lappe. The blokes traveled to the Middle East several times on assignment and produced Battleground: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge, picking up some awards for it along the way. Alongside this peeled back re-imagining of his own jaunt through bombed out Baghdad, there's visual gimmicks and vocab from activist sub cultures for a sprinkling of further credibility from his years with the Guerrilla News Network.

The comic panels are a combination of drawings and photographs, some look like they've been automatically fed through a few Photoshop filters, and there's a neat stylistic use of web feed uploads and network TV graphics framing pages. Anything from a soldiers perspective angles at you like the screen of a first person shooter.

It's in imagining the incidentals of future war and the political props of our own evolving dystopia that Shooting War rocks most. There's the jihad group that's cornering the call centre market with its throat cutting labour standards and the use of a dirty bomb to neutralise competition in the hi-tech squalor of Bangalore. Their leader, a maniacal Guevara stereotype bent on the Koran, delivers standout Bond villain lines to steal the show: “we are the Sword of Mohamed. We are not some sons of rich men hiding in caves and releasing videos to the internet like 13 year old girls.”

Back home a video game called Infidel Massacre rises up the charts, both a manual for terrorism and a sharp riposte to military recruiting freebies like today's real America's Army. The US military has harnessed civilian technologies and next gen consoles to exploit skilled self-trained gamers that control robotic gun-bots engaged in asymmetric warfare straight out of one of Mike Davis' urban terror-scapes.

Sadly Burns becomes completely divorced from his inception as the netizen every-man, used by mainstream news networks with faces battered from the blogging storm. He takes on this paper cut out April O'Neil as Naomi Klein routine that starts to grate.

Much will be made of the novel's politics of the media. Really the authors pass up poking around at the consequences of Web 2.0. If you are going to name check Negri for kudos, then picking at the immaterial slavery of uploaders and bloggers generating free content in wageless legions for major players in the media market might be a thought.

At heart there's just a raging cynicism dying to be proved wrong for once. The shits and giggles come from predictable across the board ironies, its all a flue of outraged liberal steam before the story arc can end with a final affirmation that our governance by a capitalism with the personality of "Godzilla on crank" really is just an issue of a few bad men. In that way its quite like Brian Wood's Jenny One series - Shooting War shares his concern with the media but in a much more disturbingly plausible mode.

In comic book land it'll never end up a classic like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or more obviously Joe Sacco's brilliant account of his photo journalism in Palestine. That said, with history unfolding on our screens, context free and maybe, just maybe, sometimes analyzed with tones reserved for a Britney Spears outburst - Shooting War nicely drops us in boiling pots of speculation for the crime of complacency.

Ye can check it out online at shootingwar.com and this A.D: New Orleans After the Deluge might be worth a gawk. This article was originally destined for the Village.ie website.

Twas the Season: Diary Of an X Mass Work Do 2004

2007-12-25T19:42:00.000Z

(Photo taken from Emertont on Flickr)

After spring cleaning the hard drive of a bent out of shape old work computer, that relentless 9-5 dosser Krossie, came across this hungover blast from the worklace past. We too are disappointed that RTE turned down his idea to unite Terror Danjah and Declean Nurney for a Christmas day broadcast called Songs from a Showband Era, but hopefully this tale of drunken woe will shiver the hangover cobwebs and get you through to Stephens...

7.30 pm: Speed off into the frosty night with Kris Kingle present for teacher A safely tucked under arm - thinking
"What woman doesn't want the beano annual 2005"

8 pm: – Pub Teacher B (in fetching spider web dress) informs me that she just met Bono drunk in Spar shop. Supplies extremely badly drawn picture and signature in green biro, which she claims the great man "drew" for her.

Observe that Bono's writing looks strangely familiar
Teacher B refuses to abandon obvious "made up" story.

8.05 pm: Bono's wife Aili Hewson wanders past

8.06 pm: All teachers run to smoking area to touch Bono and obtain partial indulgence (plenary indulgence can be gained by dropping the knee to the great man)

8.08 pm: Loudly declaim to male teachers that Bono tm (net worth 0.55 billion euro) as quote wanker unquote with messianic complex AND an Irish tax exile.

Teacher C observes he was in the same charismatic Christian group as saint bono but that his new stuff isn't too good.

Reply that only like Adam Clayton cos he takes drugs and is not Christian.

Application Teacher C quits unexpectedly and cannot be rebooted

Further declaim that bono wife Ali is "ride" and desire to have sexual congress with said Ms Hueston.

Note to self-stop drinking.

Consume two pints of Guinness

8.30 pm: In restaurant – late. Several teachers ignorant of the Kris kingle – emergency redistribution of "presents" begins.

Junior school have TWO Tables – RESULT

Text g'fnd important news of great strategic victory

G'fnd wishes me g'luck "with ironing"

Consume two starters, wine and bottle of miller

Further note to self – please stop drinking

10 pm: Main course – duck stuffed with some soft white stuff – absolutely delicious

Attempt to begin food fight. Results desultory though achieve direct hit on teacher D's pink pate.

RESULT

Staff warning one.

Further note to self – please stop drinking

Desert enjoyed so steal second one

Kris kingle stuff distributed to dissatisfaction of almost all.

Though teacher A appears reasonably content with beano annual

11 pm: Attempt to drive Teacher C back out of our area into to "senior zone" Teacher C stands ground and continues conversation with Teacher E's tits.

11.30 pm: repair to pub – capture seats – inveigle teachers to sit down. Teachers remain standing. Past pupil is trapped by drunken teachers but eventually manages to sidle away with "I pity you look" attached to face.

12 am: Attempt to chat up teacher F. Teacher F appears vaguely interested. Text g'fnd that teacher F is attempting to chat me up.

No reply.

12.10 am VERY loudly declaim to male, female teachers, past pupils and staff that Bono tm (net worth 0.55 billion euro) is a wanker with messianic complex, Christian, wealthy ass hole AND an Irish tax exile.

Further repeat claim that bono wife Ali is "ride" and desire to have sexual congress with said.

Note to self-probably too late to stop drinking.

Consumption 2 pints Guinness – one bought by Teacher G's husband.

Teacher H is getting off with teacher I's fiancée – teacher I too drunk to notice

12.20 am: Lead posse from pub of teachers J, K and L. Teacher J very drunk.

12.25 am: Achieve successful entry into club despite Teacher J's best attempts to prevent.

Nature of club: Not bad – good DJ mixing (and beat matching) New Order, Britiny (toxic yeah!) Kenny Logins plus rnb and disco classics

12.30-1.30 am: Consume unknown quantity Guiness continue half hearted attempts on Teacher F plus Teachers M and N. Teacher N seems amenable but continues to flash huge ring with set diamonds in one's face for some strange reason.

Teacher J grabbing punters by the neck in attempt to initiate romantic liaisons. Punters unimpressed and one attempts combat.

Teacher J is narrowly rescued.

Note to self continue drinking shure, shure you'll be grand

Punter who attacked teacher J earlier now attempting to get off with him.

1.45 am: Drunk woman spills pint on teacher K. Teacher K expresses vague wish to respond with violence against punter's boyfriend. Point out size of b'fnd. Notice b'fnd is attempting to clean up under table. Further note that floor is covered with white powder

-->[if !supportLists]-->- -->[endif]-->Very the season

Why even wait for the jacks to get the cocaine into ya?

2.20 am: – Teachers have achieved mystical union in giant ruck on dance floor – feel mildly depressed at sharp contrast between cheery Christmas tunes and cokey punters – exit with Teacher K complaining about past teacher A and former career. Past teacher A has earlier accosted me with mistle tow earlier so feel vaguely disposed to drunken defence.

Insert teacher k in taxi.

Text message from teacher F.

Teacher F thinks me sweet but "already seeing someone"

Scroll through texts and note that boastful message about Teacher F coming on to me that I sent to g'fnd was, was, in fact, instead sent directly to teacher F herself.

Achieve congress with bike and drunkingly and illegally make for home.

???? am: Accosted by small dog

Take dog on in exciting death race

Dog wins

???? am: Phone call from teacher B asking to "call up to mine" for a while

?.01 am: Succeed in breaking phone

Eye Candy: Toronto Street Art Gallery

2007-12-13T21:30:00.000Z

When I moved over here first I went around for the first week or so snapping compulsively at whatever street art came into view. The results looked a little something like this.

Vidiot: King Kong Fighting.

2007-12-09T02:50:00.000Z

Zombie like midway through game play? Natural rushes from the crowds? Well if you want your name written into history, you have to pay the price. Does that sound like the self grandiose advise of Beckham giving one of those staged and painful soul searching interviews you get every once in a blue moon? No, just the wise words of the world record holder in Donkey Kong the old coin op, to a loser that has made it his own midlife crisis a need to win that very title. We are about to enter the very strange world of retro gaming with attitude.

Check out the movie's site.

Eye Candy: Hey Apathy!

2007-12-09T02:07:00.000Z

Hey Apathy is a comic series by Toronto based street influenced graphic artist Mike Parsons, some of his larger pieces were on display today just off College St. Some of these he'd drawn doing that on street painting-as-busking thing you see going on. Remember those children's search books Where's Wally? Well imagine one of the characteristic crowd scenes rendered in black ink, over 12 foot in length and bursting with a frenzied energy and paranoid pressure.

Parson's work is churned out at a ruthless rate, he doesn't stop himself to cover mistakes and his obsession with the anonymity of crowds is a running theme of distaste throughout his larger canvases. Some of the images are similar to rushed HR Geiger rip offs, in one panel the shrill squawk of mobile phones becomes unbearable in a queue until the neural systems of their users burst through their skulls and drag the phones back into the central nervous system.

Parsons work is that feeling of standing in a major city and staring with your neck creaked up at the structures above you, built by us but dwarfing us with that pain of city isolation and social inadequacy too. I don't suspect the bloke is much of a humanist, but if you like those Dystopia cartoons that appear in Totally Dublin - then you might want to check him out.

Bolivia: Social Movements On Fire.

2007-12-07T01:07:00.000Z

Over the weekend of November 24-25th, protesters clashed with police in Sucre, Bolivia - they were demanding that the capital of be moved there. Three people died and over some 100 were wounded in the clashes. Yesterday Morales announced plans for a nationwide referendum to resolve a deepening political crisis in the country. A few months ago, two recent works on Bolivia were given a look over for the WSM's Red and Black Revoltuion 14, the review appeared on Indymedia.ie first and here it is for you blog readers

A few years ago the Cochabamba water war coincided perfectly with the 2000 anti-globalisation peak to solidify many of that movement's arguments about neo-liberal rule in cold hard scenarios of struggle. An exciting new round of images depicting indigenous women confronting militarised police dotted left publications, while documentaries like 'The Corporation' used the revolt as a sharp anecdote in hacking off the avaricious tentacles of multinationals.

A review of "The Price of Fire" by Ben Dangl and "Impasse In Bolivia" by Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing.

With the success of the Movimiento al Socialismo (1), western attention moved from the social movements honed in such resource struggles to the left caudillo Morales and, despite previous excited flutters, there's now little comment on how the grassroots relate to this new moment.

Al Giordano complained in a recent book on Oaxacca, that the radical press often shares problems with the mainstream - reeling in a journalism of instant replays, full of heroic and tragic moments from the barricades, instead of cogent analysis.

Thankfully in the past six months two very different books sought to pierce through the frailty of movement reportage on social movements in Bolivia, to explore why they emerged with such force since the 1990's and how they now relate to the MAS.

The first of these is Kohl and Farthing's 'Impasse in Bolivia', a heavily wrought background to the face off between a globally prescribed neo-liberal hegemony and a local population repeatedly drawing on a five hundred year resistance narrative.

Taking the reader through a well-elucidated history from the Spanish Conquest to the early 21st Century, they track how economic restructurings affected the composition of Bolivian resistance movements prior to neo-liberalism.

The exploitation of silver deposits at Potosi by the Spanish profoundly re-organised Andean society, leading to the emergence of indigenous resistance through nested kinship structures that fuelled rebellions such as the mythic 1781 siege of La Paz from the alti-plano by tens of thousands of Aymara warriors.

The authors describe how the later drive for an independent Bolivia stemmed from liberal criollos keen for the benefits of their own state but bent on uprooting and modernising indigenous communal land-holding systems to fundamentally exclude them as citizens.

The eventual replacement of these hacienda based elites with natural resource companies at state level set the ground for embryonic industrial agitation and ripples that reach the present.

In the thirties a rivalry between Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell over control of deposits in the Chaco region forced Bolivia into a proxy war with Paraguay for control of the disputed area. Defeat both drastically reduced the country's land mass and welded the social force for the 1952 Revolution among war weary drafted students, workers and campesinos.

The resultant Movimineto Nacional Revolucionaro deposed the mining oligarchies with a regime subject to land and labour pressure from below in the form of the Confederacion Obera Bolivian. Forced to recognise land seizures and labour demands, it constructed a state in the modernist nationalist tradition with a strong central administration and control over natural resources.

This defiant union movement continued to push for a deepening of citizenship rights only to be marshalled with a military dictatorship in 1964 as Cold War realities hit home.

The imposition of neo-liberal economics in the eighties under the NEP against this historic background becomes quite central to the authors' account, seen as a serious attack both on what became known as the "State of '52" and the labour movement.

Engineered for president Estenssoro by Jeffery Sachs of the IMF, it was the first programme of its kind, leading to some economic recovery in the face of hyper-inflation but an ensuing human misery.

Over 20,000 miners lost their jobs, manufacturing collapsed and over two thirds of the urban population were dragged into the informal economy, dramatically paralysing the COB as the backbone to popular struggles.

With the way paved for an affirmation of neo-liberal policies, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada's Plan de Todos in the nineties unfolded with the familiar theme of privatised state owned enterprises, gutting the country's revenue.

Yet according to the authors, the couching of this new market democracy in electoral and social reforms inadvertently opened a space for indigenous resistance in rural areas.

As failed neo-liberal promises bolstered anger, diverse movements around coca eradication in Chapare, land rights and basic urban services quickly transformed the political landscape to "forge a common sense of injured national identity (2)."

Unfortunately Kohl and Farthing's work is hamstrung with the distance of academia, it sketches the imposition of neo-liberalism brilliantly but fails to illustrate "the shape that popular challenges to it will take (3)" in any grounded way.

Using a very different approach Benjamin Dangl's 'The Price Of Fire' is refreshingly intimate, he too starts with a "revolution in reverse," rolling through the tides of Bolivian revolt during a brief stay in old Potosi.

His writing style is steeped in hauntology and the psychic scars of centuries of exploitation; it's the fruit of bar room conversations, pickets and blockades and a brief encounter with Morales. He cushions this in minor analysis and travelogue, allowing voices from social movements to provide a "human face to the looting and struggles of a continent (4)."

During a visit to the Chapare, this "bearded gringo with a notepad" rails against the use of coca eradication as a paltry excuse for US intervention in the post cold-war climate, arguing that the migration of unemployed miners to rural areas accelerated coca's growth as the only viable cash crop under neo-liberalism.

From this dynamic the MAS emerged, capable of unifying different strands of struggle with its origins in coca growers' unions formed by former miners. Visually this is seen in the use of the coca leaf as party insignia, once used for energy by silver miners but equally evocative of indigenous and anti-imperialist messages today.

The book continuously traces how modes of militancy spread through migration. Like Farthing and Kohl, he agrees that the water war was a momentous turning point with the practice of mass assemblies in rural areas becoming more engrained in cities through the Coordinadora.

Retaining a critical eye, he doesn't rush to romanticise the end result of the water war. Bechtel may have left but the public water company is still controlled by a local political elite, though one more subject to street based popular power.

The question of how to use Bolivian gas further unified traditionally diverse social movements in the 2003 gas war to reverse the privatisation carried out in the mid-nineties. Protesters used "the wealth underground" as a point of correction for past lost resources and to envision a future of possible development, education and health-care.

Casting his eye to Caracas, Dangl hints at the use of oil revenue in Venezuela to empower the nation's poor with literacy programmes, health clinics and community centres as a path for the Morales regime.

'The Price of Fire' takes a brief jaunt into urban geography in a chapter on the internal world of the El Alto, a city whose residents played a crucial role in the 2003 gas revolt. The same social forces that drove miners to become cocaleros in rural Chapare led to the informal settlements outside La Paz skyrocketing to a population of 800,000.

Neighbourhood organisations sufficiently ingrained to strangle the capital below in periods of struggle, sprung up based on the experience of miner and rural agitation, as well as the absence of basic state services. One of the few academics Dangl speaks with describes their strength as lying in "the basic self-organisation that fills every pore of the society and has made superfluous many forms of representation (5)."

Within these El Alto urban movements we are given glimpses of a counter-cultural response to neo-liberal hegemony in Teatro Trono, a theatre group meshing struggles against the IMF with traditional myths in popular education programmes. There's also a growing hip-hop movement that fuses the Aymara language with sampled stateside beats into a poetics of urban resistance to poverty.

In his conclusion Dangl takes a critical look at the problem fraught Morales' regime. He claims that images of troops entering gas fields from afar look like the stuff of radical expropriation but nationalisation really meant a series of buy outs of majority stakes sold for a pittance in the 1990s, higher taxes and a re-negotiation of over generous contracts.

Stepping aside from the flurry of rhetoric surrounding nationalisation, the YPFB in reality still remains at a capital disadvantage with international companies holding minority shares.

Rarely mentioned in discussions of Bolivian social movements is the traditional demand for a constituent assembly convoked by Morales this year. Many of the movement activists we meet through Dangl's travels complain that the electoral nature of the assembly excludes them, forcing them to abandon their autonomy and seek representation through the MAS party.

Simultaneously it has reinvigorated right wing parties weakened by the popular rebellions, allowing them the space to develop a dangerous language of autonomy for oligarchical strong holds like Santa Cruz.

If you are looking for long streams of statistics on Bolivia's immiseration, then Farthing and Kohl have compiled a resource for your agitational pot-shots and filler articles - but if you want the human face of Bolivia's social movement push, then Dangl is your only man.

Whichever you prefer, Bolivia remains a fertile soil for the rebellious imagination, full of "better worlds- some that have lasted and some no more than euphoric glimpses (6)."

(1) Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism) is the party of Evo Morales.
(2) Kohl, Benjamin and Linda C. Farthing. Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance (Zed Books, 2006) p175
(3) Ibid p23
(4) Dangl, Benjamin. The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Boliva (AK Press, 2007) p11
(5) Ibid p151
(6) Ibid p9

Check out Upsidedownworld for an analysis of the latest tensions.

Moving On Over.

2007-12-07T00:37:00.000Z

Thanks to an early Xmas present, I finally got myself some web space and a domain. So I'll be moving over to sountracksforthem.com some time in near future once I get a skeleton site up and runningthere. All in all, this will mean a significantly different approach to doing this thing we call Soundtracksforthem once all is up and running. Stay tuned to here for now...

Film Review: Under Their Finger

2007-12-02T05:01:00.000Z

Elio Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso) is a grim look at the psychological wounds imposed by the factory regime on its chief character, Ludovico Massa. Cruelly nicknamed Lulù the Tool by his pissed off and contrary co-workers, in a factory where he operates a lathe, his obsessive output making him the measure management use to gauge everyone else's work rate.

The movie was part of Italy's il cinema politico wave, a cinematic movement where directors screened the tensions in a country polarised, much like Dario Fo brought the crisis of the day to the stage of popular theatre. As the hang over of 1968's Red Autumn turned into one long winter of discontent through to the late seventies, younger workers brought the anti-authoritarianism of the universities into the factories, and the artistic community brought these influences into their own fields.

Petri began his career as a movie critic for the Communist daily L'Unità, no shock then there's a didactic touch to it all. With a gigantic finger pinned to the walls around the factory, pressing down at head level upon the characters; just in case you didn't already realise - these are individuals rightly under the finger of the boss.

That classic Ennio Moricone sound-tracking smothers everything deliciously in an overt desperation. It's a surreal atonal gasp running throughout - partially the factory rhythm in music (much like the 8 bar blues sequence at the start of Paul Scrader's Blue Collar) but more so the internal shriek of the factory worker in the face of monotony.

Lulu arises everyday at 6:30am, shaking his partner in frustration that she gets to sleep in later than him; its that everyday invasion of work to the domicile. Reading the morning paper's business section he identifies wholly with his companies moves on the exchange: "we're buying Beckenbower." Over coffee he explains himself as an appendage to a production unit - a machine that feeds itself raw materials - producing on the lathe and then shit at night.

The choreography of Lulu at work tends towards a sexual pounding of the machine. He finds his pace for the breathtakingly idiotic race for the piece rate between exclaims of "a bolt, a bum" and terrifies a female co-worker with this aggressive sexual behaviour. As he trains two younger students starting in the factory, the tensions between his work ethic and the younger generation, who some of the older workers are starting to listen to every morning at the gate, starts to become clear - but when he loses a finger to his machine everything changes for him.

Another of Elio Petri's movies, one I've yet to see, was Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, it copped the Best Foreign Film Oscar back in the day and has been described as an examination of the pathology of power via a bent police commissioner. This movie too uses some pretty familiar tropes to look at the psychology of work and the authoritarianism of the factory regime.

As a director Petri is hostile to all the forces in the movie, all are somewhat retarded by the systems they dwell in; from the extreme left students who bay at the factory workers through megaphones each morning "today for you there will be no light," unable to see the humanity between the slogans of their programmes to the supervisors ill assured tyrannies on the floor.

No surprise then that Lulu, once fired for his eventual political turn around, finds himself disillusioned with it all; left to quantify the past few years of his life through acts of violence against commodities in his home. Ever greater outrages take him as calculates the amount of work hours it cost him to purchase something - "a clock? 30 Hours!"

Visiting his estranged son one morning in a school, Lulu comments through the playground wire "you look like little workers." Fences stand between all in the film, both as metaphors and material, and sizable portions of screen time are spent talking through gaps in them or running around them.

The poetic voice of the movie is Militina, an old communist in an asylum, long since abandoned caring about his incarceration, he sees the whole world an institution of one framework or another. His crime against reason? Nearly strangling a supervisor, finally awoken to an explosion of contradictions, he realised that he didn't even know what he'd churned out in the factory all these years: "A man has the right to know what he is doing!"

Anyone that has some sympathy for political directors that combine some dramatic subtleties with sprinkled hammer blows of politics will get off big time here, but I actually don't quite know how to make my mind up about it - overbearing and pissing on any hope would be a fair sentiment too.

In Me Ears Six: Some Crunk Step Stylin'

2007-11-30T21:11:00.000Z

Willy Joy mix: This Chicago based messer popped up to my attention recently via the DJC blog, always a source of tasty nosiey fucked pop cheese bizness. Its a fifty plus mix of blends spanning rap, pop, rock, electro, 80s, booty, club and some more in between. Perfect material to soundtrack the disgust of Texan parents who think who fancy the puritanism of Footloose rather than the grinding of their highschool kids.

Toddla T: Prancehall had an interview with this guy where he struggles to put him in a category, concluding he sounds "like someone who is trying to make dancehall/techno/garage/house/hip-hop all at once within the same track without coming across like those dicks who make stuff like Baltimore bootlegs of kuduro tracks with an Akon acappella and a Daft Punk sample hook." It's seriously dope shit that'd have me bouncing off the walls were I to hear it out, it's the bass line evolution; no fucking morbid dull dubstep for this guy, it's like he sacrificed a hyper cat that feeds off pure catnip and made DMZ drink its blood.

Pirate Soundsystem: If even the description of Toddla T has you quaking in your dancing shoes, then do check out Pirate Soundsystem, very much in a similar vein with far more clippings of early rave effects popping over the top for shits and giggles. The remix of Ms Ting's "Love Guide" (at Hypem) is a seriously impatient dance-hall monster. More recently they've screwed with Drop the Lime and Hadouken. This lot played the George Bernard Shaw back in September, any word on how it was? Much of this sounds like the funky house that fella Woebot was bigging up some time ago as a far more significant form than Dupstep. The two most have had a bastard hate child after slaughtering some indie kids in the mean time.

Fela Ani-Kulapo Kuti: Coming out of Lagos, this bloke has a tragic story that you can read over at his Myspace, currently enjoying an album of his - simply called Afrobeat - at the moment. Imagine African percussion and chanting fused to the sound of sixties jazz, with a sharp dash of the black power politics he picked up when he was in the states during the sixties and translated back into a pan-Africanism via his lyrics. Most tracks start off as a flurry of tooting horn sections and then relax as a choir start to bring up the tension. The Hype Machine has some of his stuff and the more contemporary Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra are a group that could easily share the same blog post with him. And so now they do.

William Gibson Was A Hippy Waster

2007-11-30T05:53:00.000Z

I don't mean to be abusive, but I was pretty startled to stumble upon this video clip on a Canadian news archive of a 19 year old William Gibson wondering around down town Toronto, binned giving a CBC camera man a tour of the Yorkville village. Now Yorkville is a place, somewhere at the back of Bloor that started off pretty run down and is now the chief designer boutique and way off the scale up market hang out district for those with a lot of filthy lucre. Gibson was a draft dodger too it turns out, spending his time hanging out round Rochdale College, a student co-op that went well off the map with drug use and the 60's counter culture warbling on about how "sex is regarded as neccesary as a piece of mind," or something. You know that scene of the alternative school in the drugs episode of Brass Eye? Exactly.

Vidiot: Sometimes he's talking and sometimes he's toasting..

2007-11-26T08:21:00.000Z

"This is just an era we are in now, this jungle scene, because not so long ago there was another era, through the sound systems and what not, and all the DJ's watching this programme will know exactly what I'm talking about. It's just one of those things, a progression."

Turning into something of an old blogging vidiot box over here at Soundtracksforthem. Anyway, a Toronto friend and old junglist himself burnt me a copy of this half hour documentary last night. Lucky for you it's on Youtube. Coming from way back when in 1993 and all about the origins of jungle, its worth watching - and watching with that massive 18 month long hype around dubstep in mind. Think especially of how that has been treated as a musical form with an explosively new quality to it, it's all quietened down some what now, but you can sense a similar vibe around jungle here. The documentary is short enough and churns through the whole schema of pirates, racial segregation, freezing cold warehouses and monologues on the redemptive quality of rave with a real sense of the innovation at work and the role of technology in pushing it on. It features Rebel MC, MC Navigator, Groove Rider, Goldie, Nicky Blackmarket and of course the Ragga Twins, it's a London Somet'ing Dis. Enjoy.

Vidiot: Vinyl Films Documentary On Sir Henrys

2007-11-25T07:52:00.000Z

Anyone who as ever had a peak at the sprawling threads on early dance music clubs in Ireland over at Boards.ie, and then left with their eyes still scouring for more, will be happy to see Cork promising this little piece of recent social history.

Don't know how I missed it till now.

Avi Lewis On Occupied Factory Movement In Argentina: "This phase is less overtly political, certainly less overtly revolutionary."

2007-11-22T01:45:00.001Z

Anyone living in Toronto, a city with sidewalks wheat-pasted wildly with posters knows this; the Brunswick Theatre is creating an extraordinary space in a city bereft of places to engage with cinema. Regular discussions and talks happen, with documentaries sharply matched to a purpose rooted in popular education. If there is a criticism, it's that ticket prices are pretty steep. Last night's Avi Lewis lecture cost 15 dollars, but running a cinema at the location and with the frequency they do can't come cheap.

The poster for this screening foregrounded Lewis' public lecture, so at the start a moment was taken to see if watching the movie was actually worth while. Just over half of the raised hands had already seen the 2004 documentary that follows the fortunes of workers in the Forja auto plant as they struggle to turn it into a worker cooperative, yet the organisers ploughed ahead as planned. Using it to give ground the inevitable more abstract discussion to follow in human insight to the recuperated factories movement.

The night also doubled as something of a launch for Haymarket Book's translation of Sin Patron, a collection of interviews with participants in the recuperated factory movement. Lewis called this "a living document in the words of the workers themselves with an absurdly, provocative and piercing analysis by the Lavaca collective." A second edition is coming out soon with updates from some of the 160 something factories and workplaces indexed at the back of the present edition.

Shortly into The Take, there's a montage of boorish interviewers throwing demands for alternatives at Klein, so she explains the purpose of the movie as a search for alternatives outside the model of neo-liberal development. On the night Lewis glanced back at The Take as a glimpse of a moment in very recent social history, where large swathes of people realised "that changing pieces on the chessboard is not really changing the game." This bursting of the ideological bubble in a country where even the street signs were brought to you by Mastercard under Menem needs a closer look now that Argentina has largely stabilised, again "in the grips of a capitalist dream, where Kirchner does a good job of railing against the IMF, a bit like the NDP here, yet governs to strict IMF rules."

After the film with attention rapt for updates since it was made, the most pertinent question as Lewis saw it was more abstract: "is there a memory of struggle there, just beneath the surface? Is there a strengthened social movement that has built real bases in the communities and the workplaces?" The tone of his voice suggested a very optimistic "yes."

He'd just spent an hour and a half talking to somebody who works with This Working World in Argentina prior to this Brunswick talk, so Lewis was able to give some decent updates on the state of play in the factory movement at the moment: "this phase is less overtly political, certainly less overtly revolutionary as it deals with the nuts and bolts of making sustainable businesses work."

A friend of Zannon's ex-owner, who appears in the film as a cliche of bourgeois vampirism with the champagne bottle lurking in an ice bucket in his opulent office, recently used his position of governor of the province to run for president. The discourse he used in his campaign was largely a return to the language of the dictatorship, but he got less than 1% of the recent vote. Zannon under workers control now employs 480 people and provides more than the domestic demand for ceramics in Argentina.

On a visit to the Brukman suit factory that is dramatically re-occupied in the film, Lewis couldn't find anyone to talk to him, forcing him to comment that: "if there's a social movement or co-operative that doesn't need journalists; then you know its a success.

More recuperated businesses are coming on stream, including a landscape gardening co-op that works creating city parks. This sector tends to be controlled by Mafia type groups linked to Peronism so it was necessary to use political force for the city to sign a contract with them. Using the strictures created by the business practices of the previous operators, the new co-op was able to pull a massive scam loan legally to fund other co-ops in the region. A meat packing co-op has been set up that employs 800 people, a river boat casino is coming under workers control and the only balloon manufacturer in Buenos Aires is under workers control and supplies the whole province.

On a bleaker note many of the recuperated factories and businesses will be facing new difficulties as the legal system allows only a two year term of expropriation. With workers successfully turning failed businesses around, the bosses may try coming in through the back door of the courts leading to hazards ahead. The balloon co-op for instance may have to up stakes and use its capital to open elsewhere. For a movement that has concentrated so much effort on carving out spaces of dialog and popular education with communities, this geographic displacement may well blunt part of their projects, leaving them more easily prey to future evictions.

Book Review: The Rebel Sell

2007-11-20T06:35:00.000Z

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed (Harper Collins, 2004)

The Rebel Sell authors set themselves the task of attacking an idea of counter culture they see at the heart of social movements, so is that why the cover has a summit protester in gun sight?

Potter and Heath are right that counter cultural rebellion can sometimes suck energy away from making "concrete improvements in people's lives," providing excuses for not engaging mass society but their counter cultural imagination is limited to MTV, Adbusters, a host of mainstream Hollywood movies, the authors' own dashed ex-punk background, Kurt Cobain 's suicide notes and anything mall rat in between.

Despite their stated central preoccupation they ignore well articulated differences between “sub cultures” and “counter cultures.” You see sub cultures hang under the mainstream's belly, dependent on it and lacking a real critique. Counter cultures at least try to foster alternative values and ways of being to replace a dominant culture - so one contains at least some revolutionary purpose, the other doesn't. This failure to distinguish gives the authors an easy job of ripping into a series of piss poor straw men.

There is no discussion of the very real and needed role of counter cultural forms in political movements. How could they have overlooked the IWW's folk song tradition, the working man's clubs of the UK and Ireland or the foot ball leagues and community groups of pre-Nazi German social democracy - were these too just "pseudo rebellions" to be ignored?

Alongside historic blind sight, they completely skip the well trod over subjective reasons for engagement in counter cultures. Still note how an awful lot of school yard bullying stopped once they and their nerdy friends went punk. Counter cultures can be a very ordinary thing, a form of self defence or demarcation of space. Think of struggles around silly work uniform rules or piss ant fussy supervisors having their authority eroded by a shop floor black humor.

Really the book does contain some great pop culture writing, but the attempt to weave it into a general theory of counter culture falls a little flat even if their reason for writing it comes from a decent impulse: movements that define themselves by being on the margins of society, will stay there.

Much of the weight of their book is just a re-hash of Thomas Frank's quip that "ever since the 1960's hip has been the native tongue of advertising." The authors claim to "shatter central myths" turns out to be just restating the obvious with much weaker conclusions. They themselves do not want to "eliminate the game, but level the playing field" and so call for traditional social democratic measures to over come market failures. They even suggest bans on cosmetic surgery, ignoring how thwarted society really is by contemporary forms of alienation in their call for a rewind to the '50's.

Face it anything that opens with the claim that Adbusters selling Blackspot sneakers was a “turning point for western civilization” is bound to piss you off along the way. With sky scrapers of argumentation erected on foundations of sand, the Rebel Sell smacks of a pair of grad student academic enfant terribles - the perfect stuff for drunken conversations, mindlessly frustrating yet deeply challenging to your own steadfast opinion.

CHECK EM OUT>> Adam Curtis’ documentary The Century of the Self (on google video..) which looks at the harnessing of new lifestyles created in the 1960’s to brands that sell dreams over products and Thomas Frank’s book The Conquest of Cool, the original political economy of hip.

Not Much Street Fighting Here

2007-11-15T20:13:00.000Z

Much to his own disappointment no doubt, Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties is now a staple on bookstore over stock piles after its recent re-publication two years ago.

It's one of those works that confirms history is easier to digest if people can hinge events on individual characters, Germany had Dutschke, Paris Cohn-Bendit so here Ali consciously stands himself in as that token foreigner who through a few waves of a well educated Oxford finger summoned a mass movement into being against imperialism abroad.

He excels at describing how the development of the sixties movement was intertwined with the dashed hopes of the Wilson government and social democracy. Not that many had illusions, but for a generation it signaled a final confirmation of failed method - a path that always pushed radicalism beyond the horizon for bigger election margins and conservativism by consensus. As a new immigrant Ali was none impressed with how many Labour MP's demanded and attempted to have him deported during the Enoch Powell period.

For trainspotters Ali drops some context on the origins of the revolutionary party crops of the seventies, who he eventually threw his lot in with, its hard to imagine now how the SWP could ever have been the cutting edge of youthful radicalism but squeezed between Stalinism, social democracy and whack job Maoism its no wonder they gained currency.

In a related sense where the book does shine is Ali's discussion of his involvement in movement publications such as the Black Dwarf, the New Left Review and later Red Mole. It carries an acerbic but good natured open letter to John Lennon published by the Red Mole and a startling riposte from the songwriter that eventually led a day long interview with the paper.

You do get a strong sense of the period covered through Ali's own whirlwind prose fueled by national liberation rhetoric in the south and student uprisings in the North. But mostly its a collection of anecdotes as our hero swans from one international crisis to another, from addressing college crowds as part of the Oxford Union alongside Malcolm X to dining with leftist actors like Brando and Redgrave and generally ingratiating himself across the board. So despite the title there is very little brawling with power.

Really it's hard to eye the book up as as anything other than Ali's astronomical rise to be a token thorn in the side of the British liberal media. Don't get me wrong, its a page turner to wile away work hours and even more perfect if you are new to sixties mythology.

Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (Verso, 2005)

Class Fictions: The Tale of A Factory Girl

2007-11-13T20:00:00.000Z

Whatever about those that hoot for the progress of history as if some grand design were at work, the working class of the nineteenth century were more than aware of what had been lost with the onset of the industrial revolution. As someone who had lived through some of the rougher years of hunger in 1840's Manchester - albeit removed from discomfort - Mary Gaskell produced her novel Mary Barton as a reaction, capturing a world with direct memories of the "pleasant mysteries" of a romanticised rural life abandoned for the urban where, as Engel's had it "the rapid extension of manufacture demanded hands."

For a novel so remembered for its dealing with working class life, its stunning how little happens in the work place. The consequence of a middle class lady's inability to access factory life beyond a sociological or philanthropist basis, it could also be re-read as a striking concern about how the effects of work seep over into every day gossip, struggles and love - unwinding in manifold hidden injuries of class. It's through this space that Gaskell traces her tale of a love triangle, between a beautiful dress maker, a factory engineer and a masters son against the background of the second charter.

Gaskell's work is intertwined with the sociology of the day: best filtered down to us through works like Engel's The Condition of the Working Class in England but also in a plethora of titles like The White Slaves of England, Distress in Manchester and tonnes of government reports on factory conditions. Compare Engel's opening exaltation to the radical movement with Gaskell's introduction, and the tensions of her fear of new working class communities become clear. Aside from her main plot she strips Charterism to an atmosphere of hauntology bubbling in the background.

On the surface the novel hinges on a very private world interrupted by economic recession. Mary Barton tries to use her beauty to escape a classed faith through upward marriage. A missing aunt Esther returns as the "hooker with a heart of cold" to end themes whims, relating her own experience of where economics intersect with sexuality in a morality tale for the reader.
Crudely skim the surface of images and Barton's potential beau Henry Carson is very much the bourgeois vampire, sucking the life out of the living in the factories by day to fuel his life as a dandy at night. As her aunt Esther advises, she is best ignoring this sexual adventurer, who combines business and pleasure, to literally "screw" working class and settling for the simple childhood friend Jem.

Her father, the channel for the public world, is set on the path of murder and removed from the "the gentle humanities of the earth" once his wife dies, letting his "rabid politics" of Chartersim interfer with love interests that could naturally play themselves out. Gaskell's editorialises on the working of his mind steeped more in the criminology of her age, than the politics of striking workers like John Barton.

Ripped up and brought together in awkward patches of customs and commons by the new social forces of an advancing capitalism, a nod to Shelly's Frankenstien seems appropiate, but Gaskell as Raymond Williams noted, is more gripped by lurid fantasy than poetic reality in describing the Charterists as "a powerful monster, yet with out the means for peace and happiness ."

Whole subcultures of working class experience are ignored in Gaskell's pious treatment: drug abuse, petty theivery, sexual relations and alcohol are all filtered out through her religious lens. There is one glimpse of this as Jem sleuths around Esther's old haunts, discovering a rooming house where people bed down all day and roam the streets at night - the opposite of the work-a-day blues dominating the rest of the text. The gap left by the absence of the Manchester Irish is large too.

Her description of John's trade union meeting echoes her own work in gothic literary form, "strange faces of pale men, with dark glaring eyes peered into the inner darkness" - it's all disembodied beckoning hands, whispered desperate talk and ghostly voices murmouring through the floor boards. During the strike, a rough cartoon of starved strike leaders by Carson, is too sore an acknowledgement of the master's disdain, yet its very much a visual sketch of Barton's descriptive prose, and for John it is enough to justify murder against the masters.

The footnotes too are an ambiguous beveling of the text, they exoticise the voices within - making them more alien than they need appear, similar to Edgeworth's Rackrent and its treatment of the Irish peasantry. The tools of their life and trades are foreign to Gaskell - and she roots their slang in colloqialisms going back to Chaucer.

When John Barton returns from the delegation that delivered the second great petition, he grimly declines to tell "what happened when ye got to th' Parliment House" - any space is quickly subsumed to Job Leigh's vapid anecdote of his own trip there and back. From his perch as the self educated botanist he mediates through religious guff with Carson at the end for industrial optimism: "I'll never doubt that power looms and all such inventions are the gifts of god. I have lived long enough to see that it is part of his plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good."

This throw them all in the shit and let them sink or swim impulse of methodism chimes in perfect with the economic philosopy of Carson: "still facts have proved and are daily proving how much better it is for everyman to be independent of help and self-reliant." No wonder EP Thompson was driven to term it "a physic mastrabation" that was later replaced with the social Darwinism of consumerism as a new disciplining, secular religion for worker drones.

Ultimately she renders the working class as a useless parcel of the equation, a puzzle better left to a moral awaking in Manchester's masters than challenges to their rule. While she does develop a contrast between two ethical systems: that of the working class based on sharing and forced co-operation and that of the masters, based on ownership, authority and the law. Mary Barton is a good artifact of early capitalism, as Harry Cleaver noted she gives "various views of the beast in all its spiritual and fleshy reality."

This is most apparent in the journey to the Carson's house and the image of his tantrum stricken wife, bringing to mind Marx's comment that even the propertied classes share human self alienation but "feel comfortable and confirmed in this self alienation knowing that this alienation is its own power and possessing in it the semblance of a human existence." At leisure from work and need they are shown to place themselves in different dramas, the choice between this commodity or that, fractures of that social etiquettes or another.

Charterism was a dual moment, alongside a growing political voice through the vast networks of the unstamped radical press there was an aesthetic self-representation. Short stories, poems and accounts from within working communities from journo's like the work of Thomas Cooper (archived online...) . It's a pity one of the periods lasting literary impressions is the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, especially with her patronizing methodology to to "give utterance to the agony which from time to time convulses this dumb people" as she describes in the opening.

Bacardi Live Does Toronto

2007-11-06T03:46:00.000Z

(Photo from Oct on Flickr)

Bacardi rolled out one of those massive B-Live parties in Toronto last weekend. The city's cultural weeklies were lolling in full page advertisements for the event featuring Diplo and James Murphy for weeks now, so the inevitable mental queues languished in the Fall cold, snaking around the block for what seemed like a kilometre, slowly inching towards the arch of lights that signaled the entrance.

Silver and gold hand bag wielding American Apparel devotees dived out of taxis and rushed head forwards in packs to the front of the cue, a taster of the sort of casual disregard that leads to drinks being splashed around as they rush through crowds, surprised they don't part at their feet.

Queen West kids circled in their club kid cliques, some jaw chawing and all in ridiculous levels of style one after the other - recycled synthetic '80's fashions that lay ignored in now ravaged vintage stores for years and old-skool Nike's de rigor in a pantomime of glam and new rave kitsch cross bred with stateside hip hop and some damn clever use of the high street. If you never had a complex about body image and presentation of the self, then Toronto is the city to come to in order to pick one up.

Savvy to the blag I'd emailed in a competition on some website to win free tickets that allowed me to skip the queues outside to get in before eleven, battling through the line still led to rough greetings from over worked security and list checkers. They tried compelling the two of us to the back of the queue but our insistence prevailed. Their recognition of upsetting a Bacardi competition on the eve of a branding fest shone through and they reluctantly ushered us through into a ware house used as an academy for circus arts.

The typical farce of Toronto's licensing laws clogged the place up - over there near circle pits around vendors dishing out six dollar drink tokens, and in that corner two trailers quaking with the bass being used as washrooms - fight your way through that lot to the rushed bar staff lining up and spraying shots into glasses and filling them with pre-mixed pitchers of cock tail fillers. And at the back of it all, moving up towards the speakers the place was quite empty - the queue outside obviously being more important a statement than actually letting people in.

If you want to sell people an idea of a particular drink being more conducive to sex'ed up partying then for christ's sake don't charge them six dollars each for a cocktail when you own the damn manufacturing plants, the distribution networks, the brand and are running the event. That's like the brewery that drag people through on tours with the promise of a complementary drink and then sucker punch them with the small print reality that serves up shot glasses of lagar.

Bacardi as always do their home work but still do they get it disasterously wrong. My rusty brain scratches around and tries to remember some of their ads; usually they are Carribean laced and dashed with a lifestyle centred around wild parties of afro beats, calypso rythyms anything tinged with exotica - in this instance the global fusion of Diplo and the disco to acid house wanderings through the crates of James Murphy are the perfect complement to fleshing the theoretical image of what Bacardi are about.

When you look up and see several trapeze artists contorting themselves on rings and rolling along ribbons like yo-yo's fuck it dawns you are in the ad. Except in the real ads and not just their brief flight into reality, Bacardi aren't crass enough to ruin the visions of the dancehall with almost pornographic relays of their bottles and caps.

And even more telling of the mirage between lifestyle branding and reality was the painful murmurs of "Diplo, Diplo!" from sectors of the floor during Murphy's set. It was a pained disquiet that dawned with realization that he wasn't playing a sound track for professional something-somethings to play Toronto's mating game of pulling model poses, dragging fingers across your chest with a staring pout - but something to be danced to with your eyes closed and none of that every day hang up of the everyday celebrity multitudes like being caught in a Facebook photo unprepared mattering.

And despite this fucking barbaric rudeness to Murphy and in another constant Toronto peculiarity, once Diplo came on the crowd ignored him. He peeled off some violently good dance hall from the islands, and then he ran into some commercial hip hop just for that shot of invigoration, some Baltimore smacks and then some nasty nasty from South Rakka's crew - and all within ten minutes and then he stopped. "Come on Toronto" he begged, starting again from the outset to get the crowd into it through slightly twisted mainstream numbers in a process that seemed to happen every fifteen minutes.

Finally he seemed to give up, wielding out uninteresting and over used mainstream techno with the more interesting material simply featuring as very rare commas in a long drab sentence. For this the crowd went off and respect to Diplo he played to it but still within half an hour of it taking off they all still cleared the floor - far from the decadent promises of your typical Bacardi ad.

Toronto's night life is quite an interesting spectacle and one I haven't bothered engaging with or exploring beyond some of the more obvious events. The city is lauded by the likes of Richard Florida as a template for the cities of tomorrow, enviroments that have moved the old manufacturing class out - allowed the old industrial haunts to become ravaged with inner city decay and drug addiction finally to be restructured silently through underground artist communities.

This is the cultural electrical shock that eventually lets them swim in global capital with a whole new purpose as geographically sprawling think tanks for market innovation with building after building of indie galleries, collectively run fashion boutiques, design houses and concept shops that deal in the immaterial idea of what a space should suggest. Then the nightlife becomes a double job of further innovation, brimming pots of experimentation re-defining the landscape of aesthetics that re-packages the age old product of music and intoxicants.

Check out the spin being put out by CIRCA, the city's latest super club coming in at a cost of over six million. In Dublin places like Spirit do the dance of body and soul, selling some badly digested hippy philosophy as a cover for the trashed up mainstream that persists in all the other clubs but here CIRCA has given itself the mission of actually fundamentally transforming how mainstream club culture performs it's masquerade.

They've hired dozens of queer performers, define its musical terrain through the indie dance scene and dragging the whole alternative club culture right into the centre of the commericial one- mashing the weekend antics of the mental venting of the 60 hour plus a week professionals with the cultural legitimacy of bohemian hedonism and fashion stakes. Like Bacardi they are recruiting cool hipsterdom as an internal innovator that helps them skate over the cracks in the nightlife commerce caused by the mainstreams fluctuating tastes.

Girl Talk Interview: Not Just A DJ

2007-11-01T08:06:00.000Z

(Photo: Moe Train on Flickr)

Music writing hyperbole often seems misplaced but when it comes to a Girl Talk show it's entirely justified. At the first leg of his North American tour with Dan Deacon nearly a month ago, Girl Talk weaved a messy mix bag of down town hipsters and fresher week college drunks into a sweltering, unified but squirming beast of jiving bodies, sending 'em ga-ga with his irreverantly mashed beats and acapella. I caught up with Girl Talk a week or two after the show and chewed the fat over crowd control, how he re-defines sampling and the politics of piracy. This interview was first published in Fact Magazine in the UK.

Can you give Irish readers some idea of what to expect from your shows and do you have any plans to make it over this side of the Atlantic any time soon?

I haven't been over to Europe much in the past year because I was holding down a day job and only doing Friday and Saturday shows. I quit that job about 3 months ago, so I'm planning on traveling world wide very soon.

My shows are highly dependent on the people who come out to them. I play a single laptop. I mix and match a bunch of samples and loops on the fly. It sounds like my records, but it's a bit more free form. I like to party every time I play. I get sweaty. I get in the crowd. I dance with people. But, it's really up to the people as to how insane we're going to get. I'm ready to take it to the distance.

People like to read into things like an artist getting fans up on stage, or playing in the crowd like Lightening Bolt or Dan Deacon even, whats your reason - is it just a better party or do you like levelling it out and reducing that 'me the artist up here, you the fan down there' buzz?

To be honest, I never made a decision to have it happen. I've been playing live as Girl Talk for seven years, and sometime last year, fans started jumping on stage. People saw video of that on the internet, and it spread. Within a few months, it became this standard for my shows. It makes sense to me now. There's only so much I can physically do on stage to entertain people. I actually have to click the mouse every 10 seconds to keep the music going.

I think the people on stage is pretty much the best visuals I could have. There are some people who just like to come out and hear me do the music live, and to them, there's also some entertaining to watch. To those people who want to come party, then there's a whole dance floor and stage for that. I'm just a dude playing a computer; I'm not Steven Tyler up there. I like people to be able to interact with me to any level that they want. I like to minimize as many pretensions as possible with the music and shows.

I caught you at the Toronto show, it was pretty hectic, I'm not sure what your other shows are like - but have you ever seen bouncers do anything particularly stupid in getting fans off the stage and has the hectic crowding around you ever interfered with your ability to perform, like knocking your laptop over and people hitting keys drunk off their face and stuff?

With my shows, it's probably a bit more work for bouncers than the normal gig, so I really respect them for putting up with any bullshit. But yeah, it can get crazy, and sometimes, people cross lines. I always talk with the security before the shows and let them know what's going to go down.

I've had tons of problems in the past people stomping on cords, equipment, hitting the computer, spilling things, not having any room to even move my arm, and so on. I don't like it when those things happen, but it comes with the turf. The shows to me oftentimes feel like house parties, and I love that. It doesn't feel like going to a standard dance club or a rock show where nothing is going to go wrong. When the music stops prematurely at my show, that's a sign that things are truly getting insane. That's cool to me. It's part of the experience. I like when the shows are just barely staying together, everything is on the verge of falling apart. That's a great party to me.

I heard you recently posed for Playgirl in the man of the year issue, how the hell was that?

They wanted a "sexy photo shoot," which I think meant nude. I ran it past my parents, and I decided to keep my pants on. I've been a lot more nude at some of my live shows this year, so it wasn't too big of a deal.

You've talked before about how being Girl Talk and an engineer by night was like leading this double life, you sort of kept it quite from your work colleagues - when you finally made the decision to quit did the people there discover your other side and how did they react?

They never officially discovered about my music world. I told them I was quitting to travel the world before I was too old to do something like that, which isn't really a lie but not the complete truth. I'm still convinced that someone there knew but chose to not call me out.

You refuse to be seen as a DJ, hence those famous "I'm not a DJ t-shirts" - so what sort of live set up do you use and how much time do you think you spend on each track, from the initial idea to its readiness to be played live or dropped onto a CD?

(Photo: Tom Purves on Flickr)

I perform live on multiple copies of a program called Audiomulch. It allows me to cue up, mute, and manipulate a bunch of samples in real time. I perform it all live, but it's a rehearsed set. I think people get my records and come see my live to hear the compositions, rather than to hear me improvise. So I spend a lot of time on doing arrangements prior to performing.

It's tough for me to calculate how much time I put into specific tracks. I'm constantly working, and most things I sample don't see the light of day. I'm about ready to put together a new album right now, and it's been about a year and half since I finished up my last one. I've been averaging releasing a 40 minute album every 2 years. That's about as quantative as I can get.

I've heard you were in a few noise outfits before Girl Talk, when did you make the switch to party music and how does it relate to the sort of projects you were involved in before Girl Talk? I'm just wondering where the name comes from too?

I was in a noise band in high school. It definitely laid the ground work for Girl Talk. We worked with many different forms of experimental sound collage. We made music using physical tape collages, skipping CD's, and manipulated four-track machines.

I started the Girl Talk project in 2000, and I initially had a glitchy and avant-garde sound. I've always been a pop music fan; it just took me a few years to be comfortable making more accessible music. I started playing house parties around 2002, and I think this is when my music started to take more traditional form. The name Girl Talk comes from Yes lyrics.

You like to see your own compositions as original mash ups and sort of separate yourself from the whole mash up movement, are you still critical of it and why?

I just don't feel comfortable with many genre names in general. They are all silly to me. I like mash-ups. I don't want to separate myself from anything. For me, I was influenced to get into this style of music by people like John Oswald and Kid 606. I also listened to bands like Public Enemy growing up. These are all people who are sample-based at times but aren't usually labeled as "mash-up" artists. I'm down with all types of music. I just thought the label "mash up" might mislead people with my music. Maybe not, I don't really know.

One thing that interests me about Girl Talk, and I've heard a lot of people say this is that you are legitimizing listening to forms of commercial music that people would otherwise scoff at, sometimes this music is damn good but people need to hear it through an irony filter before admitting this. How do you feel about being this "cool" filter for people, do you think they should just drop their pretensions and recognize a good track when they hear it and not when its a safe "classic" years later?

I sample everything sincerely. I like all of the music I sample. There is no irony. I'm definitely not trying to act as any sort of "cool filter." I'm down with people being turned on to new forms of music in any way. I like how people have major differences in their interpretations of my
music. Some people like it because they love the source material; some people like it because they hate the source material. I've always hoped that my work is transformative. I want people to hear my songs and say "That's a Girl Talk song," rather than "That's song A mixed with song B mixed with song C."

I think the act of sampling music to make new music, and the fans of the new music not necessarily being into the original source material is not a new thing. Think about the history of hip hop. Producers will sample anything to make a hip hop beat; that doesn't mean that the people into the beat will be into or should be into the source material. Most young kids who jam Kanye West could probably care less about Chaka Khan. It's the context and the additional production that makes people get down with it.

Your congressman Mike Doyle seems to be quite taken with you, you are well aware too of the dangers you face from major labels around being sued for copyright breaches and have played a benefit for the Creative Commons project - how does it feel to be turned into something of a figure head for "free culture"/or the fair use movement? Can there be a reconciliation with existing copyright law or do we need a complete rupture with the economic mentality they base it on?

I've never pushed a political agenda with my music. I've always made music with samples because I simply enjoy it. If my music makes people think about these type of things, then that's cool to me, but it's really a side note.

Fair Use is a progressive idea with the existing copyright law, but it's very black and white to me. I think the current law doesn't taken into account an album that can be made from 300 samples that most major music sources and publications treat at as an original work.

I see your website links to Drop the Lime, who I've interviewed before, he's really one of my favourite DJ's and producers, have you been up to any of the Trouble and Bass parties he puts on and what do you think of the whole thing thats going down at the moment from "bass music" to new rave/french electro etc? Is there something in the air and people are just looking to dance?

I haven't been to any of those parties unfortunately. Luke and I go way back. We did one of our first tours together in 2003 or so, back when he was called Dysis. He seems like he's really shaking things up in New York right now, which gets me pumped.

I notice as well you mentioned elsewhere you liked Kid 606, Shitmatt and Jason Forrest, do you think the whole breakcore thing, aside from the frantic amen breaks and cut up sampling technique of it had any influence on your approach to music production?

Yeah, to a degree. I was more into the music known as IDM when I first started doing Girl Talk productions. I think the quick-paced nature of my music is influenced by guys like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher more than anything else. It seems like some breakcore artists came from this sort of background, so I think it's related.

I've always felt more connected to guys like Jason Forrest than more standard mash up artists. He's another guy who's make original music almost completely out of samples. I was reading on your blog about a remix project that you're working on called Trey Told 'Em. Could you tell me a little bit about that and what you have planned for the future?

It's a project with Frank Musarra and I. I'm dedicating all of my remix work to it. I want to concentrate on other material for Girl Talk. Frank and I are also doing beats together. We work with samples at times, but it doesn't have to be appropriation-based. We also do original instrumentation.

What a Muppet: Vivienne Westwood

2007-10-13T05:07:00.000+01:00

Presenting the ninth in series of Mind Numbing Muppets - a Soundtracksforthem response to the dumbing down of the commuter newspaper. I mean if they don't educate our childern how will they ever learn to have respect for animal life? Call 1866 239 6000 now...

Number 9: Vivienne Westwood

Remember Vivienne Westwood? One of those characters who like Malcolm McLaren, scored their relevance from the notoriety earned by some delinquent and very malleable teenagers, in the guise of the Sex Pistols some three decades ago.

Not that she ever went away, but she is certainly back - back, as I read in one of those free commuter papers, to feature in what's claiming to be one of the world's biggest symposiums on the importance of democracy in today's shifting world. Good enough excuse to escapethe loony bin of the celebrity pages to pass herself off for serious comment in the world section.

Look we all know Westwood is one of those contrarians, always ready with some shock horror poke at convention on the cat walk. In later years she fell back on the forms she was meant to have shattered and now she seems blessed with the gift of spewing dinner party tripe with every intake of breath.

So for her contribution to the Metro/CBC forum on democracy, she gives some startling lessons in political philosophy - in particular the evolution of democratic thought: "the worst thing ever to happen in history was the French revolution." Ah Viv, really?

You think the woman who revolutionised fashion and left you with all those cheap punkified high street jeans and t-shirts with slogans in fake paint splatters, would have a more copped approach. But no not really - the French revolution you see, was just like some a string of soap episodes leading up to the cliff hanger - "a terrible excuse for people to affect their personal vendettas."

Class Fictions: Look Back In Anger

2007-10-11T08:58:00.000+01:00

Tearing down the fourth wall of the home, dramatists and novelists like John Osbourne documented the confusion of class identiy in the "pretty dreary...American age," with nothing to do but wait bored for the great bang of the H-bomb. In re-forging the nation's social contract, post war Britain and the "craddle to grave" schema of the welfare state saw political narratives rocket from traditional community relations of solidarity and struggle to an individuated relationship to the state, and then state blocs against state blocs, literature spilled into the micro cultures of the kitchen and family, and characters left with only new interior comforts in the artificial desires of consumerism and the rat race of social mobility.

Some like the Situationists argued the content of the literature was reactionary and "thirty years behind the times", failed attempts to scandalise, innocent and new to "a certain moral subversiveness that England had managed to completely hide from them." Yet it was very much a new literature, perfectly fitted to cultural theories and sociologies of an emerging new left that struggled to hold together a class identity against the tide of fragmentation. Kitchen sink is almost an inquiry into these tensions, putting the working class voice on stage in an often raucous, confused and unsteady rant against the new order. John Osbourne's Look Back In Anger encapsulates many of these tensions, in a prism of familial tensions sourced in two fold glances back to the past haunting the present and the failing marriage of Jimmy and Alison.

With his university education, Jimmy is a dangerously lit fuse of alienation and anger: disgruntled with the peddlars of social planning and progress, he has an acute awareness of the hokum of a post war shift and a distrust of the "apocalyptic share pushers who are spreading all those rumours about a transfer of power." What he sees is really a middle class escaping its own futility, one trying to make itself more relevent to the coming tide and a more refined mobile capitalism, with status more sourced in consumer goods than blood line and the stiff upper lip: "the old firm, is selling out! Everyone get out while the going's good. Those forgotten shares you had in the old traditions, the old beliefe are going up - up and up and up."

Mostly his frustration is directed against his wife, who identifies herself as a "hostage from all those sections of society they had declared war on." His anger isn't something just directed towards one individual ,or family, or the backgrounds of his various sexual conquests but against their existence as a class; some sick moribund hangover of Britain's pink stained empire in the "Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you." More wierdly, Alison sees herself as ironically liberated and abused at the same time to the verbal violence of her marrage, to her its a more livable alternative to "rotting away at home" in the "wicked" clutches of her overbearing parents and the still rotting corpse of pre-War society.

Jimmy's real sense of pain comes from his inabilty to "pass" in the new game of social mobility and he clings to an outdated mode of working class selfhood. But even if Jimmy does puruse his bitter hatred on this grand level it really manifests itself in the personal, the larger social stage being closed to him. Early in his relationship with Alison he wages a "guerilla war" on dinner parties and society events that he gains access using the social leverage of Alison's family: "plundering them, wolfing their food and drinks, and smoking their cigars like ruffians."

For Alison this is made real when her family came back from their colonial role in India, with everything "unsettled" and incapable of a grip of what is happening in Britain, other than a sense of disquite and sub-surface turbulence - even as it stares at her within her own relationship. But Jimmy too sees himself on the losing side of history, just like his father who returned from the Spanish Civil War where "certain God fearing gentlemen there had made such a mess of him."

Having ran the job market jungle from "journalism, advertising, even vacuum cleaners for a few weeks" he's as happy manning a sweet stall as anything else - the power dynamics are the same everywhere and the only arena he can excercise power is in his sexual relationships. He uses women as battering ram and trojan horses to poison and disgust their familes. Jimmy's hatred is Osbournes own hatred of women, its a very precise hatred of a particular sort of woman: "the royalty of that middle class womanhood, which is so eminently secure in its divine rights" that it dares affront the unstated ambitions of working class men that a new fluidity of social status puts them in contact with. In a battle of archetypes Helena tears into Jimmy: "there's no place for people like that any longer - in sex, or politics, or anything. That's why he's so futile."

Alison's father describes him as speaking "a different langauge to any of us," and Jimmy in return abuses him for "still casting well fed glances back to the Edwardian twilight from his comfortable, disenfranchised wilderness" and as merely "a good blow out for the worms." It's a battle of cultural relevence amidst the modernisation process. What Jimmy and Alison know in their bones is that the old fashioned is being flushed. Jimmy, in his cynical spite prefigures this discontent and reforging of class cultures.

Told all was utterly changed, it's dull and paintively obvious to him it that in a stifling class culture, an NHS, scholarship boys and welfare state signify a class society rather than move beyond it. Even the essence of social solidarity, and rethoric of raising all boats is frustrated and rendered null by cultures of difference and classifaction pointedly exploited by the parents of Alison. No wonder he was such an angry young man.

Well Worth A Gander

2007-10-11T07:51:00.000+01:00

Rio Baile Funk always brings some excellent on the ground coverage (see the Sandrinho interview for a one of those voices seldom heard..) of that happy clappy partying taste of exotica that gets western hipsters falling over dancefloors - courtesy of it a new site out of the Czech Republic has been brought to my attention with a wicked compendium of mixtapes. Well worth a gander..

Street Art and The War On Terror

2007-10-08T07:30:00.000+01:00

Remember my interview with the Vomito Attack heads fond of raging across Buenos Aires with spray cans in hand and that link to the Flickr gallery of street art I took while away this time last year? No? Don't worry I barely did. And then I got a request out of the blue some months ago, asking if it was okay to use some of the photos I took.

They've made their way into a forth coming hardback compendium of all those walls where the war on terror and street art met head on from 9/11 on. It's coming out on Rebellion Books in the UK next month and has the title of Street Art and the War on Terror. It can be snapped up on Amazon for the Xmas season. Whether you want to use it to flesh out the personality type your coffee table reads delicately express, or as a beer mat or a rolling tray's up to you - I'm not getting any money out of it, that's for sure - but if you need any weddings doing, just shout us like...

Class Fictions: What 30 Years of Pesto Stains Will Do To You.

2007-10-07T07:45:00.000+01:00

Toronto loves it's rubbish. It loves it so much it's hesitant to send any of it to the waste tip. Whereas we in Ireland throw consumer durables into the nearest skip or try hide them buried under food packaging for garbage day collection, Toronto breeds an informal economy of weekend garage sales.

What doesn't sell, finds its way into crumpling cardboard boxes with the label "free" attached. Overflowing mainly with unwanted books or magazines, they rest battered outside houses all over the city every weekend. Fodder for wandering book worms, the rooting curious or shopkeepers filling their second hand bargain bins.

They say you shouldn't judge a book by the cover. In these instances, more often than not, its precisely the cover and blurb that draws you in. Images and choice words that sketch unknown authors and titles - pushing your buttons of choice, however superficially.

Wedged in between omnipotent, always out of date geek tech manuals outside BMV was The Dishwashers. A compact play in two acts, by Vancouver based Morris Panych, it sold itself well. A Vice-esque cover with a certifiably Victorian dish washing unit cast in theatrical lights, suggested the dingy glow of a pouncy hotel's hidden basement innards and working life.

Fire on a back blurb attacking the contemporary fiction of the classless society, alongside the petty tyrannies of supervisors over their own miserable domains and at two dollars - bingo.
Panych throws his playwriting lens on the everyday hidden, the dream likes states of the "off stage" service industry. Silenced and treated as unreal, these are alien places where real life is suspended and a new "non-reality" begins - one with frightening and hidden consequences that often can not be woken from.

Using eleven scenes from the very temporal world of dish washing he sketches the frustration of "falling in the hole" of poorly paid and dirty jobs. That frustration is amplified if you are Emmet, once rich and then waking to find his wealth as "numbers on a chalk board erased." In a four man play he becomes that archetype of the worker "only passing through" and our means to meet those for whom dish washing is permanent.

Moss is a pitiful old crone, 90 years old and riddled with terminal cancer, in the job "since dish washing was invented" his work is an exoskeleton keeping his fragile sense of self alive - then he is fired.

Dressler is a supervisor and thirty years hot spraying pesto stained dishes has left him bitter. His muscles flex on minutia. He tears into any hints of a personality wanting to move away from sink and up the stairs that lead to the restaurant floor and by extension, the good life. He is tormented by the taunts of the social mobility myth: "if everybody was on the top of the heap, there wouldn't be a heap."

Emmet rushes into his kingdom of piled plates, bearing a banner of hope and class war vindictive - antagonising the survival strategies of those that have allowed themselves to wilt in the face of failed ambitions. Ultimately he is the one we should identify with but Panych is more subtle.

The pathetic Dressler is a cunt, driving himself on with spiteful critiques of his underlings and forensic examinations of the waste he sees on the plates he washes: "a fillet mignon with only one little bite out of it, and a cigar tuck into the smashed potatoes. Beautiful. What an extraordinary little monument to overindulgence."

But unlike Emmet, he is going no where so he has none of Emmet's naive faith in opportunity amidst economy based on manufactured tastes and distinctions: "people need to be led to these things; like slaves to the promised land. You don't go out in search of encrusted head cheese for fuck's sake."

Dressler also gets to deliver some of my favorite lines of late: ""democracy is a lazy bitch who never did a day's work in her entire life; then complained if after a late shift, you made too much noise coming home and dropping dead from exhaustion on the sofa."

Stick that down as your email signature. When Emmet does move on, he does so with a distaste that rubs itself in the face of those he leaves behind in the dishwashing basement, the sort of distaste that perpetuates the alienation he raged against while soaping up everyday.

Panych's latest production called Benevolence plays Toronto this month. Set in an old porn theater, on seats where exposed foam wrestles with exposed duck tape and the lives of a financial district dick and winter jacketed bum dangerously intertwine.

Despite Panych's concern for low paid service sector jobs with uncomfortable hours in The Dishwashers, Benevolence is a play I won't get to see - its over 35 dollars a ticket. Maybe I'll find it in a bargain bin some years down the line.

Interview: Going Beyond The Green Zone With Dahr Jamail

2007-10-04T20:34:00.000+01:00

It's a cliché that the media was the first casualty of the Iraqi occupation, but few reacted like Dahr Jamail. Made brazen by his travels off the beaten path between monotonous jobs, he packed a cheap digital camera along with a laptop and entered Iraq to go beyond the Green Zone and embedded reporting.

The dispatches he circulated online, first through emails and then through his site, quickly grew into an essential resource for those in the west desperate for an alternative take on the war on terror. They remain today a vital channel for struggling voices inside occupied Iraq.

A collection of Dahr's work called Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq is coming out this month on Haymarket Books, prior to its release he sat down with Indymedia Ireland to talk about his journalism and the situation in Iraq.

Tell me about the thought process that drove you into making that first trip to Iraq, the resources you had at your disposal and how you coped with such dramatically different and dangerous place?

"I followed the media coverage of the selling of the war by the Bush administration, and compared that to the UN reports and other reportage I was scanning in foreign media outlets, and knew that this war was based on lies. Watching the mainstream media in the US act as functional propagandists rather than critical journalists, I became enraged. I could barely believe my eyes, watching a war being sold to the American public, as propaganda disguised as news.

"I felt that as a US citizen the best thing I could do was go report on what I saw myself, so after the invasion took place and the occupation began, (and reporting continued to be horrible overall) I decided to head to Iraq. I had saved $2000, had a laptop and a small digital camera, and made connections with a couple of people in Baghdad via the Indymedia Beirut website. Through a Lebanese man who was in Baghdad writing about what he saw, I obtained the necessary information to get into Baghdad relatively safely.

"I had few resources and was totally independent. Luckily, I began to meet just the right people at the perfect times-which is how I met my first interpreter in Baghdad, met other foreign journalists to work with to share costs, and eventually began to get hired and paid to report.

"I had previously done a lot of international travel, so going to a new country wasn't terribly difficult for me. However, going into a war zone was different, and certainly took a lot of getting used to."

In your book you describe having the feeling that "most people seemed blissfully unaware" of what is going on in Iraq. Some of this you put down to the corporate media, in a sense I think people have a difficulty coming to terms with Iraq because it is all news-flashes lacking a wider context, then there is dis-information on the level of stabilisation and an expert led discussion on geo-politics that dissuades people from trying to get a grip. For those that want to come to terms with what is happening in Iraq, apart from your book where would you advise them to start looking?

"First I think it's important that people read about US foreign policy, particularly regarding the Middle East. Read the document the current National Security Strategy (updated 2006) is based on, the Project for the New American Century. Then read the NSS, then the Quadrennial Defense Review Report. Those lay out, quite clearly, US goals for using the military to control strategic oil/gas reserves and transportation lanes around the region.

"Then for news, read foreign media, or alternative media. Democracy Now! in the US is good, as is the Independent newspaper in the UK, Al-Jazeera Arabic television, and other good information websites like informationclearinghouse.info. Needless to say, almost all of the best resources people need for tracking what is happening in Iraq are found online. This includes various Indymedia sites around the globe as well."

You left Iraq for home just before the transfer of sovereignty, and upon your return you found "Iraq is yet another country" - that was pretty much two years ago, how different again is it now today and what is required for unembedded journalists like yourself to remain safe?

"The situation in Iraq degraded so quickly once the occupation began that each and every trip I went back it felt like a different country. I have not returned to Iraq since just after the elections of January 2005. All of the fixers/interpreters I had worked with told me to return would mean almost certain death to me, or to them. Any Iraqi working with a westerner now is seen as a collaborator or as a spy, and will likely be killed or kidnapped. Thus, I decided it would be incredibly selfish of me to return and risk the lives of any Iraqi working with me.

"My contacts there tell me it is nearly impossible to work as a western journalist without embedding with the military. I know a few westerners who have gone back recently-and they barely left their hotels. Reporting safely from Iraq now, for an Iraqi or westerner, is impossible. We're now in a position where we must rely on Iraqis to do all the reporting about what is happening in their country."

How did Iraqis view the massive anti-war movement that developed around February 15th and in the run up to the invasion and what forms of solidarity from western activists have the most value in the current context?

"Iraqis told me they were inspired by the pre-war displays of dissent in the west on that date. I was told repeatedly by Iraqis that they liked the American people, but not their government. Even well into the occupation when the country was disintegrating, Iraqis continued to make the distinction between US citizens and their government. However, a deeply troubling crisis is that that distinction is no longer being made by most Iraqis. They've seen Bush reelected in 2004, and more recently the so-called Democrats win the mid-terms in the US and do nothing but continue to fund and support the occupation. Thus, western activists have their work cut out for them."

What do you make of the internal debates in the western left about the nature of the Iraqi resistance and the recent "third camp?" I'm sure you've come across arguments about how the resistance is politically Islamic in composition, and that we should be trying to support a secularist resistance rather than homogenizing support to the resistance with no critical take?

"I think the elements of the western left who are engaged in this debate about what is or isn't the legitimate resistance in Iraq haven't a leg to stand on. What I mean by that is that it is the failure of the so-called anti-war movement, particularly in the US, to stop the war from being launched in the first place. Thus, whatever form of resistance used in Iraq, and whoever chooses to participate in it, is of no business of the so-called anti-war movement, particularly when much of that movement continues to support so-called Democrats who continue to fund the occupation.

"The Iraqi people have a legitimate right, under international law, to resist the occupation of their country. It was an illegal invasion which contravened the UN charter, and is thus by definition an illegal occupation. There are countless forms of resistance in Iraq today-political, civil, and armed, and they are all legitimate under international law."

There's an interesting section in the book where you mention mass dissent against the newly proposed Iraqi flag, with people tearing it down everywhere it was flown and driving occupation forces crazy by putting the old one on display everywhere they could. Can you tell us of some more mass acts of popular resistance to the US forces along these lines?

"Across the board Iraqis opposed the occupation. Like the flag example, this took many forms-not giving information to US soldiers about whether or not there were resistance fighters in their area, not supporting the US-backed Iraqi puppet governments (all of them), and doing what they could to report what was actually happening in their country to reporters willing to write it. These were all consistent acts of popular resistance I saw, and which continue today."

Have other forms of resistance outside of militarism arose to sea changes like privatization of the oil industry, water supply and so on?

"Yes. The oil union workers in Basra continue to play a critical role in staving off the privatization of Iraq's oil infrastructure. Without their strikes, their ability to apply political pressure, as well as their efforts to educate people in the west about what is being done to attempt to control Iraq's oil, it may well have already been privatized. The same can be said, although less obviously, regarding other aspects of Iraq's infrastructure."

With companies like Bechtel failing to restore water supplies, you describe how people in an area near Najaf collected funds to repair it themselves - is this sort of self-organised community response to the failure of the occupation a developing theme in Iraq or is it rare?

"It is common, but on a micro-scale. One thing that is difficult to impart to the west is how grave the situation in Iraq has become. As brutal as so many of the stories are in my book, it is far worse today. People there are literally in survival mode. So, for example, one person who can afford a generator in a neighborhood gets one. Then they'll run wires to all their neighbors homes to share. The same can be said of someone who can afford some cooking gas, or a doctor in the neighbourhood will treat people there in their homes, etc. Particularly in Baghdad, self-organizing communities are all that is left now, so that is how most people are getting along, and this is spreading all over Iraq as a matter of necessity and survival. It's literally band together as a community or die."

In one short section in your book you mention the strategies people have come up with to over-come unemployment, things like re-selling petrol to those sick of waiting in station queues and the like – could you tell us some more about the toil of unemployment in Iraq and how people are faring in this new informal labour economy?

"Some of this I've mentioned-doctors are treating neighbors and friends who can't leave their neighborhoods because of the security situation. Engineers are running electrical wires through their communities to share what little electricity there may be. Teachers are teaching locally rather than in schools. These efforts are traded for food or other skills...it is quickly becoming, and in many areas already has become, a barter/trade economy out of necessity."

Do you think embedded journalists can play a challenging critical role too in Iraq? I'm thinking for instance of Sean Smith, a UK Guardian journalist who documents the disillusionment and harrowing exhaustion of those fighting in Iraq through his photography?

"I think journalists who choose to embed and actually report on what the troops are doing, saying, feeling and thinking, is rare. This article you mention, was one of these rare cases I've seen where the journalist did their job, and did it well. This, with few rare exceptions, does not happen in any of the US papers. We see embeds write maybe about how a soldier misses their family, but nothing more critical than that, for the most part.

"I have seen instances of some good, critical reporting from embeds, but it remains the exception. I am confident that if every reporter who embedded actually reported the reality of what they saw, the embed program would be promptly dissolved by the Pentagon-as they are who instituted it and maintain it."

Just following on from that do you hear much about problems in the US military, such as break downs in command and resistance from troops to orders? The sort of stuff that really gets down-played as a reason for pulling out in Vietnam but it obviously played some role in the decision to withdraw there.

"Morale is very, very low with most US soldiers today. That is according to recent polls conducted by the Army itself, and the most recent Zogby poll which found over 70% of the troops think the occupation should end in less than a year. There have been a few instances of troops refusing orders, but this still does not begin to compare to the rampant dissent seen during Vietnam. Part of this is because there are far fewer troops in Iraq, and the casualty counts are far lower, for now.

"The other reason is that what dissent is happening, of course, is getting no media attention. The discussions I have had with troops while in Iraq, in addition to those I've had with troops back home, all point towards low morale, anger towards the US government and misdirected anger towards the Iraqi people.

"All the seeds are there to repeat a growing troop resistance movement like we saw in Vietnam-disillusionment, betrayal, anger when troops realize they have been used, exploited and lied-to, poor leadership, being under-equipped....all of this is leading towards a growing troop resistance...which in time I feel confident we'll hear more about, because it will eventually grow too large for even the corporate media to ignore."

May I ask what plans you have for yourself after the book publicity run is over?

"To return to the Middle East and continue my reporting."

This Ain't No Roller Disco

2007-10-04T20:22:00.001+01:00

It's not every day you get tempted to a roller derby game with a free ticket, and I was hardly going to turn it down. My only expectations of the sport were rooted in bleary late night memories of a sci-fi dystopian called Powerball, where nutters wielding chainsaws whirred around a track after each other on skates and motor bikes.

After half an hour spent on transit I'm outside a high school on the outskirts of Montreal, watching promoters strain to organize a growing throng of fans panicked by rumours of sold out tickets for a Triple Threat Match play off that's set to decide the city's roller derby league final.

The contest tonight is between Les Filles Du Roi, a team of "roller skating misfits who love to knock other chicks to the floor and crack a smile when they bruise" and Los Contrabanditas, a bunch of "bootlegging betties" who escaped to Montreal after issues with US Customs to dish out some "black market brutality" or so an over blown biography claims. Inside the door, a stand sells cans of beer to fans for a couple of dollars, but most are whipping out their own from bags or starting to crack into slabs carried in with their mates.

Its only when you see a swelling audience of hipsters begin to chant along to tinny baile funk rhythms breaking across a high school auditorium PA system that you get even half way to grasping the buzz of the DIY grass roots roller derby rebirth sweeping cities across North America.

"I waited and waited for it to start here, and it didn't happen, so I started it myself. Derby has turned into a big sisterhood across the world. I was just in Vegas at Rollercon '07 and I met tons of amazing roller gals from all over the place," explains Georgia W Tush, a fan favourite in the Montreal League she helped found and now stars in.

The atmosphere is thick with pre-club land anticipatory ramblings crossed with a football match; and with so many sub cultural codes on display you'd be forgiven for thinking all the record stores had emptied out at the news roller girls were about to don short skirts and helmets.

Down a set of bare concrete steps closer to the hockey rink, two off track derby girls power a table, one gathers disclaimers from fans waiving any rights to personal injury claims, as the other tags passes on to eager wrists as people scramble for "suicide seats."

These are located right at the corner of the track behind a yellow line, an area where throughout the game the gallant spill of the chase is most likely to career violently out of control right in front of you. As Georgia describes, the injuries can be excessive.

"I've only been involved since April 2006 and I have seen broken ankles, noses, collar bones, the most disgusting bruises ever, and some mad fishnet burns. It's not if you're going to get hurt - but when."

The standard jam lasts 20 minutes and consists of five girls from each team—three blockers, a pivot and a jammer. At the first whistle, the skate starts, four from each team form a pack, while another player takes on the role of the pivot setting the pace and directing the team.

Suddenly there's another whistle and two girls begin to hurtle through the pack, they score points by lapping the track and forcing their way through over and over again. Of course, the opposite team tries desperately to take them down while their team mates guard them.

Left sort of dumbed by the circling effect of the skaters and the difficulty of following the rules I was happily distracted by the carnivalesque moments that dotted the game. They early started with a fake brawl between two of the team managers.

At half time two semi nude luche libre wrestlers emerged from the crowd, to chase each other around the ring, before being humiliatingly chased off by a demonically skating queer in a dress with wings stitched on. Eventually she gave up and grabbed a mike to provide a foul and sharp mouthed bi-lingual commentary on the game.

On the track the players are clad in short red skirts, some are ass busting dyke like, others play bookish, often with sex kitten lingerie tricks and fishnets to accompany their retro-style roller skates; some have cut their uniforms to a provocative approximation of suicide girls on skates.

This is the image obsessed over in the media and on the web, to the detriment of other aspects of the sport much to the frustration of skaters like Mia Culprit, a representative for the Toronto league of six teams and 75 players.

"Although there are the guys that go on and on about us being cute girls in skirts who fight, most people love it because we're for the skater, by the skater. We're passionate about it and it shows. People want to be involved and be a part of something like that"

Most of the players' names send mixed messages, trapped between punk zine politics and glamour rag personality. Georgia W Tush has her name spray painted across her arse stencil style like a Holy Bible era Manic Street Preacher on roller skates. She also carries her own crowd of piss taking friends from game to game. Tonight they stood at the side wielding placards inviting her to invade their bedrooms in a blend of sexual and political double entendre.

(Photo courtesy of Bubba Brown)

Laden with alter egos and theatrical characters, the sport allows its mainly twenty something participants, who like most of us, are stuck chasing ambitions in between McJobs, school, internships and the cacophonous ho-hum of the ordinary an escape.

The Montreal league's derby logo gives visual bent to this empowerment, being an image of a skating fifties waitress about to fling a skull in a patron's face.

"I think the alter-egos give derby an extra excitement during a bout. Some women live a generally normal life throughout the day, and by night there are the bad-ass of the track.," says Tush.

Then with a quickly developing fan culture outside the original mix bag base of new wave psycho-billies, punks and the queer scene, some new elements mightn't get the staged aspect of the theatrical sass, so there is the security of anonymity as Mia Culprit hints.

"I don't have to worry about any fans finding out more about me than I care to tell them. It also allows me to be someone else when I'm out on the track and live through Mia Culprit. She's a little terror!"

The sport has a growing surrounding culture that strikes like an ambiguous dance between a respectful but ironic reclamation of white trash culture and a third wave feminism busy re-assessing aspects of feminine sexuality and fifties kitsch.

Within this critical space some derby participants and fans are remarkably conscious of the potted social history of their sport, both haunted and inspired by the forgotten starlets and stories of a predominantly female sport as Mia tells me.

"This sport used to consist of a man with money dressing the girls and telling them what to do. The players knew what was coming and those women who did skate, didn't have any control over the game."

If you can remember an old Waltons episode where Jim Boy came up with some scam to win enough money to buy a type writer by dancing all night in a marathon competition, then you have some hint of roller derby's origins in working class depression era desperation.

A canny business man, Leo Setlzer, realised such dance marathons were interfering with his cinema takings, so he moved into simulated cross country roller skate races with two teams circling a track repeatedly for paying fans.

Of course the charm in this dizzying medley of repetition wore off quick for the spectator. Setlzer realised the most interesting aspect of his idea lay in dramatic collisions and falls, so with the help of a sports writer he developed a set of rules to maximise the carnage.

The fifties saw the North American public go on a derby binge, with a movie about the sport staring Mickey Rooney called The Fireball propelling its growth further. Troupes of women toured the states in exhibition roller derby games that pulled in massive crowds every night

"These were like touring punk bands lugging their own gear around the country" enthused Rebel Rockit to me, as I scabbed fags off her drunk outside a Toronto after game party.

At its height the sport featured on TV several times a week across 120 syndicated channels, with the indoor crowd record set at 19,507 at Madison Square Garden in 1970.

Just three years later the Seltzer killed off his league, due to the expense of moving teams around thanks to the oil crisis. Competing leagues continued, split along business lines much the same as the factionalism in pro-Wrestling.

Powerless players were trapped in the middle and the classic era of derby was over. Then the ad men pulled their money out.

Sociologist Paul Fussell sees it as a simple equation, "they discovered that the people watching it were so low-prole or even destitute that they constituted an entirely wasted audience for the commercials: they couldn't buy anything at all, not even detergents, antacids, and beer."

The leap of difference between that incarnation of derby and today's grassroots revivalist leagues couldn't be more pronounced as Tush explained to me.

"MTLRD is a non-profit organisation run by elected board members. We keep checks and balances by voting on major issues at general meetings. Anytime an outsider gives us fancy pants propositions, we often stand our guard and keep caution. Others realize there's a lot of money that can be made out of this, so it's always important to keep control close to home."

With a documentary called Hell On Wheels about the 2001 Austin league that sparked the current rebirth, piquing attention at South by Southwest back in March and Melissa Joulwan's anthology of Rollergirl: Totally True Tales from The Track sneaking around as cult bathroom reading, Georgina is optimistic about skater run derby.

"I'm sure there will be a league in most cities in Canada and US, and many more popping up all around the world."

Back inside Les Fils du Roi have taken the Triple Threat cup and track invading fans have built massive beer can pyramids for celebrating skaters to smash through.

Outside, as people wait for the teams to get their asses in gear to hit the after party, a cop car and a fire brigade have arrived in a hysterical over-reaction to the sight of some supporters with swirling fire poi and en masse street boozing.

The crowd of around 200 jeer them good naturedly, and some of the derby girls offer the uniforms swigs of lagar as they start to back off. I'm left to think what more evidence is needed for the momentum behind derby, than a football style roving, belligerent mob of drunk and happy fans heading into the Montreal night?

Shouts to Coach McWhopper, Mia Culprit, Georgia Tush and any one else from the Toronto and Montreal Leagues and thanks to Totally Dublin for carrying it.

In Me Ears 5: Serve Me That Bounce

2007-09-25T23:13:00.000+01:00

Some of you might be familiar with the chief beat reasearcher Wayne and Wax at the Rididm Method, known for his widely used "A It Dat" (download) track on Mashit, what he's served up as the 11th contribution to the blogariddim series is a cracking listen too.

Following on from his last glance back at crunk, its another genealogy of the snap sound through as he puts "the common grooves and feedback loops between crunk and clave, reggaeton and ragtime, bhangra and bounce, to name a few."

If anyone is feeling a little auto-didactic and would like to pull back the curtain on the sociology behind these forms of music then he's more than capable of hooking you up with his Harvard class outlines. Many of his more focussed writings are well worth a read, as are his blog break downs of just where the evolutions and memes in this form of music lie.

If you are still looking for the same awesomeness you've come to expect from the most excellent DJ C via his bouncement mix, then get right clicking Blogariddim 19, courtesy of John Eden. Its a hurtling journey back to exclusives from 1998, all in a bouncey, bashment fast chatting whirl of party starters including a wonderful use of Enya 37 minutes in. Check this out for the method behind the madness of the Boston Bounce.

A Street Car Called Slut

2007-09-24T22:05:00.000+01:00

(Photo: taken from HeyRocker on Flickr)

A fine example of marketing types lashing a branding exercise together with the foresight of a particularly sheltered 7 year old comes from Seattle, where the people behind the South Lake Union Streetcar, a light rail system due to open in December with upwards of 50 million dollars poured into it have had their noses dusted by residents upset city developers spent little time on their concerns.

The locals have turned the SUAS acronym on its head, refusing to forget the project's earlier use of "trolley" instead of "street car" - leaving it with the acronym SLUT starring them back in the face, twisting like a knife in their eye. Now with popular posters and t-shirts selling like hot cakes, the slogan they are using to promote its usage"ride the slut," gives the project its own weighted humour for a Dublin audience.

I know that less than gracious Dublin insult "wagon" owes more of its origins to a disproportionately large female posterior, than suggestions that anyone might be riding her - but surely if there was even a half decent acronym that spelt out WAGON/SLUT for a Dublin project, something like the Luas say - it wouldn't get by the monkey crew management responsible for our own public transit?

IBM Virtual Strike: Knowledge Workers Upping The Ante

2007-09-24T21:19:00.002+01:00

For all those geeks out there who have Second Life accounts, here's your chance to picket IBM in the virtual world of Second Life. Since the Euro-Mayday Net Parade in 2005, where scattered workers unable to participate in the traditional parade could design avators with short biographies of themselves that were added to a huge animated march, these sort of online collective acts of mobilised petitioning have become much more common.

This is the first I've heard of one specific to one workplace. The action arises from negotiations over a new internal collective agreement at the works, after a majority of IBM employees asked for a small pay increased the company snapped back by canceling benefits related to productivity, meaning a loss of 1,000 Euros for individual workers.

(Photo: There's a load of this stuff out there using Lego to illustrate far from childhood fantasical spaceships and medieval scenes, there's even an animated Lego rave. This particular image comes from the savage Theory.org.uk website.)

Bounce Back and Forth

2007-09-24T08:15:00.000+01:00

Saw Yo! Majesty smash down it down in Toronto again tonight, as two of the notorious three and Taxlo Dj Chris O passed through for the first time since their NXNE show case. It seems the last time they came through one of them was refused border crossing due to "habitually driving without a license," well she was present and semi-nude on this occasion - the others absence went uncommented on.

The new material sounds as rough and in your face as their past out put. The gig bordered on a karaoke session in parts as they performed this rather riotous cover of Justice/Simian's "We Are Your Friends," some old soul number and countless bursts of cheese, including pushing the crowd along in joint sway to Daft Punk. Then there was a preachy moment where we were advised not to fall for the "deceptions of the devil," that left most of the crowd standing their wide eyed but dripped in sweat.

Overall left feeling that I'd rather have seen Chris O do what ever it is these Taxlo sorts get up to on one of their nights down in Maryland, all the right names seem to pass through their outings and the noises his drum machine/pad were setting off were well to my liking. If you like this sort of buzz then do check out Thunderheist.

Speaking of Simian, I was dragged along to see their new Mobile Disco last week too - their stage set up is pretty impressive, with so many wires and knobs being twiddled that its hard to figure out how much is for show, how much they are actually affecting the music and whats just performance for a generation that never really sees much hardware used to play dance music these days.

It got nice deep and bassy in parts, but really that was used to elicit cries of "what the fuck was that!" from the crowd of indie-dancers present. When it got heavy it got real heavy, unfortunately they never kept it throbbing enough to sway you, moving up the scale and back to distorted effects and squelches as fast as they could for some mass - but enthused - head nodding. I'd really gotten some kicks from the New Rave mix they put together for NME about a year and a half ago, to see them DJ would be far more interesting I think.

Elsewhere: In anticipation of the upcoming Nuit Blanche, the Toronto Star carried an interesting article that weaves its way through the meanings given to darkness and night time through history and by different societies.

New Stuff From Herv

2007-09-23T19:36:00.000+01:00

Organised Ideas/Armed Ambitions have been doing the good stuff for what seems like a year now and with a new site up they bring the baying public a down loadable gift from Dublin's Herv via the Nordies in Acroplane.

Download the release from acroplane (320kb/s mp3s, 69.5MB)

The Launch Of Spook Country By William Gibson

2007-09-23T07:37:00.000+01:00

Given the depths to which sci-fi fans take their fandom I was quite surprised by the less than heaving turn out to the Toronto launch of William Gibson's new work Spook Country at the regular This Is Not a Reading Series! hosted by Eye Weekly, one of the free cultural weeklies you find scattered all over the subway. It's the sort of paper you pick up about five different copies of every edition, dumping them once done an article and fully confident one will be awaiting you at your cubicle once you hit work the next day.

Most of those present were in their thirties, bald heads and thick black rimmed glasses alongside the minor presence of Gothic sorts, really the only markers of what you may expect from a crowd attracted by Gibson. Gibson himself was older looking than I'd have imagined, coming out with that sort of hunched over walk that suggests both the onset of age and the perils of spending too much time slouched over a keyboard.

For an interview session aiming to get at the "how and why of the creative process" of writing a novel Mark Askwith couldn't have asked less probing questions. All the same Gibson let us in on his lack of secrets, staring at a computer and bidding his fingers to write with absolutely no idea of where his new novel would eventually take him before finally settling on "glimpses of lower Manhattan at night" that quickly needed populating with characters.

From the chapter he read Spook Country follows a theme similar to Pattern Recognition, its a post modernist detective thriller about a journalist on a quest to piece together the developing art of using GPS technology to create digital images mapped against geography. One such moment has an installation hooked into the Iraqi Body Count website that projects crosses representing deaths in Iraq over the American landscape. A former military technology, only relatively recently released to the public use, GPS certainly provides enough for a Gibson plot and a typically odd bent on technological history to wrap itself around.

More of the interview came to focus on his own use of technology, how he apparently writes with "Google on" - as if permanently mining it for data that he conducts into his work, like some computer age muse. He dismissed these visions with the anecdote of his friend Bruce Sterling who found it impossible to write unless he had an old TV switched to MTV resting on top of his computer monitor, a stereo tuned to talk radio and then a set of ear phones blaring music to him - distraction as concentration can take many forms. Analog, digital, same shit - Google however is something that may quickly become a "universal prosthetic memory."

Only rather late into the evening did the topic turn to the obvious, why in his recent works has he dropped the visionary aspect of his work to engage in his new style of "speculative presentism," something that brings the sci-fi lens to the everyday of modern society, looking at how our technology is affecting us now. According to Gibson this goes right down to the root of how he grew up understanding sci-fi: "as about the day it is written in. If you read sci-fi in the 1930's it is so clearly about the 1930's... I had this as a given when I started writing sci-fi."

A rather obvious answer alright, and he articulated it further by saying "the weirdness of the present is the thing sci-fi is most suited to explore." A lot of this recent change as well come down to Gibson calling himself on his own answers to interview questions, after attesting for so long that if he was writing about the present he would use the exact same style - he simply set about doing it.

Where most critics see Neuromancer as a bleak commentary on forces that were articulating themselves in Reagan's America, Gibson himself gave a surprisingly different reading of his classic fiction, seeing it as "committing an act of almost ludicrous optimism as most of the intelligent people I knew did not want to bet any money on any of us being here in 2007 because of the postures of the United States and the USSR."

He elaborated on how Neuromancer was really his view of the obvious, of how the insanity of the Cold War couldn't be allowed persist by capital, after a very brief and limited nuclear war in his dystopian vision corporations intervene to quieten the nation state, he extrapolates "to kill the middle class, fast forward a couple of years and the result is Mexico city, North America set in Mexico city." In his view Chiba city is a far more appealing place to live than contemporary Darfur, at least there you can entertain visions of becoming a cyberspace hacking cowboy.

He was pretty modest too, owing much of his recent technological accuracy to Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow, and moving onto advocating a blogging style he himself seems to use relentlessly with no comments and just links. Everything else is superfluous it seems. His approach to music was also touched on, the one thing that allows him to "round characters, even societies more convincingly if I can invent convincing musics that they are listening to...music gets to a character's interiority and exteriority equally."

Chew on the Credit

2007-09-23T06:31:00.000+01:00

Mute has been a journal I've being getting my jollies from since I came across it over two years ago. Always accessible, both meaning it always wings its way into my path and just weighty enough to remain readable - its become something of a critical ground for teasing out various themes around developments in capitalism, from multiculturalism, through precarious labour, web 2.0 production and environmental disaster. The new issue on the credit crunch is out now for reading online, though its nice to have it arrive in your letter box unexpected. Dubstep fans might also be interested in the fact that Kode9 occasionally writes for it.

Cousin Cole

2007-09-22T08:45:00.000+01:00

It was his pretty decent Soulja Boy mix that drew my attention to him, Check him out over on Myspace and get all the goodies you need from dirty crunk vocals, to ravey stabs, hissing hi-hats and decent bass over on his download page..

In Me Ears 4: Al Haca Blues

2007-09-18T07:58:00.000+01:00

AL Haca touch base with all the right German crews, friends with Modeselektor and Apparat they deal in subdued digi-dub journeys that seduce your lower body to swing on the dance floor only the way creeping bass can.

Wavering between cavernous sub sonic wobbles, electronic meanderings and the tension of soulful voices over gritty beats Put this one on for making the dinner or for bullshit conversation subdued by the after party blues.

Dancing in a Mine Field

2007-09-18T02:34:00.000+01:00

Anyone who likes the Postal Service just may like Plushgun, its your usual indie rock whimper with a dash of electronic shuffle in the background. He emailed me out of the blue and asked me to share this track with the world. Not my cup of tea really - but you can make up your own mind.

Apparently he has been included in the "popular webTV series We Need Girlfriends", and according to himself he's creating a bit of a buzz around the net at the moment. Why I feel all grown up, sort of like Palmsoutsound or something.

Plushgun "Dancing in a Minefield" (Zshare)

Maga Bo Interview: "Hip hop, Like Any Discipline, Can Be a Form of Therapy and Source of Positive Change.

2007-09-17T05:30:00.000+01:00

(Photos courtesy of Maga Bo's Kolleidosonic)

Soon to tour North America and Canada, but sadly with no Toronto date - I hit Maga Bo up for an interview. Here are the results where he talks about life in the Favela, his work as a sound recordist, his travels and his work using music as a tool of participation for those excluded from a material society that whizzes by them without pause for even a whisper of concern.

Your recent mix CD was called Confusion of Tongues, is the name some sort of reference to the cacophony of different voices that haunt your mixes and releases?

It's a reference not only to that, but more specifically to the story of the collapse of the Tower of Babel, which was built with the intention to reach higher into the sky than god. As punishment for this blasphemy, god banished humans to the furthest corners of the earth in a confusion of tongues. It's a classic story which has been written about and has inspired many different pieces of artwork.

Here are two paintings which helped inspire the title Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré and, The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Whats your own background and what sort of music would you have played when you first started to get into DJ-ing? Its pretty hard to really isolate and put you into one box isn't it?

I've always been into a really diverse range of music and my DJ sets have reflected that since day one. I initially began to DJ as a way to show my production work in public and then it just grew from there. In the beginning, I found it really difficult to get gigs, especially when there was no real way of describing what I do without simply listing all of the different influences involved.

I also found it difficult in Rio, because the market is really oriented toward proven formulas which can guarantee a good draw for the promoters and club owners. It's much easier for them to make money by booking DJs that people know (local or international) that are going to play music that is accessible and familiar to most people. I got into music in the first place to express myself, but I always felt like that was difficult within the established boundaries of the local club scene, so I just persevered with what I believed in and continue to do so.

From what I've read you've traveled extensively; is this part of a methodology of searching out new interesting sounds? Can you tell me of some of the most exciting and surprising ways you've seen music used while traveling?

I've loved to travel and get to know new people and places as long as I can remember, so seeking out new sounds as part of my travels has been a very organic progression. Although I have done a fair amount of backpacking and hitch-hiking around the world as a tourist, my traveling has become much more of work oriented. I am also a sound recordist working primarily with documentary films and have been able to travel a lot as a result.

Most of the time, depending on the place, after wrapping a shoot, I spend time connecting with people and working on music on location. I'm now getting ready to spend the month of November in Ethiopia working on a film and producing music afterwards. So, I guess you could say that I take advantage of other people paying for my transportation as much as possible.

Outside of the restrictive boundaries of North America and Europe, where there is less police presence, fiscalization, and fewer resources to go around, noise compliance laws are not respected as much and as a result, it is much more common to see people using their own sound systems however they see fit. I love this!

I'm always fascinated by how people can manage to rig together a mobile sound system with a car battery, some trashed speakers, random wire and maybe a cart or a bicycle or even a backpack with a megaphone. The whole point of doing this is to express oneself - whether to yell at people and tell them to change their ways, blast their favorite music, broadcast the local winning lottery numbers, let people know that it's time to pray or to just try and attract customers.

One of the last times my friend Grey (Filastine) was here in Rio, he brought me an amp that I ordered on Ebay in the states, we borrowed some speakers, roped another friend with a car into driving us to Lapa and just set up our sound system on the street using pirated electricity from a manhole. We played several times on the street during carnival and never had the police come and tell us to stop. Nearly every time we did this in Seattle, we were chased off by the police. Even during the Art Walk Open house whatever you call it Tuesday night thing where culture is "important" and everything is free and open.

Where did the bug for travel come from and what made you settle in Rio De Janeiro above elsewhere?

In Seattle, I got involved with the local Brazilian community recording as well as playing percussion and became interested in Brazilian culture. At the same time, I'd been plotting an escape from the rain and dreary climate for a long time. Eventually, things came together financially and I was able to come to Rio to check it out. I found work doing English language recordings and made just enough to pay my rent. That was 8 years ago. I stay because I love the weather, the beach, Brazilian culture and music, the Portuguese language, my friends and community. I am at home here.

You are involved in researching ethno-music, do you think there are qualitatively different ways of enjoying music and giving meaning to it?

This is a really good question and, in all honesty, I'm not sure that I can answer this with conviction. First, I'd like to point out that ALL music is "ethno-music" - that goes for Britney Spears and Madonna all the way through to music played in a circumcision ceremony in the forest in Senegal. To be quantitative about it, the behavioral norms of people enjoying Jola circumcision songs or "Like a Virgin" in their "native" settings is very different.

I think the motivation of people seeking out music in different environments or cultural settings can be different as well, but I think the actual experience of "enjoying" the music is extremely similar or even the same. Music is a form of self-expression and communication. It is a language which can say many different things - from the extremely sacred to the extremely profane and everything in between. My faculty to experience, or enjoy, music is the same, regardless of whether it is gangsta rap or sufi music.

You've described living in Rio as a bit of a "mindfuck," where you can be chilling on a roof and five minutes away there's a war zone with people wielding machine guns in a neighborhood beside you. What sort of psychic landscape does this create for people living there and does it have much of an effect on your own music?

A lot of people are terrified by this reality, but everyone deals with it in their own way. Most people simply take it into account and act accordingly. Don't leave the house with anything that you would care to lose. Don't go to an unknown favela without having a local contact. Etc.

Rio, like anywhere in the world, is a place where people live and want to be in peace. People want to be happy and healthy, love their family, make a living. Living in a challenging situation where violence, crime and poverty are common, forces people to unite to some degree and communicate.

Everytime I go back to the states, I notice more and more how the culture of the individual is really strong there. If you have money and privilege, you don't need anyone. That's what fuck you money is. There is much less fuck you money in Brazil and much more human interaction. So, whether this has an effect on my music, I really don't know. It definitely affects my personal relations with people and probably also somehow seeps into my music as well.....

You worked on a stunning mix for World Up, can you tell me about the work the organisation does, the sort of projects its involved in and just how it is using hip hop as a tool of education and action?

Their main objective is to promote international hip hop culture by producing events and creating situations where people can connect, show their work, learn and grow. Hip hop, like any discipline, can be a form of therapy and source of positive change. Any discipline in which we are forced to confront ourselves and our own weaknesses in order to grow and learn can be a means through which we learn about ourselves, our relationship with those around us and the world at large.

In modern-day city life, many of the traditional disciplines (like farming, capoeira, circumcision ceremonies, sports or whatever) are no longer part of our lives. Many of these activities were ways in which we learned about ourselves, related with our families and communities and grew into healthy, adult human beings.

Hip hop is being used as a tool to fill some of these roles. It is a way that people can learn a skill which boosts their self-esteem, teaches them how to learn (and solve problems) on their own and how to express themselves in a healthy, positive way.

Baile funk has reached a pretty startling level of popularity in the west, Bonde do Role and MIA feature on magazine covers, and a lot of club sets seem to have their baile funk moment; I'm wondering has much of this success made its way back to the originating producers/scenes in your city?

Yes and no. There are now a few DJs and MCs that are traveling internationally and have benefited from this exposure. They, in turn, have been influenced by music that they heard outside of Brazil and this has slowly been entering into their music. Their audience, however, hasn't had the same experience and is a bit resistant to too much change all at once.

Some of this "post baile funk" as it's being called here, can be heard at parties which are not in favelas, but in clubs (which usually are prohibitively expensive for most people). At any given baile in a favela, you would be hard pressed to notice any great difference or change as a result of the hype surrounding baile funk outside of Brazil. Most people have never heard of Bonde do Rolê or MIA, for example.

In a similar vein there seems to be something in the air around favelas and ghetto music, kudoru springs to mind too; is there a reactionary aspect to this fascination among Western listeners? In one way it sets aside the harsh realities of favella life, seeking a glamor from poverty, with out much awareness of the context where the music is born - all for a voyeuristic exotic pleasure for the ear? I think Rupture has raised something along these lines in the past, what do you think?

There is a tendency to exoticize "the other" or people who are living in a reality that is vastly different and/or unknown. There is a long history of this - from the western world to the "third world" and all the way around again. It is an objectification of people and culture which is incredibly damaging and perpetuates racial, cultural, religious and sexual inequality. The term "world music" is an excellent example of this. From the beginning, it meant music which was not from the western world and went on to lump Tuvan throat singing in with Jamaican mento on the same shelf.

By making huge generalizations like this, the richness and complexity of culture and music is belittled and objectified in the name of consumer culture. Jace (DJ /Rupture) likes to point out that "global music" is Timbaland or Britney Spears and I couldn't agree with him more. On a more positive note, it is a sign that people are, in fact, opening up to things outside of their comfort zone and engaging at some level. This has the capacity to transform into a beneficial exchange for all involved, but mutual respect and awareness are crucial.

On the other hand, what are the most interesting ways you have seen western forms of music being subject to re-interpretation?

While there can be damaging effects as a result of poorly or even ignorantly informed cultural interaction, there are many, many wonderful things that have come out of creative cultural exchange. There is the salsa movement in Senegal, Cambodian country and western bands, highlife and juju bands using electric guitars in the 50's and 60's or Jamaicans playing R & B. One of my favorites was seeing the house band for a circus in Madurai, India playing surf music. Anything and everything is possible!

Some might what you focus on is a transnational bass music, or a ghetto to ghetto style; how do you explain what you do with music and what are the threads connecting such wild diversity?

Well, I play music from the ghetto, but also music not from the ghetto. There is no discrimination in my music! I just play what I like. This can vary wildly, but I do like to form a narrative and tell a kind of story with what I play. It's kind of a way of making connections between things that may seem different, but actually share many common characteristics, whether it is in the rhythm, the melody, harmony, timbre, lyrics or feel.

Most of us who think we have a pretty wide eye for music are strikingly limited compared to you, its the usual lexicon of next big thing, dubstep, minimal and baltimore etc etc ; but from your wider palette where do you see the most exciting and innovative forms of music coming from?

Hmmm, lots of places. I'm digging on cumbia, champeta and chutney, all of which are mashups of various different things. I think as the bongo flava industry in East Africa grows and gets more sophisticated, there will be some interesting stuff there. Especially, if taarab starts to be integrated into the mix. Both Senegal and South Africa have big hip hop scenes and there's some great stuff coming out lately. In Brazil, there are a lot of people combining Brazilian musics with different forms of electronic music.

With the release of Favela Rising, many people will now be aware of the work of the community group like AfroReggae, can you tell me how you ended up coming across them and eventually working with them to build a studio in Complexo do Alemão? How are they using music to challenge different forms of oppresion?

I knew about them through their international touring band, which I'd seen perform a few times. They have a very visible presence here in Rio. Later, I was introduced to their international relations person, who is a friend of a friend. We then started talking and brainstorming as to what we could do. I had been wanting to do some sort of community oriented work for some time. Unfortunately, the studio in Complexo do Alemão has been postponed partly as a result of lack of resources and partly as a result of heavy violence that has been going down there. So, instead I made proposal to teach workshops on beat-making in Reason at their digital radio studio (and computer center) in Parada de Lucas. Afroreggae is a big organization and things move very slowly, so we are still in the beginning stages of this.

Their objective is very similar to WorldUp! in that they are using music and culture to help young people (and especially people involved in trafficking) develop self esteem and learn skills which can be marketable (and get out of drug trafficking). So, it may be that one person gets involved because they want to play music and in the process of that, they end up realizing that they can identify and accomplish their dreams and goals. That may lead them to taking computer, dance or english classes, and from there, who knows?

On another level, they are using music to become "visible." This is directly related to the exoticization of "the other." While the world around them pays them (the poor and primarily black people in the favelas in Rio) no attention and essentially treats them as invisible (MV Bill has a lot to say about this in his work), they use music as a way of asserting themselves and participating in society at large. Afroreggae is a direct result of using resources at hand in a positive and creative way to change things.

You also work on the soundtracks for documentaries, what are some of the more interesting documentaries you have worked on?

One of the things I like best about working on documentaries is that I get out from in front of the computer and into the world where I meet extraordinary people that I would never meet in any other way. I've filmed rubber tappers in the Amazon, kite makers in Gujarat, female circumsizers in Senegal and cocoa farmers in Guyana. Part of the process of making a documentary is to forge personal relationships with the people that you are filming. This necessitates exchange, honesty and and openness and that is a powerful thing.

Your touring at the moment, playing quite a few different places too; what sort of reactions are you getting, what are people being responsive too and after the gigging is done whats next for your good self?

Actually, I just finished a 2 month tour in Europe and a 3 week production trip to Senegal where I was participating in an artist exchange, producing new tracks and filming 2 video clips for tracks on my upcoming album, "Archipelagos," to be released on Soot Records. Next up is a USA/Canada tour in October and then a documentary shoot in Ethiopia, followed by a short stint in South Africa to do some gigs, make some new tracks and shoot another video.

Soundtracksforthem Blog Mix Two

2007-09-13T20:24:00.000+01:00

Soundtracksforthem Blog Mix 2
75mb / 40:57 sec (Download here at Zshare)

Just a heads up on Zshare, where once you could listen to a mix through on it they now jump to an ad screen after you stall on a page for a bit too long for a listen like. So you are probably best downloading the MP3 and listening off your hard drive.

1/ Starting Something - Unknown Reggeaton
2/ 10 - Mia
3/ Hot Like We - Cecile
4/ Beanie Man - Beanine Man (feat Dangel)
5/ El Tiburon - Baby Ranks (feat Looney Tunes)
6/ RDB feat. Elephant Man - Ishq naag reggeaton Remix
7/ Personal Jesus - Depche Mode (Boys Noize Rework)
8/ Sem Makas - Burka Som Sistema
9/ Doi Festival - Ghislain Poirer
10/ Party - Unknown Reggeaton
11/ We're Broklynites - Tittsworth
12/ Minute by Minute - Girl Talk
13/ Super Freaks on Film - Rick James Vs Duran Duran (Bass211.com)
14/ Should I Stay Or Should I Go - The Clash
16/ What I Like About Crunk Music - Lil Jon (Menegaux Mash)
17/ Oh Sheila - Ready for the World
18/ Oh Sheila - SneakMove (Quarterbar remix)
19/ Popuzuda Rock n' Roll - De Falla
20/ Go My Way - Lenny Kravitz
21/ North American Scum - LCD Sound System
22/ Bump - Spank Rock
23/ My Love - Justin Timberlake (Diplo Remix)
24/ Do I Look Like A Slut - Avenue D
25/ Yah - Buraka Som Sistema
26/ LDN - South Rakkas Crew (Crack Whore Riddim)
27/Crank Dat - Solja Boy (Rough)
28/ Ain't Nothin To Fuck With - Wu Tang Clan (Bird Peterson Remix)

On The Dancefloor They Call It Murder

2007-09-12T18:37:00.000+01:00

(Photo from Each Secure Note)

Girl Talk and Dan Deacon tonight, Girl Talk and Dan Deacon tonight, Girl Talk and Dan Deacon tonight. I don't think I've been this excited about a gig, oh since the last time I drank too much Buckfast before rushing down Thomas St to one. Rooting around for my tickets last night it dawned on me and herself that in one of those foul humored, strop around the gaff tidy ups I had managed to throw them in the recycling along with the wad of paper they were sitting in. Last minute panicked calls to the credit card ticket sales line and a rush to the home of the Toronto Blue Jay's baseball team to pick up re-issues and all was sorted. Ants in my fucking pants.

The second of the Soundtracksforthem Summer Mixes will be online tomorrow and possibly some ramblings post Girl Talk. There's a pretty in depth interview completed with Maga Bo that I'm holding off putting online in case I can get it published first, as well as one with an unembedded journalist in Iraq called Dahr Jamail. All will be revealed soon, same irregular time, same irregular bat url.

Scratching the Surface of San Telmo

2007-09-01T04:25:00.000+01:00

Buenos Aires is a city where European cultural impulses throb with a South American heart beat. Each night I found myself basking in a pool of dusk in squares ruled by colonial elegance, sipping Quillmes beer, sucking on cigerettes and nattering over life's hum and haws in the night time company of young portenos (Buenos Aires locals).

The economic collapse and peso devaluation of 2001 has made Buenos Aires an increasingly popular destination for partying American students and it has even become a retail respite for bargain hunting backpackers. Foreign language capabilities and youthful exuberence take precedence in the resulting tourist industry, allowing high unemployment to be avoided.

Staying in the Hostel Inn on Humberto Primero, one of the party hostels brought on by this economic boom, meant that I was planted right in the heart of San Telmo.

The pressure cooker of a hostel nestles nicely beside the gorgeous Plaza Dorrego, surrounded by old time cafes with their omnipotent lomo completo (world famous Argentinian steak) and ice cream parlours exhibiting the best of Argentina's Italian heritage. The Plaza also plays host to antique fairs during the weekend and the daily handicraft sellers give a taste of the hippy sub culture that exists. Off the plaza there's an open indoor market, selling limited edition screen printed t-shirts and hip urban wear.

La Boca, the old dockers neighbourhood and centre of the Boca Juniors universe, is only about ten minutes walk from San Telmo. A tack filled, tourist warren called Caminito in this otherwise run down neighbourhood is the main attraction. It stands out like a sore thumb, a badly executed memory to the immigrant heritage of the city. The hastily constructed housing in the area led to the colourful mix-match housefronts and were all artificially restored in the fifities by the artist Quinquela Martin.

(Photo of a Tourist in La Boca)

This area is famed for flamboyant tango dancers busking on the sidewalks. Away from the maddening crowds, in a bar called La Tanguerra De Roberto near Plaza Almagro, tango is a whole different experience. It is less a regulated dance and more an outpouring of pent up blues. There's a harsh reality to life in contemporary Buenos Aires, so this "tango as blues" interpretation is understandable.

In the Zizek Club on Mercoles de Octubre, the urban consumer class dish out ten pesos to watch a DJ from the States dance P Diddy style, yelling 'I do it all hours like Austin Powers!'. Later, a band called Matimatike, sporting a sort of early millenium street wear with one tracksuit-bottom leg pulled up to avoid an imaginary bike chain, encourage the crowd as they spit fire over some simplistic beats.

Taking the Subte across the city from San Telmo to Palermo is a must. Scores of kids sell religious medallions and pour fast paced descriptions of the medallions’ inherant magic before gathering them up and hopping onto the next carriage. It becomes a lasting memory as you emerge from the underground into the globalised extravagance of Palermo.

There, the Recoleta cemetery graveyard, once the highest valued real estate in the city, is but a walk away. Decorative gothic angels and gargoyles haunt Evita's final resting place in this city, replete with miniture mansions as holding spots for the bones of the nation's elite.

Palermo also holds the MALBA (Museo De Arte Latin Americano de Buenos Aires), with its Costantini Collection collection documenting the whirlpool of artistic vanguardism Buenos Aires has always prided itself on. Ironically, the amazingly vibrant street art culture that is spreading like a virus through out the city today is being clamped down on by the government for the sake of tourism.

However it is stil possible to catch glimpses of multi-coloured visions of Hendrix, animated sprites, subverted street signs and thousands of stickered cartoons that sparkle like diamonds in the corner of your eye everywhere you walk.

Buenos Aires can be anything you want it to be; all surface and no feeling or a city where the best will only be found the more you scratch the facade.

This overly gushing travel piece was published in a recent edition of the Irish Backpacker Magazine, if I remmeber it right, its amazing how much they edited out. Something else from Buenos Aires will be popping up here soon too...

Gig Review: I Still Love You Kid 606

2007-08-30T20:25:00.000+01:00

Mark keeps the home fires burning with this review of kid 606. (Photo by Gusset)

Last Friday was a big night for Gigs in Dublin, with Battles, Chris Clark, and Kid 606, all billed. It was to The Mighty Kid 606 for me who was supported by Irelands finest Herv and new boi Creator.

For those who are familiar with 606 they will know that he is as versatile as he is spanner bendingly mental, from the beautifully organic ambient sounds of Resilience to the banging electro of Pretty Girls Make Raves, the fever dream of glichy sampling that is The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You The Fucking Jams, and the twisted bounce of Oh So Now You ****ers Want To Dance, and many stupid, brilliant, and beautiful sounds in between. There are also a few free mixes of his, banging around, with one in particular making me incontinent with joy.

Heavy on the bass.

It was for these reasons that Id been looking forward to this gig for quiet a while. I got my ticket early as there seems to be quiet a appetite for this kind of music in Dublin at the moment, if you look for instance at the crowd at any of the Kaboogie gigs over the last six months.

Fire by Night were the promoters, who are new to my ears but their myspace states that the two people behind it have been promoting independent music for years.

I would have taught the logical place to have this would be the Temple Bar Music Centre but with that undergoing restructuring at the mo then the reasonably large area and downanddirtyness of Kennedys would have suited, but for whatever reason the gig went ahead in the Village with an early start (7:30 people) a very unfortunate combination in my books.

This as well as the other gigs going on that night must have contributed to the surprisingly small and in the most cases subdued crowd that turned out, unfortunately I missed Creators set entirely, (did anyone see him? How was it)?

But caught Herv, who played a excellent live set, doing his best to get the mainly muted audience wiped into a frenzy and he was well received with a shriek of joy going up from those in the front when he dropped his gameboy-core anthem "Party Gaff", from 2001's Customers.

The pockets of mentalists at the front gradually expanded into pools as the night went on, until eventually, approaching the end of the kid 606s set, there was about 40 people up the front dancing like they were selling hammers. Kid 606 really went ofF in parts but the set seemed stilted with it never really descended into that twisted reverie that I expected.

As a result of the early start, small and muted crowd, and patchy performance in my opinion this gig was less than the sum of its own parts.

We were turfed out at 11pm so that the village could get the club ready for the nightly barn dance. The small crowd drifted of into the nighT, some going to Clark, with scattered reports coming back that it was good at best. Off I was to McGurners which was hosting two sound systems Duplo (DnB/Dubstep) and Headmelt (?), cant tell you what it was like as I succeeded in not remembering arriving or leaving or anything in between, but sure apparently it was a grand old time.

Anyway I still love ya Kid 606,

And for anyone who missed this gig or who would like to get another taste in the near future and is willing to make the pilgrimage (that is not a pun) it would appear from his myspace that he is playing at Bangface in London on the 12 October, as is DJ Ruptures according to hisspace, a line-up not to be sneezed at. I couldn't find any info for this on the Bangface's website but in fairness I gave up after 5 minutes as the flashing lights and retarded music was making my head hurt.

P.S. Oh at the end of the gig the promoters came out and apologised for the early start and said to hold on to the stubs form the gig (mine had absconded by then, sure who was to no) as it would get you in free to “an exciting event” in the not too distance future, so expect something similar from the guys soon I guess.

Soot!

A System That Lets People Live In Shit

2007-08-15T07:27:00.000+01:00

A Review of Planet of the Slums (Verso 2006) by Mike Davis.

In the mega-cities of the global south, massive slums and squatter settlements have shattered modernity’s optimism with an unprecedented Dickensian squalor - now for the first time in our history the urban population of the earth outnumbers the rural. Planet of The Slums is Marxist belligerent Mike Davis’ attempt to map our world's breakneck urbanization and the impact of this watershed.

Historically he explains how once European colonialism resisted urban migration with its threat of fostering an anti-imperialist solidarity straight out of the Battle of Algiers, but now there is a staggering 400 cities with a population of one million while in 1950 there were only 86. Famine and debt, civil war and counter insurgency were the most "ruthlessly efficient levers of informal urbanization" in the fifties and sixties. Then from the seventies IMF structural adjustments tore away even the dream of third world states’ playing a role in housing provision.

As the most dominant alternative to public housing we Davis runs us through a topology of slum forms. Presented with the familiar “hand me down” of western inner city housing, the pirate urbanization of squatting and renters in invisible property markets. Finally we are confronted with the nightmarish figure of the permanent refugee camp such as Gaza on “the pariah edges” of the mega-city.

In Davis’ view, the very organization of these urban spaces has become a theatre for the play of class; sometimes its beautification drives; sometimes criminalisation. Poor people dread international events such as the Seoul 2008 Olympic games, that justify land grabs and mass evictions. Using criminalising myths that obscured their potential as resistance centres, Argentina’s generals determined to destroy the villas miserias of Buenos Aires on their return to power in 1976.

Davis explains that the class politics of urban space are best symbolized in sci-fi-esque“off-worlds” like Alphaville in Sao Paulo; heavily militarized private suburbs constructed by a super rich connected to global networks of wealth and ignorant of localized poverty. On the surface of the more mundane everyday, there is vastly differentiated access to simple infrastructure like roads and electricity - or statistics on who ends up dead in traffic accidents, predicted by the WHO to be the third largest killer of the poor by 2020.

The ecology of slums is a dangerous one too. Terms like “classquake” come to designate just who bears the brunt in natural disasters like Turkey in 1999 or man-made environmental disasters like Bhobal chemical plant. More metaphorically, in cities like Kinshasa with its population of 10 million and no waterborne sewage treatment, capitalism quite happily leaves whole swathes of humanity living in shit.

Snapping heavily at the “soft imperialism” of NGOs, Davis rushes on the failure of their talk of democratization, self-help and participation, to highlight how they diminish grassroots mobilization and increase corrupt elites. Tearing into market based solutions that celebrate “boot strap capitalism” and a small business led “transubstantiation of poverty into capital,” he describes how such ideology dissolves self-help networks essential to the survival of the very poor.

What bothers Davis most is how contrary to traditional visions of urbanization, capitalism has created “a surplus humanity” excluding billions from its labour markets and leaving them to an informal bare survivalism that defies traditional visions of class. In the absence of the left, Pentecostal Christianity and political Islam weave new social solidarities but the social technologies these religious forms leave often breed nihilistic terror. Of course there are other models such as the indigenous organizations of El Alto that provided the back bone to Bolivia’s resource wars.

As he explains in his conclusion, US military think tanks have their own take on this dose of neo-liberal reality, with crash courses in how to fight under slum conditions in an “asymmetric combat” that literally goes through walls instead of using winding streets. Haunted by this lurking counter-insurgent terror, Planet of the Slums merely provokes and prepares the reader with a preliminary over-view for Davis’ next project, with its promised leaps of scale between global warming, slum life and a future of resistance to capital.

Vidiot: Call Centre The Movie

2007-08-10T21:38:00.000+01:00

After starting a new job in a call centre I was pretty entertained to come across Call Centre The Movie, a short independent movie made I suppose, by some Indian Film makers - it strips away the telephone lines to look at life inside a fictional call centre in Delhi and the chaos that ensues when too many calls come in.

Driving along a similar vein I've recently added Chetan Bhagat's One Night @The Call Centre to my immediate reading list - it's the tale of a story told to a bunch of weary train passengers about romance, obsession and a phone call from God in another Indian call centre.

At the moment I am preparing a course on working class fiction for the Anarchist Free University in Toronto - you can expect a stream of posts on it - and am curious as to whether there is more fiction using call centres as a back drop, giving their massive role in the global economy at the moment - it'd be odd that fiction would ignore them, imagine a 19th century fiction without the mine and inner city poor. So I throw the floor open to you to fill me in, are there more out there?

Modeselektor At Remedy On November First

2007-08-08T07:13:00.000+01:00

Someone from Remedy dropped a comment here saying the mighty Modeselektor are playing Remedy on November 1st. Ye Dublin bastards are spoilt.

In Me Ears 2: Tasc The Spaceballer

2007-08-08T00:30:00.000+01:00

Tasc is a Toronto based DJ, that rips mid sections through cheesy melodic dancefloor fillers with the bounce of baltimore club stutters . I had the good fortune to come across him tearing through a killer set at about five thirty in the evening at the otherwise dour recent World Electronic Music Festival in Bumfuck, Ontario.

With only about four people dancing, we ended up being the lucky recipients of a nicely pressed, gate fold sleeve CD edition of a promo mix he uses to get money paying gigs - a calling card if you will.

Ye peasants can make do with the Zshare version of the mix, download at will and don't let that freak like Paris Hilton track inflict too much damage on your ass.

Hopefully in the next week or two I'll get the second installment of my own summer mix series online.

Interview: Vomito Attack On The Streets of Buenos Aires.

2007-08-06T17:20:00.000+01:00

Time flies when you are sitting on your hole. Nearly a year ago I made a short trip to Argentina and was pretty taken aback at the highly developed street art culture my eyes were left to devour all around the city. You can have a taste of it from a large Flickr gallery I created to store the photos I took. Sometime after returning I contacted one of the collectives involved in putting this art up and got this interview down through the auld email.

Who are Vomito Attack and how did you guys come into being?

We began processing ideas after seeing the 9/11 attacks in New York City, 2001. After that we arrived in Buenos Aires in December and the crisis exploded. Without any possibilities of work possibilities, no money and a lot of free time - the project started growing. At first we did cut and pastes from newspapers and magazines changing the meaning of the contained information. Then we decided to use the streets as our main canvas, so we translated all that information to stencils and went out to paint.

Where's the name come from?

The name comes from how we recycle images, ideas and information. No fucking copyright exists for us. And also it's a peaceful and good way to get out all the shit that makes us sick.

A lot of the art I saw across Buenos Aires really seemed to be influenced by the radical politics prevalent during the economic troubles of 2001/02 - do you think that when the middle classes were out vandalising banks a space was created for street artists to put their work up on the walls of the city too?

Of course that was a big step to do whatever in the city, people were painting and destroying banks during the day, under the nose of the police - so at night it was easier to paint and do what you wanted on the streets.

During that time the city was in complete chaos, with a little bit of anarchy in the air.

Have you ever faced any hassle from the police when engaged in the creation of street art?

Yes - but just now beginning in 2007 - not before. In one week we had two incidents with police. During the second incident they made us erase what we painted. The problem now is that we are in an electoral year, both presidentials and major cith elections. And also we have a growing number of tourists coming to BA, so the city should look clean. Now in San Telmo we have a cop on every block.

What was the 'Vote PCM' campaign all about and where did you get the idea for it?

Political parties used to promote their candidates with "paintings" - using lime for the paint - which is very cheap. At the begining of the democracy in 1983 and during the eighties, people who painted the walls were all volunteers but from the nineties on it became a paid job. It's still the cheapest way to make political advertising.

Two years ago, we started the VOTE P.C.M. campaign, on top of the same walls, using the same font but changing the color (because every party has a representative colour)we propoused to vote POWER, CORRUPTION AND LIES. (Poder. Corrupción. Mentiras).

Most of the art I came across seemed to be located in and arond the Plaza de Dorrego? Are there any other areas I should have peeled my eyes in?

Yes! There´s a lot of street art around the city - but the main hoods are San Telmo, Palermo, Congreso y Abasto. Also we saw several stencils in others states of Argentina, like Córdoba, Bariloche, Mar del Plata and Entre Ríos. Thanks to the Internet!
Is there much of a street art network across South America?

Not really. We have kind of Latin American version of the Wooster Collective, which is very useful to connect with others latin american artists. But in fact we (in bs.as.) received more visits from U.S. and Europe artists than from Latin and South America.

Is there any over lap between traditional writers/bombers and newer artists influenced by stencil and sticker work?

I don´t think so. There´s not many graffitti artists in Bs.As., spray cans are expensive here. Stencil is much more rebel in content than graffitti. The conection between both are spray cans and the streets as medium to express.

A lot of the statues of military figures and statesmen from Argentinian history in Buenos Aires were splashed with red paint or had stenciled texts about imperialism at their base. When was this done and how come the state never washed it off?

During the 90´s stencil was only used in demonstrations and by a few artists. After 2001 crisis become a very strong way to show ideas. The Internet is the most used tool now. The way through we received information from the outside world.

Many are fascinated by the Latin American tradition of murals - do you guys take any influence from this background?

Not at all. But the city has many murals, all of them make it with permission. We never ask for permission.

Aside from political pieces, many of the street art works I saw suggested a strong counter culture in Buenos Aires. Is this a fair reading and what form does it take?

Argentina has a very strong history of anarchist activism. Lots of italian inmigrants came here and spread anarchist ideas during the past century. We´ve an interesting background. And streets always were the better place to put the ideas.

Jawa: Burroughs With A Cheap Laptop

2007-08-01T22:59:00.000+01:00

Some people obsess over William Burroughs because he got rancid on amphetamines, sello- taped pages together in a constant machine gun like feed into his type writer and churned out nonsense that he would cut and paste randomly back together.

Well there's nothing too random about Jawa - it's an attempt to make coherent audio from video imagery, using cut up techniques. Every sound you hear in a Jawa piece can be traced to a visual element on the screen. Remember that Coldcut track Timber from what seems like aeons ago, full of angsty pained mother Earth imagery and an SOS beep bent to the will of chainsaw chugs? That's a pretty good exposition of the technique.

One of the other Irish blogs recently linked to Biz's Beat of the Day by Skeeter, a Toronto resident and speed-bass mucker. Here I bring you some more examples of Jawa.

Coldcut - Timber (You Tube)
Nwodtlem - Blondes Have More Coke (YouTube)
Skeeter - Untitled (YouTube)
Shinjiseiko - Destro Tokyo (YouTube)

Glasto Sunday Report: Hard To Get Into and Even Harder To Get Out Of!

2007-07-03T17:16:00.000+01:00

What a way to start your day.

Shuffling around to the very nice gypsy sounds of Forty Thieves Orkestar and suddenly one of the five or so people dancing has collapsed. Great hardly up out of bed and I get to see some one die. She's twitching and very pale - her boyfriend is screaming to her stay with him, the securities are running and walkie talkieing. All is well though within a minute or two she's back up and talking and able to take a sip of water - doctors arrive in about 8 minutes (which I thought was pretty excellent given the mud etc).

Myself and Wattser wander of around Glasto central shopping area - got the free daily guide and confirmed there would be direct coaches outa there on Monday morning.

We get back to the Jazz stage for an Australian outfit called Ganga Giri. This seems to be another band relying on the trusty crowd-pleasing format of ethno cheese, rapping and drum machines. It seems sooo, sooo easy in the hands of Bondo or the likes of Buraka Som Sistema from last night. But it quickly appears that misapplied it can bomb and bomb very badly - these guys were terrible.

Towards the end I formulated the theory that they were in fact a small hard right wing group who had set up the band as a deliberate attempt to destroy the remains of aboriginal culture through generating comically awful piss take music.

The rain returns.

Sticking with the Jazz area and the next up where a frentic Japanese jazz combo calling themselves the Soil and Pimp Sessions These fellas where astonishingly talented and crowd hypers par excellence. Quickly we all found ourselves jumping around and roaring soil soil at the top of our lungs. Full marks for the complicated “brass off” between the trumpet and sax men and the crazy “bezz style” band leader in the pork pie hat.

Nothing would do me now but to catch a bit of CSS (Cansei de Ser Sexy) on the Other Stage.

These guys are tired of being sexy (I know it can be a pain like). Personally I doubt I could get tired of watching miss lurve fox changing from really over the top cat suit to even more over the top cat suit.

In the end for my money they were completely overwhelmed by the other stage, very, very bad sound and their own alcohol consumption - though it was a good natured drunkenness which had them charmingly falling around, dropping mikes and generally generating confusion.

Still and all they still managed to knock out pretty decent versions of Lets make love and music is my hot hot sex.

Off to the dance area to meet mate Simon, charming wife Caroline and Posse for some faffing. Bondo's time had being switched so headed for the wonderful roots area for Ariwa records supreme Mad Professor The Prof and the soundman were immediately at variance as the first baseline sends the speakers shaky with distortion. The crowd in here were lovely helped out in no small measure by the ferocious skunk that the Brits love so well. I found I got quite a good buzz just wandering and sniffing the weed-saturated air. Mad prof was excellent as were a couple of younger singings to his label (a girl singing and too really young rappers)- proper deep, deep dub with modern touches. A massive standing ovation and demands for more, which seemed to take them totally by surprise.

Back in the dance lounge Erol Aiken is laying down a bombardment of that cheesy breakbeat house style which some people rather weirdly refer to as electro. A crowd of insane mongers is spilling out from all round the tent and into the mud - it's the best crowd reaction I've seen so far but not really my style of stuff. After a lot of toing and foring Bondo de Role leap onto the stage.

What a fucking insane gig.

Think three cats tied up in a bag of sugar but about to be thrown into the river.

They purr mewl, bite and fight.

“Meet me after school and I'll beat you like guerrilla”

Or how about this for an intro

“This is a romantic song, this one is for you and you and you - this is a song about sharing cock”

Over the course of 45 minutes the small audience of maybe 100 or folks witness

Outrageous cod diva posses - with winkin!

Simulated “riding” from almost every position

Repeated attempts to tear of clothes!

Live biting and licking sessions

A three person piggyback ride

A wheelie mud rubbing and throwing session

A stage invasion by

All of CSS
2. A giant cat
3. A bearded man in a wonderful gold lame dress
4. All of Erol Alkan and his crew

Surely there are rules governing this much fun in a non built up area

While all of this is going on the three of them manage to keep perfect timing on all beats and rhymes over a stew of beats from Kraftwerk, Daft Punk, Europe's Final countdown (oh yeah). Salt and Peppa, Summer Loving from Grease and various baile funk loops of their own devising. Is it rock and roll or simply shouting over thieved beats - I wouldn't care to speculate!

There is really not much point in crapping on much further it was superb.

I got briefly diverted to the cabaret stage in the circus area which was really nice and theatrical and there witnessed Four Poofs and a Piano (very funny) and irish crazy comic Andrew Maxell (very, very, very funny) - then repaired back to the tent and kidded myself that I could sleep for a while!

For the evening back to the Jazz Stage - a few pints of Perry pear cider and a bit of John Fogarty, then a long gap as Rodrigo y Gabriela were having technical problems. Technical problems!??! How can one have fecking technical problems with two acoustic guitars! Oh no I need my “lucky” plectrum.

Any way lots of chats with random strangers - Glasto is brilliant for this and kicks lumps out of ATP or any muso style festival in this regard. Eventually they started and I was glad to have seen em live - though I half missed it as the chat was too good. I thought the Pink Floyd stuff was silly.

The rest of the night - total waste of time. Drifted back to the Glade on the half hearted belief that a cancelled Hex static gig was going to be rescheduled - not a chance. This was a slow and painful walk against thousands of punters coming down from the main stage. But the attempt to get home was the real bastard. Traffic flow was directed all over the camp - Lost Vagueness and the mucky hill with our tents was more or less out of bounds due to (yawn) “surprise” gigs by Madness and that dribbling idiot Fat Boy Slim (the billionth “surprise” gig of his career - one punter retold an incident at Glasto one year where she was just standing minding her own business and a tank drove up next to her - out pops Fat Boy Slim to pull a “surprise” gig!) - a long long treck home and a deadly fall in the mud - left me pretty much spent for the day…

Part 3 Sunday (alert alert - boring section follows!)

Sunday dawns with rain and low moral. Myself and Paul sit in the nice Lost Vagueness crepe joint and speculate about staying there all day.

It has this advantage - dryness.

Finally a plan is roughly hatched to take in a few bands in our local hood are but that treks to the likes of the Go Team or Cold Cut are not happening - Dame Shirley Bassey is out - diamante wellies or not!

We bum around the Bimble Inn in the Avolon field and the sun comes out and its quite warm and there's mud wrestling which leaves me quite happy. Also they have Jameson, which leaves me even happier. Ah the simple pleasures!

The first band we dragged ourselves along to were a quite diverting mix of folk and electronic and, almost, rave betimes. They were called Tunng - I thought they were good - particularly liked the homemade bass thingy with the giant elastic band played by a lad they'd only just met - bespeaks confidence but seems like such instant collaborations are quite common in the “folk world”

The band I was most looking forward to were Tinariwen. OK y'all know the deal - a gun toating rebel band of fierce nomadic Tuareg desert tribesmen, no place to call there own - trained in Moammar al-Qadhafi's camps - traded guitars for AK47s and so on. They are ferociously good - playing a low key but gradually building set. They sounded something like seven Rory Gallaghers on a blissed out mellow buzz of a Sunday afternoon- except for the scarfs and robes of course! Very blues rock driven but yet subtly African in a way couldn't quite put yer finger on - OK maybe it was the chanting! Thoroughly enjoyable.

After a bit of a gap me favourite gypsy crooners Beirut are on. They were lucky by all accounts after a fierce taxi fuckup left them almost in the middle of nowhere. I looked the off kilter lutes and ukuleles and the lovely, lovely melancholy trumpet sounds - quite as good as their album. The lead singer is a bit mad though! Finally for the Jazz Field Amp Fiddler - I dunno it sounded OK if you just swayed around clicking your fingers and occasionally muttered “sophisticated” to yourself (give it a go - works for most jazz funk!) It was quite slick, very slick' in fact, but, at the end of the day, not shockingly original or innovative - but he worked the small wet crowd very well…

Darkness descending and for some crazy reason myself and Paul decided to take a gander at Kila - who of course you can see any old day in Dublin! But they were (in fairness)on top form! I've only seen them twice before I think but it was a mesmerising set in a gradually filling Avalon stage. Oh the percussion, the harmonies - the intensity, the tunes, the “progging” out (very, very prog) - the battering with percussion (at one stage every one of them was simultaneously battering something and signing!) I especially enjoyed that gorgeous tune “Glan na scamill amach as mo chroi” (clean the cloud out from my heart! It works I tell ya!) The crusties began to filter in - it was fun. The rain resumed its tiny patters…

After this (for some strange reason) nothing would do us but to go and see a weird band combining Elizabethan courtly music, traditional medivial ballads and spacey seventies rock. They're called Circulus. Sounds like it could be awful doesn't it? Sounds like the “outer limits” part of pulling yer wire magazine gone mental eh?!?

No actually they were well worth the horrific attempts to slide up the muddy slope of park and the standing around in the rain - because they were actually extremely entertaining and certainly fairly tongue in cheek - me-lord.

After that wandered home via the upper parts (Stone circle, Green field etc) there by avoiding any crazed mobs from the Who and the Chemical brothers! After that it was huddling in tents listening to a seven hour down pour, packing up tents in pouring rain, standing freezing for three hours before escaping to Bristol.

From what I understand we were among the lucky ones. Glasto - hard to get into and even harder to get out off!

Glasto 2007 Review 2: A Solo Pilgrimage Across the Wastes

2007-06-28T19:24:00.000+01:00

OK back to Friday

My next venture was a solo pilgrimage across the wastes to see the most talented member of the Wainwright family – the mighty Martha.
No I could not persuade any other person to go to this!
The sun came along with me though.
Hello sun
Fuck off Krossie!

I took a great liking for the new Park Area – programmed by Michael’s daughter Emily Eavis, in general, I have to say.
Very few folks hanging around for this one.
Bean searbach we say in Irish:
A bitter woman.
But can she weave the straw of heart break into the shadowy, spun gold of gold that will make yer heart ache?
YES she can.
Without doubt the most intense gig of the festival – almost too intense betimes
Before things get underway she insists on not using a radio mike
And the roadie snaps to - instantly inserting the old fashioned lead.
Possibly cos he knows only too fucking well “that she’s half crazy” as some other bard once put it.
Forty minutes of cussing, and singing like a beautiful, badly damaged but still flutterin’ angel and she has another roadie rescue the joint rolled and thrown just short by a kindly fella in the crowd. She (bizarrely!) sticks it into the neck of her guitar lights it and launches into a crowd pleasing rendition of ya Bloody, muthafucking asshole.
She tells us she’s getting married soon .
44% of marriages end in divorce.
They’re the lucky ones according to Bob Dylan’s brilliant radio show!
– Oh goody - so much new material…
Now a lot of folk don’t like Martha.
Hey that’s fine - music is very subjective.
However.
It moves me to actual physical wrath when I hear people say she can’t sing!
Certain things are easily verifiable and one of those is that her vocal range and depth and intonation are nothing short of astonishing.
But maybe she just jumps from one end of the scale to another a little too fast - she gets thrown purely on the number and scale of her own transitions.
Or, maybe, there is just a physical limit to the amount of pain that one human voice can carry.

After some tasty scran (don’t let anyone say different there is a lot a lot of excellent food in Glastonbury)
While I munch I listen to schlomo
He does human beat-boxing pretty well.
Not much more to say!

I find myself somewhat mysteriously wandering back to see brother Rufus on the other stage. In a lovely striped suit he delivers some beautiful arrangements and I have to say I enjoyed it a lot. I am even more pleased when he summons his sister up for a fairly ragged version of Jerusalem – but hey who hasn’t heard that number just too many times!
They make a good team though – mannered, trained, beautiful voice v crazy, raw beautiful voice and I like the way he looks out for her.

Back to the Park for its official opening ceremony and surprise (!) guest Lily Allen.
As if her vapid, semi literate, vacous whining wasn’t enough (and it surely is - I’ll give ya al-fresco ya dozy cow!)
– MIA has been cancelled to make way for her.
Jaysus – sickening disappointment.
More about “surprise” guests later
Death to surprise guests!
Meself and Paul bleed off and move down agin’ the tide as the masses rush up from the other stage.

…To find ourselves in the Glade.
Oh ho - a discovery!
While Bondo De Role have been whipping it up for the masses in Brazil – the imperialist motherland has been working on its own version of Baile Funk. These Portuguese geezers were called Buraka Som Sistema. They were utterly infectious fun with a roundy black female rapper/ranter/singer/grinner and a skinny young fella doing the most scarily acrobatic dancing ever – cartwheels head spins – you name it!
Trick of the day persuading us all to crouch in the mud and then leap up in the air in a coordinated fashion.
Mind you get a good class of punter in Glasto who take these things in their stride!

I repaired back to the tent for some sleep and then Lost Vagueness and Bjork – who did a decent stadium gig with really nice versions of some of her best stuff.
No Anthony from the Johnsons though. But there was also an astonishing green laser with a range of, jaysus, 2 million kilometres maybe.
I can see for miles and miles says a texter…
Then I went into a frenzied Jack Daniels trip which finally knocked me out at about 3 am.
Such a perfect day
and It hadn’t rained since four in the afternoon!

Glasto 2007 Review 1: The Mud Scientist Prelude

2007-06-28T18:54:00.000+01:00

After providing us with a chemically enhanced review of the 2004 festival, our roving raver Krossie is back with some more installments in his Glastonbury romance. All photos are pulled from this deadly Flickr collection.

Michael Eavis: Well what have you got for us in the way of mud this year my bofin-tastic friend?

Mad Scientist: Very Vell - If a vay can be found, in which, through radical agitation of the slippy mud – a partial transition can be achieved to gloopy mud we can create ze new hybridised super mud which will first of all cause zeee slip sliding avay but also trap zee victim by zeee vellies achieving a miraculous double torment for zem!
M.E: Could it last?
MS: Ze super mud vill be highly unstable at a mol ecul ar level BUT perhaps a unique combination of ze persistent light rain with occasional short clearances it can be maintained as zeee mtestable complex… But also veeeeee vill be needing zeee many feet with wellies to go tramp, tramp, tramp and then pound and pound and pound like this, like this, like this AHA HA ha ha ha ha!
M.E. That’s my knee you’re hitting
M.S: Sorry…Its just recall ze good old daze – free reign for experiments many vict…subjects for da procedures….ja ja JA! Vell
M.E: Vell??
M.S: Vell can ve proceed with these procedures – vit this new a different type of experiment ?
M.E: Yes….I do believe it could well be possible…YARR

That’s nearly all from me on the mud. I could bleat and moan and make comparisons with the battle of the Somme or Napoleons exit from Moscow, maybe the last chopper out of Saigon 1974. But this is to be mostly about the music of which there was much – a lot of it pretty decent too! However for a brilliant general article on the buzz of Glastonbury and what it involves try Charlie Brooker’s cynical but very accurate Guardian review.

Part One

(Warning contains cursin’ like- recommended for childish readers, copyleft but maybe put in a link to my Myspace.

6.15 am – Persistent rain since 4 has killed of the last sound system – thank jah for small blessings – sleep comes…

9.30 am – Awake to an interesting roasting tent scenario
– Mr Sun has arrived?
(boffin laughing in the distance…)

10 am – 12 pm rain pours like there is no tomorrow.
Strangely there never seems to be any correlation between the weather and the appearance of the sky in Glastonbury – impossible to call it – experimental weather, mental weather!

Adopt random wander strategy -
First up Tor Dogs play their guilty pleasure cover versions on the Jazz World stage
Of course comrade Nietzsche assures us that there can be only innocence in the taking (and even giving) of pleasure.
In this case full marks Nietzsche – stinking Neil Diamond covers remain stinking Neil Diamond covers – what ever you chose to call them.
Pleasure and guilt definitely ride smoother in separate vehicles methinks.

In the new Park Stage which the younger Eavis is later to officially open - the Ralph band make a tolerable racket up to a point.
The sun arrives back.
Upgrade opinion to “decentish 70s mush”.
The sun goes
– So do I.

Wandering to the dance area for two bands I want to see the weirdly monikored !!! (chk chk chk apparently is how ya say it) and eighties acid pioneer A Guy Called Gerald.
Catch the Cribs en pasant by the other stage.
Shite!
First wander around the tents to sample random DJs.
Ok break-beat seems to rule the British dance scene for now.
Punters already pleasantly mashed going by them eyes!
Crap dance music proves yet again vastly superior to crap guitar music.

Whoops - Me boots after 5 years service spring a leak – rush off for girly wellies which serve very well for the rest of the festival. Dump boots.
Glasto tip wellies >>> any other footwear including yer sophisticated 2000 quid ultra hiking boots.

They are the dogs for squelching through any conditions.

Dance tent East.
The DJ playing when I get in is called caged baby.
He should have been
(as in shoulda been caged - baby – ah ya get my drift?!)
Of he goes and out hop
!!!
Its 4 pm for you guys but its 4 am for us…they tell us…
Jaysus these guys turn out to be quite a proposition – a 28-32 legged limbed and lithe, gay funk monster from straight outa New York city – they rock out from the first chord.
The gadging about of the gangly lead singer in his massive yello wellies and his disreptutable buddy with the weird beard are a joy to behold.
He seems to have at least four extra vertebrae and be convinced that his mike should function as a spare portable cock.
Some what in the Rapture/LCD sound system mode they duck and dive around the stage like the Happy Mondays circa 1989

on crack

“tell your friends out there we’re the best mutha fookin band in the world”
he tells us bigging up their next night’s show in the Glade
(even better it was too I’m told!)
Well there ya go - now I have
– who could argue with him!?
A great start.
The sun comes out

Off across the mud track to the slightly smaller Dance Tent West…
Now who here has heard of a Guy Called Gerald?
Hmmm not many…
Who owns an early 808 state album?
Or a ground breaking piece of ambient Drum and Bass called Black Secret Technology?
To be honest I was shocked he was even playing.
I was shocked there were so many people.
But I wasn’t too shocked that it was an incredibly good gig!
His style still has much of that eighties funky percussive groove to it. In the daze before rave when house was techno and everything was subtle, funky and based on locked grooves. The tunes proceed by way of crunchy but slightly wonky industrial baselines, tinny acid squelches weaving in and out and pin point hits of 808 drum machine. The final weapon is the very occasional use of awesomely beautiful vocal samples.
He’s not adverse to throwing in lines from Detroit Grand Pubah’s sandwiches, Boogie wonder land and even an awesomely treated and isolated sample of Sylvesterout of the 1970s classic “you make my feel mighty real”?
This was the best moment for me as he froze out the entire track except that one highly treated highly pitched voice filling the tent with its
“feeeeel real, feeeeel real, feeeeel real, feeeeel real” - beat kicks in – frenzied crowd response. Finishes with a very silly version of 1988’s chart hit Voodoo Ray.
John Peel would,without doubt, have been somewhere at the back, just smiling and nodding his head…

Ah John Peel ya had to remind me!

Rant follows

(What’s the fucking deal with the John Peel stage eh eh?.

What

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT!?!?

Drab indy smindy bollix from bands who’s names all start with “the”
Is this what I listened up for every night on my tiny radio with the crap medium wave signal and the telly smacking it around into a whistly mess?!?!
I don’t think so.
And here’s the news flash
YO
–Yeah John Peel did Occasionally play the Wedding present
He ALSO played The Bhundu Boys, Bikini Kill, Napalm death, Mantronix, Public Enemy, Tackhead and any form of minimal techno, acid, drum and base and gabba gabba break core noise terror he could get his mits on!
The fucking Peel stage was sickening insult to the mild mannered Liverpudlian and everything he stood for in the breadth, depth and range of his courageous musical meanderings.
Who ever or what ever fuck wit put together this atrocity exhibition should be fuckin lead out to a place not far from this court and there…..

Krossie is taken away up to the healing field where a team 17 trained, battle hardened psychologists fail to talk him down for over 45 hours)

Rant ends

OH wait, wait

NO

NOOOOOO NOOO no noooo noooo NoONoooooooo…

I didn’t see any of kasabian, Maximo Park, Lily Alen, Babyshambles, The Arcade Fire, the fookin Manics (jay sus wept!), The Who, The Killers, The Kooks, The Gossip, The Kaiser Chiefs, The Twang, The New Pornographers, The Artic Oasis beatles Monkeybabywipes (what ever!) or, indeed, anything on the Pryamid stage ha ha
Why?
Because they are bloody useless in my view that’s the why
–so there!
Is it because you is a lonely snobby muso git then?

Em…

Hot Docs Interview: Moore and Me

2007-06-16T21:30:00.000+01:00

Again I think some version or other of this appeared in the latest Totally Dublin. This unedited interview contains a couple of hundred extra words, it's probably littered with spelling errors too. The photo to the left shows Rick Caine and his co-Director Debbie Melnyk, and the second captures a Saturday afternoon rush during the festival.

Rick Caine has been running the gauntlet of controversy across the documentary festival circuit this summer with his latest production Manufacturing Dissent. Sirring the pot first at South By South West and then Toronto’s Hot Docs, it's an acerbic look at the work of Michael Moore. Intended to explore what made a cine idol tick, along this journey Caine and his co-director Debbie Melnyk discovered that behind Moore's everyman malcontent facade lies a ruthless technique of self-creation. One that has left reeling friendships and burnt bridges, never mind a body of work stained by half truths bent for effect and out of context interview splicing. Caine, now based in Toronto where we caught up with him at the recent Hot Doc's Festival, is far from a neo-con detractor. His work is less a critique of Moore's politics than of his method, he simply believes power shaking documentarians must cling to a truth ethic or risk blowing their own foundations, and worse that of those sharing their views.

Do you think the world of documentaries has benefited from phenomenon that was Michael Moore at blockbuster level?

Yes, of course. Documentaries now play side by side with formulaic Hollywood fare in many cities and suburbs right across the world now. Michael Moore has played no small part in this documentary renaissance. His breakthrough documentary Roger & Me was the first time that a documentary was released outside of the traditional "art house" documentary ghetto. Of course wider audiences are interested in these kinds of films, but Hollywood has traditionally had the distribution channel sown up.

How has Hollywood sown up the distribution channel and can documentaries do much to challenge this?

At any given time 92% of the films showing across the world are American Hollywood films. There is of course much yet till to be done to break this monopoly and documentaries have no small role to play in this regard. And for documentaries, as a genre, it is ironically the best of times the worst of times. Michael Moore is amongst those on the best of time side of the equation.

His last film, Fahrenheit 9/11, had a production budget of US$6 million. The film grossed $125 million in the US and about $220 million worldwide. By any objective measure a remarkable and unprecedented accomplishment. But I also say that it is the worst of times because Hollywood still so thoroughly dominates the box office that we are currently in a situation where one can go to film festivals and see remarkable documentaries but all-too-frequently they will not be coming to a theater near you. Instead we will continue seeing Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, and on and on.

So while documentaries are struggling to escape the ghetto, Hollywood continues to fill theaters with entertaining, unchallenging, vacuous fare that audiences can choose to see or not go to the movies. It is still rare where there is any other option. But Michael Moore is among a select group of documentary filmmakers who are making progress in changing this dynamic. And we who believe think that once audiences get a taste of something else out there, that genie won't be put back in that bottle again.

So what is it that documentary making does better than your standard Hollywood fare?

One thing documentary filmmaking does incredibly well is that it can share the human experience of one person with other human beings, bringing us all closer together and strengthening our human bond. From a PR standpoint documentaries are a nightmare because PR is interested in only a one-sided truth, the white lie. Whereas documentary filmmaking aims to expose lies and not make them. But PR and advertising are interested in only the positive spin: Toxic sludge is good for you, light cigarettes don't cause cancer and you can eat almost nothing but bacon and lose weight (the Atkins diet).

And because we live in a world full of these white lies and one-sided truths, fuelled by big budget advertisers and well funded special interests we are all hungry (starved!) for the unvarnished truth. I have a friend that says the truth ain't couth but as we all have heard it can also set you free.

What is it that makes a documentary such a potent political tool as a purveyor of truths?

Immediacy, portability and the power of images. The medium, documentary filmmaking, is inherently powerful. Marshal McLuhan said the medium is the message. We've all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this was written before the advent of the moving image. Documentary filmmakers are able to use feature filmmaking techniques to examine the messiness that is humanity, all the while with images trumping words, very powerful stuff. We don't write about the Iraq War, we take you to the front line. We don't describe the suffering of someone who has lot their son in war, we capture and then show you the experience and allow any audience to experience it first hand.

Another reason documentary filmmaking is such a powerful tool is it's portability. Al Gore can only be lecturing about the threat posed by global warming/climate change in one place at one time. But with a film his message is instantly accessible now and forever. And watching a film is a communal experience. Unlike passive Hollywood films that entertain but don't provoke thought or action, documentaries can stir the masses to action. Sometimes when documentaries end the discussion and action is just getting started.

What should documentary makers do to make sure they are using this power instead of abusing it?

Always bear in mind that no matter how passionately you feel about any given social/political issue your values are not worth selling out just to make a point or to manipulate or mislead your audience into agreeing with you. The end does not justify the means. Do you think it's wrong to lie? Then don't do it. If you think it's important to treat others the way you'd like to be treated? Then don't take interview subjects out of context.

If a filmmaker chooses to tell the truth so many of these other things take care of themselves, including using the power instead of abusing it. It is occasionally painful to adhere to strict compliance with things like decency, fairness and truth but by disregarding these kinds of restraints the filmmaker ultimately does himself, his audience and sometimes his cause a disservice.

So with Michael Moore in mind, what are the consequences of the abuse of this documentarian power?

Part of the contention of our film is that when Michael Moore lies he gives the opposition a club with which they can bash everyone on Moore's side. "See they don't care about the truth. See they don't want honest political debate." If we think that the US president lying to the American public is not the way forward, how can we believe that the solution is having the opposition lie as well. Two wrongs don't make a right.

The title of the movie is a nice play on a Chomsky book title, after this movie will your aim remain on mainstream media shenanigans as it has with Junket Whore's expose of entertainment journalists lick arse relationship to PR and the Citizen Black portrait of media baron Conrad Black's cataclysmic fall?

Our next film is going to be fiction, but still in the same vein. It's about Lester Bangs, co-founder and music critic of Creem Magazine. Now he is the polar opposite of Michael Moore. He couldn't help telling the truth, he had an almost childlike honesty and was hated by many bands because he was so honest about their music. He died of an unintentional drug overdose at age 33.

How did the movie move from being a biography of Moore to a critique?

We always hoped that Michael Moore would cooperate in our look at him. Being political fellow travellers and Canadian and we'd heard thru friends that he liked the channel we'd been commissioned by to take a look at him, CHUM Television. So when Michael Moore's people began giving us such a hard time on a certain level we couldn't believe it. It was about this same time, approximately 4 months into our filming that we really started to struggle with our original concept and we felt we were at a crossroads. We began asking ourselves are we non-fiction (documentary) filmmakers or or we just going to stick with this sort of official biography about Michael Moore?

So when we hit this fork in the road we felt that morphing the project and going a different direction felt more like the truth than our original concept. So we changed it. But I have to say this is part of what we really love about non-fiction filmmaking. If one sets out in search of a story and it turns out to be something different then you're free to follow it. When we discovered so many skeltons in the closet, we felt we had no other choice than to turn it into an examination or critique of his methods and techniques and what the implications are not just for documentary filmmaking but for society.

We realized that when Michael refused to do an interview we would also have to follow him around to try and get any footage of him and soundbites to use in the film. We didn't expect his team to be bullies. When we realized what they were doing, trying to stop us from doing our film, we thought we should include it in the film because in a way, by showing the behind the scenes of a documentary we were getting at another level of truth. We couldn't believe when we got kicked out of Kent State and we thought others would find it shocking as well. We also felt at a certain point that documentaries should expose lies and not tell them. And if they chose to lie then they are part of the problem and not part of the solution. We regard this as the crucial issue of our time. We all want to live in well functionng democracies. That in turn is dependent upon a well informed electorate. And that depends on media that chooses not to lie and mislead the public. The horrific implications of this are obvious when one looks at how FOX News covered the lead up to the Iraq War. They don't even try to hide it. Roger Ailes was the head of the republican party and then he is runningand then he is running FOX News, doesn't get any more obvious than that. Fair and balanced my ass.

Before seeing this movie people might paint you as a neo-con detractor, didn't Fox News try and use you like this only to get a swift surprise?

FOX News assumed when they read about our film that we were in agreement with their agenda, which we aren't, and they also erroniously assumed that even if we weren't political fellow travellers that they could still use us to expose Michael Moore. For them the equation is really simple: If Michael Moore is wrong then ergo we must be right.

So in the lead up to our film premiering at the SXSW Festival several FOX News shows, both TV and radio, were chasing us insisting on interviews. We didn't want FOX to own the story and so we declined all requests from them. But then once the film had premiered at SXSW and other major media outlets had done interviews with us like CNN and MSNBC we agreed to go on a FOX News show because it had the name "Live" in the title (The Live Desk with Martha McCallum or something like that.) But we were cut off in short order after I starting discussing how some major news organisations, hello FOX, were not telling the American public the full truth and how that was causing problems for democracy and I remember I heard them in the IFB I had in my ear screaming "Get that asshole off the air."

Just after they pulled the plug (we were interviewed remotely and not in their New York studios) the cameraman looked at me and said "They had a five minute segment planned, but I think it run just under two minutes." "That was my fault," I said, "Guess they didn't want to hear what I had to say." From my point of view though this was a good thing. Where the right-wing U. S. media had been all over us now the only right leaning members of the U. S. media who called was because they wanted to argue with me, which I have done on their radio programs and what not.

Hot Docs Interview and Review: Punk The Vote

2007-06-16T20:39:00.000+01:00

As that post-Seattle wave of protest fades into memory and piss poor re-enactments, one of it's lasting cultural hangovers is the activist flick. One only has to think of the cinematic vision entailed in The Corporation's systemic critique of the profit motive to see the activist flick genre done well, working as both a propagandizing tool for the politics of horizontal practice adopted by social movements in countries as disperse as Bolivia and India it also incubated Utopian hopes for the west.

Punk The Vote is Roach from Eye Steel Films meandering attempt to expose the theatrics of a Montreal political process that cared little for the poverty he experienced in his youth leading him to run in the municipal elections. He presents the audience with a rather strange exposition of anarchist politics, intimately linking them to the punk sub-culture and a youthful rebellion he himself embraced, doing every bit the disservice of a mainstream media pre-summit hatchet job.

Roach's technique is loud and brash, mostly based on the eccentricities of his ego which he constantly pushes to the fore of the movie sacrificing both serious political critique for comic interludes and up front "punk as fuck" antics that rely on a cliched anarchist aesthetic. The movie ends up being a simply executed argument for proportional representation, which Roach confuses with direct democracy.

It is only as Roach is drunk on stage at a DIY show the end of his election run do we uncover that the actual purpose of the movie was to promote the homelessnation.org site, which acts like a brilliant online soap box for the homeless.

So without purpose, the movie ends up being a very apt encapsulation of what happens when activists touch elections - they eventually drift from their original movement concern to play the hodge podge game of media whore-dom. Confusing a drift to the centre of the political spectrum with political maturity all the while insisting on their own radical merit. I expected so much more from this. Anyway, I still managed to catch up with Roach for a short interview about the movie..

Not many people in Europe will have heard of the film Squeegee Punks In Traffic (SPIT) - can you tell me something about it and how you yourself got into film making through it?

Ok... Well SPIT is the film about my life in the street. I met Daniel Cross (director of SPIT) back in 1998. He told me he was looking for a street kid to document this world (he had done "The Street: A film with the homeless" before and I knew he was a filmmaker and what kind of work he was making). So we talked and left for the civil disobedience against the MAI : Multi-lateral agreement on Investments. So I got arrested at this civil disobedience and when I got out of jail, Daniel gave me a Hi-8 camera, that became the ROACHCAM, and told me he was going to teach me film-making.

Daniel is a University teacher in film making. So we started the film around the streets. I was in the process of getting out of drugs and out of the streets and needed a passion to quit all this and find a new life. Daniel gave me this passion through film-making. If I would have never met Daniel and Mila (cameraman of SPIT) I would have been dead.

So SPIT: Squeegee Punks In Traffic, is a documentary about me, as a street junkie who finds a passion in cinema, quits drugs and get off the streets and become a filmmaker.

How does "Punk the Vote" relate to your previous film making efforts?

I don't completely understand this question (don't forget I am francophone) but PUNK THE VOTE is an evolution in my career. I did SPIT as an associate-director, then I did ROACHTRIP my first film as a director. This film was about me traveling across Canada with my friend Smash (who was in SPIT) and it is a kind of road movie/documentary... And now here I am with PTV.

PTV for me is a film that had to be made for me. I am an activist, strongly politicized and fighting against this system since I am 14 years old. So it was just a natural shift I made, but it is also the best film I made in my career. I am really proud of the political experience I had and the result: "Punk The Vote". I think I am getting better and better and it will continue that way with my next film, which is about police harassing people of the streets and the effects of jailing and criminalizing those people.

How did you conceive of the "punk the vote" campaign was it as an excuse to make a movie or was it a political idea in and of itself?

It was actually an evolution. The film I wanted to do was called: "DIY: the Montreal hardcore-punk scene" but the grants were not coming in and people who funded films in Canada were kind of scared about this film. So when I met Starbuck, he told me he ran in 2 elections and was planning on running in the next federal election (because our government was hit with a sponsorship scandal in Canada and we knew the Liberals were going out and that we were going in election). So a new idea started in my mind and then I wrote this film... I wasn't even suppose to be in front of the camera but when it comes to politics, I just can't shut up. So I went to Astral Media ( a TV broadcaster) and pitch the film, and I just jumped into the unknown world of Canadian politics (because I didn't know shit about how the Canadian electoral system worked).

Were you aware of a similar effort in the United States with quite the few underground punk bands endorsing a campaign called "Punk The Vote" during the recent 2004 election that tried to get young people out to vote?

Yes I was aware, it was called "punk voter" but was not at all inspired by that. It was inspired by Liberal party corruption and the need for electoral change.

A lot of your movies start off as one thing, for instance Punk The Vote starts as a movie about Starbuck and ends up dealing with issues of representative democracy - are you conscious of these evolutions while making the movies or do you only come upon them while editing them?

No it is all natural... It arrives that way while we shoot. Don't forget that it is documentary and not fiction... What you see happened for real. Also the fact that I fought for proportional representation of the votes is also my ideology and I was in front of camera fighting that so of course it is the big fight of the movie, it was my whole program and the film is about campaigning. But things just happened that way.

You seem to associate punk with rebellion and political radicalism, do you think it is more so than other sub-cultures and if so why?

I don't get the question).. but punk is not unknown to provocation, social denunciation and revendicate (is that a word, in French it is). So yes I will always do that and my film will always say that I guess, we are here to demand change!

The film makes plenty use of anarchistic imagery and rhetoric, but ends up as an argument for representative democracy over the traditional anarchist desire for direct democracy - how can you explain this gap between image and idea?

Huh??? I don't get it either.... I am an anarcho-Communist punk, and I believe in the people, not the power or profit. I am no politician, I am a filmmaker and an activist and I will always be there to fight against the injustice. Workers, poor and oppressed should all become one and take over this system. I believe that the working class are the deciders, and we should be the ruling class. I am no anarchist, I believe a lot in communism. That's why I am an anarcho-communist. But I really don't understand your question.

By the end of the movie you seemed quite close to the New Democratic Party, has this relationship not developed further and would the experience of electorally minded social democratic parties like New Labour in the UK and elsewhere not signal the dead end of reformism?

I still don't understand... But I had join the NDP 2 weeks ago, a year after I ran. I will never go with the party line, I will always use my freedom of speech. Even if the leader, Jack Layton tell me to shut up, I won't. We live in a democracy, and a country where freedom of speech is encouraged, so I will keep that freedom. Parties are less democratic than democracy itself. That is why I ran as an independent and that I will resign from the NDP if I am being told to shut up. I will never stop to say what I have to say and to attack my enemies, politicians!

Hot Docs: Indie Cinema Orgy

2007-06-16T05:51:00.000+01:00

The annual Hot Docs Festival took place from April 19th to 29th earlier on this year in Toronto, and some version or other of the following material may be familiar to you from coverage published in the latest Totally Dublin...

Before Morgon Spurlock's grease laden death diet and Michael Moore's spot-on vendetta against neo-conservative America were banking the big bucks as blockbusting summer successes, documentaries dealing with the hot topics of contemporary controversy were relegated to the art-house cinema and the rather infrequent silver-screen orgy of the film festival. For fourteen years now the Toronto Hot Docs festival has been setting the pace for the current explosion of socially minded documentaries, ripping through the mold to become one of North America’s largest documentary festivals.

This year it hosted over 129 films on a hectic ten day run, showcasing not just the North American but global documentary film making efforts that will filter down to the indie cinemas over the next year, or at the very least through your home broadband connection. In short, as Sean Farnel the festivals Director of Programming told me, it has “emerged from what was essentially an industry conference to one of the world’s largest documentary events.”

Compared to the quite aficionado only ambiance of most film festivals, Hot Docs is a bustling mess of crowds and queues. With over 70,000 admissions to this years assorted flicks, a "no guaranteed entry" system is compounded by the usual hesitation of buying expensive festival wide tickets. With rush lines stretched well beyond the norm at all weekend screenings, chasing seats became an adrenalinising experience all of its own.

The ground for the festival madness is laid through Toronto's envied year long indie-cinema culture, DIY theatres like the Brunswick screen three left of centre documentaries a day, leading to what Farnel terms "a very engaged, curious and open audience" in the city. Reflecting this mass documentary culture, Ron Koperdraad a coordinator for the festival over saw 250 volunteers who "mostly did it out of a love for documentaries, but also for the social reasons."

The audience award went to War/Dance, directed by Andrea Nix Fine it’s a look inside the lives of three orphans in an Ugandan displacement camp who find expression through the country’s national music and dance festival. Best International Documentary winged its way to Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken’s tale of globalisation's Losers and Winners, a close up of the dismantling of a German smelting plant and its reassembly in China’s growing industrial hubs.

The festival also featured the debut of Morgan Spurlock’s latest look at our modern consumer shopapacyalpse in What Would Jesus Buy? Hooking up with long term icon of the no-brand, counter culture Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, he documents the cack handed Christians attempt to save Christmas from commercialism.

Gary Hustwit's Helvitica, due a Candy Culture Sugar Club screening on June 28th, examines the rise of a typeface as the embodiment of post-war values and their eventual inertia, crippled at the hands of post-modern concerns, creating a social history where no one thought possible.

Film fascination with favella poverty continued in the Made in Brazil programming stream. Kiko Goifman's Acts Of Men delivered a cooly executed jaunt into the criminal economy, with the massacre of 29 people by local death squads in the Baixada Fluminense township setting the background for impulsive interviews with the power players in one neighborhood's deadly games.

This South American concern was furthered in Arturo Perez Torres' Super Amigos, a comic portrayal of the real life super heros emerging from the Mexican popular classes obsession with luche libre, a theatrical wrestling satirized in Jack Black's Nachos Libre. In the social war against crippling poverty, movement heroes like Super Barrio and Super Gay have become unique icons of dissent and community organisation, warding off both landlords and homophobes.

If one director and film at the festival highlighted the transformative role of the documentary lens it was the formerly homeless street-punk Roach Denis and Punk The Vote. Roach's own life was the subject matter of the Daniel Cross classic Squeege Punks in Traffic. Intertwining biography with a critique of a Conservative governments brutal harassment of a new generation of homeless kids earning a buck cleaning windscreens at intersections, Cross provided Roach with a route out "I was in the process of getting out of drugs and out of the streets and needed a passion to quit all this and find a new life. Daniel gave me this passion through film-making."

Ten years later Roach is a well known filmmaker retaining the conviction he picked up on the streets. "Inspired by Liberal party corruption and the need for electoral change" he examines the theatrics of a Montreal political process that cares little for the poverty he experienced in his youth and runs in the municipal elections leading to " a film that had to be made. I am an activist, strongly politicized and fighting against this system since I was 14 years old. So it was just a natural shift I made, but it is also the best film I made in my career."

Hot Docs is critically minded to the core and a series of festival panel discussions wrenched into the existential heart of the documentary method to explore interviewing technique, political power and directorial responsibility. This tension was exemplified perfectly by the ultimate buzz movie of the festival, Rick Caine's portrayal of Michael Moore in Manufacturing Dissent.

Some selected shorts by young directors featured in the Doc It Showcase are now available for viewing online.

Get Yo Ass On The Floor: Me Summer Mix

2007-06-12T21:53:00.000+01:00

So here it is, a Soundtracks for Them summer mix. With bits of baile funk, kudoro, old school rave, electro and club rap all lazily squished together with the powers of Sony Acid, so there should be something in it to satisfy one or two of you out there. Sorry about the unknown tracks, they were just things that were sitting around my computer for the past week or two, and liking them I couldn't really leave them out. I can't even remember where the hell I got them from to start with now, the Beanieman number however came from a reggaeton MP3 collection bought in Bolivia but it has no ID tags. Thanks to Nialler9 for the Kid Sister track, it's a killer.

Track Listing (71.5mb length: 39:04)

1/ Peter, Bjorn and John, Young Folks (Diplo Drums of Death Remix)
2/ Beanieman Unknown Reggaeton.
3/ Unknown Baile Funk, Impostra De Cur
4/ 2LiveCrew, Get It Girl
5/ Bondo De Role Gasolina (Buraka Som Sistema Remix)
6/ DeBonair The DJ Killer
7/ Josh Wink Higher State of Consciousness (TV Rock and Dirty South Remix)
8/ Technotronic Pump Up The Jam
9/ CSS Lets Make Love and Listen to Death From Above (SMD Mix)
10/ Yo Majesty Club Action ( Dj Paul V)
11/ Spank Rock Sweet Talk
12/ Justice Dance (Tittsworth Bmore Mix
13/ Drop The Lime Juggernaut
14/ Dj Branquinho Danca Da Maluca
15/ Kid Sister Control
16/ Thunderheist Suenos Dulces
17/ MIA Boyz
18/ Unknown Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay (Pulled from the DJ C Baltimore Mix)
19/ Lady Sovereign Hoodie (Alternative Medysne Radio Mix)

Download it NOW at Zshare.

Chinese Rock and Movies At NXNE

2007-06-11T18:53:00.000+01:00

Alongside panel discussions on how bands can grind the best use out of their myspace, the NXNE organisers put on a sequence of movies related to the industry over at the Toronto Film Board Building. Kevin Fritz's Wasted Orient was a quick paced look into disaffected youth in modern China, going on the road with Joyside the director documents the Chinese punk scene in all its drunken apathy as it turns its back on society with anthems like "Johnny Rotten" and "I Want Beer" that celebrate a nihilism born out of a hunger for western culture. Rock and roll as they described it is an "addiction to chaos," most of this hour long flick was spent in pursuit of getting trashed with all the skills of four Chinese Pete Dohertys.

Don Lett's George Clinton: Tales of Dr. Funkenstein used people influenced by the king of funkedelic like Macy Grey, Andre 3000 and some dude from Digital Underground to look at how that mothership of funk landed and a movement grew from barber shop quartets to mass funk freakouts of 70 or more contributers. Reaching well back, the best movie of the sequence had to be Living the Blues - an intimate portrait of a group of elderly blues musicians that remembers the racism and poverty of their depression era youth, the very period when they first got the blues as a "teller of truths."

NXNE Saturday and Sunday

2007-06-11T05:10:00.000+01:00

Saturday: Toronto was pretty much kicking all weekend with this NXNE lark, most bars and clubs had 4am drink extensions and I can really be fairly accused of not making enough use of this pass business - opting instead for taking my chances on one venue for a whole night instead of bar hopping around. Harlem bore witness to some of the worst attempts at a call and response in a hip hop act during Think Twice's set on Saturday night, overly brash MC's found there was nothing they could do to move a disinterested crowd, appalling sound quality and choppy production probably explained it as well. It's numbing to see some one shout to a venue full of people "ye all want some more?" only for everyone to remain silent and look at each other awkwardly.

Ghettosocks has been touted as one of the hottest properties in Canada at the moment, bursting out of Halifax he's humorous as fuck and encourages the crowd to "Steal from Walmart" and read a booka-booka all the while rocking the off-duty accountant look he frames himself in with massive horn rimmed glasses. Is he worth the hype? Well I don't think anything could have worked for me in that Harlem shit hole.

Sunday: One night later and in the Drake, the two story epicentre leading to the gentrification of the Queen West neighborhood, it seemed like a purely Diplo sanctioned night with Bonjay, Thunderheist, YoMajesty and those hard rock head wreckers trying to pass themselves off as dance Lesbians on E all playing. I stupidly missed Bonjay, from listening to the few online tracks they have quite a dance-hall like feel to them, with a twist of heavy club electronics and bursts of chatting over the odd cowbell. They've quite a decent cover of "Staring at the Sun" over on their myspace and I was pretty gutted to miss them.

Thunderheist escaped me too, but the echo of their room shaking bass tracks wafted up the stairs to torture me in the queue before getting in. The crunching baltimore use of "Sweet Dreams" on "Suenos Dulces" over on their myspace is a perfect example of how they seem to work a club as well as something of an ode to reggaeton, part MIA and part-Modeselektor they certainly are ones to watch. There's not much that needs to be said about Tampa trio Yo Majesty except one of them was missing and they still went off with a fierce torrent of energy.

Dancers from both the Fat Femme Mafia and some nut from Kids on TV jangled their wiggly bits in some nude on-stage action as Yo Majesty taunted them on, harder and faster. What you have here is a queer and female Two Live Crew that rap about masturbation and partying to some pretty filthy grimey beats. After that it really was embarrassing to watch the hard rock antics of Lesbians on E, that band really wreck my head - iconic in the queercore scene, their outspoken identities lead people to excuse them for a real lack of musical quality. Cringing.

The Yo Majesty photo is nicked from the Beatle Jinny Flickr set. My camera is busted.

NXNE: Meeting SGT Solo

2007-06-08T23:42:00.000+01:00

Day one of NXNE got off to a pretty late start for me. Headed down to the Holiday Inn to pick up my pass, the place was covered in abandoned swag as if people had just grabbed festival goodie bags and tipped them head over, dumping the reams of glossy crap all over the lobby and making off with the bag.

One interesting thing within was the lime green menace Sgt Solo, a small visual fuck of the classic children's army man toy. Instead of clutching a machine gun, the guy grips a guitar and the blurb at the bottom of the container goes;

"Plug in your weapon, turn up the power and fire away. Your limo is a Humvee and your ride is a Blackhawk. For over 50 years American stars have earned their stripes by performing for our country's greatest audience. Find out if you have what it takes to tour the world entertaining the troops with Armed Forces Entertainment."

You can insert your own anti-militarist rant in where ever you want, but I was left slightly in awe of this little fragment of the massive internal world of the US armed service. With recommendations running low I didn't have much energy to run around all over the place on the chance of finding something decent so remained in one venue for most of the night, that being Harlem where it was hip hop all night. With very small crowds performing that terrible circle in front of the stage, there were more free passes than not in sight with many people attending on their own for whatever reason.

Atherton were on first, something like a ska punk backing band hooked up to a hip hop MC, they're from Ottawa. Coming on heavy with the sardonic lyrical flow they nag about discovering empty bank accounts through that last ATM withdrawal, break ups and more. The energy they manage to drag up live really doesn't come across in their hollow sounding uploaded tracks on Myspace.

Wordburglar's a damn competent performer with enough panache to add movement to his words, and one of a whole army of Halifax hip hop artists in Toronto for the weekend. Unfortunately too much of his wit falls back on base homophobic innuendo that extracted the "ohhhhhhs" from a crowd mocked by this supposed daring. Don't even get me started on the price of beers in Harlem.

Photo nicked from the Wordburglar's Myspace.

NXNE Festival: What Do You Recommend?

2007-06-06T08:29:00.000+01:00

Sometimes this blogging lark can lead to some very nice blags. As you might guess North By North East is something of a jealous sibling to the much larger industry junket that is the annual South By South West Festival, except with far more of a focus on the Toronto home grown. Armed with an all access pass for the weekend I've got to make some choices from this pretty insane looking list.

Is there anything here some of you would recommend before I get lost in unknown streets chasing cool names like Bourgeois Gypsies and Million Dollar Marxists only to find myself fiddled with acoustics and indie-fops? As most of this seems to be a Canadian showcase, I'll probably just take my cues from local free papers like Now. I'll try keep you posted with some day by day accounts of what goes down.

The photo above was nicked from the Yo Majesty Myspace, for some of the recent hype post SXSW alone I'll have to check them out.

Lady Sovereign Is Well Bored

2007-06-01T21:01:00.001+01:00

Over the past few years Lady Sovereign has released a string of fantastic singles with some of the tastiest beats and production out there, so when the opportunity to see her play a relatively small club in Toronto comes up I'm not one to turn it down. Last Wednesday it was at the Social, something of a hipster haunt that revels in its location right beside run down Parkdale with its Midnight Cowboy feel and the mentally wounded perched in the ghetto cafes.

The Social laps this environ up and drips with the irony of how it's one establishment among others spearheading gentrification of the area. One of walls alongside the dance floor reads in gothic font "an allegory for the death of Parkdale as we knew it" while the other boldly states "welfare." The path outside is full of real fashion histrionics taking photos of each other, mostly in a sort of nu-rave attempt that falls over itself and ends up a mid eighties Don Johnson dipped in day glo paint with some sideline fashion advice from Zack Moris. No matter how spot on the opening DJ's are none of these are going to admit enjoyment until Lady Sovereign orders them into it later in the night.

When she does come on, she stalks the stage in over sized sun-glasses and a t-shirt with "Ding dong special delivery" in large slogan font at the front, first she forces her way through "Cha-ching," before complaining about hating "Random" - a song she claims she wrote at 13 and is the only thing people this side of the Atlantic ever want to hear. Bored she continuously rolled her eyes at the DJ, and moaned at the crowd. She gave us "Love Me or Hate Me" before cheering the place into sudden violence with "Public Warning" and a scream of "mosh, mosh, mosh" into the crowds face. The opening intro set by her DJ was the tightest blend of dubstep, hip-hop and grime I've yet to hear and while busied posing right up in the lens of the scattered cameras, you got bored and eventually just wanted him to take over.

This was only meant to be a mini-set, having stumbled on the El Dorado of pop, SOV plays to the kids at venues like the massive Air Canada Centre on Gwen Stefani's tour before scalping the hipsters for a four song set for twenty dollars on the door later in the night. Whatever about Def Jam and her attempts stateside, Lady Sovereign was both tired and cranky -reduced to more a UK curio and novelty act. It's hard to figure where she stands as an artist now. Not so long ago she entered into this rather depressing confession at a similar small club show about being broke in the music industry stateside and how she hates what she is doing. Her tour dairies are over here.

Side note: Haven't these fuckwits seen Nathan Barley? Are these people in Super Super and the rest of this documentary for real? It actually sounds like a piss take of Hadouken - am I missing something here?

Drop The Lime Interview: "No Rave is the new Nu Rave was the old Neu Raev is now the neu! rayv!

2007-06-01T04:42:00.000+01:00

I linked off to a mix by Drop the Lime some time ago, it's one I've made the soundtrack to most of my bike commutes. More recently I had the pleasure of finally getting to see this self-declared heavy weight of New York Bass deliver a set at Crosstown in Toronto. He stands well tall over the decks, imposing and lanky shouting random exhortations to the crowd alongside enthused introductions to what ever tracks he's introducing to the mix. All the time he is building a pummeling wall of bass, and with the higher end of the mix well dipped it's sometimes hard to make out the vocal hooks that continuously suck you in on recorded mixes.

To my own confused drunken mind it was like he was excavating through dance culture, pulling surprising Chicago house tracks out from way back when and reminding the crowd that "this was twenty years ago" before moving on quickly in a whole other direction: be it the guitar crunched dubstep of Distance's "Ska" or some doo wap sounding oddity. His "electro banger" alter ego Curses! will be dropping the debut EP My House Is haunted! on Paris floor quaking label Institubes in June. The bucko himself drops by Kaboogie on June 22nd to serve up B-lines to ye Dublin feckers in Kennedy's over on Westland row. His latest music video is also up over on the Trouble and Bass blog.

Can you remember your first gig as a DJ and how it went for you?

I was 17 years old my name was DJ Dysis at the time and I played for a jungle/drum&bass night with Soulslinger, Pish Posh and TC Islam - I was smashing it, until TC Izlam came on to introduce Soulslinger while I was still DJ'ing and he said "who is this kid that nobody knows? blah blah blah blah" - rappin' about how I'm some nobody opening for Soulslinger hahaha, mad funny.

When did you make the move over to digital DJ-ing and how did it change things for you?

I still DJ with vinyl as well as Serato - Serato is useful for playing out unreleased material and new tunes I'm working on.. it's a good way to test the tune on a crowd and see if its ready to go public or if it still needs work in some places - plus exclusives from crews that nobody has heard yet.

You were in a lot of bands as a teenager, what sort of music were these making and has any of it rubbed off on what you are engaged in now? What finally pushed you in the direction of dance music?

I was heavily influenced by bands like Can, Fugazi, Sonic Youth, and Brian Eno - the constantly evolving style and sound in all of those bands and artists has been a continuos influence on what I do now.. Every summer as a kid I'd go to Italy and swim at this public pool, the radio would always be playing shitty euro house jams.. "this is the rhythm of the night..of the night.. oh yeah".. so the dance music sound has always been an influence on my songs.

When I was like 14 a friend of mine from London played me this mix-tape of DJ Hype, and I lost it. From that moment on I got this jealous feeling about Jungle music and that made me want to DJ and produce it, I started going to rave parties back home in New York and got more and more into electronic music, my copy of Zinc's "6 Million Ways" and "Zion08" sound like white noise all worn out now, cuz thats what I learned to DJ on.

This is a knowingly stupid question - but what's bass music all about? I know its a vicous blend of bass heavy genres but why do you think people are throwing genre boundaries out the window and going hell for leather at it for heavy duty bass?

Playing whatever you want to play as long as it has a nasty bass-line. Thats what counts. Jumping all over genres in a night is more exciting to me than one style all night long, as long as what holds the night together is bass. If you brought me some klezmer track that had a growling sub bubbling bassline holding it together I'd find a way to make it work with a B more or Electro or old school Chicago House tune, just because the bassline was so banging.

Dubstep is a pretty UK heavy sound and you manage to use it relatively distinctively - throwing US hip hop vocals over Skream's "Request Line" for instance in one mix - but is there a danger people will just labour after it as a purist sound, retarding the potential for something real interesting to come from its spread?

People tell me this a lot. I love dubstep and DJ it here and there, but its definitely a UK sound - I think every genre takes the risk of becoming washed out once it gets attention outside of the DJ scenes and into the people's homes... it's just about constantly putting out fresh material and pushing boundaries that will keep it strong, not how its mixed in a DJ set. When we in the Trouble & Bass crew mix hip hop or club rap with Dubstep it helps Americans who are unfamiliar with the sound become familiarized with something new.

What are your feelings on this whole "new rave" thing cultivated by magazines like NME and hooked on bands like the Klaxons?

No Rave is the new Nu Rave was the old Neu Raev is now the neu! rayv!

In the interview Dirty Down did with you you seem pretty down on blogs that release tunes not to promote the artist but to "have the tune" as you put it - have you ever been burnt by blogs doing this or by releasing material before you wanted it released?

Yes many a time. Sometimes a tune will get leaked thats unfinished or un-mastered, and then a blog will put it up and hundreds of DJ's will download it and play it out, even though in my ears it wasnt read yet. Really though, I have been supported massively by blogs, and I appreciate that.. its just that sometimes it wouldn't hurt to ask the artist or their label if they can post a specific tune up.. we probably will say "yes"..just ask. Most blogs do ask me or labels I'm affiliated with, and those blogs are A top on my list. Dirty Down, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Palmsout, Acid-girls, Slap you in public and Fluo - they've all asked and have been really supportive of DTL and Trouble & Bass

Do you get the chance to do much graphic design which is one of your other interests or are you just totally absorbed in music?

I do most of the cover designs, t shirts, posters etc.. that are attached to my music..

For a while there you were associated with the aul hyper active use of the amen break, what was it about breakcore that you eventually found limiting?

The amen break!

You seem to love NYC right, I'm not sure if you've heard it but on the new LCD Soundsystem album James Murphy gives the world a pre-Giuliani-era lament in "New York I Love You" - how do you think the city has changed since 9-11?

Giuliani didnt like us dancing. I was born here and feel close to the big apple. People are dancing again though, and this whole "no dancing" cabaret law is dwindling away like a weak joke. I don't know the LCD soundsystem song, but I imagine its a different image of the city than my image.. I grew up as a raver, but I heard James Murphy grow up as a Skankin' Pickle fan.

Just going on pictures of Trouble and Bass parties I've seen on the net, they look like fairly small but sweaty parties - have they gotten bigger and how do you think they compare to parties like Bangface in London?

We do large and small parties from 300 to 1500. But now, we are moving towards only bigger parties - the small ones have been too sweaty and crammed. This was our last one with our boys, Cut in May (photo courtesy of the Captain at Dirty Down and there's more here).

And finally - do you think the E-lock video will be something to be embarrassed about in 30 years time?!

I plan on doing a sequel in 30 years.

The photo of Drop The Lime is nicked from the Onwards Charles Blog.

Captain Moonlight Interview: "I just couldn't take skirting around the issues any more."

2007-05-18T06:09:00.000+01:00

Barry must have been thinking exactly along the same lines as myself when he posted about Captain Moonlight some time last week. For a flash last year Moonlight received a glare of attention for a track called "Dirty Cunts." The track scratched the face of our gombeen elite with hip hop beats and a visceral abuse tempered with some precision angered comments on developers and corporate Ireland. Keen to avoid a critical discussion about politics, most media obsessed about his dirty, dirty cursing and treated him as a once off hip hop oddity instead.

Moonlight's guttural rhyming patterns strike like a lyrical hot poker into the heart of Celtic Tiger Ireland to expose alcohol crippled lives, sharp cultural clashes of class and a deep seated alienation from politics as done, that "same auld, same auld shite." Moonlight is a very capable musical voice for a slowly growing Irish social movement, a transmission point for social woes that rarely get adequate treatment in the main media, and that is hip hop at its most traditional. In this interview carried out for Indymedia I catch up with the good Captain about politics, that track, voting and the demon delight of booze...