Yesterday/Today

# THEN

Yesterday was a long day in the studio finishing off my track for the next New Weird Australia compilation. I think it's out soon. Pretty sure I'm holding up the works.

# NOW

You know, I still love Guided By Voices as much as I used to when I was first discovering them. They're so evergreen it's crazy. I was thinking of them last night when I watched a few songs from Royal Headache; that band surprised me, they could write song songs.

Three Instances of Sound Artists Liking Deftones

#1

#2

From a recent interview with Ben Frost:

"At that time, that sort of 2000-2004 period, Melbourne had become engulfed in this fender twin, reverberated post Mogwai shoegaze thing that I, along with everyone else was drowning in. I walked into a record store one day around 2003-04 I guess, which at that time was owned by Oren Ambarchi and I recall mentioning how I had found my way back to the Swans, Big Black and a lot of metal because for me that was kind of an antithesis to everything around me then, but how also I was actually fascinated by some of these nu-metal records, the texture of them; so hi-fi, so clinical and so brutally cold. It was fascinating to me; Slipknot, Korn, The Deftones… I couldn’t put my finger on what I meant exactly, I mean, the music itself was mostly irrelevant, but I remember at one point I said, “what is there that sounds like this, but works like this” and I held up two records: (The Deftones’) White Pony, and Arvo Pärt ‘s Tabula Rasa. He couldn’t name anything, and in a very crude and simplified way, I knew there and then there was a record that needed to be made that could feed on that space."

#3

My review of new Deftones album 'Diamond Eyes' over at The Vine.

I let those feelings haunt me, they control me, but tonight I'm letting go.
You're more then just a photo album, you're more than what some people let you know.
And if we ever make it home, I'll tell you all the things that shaped me thus:
Something forged in a phonebox but lost in a restaurant...

EQUALS

Pretty much my favourite lyric ever. It's from the Arab Strap song 'The Shy Retirer':



In a world almost choked half to death by pop songs about relationships, those lines are all of it in clear, brutal simplicity. Overlaid over the song's thumping/cheesy beat, it's what I remember. How many people have I met out and at night's end there's just the same sad stories: I'm only here because things went wrong. A relationship reduced down to a starting event (a call from a phonebox) to the final one (a scene in a restaurant), this is Adian Moffat at his most bleak and reductive.

It's fucking genius. And strangely reassuring.

God Hates Toowoomba too...