Sydney Show:

My first ever Ambrose Chapel show in Sydney! Details are here and there's a Facebook page here. Should be a good night.

Lori? Is that you hanging out with Ringo?

Is this a photo of a future Melvins bass player? This person thinks so. So do I.

In 1989, Lori Black aka Lorax aka the daughter of Shirley Temple (yes, you read that right) joined the Melvins. To date, she is the only woman to have joined the band and she played on two of my favourite Melvins albums: Ozma and Bullhead. The little girl above - next to Shirley - does bare a resemblance to Lorax pictured here:

He's The Uncle

Sometimes when you hear a song, you kinda hear more than what's there. You hear the sound but - sometimes - you sense more than that; you feel some way about the people who recorded it, you have ideas about where it was recorded and how, you tap into a history and thus you get the feeling that a particular song might just be a pinpoint on a map of something a lot bigger than the song itself. You want to explore that map.

That's how I felt about this record when I first heard it:

Released by Australian label Fellaheen to coincide with a joint tour by both bands, it's a pretty killer 6 track EP. I bought it for the Superchunk songs (GBV didn't even make the tour in the end) but it was a track called 'He's The Uncle' off the split that really caught my ear.

In Guided By Voices folklore, 'He's The Uncle' is a bit of mythological song. Apparently recorded for an aborted concept album (gloriously titled The Power of Suck) but later scrapped and reconfigured into 1996's Under The Bushes Under The Stars. It's the Guided By Voices b-side that everyone knows is a stone cold classic. The band know it too, I noticed they played it at their final show.

To me, it's a song that captures everything I like about GBV: a big chorus, noise, melody, tape compression and hiss all recorded by one of my favourite GBV line-ups. It's somehow BIG and lo-fi at the same time.

What I didn't know then was this: (1) 'He's The Uncle' would be my gate-way drug into the spiral of GBV fandom, something I'm happily floating around in a decade later (2) the song sounds so fucking good because it sits at a bizarre intersection of so many things I like about music. For instance:

• Steve Albini recorded it at home. On the CD sleeve it says Tobin Sprout recorded it on 4-track but bass player of the time Jim Greer seems to remember it otherwise.
• Jim O'Rourke performed the noise interlude in the middle-8 that I've always thought was just mildly too far-out for GBV.
• Later Bob Pollard messed around the mult-tracks at home and added the guitar solo and some delay.

That's a perfect storm of everything I like about music made in the 90s.

That's what I heard but didn't really comprehend.

But it was all there all this time.

Music is awesome like that sometimes don't you think?

mumble(speak) at Almost Invisible #4

New Weird Australia Vol. 6

I've got a new track on the most recent New Weird Australia compilation.

The whole thing is free to stream and download here.

Here's the track listing:

1. AMBROSE CHAPEL, Black Lava (7:47) previously unreleased
2. JONNY TELAFONE, Stardate 2012.1221 (3:33) from ‘Rainbow Genesis’ (self-released)
3. CHROME DOME, She Said (1:13) from ‘Chrome Dome’ (Lexicon Devil)
4. WIGWAM, Ancient Path (3:31) from ‘Sweat Lodge’ (Badminton Bandit)
5. J NEWMAN & R SQUIRES, The Church Of Our Lady Of Pompeii (Excerpt) (3:50) from ‘Our Lady Of Pompeii’ (Gift Project Audio)
6. KYNAN TAN, Melt (4:44) from ‘Two Clouds’ (self-released)
7. TRJAEU, Hull (4:56) from ‘Home EP’ (self-released)
8. EASTERN GREY, 24-5 (9:23) previously unreleased
9. PANEYE, Staircases Under the Sea (3:20) from ‘Lying Under Moribund Waves’ (Secret Station Records / Butter People Records)
10. ISLE ADORE, Keep A Lid On (4:53) from ‘Perfect Dust’ (OWLS)
11. UNDERLAPPER, Elephant Shoe (2:51) previously unreleased, from forthcoming album ‘ Softly Harboured’
12. DANGER BEACH, Milky Way (2:02) previously unreleased
13. PHILIP SULIDAE, Dead Horse Gap (6:07) from ‘An High Land’ (dontcaresulidae)
14. ANNA CHASE, Lines (3:42) previously unreleased

Compiled by Stuart Buchanan.
Artwork by David Egan, www.badmintonbandit.com
Click artist title for background information and links.
All music licenced via Creative Commons (Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives), except track 9, all rights reserved.

Seven New Songs of Mt Eerie

This is one of my favourite records:

A few years back my then room mate - now next door neighbour - Ben Thompson went to see Mt Eerie perform at Rics (no you didn't read that wrong - can you imagine it now?). He actually bought a copy of this CDr and we played it to death around the flat. I think it even came for a ride in the Iron On tour van as well. I have memories of listening to it in regional QLD where Wooly Mammoth's Absence's steady strumming seemed to roll along like the dry countryside.

I don't think anyone knew back then that it would become a rare and collectible item.

Anyway, it's legally available free-of-charge here.

One Instance Of Deftones Liking Experimental Sound...

Following on from this post, in a recent Deftones interview for Quietus, vocalist Chino Moreno talks about the influence of experimental sound on the band's work:

"Well, we love drone and stuff like that. The majority of the music I listen to is purely instrumental. Not that I don't like singing or singers, it's just that I feel that there's so much optimism in wordless music. The idea that it can take you wherever you want and not confine you to these thoughts or words... It's just music as a feeling, you know? Bringing different soundscapes into our music is always something that we've tried to do. I mean, that was Frank's whole role in the band when we brought him in. At that time, he was just a DJ and his only instrument was a turntable. White Pony was when we really started to experiment with sound more. We were trying to create this disgusting sound with the instruments on that record."

Omissions

I've written about this academically but it came up again on the weekend at Unconvention where I shared a panel with Andrew Stafford, author of Pig City.

My critical stance is this: I love the book but I don't like some of the uses it's been put to; none of which are Stafford's fault, mind you.

My problem?

To me, the historical lineage of Brisbane music is very, very clear. The Saints put out an independent record and played in houses when they couldn't find venues. Thirty years later Brisbane bands put out their own records and play in houses/warehouses when they can't find venues. Why? Because the city can still be violent and culturally parochial (something Stafford himself has taken to pointing out lately).

So with all that in mind...

I argue that you can't acknowledge the story of Brisbane's professional development in the music sector without also acknowledging that other group of musicians - the majority of musicians - for whom the actual week-to-week practice of music has gone largely unchanged. The ingenuity of the city, its humour, its good-natured wretchedness and slothfulness, the way it sweats and throws up and sings out of tune, off mic, all that has to be there alongside the story of The Veronicas or the story of our city isn't history, it's a press release.

Both stories are true. They speak directly to the other.

We need to celebrate both.

I can't taste this gin, put some more in...

Five weird things that happened to me on the weekend:

1. I went to the Down Under Bar. Worse still, I dimly remember being pretty excited about it.
2. Unconvention Brisbane took place for the first time. I chaired a panel on Music As Culture and during which Andrew Stafford, the author of Pig City: The Saints To Savage Garden, broke into song. Fellow panelist Everett True had decided that if we were asked a question we didn't wish to answer, we had to sing. What did I ask Andrew? Oh just something light and breezy: 'So what was the worst thing that happened to you because you wrote Pig City?' (I made Everett sing as well).
3. I walked around Highgate Hill at 3am with a cocktail.
4. A taxi driver told me that we should just shoot people who wish to immigrate to our country. 'Just shoot them, it doesn't cost a lot to shoot people.' And I tipped him. This morning I couldn't remember why. Then I did. I tipped him because I was scared he was going to kill me and dump my severed body parts in the river.
5. Walking up Merthyr Road last night, not 15 minutes after Ted Bundy the taxi-driver, a car pulled up next to me as I walked along. The driver said 'You want a lift.' I told the driver I lived closeby so it was cool. I was eating a packet of crisps. Then the driver said 'Do you want me to suck your cock?' and I said 'Nah man, I'm good' and he drove off.

Conference Paper

I'm presenting at this year's International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference at Monash University, Melbourne in November:

# ABSTRACT:

We’re All Doomed: The Democratising Potential of Drone Doom Metal.

In recent years, the rise in popularity of arcane heavy metal sub-genre Drone Doom has attracted a passionate chorus of detractors. Within metal and avant-garde circles, this music – typified by bands such as Sunn O))), Earth, Monarch and Grey Daturas – has been criticized for appearing simplistic, monochromatic and camp. Yet much of this negative commentary overlooks the exciting potentialities inherent in Drone Doom’s aesthetic palatte. As a music that can be easily accessed, composed and performed, it presents a remarkably democratic opening into heavy metal. As a body of established sound, Drone Doom is a popular form in which a range of experimental practices have found a wider audience. Drawing upon a range of secondary resources and the author’s own creative practice within the sub-genre, this paper strives to map and explore the democratising aspects of this emergent form of heavy metal. I argue that within Drone Doom resides a homological and broad-reaching set of tools and ideas that encourage participation from a range of listeners and musicians and thus a greater understanding of this framework speaks directly to the popularity of an otherwise difficult music.

Bass & Nadja

Brief but pretty interesting interview with Aidan Baker of Nadja over here. I quite like a lot of his solo stuff and his band work and thus I'm especially interested in how he gets things sounding as he does without an amp. As the interview indicates, his effects are solid choices - not fancy ones.

I think the secret to Nadja's sound is the bass guitar. A DI'd bass tone is not such a stretch, it's pretty standard practice at almost all live shows and it's certainly in the mix on a lot of my solo stuff and with No Anchor. We're all used to hearing it.

And this is the great thing about the bass guitar: it's not such a tone war. Bass can sound warm and full straight in if you record and mix it right. So instantly, before all the drama of effects and antique amps, the bass guitar is already sounding pretty good. I love that about it. I feel like it's an instrument that works with you.

Why doesn't everyone want to play one?

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...

Tourism #2

# ADELAIDE

Something I've forgotten to mention thus far is that I've been experimenting with being soft on tour and it's been going great. After a decade of couch surfing and floor-coring across the music landscape I just got tired and decided I want to sleep in a bed. So I rented some beds. For around $100 a night I slept well (thanks global economic crisis + last minute accommodation booking online) and two of my best bourgeois adventures happened on this leg of the tour.

In Adelaide I stayed in a special room they keep at The Mercure for assholes and travelling musicians. This room looks EXACTLY like a run down motel I stayed in once in regional NSW. Who knew this netherworld of 4 star accommodation existed? Exciting.

In the afternoon, Tristan Louth-Robins, Jason Sweeney and myself spoke to students at ANU about the comparable joys of making and performing arcane music. It was a surprisingly good time. That night we played in the same performance space and Tom Hall entered the city and after a small dispute about the size of our names on the promotional materials...

...we played a show together. To be honest, this was the worst show I gave on the tour thus far. The ANU's sub was a gigantic military grade device (I think this model was actually used to pipe Billy Ray Cyrus songs at the WACO compound) and my set turned said device into a rumbling washing machine that featured way too prominently in the mix. I chalked it up to a special section of my brain called 'The Fuck It Quadrant' and celebrated everyone else's music with some beers afterward. Maximum props to Jason Sweeney for putting me on.

# CANBERRA

I used to think 'Let Canberra have as much decriminalised marijuana and fireworks and photos of yawning vaginas as they need for they live in Canberra!' but now I've changed my mind. Maybe I missed the city centre last time (probably) but it's incredibly beautiful at night and the people are very lovely and very relaxed and friendly. As I stood on the balcony of my six story apartment and surveyed our national capital, I thought 'Hell yes, this was a good idea' and it was.

Moments later I thought 'Where are the fireworks at?' and 'Surely someone will bring them to the show tonight, surely.' But no one did. I like to think that everyone thought to but forgot because they were too high.

The show was the best of the tour so far. Unbelievably good sound from an unbelievably cool sound engineer at The Street Theatre. I was actually louder during my set than at sound check, there's one for the books. I also met and saw Pimmon, Jeff Burch and Alister Spence play + rad locals (Luke and Austin) and promoter Shoeb even took me to Canberra's late night McDonalds afterwards. I would also like to point out that it was a frosty near-zero degree night in Canberra and Shoeb was wearing thongs and flat out didn't give a fuck. Tough.

I retired to my room and drank the beer that I was randomly smart enough to buy and stow earlier. Then I laid back, just me, alone in my room and happily watched Rage until I fell asleep.

(Yes, I was an only child).

# DOCUMENTATION