Bikini Rave 2008

Yeeesssss.

I approach the fourth annual Bikini Rave with equal measures of fear and excitement. The last three Bikinis have seen me attend the decks on and off for an average of 12.46 hours in a single stint and have robbed me of both coherent speech and proper liver function for 3-5 days afterwards. The same can be said for Rusty, and then Al, as my partners in these gargantuan musical odysseys. It's tough work, but, what's one day of your life?

Marto always delivers the ingredients required for concocting a party that is the best of the summer, and with a return to our new home of Wests' with the slippery slide (conspicuously absent in the '07 edition), this year's Bikini Rave is shaping up to be the best yet.

By the way, should you be in Brisbane on Saturday 20 December, you are most cordially invited. Bring a smile and be prepared to give 110%. It's an endurance event, not a holiday.

Great white, where?

I was floating around in the ocean yesterday when my mate Damo asked me if I'd seen the Gold Coast Bulletin this weekend. I hadn't of course, because I don't live on the Goldie. He smirked, out of the side of his mouth, and then asked why I thought there were so many jet skis driving up and down the beach, outside of the lineup? I thought that this was reasonably normal, though there were more skis than you get on your average day at the beach.

By now my appetite for information on what was behind these questions had been whet. Ususally when you're out having a surf with your mates, the talk centres on football or cricket results, what happened during the week, and other such subjects. Finally, Damo says, "They caught a great white, right here, at lunch time on Friday. And they caught another one last week down at Rainbow".

I burst out laughing.

I spent most of my youth in Western Australia going surfing every weekend, and I spent heaps of time swimming and snorkelling along most of the coast from Warroorra Station north of Carnarvon down to Esperance in the Bight. WA is renowned for it's sharks, and particularly its Whites thanks to the rich waters full of aquatic life that the Leeuwin current brings down from Indonesia. As a person who likes to spend time in the ocean, I've come to an understanding that there are fast fish with big teeth that may want to nibble on your extremities from time to time, if for no other reason than to check you out. Sometimes they want to eat you, but not often. So I'm resiled to the possibility, the potential, of a shark encounter every time I go into the water. I've seen a few out there too, but not many. You can mitigate the risk significantly by staying out of the water at night, at dusk and at dawn, and I do this as a matter of policy. But that is a mitigation only. The risk is never fully diminished.

Sharks draw a primal fear in almost everyone. Their appearance and skill in the water puts we humans many rungs below them in the food chain and there is nothing that can be done should they choose to bite you. Motor cars and aeroplanes provide far more compelling statistics for people to meet an early death, however these machines are so workaday that we barely give them much of a thought. Cars and planes don't look like this either:



So I burst out laughing. And then I caught another wave and it didn't enter my mind again until this morning. If your time's up, well what can you do but accept it and enjoy the waves?

The story from the Bulletin is here: http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2008/10/18/17657_gold-coast-lead-story.html

Some new entries

It took me a bit of time to get going, but I've penned my first proper entry for the Elite Force's Tech Funk Manifesto, which can be seen here.

The Dan F piece is on there too.

Big

We surfed and surfed and surfed, last year in Brasil. Every day. We had the tide charts and revolved our existence around when it was low or when it was high, or whenever it would give us the best waves. We crammed ourselves and our 7'2" board into the mini-bus to take us to the Praia de Madeiro, and descended the huge stair case down the sand cliff every morning, peering through the foliage to catch a first glimpse of the swell, and listening all the time to try discern the size of the waves from the impact of the lip upon breaking over the sand bottom. When we moved from Pipa to Morro de Sao Paulo, off the coast of Salvador, it was the same. This break was the rocky reef kind, with heads of coral that poked through the face of the small sets, daring you to take off deeper inside, to run the gauntlet. And it wrapped beautifully in towards you on the right-hander, so that if you positioned yourself just so, you could sit in the pocket of the wave, with the spinning whitewater at your right heel, and the green face peaking and open in front of your face.

I can't explain why, but upon returning to Australia, there was so much stuff to do. There were gigs to play, birthdays, engagements and weddings to attend, those pesky five days a week at the office, rebuilding after the fire and who knows what else. Only twice in a year did we make it to a beach with board in hand, and with the fitness required to paddle, duckdive and push your body into the standing position mostly gone, the surfing was difficult and a little unsatisfying. Because to know what you are capable of, and to have lost it for reasons and activities that you can't remember as being that important, and in remembering the joy and thrill of surfing, well it hangs a gloom over the motivations for this life in 2008.

So we made a pact: To make the effort to get down to the beach and paddle, and duckdive and push ourselves into that riding position and have more of the joy and thrill that surfing provides in its unique way. To feel the wiry spring of the salt in your hair, and the crust of it on your skin. The fear as a big one looms overhead, breaking. And the yes! of making it through the bottom turn while your body is pulled and stretched as gravity takes your feet downwards and you keep your arms upwards.

I s'pose the guys who tow in to cliffs of water at 60km/h know that feeling well, and are as addicted as any person could possibly be. Why else would a guy like Mike Parsons do what he does?

More blogging

Possibly the most overused word in internet parlance today is blogging. Fast becoming a synonym for rubbish-speak, crap and waffle, I no doubt have made my own contribution to the piles of bullshit bytes gathering in little-visited web pages all over the world.

And so, miraculously, a fellow of some repute in the music stakes reckons that when I concentrate on my writing, it's pretty good. The subject of that recent bit of concentration said that he owes me beer for my efforts (I have that in writing, and I always collect).

So my name will shortly be listed next to some other people who write well on a blog that a large number of people actually read. That might be because there's a bunch of free music being posted on it. Or maybe not. Whichever the reason, I am assured of an audience. Check it out at http://techfunkmanifesto.blogspot.com

I expected far less of this Monday.

Jazzman Records

I've been accidentally buying records from the UK's Jazzman label for a few years now. And thinking about it, I reckon I a decent part of my music education (thanks Mum) contained if not these exact sounds, then sounds closely related to them.

So I received a compilation on BGP Records this afternoon called Superfunk 2. It's old school, down home, FUNK. I wonder if this kind of music will die out as a form of tunes that are created by folks in the 2000s? Of the groups I'm aware of (and I'm no aficionado) there are Quantic, The Bamboos, and Breakestra all doing the business. And there's a certain Alice Russell who kills it on the mic too. She's good. And there was some band from Finland I heard recently too, but their name escapes me right now. Hmmm.

I caught this quote on Jazzman's site tonight, and I thought I should share it with the people who read this page, which to my knowledge is currently nobody:

It’s hard to make good music without drawing upon good influence, and we at Jazzman worry about the rubbish that kids today are listening to - it doesn’t bode well for the future of music in this world.

Amen my brothers and sisters. I worry about the rubbish the kidlets are listening too as well. If you were to ask me what sort of music I like, it'd give you a non-committal answer that goes, "Well, I like a lot of different music". I admire producers like Dan F, Elite Force and Meat Katie who are so incredibly dedicated to their sound. I just don't have that single mindedness.

These days I get booked to pay funk, rare groove, hip hop and assorted mid-tempo funkiness, and this makes me happy. I like collecting vinyl too - I get the majority of these types of tunes on wax you see, it makes the gigging easier. So here I am, writing about Jazzman, and funk music, and recalling the Motown music I heard so much of in my youth, unable to focus on one sound, yet exploring decades of recorded output and being satisfied by that. At least I'm honest.

Dan F - The full bit

I'm reasonably confident that ITM and their readership have moved on from the feature article posted online on 25 July. For a read of that, go here.

For the whole thing, read on:

-------------

Top producers have long since abandoned making music that fits into any one particular style. Classification of music by genre was invented so as to better package music for sale. Sounds good on paper, and it does have a role in this era of quick consumption and digital downloads. For producers of the world’s cutting edge underground electronic music however, the constraint of genre plays no part in the choices made at the mixing desk. To do so would undermine the creative process and the work ethic required to turn thoughts and concepts into living sound.

Dan F is a person who embodies a purist’s outlook on music production. He finds comfort behind his G5, not hyping a Saturday night crowd on tour in a foreign country. He doesn’t care about the constraints required to make music suitable for the breaks genre, the techno scene, the rock circuit, the hip hop crew or anything remotely trendy. He makes music that is drawn from themes and concepts of the world and its issues. His is music that appeals purely on its melodic and rhythmic merits.

Fellow producers and luminaries of the underground electronic music community including Meat Katie, UNKLE, Andy Page and Lee Burridge are all similarly inclined, and Dan F’s latest offering ‘Rendition’ fits firmly and comfortably amongst this group. Rendition sits astride genres, while drawing from, absorbing and ultimately reinventing them.

Past

Dan Findlay hasn’t always made ground breaking electronic albums from his studios high in a Hong Kong apartment block. Originally from Canada via England he first worked as a geologist exploring for gold and oil. With commodities prices being depressed by comparison to today’s prices, Dan found it difficult to stay gainfully employed. Needing a change, and a more stable source of income, Dan took a civil engineering opportunity and moved to Hong Kong. Finding less enjoyment from the civil engineering than he did from exploration and ‘falling asleep at my desk often enough to not get my contract renewed’, Dan decided to try an equally unstable career path. Music.

Like many of his contemporaries, Dan took piano lessons as a youngster and spent a lot of time digging through his Dad’s record collection where the sounds of Count Basie, Robert Johnson, and Creedence Clearwater Revival found a place in his imagination. Later, he picked up Sound On Sound and early copies of Future Music and was fascinated by the products and technology in those pages. Dan bought a series of ‘really cheap and crappy Yamaha keyboards because the sounds and primitive sequencing features were far more interesting’ than the acoustic piano. ‘The first thing I ever owned was something like a PSS-380. It could make white noise and really fucked up digital harmonics if you ramped the pitch up’.

Not long after landing in Hong Kong, Dan saw Roland’s MC-505 and an Akai MPC2000 at a local music store. He bought them both, and ‘pushed those things to point where I started hitting all sorts of limitations. I eventually moved onto an Akai S3000XL with ReCycle and buggy pirate copies of Cakewalk and Cubase and made this latency ridden MIDI driven monster. As soon as I had got my head around MIDI a chance meeting with Andy Page introduced me to Logic 4 and the process of audio sequencing. I never looked back.’

These days Dan works on a G5 Mac with Logic 7 as his main workstation. He categorically states, ‘I will never upgrade my current Logic set-up. Logic 8 is the worst piece of shit ever created so my future upgrade path will involve Intel Macs and switching over to ProTools for mixing and final engineering’.

Dan made his mark on the music world by releasing a string of well-supported 12s and remixes on Global Underground, Distinctive, Lot49, Bedrock and his own label, Disuye. Tracks such as ‘Zhenghe’, ‘Corporation Triptech’ and ‘Do The Decent Thing (Go Fuck Yourself)’ as Dan F, and recently ‘Girls In Front’ and ‘Busy Tone’ under his Whømp moniker have all found their way into the record bags of the best underground deejays. When the calls for remixes and collaborations started in 2003, Dan answered. And they haven’t stopped.

Dan rates his best remix work as the string of reworks he’s completed for UNKLE – ‘I Need Something Stronger’, ‘Inside’ and ‘Burn My Shadow’. Years ahead of their time, and still being played out, up to three years after they were first released. Collaborations with Lee Burridge and Jariten (as Random Source) have all done damage on dancefloors across the world and have made it onto top compilation mixtapes, most recently Ewan Pearson’s Fabric35 mix.

Expect to see more music from Dan F without any collaborators though, ‘Working as a team in the studio does not really work for me and I can't see myself attempting it again. No more sitting down with someone else and a blank canvas. The motivations I have for making music are too overpowering for me to be flexible’.

Disuye

Dan set up Disuye Records initially as a vehicle to release his own club singles and ultimately as a vehicle to release his album projects as they evolved.

‘Disuye comes from the old Chinese slang phrase ‘大少爺’ and is translated roughly into ‘spoilt little brat’ or more accurately ‘big little master’. The word traditionally refers to the eldest son of a rich and powerful family. In Chinese culture, men get all the respect and if you are the father (making all the money) then you rightly deserve that respect. As the eldest son in a rich family – your biggest worry being whores and alcohol – simply being the second eldest male in the household is enough to earn nearly the same level of respect.’

Disuye is a demanding going concern, but is one that allows him the freedom to get his music out to both loyal and new fans all over the world.

Rendition

Finding suitable descriptive terms to describe Dan’s second album ‘Rendition’ is, at best, extremely difficult. It would be easy to resort to a range of clichés, but to do that would undermine the colossal effort and thought that has been poured into this album. Rendition follows themes of political messages and short stories expressed through a convergence of styles covering rock, electronic, hip hop, industrial and chill out. And with its straight rhythmic structures, sub-five minute song lengths and a lack of abstract melodies, it’s an album that is accessible too. Throughout the 15 tracks of this largely instrumental longplayer, heavily altered voices peer through the mix, giving the listener encoded snippets of information that guide you through the stories. Bisc1, rapper and lyricist on two tracks on Rendition, offers some choice words on his website www.bisc1.com:

‘Dan F has pushed limits, changed landscapes and delivered a sound that is new, that is heavy, and that is the future’.

Rendition is riddled with a low pathos akin to Massive Attack’s seminal 1998 release ‘Mezzanine’. It’s bad guys crossing paths in Hong Kong’s alleyways. It’s the frustration of seeking solitude and being unable to find it. It’s stencil graf, bass bins, a perfect sine wave, and the trash of white noise on a broken mono television set. Built with precision and to exacting tolerances, Rendition showcases Dan’s huge depth and breadth of influential listening. And despite being entirely produced by electronic means, it doesn’t sound electronic. It's a record for night time listening. It is a record that will change the way you think about electronic music. It quite literally does not sound like anything else available today.

Two vocalists - New York’s Bisc1 and Brisbane’s Quan Yeomans - lend their skills to Rendition over three tracks. The Regurgitator front man, or Q according to the album credits, provides both the lyrics and vocal performance on ‘Follow the Sines’.

‘He did a brilliant job’, says Dan. ‘I’d done several projects for Quan over the years so I decided to ask him if he’d feature on one of my tracks. He took what I thought was a so-so instrumental track and turned it into what it is now. He spells the meaning of the song out in letters ten feet tall… he’s got more musical talent in his hair-cut than I have in my entire studio.’

New York rapper Bisc1 features on ‘The End Of It’ and ‘White Wall’. While visiting Hong Kong a few years ago, Bisc1 and Dan met through a mutual friend. And as Bisc1 describes that meeting, ‘We made a tune or two, the energy was right, so we made more.’ (Those songs remain in Dan’s back catalogue, and may see a release on Disuye later this year.)

‘N44982’ opens the Rendition journey by introducing you to an industrial, back alley world with snippets of passing sounds over the low hum of a big city. ‘Right On’ is all machine beats injected with sampled, edited cuts of guitar. A two-note bassline holds it all together, murmuring in the background and expanding into melody as the song progresses. White noise is a surprisingly well-used feature throughout the album and is used with particularly judicious effect on ‘Incidental’. This is the closest thing to rock on the album, except for the mechanical typewriter holding down the rhythm in the quieter sections. The whole song is interrupted as if by an ill-tempered neighbour fumbling a jack from an amplifier’s input port. Programmed guitars feature and are augmented by textural back-up including harmonics, string and pick up noise.

Rendition flows as a coherent musical statement, despite the surprise turns in energy levels and intensity: just when you think it’s an electronica-meets-rock album, it morphs through the back-to-back vocal tracks, ‘Follow The Sines’ and ‘The End Of It’ followed by the super dark electronic number ‘Frag’. And from the end of the last of the brilliant lyrics to flow through Bisc1’s mic on ‘White Wall’, ‘Leaves’ enters like a storm building, crescendo-like in its intensity, threatening to break loose, but somehow being held. ‘Anticomm’ marks a step-change from the intensity of the prior tracks. Here the downtempo overdriven bass, topped with a gorgeous melancholic piano and industrial beats is perfectly placed. ‘Sand pit’ starts a slow burn of driving, static filled purpose, backed by a looped guitar sample that is expansive as it is metallic, while ‘Where Are You’ opens with a Chinese violin before clouds of apple-green cover and then briefly open, revealing downtempo perfection rarely seen. The static interjects only occasionally here, and a numbing sensation takes over. ‘Dead Air Space’ takes you back up into a half muted scream and the second to last track entitled ‘____’ is the comma in the sentence, the chance to breathe in, the pause before the ending of ‘Next’.

‘I'm looking outside of what club music offers to find those themes and concepts I need to make music, and I'm not concerned if anyone else gets them but me. Others will I'm sure, 'cause my stuff is not exactly way out there ... but if anyone does follow what I'm doing that is now a bonus, not the goal.’

What does it all mean?

The word ‘rendition’ has several meanings. The particular meaning Dan has chosen to represent his album is one that many people are not familiar with. Reported only sparingly in the mass media, Extraordinary Rendition is a practise undertaken selectively by the Clinton Administration and massively by the Bush Administration in the purported ‘War on Terror’. Extraordinary Rendition involves CIA operatives kidnapping suspected terrorists in foreign countries, usually on loose circumstantial evidence, and transporting them to a third country (such as Egypt, Jordan and Uzbekistan) where the suspect is interrogated without charge, and without any accountability. In the reporting that is available, torture for months on end is frequently cited by those who have been rendered. The Bush Administration alternately denies knowledge of torture, or claims that these third party countries to the Extraordinary Rendition program have provided assurances that suspects will not be tortured. The practise itself is not in question.

‘Rendition is one of the few words that had both a strong political connotation and also some musical meaning. After shortlisting the word I later learned it can also mean 'an explanation of something that is not immediately obvious' ... so on all counts it suited the project perfectly. Most of the songs are based on events or situations I'd read about.’

Despite being completed months ago, Dan had to overcome significant setbacks to achieve a release for Rendition. As Dan explains, ‘the model for small artists and indie distribution has changed significantly over the years and without constant management things slip behind schedule very quickly. The only alternative is to do it yourself. There’s more work involved but at least I have control and to be really honest, I feel much more alive about producing knowing that I control the path between me and the audience.’

My day job

In between making future music, Dan can be found hard at it mixing albums and singles for Chinese pop artists. This, of course, brings karaoke to mind, but with his pedigree Dan doesn’t get the calls to produce those kinds of artists. In a music industry as large as China’s, quality songwriters abound, and it’s these artists which enthuse Dan.

‘My reputation as an underground producer here in SE Asia means that most labels won't even think to hire me for the really bad karaoke destined tracks and instead I am contacted to work on decent quality album projects like Eason Chan, Josie Ho and suchlike, remixes and more esoteric, experimental releases. Some of the noises and studio tricks I've managed to slip into these - still essentially - pop songs make me laugh when I hear 'em again on radio. I’m working on music everyday so it's all good. Actually there are a few Chinese artists I would like to produce for eventually, one of them being Faye Wong.’

Yumla

The other string on Dan’s increasingly long bow is Yumla. Dan set up this bar on the western boundary of Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong’s Central district in 2003. With its changing painted façade, refusal to charge an entry fee, and six-nights-a-week music roster covering the entire range of electronic music, Yumla has become the venue of choice for Hong Kong’s underground music community. The motto that greets everyone who walks in the door is beautifully simple: Tunes. Booze. People.

Dan has recently introduced the ‘Yumla knows:’ series of nights, which allows only those producers whose tracks are already being regularly spun by the Yumla resident deejays to headline. To date Yumla knows: has featured Martin Eyrer, Dean Muhsin, Tom Clark, Danton Eeprom and Frank Monoroom.

‘I set that place up to relax,’ Dan says, ‘I book all the DJs, kick-started quite a few careers, and arrange the schedule of events. It's cool having passionate DJs, a proper PA system and decent crowd to test drive new mixes with. In that regard I have my own personal dance-floor bolted onto the studio!’

Future

The futures of Dan F, Disuye Records and Yumla are tightly interwoven. With none of these enterprises being remotely commercial, yet with each holding its own in an increasingly commercial and cluttered world, where does Dan see these ventures heading?

‘I think the future, at least for people at my level, will require a direct connection between communicative artists and a supportive audience. We need our own shop-fronts selling our own music and merchandise, directly to the audience. As for Yumla, we have great management, incredibly talented DJs and a fantastic crowd of supporters, so unless our running costs skyrocket out of control, we will be around for as long as people want us.’

The release of Rendition marks the beginning of a busy back half of 2008 for Dan F and Disuye. Digging through old hard drives recently, Dan has uncovered 10 tracks that didn’t see a release for a range of reasons. There’s a soon-to-be-released remix for AMB on Chi Recordings and several remixes from Rendition.

Dan has already started working on his next full-length album. With Rendition as a guide, the next one should be even more amazing.

-----------

Massive respect to Dan for giving so much of his time to me. After all, I was only some bloke who made contact on myspace to ask about the origins of a slide sample.

The self loathing post

Difficult to put a point on where to from here. I'm nearly 31 an have absolutely no idea what I am doing with my life, nor what I should do to find out. I've done quite a few things, think that I have goals more lofty than most, yet am covered in an apathy that sees me behaving like the suburban masses I think I dislike so much. 'There is nothing more common in this world, than unsuccessful men with talent.' Who was that, Tennyson? I make money, and that's about it. But then, you can be a talentless muppet in 2008 and make money. There's nothing hard about that. Just turn up and punch in. Book hours to overheads and kick back. Log on and read email. Check the sports results on the BBC and wonder about what's happening next weekend. Output? What is output?

Seems like the self loathing comes after weekends spent drinking pish. So why don't I fucking stop it and try to achieve something. Use that apparent store of willpower. Kick a few goals. Get some runs on the board. Stake a claim. Mark out some territory.

Yeah, why not.

Share life

My link to 'Caped, masked and armed' doesn't point to the place it used to when I included it on this page last year. Back then it was a bunch of street shots of dope stencil graf and stickers, a majority of which had political denotations.

But now, you can get these little morsels:

Here's a sample of the pics I've saved from some time ago, for your edification...

Dan F

I hit Dan F up on myspace to ask him if I heard a sample correctly on his latest club track 'Arctic Warfare Super Magnum'. To my surprise, he responded rather rapidly, and told me the origins of this particular sample and from there we tic-tac'd on this and a few other things. I realised that I hadn't written anything for an age, and being a fan of his music and aware that his new longplayer Rendition was about to drop, I asked if I could interview him and write a review of the album. You could almost hear him bursting with a 'fuck yes!' and so the long week that was began.

I don't know how long I spent on it, but on top of the many hours in the evening, I was forced to spend a whole day on it in a concerted effort to get through the volume of material I had amassed. Dan knows how to write too you see (better than I can, that is for certain) and when the topic is your project, the totality of his personal musical vision, there is a lot to say.

This is what was published, nationally, on www.inthemix.com.au this afternoon (all typos and errors are the fault of the sub editor, not me):

----------

“Dan F has pushed limits, changed landscapes and delivered a sound that is new, that is heavy, and that is the future”. So says rapper and lyricist Bisc1 of Dan F, and his new Rendition which has just been released. And while Bisc1 may be forthcoming, finding suitable terms to describe Rendition is at best extremely difficult. It would be easy to resort to a range of clichés, but to do that would undermine the colossal effort and thought that’s been poured into the release.

Rendition contains political messages and short stories expressed through a convergence of styles that covers rock, electronica, hip hop, industrial and chill out. And with its straight rhythmic structures, sub-five minute song lengths and a lack of abstract melodies, it’s an album that’s accessible too. Throughout the 15 tracks of this largely instrumental longplayer, heavily altered voices peer through the mix, giving the listener encoded snippets of information that guide you through the stories.

Rendition is riddled with a low pathos akin to Massive Attack’s seminal 1998 release Mezzanine. It’s bad guys crossing paths in Hong Kong’s alleyways. It’s the frustration of seeking solitude, and being unable to find it. It’s bass bins, a perfect sine wave, and the trash of white noise on a broken mono television. Built with precision, Rendition belies Dan F’s huge depth and breadth of influential listening. It quite literally does not sound like anything else available today. And despite being entirely produced by electronic means, it doesn’t sound electronic. It’s a record for night time listening. It is a record that will change the way you think about electronic music.

As well as the before mentioned Bisc1 from New York, Regurgitator frontman Quan Yeomans also provides lyrics and vocals on Follow the Sines. “He did a brilliant job”, says Dan. “I’d done several projects for Quan over the years so I decided to ask him if he’d feature on one of my tracks. He took what I thought was a so-so instrumental track and turned it into what it is now. He spells the meaning of the song out in letters ten feet tall… he’s got more musical talent in his hair-cut than I have in my entire studio.”

Bisc1 features on the tracks The End Of It’ and White Wall, and he met Dan F through a mutual friend several years ago while visiting Hong Kong. As Bisc1 describes it, “We made a tune or two, the energy was right, so we made more.”

N44982 opens the Rendition journey by taking you into an industrial, back alley world with snippets of passing sounds over the low hum of a big city. Right On is all machine beats injected with sampled, edited cuts of guitar. A two-note bassline holds it all together, murmuring in the background and expanding into melody as the tune progresses. White noise is a surprisingly well-used feature throughout the album and is used with particularly judicious effect on Incidental. This is the closest thing to rock on the album, except for the mechanical typewriter holding down the rhythm until the whole song is interrupted as if by an ill-tempered neighbour fumbling a jack from an amplifier’s input port. Programmed guitars feature and are augmented by textural back-up including harmonics, string and pick up noise.

The album flows as a coherent musical statement, despite the surprise turns in energy levels and intensity: just when you think it’s an electronica-meets-rock album, it morphs through the back-to-back vocal tracks, Follow The Sines and The End Of It followed by the super dark electronic number Frag. And from the end of the last words to flow through Bisc1’s mic on White Wall, Leaves enters like a storm building, crescendo-like in its intensity, threatening to break loose but being held back. Anticomm marks a step-change from the intensity of the prior tracks. Here downtempo overdriven bass, topped with a gorgeous melancholic piano and industrial beats is perfectly placed. Sand Pit starts a slow burn of driving, static filled purpose, backed by a looped guitar sample that is expansive as it is metallic, while Where Are You opens with a Chinese violin before clouds of apple-green cover and then briefly open, revealing downtempo perfection rarely seen. The static interjects only occasionally here, and a numbing sensation takes over. Dead Air Space takes you back up into a half muted scream and the second to last track entitled ______ is the comma in the sentence, the chance to breathe in, a pause before the ending of Next.

“I’m looking outside of what club music offers to find those themes and concepts I need to make music, and I’m not concerned if anyone else gets them but me. Others will I’m sure, ‘cause my stuff is not exactly way out there … but if anyone does follow what I’m doing that is now a bonus, not the goal.”

Suitably intrigued? Rendition is available now through http://rendition.disuye.com, through either digital download or mail order CDs and box sets. And it appears he’s taken an unconventional approach to distribution in a similar fashion to Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor – there are links to torrent sites offering the exact same files officially, for free over P2P. Viva la musical revolution!

Dan F’s Rendition is available now through http://rendition.disuye.com, as well as Beatport and iTunes/Amazon/eMusic. Keep stay tuned to ITM for details of an Australian tour…

----------

This was but a portion of what I wrote. I'll stick the whole thing up here in due course. Dan will probably link to it from his websites/ blogs etc.

Stuff

I promised to write stuff here, as the fancy took me, when I completed my last post in that generic Sao Paulo hotel last September. Seems like quite a while since we were over there in the southern part of the Americas, and so it is.

For an update of what's happened since then, here are the highlights, in no order whatsoever:

• We received a 100% payout from our benevolent insurers for all the stuff we lost in that fucking big fire.
  
• We spent a metric shitload of weekends shopping to replace everything we lost, and yes, we still remember stuff even today. Lucky for us most of it was entirely disposable and we are definitely no worse off than before. It sure did make moving house easy.
• We both got jobs.
• Our surfing fitness dropped back off to nothing, and on the extremely odd occasions when there are both surfboards and waves about, the knowledge that it is impossible to stand up after your arms have fallen off from the exertion of paddling into the lineup tempers the lust for the sea. The only way around this is to move nearer the beach, and that seems an unlikely proposition right now.
  
• I gave in to the myspace and facebook rages. Facebook does play a role in my life now though, and that is in the the low-cost ability to promote select gigs to people I know/ have met. It gives greater returns than sticking up posters in the dead of night.
• I bought an Apple and a copy of their Logic software and am really not much better than when I first plugged it all in. That is through lack of focus. Perhaps this is the little exposing-of-my-soul catharsis I need to devote more time to it. I made a tune, but it wasn't an original, more an exercise in sequencing.
• We bought a Subaru.
  
• The rollerskate of death lives on.
• I've played bundles of gigs, overwhelmingly in the funk vein.
  
• I am a part of Boxy Lucha (www.myspace.com/boxylucha)

That's probably enough for now. Having recently remembered that I know how to write during a little project I did for Dan F, and simultaneously noticing that my vocabulary hasn't progressed at all in several years, I have decided to exercise this ability so that it doesn't slip into a terminal decline.

Happy days.

Bikini Rave 2007

So Marto and Charlie did it again, only this time the Bikini Rave in 2007 was an all outdoor affair, and for the first time it was at a public venue. I'm amazed the Coppers didn't pay us a visit.

Download the film here: http://www.playtv.com.au/Bikini_RaveMk2.mov/

Can't wait for the 2008 edition