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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):

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“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…

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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.