Vinyl Diaries XXXV: Taikoz

Drums.

Big ones.

Vinyl Diaries XXXIV: Natsuko Yoshimoto and James Cuddeford

Violins.

Lovely.

Vinyl Diaries XXXIII: Halcyon

Oh yes, I forgot I had even written this one - was quite a nice night, and proves I haven’t been entirely lazy...


Halcyon turns 10

Vinyl Diaries XXXII: Alex Masso Ensemble

While it may appear I’ve been a little lazy of late, I’ve at least managed to put a few words together for the Alex Masso Ensemble show last week, and they’ve just popped up over at the always peek-atable Resonate magazine.

Vinyl Diaries XXIX: Sono Perception

In which I waffle on a bit about this and that in the general hope of making some sort of sense of 'Sonic Art', all over in the part of the webesphere known as Resonate magazine.

Vinyl Diaries XXVII: dj museum

When last we were away Peter and Angela were kind enough to water our plants and bring in the mail... while they're away it seems to be our turn to repay the favour by hijacking Peter's splendid radio show, Utility Fog, which features, if i remember correctly, postfolkrocktronica, from granular pop to orchestral breakcore and beyond...

I think I know who got the better deal, but given they're off gallivanting around Europe and off to see My Bloody Valentine in Glasgow maybe they're coping somehow. Oh well.

While I've been doing bits and pieces of production, it's been a while since I've done any programming or on-air presenting. I'm rather looking forward to it and it's been fun auditioning tracks that might get a spin - the idea being to try and keep to the flavour of the show while lending it a benjamin and serena sprinkle.

Thanks to the wonders of the interweb, apparently it will be streaming from hereabouts from 10pm Sunday to 1am Monday, Sydney time.

So thank you to Peter for letting us play with your shiny show and enjoy the rest of your trip - we'll try not to break it while you're gone ;-)

Vinyl Diaries XXVI: Mike Cooper & Chris Abrahams

Mike Cooper & Chris Abrahams
+AustraLYSIS Electroband
April 4, 2008

I've been tinkering on a few things lately, but here's another piece put together for resonate magazine.

Back soon...

Vinyl Diaries XXV: Sydney Symphony Orchestra

Dimitri Shostakovich & Georges Lentz
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
March 26, 2008

A little something I put together that's now popped up over at resonate magazine.

Vinyl Diaries XXIV: Múm

Múm
Manning Bar
March 18, 2008

How I love the Icelanders. Those cute little vikings, playing their strange little games. Perhaps it's the vast gulf between us, spatially but also geographically, that intrigues.

After days spent on golden beaches, baking under blindingly blue skies, it makes a pleasant change to don some wings and rug up for the journey north, to a land of ice-green castles and eternal childhood... or so it can often seem.

Predictably Björk (while in Sugarcubes) was my first encounter with this land, a snow angel with a Cockney twist. Along the way I picked up a certain fondness for the electronic tinkerings of Múm, but as they drifted along on unsteady seas following their excellent debut Yesterday was Dramatic - Today is OK it was soon overshadowed by an adoration for the bombastic dramascapes of Sigur Rós.

In their wake, Múm seemed a tad anaemic, a little too indecisive and directionless. Their lack of sweeping gestures, unwillingness to unleash grand musical statements about the state of human existence, relegated them to a pleasant background, unambitious glitchy aural wallpaper to cook by.

Tonight, however, they peeled themselves of the wall and plopped themselves fairly and squarely in the middle of the room, adding a little shimmy for good measure. Their line-up change has clearly done them a world of good and we're all the richer for it. Late on stage due to "getting caught up in the traffic of life", they quickly settled us in for the ride, setting the scene with an icy wind across the frozen tundra.

With the arrival of Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, not only do we have a line-up expanded to seven members, but what it's hard to call anything other than songs. In the past they seem to have worked in spaces, on scapes rather than journeys, moods rather than stories.

Electronics may be at the heart of the song writing and the general Múm experience, yet on stage it played but a bit part, subsumed by wave after wave of instrumentation - cello, violin, recorder, harmonica and even kazoo giving beautifully flawed flesh to the bass and drum skeleton that danced into being. And of course it wouln't have been Múm without plenty of the usual melodica mayhem.

I have a not-so-hidden soft spot for a bit of doom or gloom in my music, a weakness for a little nihilism with my glockenspiel, but I can see this new bounce in their step is doing Múm's music a world of good. The joyous 'Marmalade Fires' with its warm and fuzzy sweet nothings should be required listening for Architecture in Helsinki, a lesson in cheerful layering that manages not to descend into over-sugared, gratingly hyperactive inanity.

An extended 'Dancing Behind My Eyelids' was gloriously cheerful, a playful nod to Stereolab on its way to a three-way recorder duel breakdown. 'Blessed Brambles' was another uplifting treat, while the occasional Eastern European influence creeping in gave a welcome sense of them pushing into new directions and drawing us with them.

Of the older songs, it was heartening to hear 'Oh How the Boat Drifts' given some life, the twinned male/female vocals bringing it to a much more satisfying conclusion than the wispy coo of the Summer Make Good version.

The same reinvention lifted the two-song encore to delightful heights. 'The Ghosts you Draw on My Back' and that tingling final couplet: 'I hope tonight you will touch my hair/ And draw ghosts on my back' could have been the perfect slowburn ending for sending us out into the moonlit midnight, but the twitching electrowave clatter of 'Smell Memory' was more fitting for this newfound cheerfulness, the indescribably memorable synth line still skittering and jittering around my head, where it's bound to stay for days.

Vinyl Diaries XXIII: Iron & Wine

Iron & Wine
Manning Bar
March 11, 2008

Welly well, this one is bound to split the faithful. But they can't say they weren't warned...

When Shepherd's Dog spilt from the Iron & Wine crucible last year, it was not quite what many may have expected. Where previous experiments had delivered a hushed, delicate substance, salty, brittle and liable to dissolve under the weight of no more than our gaze, in its place we now found a malleable, multi-hued affair with a whole lot more bounce.

There were hints of this fuller sound on 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, but the image that still came to mind when I thought of Iron & Wine was the bushy-bearded The Creek Drank The Cradle and its fragile, acoustic, front porch whispers. We were reminded tonight of the intimacy of these early songs, the husky hush over finger-plucked guitar, when Sam Beam and sister Sarah took to the stage for the hauntingly gorgeous 'Trapeze Swinger', its eloquent graffiti at the pearly gates a peek into a vivid past near-perfect. Sitting back-to-back with 'Jezebel', we are struck by the powerful forces that are absence and memory, and how well Beam paints with these themes.

At this point, for better or worse, things took a turn for the fuller. The band took a few songs to settle in, but once they did there was no denying they had found a groove. What's more complicated is deciding whether this groove was the right one. I expect there will be a bit of angst about the drumming, and the general direction in which it carried the show. The dub element gave Sam a fairly strong base from which he could branch out, opening up new spaces for jamming out a few ideas. It was a little unsettling to see this go as far as the Fozzie Bear pedal (wokka wokka), but when it clicked it carried us along quite well.

A niggling feeling I couldn't shake was a certain paint-by-numbers approach from the band at times, coming across like session musos out on a field-trip. There wasn't the same fire in the belly Sam clearly has, and Sarah was really the only other one who kept us believing that they meant it. So when working it was a treat, when not quite working it came across as a lite-dub Wilco.

The fuller arrangements worked really well with new songs such as 'Boy With A Coin' and the fantastically hewn 'House by the Sea', and even gave a nice kick to older works - 'On Your Wings' and 'Cinder and Smoke' revelling in their make-overs while retaining their low-key rhythmic genius.

Yet one also couldn't help but wish, at times, for a little more breathing space for Sam's more delicate pieces. 'Sodom, South Georgia' needed stripping right back, the beautiful bare bones on the album sadly over-dressed. And surely with a band this size, there was room for the occasional banjo outing? Oh well, minor quibbles. As the songs gained in instrumental richness, they lost a little in terms of having our breath taken away by these snatches of lyrics for which I fell in swoon with Iron & Wine.

When I first heard Sam's voice warble "Those band-aid children chased your dog away" over the edge of a gorgeous 'Sunset Soon Forgotten' precipice, I was swept off my feet and haven't turned back. Dig a little deeper and such turns appear all over the place, but are harder and harder to find as the music does more and more of our thinking for us.

So here I am again, facing the same dilemma posed by Jason Molina a little way back. I cherish these troubled gents in their nakedly exposed solo mode, and humour them well enough when coddled by a band. They're enjoying it, it's where their path has taken them, and the choice is to get used to it or miss out on those moments of magic they can still deliver.