For much of Kid606’s ten-year career, he’s confounded and confused as often as he’s delighted: for every slice of techno wizardry, there’s been a frankly distressing three-minute cacophony of static and noise or a comedy snippet of A-Ha thrown in for a chuckle. This sense of digital mischief has set him apart over the years, in that he succeeds where precious few do in bringing a sense of personality to electronica.

However, this new EP, a taster in advance of a new album due out in 2009, is perhaps one of the most straightforward things he’s done. Straightforward in the sense that it’s fantastic, pounding TECHNOJOY of the highest level. Absolutely dominated by pulsatile, growling basslines, there are obvious dubstep grooves here, but delivered at the restless, aggressive pace we’ve come to expect from 606.

Elsewhere, old-school handclaps ride over a hurricane of a bassline on ‘Umbilical Bullets’, while ‘The Drip’ brings to mind an update on something the Ganja Kru might have put out in 1996. ‘Bat Manners’ drops the pace a little, all atmospheric reverbs, sluggish, downbeat drum work and a crackling undercurrent that gives it the feeling of a dub classic trying to break its way out of a pocket calculator.

Kid606 has taken the signifiers of classic electronica from the past decade (bits of jump-up, techno, hardcore and bassline all take the lead at various points) to create a miniature tour de force of dancefloor-fillers. The only downside, perhaps, is that there’s little of the flagrant sonic mischief we’ve come to expect, so it’s not stamped through with his personality as clearly as other releases. When it’s as consistently great as this though, who cares?

Kid606

Tigerbeat6

So, I write this other website Super Cute Kawaii! (in the guise of a cute bunny) and a recent press release informs us that Japan’s ambassador for cute, Hello Kitty, has just made her first album. Since she doesn’t have a mouth, she has roped in some “talent” to help her out, none of which I have ever heard of. Just reading the tracklisting, a mix of ‘you go girl’ optimism and ‘ain’t I cute”‘ sugariness, I can practically hear it. Her good friend Chococat has also muscled his way in to funk things up with Chococat’s Jam, which sounds particularly inedible. I guess in an age of Hannah Montana albums, Kitty has a right to feel she’s capable of putting an album together but it all seems a bit power-crazed; having seen the lengths Hello Kitty goes to in Japan to get her face into everything (including dressing up as food and other Sanrio characters), I wouldn’t be surprised if she turns up next as Japan’s new Prime Minister. Especially since they’re already going that way with current manga-loving otaku Prime Minister Taro Aso.

What times we do live in.

Check out Hello Kitty’s jams here.

(Originally posted August 2002)

Okay. OKAY! right. Moving on up! Woo. Here we go. I’m hoping that this column will be something of a halfway house between the shameless debacle of the last one (wherein I did write about nothing but gibberish), and those of the future (wherein I will cover interesting films in the hope of enlightening you to some non-Blockbuster fare.

I am now in Oxford, land of arty people and independent cinemas (or so I hope…) and yes! I have bought myself a shiny new silver space-age video recorder. This means that once I’ve got over slight agoraphobia and not-so-slight laziness, I will be making regular trips out to little steam-powered cinemas to catch all the weird and wonderful offerings available, and also scouring Blockbuster for the one or two good tapes they generally seem to have hidden behind the latest hit (with an ‘S’) movies. But this is yet to happen. So for now, I can do nothing more than present you with some reviews & opinions of the latest few films I’ve been seeing on video, which generally (although not exclusively, I hope) fall into the I’ve-already-seen-that category. Before I get going, a minor aside: is it just me, or has the quality of films being shown on television rapidly diminished lately? There used to be several ‘better tape that’ offerings I’d notice in the TV guide each week, generally on in the middle of the night, but just lately there doesn’t seem to be any action. Maybe it’s the gradual takeover of the airwaves by SPORT which is to blame. Grr.

First up: here’s an odd film which I felt compelled to buy upon seeing it cheap. GET WELL SOON (2001), starring Vincent Gallo (he of BUFFALO 66 fame) and Courteney Cox (of some programme called FRIENDS, apparently). According to the box, this is ‘a twisted romantic comedy in the spirit of There’s Something About Mary’. According to me, this is ‘a somewhat offensive attempt at making a quirky comedy, and simultaneously a waste of talent’. The premise is this - Gallo is a successful TV chat show host (in the mould of Leno, Letterman etc) who suddenly cracks on air, and decides to track down his childhood sweetheart (Cox) in New York, with a notion that getting back together with her will make his otherwise shallow, meaningless life take a fulfilling course once more. Not wanting to spoil the subtle, twisting plot, he does find her, and everything does turn out OK. Is that a surprise? It’s not a bad idea for a story - the weight of fame and adoration pushing a star to the brink of wanting to lose it all - but it’s strangely handled; Gallo’s particular reasons for losing it are not really explained, Cox’s initial reluctance to see him is not really explained, and the supporting characters are one-dimensionally ‘weird’. Several of the minor characters in the film reside in some kind of mental institution, seemingly for no other reason than to get some cheap ‘mad’ gags in there, and to reinforce all kinds of straight-jacket/mad-people-talking-to-themselves stereotypes. (Or maybe - hey - they’re sane, and so is Gallo, and everybody else is crazy. Huh ? No.)

Continue reading »

I can’t imagine the work that went into this, first animation to make me slack-jawed since Princess Mononoke. I have an idea that it’s already been ripped off for a car advert but that’s hardly their fault.

Made in Argentina by some people / thing called BluBlu.

Killer album. Truly magnificent. Listening to this is like being dragged face-first into the deepest circle of Hell, via metal-drenched Birmingham and repetition-drenched Berlin. Fuck! Frighteningly addictive.

Hey Colossus
Riot Season

You Tube Gold, having something of a nostalgia-trip today but how cracking are some of these tunes?

SCARCE - ALL SIDEWAYS

Love this song. The guitar is so bendy. I think I saw Scarce once but unfortunately my brain is shot through like Swiss Cheese and I can’t decide if I dreamt it or not. Phil Welding swears he saw Page & Plant play the Ballroom in Nottingham and there is NO WAY that happened. Mind you, I only know I saw the Jesus Lizard because I can pick me out in the footage from TV show The Beat.

SENSELESS THINGS - HOLD IT DOWN (Live)

If these guys had done less speed and cider and slowed it down they’d have sounded like Neil Young. Of course that means I wouldn’t have dug them in 1993.  More from The Word in a moment…

Continue reading »

(Originally posted August 2002)

Quick! I ran out of time to get a proper, well thought out, carefully structured and reasonably argued music column together, so I’ve instead thrown together a collection of quickly dashed off, barely thought through first impressions of a few CDs and records which have been passing through my crappy stereo of late. Now that’s professionalism.

Study of the Lifeless
CD, American Pop Project AMPOP207CD

Nasty, nasty cover; as if the sleeve of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’ has been scanned in badly, and the contrast has been turned way up in Photoshop. And that’s a shame, because this album of shoegazey-style atmospheric music generally hits the spot in a ‘more upbeat Slowdive’ sort of way, with lots of blurry guitars and distant dual vocals. It falls short of the great heights of any MBV, or even Ride’s ‘Nowhere’ (probably because of the lack of aggression featured in much of those two examples), but it’s certainly a pleasing way to pass the time. >>>

Sterling Roswell
Girl from Orbit CD single
Mint/Jungle Records

Sterling Roswell used to be known as Rosco and used to be in Spacemen 3, which means he’s always going to be a stand-up kinda guy to some degree. This is his debut single as SR and sounds like the Shadows duelling with the Shadows of Knight in exceptionally slow motion, in an echo chamber, on the set of Battlestar Galactica, using instruments left behind by Phil Spector several decades earlier. And it can’t be made any clearer than that. It’s somewhat boring, though, strangely enough. Maybe he should have called himself Spacemen 1 and joined the ever-popular tribute band circuit. >>>

Sonic Youth
Murray Street CD
Geffen

On the Sonic Youth website at the moment it proudly features the quote ‘…their most accessible album in years’, which to me seems very wrong. Because whilst ‘Murray Street’ is a good album, full of beautiful melody and the usual intertwining/ meandering guitar lines which have become familiar over Sonic Youth’s recent couple of albums, it also leaves me wishing, to some degree, that they’d go back to their mid-80s peak of weirdosity and rock out in a goofy stylee some more. I love them, everybody knows I love them, and I’ll play this a lot. But not as much as I play ‘Sister’, ‘Evol’ or ‘Daydream Nation’. >>>

Misty’s Big Adventure
I am cool with a capital C CD single
Awkward Records AWKD003

Wow, this is weird, the press release drops all kind of names - Broadcast, Pram, Plone, Bentley Rhythm Ace - but this sounds like one of those literary style bands in the vein of Tindersticks, Jack and various things which used to come out on Setanta. It’s all eclectic instruments, self-consciously ‘knowing’ lyrics, pin-sharp production and arrangement, and I-just-wasn’t-made-for-these-times obliqueness. That’s all well and good, but music along these lines sometimes has a strange habit of making me angry… but I don’t want to burden you with my hangups. >>>

Phlegm, Telemak, Electroscope, Stasola, Francois Michaud
Lykill Records sampler CD

NOW! Watch me fit in detailed and explanatory descriptions of the three different records showcased on this CD. The Phlegm/Telemak 12″ is three tracks from the former (from soporific repetitive, wonderful intensity to angry, dazed riffing) and one from the latter (Rachel’s meets GYBE! in a random way). Electroscope and Stasola share a 7″ with scary-childrens’-books-stream of consciousness music on one side and Can-styled deranged and stretched out blues on the other. Francois Michaud and Stasola on another 7″ get all ‘le drum et le bass’ on your ass. This is a great CD. >>>

Primal Scream
Evil Heat LP
Columbia 508923 1

God bless you Primal Scream for sounding like a combination of early Pink Floyd, gospel choirs, Suicide, The Byrds, pissed-off Depeche Mode, Atari Teenage Riot, Motorhead, Loop, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Kraftwerk, The Fall, White Album-era Beatles, and all of your earlier records combined! This is a fantastic album which seems to have taken the angry elements of ‘Xtrmntr’ and made them angrier! A sharpened bolt of light directed straight into the centre of your eye. As a friend recently summed up, “Primal Scream! Fucking yes!!” >>>

What have YOU done this Summer? Well, Alistair Fitchett (he of the Tangents website and Unpopular label) has made not one, but two zines. Both issues of Don’t Forget To Dance come beautifully designed with tracing paper details and free badges, and of course packed full of great writing. Almost defiantly self-indulgent, Alistair writes about whatever he damn well pleases, from indiepop to cycling to books. Luckily for us, his writing is always interesting and engaging regardless of the topic. Issue 1 has stuff on Glasvegas, The Kinks, George Pelecanos and Phil Wilson while issue 2 features Nestor Burma books, Pauline Murray & The Invisible Girls, The Playwrights, The Bomb Pops and Slumberland Records. Go get! Both issues are available from the Unpopular shop on Folksy for just a little over a quid each.

I got sent a copy of The Illustrated Ape magazine last week, as they’d used a quote from my Paul Cannell interview. I’d never seen it before and it’s an amazing looking magazine, as much about the illustration and design as the writing. This here is their Heavenly Records issue which was hugely nostalgic for me. As well as the article on Paul Cannell (Heavenly and Creation artist), there’s a great rambling interview with Heavenly founder Jeff Barrett, a group reminiscence session with all the key players of the Heavenly Sunday Social, poetry from Nicky Wire, a piece by Kevin Pearce and some lovely illustrations by the likes of Rob Ryan. There’s also a bunch of random oddness and fiction which verges on the self-indulgently baffling but overall it’s a great read. Have a look at their website for info on stockists.

I myself made THREE zines this Summer, get me. Okay, one of them was a compilation of some good bits of diskant and one was a print version of my Tokyo Shopping Guide but the third is an all-new telling of my fun times in Tokyo last year. If you want to read about everything I got up to during ten days in Tokyo, from kawaii shopping to sightseeing to eating everything in sight then this is the zine for you. You can get all my zines from my shop.

Have you made a zine recently? If so send it over so I can read and review it!

(Originally posted July 2002)

This’ll be an interesting movie column if for no other reason than my complete lack of movie-watching action over the past month. But hey - don’t use this as a reason to hate me, or to follow me down the nearest dark alley in order to assault me whilst my mind is on other things - because I AM NOT ENTIRELY TO BLAME FOR THIS SITUATION.

Here’s the deal, see: up until recently, I shared a house with two of my friends, and many a happy evening was spent watching videos, or going down to the cinema, or indeed simply sitting around discussing the post-modern Brechtian tendencies of so much of the work of Don Simpson as producer AND ALSO actor. Then, just as life couldn’t be any more perfect, one of my friends decided to move away down to Brighton, where the pebbles are smooth and the hair is styled, and as he moved out I came to realise exactly how many items of furniture, electrical equipment and cutlery in the house he actually owned. Can you see where this is leading? Correct. My video recorder - and I do consider it MY video recorder, simply as a result of having shared a house with it for about five years - now lives in Brighton, which means a three-hour train journey simply to watch crap like ‘Jeepers Creepers’ or ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’, let alone the exciting new ‘Apocalypse Now Redux’ edit or ‘Psych-Out’ once again. And that’s like, too much, man.

You might be thinking “why doesn’t he just go to the cinema, like anybody else?”. But to be honest with you, if you’re thinking that, you obviously haven’t been reading all my previous columns and hanging on my every fucking word like I expect you to. Let me run through it once more, though, for those of you not paying attention: I live in Reading, where there are two cinemas within easy distance - one walkable, one not - but both of these cinemas show, pretty much consistently, THE WORST KIND OF HOLLYWOOD SHITE THAT EVER WASTED VALUABLE CELLULOID. So, are there any other options? Well, one: the local university has a film club kinda thing which shows your more art-house and your more obscure films, which is a short car journey away.

Continue reading »

Apparently a Dundee-based music magazine is getting ~£230,000 public funds to fund its digital expansion.

the company also produces most of its journalism in London, in words of O’Rourke, carrying out “the nuts and bolts” work on the magazine and the website in Dundee.

It is an approach that has brought them wide plaudits, winning several industry awards and an exclusive interview with Paul McCartney on the release of his new album last year.

I’ve never seen a copy. Is it any good? (I mean by the standards of magazines that value exclusive Paul McCartney interviews in the 21st century….) Suppose its cool that there’s work there for typesetters, etc (though there seems to be a shortage of proofreaders if that Sunday Herald extract is typical) but what does this mean, “massive digital expansion of his brand”.

Yeah, I’ve seen a music website too. I could name a couple of people who’ll do you one for less than half a million and all.

Someone is missing the point, probably it’s me…