I’m going to do an A to Z of 06 when I get chance, possibly tomorrow to cure the inevitable hangover but in the meantime…

MUSIC
Bo Diddley
Groundhogs
Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac
Loren (MazzaCane) Connors
Marc Ribot
Monorchid
Skull Kontrol
Wrangler Brutes
Comets On Fire
Erase Errata
Daniel Higgs / Lungfish
Bilge Pump
Sailors
Geriatric Unit
Nels Cline

LIVE
Spiritual Unity at the Festival Hall
Brotzmann/Bennik at ATP
Stooges at ATP
Whiteout w/Nels Cline at ATP
Bonnie Prince Billy/Harem Scarem in Easter Ross
Monorchid at The Note, Chicago
Touch & Go Festival in general (PW Long, Negative Approach, MOAM?, Ted Leo, Enon etc)
Powerhouse Sound at the Hideout, Chicago
Part Chimp every time I saw them this year, especially Latitude Festival and in Glasgow too
Bilge Pump every time I saw them
Comets On Fire in Nottm
Birds Of Delay supporting Magik Markers in Cambridge
Unit Ama and Lafaro in Easky, Ireland
The Gossip, Dinosaur, Boredoms, Big Business at April ATP
Lightning Bolt in Nottingham
Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip at Latitude
The Horse Loom in Nottingham
Hey Colossus in Brighton
The Good Anna a whole load of times
Carla Bozulich in Nottm
Erase Errata in Nottm
Chris Corsano at Nottm Raffles
US Maple and High On Fire Supersonic
Earth in Birmingham

FILM
Saw very few new ones. Enjoyed:
Get Carter
Idiocity
The Devil & Daniel Johnston

BOOKS
The Psychic Soviet by Ian Svenonius
The Biggest Secret by David Icke
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
How To Live Like A Lord Without Really Trying by Shepherd Mead
Them by Jon Ronson
Love & Death by Halperin & Wallace
The Sweeter Side Of Robert Crumb by Robert Crumb
Billy F Gibbons: Rock n Roll Gearhead by Billy F Gibbons

MAGS
Stop Smiling
Vice
MOJO

WEBSITES
Flickr
I also discovered the joy of Soulseek this year

BEST THING
It’s been a good year, personally, for music stuff
Going to Chicago

WORST THING
It’s been a frustrating year, personally, for music stuff.
The United Kingdom going down the pan

OVERALL
Not bad not bad.

Take a moment out to read through this site:

www.savagesound.com

I don’t live in Chicago, or in fact the USA at all for that matter. I went to Chicago once, it seemed refreshingly community-based for a big city. I post on a Chicago-based forum from time to time and it was on this forum that I heard about Malachi Ritscher. Malachi Ritscher lived in Chicago and from accounts seemed to have devoted his life to supporting the musical community of the city. He is known best as a live performance archivist and many of his ‘field recordings’ from gigs have made it to official releases on the artists’ albums.

*

The instant quality of the internet is both a blessing and a curse. How many times have you fired off an e-mail to someone in a fit of rage only to regret it a split-second later? With the internet it is possible to offend an enormous amount of people with the click of a mouse. However, with the internet it is also possible to stream photos of a plane hitting the Pentagon to a punk rock music forum and thus make the readers of the Forum (for those few minutes) the most knowledgable people on the planet about current events, right in the moment.

I think everyone has read about people making rash decisions to end their own lives by posting a “Do I or don’t I?” message on Myspace and no one responding. I think the figure is something like one third of all Americans with access to the internet have their own blog. We are used to seeing people’s opinions and feelings immediately thrown out to the world to the point where we can detach the words and pictures from a real person at the end of the internet connection.

Have a read of these:
http://www.savagesound.com/gallery99.htm
http://www.savagesound.com/gallery100.htm
http://cbs2chicago.com/local/local_story_307085813.html

There is something perverse and unsettling about reading things that should be this personal in an environment that is totally opposite to that. It normally makes me recoil at someone’s self-centredness. This has similarities for sure – the person concerned carried out their actions to draw attention to the things they were writing about (to put it in simplistic terms) but in this case what they were writing about and what concerned them needed that attention.

Anyway, have a read of it all, it’s what the internet is there for.

http://hootpage.com/hoot_wattstooges2006record.html
COME ON!!!!!!!!!

Like great adventurers of yore, Team Damn You! set off to Chicago in September to attend the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary.
We took a squillion photos and they, along with some diary style blurb is here:

www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin

Enjoy with your brain!

First record you bought and do you still own it?
The first record I bought myself was the Snap album “The Power”. I don’t still own it. The first record I remember having was The Beatles 67-70 and I still have that though it’s not the same copy.

Last record you bought
I bought a load of stuff in Chicago at the same time: Eddie Murphy “Comedian” LP, Pharoah Sanders “Tauhid” CD, Reissue of “Blind Joe Death/John Fahey” LP, Borbetomagus 7″, UOA 7″, Sun Ra LP the name of which escapes me, Earthless LP, Ornette Coleman “Dancing In Your Head” LP, Thurston Moore/Nels Cline Live CD, Loren Connors “The Departing Of A Dream Vol II” CD, Ken Vandermark’s School Days “In Our Times” CD. It’s the most music I have bought in ages and I’ve only listened to a small bit of it.

Last song you downloaded
I am not a big downloader but I did get all the old Scratch Acid stuff off Soulseek.

Last song/record you went to enormous lengths to find
Not counting Tauhid by Pharoah Sanders (as I settled on the reissue CD) it would be this weird double 7″ called Burlap Fantasy (it’s an 8 track dub-style mix of Mississippi Queen by Mountain) that I heard on WFMU.

Most elaborately packaged record you own
Harry Smith Anthology Of American Folk Music Vol 4 on Revenant. Or “America” by John Fahey.

Last song you listened to
“Holy Teeth” – Comets On Fire

Favourite mixtape someone made you that you still listen to
Chris Thrash made me a really good one called “Don’t Sweat The Technics” a long while ago that was great. Luke Younger made me a few too that were equally good and all feature still in my bath time tape collection.

What records are you going to buy next?
God knows. Probably Bonnie Prince Billy.

What are your top 10 most listened to songs on iTunes/last.fm/whatever
I use none of the above so will guess from my stereo/car stereo.

Comets On Fire – Holy Teeth
Comets On Fire – The Swallow’s Eye
The Gories – Thats The View From Here
The Kills – Cat Claw
PW Long – Stand Up!
The Monorchid – Beard Of Bees
The Monorchid – Distortion
Awesome Color – Hat Energy
Awesome Color – Free Man
Excelsior – Hoedown at the Thunderdome (aka Hoedown At Dude Ranch)

THINGS I LIKE
Going boating on a canal (www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin)
Being in Chicago
The Monorchid at The Note, Chicago
Uzeda guitarist Agostino
Buying a copy of my own guitar for £100
Awesome Color live
My new Polaroid
New Felix songs

NOT
Being in Nottingham
My next door neighbour practising his rapping skills (sorry, skillz) at 7am at concert volume
Being skint
The people of Sneinton

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5311298.stm

Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray in Queensland. Anyone who has spent an afternoon in their pants eating cheese on toast will have watched one of his programmes open-mouthed in amazement or laughing their heads off as he leapt onto a crocodile 3 times his size while his daughter Bindi watched on.
I turned into a massive Steve Irwin fan when I was in Australia. I was outraged when the press turned on him for the ‘baby stunt’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3364733.stm) and I almost changed my plane ticket home, risking a prison term by breaking my Visa, in order to see him at local Australia Day celebrations.
His death appears to be the first of it’s kind in Australia. You can bet he was probably french kissing the Stingray. Or at the very least licking it’s face.

Marceline has been hassling me (and all the diskant crew) to do some more music reviews and I kept putting off answering until finally I had to admit that I’m not that into music anymore. Or rather I’m not that interested in new music or listening to things that are put in my lap.
However, I am hugely into music and about 99% of it at the moment is Lungfish.
When I first got into Dischord Records, Lungfish were a total oddity among the deep back catalogue of the label that I was investigating (they still are in a lot of respects). It wasn’t an instant conversion by any means, in fact I didn’t really like them. I remember talking with someone who knows the Dischord people and he spoke incredulously of the excitement shown by Ian MacKaye when the final mix of the new Lungfish record was delivered to him. I remember we laughed.
Then I got a tape of The Unanimous Hour LP about 5 years ago maybe. I remember clearly driving in my car with a girl I had just started seeing and putting the tape in and saying to her:
“I don’t know if I like this album, I just can’t stop listening to it” like I was apologising. I don’t know why I did that but I think it was because if there’s one thing Lungfish isn’t, it’s ‘now’ music or ‘music of the moment’. It isn’t stylistically current. And when you’re impressing a lady I think it’s important to be current right?
The thing is Lungfish songs (or the later ones at any rate) don’t have any changes. For someone digging math rock and every weird time signature shit I could put my hands on in 2001, having no changes was as revolutionary and mind blowing as hearing Trout Mask Replica for the first time.
I think during the approximately 365 baths I took in 2001, I probably listened to that tape for at least 300 of them, still not really sure why. I just found, increasingly (and still so) that when I stare at all my records it tends to be Lungfish that jumps out.
There’s something really all-encompassing about the music they make. It’s for all times. It’s not like putting on AC/DC on a Saturday because you feel hyped or listening to Smog because you want to wallow in bad feeling or listening to Brian Eno to go to sleep. It seems to serve all purposes and be the right thing at all times. Again, I can’t fathom this.
I also can’t fathom what Daniel Higgs is singing about. I think the ambiguity is a big part of the band and their power in that he sings about things that, from time to time, really strike within me like it’s something I’ve heard before or I know already. It’s powerful but yet it has no feeling of lecture. The symbolism he uses rings bells in my head about bizarre cultish practise, the cosmos, power balances and religion but it’s never direct.
When I was in Australia in 2003 I was really down when I found out the band were playing Nottingham in my absence.
I asked Phil what it was like. He said he went to soundcheck and the sound engineer went through the drums and bass etc and then finally asked for guitar. Phil said as soon as the guitarist Asa played a chord it became Lungfish and he remembered why he was there. How many bands can you say that about?
I got lucky when they were added to the 2004 ATP festival. Looking across the front row I think I knew maybe 9 out of 10 of the people clutching the barrier. Live they were bizarre, requiring a certain amount of submission on the part of the listener, i.e. you had to go with it. I love bands like that and I loved them.
I had the bizarre experience of watching the sea with Higgs, Steve from Unit Ama, Neil, bassist Sean Meadows and my girlfriend later that night and I had no idea what to say to them or how to chat to them about anything which sounds completely corny but I’m not usually lost for words or freaked out by people.
Anyway, I’m not even sure what’s going on with them at the moment. Their last LP Feral Hymns is mighty. I heard they may not be operational right now, I know Higgs is playing solo shows.
The reason for writing this is that I stumbled across what might well be Dan Higgs’ only radio interview and it’s a real piece of work. Listen and enjoy!

Link to interview

I have been clearing out a lot of my house to keep no-job boredom at bay and in doing so I have found loads and loads of old photos and gig tickets and set lists and other geeky stuff I have saved away over the last few years.
So I got a Flickr account and scanned them all in together with a load of more recent digital photos of holidays, festivals and the like. Go have a look if you’re as bored as me:

www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin

Link

Thanks!

My friend Phil and I have a joke that always gets delivered when coming out of a record store:

“What’d you buy?”
“Oh (insert names of really good, weird, interesting contemporary records)…
….never gonna listen to them”

It’s true. So much music exists purely as a fetish item, an object divorced from it’s purpose – to be listened to. It’s why people buy unplayable lathe cut 9.5 inch records or CDs encased in packaging that has to be broken to be played. Playing it is not the point, owning it is.

I don’t want to be presumptious to the people who buy their records, but I reckon the Get Hustle are a good example of this. In fact, Phil himself said he hadn’t listened to their debut album Earth Odyssey in a while now. But get this, they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t exist in that chasm of bands who sell more belt buckles than records.
Earth Odyssey is a cracking record, I wore it out listening to it when I got it. But this new stuff is something else. The warning sign was shot like a flare with the Who Do You Love? 7″ a while back, that reduced Bo Diddley’s sexual brag to a series of terrifying throbs and grunts that genuinely seem from another planet.
Rollin’ In The Ruins takes that and just makes it even stranger but yet somehow more euphoric. It’s more showy, more entertaining, still as minimal in the instrumentation but yet massive in sound. They always had this thing for a crescendo and a crash and an extravagant gesture but now it’s like a hyped up circus Barnum-gone-wrong witchdoctor hocus pocus overwhelming BLOB of sound.
WSTP especially is giant, I would kill to see them do it live (c’mon folks, UK tour?) and in Valentine they have a genuinely unsettling, commanding frontwoman. I don’t know who to compare it to: Ike & Tina Turner? Sun Ra? Birthday Party?
I don’t know. I’m not going to tell you to buy it as I reckon loads of you already have, I’m going to tell you to break the seal and listen to the damn thing.