i’m stealing chris summerlin’s thing of making a mixtape tracklisting. this seems like a good plan since the tape ring ground to a halt, and it will hopefully quench my desire for stupid pointless lists of bands.

side a
mike patton & melt banana: area 877
antioch arrow: chaos vs cosmos
behead the prophet n.l.sl.: in the garden
men’s recovery project: get the fuck out of my office
love lost but not forgotten: means to no end
my lai: twenty/twenty

side b
the eyesores: nausea
neutral milk hotel: oh comely
low: weight of water
johnny cash: i see a darkness
royal trux: money for nothing

there it is. short/sweet/shit. should you want a copy for yourself, please send me no less than £20 cash and 5 blank tapes in case i screw it up. thanks.

ok, so appleseed cast were pretty good, but not exactly sensational. one of them looked like jason lee, which was rather amusing. cursive, on the other hand, were cack. pavement meets dexys midnight runners? not today thankyou.

avid followers of this blog (you know who you are) will remember some time ago that i won a competition with three lobed recordings and i got the first part of my prize today. it was a subscription to the purposeful availment cdep series, and today i got cds by bardo pond and six organs of admittance. woohoo, free stuff!

also, has anyone else noticed that the new issue of fracture has a full colour glossy cover? they’ll be asking people what ringtones they have quicker than you can say “newmusicalexpress”.

things i like:
ice-cream: i discovered today that an ice-cream van stops in the car park of where i work, and we’re all allowed to go and buy some. treat!
new issue of the diskant zine: good columns and interviews, plus wil forbis mentioned me. woo!
fugazi dvd: inspiring stuff. plus dvd extras!
wolves of greece: as previously mentioned.

things i don’t like:
the daily mail: “free queen mother rose for every reader”.
lenny kravitz: someone please explain how this man has any kind of a career.
pollen: my eyes! etc

i’m also going to see appleseed cast and cursive tomorrow, which should prove to be an education if nothing else. i’ve been reliably informed that this is a rare opportunity to see some ’emo’ bands in an ‘intimate’ venue. with ‘the kids’. i’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

yeah.

ok, so i’m drunk and in no state to blog, but marceline insisted. when the overlord calls, what can you do?

um was, as ever, a lyrical genius, and managed to get through his own set, despite there being a crowd of about seven people, quite superbly. this man deserves awards. give them to him. now.

sunnyvale, despite 15 minutes of technical problems,. managed to get their groove on quite severely. hats off to smint and stu.

and then crs*, while playing a very short set, managed to charm the pants off most of the audience, and they even got some bookings on the strength of their set. so, yeah, rock!

so, an all dayer. i managed about five hours before scuttling home, inebriated and exhausted. take heed kids. entering your 20s does bad things to a person.

Following in my great tradition of discovering exciting things roughly three years after everyone else, I’ve been listening to a lot of bands hailing from the Providence area of Rhode Island. For years I’ve been blissfully unaware of this little community of super creative type people who all seem to either a) paint interesting, beautiful and often disturbing pictures or b) play in fantastic bands whilst wearing balaclavas. The hub of all this activity would appear (or have appeared) to be Fort Thunder which was founded by hooded crazies Lightning Bolt. So they, along with Thee Hydrogen Terrors, Men’s Recovery Project, and Mindflayer have been fulfilling my desire for scary noisy stupidness, while The Eyesores and The Iditarod have been providing me with some more subdued (but no less dark and twisted) folk/country type stuff.

One day I’m gonna be ahead of everyone else and find a great band who are actually still releasing records and might possibly play within 500 miles of where I live. But not yet.

i implore you all to go here and download the mp3.

having not won a single thing since guessing the correct number of sweets in a jar at a school fete when i was about nine, i was very pleased to hear this morning that i’m like the winner of a subscription to a series of cds on three lobed records. entitled purposeful availment, its like this nice limited run of cdeps by bands including bardo pond, tarentel, shannon wright and mick turner from dirty three. needless to say this makes me very happy indeeed. hurrah for three lobed, and hurrah as well for fakejazz, who seemed to be involved in me winning somehow.

interesting things i have been doing lately include:

skiving work, liking the bubba sparxxx single far too much, whatching stupidly bad tv (young, gifted and broke anyone?) and ah yes, seeing mogwai of course. they were good but not like amazing. better then average i’d say. my mogwai gig tally is now in double figures though, which is quite nice.

i have been listening to rhode island’s lightning bolt lots and lots, who are certainly worth checking out if you like full on noisy mathmatical stupidity (and let’s face it, who doesn’t). i also got the set fire to flames album, who manage to nicely escape the moniker of ‘yet-another-godspeed-side-project’ which can only be good.

the official diskant tape ring 2001 (as it has now become known) is proceeding at a terrific rate as anyone involved will tell you. well done to everyone for making it this far. it can only get better.

woo, i legally purchased fugazi (i’m getting the hang of the bold things now) today, but i haven’t had a good listen yet. i got the mogwai single too, which is great obviously, and the six by seven single, which ain’t. hooray for long overdue record buying.