Hey

http://www.gigposters.com/designers.php?designer=41189

is my page at gig posters. 36 of them. Sadly not in date order so the quality fluctuates. The Comets On Fire one is on the last page and rules if I say so myself. The Yanks don’t get my style. Thats cool, I don’t get America.

So link it from your site!

xxx

Does anyone else find the line in Chain Reaction by Diana Ross where she sings

“I start to tremble when your hand goes lower”

really fucking creepy????

Hi.

A little piece of slight self promotion but an interesting blog anyway hopefully: here in Nottingham we often pontificate over a Sunday luncheon about how great it would be to curate ATP. After 4 years or so of waiting for someone to ask us we decided FUCK THIS and went ahead and booked our own version.

Nottingham recently has gone stale. The venues in the town are now all owned by the one corporation and it makes things weird. It’s good for some things but not for others. It got us down, we stopped doing gigs. But recently we became re-energised and the last few things we’ve done in the town (El Hombre, Christina Carter, Growing, Evens) have been successes for us. We got together and had a meeting with everyone who books shows independantly in the city and decided we wanted a festival.

We actively saught out more than we can chew.

So please take time to visit www.damnyou.co.uk for info about

DAMN YOU! KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS

Allow me a brief over-view. Its staged from Dec 4 -10 and basically sees a series of seriously eclectic bands playing venues you don’t usually go to, or that you might not have been to for a while. Each one has a door price as per normal but a £20 ticket is available for the week to save money.

So, without further delay

SATURDAY DEC 4

Record swap and bakesale in the afternoon followed by

SEACHANGE

BURNING MAN

ST JOAN

LAST OF THE REAL HARD MEN

SNEINTON GREENS MILL OLD SCHOOL HALL (off off the Sneinton Dale – map at the website)

SUNDAY DECEMBER 5

LIGHTNING BOLT

JOEYFAT

PRINTS

NOTTINGHAM BOAT CLUB, NXT TO THE FOREST GROUND

MONDAY DEC 6

SUNBURNED HAND OF THE MAN

BIRDS OF DELAY

+ one more

THE MAZE

TUESDAY DEC 7

TBC

WEDS DEC 8

JACKIE O MOTHERFUCKER

WOLVES! (OF GREECE)

SPIN SPIN THE DOGS

BAR NONE! (opposite the college, a few doors up from the Old Angel)

THURS DEC 9

DEAN ROBERTS

MODEL FIGHTER

plus more

BAR NONE!

FRIDAY DEC 10

HOOVER (yes, the Dischord band)

LORDS

BULLET UNION

THE MAZE

I hate to be a self-plugging whore, but Jesus, this took a lot of work. But now it’s finally done! Well, barring some additions and amendments. Please take a look and let me know your thoughts/reports any faults/etc. And can I encourage you to go to this page and view the photos of some band or t’other playing at Brown’s, Coventry, from last month? They’re some of David Moult’s finest camerawork to date (and fully justify having to wait around for 130kb images to load).

This morning I got the latest release by free-pysch-improv-noise hustlers Davenport, entitled ‘Owl Movement’. To the day, it was recorded but one month earlier – on 11th August 2004. And I had to import it from the USofA.

That’s a one month turnaround time. It’s taken my band 13 whole months between mixing a record and sending it off to the printers, and the damn thing’s not even going to get distributed for at least another month yet. Bastards, I say, Bastards!

I got some nice things in the post the other day from Alistair of Tangents/Unpopular fame. Some nice looking records (which obviously I haven’t listened to yet) and some badges but best of all was some little A5 photozines. Simply done with stamped sugar paper covers and nice shiny paper inside they’re apparently a kind of photo diary, random unconnected photos of everyday scenes and things and people. They’re really nice detailed interesting photos though with lots of my favourite things – text, signs, graffiti, patterns – and kept me occupied for a 10 minute bus ride no bother. It’s also made me long once again for a digital camera. It’s all very well having a nice proper 35mm camera but you can’t stick it in your pocket when you go for a walk. Not to mention the waiting up to a year before I have the spare cash to get films developed. Anyway, the zines are £2 each so go spend some money.

Okay, diskant-related live event plugging time:

#1 – UTER and SUNNYVALE NOISE SUB-ELEMENT play together at The Buffalo Bar in London on August 21st in honour of our fancy new record that you’re sick of hearing about (the sooner you buy one, the sooner they’re all sold and we stop going on about it). Do come, it’ll be great.

#2 – The line-up for AUDIOSCOPE 04 has just been announced with our own Chris Summerlin playing with headliner Damo Suzuki, diskant faves Cat on Form, Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies and Sunnyvale and those OXES fools being only a few of the great bands on offer. Be there! I will be.

People are stupid and greedy and weird. My favourite cafe Tchai Ovna, is under threat from someone wanting to build flats on the half-wild spot between their garden and the river. This will wreck the feel of the place and I’m baffled that anyone would want to do that.

There’s been a visit from the developer and work could start as soon as next week.

There’s a meeting about it there at 10 tonight and I’ll post more stuff about the campaign to stop this when I know more.

I have a record label and I got my test pressings today so very very soon I will have an real record what is available to purchase in a fancy BOX and everything. It features diskant staff bands Uter and Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element and our friends in the USA A Roman Scandal and Denim & Diamonds. There will be some gigs happening soon in the honour of so keep an eye on www.askingfortrouble.org for all the info on that and more. diskant record label madness! (This is why diskant is never updated).

Much more importantly and excitingly, I have just returned from the Netherlands where we discovered a whole new trend which we have brought back in abundance – PARASITE PALS!

“One day Holly was a lonely girl with not the friend. The doctor tells of the infection of many parasites. He give the pills for removal of parasites, but Holly is sad. Why to kill the parasites?”

And thus meet her parasite pals, the most fun being Tickles the Tapeworm who lives in Holly’s unhappy tummy. This is the most insane thing I have seen in a long time. I really never thought I’d see the day when tapeworms were cool.

But never mind.

I too have a new record label: Fourier Transform, with our first couple of releases coming out over the next couple of months. Please go and take a look!

It’s gonna RULE !

I’m running the risk of self promotion with this one but hear me out. I watched the BBC documentary about John Coltrane last week and was really stoked. The docu itself was hippy dippy rubbish but it inspired me to try and work even harder. But I left the program wondering how I was going to do that exactly. I turned my PC on and there was something that was at least part way to answering my question. I got asked to play guitar for Damo Suzuki. Crumbs. Damo was in Can for the uninitiated. He’s on an endless tour right now playing with “sound carriers” of his or the promoters choosing and we got put forward to back him in Nottingham (we being Neil and Phil from wolves and Elvis from Twinkie and Lords). We have to improvise with him for an hour. It’s going to rule. September 14th.

Tomorrow also sees the first steps towards my own record label of a kind. No name as yet (so the first release helpfully has no record label on it) for the label but me and my bud Gareth are just doing small run CDRs of things that might be better served with a cheap price tag but some nice packaging and a little care. The first CDRs we’ve done are for our ambient-ish project EOM and thats a live to cassette album (36 mins or so). There is a also a CDR of a record I made on my own which is coming out in 10″ on Lone Hand (ltd to 77 copies!) and another solo CDR audio travel diary of Australia. All kind of throwaway stuff but hopefully relatively devoid of commerce and hopefully therefore fun.

Been investigating modern composition too and the work of Gavin Bryars who has further convinced me that I am not pushing hard enough.

I move house on Monday too.

xx