Some new links I have added that you may not have noticed:

Oxfordbands weblog: You might think a blog on a local music website would be cliquey and bitchy and very boring for outsiders but this is looking rather good, and not just because our own Stuart Fowkes actually blogs there (rather than just pretending to as he does here). Nice way to find out about some new bands as well. If only every town had one of these. I’m sure if Glasgow did it would quickly disintegrate into Mogwai/Franz Ferdinand abuse central so well done Oxford!

Guardian Gamesblog: I’m fairly impressed that the Guardian considers gaming to be of such current importance that it deserves a whole blog. What with this, the online blog and the Music and Food monthly magazines, the Guardian is quickly becoming my best work timewaster. It’s also got Aleks whatshername what used to be on Bitz writing for it, sad geek boys. I await her reports from the Edinburgh Games Festival with some interest to see if it’s worth going this year. Last year we just waited 20 minutes to throw some pigs around in Wind Waker and then sneered at the N-Gage.

JGram World: You may know Jason from his columns here at diskant or his marvellous No Pictures zine but he now also has a weblog where you can learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about him. It’s better than Eastenders! Hopefully Jason will be blogging here soon too.

also worth a look for sure is our Asking For Things blog where we’re getting everyone who bought our record to tell us about the random object they got in their box. I’m really enjoying it so far.

I finally got round to seeing some films last week after too many evenings organising records and/or being ill in a coughing way, which means trailers!

I, ROBOT – still looks really really dumb. Now starting to edge into the ‘so ridiculous maybe we should go see it for a laugh’ but NO. Also seems to have almost exactly the same plot as Minority Report. With robots.

CATWOMAN – this looks terrible, particularly the ‘hilarious’ cat-related jokes.

KING ARTHUR – was starting to actually look okay (if you can stop thinking about how cool a LOTR style King Arthur fantasy film might be) until the actor playing King Arthur said something. What kind of an awful accent is that? Urgh.

3 (or maybe 4, we were a little late) part trailer for HELLBOY – does anyone really care that much? Failed to move me to any emotion whatsoever, good or bad. Small child in front of us seemed confused also.

Not much to say about the actual films we saw. Spider-man 2 wasn’t really as good as the first one but was still very enjoyable (apart from several shouting at the screen type moments (STOP TAKING YOUR MASK OFF!, why didn’t you notice Spider-man and your best friend had THE SAME VOICE?) and the worry that all goes downhill now that some people know who Spider-man really is and he spoiler spoiler at the end. I really liked the opening credits though, all comic book style and nice flashes of the previous film for dumbasses like me who suddenly realised they’d forgotten everything that happened previously.

And Fahrenheit 9/11 was much better than I expected, what with all the furore and dismissiveness and OH NO LEFTY BIAS etc. Much less stunts and use of 9/11 than expected and very funny with a few utterly shocking moments. In this cynical old world it’s weird to find myself gasping in disbelief of what I have just seen. The weirdest thing for me though was being shown lots of footage of major players in the US government and me not recognising them, thanks to not having watched much TV in the past year! That’s one unexpected downside of getting all your news from the internet.

I haven’t got round to seeing Shrek 2 yet, thanks to my bandmates telling me the “twist” (no doubt obvious to a 4 year old) after someone spoiled it for them. Thanks guys. The gingerbread man is my new hero though so I will sometime. Also, why did no-one ever mention Shrek is Scottish? Sorry, I mean “Scottish” (cue Stu and his his Amazing Terrible Scottish Accent).

Hello!

I’ve been busy (BUY OUR RECORD) but I now hope to be able to stop neglecting diskant and do some much-needed redevelopment and updating, in between spending hours at the post office sending parcels (BUY OUR RECORD). So expect some changes round here. To show you just how serious I am, I’ve just spent all of 10 minutes adding commenting to the blog so that we can carry on in-jokey conversations and you, yes YOU the reader, can tell us how great we are, or how wrong we are, or, er, how great we are. Please do add your comments if you have anything you’d like to add.

I have lots of other things to post but not now. Soon, though.

No, really, BUY OUR RECORD.

• Gig in Glasgow, at Stereo, last weekend. Good place (including a record shop where I got served by Stephen Pastel – doesn’t get much more exciting than that), good company (stayed at diskant towers, Marceline’s bohemian flat slap bang in the centre of Glasgow), good bands to play with (Uter and Hex), good good good. Celebrating the launch of our new record.
  
• Gig at Truck Festival, on the edge of Oxford, this weekend. Playing in an actual barn. With hay around the place.

Couple of capsule reviews to tide you over until my next column:

• Stuffy/The Fuses 7″ on May Go 0 Records: Nicely heavy, yet nicely melodic. Very pop-savvy, one of those bands who sound like they’re enjoying life. A great live band. ‘Early Blur crossed with late Ash.’
• Chuck No, Not Ah! 7″ on Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation: Mexican-bandit style heavy surf garage punk with added chanting. Blue vinyl. Pleasingly deranged and pleasingly not of these times. ‘Early Shadows crossed with Man Or Astroman.’
• Trencher When Dracula Thinks “Look At Me” CD on Victory Garden/Jonson Family/SuperFi/A Tree In A Field/Action Index/La Vida No Es Un Mus: Heavy. Fucking. Mayhemic. Noise. 14 tracks of complex, fast, guitar skroink in around 18 minutes. ‘Early Locust crossed with Melt-Banana.’
  

Thanks Chris.

So has refinding the name of the church where John Cage’s As Slowly As Possible is being played. I want to visit that.

The Tchai Ovna call out. If you’re wondering why you should care, one reason is that it’s the first place I saw people beatboxing and not being shit. Acappella Hardcore!

In my job it is possible to “raise a pink stub” in order to “get the disco going”.

Here are some other lovely comments from the people who work in the call centre (spelling is straight from the comments):

“Cust called when she was down on electric and someone advised customer that she should go to a hotel or eat cold beans”

“spoke to Miss K but she was not able to speak”

“reading seemed a bit out of sink”

“cust requested to speek to someone higher than myself”

“it’s been a catogory of mistakes”

“house hit by lightening”

“house hit by lighting”

(person is looking for a property) “there is a big hole in the ground where something once stood and is possibly that”

“confirmed property is demolised”

“exoplained”

“expolained”

“occuopier”

“acocunt”

“garunted”

“garentee”

“customer has been reduced to near teers”

“customer is with daughter having belly button pierced. will call back later”

“cust qurin if mops gona be out obn wed conformed this, but relised scot power mat they are only avail on tues + thurs dairyed to contact cust” (translated – The customer is querying if meter operations are going to be out on wednesday and I confirmed this but then realised meter operations are only available on tuesday and thursday so I have placed this in my diary so I can contact the customer to tell them)

“property empty for a while. is a shabby council house”

“the night reate follows on from perv reads”

“queen of puddings, £1.49”

“customer deceased (apr 03) so should not be chased for debt”

“I apologised to customer and luckily he finds the situation quite funny”

“there is a gas leek at the property”

“passed call to meter changes to orangise”

“miis F custclaled thatshe has n ow moved out, of proert nbut dosner hand over the keys ofd proerty untill 16th feb I aidvseed to clal nearer thattime andf I iwll geta key swnet out ofr m enter alsoa refiund of gas accoutt has been done a bill is up to date reading”

“tried to call…no one was responsing”

“customer called back again regarding her ill father as she is not happy with us, stated that we have pressurised him into coming to us. I stated that we do not have a list of ill people in Britain”

“told her she can go to the post office and INSERT IT”

“the customer hunged up”

I am convinced the DESIGNER BABIES are on the verge of something. I don’t mean a commercial breakthrough or anything like that. I mean they are close to arriving at a new sound. They used to take two opposing styles and spot-weld them together. The results were always interesting but the joins were always visible.

But last night I saw them play and a couple of points in the set were just above and beyond. If you’ve not heard them before the basic premise is playing heavy, disjointed rock using sounds not usually associated with that. So structurally its Fantomas – blast beats, twists and turns – but sonically it’s all over the shop. Kate employs a theramin, laptop and a turntable with pre-damaged and prepared vinyl. Mark plays a Tele tuned down to A through a bass amp and Nick could play in Napalm Death if he wanted but chances are they’d turn him down for being too damn joyous when he plays. And thats before considering Kushs vocal talents that range from wailing eastern scales to put Percy Plant to shame to ferocious growls and grunts. It’s a strange setup but somehow they are getting some wonderful pop music from it. Serious!

2 new songs in particular are just incredible, instantly memorable and amazing. One is a weird shifting single note riff built on a dancehall rhythm with tons of twists but never for the sake of it. The second takes the kind of Son House slide guitar thing that Beefheart stole for I Feel Like Ahcid and just pounds it out really ferociously while Kush makes melody of the whole thing.

Rather than mash it all together but keep the bits distinct it’s like they’ve finally found a way of being all the things they are at the same time. I can’t fucking believe it.

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 !