good things:

shellac. should be frozen right now and thawed out in thirty years to show people how to make perfect rock music. also, discussions on stage about band members’ beards are a good thing.
six minutes into blonde redhead‘s set, playing ‘bipolar’, warm feeling
simon albini demanding that everyone at atp listen to sonic youth and no other bands
giving ian scanlon pie
discovering that zeni geva are bluddy grate
jack daniel’s
meeting lots and lots of people who are nice and being in a proper ROCK gang
booking one of the bands who were at atp to play audioscope02

bad things:

being ill from too much alcohol, and this being directly responsible for my not meeting steve albini
adrian errol refusing pie
not seeing enough bands
ot being able to get in to see the fall
no sword fights or crazy golf, boo
cheap trick. rubbish trick, more like. also, arcwelder were disappointing, like a rubbish husker du.

Hoho. Everyone else must be dealing still with all yesterdays hangovers.

Apart from the stuff I’ve seen before (Low, Godspeed…), I was most impressed by:
The beach. Proper good sand dunes.
Zeni Geva, proper immense metal works and more than 3 people in a band is trying too hard.
PW Long, bloke with acoustic guitar who made Smog look lazy. Yeeha. On tour now but I didn’t catch the name of his band. Whoops.
And that off-kilter instrumental group I can’t remember the name of. You know who I mean.

And I owe apologies to:
Rachels
anyone I made coffee for over the weekend
anyone who tried to speak to me in the mornings
everyone I didn’t see much because I was looking at bands or dossing in my chalet too much

I braved the Blectum From Blechdom vs Dianogah dilemma last night and went for the girls playing electronics since there is very little of that at ATP and lots of Dianogah. Well, some Dianogah anyway. Seemed like everyone was having traumas though as the venue was pretty quiet and meant my only choice of company was to foist myself on wee stuart Mogwai and his lovely wife who was promoting the gig. So big yay to them. Great band choices too. First up were The Magnificents who I had seen supporting Mogwai but sounded wrong that night apparently. I remember being quite bemused by them at Mogwai and they were certainly much more enjoyable this time. Helped on by John Cummings’ excellent soundman choice of turning everything to ‘FUCKING LOUD’ they ended up coming across like Joy Division fed through an electronic frenzy machine. Doom electro racket or something. It was funny as well, the main singer guy batting his microphone about the place like some slapstick master and barking super vocoder nonsense [‘HELP…HELP….HELP……MEEEEE’]. Fools.

Blectum From Blechdom are two cute american girls with three laptops, a keyboard on a strap, a banjo and a girlish sense of humour. They kind of alternated between crouching beside their laptops pulling off glitchy electronica breaks and some punk rock girl shouting. The best bits were when they were both singing away in front of those booming crunching beats I like so much. The bad bits were when it all got a bit too much on the funny lyrics and you started thinking Moldy Peaches. Kind of hard to describe really but they were fun fun fun. Girls are much more fun than boys, it’s the truth! I should have bought one of their records, duh. They ended up staying at my house as well due to cat fear and were very nice. Even left me a bottle of vodka. Rock!

hey!

i saw hirameka hi-fi and electro group in colchester on saturday. i got drunk but i remember electro group being great and an excellent soundtrack for drinking. some rilly drunk guy liked them so much he threw beer at them and got thrown out. hawhaw! hirameka were fantastic, playing mostly new tunes and pulling out guest guitarist Chris Baldwin for a chaotic version of the Formalists. can’t wait for the new album.

Simon just mentioned The Internet Archive which is a website that archives past versions of websites. Sniggering at early basic HTML Amazon was all very amusing until we both had the same idea of looking for diskant. Simon’s not been here that long though so wasn’t able to dig as far back as I was and here we have diskant as it was in October 1999!! Note our catchy address of diskant.future.easyspace.com, classy banner ads and boasting of ‘Over 100 Links’. Awww. For me, this is somewhat like stumbling across some high school essays – I’m cringing over my awful web design skills and remembering the trauma of Website of the Month. Dear oh dear. I’m just grateful there’s no evidence of the very first incarnation of diskant which was similar but all the text was in size 4 and we only had three websites.

But what strikes me more now is actually how little diskant has changed in those two years. We’re still yellow, we still have a very similar logo [though it’s not showing up], the diskant icon at the bottom of the page hasn’t changed a pixel and we still cover the same themes. Yet it seems like forever ago.

Haha. Remember when the Mogwai website used to look like this? Sadly I couldn’t find any examples of the icky fleshy pink version.

Okay, so official ATP over-excitement may not start til Monday [according to us] when we will start with the shrieking and the jumping up and down. But anyway, get yourself in gear for that by reading the coverage of the New York ATP on Fake Jazz. This article is the better one and they make no effort to try and cover the thing properly, they just go to exactly what they want and ponder all kinds of things around it. Sounds like the weekend was ace with possibly a little too much avant garde instrument hitting. I want to see Merzbow! Wow.

I also want to go to the Sonar festival in Spain. Look at at that line-up!! Shall have to make do with Blectum From Blechdom here on Wednesday instead. Especially since the head of department took all my remaining holiday allowance away meaning I have to struggle back to work the day after Trail of Dead. Gar!

And finally, I’m having a very odd time with the Electro Group album. I remember listening to this the day they all left for Leeds and thinking it was a vaguely nice jangly indie guitar record but I put it on yesterday and damn me if it hasn’t transmogrified into a super fantastic effects laden My Bloody Valentine swirlfest. What happened there? I’d think I ‘d been listening to the wrong CD before but a) I wasn’t that drunk and b) I remember the spooky hidden song ten minutes into the last track. Hmm, I need help.

It’s been banished from my 3 cd changer. We need a break. I need to see other people. I haven’t sickened myself of an album through overplay in ages but I was really starting to get sick of the more poptastic tunes on ST&C – Baudelaire and Relative Ways in particular.

I do find myself more and more concentrating on three cds at a time plus one record as befits my stereo. The vinyl is usually something I can stick on to get overexcited about before I leave the house – Le Tigre‘s first album at present – while the cds tend to be one rock, one downbeat and one electronic. I’m getting very predictable. Unwound are my rock cd at the moment and also my new heroes. I’ve liked Unwound kind of absent-mindedly for the last few years but they’re gradually edging into my top bands evah! list. It’s the guitars – they fill my heart with joy and my eyes with tears, if you want to be cheesy about it. That Death Cab for Cutie album is providing some quiet moments although I can see it being swapped back to the Papa M album very soon. The DCfC just seems so flimsy and mimsy and lacking in anything solid and still too much about mittens! But I can’t stop playing the thing either. Damn them. The electronic one arrived this morning and is the new thing by EU. It’s in a perfectly circular plastic cd case which is a design marvel but I’m not sure if it’s good or if I like it. The music however I do like – it’s all twitchy and fluid and mmm.

I really recommend you go read some of the new articles on The Morning News as they are all really good, particularly this one. And let’s not forget Tangents [which I did, now added to our links on the side as it should be] which is always excellent, particularly Alistair’s blog and this article about Friends Reunited. I should register there while I can brag about my super-popular web empire and my work for crazy Texans. And also while I am actually still in employment…

i’m sure this won’t come as news to any of you, but six by seven are shite. four years ago they were one of my favourite bands in the whole world, but after seeing them tonight i have finally given up all hope. basically, i have put it down to the loss of their two critical elements: the saxophone, and the drumstick/guitar action. since the departure of guitarist sam hempton a couple of years ago, things have been getting progressively worse, but i was determined to reserve judgement at first in case they were just going through a “bad patch” or some crap, but alas, as tonight showed me, it just ain’t happenin’. i struggled through the barrage of mediocre, lack-lustre new songs, ever optimistic that any minute they would tear into brilliantly cute, and my faith would be restored, but i was left dissapointed, wondering what went wrong. they played the same venue last november with the same line up, and while i knew then that they weren’t the same band they once were, there were still moments that captured my imagination, and kept that flicker of hope burning in my heart (sniff) but tonight there was not one single moment that really made me stop and think “wow”, which essentially is what they were all about. their gigs in 98, just before the release of their first album were something to cherish. they seemed so incredible, so…vital to my 16 year old ears, and the “wow” factor was quite considerably higher. they were crucially ever on the brink, and the thrill was watching them avoid it, holding onto every last chord like their lives depended on it. and now it seems they have gone over the brink, and are spiralling into the chasm of indie oblivion.

so, i’m just confirming to myself what i’ve known for some time, but maybe some of you will know what i’m talking about, if not with this band, then someone else that seemed so perfect when you were younger, who now have just become in your mind, the same as every other dull shmindie outfit dragging themselves round this nation’s less glamourous venues.

support came from british sea power, who should never be allowed to play to people again, ever. thankfully, local band the visit opened, who were quite charming with their brand of wonky pub rock (and at least three songs about cocks). they were the perfect band to play first at a gig like this, it’s just a shame six by seven didn’t feel like finishing the job.

still, atp next week, so it’s not all bad.

BBC postpone tonight’s Trail of Dead Peel session for not having the right note of respect on the Queen Mum’s funeral day. Rock on. I wish the BBC had done a real news report on this instead of just mentioning it like a slight schedule change. Excuse me while I get my Breakstuff hat…

I saw The Redneck Manifesto last night for the second time in a fortnight and they were fucking ace again. They had been on tour round Europe for two weeks and well to be honest they were a bit smelly. But the tour was pretty eventful. They wrote off a car and had to buy a lovely sporty 10 year old VW estate in a dubious shade of brown to finish the tour in. The was in between playing to 4 people in hamburg (3 of whom were tramps) and 200 people at a festival in belgium. Still must have made for an intesting time. The gig last night though had 4 bands playing in a dark, gloomy rehearsal room in a part of Manchester you’d not end up in out of choice. Dunno who the fist band was so we’ll skip past them but the second band were ace. Called Green Acre and from Grimsby or somewhere they managed to be more math rock and disjointed than Geiger Counter while throwing in some shouty vocals. They were great. Then it was Bilge Pump of Gringo fame who did their slightly odd mumbled word thing while fighting against a variety of technical hitches. Richie Redneck actually managed to sleep through part of the set which considering the noise emanating from the stage was some considerable achievement. Then came the Rednecks. No soundcheck they just ambled onstage and launched into it. As I said even dead tired they still managed to pull off a great show.

Things I like at the moment:
Shouty shellac type rock stuff. Especially a 7″ by Candian band Blake.
Bowyers pork and beef sausages – they’re like the holy grail, can’t find em anywhere no more, which is a shame ‘cos I got a hankering
Natalie Imbruglia (she’s sooooooooooo lovely)

Things I don’t like at the moment:
Arrogant people.
my bank balance
choc chip cookies

Ollie why were Cursive cack? I love their recorded stuff…