(Originally posted October 2002)

So hey yeah, there’s been a lot of great movies on television lately. And I’m not even talking about super-special they-beam-it-from-space satellite TV either, just those regular five channels are keeping me furnished with film treats… Maybe I’ve just never noticed before but it’s in your interests – every one of you – to scour the television listings on a weekly basis. You’ll be surprised at what you may find. You can then go on to videotape films you like, cover them in dust and show off to your friends about how long you’ve had such cool films on tape for – like, “what, you’ve never seen Alice In Acidland?“. But never, never make the mistake of actually letting those friends watch your videos, or they’ll immediately place their recording with a kind of modern carbon dating, through the adverts and so on, and show you up as the lying movie one-upper you always suspected you were.

So, er, anyway, I’ve watched on television recently films including Boogie Nights, Clueless, If…. and Casino, and due to the decaying moral structure of the country, such films are being cut less and less as time goes by, avoiding that whole “I’m sure there was a bit more violence in this film”-type scenario. Why, it’s like a cinema in your living room! Well, if you like your cinemas with a fake wooden surround and a thirty year old screen, it is (at least in my case). Comfortable chairs, though – they should definitely install sofas in cinemas.

It’s worth paying particular attention to the late-night TV listings too, as that’s where you’ll find all the weirdy indie flicks, 1950s B-movies and classic Hammer horror films, tucked away at 3.30am on a Wednesday morning. God bless the video recorder timer facility! It’s a whole galaxy of fun trying to work out whether a film is worth taping and watching or not from the 5-word (at a push) description of it. I favour the date/genre snap judgement; as in “1968 sexploitation”=hurray!; “1994 erotic drama with Shannon Tweed”=boo, and so on.

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Chantal Acda’s Sleepingdog project has gleaned its second album, coming after the debut ‘Naked in a Clean Bed’ (2006). Predominantly based around her voice with spare accompaniment of piano and acoustic guitar, with occasional flourishes of synthesised strings, chord organs, xylophone, glockenspiel and some fantastically subtle electronic processing, it is a largely beatless and free-floating affair that will have some in rapture.

Acda contributed to Adam Wiltzie’s Stars of the Lid side-project The Dead Texan and he has repayed the favour by producing and contributing “soundscapes” to this album. It’s to his credit that the instrumental and understated textural variation maintains the listener’s interest throughout, pushing the focus away from the lack of rhythmic layers and towards Chantal’s voice.
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Dundee’s annual experimental art and music festival is upon us. It takes place this very weekend at the DCA with the usual impressive line-up of experimental artists, musicians and filmmakers. During the weekend you can enjoy live performances, film, visual art, workshops and much more. Tickets are £25 for the weekend or £10 per day and you can view the whole line-up right here. If you’re based in Glasgow or Edinburgh, they’re even putting on FREE BUSES to get you there and back since there’s train strikes going on. First come first served so get there on time to secure your seat.

EDINBURGH – the bus (Browns) will leave from outside the Fruitmarket Gallery EH1 1DF at 17:30.
GLASGOW – the bus (Silver Choice) will leave from outside the CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, G2 3JD at 17:30.
Return journeys from DCA at the end of the performances, around 23:15.

If you’re not in Scotland then fear not, as KYTN will be on tour in November and December. More info at Arika.

(Originally posted October 2002)

Without sounding too self-obsessed, I think that for this column I’m going to run through ‘the events of September 7’… that is, the AUDIOSCOPE festival, which I helped set up and which featured (among others, obviously) the band which I’m in. Is that self-obsessed? Am I self-obsessed for worrying about whether you think I’m self-obsessed? Arg. Oh well. If you don’t like it, turn off your TV and go and do something less boring instead, or something. Anyway, word up, it was a fine fine day and despite me obviously enjoying things in that certain special way which came from having helped make it happen, I was consistently to be found standing open-mouthed in front of bands thinking “wow, this band is actually something special…” A result, as they say! And it looks we raised about three thousand pounds for charity, too! (The charity being Shelter, who want everybody in the country to have a proper home, a worthwhile and honourable cause I hope you’ll all agree).

Anyway, first up was my band (me! me! me!) SUNNYVALE NOISE SUB-ELEMENT, and we played either (a) a stunning set of mindbending electronified existential punk rock music with effortless precision, or (b) a somewhat disappointing set marred by ‘bad sound’ (honest!), albeit with some very pleasant slides being shown at the same time. Take your pick from these decisions based on whether you (a) didn’t see us, or (b) did.

DUSTBALL appeared on stage next, with a surprisingly early slot (due to some rock and roll commitment or other) for one of Oxford’s favourite bands. Now I’ve seen Dustball play live a few times before, and always found them to pleasantly amiable, like a more raucous (early-) Ash or a less angry Hüsker Dü, like all catchy melodies and choppy chop chop noise guitars and so on. But this time, I’m not sure what it was, maybe they’d just had their Ready Brek or something, they were absolutely blindingly spot on! Fiercely confident in their songs and treading the thin line between audience-pleasing and audience-baiting. I know that they play live, like, 5 times a week or so, but they seem to have suddenly magicked up a stunner of a show which has let them become (to me, at least), a ‘real’ band instead of a ‘local’ band.

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For much of Kid606’s ten-year career, he’s confounded and confused as often as he’s delighted: for every slice of techno wizardry, there’s been a frankly distressing three-minute cacophony of static and noise or a comedy snippet of A-Ha thrown in for a chuckle. This sense of digital mischief has set him apart over the years, in that he succeeds where precious few do in bringing a sense of personality to electronica.

However, this new EP, a taster in advance of a new album due out in 2009, is perhaps one of the most straightforward things he’s done. Straightforward in the sense that it’s fantastic, pounding TECHNOJOY of the highest level. Absolutely dominated by pulsatile, growling basslines, there are obvious dubstep grooves here, but delivered at the restless, aggressive pace we’ve come to expect from 606.

Elsewhere, old-school handclaps ride over a hurricane of a bassline on ‘Umbilical Bullets’, while ‘The Drip’ brings to mind an update on something the Ganja Kru might have put out in 1996. ‘Bat Manners’ drops the pace a little, all atmospheric reverbs, sluggish, downbeat drum work and a crackling undercurrent that gives it the feeling of a dub classic trying to break its way out of a pocket calculator.

Kid606 has taken the signifiers of classic electronica from the past decade (bits of jump-up, techno, hardcore and bassline all take the lead at various points) to create a miniature tour de force of dancefloor-fillers. The only downside, perhaps, is that there’s little of the flagrant sonic mischief we’ve come to expect, so it’s not stamped through with his personality as clearly as other releases. When it’s as consistently great as this though, who cares?

Kid606

Tigerbeat6

So, I write this other website Super Cute Kawaii! (in the guise of a cute bunny) and a recent press release informs us that Japan’s ambassador for cute, Hello Kitty, has just made her first album. Since she doesn’t have a mouth, she has roped in some “talent” to help her out, none of which I have ever heard of. Just reading the tracklisting, a mix of ‘you go girl’ optimism and ‘ain’t I cute”‘ sugariness, I can practically hear it. Her good friend Chococat has also muscled his way in to funk things up with Chococat’s Jam, which sounds particularly inedible. I guess in an age of Hannah Montana albums, Kitty has a right to feel she’s capable of putting an album together but it all seems a bit power-crazed; having seen the lengths Hello Kitty goes to in Japan to get her face into everything (including dressing up as food and other Sanrio characters), I wouldn’t be surprised if she turns up next as Japan’s new Prime Minister. Especially since they’re already going that way with current manga-loving otaku Prime Minister Taro Aso.

What times we do live in.

Check out Hello Kitty’s jams here.

(Originally posted August 2002)

Okay. OKAY! right. Moving on up! Woo. Here we go. I’m hoping that this column will be something of a halfway house between the shameless debacle of the last one (wherein I did write about nothing but gibberish), and those of the future (wherein I will cover interesting films in the hope of enlightening you to some non-Blockbuster fare.

I am now in Oxford, land of arty people and independent cinemas (or so I hope…) and yes! I have bought myself a shiny new silver space-age video recorder. This means that once I’ve got over slight agoraphobia and not-so-slight laziness, I will be making regular trips out to little steam-powered cinemas to catch all the weird and wonderful offerings available, and also scouring Blockbuster for the one or two good tapes they generally seem to have hidden behind the latest hit (with an ‘S’) movies. But this is yet to happen. So for now, I can do nothing more than present you with some reviews & opinions of the latest few films I’ve been seeing on video, which generally (although not exclusively, I hope) fall into the I’ve-already-seen-that category. Before I get going, a minor aside: is it just me, or has the quality of films being shown on television rapidly diminished lately? There used to be several ‘better tape that’ offerings I’d notice in the TV guide each week, generally on in the middle of the night, but just lately there doesn’t seem to be any action. Maybe it’s the gradual takeover of the airwaves by SPORT which is to blame. Grr.

First up: here’s an odd film which I felt compelled to buy upon seeing it cheap. GET WELL SOON (2001), starring Vincent Gallo (he of BUFFALO 66 fame) and Courteney Cox (of some programme called FRIENDS, apparently). According to the box, this is ‘a twisted romantic comedy in the spirit of There’s Something About Mary’. According to me, this is ‘a somewhat offensive attempt at making a quirky comedy, and simultaneously a waste of talent’. The premise is this – Gallo is a successful TV chat show host (in the mould of Leno, Letterman etc) who suddenly cracks on air, and decides to track down his childhood sweetheart (Cox) in New York, with a notion that getting back together with her will make his otherwise shallow, meaningless life take a fulfilling course once more. Not wanting to spoil the subtle, twisting plot, he does find her, and everything does turn out OK. Is that a surprise? It’s not a bad idea for a story – the weight of fame and adoration pushing a star to the brink of wanting to lose it all – but it’s strangely handled; Gallo’s particular reasons for losing it are not really explained, Cox’s initial reluctance to see him is not really explained, and the supporting characters are one-dimensionally ‘weird’. Several of the minor characters in the film reside in some kind of mental institution, seemingly for no other reason than to get some cheap ‘mad’ gags in there, and to reinforce all kinds of straight-jacket/mad-people-talking-to-themselves stereotypes. (Or maybe – hey – they’re sane, and so is Gallo, and everybody else is crazy. Huh ? No.)

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4[/youtube]

I can’t imagine the work that went into this, first animation to make me slack-jawed since Princess Mononoke. I have an idea that it’s already been ripped off for a car advert but that’s hardly their fault.

Made in Argentina by some people / thing called BluBlu.

Killer album. Truly magnificent. Listening to this is like being dragged face-first into the deepest circle of Hell, via metal-drenched Birmingham and repetition-drenched Berlin. Fuck! Frighteningly addictive.

Hey Colossus
Riot Season

You Tube Gold, having something of a nostalgia-trip today but how cracking are some of these tunes?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9of3sefxY4[/youtube]

SCARCE – ALL SIDEWAYS

Love this song. The guitar is so bendy. I think I saw Scarce once but unfortunately my brain is shot through like Swiss Cheese and I can’t decide if I dreamt it or not. Phil Welding swears he saw Page & Plant play the Ballroom in Nottingham and there is NO WAY that happened. Mind you, I only know I saw the Jesus Lizard because I can pick me out in the footage from TV show The Beat.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnQ0mUoyKCg[/youtube]

SENSELESS THINGS – HOLD IT DOWN (Live)

If these guys had done less speed and cider and slowed it down they’d have sounded like Neil Young. Of course that means I wouldn’t have dug them in 1993.  More from The Word in a moment…

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