As promised, a few posts ago, I have created A MONSTER RSS FEED which includes the following:

– full posts from the weblog
– full reviews from the reviewsblog
– daily links from diskant’s del.icio.us
– photos from the new diskanteers Flickr group
– updates on new features, Talentspotters etc.

If you are an RSS hero, add this link to your reader NOW. It is a beta link so some things may change again. The current RSS feeds will continue to work so you can still keep subscribed to them if you don’t want all this extra stuff. It’s fine, we understand.

If you are currently an RSS dullard (and I see from the reader survey that we have quite a few) now is the time to learn. I am really not joking when I say this will change your life.

RSS is a way of subscribing to the content of a website which means all the content comes to you, as it happens, instead of you having to go over there and see if anything’s changed (which is hasn’t except for as soon as you leave, then they upload tons of stuff which you don’t see til the next time you visit). You can subscribe using a web-based RSS reader such as Bloglines or even your personalised Google Homepage, or you can download a free desktop RSS reader such as NetNewsWire Lite (for Mac) or RSS Owl (for PC). You can also subscribe using Firefox and even IE7 but I haven’t tried this yet. With both these options you can add all your favourite website feeds and there are literally millions of them. Almost all of our blog friends linked down the left side there have RSS feeds. I will post a guide to my favourite RSS uses on the web soon.

Once you’ve added all your feeds, you just sit back and let everyone else do the work. If you have a desktop reader, it will automatically go off and fetch new content for you which you can even read offline. If you have a web-based reader then you have one site to check in with regularly that will tell you if there’s anything new to read. You usually get the full content though you will have to click through to the site to see comments or full articles. Speaking from experience, it will immediately half the time you spend faffing on the internet as you will no longer have to trawl through a bunch of sites only to see nothing has changed. Unfortunately, you will start discovering so many new things on your RSS feeds that you will quicky fill that time back up.

So, don’t be scared. Give it a go and come join us here in The Future.

This is the URL you should add for the diskant feed:
http://feedblendr.com/atom/11797

So it seems that NME, the “world’s greatest rock weekly” (a quote that would have applied pre-1990 more readily than it does today) wants a new features editor:

Department: NME
Contact: To apply please complete the following potential cover feature treatment for three bands: The Twang, My Chemical Romance and Razorlight

– Cover photo concept/structure
– Main cover sell
– Feature picture concept
– Feature headline
– Feature sell
– Brief for the feature with word count
– Two potential feature pull-quotes

Include a CV and email to: editor@nme.com

Closing Date: 23rd February 2007
Email: editor@nme.com
Reference: (M&S608)

(Also see here)

Get your applications in today, people, and you could be hyping the next flash-in-the-pan self-created ‘scene’ within weeks. Bring on New-Nu-Post-Rave!

In other news, the new IPC Media logo has effortlessly repositioned them into what looks like a local graphic design company from the mid-1980s.

Well, February has been….interesting. My trip to London was good fun with lots of shopping and wandering and eating but then the next day there was hella snow and I got stranded at my sister’s with no plane home! This did mean I got an extra day to have a peek at the V&A and buy more expensive Japanese books but all the extra expense has not done my purse any good. Typically, there was not a drop of snow to be found in Central Scotland. Gah! My purse was refilled slightly by the DADA/Miso Funky Market where I sold a few things and had some fun and sewed up a few new purses. There’s a few things available at my Etsy shop if you’re interested.

The big news at diskant is that we are doing A READER SURVEY to find out what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong and what we should be doing in future. The response has been brilliant so far, confirming some of my thoughts and giving me lots of great new ideas. If you have a few spare minutes do please fill it in so we can make diskant even better. There’s even an amazing prize on offer.

The main call so far is for MORE CONTENT, MORE OFTEN which is always our biggest problem. The reviews blog is ticking along as always and the weblog is picking up again but hopefully your comments will inspire our writers to get working on some new interviews and articles. I’m certainly feeling a lot less like giving the whole thing up which is always good.

Current listening: Margaret Berger, Asobi Seksu, Robyn, Joanna Newsom, Errors.

Some things that caught my attention recently:

– A very interesting interview with Thurston Moore about his Ecstatic Peace label at Austin Sound (via TMN)
– Andrew at The Morning News scoffs at us lightweights and our annual roundups. He’s working his way through the top ten albums of EVERY YEAR since 1978.
– the pie debate reaches a whole new level of mentalism over at Freaky Trigger
– OxfordBands.com has had a makeover and looks much cleaner and more streamlined. And orange! We need more orange on the web.
– How could I forget?! I have had to create a website at work using our new web building product for testing purposes and so there now exists Bunny Bento, the lazy girl’s guide to bento. I think I will actually keep updating this.

Don’t forget I am adding new links on the home page regularly. I am working on some kind of ALL ENCOMPASSING RSS feed that will basically inject diskant’s every move straight into YOUR BRAIN your RSS reader. Until then, you’ll have to do the work yourself by clicking on this link occasionally.

Some extremely sad news chanced upon just as I’d finished listening to Sir Richard Bishop’s superlative debut LP “Improvika” for the first time in too long:

Charles Gocher R.I.P.

Everyone needs to have at least one Sun City Girls album in their collection; it’s a real shame there’ll be no more added to the millions you can already choose from. A chapter closes on a wholly singular band.

I knew that would get you clicking! diskant is undertaking A READER SURVEY so that YOU (being the reader) can TELL US (that’ll be the survey) what you think about diskant and what you’d like to see more (or less) of in future. It’s only ten short questions and you don’t even have to answer them all if you don’t want to. diskant collects no personal information and will never bother you again.

As well as the satisfaction of helping steer diskant in the best direction, one lucky random person will win A PRIZE consisting of the following.

– Some half decent CDs that have been reviewed on diskant or have been sitting here so long the band released something newer. Will likely include some things by FatCat, Resonant and Fortuna Pop!
– A Japanese origami paper covered notebook, handmade by me
– An Asking For Trouble box set, if you don’t already have one
– A tin of German soup containing chicken, mango, pineapple and banana (no, really!)*
– A highly sought after diskant badge
– A corporate branded pen from my work
– A plastic stress monkey with googly eyes
– A plastic light-up pen with a dog on top
– A plastic San-X WanRoom table in the shape of a dog (from JAPAN!)
– Whatever else comes to hand in diskant HQ

How can you resist? Here is a picture of some of it. I haven’t gone through the CDs yet.

So, what are you waiting for?

THE SURVEY IS HERE

*In the event of our winner not residing in the UK I am not even going to try posting the soup. If this happens I promise to eat it myself and report back.

It really has been a while. I last saw Trail of Dead live maybe two years ago (maybe three!) and this was a bit of a come down for both of us. They had been downgraded from the QM to the much much smaller Oran Mor and I was reduced to standing on a chair at the back of the venue rather than stageside. They are so much more suited to smaller venues though that it was more of a treat then anything. But first there was Forget Cassettes, the other band of one of the new TOD guys (I keep getting them mixed up…) who had so many technical difficulties that they only got to play about 4 songs. With retro grumbly keyboards, strong female vocals and swathes of guitar noise they were a bit like a noise goth PJ Harvey, the singer similarly striking. I was not in good shape though so they mostly gave me a sore head. Later I managed to totally bash my head in and have a nice bump to show for it. In the olden days this would have been due to excessive fun, these days it is because of tiredness and not looking where I’m going. Sigh.

So, Trail of Dead. The first two songs were utterly atrocious, so much so that I actually almost left. Relative Ways has never been in my top 100 TOD songs and I don’t think Conrad has ever managed to hit those high notes so it was all quite painful. Surprisingly, it was another song I never liked, The Best from Worlds Apart, that turned things around and had them back at what they do best – riot action prog rock. A few Jason songs with him careering around the place like the mentalist he is ( in the audience, up the speaker stacks) got everything properly started and from then on it was all good, if a bit ragged round the edges. Never having been the biggest followers of professionalism or, well, being in tune, they just pulled out all the old stuff and had fun with it, the new guys helping free up Conrad and Jason for more audience interation. Totally Natural, Richter Scale Madness and, of course, A Perfect Teenhood all got the extended fervoured spoken word extended middle treatment and were triple the fun. It all felt like a celebration, like those early days of mayhem and over-excitement. I felt quite nostalgic really. They may have never fulfilled their potential or made their millions but they still know how to work a crowd and how to entertain and how to make me laugh and that’s good enough for me.

What with Arctic Monkeys, Futureheads and the (geographically realigned from Oxford to Ashby de la Zouche) Young Knives all achieving varying degrees of success and fame lately, not to mention the constantly impressive output of bands from places like Leeds and Nottingham, it seems that a non-Southern demographic is driving a lot of indie music these days. That’s not to say that London isn’t still a focus for bands and the music industry, but it’s interesting that bands that exist in distant locations, far from the perceived centre of music, seem to have much more fun in their music. It’s refreshing to hear enjoyment and silliness in music at times, as opposed to relentless grit and ‘real’-ness.

Dartz! have no short supply of bouncing, ‘up’ songs, on the basis of this, their debut album. They’re at the connecting point of the melodic straightforwardness evident in the music of the aforementioned bands, and the complex guitar patterns and syncopated rhythm structures of more hip, in-the-know outfits like Battles and Foals. What stops Dartz! from turning out twelve songs of middling copyist style-over-content short term appeal – which is, I’m sure, all that many of their contemporaries are capable of – is a genuine skill at assembling songs and injecting just enough individuality to hint at great things to come.

So for every melody-rich, comfortably familiar tune like previous single ‘Once, twice, again!’ or ‘Laser Eyers’, which fit right in with the listening habits of hip young haircuts about town, there is a glimpse into a depth of ingenuity and quality evident here. Be it ‘Prego Triangolos’ with its falsetto backing vocals, ‘St. Petersburg’ with its ridiculously catchy funk rhythm section, or the unnamed secret track which effortlessly develops Tortoise-like lazy repetitions into dreamy Explosions In The Sky-style layers of distortion and echo, Dartz! have done on this album what I hoped they would. They’ve taken a template of influences and style which currently works well for many bands right now, and started to twist it with their own ideas and skill into something new. What’s very exciting is that they seem to be able to capture that magic combination of radio-friendly recognition and beard-stroker-friendly quirkiness. This is how bands become influential, rather than being purely based on their influences.

Dartz!
Xtra Mile Recordings

I went to Berlin, it snowed. It was beautiful. And a bit scary in a Gothic, Eastern-Block kind of way.
I took hundreds of pictures. Waste time by viweing them here:
www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin

A bit of market research, if you all don’t mind. We here at diskant are eager to hear your suggestions for bands and labels (and indeed anything else) that you would like to see featured/interviewed on the site. We can’t promise anything (especially if you want to see an interview with Elton John or something), but it’d be great to get some ideas about stuff to cover here.

You can see some of the other people we’ve covered here: www.diskant.net/features/index.htm.

Feel free to leave suggestions as comments on this post, or alternatively you can e-mail Marceline or I at the usual addresses… thanks!