For all that the late John Peel gave music, it’s the Peel Sessions that will stand the test of time long after anecdotes about taping his show onto C90s as a teenager and queuing up to hand him a demo tape that one time he DJed at your student union have grown even duller than they already are. At their best they were a chance for a band to experiment and try out new material in the studio. At their worst an invitation to a few point-missing acts to replay their songs note-for-note, though this was, thankfully, a rare occurrence. This EP, consisting of the four tracks from Múm’s lone session recorded in 2002, falls somewhere in-between those two camps. Three songs from their 2000 album “Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK”, and one from 2002’s “Finally We Are No One” are offered up, and while there are no radical departures to be had, the necessary compression of time and budget imposed by a radio session, along with the opportunity for post-album tinkering, has had a pleasing effect on them.

Scratched Bicycle and Smell Memory, for example, both gain extra glitchy beats, and feel less fussy more skittish than their official counterparts, but despite the odd electronic edition or momentary meander, it’s the the uncluttered production that truly benefits the songs and grants them a general intimacy where once they might have felt a little too fragile and distant for comfort.

Hardly an essential purchase for the Múm-curious, then, but not without merit for those feeling starved of their gentle Icelandic tinklings.

Fat Cat

In August of last year I gushed about Green Pheasant’s eponymous debut album – a handful of songs originally recorded at home on a four-track for demo purposes, but which so impressed Fat Cat that they chose to release it with hardly any modification. I did, however, have one reservation: much as I loved its woozy, dream-like quality, I did wonder how much of that was down to the circumstances of its recording. The low-fi, distant qualities of cassette tape suits gentle acoustica more than any other genre you might attempt to commit to it, and the production on that album, consisting largely of turning the “reverb” dial all the way to eleven, could easily have been a response to the weaknesses of the format as much as a deliberate attempt to gently obfuscate. Would the larger budget that signing would inevitably bring result in a more obvious, less charmingly obscure sophomore album?

Thankfully, I needn’t have worried. Aerial Days sees Duncan Sumpner reject the temptations of the studio and continue recording at home, albeit having splashed out on some slightly more modern recording equipment, resulting in an album that’s more an appropriate and carefully judged step forward than a baby-and-bathwater-discarding act of self indulgence. As before the songs have a hallucinatory quality, but the hints of a folkier past have been toned down a little, a some new-found freedom has been exercised in terms of instrumentation, with friends adding recorder and trumpet to the bedroom guitar-and-drum-machine setup.

The only mis-step being a slightly-too-twee cover of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence”, Aerial Days enriches the sound of its predecessor with care, and its creator deserves credit for restraint alone.

Fat Cat

On the basis of this four-song first single, Liverpool upstarts The Maybes? (and yes, that is an annoying question mark of theirs) present themselves as a solid, if somewhat unexciting, take on the combined sounds of The La’s, The Jam and – like so many others – The Beatles. Theirs is a stoned world of rock and roll, livin’ it up and tight male-bonding hugs on drunken nights out to see Oasis.

The first two songs suggest, I hope, the direction that the band might go from here. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ is more Cast than The La’s, with its workmanlike writing and adherence to a well-worn have-it-large ideal. ‘Actions’, however, is happily more The La’s than Cast, with more considered and delicately rocking guitar lines twisting through some light-hearted harmonic indie rock. This is all very nice and very listenable, but it’s the two other songs here that are a sticking point for me: ‘Get On The Resin’, The Maybes?’ ode to hashish, is painfully quirky funk rock which reminds too much of the good-time nonsense of Toploader; whilst ‘Supercharged’ is an admittedly excited/excitable chunk of high energy rock-out, which unfortunately falls rather short of the Led Zeppelin/Live At Leeds heights it seems to be aiming at.

If The Maybes? can isolate where it is their music lies, and refine what they’re doing to something that seems less of a rag-bag of influences used with varying degrees of success, they have it in them to – putting it in the most patronising terms possible – win the heart of the common man. At present they seem slightly lost; but this is the first single. They should lose that question mark, though…

The Maybes?
Xtra Mile Recordings

Today, as part of my actual job, I have been researching add-ons, features and widgets people might like to add to their websites. In the course of this I have emailed eBay to tell them how aghast I am at their lack of web widgets and discovered that two of my long-held brilliant internet ideas have actually been realised by other people. Someone who actually had any ambition might be annoyed by this, I am just delighted they now exist.

GiftTagging have answered my frequent question of ‘Why isn’t there an Amazon Wish List but for EVERYTHING you can buy’ with a site that is something of a cross between del.icio.us and ThisNext. You can import your Amazon wishlist, add new gifts by hand or add them from any website with a toolbar button. You then tag them with handy descriptive words and your friends, family and random stalkers can buy you a present that you actually want. It’s a little clunky and basic at the moment but it looks great and has loads of potential.

Remember The Milk is the answer to my other daily trauma, two computer forgetfulness. I have all my best ideas at work and then forget them all by the time I get home and can do anything about them. Usually I resort to that utter patheticness – emailing myself reminders. Remember The Milk though, lets you set up a web-based to-do/task/reminder list which you can tag and split into seperate lists and, best of all, you can email reminders to it which it will automatically add. Put an RSS feed of it on your blog or RSS reader and you’ll never forget anything again.

Marvellous. I’m so glad there are so many clever people on the internet.

Dave used to be diskant’s resident obscurist, guaranteed to fill his columns full of unpronounceable unlistenable music that he still managed to make sound amazing. Since then, we’ve recruited a few other mentalists to keep him company, so much so, that Dave actually turned out to be the diskanteer who’d heard the most out of our Top Ten Albums of 2005 and thus had the fun job of writing up the article*. He’s also given us the enormously helpful guide to getting gigs and the highly entertaining Souvaris European tour diary as well as profiling swathes of labels for Talentspotter.

By day Dave works as a Project Officer for Children’s Centres Services at Nottingham City Council working with children and families in Nottingham’s most disadvantaged areas. By night he makes “guitars chime, churn and occasionally howl” in Souvaris, “what’s generally regarded as horrific noise and drone” in Bologna Pony, “sporadically mucks around with homemade lo-fi ambient things”, helps out with DIY non-profit gig-organising collective Damn You! and sometimes even finds the time to write a few extra esoteric reviews for Foxy Digitalis. Blimey.

Where do you live and what do you like about it?
Sneinton, Nottingham. It’s just outside the centre of a medium-sized but comparatively lively (read as: violent) city and I can get out to green space or nice places outside the city limits with a short walk. I also live just around the corner from HQs for three record labels: Gringo, Low-Point and Fire. Convenient.

What have you been listening to/reading/watching/playing recently?

Oof, where to start?

Listening to: The news of Relapse reissuing Harvey Milk’s Courtesy and Goodwill To All Men had me dusting off my copy and remembering quite how wilfully absurd/strangely brilliant it is. Ditto the This Heat boxset, which has to be my purchase of the year. Steven R. Smith’s new LP on Important is really lovely and comes in a beautiful woodcut sleeve. MV & EE w/ The Bummer Road’s latest album on Time-Lag might possibly be the best/most maddening new music I’ve heard this year. Birchville Cat Motel’s 3xCD live document Curved Surface Destroyer is appropriately mindblowing. The new (Chris) Clark album Body Riddle sounds sumptuous. Erase Errata were tremendous when they played live recently, but their new album doesn’t sound half as raucous.

Reading: Last things I’ve read have been Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle (lent by a friend) and Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H (on which everything you associate with that title was originally based). Next up is a Bukowski biography, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and at some point finally tackling Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of America.

Watching:
I don’t watch television, and I’ve barely had time or inclination to watch any new films recently. I did get The Parallax View and My Own Private Idaho on DVD for dirt cheap not that long ago though. Both classy films. Seeing stuff in the flesh, I went to the Sunday of the Barbican’s celebration of Steve Reich’s 70th birthday and it was mostly brilliant: Konono #1 played in a free gig in the hall; Reich’s new piece (entitled Daniel) managed to be both emotionally charged and beautiful; seeing Music For 18 Musicians performed in the flesh is an experience I’ll never forget. Especially when Steve started hitting loads of bum notes on his vibraphone halfway through.

Tell us about your favourite local bands
Nottingham’s a funny old place for music: there’s always a steady stream of interesting bands but few seem to stay together for more than a few months at a time (except the terrible ones that refuse to die). Lords have to be mentioned as a premier live attraction, but bring your earplugs because they’ve gotten unbearably loud since they got their new amps. Gareth Hardwick may have the misfortune to be in a band with me, but I still love his solo ambient stuff anyway, and it’s getting better with every release. Designer Babies seem to have been in a period of transition for a frustratingly long time since they lost their frontman, but I’m hoping for exciting things when they play soon. The inimitably unique Hellset Orchestra are always worth seeing and I really admire their wilful absurdity and Queenesque stage antics. Apparently Love Ends Disaster! live just around the corner but never seem to play here. Orchards are a new proposition from members of many established Nottingham bands that I really enjoyed when they played their second-ever gig recently. Lovely melodies alongside American Analog Set-style keyboard throbs – it can’t be beat. There are loads more, such as Lovvers and the new-look Exploits of Elaine, that I really need to get around to seeing soon.

What are you planning on writing about next for diskant?
At the start of the month I managed to buy about 50 LPs for a quid from a fleamarket. I got some amazing stuff, such as Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, but also the first Dire Straits LP, The Fine Young Cannibals and a really fucked up Wagner sampler LP got in there too. I’m thinking about trying and write a two sentence review of every one.

What are your favourite articles/interviews on diskant?
I love Ollie’s infectious enthusiasm for anything absurd and/or highly offensive. Joe Luna has an incredible knack of writing about things that I was either thinking about buying or thinking about reviewing – keep it up Joe! And whatever Chris turns his hand to is inevitably going to be worth reading.

What are you looking forward to this year?
I really want to see Darren Aaronofsky’s The Fountain, which has been in development for about five years now and will hopefully hit the cinemas before the end of the year. I just hope it’s not the train wreck it could well turn out to be.

I’m also very much looking forward to Damn You! putting on Birchville Cat Motel early next year, and there are whispers about the possibility of Charles Hayward (This Heat, general drumming genius) coming up shortly after that have got me in a real spin.

Lastly, I’ll be excited on Friday because that day I have to post a completed mix of the long-awaited second Souvaris album (entitled “A Hat” for no particularly good reason) to Mr John Golden to unleash his mastering skills on. You’ll be able to listen to the results courtesy of Gringo Records early next year. Thank fuck!

What have you learned during your time at diskant?
That the advent of Web 2.0 means that you can no longer slag off a shit record with impunity. Someone’s opinion is always going to be more important than yours, especially if it’s the artist’s.

* Although I see I have actually credited the article to myself. Oops.

If anyone living in the US would like to buy me a white bunny radio from this site I will not only love you forever but will send you something of your choice in return (or the money if you want to be boring). It’s a bargainous $7 but the only international shipping option costs a quite unbelievable $300 and I don’t want one that much. Please?

(Yes, I know this is of no interest to 99% of diskant readers. I have more proper content to go up shortly).

UPDATE: My bunny woes are over, hurray!

This is fantastic – The Fore sound like they haven’t listened to any records except for a scant collection of pre-65 Beatles and Rolling Stones 45s. They’re so carefully studied in the sound and style of the Brit Invasion that it’s hard to believe that this isn’t some long lost recording discovered bricked in to the back wall of the Cavern. Each of the three songs on this demo, none of which come in at longer than two and a half minutes, seems to display a different aspect of The Fore’s obsessive reverence of a particular sound. ‘In So Deep’ is cheeky, jangly pop with melodies picked out over snappy arpeggios; ‘Love For Sale’ is a slightly slower, more reflective-sounding song with a Beatles-all-over bright guitar line driving it along; and ‘We Were Meant To Be’ goes in a more Stonesy direction, with stabs of guitar and jittery rhythms holding together some snarling, garagey vocals.

They may be forty years too late to make the most of this music, but that’s besides the point. This is incredibly authentic-sounding in its song structures, vocal and musical styles, and recording quality, and The Fore must know they’re destined for no more than tiny hipster’s clubs and underground beat venues. If they can stay away from the dreaded tribute act/wedding band situation of becoming more of a jaded parody than an exciteable, real group – and on the basis of these three songs they’ll have no problems doing that – they can’t cease to charm.

The Fore

TD Lind is a English bluesman who honed his chops with travels through Paris, Kentucky, Memphis and New Orleans. Now, that might sound like the stuff of nightmares to some – a pale-faced Englishman soaking up the histories of those who have led harder lives than he – so it’s good that ‘Come In From The Cold’ is a nicely subtle, upbeat slice of fuzzy guitar blues. Alongside the odd scrape of slide on guitar strings, the underlying, repetitive riff that forms the core of the song is overlaid with some lovely, complex fingerpicking and almost hidden drums and keyboards. Lind’s vocals are kept nice and low in the mix, and work all the better for it, as they don’t speak of years of torment and pain, but sound more like a good voice singing over a great backing. The song slowly builds to a quietly chugging density, and succeeds through seeming devoid of any connection with modern music.

Two further songs, ‘Let’s Get Lost’ and ‘I Don’t Miss You’, bring the vocals more to the fore, and lose the lead track’s smoky sense of impromptu musical thoughts accidentally captured onto tape. Straying too close at times to the unpleasantly mainstream, warbling, bland style of singers like James Morrison and – ack – James Blunt, these songs retain at least a modicum of emotional depth and musical simplicity that hasn’t been completely over-produced and polished. I get the impression that TD Lind could be pushed into the mainstream with the help of a hitmaking producer and an integrity-free manager; but that he’s not going to let that happen.

TD Lind

What with the rise of YouTube and “the download generation”, everyone is now rushing to offer as much multimedia content as our brains can handle. Two of Scotland’s festivals have put this idea to good use, making available all kinds of video, audio and photography on their websites.

Instal has been sadly under-covered on diskant this year (I didn’t make it along in the end) but if you wished you were there, you practically can be thanks to Instal Live, a new section of the website where attendees are encouraged to upload their photos, videos and comments on the sets. As well as this, there are free MP3 downloads of all the sets from this year including Keiji Haino & Tony Conrad, Sachiko, Tetsuya Umeda, Blood Stereo & Ludo Mich and literally loads more. There’s more content promised soon including stuff from Resonance FM so it will quite likely take you until Instal 07 to work your way through this lot.

Triptych are a little less giving as most of the music is in streamable form only but it’s still a good introduction to the breadth of artists that make up the Triptych line-up. There are also full live sets to listen to in the Triptych Player from the likes of Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid, Jamie Lidell, Candi Staton and Boom Bip. Newly added are some of the short films about the festival by aspiring film-makers which we got a sneak preview of at the GFT a few weeks back. There’s a fairly basic overview of the festival by Roseanne Davidson and a clever, glitchy A-Z by Jonno but everyone’s highlight was My New Job by Jorn Utkilen of Schneider TM, a witty and hilariously deadpan film of his rise to Triptych fame as a pop star complete with fish slice guitar and backing group of cuddly toys. Well worth a watch.

THOSE AT WORK BEWARE – the Triptych site will launch with sound on.

Here’s a pop record put out by a brand new California-based label, Surreal Ceremonies. They’ve gathered two really nice bands to put out a 7″ with.

Friday Bridge are a nice little beat-driven Swedish band whose lead singer sounds a little like Kahimi Karie and a little bit like Annie. The band is just a shade more lo-fi and looser, which is to their credit, because no one wants to hear an indie band try for well-produced new wave. Their contribution “The End of the Affair,” is shimmery, yet dark and utilizes a very trance-y synth arpeggio throughout the song, which I’ve heard used to similar affect by the old Creation band Pacific. The more I listen to this song, the more I like it, in all it’s Cardigans echo-grove bliss.

I’m a little more familiar with Kelly Slusher, ever since she worked with Rocketship’s Dustin Reske on a quiet little record a few years ago. Her addition, “Be There,” is the first I’ve heard from her since, except for her work on the Kitteridge Records Homemade Hits compilation with the band Boothby, which I quite enjoyed. Slusher’s vocals make your ears swoon and pine and when she sings, “Let’s go crazy for just one night” so delicately, you can’t help but think about a time when you’ve thought that thought. Her guitars catch up with her anxiousness on the chorus and the fuzz blends into the pretty river of keyboard melody, creating that perfect blend of nostalgia and déjà vu.

-Maxwell Williams

Surreal Ceremonies