You’ll have to excuse me if blogging etiquette has changed over the past couple of months and i’m inadvertently upsetting or abusing some of you. ANYWAY i did something that i’d like to share, i went to see some bands last night and they were all great. it was a vacuous pop-sponsored gig at the zodiac in oxford. first up were GIDDY MOTORS who for some reason i expected to be some kind of quirky, shaky indie band, but who turned out to be fiercely full-on intensity in a very complicated, very proficient, very out-there, very NOW kinda way. plus, the lead singer looked like Alex of A Clockwork Orange crossed with Leatherface of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. hurray! and just as they were becoming ever so slightly samely, AlexFace began stomping around the empty space in the front of the stage, banging a maraca against a tambourine like a deranged fundamentalist christian. double hurray! NOXAGT, next, were very polite (“hello ladies and gentlemen, we’re noxagt from norway”) to make up for, i presume, the absolutely mind-crushing heaviness of their music which was, to put it in the worst, unoriginally journalistic style possible, ‘like shellac falling down a flight of knives into a death metal band’. absolutely bleedin’ GREAT, too. the audience was left reeling after their performance, only to be further bludgeoned into submission by NOUGHT – they played at that AUDIOSCOPE festival, you know – who continued the theme of complicated jazz-style structures as performed by noisy motherfuckers, throwing a power drill and guitar-abuse-with-screwdriver-and-drumstick into the mix. exceptional, and exceptionally original. as were all three of the bands, constantly making me wonder where they get their musical cues from, and constantly amazing me with the sheer precision with which they made their seemingly random and chaotic sounds. you gotta see all these bands!!

Hello, I’m Will Marshall. Who the fuck are you? Send me shit now so’s I can hate it. And bundle it into stormdrains. And give it hug. Because everyone needs their mother. I am the human pendulum of knasty knives and huggy fur. Love me. Hate me. We need balance, damn you.

I manage band called Cayto -enough! Self imposed rule of non-caytopoitation on diskant begins here. Wouldn’t want to be a caytobore now, would I?

This week playes host of weath of great gigs in support of the Rock Mess Monsters compilation, and the ‘mini-in-the-city’ Musicworks. Plus fugazi play Glasgow for the first time in, like, years. So I’ll have some good to rant about soon. Lately everyone at diskant seems to have got a life. Not I! Busy slaving away am I. What IS the outside world?

Finally did something fun last week that wasn’t Cayto related. Took a trip through to city of smoke, and magnanimous crust: Edinburgh! The cavernlike Bannerman’s played host that eve to Fighting Red Adair, Par Avion, Sam’s Hot Car Lot, and Torqamada. Yeah. It’s rock. We like rock.

I like Fighting Red Adair a lot. I consider them to be close-personal-friends-of-mine. I reality they pushpins up my fingernails and shit in my shoe in my sleep. They have also been known to send sane people on the downward spiral by an elaborate sleep deprivation act that involves thee intense discussion of gay Transformers. Nice lads. Their music reflects this: grumpy, sleazy, puuuunnnnkkkROCK with tales of human weakness, embittered characters, wrapped in a dry, brutal sense of humour. This band is cursed. Never have I seen the play without technical mishap. Tonight was typical. Broken strings all over the place but they laugh it off and throw themselves about a bit to compensate. Band as an amimal: hawk.

I want to like Par Avion more than I do. The tunes are there and it all SOUNDS good. But they are totally soulless I the flesh. Sadly they are doomed to be ‘great on record’. Band as an animal: some fucking porpoise.

I have a problem with Torqamada. Namely, there are the opposite of Par Avion. All fun and bluster live- Calling everyone ‘Mutherfucker’, and pretending to be from Texas. Fast and furious punk rock. No song over 2m 30s! Their recorded downtime shows them up for what they are. Stoopid punk Rawk. Ramones/Stooges/Thunders punk rawk. But damn they’re fun live. Rumour has it that Poptones are interested. They will fit I well with the NME trend for prettyboy garage punk revivalism. See ’em now before they are on the front cover and you hate them properly. Band as an animal: hyena.

Last time I saw Sam’s Hot Car Lot I wanted to mow them. To cleave them. To rain fire down upon therm. Anything to bring death upon them in thee most heinously old testament way. I did not like them. Drunken foos playing derivative pish REALLY REALLY LOUD. I should pay more attention really. I could have swore there was four of them and they were dreadful. Now they are three. This has my foot taping and head bobbing. I am liking this. Change is good. Two songs in and somebody tells me we have to catch a bus. And just like that, we’re gone.

Either that or they’ve been doing really boring things like going to see Fugazi and to the cinema and stuff. cough cough etc.

I’ve been doing some exciting stuff but it was ages ago now and I can’t remember much about it. Fugazi tomorrow though and the mighty Eska supporting. I just wanted to mention a couple of things. Firstly, the nice people at Instal [hopefully they’ll update that website soon…] are offering YOU a 2 for 1 ticket deal for this year’s event. It takes place at the Arches in Glasgow on December 1st and features all manner of exciting and innovative ‘brave new music’ including perfomances by Ryoji Ikeda, Stephan Mathieu, Koji Asano & the Paragon Ensemble and Phill Niblock. We’ll be previewing Instal 02 in next month’s ZINE but there’s details on the event, the line-up and the ticket deal here. I suggest you get yourself along.

In other news, um, there’s a really interesting interview with ME in the latest issue of Tasty zine. You can also email Sam for your own free copy! Okay, I’ll shut up now.

Hurray, I’ve finally been doing something I can blog about. We grabbed some handily placed kids today and went to see The Powerpuff Girls Movie! It was really great as well. And don’t say it’s not topical since it has a theme tune by bis [which they nicely punked up for the film]. It was basically just a long episode of the cartoon but considering how rare it is for cartoons not to get messed up in the movie version, that was pretty ace. They used the time to explain the origins of the Powerpuff Girls in proper detail and also how Mojo Jojo came to be an evil monkey genius. It was hyper brightly coloured, almost excessively loud and packed full of monkey smacking action and actually funny jokes. It also had the best newspaper headline ever: FREAKY BUG-EYED WEIRDO GIRLS BREAK TOWN. We also added our own brand of hilarity to the showing by bringing along Rhiannon’s talking Pikachu who has master timing for shouting ‘pika-pika!’ during quiet moments. I’ve yet to find a situation where this isn’t funny. So, yeah, go see go see!

When I was young I used to love to stay home, but now I just get bored and irritable. It has given me the chance to listen to some music for the first time in ages though…

HELLA Falam Dynasty 7″ (5RC)
I’m yet to hear a bad word said against this band. Dave Stockwell very kindly got me their LP which for me will rank highly in the upcoming diskant 2002 review thingy. Word has it that these guys are 20 and 21, which makes me feel very lame indeed. Some of the most intricate and keenly executed sounds I think I’ve ever heard. Can’t recommend this, and their LP enough. Seriously, get on it.

THREE MILE PILOT s/t 12″ (Gravity)
Been meaning to get this for some time, and now I have, I’m a little dissapointed. I went off 3MP for quite a while, but recently Another Desert Another Sea has been reminding me how great they are. This, on the other hand, is really just lacking that edge that makes a lot of their other stuff so amazing. If nothing else though, it did remind me that I need to get the new Black Heart Procession album.

GET HUSTLE Earth Odyssey CD (5RC)
Took me a while to get into them, but the general sexiness of this band has won me over big time. They somehow manage to sound laid back and full on at the same time, with lots of piano and the odd wailing vocal. Get Hustle also feature on…

DYNAMITE WITH A LASER BEAM comp (31G)
Lots of weirdo bands playing Queen songs. Sounds like it should be shit, in fact I was apprehensive for a while, but thankfully it rocks. My favourites are probably rather amazingly The Oath (punk, oh no!) doing We Are The Champions and The Locust doing FLASH!! (aaaargh). The Locust will always be a rather silly novelty band in my eyes, but the crappy sci-fi element of band and song works here very well.

I still think us staff should have wishlists because we’re very important and deserve to be given stuff, so here’s mine:

Melt Banana’s new 6″ on Level Plane
The Hudsucker Proxy region 1 DVD
Train tickets to Nottingham so me and Kim can get to see Fugazi and Wolves of Greece on the 23rd
Hell, I’m not picky. If something’s free I’ll take it. Go nuts.

The christmas lights have been up in George Square since at least Wednesday. No wonder I’ve been cold in the mornings.

Better put a link here too. How about an Escher picture using Lego? Or settle arguments using Googlefight.

Sweet Sixteen. I went to see it last night and it’s excellent. Ken Loach is a supreme manipulator of emotion. If he wasn’t allergic to happy endings he’d be bigger than Spielberg. Him and his damned inconvenient integrity. The film is great and, according to the BBFC, it is as dangerous to children as the film I nearly went to see last night, Baise-Moi. The French film with the (allegedly) gleeful amounts of rape and murder. They both get 18 certificates but if you watch Sweet Sixteen you would be hard pressed to see why. There’s no nudity, the drug use is all off-screen and the small amount of violence is sensitively and inexplicitly handled. But it is as dangerous as Baise-Moi because it contains some words, one in particular, that the censors don’t like. Can you guess what it is? Yes, it’s the one for everyone’s favourite piece of anatomy. I have to say that as the film is set in Greenock, not far from diskant tower and as Ken Loach has used local actors, I know just how well he’s done at capturing his characters’ voices. And yes they are saying “cunt” a lot. Big Deal. The kids throwing fireworks outside my window are too. Why is it that films about growing up are always kept away from the age group they are about? I won’t get onto how I think this shows the BBFC to be suffering from geography- and class-based bias, just this: Why not use a combination of the new 12A rating and the consumer advice now on every poster (i.e. “contains strong language”) to let folk decide for themselves, rather than class a well-made and touching (hate that word) film alongside Zombie Flesh Eaters?

If nothing else, it devalues the 18 certificate as a guide to those seeking out morally reprehensible filth.

Get Your War On. The Guardian should syndicate it instead of that Doonesbury column I can never spot the punchline of. Haven’t laughed more at work for too long.