Well, AUDIOSCOPE‘s all over for another year, and Chris has summed up the flavour of the day better than I’m able to at the moment (give it a week or so, but by then it’ll be old news), so I won’t go into too many details – if anyone’s interested, there will be plenty of post-event chat here. Just to add to what Chris has said about Damo Suzuki – I’m sure everyone who meets him has the same impression, but he really is a remarkable man. For all he’s achieved and seen and all his travelling tales, he’s completely down-to-earth and egoless, willing to chat to anyone, and even pitching in on the Saturday with blowing up Shelter balloons and loading in stuff to the venue. What a hero.

Anyway, to the point – it occurs to me that with organising one thing and another, I’ve been rather neglecting my duties of listening to new bands and offering up some regular thoughts on here, so I’ve undertaken a MONTH OF REVIEWING PENANCE, starting today. I’ll be reviewing AT LEAST ONE record from some new band, somewhere in the world, every day this month. And if I don’t, I’ll be flagellated and forced to listen to bad funk rock.

So yeah, let’s kick things off with a double helping.

First up are a very seriously named band from Utrecht called We Vs. Death, who don’t do things by halves: we have badges (one reading ‘WE VS.’ and the other, in an ultimate rock’n’ roll stylee, emblazoned ‘DEATH’), stickers, and the CD, Postneoliberalise, comes wrapped in an intricately-folded black ‘n’ white sleeve that I just know I’m never going to get back together and I’m gonna have to dump with all the unfolded road maps in our spare room. But anyway, onto the music, and blow me down if this isn’t a little instrumental post-rockin’ treat. Now I’m getting as sick as the next man of instrumental post-rock, but this is pretty neatly put together – there’s oodles of trumpet all over the first track ‘My Dog Is Watching Me’, and pretty flourishes give way to crunching chord progressions that remind me almost to a frightening degree of Oxford’s Stravinsky-meets-Tortoise heroes The Rock of Travolta. Strings and the effortless-yet-studied feel of a Dianogah track punctuate ‘City Council Cosmos’, which pootles along for eight minutes with a great deal of dignity, if not too much in the way of development of musical themes. It’s all earnest, heads-down post-rock, but it’s the jaunty-meets-spiky splashes of colour and cracking dynamics on the opening track that steer this more in the direction of interesting and individual, rather than soundscaping by numbers.

And so onto a two-track demo so home-made it was probably recorded in one of the demo bedrooms at B & Q, but then that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Go! Team! Go! Sounds like they should all be Manga characters with massive boggling eyes and comedy oversized instruments, and it’s a few minutes of woogling keyboards, play-fighting and yelping vocals. The first track sounds like The Capricorns gatecrashing Kim Gordon’s eighth birthday party, the highlight coming when a big, enthusiastic wave of feedback breaks down into a playground chant. It’s toy keyboards thrown out of prams, thrown together with relentless enthusiasm: rough around the edges and sometimes overly keen to get to where it’s going, but at the same time a thrilling listen and enough to make ’em a prospect well worth keeping your eyes on.

Go! Team! Go! (e-mail rmanber@aol.com)

I must have been one of the hundred or so people in the country not watching England sort-of-convincingly sweep the Croatians aside on Monday, ‘cos I was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall checking out Nina Nastasia, plus ‘rare guests’, whatever they are (robot guitarists? Thurston Moore on French horn?). Well, as it turns out, they were, in addition to the already-impressive backing band, two fellas from Tuva (near Mongolia, geography fans) called Kaigal-ool Khovalyg and Sayan Bapa, wielding a formidable array of Tuvan instruments like the igil (cello thing using horse hair), doshpuluur (a long-necked lute) and, er, their throats. And guess what? It was utterly wonderful.

The effect of what are apparently the khoomei (you’ll have to imagine some accents on this word – I’m not sure if Blogger will let me) and kargyraa singing styles was that of an ersatz string section. Thankfully, there was nothing ‘novelty’ about it – Nastasia’s been using saws, dulcimers and that for ages, and this was just a natural extension and a new way to hear her songs. Even better, none of that gorgeous open space that characterises her recorded stuff was compromised by (ahem) coruscating instrumentation – it’s just that when things picked up, it wasn’t just a case of upping the volume, but gradually building up layers of sound, underpinned by drumming that was fabulous in an understated sorta way. I won’t come over all encomiastic about NN’s songs (suffice to say all three of her records are great), but Monday night really was terrific and if you’ve not heard her before, do yourself a favour and have a listen.

Obligatory further information links for the ‘inter net user’:

Nina Nastasia

Huun-Huur-Tu

Contemporary Music Network

So Cat Power surprised pretty much no-one by being really inconsistent last night (at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire). Parts of it were gorgeous, notably a couple of what I presume are new songs, and versions of ‘Metal Heart’ and ‘I Don’t Blame You’. For reasons best known to her, she decided to turn up the house lights and sit looking at her illuminated audience for the last ten minutes while she smoked a fag and muttered things into the microphone. There wasn’t even the payback of a triumphant final song, just: ‘You all have to go now, or the government will attack’. Possibly the most anticlimactic end to a gig I’ve ever seen, but then you’d expect nothing less infuriating from Ms. Marshall. Having said that, it was wonderful to see her with a (mostly) attentive audience in relatively-civilised seated conditions, punctuated by a constant stream of stewards telling people to stop smoking, and a stream of people slinking off to smoke guiltily by the bar. And I still love her.

This seems like as good a time as any to break my blogophobic habits and rejoin the fold post-ATP. Not too much to say now, as I’m sure we’ll be putting up a diskant feature like we did last year, but HELLO to everyone I spoke to from the diskant fold – you’re all WINNERS. And HELLO to Ivory Springer, Big Joan and Ann Arbor, who are all GREAT and lovely and you should go check ’em out.

Personal highlights were Lungfish (who were even better than I thought they’d be – get that gurning!), Boredoms (who gave me the best headache EVER and made at least one of our party retire to the beach in pain), Lightning Bolt (who sounded like they were probably utterly skill from where we were standing, but were predictably only properly experienced by the 100 or so people nearest to where they set up), Uzeda (such a shame they overlapped with Shellac), Cat Power (who was TOO QUIET TOO QUIET TOO QUIET and as such didn’t seem to go down very well beyond the first few rows of people), and Shellac, obviously. AND I’m going to see Cat Power again tomorrow and Le Tigre next week, which makes up for the weekend two lineup being BETTER. Anyway, work – BOO, ATP – yay. Also, I’m a plane.

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.

We (Minter, Ady & I) went along early, saw Cassetteboy. Brilliant, brilliant stuff, all on tape loops so the bloke didn’t actually have to do anything, he just sat on a stool WITH HIS PENIS OUT (well a sort of putty penis, if you follow me, looked realistic though) and a mask of Jimmy Saville, then he cut his penis off, went offstage and came back on dressed as Bin Laden with a hat made of aeroplanes.No really. And he fought with another man who had a cardboard twin towers on his head.You had to be there. The music was loads of cut up, blink and you’ve missed it loops of songs, famous and not famous (caught the Smiths, Public Enemy, Joy Division etc amongst other things). ‘The drugs don’t work’ with the lyrics changed to say ‘the drugs work, they don’t make you worse, i know i’ll be on drugs again’. Blinding. And a cut up politician’s speech made to sound like it was good to murder 11 year old boys. Some sort of comment on the manipulative power of the press, i expect. Before Cassetteboy, some well-constructed glitchcore (ha ha, love these terms, tech step, darkcore) from Wauvenfold. A weird evening up there with the fish-headed man of Gloucester (ask Minter).

Hood themselves were really, really good I thought. Started off with left handed guitarist playing right handed bass upside down and right handed bassist playing left handed guitar upside down, but sorted out after first song.

Sounds a lot punchier live (obviously), and i think it’s a good thing that the vocals were occasionally sunk under the rest of the mix, what with them being weak from time to time. Asked them about Audioscope too, they seemed quite up for it, amazingly.

Ace gig, though, apart from the crowd. Loads of them faced away from the band the whole time and even more talked all the way through, very beard-scratchy being there to look cool sort of crowd.

There was even one guy with an old man’s cap on, backwards, a little goatee anda black polo neck, smoking rollups. The man was a cliche on legs. I swear I saw him in top lesbian sitcom Ellen once, too.

In other news, Sunnyvale have their first MP3 up for download on our fantastic website It’s us messing about doing a two-minute funk interlude, and is in no way representative of what we do most of the time, but some of you might enjoy it. If you like 70s cop show themes. Let’s play drums…

I went to see some of my favourite musicians play in Oxford for like the first time EVER last night as the Ninja Tune posse came down to find that the Zodiac had printed up flyers saying the label was called Ninja Tunes and advertsing theri web address as ninjatunes.net, which it isn’t. At least they made the effort, bless. (go to and buy everything, go on) DJ Food were brilliant, although still adjusting – they made a few mistakes which they blamed on it being the first night of the tour, and it took DK a few goes to scratch out the tune to the Addam’s family. But the breadth of music the played and the skill with which they mixed it was incredible. Why can’t all club nights be made this way?

It is Therapy? next week. I expect to behave like an excited child.

Will post something interesting that’s come out of my own brain and everything soon, but for now, everybody should read this piece of genius writing: God reiterates ten commandments