Kenny Dixon Jnr is one of the handful of househeads really worth checking live, he’s militant, soulful, talented. And he’s putting on a Mahogani Music night featuring Andres and Pirahna Head, Paul Randolph, Roberta Sweed and Nikki-O at Liquid Rooms at the end of July, the day before I will have to leave.
The translated info on Let’s Enjoy Tokyo is worth reading, but to buy tickets you should go to the Liquid Room.
Also Daniel Wang’s playing the 26th of June, and July 17 they have DJ Eye from the Boredoms playing for seven hours (!) at Liquid Room 1st Anniversary.

iPods are a big step forward – as much a hot new technology as a zeitgeist defining change in the way people listen to music – but the manufacture seems pretty average on the recent models.
My 4th gen 40GB model died after only five months. Fortunately I’m in Tokyo, where the super-helpful Mac Geniuses at the Apple Ginza store were happy to replace it, but if it happens again in seven months then I’ll just have to throw it away.
Crazy, as friends with early models – one good friend has a happily functioning 1st gen 5GB model – report no problems.

Hordes of Japanese artists, designers, musicians, video artists, sculpters, rappers, pop stars and some seriously random kids descend on Tokyo every six months to show their wares. The Design Festa was at the massive Tokyo Big Sight festival hall on May 15.

This t-shirt really summed the whole day up. Cute ambitious and DIY. One of the coolest things I saw was the hip hop heads by one of the exits – one guy MCing into a set of headphones plugged into the mic jack. Other stalls that stood out were the badges from Bota Botan, great beats from DJ Better, actually there were loads of great things. But there were so many stalls that my head was really hurting by the end.
Amazing… it’d be wild to see the zine fair at TINA (Newcastle, Australia) get a bit wider in the sorts of creative work people can display.
Tokyo

Five months since I left my weekly radio show in Australia. Radio too – it’s not that easy to catch radio without a tuner (travelling with an iPod and a laptop) and without knowing the local stations. But I’m dying to hear some good radio… so podcasts?
Any good ones? I’m open to different types of music – indie, electronic, house, hip hop – as long as it’s interesting, well-produced and new.
Hit the comments up with some hot shows.
Music, Podcasting, Podcasts

Ben Frost was fantastic at TINA* last year, I got hooked on his band School of Emotional Engineering at the same time. He collaborated with Melbourne video artist Khalid whose beautiful abstract images, simple visuals and understated approach really impressed me. Anyway Khalid has a new website showing some of his work.

* Don’t expect a great site from TINA, for the second year running it’s fairly average.

If you’re in Tokyo you have to be doing regular karaoke. Here’s a quick primer.
Oasis – Shakermaker
Sonny and Cher – I Got You Babe
Simon & Garfunkel – I Am A Rock
Billy Idol – Dancing With Myself
The Who – Substitute
The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog
Billy Joel – Piano Man
Other surefire hits include Downtown, Sweet Child O’Mine, I Will Always Love You, Tide Is High, Heaven Is A Place On Earth and Ghostbusters.
Don’t hold back.
Category: Music, Karaoke

Listening to jazz is cool, but reading about it is wild.
It’s the only way to cut through the kid-gloves holding-an-antique thing most people have with jazz these days. I’m reading Miles Davis’s autobiography. Sure he was well educated – musically and otherwise – but he will try anything, listening to classical composers, ‘60s rock bands, funk. Chasing his idols around bars in St Louis and New York.
His idols did their own thing too. Dizzy, Bird and others. Most didn’t even go to music school, let alone play the boring academic thing.

Miles’s English is hip to put it mildly. He rants about Juillard music school in New York – for being racist in not being up on music like jazz and blues and being so focused on white classical music.
But you could get most music schools with that sort of complaint. They’re good at teaching the technical stuff. But when it gets down to original composition, you can’t learn that. Jeff Parker from Tortoise said much the same thing when I interviewed him last year for Cyclic Defrost, except he was talking about a jazz school.
I’m listening to the New Thing! compilation. Soul Jazz really have changed the game when it comes to reissues and compilations, they just have so much love for the music and they’ve picked up where Rhino left off.
Other travelling jazz favourites include Albert Ayler’s Love Cry and the Art Ensemble of Chicago – Reese and the Smooth Ones.
Category: Music, Jazz

“Artists like Linkin Park and Coldplay could be the first of many flare-ups, with more artists starting to view themselves as small business units and not major label adjuncts.” Digital Music News.
Bands like Gorillaz, Limp Bizkit or Coldplay are driving the bottom line of their major label sponsors – look at recent problems for EMI and Warner.
It is easy to see why bands are welcoming the changes in the music industry. Legendary producer Steve Albini’s summary of the problems for bands signing with major labels makes for pretty depressing reading. Anything that lets bands discard such a huge feeding chain must be great.
So what are large multinational record companies good for? Spending money, long lunches, tricky contracts. Well seriously, they have big back-catalogues, which will be underscore any online music future. And they have good distribution networks, though these are increasingly being made redundant. Their response to the massive changes to the music industry looks like a big marketing blunder.
There are still plenty of kids who want to be stars. And a lot of these don’t have access to lawyers or savvy management. But the web is connecting people, and increasingly these people will sidestep the hoops and payola.
Maybe the music industry will split. Already major labels are cutting so many acts. A main industry packed with Pop Stars and Idol contestants. And an alternative powered by P2P, independent labels, netlabels, human relationships. Does this sound a little too utopian? It’s becoming a reality in Australia, where the success of a handful of indie labels has shown this can be creatively liberating as well as financially worthwhile.
Category: Music Industry

1. Various – Sexual Life of Savages: Underground Post Punk from Sao Paolo, Brazil (Soul Jazz LP)
This dark rhythmic punk funk puts most of the white bread stuff currently exciting the NME to shame. Highlights for me are tracks by Fellini and As Mercenarias.

2. Six Vicious – Krunk’s Not Dead (Sixtoo 7″)
Heavy instrumental hip hop with a dark post punk mood, the sleeve’s cool too.
3. Vex’d – Gunman/Smart Bomb (Planet Mu 12”)
Heavy heavy dubstep . The A-side is all ravey synth stabs that build into a massive ragga dubstep. The B-side is more on the industrial tip. Both bombs.
4. Acetate Zero – Crestfallen (Arbouse CD)
Beautiful Mogwai-ish shoegazer soundscapes, lots of atmosphere, odd French vocals.
5. Jackie Mitoo – Ayatollah/Mash Up Babylon (Basic Replay 12″)
Low down dubbed out mixes of the ska-est rude bwoy.
6. Ark – Caliente (Perlon LP)
I loved Ark’s single a couple of years ago, so I’ve been looking forward to this album. It’s as good as I could have hoped. Off the wall electro, little bits of deep house, techno with a real punk do it your own way vibe.
7. Keith Tucker – Detroit Saved My Soul (Seventh Sign 12”)
The title track, It’s A Mood (Detroit Saved My Soul), is a deep groove that could easily cross over in a very big way. The B-sides are heavy Detroit electro funk, equally good.
8. Jay Haze – Love For A Strange World (Kitty Yo LP)
The label boss of Context and Context-terrior drops a solo album for Kitty Yo. The results are glitchy electro pop, reminiscent of Ken Cesar’s tracks for Cheap. Very cool.
9. Marco Passarini – Sullen Look (Peacefrog LP)
His cover of I House U last year was excellent and this one keeps the tone. It’s a bit more accessible: extremely funky electro with a sharp techno feel.
10. Various – Cooperation Sessions 1 (Goya LP)
I bought the second in the Co-op broken beat series last year from Picadilly Records. That was essential, this is even more so, I was thrilled to see it in a sale bin at Disk Union in Shibuya. A little more experimental and I guess a little rougher round the edges.
11. Mood II Swing – I Got Love (Bingo 12”)
I love Ciafone and Mood II Swing. I’m not totally excited about what they’ve done with this, instead of the heavy repetition and dub delay of the original, they’ve just thrown a big drum’n’bass break under it. Still it’s a killer break and sure to big for d’n’b heads.
12. Dynarec – Eiso X (Vapourwave 12”)
Former Delsin head drops the first track on, what I assume is, his own new label. Still a little of the broken vibe that colours most Delsin, but much harder. This is dark, hard, distorted electro techno like early New York Nugroove stuff from Joey Beltram and Lenny Dee.

I’ve also picked up old records by Freakwater, Durutti Column, Motherhood, Lisa Shaw, Monochrome Set, Orange Juice and BMX Bandits. The guys from Solo Action sent me their back-catalogue, which I’ll write about before too long (suffice to say it’s killer broken techno).
Category: Music

I was a little skeptical at first, but so many sites are tacking on Google Ads – loads of blogs, Sydney Morning Herald and Inthemix.com.au – and plenty of people are talking about the profits from doing it. So there’s now one on Fortune Grey. What do you think?