It’s been such a cool year for music – of course, there’ll be plenty of people saying the opposite, people do that every year. But like every year, really, if you’re looking around there’s always so much. It’s been particularly good for me because, having spent most of the year travelling, I’ve been able to do great records real justice by spending a lot of time with them… on the ipod – well until it died, twice in two months – and on random CD players wherever I stopped. Listening like that I found myself drifting back into a lot of indier records and a lot of more obscure, freakier stuff (still positively chambray shirt and boat shoes conservative compared to plenty of my Cyclic Defrost and Stylus colleagues).

I’ll flesh this out with time, I’m just getting a list in now and I’ll probably even knock some off and add some on before it’s finished. Damn, somehow I’ve gotta strip this down to a top 10. Eek. And I think the Stylus top 10 is due this week.

There’s a lot of stuff that I probably haven’t come near in the past year – I definitely haven’t been listening to as much hip hop or house, I’d say being back in Australia and, at least in theory having my own place with decks and records at some time in the future, should be listening to a bit more club music and playing it out a bit too. In any case, here are a few things that have had me bouncing off the walls, fighting back tears, singing in the shower (or train), doing air guitar or weird mouth movements to try and get the right sound.

BEST RECORDS
Omar S – Just Ask The Lonely (FXHE)
Khonnor – Handwriting (Type)
Pasobionic – Empty Beats for Lonely Rappers (Elefant Traks)
Sam Prekop – Who’s Your New Professor (Thrill Jockey)
Pivot – Make Me Love You (Sensory Projects)
Broadcast – Tender Buttons (Warp)
Softland – War Againstt Error (Spezial Material)
Remote Viewer – Let Your Heart Draw a Line (City Centre Offices)
Jackson & His Computer Band – Smash (Warp)
Roll Deep – In At The Deep End (Radioclit’s chopped and screwed version) (Radioclit.com)
Five Dollar Day – Black Bears (Ill & Alice)
Shed – 12” series on Solo Action (Solo Action)
The Herd – The Sun Never Sets (Elefant Traks)
Datarock – Datarock (Young Aspiring Professionals)
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.
Six Vicious – Krunk’s Not Dead (Sixtoo 7?)
Heavy instrumental hip hop with a dark post punk mood, the sleeve’s cool too.
Vex’d – Degenerate (Planet Mu)
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.
Acetate Zero – Crestfallen (Arbouse)
Beautiful Mogwai-ish shoegazer soundscapes, lots of atmosphere, odd French vocals.
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.
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.
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.
Dsico – You Fight Like A Girl (Spasticated)
Fourtet – Everything Ecstatic / Madvillain – Madvillainy (Fourtet remixes) (Stones Throw)

BEST SHOWS
Jens Lekman @ Mudd Club, Berlin
Autechre, LFO @ Tokyo
The Herd @ The Metro, Sydney
Tresor closing, Berlin
Oya Festival, Oslo
Lali Puna/Pole/Mouse on Mars @ O-East, Tokyo
Sam Prekop & Chicago Underground Duo @ Tokyo
Pivot @ Abercrombie Hotel, Sydney

Sydney dubstep producer and Ableton jockey Moving Ninja (aka Jabba) played at Frigid last week, d/l the set here and read a review of his Southern Steppa gig the week before here.

In the spirit of killer sets, here’s one from Vex’d (thanks to Spannered.org and QLD dubstep don Frosty).

“Four minutes into the ecstatic rush of soft focus drum’n’bass on “Montecore”, everything stops, just like the moment in a fireworks shower when the explosions of light and sound stop and you think, “Is that it?” All of sudden there’s another explosion and you’re right back in the middle of the show.”

Six years in the making, Pivot took a long time on their debut album – Seb Chan from Cyclic Defrost says he went through a pile of old CDs the other day and found at least four previously demoed versions of the album. It’s easy to see why considering the five members collaborate so widely it sometimes feels like a super-group (even though Pivot came first) recording as Triosk for Leaf, collaborating with Jan Jelinek for ~Scape and traveling through Europe in Burnt Friedman and Uwe Schmidt’s group Flanger.

And people love the album, which was released on Melbourne’s Sensory Projects, the national broadcaster Triple J has even nominated it for the inaugural J Award (shaping up to be a pretty decent shortlist). Their usual comparison is Tortoise, but dropping names like Squarepusher, DJ Shadow and John Tejada’s I Am Not A Gun might give you a good idea of their sound too. I said in my review of the record that: “Describing electronic music as a soundtrack is so ’95, but the images evoked by Pivot’s music are impossible to ignore. I can almost see it on the movie screen: sick-in-the-head lead character who you’ve come to understand, even like, but he’s spiraling out of control, hitting out and desperate for understanding.”

Richard Pike was cool enough to take some time out from touring Europe with Flanger to answer my questions.

You took your time with the debut album for Pivot, are you happy with the results?
Yes. Good things take time. We didn’t want to do a ‘nice’ album. We spent years developing what we do as a band, because we wanted to make music that sounds unique and singular. I feel like not many people do this in Australia. Everyone just wants to get a CD out before they turn 23.

Can you give me a run-through of the various projects/bands/collabs you’re involved in?
Pivot, Flanger, Gold Mice. I also co-produce Triosk.
At the moment I’m touring with Flanger in Europe. Myself and Laurence (my brother in Pivot) collaborated on Flanger’s 4th album ‘Spirituals’. Via mail and internet. Flanger is an electronic duo, of Burnt Friedman and Atom Heart, and I’m the first singer to record with this project. Which is pretty exciting. Flanger influenced Pivot when we first started, before I ever met them.
I met Burnt through Pivot. We played a gig together in Sydney and started collaborating.
I help produce Triosk, which has Pivot members Laurence and Adrian. With this group I edit and shape their music, that they write as a trio. So I have a very different role there.
Gold Mice is a new group I am working on. Nothing released yet.

It’s probably confusing to someone who listens to only Coldplay and inevitably will ask why don’t you do one band? Which one do you like the best?

How do you work in Pivot? in Triosk? Is there much overlap between your different groups and all the other collaborations? How do tracks/songs develop?
Essentially they are similar, but Triosk is a lot more conceptual in process. I just help them shape it into a releasable album, and add some tricks, computer production. I do the same thing with Pivot, but our process is based around the 5 piece creating together and a lot of post-production. By that I mean a lot more structuring and album producing in a traditional pop/rock producer sense. The band needs a producer to make the music solid. That’s my job.
Of course there is overlap. You hear it in the music. How we develop the songs is just a matter of working on it till it sounds good, and fits the vision.

How naturally do the electronic elements fit into your music? As musicians, do you find it difficult to improvise with electronics for example?
Not at all. We just work until it sounds good. We love those sounds. It would only be difficult if we didn’t like those sounds.
But I’m rarely happy with a piece of programming straight away. I spend a lot of time on particular sounds.

I find Montecore stuck in my head all the time, tell me about your scales addiction?
Scales addiction? I love melody. Montecore was a melody that came into my head, the same way the Beatles wrote songs. It’s just a simple pop melody, that you can meow meow meow along to.

Do you feel part of a music community in Sydney or a wider Australian or international one?
Playing overseas I feel the world is smaller than you think. Pivot is not distributed OS yet, but that will come next I hope.
But Sydney is a tiny scene really. And Australia not that much bigger. All bookers, musos and managers know each other. I feel part of both Australia and OS now, even though the music I make is so underground.

I interviewed Jorgen Munkeby from Shining/Jaga Jazzist a few weeks ago and he couldn’t stop saying how important his musical training is for the music he makes, how important is musical training to the music you make?
Well, with Jaga Jazzist, of course, that music needs training and discipline. I feel the opposite. I think the more you learn the more convoluted things become. I never wanted to be just a technician. That’s boring music. I’ll leave that to Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen.

Is there anything you’re trying to convey in your music?
I always say this: the balance between past and future, analog and digital, good and evil. An ongoing battle high on a mountain, a place I like to call Danger Mountain. I have a very distinct idea of what I want it to say. But it is purely musical. Music can never describe anything directly but itself.

What do you think of the small label scene in Australia? In your opinion, how is that scene being affected by filesharing and the Internet?
There is a very very small label scene. The majors are small labels now. Ringtones are the new hit singles, and music writing will adapt to that. If you wanna make money you’ve got to play gigs. Or write a great ringtone.

Pivot are back in Sydney and playing this Sunday night at the Abercrombie Hotel (corner of Abercrombie Street and Broadway in the city). Melbourne’s Mountains In The Sky are supporting, plus Levins and I will be playing records between bands.

Murky business. Skirting around the edges of what is and isn’t jazz these days is tricky. The stuff that’s generally accepted into the canon is pretty conservative, the more challenging stuff isn’t taught at the colleges and it all gets a bit tricky. Jeff Parker quit partway through his course at Berkley, even though he went on to work with plenty of legends, and arguably contribute a lot to jazz’s current relevance. Everyone you speak to bemoans the state of the colleges, the problem is they just teach the canon these days. Where it was once an outpouring of rhythms and tones and sounds thrilled to travel every which way, whether into European inspired avant garde experimentalism (ala Mingus) or r&b inflected blues (all over the place, eg Miles), now jazz means jazz, a very strict assemblage of rules taught to prospective students, prospective jazz musicians. I guess it’s the old thing about not knowing the rules making it easier to break the rules.

But where do electronic cats fit into this. Artists bouncing off the jazz idiom coming from heavy electronic backgrounds or grainy hip hop. This means everything from Boxcutter to Madlib to Shining to Jazzanova. Jorgen from Shining told me in a recent interview (which will be up before long at Cyclic Defrost, I promise) that he sees his conservatory training as vitally important to his music, that rather than stopping him from breaking the rules, it lets him know the broad range of possibilities.

David Yaffe at the Nation rips up a recent book on the subject, Is Jazz Dead? by Stuart Nicholson.

I’m talking to Jurgen from Jazzanova tonight, so I might ask him his thoughts. Although their music is pretty peripheral to the jazz world, it’s built around the house culture of producing beats using samples, PC-based programming and loops, they’ve always incorporated complex rhythmical ideas from jazz.

The Australian on freelancing in Australia… As the story says, the Canberra Times pays not much more than 10 cents a word – that’s for in-depth science reportage and light-hearted music/arts stories. In music writing it’s even worse, most of the good magazines are entirely voluntary, which is understandable, but even the commercially successful mags stop returning your emails when you ask about payment, while music websites pay their sales staff corporate wages while keeping their editorial staff on incomes that’d make your local check-out staff blush.

The only way is to get a proper job and do the other stuff as a sideline, or even better, start your own zine/ezine/blog/whatever.

A couple more interviews. Both bands mine the past, but where Broadcast create a new sound inspired by bands like the United States of America and Esquivel, Breakestra strictly recreate the ’60s funk of bands like The Meters. I love funk, but it’s increasingly easy to find those original records, I wanna hear new bands making something individual.

Anyway, poor indie kids Broadcast have a new album, Tender Buttons, out through Warp. It’s great, though I suspect if they don’t have some financial windfall soon, they’ll pack up the shop. Check my interviews with Broadcast and Breakestra for 3D World.

The best NYE party in Sydney, well considering it’s my two favourite club nights in town – Popfrenzy and Frigid – hooking up for a kinda house-party-esque mash up of dancehall, pop, electro, indie and hip hop it’s obviously gonna be my fave at least. Plus I get to drag a box of records down to the club and force my favourites on other people. Tickets on sale soon, the lineup’s something like this.

POPFRENZY ROOM
The Brunettes (live, NZ)
Popfrenzy Sound Unit
Enari
Fflloyd Quinlan
Bazooka DJs
Calico
Red Peugeot
Sleater Brockman

FRIGID ROOM
Pivot (live)
Gemma
Seymour Butz
ollo
Sub Bass Snarl
Sir Robbo
Bec Paton
Superlight (video)

CHILL ROOM
Eli Murray
Clark Nova
Sinclair
Some Freak
Australian Rozie
Von Boyage the Smashed Aristocrat
Lyndon Pike

8pm to 5am @Newtown, 52 Enmore Rd, Newtown. NYE 2005/2006. Tickets $22+bf from Moshtix, Fish Records, Incu Clothing (Galleries Victoria City and Paddington) and Gifted Records (Surry Hills).

Kid Chameleon breaks down some shows he’s been involved with lately, including Meat Beat Manifesto, Plasticman, Vex’d and Joe Nice, but the most interesting one as far as I’m concerned is a profile of Al Haca and their label Klein. It’ s gotta be one of the most criminally underrated imprints, at least here in Australia, where their junglist dancehall and broken hip hop should be massive. Like, it’s really pop music, but killer pop music. You might know the label for Seelenluft‘s Manila, the quirky house tune that crossed over big time into the electro/house scene, but names like Stereotyp, the Bug, Sofa Surfers and the increasingly wide Sofa family need investigating.

Not being a hardcore digger of drum’n'bass Pieter K was a new name to me, but Kid Chameleon’s piece on Riddim Method has my interest piqued. Check out his Pieter K tribute mix.

After drinks above a shop Crown St with friends, we skipped seeing Grand Salvo and Kes at the Hopetoun and instead drove down to the Abercrombie Hotel on Broadway. There’s been a resurgence of pubs in Sydney, I’m not sure what’s inspired it, but joining the evergreen Cricketers Arms, the Hoey, the Judgie, these days you’ll find regular music nights at places like the Sly Fox (Enmore), the Clare and the Abercrombie (Broadway). So the newly cool Abercrombie, whose luck turned when it was bought out by the guys behind the Clare Hotel down the street, has played host to plenty of gigs lately, the Popfrenzy crew are doing parties down there on Sunday nights with bands like Pivot, and a bunch of other regular nights including the indie night Purple Sneakers. Thursdays sees Inhale invite a different crew of Sydney beat makers every week, last week it was Southern Steppa.

We walked in to the corner pub to quease-inducing bass from Steppa-operative Eli Murray. I’ve known about Eli for ages, I even asked him to DJ at the TINA festival in 2004 when I organised the gigs up there in Newcastle – though a squashed lineup and a few last minute technical hassles meant we just ended up hanging out – so all I’d heard before was his killer mix CDs. Playing in the club he was tight, dubstep’s not the easiest sound to mix, the rhythms are deliberately off-kilter and jerky, but Eli has it locked down, the moody sounds flowed perfectly, well as perfectly as can be while still being uneasily funky. I’ve been off the planet as far as these sounds go for ages, but there was a lot of DJ Hatcha and Horsepower style dub-heavy beats with middle eastern melodies and whip-crack beats.

Southern Steppa’s schtick is dubstep, in case you didn’t guess. Well dubstep, grime and whatever other microvariations are coming outta East London, Germany or any of the other places the viral beatscience has appeared. And being more of an eclectic music lover, I have to admit I’d prefer to see these guys get a bit wider spectrum – any style gets a little boring after too long – so I was feeling a little skeptical as a quiet, wiry kid with a shaved head and a tight jumper flipped up his laptop next to the decks. I needn’t have. As part of the Garage Pressure live crew Moving Ninja, Jabba’s recorded for labels like Vertical Sound. But where that group got their name for ‘robo-grime’, Jabba was dropping something a bit deeper via an Ableton-enabled laptop. Heavy and flavoursome wobbly sounding dubstep action that despite the odd computer malfunction sounded tough, later it even developed into grimier IDM-flavoured riddims ala Maxximus. The beats underpinned by a stark, skeletal dub and electro base, like screwed & chopped down drum’n'bass. A small but appreciative pub audience vibed off the music in a mish-mash assortment of Melbourne style second hand lounges. The Steppa cats brought in extra sound making the bass wobble extra. It became properly evident when Kodama stepped up to add some sounds to Jabba’s set at one point. It was dark and minimal, with an occasional burst of light, such as the dark Zinc-style track featuring some seriously cut-up Missy Elliot vocals.

After Jabba left the stage, to a crowd of adoring backpack sporting guys, Kodama and Zerodub kicked right in with a CD jacket full of up to date dubs and a box of records. Their tough, hard dubstep had the building crowd nodding their heads and a bit of a crowd who were borderline dancing. Plenty of Zinc/Bingo style beats and sirens. The constant chatty buzz, relaxed mood and top shelf underground music reminded me of the Cricketer’s Arms of old. And damn, I miss the regular nights there.

Kodama – Mixed Peas (hosted by Southern Steppa)
Eli – Outbreak Vol 1 (hosted by Southern Steppa, sorry it’s WMA)

Moving Ninja – Alien, Soma, Antigen, Shellcode, Lost Tribe, Murky (hosted by Moving Ninja)

Me on two new ambient electronic producers, Softland (War Againstt Error) & The Village Orchestra (Et In Arcadia Ego), as with the last lot of reviews the new is italicised because both have done lots of other stuf under other names… Both are lovely and fantastic records, Softland’s kinda on the dark, unsettling Tarwater tip, while the Village Orchestra is optimistic ala Orbital.

Try before you…

The Village Orchestra – Love Them From Two Man Rumble

Softland – Seismo