Darwin’s loveliest dreadlocked layabout teacher slash plaintive song and crunchy electronic musician, Kris Keogh, added another string to his bow last night by appearing as The Hippy Shake on Funniest Home Videos. If you thought those City Centre Offices indie electronic heads were a little too serious for their own good, well get below that sensitive synth laden veneer and there’s a wacky video waiting to be found. On the evidence in question at any rate.

Apparently, Kris (who records as Blastcorp) won $500 worth of Shannon Noll and Pete Murray CDs – awesome. He’s already put the word out for friends needing Christmas presents for family. And he’s in the final, which considering he wants to go live in Berlin and get his album out (will it ever come out??) will mean the $10,000 prize money would come in very handy. So, vote one for Blastcorp.

This week, Sir Robbo from Sydney bands Tooth and Astronomy Class, and DJ/promoter of Sydney’s long running (but not for much longer) electronic night Frigid, is coming in for my radio show Join The Dots. With not one but two albums set for release, including the lush double Tooth album that’s in shops this week, and a gig this weekend supporting Hermitude, the Sydney DJ and musician has plenty to talk about. Tune in to hear new material from Tooth, as well as Soft Machine, Bjork and A Tribe Called Quest.

Very sad news…

Grant McLennan had such a poetry about him. I last saw him perform at a Go Betweens show/discussion at the Sydney Festival in January. I had the feeling at the time that he and Forster were just maturing in their song writing, developing a richness of expression that was quite intoxicating to hear.

This week was the first time on a Thursday for my radio show Join The Dots, and although I used to like catching up with Chris Twite from Whiplash at 11pm on a Tuesday, it’s really cool chewing the fat with Lorna at 11 on Thursday night, considering she’s got pretty fantastic music taste. I guess by fantastic, I mean complementary.

Anyway first week was all about kicking out the funk. Even though I had a nasty headache all day. I was feeling a little out of focus by the end, but mostly in a good way.

BTW if you’ve been keeping an eye on my sets the past few weeks you would have noticed Mapstation popping up a few times. I like his new record, so I reviewed it for Stylusmagazine.com.

Anyway, here’s this week’s playlist:

Mark De Clive Lowe – Tide’s arising feat Abdul Shylon (ABB)
The Bamboos – Eel Oil (Shock)
The Bamboos – Golden rough (Tru Thoughts)
Rotary Connection – Black gold of the sun
Georgia Anne Muldrow – Nothingness (Stones Throw)
Yesterday’s New Quintet – You’ve got it bad girl (Stones Throw)
Sound Directions – Theme for Ivory Black (Stones Throw)
Madvillain – Rhinestone Cowboy (Stones Throw)
Beatless – Dominant (feat Quasimoto & Madlib) (Ubiquity)
Jaylib – Heavy (Stones Throw)
DJ Rells – Don’t You Know (Stones Throw)
Umod – Tromboline (Sonarkollektiv)
Yotoko – All creation (Delsin)
Jazzanova – Mwela Mwela (Here I Am) (Bugz remix) (Sonarkollektiv)
Nu Era & Pavel Dego Kost – Nana Nomura (Goya)
Alien Digit – Signal to noise (self released)
FBA feat Jason Bruer – Black Memories (Ferox)
Microworld – BC Style (Vinyl mix) (Transmat)
Jamie Lloyd – Adori’s Kitchen (Putsch ’79 mix) (Future Classic)
Deepchild – Blackness of the Sea (Deepchild remix) (Future Classic)
Wind Up Toys – Windup Dub (Clan Analogue)

Next week I’ll have Sir Robbo from Tooth/Astronomy Class/Frigid coming in to the show.

It was interesting to hear Keith Fullerton Whitman talking tonight. He played last night with Pimmon too. He talked a lot about the effect dynamics of playing in a room. The impact of the space on the ‘room mode’ and its natural frequency. It was obvious how much of an effect it has on the music having seen the show in two spaces. Last night, the music was far less dissonant and protracted, though having said that, there was a spate of near breakcore noisy dissonance. Tonight, the interference built up in the room was far more destructive.

He’s in Australia for a semi-festival, which happened last weekend in Brisbane with Terry Riley, organised by Lawrence English at Room 40. But he did get down to Sydney for a few sets – one as Hrvatski, which I didn’t see, and two as KFW that I did. The second was more interesting – even if the room wasn’t as perfectly suited his sounds. Turkish bread and question time added another level of understanding of what he does.

He was really open about his music ‘practice’, for want of a better word. For example, he said he put out his first album almost 10 years ago, but because every track was different, from psych rock to ambience, he used different names for each. Then he got an email from a British label asking for a album by ‘Hrvatski’, so he hastily set up an email address ‘hrvatski@etc.etc’ and got his first album out. The another, and so on. And he showed the Max/MSP patches for his live sets as Hrvatski, and explained that they have to be easy to operate while drunk, because breakcore is really best played (and listened to) when drunk.

But because he’s getting older, less drunken nights, he’s making less of that and more of the KFW music that’s interested in form and structures and some of the ’60s experimental musicians like Riley and Reich. More academic, obviously, but I think still informed by the noise and raucousness of his alter-egos. He talked about his synth-tourism that’s half inspired by searching out these amazingly powerful sounding old things and half (as Peter Hollo pointed out) geeky machine love. I really should have asked about the double-barrel surname though.

I rarely seem to write much about live music. I have been big on the idea of recorded or DJed music being just as fascinating as the live counterpart, but the fact is, it does create a very different dynamic live. Seeing Pimmon play last night was the perfect proof. He wasn’t creating any theatrics, as a friend remarked he was the essence of understatement, slurping on a plastic cup of red wine as he fiddled with the audio plug on his Dell laptop. But we were transfixed as he created this fabric – there’s no other word for what he does – of music. The only thing I can compare it to is a material made up of many different bright seams – bright gold thread and sparkling silvers and reds and etc – from a distance it meshes into a hazy mix of colours, interesting, but hard to pin down. Difficult to get to grips with. Up close, the individual threads jump out, grabbing your eye. Sitting on a rug in the small Chippendale warehouse space Pelt all these things leapt out as my mind as it raced to Pimmon’s music.

This week, for the first time on a Thursday night, my radio show JOIN THE DOTS sails the waters of the funk. Launching off with The Bamboos and Mark De Clive Lowe, I’ll be stopping in on DJ Rells, Domu, Shed and Morgan Geist, as well as mapping out some new territory from cats like Georgia Anne Muldrow and Jamie Lloyd.