This week my radio show is joining dots like Darren Hanlon, Primal Scream, The Warlocks, Two Lone Swordsmen and Calvin Johnson. Thursday night from 9pm on 94.5 or online.

SYDNEY PRODUCER Robert Miller’s demo arrived in my pigeon hole a few months ago. Fighting the temptation to load the disc up with everything on his home PC, Miller cut just three tracks onto the 12 minute and 20 second disc. For a first go from a musician whose tastes seem to run to indie rock rather than dark electronics, it’s a surprising listen. First up, Want From You starts with the sound of rain falling outside Miller’s Newtown terrace. He knows his way around a bass synth, and when it arrives, the dull thuds and eerie wash fill the spectrum. Almost a minute in, he introduces a tinny breakbeat that would sound thin anywhere else. His palette is pretty simple. Two and a half minutes in some rather brutal cuts in the tape give way to an organ-driven melody and Miller’s plaintive and arch half Bowie half Reznor voice. His restraint gives the simple lyrics a sense of depth that’s only amplified by the heavy ambience. Sadly, second track Aliens and Alcohol is a far more typical affair. The riff-by-numbers, drum-machine-driven beats and weak cliched lyrics sound more Sigue Sigue Sputnik than Aphex Twin. To its credit, the whole thing does degrade into a cool distorted break at the end. Fortunately that’s not where the short sharp set ends. Miller’s bass synth starts the final track, along with the slowed down relentlessness of a techno-on-33 beat. A cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s Modern Romance, Miller’s voice is perfectly accompanied by the almost three-dimensional wall of glitchy granular sound that writhes and scratches like sand.

This is a self-titled demo, find out more from milkrun at myspace or from DEMUS (a goth, sorry dark electronic music site run by an old friend). BTW I packaged up an interview I did with Miller on my show, just waiting for it to be podcast on FBI.

IT’S general knowledge now that Nylon (website mia) has folded. Apparently, Nylon US put all their content online and on their myspace page, which meant the Aust version (containing some very large amount of syndicate material) was outdated before the Australian publishers even got the CD of content, let alone a month later when it got published. It was covering some great stuff, but despite the fact that Ishil and the others wanted to cover more local fashion/music, the deal they’d negotiated with Nylon in the states meant they had to pull in the US content. So, who wants to give me a job writing for another cool magazine?

After the Cronulla riots there was a rash of white boys getting National-Pride-inspired ‘Southern Cross’ or ‘Aussie Pride’ tattoos. It’s still going on in the Shire according to friends, and in other places too.

Bass player Cameron Undy’s new album for Future Classic (as Kidzen) is the best thing from the label to date. Here’s first single Superpeople.

In Part Two of the clearing the mountains of great new CDs from around my desk series, this week was all about joining up the brilliance of Kidzen, Junglehammer & Daktari, Telafonica, Snog and The Woods Themselves, as well as the Underground Lovers, Domu and Phillip Brophy.

Daz-I-Kue feat Andrea Clarke – Lifeline
Kidzen – Supersticious (Domu remix)
Domu – The Boss
Kidzen – Sweet Happening
Inga Liljestrom – Knotted
Ollo – Black Elizabeth
Junglehammer – Summer
The Woods Themselves – Georgie Boy
Telafonica – Request
GB3 – Training for a Fight
Underground Lovers – Monkey
Vince & Jason – (track 2 off demo)
Other People’s Children – 100 Ways to his Heart
All India Radio – The Quiet Ambient
Don Meers – Ready to Download
All India Radio – Ghost Dirt
Shinjuku Filth – The Art
Snog – King of Hate (Cabana Dee and the Calculators mix)
Tsk Tsk Tsk – One Note Song
!!! – Get Up
The Magnetic Fields – (Crazy For You But) Not That Crazy

Melbourne producer, and J Award nominee, Gotye came on my show a few months ago. If you want to hear what he had to say, the interview’s podcasted at FBI.org.au.

Awesome. Ozi Batla, Chasm and Sir Robbo’s first record together, as Astronomy Class, is about to drop – think heady dancehall hip hop, like this one featuring Lotek.

Throwing down a collection of CDs from on high – the rugged peaks of my desk – this week on my radio show Join The Dots is all about joining up the brilliance of Kidzen, Junglehammer & Daktari, Telafonica and The Woods Themselves, and beautiful songs from Underground Lovers, Domu and Phillip Brophy.

Richard Easton put out a record called Two Thousand Demolition Songs on Candle Records in 2004, which I heard because I interviewed him for the Canberra Times. There are so many records that drop without a trace, and at least to my knowledge this is one of those, but this is one of those albums that I can’t tear myself away from. I really love it. Here’s the interview, and at the bottom is a song. If you like the sound, go and find more.

“Film has always been a really big part of my life,” says Easton. “I enjoy that sense of music that gives you a visual feel when you hear it, something that evokes music, that’s the kind of music that I enjoy.”

Although he studied cinematography, shot a couple of short films, and still works part time in a small independent cinema in Melbourne, its Easton’s lovely fourth album, Two Thousand Demolition Songs, on the excellent Candle Records label, that I’m so excited about.

The filmic element has been incredibly important in his music. “I always think of the Dead Man soundtrack,” he says, “Neil Young has probably been one of the most influential people for me. He sat down and watched the visuals: he had a big screen in front of him, plugged his guitar into his amp and played to what he saw.”

It doesn’t get too much more stripped back than just a guitar and a voice. “I enjoy solitude and always have, so I guess that is often reflected in the music and not wanting to fill songs up too much.”

He moved to Melbourne in 1998 after his critically acclaimed debut release and he’s been back and forward ever since. Although US college radio picked up on the track, ‘Well Maybe Somebody,’ from Easton’s second album, he got sick of the whole thing soon after and went back to Perth. After a good deal of soul-searching, he eventually recorded his third album, which was named after the small WA country town of Darkan. The sparse, live sound reflected his disenchantment with city life.

“The songs have a lot of space in them and I just wanted to record something in the vein of an old style blues recording where you just whack a microphone in and just take somebody and sit them down there with a guitar and let them go for it. That kind of brought me back into music, you know it kind of was my saviour in a way.”

“A lot of the music I’ve done has been set in a sort of a rural setting, but when I write music I have a very strong visual sense and often there are fairly complex but simple characters who exist in open spaces and small towns. I guess it’s quite an Australian sort of feel.”

It was a natural progression to his latest album. He recruited Pete Cohen and Karl Smith from Sodastream, Marty Brown from Art of Fighting, and newcomer Phil Romeril from Small Knives, as well as Greg ‘J.’ Walker from Machine Translations to handle production.

“My lyrics have been said to be a little abstract at times, but I often step into that character of a young guy who’s just sort of drifting pretty much.” Easton added. “Drifting through the badlands.”

Listen: Richard Easton – Coffin