The last two weeks of Join the Dots on FBI 94.5 have been a real pleasure.

Both weeks I’ve had guests, both guests were people who make things that I have a lot of love for, and both were fascinating to talk with.

Mark Mordue is a veteran rock journo who’s contributed to (hold tight while I take a breath) The Wire, Melody Maker, The Australian, SMH/Age, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Interview, Salon, The Bulletin and a lot more. He’s also just put together the latest issue of Meanjin, All Yesterday’s Parties (Meanjin does rock’n'roll). It’s been a roaring success, with only a few remaining copies at Gleebooks, apparently.

Adrian Klumpes, piano man for Triosk, was on the show last week to talk about his spectacular solo debut, Be Still. Stay tuned for an interview in the next issue of Cyclic Defrost.

Both were long interviews, but, I hope, as interesting on the radio as for me in the studio.

(30/11/2006 with Mark Mordue)

The Valentinos – Man With The Gun (Headman dub)
Prop – Free From The Shark (Mice Parade Remora remix)
The Presets – Down Down Down
DJ Hell – Keep On Waiting (Tomas Andersson remix)
Fat Truckers – Teenage Daughter
Relaxed Muscle – Rod of Iron
Pulp – Joyriders
Jarvis – Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time
Thee Headcoats – Gun In My Father’s Hand
The Makers – Texture of a Girl
Sleater-Kinney – Combat Rock
The Go Betweens – Darlinghurst Nights
Deloris – Postponement Plan
The Triffids – Wide Open Road
The Saints – Know Your Product
Ed Kuepper – Electrical Storm

(23/11/2006 with Adrian Klumpes)

The Small Faces – Ogden’s gone nut flake
Jack Ladder – Ooh la la
Saddleback – Seven Miles
Animal Collective – Grass
International Karate – A shadow told me
Pivot & The Break Ups – But now I hate you
Dave Miller – One light, dark room (Pablo Dali remix)
Rosner – Through the glass
Pivot – Incidental backcloth
Triosk – Lost broadcast
Adrian Klumpes – Weave in and out
Sebastien Roux – The prepared piano song
Fourcolor – Rowboat (with Piana)
Qua – On clouds
Adrian Klumpes – Cornered
Autechre – Iera
DJ Food – Sexy bits (ae9v mix by Autechre)
Coldcut – Sign

More bass heavy wobble from Sydney reggae/hip hop crew Astronomy Class. This time a dub of Third Weapon.

Reading Triosk’s gig at the Jazzgroove birthday captured so clearly was almost as enjoyable as hearing the band live.

“Adrian Klumpes’s piano was made electronically hard-edged and cold, but his lines were often melodically radiant. At their best these became little shards of beauty, like a mirror that has been shattered while holding the image of a beautiful woman.”

Thanks to Adrian for coming on Join the Dots last Thursday – he’s the definition of radio talent: Adrian took my sketched questions (which I’m blaming on a new job/house move) and filled them out with thoughtful, fascinating answers.

Listen to Join the Dots this Thursday night (FBI 94.5 from 9 until 11pm) for an interview with veteran rock journo Mark Mordue about music, writing and the latest issue of literary journal Meanjin – All Yesterday’s Parties: Meanjin does rock’n'roll.

• Cyclic Defrost 15 launch: Wednesday night from 7:30 at Madame Fling Flong’s in Newtown. Free. Playlist DJing from Cyclic contributors including Lars (Ollo), Bec Paton, Renae Mason, Seb Chan and I.
• Triosk piano man Adrian Klumpes comes in to chat on Join the Dots on FBI 94.5 on Thursday night from 9pm. Recorded in just five hours, Klumpes’ spectacular solo debut Be Still is one of the year’s best.
• Twee at the Brighton Up Bar, Oxford St, on Saturday night from 9pm. Indie & New Wave pop from its heyday of the 80s + 90s is the deal. Wu, Smith, DB and I are playing the records.

Not one, but two weeks worth of songs and joining of dots for you. Thanks to Joey Braintax, Pip from TZU and Sean from a-reminder.org for coming in. Here are the songs.

This week:
Toys Went Berserk – Stolen Ground
Toydeath – The Girl (feat Frank Bennett)
Psapp – Curuncula
The Rakes – Retreat
Gotye Working For A Nuclear Free City – Dead Fingers Talking
Minotaur Shock – Somebody Once Told Me It Existed But They Never Found It
Faux Pas – Hermann’s Herrmans
Gotye – Hearts a Mess
Dappled Cities Fly – Within Hours
Spoon – Stay Don’t Go
New Pornographers – Twin Cinema
Cinematic Orchestra – All That You Give (feat Fontella Bass)
Tricky – Black Steel
Massive Attack – Sly
Mad Professor – Good Vibrations
TZU – Recoil (Traksewt remix)
TZU – Coming Round
Pasobionic – Black Ink Concerto
Curse Ov Dialect – Word Up Forever

Last week:
Hilltop Hoods – Left Foot, Right Foot
Sir Robbo feat Hau, Ozi Batla & Urthboy – The Path
Koolism – Warm & Easy (feat Rodney P)
Rodney P – Trouble
The Nextmen – Fire Walking (feat Rodney P, Dynamite MC, Cutty Ranks)
The Sundragon feat Klashnekoff & Kyza – Watching (Jehst remix)
Jehst – Move Back
Taskforce – It’s Us We’re Back
Braintax – Godnose (feat Taskforce)
Braintax – Last Tenner (Instrumental)
Braintax – Last Tenner
Braintax – Run The Yards (Instrumental)
Braintax – Run The Yards
Comfort Fit – Take a Look
Braintax & Mystro – Free The Walls
Comfort Fit – Emotional Draft
Braintax & Mystro – Anti-Grey (feat Dubbledge)
Mystro – My Type of Party (C-Swing remix)
Mystro – State Cypha (feat Hyjak, Drapht, Muph, Robby Balboa)
Plutonic Lab – The Waiting (Instrumental)
Lotek HiFi – Under My Bed
Astronomy Class – Rewind The Tape (feat Lotek & BVA)
Ghislain Poirier – Elephant (Partie Um) (feat Seba)
Ghislain Poirier – Pour te Rechauffer (feat TTC & Omnikrom)
TTC – De Pauvres Riches
TTC – Latest Dance Craze

Sean from a-reminder.org is coming in to the studio tonight to chat about his Australia’s Top 25 Bands & Artists list. Although Sean’s an expat, he runs a great blog about Australian music, and he’s coopted a random selection of bloggers and radio presenters to vote on the list (now in its second year).

Later in the show, I’ll be chatting with Joel and Pip from TZU after their gig tonight in Newcastle.

It all happens on FBI 94.5 tonight from 9pm until 11pm.

Think there’s no political music out there? Check DJ C‘s ride through the crates. But with Bush imploding here’s hoping the Dems offer something else. (via Mudd Up).

Watch out! The latest issue of Cyclic Defrost is online (or on PDF) and 5000 copies of the magazine will arrive in shops around the country next week. They go fast, so if you want to guarantee a copy, subscribe here.

The cover comes direct from new art director Bim Ricketson in Qatar in the Middle East. It also features interviews with Kid Koala, Nico Muhly, Post and Winduptoys (Melb), Matt Warren (Hobart), Rebel MP (Lismore), Astronomy Class, Shannon O’Neill and Deepchild (Sydney). The interview with Rune Grammofon boss Rune Kristofferson is a must. Comprehensive reviews too, of course.

Sean from a-reminder.org has compiled his second annual top 25 Australian bands list – a dream, undoubtedly, for any music geek raised on High Fidelity and/or the Commitments. 12 months ago I followed his first list with a blog comment about notable omissions, so this year I got a vote. It’s harder than it looks. Try and come up with your favourite (still operational in some sense) bands from this country – post them below – the first 10′s easy, then it gets tougher and tougher.

It’s personal. My first 10 was Sun, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Triosk, the Go Betweens (honorary), Architecture In Helsinki, the Herd, Pivot, Mnemonic Ascent, Sodastream, the Crayon Fields, the Drones. Some I still agree with, some I don’t. That will always be the way with a list like this. But the weirdest thing about coming up with this list was how few bands I considered worthy of being the top. I live and breath music, but when it came to putting one above another a top list feels about as useful as judging the quality of a bowl of rice by lining individual grains up and measuring how far they reach (to the moon?). Maybe it’s something you just get excited about when you’re in high school, or maybe just if you’re down with a specific sound where things can be ranked as comparitive equals. I mean how do you set Mnemonic Ascent against Midnight Oil, Saddleback against the Orange Humble Band (mostly included just because I love the Stems and want something of theirs in the list), or Ed Keupper and Ollo?

Not too many of my choices made it in, at any rate, but as someone who grew up watching the Commitments at parties, dreaming up top 10 lists, and more recently High Fidelity, it’s a fun exercise. Go see what you think of the list, come back and vote yourself.

One week after I arrived in Shanghai, to live, which is a long story in itself, I got a call from a friend inviting me to cover Norway’s Oyafestivalen for whichever Australian music outlets I was writing for. Considering I wasn’t even in the country that meant a few very quick phone calls, and ultimately a review, interviews with Shining, Datarock and this one with Subs (originally published in Nylon, but that’s since folded).

One! No money
Two! No family
Three! No job
Four! No future

Five-foot Kang Mao (above, centre) explodes from the tiny stage at the Last Train bar in downtown Oslo; her short black bob whips around her head as she screams out the words. The tiny New York-style bar is packed way past capacity with music heavyweights from across the globe, some intrigued by the idea of Chinese punk rock, but most excited by the rumours of Subs’ exhilarating live show.

The Ramones-esque Beijing quartet belt out a fiery blend of hardcore punk, rockabilly and heavy ’70s rock.

“Until 1995, China didn’t have punk,” says Kang Mao, speaking dialectical Mandarin spiced with bits of English through an interpreter. There were so few people that liked punk,” she continues, “particularly in our city Wuhan, so, of course, you knew everybody.”

Guns’n'Roses, Bon Jovi and Michael Jackson CDs were readily available, but she bonded with guitarist Wu Hao, drummer Ah-Dong and bass player Zhu Lei over Nirvana, Fugazi and Alice in Chains CDs that arrived as what the Chinese call “dakou”.

“Basically, you look at the spine of these dakou CDs and there’s a strip missing,” says the diminutive punk, “like someone took a blade saw and just went zzzt.” Record labels across the world cut a notch from the plastic case of surplus CDs, marking them as ‘remainders’ to be sold cheaply or destroyed. Thousands wound up in Chinese garbage dumps and China’s alternative record stalls and, Kang Mao says, without these “dirt cheap CDs, there’s no way we would be here, they were the primary source of music for us.”

But although music was leaking into the country, it was still tough to find instruments, and tougher still learning to play them. High quality instruments were extremely rare, and cheap instruments were out of the range of poor punk kids. A friend of Kang Mao’s bought an electric guitar because he wanted to play punk rock. He got the guitar home and couldn’t understand why it was so much quieter than his favourite CDs. Kang Mao giggles explaining he hadn’t bought an amplifier. “There really was no institutional way of finding out what a guitar is or what it could do,” she says. “We didn’t know you had to put the effects box into the wire and the other effects box into the guitar, the electric guitar into the amplifier.”

Their new demo album, follow up to the debut Subs Life EP, captures all the ferocity of Kang Mao’s voice, with a tougher rockabilly nod to Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion.”There’s a lot of different things going on in each piece,” Kang Mao says. “We don’t want to spend time talking about what we’re not satisfied with, I mean there’s a lot of stuff that we’re excited about and we want that to come out too. There’s hatred, but there is also excitement and happy so fine emotions running into each song.”

Desperate the frustration that obviously underlines Subs’ songs, there is also a lot of mischievous fun. Ah-Dong says drily, “Well look the woman’s angry, but the three of us are having a good time.”

Here’s their manager, Jon Campbell (pictured, left) on Subs for his column at Pop Matters.

LISTEN:
Subs – 8 O’Clock
More Subs songs at Pure Volume.