Museumface blogger and music writer Richard MacFarlane came on the show this week, playing some lovely records from Saddleback, Islaja, A Sunny Day in Glasgow and Growing, before I went on a Fall bender.

Brotzmann – Pica Pica
Mazen Kerbaj – Starry Night
Clotaire K – Papa (Coptic remix)
Beirut – Fountains and Tramways
Pompey vs Vesuvius – I Am a Raft
Holland – Imperial
DJ Regal – Keep On (Ed Seven remix)
Ed Seven – On A Matter Payer
Black Sesame – Sigh
A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Things Only I Can See
Saddleback – Dance Card
Growing – Emseepee
Islaja – Psahtyneet Planeetat
Mouse on Mars – Igo Ego Why Go We Go
Mouse on Mars – Wipe That Sound
Von Sudenfed – Serious Brainskin
The Fall – Contraflow
DOSE feat Mark E. Smith – Plug Myself In (7″ Nero Mix)
Inch feat Mark E. Smith – Inch (Val Hooligan mix)
The Fall – Hit the North
Motocade – Into the Fall
Long Fin Killie – The Heads of Dead Surfers
Mogwai – It Would Have Happened Anyway

Not only that, music itself is engaged in a relentless churn. 70 years of pop history – quiffs and southern rock, Elvis, Mingus, post punk, traditional song structures, free jazz, beats, noise and melody – you name it, there’s a band that’s doing it. The Null Device frames it like this:

If there is no originality any more, then originality becomes simply a matter of choosing which reference points you slavishly rip off (and/or update by putting in more swear words and references to iPods and text messages) more creatively.

Don’t start talking about techno’s future obsession, it’s the one musical form that sounds pretty much exactly the same as when it first appeared. Everything in music is retro, according to Maddy Costa in The Guardian. Paul Morley pins the shift on britpop, Simon Reynolds on C86, but it has to have been around for a lot longer than that.

Look and political standpoint are reference points every bit as strong as music. Think back to the Prodigy’s co-option of mohawk (sorry, ‘fauxhawk’) and shouty vocals to add a bit of edge to their major label neutered big beat or Noel Gallagher coupling Beatles melodies with Ian Brown’s lethargic cool – both firmly in my head at the moment after watching the Coachella documentary (read extended promo flick) in which Gallagher criticises Saul Williams’s idealism with a typically suburban claim that only PMs and Presidents can change the world, music is purely entertainment. In Australia you’ve got CW Stoneking doing ’20s delta blues, The Whisky Go Gos doing bourbon-drenched southern rock, Moving Ninja doing UK dubstep, Microworld doing classic Detroit techno, pretty much the entire electronic scene covering mid to late ’90s material from Warp et al.

The Guardian piece places the blame firmly in the increased availability of all this music, the canonisation of the musicians through literal libraries of documentation, and kids who (like Sydney label Future Classic) want to be seen within that tradition. Less about risks, more about being seen as a classic in years to come – that’s true whether you’re talking about ‘avant garde’ sound art or deep house or indie rock.

Another crucial change in the consumption of music has made it harder than ever for the truly original to be heard. The coverage of music has been democratically spread into the broadsheets, radio and television; pop music seems to be everywhere. But in a funny way that means there’s more interference to finding new music. So much that is familiar is being declared the ‘new’ thing by the record industry, the advertising industry and the mainstream media, anything that is truly unfamiliar and moving forward is more neglected than ever before.

That quote (again from Paul Morley), as Costa observes, explains why the truly original grime scene is getting little coverage despite the masses of media space devoted to music. It’s why TV On The Radio’s thrilling EP and debut got enthusiastic reviews but little airplay, while their homogenised follow-up crossed over.

I covered for Stephen Ferris on FBI this morning from 9 ’til 12. Here are the songs.

Shitmat - Steal Ragga
DJ Vadim – Ballistic Affair
The Whiskey Go Gos – True Love
Soft Tigers – MARIA (Bumblebeez remix)
Roman Revutsky – Hurry Up!
Institut Polaire – City Walls and Empires
Professor Murder – Champion
Holland – Yellow For Brown
Treetops – Wisdom Beads
Swoop Swoop – Tomorrow We Triumph
Love of Diagrams – The Pyramid
Charchie Ink – Mitten
Damn Arms – Home Wrecker
Expatriate – Blackbird
KIM – By the Time They Reach You (Bagraiders remix)
Plutonic Lab – Kill Em All
Sui Zhen – No Disko!
Gudrun Gut – Rock Bottom Riser
Apparat – Komponent (Telafon Tel Aviv remix)
The Tiki Two – The Best is Yet to Come
The Russian Brides – Daggerfield
Morgan feat Steve Spacek – iiii
Thee More Shallows – Proud Turkeys
Windmill – Tokyo Moon
DJ Ransom - Same Old Thing
Wolf & Cub – This Mess (Serge Santiago Dub)
Walter Meego – Romantic
Feist – My Moon My Man
Actor/Model – My Agent Says
Vybz Kartel – Run Them Down
Busdriver – Less Yes’s More No’s
Don Juan Dracula – Changing You, Changing Me
The Grand Sons – Twenty Twenty
Sir – Men Who Lie
Ebb – I’m All Made of Music
Electrelane – To The East
White Flight – Pastora Divine
Dials – East of Gillham
Andrew Bird – Simple X

Blogs, like anywhere, get a bit drab. That’s why I revamped this a while ago.

Today I visited a favourite, Simon Reynolds’s Blissblog. He’s swapped skins. It reminded me a change can be an upleasant shock too. Blissblog’s spartan page was not pretty, but I associated its utlitarian aesthetic with his dry, long-term-hack/quasi-academic style – a kind of blogging for the post-punk proletariat. The new page is more of the same, but plainer.

Would a Basic Channel record be as brutally powerful in a soft-focus Cafe Del Mar Ibiza sleeve?

Emmy Hennings’s story on Wilco, on her Fangrrl blog a couple of days ago, used a picture that surprised me the same way. I always thought her prose was so evocative she had no need for images. Maybe I read too much into these things.

Neumu’s been quiet. Not saying it needs a redesign, just some writing. In the meantime, read this 2004 piece on the challenges of being a creator and a critic.

Every decision has an impact on a real flesh-and-blood human being. I try not to think about the impact of my decisions on them. I certainly don’t want to hurt anyone, but I can’t be a “nice guy” either. If I want Neumu to be a compelling, quality online magazine, with good writing about music that is worth people’s time (and money!), I can’t let that “emotional stuff,” my concern for the writer’s (or the musician’s) feelings, get in the way of my critical judgment.

But what if I’m wrong? What if I was just in a really bad mood the day I listened to five or 10 seconds each of the first three tracks off some album that arrived in the mail? In the late ’60s, the first time I heard a solo recording by Van Morrison, I didn’t like his voice. I have thought about that many, many times over the years.

That gets to the heart of why being a critic is different from being an advocate. I’ve only just come across that column, but I’ve thought about exactly those issues hundreds of times, some of my favourite records took years to get my head around. Who knows how many I’m passing by – even as I type! – though getting into records a few years down the track has always been much more interesting to me than being first to discover an act.

Sydney sound maker Ben Byrne selected a bunch of tracks for the new Pink Sheets MP3 blog at Alias Frequencies. It’s worth checking if you’ve got time for people into experimenting with sound – think Shannon O’Neill, Clayton Thomas, Lloyd Barrett and Machine Death – I’m looking forward to seeing who/what else appears at the blog.

On a whole other tip, those lovely Ro Sham Bo cats have a new mix here.

I was down about missing Wilco’s gigs in Sydney and Melbourne. Thank god for Emmy.

I’m sitting in for Ferris on FBI tomorrow morning from 9 ’til noon. Just in case you’re up bright and early on a public holiday.

This week marks a change in my radio show. Not a big one, just a shift in emphasis. Instead of bands, producers and DJs, from now on I’ll be interviewing music journos, bloggers, writers and presenters. Same time (Australian EST 9-11pm), same station (FBI 94.5 Sydney or streamed online).

To kick things off I’ve asked a Sydney blogger and music writer called Richard MacFarlane to come on the show. He writes for Drowned In Sound, Mess & Noise, the Brag and others. There’ll be the usual joining of dots aplenty too, stay tuned for songs from the El Michels Affair, Islaja and Holland as well as Genaside II, the Wu Tang Clan and Bjork.

Why are some people obsessed with music while others have five CDs to their name, all movie soundtracks?

I’ve heard friends say they distrust such people. Something along the lines of this forum quote: “They simply have no soul at all. Some of these people are responsible for voting in our current government.” But people have different priorities, why? I’ve often thought about it, but never settled on an answer. Possibly because I’m not trained in neuroscience

Former session muso, record producer, A&R and eventually Standford-educated neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has come up with some answers in a book released last August called This is Your Brain on Music. By studying dopamine in the nucleus accumbens – the pleasure and reward centre of the brain – Levitin showed a link in some people between listening to music and feeling good. “When people say that they like music and it’s pleasurable, it really is,” he said, “pleasurable music activates the same brain region as drugs like heroin and opium.”

There’s a lot more to warrant reading Levitin’s book, but does knowing you’re hardwired for music love make you feel any less full of fuzzy happiness at hearing your favourite song (whether it’s My Bloody Valentine or, in Levitin’s case, the Blue Oyster Cult)?

Mazzy Star – Fade Into You
Jesus & Mary Chain – Just Like Honey (Peel Session)
The Black Angels – Young Men Dead
The Laurels – Vacuum Boots
Belles Will Ring – Mad Love
Howling Bells – A Ballad for the Bleeding Hearts
Waikiki – You’re Still Good
Ben Lee – In My Life
Macromantics – Conspiracy (Yoko Solo remix)
Yoko Solo – Kluge (?!)
Macromantics – Scorch (Spruce Lee & Sleater Brockman remix)
Male Slut – Industrial Noise Blues
Au Pairs – Sex Without Stress
Le Tigre – This Island
Delta 5 – Mind Your Own Business
Brooke – Inside Out
Le Tigre – Sisters O Sisters
Mailer Daemon – Notions of Rapture
Triosk – Moment Returns
Gudrun Gut – Rock Bottom Riser
Bill Callahan – Sycamore
Smog – Truth Serum
Golden Smog – V
Wilco – One Hundred Years From Now

Listen to Join The Dots every Thursday night from 9pm until 11 (Aust EST) on FBI 94.5 throughout greater metropolitan Sydney. Or stream it around the world at FBIradio.com.

It’s a few months after the fact now, but Lou Reed’s Berlin was a highlight of the Sydney Festival this year. My review is in the latest edition of Artlines. The mag features a beautiful Dennis Nona linocut on the cover, but it’s not online. So here’s the review.

Lou Reed’s Berlin met sickeningly bad reviews and sales on its release in 1973. It almost ruined his solo career. So you can understand why Reed wore a broad grin as a 2000-strong Sydney Festival audience gave the record’s live debut a rapturous response.

Released within days of The Who’s Quadrophenia and produced by Bob Ezrin (who produced Pink Floyd’s The Wall six years later), Berlin could have been just another 1970s rocker reaching the end of his oeuvre. With top session players, strings and a children’s choir on board, this was the ‘70s that punk supposedly reacted against.

Berlin began with a song of the same name, one of the few originals on Reed’s eponymous debut. Ezrin convinced him to extend it to a full album, and Reed, who wanted to “bring the sensitivities of the novel to rock music,” needed little encouragement. The volatile former Velvet Underground front man zoomed in on a pair of drug-addled lovers in a city he had never visited. Over 10 songs, his young protagonists travelled from the bliss of first love to the tarnished end via speed, domestic violence and ultimately suicide.

33 years later its paradoxes are only magnified: a glossy concept album about poor addicts; Reed’s drop-dead monotone set against arena rock riffs; a critical and commercial flop revived for a headline festival show. Despite, or perhaps because of that, Berlin has a tawdry magnificence, and Reed snatched the opportunity to present it the way he wanted. His band featured Antony (sans Johnsons) and Sharon Jones, singers who could sell out the venue alone; seven extra musicians playing strings and woodwind; and the Australian Youth Choir. Aside from ‘The Kids,’ strings and choir added little more than superfluous pomp, while artist Julian Schnabel’s wallpaper, hanging chair and video projections made for oblique set design. But even in his mid-‘60s, the wiry Reed remains an authoritative figure. He drew wild cheers with a fists-pumping extended ‘Men of Good Fortune.’

Sharon Jones sparred with Reed on a searing ‘Sweet Jane’ and Reed finished with ‘Rock Minuet’ from 2005’s Ecstasy. In between was Antony, who rarely sings as well as when he’s singing other people’s songs. As in 2003, when Antony sung Leonard Cohen’s ‘If It Be Your Will,’ the song, ‘Candy Says,’ seemed to force its way out of him. It was edge of the seat, ecstatic and exciting.

I’m in Melbourne for a week from Saturday for this. The Cyclic Defrost 16 launch featuring Taylor Deupree, Seaworthy and Solo Andrata is a must, of course. What else is on?