Because of Ghosts – No Stars In Tokyo
Mr Speaker – Happy (Hardcore)
Aluf – Livemoog
Luomo – Make Believe
Vladislav Delay – I Saw a Polysexual
The Mules – Polly-O
Magic Numbers – The Mule
Sarah Blasko – Flame Trees
The Go Betweens – Head Full of Steam
Divine Comedy – Sunrise
The Blazing Zoos – I Didn’t Have The Material (Before Now)
Robbie Fulks – Where There’s a Road
Glovebox – Please Skill Me
Saddleback – Dance Card

I covered Anna Burns’s show on the 20th – three hours of something I wouldn’t exactly characterise as power, but hope that it made a decent soundtrack.

Ghostface Killah – Mighty Healthy (Nobody remix)
Sleeper – Lady Love Your Countryside
Wons Phreely – Rules of Nature
Muscles – Chocolate Rasberry Lemon and Lime
DJ/Rupture – Dem Nuh Know Me feat Wayne Lonesome
Bright Eyes – Hot Knives
LCD Sound System – Someone Great
Big Low – We Gunna Die Out Here
Etherland – Same Old Trap
XXX Change & Amanda Blank – Get It Now
Plan B – Missin Links
The Rezillos – Flying Saucers Attack
Expatriate – Blackbird
Hancock Basement – Tempest
Scritti Politti – The Boom Boom Bap
Sa-Ra Creative Partners – Not on our Level (feat Capone-n-Noreaga & Lord Nez)
Coda – Miss Bliss
Windmill – Tokyo Moon
El Michel’s Affair – CREAM
The Kissaway Trail – Smother + Evil = Hurt
Gameboy/Gamegirl – Sweaty Wet/Dirty Damp
Thief – Got Me
Whiskey Go Gos – True Love
Jaime Robbie Reyne & the Paradise Three – Fallen Flower
King Creosote – Bootprints (Hot Chip remix)
Victor Xray Sound System – The Dead Walk
Skeletons and the Kings of all Cities – What They Said
Dizzee Rascal – Sirens
Ripple – Ripplin’
Arcade Fire – Intervention
Luminarsi – Waronwa
Victor Berman – Theatre of Signs
Gudrun Gut – Rock Bottom Riser
Popolice – Middle Ground
Saddleback – Hanging at Picnic Rock
Tarwater – World of Things to Touch
Makkenz – Dokan Fumi
Digitalism – Pogo
Agnes Kain – All Time High
Melanie Horsnell – Kiss You Again
Battles – Atlas (DJ Koze mix)

Last night the Hopetoun bubbled with a quiet anticipation I hadn’t seen in the venue since the Seaworthy/Sodastream double act a while back, though the median age was up by at least 20 years. Starring three experienced (female) music writers and one (male) journalist (who happened to have written about a woman rock journo), the panel discussion kicked off the Sydney Writer’s Festival, or at least the rather large Off The Record music writing section of the festival. There was something surreal about Chloe Sasson talking drum’n'bass and hip hop to the snowy peaked crowd, but that, and all the rock hedonism talk, lent a frisson to proceedings.

I Am Woman featured former Rolling Stone and now AFR magazine editor Kathy Bail, ex-Sydney street press writer/editor and now Bigpond music boss Tracey Grimson, former Inertia publicist and now SMH hip hop reviewer and myspace producer Chloe Sasson, and Robert Milliken who wrote a book on possibly the most famous female rock journo, Lillian Roxon.

The female voice in international rock journalism has a long and venerable tradition, yet many great women writers do not enjoy the profile of their male counterparts.

Basically, why aren’t ladies who write about music as famous as the guys who do same?

For all the writers involved it didn’t seem as though they really considered their writing through the prism of male/female, but like music writers anywhere, in terms of good/bad music. Tracey said she only had two music books by female writers (including one on Courtney Love – “a gift!”), because she read books about music rather than specifically by women. Although later Kathy said she’s fixated on Sasha Frere-Jones‘s writing, initially because she’d mistaken the influential critic’s sex due to his ambiguous name.

At one point, a panelist stated that female writers aren’t as famous as the guys because the girls multitask. They’re publicists, A&R, bookers, door staff and so on, which was borne out in the panelists’ diverse backgrounds, but that’s equally true for most male music writers too.

The reasons why female rock writers aren’t famous seem almost irrelevant considering the media landscape’s changing so quickly. It’s harder than ever to make a living or a name as a writer. But it’s not too hard to get a following, at least locally, or within a specific niche. Chloe commented that myspace comments and Amazon five word reviews are the next step for music criticism, which I completely disagree with, however, blogs and podcasts are an extremely viable space for music criticism to flourish, and it is.

My favourite female writers really do bring something very different to their writing. It’s thrillingly personal, less ego-driven and often less hung-up on the orthodoxy. On stage last night, it would have been great to hear the panelists talk about what they do. Because ultimately most of their points, even when couched as female-specific issues, were really just issues that any music writer faces.

It needed women who really engaged with (and cared about) the topic to be crucial.

I missed this post from Emmy when it appeared almost a month ago, but Eliza Sarlos and Pitchfork news writer Mairead Case didn’t (possibly because they were both linked from the post), and the ensuing comments provided the kind of passionate commentary the panel missed.

The ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ line so often used by disgruntled musicians always struck me as strange. I love the idea of being so inspired by architecture that I can’t resist gamboling about – I felt that way at the Bauhaus museum in Berlin a couple of years ago.

Andrew Ford, the presenter of Radio National’s Music Show, tackled music writing in late March on another RN show, Lingua Franca. He’s a classical music broadcaster, but as he points out, these issues are relevant in responding to music of all kinds. Befitting the language-oriented show, he’s extremely articulate in covering the often heated no-mans-land that is music writing. Especially when you consider it’s a radio transcript rather than a laboured over treatise!

When it comes to music criticism, you must address what you hear.

One of the main qualities the reader looks for in a critic is the ability to place a musical experience in a useful and correct context. So a good critic writing for the general public will, first, have excellent ears and, second, the widest musical knowledge. He or she must also be as much of an expert as possible in contemporary music. Of course, this goes without saying if the critic’s field is rock music or jazz, but it is surprising that one continues to come across classical critics who feel that new music is really not for them. There is no place for equivocation here: simply put, these people have no business writing criticism at all, and editors have no business publishing their writing. Critics write for their contemporaries, and the first and most important contemporary context for any piece of music, whether by Gabrieli, Grieg or Gordon Kerry, is contemporary music.

The other skill we look for in our critics is an ability to make us feel we were there, when most likely we weren’t. This is also partly a matter of context, but it’s closely tied to listening and to the critic’s ability to turn the experience of listening into words. If one cannot listen well, one will not write well about music. The musicologist Wilfrid Mellers once told me that if you are not writing technically about music, then you’re not writing about music at all – you are writing about something else. So while in a piece of music writing it may be legitimate and even desirable to tell anecdotes, to give dates and to quote reviews, it’s never enough. The music itself must be addressed head on, and the right words – or at least the best words – must be found. They should always be as simple as possible.

I believe that a musically experienced person ought to be able to listen to all sorts of music and make something of it. This isn’t to subscribe to the cliché that music is a language that speaks to all nations – it’s nothing of the sort – but it is to suggest that when we hear pitches and rhythms and harmonies and instrumental or vocal colours, a good listener should be able to make a simple analysis of these basic elements and then say something about the way in which they relate to each other.

Twiddle your [radio] dial until you find some music that’s unfamiliar. Listen to it. Really listen. Ask yourself some questions. What instruments are involved? What voices? How are the instruments and voices used? How does the harmony sound? Is there an obvious melodic line? Is the music contrapuntal – does it have two or more lines of music layered on top of each other – and, if so, does it sound strictly composed or is it a more spontaneous coming together of lines? Is it fast? Is it slow? Is it loud or quiet? And do the dynamics change a lot? There are dozens of these questions, all of them technical, all related to the actual sound of the music, and they help us to think, talk and maybe even write about the music we hear.

We are as a society losing our ability to listen – to classical music, of course, but to other things as well.

Critics once helped to hone that ability. In writing about concerts and recordings, in describing, as simply and accurately as possible, what they actually heard, they in turn helped us to hear. In providing a wider musical context – and perhaps a social or historical context too – they helped us to think about what we heard. In other words they sharpened the audience’s listening skills and its critical faculties.

Clichés not only multiply, they grow. They take over.

- Andrew Ford

The full transcript is on the RN website, and for anyone even vaguely interested in writing about music and what it all means, it’s worth reading.

I don’t know what to make of Sydney producer Mr Speaker’s latest song, or at least its title, ‘Happy (Hardcore)’. Still, the rather low-fi-ish piece of glitch-framed electronics on offer is as likely to be mistaken for happy hardcore as Speaker’s other stated influences: A Flock of Seagulls and Sons & Daughters (the Aust. TV show, not the Scottish band).

Listen for that song, and new things from Vladislav Delay, Drawing on a Chalkboard, Saddleback and the Sa-Ra Creative Partners, this Thursday night on Join The Dots, FBI 94.5.

I’ll also be talking to Andrew Mueller. The former Melody Maker reviews editor and contributor to The Guardian, The Face, Uncut and the Independent was born in Wagga Wagga, and is back for the Sydney Writer’s Festival this week. He started off as a music journo with On The Street in Sydney, as far as I can tell, but he’s ended up covering conflicts in Lebanon, Afganistan, Africa and Serbia. He’s just released a book on his last five or six years. It should be a fascinating interview.

I like this.

It’s a new blog from a Sydney band called Telafonica – here’s their proper web page, here’s their myspace, virb, last.fm and a pretty site for their label, 4-4-2 – but the new site is something quite different to all those.

General housekeeping, plans for the band, thoughts about future gigs and who can support/play with Telafonica at the gigs, plans for remixes with a wish list that includes everyone from Manitoba to Faux Pas, even a discussion of whether the blog itself might be interesting to anyone. Which would be awfully post-modern if it wasn’t standard fare for just about every blogger. But this isn’t standard fare at all, it’s a voyeuristic peek into what happens behind the scenes in running a band, and it’s pretty interesting.

It’s three years since Clap Your Hands Say Yeah materialised in a blaze of blog hype. But although they were billed for last year’s Splendour in the Grass festival in Byron Bay (vocalist Alec Ounsworth had a sore throat), this week is the first time the band’s played in Australia. The Honda ad soundtracking five piece played at the Enmore Theatre last night, and, you might have already guessed this given the headline, they were terrible. The sound was bad. But the band’s show was worse, just boring.

Seven Horses – 3068
Alphatown Collective – Part Two
Fuji Collective – Late Night Lemmings
Animal Collective – Leaf House
Panda Bear – Ponytail
Francis Plagne – Idle Bones and Sinking Ships
The Clouds – Wichita Lineman
FourPlay – Freeformeshugganah (Pimmon remix)
Pimmon – Over the Black Dot
Kid 606 – If I Had a Happy Place This Would Be It
Robert Henke – Layer
Gang of Four – To Hell With Poverty
Gudrun Gut – Rendering Buddha
Wang Fan – Xuanzhuan De Tuoluonidi
Mapstation – Watching Paik’s Video Buddha
Architecture in Helsinki – Adrenaline (DJ/Rupture Ital Hymn feat Mr Lee G)
Minit – Winged Life
Monty Python – Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
Co-Real Artists – What About You (In The WorldToday)
Battles – Atlas (DJ Koze mix)
Chachi Jones – Liturgy of the Free (Chachi Jones remix)
Shitmat – The Most Radical Free Party Since 1979
Hancock Basement – Are You Party?
New Buffalo – No Party
Belle & Sebastian – I’m a Cuckoo (Avalanches remix)

Sentimental mixtape-ology – and I mean tape – is a perennial music head fixation. I love it, but aside from one good mate in Alice Springs, I don’t know anyone with a tape player. So, to me, mixtapes are a pointless anachronism – technology’s moved on! It’s tempting to say playlist/burn mixes are the future. But the biggest problem with this kind of mix is its popularity and ubiquity – you like the songs, but you’re not going to listen more than a few times. And there’s no shortage of ripped compilations.

But if someone went to the effort of making an actual mixtape, would you listen over and over the way you did at 13? There’s too much music to soak up at any one time – that’s an equally interesting question in itself, which Eli took up a while ago (interestingly he’s only posted once to his blog since) – I reckon the media’s not the issue, it’s the effort/thought that goes into the compiling and sequencing.

I used to listen to favourite mix tapes over and over and over, until the tape distorted, tore, and got sticky tape surgery. When I hear songs from those tapes now I expect the next song. It’s a weird, hollow feeling when the song fails to materialise.

Scientific American‘s new mix (click the picture) has that feeling at its core. And I’ve been listening since Riddim Method first put me onto it. SA took favourite mixes, turned the spotlight on those perfect segues, and created what they call the massdstrction mix.

umm, yeah, okay i guess it needs explaining. mass.dstrction is a mix series. like a cd a dj makes of songs that all blend together, or a tape you made for a girl in 10th grade because you thought she was cute and would think you had good taste in music. so make yourself a mixtape, then a few months later take your favorite parts and mix in some new songs, take parts out, whatever. keep changing things and rearranging, maybe only use the snare sound from one song, with the bass part from another, you get the picture. that’s what’s going on here – except that if you’re in 10th grade and give this to a girl, she’ll probably think you’re sorta crazy. love it!

I used to worry about my privacy online. If you’re concerned about using visa cards over the phone, stand by to be appalled now. And although I revel in it, I often wonder whether the shift’s a good thing. When last.fm appeared, for example, I waited ages before signing up – though that was at least partly because I couldn’t get the application to work on my mac at home – now everything I listen to on the mac goes to last.fm. myspace replaced heavy metal as the tabloid media’s favourite scapegoat for the dank decay of our schools, ning is connecting science journalists and communicators around the world, and flickr gives you somewhere to put the pics. Although none of those are Australian, Readwriteweb lists Australian applications in development.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the next generation were meta-applications, like this one, that act like a next level internet for all these online communities.

That’s Fidgt’s Visualiser, which I came across on Seb’s blog. You don’t need to login, though I imagine it’d get a lot smarter if you did, all you need to do is insert your flickr and last.fm handles. My results weren’t as pretty as the examples on their site, but it’s pretty, and I can see it could get much more interesting.